UK

Last week I drove to Glasgow.

There were two of us in the car. I used a tank full of petrol to get there, and a tank full of petrol to get back. The petrol alone cost me about £150. I did not need the car when I got there. We were staying for the weekend, and everything we wanted to do was within walking distance of the hotel. So the car was purely a means of transport to get us there and back.

Should I have chosen a ‘green’ alternative? I considered it. Return train fares to Glasgow are approximately £150, even when bought weeks in advance. So the public transport route would have cost me nearly double the cost of using a car.

It’s crazy to think that a society that wants to encourage less use of fossil fuels is organised in a way that pushes people to drive cars when the only reason to drive is cost.

Public transport should be free. Completely free.

I know from personal experience that, ever since I became old enough to qualify for free public transport in London, my car use has been reduced drastically. Of course there are times when I need to carry stuff around that would make trains and buses awkward. But nowadays nearly all of my London journeys are done on buses or on the underground.

If we are serious about ‘saving the planet’ there is a hell of a lot more we can do, apart from adding a tax on plastic bags. The powers that be would like us to focus our attention on the most trivial objectives; objectives that have little or no impact on the profitability of big businesses.

All public transport should be owned by everybody, and controlled by the workers within the industry, with a mandate to provide the most efficient service to the public, in terms of cost and effective use of public resources.

The myth that publicly run services are less efficient than privately owned and managed services is precisely that – a myth. The East Coast mainline was run and managed by the public sector for 5 years, generating customer satisfaction scores as good as many of the vaunted private sector customer-focused franchises, and returning £5bn to the government as income.

Bring the transport network back into public ownership, and let the people who work in the industry decide the most efficient way to run the service. The people at the sharp end know best.

What is the definition of an opportunist? Someone who has no fixed principles but jumps at every opportunity to make themselves look good.

This is a week of opportunism in politics, and it is still only Tuesday.

On Sunday Danny Alexander went on the Andrew Marr Show to announce his new principled opposition to tax evasion. He wants to make it a crime to aid and abet any individual who is trying to hide their true tax position from HMRC. This comes in the wake of the HSBC scandal which broke last week. A Tory peer and former minister was at the helm of HSBC when it was using its Swiss arm to assist British tax-payers to “skim” their tax liability. It came as no surprise to anybody that bankers and accountants were advising and assisting rich people to avoid and evade tax. But it seems to have surprised Danny Alexander. What DID come as news to me, and to most of the innocent public, is that assisting a criminal was not a criminal offence. We all know what would have happened to us if we had tried to assist or cover up someone who tried to claim housing benefit illegally, or claimed other benefits illegally.

But it is one law for the rich, and one law for the rest of us. So now Danny Alexander wants to make it illegal for accountants and bankers to aid felons. Big deal. When you have been in power for nearly five years, and you and  your coalition partners have been vocally denouncing aggressive tax avoidance, the rest of us expect you to have actually done something about it.

Yesterday another scandal broke. Jack Straw and Malcolm Rifkind have been caught in an undercover scam, offering their services for hire. Rifkind can get you introductions to ambassadors. Straw can help you get what you want, and charges only £5000 per day for his services.

So what does the courageous Miliband have to say on the subject? He wants to table a parliamentary debate proposing that MP’s should be banned from holding directorships and acting as consultants while in office.

The horse has bolted, and here comes Miliband to the rescue with his barn-door closing strategy.

As I have argued elsewhere on this site, genuine democracy, workers’ democracy, requires our representatives to work for the common good, not to line their own pockets. Pay them the national average wage. If that is not enough for them, then good: they can work their little hearts out making the national average wage enough to live on comfortably.

So let’s ignore these publicity-grabbing politicians and move towards a genuine democracy, a workers’ democracy, where the people’s representatives genuinely represent the people.

Irony is not Danny Alexander’s strong point.

The Treasury Minister who has diligently carried George Osborne’s bag for him over the last 4 years or so, and happily popped up on screen to present the ‘human face’ of the cuts imposed by the Coalition, sprang to the defence of his Lib-Dem leader yesterday.

Mr Clegg was criticized by one of his own MP’s, Jeremy Browne, for leaving the Lib Dems in a “no-man’s land” between the Conservatives and Labour. Mr Browne has surely been a Liberal for long enough to know that his party has always tried yo position itself in the middle. They are the ‘nice’ Tories, attacking workers’ earnings, social benefits and long-won gains such as the NHS just like the Tories, but doing it with a sadder face. At the same time they try and present themselves as having a social conscience, caring about the poor and disabled, while again with sad faces attacking their benefits and rights with their Tory chums.

So when Danny says in a press interview “Far from being in a no-man’s land, our party stands proud of its record of economic competence during these difficult years” he sees no irony in that statement.

Meanwhile, on another page of the same newspaper, they report that the biggest cuts to public spending have been in the areas of greatest deprivation.

Since 2010-11 the amount the government spends has dropped by hundreds of pounds per head in areas like Manchester, Knowsley, Rochdale, and Liverpool. The cuts (oops, we don’t use the C-word in politics, I should say ‘austerity’) in these areas amount to about £300 or more per person per year. In the less deprived areas like St Albans the cuts have been £38.02 per head, in Richmond-upon-Thames they were £43.54, and in Wokingham the cuts were a mere £2.29.

Wokingham is probably a special case, because any spending cuts in that area might affect the Henley Regatta, which takes place on its banks every summer.

So Mr Alexander, if you are so proud of your economic competence, I can only presume that it was always your intention to attack the poor disproportionately.

Your Tory friends must be so proud of you.

The growth of food banks and reported cases of malnutrition is a scathing indictment of 21st century British capitalism.

You do not need to be a socialist to see food poverty as a shameful scourge that must be dealt with as a matter of urgency. And as I was fuming quietly to myself about the shame of this happening in my country, a very simple and practical idea to end food poverty at a stroke came to me. Bear with me….

First, we need to raise enough money to fund my programme. The simple way to do this is to tax soft drinks and/or sweet foods. Without carrying out a back-of-the envelope calculation, it should be possible to raise enough money to fund my programme. Let’s say we put a 50p tax on every sweet snack. That is 50p per piece. So every Mars bar now costs an extra 50p. And every Mars Duo bar costs an extra £1. (I know – it needs a little more thought. But it cannot be beyond the wit of the human race to figure out how to raise approximately £20.00 per week from every family in the country (or at least, those of them who consume sweet foods and soft drinks) to eradicate food poverty in the UK. And the people complaining about the imposition of an onerous new tax will get their £20 back in healthy food.

What do we do with the money?

We open a workers’ co-operative shop in every town, village and high street in the country. The aim is to make sure there is an outlet within walking distance of as many homes as possible.

And in those shops we provide free vegetables and free fruit.

That’s it. It is simple, and it is practical.

This country introduced the first and greatest health service in the world. Now let’s introduce a National Food Service (NFS).

What fruit will be available? Any fruit grown in the UK. Apples, pears, plums, cherries, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, rhubarb. And similarly vegetables grown in the UK are also available for nothing.

Now any undernourished kid being sent to school by impoverished parents with no money for a nutritious meal can simply send their kids to the NFS shop to pick up an apple or a pear to keep them going. Carrots, celery and other “snacking” vegetables are also available, as well as staples like potatoes, cabbage, cauliflower etc. So the evening meal does not have to be filled with processed packaged cardboard food.

And what happens to the supermarkets? Well, to be honest, I don’t really care what happens to the supermarkets. But let’s follow the scenario through. They have to charge more for those sugary ‘impulse buys’ they dangle in front of us at the checkouts. Tough. And they no longer have any incentive to sell the produce you can get free from your local NFS shop. But they can still sell more exotic fruit and veg: peaches, bananas, mangoes and so on.

In the new food stores there is no reason to sell multi-packs. You are better off just picking up small quantities of what you need, when you need it. No promotion of bulk items to induce you to buy more than you need. So less food waste, fresher foods in the home, and you even reduce the carbon footprint (whatever that is) by sourcing as much of the produce as you can from local growers.

Once you establish the principle that healthy food is a basic right – like air and water – it becomes unthinkable that sections of the population are ever unable to afford a healthy diet. Like the NHS’s free healthcare from the cradle to the grave, we want free healthy food for all.

Are there issues with this programme? Of course there are. But there is no reason why it cannot be done. The human race is not so poor in ideas and ideals that we cannot find a way to put it into practice. And the end result is that we abolish the shameful existence of food banks.