BLAIR’S BABY BONDS
British prime minister Tony Blair has offered to give every child £300+ in a protected trust fund, to be topped up intermittently until age eighteen, to promote saving and give hope, he says. This is the real meaning of Blair’s baby bonds:
* Don’t trust the parents The PM complained that people thought the government was anti-family when it abolished Family Tax Credit. Well if anyone had any lingering doubts on that score this should dispose of them. The baby bond trust funds will not be available until baby is an adult. It seems parents just cannot be trusted to look after the interests of their children.
* Popular capitalism for babies The government is making a point of breaking with the traditions of the welfare state. Instead of providing education and health from the state’s resources to people who need them, the government proposes to give them some of the capital for them to invest for themselves; or, as Harold Macmillan once remarked of Mrs Thatcher’s policies, to sell off the family silver.
* Thinktank twaddle New Labour policy wonks are peddling the superannuated myth that capital can be owned by everyone, and if we just invest our bonds wisely they will go on growing and growing. They forget that interest income does not fall from the skies; capital is a social relation in which some are exploited by others, and we cannot all exploit each other.
* Forgotten by history The baby bond scheme is a warmed over version of the scheme proposed by Major Douglas, ‘Social Credit’, that enjoyed a sudden but brief popularity in the 1930s. With hopes crushed by recession, Douglas’ proposal to pay everyone dividends on the social capital seemed - for a moment - to make sense, before being revealed as the political equivalent of pyramid selling. (CH Douglas, Social Credit, NY, 1933)
* Writing off a whole generation Government spokesmen have insisted that the scheme is not a gimmick but an attempt to give the young a stake in society ... the young in about 20 years time that is. It seems New Labour is so disappointed by the current generation of adults lack of enthusiasm for British society that it has written them off, and is pinning its hopes on our infant sons and daughters instead.
* Don’t trust the babies No sooner was the proposal made public than the alarm was raised that 18 year-olds would spend the money on clothes and holidays instead of investing it in their futures. Ministers reassuringly explained that the stakeholders of the future would have to be told what to spend their money on.
MAYDAY MONOPOLY
On Mayday, ordinary Londoners will once again run the gauntlet of mayhem organised by an elitist conspiracy of politically motivated enemies of democracy. These thugs have admitted that many of them will come fully armed into central London, and they have demonstrated before that they are happy to use violence to achieve their objectives.
And what are the objectives of these evil men? They claim to be saving us from a few hundred masked vegetarians who have been recruited from English public schools to demonstrate against the ecologically unfriendly business activities of American corporations. One monopoly the vegetarians are unlikely to break on Mayday is the Metropolitan Police’s stranglehold on the legal use of force. Since 1990 170 people have died while in the custody of the Metropolitan Police; no police officer has ever been convicted in relation to these deaths.
-- James Heartfield