Post-Brexit economics
Following the 2008 banking crash from which the system has yet to recover, the system received a shock. The banks were broken.
Rather than bail them out with no strings attached, we should have broken up the banks, separated casino banking from boring retail banking.
No bank should have been too big too fail. If banks wished to gamble, that would be the role of casino banking.
Instead, we bailed them out, failed to bring criminal charges against criminal bankers (and as Paul Mason shows in PostCapitalism many were engaged in criminal activities), we allowed them to rise phoenix like from the ashes and they are now stronger than they were before.
The Remain camp was bankrolled by Goldman Sachs, J P Morgan and Morgan Stanley, well known supporters of democracy. These are the banks that created the dodgy financial instruments, now worthless, giant Ponzi scams, that caused the banking crises of 2008.
The banks are bankrolling Hilary Clinton.
No banker was allowed to participate in the Bretton Woods talks.
It was bankers who caused the Wall Street Crash
1929 was our 2008.
What we should have done, was restructure how the system works.
We are now, with Brexit, in exactly the same situation as 2008, a shock has hit the system. Brexit has shown how out of touch politicians were with the people, we have no functioning government or official opposition, due to both parties imploding. Micheal Gove showing he is unfit to hold any office of state and 172 Labour MPs with no mandate from their Party, mounting a coup against Jeremy Corbyn.
The people have to grasp the opportunity and decide what Post-Brexit future do they want. There has to be open public meetings across the country to reach a broad political consensus. Our future is too important to be left to politicians and political parties.
The suggestions put forward by John McDonnell and Yanis Varoufakis at Beyond Austerity last year, would be a good starting point.
We should invest in green infrastructure, invest in education.
The £350 million we give to the EU every week, less the rebate, is money we should be investing.
We must deal with tax dodging. We have to end the tax avoidance and tax evasion by global corporations.
Corporations are sitting on a £750 billion cash pile. We should consider a windfall tax and put this dead money to productive use.
People have no future. It used to be each generation had better prospects, now it is the opposite. People need to have creative work, where they contribute to the greater good of society.
We need to end zero-hours contracts. Increase the Minimum Wage. Consider the payment of a Basic Income. The Bedroom Tax must be scrapped.
Those who contribute their labour, must have a greater share of the GDP cake. If there is an increase in productivity, then that gain must be equally shared between capital and labour.
Immigration is a problem and we cannot pretend it is not. There has to be an intelligent conversation. Free movement of people never envisaged mass movement of people. We do not solve the housing crisis by building more houses. More houses means loss of green space.
The coup against Jeremy Corbyn shows Labour has a problem, and that problem is not Jeremy Corbyn. Having outed themselves these Labour MPs have to be de-selected, replaced by parliamentarians who are willing to act for the people, not their own self-interest.
We have to deal with the energy sector, and not by taking into public ownership the Big Six. We have to follow the example of Germany, create community owned, local area networks, into which feed renewables guaranteed a fair price, the consumer pays a fair price, and surplus generation is fed to other local are networks via a publicly owned National Grid, any profit is either reinvested in the local grid, or spent on community projects.
The Big Six would not be able to compete with community owned local area networks and would go out of business.
HS2 vanity project, a gravy train for contractors, must be scrapped. The money saved, invested in a publicly owned national rail network.
The rail networks, as each franchise expires, must be taken back into public ownership. In the case of failing networks, such as Southern, that must be with immediate effect.
There should be no additional runways at Heathrow or Gatwick.
We need to invest in open coops, the collaborate commons.
We need more projects like The Hive in Dalston, that bring abandoned space back into use.
We have to reconstruct society from below. We have to seize control of Town Halls, this means more than winning elections, follow the example Barcelona, of towns and cities across Spain, of Flatpack Democracy revolution in Frome in Somerset, then network across Europe.
Trade forms roughly 10% of the economy, of that, less than 10% is with EU. We have a trade deficit with the EU. Ideally the status quo remains, our trading position with the EU does not change. Otherwise the minimum would be WTO Favoured Nation Status, with low tariffs, these forming the basis of any future negotiations.
As Tim Martin points out in a an article in Wetherspoon News (Summer 2016), we do not need trade deals to trade. The products in our shops are from China. We sell jet engines to the US. Neither are in the EU, there are no trade deals with US or China.
Countries are not exactly knocking the door down, to do a trade deal, but Switzerland, Iceland, India and New Zealand have already expressed an interest.
It is going to be a lot easier for India to conclude a trade deal with the UK, than with 27 members of the EU. There are historical links and a common language. This does not mean we open the door to mass migration from India.
India has spent nine years in trade talks with EU and got nowhere.
Countries are going to wish to trade with the fifth largest economy in the world. Already eleven countries are lined up wanting trade deals.
We must end austerity.
It is to credit George Osborne with intellectual rigour he lacks to describe his attacks on the poor as Osbornomics.
Wrong to say it was Osbornomics that led to Brexit. Austerity is the policy of the EU.
Brexit was led by many factors including concern over mass migration, loss of sovereignty, need to control borders, democracy.
Brexit must not lead to any loss of workers rights or environmental protection.