By Abi Wharton, Head of Faculty: Humanities
This year, Bedales parent Don Amstad kindly inaugurated and funded what will be an annual Bedales Politics & Global Perspectives Essay Prize. In February, students in two categories – Blocks and Sixth Form – were invited to write a 1,500 word essay with the title ‘If I was Prime Minister for a day…’
Read the essays submitted by Sixth Form students below.
Max Chassels, 6.1
The UK is in a state of crisis. Hundreds of issues dominate the political landscape ranging from the Cost-of-Living Crisis to Immigration to the war in Ukraine. Inflation is at 10.1%, Britain is the only country in the G7 whose economy is forecast to shrink, the current NHS backlog is at around 7 million people and strikes continue to dominate the political landscape. Unfortunately, the Conservative party which has been in power for the past 13 years has failed and Labour`s policies are vague and unambitious. I could write about hundreds of things I would change if I was Prime Minister for a day, but to keep it short and readable I have chosen the most pressing topics which I would prioritise in a hypothetical situation. The Cost-of-Living Crisis, the immigration crisis, and foreign policy.
It is no surprise that the Cost-of-Living crisis is my first talking point. People across the UK, especially low and middle-income families are struggling to pay their bills, and something needs to be done to solve this. Inflation wouldn’t necessarily be my main priority because it will eventually half, but I believe that taxes and the budget deficit are important. I believe that our current taxation rates are broken. Low and middle-income people across the UK are being hampered down by the unjust tax system. I believe that taxes for low and middle-income families should be reduced. From the BBC, council taxes are rising from 5% from April which would add about £100 a year to the average band D property. I would support an increase in the personal allowance from £12,570 to at least £13,000, I would also support a cut in the basic rate from 20% to 19%. These cuts would help low and middle-income people save up more money which will enable people to spend in our economy and support businesses across the UK. I do believe that we will have to make cuts to public spending to reduce the ridiculous budget deficit that the Conservatives have built up. From the House of Commons Library, for the 2021/22 financial year the budget deficit was £125B or 5.4% of GDP, this is not sustainable. I believe that to reduce the budget deficit which in the long term is going to prove immensely beneficial, we do have to make the hard decision of cutting public spending. I believe that Education, Defence, Public Order and Safety should receive the least number of cuts because education should be protected because we need to improve the skills for our youth, any defence cuts would only worsen our already weak defence forces and public order and safety are incredibly important especially as crime rates have increased by 8.21% for the 2022/23 year (From CrimeRate) which means any further cuts for public order and safety will influence crime rates. Also, these three receive very little amounts of spending, £95.6B for education, £44.6B for defence, and £39.1B for public order and safety. I also believe that a windfall tax would help to reduce the budget deficit. Gas and energy companies have made ridiculous profits during the cost-of-living crisis and have profited whilst the average British person loses out. From the BBC, BP saw its biggest profit in 14 years as they saw “underlying profits” hit £6.9B between April and June 2022. As the Guardian says, a windfall tax would generate around £1.2B. This money would be able to pay back the energy scheme that the government introduced which has supported low and middle-income families during the winter.
Since the early 2010s, immigration has been a constant issue, however, it has become more of a crisis than we have seen before. For the past decade the Conservative party has over-promised and under-delivered on their immigration policies, and I doubt that the current Illegal Migration Bill will do anything to solve the immigration crisis. Firstly, the cost of the immigration crisis. From the Home Office, the government is spending £4.7m a day on housing asylum seekers. This is not sustainable, especially as we are in a cost-of-living crisis which is why we need to solve this crisis urgently. I do believe that asylum seekers can bring benefits to our economy. Currently, we have a worker shortage. From the ONS, there was 1.2 million job vacancies in the “three months” running up to November 2021. This is proving to be an issue for our economy. If we were to utilise asylum seekers and place them into our worker force, we could reduce the number of job vacancies and thus improve our economic output. Also, security is a big issue. Once asylum seekers are housed in
temporary accommodation like hotels, they are not monitored and are free to roam around. Another issue with this was the uncovering on asylum seeker children being kidnapped from hotels. From the Guardian, about “600 unaccompanied children” that were sent to a “Sussex hotel” around 136 were reported missing. I believe that more money needs to be put towards security and monitoring of unregistered asylum seekers who some have the potential to be a threat to national security. Not to mention that we have a duty to protect unaccompanied asylum seeker children and this current government has failed in that regard. I would scrap the very unsuccessful Rwanda policy that was introduced by Johnson and Patel. The government have given Rwanda around £120m in return for taking in around 400 asylum seekers despite not one flight leaving from the UK to Rwanda taking place. Not to mention that more asylum seekers are arriving in the UK per day than would be leaving to Rwanda.
Foreign policy may not be a dominant issue, but it does still play a role in politics, and it is also a subject that interests me. International politics has been shaken to put it mildly, Russia`s invasion of Ukraine has seen the biggest war in Europe since WW2 and China`s increasing superpower status has begun to change international stage, but where does Britain lie in the world now? Since Brexit we have completely diminished our influence in Europe and it has also strained them to all-time lows, for example, with France. Not that long ago in late 2021, we had the fishing boats crisis with France and during the summer Conservative leadership contest, Liz Truss said the “Jury is still out” over whether President Macron was a friend or foe. I believe firstly that we should re-approach leading EU countries such as France and Germany and the EU itself as our current relationship with these countries is at a low point even after Brexit and not to mention it would benefit us economically and reduces the likelihood of a trade war. I believe that the biggest threat posed to us is, to an extent, not Russia but China. Although Russia geographically poses a bigger threat us than China does, and with the war in Ukraine and nuclear threat, but China will, I believe, play a bigger threat to us and globally in the future. We can already see signs of this taking place. Their continuing threats to the independent island of Taiwan which if a war where to break out it would destroy global trade as Taiwan is the leading nation for semiconductors. China has also violated national sovereignty on numerous occasions. Undercover Chinese police stations have been uncovered across the UK in cities like London and Manchester. I believe to counter this threat we need to take a harder line against China as advocated by former Prime Minister Liz Truss and which Rishi Sunak is so far failing to do.
So, to summarise, if I was PM for one day my main priorities and focus would be on the-cost-of-living crisis, immigration crisis, and foreign policy. As mentioned, I do believe that the best ways to help the cost-of-living crisis is to reduce the tax burden on the low and middle-income person and to reduce the government`s budget deficit. I would like to mention other factors which I believe to be important like housing, productivity, and growth, but I do need to keep this essay short. Immigration is going to continue being a big issue, as it has been used as a front for the new populist right in politics. I believe that we can use asylum seekers as a benefit to our economy. Foreign policy may not be a big issue for the average person, but I do believe that we are heading in the wrong direction. I honestly believe that our sympathetic opening up relation with China is going to bite back just like what happened when Blair tried to mend relations with Putin and Russia. Unfortunately, I doubt that anything is going to get better with these issues due to the failure of the Conservative party which has had 13 years to improve Britain and has failed.
Eben Macdonald, 6.2
As major economies, the UK included, undergo rampant inflation and are stuck with dire prospects for 2023, there has arisen an urgent need for bold and creative radicalism among public policymakers, not only to address contemporary social and economic problems, but further issues which have long predated the current climate. In this paper, I will make the case for one policy in particular which policymakers should consider – and which I would enforce were I to be the UK’s prime minister for the day: the abolition of import tariffs. Given the simplicity of the measure, it could be easily accomplished even within a day of political office. Not only would greater ‘openness’ to free trade bring substantial benefits to the UK’s economy but would contribute to raising living standards in developing nations, in which Britain should have a moral interest.
Despite high levels of ‘trade openness’ by global standards, Britain continues to maintain at least some tariffs on imports. According to the World Bank, the UK’s average unweighted tariff stands at 1.3 percent. Although lower than figures of comparably developed nations – the European Union’s average rate stands at 1.5 percent – this does not dent the moral and economic necessity for bringing the rate to zero. Furthermore, historical data show that we shouldn’t underestimate the wider welfare impacts that superficially small economic disruptions which reductions in free trade can bring. Studying the Smoot-Hawley tariff implemented during the US Great Depression, economist Vincent Geloso argues that the impacts could have been large, contrary to the popular observation that trade was only a small component of America’s GDP, as firms had to find substitutes for imports now made more expensive, hence disproportionately inhibiting production.
Regardless of the impacts of current tariff rates, copious amounts of empirical evidence indicate that reforms to increase trade openness, typically by reducing tariffs, bring large benefits to developed economies, such as the UK. One benefit indicates the urgent necessity of trade reform – inflation reduction. According to the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), a program of trade liberalisation in the United States, rescinding tariffs on popular goods and services, could save the average household $797. Since America’s average tariff rate – 1.5 percent – is virtually identical to the UK’s, such cost-of-living benefits of trade liberalisation could easily be replicated in Britain, as they already have done in Europe; in fact, economists estimate that the Uruguay Round of tariff reduction saved EU consumers a total of 60 billion euros. Although the inflationary crisis may well be turning a corner in most places, households continue to struggle and suffer under the boot of high bills and expensive goods.
However, the benefits of tariff reductions run far beyond cutting inflation. To address urgent concerns related to employment, labour force productivity and geographical economic disparities, the UK must prioritise GDP growth. A popular perspective holds that trade openness and globalisation have damaged GDP in developed countries, by allowing domestic industries to be supplanted by cheap imports from abroad. While this is true – studies have indicated that the two such forces have played a large role in the decline of the Western manufacturing industry – it ignores the flip side of the coin: that tariff reductions help grow the economy through saving firms money with cheaper imports. Such an effect explains PIIE’s ground-breaking result, that since 1950, free trade has raised US GDP by an astounding $2.1 trillion. Further reductions in tariffs would support economic growth even more, as the cost-saving effect described would remove obstacles to additional job creation and industrial growth. To illustrate this, consider the following anecdote: the United States maintains especially high tariffs on imports of sugar cane, to
protect its own industry. However, investigation by the US Department of Commerce has found that for every job in the sugar cane industry protected by the tariffs, three are destroyed in the confectionary industry which is hamstrung by high sugar prices.
Reducing business costs isn’t the only way in which the UK’s abolition of all tariffs would stimulate economic growth. Another is through the inevitable results of breaking down the (small) brick wall the nation’s tariffs have placed around our border and exposing British firms more to international competition. Competition between firms unequivocally benefits the public – through raising wages, reducing prices, raising productivity, and increasing innovation, to name a few advantages. Thus, when measures to increase trade openness bring firms to compete with entrepreneurs beyond their own borders, these effects are amplified. For instance, the impacts of trade reform on business productivity have been studied. In the decades after the US-Canada Free Trade Agreement was passed, economists observed, the productivity of the Canadian manufacturing sector rose by as much as 15%.
Productivity aside, essential to long run economic growth is innovation. Many policies can help promote innovation, tariff reform being one of them. Not only does intensifying competition put pressure on firms to produce innovations but breaking down the economic barriers between nations allows a more efficient diffusion of knowledge. Hence, a 2016 study estimated that the declining tariffs brought by the Uruguay Round of the 1990s had a significant impact on innovation; an estimated 7% of the increase in the global knowledge since then can be attributed to the reform itself.
A need to abolish tariffs doesn’t just pertain to improving the UK’s economic situation, but also to helping living standards in developing countries. A popular method of giving ‘reparations’ to countries with histories of colonial exploitation is simply direct transfer payments. However, perhaps a more effective measure to compensate for the
treatment of poorer nations would be to allow more private trade between the West and those nations.
Although the UK’s rescission of tariffs alone wouldn’t do an awful lot to improve the plight of the global poor, the even small contribution such a reform would make makes a moral case for trade liberalisation, while signifying the inherent oppressiveness of tariffs. Exports are an important instrument at their disposal for developing nations to boost growth, increase real wages and reduce poverty; according to IMF data, the commodity boom of the 2000s and 2010s was a large driver of poverty reduction throughout South and Latin America, as it enabled those countries to export goods at higher prices. In 2001, a large trade agreement with the United States significantly boosted exports from most Asian countries; a study identified that Vietnamese provinces more exposed to trade with America saw sharper reductions in poverty and faster growth in real wages.
Increasing the volume of trade doesn’t just reduce global poverty through a direct channel (by raising real wages), but also through boosting economic growth, which has been shown to be an effective way to slash poverty rates. In fact, following an end to chaotic political turmoil and the aftermath of the AIDS crisis, exports from Sub-Saharan Africa began to rise (as did imports into the region, due a wave of liberalisation reforms). According to a 2016 study, the effects of these changes on Sub-Saharan economic growth were overwhelmingly positive; a 1 percent increase in ‘the ratio of trade’ (exports plus imports) of GDP was associated with a 0.8 percentage point increase in per capita income growth over the long run.
Of course, problems which afflict developing nations run far beyond just poverty and a lack of economic growth; another is chronic gender inequality. Many obvious remedies to such a problem are frequently advertised – improvements in education, greater access to contraceptives, more liberal abortion laws, and the removal of
regulations which prevent women from attaining high status positions. However, trade liberalisation is an unintuitive and oft-neglected solution. Lowering tariffs by all nations must serve as a valuable instrument to promote women’s economic status. This is because in the developing world, firms which export disproportionately employ women; logically, therefore, if developing nations are allowed to boost exports because of tariff reductions by the West, women’s’ wages and employment levels should rise, as has been frequently observed following the initiation of major free trade agreements, like in Mexico after NAFTA.
This does not mean, of course, that developed countries abolishing tariffs should be the best solution to any of the problems for poorer nations mentioned; however, given the empirical evidence that such a reform would almost certainly ameliorate them, the UK is under a moral obligation to remove an impediment to rising living standards, and begin the dismantlement of the remnants of the Western protectionist system.
Holding political office for one day wouldn’t allow significant legislative reforms within the UK. However, it would be possible to pass quick, simple policies which have the potential to bring both domestic and worldwide benefits – and which the UK is under a moral obligation to implement. Although British tariffs are low, complete trade liberalisation would nevertheless make significant contributions to repairing Britain’s economic situation and improving living standards globally.
Tom Montagu, 6.2
In a sentence, I would increase the UK’s investment in foreign aid to 1.4 percent of GDP. European powers were responsible for unspeakable crimes during the colonial era, which remain significantly undercompensated for. It would be financially impossible to pay for them in their entirety, but countries such as the UK, which committed a vast amount of sin, can make far larger efforts to help developing nations victimised by it and other powers. It can do this by massively increasing the amount of money spent on foreign aid. In 2021 the UK spent a mere 0.5% of its GDP on foreign aid, down from 0.7% the previous year. This amount is insultingly low. If I were prime minister for a day, I would bring it to 1.4%, double of the 2021 level – still a small amount, but nevertheless with the potential to make a large difference.
First, it is important to set out the amount of harm done by European powers, the UK included, and thus the obligation we owe to former colonies today. The level of crime committed by those powers varied by country, but a fair assessment is that they were universally negative and have stunted the long run development of the colonies, regardless. Take English occupation of India. Before England’s colonisation, India was one of the largest economies in the world, generating a whole quarter of the world’s GDP and had a formidable manufacturing sector. Estimates indicate that India produced a quarter of the world’s manufacturing output. Workers’ living standards were high, too. Evidence presented by historian Prasannan Parthasarathi shows that textile workers in the areas of Bengal and Mysore earned more than equivalent workers in Britain. However, the colonisation of India by British forces and the subsequent implementation of economic policies changed this completely. Most infamously, the British East India Company placed significant tariffs on the global exports of Indian cotton and forced cheaper British cotton to flood Indian markets, as well as imposed a regime of hefty taxation. The effects of this, along with other policies aimed at dismantling Indian industry, were devastating: India’s manufacturing output fell to a mere 2 percent of the global total, and India’s contribution to the global economy fell from 25 percent in 1750 to 2 percent in 1900. De-industrialisation wasn’t the only social and economic problem incurred by British rule; so was famine. British rule of India saw a large series of famines, claiming millions of lives, like the Bengal famine of 1770 (1-10 million dead), the Great Famine of 1876-78 (5.5 million dead) and the Bengal Famine of 1943 (1.5-3 million dead).
India is not the only example of severe exploitation by colonial powers. Belgian atrocities in the Congo were unspeakably horrendous, as the enslavement of a population to support Belgium’s mining interests precipitated a genocide which claimed 15 million lives. Why do I mention atrocities which the UK wasn’t responsible for? Dostoevsky once said, “there is only one way to salvation, and that is to make yourself responsible for all men’s sins”. The UK has a responsibility to help put right the wrong done not just by itself, but by all European powers, given how clear it is that the inherited effects of colonialism are a major reason why some nations are so underdeveloped. In fact, according to historian Daron Acemoglu, the main economic policies left by colonial powers – restrictions on free trade, disregard for the rule of law, and extreme infringement on private property rights – are the biggest drivers of global economic inequality. In fact, in 1995, these inherited effects from colonialism were responsible for half of the variation in global income per head. Since the effects of colonialism are a major reason for the persistence of poverty across the world, and the UK massively partook in it, we have an obligation to help with economically and socially developing and rebuilding countries which were victims of oppression by European powers.
Another reason, meanwhile, why the UK has such a strong obligation to do this is because colonial exploitation was a major force in driving the industrial revolution, and hence why Britain enjoys such a high standard of living compared to the rest of the world. Since we benefited from the suffering of others, we are obliged to help alleviate it. Colonial exploits helped drive industrialisation in Europe for numerous reasons: industries were directly supported, for example, by exports to colonies, and the money accumulated from slavery was often invested back into Britain’s infrastructure. A major study found that in 1830, areas of Britain with more slave-holding wealth were “less agricultural, closer to cotton mills, and (had) higher property prices”. Without slavery and colonisation, the authors conclude, Britain would have been “substantially poorer”.
Now that the obligation Europe and Britain owe to developing countries and former colonies has been described, I will now set out how that obligation can best be fulfilled. Some would say that we should be careful not to equivocate ‘developing countries’ with ‘former colonies’. However, an astounding 80 percent of the world’s land mass was conquered by Europe between 1492 and 1914.6 Many countries which today are seen as ‘developing’ were governed by European powers.
Many people propose reparations to these countries. However, the form in which these ‘reparations’ should take is hotly debated. One idea might be to compensate countries for all the wealth which was stolen from them. However, this is an unworkable proposal due to the sheer amount of what was stolen; renowned economist Utna Patnaik estimates that Britain stole $45 trillion from India from 1765 to 1938. A cheaper and perhaps more efficient initiative would be for European countries, such as the UK, to simply increase foreign aid transfers to improve public services and infrastructure and reduce poverty. Currently, very little money is spent on doing this, especially by the UK. Although in 2019, the UK’s spending 0.7 percent of GDP on foreign aid was above the EU’s average of 0.46 percent, this subsequently declined to 0.5 percent in 2021. It is imperative that this amount is substantially increased; I propose at least 1.4 percent, double of the 2021 amount.
The advantages of foreign aid spending are frequently doubted; in The White Man’s Burden, William Easterly made the case that aid is simply colonialism in another guise and does very little to help developing countries. But the evidence says something different. Firstly, the effectiveness of foreign aid is revealed by how harmful reductions in spending can be to developing countries. For example, when the UK’s spending on foreign aid declined from 0.7 to 0.5 percent of its economy, the International Development Committee announced that over 9 million women and girls wouldn’t have access to contraception as a result of the cuts, 11 million children under the age of 5 would be at risk of malnutrition, and nearly 4 million fewer girls would have access to decent education.
Furthermore, the effectiveness of foreign aid initiatives is demonstrated by how successful private charity has been at improving peoples’ lives in less developed nations. For example, in 1983 Mohammed Yunus established the Grameen Bank which was focused on giving out loans to small entrepreneurs in Bangladesh. According to Microcredit Summit, this program alone helped lift around 10 million people out of poverty in Bangladesh from 1990 to 2018.
However, many question the benefits of foreign aid programs more. For example, Dambisa Moyo expressed concern in Dead Aid that they won’t – and don’t – work because of high levels of corruption in developing countries, so funds are expropriated and spent inefficiently. This is a very legitimate concern. If I were Prime Minister, not only would I substantially raise the UK’s aid commitments, but also establish guidelines for what aid should be invested into – and there are many things worth investing in, beyond the usual, such as increasing phone access. A study found that the expansion of mobile phone services in Kenya directly lifted 194,000 people – 2 percent of the population – out of poverty. Much of this effect was due to providing people with the means to become entrepreneurs, as 185,000 women are estimated to have left agriculture and set up businesses.
Many people would want to focus on domestic challenges if they became Prime Minister. However, Britain has historically neglected its obligation to those it has sinned against – the people who, in today’s global economy, are suffering the most. I believe measures can be taken to help fulfil this obligation, like by doubling the UK’s spending on foreign aid from the 2021 level to 1.4 percent of GDP.
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