N30: the struggle for pensions justice

On 30 November 2011 twenty nine public sector unions took joint strike action over savage cuts to their pensions. Over 2 million workers went on strike, the largest number in the UK since the General Strike in 1926. In Cheshire West Against the Cuts we organised a march and rally in Chester that was attended by over 1000 striking workers and supporters. The march started on Castle drive at 12.30 and as it progressed through the city centre spontaneous applause broke out from many on the onlookers. It was a day of mutual support and solidarity against the attacks of a reactionary class war government, which is making the public sector pay for the crisis we are in. The 3% pensions levy is unnecessary to sustain public sector pensions, and is being used to pay down the deficit.

We had a great day out. There was a lot of happiness in solidarity which is what the bedrock of the trade union movement is about, but there was also some sadness that people were having to do this in the face of a class war attack from their own government. People in the UK have been lead to believe that unions are a thing of the past, irrelevant in a 'modern' age, they are now beginning to realise that they need the support of their fellow workers to survive the onslaught of the capitalist class as the crisis deepens.

There is hope for the future and we can change things but we need to get this government replaced by one which acts in the interest of the people rather than the capitalist elite. That means getting out and voting for alternatives at elections. If you are a public sector worker reading this, consider the fact that the Green Party has a policy for a Citizen's Pension for all at £300 p.w. for a couple and £170 p.w. for single people.

SS Titanic-Capitalism is still heading straight for the rocks

Perhaps I should have entitled this post the 'comedy of errors'? The problem with that title that I have, is that the current crisis of capitalism, which is manifesting itself in the sovereign debt crisis, is being so cack-handedly managed by our leading politicians that it is really a human tragedy, rather than a comedy.

In the UK, the NoW phone hacking scandal is moving so quickly that people are forgetting about the main event - the slow motion collapse of the world economy, and the feeble attempts of politicians in Europe to deal with it - see this. The reason for the failure of politicians in Europe to sort out the economic crisis is obvious; they are completely blinkered; they are so conditioned to neoliberal 'free' market fanaticism and looking after themselves and the rich, that they, like the Captain of the Titanic, are going down with the ship.

Its just a pity that there are many many hundreds of thousands of Europeans, and other millions of peoples around the world who are going to suffer in the process. They don't deserve to suffer - the politicians do.

What is the Labour Party for?

A lot of people are wondering what the Labour Party is for. Since Ed Milliband became leader its been hard to to tell. But at least we know what the Labour party is not for; its not for the working class, it abandoned them a long time ago, letting the BNP fill the vacuum; its not for decent public sector pensions; its not much interested in housing; or the poor; or trade unions. It is, we know, in the historic words of Peter Mandelson - "intensely relaxed about the filthy rich" and it seems to be pretty keen on the banks; Oh!, and privatisation of the NHS, education, and well, pretty much anything else that moves.

The Labour Party is a party that has lost its way completely. So much so that it doesn't really know what it is for, except perhaps a vehicle for its leaders to get elected and hold political power, a vehicle for career politicians, the political class that I blogged about in this post. That means that it is the job of party members, who presumably think they are part of a project to change things, merely to have a role of furthering the career aspirations of Milliband, Jowell, Balls, Alexander et al.

I'm sure that Ed would be horrified if he read what I'd just written. He'd protest that he believes in a progressive future and that he, and his colleagues, have been traduced by that statement. If he thinks that I'd like to suggest its his own fault, because I think I think those are perfectly reasonable conclusions for onlookers like me to draw, based on the statements, and behaviour of Ed and other leading Labour politicians.

For example, for him to state that the June 30th strike was wrong, on the basis that negotiations about public sector pensions were ongoing, was laughable. It was obvious to all but the most naive that the government wasn't involved  in meaningful negotiations and had no intention of compromising on terms remotely acceptable to the striking teachers and civil servants. Not only that, but it was clear that the government had been hiding the fact that the Hutton Report showed that public sector pensions were affordable, and this had been exposed on the Today programme.

The Labour party has become a right-wing reactionary neoliberal party and there is little to distinguish it from the other neoliberal parties; the Liberal Democrats and the Tories. The reason for this transformation is not difficult to discern. This transformation has happened to 'left' parties all over the world since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Social Democracy has been abandoned in favour of 'free' market globalisation, and the domination of democracies by the multinational corporations and the banks. In fact, this is little different to Fascism. It is only a matter of degree, because Fascism is the subjugation of democracy to capitalist corporations -  with some goose-stepping in uniform, and gratuitous violence, thrown in.

This is what is happening in Greece. Democracy has been openly replaced, under a 'Socialist' government,  by the control of financial technocrats from the EU and IMF, on behalf of their market masters. Our politicians, including Ed,  are complicit in this free market coup d'etat. There is only one way we can stop this. We must stop voting for these people. We need to vote for parties which can stop the rot. In the UK there is only one party of social justice left - the Green Party.

Britain's new ruling class

I grew up in Britain in the 1960s. A that time, people used to talk about the ruling class. Nobody thought there was anything odd about that - such talk was common currency, on the bus, in the pub and in the workplace. This was because people wanted change, they wanted the ruling clique bust wide open. I have already referred to this in more detail in a recent post - about how things improved, and how people thought that power had become more accessible to all, largely through the opening up of our higher education system. How things have changed! Now you never hear anyone talk about the ruling class. There is a kind of tacit assumption that we all have equal access to the corridors of power - but I beg to differ. I think that the ruling class  is back, and with a vengeance.

There is no doubt that over the past 20 years or so we have seen the development of a political class of career politicians. Peter Oborne, the right wing polemicist wrote about this in his book, The Triumph of the Political Class, in 2007. In a nutshell, his argument was that a new self-serving political class had grown up, and become dominant in the UK. I have to say that, on the whole, I agree with him. Prior to the emergence of this class, politicians had often lived and worked in the real world before entering parliament. They had to work their way up the ladder. There were working class MPs. But this has changed. Many of the most important and influential of our politicians have jumped straight from higher education into parliament. Worst still, many are the appointees of our leaders, people who were chums of Tony Blair or are pals of Dave and George. These people are parachuted into safe seats knowing that they will be elected, and they owe their allegiance to the people who 'appointed' them.

This process means that more and more of the people who sit in parliament are hand-picked by a small ruling clique. No one else can get a look in. Its as if the House of Commons is set up like the House of Lords. Sure, you can vote for people, but only people chosen by Dave, or Nick, or Ed. Put like that, its a chilling thought, and what does it say about our democracy? I'm not suggesting this is the whole story because I don't believe that these politicians rule on their own. The new ruling class is an alliance of these leading politicians and big business leaders (capitalists, increasingly from the financial sector). What matters is that we are talking about a cabal of people who have things sewn up, and act in their interests - not the interests of the people in the UK. The resulting irony is that Britain is becoming more like Egypt, with a rotten self-perpetuating elite and a fraudulent democracy, just as Egypt struggles to become, more like how Britain is supposed to be.

What suits this ruling group is a narrow neo-liberal right wing ideology dressed up as economic necessity i.e. the usual suspects - privatisation, de-regulation, ending welfare and pensions etc. - which amounts to a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary people to the elite - the rich and the big corporations. No wonder we are being told to tighten our belts, we are facing the biggest heist in history. 

Its not just the fact that our democracy has been subverted by this new ruling alliance that we should be concerned about. Its the fact that some of these 'chums' are unfit to be in positions of power, and never would have been, if they'd had to go through a normal selection process. One topical example that springs to mind is Michael Gove, Minister for Education, and chum of David Cameron, who was parachuted into parliament because Dave thought he was a good egg. But Gove is a deluded right-wing crank who draws his inspiration from Tom Brown's Schooldays. His latest potty idea, that parents should break the teachers strike on June 30th by taking over schools, shows exactly what sort of extremist he now is. Take a look at this priceless photo, which shows just what sort of 'extremist' he used to be.

We can end this  situation, but only by re-asserting control over our political parties and our democracy. By using our votes wisely and judiciously at election time and fighting for change. Its going to be a long hard struggle, and we need to get started now!

The Coalition deficit cuts will increase the deficit

On March 26th half a million people marched in London against the savage £81 billion worth of cuts introduced by George Osborne in the 'emergency' budget last year. More recently an impressive (sic!) estimated 350 people attended a 'Rally against debt' on the 14th of May. Not hard to see where the British peoples' sympathies lie then - and the vast majority have got it right because the Coalition government's cuts are not only going to cause great social harm but they are more likely to increase the deficit than reduce it.

How can that be right? How can cuts in expenditure increase a deficit? Well, you only have to look at Greece and Ireland to see how. Both countries are in deeper debt now than they were when they began their austerity programmes. If you slash spending you increase unemployment which increases costs and reduces your income in the form of taxes. The best way to pay off debt is to earn more. Governments earn more if they increase taxes and if the economy grows. As the economy grows government income, in the form of taxes, increases. But the cuts here have lead to a stagnant economy with no growth. There is further bad news to come in the form of increasing unemployment as the cuts bite further. Government borrowing last month was the highest ever recorded for April because tax receipts fell. Osborne has clearly shown his economic illiteracy in the last budget, which did nothing to address the problems caused by these savage, unnecessary, ideological cuts. What our economy needs is a stimulus with investment in jobs through a Green New Deal, not savage cuts.

The same failed course of action is leading to an even greater crisis in the Eurozone where Greece is unable to repay its debt and will have to default at some stage. The effects of this could be even greater than the collapse of Lehmans in 2008. In addition, Ireland, Portugal and Spain are all in trouble. The truth is that none of the bailouts of the Eurozone countries were made to help the people of those countries. They were made to bail out the bondholders and the banks - the money lenders . As with the bailout in the USA and UK, taxpayers are being asked to bear the pain and bail out the market. It is clear where the real power lies, and that's not in your democratically elected government, which exists to serve the market, whatever the cost to you and your family. And if your economy is ruined in the process its just tough luck.

Cuts where they're needed, not where they hurt

Cheshire West Against the Cuts

We had a another good stall in Chester today. Lots of people signed our petition. Get involved and support us. We have a public meeting in Chester on Wednesday 20th April at the Guildhall on Watergate street - see you there.

Another Tory budget demonstrates the poverty of neoliberal thinking

I've posted many times on the blog about the current neoliberal paradigm, and the 'free' market fanatics who espouse it. Yesterday we saw a classic neoliberal budget, entirely one dimensional and doomed to failure in terms of doing what the country needs - creating jobs, greening the economy and lowering economic inequality. Its important to understand that if we had a Labour or purely Liberal Democrat government, we wouldn't have seen much difference. All three main parties subscribe to the same 'economic' philosophy - the market must rule - even though its clearly been shown recently that the unregulated market causes boom and bust which only the state can rectify.

Neoliberalism is more akin to a religious cult than a political philosophy and all its adherents, from Blair to Clegg to Cameron to Sarkosy and even Sarah Palin subscribe to the same narrow orthodoxy; only the market can be allowed to do anything. The role of governments is simply to make the market supreme, they are not allowed to intervene, take initiatives, engage in economic planning, or invest in society through public services.

This means that the only economic measures we are allowed to pursue are ones that (big) businesses want - lower taxes and cutting 'red tape'. This is similar to the policy that was followed by Western governments during the last great economic crisis in the 1920s and 1930s - we are going backwards rather than forwards. Suffice to say these policies failed then and they will fail now, leading to at least another decade of economic stagnation, mass unemployment and increasing poverty. The irony then was that it took a world war and massive government spending in the USA, which was the powerhouse of the world economy, to lift the world out of depression and into post-war prosperity.

The neoliberals only have only three economic levers to pull: lower taxes, cutting 'red tape' and labour market flexibility (bashing the workers). These fetishes have already demonstrably failed to make the West more prosperous in the past thirty years. All they have succeeded in doing is making the rich much wealthier and the rest of us poorer. The cunning plan is supposed to be that if you cut taxes on corporations and the rich they will invest more - thus creating more wealth for all of us. Unfortunately the evidence is that this doesn't work. The rich pocket the money and corporations pass it on to their shareholders. Large corporations just don't create jobs anymore, or if they do they invest in low wage economies like China. The wealthy invest in property or financial schemes which bring a bigger return.

We need government investment in our economy. The Green Party has an economic programme which would have cut the deficit by £70 billion over 4 years, created one million jobs and protected the public sector and the welfare state - see our manifesto. Yes, we would have raised taxes but to the same level they were during the Thatcher government - about 43% of GDP. Higher taxes benefit the economy and ordinary people. The public sector generates wealth by investing in society and stimulating private sector growth.

The irony in all this is that the greatest period of wealth and economic equality we had in our history was at a time when we had a mixed economy, strong trade unions, high taxes and a strong public sector. The neoliberal approach only benefits the rich and corporations. The question is - how long can this go on before the penny drops with the majority and there is a real drive for political change? I suspect that we are all going to have to get a lot poorer before the tide is turned.