Claim the Future

John McDonnell MP
November 2020

John McDonnell MP
November 2020

Introduction
There is a struggle taking place in
our society. It’s barely reported in
the mainstream media but it’s real
and it’s happening.
It’s between people who have experienced the last 10 years
of austerity and the first wave of the pandemic and have
decided that things have to change. It’s between them and the
establishment who are desperately seeking to hold on to their
grip on wealth and power.
The pandemic has acted as a pressure test on how our society
and economy operates. It has exposed the stark reality of 21 st
century capitalism.
Where for millions work means poverty wages and a daily
struggle to make ends meet. Where social security provides no
security. Where, as a result of gross underfunding, social care
leaves thousands in neglect.
Not only have the weaknesses and failings of the system been
exposed but the dominant theories upon which the economy
has been managed are being forcibly challenged.
The market patently doesn’t always know best. Private good,
public bad as a dictum for the provision of public services has
led to rip-off profiteering and poor and at times dangerous
delivery of the services we depend on. The wealth amassed by
the rich at our expense has not trickled down.
The first wave of the pandemic inflicted immense hardship and
produced many personal tragedies but it also often brought out
the selfless best in people and prompted the first stirrings of an
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optimism that lessons were being learnt and change could follow.
Since then tens of thousands more have died and we face the
second wave in which it feels like we are back to the start but
without the safeguarding systems put in place to cope that were
promised months ago.
The frightening threat of Covid has been made so much worse
by the crass incompetence of Prime Minister Johnson and his
ministers, who have combined failure with disingenuous bluster
and cover up.
Ministers and advisers have disregarded safety rules with
impunity and created unnecessary divisions across the country
to the point of putting at risk the very integrity of the UK.
Nevertheless, for their friends, awarded lucrative government
Covid contracts, it has been a very profitable crisis. What
economic support that has been provided to businesses has
been unconditional, with the result that there have been no
constraints put upon companies pursuing fire and rehire
strategies to cut workers’ wages and undermine hard won terms
of employment.
Lack of effective action by Government has resulted in
mass redundancies and job losses are mounting rapidly.
Unemployment is predicted to reach levels even beyond the
1980s, hitting young people the hardest. A new lost generation
is emerging.
Mobilising to respond to the immediate problems our people
are facing of job losses, attacks on wages, rising debt and
evictions is now taking on a heightened sense of urgency. But
whilst confronting the day to day issues it is equally important
that we lift our sights to plan the society we aim to create so that
never again will we face a crisis so vulnerable and ill-prepared:
a society that will guarantee the security, hopes and dreams
people naturally seek to possess.
5 Introduction

We must claim the future. If we don’t, others will.
It will be the establishment politicians and the corporate
interests they serve that will prevail.
The risk is a repeat of what happened after the financial crash of
2008 when, by failing to mobilise for an alternative, progressives
allowed the political vacuum to be filled by the right.
That crash exposed a grotesque economic system built on greed,
perilously out of all democratic control, but the establishment
soon closed the waters over the crisis to return to business as
usual. The result was 10 years of brutal austerity that didn’t just
cause hardship but cost many lives.
History has taught us that a recession on the scale we could be
facing now not only blights the lives of a generation but is often
dangerously also the breeding ground for the far right.
The Claim the Future project has brought together a wide range
of policy experts and campaigners to discuss and plan what a new
future could be like but also by networking activist campaigners
with policy analysts and researchers to enable the prefiguring
of that new society in the campaigns and policy solutions being
promoted now.
We must claim the
future. If we don’t,
others will.
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Claim
The Future

How do we Claim The Future?
With an 80 seat Conservative majority in Parliament and a largely
craven media, the question is how do we claim the future? How is
fundamental political and economic change achieved?
The past two major political paradigm shifts were brought about
by the post war Labour government and the 1980s Thatcher
government. They achieved radical change not by relying solely
on the publication of a long lists of policies but by advocating a
vision of a society based upon a basic set of principles that caught
the wind when the opportunity for change arose.
For Attlee’s Labour Party it was a society built upon solidarity,
collective action and public ownership. For Thatcher’s
Conservative Party it was individualism, market competition
and private ownership. Both these sets of principles dominated
political economy for their generation and beyond to the extent
that they were incorporated into the thinking and policies of
political opponents.
The experience of the pandemic after a decade of austerity has
the potential to deal a fatal blow to the already shaky hegemony
of Thatcherite neoliberal ideas and open up the opportunity for
change.
Contrary to the Thatcherite claim that there is no such thing as
society, the pandemic has taught us that we are a community and
we do care for each other and need each other.
Collective action and mutual support have been essential to
tackling the pandemic and supporting its victims, not just by the
state but also in a multitude of forms of mutual aid.
The promotion of individualism in a society and economy where
there is already an unequal distribution of power and wealth
has exacerbated that inequality. The pandemic has exposed the
brutal consequences of inequality in the higher death rates in
economically deprived areas and the BAME community.
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How do we
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Markets become next to irrelevant in large sections of an
economy shut down in a pandemic and private ownership has
proved to be unsustainable in many sectors of the economy,
such as transport, or shown to be dangerously unfit for purpose
in areas like social care.
The pandemic has demonstrated the redundancy of
neoliberalism at times of crisis with a clear lesson for how we
deal with the next crisis: the existential threat of climate change.
The argument could now be won for resetting our economy to
a new set of principles burnished by the pandemic experience.
An economy where universal basic services provide, as a right,
access to employment, education, a decent home, treatment and
care and an income securing a good quality of life.
An economy of true value, where the distribution of rewards is
based upon the social value of the contribution a person makes
to society and not solely the market value. An economy based
on community, whose aim is to bring people together and
support communities to thrive across the whole country. And,
as climate change is here, an economy with sustainability at its
core – where every economic decision is based upon sustaining
life on the planet and the rights of future generations.
A new set of founding economic principles is made real by the
advocacy of specific alternative policies to meet the immediate
challenges we face that prefigure the society we aim to create.
It is these policy demands that can provide the basis upon
which movements can be mobilised. It is only through those
movements that we can create an unstoppable climate of
opinion to force through fundamental change.
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Valuing Work and Empowering Workers
A Jobs Guarantee
The coronavirus crisis has revealed how reliant everyone is on
working people from the carers in our residential care homes,
to the supermarket workers, the drivers of trains and buses
and to the cleaners, essential to reducing the risk of infection.
Workers have secured people’s health, care, travel, shelter, and
livelihoods.
But it has also exposed how the pay and working conditions of
many of these workers show how little they have been valued in
the eyes of employers and government alike.
There are 3.7 million people in insecure work with nearly a
million workers on zero-hours contracts with no guaranteed
hours. Insecure work has gradually spread into new industries,
such as banking and education.
The last ten years have also seen a “pay disaster”, in the
words of the chief economist of the Bank of England, with
weekly wages still below the 2008 levels in the months before
the pandemic. In-work poverty has increased by a third
since 1996/97.
Statutory sick pay is at a miserable £95.85 per week and many
zero-hours contract workers and other ‘gig economy’ workers
do not have access to statutory sick pay at all. Low pay is the
product of decades of decimating workplace rights.
Margaret Thatcher’s goal was “to smash the unions forever”.
She introduced legislation reducing compensation for unfair
dismissal, enabling punishment for striking, restricting
strikes in support of other workers and ending the “closed
shop”. Privatisation, outsourcing and deregulation were often
justified on the ground of reduced costs but invariably this
reduced cost was secured by undercutting workers’ pay and
conditions and loosening protections at work.
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Valuing Work and
Empowering Workers

Key elements of anti trade union legislation were maintained
under New Labour. Then, between 2010 and 2020, efforts to
dismantle organised labour were redoubled under successive
Conservative-led governments. The Trade Union Act 2016
introduced even further restrictions on when a strike was possible.
Unite General Secretary Len McCluskey called it “a dark day for
workers” when the Act was passed.
It is no coincidence that as membership of trade unions fell by
47% between 1979 and 2014 there was a sharp rise in inequality.
Over the same period the share of wealth that went to the richest
one percent leapt by 134%.
When the pandemic hit, it became obvious that the state
had to intervene urgently and at scale to support people
unable to work and to support businesses whose operations were
curtailed.
But the government’s interventions have been slow, half-hearted
and riddled with gaps in coverage, with the result that many have
suffered hardship from inadequate or no support at all.
By failing to attach basic conditions to state aid the government
has also given free rein to employers to drive through long-held
corporate ambitions to cut wages and undermine terms of
employment to enhance their long-term profits. The rapidly
expanding practice of “fire and rehire” has demonstrated that
many employers are not letting the crisis go to waste.
With the uncertainty of adequate government support
continuing, joblessness is predicted to reach levels not seen
since the 1980s. The Alliance for Full Employment estimates
that one and a half million young people will experience
unemployment over the next year.
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A Jobs Reset Programme
We need a reset programme of immediate measures to protect
living standards during the pandemic and lay the foundations
of a new economy based upon full employment and properly
valuing and rewarding workers.
A Job Guarantee Scheme providing the guarantee of paid
work at least at the real living wage, or the union negotiated
rate, or to provide free education or skills training, will be vital
to preventing a prolonged slump and the even larger economic
and social costs that come with sharp rises of long-term
unemployment and increased poverty. Linked to the Green
New Deal, this would provide the well paid, skilled jobs needed
in the just transition to a sustainable economy.
The guarantee of a job or an education or training opportunity
will only succeed if universities and colleges are fully resourced.
The free market model in universities and colleges was already
fundamentally broken, since a large percentage of student debt
is never going to be paid back. And now, hit through the Covid
crisis by a £2.6 billion shortfall, some universities may face
bankruptcy, denying opportunity to thousands of young people,
as well as resulting in job losses.
Government has provided some limited financial assistance
to universities to help with cashflow but is threatening to cut
courses and restrict access. A full bail-out is critical but must be
conditional on preventing job losses, ending casualisation and
be linked to scrapping tuition fees, restoring maintenance grants
and the Education Maintenance Allowance to remove barriers
to workers seeking to improve their skills and retrain throughout
their working lives.
The Job Retention Scheme could readily be adapted to a short
time working scheme, permanently available if needed, to share
work and reduce the working week under the leadership of
trade unions.
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Valuing Work and
Empowering Workers

Boosting the minimum wage is an essential way both to value
workers properly and to assist in recession-proofing people in
work. Prior to the coronavirus crisis the minimum wage was
not a real living wage. An immediate increase to £10 an hour
with the aim of a staged increase to £15 an hour would not only
reduce in-work poverty but also inject money back into the
economy, since those paid the least are highly likely to spend
these wages rather than save them.
Sectoral collective bargaining is the single most important way
to ensure good minimum terms, conditions, and pay are agreed
across an industry. Its early introduction in the care sector could
overcome the chronic low pay of carers.
Effective collective bargaining requires the restoration of
trade union rights by repealing the Trade Union Act 2016 and
overhauling earlier legislation restricting the rights to organise,
strike, and gain access to workplaces for organising.
The exploitation of insecure work would be reduced by banning
zero hours contracts and returning to one category of ‘worker’
whilst a better balance between work and rest could be struck by
reducing working hours with the aim of achieving the equivalent
of a four day week and increasing the number of bank holidays
without loss of pay.
A better balance between work
and rest could be struck by
reducing working hours with the
aim of achieving the equivalent of
a four day week without loss of pay.
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Social Security
Nobody Should Live in Poverty:
A Minimum Income Guarantee
The path to a better society and a stronger economy can only be
built on the foundations of a strong safety net. If social security is
to mean anything in the sixth wealthiest country in the world, it
should mean nobody lives in poverty.
Poverty has been rising in Britain for over a decade. Under the
austerity policies of the Conservative government from 2010,
billions of pounds have been cut from social security budgets,
driving millions more people into poverty. The benefit freeze
meant real terms cuts in incomes – while eligibility for support
was removed from many people. Support for low paid workers
was also reduced through cuts to tax credits, Universal Credit
and housing benefit.
Alongside these cuts, a more punitive conditionality and
sanctions regime has been introduced, described as going from a
system that helped people to a system designed to trip people up.
14 million people in Britain are now officially classified as living
in poverty. Over four million children are growing up in poverty,
pensioner poverty is rising again, and over three in ten disabled
people live in poverty.
In-work poverty is at record high levels, and 70% of the children
in poverty are in a household where at least one parent works. Of
the 14.3 million people in poverty, nine million live in households
where at least one person works.
UK benefits provide some of the lowest incomes in western
Europe. The United Nations has been damning about the impact
of austerity, saying that the UK’s social safety net “has been
deliberately removed and replaced with a harsh and uncaring
ethos” whilst a former government adviser, Louise Casey, has
referred to people facing destitution.
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Social
Security

In recent years the number of workers who are self-employed
has increased dramatically from 3.3 million in 2001 to around
5 million workers at the start of 2020. Many are not eligible for
the social security protections that are available to employed
workers, and many are forced into bogus self-employment –
working regularly for the same employer, while the employer
avoids having to pay pension or National Insurance
contributions or having any duty to provide benefits like sick pay
and pensions.
When the coronavirus crisis hit it was clear that the UK’s
shredded social safety net would be inadequate but whilst the
government has been forced to introduce a series of additional,
short term, late and limited measures to support businesses
and wages, its obvious aim is to cut this support at the
earliest opportunity.
The Government clearly shares the view of the Governor of
the Bank of England when he argued for ending support “to let
structural change in the economy take place.” The inevitable
consequence of withdrawing support without any plan for
managed structural change is rapidly rising unemployment and,
with the resultant loss of income, poverty. It is the return of the
Conservative attitude of the 1980s that unemployment is a price
worth paying.
Government ministers fail to accept that social security acts as
what economists call an ‘automatic stabiliser’, acting as a buffer
that not only protects the individual but the wider economy –
preventing economic demand from slumping. The underlying
principle of social security is that it should provide a liveable
income for all those unable to work or whose pay from work
does not provide a liveable income. The current system fails to
fulfil this basic role. It needs to be reset.
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A Social Security
Reset Programme
All our children should be given the best possible start in life, but
child poverty has been rising in recent years due to deliberate
policy choices – including limiting benefits to the first two
children and freezing and then capping child benefit. To tackle
child poverty, child benefit must be increased substantially, the
benefit cap scrapped, and the two-child limit removed.
A social security system that does what it says and provides
security, must start with a Minimum Income Guarantee at its
base – providing the minimum level that anyone is expected
to live on. A range of levels for the MIG have been suggested
including a Liveable Income Guarantee equivalent to the real
living wage, accounting for housing costs too, and linked to
additional support to ensure the right to independent living
for disabled people. These would be significant increases from
the current levels of UK social security, but they would be not
greatly dissimilar from levels of social security paid in Ireland,
France or Germany.
The underlying principle of social
security is that it should provide a
liveable income for all those unable
to work or whose pay from work
does not provide a liveable income.
The current system fails to fulfil this
basic role. It needs to be reset.
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Social
Security

Housing
A Home for Everybody:
A Homes Guarantee
Housing is the starkest example of market failure. In the last
decade the number of people sleeping rough on England’s
streets has more than doubled. 726 rough sleepers died in 2018.
The street homeless are the tip of the iceberg of the housing
crisis that exists across Britain. There are now over 135,000
children growing up in temporary accommodation, without a
home to call their own. Home ownership has steadily declined
especially among younger households, which have not been able
to afford a home. The average house price is nearly eight times
the median wage.
Landlords have also been crowding out first-time buyers in
the housing market, as house price rises have outstripped
wage rises for a generation. Only those with significant wealth
are able to put down the necessary deposit in order to get a
mortgage. This trend means nearly a million fewer under-40s
own their own home than was the case a generation ago. At the
same time the numbers renting in the private sector in England
have doubled to 4.6 million with many renters trapped in
overcrowded accommodation.
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Cuts to housing benefit mean that a lower proportion of rent is
being paid by benefits. The bedroom tax also took away further
housing support from council and housing association tenants if
the property was deemed to have a spare room. The household
benefit cap has socially cleansed low income renters out of
many areas.
Despite pledging to end no-fault evictions in 2019, the
Government has yet to bring forward legislation and more than
three years on from Grenfell, hundreds of thousands of people
continue to live in homes covered in flammable cladding.
In the early stages of the pandemic the Government gave all
mortgage holders a payment holiday with deferred payments
added to the end of the mortgage term or added to monthly
payments. A moratorium was introduced on evictions
for renters and renters and landlords were urged to agree
repayment plans.
The result is landlords have been protected from losses like no
other businesses. Housing benefit was marginally improved
but the benefit cap and the bedroom tax have been left in place.
StepChange debt advice charity estimated that by late May 2020,
590,000 household had fallen into rent arrears.
The temporary ban on evictions has ended, with the prospect
of large-scale evictions and homelessness. For homeless people
sleeping rough, the Government brought in an ‘Everybody in’
policy, working with hostels and hotels to try to accommodate
all rough sleepers, but that policy was ended in May, and rough
sleepers are at risk of a bleak winter back on the streets.
The failure to have any concerted housing policy and leaving
housing supply to the market has resulted in millions of families
being without a safe, secure and affordable home and that figure
risks growing unless urgent and co-ordinated action is taken.
17 Housing

A Housing Reset Programme
Housing should be a human right for all not an investment
opportunity for a few. Whether they are homeowners,
leaseholders or renters, everyone must have the right to a
safe, secure and affordable home.
To achieve that we need a Housing Reset Programme that deals
with the immediate housing crisis and lays the foundations for
ensuring a decent home is guaranteed for everybody.
Emergency accommodation must be provided to homeless
people and the ban on evictions extended for a further year,
whilst 8000 additional homes are allocated for people with a
history of rough sleeping, and legislation to protect renters has
been enacted.
Millions of renters will exit lockdown with substantial housing
debt because they have lost their job or had their pay cut on
the furlough or job support schemes. The government should
legislate to cancel housing debt.
To ensure housing is affordable, housing benefit should be
restored to the 50th decile of local market rent, the bedroom tax
scrapped and the benefit cap abolished. Rent controls should
be re-established and security of tenure in the private sector
legislated for, with councils required to introduce landlord
licensing to enforce minimum standards.
Landlordism is an even greater scourge today than it was when
Keir Hardie wrote in 1907, “Socialism proposes to abolish
capitalism and landlordism.”
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We should not be neutral but increase the taxes on property and
rental profits, and bring forward new regulations that contribute
to curtailing and ending landlordism, including increasing
capital gains tax on second homes, banning the purchasing of
homes by companies, limiting the number of homes that can be
owned by an individual and ending leasehold.
A nationally co-ordinated programme of mass council house
building is urgently needed to ease the housing crisis, and to
provide jobs and training. This programme needs to be part of
a co-ordinated green investment programme to ensure all new
builds meet a zero carbon homes standard and a new Decent
Homes Standard, as well as making existing homes safe by the
removal of cladding, with improvements funded by landlords
and private developers in the private rented sector.
A new agency is needed with powers to purchase land
and to make public land available for low-cost housing,
combined with ‘use it or lose it’ taxes applied to developers
that are land-banking.
Landlordism is
an even greater
scourge today.
19 Housing

Debt
Tackling Debt Domestically
and Internationally:
A Debt Jubilee
With government debt much higher than levels reached after
the financial crash, some will resist action to tackle domestic
household debt or debt in the Global South.
The response is to point to the Attlee government which, with a
debt of over 200% of GDP, created the NHS, built the welfare
state, undertook a massive council house building programme,
producing economic growth, full employment, rising wages and
debt reduction.
In the 2008 banking crisis, the banks were bailed out, enabling
the financial system to recover. In this crisis, it is people,
businesses and the poorest countries that need the bailouts and
protections that the banking sector was afforded in the last crisis.
The shutdown of the economy is leading to unemployment,
business collapse, and rising personal and corporate debt.
The debt charity StepChange has calculated that between
March and June 2020 4.6 million people were facing a “tsunami”
of debt or arrears of more than £6bn. It’s estimated that 100,000
people attempt suicide every year due to debt.
Although the Bank of England cut the base rate of interest,
credit cards, personal loans secured or unsecured, payday loans
and overdrafts all charge rates of interest tens or even hundreds
of times in excess of the Bank of England base rate. It is in this
way that banks and other lenders make profit, often from their
least well-off customers.
One solution is to cap interest rates. This could be done as a
multiple of the Bank of England base rate or as the BoE base
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rate plus a percentage. Other proposals include capping the total
amount that can be paid in overdraft fees or interest payments.
The mortgage payment holiday has extended mortgage terms
for the 1.8 million people who have not been able to make
mortgage payments for several months but borrowers may
have their credit rating downgraded for taking advantage of the
payment holiday scheme.
Many people have also gone into arrears on household bills
and council tax. Italy suspended household bills during the
coronavirus crisis, but the UK did not follow suit.
The Government has ended its ban on bailiff visits. Bailiffs
don’t just collect debt on behalf of lenders, but on behalf of
those who have purchased debt on the secondary debt market.
These vultures purchase (at knockdown prices) debts that other
lenders have given up on recovering and pursue debtors.
In this crisis, it is people,
businesses and the poorest
countries that need the bailouts
and protections that the
banking sector was afforded in
the last crisis.
21 Debt

A Debt Reset Programme
for Domestic Debt
The Government is the only actor that can borrow at low
interest rates and act to control and reduce company and
personal debts. A more wide-scale solution to debt would be for
the Government to create a consumer equivalent of UK Asset
Resolution, the so-called ‘bad bank’ that purchased problem
debts from the banks to clean up their balance sheets.
Such a vehicle would allow people to offload problem debts and
refinance at affordable rates, avoiding the excessive interest rates
and extortionate fees made by some lenders and bailiffs.
A Debt Reset Programme
for the Global South
Covid is a global pandemic so global solutions are needed.
A number of countries in the Global South have managed
coronavirus far more effectively than the United Kingdom,
adopting stringent quarantine and lockdown measures and
responding rapidly to the threat of an outbreak.
But other countries face funding constraints and restricted
public capacity, because of the longstanding expropriation of
resources from the Global South by imperial powers, especially
the UK, which has removed a key source of revenue for
governments, contributing to high levels of government debt.
Policies imposed by the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund, alongside Western support for military action,
sanctions regimes or corrupt authoritarian rulers, have left many
countries ill-equipped to deal with the pandemic.
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Radical reform of international finance is needed combined
with the pursuit of debt cancellation by the UK. The G20
agreed to suspend some debt payments for 76 countries.
But this involved only country-to-country debt, not debt to
international institutions or the private sector.
Because of the central role of the City of London in global
finance the UK’s support for the new international campaign for
debt cancellation would be a game-changer.
The Black Lives Matter protests highlighting Britain’s imperial
past and role in the slave trade should make debt cancellation a
first step in a reparations process phased over time.
Health and Social Care
Care Guaranteed:
A National Care Service
Austerity, privatisation and fragmentation within the NHS and
care sectors have exposed the UK to one of the worst Covid
death rates in the world. If we aspire to ensure good health and
care for all, we need a reset programme to rebuild our NHS as
a publicly-owned universal and comprehensive health service,
alongside the founding of a National Care and Support Service.
Over the last decade the NHS has been subjected to the longest
funding squeeze in its 72 year history. When the coronavirus
crisis began, the NHS had over 100,000 staff vacancies,
including 40,000 nurse vacancies caused by the removal of the
nurse student bursary, exacerbated by the ‘hostile environment’
policies and pay falling by 8% in real terms.
Before the pandemic NHS hospitals had recorded the highest
number of A&E ‘trolley waits’ on record, NHS targets had not
been met since at least 2016, and some not since 2015, including
the waiting time for cancer treatment.
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Health and
Social Care

The 2012 Health & Social Care Act opened the door to large
scale outsourcing and privatisation, whilst the number of NHS
hospital beds fell by 5% between 2012 and 2019, leaving the
government needing to rent private hospital beds for coronavirus
patients at huge expense. Chronic underfunding resulted in NHS
Trusts entering the Covid crisis with £13.4 billion of debt.
If the NHS was under pressure, then social care was in crisis.
There were 120,000 vacancies across the care sector, where
low pay for care workers was endemic. Due to £8 billion being cut
from the social care sector since 2010, Age UK estimated that 1.5
million older people were not receiving the care they neeeded.
Even before the pandemic hit the UK, life expectancy
improvements had slowed dramatically, and even begun to fall for
some groups, and health inequalities were widening. According
to the King’s Fund, “in 2015–17, people in the least deprived
areas could expect to live roughly 19 more years in good health
than those in the most deprived areas.”
From the identification of the first case of Covid, the
Government’s response to the pandemic has ranged
from the complacent to the incompetent and at times
downright dangerous.
An initial adoption of a dangerous strategy of herd immunity has
been followed by the failures in the supply of PPE and testing
and tracing on anywhere near the scale and speed required.
Lockdown policies have been late in implementation, then
confused and undermined by being disregarded with impunity by
senior government ministers and advisers.
So far the failure to effectively implement the World Health
Organisation test, trace and isolate strategy has contributed to
a death toll of 45.000 and predicted to reach 60,000. 600 of our
health and social care workers have also already died. Even now,
with the prospect of a vaccine in sight, there are strong concerns
about the resources and the capacity in Government to manage
its effective distribution.
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A Reset Programme for
the NHS and Care Services
We need an NHS and Social Care reset programme on the
scale of a ‘new Beveridge settlement’ to rebuild our NHS
and to create a National Care and Support Service.
The first priority for the NHS is to secure the long-term funding
it needs: to meet the needs of an ageing society, to recruit the
staff to fill gaps, to give especially lower paid staff a decent
pay rise, and to address the backlog of delayed operations
and treatments. This will require substantial and sustained
investment, well in excess of existing commitments.The NHS
already had record waiting times, which are being exacerbated
by the coronavirus. The NHS will need considerable investment
in reopening beds and increasing capacity to cope with the
accumulated backlog.
Increasing NHS workers’ pay is essential to retaining
existing workers and those who have recently returned, as
well as attracting new recruits and trainees. The nurse
bursary is set to be restored in 2020 (at a lower level), but the
Government should go further and abolish all fees for all health
professionals’ training. The NHS has been operating below safe
staffing levels, and the Government should legislate to require
safe staffing on wards.
The Government should also end the ‘hostile environment’ so
that all UK residents can access NHS services. We are all at
greater risk if some are excluded from care. There should be no
checks on immigration status at NHS or primary care settings.
It is also clear that there will need to be extra investment in
mental health, as cases emerge of Covid-19 survivors, as well
as NHS and care staff, suffering from PTSD, and to deliver the
commitment to put mental health on a par with physical health.
25
Health and
Social Care

NHS privatisation must end and services be brought back
in-house to meet public need, not private greed. Repealing
the Health & Social Care Act is the key to rebuilding a
comprehensive and universal healthcare system that ends
the requirement on health authorities to put services out to
competitive tender, and ensure services are delivered in-house.
It is also vital that the NHS, social care and all vital public
services are kept out of future post-Brexit trade deals.
To reduce NHS procurement costs and aid future pandemic
preparedness, the UK Government should establish a
generic drug company whilst incentivising all pharmaceutical
companies to prioritise research on what is most medically
urgent, not on what is most profitable.
A National Care and Support Service is needed with the status,
respect and commensurate resources of the NHS to meet the
needs of an ageing population and to ensure independent living
for people with disabilities. It should be funded from progressive
taxation, free at point of use, and have universal coverage, and
staffed on terms aligned to the NHS.
To fundamentally refocus our social and economic decisionmaking,
the Government should consider adopting the Welsh
Government’s Future Generations Wellbeing Act 2015, to
ensure that health and wellbeing of the nation is prioritised in all
policy-making.
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The Future

Climate Justice
A Sustainable Future:
Guarantee of a Just Transition
This is a generation-defining moment. We can choose to move
out of the coronavirus crisis and revert to the high-emitting,
environmentally destructive practices that have brought our
planet to the brink of overheating. Or we can decide that the
catastrophic damage to human life, communities, and economic
wellbeing caused by the coronavirus crisis provides the
opportunity for a reset.
Prior to the outbreak of coronavirus, the United Nations
Secretary General Antonio Gutteres said on climate change:
“The point of no return is no longer over the horizon. It is
in sight.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s work
demonstrated the urgent need to limit global warming to a
1.5 degree increase. Although a 1.5 degree increase would still
bring severe weather and temperature impacts, the impacts
on species loss and ecosystems as well as climate-related risks
to health, food security, and water would be much lower at
1.5 degrees.
In the United Kingdom, environmental leadership from the
government has been profoundly inadequate. The Committee
on Climate Change set out 25 policy actions for the year
ahead in 2018. A year later, in its mid-2019 update report, the
Committee observed that 24 of those had not been delivered.
The UK was not expected to meet its 2021 legally binding
target for water pollution, with the Environment Agency
labelling water companies’ environmental protection efforts
“simply unacceptable.”
27
Climate
Justice

ClientEarth said in late 2019 that 83% of reporting zones in the
UK had illegal levels of air pollution, with no progress shown in
meeting obligations that should have been met in 2010; 40,000
early deaths are estimated to be caused by air pollution every
year in the UK.
This country’s and the world’s record in tackling climate change
and protecting the environment have left the future of the planet
at risk.
In response, 2019 saw people-driven environmental movements
create a growing groundswell of demand for action, including in
the UK three school strikes inspired by Swedish activist Greta
Thunberg and mass civil disobedience actions by Extinction
Rebellion.
The outbreak of coronavirus relegated climate change to the
margins of media reporting and political attention. On 1 April
the Glasgow COP-26 climate talks were postponed until
2021 with the risk that climate change would be neglected in
policy-making.
Nevertheless the plummeting of US oil prices in April,
which reached a point where the price went below zero, has
sparked renewed discussion of a managed windup of fossil
fuel production and a demand for just transition guarantees,
including an end to fossil fuel subsidies, no new exploration for
fossil fuels, and a nationalisation of the oil industry to enable
managed decline.
This country’s record in tackling
climate change and protecting the
environment have left the future of
the planet at risk.
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An Environmental
Reset Programme
There is a strong case therefore for the Government to establish
a green Ministry of Public Works to co-ordinate a Marshall
Plan-scale investment programme in clean physical infrastructure
investment, improved insulation, in natural capital, clean R&D
spending, energy efficiency programmes for the UK’s housing
stock, electric vehicle charging networks, better road design for
cycling, tree-planting and rolling out full fibre broadband.
New publicly owned and democratically run industries are called
for that address both the unemployment crisis and the climate
crisis at the same time, centred on an expansion of the renewables
sector to supplant oil, gas, and coal. Key water, energy, mail,
rail, and broadband infrastructure must be brought back into
public ownership. Publicly funded retraining of workers for these
industries is essential to ensure the transition does not involve
job losses.
There is growing support for a National Investment Bank
to focus on lending for infrastructure and SMEs, with an
overriding goal of rapid decarbonisation and innovation,
providing essential resourcing for green projects, as well as skills
and capacity-building for these projects. To harness private
investment to the decarbonisation agenda, Bank of England
credit guidance could encourage green lending and prevent
lending to fossil fuel projects; whilst the requirements for listing
on the London Stock Exchange should be amended to encourage
climate-friendly practice, delisting companies that fail to meet
environmental standards.
A Green New Deal must be global if climate change and other
threats are to be tackled. Debt relief is needed so that the Global
South can contribute to green investment efforts to tackle
climate change and the UK government should commit to
offering technology developed in this country cheaply or free to
countries in the Global South, partly as an act of reparation for
historical injustice.
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Climate
Justice

Migrants’ Rights
Our Economy has to be
for Everyone: Migrants’
Rights Guaranteed
The role of any economy should be to enable us all to live
thriving and fulfilling lives. The exclusion of migrants from
participating in and sharing the benefits of the economy
undermines that whole purpose.
Guaranteeing the rights of migrants and ending their exclusion
is a part of guaranteeing a sense of security for us all. It
also reflects our commitment to internationalism, which
recognises a right to move for everyone, not just the global
rich. It also acknowledges that the movement of people is a
result of global inequality to which the United Kingdom has
significantly contributed.
“Hostile environment” and other racist policies have been an
assault on the standing and basic dignity of people who have
migrated to this country. They have been built on top of a
longstanding framework of policies and legislation that treats
migrants as second-class citizens: through detention centres,
policing practices, deportation flights, and restricted access
to work, housing, and public services. They are a product of
the United Kingdom’s participation in an unjust international
economy, walled up by borders, producing migrant injustice
every day.
These policies are the direct result of past and current
imperialism and racism in the United Kingdom, that has been
highlighted by the recent Black Lives Matter movement.
As coronavirus spread across the United Kingdom in
February and March, non-UK nationals found themselves
with restricted access to social support and were left unable
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The Future

to self-isolate effectively, and to protect themselves from
contracting coronavirus. The ‘No Recourse to Public Funds’
visa condition blocked access to vital public services. Migrants
continued to be held in migrant detention centres indefinitely,
with reports of coronavirus cases breaking out, concern over
the mental health of those detained, and no instructions or
guidance on social distancing.
There was a threefold increase in hate crime against people
appearing to be Chinese or from East Asia between January
and March 2020. With travel to a number of countries
restricted, many migrants were locked out from returning
home. In addition, those from overseas have been asked to pay
astronomical fees, like the Immigration Health Surcharge, just
to carry on living and working here, on top of paying taxes just
like British nationals.
Campaigners mobilised to pressurise the Conservative
government with the result that the visas of overseas health
and care workers were extended for a year. More than 700
detainees were released from migrant detention centres between
March and April and a successful legal challenge secured some
exception to the “No Recourse to Public Funds” rules. These
limited moves by the government did not prevent stark injustices
and human tragedies.
Although the coronavirus crisis highlighted the need to revalue
work that was previously labelled ‘low-skilled’ the Government
went ahead with the introduction of its Immigration Bill in May,
paving the way to restrict entry to the UK for those who do not
not meet its salary threshold, the so-called ‘low-skilled.’
By reducing access to legal, flexible migration routes for the
lower-paid, the Government’s so-called ‘points-based system’
will force more people in those circumstances into workplace
exploitation and modern slavery where they are unable to obtain
a secure legal status in the country.
31
Migrants’
Rights

The likely tightening of borders around the world creates the
risk of anti-immigrant policy and rhetoric becoming entrenched.
We need a strategy to resist any rise in xenophobia.
The Black Lives Matter movement has also exposed the role
of the criminal justice system in excluding people from the
economy and society. Responses to the movement in the
United Kingdom have made clear that racism, classism, and
brutality in the criminal justice system are pervasive problems in
this country.
Early release of people from prison during the pandemic has
revealed that many individuals in prison are better off rebuilding
skills and resilience in the community.
But a carceral mentality runs deep. To mark a break with this
way of thinking we need an immediate moratorium on new
prisons. Urgent support must be given to groups advocating
drug law reform, a moratorium on school exclusions, and an
end to youth custody centres. We need to rethink police powers,
including suspicionless stop and search. And we need to review
whether the police are best placed to provide support for
individuals in need of more specialised social services support,
while acknowledging the problems of racism and punitiviness
right across the delivery of public services.
Greater investment in universal basic services can play a role
in tackling social harm that prisons and police have struggled
to resolve for decades. Writer Amna Akbar has called for an
‘invest-divest’ strategy, where spending is rebalanced across
the system towards essential social services. This is a positive
opportunity to find effective responses to social harm, and to
address the social conditions producing that harm.
We need a strategy to resist any
rise in xenophobia.
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Justice for Migrants
A much broader conversation must be started about the United
Kingdom’s historic role in the world, and how that has informed
its approach to politics – and in particular migration – today.
By advocating greater teaching in schools about this country’s
imperial history we can use political education effectively
to draw connections between past racism and the current
immigration system, as embodied in the Windrush scandal.
One spur to this broader political conversation is that the
coronavirus crisis has confirmed, yet again, the ongoing
contribution made to the UK’s society, culture, and economy by
migrants. It is migrant carers, nurses, and doctors that have kept
people alive during the crisis.
But while this contribution made by migrants is undeniable,
it is vital that policies do not reinforce false narratives about
‘deserving’ or ‘undeserving’ migrants. Access to social services
should be guaranteed due to migrants’ status as human beings,
not on whether they have contributed to society.
Based upon the adoption of Maya Goodfellow’s “no caveats”
approach and the immediate issues faced by migrants, our aims
are clear.
There is a need for an end to ‘no recourse to public funds’ in its
entirety, a closure of detention centres, an end to the Prevent
duty, an end to all deportations, firewalling of data between
policing and public services , increased legal aid support for
migrants, and a scrapping of the Immigration Health Surcharge,
not for some migrants but for all. The right to work for asylumseekers
must be reinstated. At the same time, it is essential that
progressive movements, including trade unions, support routes
to regularisation for people without legal status, including
through work.
33
Migrants’
Rights

Financial System
Paying for the Future
Panic is being sown by some government ministers about how
the pandemic will be paid for, with some even mooting a return
to austerity with cuts in public service spending and wage cuts.
Instead the real discussion that is needed is how we tackle the
shocking levels of inequality that have been exposed and made
worse by the pandemic and how we harness the country’s
resources to invest in securing a growing but sustainable
economy of the future.
A Reset Programme for Tax
Reform of taxation and our financial system is key. On tax, to
address the grotesque levels of inequality in our society and
fund our public services, a basic five point reform programme is
proposed, based upon raising funds from those that have gained
rather than lost from the crisis.
First, the introduction of an excess profits tax on all businesses,
exempting small businesses, taxed over a defined period during
the coronavirus crisis, at a level set either above a defined level
of reasonable profit or relative to previous profits.
Second, the promotion of the principle of unitary taxation,
installing a new tax on multinationals that reflects where
economic activity really takes place and where value is created,
rather than where revenue and profits are booked.
It involves taxing a proportion of a multinational’s global profits
that matches the UK proportion of their sales, labour, and
operations. On a conservative estimate, some £6 billion would
be raised.
Third, the ending of the artificial split between capital gains and
income and taxing them at the same rate, thus raising £14 billion
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The Future

in the fifth year of operation. Capital gains are just repackaged
income. The income share of the top 1% has grown twice as
fast as previously thought since 1996–7 when capital gains are
taken into account.
Fourth, raising Income tax on the highest earners by restoring
a 45p additional rate from £80,000 and 50p top rate from
£125,000 would raise some £5.4 billion, taking into account
behavioural response.
And fifth, launching a blitz on tax avoidance including
action such as introducing a public register of trusts, greater
transparency in the Crown Dependencies and Overseas
Territories, replacing the governent’s ineffectual General Anti-
Avoidance Rule, clamping down on enablers of avoidance and
evasion, an increase in targeted audits by HMRC, scrapping
non-dom status, public country-by-country reporting in the UK,
fair taxation of trusts, as well as an Overseas Loan Transparency
Act to close loopholes. To support international tax justice we
must mobilise a mass direct action tax justice movement on the
model of UK Uncut.
A Reset Programme
for Finance
In the finance sector, central bank and government
interventions have gone some way to protect the stock market
with some hedge funds even profiting massively from successful
bets on the economy. Now is the time to secure robust reform
to both regulate and harness finance to resource investment in a
sustainable economy agenda.
Against a backdrop of sustained volatility the timing is right
for the introduction of a small levy applied to a wider limited
select group of trades to stabilise financial trading and provide
additional revenue.
35
Financial
System

Given the failure of existing regulatory structures, including
the Financial Conduct Authority, it is also time to introduce
stronger regulation and greater democratisation of financial
regulation, covering areas like shadow banking, short
selling, hedge funds, asset management, private equity and
greenwashing.
To address the imbalance in bank lending that focuses more on
real estate than benefical growth sectors, we need the Bank of
England to use credit guidance to encourage lendng for green
and productive industries.
The UK also has a vital role to play in the reform of global
finance, where the system of trade and investment agreements
and the role played by the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund are impeding the ability to take decisive and
effective global action against both Covid and climate change.
This requires an overhaul of trade agreements to withdraw from
existing investor dispute settlement clauses and prevent their use
in future agreements.
The failure of both the World Bank and the IMF to address
effectively the issues of debt relief and regulation to stem
capital outflows from the Global South cries out for major
reform or, failing reform, for the replacement of these bodies
with international institutions better equipped to coordinate
progressive taxation, social support programmes, reparative
justice and environmental action.
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The Future

What Next?
Covid has been a huge shock to our society and economic
system. Faced with threats to their health and livelihoods, it’s
inevitable that people experience feelings of vulnerability and
search for greater security.
They also sense the lack of any say or control they have over
decisions being made distantly over their lives and their futures.
There is an understandable desire to get back to normal life.
But we can’t accept a return to a normal that created a society
with its public services so ill prepared for the pandemic and
with families so lacking in financial resilience that they were
immediately threatened with economic hardship.
In crises like this, progressives have a responsibility to act to
protect our communities from the immediate hazards and
hardships they face but also to seize the moment to envisage a
new society, to claim the future.
First, in practice, that means mobilising and supporting the
numerous actions and campaigns that are at the forefront of
confronting the damaging impacts of the virus and its economic
consequences.
This includes:
• backing trade unionists’ campaigning and taking action
against job and wage cutting employers,
• supporting the campaigns for a real living minimum wage
and decent sick pay,
• providing solidarity support to renters fighting evictions,
• joining forces with others to demand the repeal of
“No Recourse to Public Funds” and the closure of
detention centres,
37 What Next?

• backing the model of UK Uncut and launching a new directaction
mass tax justice campaign,
• being part of the “Black Lives Matter” movement,
• and of course, taking what action we can to place the threat
of climate catastrophe central to our demands for change.
An essential element of the current campaigning is the
discussion, development and advocacy of the vision of that new
society we aim to create, and also the concrete policy advances
that will bring it about.
Our vision is a society where everybody’s basic needs are
guaranteed as a right by universal basic services, rewards are
distributed on social not market value, where community is not
denied but promoted and sustainability is at its core.
To make a start on its creation we advocate a reset programme
for our economy entailing four basic guarantees for everyone
of a job, a minimum income, a home, and health treatment
and care when needed, alongside a debt jubilee and justice for
migrants. We take inspiration from past movements that have
secured paradigm change.
In the depths of the Second World War progressives looked
back to the depression of the 1930s and determinedly stated
“Never Again.”
Then they went on to dream, discuss and plan the new society
they eventually successfully built after the war was won. It falls
to us now in the midst of the present crisis to be the ones to
inspire those dreams, hopes and plans of the new society we will
now campaign for and, in due course, bring about.
We are claiming the future.
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Claim
The Future

Claim the Future has brought together a wide range
of policy experts and campaigners to discuss and
plan what a new future should look like.
By bringing activists and campaigners together
with policy analysts and researchers, we have both
campaigns and policy solutions to promote and
support now.
Core Team
John McDonnell MP, Madeleine Williams, Max Harris,
Andrew Fisher and Ali Milani.
Contributors
Many individuals gave their time and expertise to this project
and we are very grateful. Those who helped inspire and develop
new policy and campaigning ideas include:
Adam Elliott-Cooper, Akram Salhab, Alex Cobham,
Alfie Stirling, Amelia Horgan, Amina Gichinga,
Andrew Cumbers, Andrew Towers, Arun Advani,
Backa Hudson, Caroline Molloy, Cat Hobbs, Cathy Cross,
Chai Patel, Christine Berry, Clare McNeil, Clare Walden,
Dalia Gebrial, Daniele Gabor, Dave Hall, Dave Ward,
Doug Parr, Ellen Clifford, Emma Saunders, Fizza Qureshi,
Gracie Bradley, Gwyneth Longeran, Hilary Wainwright,
Ian Hodson, Ian Lawrence, Jacky Davis, Jason Moyer-Lee,
Jayati Ghosh, Jo Grady, John Hendy, John Lister,
Johnna Montgomery, Josh Berlyne, Keval Bharadia,
Lachlan Stuart, Laurie MacFarlane, Lavinia Steinfort,
Liz Davies, London Renters Union, Mary Robertson,
Maya Goodfellow, Mika Minio-Paluello, Minnie Rahman,
Nadine Enany, Paul Keenlyside, Paul O’Connell, Peter Rice,
Pragna Patel, Prem Sikka, Richard Garside, Rob Knox,
Rory McQueen, Satbir Singh, Satoko Kishimoto,
Seumas Colclaogh, Shami Chakrabarti, Shreya Nanda,
Sian Errington, Stephany Griffith-Jones, Stephen Le Fanu,
Steve Battlemuch, Steve Gillan, Thomas Hanna, Tim Jones,
Tina Ngata and Wendy Savage.

Position Papers
Read more about the solutions needed to reframe our
economy and bring people together to secure change:
Empowering Workers Properly After the Crisis
Social Security
Democratic Public Ownership after the Crisis
Higher Education
Ending Landlordism
Green Investment after the Crisis
Care Guaranteed
Reasserting Migrants’ Rights Through the Pandemic
The Financial System After Coronavirus
Tackling Debt Domestically and Internationally
Fair Taxation after the Crisis
A New Approach to Criminal Justice after the Crisis
Design: Common Knowledge
Illustrations: Ilyanna Kerr
Claim the Future was initiated by
John McDonnell MP, with the support of
the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung London.