Britain Needs a Truth Committee on Debt
by Caroline Lucas (Green Party MP for Brighton Pavilion.)
While the debt of states is widely used as an instrument of submission to neoliberal policies, Caroline Lucas points out, reflected by the recent experience of Greece, the need to set up a truth commission on debt .
Over the last few days I’ve been in Greece as part of a delegation with the Greece Solidarity Campaign. The scale of the challenge facing the Greek people, though already at the forefront of my mind, has been amplified by the many people I’ve met who describe to me a country in utter turmoil. Greece’s economy has been hit by a depression deeper than the one which plagued the USA in the 1930s. A quarter of the workforce is unemployed and half of the country’s children live in poverty. Wages have declined, more than half of pension payments don’t cover the basics and deprivation has risen.