As the East Coast Main Line shows, the public sector is just so much better at delivering essential services

What made me want to write this post was an item I heard on the BBC Radio 4 lunchtime consumer programme You and Yours. I heard about mobile phone customers complaining that they were paying £40 for nothing - no service at all. Some, but not all, of these people lived in the countryside and could never get a mobile signal in their home. I live in mid Cheshire and the mobile signal in my house is poor to say the least, sometimes I get cut off in mid call because the signal drops. The reality is that mobile phone reception varies wildly around the country and there just isn't a good universal service. 

So why is this? The answer is simple - privatisation. This is what you get in terms of service from private sector corporations. A couple of months earlier I caught part of a conversation on The World at One, again on Radio 4. This was also an argument about mobile reception and someone was saying that if the service was run by the public sector it would be universal - everyone in the UK would get good reception, regardless of where they lived. That was when he could get a word in edgeways because he was being shouted down by a representative of the private sector who ranted about how much better it was, how private was more efficient, blah blah etc.

More recently I heard someone from Stagecoach being interviewed on BBC Radio 4PM about why they and Virgin could run East Coast Main Line better than the successful public sector company that's run it for five years. The guy couldn't give a good answer to the question, he blustered and floundered and talked about new trains, which are being paid for by the government anyway.
 

East Coast Main Line

I'm sure you have heard that kind of stuff before. The reality is that the public sector can do many things much better than the private sector can, like running services we all depend upon,  and still make a profit which goes to help the taxpayer instead of going into the pockets of foreign shareholders. No wonder these private sector advocates bluster and flounder and have to shout their opponents down. Its because they know damn well they can't compete with a good public sector alternative on efficiency or price, and they know that they are riding the fat privatisation gravy train out our expense. So what we need to do is boot out the profiteers and bring essential services like railways, mobile phone networks, energy distribution and broadband supply back where they belong - into a sector we own and control - the public sector.

Apparently 'economics' means screwing the workers

Last week we heard that Vince Cable had decided to kowtow to his Tory masters and introduce a range of 'reforms' which are intended to make it easier to sack workers and 'create more jobs'. This is an ideological class-war driven attack on workers rights which follows hot on the heels of the recent lengthening of the period of no fault dismissal for workers from one year to two years, and apparently implements some parts of the discredited Beecroft Report, described as 'crap' by Coalition government insiders. It's important to point out that there is no evidence that these measures will create any more jobs - just evidence that the 1% are using the economic crisis that they caused as an opportunity to bash the workers. This is part and parcel of the well known 'Shock Doctrine' described by Naomi Klein, you create a crisis, then use it as cover to attack the living standards of the 99%.

Cable - screwing the workers

Now, these attacks are being followed by renewed calls for an end to national pay bargaining in the public sector. According to the Guardian '25 senior academic' economists have called for individually negotiated public sector contracts.  This is a blatant attack not only on employee rights but the trade union movement itself, and has been a Tory dream for decades. All the usual bogus arguments about 'labour market flexibility' and 'job creation' are predictably trotted out. What's crucial here is to understand that this is really 'free' market fundamentalist ideology dressed up as 'economics'. This is not about the economy it's about politics. The so-called economists who have dreamt up this stuff are capitalist economists  - the same blinkered individuals who promoted the ideas that caused the economic crisis in the first place and who see the solutions as more of the same or 'business as usual'. This is about screwing workers -  allegedly to make markets work better. It is not a science or an academic discipline but a belief system, and these economists are the high priests of the system, worshipping at the altar of the market.

These are the very same neoliberal 'free' market fanatics who believe in 'externalities' which is capitalist economic speak for explaining away the right of corporations to dump their costs free of charge onto communities and the environment, in the form of pollution and unemployment, causing health problems, hardship for millions, and massive environmental destruction. These are the same sort of people who believe that basics such as food can be traded as commodities - in short they are people without human values who should not be taken seriously and represent a danger to the well-being of millions. Their type of economic 'solutions' are responsible for death and destruction on a global scale, and, of course, they won't be the ones to suffer pays cuts and unemployment as a result of these proposals. They will remain safe in their cosy academic bubble while the rest of us get our standard of living cut still further.  

Of course economics doesn't have to be like this. There are economists who recognise that economics has a social dimension, and at its heart should be the well-being of people and communities, not abstract notions about money which favour corporations and the rich. For an excellent analysis of the ongoing destruction of the social contract in Europe by neoliberal economists, and its consequences, read this excellent article by the economist Ha-Joon Chang. At its root this debate is not about economics at all - it is really about values. The values of humanity, decency and pay equality for hardworking people doing the same job versus the anti-human, 'abstract', and immoral values of the 'free' market, and screwing the workers.

Free market myths no. 4: capitalism is dynamic and innovative

I was talking to a friend the other day who was telling me about someone in his family who is a businessman. "What is his business" I said, "property" came the reply. This exchange set me thinking about how capitalism works. For sure, it wouldn't work without 'property', because the concept of private ownership of property is crucial, and without it capitalism couldn't function. When the Soviet Union collapsed and the 'free' market vultures moved in to feast on the corpse, one of their first priorities was to introduce new laws enshrining property rights so that the 'oligarchs' could get their hands on the loot - otherwise known as the common property and resources of the people of the Soviet Union.

So property is a crucial part of capitalism because from property comes rents and the commodification of land, which leads to capitalists cashing in on the exploitation of natural resources such as oil, which ought to be held in common. All these activities which rely on the holding of property can be used to generate great profits but none of them are in any way dynamic or innovative. Much of capitalism is about getting an easy ride like rent-seeking, asset stripping, corporate welfarism and cannibalising the public sector. Far from being innovative capitalists will seek to squeeze every drop of profit from existing commodities and plant and machinery before they bother to think of trying to do something new or different. There are countless examples of this, one recent example being the iPad 3 which differed from its predecessor largely only in having a higher definition screen. And, you can easily see how conservative capitalism is if you go to your local supermarket where you will see the same old detergents wrapped up in packets labelled "new" and "improved" .

Its much easier to make money from what you know. If you have a good product you flog it to death before thinking about a new one. This makes corporations resist change and become conservative rather than innovative, and that, as I've pointed out before on the blog is the reason why capitalists aren't using new, resource efficient methods which would make them more competitive and be much better for the environment - see here. What capitalism tends to be good at is adaptation to changing circumstances and finding a way around the crises it creates. But its the public sector which often leads the way in innovation. Many of the greatest breakthroughs we have seen in medicine, engineering and computing, like the mouse you are using with your PC, come from publicly funded activities. However, for the 'free' market fundamentalists its essential to maintain the myth that the public sector is slow and bureaucratic, whilst the private sector is dynamic and innovative. The problem is this just isn't true.

It's not just the banks that need a change of culture

Speaking about the banks last week , Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, said that what was needed was a "change of culture". Some people might think that was an understatement given the emerging scale of wrongdoing at Barclays, and other major banks. Vince Cable, Secretary of State for Business, described the City as a "cess pit".  Strong stuff then? But criticism is about as strong as it gets these days from our feeble politicians. In relation to the banks there can be no doubt where real power lies, and it's not in our democratically elected parliament.

But King was right, we do need a change of culture, but not just in the City of London, we need it throughout business and throughout our whole society. When I grew up in Britain in the 60s and 70 s there was a much greater culture of mutual support and solidarity than there is now. This stemmed, in large measure, from a sense of solidarity in adversity that developed during WWII, and a large factory-based working class that had jobs and pride in their work.


The aim of Thatcherism was to destroy that social solidarity and create a culture of selfishness and individual gain. In the 1980s it became smart to get rich quick and jump on what then seemed like a capitalist bandwagon that promised endless growth. Measures such as the sale of council housing, at knock down prices, contributed to the fact that many working class people thought they had "arrived" and that they were better off if not actually better than their forbears. We have had 30 years of relentless plugging of this Thatcherite culture by politicians and the capitalist media, and it has had a corrosive effect on our society at all levels, in politics, business and in our democracy. More than ever, in recent history, we have seen the revolving door in Westminster where politicians and senior civil servants have colluded in the privatisation of public assets, to be rewarded afterwards by lucrative jobs in the private sector.

Margaret Thatcher: "There is no such thing as society"

In the noughties we had a relentless attack from New Labour on the public sector and the values of public service. Public sector workers were lambasted and pilloried  as petty bureaucrats, jobsworths and inefficient skivers on bloated pensions. Public bad, private good was the message. Why bother with serving the public when you could be making a profit out of their illnesses and public service needs?


Its not just a change of culture in the banks that we need, its a wholesale change of culture across British society. We need to re-establish the values of social justice, solidarity and equality, which made our society a much better place to live in the decades after WWII. We need to kick out commercialism from the public sector, re-establish the commons, and create a lasting systemic change. I think that millions of  people want this kind of change. Many were never part of the Thatcherite revolution anyway. That change can only happen if people get involved in our democratic process and vote for parties and politicians who can deliver that change, and if they show social solidarity in their personal lives.  And, believe me, its essential that we succeed in doing this because the crisis of capitalism isn't going away anytime soon, and, as we have seen with the flooding recently, we will have to come together to mitigate the worst effects of climate change.

'Free market' capitalism is just a racket

As the 'free' market fundamentalists of the neoliberal right continue their class war mission to drag us all back to nineteenth century conditions its becoming clearer that the 'economic policy' they support is little more than a racket. Before I describe this, its worth considering one of the central problems of capitalism - the falling rate of profit. In the nineteenth century many economists accepted that there was a tendency of the rate of profit to fall over time and Marx explained how that worked in Capital. Of course, Marx's theory has since been disputed, but not disproved. Nevertheless, by the 1970's, after the post WW2 boom profits were beginning to fall. The solution? - neoliberalism. Neoliberalism works by screwing workers, including middle class workers, harder, and reducing their living standards. Quite simply capitalists take a bigger slice of the cake, leaving ever fewer crumbs for the rest of us.

That is why our pensions, wages, and working conditions have been under attack for the past 30 years. The politicians who have been doing this to us have invented a series of plausible 'excuses' for doing so. In the case of pensions the 'excuse' is demographics, people are living longer, and so they are, but decent pensions are still affordable, the real reason they are being removed from us is to increase profits for corporations.

This is also the reason why our current reactionary neoliberal coalition government are so keen on privatising the NHS and public services - guaranteed profits. The corporations know very well that public services are an easy risk-free way of making guaranteed profits and they have long wanted to take control of them. With austerity and the most reactionary government in half a century in power their chance has come. In the UK this privatisation drive began with Thatcherism in the 1980's well before the current government, with the 'excuse' that the private sector was more efficient and would deliver better services. We have seen what has happened with the railways and energy. Large corporations making vast profits out of the taxpayer and customers (who used to be stakeholders) with none of the promised improvements. The economic crisis we are in, created by neoliberal 'economic policy' has now enabled the whole project to be pushed further and harder than it ever has been in the past 30 years.

We have reached the stage whereby public services are being handed over by our politicians to profit makers without any regard for supposed efficiency. This is nothing more than the imposition of 'free' market ideology and has become a racket, with guaranteed profits for the corporate winners. Here are a couple of examples I have recently come across, but there are many more. In the USA corporations are 'offering' to take over publicly run prisons as long as there is a minimum of a 90% occupancy rate. Just think about that. That means that the public bodies are going to have to find more prisoners to fill those jails! I guess they will just have to search harder for lawbreakers, and find sympathetic judges.

Meanwhile, in the UK A4e, a company which is supposed to help people back into work, is now under investigation for fraud, for allegedly fiddling its figures to get taxpayers money. The founder, Emma Harrison, paid herself £8.6 million last year. But this person is the darling of government, held up as an example of entrepreneurship to us all. A4e is built entirely around government contracts, that is taxpayers money, at least £8.6 million of which has been wasted in my view. That money could have been used to create jobs.

As long as our politicians are hand in glove with the corporations, we can expect more corporate welfarism and cosy deals carving up public services to continue. No risk-taking and no efficiencies -  except for lower wages and worse conditions for the workers who are expected to deliver. Even Tory MP David Davis has condemned 'crony' capitalism, but In fact, this is barely capitalism, its more akin to a form of neo-feudalism where the political barons and capitalist kings conspire to keep the rest of us in perpetual wage serfdom.

'Free' market myths no.2: low taxes are good for you

The saying that 'only two things in life are certain, death and taxes' has been attributed to Benjamin Franklin, and taxes are certainly something which has vexed the political right for a very long time. The Republicans in America have set their face against taxes even if it makes economic recovery harder, and for the Tea Party low taxes is an article of faith. Surely they are right? Isn't it a no brainer? Low taxes have to be good for you, don't they? That is what we have been told almost day-in and day-out for the past 30 years, and, in that time, right wing governments have lowered Taxes all over the world. Are we better off because of this? If you take a hard look at what is happening - clearly the answer is no.

Pieter Brueghel the Younger, 'Paying the Tax (The Tax Collector)'

The simple fact is that low taxes only benefit the rich, or the 1% if you prefer, and the politicians who have been telling us that low taxes are good for us are well aware of that fact. In the USA we have seen an ever widening gap between the 1% and the rest of society, as they take a larger slice of the economic cake and pay less in tax. To be fair, some of the richest Americans, like Warren Buffet, have called for the 1% to be taxed more heavily. I'm not that bothered about the super-rich being taxed more heavily. What I want, in a democratic society, is for everyone to be taxed equally, and for workers to get a real share of the wealth they create. I don't want redistribution. Redistribution is only necessary in a capitalist society because the capitalists expropriate wealth from workers through the mechanism of surplus value, as Marx showed us. Everyone should be taxed equally. Full stop. If I earn £10,000 and pay £3,000 tax, you should pay £300,000 tax, to the penny, if you happen to earn £1,000,000. But in capitalist democracies tax regimes don't allow for this. The rich pay less tax on their earnings than the poor. 

We need taxes to pay for the infrastructure and services that we all depend upon. The 99% rely on those taxes to fund education, healthcare and public services that they all need. And it makes perfect sense for all for those services to be paid for collectively for the benefit of everyone. Only the rich can afford to pay for these services themselves, so they have a vested interest in low taxes. Don't be fooled. Low taxes mean diminished public services that most of us can ill afford to live with. Our politicians have betrayed us by promising low taxes and great public services. That can't happen because you only get what you pay for. Taxes, as long as they are fair, are a good thing for the overwhelming majority of citizens in society.

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.

'Free' market myths no.1: the public sector doesn't create wealth

This is the first in a series of posts which aim to explode the common myths of neoliberal 'free' market propaganda. Something you can read in the Daily Mail, Times, Telegraph, Sun, and Daily Express any day of the week. If you want to find out more about the mythology of the 'free' market right I recommend the excellent '23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism' by the economist Ha-Joon Chang. Its essential reading to understand how modern capitalism portrays itself as dynamic and risk-taking, when it is more often conservative and protectionist:

In the UK, in the past decade or so, and particularly since the big crash of 2008, there have been increasing attacks on the public sector. Neoliberal 'free' market fanatics have been working hard to paint the public sector as a drain on our national resources, something which is an unaffordable luxury populated by workers on fat cat salaries and pensions. We are routinely told that only the private sector can create wealth. This is nonsense, and is demonstrably false. But why is it happening?

The reason is that corporations want to get their hands on public sector assets at knockdown prices, and see providing public services as very easy money. This is because public services are monopolies.  For example, your local council has a waste collection (and disposal) contract with one company. You don't see refuse wagons tearing down your street competing to pick up your bins, do you? Its a monopoly and therefore very easy money compared to the supposed cut-throat world of capitalism, where businesses are supposed to be competing for survival. So, the public sector represents rich and easy pickings for 'free' market 'entrepreneurs'.

Rubbishing the public sector is all about getting the public onside to accept the asset stripping of privatisation, which is based on sacking workers, reducing the conditions for those who remain, and dumping the costs of unemployment and hardship onto wider society. This is the time-honoured 'free' market trick of privatising the profits and nationalising the losses, in other words - a racket.

The reality is that the public sector creates jobs, infrastructure and wealth and a vibrant public sector is essential to a healthy economy. A public sector that is efficient and well run offers much better value for money than the private sector ever could. Why? Its simple, the public sector doesn't have to make a profit and therefore will always provide better value for money than a private sector alternative. That is why the 'free' market fanatics are so desperate to convince you the opposite is true.

Neoliberal 'free' market fanatics don't really understand the concept of wealth anyway. They think in terms of profit, cash and personal gain. But real wealth is not about money, its about much more than that, it's about human need and well-being. The public sector creates wealth in many ways, through health, education and welfare, through infrastructure and creating jobs both in the public and private sector. Without it we would all be at lot worse off. The NHS is the greatest engine of wealth creation in the UK and plays a crucial role in our economy.

 If we allow our public sector to be privatised it will become hollowed out. Do you really want the education of your children to be reduced to the level of a transaction at Tesco or Barclays?  If you privatise these crucial services, you reduce them to the level of a mere commodity, a financial transaction, and you become merely a customer, rather than a stakeholder, an owner. But you can never expect the 'free' market fanatics to understand that level of subtlety, for them humanity is reduced to mere units of consumption. That is your function, to provide them with profits. Their  ideology is ultimately anti-human, like George Orwell's Room 101, and the boot stamping on the human face -  forever.

God's investment banker still doesnt get it

Nice to hear that the Church of England is beginning to catch up with the protesters at occupylsx. The recent statement by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, that there is "widespread and deep exasperation with the financial establishment",  is what we should expect from the church - support for the poor against their powerful and rich exploiters - now known as the 1%.

Now, the Bishop of London, he of the chauffeur driven car, has appointed an investment banker to look at solutions to the problems identified by the occupylsx protesters, though you could be forgiven for thinking that a banker is perhaps not the best person to seek advice from, given the problems we have been suffering from since 2008. However, in today's Sunday Telegraph, Ken Costa, Chairman of St Paul's Initiative, has written about markets losing their "moral moorings". He is right of course, but what are his solutions? Well, there is a lot of stuff about civic duty. Essentially we need reform, and we need to get rid of "shareholder value", something I couldn't disagree with, and we need to " reconnect the financial and the moral", and "legislation might help with this", but not yet apparently. Then he goes on to make this telling statement:

"Those in power should understand that governments are incapable of creating new jobs and wealth, that is what a vibrant private sector is for, supported by a vibrant financial services sector. "

I find this statement worrying because it is plain wrong. It is factually incorrect. Of course governments can and do create jobs and wealth. The public sector is essential, not only for delivering services, but it also creates jobs in the private sector as well. What we need is more government intervention to create green jobs in the UK, especially for young people, because the private sector has failed to do so, and is incapable of doing so. What the crash and its aftermath have shown us is that the powers of the private sector are very limited indeed, and that we need governments more than ever to directly create wealth and to help the rest of society to create wealth.

What Costa's article illustrates is that he is trapped in the same 'free' market fantasy as are all neoliberals. Perhaps that's not surprising when we learn from his article that he has been a banker for 30 years. That tells us that he has been part of the problem, and is therefore unlikely to be part of the solution. His pious words about "moral moorings", and patronising comments about the "usual suspects" at occupylsx are a dead giveaway - if we want to get out of this mess we need a radical change of direction, not the tinkering with legislation, appeals to goodness,and papering over of the cracks - however worthy that may be.

The free market fundamentalists are the purveyors of our poverty

I like to describe neoliberals as 'free market' fanatics or 'free market' fundamentalists. I always put the 'free market' bit in italics because there really is no such thing as a free market, and never has been. The 'free market' concept is a crucial part of the flawed ideology of neoliberalism, which is an extreme right-wing ideology that favours the rich - the capitalist class, over the rest of us. An important part of the reason why neoliberalism has been so successful is that it has successfully disguised itself as 'economics', an economics which pretends to be a mechanism for prosperity and has been sold to us as good for everyone.

We have been told by economists and politicians that the tenets of neoliberalism i.e. - globalisation; 'free' trade; privatisation; low taxes; downsizing; outsourcing; and deregulation are essential economically and that without them, we cannot have a prosperous and successful society. But prosperous and successful for who? All the aforementioned things benefit the capitalist class, at the expense of the rest of society. That is how they have gone from being the rich to the super-rich over the past 35 years or so, and these are the mechanisms by which the 1% have left the 99% way, way behind.

The simple fact is that the outcome of this neoliberal ideology, driven by the capitalist class, with the support of Western politicians, is a direct transfer of wealth from the 99% to the 1%. As wages have fallen as a percentage of GDP, profits and income for the rich have risen - see here for the recent US figures. The super rich don't need social security, they don't need healthcare, they don't need state education like the rest of us, so their view is - 'why should I pay for any of that through my taxes'? In fact, 'why should I pay taxes at all'? Furthermore, thanks to globalisation, if they can pay someone in the Third World $1 an hour to make widgets, why should they pay you, as a worker, in Europe or the USA, $10 an hour to do the same job?

But we still live in a consumer-capitalist economy, so as wages have fallen as a percentage of GDP, the 99% have accumulated more and more debt, with the help and encouragement of capitalist lenders, in order to try and maintain their lifestyles, and this is part of the debt crisis, and the economic crisis we are now in. Because if people in 'wealthier' Western countries can't afford to buy the products of capitalism, and are saddled with debt, the consumer-driven economy is bound to be depressed, which is exactly what is happening now. The 'free market' fanatics through the mechanisms of privatisation etc. are therefore purveyors of poverty, through lower wages, unemployment and austerity for us, the 99%.

In addition to the problems of the current banking debt crisis, which was caused by deregulation of the banks and financial capitalism, there is the longer-term problem for capitalism of the falling rate of profit. It has been noted by many observers that capitalism is uniquely versatile and able to re-invent itself when faced, as it always is, by periodic crises. If capitalism reaches a barrier it will find a way round it. So, the big driver for privatisation is the need for capitalist corporations to maintain their profitability, because having exhausted much of the possibilities of the private sector, through globalisation, they are now intent on devouring the public sector in the search for new profitability and never ending growth.

For the 99%, healthcare, education, pensions, housing and social security are essential. Healthcare and education are public goods - not commodities to be bought and traded like widgets. We need social security as a right, paid for through national insurance - not welfare as some kind of handout. We need social housing and pensions so that we can retire with some dignity in our old age. All these public services are best paid for through taxes, collectively, and delivered without the profit motive, for the benefit of all. If we want public services and pensions we need to pay taxes. Low taxes are only good for the 1%, and are bad for the rest of us. In addition to paying more taxes ourselves, we need to make the rich pay much more in taxes, as a prelude to permanent economic change.

Until very recently, we had all of these essential public services mentioned above here in the UK. Now the capitalist class are trying to take them away from us, they are trying to to roll back all the democratic gains our grandparents, and parents made in the 20th century. The banking crisis is being used as an excuse to pay for the failures of neoliberalism through austerity. It is essential that we resist privatisation and cuts in public services by supporting each other, and supporting the occupations, local anti-cuts organisations, student protests, and all the diverse community groups in their ongoing struggle against austerity, and the trade unions in their planned strike action on November 30th.

Last weekend, on 15 October, global demonstrations were held to show the growing discontent of the 99%, and as a result a video was produced - see below, and a manifesto, which is worth reading, and may be the start of global demand for change.



The many thousands of people involved in the occupation movements and protests which are now happening in 900 cities across the world are rightly suspicious of politicians, political parties, and ideologies. They must be able to determine their wants and their own destiny. But ultimately what they need are the things we all need, the public services which I have outlined above, plus work, and freedom of expression, and freedom from fear. What is clear is that they can only achieve their aims by breaking the stranglehold that 'free market' neoliberalism has on our economy and democracies, and to regain control over their lives they must seize control of the economy and make the global economy their economy.

Only when we control our economy will we have the freedom and dignity we all desire and need.

March for the alternative at the Tory conference

Last Sunday, along with 35,000 other people I marched in Manchester to protest against the austerity measures being inflicted on the British people by the Coalition government. The march started and finished up at First Street, and was characterised by good humour and a feeling of solidarity on what was a very mild and largely sunny October afternoon.

Most of the marchers were trade unionists, with members from Unison, Unite, The GMB, NUT and PCS, mixing with other protest groups. The Green Party was represented mainly by members from Manchester, Carlisle and the Green Left, and a coach came from Chester from our local campaign, Cheshire West Against the Cuts, which is supported by West Cheshire Trades Council.

One of the biggest issues for the marchers was the attack on public sector pensions. The Tories and their corporate backers, aided by cheerleaders in the right wing press, have managed to drive a wedge between public and private sector workers on the pensions issue. Public sector workers, many of whom are low paid and can expect a pension of only £3,000 per year, have been vilified as 'fat cats', whilst private sector workers have seen their pensions slashed. If the government succeeds in destroying pension provision for the public sector that will make it all the harder to bring back decent pensions for those in the private sector. Public and private sector workers need to support each other on this issue, otherwise millions more will be condemned to poverty in their old age. The Green Party sought to address the pension crisis in its 2010 manifesto by introducing a citizens pension of £300 p.w. for a couple and £170 p.w. for a single person.

The public sector unions are balloting their members for industrial action on pensions to start on November 30th. Its important that all working people support this struggle because it could be the pivotal point where the public really turn against the Coalition government's austerity programme, which is already becoming more unpopular. Cameron is well aware of this and his lacklustre speech at the Tory conference shows that the government is stuck in a hole of its own making with no plan B, rising unemployment, a flatlining economy, and no real idea of how to move the country forward. Never has the alternative I've argued for in this blog been more sorely needed - see here.

Our anger should be directed against the real villains

After four nights of looting and violence like many other people in our society I'm angry. Very angry. My anger is directed at the people who are responsible for what has been described as mindless vandalism. Not just those who were directly responsible, but those who are really responsible for the crisis we are in. These real villains are the people I've been talking about in many posts on this blog for the past 3 years or so. The people who have imposed 30 years of Thatcherism on our society. The people who said they were going to make us better off when they knew damn well that most of us were going to end up poorer. These people are the privatisers, the deregulators, the people who have taken our pensions away whilst supporting bankers bonuses, the ones who pocketed the profits whilst the losses were being nationalised, the 'free' market fanatics who worship the winner-takes-all, beggar-my-neighbour capitalist economy which puts us all in thrall to the market.

We used to have a reasonable balance in this society. We used to believe in the public sector and the public good. Not any more. People have been seduced by the glitzy worship of celebrity and consumerism that has been rammed down our throats. Private good, public bad. The wanton destruction of good honest public institutions that served to public good. Those institutions weren't perfect. They had their faults. They needed improvement. But they were a bloody sight better than their profit-driven private sector replacements. I look back with nostalgia at British Rail. Yes it was tatty but that is because it was starved of investment. It was a damn sight better than the crowded 'luxury' cattle wagons we are crammed into nowadays at exorbitant prices whilst the likes of Richard Branson trouser millions of pounds worth profit every year.

The phenomenon we have witnessed in the past few days is the result of the chickens of Thatcherism coming home to roost. The underclasses have learnt the lesson from their betters in society - if its there for the taking - take it. The looting is the mirror image of the behaviour of the bankers and politicians. The bankers have looted our society to the tune of hundreds of billions and now the so called "feral rats" are taking their share from Top Shop and JD Sports to the tune of hundreds of millions. The difference is that the "rats" will end up in gaol. But what about the bankers and their politician chums? The message to society is - "If you wear a suit you can go out and loot" - with impunity.

I have seen some very good comments about what has been happening, particularly in today's Guardian letters and I just wanted to finish by quoting this wonderfully perceptive comment from Rick Osborn:

"While we all must condemn the violence and looting of recent nights, we must not allow those who lead our society to duck their roles in the conditions leading up to it. We find members of parliament fiddling expenses and only some of that deemed illegal. We see bankers plundering the public purse to cover their incompetence and still receiving ridiculous bonuses. Members of the press, that bulwark of our freedoms, pay criminals to get them stories and some of those criminals are members of the police force. Meanwhile, what happens to the law-abiding, decent citizens whom we would like our young people to become? They are told that they must pay more for their pensions, have certain health procedures denied to them, pay more for food, fuel and housing, and probably get made redundant to boot. Our young people are not fools. They see quite clearly that in modern Britain, being good brings no rewards; on the contrary, it is punished."

We can win the economic argument - so lets do it!

"Its the economy stupid!" - it sure is. The economy is just about all we hear about these days, and its no wonder, because we are going through the biggest economic crisis of capitalism since the Great Depression. But the problem we have is that the neoliberal right are in the ascendancy, they have the power. This means that the response to the economic crisis is the same as it was during the Great Depression. Does this mean we have learnt nothing in the past 80 years? To some extent yes, but the real problem is that the same kind of people are in control now as were in control in the late 1920s - capitalist corporations and the politicians who support them. The Great Depression lead to immense hardship and deprivation for people around the world. In America, the slump, despite the uplift given by Roosevelt with the New Deal, lasted over a decade until the end of World War II. It was the massive US spending during the war economy that lifted the whole world out of the Great Depression. Without that lift the world economy would probably  have remained stagnant for many more years, possibly decades.

In the mid 1930s  the economist John Maynard Keynes explained that in a economic slump governments needed to take counter-cyclical measures to revive the economy. In other words, you don't cut spending in a recession - you increase it. But Keynes's ideas were ignored then - just as they are being ignored now. Then as now, for reasons of class, politicians preferred to cuts jobs and welfare rather than increase spending or increase taxes on the rich - who could have afforded to pay more. Belt tightening was, as usual, forced on the poorest in society.

So where does that leave us? The sovereign debt crisis which is now engulfing Europe and the USA is a direct result of the banking crisis known in the UK as the 'credit crunch'.  This crisis would have brought down the world economy, if it had not been for the fact that the state intervention, both here and abroad, propped up the faltering world private banking system. The resulting losses (costs) were nationalised and the gains (profits) remained in private hands. The people who caused the crisis got away free whilst ordinary people picked up the tab, bailing out the banks, and paying by losing their jobs, homes and pensions.

But that was only round one. The debt form the economic crisis didn't just  disappear - it became the sovereign debt which is crippling Ireland, Greece, Spain and Portugal, and which now threatens the USA itself with debt default. So, the people are  being made to pay for the crisis a second time around. The name of the game now is austerity. Yet more cuts in welfare and more jobs losses - all to protect the same people  - the private sector, the banks and bondholders - financial capitalism. But as Keynes showed more cuts and austerity won't fix the problem - it will make it worse. That means the best we can hope for in the UK and Europe is economic stagnation, continuing high unemployment, and increasing hardship and poverty. The result is that your children will inevitably be poorer than you are and your grandchildren will be poorer still, in a society blighted by homelessness and inequality.

In the UK we have our own austerity crisis. The Chancellor of the Exchequer,  George Osborne, has taken a reckless ideological and political gamble with our economy by instituting savage austerity cuts of £81 billion. His aim is to use the debt crisis as cover to slash the welfare state - which is something the right have always hated. He is hoping that the economy will recover enough so that he can announce tax cuts before the next election. he believes this will win the next election for the Tories. That is why the Tories wanted a fixed term five year parliament - because they need at least 5 years for this ideological economic gamble to have a chance to work.

So, if the economic policies being followed by the EU, in Greek debt crisis for example, and in the UK government aren't working, why are they being followed? The answer is simple - neoliberal ideology. This is class war politics. The lesson of the past thirty years is that the capitalist class and their politicians have allowed a world economic crisis to develop by following neoliberal 'free' market dogma, by deregulating financial capitalism (the banking and shadow banking system). Now they are exploiting the outcome of that crisis, and using it to roll back all the democratic gains made by working people in the last century. 

So what does the left do about this? Well, we have to win the economic argument. That is essential. We have to explain to people how the failed 'economic' policies of the neoliberalism got us here. We have to explain how the crisis has been exploited to benefit the people who caused it. We have to debunk the myths about the benefits of the unregulated 'free' market. But most of all, we have to show that we have an alternative which can create jobs and prosperity. That is what the Green Party did in its 2010 election manifesto. We showed that  by investing in creating one million green jobs, and by building housing, by improving public transport, by controlling the banks, and by growing our economy in a sustainable way, we could lift the UK out of the economic crisis it is in.

The reality is that Osborne's reckless ideological gamble with our economy won't work, and when it fails, we have to be ready to strike. The next UK quarter figures are due soon. All the indicators are that they will be very poor - either very low growth, or no growth at all. That is the time we must put the boot it - and hard. People in the UK are beginning to waver in their support for cuts. In the past year support for the cuts has fallen from 69% to 55%, with 45% now against Osborne's savage cuts. Once the British people realise that Osborne's economic 'policy' isn't working the Tories economic competency will be finished. It is then that the Coalition will be in real danger. The Coalition government is a weak and divided government which has only survived because the British people have been conned into believing that it was acting in the national interest, to tackle the economic crisis. Cameron has already been severely wounded by the phone hacking scandal. Its hard to see how the government could survive similar damage to Osborne.

The reality is this; pensions and the welfare state aren't unaffordable; low taxes only benefit the rich; the state is not inherently a bad thing - governments can and should intervene to create jobs, build houses and protect the vulnerable; we can only have a better health service if it is provided by the public sector; privatisation means that you pay more for less; banks can be nationalised and brought under democratic control; co-operation is much more important than competition.

These are the messages that all those who oppose this government; UK-uncut, the Coalition of Resistance; trade unionists, and all the other anti-cuts groups need to get across, and get across soon. The only way we can slay this neoliberal system and get rid of this government is by winning the economic argument. Until we get on with the task of doing that we won't have the power to change things for the better and we won't be able to stop the deliberate destruction by this government of all the things which make this a society worth living in.

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.

Cheshire West Against the Cuts: J30

On Thursday June 30th striking public sector workers and their supporters came together for a rally at the Town Hall in Chester. We had a  turnout of about 350 people and some very good speeches from trade unionists and CWAC supporters. All in all a very good day for the fightback against Cameron's class war government's attempt to make us pay for the failures of financial capitalism.



There is a lot more work to do but we are building resistance in an area which is hardly renowned for left or trade union activism. Long may it continue.