Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 03 March 2021
I very much welcome the debate, and I echo the welcome that has been offered to Monica Lennon in her new role.
There is nothing in Monica Lennon’s motion with which I disagree. Deep structural inequalities have, indeed, been exposed by the pandemic. This has been a terrible year for everyone, but it has been far, far worse for people who are on low or precarious incomes, people in precarious housing and people who cannot work from home, either because of their employers’ attitudes or because of the nature of their homes.
People have faced issues to do with workplace autonomy. How much control do people have over the public health measures that need to be implemented in their workplaces? Do they really have a voice at work?
There is also historical underpayment of the kind of work—from social care to cleaning—that is critical to the wellbeing of us all.
Issues in retail and hospitality have been mentioned. Those issues are especially relevant to women workers. They are also relevant to younger workers, who are disproportionately represented in those sectors and endure discriminatory minimum-wage rates.
Those structural inequalities cause harm in their own right, but they have also been impacted by Covid. There are people who face low rates of statutory sick pay or no sick pay at all. There are people who do not have the confidence to enter self-isolation when they know that they need to, because they know that they will lose pay as a result. I have spoken to people on precarious contracts who are worried even about taking a test, for fear that they will lose pay if they are not able to work. It remains to be seen whether those structural inequalities will also be evident in roll-out of vaccination through lower take-up in marginalised communities.
The Government’s amendment adds the issue of control over employment law. I cannot disagree with that. I was surprised only at how limited the Government’s amendment was.
Only the Conservatives seem to disagree with the basic premise of the debate. I would vote against their amendment even if it would only add to the motion. The coronavirus restrictions business advisory council that they call for—yet again, that policy is reheated—would, as I have argued before, end up not as a body advising on how best to implement public health measures, but as a group lobbying against public health measures.
However, what the Conservative amendment would delete is far more extreme than what it would add. It would delete reference to the idea of our being a fair work nation. It would delete reference to support for groups that are marginalised in the economy and it would delete mention of a green economic recovery. It would delete even the mere acknowledgment that there are exploitation and low wages in our economy.
We should remember that we are living in an economy in which one of the richest people on the planet, sitting at the top of a company—Amazon—is a billionaire many times over as a result of tax avoidance and paying poverty wages. People who work in that organisation are paid poverty wages and are simply allowed to be exploited. Such a person becomes a billionaire not because he works hard, but by exploiting others. That is the structure of our economy.
The Green amendment, which was not selected for debate, sought to add other perspectives. It is clear that the concept of everlasting growth on a finite planet is unsustainable. However, it is also clear that growth ideology has failed to achieve human wellbeing. Growth happens at times when the gap between the richest and the poorest continues to increase. The rhetoric about a green recovery, which is now heard right across the political spectrum, is increasingly common, but so often it is heard from the lips of those who also support the fossil-fuel industry, road building, aviation growth and all the failed approaches of the past. Essentially, they are still propping up an economy that rests on the waging of a war against nature.
I will finish by saying something about the historical context. As has been said, we, or most of us, want to avoid a return to austerity—to the idea that the burden of what we have come through should rest on the shoulders of those who have the least. At some point, reconciliation will have to be made and we will have to find a way to pay for what we have come through, but it must not be people who are in poverty who pay the bill.
However, that is about more than just the crash of a dozen or so years ago; we need to look at what happened before that. There were decades in which Governments handed over power—away from democratic accountability and on to the markets and the financial system. When those systems failed more than a dozen years ago, there was an opportunity to correct that historical error. The opportunity was not taken. Now, even deeper power is being accumulated in the age of big data, with all its capacity to manipulate people’s behaviour and perceptions. The big players in surveillance capitalism have a kind of power that even those in finance capitalism never achieved.
Important policy questions therefore face us, including how to deliver and fund social care, and how to transition to a sustainable economy and do so fairly. However, the challenges that we face are not solely about those policy choices. Recovery from what ails us as a society must mean bringing power in our society back under democratic accountability. That is a far bigger challenge, and it is one that few Governments around the world are even attempting to address.
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