The neoliberal parties have no answer on poverty and inequality

This evening I was at a ‘question time’  hustings at Aberdeen College, with an audience of around 100 social science students and staff, as well as student representatives from Aberdeen’s universities and the NUS. It was only the second event of that kind that I had ever done, and it was the first time I really managed to take on the other parties and challenge them for the frauds I think they are in terms of claiming to represent ordinary people.

Present were the other candidates for Aberdeen North (bar the BNP): Frank Doran, the sitting Labour MP on a pretty decent majority; Stuart Whyte, the Tory who is also a history teacher; Joanna Strathdee, leader of the SNP opposition at Aberdeenshire Council (which is best known for colossaly mishandling the Trump affair); and Kristian Chapman, the 22 year old politics student at Aberdeen Uni who is smoothly trying to make a transition from student to Lib Dem career politician with as little a gap in between as possible, claiming to bring a “New Age of Politics” (I can hear the laughs of derison already). Anyway, of all of them, the one who I’d give least stick to is Joanna, who at least had some decent opinions, even if they weren’t carried very strongly.

The first question was on voter apathy and the expenses, which I made the obvious point that our representatives take a workers’ wage and don’t live at a much higher living standard than those who they claim to represent. However, I then made the point that people aren’t interested because they don’t actually have any real democratic choice in the election, as whichever of the main parties they vote for, they always get the same policies. I quoted John Pilger, who has written that Western democracies have descended into “indistinguishable parties competing for the management of a single ideology state”. Frank Doran disagreed with this, as had Anne Begg, the Aberdeen South Labour MP, when I mentioned this at the last hustings I was at. The reason that Labour representatives find this truth the hardest to accept is because it’s Labour’s sellout to neoliberalism that made this state of affairs the case, something they’d rather ignore. Anyway, Frank Doran made a throwaway comment that there are substantial differences between the parties, before the next hour and a half proceeded to show this to be complete bollocks.

The issue of climate change came up, and while the Tory candidate talked about reducing the domestic carbon footprint (i.e. ignoring the role of business and capitalism in driving ecological destruction) and vague talk of ‘green investment’ was made by the others, I got stuck into talking about (what is one of our best policies IMO) our free public transport policy, ripping into the shitty privatised transport system, especially First Bus, and talking about how we need to take them into public ownership making the service free, which drew enthusiastic clapping from the audience. I will never, ever, tire of explaining how indescribably shit the First Bus service in Aberdeen is, so be prepared in advance for that when any of you next see me! The picture below is from one of the strikes by First Bus drivers, as the company are constantly attacking the wages and conditions of their staff as well as ripping off Aberdonians with extortionate fares.

We also talked about nuclear weapons, with myself and the SNP opposed, Frank Doran opposed (but admitting his party wasn’t), the Tory doing the usual, ‘yes we need to disarm, but it must be multilateral’ i.e. we’ll still spend fucking billions renewing them, and Lib-Dem Chapman murmuring something about ‘reviewing policy’.

Finally we got to the heart of the debate: cuts and the economy. I talked about where the deficit had come from, and that we were different from all the other parties because we said there didn’t have to be cuts: we would scrap Trident, bring the troops home from Afghanistan, raise corporation tax and end tax havens, and the key point: tax the rich. I mentioned the obscene wealth of the richest 1000 people in Britain (who have £335 bn between them, just under half of the total debt of the British state), and the face that inequality has grown massively under the Tories and Labour. The cuts are a way of continuing to transfer wealth from poor to rich, and represent the biggest attack on living standards in a generation.

This led straight onto a question from a staff member (who said he had stood for the council for the SSP a few years back, name is Brian Dunn), on what the parties would do about poverty inequality in this country. Doran for Labour mentioned that they had created the minimum wage, Chapman for Lib-Dem how they would re-jig the benefits and tax system (i.e. a tax break for earnings under £10,000), Strathdee for SNP on what they had done in the Scottish parliament (i.e. bugger all to tackle poverty), and Whyte for Tories on how they would create (plenty of low paid) jobs.

I retorted that the largest growth in poverty was for people already in work but with shitty pay, so the Labour minimum wage was clearly inadequte, as you can see here. Then I said that all of these parties were just tinkering, that the root of the problem was the system of neoliberal capitalism (and capitalism more generally) that had been developed over the last 30 years. I said we would introduce a social living wage of say £10 an hour, redistribute wealth through taxing the rich, increase corporation tax, and take key sectors of the economy into public ownership, such as transport and fuel. I made the point that in Aberdeen, ‘oil capital of Europe’, people still struggle to heat their homes in the winter while private corporations increase there prices to make money off of higher fuel prices. For me this is inhumane and undoubtedly leads to deaths each winter: it is one of the clearest example of the inhuman nature of capitalism and underlines the importance of the “people not profit” slogan. I told people that it was values such as these which was why I was involved with the SSP

I went on to explain that  sovereignty lies with the people, that we should govern ourselves, and that we needed to abolish the House of Lords and the monarchy, if we were to live in a democratic socialist republic where we could share wealth more equally and offer everyone a decent standard of living. The gulf between myself and the other parties could not have been more clear. The member of staff who asked the question commented on how all the parties on the panel seemed just to want to tinker with poverty, not sort it. I asked whether he would put the SSP in that catergory, to which he replied “no”.

I did get one challenge on all of this from the Tory candidate who said I seemed to be “paranoid” about people being rich, to which I replied that it was nothing to do with paranoia, but with making the rich pay their fair share so that everyone can enjoy a decent standard of living. That was pretty much the last word of the hustings, bar me plugging the YouTube vidoes.

The hustings ended with a definite mood in the room, in my opinion, of people generally not swallowing the shit the other parties were trying to feed them. Several of the staff members in particular expressed their support for the SSP in the election, and one said he may join after the election. Certainly, by saying things that were so utterly different from the other parties, and rejecting the neoliberal politics the others were peddling, people were given a lot to think about, and the experience made me feel (even more) passionate about our politics. As as aside, in Aberdeen we’ve been having a really good experience  with this campaign, and I hope we can carry that on after the election.

Anyway, tomorrow night I have another hustings, this time organised by the CND, and plan to give the other candidates as much of a grilling as I can again over their abysmal offerings of cuts, privatisation, war, renewed Trident, and selling people out to capitalism, in this election.

Ewan Robertson