A joyless economic recovery?


    Ross Saunders

    The UK economy will shortly become the fastest growing economy in the western world predicts the ICAEW (the body which represents accountants).

    The bosses’ organisation, the CBI, has also stoked optimism with a prediction of higher growth than it had anticipated – 1.4% for 2013 and 2.4% for 2014, up from 1.2% and 2.3% respectively.

    This follows the Office for National Statistics reporting that the economy has improved consistently all year and was now registering “fairly strong” performance not just in services but across several sectors including construction and manufacturing, the best since 2010.

    So where’s our share of the ‘recovery’? If any readers of the Socialist are expecting to benefit from this ‘boom’, then prepare to be disappointed!

    The evidence of recent history shows that any increase in wealth from growth in the economy, without a determined effort to prise it out of the hands of the capitalists, will not automatically translate into better living standards for the working class.

    The National Institute of Economic and Social Research calculates that real wages won’t be back to their pre-recession peak until 2019!

    The Trade Union Congress reckons that on average each worker is £2,000 a year worse off since the start of the last recession.

    The figures show we’ve been getting poorer, while the wealth we create gets swallowed up by the capitalists.

    According to the Sunday Times Rich List 2013 the top 1,000 UK fat cats’ combined wealth amounts to almost £450 billion. That’s an increase of more than £35 billion from last year

    There’s been no austerity for the rich, and now there’s no recovery of living standards for us. There are more families made homeless having to be housed in temporary bed and breakfast accommodation than at any time in the last decade.

    And it’s not just those who are out of work who have been hit. Over six million of those in poverty in Britain are in working households.

    It’s an indictment of the profit system of capitalism that over half of benefits are now claimed by the low-waged because scrooge employers won’t pay enough for workers to live on.

    Working class people have to fight in the workplaces for economic justice and build a socialist political alternative to capitalism – the only way that lasting prosperity for the millions can be achieved.