Maroiogog speaks about his views on economic policy at an event organized by the Fabian Society.

Hello everyone and thank you for having me. I assume like me many of you here will be keen Socialists. If you're a Socialist I believe Labour is your natural political home.

The reason I am left wing is because I believe in left wing economic policy. I believe that the state should be at the center of the economy of the country, providing many services, acting as a regulator and redistributing wealth effectively.

Let’s start from the first of those points. There are many things that most of us would class as public services, things such as healthcare for example. I strongly believe these should be supplied strictly by the state or by subsidiaries thereof. Let’s look at the NHS. Due to its current organization currently it often has to purchase services from private sector providers. This means that your taxes are being spent on making sure private companies make profits rather than making your healthcare better.

State sector providers don’t have dividends to pay off, they are free to reinvest every single penny they receive or make into making their products better.

Often however this becomes a dilemma of social justice though. Take as an example the schooling system we currently have. The government is currently subsidizing through generous grants the most exclusive schools in the country. These institutions can enjoy the same tax exemptions as charities, even though they are by all measures businesses.

I want to stop that and put a more equitable system in place. I would like tyo use the aforementioned grants to guarantee every school in the country has more money to spend on providing children with better education, including here in East London. This is real opportunity: where we currently have a system which gave a very large helping hand to those already well off to put themselves in a position of even greater advantage we will put a system which treats everyone equally and pays no attention to background. Real opportunitioes are for everyone, not just for those whose parents are rich enough.

There is also another type of businesses which in my opinion should be nationalized, and those are natural monopolies. The most prominent examples are water, rail, electricity and broadband. All of these services require very expensive pieces of infrastructure to be delivered to you, so we never end up in situations where 2 different railway lines connect the same two places for example. This means monopolies are very likely to form, and at that point they are free to charge you higher prices and make very large profits on your back. This is unfair and very damaging, especially given many of these goods/services are necessities.

However, if the government runs them it can do so in a way to still break even, but allow far greater access and lower prices for you, the consumer. This is why the state should be in control of water, rail, the energy grid and broadband.

And lastly, the state is a regulator. In order to protect consumers like you from companies which try to cut corners and from other shady things such as smuggling it is key that it enacts that role with a very stringent perspective with regards to what it wants to allow. Now that we are leaving to EU we must look at what is happening around the world and judge where we want to go. Do we want to become the USA and start to regulate products and industries after something goes wrong and someone faces the consequences of inaction or do we want to be proactive and thoroughly inspect the minute detail of every product we allow on our market? I think the latter is more in you interest, and thus I support it.

With regards to tax my feelings are portrayed very well by the current Labour manifesto. The current distributed profits tax given companies a very large amount of loopholes to exploit to avoid paying it. This is especially damaging to small business owners, who may not have the money to pay clever accountants to pay such tricks for them.

Whilst the previous system was not perfect, and ought to be made more progressive, it was a great deal more effective in raising revenue and making sure it was actually collected, hence I believe it is in your interests we go back to it.

I also believe the current income tax system can be made a lot more progressive through the introduction of extra tax bands, as highlighted in the party manifesto. This does not mean any particular shift in revenue nor does it entail the fact that low incomes will be charged more, much the opposite in fact. Low taxes are good, but if we want them to be the best they can we must implement them with careful consideration.

If you want to put a likeminded person in parliament this Friday, vote Polteaghost! Britain needs to Face the Future.