Following the emergency Budget the BBC Radio 4 Today programme for once put the ruling coalition's politics under pressure. Its presenter demanded that Nick Clegg explain why he was supporting a Budget that hit the poorest the hardest. The Lib Dem's blustering and vague accusations about "unfunded cuts" did not really deal with the issue at all. The philosophy and economic strategy behind the Budget aims to roll back the welfare state. This is not a new idea - the same thing's already happening at great speed in Greece and Spain. Both are being forced to swallow a toxic medicine of cuts and redundancies among valued public employees. What we are seeing in Europe today is strikingly similar to the economic policies prescribed to indebted poor countries by the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank. They've long promoted cuts to public spending, privatisation of services and a reduced role for the state in all social matters. Internationally taxation policy has become a beggar-my-neighbour strategy where all are forced to compete in reducing corporate tax levels. And on Tuesday Chancellor George Osborne promised that Britain would see one of the lowest levels of corporation tax in the world. Gone is even any discussion of a "Robin Hood" transaction tax, better known as the Tobin tax, to enforce some taxation on the huge levels of capital flows around the world.
The Budget is the first of a long series of plans that the Con-Dems have in store. This week it was attacks on welfare benefits and housing benefit. Before that it was cuts to free school meals. In October the coalition will set out spending plans for the next three years which will wreak enormous damage to the welfare state. Despite Con-Dem claims about protecting health expenditure, it is clear that the NHS will suffer too as it struggles with the huge built-in costs of existing private finance initiative contracts and growing demand from an increasingly elderly population. On top of this our health service will have to deal with a wave of demand as poor housing, unemployment and poverty lead to greater sickness. A day before the Budget, Parliament had hosted a different debate on spending where talk of cuts, retrenchment or rolling back the state's role were off the agenda. MPs were discussing the Strategic Defence Review first announced by the outgoing Labour government, which made sure that our hugely expensive nuclear weapons and Trident programme were not included. Scottish Nationalists did try to get Trident into the review and managed to force a vote on its inclusion during a debate on the Queen's Speech. However the entire coalition voted against the SNP demand - a Liberal Democrat manifesto pledge - while the Labour front bench demanded that MPs abstain. This instruction was ignored by a large number of Labour MPs.
An air of unreality permeated last Monday's proceedings. Both front benches were agreed on Iraq, Afghanistan, nuclear weapons and essentially about interventions elsewhere. Tory backbencher Bernard Jenkin delivered a speech that underlined the position of those who favour arms spending. "In today's world overpopulation," he declared, "competition for food and resources, the risk of environmental catastrophe, mass migration, accelerating technological change, nuclear proliferation, nationalism and extremism are all on the rise. That is quite a list, aggravated further by the global recession. Is this the moment to substitute hard power for soft power?" He talked in the language of Bush and Blair, declaring the "right" of the powerful to intervene where they think fit. Mercifully his allotted eight minutes were up before we could learn more of his apocalyptic worldview. The same day the House of Commons library published an analysis of the financial costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan adventures. In total from 2004 to 2009 the British public have paid £11.8bn. In the last full year for which information was available, 2008-9, Iraq had cost £1.3bn and Afghanistan £2.6bn. The bill for the latter will be far higher in 2009-10. What's more the predicted cost of replacing the Trident missile-carrying submarines and their warheads stands at £76bn over a predicted 25-year life.
Those who support this strategy - including those who claim that Britain's nuclear arsenal are about deterrence - actually share Jenkin's swivel-eyed, Dr Strangelove worldview. If such a perspective were allowed to dominate, the 192 non-nuclear-weapons nations which do not wish to have WMD would do better to develop them as quickly as possible in preparation for a new era of resource wars. For the biggest corporations these kind of wars work. The bizarre auction of Iraq's oil reserves a year ago and Afghanistan's reported multibillion-pound mineral wealth show what is really behind such interventions. However they do nothing for ordinary people, the very people who are being asked to swallow huge cuts in social spending, lower tax for big corporations, an enormous defence budget and a new generation of nuclear weapons. As the cuts bite, the public focus will turn increasingly to issues of social need. It is time to promote an alternative view with social and economic justice at the forefront, at home and across the world.
Showing posts with label economy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economy. Show all posts
Monday, 28 June 2010
Wednesday, 12 May 2010
Democracy is dying
So that’s what “democracy” means. Every five years or so we vote – and that’s the end of it until the next election. Of course, having a vote is certainly better than not having one. But the hung parliament has led to backroom discussions – and we are all as excluded as the thousands of people who couldn’t get into polling stations after 10pm on election day. The truth is that what we voted for bears little resemblance to what we got. The Tories have far more seats than can be justified by the number of votes they got. In this situation, many, including myself, are calling for a change to the voting system, in the shape of proportional representation. The first-past-the-post electoral system, which allowed Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair to win election landslides with just two fifths of the vote, is indeed unfair. The last time there was momentum for PR on the left was when the Tory election victories in the 1980s and 1990s looked like they would never end. Then it was out of desperation – a belief that only by changing the voting system could the Tories be beaten. Now it is out of frustration that all the parties are so similar. After the Second World War, the Labour and Tory parties completely dominated British politics, sharing around 96 percent of the popular vote between them. Last week they got just 65 percent between them. Yet parliament is still dominated by the two biggest parties.
That’s why socialists support electoral reform although we need proper debate about what form takes. The strongest argument is that it would help break the dominance of two increasingly unrepresentative big parties, opening up a space for the left – and this is true. Voting systems like multi-seat constituencies or alternative votes and a list system are more democratic than what we’ve got. But the left should not obsess over PR and get trapped in a debate about constitutional reform that in many ways serves the interests of the big parties. For example, Southern Ireland has a “fairer” electoral system – yet politics is dominated by right wing parties and corruption. The Northern Ireland Assembly was structured after enormous care and effort to provide proportionality and parity of esteem, yet it has copper-fastened sectarian division and put the bigots of the DUP in charge. Greece has PR – but this has not prevented the government trying to impose swingeing cuts. In Britain, the radical left is fragmented and electorally very weak. The collapse of the existing party system could even make things worse if the only alternatives come from the far right – racist parties like UKIP and the BNP.
The problem with today’s democracy, and with the dominant view of democracy in our society, is that it is far too limited. To address that we need to go far beyond which type of voting system we want. To make democracy truly relevant to the majority of working people, what is needed is not just political democracy but also economic and social democracy. The capitalist class can live with political democracy alone – the election of parliaments and governments – because the decisive levers of power are not in parliament. Control over society really lies first in the boardrooms of industry and the banks, and second in the permanent institutions of the state, above all the armed forces. The capitalists own and control the former directly, and the latter is bound to it by a thousand economic, social and ideological ties. By these means they can turn parliament into a talking shop and bend governments to their will. We got an insight into the real base of power when the media with demands to reassure “the markets” that the new government would be formed quickly. Marxists call what we have now “bourgeois democracy” – democracy that is based on and enshrines the rule of the capitalist class, the bourgeoisie.
To move beyond this to a system based on real power for the masses, it is necessary to extend democracy to production and work, and then other areas of social life. This means democracy in every factory, call centre, supermarket, school, university, hospital and post office. It means workers’ democracy. That cannot be achieved without overturning capitalist property ownership, law and the state – with a workers’ revolution that will enable the working class to run society. In the full glare of publicity the three main parties jostle and manoeuvre over power. But, in the background, there is a much more fundamental assertion of power.This is, of course, by the famous “markets” that hover threateningly over the politicians as they negotiate. The process began even before the general election took place. At the beginning of last week the Financial Times reported that the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange was planning to open at 1am that Friday morning, three hours after voting ended. This was to allow traders in gilts—British government bonds—to start buying or selling them as soon as the result of the election began to become clear. It was clear that there was only one outcome that was really acceptable to the bond markets—a majority Tory government that would immediately implement unprecedented cuts in public spending.This announcement amounted to hanging a sword of Damocles over the heads of the British electorate.
When the voters failed to deliver the result the markets had demanded, the latter’s spokespeople were absolutely furious. Sir Martin Sorell, chief executive of the advertising empire WPP, spluttered on Radio Four’s World at One on Friday last week that a hung parliament was the “worst possible” result. Alan Clarke of Paribas pontificated to the Financial Times that “the UK could lose its top triple A credit status because of its failure to deliver a majority government with the authority to tackle the country’s public finances immediately”. Arnaud Mares of Moody’s, one of the three agencies that rate the credit status of states and firms, said he assumed that “the incoming economic team could muster convincing parliamentary support for a fiscal adjustment that was no looser or slower than outlined by all three political parties during their respective election campaigns.” All this reminds us that Jimmy Carville, one of Bill Clinton’s advisers, said in 1993 that, “if there was reincarnation... I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.” Let’s remind ourselves of what’s really going on here. Less than three years ago, the banks, hedge funds, and the like precipitated the biggest financial crash and the worst economic slump since 1929. The ratings agencies were condemned only last week by the French and German governments for their contribution to this disaster by giving triple-A ratings to various financial instruments that are now mostly worthless.
To prevent a repeat of the Great Depression of the 1930s, states increased their spending. They found that money largely by borrowing. This was a good thing because it helped to maintain demand for goods and services. But, as a result, budget deficits have risen. Now all the banks and other financial institutions that were saved thanks to this spending and borrowing are denouncing the rise in deficits as an economic scandal that can only be expunged by the most savage cuts in public services. To get an intimation of the kind of suffering that this will cause, look at Greece. The austerity programme extracted as the price of the country’s “rescue” by the International Monetary Fund and the eurozone will slash wages, pensions, and services. As a result the Greek economy is projected to shrink by 4 percent this year and by 2.6 percent in 2011. In other words, slashing the deficit is economic nonsense. Its only justification is to increase the profits and bolster the power of the very forces that unleashed the crisis in the first place. But, at the same time as demanding austerity, these same forces are scurrying back to the state to rescue them again. Last Sunday’s New York Times anxiously reported: “The fear that began in Athens, raced through Europe and finally shook the stock market in the United States is now affecting the broader global economy.” The European Union emergency package agreed at the weekend is designed particularly to bolster the bond markets. The sacred “markets” that sit in judgement of mere voters and elected politicians are themselves deeply fragile, riven with deep fractures.
That’s why socialists support electoral reform although we need proper debate about what form takes. The strongest argument is that it would help break the dominance of two increasingly unrepresentative big parties, opening up a space for the left – and this is true. Voting systems like multi-seat constituencies or alternative votes and a list system are more democratic than what we’ve got. But the left should not obsess over PR and get trapped in a debate about constitutional reform that in many ways serves the interests of the big parties. For example, Southern Ireland has a “fairer” electoral system – yet politics is dominated by right wing parties and corruption. The Northern Ireland Assembly was structured after enormous care and effort to provide proportionality and parity of esteem, yet it has copper-fastened sectarian division and put the bigots of the DUP in charge. Greece has PR – but this has not prevented the government trying to impose swingeing cuts. In Britain, the radical left is fragmented and electorally very weak. The collapse of the existing party system could even make things worse if the only alternatives come from the far right – racist parties like UKIP and the BNP.
The problem with today’s democracy, and with the dominant view of democracy in our society, is that it is far too limited. To address that we need to go far beyond which type of voting system we want. To make democracy truly relevant to the majority of working people, what is needed is not just political democracy but also economic and social democracy. The capitalist class can live with political democracy alone – the election of parliaments and governments – because the decisive levers of power are not in parliament. Control over society really lies first in the boardrooms of industry and the banks, and second in the permanent institutions of the state, above all the armed forces. The capitalists own and control the former directly, and the latter is bound to it by a thousand economic, social and ideological ties. By these means they can turn parliament into a talking shop and bend governments to their will. We got an insight into the real base of power when the media with demands to reassure “the markets” that the new government would be formed quickly. Marxists call what we have now “bourgeois democracy” – democracy that is based on and enshrines the rule of the capitalist class, the bourgeoisie.
To move beyond this to a system based on real power for the masses, it is necessary to extend democracy to production and work, and then other areas of social life. This means democracy in every factory, call centre, supermarket, school, university, hospital and post office. It means workers’ democracy. That cannot be achieved without overturning capitalist property ownership, law and the state – with a workers’ revolution that will enable the working class to run society. In the full glare of publicity the three main parties jostle and manoeuvre over power. But, in the background, there is a much more fundamental assertion of power.This is, of course, by the famous “markets” that hover threateningly over the politicians as they negotiate. The process began even before the general election took place. At the beginning of last week the Financial Times reported that the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange was planning to open at 1am that Friday morning, three hours after voting ended. This was to allow traders in gilts—British government bonds—to start buying or selling them as soon as the result of the election began to become clear. It was clear that there was only one outcome that was really acceptable to the bond markets—a majority Tory government that would immediately implement unprecedented cuts in public spending.This announcement amounted to hanging a sword of Damocles over the heads of the British electorate.
When the voters failed to deliver the result the markets had demanded, the latter’s spokespeople were absolutely furious. Sir Martin Sorell, chief executive of the advertising empire WPP, spluttered on Radio Four’s World at One on Friday last week that a hung parliament was the “worst possible” result. Alan Clarke of Paribas pontificated to the Financial Times that “the UK could lose its top triple A credit status because of its failure to deliver a majority government with the authority to tackle the country’s public finances immediately”. Arnaud Mares of Moody’s, one of the three agencies that rate the credit status of states and firms, said he assumed that “the incoming economic team could muster convincing parliamentary support for a fiscal adjustment that was no looser or slower than outlined by all three political parties during their respective election campaigns.” All this reminds us that Jimmy Carville, one of Bill Clinton’s advisers, said in 1993 that, “if there was reincarnation... I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.” Let’s remind ourselves of what’s really going on here. Less than three years ago, the banks, hedge funds, and the like precipitated the biggest financial crash and the worst economic slump since 1929. The ratings agencies were condemned only last week by the French and German governments for their contribution to this disaster by giving triple-A ratings to various financial instruments that are now mostly worthless.
To prevent a repeat of the Great Depression of the 1930s, states increased their spending. They found that money largely by borrowing. This was a good thing because it helped to maintain demand for goods and services. But, as a result, budget deficits have risen. Now all the banks and other financial institutions that were saved thanks to this spending and borrowing are denouncing the rise in deficits as an economic scandal that can only be expunged by the most savage cuts in public services. To get an intimation of the kind of suffering that this will cause, look at Greece. The austerity programme extracted as the price of the country’s “rescue” by the International Monetary Fund and the eurozone will slash wages, pensions, and services. As a result the Greek economy is projected to shrink by 4 percent this year and by 2.6 percent in 2011. In other words, slashing the deficit is economic nonsense. Its only justification is to increase the profits and bolster the power of the very forces that unleashed the crisis in the first place. But, at the same time as demanding austerity, these same forces are scurrying back to the state to rescue them again. Last Sunday’s New York Times anxiously reported: “The fear that began in Athens, raced through Europe and finally shook the stock market in the United States is now affecting the broader global economy.” The European Union emergency package agreed at the weekend is designed particularly to bolster the bond markets. The sacred “markets” that sit in judgement of mere voters and elected politicians are themselves deeply fragile, riven with deep fractures.
Sunday, 9 May 2010
Stand by Greek workers
As was not only predictable, but inevitable, the people of Greece have turned out onto the streets in their tens and hundreds of thousands to show their resistance to the draconian economic measures being forced on them by the European Union and the ECB. The organised Greek working class has sent and is still sending a strong message to its own government and those "friendly" governments that are supposedly bailing out the Greek economy. And that message is that they will not stand idly by while, under the pretext of friendly assistance to their country, the privatisers and market parasites of the EU strip them of their wages and their pensions, extend their working lives and demolish their public sector. They will not allow a weak, supposedly socialist, government to collapse under pressure applied by a pincer movement of the EU on the one hand and the finance sector on the other. Rather, they will fight on the streets and in the factories and offices to ensure that those who caused the crisis will pay for it and that isn't the Greek working class. In this country, the Greek crisis has produced an outbreak of appallingly bigoted national stereotyping, with the Greek people being variously described as lazy, shiftless and indolent and greedy in the Tory press. Such slanderous and vicious assaults on a people who are the victims, rather than the offenders, are distasteful in the extreme, but illustrate well just how far down the line the capitalist offensive will go to justify its raids on the living standards of ordinary people. We must be very clear on this. The Greek bail-out is no such thing.
It is an orchestrated attempt to turn Greece into a wasteland, a battleground where free-market capitalism can first kill civil society in the country and then pick over the corpse, stealing what it can and wrecking what it can't, a forced auction of a whole country's assets to the highest bidder. And what rankles deepest with the organised working class in Greece is that it is the representatives of capitalism who caused the crisis in the first place, it is those same capitalists who will benefit from the auction of the country and it is that very same class that isn't being asked for any sacrifices to remedy the crisis that they caused. Let's not forget also that the latest episode in the Greek crisis was precipitated by yet another capitalist edifice, the ratings agency structure that downgraded Greek debt to junk status - those same ratings agencies that gave AAA ratings to billions of dollars of residential mortgage-backed securities which precipitated the near collapse of the world economy. The Greek trade unions are quite clear about it. They will never accept the destruction of their country as the price of bailing out a rich class of greedy tax evaders and profiteers. And in their statements over the last few days, they send a warning to workers in other countries. They are right to do so. The measures being forced on them by the EU as the price of support are precisely the same measures being punted by the new Labour, Tory and Lib Dem friends of the ruling class to reduce the national debt level in this country.
This is no coincidence. It is part of the world-wide drive by capitalism to reverse the tide of history, to attack working class living standards and to shrink the edifices built up to benefit ordinary people. The price of a decent life for all is to high for capitalism to accept. The capitalist system has bought itself a continuation long past its sell-by date, but it is no longer prepared to tolerate the carrot. It's now time for the big stick, because they will not tolerate anything eating into their profits and civil society is doing just that. We wish the Greek workers well in their fight and urge everyone to show what solidarity that they can. Our fight will come sooner than we might expect.
It is an orchestrated attempt to turn Greece into a wasteland, a battleground where free-market capitalism can first kill civil society in the country and then pick over the corpse, stealing what it can and wrecking what it can't, a forced auction of a whole country's assets to the highest bidder. And what rankles deepest with the organised working class in Greece is that it is the representatives of capitalism who caused the crisis in the first place, it is those same capitalists who will benefit from the auction of the country and it is that very same class that isn't being asked for any sacrifices to remedy the crisis that they caused. Let's not forget also that the latest episode in the Greek crisis was precipitated by yet another capitalist edifice, the ratings agency structure that downgraded Greek debt to junk status - those same ratings agencies that gave AAA ratings to billions of dollars of residential mortgage-backed securities which precipitated the near collapse of the world economy. The Greek trade unions are quite clear about it. They will never accept the destruction of their country as the price of bailing out a rich class of greedy tax evaders and profiteers. And in their statements over the last few days, they send a warning to workers in other countries. They are right to do so. The measures being forced on them by the EU as the price of support are precisely the same measures being punted by the new Labour, Tory and Lib Dem friends of the ruling class to reduce the national debt level in this country.
This is no coincidence. It is part of the world-wide drive by capitalism to reverse the tide of history, to attack working class living standards and to shrink the edifices built up to benefit ordinary people. The price of a decent life for all is to high for capitalism to accept. The capitalist system has bought itself a continuation long past its sell-by date, but it is no longer prepared to tolerate the carrot. It's now time for the big stick, because they will not tolerate anything eating into their profits and civil society is doing just that. We wish the Greek workers well in their fight and urge everyone to show what solidarity that they can. Our fight will come sooner than we might expect.
Saturday, 1 May 2010
Wake me up when the crisis is over
The state of the economy will continue to mould British politics after the election. Economics will constrain the room for manoeuvre of the political elite, pressing them to drive through a series of attacks. It will also create the terrain on which workers will have to organise and resist. The prospects for the system are, then, of keen interest to those who wish to challenge it. After almost three years of chaos, what lies in store? It is worth reminding ourselves of the enormity of the crisis that has unfolded around us. It is estimated that lost output, the goods and services that went unproduced during the crisis, amounts to $4 trillion - enough dollar bills to stretch to the sun and back twice over. That sum would also be sufficient to provide basic education, healthcare, sanitation and nutrition to all those on the planet currently denied them, and to do so for 30 years. According to Andrew Haldane, the Bank of England's director of financial stability (an oxymoron if ever there was one), the permanent long-term impact of the crisis could magnify these losses to anywhere from $60 trillion to $200 trillion. One of the oldest and most powerful arguments for socialism is the gap between what the system ought to make possible, the capacity of collective human labour to enrich the lives of those who undertake it, and the miserable reality of what it actually delivers. And every sign is that the impact of the crisis, which has already mutilated nations, tortured millions with hunger and sparked both instability and resistance, will continue to be felt.
A year ago economists Barry Eichengreen and Kevin O'Rourke published research showing that the "Great Recession", as it has been dubbed, was closely tracking the trajectory of the Great Depression that began in 1929. But history seldom repeats itself. In a recent update to their original paper they show how the global economy has begun to diverge from the path of that earlier meltdown. The action of states across the globe, which engineered a series of financial bailouts, stimulus packages and liquidity injections on a scale hitherto unseen, is largely responsible for preventing a 1930s-style slump. But this intervention has come at a great price. Socialising the risks associated with the crisis, at the very moment when tax revenues were spiralling down, has replaced the danger of a private-sector meltdown with that of entire nations becoming bankrupt. Events in Greece this spring are the clearest example. After months of insisting that it would not bail out the heavily indebted Greek economy, the German government, along with the other eurozone countries and in partnership with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), agreed to do just that. The bailout comes with strings attached - Greek workers, a fifth of whom already live below the poverty line, will now face a structural adjustment programme as savage as that imposed on many Third World countries in the past. In return the IMF and eurozone government will guarantee that Greece can, in the short term, roll over its debt. Even this may well merely postpone the inevitable as markets continue to bet on an eventual default.
But even if Greece does avoid bankruptcy, this is not the end of the matter. Several financial columnists likened the bailout to that of Bear Stearns, which in spring 2008 became an early casualty of the crisis on Wall Street. Few people now remember Bear Stearns, but most do remember the next big Wall Street bank to collapse - Lehman Brothers - and the meltdown that followed. Speculators are already looking for the next domino set to topple after Greece. It might be one of the other weak eurozone countries, with Portugal tipped as the most likely, but it might well be Britain. As the Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott writes, "Greece's...projected budget deficit in 2010 is lower than those for the US, Ireland and, of course, Britain. The UK is helped by the long maturity of its existing debt, which removes some of the short-term pressures on government bonds, and by its floating exchange rate, which allows the currency to take the strain during a financial crisis. On the other hand, there are plenty of off-balance-sheet liabilities, a record peacetime budget deficit, a dysfunctional financial system and a grotesquely unbalanced economy. "The assumption is that the US is too big to fail because the dollar is the world's reserve currency... The assumption is that Japan is too big to fail because a debt-to-GDP ratio in excess of 200 percent can always be financed by high levels of domestic savings. The assumption is that Britain is too big to fail because, well, just because those sort of things don't happen here." As Elliott points out, this is hardly reassuring.
All this is happening despite the fact that the major economies are technically out of recession. The recovery can be characterised in three words: "weak", "fragile" and "uncertain". The recovery is weak because the crisis, in spite of its severity, has not resolved the underlying problems capitalism faces. The conditions for the crisis were created by three decades of sustained low profitability. This argument, often made by Marxist commentators, occasionally finds an echo in the mainstream press. So a recent column in the Financial Times lamented the collapse of the "return on capital", roughly equivalent to what Karl Marx called the "rate of profit". It pointed out that after the Second World War this held up at about 15 percent in the US. By the 1980s it was 10 percent, and today it is just 5 percent. If these figures are to be trusted, the system has gone from a situation in which US firms could double the scale of their investment in just six years to one in which it would take two decades - hardly a great advert for the dynamism of global capitalism. Marx placed just such a long-term decline in the rate of profit at the centre of his theory of crisis. He also argued that profitability could be restored by crisis itself, through what he called "the annihilation of a great part of the capital". During a recession some companies fail and are bought up by rivals, and others have to sell off parts of their business or dump their stock on the market to meet their obligations. Those companies that survive can take advantage of this, grabbing assets at a fraction of their real value and putting them to highly profitable use in the recovery that follows. Depressed wages and high unemployment also allow capitalists to squeeze more out of workers. A process of "creative destruction" may lead to a boom following a slump.
But this is not some automatic process that pushes the economy back towards some natural equilibrium. The post-war boom followed only after the prolonged horror of the 1930s slump and the destruction of the Second World War, which also forced states to intervene to reorganise whole national economies. The current crisis has led to a surge in firms failing. In the US the asset value of publicly listed companies filing for bankruptcy in 2008 and 2009 was greater than the total for the preceding 28 years. However, so far the current crisis has not been long enough or deep enough to clear out the system and pave the way for a boom like that of the 1950s and 1960s. Some of the big multinationals have been able to survive by reducing their output for a time in an attempt to ride out the storm. And, more importantly, states have intervened to keep failing businesses afloat, for instance by rescuing car manufacturers Chrysler and General Motors along with large chunks of the banking system. Eichengreen and O'Rourke contrast the length of the Great Recession with that of the Great Depression: "Global industrial production now shows clear signs of recovering. This is a sharp divergence from experience in the Great Depression, when the decline in industrial production continued fully for three years." Paradoxically, staving off a catastrophic slump may have simply guaranteed that problems linger on, ensuring that recovery remains weak. The recovery is also uneven.
Initial estimates suggested that British growth slowed to just 0.2 percent in the first quarter of 2010. The US is growing faster, and is also faring better than Germany and Japan, which are more export-oriented and have suffered more from the decline in world trade than from the initial financial meltdown. China was also hit by falling demand for its exports but has continued to boom due to a massive state-sponsored domestic investment programme. This has revived the fortunes of some of the developing economies that supply it with raw materials. But even in China there are fears that growth is unstable, with widespread concerns about an emerging property bubble, a glut of lending raising the prospect of colossal levels of bad debt, and the danger that too much is being produced for still-limited markets. The weakness of the global recovery means that workers will continue to suffer. In some countries this takes the form of high unemployment and attacks on wages, as in the US, Spain and Ireland. In others, such as Germany and Japan, where unemployment has not risen as fast, companies have sought to hold on to workers but have cut pay rates, reduced hours or shifted workers onto part-time contracts. Britain lies somewhere between the two extremes. Wages have been held below the rate of inflation and unemployment has increased significantly. In April the jobless rate hit 8 percent, the highest it has been in 14 years. This figure excludes the growing number of people no longer looking for employment, which currently stands at over 21 percent of those of working age. In addition, the number of people working part-time because they cannot get full-time work is at its highest level since 1992.
Unemployment and underemployment will persist well into any recovery. A recent IMF report argues that employment falls further and takes longer to recover during recessions that have a significant financial component. The report indicates that it could take a year and a half from the end of the recession for any substantial improvement, assuming that the recovery continues. Accompanying the weakness of the recovery is its fragility. This is a product of changes to capitalism that took place during the past few decades. Faced with continued low profitability, capitalists began to shift their investment towards the financial system, where they hoped to be able to grab short-term paper profits. This created a series of bubbles as asset prices boomed, from the dotcom bubble of the 1990s through to the subprime mortgage and commodities bubbles that had swollen to huge proportions when the crash came. These bubbles flattered economies with the impression of dynamism and kept the system ploughing forwards. Underlying them was a "mega-bubble" of credit, fuelled by low interest rates and excess savings seeking a profitable outlet.
Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, one of the ruling class's most brutally honest spokespeople, argues, "Quite simply, the financial system has become bigger and riskier. The UK case is dramatic, with banking assets jumping from 50 percent of GDP to more than 550 percent over the past four decades... A large part of the financial system seems to be a machine to transfer income and wealth from outside to inside, while increasing the fragility of the economy as a whole." He concludes that the financial system produced "illusory gains on the way up and real pain on the way down". The excesses of the bubble era now emerging are astonishing. April saw the beginning of a series of litigations against those who created the arcane financial instruments traded in the run-up to the crash. Goldman Sachs stands accused of repackaging loans, including what it knew to be toxic debts, in an asset it created for the Paulson hedge fund. Paulson could then bet on its failure, while unsuspecting buyers lost out. So too did companies who insured the investment, including RBS and AIG, in which the British and US governments respectively are now the majority shareholders. Goldman Sachs denies the allegations, but whatever the outcome of the case it sheds light on the increasingly bizarre and bloated world of finance. There is little evidence that the crash has "tamed" finance, as some left-leaning economists had hoped. Indeed, all the features of the bubble era are returning. Financial profits are growing far faster than profits in the wider economy; the housing market, which tumbled with the recession, is shooting back up, as are oil prices; speculation on exchange rates continues; banking bonuses are back. The super-rich are also returning to the conspicuous consumption to which they are accustomed, as evidenced by the 33 percent growth in sales of Dom Pérignon and similar high-end champagnes in the first three months of 2010.
Financialisation means each new problem that emerges is amplified as panic spreads rapidly through the system. This is what happened just before Christmas with the Dubai property crash and then in spring with events in Greece. All of this lends an additional fragility to the already weak recovery.
Finally, any recovery is and will remain uncertain. State interventions replaced private borrowing and investment with mountains of public debt, and falling tax revenues made it difficult to recover the money spent. Now governments everywhere face a dilemma. Do they cut back to pay off their debts, risking a "double-dip recession" as the stimulus is withdrawn? Or do they continue spending and risk a run on their currencies, as the eurozone experienced amid fears of a Greek default? Chris Giles writes in the Financial Times, "Never has a UK government borrowed more in peacetime than Labour did last year, when it was in the red to the tune of 11.8 percent of national income. Never has a government had to obtain £1 for every four it spends from investors rather than tax payers. And never has a government borrowed £6,000 annually, as in 2010-11, on behalf of every household, with a further £25,000 expected over the course of the coming parliament." Even if Britain avoids a complete loss of faith on the part of its financiers, the political elite is committed to an assault on the public sector the likes of which we have never seen. The general election result was unknown as Socialist Review went to press but the consensus between the parties in the run-up to polling day was greater than the differences. As Giles argues, "In terms of defined spending cuts, each [party] has outlined less than £10 billion worth - far less than the minimum £40 billion needed in the first three years." In order to appease the City of London real government spending will have to be slashed by about one fifth, he concludes.
Similarly, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, a body representing human resources professionals, predicted "a 10 percent reduction in the 5.8 million core public sector workforce...the likelihood of 500,000 jobs being shed in the next five years dwarfing the figures the parties have been prepared to acknowledge".
The scale of the challenge facing the left can seem paralysing. But it is important to remember that crisis also weakens and divides our rulers. Capitalism has been discredited in the eyes of many who live under it as once solid certainties have melted into air. The crisis has sharpened the divisions within the ruling class, setting its representatives against each other as they each seek to find ways to preserve their profits at the expense of their rivals. Different groups of capitalists are coming into conflict on a global and national level, further fracturing the ideological consensuses of our age and creating cracks that the left can exploit by putting forward its own arguments. The political elite who claim to preside over the system have suffered blow after blow to their legitimacy. Any incoming government will be a weak one, lacking real hegemony over those it seeks to rule. But it will be under pressure from the wider ruling class to drive through attacks on an unprecedented scale, whether it does so enthusiastically or reluctantly. This is an explosive combination, and in this context there will be further struggles, both local eruptions and national disputes. Politics will be crucial to these battles. For instance, in order to break out of the commonsense view that some part of the public sector has to be slashed, it will be necessary to argue that there are other ways of raising the money - through cutting the budget for the Trident nuclear programme, for example, or closing tax loopholes exploited by the rich, or by increasing the top rate of income tax. That means challenging the agenda of the mainstream political parties.
Politics can also bridge the gap between local campaigns to defend public services and struggles by groups of workers in these services who also wish to defend their wages and their jobs. The Right to Work initiative, set to hold an emergency conference on 22 May, can begin to draw together a network of solidarity and resistance, strengthening each of the different battles and maintaining a permanent relationship between all those who want to fight back. At the heart of the resistance, we also need a growing core of revolutionaries committed to a socialist alternative to capitalism and capable of arguing for a way forward for the working class movement as a whole. The situation in the coming months can change very rapidly indeed. To rise to the challenge, the left must be able to match the pace of events.
A year ago economists Barry Eichengreen and Kevin O'Rourke published research showing that the "Great Recession", as it has been dubbed, was closely tracking the trajectory of the Great Depression that began in 1929. But history seldom repeats itself. In a recent update to their original paper they show how the global economy has begun to diverge from the path of that earlier meltdown. The action of states across the globe, which engineered a series of financial bailouts, stimulus packages and liquidity injections on a scale hitherto unseen, is largely responsible for preventing a 1930s-style slump. But this intervention has come at a great price. Socialising the risks associated with the crisis, at the very moment when tax revenues were spiralling down, has replaced the danger of a private-sector meltdown with that of entire nations becoming bankrupt. Events in Greece this spring are the clearest example. After months of insisting that it would not bail out the heavily indebted Greek economy, the German government, along with the other eurozone countries and in partnership with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), agreed to do just that. The bailout comes with strings attached - Greek workers, a fifth of whom already live below the poverty line, will now face a structural adjustment programme as savage as that imposed on many Third World countries in the past. In return the IMF and eurozone government will guarantee that Greece can, in the short term, roll over its debt. Even this may well merely postpone the inevitable as markets continue to bet on an eventual default.
But even if Greece does avoid bankruptcy, this is not the end of the matter. Several financial columnists likened the bailout to that of Bear Stearns, which in spring 2008 became an early casualty of the crisis on Wall Street. Few people now remember Bear Stearns, but most do remember the next big Wall Street bank to collapse - Lehman Brothers - and the meltdown that followed. Speculators are already looking for the next domino set to topple after Greece. It might be one of the other weak eurozone countries, with Portugal tipped as the most likely, but it might well be Britain. As the Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott writes, "Greece's...projected budget deficit in 2010 is lower than those for the US, Ireland and, of course, Britain. The UK is helped by the long maturity of its existing debt, which removes some of the short-term pressures on government bonds, and by its floating exchange rate, which allows the currency to take the strain during a financial crisis. On the other hand, there are plenty of off-balance-sheet liabilities, a record peacetime budget deficit, a dysfunctional financial system and a grotesquely unbalanced economy. "The assumption is that the US is too big to fail because the dollar is the world's reserve currency... The assumption is that Japan is too big to fail because a debt-to-GDP ratio in excess of 200 percent can always be financed by high levels of domestic savings. The assumption is that Britain is too big to fail because, well, just because those sort of things don't happen here." As Elliott points out, this is hardly reassuring.
All this is happening despite the fact that the major economies are technically out of recession. The recovery can be characterised in three words: "weak", "fragile" and "uncertain". The recovery is weak because the crisis, in spite of its severity, has not resolved the underlying problems capitalism faces. The conditions for the crisis were created by three decades of sustained low profitability. This argument, often made by Marxist commentators, occasionally finds an echo in the mainstream press. So a recent column in the Financial Times lamented the collapse of the "return on capital", roughly equivalent to what Karl Marx called the "rate of profit". It pointed out that after the Second World War this held up at about 15 percent in the US. By the 1980s it was 10 percent, and today it is just 5 percent. If these figures are to be trusted, the system has gone from a situation in which US firms could double the scale of their investment in just six years to one in which it would take two decades - hardly a great advert for the dynamism of global capitalism. Marx placed just such a long-term decline in the rate of profit at the centre of his theory of crisis. He also argued that profitability could be restored by crisis itself, through what he called "the annihilation of a great part of the capital". During a recession some companies fail and are bought up by rivals, and others have to sell off parts of their business or dump their stock on the market to meet their obligations. Those companies that survive can take advantage of this, grabbing assets at a fraction of their real value and putting them to highly profitable use in the recovery that follows. Depressed wages and high unemployment also allow capitalists to squeeze more out of workers. A process of "creative destruction" may lead to a boom following a slump.
But this is not some automatic process that pushes the economy back towards some natural equilibrium. The post-war boom followed only after the prolonged horror of the 1930s slump and the destruction of the Second World War, which also forced states to intervene to reorganise whole national economies. The current crisis has led to a surge in firms failing. In the US the asset value of publicly listed companies filing for bankruptcy in 2008 and 2009 was greater than the total for the preceding 28 years. However, so far the current crisis has not been long enough or deep enough to clear out the system and pave the way for a boom like that of the 1950s and 1960s. Some of the big multinationals have been able to survive by reducing their output for a time in an attempt to ride out the storm. And, more importantly, states have intervened to keep failing businesses afloat, for instance by rescuing car manufacturers Chrysler and General Motors along with large chunks of the banking system. Eichengreen and O'Rourke contrast the length of the Great Recession with that of the Great Depression: "Global industrial production now shows clear signs of recovering. This is a sharp divergence from experience in the Great Depression, when the decline in industrial production continued fully for three years." Paradoxically, staving off a catastrophic slump may have simply guaranteed that problems linger on, ensuring that recovery remains weak. The recovery is also uneven.
Initial estimates suggested that British growth slowed to just 0.2 percent in the first quarter of 2010. The US is growing faster, and is also faring better than Germany and Japan, which are more export-oriented and have suffered more from the decline in world trade than from the initial financial meltdown. China was also hit by falling demand for its exports but has continued to boom due to a massive state-sponsored domestic investment programme. This has revived the fortunes of some of the developing economies that supply it with raw materials. But even in China there are fears that growth is unstable, with widespread concerns about an emerging property bubble, a glut of lending raising the prospect of colossal levels of bad debt, and the danger that too much is being produced for still-limited markets. The weakness of the global recovery means that workers will continue to suffer. In some countries this takes the form of high unemployment and attacks on wages, as in the US, Spain and Ireland. In others, such as Germany and Japan, where unemployment has not risen as fast, companies have sought to hold on to workers but have cut pay rates, reduced hours or shifted workers onto part-time contracts. Britain lies somewhere between the two extremes. Wages have been held below the rate of inflation and unemployment has increased significantly. In April the jobless rate hit 8 percent, the highest it has been in 14 years. This figure excludes the growing number of people no longer looking for employment, which currently stands at over 21 percent of those of working age. In addition, the number of people working part-time because they cannot get full-time work is at its highest level since 1992.
Unemployment and underemployment will persist well into any recovery. A recent IMF report argues that employment falls further and takes longer to recover during recessions that have a significant financial component. The report indicates that it could take a year and a half from the end of the recession for any substantial improvement, assuming that the recovery continues. Accompanying the weakness of the recovery is its fragility. This is a product of changes to capitalism that took place during the past few decades. Faced with continued low profitability, capitalists began to shift their investment towards the financial system, where they hoped to be able to grab short-term paper profits. This created a series of bubbles as asset prices boomed, from the dotcom bubble of the 1990s through to the subprime mortgage and commodities bubbles that had swollen to huge proportions when the crash came. These bubbles flattered economies with the impression of dynamism and kept the system ploughing forwards. Underlying them was a "mega-bubble" of credit, fuelled by low interest rates and excess savings seeking a profitable outlet.
Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, one of the ruling class's most brutally honest spokespeople, argues, "Quite simply, the financial system has become bigger and riskier. The UK case is dramatic, with banking assets jumping from 50 percent of GDP to more than 550 percent over the past four decades... A large part of the financial system seems to be a machine to transfer income and wealth from outside to inside, while increasing the fragility of the economy as a whole." He concludes that the financial system produced "illusory gains on the way up and real pain on the way down". The excesses of the bubble era now emerging are astonishing. April saw the beginning of a series of litigations against those who created the arcane financial instruments traded in the run-up to the crash. Goldman Sachs stands accused of repackaging loans, including what it knew to be toxic debts, in an asset it created for the Paulson hedge fund. Paulson could then bet on its failure, while unsuspecting buyers lost out. So too did companies who insured the investment, including RBS and AIG, in which the British and US governments respectively are now the majority shareholders. Goldman Sachs denies the allegations, but whatever the outcome of the case it sheds light on the increasingly bizarre and bloated world of finance. There is little evidence that the crash has "tamed" finance, as some left-leaning economists had hoped. Indeed, all the features of the bubble era are returning. Financial profits are growing far faster than profits in the wider economy; the housing market, which tumbled with the recession, is shooting back up, as are oil prices; speculation on exchange rates continues; banking bonuses are back. The super-rich are also returning to the conspicuous consumption to which they are accustomed, as evidenced by the 33 percent growth in sales of Dom Pérignon and similar high-end champagnes in the first three months of 2010.
Financialisation means each new problem that emerges is amplified as panic spreads rapidly through the system. This is what happened just before Christmas with the Dubai property crash and then in spring with events in Greece. All of this lends an additional fragility to the already weak recovery.
Finally, any recovery is and will remain uncertain. State interventions replaced private borrowing and investment with mountains of public debt, and falling tax revenues made it difficult to recover the money spent. Now governments everywhere face a dilemma. Do they cut back to pay off their debts, risking a "double-dip recession" as the stimulus is withdrawn? Or do they continue spending and risk a run on their currencies, as the eurozone experienced amid fears of a Greek default? Chris Giles writes in the Financial Times, "Never has a UK government borrowed more in peacetime than Labour did last year, when it was in the red to the tune of 11.8 percent of national income. Never has a government had to obtain £1 for every four it spends from investors rather than tax payers. And never has a government borrowed £6,000 annually, as in 2010-11, on behalf of every household, with a further £25,000 expected over the course of the coming parliament." Even if Britain avoids a complete loss of faith on the part of its financiers, the political elite is committed to an assault on the public sector the likes of which we have never seen. The general election result was unknown as Socialist Review went to press but the consensus between the parties in the run-up to polling day was greater than the differences. As Giles argues, "In terms of defined spending cuts, each [party] has outlined less than £10 billion worth - far less than the minimum £40 billion needed in the first three years." In order to appease the City of London real government spending will have to be slashed by about one fifth, he concludes.
Similarly, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, a body representing human resources professionals, predicted "a 10 percent reduction in the 5.8 million core public sector workforce...the likelihood of 500,000 jobs being shed in the next five years dwarfing the figures the parties have been prepared to acknowledge".
The scale of the challenge facing the left can seem paralysing. But it is important to remember that crisis also weakens and divides our rulers. Capitalism has been discredited in the eyes of many who live under it as once solid certainties have melted into air. The crisis has sharpened the divisions within the ruling class, setting its representatives against each other as they each seek to find ways to preserve their profits at the expense of their rivals. Different groups of capitalists are coming into conflict on a global and national level, further fracturing the ideological consensuses of our age and creating cracks that the left can exploit by putting forward its own arguments. The political elite who claim to preside over the system have suffered blow after blow to their legitimacy. Any incoming government will be a weak one, lacking real hegemony over those it seeks to rule. But it will be under pressure from the wider ruling class to drive through attacks on an unprecedented scale, whether it does so enthusiastically or reluctantly. This is an explosive combination, and in this context there will be further struggles, both local eruptions and national disputes. Politics will be crucial to these battles. For instance, in order to break out of the commonsense view that some part of the public sector has to be slashed, it will be necessary to argue that there are other ways of raising the money - through cutting the budget for the Trident nuclear programme, for example, or closing tax loopholes exploited by the rich, or by increasing the top rate of income tax. That means challenging the agenda of the mainstream political parties.
Politics can also bridge the gap between local campaigns to defend public services and struggles by groups of workers in these services who also wish to defend their wages and their jobs. The Right to Work initiative, set to hold an emergency conference on 22 May, can begin to draw together a network of solidarity and resistance, strengthening each of the different battles and maintaining a permanent relationship between all those who want to fight back. At the heart of the resistance, we also need a growing core of revolutionaries committed to a socialist alternative to capitalism and capable of arguing for a way forward for the working class movement as a whole. The situation in the coming months can change very rapidly indeed. To rise to the challenge, the left must be able to match the pace of events.
Thriving on disaster capitalism
Volcanic ash, eh? What is it about disasters and capitalism? It seems that any event outside the daily norm exposes all the system's horrors and weaknesses. Throughout the general election campaign, the consensus of the major parties remained that private enterprise, the free market, low taxes and a move away from "welfarism" are all good things. You would hardly think that a system founded on these principles was going through the worst economic chaos experienced by anyone not old enough to have lived through the 1930s. Nor would you think that this chaos was in no small part created by the unfettered and unregulated behaviour of ultra-greedy bankers and capitalists. Indeed all the warnings that politicians issued about tough times ahead are aimed at precisely those who had nothing to do with causing this crisis - the poor, those on benefits and public sector workers. So, despite the mayhem that potentially awaits all those of us who don't own or control wealth, they all argue for the virtues of their system. Yet every time the system is put to the test it fails. The eradication of famine, starvation and drought should all be well within the means of the modern world, yet we repeatedly witness human tragedy on a colossal scale. I heard a Haitian commentator on the radio explain that most of the problems faced by Haitians immediately following the earthquake still remain. Nor is the system's inability to cope with disaster restricted to what are often dismissed as "obscure and backward" parts of Africa or Asia. One only has to think back to the devastation caused by Katrina, in a large city at the heart of the richest and most powerful country in the world, to remember just how utterly useless US capitalism was when coping with the crisis. Sadly, New Orleans remains a tarnished testament to such failure to this day.
So it is that in each and every disaster of this type the free market, the profit motive and the "shackling of the nanny state" have proved to be utterly useless weapons in dealing with the crisis. As a result of that uselessness, untold, and frequently unnecessary, human misery has ensued. This shouldn't surprise us. Where is the profit in rehousing the homeless poor, feeding the penniless starving or taking care of the unemployable injured? Indeed the profit motive and the free market, far from solving such problems, actually add to them. For free market capitalism, profit is far more important than providing human happiness - indeed, on many occasions, far more important than life itself. One of the fascinating aspects of the economic crisis is that we are now told by many that concern for "green issues" must be put on the back burner. The very future of our planet and the air that we breathe must come below the drive for balanced budgets and profitability. So to the recent crisis caused by Icelandic volcanic ash. The airline bosses apparently at first thought it was a good idea not to fly in conditions that might cause death and disaster. But, after a few days of not making profits, their tune rapidly changed. Suddenly this was just the ultra-caution of Eurocrats, the cowardice of aviation experts.
Enter the profoundly disgusting Willie Walsh. Up to now his CV has consisted of being responsible for transforming Aer Lingus into a no-frills (but ludicrously expensive) airline, attacking working conditions and doing everything he can to smash the unions at British Airways. Unsurprisingly, he was swiftly demanding that the same staff whose livelihoods he is wrecking should have their lives endangered for his profits. His pathetic stunt of going up in a flight was just that. The likelihood of one plane flying into the ash was indeed very small, but if the skyways were fully employed the likelihood would quickly change. Ah, but we are losing massive amounts of money, whined Walsh and his ilk. And compared to that what do the lives of crew or passengers matter? So every disaster or crisis, no matter how major or minor, is made worse by the priorities of the system. None of this was aired by the party leaders in the election campaign. Of course, David Cameron would never question the system - his party is, after all, the party of the greedy, the free market obsessed, the rich and privileged. There was a time when Labour would have at least been critical of aspects of the system and acknowledged that fetters had to be put on it. But now there are very few voices in Labour expressing such views - and Gordon Brown's certainly hasn't been one of them. As for Nick Clegg, and the freshness of what he had to say, when you scratch beneath the surface you find one more defender of the capitalist status quo. All in all a bloody disastrous lack of choice!
So it is that in each and every disaster of this type the free market, the profit motive and the "shackling of the nanny state" have proved to be utterly useless weapons in dealing with the crisis. As a result of that uselessness, untold, and frequently unnecessary, human misery has ensued. This shouldn't surprise us. Where is the profit in rehousing the homeless poor, feeding the penniless starving or taking care of the unemployable injured? Indeed the profit motive and the free market, far from solving such problems, actually add to them. For free market capitalism, profit is far more important than providing human happiness - indeed, on many occasions, far more important than life itself. One of the fascinating aspects of the economic crisis is that we are now told by many that concern for "green issues" must be put on the back burner. The very future of our planet and the air that we breathe must come below the drive for balanced budgets and profitability. So to the recent crisis caused by Icelandic volcanic ash. The airline bosses apparently at first thought it was a good idea not to fly in conditions that might cause death and disaster. But, after a few days of not making profits, their tune rapidly changed. Suddenly this was just the ultra-caution of Eurocrats, the cowardice of aviation experts.
Enter the profoundly disgusting Willie Walsh. Up to now his CV has consisted of being responsible for transforming Aer Lingus into a no-frills (but ludicrously expensive) airline, attacking working conditions and doing everything he can to smash the unions at British Airways. Unsurprisingly, he was swiftly demanding that the same staff whose livelihoods he is wrecking should have their lives endangered for his profits. His pathetic stunt of going up in a flight was just that. The likelihood of one plane flying into the ash was indeed very small, but if the skyways were fully employed the likelihood would quickly change. Ah, but we are losing massive amounts of money, whined Walsh and his ilk. And compared to that what do the lives of crew or passengers matter? So every disaster or crisis, no matter how major or minor, is made worse by the priorities of the system. None of this was aired by the party leaders in the election campaign. Of course, David Cameron would never question the system - his party is, after all, the party of the greedy, the free market obsessed, the rich and privileged. There was a time when Labour would have at least been critical of aspects of the system and acknowledged that fetters had to be put on it. But now there are very few voices in Labour expressing such views - and Gordon Brown's certainly hasn't been one of them. As for Nick Clegg, and the freshness of what he had to say, when you scratch beneath the surface you find one more defender of the capitalist status quo. All in all a bloody disastrous lack of choice!
Friday, 30 April 2010
Bowing down to big oil altar
Shell and its apologists are wriggling as usual in their attempts to pass off £3.2b nillion profit over the last three months as entirely reasonable. They deny that it is motorists in Britain who contribute, through previously unseen forecourt petrol prices, to this level of profits, insisting that half of their bonanza comes from extracting the oil, and selling it on the wholesale market. Maybe it does, but 25% of it comes from refining, distribution and retail, which is a not inconsiderable slice of the cake. In any case, the oil transnational companies' ploy of dividing up their operations into the various stages from exploration to the petrol pump is simply a means of obfuscating the obscene level of their profits. It is similar to the game played by the gas and electricity privateers, which blame the price that they are forced to charge on the upstream costs that they have to bear. They don't mention that each company has its own wholesale operation which maximises its profits by charging the ultimate price to the parent company's subsidiary further down the line. It's almost like value added tax, with every single transaction bringing an additional cost. But, whereas VAT ends up in the exchequer, the ratcheted-up costs of the gas, electricity and oil companies pour a profits stream of flood-like proportions into the pockets of shareholders.
Those who claim that energy markets are highly competitive are living in another world. These markets are dominated by an oligopoly, into which it is virtually impossible for new companies to break. Even if they give the impression of challenging each other for contracts, their commanding positions in the marketplace guarantee their continued, very profitable domination. Nor is it true that Shell and the other oil majors have to have this level of profits to either search for new oil fields or to diversify into renewables. Shell is, in fact, investing less in exploration than previously and it has retreated from its fine words on renewables of a decade ago to concentrate on environmentally damaging projects such as the exploitation of Canada's oil sands. Disregard the cuddly, nice-to-be-with sunshine adverts of the oil transnationals. They are all as single-minded as ever to control the globe's scarce hydrocarbon reserves, even if it takes invasions of sovereign states, as in Iraq, and their sole priority is the well-being of shareholders. As Unite joint general secretary Tony Woodley intimates, that should not be acceptable to the people of this country or to its government. New Labour has been too soft by half on big business, holding down its share of taxation, slashing corporation tax and refusing to increase income tax on the super-rich who benefit disproportionately from the profits bonanza. And this at a time when Gordon Brown and his cloned Chancellor Alistair Darling miss no opportunity to impose below-inflation pay settlements on public-service staff and to lecture low-paid workers on the need to rein in their demands. An immediate windfall tax on Shell's obscene profits could help to plug the yawning gap in the government's tax income, but the only long-term solution to this problem is to bring these oligopolies into public ownership.
Those who claim that energy markets are highly competitive are living in another world. These markets are dominated by an oligopoly, into which it is virtually impossible for new companies to break. Even if they give the impression of challenging each other for contracts, their commanding positions in the marketplace guarantee their continued, very profitable domination. Nor is it true that Shell and the other oil majors have to have this level of profits to either search for new oil fields or to diversify into renewables. Shell is, in fact, investing less in exploration than previously and it has retreated from its fine words on renewables of a decade ago to concentrate on environmentally damaging projects such as the exploitation of Canada's oil sands. Disregard the cuddly, nice-to-be-with sunshine adverts of the oil transnationals. They are all as single-minded as ever to control the globe's scarce hydrocarbon reserves, even if it takes invasions of sovereign states, as in Iraq, and their sole priority is the well-being of shareholders. As Unite joint general secretary Tony Woodley intimates, that should not be acceptable to the people of this country or to its government. New Labour has been too soft by half on big business, holding down its share of taxation, slashing corporation tax and refusing to increase income tax on the super-rich who benefit disproportionately from the profits bonanza. And this at a time when Gordon Brown and his cloned Chancellor Alistair Darling miss no opportunity to impose below-inflation pay settlements on public-service staff and to lecture low-paid workers on the need to rein in their demands. An immediate windfall tax on Shell's obscene profits could help to plug the yawning gap in the government's tax income, but the only long-term solution to this problem is to bring these oligopolies into public ownership.
Thursday, 29 April 2010
Education not for sale
Michael Gove has been drawing some of the details onto the Tories' fuzzy "people power" poster. The big question is, which people, what power? The answer is - not you. Instead, Gove's mates will get the power to take money away from your children. The Tory manifesto says it will copy Sweden's "free schools programme," allowing parents to set up their own schools with government money. This month the Tories admitted the obvious - that "any parent can take the money," but they will take the money from somewhere else. A new "free school" will not be free for the Local Education Authority - cash will drain away from existing schools to fund Gove's new toys. And where will the money go? The manifesto says that new schools can be "founded by foundations, charities and others." We need to ask the same question they always ask in that TV programme Lost. "Who are the others?" In the television show, "the others" are a malevolent and sinister group of settlers who harass and manipulate the unfortunates marooned on the tropical island. On Gove Island "the others" are an even more malevolent and manipulative group - Cameron's business chums.
Aspirational consumer parents on the Toby Young model will front the new people power schools. But the actual running of the school can be passed to for-profit companies - which must interest John Nash and his wife Caroline. They have given the Tories £177,500 since 2006. Nash runs Sovereign Capital, a private equity firm specialising in investments in private school companies. So far he has failed to get his hands on a state academy school due to worries about his Tory and business links; Gove as minister would change all that. Look at the wider Tories' education policy and you'll see they plan to revive the policies of one of the least successful Tory ministers of the Major years. John Patten, education minister between 1992 and 1994, was so ineffectual that most people confuse him with former environment secretary Chris Patten. Chris was the blond one who became governor of Hong Kong. John was the one with brown hair in a kind of Brideshead floppy style. John Patten always had trouble making the right impression, according to his former girlfriend, author Lucinda Lambton. She said that, when he walked into the same room as her in the 1990s, she had "felt sick" and "had to leave" as he had been "repellently smooth." She told a friend: "In my greasy past, he is the biggest grease spot of all." She also described Patten as "the slimiest skeleton in my cupboard."
He made an unpleasant mark in education as well. First he made a fool of himself by describing leading educationalist Tim Brighouse as a "nutter." Brighouse sued for defamation and Patten had to pay out £100,000. Patten then tried to take on the teaching unions - and failed. In his autobiography former PM John Major wrote that Patten was "rather worn down by it," to the point where "his health suffered and I decided he needed a sabbatical." Patten was widely rumoured to have suffered a nervous breakdown, and the minister could be heard mumbling that heaven and hell should have a more prominent place on the school curriculum to scare children into better behaviour. Major sacked Patten and sent him to the back benches, his ministerial career over. And now the Tories want to revive all his disastrous schemes. Patten wanted schools to "opt out" of local authority control. He didn't want democratically elected local councils running schools. Instead, he wanted centrally funded schools answerable to a committee that he set up, stuffed with businessmen who funded the Tory Party. It flopped. But the Tories' "free schools" would follow the same lines.Patten launched a "licensed teacher" scheme. He was convinced that teacher training colleges were soaked in the "fashionable ideas of the 1960s."
He wanted to send people with a "business background" straight into the classroom to learn on the job without the influence of the ungodly radicals who he thought infested the colleges. It flopped. But now Gove is promising a programme called Teach Now, which would also put party-qualified people from "business backgrounds in the classroom." Of course it is easy for the Tories to launch these crazy schemes because Labour has been running its own versions of Patten's failures - incredibly with Patten's personal help. Patten lost none of his appetite for failure after leaving government. Indeed it even seemed to infect his wife. Lady Louise Patten was a key director of Bradford & Bingley. The firm collapsed after issuing too many dodgy mortgages and had to be bailed out by the Labour government. She was also a director of a property firm called Brixton. That went bust too. Her husband had beaten her to the punch when it came to collapsing companies. After Parliament, Patten became a director of privatisation specialist Amey. It went into a crisis and was bought out by a Spanish multinational, leaving Patten out of a job. But before his company crashed, the Labour government asked Patten to help out with schools. Patten's firm Amey sponsored the Middlesbrough "city academy." This business-backed school was supposed to rejuvenate education, but instead inspectors found truancy, poor teaching, inappropriate buildings, "exceptionally low" results and "inadequate" progress. Labour's academies were their version of Patten's "opted-out" schools and the Tories "free schools" take the process one step further.
Labour had its own version of "licensed teachers" as well, an on-the-job training scheme marked by "weak training," leading to "unsatisfactory teaching." So the Conservatives plan to revive the education policy of a man even his former girlfriend called a greasy spot and a slimy skeleton. But their job is a whole lot easier because Labour already flattered Tory failures with its own imitations.
Aspirational consumer parents on the Toby Young model will front the new people power schools. But the actual running of the school can be passed to for-profit companies - which must interest John Nash and his wife Caroline. They have given the Tories £177,500 since 2006. Nash runs Sovereign Capital, a private equity firm specialising in investments in private school companies. So far he has failed to get his hands on a state academy school due to worries about his Tory and business links; Gove as minister would change all that. Look at the wider Tories' education policy and you'll see they plan to revive the policies of one of the least successful Tory ministers of the Major years. John Patten, education minister between 1992 and 1994, was so ineffectual that most people confuse him with former environment secretary Chris Patten. Chris was the blond one who became governor of Hong Kong. John was the one with brown hair in a kind of Brideshead floppy style. John Patten always had trouble making the right impression, according to his former girlfriend, author Lucinda Lambton. She said that, when he walked into the same room as her in the 1990s, she had "felt sick" and "had to leave" as he had been "repellently smooth." She told a friend: "In my greasy past, he is the biggest grease spot of all." She also described Patten as "the slimiest skeleton in my cupboard."
He made an unpleasant mark in education as well. First he made a fool of himself by describing leading educationalist Tim Brighouse as a "nutter." Brighouse sued for defamation and Patten had to pay out £100,000. Patten then tried to take on the teaching unions - and failed. In his autobiography former PM John Major wrote that Patten was "rather worn down by it," to the point where "his health suffered and I decided he needed a sabbatical." Patten was widely rumoured to have suffered a nervous breakdown, and the minister could be heard mumbling that heaven and hell should have a more prominent place on the school curriculum to scare children into better behaviour. Major sacked Patten and sent him to the back benches, his ministerial career over. And now the Tories want to revive all his disastrous schemes. Patten wanted schools to "opt out" of local authority control. He didn't want democratically elected local councils running schools. Instead, he wanted centrally funded schools answerable to a committee that he set up, stuffed with businessmen who funded the Tory Party. It flopped. But the Tories' "free schools" would follow the same lines.Patten launched a "licensed teacher" scheme. He was convinced that teacher training colleges were soaked in the "fashionable ideas of the 1960s."
He wanted to send people with a "business background" straight into the classroom to learn on the job without the influence of the ungodly radicals who he thought infested the colleges. It flopped. But now Gove is promising a programme called Teach Now, which would also put party-qualified people from "business backgrounds in the classroom." Of course it is easy for the Tories to launch these crazy schemes because Labour has been running its own versions of Patten's failures - incredibly with Patten's personal help. Patten lost none of his appetite for failure after leaving government. Indeed it even seemed to infect his wife. Lady Louise Patten was a key director of Bradford & Bingley. The firm collapsed after issuing too many dodgy mortgages and had to be bailed out by the Labour government. She was also a director of a property firm called Brixton. That went bust too. Her husband had beaten her to the punch when it came to collapsing companies. After Parliament, Patten became a director of privatisation specialist Amey. It went into a crisis and was bought out by a Spanish multinational, leaving Patten out of a job. But before his company crashed, the Labour government asked Patten to help out with schools. Patten's firm Amey sponsored the Middlesbrough "city academy." This business-backed school was supposed to rejuvenate education, but instead inspectors found truancy, poor teaching, inappropriate buildings, "exceptionally low" results and "inadequate" progress. Labour's academies were their version of Patten's "opted-out" schools and the Tories "free schools" take the process one step further.
Labour had its own version of "licensed teachers" as well, an on-the-job training scheme marked by "weak training," leading to "unsatisfactory teaching." So the Conservatives plan to revive the education policy of a man even his former girlfriend called a greasy spot and a slimy skeleton. But their job is a whole lot easier because Labour already flattered Tory failures with its own imitations.
Wednesday, 28 April 2010
Burning issues fall on deaf ears?
The more important the issue, the less likely it is to come up in the general election. Trivia and bribes are the order of the day. This goes especially for economics. Labour, the Lib Dems and the Tories are competing to introduce ever larger public spending cuts and it is accepted that taxes are likely to increase. Yet the reason we have a deficit is the banking bailout. The British economy is far too reliant on banking and finance in the City of London. The City is far too reliant on increasingly esoteric financial instruments, which are essentially highly sophisticated forms of gambling. Let's not forget that the British economy came close to a total crash because British banks like Northern Rock held toxic assets. Buying up financial instruments that contained dodgy subprime mortgages from Florida caused chaos. The Tories bleat about Labour increasing debt - but forget that Thatcher ripped up the rule book and allowed banks to lend in irresponsible ways and march into speculation. The Tory push to demutualise building societies made it worse. The most significant part of our present economy strongly rewards irresponsible risk via a bonus-fuelled culture of excess. When the banks mess up, we all pay through tax increases and spending cuts. Yet a critique of speculative finance remains off of the agenda.
Let's be frank. The Tories under Thatcher created a financial timebomb that exploded and is primed to go off again. Most politicians don't understand the madness that is modern banking so they are leaving well alone. The banks could crash again and we could pick up the tab again. The Tories decimated manufacturing and with globalisation running riot British industry has continued to decline. Unless we reverse this, the long-term stability of the economy is under threat. Britain has been living off of oil revenues. The discovery of North Sea reserves funded Thatcher's economic experiment and cushioned Major, Blair and Brown. During the 1980s and 1990s, when production peaked, oil prices were just £6.50 a barrel. Now oil is at £55 and could head to £130. But North Sea oil is largely exhausted. This is a huge scandal - and guess what, politicians will be ignoring it during the election and blaming hard-working migrants for the unfolding British economic disaster. Ultimately an economy based on gambling and fuelled by dirt-cheap fossil fuels is not going to pay our pensions or provide security for our children.
We need economic democracy, with people in control of economic activity. The drive to privatisation and private finance schemes takes economic control out of our hands and places it in the hands of an increasingly small global elite who are concerned with immediate profit - not real long-term prosperity. Politics is increasingly meaningless because politicians elected by voters have less and less influence. How can we develop solutions to climate change if buses and rail services are no longer controlled by elected representatives? Mutual or co-operative control of banks would reverse the tendency to focus on the short-term. Economics needs to be a tool used to make us better off. Above all, the economy needs to work ecologically. The idea of an economy that ruthlessly focuses on profit means we mortgage the future for immediate gratification. Cleggmania is a product of voters who want to see a change, but the far-from-left Liberal Democrats have leant further and further to the right under his leadership. Social liberalism has made way for market liberalism, so the fundamentals of leaving economic activity to corporations and continuing to privatise - which are creating an unsustainable and increasingly unequal Britain - will continue. Unless we change our economy, it will become increasingly unstable. Green economics need to be on the agenda and that won't be brought about by electing a fresh crop of new Labour, Conservative or Liberal Democrat neoliberals.
Let's be frank. The Tories under Thatcher created a financial timebomb that exploded and is primed to go off again. Most politicians don't understand the madness that is modern banking so they are leaving well alone. The banks could crash again and we could pick up the tab again. The Tories decimated manufacturing and with globalisation running riot British industry has continued to decline. Unless we reverse this, the long-term stability of the economy is under threat. Britain has been living off of oil revenues. The discovery of North Sea reserves funded Thatcher's economic experiment and cushioned Major, Blair and Brown. During the 1980s and 1990s, when production peaked, oil prices were just £6.50 a barrel. Now oil is at £55 and could head to £130. But North Sea oil is largely exhausted. This is a huge scandal - and guess what, politicians will be ignoring it during the election and blaming hard-working migrants for the unfolding British economic disaster. Ultimately an economy based on gambling and fuelled by dirt-cheap fossil fuels is not going to pay our pensions or provide security for our children.
We need economic democracy, with people in control of economic activity. The drive to privatisation and private finance schemes takes economic control out of our hands and places it in the hands of an increasingly small global elite who are concerned with immediate profit - not real long-term prosperity. Politics is increasingly meaningless because politicians elected by voters have less and less influence. How can we develop solutions to climate change if buses and rail services are no longer controlled by elected representatives? Mutual or co-operative control of banks would reverse the tendency to focus on the short-term. Economics needs to be a tool used to make us better off. Above all, the economy needs to work ecologically. The idea of an economy that ruthlessly focuses on profit means we mortgage the future for immediate gratification. Cleggmania is a product of voters who want to see a change, but the far-from-left Liberal Democrats have leant further and further to the right under his leadership. Social liberalism has made way for market liberalism, so the fundamentals of leaving economic activity to corporations and continuing to privatise - which are creating an unsustainable and increasingly unequal Britain - will continue. Unless we change our economy, it will become increasingly unstable. Green economics need to be on the agenda and that won't be brought about by electing a fresh crop of new Labour, Conservative or Liberal Democrat neoliberals.
Sunday, 25 April 2010
BNP offer no way forward
In last year's European elections the British National Party (BNP) got just under a million votes, 6.4% of the total votes cast. Its highest polling areas were all traditionally Labour voting, working class areas - Barking and Dagenham, Stoke-on-Trent, Thurrock, Barnsley and Rotherham. On 6 May the BNP are hoping to take control of Barking and Dagenham council. Party leader, Nick Griffin, is also standing for parliament in Barking, one of 326 parliamentary seats that the BNP will be contesting. Regrettably, it is no surprise that the number of working class people voting BNP has increased over recent years. Workers are faced with a choice between three major parties that stand in the interests of big business and not of working class people. These are parties that have supported bailing out the 'banksters' while expecting us to pay for the crisis. No wonder many workers cannot bring themselves to vote at all and others express their anger by voting for the BNP. But the BNP does not stand in the interests of working class people. On the contrary, its ideas are a recipe for defeat and despair.
Public services are already inadequate, underfunded and overcrowded. But, whichever party wins the general election, Tories, New Labour or LibDems, they will take an axe to what is left of our services, with proposed cuts of 15% or more over the coming years. Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP, is not campaigning to defend public services, but the bankers! As a member of the European parliament he has argued that the European Commission does not understand "the City of London's role in world markets and that it is a leading economic and commercial asset in Great Britain." Far from being an 'asset', the rich bankers in the City of London bear responsibility for the dramatic increase in public debt. Deregulated under the Tories and then New Labour, the City enjoyed a massive party of profits. When the hangover came, it was taxpayers who propped them up. Now the bankers are partying again and our services are being cut to pay the bill. Socialists demand nationalisation of the major banks - with compensation paid only on the basis of proven need. Instead of being run by and for the profiteers, a nationalised finance sector could be run by and for the mass of the population. The BNP, by contrast, not only opposes nationalisation, but even demands increased deregulation of the City!
The BNP's programme for the economy does not include one proposal to make the rich pay more - either in taxation or by other means. Nick Griffin may pose as a friend of working class people, but nothing could be further from the truth. Where they have councillors they have consistently supported massive cuts. In Barking the BNP moved an alternative budget, which not only accepted all £14 million in cuts proposed by the New Labour-led council, but added its own cuts of several million - including £0.8 million from the school buildings budget. In Stoke-on-Trent the BNP supported the council budget, which proposes savage cuts in jobs, closure or further privatisation plus an almost 3% council tax increase. In Kirklees the BNP voted for a huge £400 million worth of cuts over the next five years. A BNP councillor called for public sector jobs to be slashed by 25%, even more than the cuts that the Labour council was proposing. Only councillor Jackie Grunsell, a member of the Socialist Party, is actually fighting the cuts.Defending our services will require a united mass movement. To be successful, like the movement against Thatcher's poll tax 20 years ago, it will need to unite as many working class people as possible - men and woman, old and young, migrant and those who were born here. The racist and pro-cuts BNP will never lead such a movement. It creates division not unity - and supports the cuts!
Five million people say they want social housing. But as a result of government policy over the last 30 years, there is virtually none available. 20 years ago there were more than five million council homes, now there is barely half that number. In Barking and Dagenham alone there are 8,000 people on the council house waiting list. The number of council homes in the borough has fallen by 22,000 in the last 20 years. Now the Labour council, frightened by the growth of electoral support for the BNP, is building its first council houses for 25 years - all 32 of them! From 1949 to 1954 an average of 230,000 council houses a year were built. The Socialist Party campaigns for a programme on a similar scale now that would refurbish existing stock and build enough new homes to genuinely solve the housing problem for all. Such houses could be built to the highest environmental specifications but, unlike the eco-housing Brown is proposing, be public and affordable. The BNP has gained support in Barking and Dagenham as a result of anger at the terrible housing situation, for which it has no solution. BNP councillors propose to take a council site in the borough and bung 1,000 caravans on it - worth £1,000 each. That appears to be as far as their 'Steptoe and son' solution to the crisis goes!
At the same time the BNP actually opposes a major council house building programme in Barking and Dagenham, ignoring the huge drop in the number of council houses. Completely wrongly they argue that if indigenous families are prioritised, it will be possible for them all to get housing without building new homes. Given capitalism's and, in particular, New Labour's failure to provide council housing it is inevitable that tensions will exist about who does, and who does not, get council housing. These tensions are exacerbated in areas like Barking, where there has been a recent and significant increase in the population, including increased numbers of immigrants. The lack of an open, democratic and accountable system of allocations, that would be accepted by most workers, also increases anger. The Socialist Party believes that the right of families to be housed in the same community, if they wish to be, is an important one. The struggle to achieve this, and to satisfy the housing needs of other categories of applicant, has to be linked to both the fight for a mass council house building programme and for democratic control of the allocation system.
Decisions should be taken on the basis of need, including the right to be housed near relatives and friends, not by unelected council officials, but by elected representatives of local community organisations, including tenants' associations, trade unions, community campaigns and councillors. The struggle for decent housing has to be linked to the election of councillors who stand in the interests of working class people. That means socialists - not the BNP. From 1983 to 1987 the socialist-led Liverpool City Council mobilised a mass campaign to defy the Tory government and built 6,000 new council homes, as well as massively improving local public services. We need councillors who are prepared to do the same today. Since Nick Griffin was elected to the European parliament (less than a year ago) he has claimed £200,000 in expenses, in addition to his £82,000 salary! So much for standing up for working class people! Socialist Party councillor Dave Nellist explains how Socialist Party MPs and MEPs would be different: "I was a socialist MP for nine years and, unlike the current money grubbing MPs, I only took the average wage of a worker. "I lived the same lifestyle as my constituents. Any Socialist Party member elected to parliament will take the same principled approach that I did."
Over the last decade in Britain big business has moved might and main to keep wages down. One way that they have done this is by using workers from other countries as a supply of cheap, highly-exploited labour. The BNP has no solution to this problem. This is understood by workers who are fighting to defend their pay and conditions. Last year, during the victorious construction workers' strikes at Lindsey Oil Refinery (LOR) against the race to the bottom, BNP members tried to visit the picket lines - but the workers sent them packing. The oil refinery workers understood that the only way they could defend their pay, conditions and jobs was by united action - demanding the rate for the job for every worker, regardless of their national origin. The vile racism of the BNP would have divided the workforce and led to a defeat. As Keith Gibson, a leading member of the Lindsey strike committee put it: "The workers of LOR, Conoco and Easington did not take strike action against immigrant workers. Our action is rightly aimed against company bosses who attempt to play off one nationality of worker against the other and undermine the NAECI agreement. "The BNP should take heed; UK construction workers will not tolerate another racist attempt to sever fraternal relations with workers from other nations."
The LOR workers' strike has lessons for the trade union movement. The only way to prevent big business driving down wages is a united struggle to demand that all workers - regardless of national origin - are paid 'the rate for the job'. To do this successfully means appealing to immigrant workers for a joint struggle. Otherwise big business will continue to use the tactics of 'divide and rule'. The same applies to the struggles in local communities to defend public services. It is also important for the British trade union movement to support struggles of workers in other countries against low pay, cuts in services, etc. The BNP claim that they are not a racist party, but this is a lie. Until the courts forced them to change their rules, only people of "Caucasian origin" were allowed to join their party. To give another example, the BNP councillors in Barking and Dagenham voted against congratulating British athletes on their success at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. They do not consider athletes such as Amir Khan and Kelly Holmes to be British! The leadership of the BNP has a long record of supporting neo-fascist ideas. Now, to try to gain votes, they are attempting to present a respectable gloss. However, as recently as 1998 Griffin was found guilty of inciting racial hatred for holocaust denial.
In 1995 Griffin wrote: "The electors of Millwall [who elected the BNP's first and short-lived local councillor in 1993] did not back a post-modernist rightist party but what they perceived to be a strong, disciplined organisation with the ability to back up its slogan 'Defend Rights for Whites' with well-directed boots and fists. When the crunch comes power is the product of force and will, not rational debate". Mark Collett, previously BNP director of publicity and general election candidate for Sheffield Brightside, has been sacked by the BNP for allegedly threatening to kill Nick Griffin. However, he was never sacked for supporting Hitler. In 2002 Collett was filmed saying: "I honestly can't understand how a man who has seen the inner-city hell of Britain today can't look back on that era of Hitler's Germany without a certain nostalgia and think 'yeah, those people marching through the streets and all those happy people in the streets, saluting and everything, was a bad thing'." The BNP is growing because of the lack of a mass party that stands in workers' interests. New Labour is a party of big business, yet most trade unions continue to fund it to the tune of millions. Meanwhile New Labour continues to kick working class people in the teeth. The trade unions should stop funding New Labour and begin to build a party that stands in their interests.
The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition - supported by trade union champions like Bob Crow, general secretary of the RMT, Brian Caton, general secretary of the POA, and others - will contest seats in the coming general election as a step towards an independent political voice for working class people. In addition to calling for a vote for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition wherever it is standing, the Socialist Party supports a vote for genuine, left, anti-cuts and anti-privatisation candidates. Only a party that genuinely stands in the interests of working class people will be able to successfully expose and undermine the BNP. That is why we are campaigning for the development of a party that, instead of backing the 'banksters', fights to defend the NHS, stands for a living wage for all, for a mass programme of council house building - a party that stands for the millions, not the millionaires.
Public services are already inadequate, underfunded and overcrowded. But, whichever party wins the general election, Tories, New Labour or LibDems, they will take an axe to what is left of our services, with proposed cuts of 15% or more over the coming years. Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP, is not campaigning to defend public services, but the bankers! As a member of the European parliament he has argued that the European Commission does not understand "the City of London's role in world markets and that it is a leading economic and commercial asset in Great Britain." Far from being an 'asset', the rich bankers in the City of London bear responsibility for the dramatic increase in public debt. Deregulated under the Tories and then New Labour, the City enjoyed a massive party of profits. When the hangover came, it was taxpayers who propped them up. Now the bankers are partying again and our services are being cut to pay the bill. Socialists demand nationalisation of the major banks - with compensation paid only on the basis of proven need. Instead of being run by and for the profiteers, a nationalised finance sector could be run by and for the mass of the population. The BNP, by contrast, not only opposes nationalisation, but even demands increased deregulation of the City!
The BNP's programme for the economy does not include one proposal to make the rich pay more - either in taxation or by other means. Nick Griffin may pose as a friend of working class people, but nothing could be further from the truth. Where they have councillors they have consistently supported massive cuts. In Barking the BNP moved an alternative budget, which not only accepted all £14 million in cuts proposed by the New Labour-led council, but added its own cuts of several million - including £0.8 million from the school buildings budget. In Stoke-on-Trent the BNP supported the council budget, which proposes savage cuts in jobs, closure or further privatisation plus an almost 3% council tax increase. In Kirklees the BNP voted for a huge £400 million worth of cuts over the next five years. A BNP councillor called for public sector jobs to be slashed by 25%, even more than the cuts that the Labour council was proposing. Only councillor Jackie Grunsell, a member of the Socialist Party, is actually fighting the cuts.Defending our services will require a united mass movement. To be successful, like the movement against Thatcher's poll tax 20 years ago, it will need to unite as many working class people as possible - men and woman, old and young, migrant and those who were born here. The racist and pro-cuts BNP will never lead such a movement. It creates division not unity - and supports the cuts!
Five million people say they want social housing. But as a result of government policy over the last 30 years, there is virtually none available. 20 years ago there were more than five million council homes, now there is barely half that number. In Barking and Dagenham alone there are 8,000 people on the council house waiting list. The number of council homes in the borough has fallen by 22,000 in the last 20 years. Now the Labour council, frightened by the growth of electoral support for the BNP, is building its first council houses for 25 years - all 32 of them! From 1949 to 1954 an average of 230,000 council houses a year were built. The Socialist Party campaigns for a programme on a similar scale now that would refurbish existing stock and build enough new homes to genuinely solve the housing problem for all. Such houses could be built to the highest environmental specifications but, unlike the eco-housing Brown is proposing, be public and affordable. The BNP has gained support in Barking and Dagenham as a result of anger at the terrible housing situation, for which it has no solution. BNP councillors propose to take a council site in the borough and bung 1,000 caravans on it - worth £1,000 each. That appears to be as far as their 'Steptoe and son' solution to the crisis goes!
At the same time the BNP actually opposes a major council house building programme in Barking and Dagenham, ignoring the huge drop in the number of council houses. Completely wrongly they argue that if indigenous families are prioritised, it will be possible for them all to get housing without building new homes. Given capitalism's and, in particular, New Labour's failure to provide council housing it is inevitable that tensions will exist about who does, and who does not, get council housing. These tensions are exacerbated in areas like Barking, where there has been a recent and significant increase in the population, including increased numbers of immigrants. The lack of an open, democratic and accountable system of allocations, that would be accepted by most workers, also increases anger. The Socialist Party believes that the right of families to be housed in the same community, if they wish to be, is an important one. The struggle to achieve this, and to satisfy the housing needs of other categories of applicant, has to be linked to both the fight for a mass council house building programme and for democratic control of the allocation system.
Decisions should be taken on the basis of need, including the right to be housed near relatives and friends, not by unelected council officials, but by elected representatives of local community organisations, including tenants' associations, trade unions, community campaigns and councillors. The struggle for decent housing has to be linked to the election of councillors who stand in the interests of working class people. That means socialists - not the BNP. From 1983 to 1987 the socialist-led Liverpool City Council mobilised a mass campaign to defy the Tory government and built 6,000 new council homes, as well as massively improving local public services. We need councillors who are prepared to do the same today. Since Nick Griffin was elected to the European parliament (less than a year ago) he has claimed £200,000 in expenses, in addition to his £82,000 salary! So much for standing up for working class people! Socialist Party councillor Dave Nellist explains how Socialist Party MPs and MEPs would be different: "I was a socialist MP for nine years and, unlike the current money grubbing MPs, I only took the average wage of a worker. "I lived the same lifestyle as my constituents. Any Socialist Party member elected to parliament will take the same principled approach that I did."
Over the last decade in Britain big business has moved might and main to keep wages down. One way that they have done this is by using workers from other countries as a supply of cheap, highly-exploited labour. The BNP has no solution to this problem. This is understood by workers who are fighting to defend their pay and conditions. Last year, during the victorious construction workers' strikes at Lindsey Oil Refinery (LOR) against the race to the bottom, BNP members tried to visit the picket lines - but the workers sent them packing. The oil refinery workers understood that the only way they could defend their pay, conditions and jobs was by united action - demanding the rate for the job for every worker, regardless of their national origin. The vile racism of the BNP would have divided the workforce and led to a defeat. As Keith Gibson, a leading member of the Lindsey strike committee put it: "The workers of LOR, Conoco and Easington did not take strike action against immigrant workers. Our action is rightly aimed against company bosses who attempt to play off one nationality of worker against the other and undermine the NAECI agreement. "The BNP should take heed; UK construction workers will not tolerate another racist attempt to sever fraternal relations with workers from other nations."
The LOR workers' strike has lessons for the trade union movement. The only way to prevent big business driving down wages is a united struggle to demand that all workers - regardless of national origin - are paid 'the rate for the job'. To do this successfully means appealing to immigrant workers for a joint struggle. Otherwise big business will continue to use the tactics of 'divide and rule'. The same applies to the struggles in local communities to defend public services. It is also important for the British trade union movement to support struggles of workers in other countries against low pay, cuts in services, etc. The BNP claim that they are not a racist party, but this is a lie. Until the courts forced them to change their rules, only people of "Caucasian origin" were allowed to join their party. To give another example, the BNP councillors in Barking and Dagenham voted against congratulating British athletes on their success at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. They do not consider athletes such as Amir Khan and Kelly Holmes to be British! The leadership of the BNP has a long record of supporting neo-fascist ideas. Now, to try to gain votes, they are attempting to present a respectable gloss. However, as recently as 1998 Griffin was found guilty of inciting racial hatred for holocaust denial.
In 1995 Griffin wrote: "The electors of Millwall [who elected the BNP's first and short-lived local councillor in 1993] did not back a post-modernist rightist party but what they perceived to be a strong, disciplined organisation with the ability to back up its slogan 'Defend Rights for Whites' with well-directed boots and fists. When the crunch comes power is the product of force and will, not rational debate". Mark Collett, previously BNP director of publicity and general election candidate for Sheffield Brightside, has been sacked by the BNP for allegedly threatening to kill Nick Griffin. However, he was never sacked for supporting Hitler. In 2002 Collett was filmed saying: "I honestly can't understand how a man who has seen the inner-city hell of Britain today can't look back on that era of Hitler's Germany without a certain nostalgia and think 'yeah, those people marching through the streets and all those happy people in the streets, saluting and everything, was a bad thing'." The BNP is growing because of the lack of a mass party that stands in workers' interests. New Labour is a party of big business, yet most trade unions continue to fund it to the tune of millions. Meanwhile New Labour continues to kick working class people in the teeth. The trade unions should stop funding New Labour and begin to build a party that stands in their interests.
The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition - supported by trade union champions like Bob Crow, general secretary of the RMT, Brian Caton, general secretary of the POA, and others - will contest seats in the coming general election as a step towards an independent political voice for working class people. In addition to calling for a vote for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition wherever it is standing, the Socialist Party supports a vote for genuine, left, anti-cuts and anti-privatisation candidates. Only a party that genuinely stands in the interests of working class people will be able to successfully expose and undermine the BNP. That is why we are campaigning for the development of a party that, instead of backing the 'banksters', fights to defend the NHS, stands for a living wage for all, for a mass programme of council house building - a party that stands for the millions, not the millionaires.
Heading for coalition collision
The general election - which could lead to a form of coalition government after 6 May - is in terms of ideas and policy probably amongst the worst in history, certainly since the winning of universal suffrage, the right to vote. If democracy means that the people have a 'choice', then there is no real democracy in Britain. It is as if we live in a one-party regime divided into three wings: New Labour, the Tory party and the Liberal Democrats. Three brands of the same cheap soap powder would offer more excitement than this election! 'Change' is in the air - especially from Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats - and yet, as the French say, 'everything changes so everything remains the same'. All the parties agree that the axe will be taken to the living standards of British working-class people, irrespective of which type of government emerges from the election; all that is under dispute is the size of the axe to complete the job. An unofficial coalition already exists on the need for 'sacrifices', cuts, from the working class. The presidential-style debates of the three party leaders are a further degeneration of British elections into a personality contest - a political 'X-Factor' - with commentators swooning because Clegg looks straight into the camera with his puppy-dog eyes.
Yet beneath the froth, the 'surge' for the Liberal Democrats after the first TV debate does denote the desperate search for an alternative to the pro-big business, pro-market, pro-wealthy and powerful interests, which all the main parties and their leaders in reality espouse. The mass of the British people are way to the left of the marionettes who appear on our screens. Johann Hari points out in the Independent: "Fifty-eight per cent support a dramatic increase in the minimum wage. Fifty-eight per cent want to ditch Trident - an act of unilateral nuclear disarmament. Seventy-seven per cent want to bring the troops home from Afghanistan now, or within a year at the latest. Fifty-three per cent say people come out of prison worse than they go in, and would rather spend money on more youth clubs than on more prison places." Yet not a mention of these proposals gets onto the airways. The shameful dumbing down of politics at the time of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, affecting millions, reveals a hollow shell of democracy.This goes together with the virtual outlawing of strikes by unelected judges and the crowding out of even the small voice of dissent of left forces like the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC), which has been kept off the television and radio, let alone the press.
We are on the road to America, the home of 'dollar democracy', where two big business parties - the Democrats and the Republicans - vie for support from a narrowing base of those who take an interest or participate in voting and other aspects of capitalist 'democracy'. Yet even in the US there is a brewing revolt against them. Socialist candidates are getting a hearing, with one receiving 16% of the vote in an election in California and unions standing their own candidates in North Carolina. Here in Britain, the attempt to establish an alternative pole of attraction for working-class people in this election is given no space, either at national or local level. New Labour local authorities have banned posters - even where the Socialist Party and TUSC has offered to take them down after the election - because they are mortally afraid of the message of organised opposition to what is coming to them, the Tories and the Lib Dems.This is a very dangerous situation for the capitalists. If there is no outlet for alternative views in elections, particularly against the background of this catastrophic economic crisis, then working-class people will take direct action on the streets, in the workplaces and in the communities in order to stop the capitalist juggernaut destroying them and their families.
Britain has been on a trajectory of low turnouts in election after election. In 1950, 84% of those able to vote turned out in elections. By 2001, under the baton of the Blair-Brown government, this had dropped to a scandalous 59%. There was a small increase in the 2005 election to 61%. Up to the first TV debate, the pattern of lower and lower turnouts seemed about to be repeated on 6 May. Reports, however, have indicated that now 65% of voters will 'definitely' use their vote. The Electoral Commission reported more than 460,000 voter registration forms had been downloaded from its website since 15 March, almost half of which had come after the first debate. It remains to be seen whether hopes for a higher turnout will be borne out. In the past, an increased turnout would 'normally' benefit Labour. But this is uncertain this time, given the widespread disillusionment with Brown and New Labour's record. Indeed, so bereft of an alternative and with the incubus around their necks of responsibility for presiding over the present devastating capitalist crisis, Brown's main plank seems to be 'I agree with Nick [Clegg]'. Indeed, the bookmakers Paddy Power took bets before the second debate on how many times Brown would repeat this phrase! The only distinct theme in New Labour's campaign in this election has been the idea of a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats.
Andrew Adonis - the besieged transport minister - and Peter Mandelson, the eminence gris of New Labour have both hammered away at this theme. So has Peter Hain - an earlier refugee from the Liberals to New Labour after all - emphasised the 'common ground between the Liberal Democrats and New Labour'. He conveniently passes over the fact that the dominant Lib Dem duo at the moment, Clegg and Vince Cable, are from the 'Orange Book' wing of that party. They swung their party over to a completely pro-market, viciously anti-working class stance in the run-up to this election. At a local level, they have given us a glance, in Leeds for instance, of the kind of cuts programme which they would favour in the event of their participation in the government nationally. And yet Clegg has been able to get away with the swindle that he is a 'change agent' because of the immovable pro-capitalist stance of Brown's New Labour. The Tories, on the other hand, have openly come out for brutal attacks on the poor and the working class as the bedrock of their government, if Cameron sneaks through the portals of 10 Downing Street. Quite casually on the election trail, he has venomously declared that "his government" would unceremoniously "cut benefits to those who refuse to work". This is a chilling echo of the 1930s slashing of unemployment benefits which led to riots on Merseyside and elsewhere.It also assumes that there are countless jobs which the unemployed can just fall into. On the contrary, one fifth of those able to work are idle in Britain today.
This arises not from 'laziness' or a reluctance to work, as Cameron suggests. The Daily Mirror (23 April), reported on the suicide of a 21-year old woman who had been rejected 200 times for jobs! The Guardian (23 April) reported the situation of a 56-year old IT professional from Harlow who has been unemployed for five years. "He has applied for 4,700 jobs over the past five years and been invited to just two interviews. Alongside jobs at senior management level and banking he has also applied for taxi driving, warehousing jobs and baggage handling at nearby Stansted Airport. "'I hit rock bottom last year and applied for a job at Harlow crematorium.'" It is capitalism, a system for the production of profit for a few capitalists and not social need, and those who prop it up like Cameron, which is entirely responsible for mass unemployment. Their proposals will add considerably to the army of unemployed. Even 'one of their own', the City hedge fund manager RAB Capital has conceded this. An economist from this body has pointed out that aggressive cost-cutting of state expenditure to fund a National Insurance contributions cut for the employers promised by Cameron "would lift unemployment by almost 250,000 people and knock out a significant market prop". They comment: "Prices [for property] remain around seven times average income, which is higher than the long-run average of 5.5. It is unsustainable without continued low interest rates and government support especially public-sector jobs." Before New Labour can point the finger at the Tories, however, they also state: "On our calculations, Labour's 1.5% spending cut for 2010-11 equates to 120,000 jobs [which will be cut] while the Conservatives' 2.8% would shed about 230,000." What kind of choice is this for public-sector workers or for working people as a whole? Electoral collapse of Tories in the cities If the real programme of the Tories was exposed, they would face even greater attrition than suffered in previous elections.
In the last election, they came out with no seats in whole swathes of some of the most important urban areas of Britain. This was the case in Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield. The Tories in Liverpool went from 44% of the vote 40 years ago to 8% in 2005! A major reason for this collapse of what was once the most successful capitalist party in Liverpool was the work of the Liverpool labour movement under the political sway of the much-maligned Militant (now the Socialist Party). Getting rid of Militant and the left, the abandonment of Clause IV, Part 4 of Labour's constitution, was, it was argued by the Blairites, the road to electoral triumph and the long-term benefit of Labour. The result of this ruinous policy - in effect, the destruction of the Labour party as a workers' party at its base - is revealed in the electoral train wreck of Liverpool and elsewhere. So wedded to capitalism is New Labour that the Liberal Democrats outflanked them in demagogic attacks on the banks. We were treated to the spectacle of Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight almost pleading with Alistair Darling to 'satisfy Labour supporters' with some kind of minimalist attack or promised action against the banks. To no avail!
Darling, alongside Brown and the rest of the New Labour tops, has stuck unswervingly to their pro-capitalist, pro-big business mantra during this election. Consequently, even the satirists are virtually redundant in this election campaign. The makers of Spitting Image, for instance, have complained that there are no "distinguishing lines" in the main parties or their leaders.To have caricatures, you must first of all have characters! It is a case of the bland leading the bland! And the losers from this charade are the British people in general but particularly the poorest sections of society who will be called upon to make even greater 'sacrifices' in the aftermath of this election.And yet, despite the domination of the airways by empty rhetoric - the lack of an election atmosphere which pervades Britain - this election and its outcome could still be very important. The most striking feature demonstrated in the polls is the lack of authority, the absence of 'legitimacy' for any of the three major parties. They will lack a mandate to savage the rights and conditions of the working class after 6 May, as they intend. Before the second TV debate, the opinion polls gave 32% for the Tories, a huge diminution from the figures of the last three years which put them between 38% and 40%. The more the British people hear of Cameron's proposals for the so-called 'big society' - that will benefit 'big' business - and of the economic barbarism of George Osborne, the more they reject it.
When Cameron proposed mass privatisation in the form of 'power to the people' - the handing over of schools, local and national services to unspecified and unelected 'citizens', it was met with a loud raspberry. In the hell of neo-liberal capitalist society, with sweated and prolonged labour in the factories and the workplaces, every spare moment for workers is taken up trying to earn enough to keep the wolf from the door.
Two or three jobs have become the norm for big swathes of society. "There is no time for us to run your 'big society'" has been the riposte of workers to Cameron and the Tories' proposals. This underscores the urgent need for a cut in the official working week to share out the work without loss of pay, as a means of drawing in the unemployed kept idle for no reason other than it benefits the capitalists. Additionally, it points to the need to provide for working-class people time for leisure for themselves and their families free from the relentless pressure of the workplace. If workers are to run a socialist society in the future - which is ultimately the only salvation from the chaos of capitalism - then the working week must be cut without loss of pay to the workers affected. The Liberal Democrats, incredibly, are on or around the same standing in the polls as the Tories. This astonishing advance - if it is maintained up to election night - is itself a distorted symptom of the underlying desperation of working people for real change. Millions have left their traditional electoral moorings and are searching for a figure or a party that can show a coherent way out of the present economic and political cul-de-sac. The Lib Dems have momentarily become a focus for this mood but such is the present effervescent, almost organic instability in society that within a matter of days or weeks this mood could ebb away once more. A strong left pole of attraction in the form of a new mass workers' party could harness this urge, almost desperation. It would capture support from a significant section of those looking for a change.
New Labour, on the other hand, is seen as the main force presiding over the present economic mess, and seems destined to get one of its lowest votes in history. It presently stands at 28% in the polls. If reflected on election day, this would be its lowest share of the vote since 1983. Then Labour was described by the right of the party as standing on a manifesto that was "the longest suicide note in history". Yet even with this share of the vote, and so long as the Tories are not a clear six percentage points of New Labour, then it could come out of this debacle with the largest number of seats! Clearly, Gordon Brown and his entourage hope that this will allow him to continue to govern with the support or acquiescence of the Liberal Democrats. The question is whether a formal coalition can be formed or the Lib Dems will be content to support New Labour from the outside, demanding policy concessions, particularly for changes to the electoral system. But a significant reduction in New Labour's vote would, in all probability, lead to an undermining of any 'legitimacy' to rule alone. Already, Lord Owen has written in the London Evening Standard urging Clegg and the Liberal Democrats to support a minority Cameron government. However, given Brown and his entourage's courting of the Liberal Democrats during the election - it cannot be ruled out, in fact it is probable, that in this situation the Lib Dems would enter a Brown government. Ironically, when Blair flirted with the idea of including the Liberal Democrats and particularly their then-leader, Paddy Ashdown, in the cabinet in 1997, it was Brown who vetoed this.
In the past, it was the trade unions that proved a stumbling block to Labour entering coalitions, as shown by the events of 1931 when Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald could only carry through his economic retrenchment programme by splitting from Labour and forming the 'National Government'. The unions were implacably opposed to MacDonald's cuts, which led to his betrayal and the coalition with the Tories and Liberals. Yet so right-wing and inept are the trade union leaders today, and so ideologically wedded to pro-capitalist 'partnership' in the workplace, that they would not put up much resistance if any to a 'progressive' link of New Labour with the Liberal Democrats. Alternatively, could Cameron form a government with the Liberal Democrats' participation? This cannot be ruled out if the Tories were the biggest party in terms of the number of seats. However, the Liberal Democrats, with their still 'left-of-centre' posture and a partially radicalised base would probably find it difficult to actually enter a Cameron government - particularly if the Tories did not have the largest number of seats - without serious splits developing within their party. The British electoral system - famed throughout the world for ensuring 'stability' - now acts like a disordered slot machine with the outcome highly uncertain. Electoral deadlock could even result in a national coalition government of all three capitalist parties.
Clearly the possible scenarios following an election indicate the unprecedented social and political situation that Britain is entering. A constitutional crisis could even develop in the aftermath of the election if no party had a commanding lead. The monarchy - always a reserve weapon for the capitalists in a crisis - could be drawn into controversy over the 'choice' of which party leader should be called on first to try to form a government. There is no written constitution in Britain but plenty of 'precedents' from the past. The British ruling class is not averse to 'changing the rules' whenever it sees an electoral or governmental obstacle to what it wants. The 'markets' - the financial sharks, the handful of chief executive officers of big monopolies who are responsible for ruining the lives of millions of working and middle class people - must be mollified by any capitalist government that comes to power. It must do their bidding or there will be a 'strike of capital', a further run on the pound, and a refusal to buy government bonds to plug the huge deficit. Therefore big business wants a stable government, preferably the Tories now, as shown by the millions of pounds they have poured into the Tories' coffers in the first week of the election. Failing this, they would be satisfied with a 'hung parliament' resulting in a Tory/Lib Dem coalition government, either officially with the Liberal Democrats in its ranks or unofficially, from outside.
The worst of all worlds for them would be a continuation of the Brown government with Liberal Democrats either inside the government or propping it up from the outside. They calculate that this government would be more susceptible to mass pressure. But in any post-election scenario, Britain faces a period of unprecedented turmoil. If the Tories are the biggest party, they will probably take office but their tenure could be extremely short. 'Cameron the brief' could be the epitaph for the Tory leader who may have to face the electorate again within a very short period of time. The social and economic situation in Britain is much worse than that which confronted the Harold Wilson government of 1974 which also ruled as a minority government for a short period of seven months. Cameron could be in office for an even shorter period than this. More importantly, it will be against the background of colossal pressure from the capitalists for big cuts in living standards matched by growing and stubborn resistance from the working class and labour movement to this. Usually, when checked on the electoral plane, the British labour movement turns to the industrial arena, particularly when faced with a Tory government. Cameron has been more vicious in his programmatic promises than Thatcher ever was before she came to power. This alone denotes the seriousness of the situation.
The British ruling class will also press for big changes in the electoral system in order to ensure future 'stability'. The so-called 'Alternative Vote', if accepted, will actually undermine the limited democratic electoral system we have today. It will enshrine almost permanently the two-party system and squeeze out smaller, particularly left parties from establishing a firm electoral presence. The labour movement must reject this in favour of a real proportional representation system which opens up the possibility of new small left parties making an impact. The 2010 general election will also mark the end of the era of Blairism. The ruling class may think that out of this electoral meltdown of New Labour, they can stitch together a government which could massively squeeze the British working class with minimal resistance. They will be proved wrong by an unprecedented upsurge of struggle in Britain, which Clegg himself conceded could be of Greek proportions, once it dawns on British workers the full magnitude of what they will be expected to suffer at the hands of the capitalist parties in power.
Yet beneath the froth, the 'surge' for the Liberal Democrats after the first TV debate does denote the desperate search for an alternative to the pro-big business, pro-market, pro-wealthy and powerful interests, which all the main parties and their leaders in reality espouse. The mass of the British people are way to the left of the marionettes who appear on our screens. Johann Hari points out in the Independent: "Fifty-eight per cent support a dramatic increase in the minimum wage. Fifty-eight per cent want to ditch Trident - an act of unilateral nuclear disarmament. Seventy-seven per cent want to bring the troops home from Afghanistan now, or within a year at the latest. Fifty-three per cent say people come out of prison worse than they go in, and would rather spend money on more youth clubs than on more prison places." Yet not a mention of these proposals gets onto the airways. The shameful dumbing down of politics at the time of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, affecting millions, reveals a hollow shell of democracy.This goes together with the virtual outlawing of strikes by unelected judges and the crowding out of even the small voice of dissent of left forces like the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC), which has been kept off the television and radio, let alone the press.
We are on the road to America, the home of 'dollar democracy', where two big business parties - the Democrats and the Republicans - vie for support from a narrowing base of those who take an interest or participate in voting and other aspects of capitalist 'democracy'. Yet even in the US there is a brewing revolt against them. Socialist candidates are getting a hearing, with one receiving 16% of the vote in an election in California and unions standing their own candidates in North Carolina. Here in Britain, the attempt to establish an alternative pole of attraction for working-class people in this election is given no space, either at national or local level. New Labour local authorities have banned posters - even where the Socialist Party and TUSC has offered to take them down after the election - because they are mortally afraid of the message of organised opposition to what is coming to them, the Tories and the Lib Dems.This is a very dangerous situation for the capitalists. If there is no outlet for alternative views in elections, particularly against the background of this catastrophic economic crisis, then working-class people will take direct action on the streets, in the workplaces and in the communities in order to stop the capitalist juggernaut destroying them and their families.
Britain has been on a trajectory of low turnouts in election after election. In 1950, 84% of those able to vote turned out in elections. By 2001, under the baton of the Blair-Brown government, this had dropped to a scandalous 59%. There was a small increase in the 2005 election to 61%. Up to the first TV debate, the pattern of lower and lower turnouts seemed about to be repeated on 6 May. Reports, however, have indicated that now 65% of voters will 'definitely' use their vote. The Electoral Commission reported more than 460,000 voter registration forms had been downloaded from its website since 15 March, almost half of which had come after the first debate. It remains to be seen whether hopes for a higher turnout will be borne out. In the past, an increased turnout would 'normally' benefit Labour. But this is uncertain this time, given the widespread disillusionment with Brown and New Labour's record. Indeed, so bereft of an alternative and with the incubus around their necks of responsibility for presiding over the present devastating capitalist crisis, Brown's main plank seems to be 'I agree with Nick [Clegg]'. Indeed, the bookmakers Paddy Power took bets before the second debate on how many times Brown would repeat this phrase! The only distinct theme in New Labour's campaign in this election has been the idea of a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats.
Andrew Adonis - the besieged transport minister - and Peter Mandelson, the eminence gris of New Labour have both hammered away at this theme. So has Peter Hain - an earlier refugee from the Liberals to New Labour after all - emphasised the 'common ground between the Liberal Democrats and New Labour'. He conveniently passes over the fact that the dominant Lib Dem duo at the moment, Clegg and Vince Cable, are from the 'Orange Book' wing of that party. They swung their party over to a completely pro-market, viciously anti-working class stance in the run-up to this election. At a local level, they have given us a glance, in Leeds for instance, of the kind of cuts programme which they would favour in the event of their participation in the government nationally. And yet Clegg has been able to get away with the swindle that he is a 'change agent' because of the immovable pro-capitalist stance of Brown's New Labour. The Tories, on the other hand, have openly come out for brutal attacks on the poor and the working class as the bedrock of their government, if Cameron sneaks through the portals of 10 Downing Street. Quite casually on the election trail, he has venomously declared that "his government" would unceremoniously "cut benefits to those who refuse to work". This is a chilling echo of the 1930s slashing of unemployment benefits which led to riots on Merseyside and elsewhere.It also assumes that there are countless jobs which the unemployed can just fall into. On the contrary, one fifth of those able to work are idle in Britain today.
This arises not from 'laziness' or a reluctance to work, as Cameron suggests. The Daily Mirror (23 April), reported on the suicide of a 21-year old woman who had been rejected 200 times for jobs! The Guardian (23 April) reported the situation of a 56-year old IT professional from Harlow who has been unemployed for five years. "He has applied for 4,700 jobs over the past five years and been invited to just two interviews. Alongside jobs at senior management level and banking he has also applied for taxi driving, warehousing jobs and baggage handling at nearby Stansted Airport. "'I hit rock bottom last year and applied for a job at Harlow crematorium.'" It is capitalism, a system for the production of profit for a few capitalists and not social need, and those who prop it up like Cameron, which is entirely responsible for mass unemployment. Their proposals will add considerably to the army of unemployed. Even 'one of their own', the City hedge fund manager RAB Capital has conceded this. An economist from this body has pointed out that aggressive cost-cutting of state expenditure to fund a National Insurance contributions cut for the employers promised by Cameron "would lift unemployment by almost 250,000 people and knock out a significant market prop". They comment: "Prices [for property] remain around seven times average income, which is higher than the long-run average of 5.5. It is unsustainable without continued low interest rates and government support especially public-sector jobs." Before New Labour can point the finger at the Tories, however, they also state: "On our calculations, Labour's 1.5% spending cut for 2010-11 equates to 120,000 jobs [which will be cut] while the Conservatives' 2.8% would shed about 230,000." What kind of choice is this for public-sector workers or for working people as a whole? Electoral collapse of Tories in the cities If the real programme of the Tories was exposed, they would face even greater attrition than suffered in previous elections.
In the last election, they came out with no seats in whole swathes of some of the most important urban areas of Britain. This was the case in Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield. The Tories in Liverpool went from 44% of the vote 40 years ago to 8% in 2005! A major reason for this collapse of what was once the most successful capitalist party in Liverpool was the work of the Liverpool labour movement under the political sway of the much-maligned Militant (now the Socialist Party). Getting rid of Militant and the left, the abandonment of Clause IV, Part 4 of Labour's constitution, was, it was argued by the Blairites, the road to electoral triumph and the long-term benefit of Labour. The result of this ruinous policy - in effect, the destruction of the Labour party as a workers' party at its base - is revealed in the electoral train wreck of Liverpool and elsewhere. So wedded to capitalism is New Labour that the Liberal Democrats outflanked them in demagogic attacks on the banks. We were treated to the spectacle of Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight almost pleading with Alistair Darling to 'satisfy Labour supporters' with some kind of minimalist attack or promised action against the banks. To no avail!
Darling, alongside Brown and the rest of the New Labour tops, has stuck unswervingly to their pro-capitalist, pro-big business mantra during this election. Consequently, even the satirists are virtually redundant in this election campaign. The makers of Spitting Image, for instance, have complained that there are no "distinguishing lines" in the main parties or their leaders.To have caricatures, you must first of all have characters! It is a case of the bland leading the bland! And the losers from this charade are the British people in general but particularly the poorest sections of society who will be called upon to make even greater 'sacrifices' in the aftermath of this election.And yet, despite the domination of the airways by empty rhetoric - the lack of an election atmosphere which pervades Britain - this election and its outcome could still be very important. The most striking feature demonstrated in the polls is the lack of authority, the absence of 'legitimacy' for any of the three major parties. They will lack a mandate to savage the rights and conditions of the working class after 6 May, as they intend. Before the second TV debate, the opinion polls gave 32% for the Tories, a huge diminution from the figures of the last three years which put them between 38% and 40%. The more the British people hear of Cameron's proposals for the so-called 'big society' - that will benefit 'big' business - and of the economic barbarism of George Osborne, the more they reject it.
When Cameron proposed mass privatisation in the form of 'power to the people' - the handing over of schools, local and national services to unspecified and unelected 'citizens', it was met with a loud raspberry. In the hell of neo-liberal capitalist society, with sweated and prolonged labour in the factories and the workplaces, every spare moment for workers is taken up trying to earn enough to keep the wolf from the door.
Two or three jobs have become the norm for big swathes of society. "There is no time for us to run your 'big society'" has been the riposte of workers to Cameron and the Tories' proposals. This underscores the urgent need for a cut in the official working week to share out the work without loss of pay, as a means of drawing in the unemployed kept idle for no reason other than it benefits the capitalists. Additionally, it points to the need to provide for working-class people time for leisure for themselves and their families free from the relentless pressure of the workplace. If workers are to run a socialist society in the future - which is ultimately the only salvation from the chaos of capitalism - then the working week must be cut without loss of pay to the workers affected. The Liberal Democrats, incredibly, are on or around the same standing in the polls as the Tories. This astonishing advance - if it is maintained up to election night - is itself a distorted symptom of the underlying desperation of working people for real change. Millions have left their traditional electoral moorings and are searching for a figure or a party that can show a coherent way out of the present economic and political cul-de-sac. The Lib Dems have momentarily become a focus for this mood but such is the present effervescent, almost organic instability in society that within a matter of days or weeks this mood could ebb away once more. A strong left pole of attraction in the form of a new mass workers' party could harness this urge, almost desperation. It would capture support from a significant section of those looking for a change.
New Labour, on the other hand, is seen as the main force presiding over the present economic mess, and seems destined to get one of its lowest votes in history. It presently stands at 28% in the polls. If reflected on election day, this would be its lowest share of the vote since 1983. Then Labour was described by the right of the party as standing on a manifesto that was "the longest suicide note in history". Yet even with this share of the vote, and so long as the Tories are not a clear six percentage points of New Labour, then it could come out of this debacle with the largest number of seats! Clearly, Gordon Brown and his entourage hope that this will allow him to continue to govern with the support or acquiescence of the Liberal Democrats. The question is whether a formal coalition can be formed or the Lib Dems will be content to support New Labour from the outside, demanding policy concessions, particularly for changes to the electoral system. But a significant reduction in New Labour's vote would, in all probability, lead to an undermining of any 'legitimacy' to rule alone. Already, Lord Owen has written in the London Evening Standard urging Clegg and the Liberal Democrats to support a minority Cameron government. However, given Brown and his entourage's courting of the Liberal Democrats during the election - it cannot be ruled out, in fact it is probable, that in this situation the Lib Dems would enter a Brown government. Ironically, when Blair flirted with the idea of including the Liberal Democrats and particularly their then-leader, Paddy Ashdown, in the cabinet in 1997, it was Brown who vetoed this.
In the past, it was the trade unions that proved a stumbling block to Labour entering coalitions, as shown by the events of 1931 when Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald could only carry through his economic retrenchment programme by splitting from Labour and forming the 'National Government'. The unions were implacably opposed to MacDonald's cuts, which led to his betrayal and the coalition with the Tories and Liberals. Yet so right-wing and inept are the trade union leaders today, and so ideologically wedded to pro-capitalist 'partnership' in the workplace, that they would not put up much resistance if any to a 'progressive' link of New Labour with the Liberal Democrats. Alternatively, could Cameron form a government with the Liberal Democrats' participation? This cannot be ruled out if the Tories were the biggest party in terms of the number of seats. However, the Liberal Democrats, with their still 'left-of-centre' posture and a partially radicalised base would probably find it difficult to actually enter a Cameron government - particularly if the Tories did not have the largest number of seats - without serious splits developing within their party. The British electoral system - famed throughout the world for ensuring 'stability' - now acts like a disordered slot machine with the outcome highly uncertain. Electoral deadlock could even result in a national coalition government of all three capitalist parties.
Clearly the possible scenarios following an election indicate the unprecedented social and political situation that Britain is entering. A constitutional crisis could even develop in the aftermath of the election if no party had a commanding lead. The monarchy - always a reserve weapon for the capitalists in a crisis - could be drawn into controversy over the 'choice' of which party leader should be called on first to try to form a government. There is no written constitution in Britain but plenty of 'precedents' from the past. The British ruling class is not averse to 'changing the rules' whenever it sees an electoral or governmental obstacle to what it wants. The 'markets' - the financial sharks, the handful of chief executive officers of big monopolies who are responsible for ruining the lives of millions of working and middle class people - must be mollified by any capitalist government that comes to power. It must do their bidding or there will be a 'strike of capital', a further run on the pound, and a refusal to buy government bonds to plug the huge deficit. Therefore big business wants a stable government, preferably the Tories now, as shown by the millions of pounds they have poured into the Tories' coffers in the first week of the election. Failing this, they would be satisfied with a 'hung parliament' resulting in a Tory/Lib Dem coalition government, either officially with the Liberal Democrats in its ranks or unofficially, from outside.
The worst of all worlds for them would be a continuation of the Brown government with Liberal Democrats either inside the government or propping it up from the outside. They calculate that this government would be more susceptible to mass pressure. But in any post-election scenario, Britain faces a period of unprecedented turmoil. If the Tories are the biggest party, they will probably take office but their tenure could be extremely short. 'Cameron the brief' could be the epitaph for the Tory leader who may have to face the electorate again within a very short period of time. The social and economic situation in Britain is much worse than that which confronted the Harold Wilson government of 1974 which also ruled as a minority government for a short period of seven months. Cameron could be in office for an even shorter period than this. More importantly, it will be against the background of colossal pressure from the capitalists for big cuts in living standards matched by growing and stubborn resistance from the working class and labour movement to this. Usually, when checked on the electoral plane, the British labour movement turns to the industrial arena, particularly when faced with a Tory government. Cameron has been more vicious in his programmatic promises than Thatcher ever was before she came to power. This alone denotes the seriousness of the situation.
The British ruling class will also press for big changes in the electoral system in order to ensure future 'stability'. The so-called 'Alternative Vote', if accepted, will actually undermine the limited democratic electoral system we have today. It will enshrine almost permanently the two-party system and squeeze out smaller, particularly left parties from establishing a firm electoral presence. The labour movement must reject this in favour of a real proportional representation system which opens up the possibility of new small left parties making an impact. The 2010 general election will also mark the end of the era of Blairism. The ruling class may think that out of this electoral meltdown of New Labour, they can stitch together a government which could massively squeeze the British working class with minimal resistance. They will be proved wrong by an unprecedented upsurge of struggle in Britain, which Clegg himself conceded could be of Greek proportions, once it dawns on British workers the full magnitude of what they will be expected to suffer at the hands of the capitalist parties in power.
Friday, 16 April 2010
We must battle slash & burn politics
This is the first general election for eighteen years where the outcome is impossible to predict. Yet, far from being gripped by the drama, millions of voters are already fed up to the back teeth with the election. Even some Guardian commentators reflect this mood. Geoffrey Wheatcroft, for example, expressed his happiness that he will be out of the country for the course of the election campaign.He described the plea of Guardian advocates for New Labour as being: "Yes, all right, the Labour government presided over a spurious economic miracle that was really no more than an explosion of household debt combined with criminal recklessness in the financial sector, it has created the most intrusive surveillance state in Europe, and it took us into a needless, illegal and disastrous war - but, hey, the Tories might be even worse." The "alternative slogan", Wheatcroft suggested, is equally "uninspiring": "Even if the Tories are pretty dodgy, anything to get rid of the present lot." In the last two general elections, turnout has been an historical low of around 60%. No doubt this time as well, many millions will abstain from voting in protest at three establishment parties who offer almost identical pro-capitalist policies. Others will vote for socialist candidates, particularly in the 42 seats where the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) is offering a militant anti-cuts alternative. Unfortunately, in some areas, the lack of a genuine workers' party will mean that a layer of people will express their anger with the capitalist politicians by voting for the far-right, racist BNP.
However, there will also be workers, including some that did not vote New Labour in the last general election, who will, through gritted teeth, put a cross on their ballot paper next to New Labour. In most cases this will not represent one iota of enthusiasm for Gordon Brown and his cohorts, but stems from desperation to prevent a Tory government. The Socialist Party's predecessor, Militant, led some of the most important battles against the Tory Thatcher government - including the struggle of Liverpool City Council and the eighteen million strong anti-poll tax movement which brought down both the tax and Thatcher herself. We fully understand why workers rightly fear a Tory government, which will attempt to implement brutal anti-working class policies. However, the policies pursued by a fourth New Labour government would not be fundamentally different. Whoever wins the election will demand that the economic crisis and the bailout of the banks be paid for by cuts in public services and working-class people's living conditions. New Labour's manifesto yet again reiterated that they will halve the public sector deficit by 2014. This will not come from greater taxation of big business - in fact the manifesto emphasised that tax on big business would be "kept as low as possible". Instead we face £78 billion worth of cuts and tax rises for working and middle class people over four years. This vast amount of money is almost equal to cutting the entire NHS annual budget in the course of one parliament.
It would not be true to say that there are no differences between New Labour and the Tories. For example New Labour's manifesto includes a pledge to raise the minimum wage in line with average earnings which is designed to emphasise the 'difference' between them and the Tories. The Tories are planning £6 billion more in 'savings' (ie cuts) in the first year to pay for their reversal of the National Insurance increase planned by New Labour. However, compared to the scale of the cuts planned, the differences are small. Ludicrously the Financial Times dedicated an editorial to attcking New Labour's manifesto for failing to cut the size of the state. In fact New Labour proposes to accelerate the privatisation policies pursued over 13 years in office. The fat cats are to be invited to make profits from ever greater swathes of our public services. Every hospital would become a 'foundation trust', a significant step towards privatisation. Even the shiny new hospital where the manifesto launch took place was built on the basis of private finance at huge cost to the taxpayer. It is worth around £627 million but, because it was built using the Private Finance Initiative, taxpayers have been left with a bill for £2.58 billion.New Labour clearly wanted to highlight the hospital's new treatment centre for soldiers wounded in Afghanistan. While this facility will be welcomed by soldiers and their families, it is no compensation for the government's occupation of Afghanistan in the first place!
The differences are equally small on other issues. The Tories stand for total privatisation of Royal Mail, but both New Labour and the LibDems call for part privatisation. At the same time the previous Labour commitment to freeze university tuition fees has been dropped, an indication that New Labour, just like the Tories, would lift the present cap on fees beyond the general election. It is clear that a Tory government would move to increase the amount of repressive anti-trade union legislation. New Labour, however, has not only left the previous Tory government's anti-trade union laws overwhelmingly intact, but has allowed them to be used in a brutal manner against the British Airways cabin crew and railway workers' union - effectively taking away the right to strike.The Socialist Party, like millions of workers, is not willing to accept a choice between a 'greater' and a 'lesser' evil. Neither is abstaining from elections a way forward. What is needed is the creation of a mass party that stands in workers' interests. TUSC, by standing in these elections, can be a step towards such a party. It is also standing to argue the case for socialism and to help prepare working class people for the mass struggle against cuts which will be needed beyond the general election.
LibDem leader Nick Clegg was right when he warned that "Greek-style unrest" would take place in Britain if a government with a small majority attempts to carry out "slash and burn" policies. However, any party that accepts the logic of the capitalist markets, as all three establishment parties do, will attempt to "slash and burn" our public services. The next government - regardless of its political stripe - will be a weak government with a shallow basis of social support, attempting to carry out deeply unpopular policies. As a result, at a certain stage, Greece will come to Britain as workers are forced to defend their living conditions against the brutal reality of 21st century capitalism. In the course of such movements there will be opportunities to build mass support for socialist ideas - as a real alternative to the three big parties of the bankers and the billionaires.
However, there will also be workers, including some that did not vote New Labour in the last general election, who will, through gritted teeth, put a cross on their ballot paper next to New Labour. In most cases this will not represent one iota of enthusiasm for Gordon Brown and his cohorts, but stems from desperation to prevent a Tory government. The Socialist Party's predecessor, Militant, led some of the most important battles against the Tory Thatcher government - including the struggle of Liverpool City Council and the eighteen million strong anti-poll tax movement which brought down both the tax and Thatcher herself. We fully understand why workers rightly fear a Tory government, which will attempt to implement brutal anti-working class policies. However, the policies pursued by a fourth New Labour government would not be fundamentally different. Whoever wins the election will demand that the economic crisis and the bailout of the banks be paid for by cuts in public services and working-class people's living conditions. New Labour's manifesto yet again reiterated that they will halve the public sector deficit by 2014. This will not come from greater taxation of big business - in fact the manifesto emphasised that tax on big business would be "kept as low as possible". Instead we face £78 billion worth of cuts and tax rises for working and middle class people over four years. This vast amount of money is almost equal to cutting the entire NHS annual budget in the course of one parliament.
It would not be true to say that there are no differences between New Labour and the Tories. For example New Labour's manifesto includes a pledge to raise the minimum wage in line with average earnings which is designed to emphasise the 'difference' between them and the Tories. The Tories are planning £6 billion more in 'savings' (ie cuts) in the first year to pay for their reversal of the National Insurance increase planned by New Labour. However, compared to the scale of the cuts planned, the differences are small. Ludicrously the Financial Times dedicated an editorial to attcking New Labour's manifesto for failing to cut the size of the state. In fact New Labour proposes to accelerate the privatisation policies pursued over 13 years in office. The fat cats are to be invited to make profits from ever greater swathes of our public services. Every hospital would become a 'foundation trust', a significant step towards privatisation. Even the shiny new hospital where the manifesto launch took place was built on the basis of private finance at huge cost to the taxpayer. It is worth around £627 million but, because it was built using the Private Finance Initiative, taxpayers have been left with a bill for £2.58 billion.New Labour clearly wanted to highlight the hospital's new treatment centre for soldiers wounded in Afghanistan. While this facility will be welcomed by soldiers and their families, it is no compensation for the government's occupation of Afghanistan in the first place!
The differences are equally small on other issues. The Tories stand for total privatisation of Royal Mail, but both New Labour and the LibDems call for part privatisation. At the same time the previous Labour commitment to freeze university tuition fees has been dropped, an indication that New Labour, just like the Tories, would lift the present cap on fees beyond the general election. It is clear that a Tory government would move to increase the amount of repressive anti-trade union legislation. New Labour, however, has not only left the previous Tory government's anti-trade union laws overwhelmingly intact, but has allowed them to be used in a brutal manner against the British Airways cabin crew and railway workers' union - effectively taking away the right to strike.The Socialist Party, like millions of workers, is not willing to accept a choice between a 'greater' and a 'lesser' evil. Neither is abstaining from elections a way forward. What is needed is the creation of a mass party that stands in workers' interests. TUSC, by standing in these elections, can be a step towards such a party. It is also standing to argue the case for socialism and to help prepare working class people for the mass struggle against cuts which will be needed beyond the general election.
LibDem leader Nick Clegg was right when he warned that "Greek-style unrest" would take place in Britain if a government with a small majority attempts to carry out "slash and burn" policies. However, any party that accepts the logic of the capitalist markets, as all three establishment parties do, will attempt to "slash and burn" our public services. The next government - regardless of its political stripe - will be a weak government with a shallow basis of social support, attempting to carry out deeply unpopular policies. As a result, at a certain stage, Greece will come to Britain as workers are forced to defend their living conditions against the brutal reality of 21st century capitalism. In the course of such movements there will be opportunities to build mass support for socialist ideas - as a real alternative to the three big parties of the bankers and the billionaires.
Welsh recipe for failure
The right-wing Thatcherite mantra of private wealth and public squalor is writ large in the propaganda coming from all of the mainstream parties. We are told that we now have to pay for the "good times" enjoyed in the 14 years of "prosperity" under Labour. The only difference, but a big one economically, is that the Tories want to grind the people sooner rather than later. Wales has been one of the main victims of the boom-and-bust cycle of capitalism. It has paid a high price for both - horrendous exploitation of its peoples and countryside in boom times and bad housing, health and unemployment in the slumps, which it is still suffering from because of distant and recent history. We need an election manifesto to strike the right note here, urging working people to rise up and fight against attempts to make them pay for the capitalist crisis and demanding that the fat cats must pick up the tab for their own bail-out. Despite the "limited choice" on offer from the main parties, the CPB expresses its "clear and unambiguous preference for the election of a Labour government rather than a Tory one," while pointing out that people cannot rely on elections or parliaments alone to defend their interests. "If they want to protect jobs, wages, services, pensions and their rights at work, they must also take action wherever and whenever necessary," it declares. There is however another dimension that is now in jeopardy, particularly in Wales - devolved democracy.
Its extension would assist working people in the fightback against cuts, but the Tories would undoubtedly curtail the process. Wales, alongside Scotland and Northern Ireland, has secured through devolution greater control over powers that affect the day-to-day lives of people in the nation. Devolved power in areas such as health and education have brought more progressive policies and prevented reactionary ones. All the signs are that the Tories, if elected, would seek to rein in the relatively limited powers that have so far been granted to Wales and would resist the will of the Welsh people - now increasingly evident - to support more powers for the assembly. The latest evidence for this view came as parliamentary business was wound up in advance of the general election. An order that would have granted the Wales Assembly the power to halt the sell-off of council houses in order to maintain and increase the stock of homes available to less well-off members of the populace was voted out by the Tory leadership.
Another indication of the Tories' stance towards democracy in Wales was their attitude to the government's Independently Funded News Consortium project in Wales, a scheme aimed at providing entertainment and information to a Welsh public currently very poorly served by their media. A bid was accepted from a consortium involving Ulster TV and a north Wales newspaper group entitled Wales Live to take over a failing ITV service. Wales Live managing director Michael Wilson said the consortium would provide a "fresh and authoritative news service to the whole of Wales across TV, online and radio with the current ITV Wales news team. "Wales Live will reflect fully the needs of a devolved nation in conjunction with local and community media across both north and south Wales." The proof of the pudding is in the eating, so go the saying goes, but the new TV station in Mold, as well as providing jobs and apprenticeships, should lead to a better-informed public, boost democracy and encourage greater participation in the political process. However even before the bid had been accepted Tory shadow, culture, media and sport secretary Jonathon Hunt warned that if the pilot project went ahead it would not be honoured by an incoming Conservative government.
It seems they would prefer the current failed, hands-off approach to business that allows so-called entrepreneurs dipping in with little scrutiny and no-holds-barred treatment of staff training, wages and conditions. If that's the case then we can expect a downward spiral in content aimed at maximising profits in a dash for diminishing advertising revenues. An informed public will be the last thing on the agenda.
Its extension would assist working people in the fightback against cuts, but the Tories would undoubtedly curtail the process. Wales, alongside Scotland and Northern Ireland, has secured through devolution greater control over powers that affect the day-to-day lives of people in the nation. Devolved power in areas such as health and education have brought more progressive policies and prevented reactionary ones. All the signs are that the Tories, if elected, would seek to rein in the relatively limited powers that have so far been granted to Wales and would resist the will of the Welsh people - now increasingly evident - to support more powers for the assembly. The latest evidence for this view came as parliamentary business was wound up in advance of the general election. An order that would have granted the Wales Assembly the power to halt the sell-off of council houses in order to maintain and increase the stock of homes available to less well-off members of the populace was voted out by the Tory leadership.
Another indication of the Tories' stance towards democracy in Wales was their attitude to the government's Independently Funded News Consortium project in Wales, a scheme aimed at providing entertainment and information to a Welsh public currently very poorly served by their media. A bid was accepted from a consortium involving Ulster TV and a north Wales newspaper group entitled Wales Live to take over a failing ITV service. Wales Live managing director Michael Wilson said the consortium would provide a "fresh and authoritative news service to the whole of Wales across TV, online and radio with the current ITV Wales news team. "Wales Live will reflect fully the needs of a devolved nation in conjunction with local and community media across both north and south Wales." The proof of the pudding is in the eating, so go the saying goes, but the new TV station in Mold, as well as providing jobs and apprenticeships, should lead to a better-informed public, boost democracy and encourage greater participation in the political process. However even before the bid had been accepted Tory shadow, culture, media and sport secretary Jonathon Hunt warned that if the pilot project went ahead it would not be honoured by an incoming Conservative government.
It seems they would prefer the current failed, hands-off approach to business that allows so-called entrepreneurs dipping in with little scrutiny and no-holds-barred treatment of staff training, wages and conditions. If that's the case then we can expect a downward spiral in content aimed at maximising profits in a dash for diminishing advertising revenues. An informed public will be the last thing on the agenda.
Who really holds British power?
We are told that we elect representatives to parliament so that they can make decisions on our behalf—but big business still pulls the strings. For the next three weeks there is no government in Britain. Parliament has shut down for the election, and every MP and minister is running around the country desperately trying to shore up their vote. So who’s running the country in the meantime? The answer is the same people who always do.We are told that power in Britain lies in parliament, the cabinet and the office of the prime minister - whether it’s day-to-day politics or a huge emergency, they make the decisions. That’s one reason why people get so angry when MPs are caught spending more time sitting in their million-pound expenses mansions than “running the country”. Some even say that our problems come from the rise of a corrupt “political class”—party apparatchiks more interested in feathering their own nests than serving the people.But the truth about who really runs Britain is even worse. Our real rulers are completely unelected. Once it was the landed aristocracy who held power. Their influence has declined—although many are still filthy rich. But since the industrial revolution, it has been the super-rich—the chief executives, bankers and industrialists—who hold sway. They are the people who own the massive corporations and have the power to make the real, economic decisions that affect all of us.They are the ones who can close down a factory and sack thousands of workers at the stroke of a pen.
A small number of very rich men, and a few women, dominate British companies. Just a few hundred people make the decisions about investment and employment that affect the lives of millions. These are the people who have queued up to sign the Tories’ letter bemoaning Labour’s decision to raise the level of national insurance. In truth they are against all taxes on business—and anything else that drains money away from profits, such as a decent minimum wage or union rights. To take one example—Sir Stuart Rose signed the Tories’ letter. He was appointed executive chairman of Marks & Spencer in June 2008. He is also a non-executive director of Land Securities plc and chairman of Business in the Community. That’s typical of the web of interlocking directorships that produce a powerful “magic circle” of bosses. Nicolas Moreau, another signatory, is the chief executive of Axa UK insurance. He is also a trustee for the Hedge Funds Standards Board Ltd and director of Winterthur Life UK Ltd which “offers wealth management solutions to the high net worth marketplace”. Sir Nigel Rudd also signed the letter. Rudd is the non-executive chairman of BAA, but holds an additional seven posts on boards of big business. These include luxury car dealerships and LLP Capital—a private equity firm.One study of the directors of Britain’s biggest 350 companies showed that six men were each on the board of five companies, and 15 were on the boards of four companies. If smaller companies are included then some businessmen have collected 17 directorships each. These are not only incredibly powerful positions, they are also very well paid. The boss of Xstrata, Mick Davis, grabbed almost £29 million for 2009. Davis is one of the most high- profile supporters of the Tories’ campaign against the government’s increase in national insurance. The Tories say they want the top earners in the public sector to get no more than 20 times as much as the lowest paid. The Guardian newspaper last week found that bosses at ten of the largest companies who backed the Tories on national insurance would have to take a combined £74 million cut to their pay and bonus deals if the same rules applied in the private sector.
As was hazarded on Tuesday, Labour's election manifesto was marginally less toxic than the farrago that the Tories had built up as their offering. And so it has turned out. Toxic terror David Cameron has produced something that is as poisonous as any political manifesto coming out of the Thatcher years and, if it's possible, even more deceitful. Let's give public-sector workers ownership of the services they deliver, says Mr Cameron. But, at the same time, let's freeze their wages. Up and down the country, said he, the Tories have been faced with pleas from the private sector to do their bit. Mind you, according to Mr Cameron, these pleas were framed in terms of "give us more government contracts," so we beg leave to doubt the motives behind them. It would just mean that the rich get richer. And as far as ownership of the services is concerned, the Tory vision of a public sector made up of small private firms and so-called "co-operatives" bidding against each other for contracts in a frantic race for the bottom is merely a formula for a price war on services which could only lead to wholesale cost-cutting and the eventual destruction of those services. Residents will apparently be able to veto council tax increases. Sounds wonderful, doesn't it? That is, until you remember that much of the funding for councils also comes from central government and, should that be cut, you can bet that there won't be any referendums allowed.
In that event, councils would lose any political decision-making powers and would be faced with no choice but to cut services, something which would suit the Tory privatisation agenda very nicely indeed. In fact, it's just a recipe for wholesale demolition of the public sector under the guise of fake "democratisation." Unison general secretary Dave Prentis accurately descibed this as "another ploy to break up public services, plunge them into confusion and then let the private sector pick over their bones. The Tories' plans would create a bureaucratic nightmare," and we can't disagree with him. "We will consult on the introduction of a fair fuel stabiliser. This would cut fuel duty when oil prices rise, and vice versa," continued Mr Cameron. Again, this sounds wonderful, a way forward for cheaper fuel - until a little more thought reveals that it's simply a way for the private sector to control government revenues. Prices rise and, as a result, taxes fall. So it's just a way of cutting taxes and transferring tax revenues into private-sector pockets.
And who's going to replace the lost revenue? The simple answer is... nobody. Revenue will fall and services will therefore be cut as unaffordable. Big company profits are underwritten by tax cuts and the rich just keep getting richer. It's not just on the roads or in the air, either. "We will grant longer, more flexible rail franchises to incentivise private-sector investment," say the Tories. Again the truth is somewhat different. Longer franchises simply mean licences to print even more money and will make it even more difficult to get rid of the incompetents who hold the franchises at the moment. Result? The rich get even richer. Then they move on to corporation tax and, guess what, the Tories are going to reform it. A new Conservative government would cut corporation tax. Surprise, surprise. A giveaway to big business from the Tories. Who would have thought it? It summarises the Tory position marvellously. Demolish the welfare state, wreck the public sector and hand it all over to big business to profit off - oh, and don't tax their profits. And it's all clad in populist fancy dress to make it appeal to the voters. But it's a big, ugly lie which is dressing up the closure of the welfare state as some kind of democratic advance. All it's aimed at is making sure that the rich just keep on getting richer.
A small number of very rich men, and a few women, dominate British companies. Just a few hundred people make the decisions about investment and employment that affect the lives of millions. These are the people who have queued up to sign the Tories’ letter bemoaning Labour’s decision to raise the level of national insurance. In truth they are against all taxes on business—and anything else that drains money away from profits, such as a decent minimum wage or union rights. To take one example—Sir Stuart Rose signed the Tories’ letter. He was appointed executive chairman of Marks & Spencer in June 2008. He is also a non-executive director of Land Securities plc and chairman of Business in the Community. That’s typical of the web of interlocking directorships that produce a powerful “magic circle” of bosses. Nicolas Moreau, another signatory, is the chief executive of Axa UK insurance. He is also a trustee for the Hedge Funds Standards Board Ltd and director of Winterthur Life UK Ltd which “offers wealth management solutions to the high net worth marketplace”. Sir Nigel Rudd also signed the letter. Rudd is the non-executive chairman of BAA, but holds an additional seven posts on boards of big business. These include luxury car dealerships and LLP Capital—a private equity firm.One study of the directors of Britain’s biggest 350 companies showed that six men were each on the board of five companies, and 15 were on the boards of four companies. If smaller companies are included then some businessmen have collected 17 directorships each. These are not only incredibly powerful positions, they are also very well paid. The boss of Xstrata, Mick Davis, grabbed almost £29 million for 2009. Davis is one of the most high- profile supporters of the Tories’ campaign against the government’s increase in national insurance. The Tories say they want the top earners in the public sector to get no more than 20 times as much as the lowest paid. The Guardian newspaper last week found that bosses at ten of the largest companies who backed the Tories on national insurance would have to take a combined £74 million cut to their pay and bonus deals if the same rules applied in the private sector.
As was hazarded on Tuesday, Labour's election manifesto was marginally less toxic than the farrago that the Tories had built up as their offering. And so it has turned out. Toxic terror David Cameron has produced something that is as poisonous as any political manifesto coming out of the Thatcher years and, if it's possible, even more deceitful. Let's give public-sector workers ownership of the services they deliver, says Mr Cameron. But, at the same time, let's freeze their wages. Up and down the country, said he, the Tories have been faced with pleas from the private sector to do their bit. Mind you, according to Mr Cameron, these pleas were framed in terms of "give us more government contracts," so we beg leave to doubt the motives behind them. It would just mean that the rich get richer. And as far as ownership of the services is concerned, the Tory vision of a public sector made up of small private firms and so-called "co-operatives" bidding against each other for contracts in a frantic race for the bottom is merely a formula for a price war on services which could only lead to wholesale cost-cutting and the eventual destruction of those services. Residents will apparently be able to veto council tax increases. Sounds wonderful, doesn't it? That is, until you remember that much of the funding for councils also comes from central government and, should that be cut, you can bet that there won't be any referendums allowed.
In that event, councils would lose any political decision-making powers and would be faced with no choice but to cut services, something which would suit the Tory privatisation agenda very nicely indeed. In fact, it's just a recipe for wholesale demolition of the public sector under the guise of fake "democratisation." Unison general secretary Dave Prentis accurately descibed this as "another ploy to break up public services, plunge them into confusion and then let the private sector pick over their bones. The Tories' plans would create a bureaucratic nightmare," and we can't disagree with him. "We will consult on the introduction of a fair fuel stabiliser. This would cut fuel duty when oil prices rise, and vice versa," continued Mr Cameron. Again, this sounds wonderful, a way forward for cheaper fuel - until a little more thought reveals that it's simply a way for the private sector to control government revenues. Prices rise and, as a result, taxes fall. So it's just a way of cutting taxes and transferring tax revenues into private-sector pockets.
And who's going to replace the lost revenue? The simple answer is... nobody. Revenue will fall and services will therefore be cut as unaffordable. Big company profits are underwritten by tax cuts and the rich just keep getting richer. It's not just on the roads or in the air, either. "We will grant longer, more flexible rail franchises to incentivise private-sector investment," say the Tories. Again the truth is somewhat different. Longer franchises simply mean licences to print even more money and will make it even more difficult to get rid of the incompetents who hold the franchises at the moment. Result? The rich get even richer. Then they move on to corporation tax and, guess what, the Tories are going to reform it. A new Conservative government would cut corporation tax. Surprise, surprise. A giveaway to big business from the Tories. Who would have thought it? It summarises the Tory position marvellously. Demolish the welfare state, wreck the public sector and hand it all over to big business to profit off - oh, and don't tax their profits. And it's all clad in populist fancy dress to make it appeal to the voters. But it's a big, ugly lie which is dressing up the closure of the welfare state as some kind of democratic advance. All it's aimed at is making sure that the rich just keep on getting richer.
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