Throughout the Western world we are learning continuously that people are rejecting neo-liberalism and all its horrid machinations. It is the uglier face of Thatcherism. Brexit, in itself, is a people turning their back on globalisation and opting for the security of the nation state and some form of protectionism against big business. I’m not against immigration, but I’m a solid believer in the nation-state. Nations, most often, have been forged in blood, and it’s no business of any government to surrender the sovereignty which makes up their heart-beat. The power of the population in the form of the state is the only protection we have in this world against the forces we cannot control, for through it we can manipulate how we respond to such happenings – by putting our own house in order, we may better equip ourselves to help address the problems of others in the world.
But the point of this article is the issue of unemployment, which although falling due only to record low interest rates, impacts the livelihoods of everyone everywhere. Now I can’t lay out for you a comprehensive model for remedying all the economic implications of it or of what I am proposing, but I do know for sure that this is how it will end up being tackled generally, when destiny and circumstance permits.
At present, people are over-worked, putting in ever longer hours for less pay and pensions, and with dwindling time to spend with their families/friends. They are living just in order to work, as opposed to working in order to live – and live a full life they should. On the other hand, there are people who are underemployed in insecure jobs and there are those who have no job at all. This is a scar on the face of a developed populace; an uncivilised and grim state of existence, that we condemn our fellow citizens to the idle confines of nothingness each day when their genius and talents could be building the roads and infrastructure of our land and minds. It has caused a litany of mass depression and feelings of meaningless among many of our fellow citizens; a culture of Prozac and self-harm, if not suicide.
At some future point, I don’t know exactly when, a reunified Ireland would have the wind at its back to exit the European Union and take back some control over our economic destiny. This would mean having power over our own currency, an Irish currency, to devalue according to the amount of money we need to spend on public services, and to determine our own working conditions. Like Norway (the most equal country on Earth), we could access the EU Single Market, albeit with terms that would suit the Europeans desire to sell and our wish to be able to purchase goods and services as we choose (via higher wages). That’s not idealistic, why would they not want to increase their turnover in our markets, especially when we mean them no harm?
With new technologies springing up here, there and everywhere, life is becoming more colourful but jobs are becoming more precarious – machines are taking over the roles which human beings occupied for decades. Just like Harold Wilson predicted in the 1960’s. So, it stands to reason that the only way to give people more free time and to create jobs in the process is to do several things;
1. Decrease by half the working hours of those already in work, creating an additional job for the one already in existence – to compensate for the other half of the working week which needs manned.
2. Tax the affluent more to pay the salaries of the new jobs having been created by this doubling of labour potential, but not excessively, just enough.
3. Print a sufficient amount of money with our own currency, so as to have the revenue to salary these new employees, just like we did when the banks were bailed out. Yes that will mean a devaluing of our currency by international banks, but what’s the price of idleness? What’s the point in having a lost generation of youth? The people who would devalue our currency are the very same individuals who caused the mortgage crash and austerity, offering up our children’s futures on the altar of monetarism. Their agenda and motivations are not reconcilable with the public interest clause. Their interests do not lie with our interests.
4. Use the taxes gathered from these new employees to invest in creating new social and health services for the population, while investing in existing ones. We need a National Care Service, to combat the indignity and isolation forced on those who are old or sick. Likewise, a National Day-Care Service, to provide free nursery level education for families to be able to work. In addition to that, we need a population with a skills overdose and not a skills deficit. These newly employed citizens would immediately become PAYE workers, contributing taxes towards the services employing them.
This isn’t some obscure economic philosophy, it is the same model which built the NHS – the work of John Maynard Keynes. Ask yourself this, what could you do with that extra free time? What talents could it free up and what affections could it nurture? Now, I’m not a Marxist and I’m certainly no Trotskysist. The motivating reason Britain remains on this island is to inhibit some sort of beacon of both social justice and affluence from emerging – which would give the British working class ideas from their doorstep. The reason it would require a reunified Ireland is simple – the vested interests of global capital are too great and time-consuming to overcome in the UK, particularly when Irish votes count for nothing in a British Parliament. It is a legislature of British interests, made up of British MP’s, voting on British issues. It would be much easier to oust a similar set of elites in a small country like Ireland than in the much larger UK state, with its militarist and securocrat tendencies undermining all such democratic initiatives (as is happening in Labour at present).
Now that’s what’s going to happen, in time. People look at the DUP and their electoral successes to date and think woefully about the prospects of an Irish Republic happening, devoid of the fact that there are forces in this world mightier than parliamentary majorities. But remember, values and political objectives are not physical entities which can ever cease – for they exist in a transcendental realm, where they cannot be fought for nor destroyed, but pursued by the mind’s work, however bleak the circumstances.
Remember, there are no final battles between good and evil, left and right, or right and wrong. Each generation must fight the same battles time and time again, with a bit more ground being gained upon each encounter. Parliament would not exist if brave men and women were not prepared to bare arms against the tyranny of kings to achieve it. But that historical set of precedents has to be taken into an Irish context – we have won the right to have some form of self-government over the affairs of this island. It’s not perfect but the battle now that political democracy has been partially won has to be for industrial and national democracy. When that happens, the decadent sky-scrapers of prosperity will dawn Irish skies neath only the Heavens.
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