DURING the Scottish election campaign, the SNP introduced a manifesto pledge around food pricing, which caused much consternation. The idea was to legally cap the prices of essential items in supermarkets.
Given the party’s track record when it comes to making big statements without a strategy for delivery, it was met with scepticism and immediately cast as a pie-in-the-sky policy. Here, apparently, was another “populist” bung for the electorate ahead of the vote.
Most in the media and the land of the commentariat scoffed at the notion. This was, after all, alien to the laws of economic physics.
That the government should impose such a mechanism would be a slight to the holy writ of the free market. Food and Farming Minister Mark Spencer said it would only “drive up prices” and is, effectively, “communism”.
There are a couple of obvious initial thoughts. The SNP are a neoliberal party. A track record which has prioritised the needs of foreign capital, signed off on freeports and privatised wind and national assets tells us this.
John Swinney, indeed, personifies the image of a canny bank manager. He is no socialist maverick, as everyone knows, and likely uncomfortable with such a moniker, even if it was for a few days while the press covered the story.
The First Minister is steeped in the traditions of Adam Smith and the orthodoxies of European market liberalism. So this policy is not driven by some ideological commitment to the opposite, as you might think if you read some of the responses casting the Scottish Government as a cabal of anti-capitalist radicals.
The more obvious assumption was that it amounted to a simple piece of electioneering. The SNP are experts on grabbing headlines in this way. As they did with the National Care Service, for example, before that hit the rocks. Or with the announcement of a publicly owned, not-for-profit, energy company, designed to sell energy to customers at “as close to cost price as possible”. It was meant to be set up by 2021.
The Scottish National Investment Bank was meant to be a countermeasure to the failures of the market, but has been nothing of the sort. We could go way back to 2007 and promises of scrapping the Council Tax, as yet unrealised.
So it is more than plausible that capping food prices nestles within that context – a big idea which never really has to be implemented but is deemed popular enough to sway people into voting for the party.
But then, not long after the election, it was the turn of the UK Government to morph into “communist” outriders. Leaked negotiations between supermarkets and the Treasury revealed a push from the Chancellor’s office to cap the price of essentials.
This naturally led the industry’s lobby group to rage about “1970s-style price controls”, as is typical of the kind of animosity the mere mention of price caps induces.
But such talk is coming from inside the institutions of the British state on the one hand, and from the cautious and managerial SNP government on the other. Not from the pamphlets and papers of the socialist left. And that in itself reveals the true extent of the crisis facing the system.
The dogma that has grown up around economic debate and analysis in the aftermath of the Thatcherite revolution is far from scientific.
It takes the form of religious observance, where the market is god.
As Dianne Abbot quipped recently when asked about the bond market response to Labour infighting, MPs might as well pack up and go home if that is how decisions are made.
Even the most tepid public ownership reforms that might, for example, relieve English waterways of sewage and slurry are written off as leftist fantasy. For some, even breakfast clubs are a secret collectivist plot.
Now, reality is hitting. And all of the neoliberal shibboleths in the world can’t stop it. Indeed, they would only worsen the situation.
Not just for the working class, but for the system writ large.
Since 2020, food prices have risen by an eye-watering 40%. This summer, costs are going to surge even further. A combination of factors is at play, illustrating mounting and intersecting global calamities.
The impact of the war on Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is percolating through the system, and will do so for many months even if a deal is arrived at.
Then, there is the forecast of a record-breaking El Nino, which, in the words of the erstwhile adviser to the former shadow chancellor John McDonnell, will “hammer global food production”.
Yes, you guessed it, the UK is wildly underprepared for such eventualities, given that 35% of all foodstuffs are reliant on global supply chains, themselves subject to the shocks of war, climate breakdown and political instability.
It is simply incomprehensible to those indoctrinated by the mythologies that sustain the neoliberal creed, that we should ever alter course as a species.
The corporate giants, their lobbyists and sycophants are up in arms that there should be any interruption to inhaling the fumes of free-market capitalism.
Emerging in a trance-like state, their answer to the existential challenges confronting humanity can only be one thing: more of the same, but harder.
This takes us to a core dichotomy in capitalism: what is good for one company can at the same time be to the detriment of the system as a whole. That is one reason why it requires a state to regulate the market in the first place.
Perhaps above all, the thing you cannot have is a hungry population unable to afford basic sustenance.
Throughout history, this has been the catalyst for massive political and social upheaval and transition. In this way, the UK Treasury and the First Minister’s office are attempting not to curtail the market, but to preserve the conditions necessary for it to function.
And it is only because of the scale of the crisis building up inside it, nationally and globally, that they resort even to talking in these terms in the first place.
