As 2025 gets underway, Scotland needs a socialist alternative to the big business agenda, the threat of billionaire elites, to escalating war, and to the failing status quo.
Writing in The National, SSP Trade Union Organiser Richie Venton outlines the socialist alternative to the failing status quo and the rule of billionaire elites:
“Tis a time to renew plans for the year to come, a time to ponder the world we live in and make resolutions on our aims for the future.
“What are some primary features of the world looming large from the mists of deep, dark midwinter?
“Entering 2025, the bountiful natural wealth on Planet Earth, combined with the manufactured wealth and ingenious inventions of collective human labour, offers up the potential of health, happiness, and prosperity for the entire human race.
“At no time in human history has there been less excuse for want, insecurity, or premature deaths.
“But the harsh reality of this capitalist world is that five billion people – 60% of the world’s population – have seen their incomes fall, with Oxfam calculating that on current trends it would take 229 years to eradicate poverty. The system of capitalism – based on production purely for profit, not for human need – creates a world in its own image.”
War and Inequality
“A world of polar opposites. A world where the five richest men have doubled their wealth since Covid-19 to £688 billion while the average real wages of 800 million workers in 52 countries have fallen by a combined £1.2 trillion; the equivalent of 25 days’ wages lost per worker.
“A world whose 148 biggest corporations raked in £1.4tn combined profits in the year to June 2023 – a leap of 52% compared with pre-Covid profits – while our TV screens and social media are saturated with heartbreaking charitable appeals to provide children with clean water, basic food and medicine to combat the silent social slaughter by this system of grotesque profiteering.
“While millions of people starve, the military industrial complex (including the likes of Raytheon, Leonardo, Thales, Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems) engorge the bank accounts of their shareholders from arming belligerent states such as Israel in wars without end. Western governments pour billions into the war in Ukraine, prolonging the slaughter of both Ukrainian and Russian conscripts.
“BlackRock, the world’s biggest multinational investment company, has set aside $1tn to profit from the “reconstruction” of decimated Ukraine. Capitalism means war. And war is profitable for some, regardless of the human cost.”
A Failing Status Quo
“Closer to home, we are told there’s not the money to provide every pensioner with a Winter Fuel Payment as energy prices rocket; or to end the iniquitous two-child benefit cap; or compensate the 1950s-born Waspi women for the loss of thousands of pounds in their pensions; or provide every school pupil with a warm, nutritious free school meal.
“But the British Labour Government finds £205bn to renew Trident nuclear weapons of mass destruction, parked on the Clyde and costing the people of Scotland £1.5 million every day for the next 30 years.
“This year marked the abject, continued failure of the so-called mainstream parties to confront these obscene contradictions between a potential world of plenty for all, and the realities of growing poverty, escalating inequality, and mass suffering and deaths.
“They are wedded to the capitalist status quo and utterly fail to fulfil the basic needs, let alone dreams, of the working-class majority populations.
“Healthy life expectancy for men in the poorest parts of Scotland is 26 years less than for those in the richest districts; for women, the class divide in healthy life expectancy is 25 years.
“What could and should be done differently in 2025, to address these abominable facts of life under capitalist rule regardless of which pro-capitalist party is in government?
“My appeal to all people of principle is to join in making a new year resolution to fight for socialist solutions with renewed vigour, as I and the entire Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) will be doing. Socialism is not an abstract concept. It could transform the world we live in and unleash the potential for health, happiness and prosperity for humanity in its entirety.”
An Alternative to the Big Business Agenda
“Reinstatement of the 52% Corporation Tax rate which prevailed prior to Maggie Thatcher’s 1980s regime would generate at least £85bn in a year for vital public services and a £15-an-hour statutory minimum wage for all aged 16 and upwards.
“Instead of leaving mind-boggling wealth in the hands of a few capitalist oligarchs, even a modest 5% wealth tax on all millionaires would raise £260bn in a year for investment in wages, pensions, the NHS, education, housing, new green jobs, and public transport, free at the point of use, to combat both poverty and pollution.
“Instead of Scottish councils jacking up Council Tax bills by up to 17%, while reducing services, the SSP demands immediate abolition of this regressive tax and its replacement with a progressive, income-based Scottish Service Tax, whereby 75% of people would pay less but taxation of the super-rich would double the money for council jobs and services.
“Starmer’s Continuity Conservatives are hellbent on a new raft of privatisation in our National Health Service, and both Labour and the SNP seem oblivious to the horrendous detriment of PFI schemes, which put Scotland in debt to the tune of £29bn for just £5.8bn of substandard infrastructures in schools, hospitals and waste treatment facilities. The Scottish people face bills until at least 2043 for 75 PFI projects, where on average for every £1 investment we must repay £5 to consortia of banks and speculators.
“Rather than accept the extension of this profiteering from public services, the SSP will step up our demand for cancellation of existing PFI contracts and redirection of funds to improvements in hospitals, schools and environmental infrastructure.”
Democratic Public Ownership
“At the very heart of a socialist alternative to the current capitalist dystopia lies democratic public ownership.
“Instead of the jobs carnage at Grangemouth and North Sea oil and gas, we need public ownership of all forms of energy and immediate UK and Scottish government investment in alternative plans of green production, to be drafted with the expertise of energy workers.
“Public ownership of all forms of transport, democratically controlled by workers and communities, could usher in a vastly expanded, reliable People’s Transport Service, free at the point of use and creating jobs while confronting pollution and climate catastrophe.
“Public ownership of the construction industry and banking is at the heart of a solution to the housing crisis, providing councils and a national building company the wherewithal to retrofit every home free of charge to cut fuel bills and emissions – and construct 100,000 eco-friendly council houses for genuinely affordable rent.
“These socialist alternatives are not wild-eyed dreams beyond the comprehension of the mass of the population. Various opinion polls and social attitudes surveys have demonstrated that support for public ownership has increased in the past seven years – 87% want to keep the NHS in public hands, and likewise water (82%), railways (76%) and energy (71%).
“Yet no mass political party – Labour, SNP or others – has advocated public ownership of services and industries. Instead, they go cap in hand to multinationals and billionaires, offering them state incentives to profiteer, reinforcing the interference by individuals such as Elon Musk in elections and direction of governments worldwide.”
Time to Take Action
“I’m surely not alone in seeing 2025 as a time to urgently advocate an independent socialist Scotland, where people and the planet we live on scream out for a system based on human solidarity, co-operation and mutual care, not plunder for the profit of the few.
“In the words of poet Jackie Kay: ‘Remember, the time of year/when the future appears/ like a blank sheet of paper/a clean calendar, a new chance.’
“Resolve to make 2025 a new chance to help build a socialist future.”