3 days ago
19
Yes, the budget’s gestures are welcome (Rachel Reeves targets UK’s wealthiest in £26bn tax-raising budget, 26 November). Abolishing the two-child cap is the right call, but it is solving a failure that should not exist. No advanced economy should have child poverty baked so deeply into its design. Freezing train fares, taxing wealth a little harder – fine. Good. Necessary. But still just sticking plasters on wounds that have been haemorrhaging for years. And once again, it is the middle classes footing the bill while the ultra-wealthy and the corporate giants look on, essentially untouched.
Meanwhile, the core problem remains unaddressed: an economic model built to maximise shareholder returns while hollowing out wages, public services and social resilience. Until we shift that model towards high wages, broad-based prosperity and an economy where labour, not capital, holds the centre of gravity, every budget, red, blue, green or technocratic beige, will remain cosmetic. What is needed is a full package of structural reforms: corporate governance that shares power with workers, taxation that shifts the burden upward instead of protecting vast concentrations of private wealth, and incentives rewired so that companies cannot keep extracting while offloading the consequences on to the public.
And the political risk of ducking that challenge is upon us. When the centre offers only tinkering and managed decline, desperate voters look elsewhere. That is the void Reform UK and demagogues like Nigel Farage exploit, manipulating the frustrated and peddling enemies instead of solutions.
This is not uniquely British. The same pattern is playing out across the west, with extraction-driven economics widening the wealth gap, eroding trust and corroding democratic institutions. Civilisations have unravelled over less. Assuming ours is somehow safe because it is modern seems naive at best.
We are seeing the consequences everywhere: privatised utilities collapsing under the weight of extraction; rail, water and energy all run for profit until the public ends up paying for the fallout; a health crisis fuelled by ultra-processed food because maximising margins mattered more than wellbeing; environmental damage from Pfas “forever chemicals”, pesticides and microplastics, with clean-up costs dumped back on to society; and an entire generation’s mental health hammered by algorithmic attention-mining so that tech giants can keep their quarterly growth.
Different industries, same model: constant growth, extract value, socialise the harm.
So sure, we will take the bandages. But without a fundamental reset of who this economy serves, the bleed-out will not stop. And if we keep squeezing the middle while allowing the wealthy to strip-mine society from above, we are not steering away from crisis but straight into it.
Now, who is actually going to have the guts to clean up this mess?
Cassie Groos
Lymm, Cheshire
