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‘NATIONAL LIBERALS believe that everyone – regardless of wealth or social background – has the right to decent housing, proper medical care and generous provision for old age.’

The UK Conservative Party (left) and Éire’s Fine Gael (right) are brothers-in-arms when it comes to homelessness.

TOWARDS THE END OF LAST YEAR we featured an article – http://nationalliberal.org/

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of-capitalism – which looked at the plight of those who found themselves homeless in Tory Britain.

Our article was based on the housing charity Shelter’s third annual analysis of homelessness. In 2016, it estimated there were 255,000 homeless people in England alone, a figure it subsequently adjusted to 294,000 for Britain. This rose to 307,000 in 2017. When the 2018 analysis was conducted it found that around 320,000 people were homeless in England and Wales. Indeed, the report concluded that real figure is likely to be higher because of the plight of the ‘hidden’ homeless. This would include people ‘such as sofa-surfers, and others living insecurely in sheds or cars, for example.’

Whilst homelessness is at its highest in London, other areas also suffer. Indeed, high rates of homelessness rates were recorded in Birmingham, Luton, Brighton & Hove, Slough, Dartford, Milton Keynes, Harlow, Watford, Epsom, Reading, Broxbourne, Basildon, Peterborough and Coventry.

However, Tory Britain is not the only place people find themselves in dire straits. For a similar situation can also be found across the Irish Sea in Éire.

According to a report – https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/780000-people-living-in-poverty-in-ireland-report-finds-889404.html– which appeared in the Irish Examiner also towards the end of last year, around 780,000 people in Ireland are living in poverty – a figure which includes around 250,000 children.

The report – the National Social Monitor – is produced three times a year by Social Justice Ireland, an independent justice advocacy organisation and think-tank.

As well as looking at poverty levels in Éire it also noted increasing waiting times for treatment in hospitals and care centres. Here, the number of people on lists stands at over 700,000. In practical terms, this means that almost 95% of beds are occupied and there is no capacity within the hospital system to cope with ‘unforeseen events.’ The report also highlighted the lack of homecare services for the elderly, people with disabilities and with mental health needs.

Homelessness is another huge problem.

The National Social Monitor found that more than 11,000 people are homeless and that almost 110,000 households are in need of social housing.

At the moment Leo Varadkar’s Fine Gael government is focusing on short-term housing solutions provided through the private rented sector, rather than the investment of capital spending in social housing. Varadkar claims this is helping with an economic ‘recovery’ – however, his critics claim that massive profits are being made by ‘vultures and developers’ at the expense of ordinary people.

The issue of homelessness in Éire was also brought into sharp focus by a more recent report – https://www.newstalk.com/Number-of-homeless-families-skyrockets-in-Dublin-by-420-in-10-years– produced by Focus Ireland.

Focus Ireland is a not for profit organisation which works with people who are homeless or at risk of losing their homes across Ireland:

‘We are driven by the fundamental belief that homelessness is wrong. Wrong because it is a failure of society that creates victims out of ordinary people and robs them of their potential. Wrong because it can be prevented, it can be solved but is allowed to continue and in doing so, undermines society’.

Taking part in Facebook’s #10YearChallenge, it revealed that homelessness in Dublin has rocketed by 420% in the last ten years. The capital city now has 1,296 families registered as homeless.

Focus Ireland has also echoed existing criticism of Varadkar’s Fine Gael government and has called for more social housing to be built. Such a move would help those in difficulty by reducing demand for private rented accommodation and easing rents.

THIS IS the fifth and final part of our serialisation of Richard Howard’s essay Distributism As A Means of Achieving Third Way Economics which first appeared in 2005 on the web-site – http://www.hsnsw.asn.au/index.php – of the Humanist Society of New South Wales..

This article should therefore be read in conjunction with part one http://nationalliberal.org/distributism-as-a-means-of-achieving-third-way-economics-part-1 part two http://nationalliberal.org/distributism-as-a-means-of-achieving-third-way-economics-part-2 part three http://nationalliberal.org/distributism-as-a-means-of-achieving-third-way-economics-part-3 and part four http://nationalliberal.org/distributism-as-a-means-of-achieving-third-way-economics-part-4

National Liberals believe in Self-Determination for all. This includes personal Self-Determination as well, as the more familiar national Self-Determination. It’s been noted that in order to achieve true personal Self-Determination one must first achieve economic Self-Determination. However, economic Self-Determination cannot be achieved via Capitalism nor Socialism. Both are collectivist in nature. Here the individual is either ruled (and thus effectively owned) by large corporations – Capitalism – or the State – Socialism. Distributism is different as it advocates a society marked by widespread property ownership. This is the mark of a truly free society.

As Hilaire Belloc – one of Distributism’s greatest advocates – noted:

‘But if we are to retain freedom, then we can only do so by keeping the determining mass of the citizens the possessors of property with personal control over it, as individuals or as families. For property is the necessary condition of economic freedom in the full sense of that term. He that has not property is under economic servitude to him who has property, whether the possessor of it be another individual or the State.’

We invite our readers to share their thoughts when this article is reproduced on our Facebook site https://www.facebook.com/groups/52739504313/ It goes without saying that there are no official links between Richard Howard, the Humanist Society of New South Wales and the National Liberal Party. Readers will note that this Introduction uses the phrase ‘third position’ (not to be confused with the extreme-right philosophy of that name) and that the article uses the phrase ‘Third Way.’ Here they are used in a context that distinguishes it from capitalism and socialism – indeed, it refers to an economic position that goes way beyond both capitalism and socialism.

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Distributism As A Means of Achieving Third Way Economics (Part 5)

Arthur Joseph Penty (1875 – 1937) was a English architect and writer on Guild socialism and Distributism. He was first a Fabian socialist, and a follower of Victorian thinkers William Morris and John Ruskin. He is generally credited with the formulation of a Christian socialist form of the medieval guild, as an alternative basis for economic life. As an associate of Alfred Richard Orage, Penty was also familiar with the Social Credit ideas of Major Clifford Hugh Douglas. However. Penty embraced Distributism. He published a number of texts on Guild socialism and distributism including The Restoration of the Guild System (1906); Towards a Christian Sociology (1923) and Distributism: A Manifesto (1937).

Australia is however not a nation of starving match-girls and poverty-stricken tubercular factory workers crowded six to a room. This is a rich country whose poor are still fabulously wealthy by Third World standards.

Australia is however, at the beginning of the 21st century, a country whose living standards have not been rising consistently.

Thirty years ago a single working-class income was enough to support a family. A bus driver or council labourer could reasonably expect to be able to buy a modest house and drive a late model car. Today all that has changed. While a proliferation of electrical consumer gadgets get ever cheaper and more numerous, the fundamental costs of living – accommodation, food, transport, health care and education are far less affordable now than then.

In response, both partners in most relationships have quietly gone to work full time, but even this doubling of family incomes has still not kept pace with the erosion in average income standards.

Yet this is not universally true. The living standards of professionals, managers and others on higher wages have kept pace with the increasing cost of living.

Part of the reason for this is that those on higher incomes now rarely marry outside their socio-economic class. Where once doctors and lawyers and company executives married their secretaries or people on lower incomes that they met at social gatherings today they marry each other, maintaining their combined earning power but helping to lock those on lower incomes out of one means of economic advancement.

Fundamentally however, this is a reaction rather than a cause. The fundamental problem is that over the last 35 years the purchasing power of take home pay for those on lower incomes has declined, particularly in terms of accommodation cost.

Concomitantly, waves of takeovers and mergers has seen ownership of every aspect of production, distribution and exchange concentrated more and more in fewer and fewer hands.

As “globalisation” continues to place a downward pressure on wages and conditions, this situation is likely to be exacerbated.

In Australia as in the United States, since the demise of Keynesianism in the early 70’s, the gap between rich and poor has continued to widen. In the US in 2000 the salaries of the CEOs of the 365 largest companies was 500 times the average wage and the 13,000 riches families have around the same collective income as the 20 million poorest.

Small family farms, once the cornerstone of Australian life outside the big cities, have become an endangered species as vast agribusinesses have grown up driven by the voracious fast-food industry.

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For more and more young people today, the prospect that they will never be anything but poorly paid wage slaves living in rental accommodation is a real possibility.

Increasingly all sense of community is being lost, as the dog-eat-dog struggle to grab a few chestnuts out of the economic fire turns us into an anonymous collection of disconnected individuals – more a bus stop than a nation – in which no one cares for anyone but themselves.

Driven by the ceaseless demand for ever greater profits in ever fewer hands rather than nutritional benefit, the very foods that we eat are being genetically transformed and chemically altered, the long-term consequences of which we can only guess.

Yet what really does this profit anyone?

In the end, the purpose of material advancement cannot be simply material advancement for its own sake but must be an increase in human happiness.

As the struggle for living standards intensifies, can we really say that our society as it is today is achieving this?

Can even those few who do gain from vast profits really say their lives are better than they might be if everyone had a better life, when more and more their material enjoyment is curtailed by the need to hide behind walls and security guards and legalized violence?

Some will say that 1930s social theorists and the localized success of the co-operative system in the Basque region of Spain have little relevance to us in Australia today, but in Switzerland, Norway, Denmark and Iceland, four of the richest countries in the world, communitarian distributism in small farms and businesses and housing is alive and well.

In addition to having higher per-capita incomes than Australia, all have a tiny fraction of the levels of poverty, drug abuse, homelessness and crime of this country. They have less pollution, less traffic congestion and much less urban sprawl than Australia and a far stronger sense of community than we have here.

It is in this context that Belloc’s prescient warning of the dangers of the servile state and distributism’s alternative vision of an affluent, cohesive society of home owners and self-employed deserves to be re-examined.

NATIONAL LIBERAL TRADE UNIONISTS – NLTU – are opposed to both capitalism and socialism. We view the workings of both systems as fairly similar. Neither are we particularly interested in class – indeed, the NLTU regards itself as ‘beyond class’. As our Facebook site – https://www.facebook.com/groups/277840098977231 – declares:

The National Liberal Trade Unionist aims to promote a non-socialist trade unionism i.e. building employee protections rather than class revolution. The group will support the principles of liberty e.g. the protection of all individual employees, and patriotism e.g. the defence of workers from globalisation, and promote a liberal e.g. supporting greater employee share ownership, agenda.

With the NLTUs opposition to globalisation in mind, our attention was recently drawn to an article – The Left Case Against Open Borders – https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2018/11/the-left-case-against-open-borders/– written by Angela Nagle for American Affairs.

Founded in 2017, American Affairs is a ‘is a quarterly journal of public policy and political thought.’ Interestingly, it features ‘established authors and new voices, from both the Right and the Left’ who aims to ‘look beyond ossified ideological modes’ and offer a ‘more informed responses to perennial questions and immediate problems.’

The NLTU might not agree with everything Nagle writes. However, in the spirit of comradeship, free speech and open debate, we feature her article below. We invite our readers to share their thoughts when this article is reproduced on the NLTU Facebook site – https://www.facebook.com/groups/277840098977231 – and the NLP Facebook site – https://www.facebook.com/groups/52739504313/ It goes without saying that there are no official links between Angela Nagle, American Affairs, the NLTU and the National Liberal Party. Please note that the NLTU has kept the original US spelling and phrases as they are.

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BEFORE “Build the wall!” there was “Tear down this wall!” In his famous 1987 speech, Ronald Reagan demanded that the “scar” of the Berlin Wall be removed and insisted that the offending restriction of movement it represented amounted to nothing less than a “question of freedom for all mankind.” He went on to say that those who “refuse to join the community pf freedom” would “become obsolete” as a result of the irresistible force of the global market. And so they did. In celebration, Leonard Bernstein directed a performance of “Ode to Joy” and Roger Waters performed “The Wall.” Barriers to labor and capital came down all over the world; the end of history was declared; and decades of U.S.-dominated globalization followed.

1. https://www.vox.com/2015/7/28/9014491/bernie-sanders-vox-conversation• ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Angela Nagle writes for the Atlantic, Jacobin, the Irish Times and the Baffler. She is the author of Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (Zero Books, 2017).

   • CHECK OUT the National Liberal Trade Unionists here: http://nationalliberal.org/liberty-wall-3/national-liberal-trade-unionist

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• THIS should be read in conjunction with the following:

Where We Stand (1) The National Liberal Party Supports Real Democracy! http://nationalliberal.org/where-we-stand-1-the-national-liberal-party-supports-real-democracy

Where We Stand (2) The National Liberal Party Supports Constitutional Reform! http://nationalliberal.org/where-we-stand-2-the-national-liberal-party-supports-constitutional-reform

WITH CHRISTMAS just a few days away, the National Liberal Party is calling its members and supporters to undertake some local community action.

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We want folks to print out just ten of our Christmas 2018 – Support Your Local Shops! leaflets and simply distribute them to their family, friends, workmates, neighbours and local shopkeepers.

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Distributing just ten leaflets will take a matter of minutes – but it will alert many, many people to our campaign in support of local shops, small businesses and the self-employed.

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To download our Christmas leaflet simply click here:

http://nationalliberal.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/shoplocal18xmas.pdf