1969 was an important year for us as I moved my young family from Liverpool to West Virginia in the United States, where I had obtained a poorly paid but interesting research post. My wife had funded the journey by selling our rusting Mini for £200 and we had managed to rent out our small house (which had cost £3,000) for an amount that just covered the mortgage payments.
As a young NHS doctor, seven years qualified, earning about £1,000 per annum, I already had an overdraft agreed with my bank manager. Two years later I applied for and obtained an NHS consultant post in Cardiff, having had to pay for the transatlantic return trip in order to be interviewed. Things got worse. The house had deteriorated under a succession of careless tenants and its sale, at a loss, didn’t enable me to pay off the overdraft.
The bank demanded repayment and, with the need to rent a home in Cardiff, I became desperate. But here my luck changed; I saw another bank across the road, met the manager and asked if I could borrow the money to pay my debts off. He saw me as a young consultant and probably assumed I would earn large sums in private practice; he agreed an overdraft and eventually a mortgage on a new house. No doubt the interest I paid on these debts over the next 25 years justified his decision. I never did private practice and in my career as a chest physician and researcher into industrial and environmental diseases I learnt enough about the position of those much less fortunate than myself to cement my left-wing philosophy.
1869, a century earlier, was an important year for debtors, being the year of the Debtor’s Act which seriously restricted the ability of the courts to send people like me to prison. Subsequent insolvency acts brought relief to companies so that now, if they finally go under, their assets are realised and used to pay their creditors, in an order that puts banks first and the little people, their suppliers and customers, last. Now we know what happens when banks go bust – we, the taxpayers, pay off their debts, no matter how egregious their path to insolvency, and watch horrified as they pat themselves on the back and stuff their executives’ wallets with seven figure bonuses. But what about when countries go bust?
In 1945, as a schoolboy, I watched my first general election. Britain was ruined and our new government, the best and fairest we have ever had, influenced by the work of JM Keynes, set up the welfare state and embarked on a massive house-building programme. The rest of Europe was even worse off than us after the ravages of war and we were all saved by loans from the USA and the Marshall Plan. Germany was a particular beneficiary of this generosity.
Very fortunately for us, no international body told us that it was all our fault for having a war in Europe and decided that a welfare state and building houses were luxuries that we could not afford and that we should take our punishment at whatever cost. We certainly underwent austerity, low salaries, food and clothes rationing, very high taxation, but we avoided gross poverty, unemployment and starvation. We knew we were all in it together. How ironic that phrase sounded when issued from the mouths of politicians whose fortunes were derived from inherited wealth, and purchased privilege.
2015 has been a horrible year for my Greek friends. How much we owe to their country, including democracy itself. How badly they have been treated in recent history, invaded by the Turks, the Italians (albeit somewhat unwillingly) and the Germans – the Germans, yes. All who know Greece and Greeks will have heard of the memories they have of that brutal occupation, something that they are unlikely to forget or forgive. And now entrenched elements in Germany and the European banking system are the ringleaders of those who believe that the cure for their supposed profligacy in getting into impossible debt is to impose further austerity with no hope of ever being able to repay it, casting them out on a sea of despair. That same country that tortured and murdered its way across Greece and that, when finally defeated, was itself saved by the humanity of the United States with the agreement of the victims of its belligerence, lending it money for reconstruction.
Let us not kid ourselves that this is not our business. We are acquiescent to a system whereby unelected bureaucrats have decided to provide loans to hopeless Greek governments and banks that they must have realised were unlikely to be able to repay and then have piled further loans on them with increasingly stringent conditions until the country is bankrupt and most of its young people unemployed or working abroad, survivors drifting on a Medusa’s raft. No 21st-century Marshall Plan, only punishment and a metaphorical debtors’ prison. All that matters is that Europe’s banks and bureaucrats remain affluent. This is where neo-liberal economics gets us, the economics of the Poor Law.
Just think for a moment. Where does this leave us, in Scotland? We live in what has become almost a one-party state, inclined for the moment to the left, with a neighbour 10 times our size and increasingly inclined to the far right, but with whom we share a reasonably strong currency. It seems likely to me that soon we shall have to vote on independence from the UK. Where shall we go if we vote Yes? Do we join an increasingly corrupt Europe and take the euro, surrendering control to those bureaucrats that have wrecked Greece? Or do we try to persuade the now very hostile English to allow us to continue with the pound, subject to the control of the Bank of England? Or do we mint our own Scottish drachma and let it float in a neo-liberal world controlled by the plutocrats and multinational corporations?
My first essay, written as an eight-year old, made a case for nationalisation of doctors, something that happened that very year (I don’t think my teacher sent it to Nye Bevan!). This essay, 69 years later, makes a plea for a return to the altruism that characterised our nations over the war and post-war years. Remember the poor and disadvantaged of the world and in our own country. How can we best save them and us from red in tooth and claw capitalism, enriching the wealthy and impoverishing further the rest? I see a glimmer of light in the behaviour of the SNP in Westminster and in the maiden speech of Mhairi Black.
Now is not the time for division; it is time for people of goodwill across nations to join together for the greater good. It cannot be done by one political party or by one small country. Otherwise I hate to think what the future holds for our young people.
By Anthony Seaton | August 2015