Back to the future for public money?
Mary Mellor speaks at a Quaker Economic Justice Group public meeting
Nothing but trouble has come from market fundamentalism, professor Mary Mellor told Newcastle Friends at a public meeting of their Economic Justice Group on 24 October. ‘This system has done us no good at all,’ she said.
Mary, who is emeritus professor of sociology at Northumbria University, speculated that the system, dominant from the 1950s to its peak in the mid-1980s, has had its day. ‘It was a thirty-year-long boom, and now the ideas that grew in reaction to it are beginning to assert themselves. Their time has come.’
Mary insisted that a call for a reinvigorated public sector finance was neither ‘utopian nor crazy. I’m talking about the old system, reclaiming the past for the future’.
The public finance sector had been demonised, she said. ‘You can’t say anything good about the public sector these days. It’s thought of as a drain, inefficient and continually failing. We are in a period of deficit hysteria.’ But public money has funded technological innovation, can pay for the health service and can remove the need for food banks. ‘The rise of the working poor is taking us back to the days of the nineteenth century. Cheap goods from China mask how poor people are becoming.’
Instead of the public sector being a parasite on the private sector, the reverse was true, she claimed. ‘It is the public sector which is being parasitised.’
The Economic Justice Group hopes to heighten Quakers’ awareness of economic issues. ‘Although many Quakers in Northumberland may make considerable efforts to influence “economic justice” at a personal level,’ said convenor Michael Norris, ‘there currently appears to be no attempt to influence the economic process at local, regional or national levels.’
