How the LEFT betrayed the working classes
In Ireland, America, France and Britain, parties of the left, all too often led by middle-class do-gooders, are being abandoned at the polls by the very people they claim to represent. Why? Because the working poor don’t hate success – they want a fair ch
AS a teenager, I used to wonder why my father wasn’t taken with socialism, or didn’t vote for parties that pitched to workers that they would protect their rights and improve their living conditions.
After all, he should have been a prime candidate to support this. He had to get up for work at 5.30 each morning and he would cycle to the Marina Bakery in Cork where he worked as a confectioner. He didn’t have the money for holidays or other things I now take for granted either, even after working overtime. There were years when he had to do shift work – which he didn’t like. He used to tell me that when I reached adulthood I should get a job where, if possible, I would work normal hours.
The prospect of getting a job in Cork in the 1980s was far from certain. This was the era of the closure of the big manufacturing plants at Ford, Dunlop and the Verolme shipyard. Of my Leaving Certificate class of 1983, in the North Monastery in Cork, there were 21 of us in the 37-pupil class who came from homes where nobody was working. My father was made redundant from his just months before he was due to retire; he was delighted because he now got a redundancy payment he had not been expecting. But it still wasn’t so large as to interfere with my eligibility for a Cork Corporation grant to pay my full fees and living expenses for my time at University College Cork and then for a year’s post grad at Dublin City University. I remain thankful for that opportunity I was afforded and wish more of my generation had it.
MY father enjoyed free travel and other State-provided perks of retirement – and the use of a medical card – and was grateful for it, reckoning that he had worked for these things. It wasn’t that he was easily satisfied, but he reckoned that there was only so much to go around. He wasn’t envious or dismissive of those who succeeded or who enjoyed a higher standard of living but he was a bit impatient with those who complained about not getting what they wanted, especially if they clearly hadn’t made at least a bit of an effort.
They say most sons turn into their fathers eventually. That might explain a few things about me. I know that my main motivation is providing for my family and that I’m prepared to work hard to do that. But then there is nothing unusual in that. Self-reliance is a common Irish trait… and you find it in many other societies, too.
It might help to explain why these are not good times across the western world for those on the left, politically. Some of those workers you might expect to vote for socialist policies are ditching the left for the lure of the populist promises from the sirens on the right. Others, sharing a contempt for the hatred and hostility of the right, are hunkering down in the political centre.
This, despite the real and perceived failures of capitalism in the last decade and the hatred of austerity.
The socialist leaders do not appeal to those they want to lead. Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn, a proud old-style socialist, has no chance of becoming British Prime Minister in June’s forthcoming general election. Five more years of Tory rule beckon. Hillary Clinton, standard bearer of the soft left in the United States, lost the presidential election to a boorish, fraudulent champion of the common people in billionaire Donald Trump, who seeks to implement policies of the extreme Alt-Right. Marine Le Pen, daughter of a dangerous fascist and not far removed from his policies, albeit with a different sheen, is in pole position to reach the final runoff vote to be the next French president.
All over Europe, the centre is finding it difficult to hold but when it loses it is to the right, not the left. Ireland, at first glance, appears to be different, even if populism has given us a dolly-mixture Dáil and a weak government to boot. We have no extreme right-wingers in politics, despite attempts by the left to demonise Fine Gael in that way. Yet the left, while much more significant in political representation than a generation ago, has not made the advances that the reaction to austerity could have brought about.
This is because, like in other countries, Ireland is not convinced by the rationale of the arguments of the left. I suspect the vast majority of our citizens want any government to deliver services on a fair and equitable basis and to levy
taxation accordingly. They believe in the provision of the safety net as part of a decent society but that does not mean that everyone gets everything for no payment or that every demand is met as if there is a limitless pool of available money to do so. Indeed, we may be about to see quite a backlash from people who work hard and pay their taxes honestly, yet see other people demanding more and more financial support from the State despite often contributing little.
Some on the left seem to have moved from wanting equality of opportunity to an equality of outcome. Which is not feasible – and is not actually fair either.
There is a problem, it should be conceded, with vast income disparities in the modern world, including Ireland, but there are ways of addressing that without going too far to the other extreme. Unfortunately, if you have a large income – and there is often debate as to what constitutes large and confusion as to the distinction between income and assets – then there are those who would suggest that there has to be something suspect about how you have it.
What follows is an automatic assumption that because you are then apparently undeserving you should be paying more taxes in mitigation… or as an imposed retribution.
This is described by the left as progressive, as it allows even more people on lower incomes to escape the tax net or have additional services delivered to them by the State with the tax money taken from the better-off. As it happens though, Ireland already has one of the most progressive tax systems in the world; the top 1% of earners pay 22% of all personal taxes collected. The next 24% of earners pay 59% of the total. The bottom three quarters of earners pay 19% between them. At low levels of income, the Irish pay the least tax in the EU. At high levels of income, they contribute the most.
When the crash hit nearly a decade ago there were 42% of people who had been exempted from the tax net entirely, other than paying Vat on their purchases. The late Brian Lenihan, as Minister for Finance, introduced the much hated Universal Social Charge not just as a way of dramatically replacing other lost taxes from the property sector, but to ensure that everybody paid at least something, that they contributed and appreciated better the services received in return.
Some of the very lowly paid were exempted – just 11% of the waged – but we have returned to removing people from the income tax net and 29% pay no direct taxes at all now.
We do all of this while supporting one of the highest minimum wages in the EU – and we’re told that we should also be paying a much higher ‘living wage’ – and providing a more generous social benefits system than available in most EU states. The national debt is still €200billion, six times higher than a decade ago, and personal debt is still at record highs. Yet many behave as if the crisis is over, that all can be returned to as it was before the crash, as if that is a good thing.
Minister Leo Varadkar this week provoked the predictable howls of outrage from some on the political left when he promised a crackdown on social welfare fraud and asked people to inform his Department of Social Protection about suspected offenders. He was accused, on Twitter of course, where outrage is rife and judgment is readily dispensed, of demonising the poor and choosing the wrong targets in seeking to right the wrongs of Irish society.
WHY wasn’t he targeting white collar crime, for example? What is he doing about tax evasion and tax avoidance? Why is the State so keen to chase down money from the poor and disadvantaged when it is not willing to take €13billion, plus possible interest and tax penalties of another €6billion, in tax revenue that Apple has avoided and which the EU wants us to charge? The implication was clear: he was going after the hard-pressed little man instead of the elite.
I admit that I asked him those questions myself when he came to my radio studio on Tuesday. But the questions I ask on The Last Word are not necessarily reflective of my own beliefs. I’m interested in the reaction they provoke, the quality of the answers provided. Varadkar handled them well.
He pointed out that about €100million a year may be lost to the State because of welfare fraud, which we cannot afford. Decrying what he called ‘whataboutery’, he said that this is a separate matter to anything else I raised and deserved to be treated on its own merits. And he’s right.
All of this, predictably, drove some of the text messengers to Today FM crazy, leading to all sort of accusations of heartlessness on Varadkar’s part and the like. That, in some respects, sums up the position of some on the left: if you don’t follow their agenda of seeing everyone on a low income as being the victim of a gross injustice and imposed inequality, and don’t agree that these victims are somehow superior morally to those who earn higher incomes, then you are a selfish, oppressive, greedy and, possibly even, an evil person.
But most people don’t think that way. Significantly, Varadkar’s contribution also prompted a considerable number of messages of support. These people thought he was talking sense, that we should not tolerate a situation where people defraud the State, no matter how disadvantaged their address or school they went to. That wasn’t unexpected either.
I have long noted the frustration that many listeners have expressed about what they see as the sponging off others, the sense of entitlement often present in the complaints of people who not only feel they should not have to pay, but that others should pay more.
The evening after Varadkar’s appearance, Dr Ruairi Hanley, a general practitioner who works in Drogheda, joined me on the programme to argue against the idea – adopted by an Oireachtas committee recently – that, within the next five years, there should be free GP care available to all.
Dr Hanley laid out a clear and coherent argument that this is not a good idea. Firstly, it does not work as it should in the much feted National Health Service in the UK: too many people seeking free appointments mean a backlog in many areas of up to three weeks before patients can get to meet their doctor.
Secondly, we already have too many people with medical cards in the country who clog up waiting rooms because they are not charged for accessing the service; the giving of free GP cards to all under the age of six has made this worse.
Third, there are not enough GPs in Ireland to provide the service as it stands, let alone cater for the greater demand that would inevitably follow from making primary care free to all, irrespective of income. And, as he pointed out, these politicians want to raise income taxes on almost everyone to pay for what may well turn out to be a deeply botched system.
The absence of an economically conservative party – to represent the ordinary worker, not an elite – has created an unwelcome vacuum in Irish politics, one which meant an absence of intellectual and philosophical debate.
Our new politics seems to be mainly about naked clientelism and populist emoting. Everyone is trying to outdo each other in promising money to specific constituencies while presenting a human, caring face. But there are voters who can see beyond this. Those voters are the workers.