Page 1 of 3 Next
Grace Blakeley is a staff writer at Tribune, and the author of Stolen: How to Save the World from Financialisation.
Amid a brutal cost-of-living crisis after decades of austerity, popular support for progressive economic policy is the highest it’s been in years. Yet Keir Starmer’s Labour Party refuses to deliver — because it’s afraid of empowering workers.
Policymakers in the Global North have mostly responded to rising inflation by raising interest rates. That’s bad for their own workers — and it’s creating a debt crisis for many countries in the Global South.
Developmentalist nationalism is a poor substitute for social democracy.
When oil prices plummeted during the pandemic, fossil fuel companies made vague efforts to invest in clean energy. Now pulling in bumper profits, Big Oil is discarding those initiatives to maintain their business model: capital over climate.
In the UK, housing prices are thankfully forecast to drop this year. But without a serious investment in social housing from the government, the housing crisis isn’t going to end.
Much of the world is likely to have a recession this year, and Britain is expected to be especially hard hit. We can thank years of stagnant wages for workers — made worse by the Tories’ return to cruel austerity policies.
At the World Economic Forum’s conference in Davos this week, elites will try to address problems from climate change to the threat of worldwide recession. But these elites’ endless thirst for profit created these problems — and will doom their efforts to fail.
British public sector workers are striking to demand wage increases that keep up with the cost of living. The Tories claim the government can’t afford it ― but they had no problem lavishing cash on big business, banks, and landlords during the pandemic.
Following Conservative British prime minister Liz Truss’s U-turn on tax cuts for the rich, the government is now set to attempt sharp spending cuts. More austerity would mean further punishing the poor and crippling already-starved public services.
The British economy is in shambles. Yet new UK prime minister Liz Truss is making things far worse with a disastrous economic policy that does nothing for ordinary workers.
It’s not rising workers’ wages that are causing spiraling inflation — it’s corporate profiteering.
The cost of living crisis is causing Britain’s biggest fall in living standards in decades. The only way to change this: wage increases across the economy.
Inflation is threatening to push millions into poverty. Forget what the establishment says: workers should demand higher wages right now.
Today’s right-wingers hope to solve the inflation crisis like they did in the 1970s: through hiking interest rates, suppressing wages, and defeating already-hurting workers. That’s how economists wage class war.
The obscene wealth of the world’s billionaires doesn’t just mean they get to lead lives of luxury. It also means they have almost complete control of the economy — control that is fundamentally undemocratic and unjust.
Many claimed early in the pandemic that COVID-19 would flatten inequality in a deeply unequal world. Luckily for the ultrarich, central banks stepped in, making the global elite richer than ever.
Keir Starmer is a modern-day Neil Kinnock: a myopic and embattled leader who is far more focused on destroying his enemies than uniting the Labour Party behind a pro-worker agenda.
Unless working people organize to resist it, the legacy of the pandemic, like the legacy of the financial crisis, will be a permanent shift in power in favor of capital.
The Economist’s liberalism is often framed as the politics of human rights and individual freedom, but its origins lie just as much in a fear of the masses and democracy.
The pandemic was and remains brutal for average people. But not for the rich: central bank policies created 5 million new millionaires during the pandemic. It’s the latest sign that our economy is rigged for the wealthy.