Two stories illustrate central dynamics of our time – the climate of fear generated around migration and the rise in house prices ('Go home' campaign denounced by human rights groups, Buy-to-let fuels property boom, both 9 August).
The house price rise, especially in London, is caused partly by the international movement of money as the wealthy seek to capitalise on speculative investment. At the same time those with access to money can borrow more and invest in buy-to-let properties, to profit from those who must rent. So this system works to move capital to where it will make more and to divide those who have it from those who don't. Wealth accumulates in fewer hands and and its movement produces rapid, uneven developments.
Writ large, that is the story of our world, and the free flow of capital is followed inevitably by the flow of labour, as people move from areas of forced decline to wherever there is a prospect of work. Employers benefit from cheaper labour but the migrants are blamed for displacing unskilled workers and competing for scarce resources in housing and health.
To reverse these processes requires economic planning and wealth taxes to put accumulated private capital back towards social use; in the UK the £4.5 trillion owned by the top 10% could pay off the national debt four times or finance re-skilling, infrastructure, green technology and much else. It also requires politicians and media to stop blaming the migrants, refugees and other victims of the system, and to look instead at how to rebuild our world so it is more use to all who have to live in it.
Professor Greg Philo
Glasgow University Media Group
• As Larry Elliott rightly says, the proliferation of zero-hours contracts represents an increase in the "reserve army of labour" in an attempt to reverse a long-term decline in profitability (Why stop at zero hours? Why not revive child labour, 5 August). But neither this nor the other responses he mentions, such as financialisation, can ultimately overcome the tendency for profit rates to fall.
This is an inherent feature of capitalist competition, resulting not from pressure on prices but from each capitalist's attempt to raise their individual profit rate by investing in more capital-intensive production processes. The overall capital, relative to total profit, goes up, and the profit rate goes down.
Although such things as attacks on wages can offset the basic tendency, sooner or later it results in crises such as the one in progress since 2008. Since the cause is too much capital, the only cure (within capitalism) is destruction of capital through bankruptcy of less-profitable enterprises. Palliatives such as increasing workers' purchasing power can help the system limp along for a while but only at the cost of preparing a bigger and worse crisis.
Julian Wells
Economics department, Kingston University
• John Harris appears to suggest that Labour's problems in 2007/08 were caused by a global financial crash (Where is Labour going wrong?, G2, 12 August). They weren't. They were caused by a Labour party pursuing Thatcherite policies. A failure to rein in the wild west financial sector inherited from Nigel Lawson or to reform the idiocy of right-to-buy, deregulated rents and our national obsession with bricks and mortar. These were the selfsame policies that gave us boom and bust in 1990. Which countries went down? Britain, America, Iceland, Ireland, Spain, Greece. Which countries survived better? The western and north European states that pursue a more social democratic style of capitalism. This was not a crisis of global capitalism; it was a crisis of Friedmanite Anglo-Saxon capitalism, and it beggars belief that after three decades of this unworkable, malign ideology, the left are not shouting their opposition from the rooftops.
David Redshaw
Gravesend, Kent
• Labour's ambivalent attitude to foreign workers highlights the dilemma facing the party (Report, 12 August). Why are employers "unscrupulous" because they recruit the workers best able to fulfil the required roles? That is what all employers do, and are entitled to do under European legislation. If there is a problem with EU law, Labour should tackle that deficiency directly, instead of carping about "localised" side effects. Perhaps the Labour party hierarchy could steal a march on its rivals by proposing a system of controlled EU immigration, a proposal that would resonate strongly with the electorate.
Dr Mark Ellis
Huddersfield
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