Imagine a world where profits aren’t the sole driver of our economy. Imagine a world where the nation’s health and well-being are equally, if not more, important. Imagine a world where everyone has a decent affordable home to live in. Imagine economics where GDP isn’t the only measure of success; where fiscal rules don’t prevent investment and change; where the myth that the country’s economy is like a household budget is finally exploded; where the Treasury enables, rather than blocks.
Imagine all this and you begin to see where County Durham born Maeve Cohen – economist and campaigner, is coming from. She says there is an alternative narrative. Change can mean changing for the better not the worse. The world can be run to support its people.
Now imagine a church hall in Hexham on a Saturday morning. The Northumberland County Show is on; there’s a farmer’s market in the town centre, but an astonishing seventy people have turned up to hear what Maeve has to say and engage with this alternative world.
Maeve, who now lives in Whitley Bay, pronounced herself “blown-away” by the turn-out to an event jointly organised by campaign group Tynedale Transformed and Hexham Debates. “It gives us all hope that if we can get messages across, engage people, apply pressure to upset the status quo we can change things. It doesn’t have to be this way,” she said afterwards.
Her talk, and the debate which followed, concentrated on destroying myths:
GDP
First the tyranny of GDP as a measure of economic success. “Your GDP,” as one member of the public famously told a politician who was rattling on about it.
“GDP doesn’t mean a lot to most people,” said Maeve. “It should not be the only measure of an economy. Something like the NHS brings huge economic value to the country, keeping our workforce healthy – but because it can’t be bought or sold in the market it’s not included in GDP.”
There are other ways of measuring an economy which take into account the value of public assets like the NHS, and our education and health systems.”
Fiscal rules
Next, fiscal rules came under her scrutiny. Maeve Cohen said, “It is a universally accepted fact that we need investment in this country. We need to spend money. But the way we use fiscal rules at the moment is like a restaurant saying it will wait for business to pick up before it invests in an oven. Of course, it hasn’t got a business at all without the oven.”
“We are the economy. People are the economy. But what if people are too ill to go to work; if people can’t afford, or find, a bus to get them to work; if children are living in insecure housing and don’t do well at school? These public services are not a lefty luxury, they are a fundamental economic necessity.
“The stagnation in the economy that we see now is due to fourteen, fifteen years of austerity. To have a set of fiscal rules that prevents you from investing in the things we require is totally insane. I do not understand why we don’t change the rules to enable us to invest in what we need.”
“We also need to change the regulations around investing which currently favour borrowing for infra-structure, such as buildings or new roads, but not investing in people and public services which are more important.”
Housekeeping myth
Maeve then laid into the myth that the UK household economy is like a household budget – you can’t spend what you don’t have. The basic argument goes that the scale of government changes everything. Its assets and liabilities can’t be measured in the same way as a household. A government doesn’t use money it issues money – prints it. How much it prints is a political decision.
Education
“Most politicians do not really understand economics,” said Maeve. This is why MPs get it wrong time and time again. She argued that the way we educate people about economics has to change too. After graduating she founded a campaign to transform the way economics is taught in universities. “Unfortunately, most MPs only have a very basic knowledge,” she said.
Treasury
Maeve described the Treasury as a “roundabout of incompetence” due to a culture that blocks everything.
“Someone wants to spend money to solve a problem and the Treasury blocks it. We need to change that. But we are not going to change the culture of something so old as the Treasury unless we have strong leadership and, at the moment, we do not have that.”
Alternatives
“The role of governments first and foremost should be to provide for the needs of its people,” Maeve believes. “First of all, we need a functioning planet. We need basic shelter, food, a good education, a fully functioning transport system, a health service, care in old age. These services should be provided not for profit by the state,” she said.
She focused on social housing to show how previous thinking hadn’t worked. “We used to have an asset, social housing, but we sold that asset off. Now we hand out housing benefit to the landlords, to the rich. It is vastly more expensive and inefficient, it’s mad, and we the people don’t own those assets anymore.”
Maeve believes that change can be won by community action and organisation. That groups of people must fight for what they believe is right. And that people mustn’t let themselves be exploited by political parties which want to use hate and division as a route to power.
She also believes that some solutions might emerge organically. “For example, the insurance system will drive measures to reduce climate change. That’s all the insurance industry is talking about at the moment. Climate change is not something we need to worry about in ten years’ time. It is happening now. Insurers realise that many things will become uninsurable and this will collapse economies very quickly.”
Maeve Cohen’s fight will go on. The question is how many of the rest of us are prepared to help and support those who want to drive change. The alternative is too awful to bear.
And we don’t want to imagine that.
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