Let’s be honest about socialism’s paradoxes | Letters

The question arising from Owen Jones’s article (How the Tories are victimising young people, 12 January) has to be: is socialism choking itself to death on its own inherent contradictions? Has the past 50 years been a good period in history, or has it not? If it could be repeated, should it be repeated? If the parental generation has spent its children’s future, how does the next generation suppose it can avoid doing the same to its children?

Jones reports that rates of depression and anxiety among the young have increased by 70%; a third feel they will have a worse standard of living than their parents; 42% feel owning a home is an unrealistic prospect. If we compare the last 50 years with preceding periods of history, it is apparent that the last 50 years has been the aberration. The parental generation enjoyed a higher standard of living, not because it worked for it, but because it mortgaged (borrowed) from subsequent generations.

When socialists argue that a socialist government could renew the country with a different tax regime, they implicitly argue that the Tories haven’t done such a bad job of running the country. The evidence in the rest of Jones’s article suggests that failure is endemic in that class. Britain is poor because it has been running a trade deficit for 40-odd years. Austerity was the hangover from decades of overindulgence. Brexit is the tantrum that comes from the loss of self-worth. Unfortunately, youthful optimism is no substitute for gainful employment. We need to be more honest about the excreta we are sitting in.
Martin London
Henllan, Denbighshire

• John Harris’s recommendation of universal basic income as a key Labour policy is sensible (Opinion, 13 January). It is, as he says “a given that work will define a declining share of most of our lives”. In their thought-provoking 2015 book, Inventing the Future, Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams argue that we should welcome that fact, even demand full automation, and, among other things, introduce UBI. Then, as Harris also says, tax avoidance is naturally an obvious target for Labour, though awkwardly a moving target: it is transnational and the avoiders move. Therefore one other policy Labour must promote more strongly is a land value tax. Land cannot be secreted away in treasure islands.
John Airs
Liverpool

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Let’s be honest about socialism’s paradoxes | Letters