Green Party Spring Conference was in Finchley this year, so I could hardly not make an appearance. This weekend I am busy working, leafletting, and trying to have a social life - shock! horror! - but I did manage to attend on the Thursday and Friday.
As always, there was plenty of policy being made (we are one of the few parties left with a truly democratic internal culture - any four members of the party can propose policy and have it debated), discussions being had and campaigning plans being hatched. The most interesting decision of the two days, to my mind, was one that I couldn't actually speak on - I was co-chairing the plenary session where it was discussed!
At long last, after the session on Friday, the Green Party has firm policy in favour of a maximum income differential within UK firms. I have been a fan of the idea of a maximum wage (in one form or another, there are many ways in which it can be done) for years, and it's great to see the Party adopting such a radical proposal, which sets us out way ahead of the establishment political consensus. We have set the differential that we would pursue at ten times - in other words, the highest paid worker in an organisation could not earn more than ten times as much as the lowest paid. Given that, in some big firms in the UK today, that differential is currently well over 100, this is pretty meaty stuff.
Having said that, there have been rumblings about this idea for a while in the mainstream press, with this article in The Mirror being only the latest example. NEF guru Andrew Simms, with his usual foresight, was writing about it in the Guardian way back in 2003. And, of course, there are actually operating examples of such schemes across the world - with perhaps the most famous being the Mondragon Cooperatives in Spain.
The effects of inequality in our society are obvious, and there hasn't been such a prime opportunity to deal with them for decades. I hope we won't let it pass - and that policies like this will take centre stage at the next General Election.
Showing posts with label equality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label equality. Show all posts
Saturday, 20 February 2010
Saturday, 30 January 2010
Housing and Equality
Given my previous posts on the disastrous effects of wealth and income gaps on our society, I can hardly let the publication of the latest major report on inequality go by without a mention. Its headline finding is that the top 10% of wealth-owners in the UK are 100 times richer than the bottom 10%. While this is perhaps unsurprising, it should not be anything less than shocking. A society with such levels of inequality cannot avoid dysfunction. That is why I have become one of the first Parliamentary candidates to sign the Equality Pledge, the opening initiative by OneSociety and the Equality Trust to influence the forthcoming General Election. I hope many more sign in the coming days and weeks!
One of the major inequalities in our society is, of course, in the housing sector. With some people owning copious and expensive amounts of property, and most others unable to get anywhere near a secure tenancy in an affordable home, the playing field is painfully skewed. It's an area that I've always felt strongly about - and for that reason, I'm glad to be able to announce that I have recently been named as the Green Party's new national spokesperson on housing.
Those who are interested in lots of detail can always look at the full list of Green Party Housing Policies - but for those who want some reasons why we desperately need new and progressive thinking in this area, perhaps a few facts might help.
- There are still 2.5 million Council tenants throughout the UK.
- However, there are around 5 million people currently on council housing waiting lists.
- There are still almost 100,000 people in temporary accomodation, which is often totally unsuitable for their needs.
- 485,000 social homes have been sold over the past 10 years through Right To Buy.
- £141 million is being spent on new council housing this year. Sounds good - but it equates to only 2,000 homes.
- There are approximately 750,000 empty properties in the UK.
The Green Party is already doing a lot of work on housing issues - both in terms of ensuring that new and retrofitted properties meet stringent energy efficiency and fuel poverty standards, and in ensuring that ordinary people can afford to live in excellent properties in the first place. As this report on London's affordable housing crisis from the office of Jenny Jones AM illustrates, there is a very very long way to go on these issues. As the report explains, referring particularly to London but applying more generally to the country as a whole:
1. There has been a massive loss of social rented homes. Right to buy sales have far outstripped the building of new social rented homes, despite growing demand and a slightly improved delivery of social homes in recent years. This has led to the waiting list in London almost doubling within a decade.
2. The cost of buying a home has risen twice as fast as incomes. It now costs eleven times the average income to buy a home in London, putting home ownership far beyond the means of most households.
3. New housing delivery hasn’t met housing needs. House building has completely failed to slow the rising affordability gap in housing. In 2009 London only managed to build a little over half of the housing we needed.
I would say that with the financial crisis and recession, the delivery mechanism for affordable housing (building private sector housing for sale at market rates and subsidising social housing with the profits) has broken down. I would say that, except it is difficult for something that didn't work in the first place to break down. 'Affordable' housing has rarely been anything of the sort over the last decade. It is crucial that, in the next ten years, we ensure a great deal more housing that is affordable, well-built, and democratically controlled.
More on this subject anon. For now, if you are interested in getting involved, you could do a lot worse than to check out the Defend Council Housing website, or the London Coalition Against Poverty.
One of the major inequalities in our society is, of course, in the housing sector. With some people owning copious and expensive amounts of property, and most others unable to get anywhere near a secure tenancy in an affordable home, the playing field is painfully skewed. It's an area that I've always felt strongly about - and for that reason, I'm glad to be able to announce that I have recently been named as the Green Party's new national spokesperson on housing.
Those who are interested in lots of detail can always look at the full list of Green Party Housing Policies - but for those who want some reasons why we desperately need new and progressive thinking in this area, perhaps a few facts might help.
- There are still 2.5 million Council tenants throughout the UK.
- However, there are around 5 million people currently on council housing waiting lists.
- There are still almost 100,000 people in temporary accomodation, which is often totally unsuitable for their needs.
- 485,000 social homes have been sold over the past 10 years through Right To Buy.
- £141 million is being spent on new council housing this year. Sounds good - but it equates to only 2,000 homes.
- There are approximately 750,000 empty properties in the UK.
The Green Party is already doing a lot of work on housing issues - both in terms of ensuring that new and retrofitted properties meet stringent energy efficiency and fuel poverty standards, and in ensuring that ordinary people can afford to live in excellent properties in the first place. As this report on London's affordable housing crisis from the office of Jenny Jones AM illustrates, there is a very very long way to go on these issues. As the report explains, referring particularly to London but applying more generally to the country as a whole:
1. There has been a massive loss of social rented homes. Right to buy sales have far outstripped the building of new social rented homes, despite growing demand and a slightly improved delivery of social homes in recent years. This has led to the waiting list in London almost doubling within a decade.
2. The cost of buying a home has risen twice as fast as incomes. It now costs eleven times the average income to buy a home in London, putting home ownership far beyond the means of most households.
3. New housing delivery hasn’t met housing needs. House building has completely failed to slow the rising affordability gap in housing. In 2009 London only managed to build a little over half of the housing we needed.
I would say that with the financial crisis and recession, the delivery mechanism for affordable housing (building private sector housing for sale at market rates and subsidising social housing with the profits) has broken down. I would say that, except it is difficult for something that didn't work in the first place to break down. 'Affordable' housing has rarely been anything of the sort over the last decade. It is crucial that, in the next ten years, we ensure a great deal more housing that is affordable, well-built, and democratically controlled.
More on this subject anon. For now, if you are interested in getting involved, you could do a lot worse than to check out the Defend Council Housing website, or the London Coalition Against Poverty.
Tuesday, 8 September 2009
Equality Is A Must
If you read one political book this year, it should be The Spirit Level. A masterly survey that summarises decades of research on the effects of inequality on society, it proves that all of the most important areas of our lives are worsened by extreme gaps between rich and poor.
Of course, this is exactly the case that Greens have been making for decades - that while absolute poverty is clearly something that must be tackled (everyone should have the basics of life, a principle that is contained within the UN Declaration of Human Rights), the ever widening inequality in our society is also at the root of many of the problems that we face. Someone can be above 'the breadline', and still feel insecure, stressed and anxious about their place in society, their power over their own life, and their ability to have any influence over their community.
As Marshall Sahlins has put it: "Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status...it has grown...as an invidious distinction between classes."
The Equality Trust, which is the project started by the authors of the book, provides a lot of the evidence base for the effects of inequality on the issues that trouble the UK today - and many of them couldn't be more relevant to Hackney, one of the most unequal boroughs in the country. The correlation between violence and inequality, for example, is striking - and instructive, given the latest in a string of shootings on Amhurst Road just this weekend. Similarly, the relationship between education and inequality is plain to see - and so on, from obesity to depression to drug use.
Perhaps the most intriguing thing about the book, however, is the way in which the authors reveal the obvious truth - that living in an unjust, unequal and dysfunctional society is bad for all of us - not just those in the bottom quartile or half. We all feel the effects of inequality. To quote from the Equality Trust website:
"One of the most striking and important features of these relationships is that the differences in the prevalence of the various social problems are so large. Some are two or three times as common in more unequal societies, but others are as much as ten times as common. The evidence suggests that this is partly because inequality affects the vast majority of the population - not just the poorest.
Finally, it tends to be the same societies which do well on each of the different outcomes just as it is the same ones which do badly. Because inequality affects so many different outcomes, if you know that a society does badly - for instance - on health, it is likely that it also does badly on a wide range of social problems: it probably has high levels of violence, high teen birth rates, a high prison population, lower levels of trust, more obesity, and a bigger drug problem. Put simply, it looks as if societies with large income inequalities become socially dysfunctional."
I pledge today that if I am elected to Parliament, the issue of poverty and inequality will be at the very top of my agenda. The Green Party is committed to higher rates of tax for the rich and better provision for the most vulnerable - and if you elect me as your MP, I'll do my utmost to make sure that Parliament starts striving to reduce the gap between rich and poor, not widen it.
As the Green Party's outgoing Policy Co-ordinator said at our Hove Conference only last week - "Peter Mandelson famously said that Labour are 'intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich'. Well, we Greens are 'intensely relaxed about the filthy rich getting a bit poorer'." Too right. Lets toss the Thatcherite consensus overboard, and get working to recreate some solidarity in the UK - and where better to start than Hackney?
Those who are interested in hearing more about the Equality Trust can check out this YouTube video:
Of course, this is exactly the case that Greens have been making for decades - that while absolute poverty is clearly something that must be tackled (everyone should have the basics of life, a principle that is contained within the UN Declaration of Human Rights), the ever widening inequality in our society is also at the root of many of the problems that we face. Someone can be above 'the breadline', and still feel insecure, stressed and anxious about their place in society, their power over their own life, and their ability to have any influence over their community.
As Marshall Sahlins has put it: "Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status...it has grown...as an invidious distinction between classes."
The Equality Trust, which is the project started by the authors of the book, provides a lot of the evidence base for the effects of inequality on the issues that trouble the UK today - and many of them couldn't be more relevant to Hackney, one of the most unequal boroughs in the country. The correlation between violence and inequality, for example, is striking - and instructive, given the latest in a string of shootings on Amhurst Road just this weekend. Similarly, the relationship between education and inequality is plain to see - and so on, from obesity to depression to drug use.
Perhaps the most intriguing thing about the book, however, is the way in which the authors reveal the obvious truth - that living in an unjust, unequal and dysfunctional society is bad for all of us - not just those in the bottom quartile or half. We all feel the effects of inequality. To quote from the Equality Trust website:
"One of the most striking and important features of these relationships is that the differences in the prevalence of the various social problems are so large. Some are two or three times as common in more unequal societies, but others are as much as ten times as common. The evidence suggests that this is partly because inequality affects the vast majority of the population - not just the poorest.
Finally, it tends to be the same societies which do well on each of the different outcomes just as it is the same ones which do badly. Because inequality affects so many different outcomes, if you know that a society does badly - for instance - on health, it is likely that it also does badly on a wide range of social problems: it probably has high levels of violence, high teen birth rates, a high prison population, lower levels of trust, more obesity, and a bigger drug problem. Put simply, it looks as if societies with large income inequalities become socially dysfunctional."
I pledge today that if I am elected to Parliament, the issue of poverty and inequality will be at the very top of my agenda. The Green Party is committed to higher rates of tax for the rich and better provision for the most vulnerable - and if you elect me as your MP, I'll do my utmost to make sure that Parliament starts striving to reduce the gap between rich and poor, not widen it.
As the Green Party's outgoing Policy Co-ordinator said at our Hove Conference only last week - "Peter Mandelson famously said that Labour are 'intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich'. Well, we Greens are 'intensely relaxed about the filthy rich getting a bit poorer'." Too right. Lets toss the Thatcherite consensus overboard, and get working to recreate some solidarity in the UK - and where better to start than Hackney?
Those who are interested in hearing more about the Equality Trust can check out this YouTube video:
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