Roosevelt was right; it seems that what we have to fear is fear itself

Despite Cameron and Osborne's best attempts to convince us that we are in recovery, and that we are all getting better off and heading back to the sunny uplands of endless growth, its clear that the crisis hasn't been worked through yet and we still have major problems. Lets consider unemployment; the figures are falling and have been for some time but its obvious that they are being massaged. 'Jobseekers' are being sanctioned for the feeblest of reasons, and no reason at all - like failing to attend a meeting you weren't invited to. There has also been a massive rise in the numbers of 'self employed' people and there are now 1.4 million people on zero hours contracts. Self employment is a convenient way of getting people off the books but it is also a sign that the economy is failing to provide proper jobs for people. So, despite a fall in unemployment to 2.24 million its clear that the real figure is way higher and if you consider underemployment, which has been estimated to be as high as 6 million people, you can see an economy that is failing.

Of course its not just unemployment that concerns people, there are also severe problems with falling living standards, poor housing, growing personal debt and shrinking pensions. This is the result of 30 years of neoliberalism, or Thatcherism as it is better known in the UK. The bright shiny future we were all promised in the 1980s just turned out to be a bonanza for casino capitalism and the super rich. And the super rich are really just a kleptocracy who have made massive gains by asset stripping the public sector and stealing our pensions, making the rest of us poorer in the process. 

Those who caused the great crash of 2008 have escaped without any sanction, banks have been bailed out, and lots of ordinary people have suddenly found themselves much worse off. Children have found they have less prospects than their parents. Not surprisingly governments and politicians have become unpopular and there is real anger about these changes. So who to blame? Well anyone it seems apart from 'ourselves' - in the sense that 'we' voted repeatedly for people who screwed 'us' because 'we' are politically naive - and the people, the capitalist corporations and their tame politicians, who are really to blame for the mess we are in. 

And there we have it. Lots of angry people, fearful for the future, feeling they have been left behind in a time of austerity, and wanting change. And how do you control those people and deflect them from the real culprits and the real solutions to their problems? You play on the their fears and you offer them simplistic solutions which feed their prejudices. You divide them to rule them, and you use the well worn but effective tactic of scapegoating. "Blame the immigrants, they are taking your jobs. Blame the unemployed, they are benefit scroungers soaking up your hard earned taxes". 

Franklin D. Roosevelt; well aware of the dangers of fear

Which brings us to UKIP which is the vehicle that people are using to vent their anger in the UK because they have been screwed. UKIP, the anti-establishment blokish party of common sense. Except that UKIP is neither anti-establishment nor does it speak any sense. What it does do very effectively is feed on people's fear and and discontent and its clear that if we ever had a UKIP government the very people who voted for it would be screwed even harder by the capitalist class. All of which shows us that Roosevelt was right, what we have to fear is fear itself because it is fear which can be exploited by political demagogues like Nigel Farage for their own ends and fear which blinds people to the truth and makes them act against their own best interests. Make people insecure and it is much easier to control them.

So what is the answer? Hope has to be the antidote to fear and we have to expose the real establishment nature of UKIP, and its policies, such as privatisation of the NHS. We have to promote positive alternatives which will result in the restoration of security for all the people through Social Security and a publicly run public sector. The only political Party which offers this hope is the Green Party. So vote Green in 2014.

Unemployment: Labour and the Tories compete to blame and persecute the victims

Are you unemployed? If you are you are in a pretty tough situation. There clearly aren't enough jobs to go round, and many of the jobs that can be found are pretty poor. Add to that the fact that the minimum wage if you actually get paid it, is inadequate. The reason for this situation is a global economic crisis created by 'free' market capitalism. The great crash of 2008 is still reverberating around the global economy, and the response from western governments - austerity - has made the economic situation worse, not better.

But austerity is not intended to make things better for ordinary people. The intention with austerity is to make ordinary people pay for the mistakes and greed of the bankers, and the tame politicians which support them. To make people pay for a crisis which is not of their own making. For capitalists, the added bonus is that the crisis can be used to suppress wages and attack collective rights and agreements which have benefited workers, slashing pensions and terms and conditions. Its simple, the 1% have taken a larger slice of the economic cake, and have increased their share of wealth to 46% globally, and they have taken that wealth from the rest of  us.

You'd never believe it if you read the Daily Mail but being unemployed has never been easy. I was unemployed in the 1970s. Although I was better off than today's unemployed I still had to deal with the stigma of unemployment and go through the weekly humiliation of standing in the dole queue and signing on. And there were very few jobs going for young people then. I ended up getting a couple of jobs working outdoors on what was called the Youth Opportunities Programme, a government employment scheme. Not great, but at least I was working and being paid for it. And I didn't have to deal with the persecution of workfare and job clubs which today's unemployed are subjected to.

What the Coalition government and its supporters in the capitalist media are doing is seeking to vilify claimants and blame them for their own situation, they are blaming the victims of capitalism. What's worse is that we now hear that Labour are competing with the Tories at their own game in a benefit bashing race to the bottom which is taking us back to the workhouse. How any Labour Party members and supporters can bear this complete betrayal of what the party has stood for is beyond me. But what is certain is that Labour politicians are more concerned with out-Torying the Tories in the hope of being elected than doing the decent thing by the victims of the economic crisis.

There are solutions to helping the unemployed which don't involve workfare or forcing them to take jobs, but none of the three main parties have any interest in pursuing them. If capitalism can't create meaningful work for people to do - and why should it bother to? - then governments must. Those jobs must be green jobs, and they will not only benefit the young and unemployed but they will also help us fight climate change. The solutions, such as One Million Climate Jobs and The Green New Deal  are well thought through and planned alternatives. We need to be actively campaigning in parties, trade unions and wider society to get these solutions adopted otherwise millions face a very bleak future. 

Real change is possible if you vote for the Green Party, and now is the time to start

Would you like to see the return of British Rail and the end of rip-off rail fares? How about an end to tuition fees so that young people can go into higher education without massive debt? And what about a Citizen's Income, so that people can live in dignity if they are disabled or become unemployed, and a financial transaction tax and an end to tax dodging? How about investment in housing and a  Green New Deal to end the misery of poor housing, homelessness and unemployment?  These are all things that millions of people in the UK want, a real change to the endless austerity, economic stagnation and pandering to the rich and corporations which is the stock-in-trade of the Coalition government.

But to bring about these changes those people will have to vote for the Green Party locally, and in the European and general elections. Now is your chance to make a start down that road to positive change. Vote for the Green Party in the local elections on May 2nd! Watch our party political broadcast to find out more, and to help us build a better future visit - join.greenparty.org.uk

Why we must all bow down to "The Market"

Sometime ago I posted on here about the people of the remote Lambayeque Valley in Peru who were threatened by a series of environmental crises, and who sacrificed some of their number and destroyed pyramids they had built to appease the gods in an attempt to save themselves. You see, they believed that the gods were angry and must be appeased if they were to be saved from catastrophe. Needless to say they were wrong and after lasting for 450 years their civilisation was destroyed.

I was reminded of this when I watched Question Time last week. In fact I am reminded of it almost every time I open a newspaper or switch on a radio or television these days. On Question Time the redoubtable Melanie Phillips was one of the pundits telling anyone who could be bothered to listen that there was only one answer to the economic crisis we are in - we must appease "The Market". Like so many others she believes that "The Market" can only be appeased by a few selected actions, the favourite of which appears to be "tax cuts". Cut taxes and all will be well. The crisis will come to an end. There are of course other things which appease "The Market"; they include "privatisation", "flexibility of labour" and another important cut known as "cutting red tape". In fact there are lots of cuts which appease the market. Cutting benefits and cutting public expenditure also keep "The Market" happy.

Of course there is never any acknowledgement by supporters of "The Market" that the great economic crisis we are in might have been caused by "The Market", or even that it is in fact just the latest and greatest in a series of crises caused by "The Market", because "The Market" can never be blamed for anything. We can though, blame everything else, the government, trade unions, public sector, regulators, benefit scroungers, or even the weather. If anything goes wrong the inevitable answer that we get is that we need more of "The Market", not less. Because "The Market" is there to be admired and worshipped by the devout. Its not difficult to imagine Melanie as a Lambayeque priestess administering cuts to the unfortunate sacrificial victims on a Peruvian pyramid. But have no doubt; faith in "The Market" is just that; faith. Its not economics or policy or even ideology, it is a belief system as strong and irrational as the beliefs of the high priests of the Lambayeque Valley. On the day that a new Pope was elected let us not forget that the believers in the true faith are people who believe in "The Market".

Antibiotics - another failure of "The Market"

At the moment, millions of people are being sacrificed on the altar of austerity because that is what "The Market" wants. Not only that but the planet and the people that depend upon it are in danger of being destroyed like the Lambayeque people to suit the needs of "The Market". Yesterday we heard of another failure of "The Market". We are facing a crisis in healthcare due to a lack of effective new antibiotics. This is because "The Market" deems it is not profitable to produce them so they aren't going to be made. Could this be the same "Market" which is feeding antibiotics to farmed animals to make them fatter, rendering the antibiotics we need less effective in the process? Or is it the same "Market" that can't provide us with houses to live in, or vaguely ethical financial services or fairly priced utilities, or was responsible for BSE, or can't provide two billion people with an income of more than $2 a day? The list goes on and on, and so does the madness of  "The Market" and its disciples. But let's make no mistake, if we don't end the tyranny of this mad belief system the fate that befell the people of Lambayeque awaits all of us too.

Neoliberal Labour fail the social justice test - again!

Neoliberal Labour are at it again. This time pandering to the Coalition's class-war driven attack on the unemployed with their own version of Workfare. Labour's new plan - or should that be New Labour's plan? - announced by Ed Balls, is that people who are unemployed for more than two years would be forced to work in some sort of government backed scheme for at least 6 months. And Labour have repeated the Tory mantra that work must pay more than benefits.

So what is wrong with this you may ask? Well there is plenty wrong with it. For a start, unemployment is a failure of Labour's beloved 'free' market to provide meaningful jobs for people. But this can't be admitted, so the unemployed must be blamed for their own predicament, including the 660,000 public sector workers who have lost their jobs under the Coalition. In 'free' market la la land you must always blame the victims never the culprits - i.e. the banks, the tax dodging corporations and the tame politicians who support them, the very people who created the economic crisis we are now all paying for. Secondly, if people on benefits get more money than those in work that tells us the simple truth that those in work are not earning enough. Under the previous New Labour government, Gordon Brown's tax credits for working families simply subsidised cheap labour for the tax dodging corporations. It was a form of corporate welfarism. Thirdly, the unemployed and low paid are exactly the sort of people who ought to expect and allegedly 'progressive' party like Labour to give them some support in difficult times. Instead of this reactionary nonsense, Labour should be committed to full employment, as it used to be, and guarantee every unemployed person a meaningful job. But Labour doesn't have the 'Balls' to do that.

What is the answer? At the last general election in its 2010 manifesto, the Green Party came up with policies to halve the deficit and create one million new jobs in the green sector - in areas like home insulation - to tackle the crisis in the economy and fight climate change. This carefully costed programme, paid for by shelving wasteful and unnecessary projects like Trident, and taxes on environmental pollution and the rich, would have put the UK in a much stronger position than it is now. There would not have been swinging cuts in the public sector and no privatisation of the NHS. There is a real alternative of hope to the despair and destruction that neoliberal austerity is wreaking on the people of Europe and the UK. We can bring about positive change if people vote for us. Do you want to be part of a positive future? Then come and join us.

Osborne's cuts have nothing to do with the deficit

In my last post I blogged about how the 'free' market was working - for the banks, corporations and the capitalist media (if that seems contradictory to the title of the that post - you 'll have to read the post).  Now I have to follow that up with the simple fact that austerity is working. Its working for the 1%, for the George Osbornes of this world, that is why it is being imposed on the people of Europe and the USA. The real aim of austerity is not to solve the 'problem' of the deficit, or to revive our economy. The real aim is to destroy the welfare state, and to reduce the unemployed, and the working poor to third world levels of destitution, and to destroy collective provision.

The poorest and most vulnerable people in our society, the disabled, the unemployed, and the working poor, are the first targets of austerity, The middle classes come next. The aim of austerity is to return the UK to the nineteenth century, and to roll back all the gains in pensions, conditions of employment, living standards, and healthcare, which we have obtained through the trade unions and our democratic process in the past 100 years.

George Osborne - destroying the welfare state in the UK

Osborne is a bare-faced liar. He knows very well that his description of the UK economy as some sort of household budget is a complete fiction. Either that or he is stupid. National economies are not like household economies. National economies can live with high levels of debt for long periods. Governments can borrow far more cheaply than companies or families. They can also create money. Not one penny of Osborne's original £81 billion of cuts was necessary. The structural deficit is convenient cover for an ideologically driven Tory class war on the British people. Its something that they have dreamed of for years - destroy the welfare state and privatise the NHS and the public sector. Now, under the cover of an economic crisis their friends in the banks created they have the opportunity to inflict their 'free' market ideology on the UK. Don't believe me? The read this quote from Michael Burke in the Guardian today:

"The stated aim of "austerity" is not growth but fiscal balance. According to its supporters it is self-evident that, like any household, if you cut your spending you will have more money left at the end of each month. For governments, this is reflected in current spending not capital spending – any fool can cut needed investment on school buildings, rail and roads and claim that things are improving. In official projections, the deficit on the current budget was expected to be falling to £80bn in the current financial year, down £34bn in two years. Is this current deficit falling? [no]. If not, austerity is failing in its stated objective, and persisting with it implies there is actually a different policy objective of lowering wages and benefits, which is what has happened.

Don't be fooled by this Coalition government. Austerity is working very well indeed because the Chancellor's cuts programme is a direct attack on the living standards of you and your family. It is designed to make the rich richer and the rest of us poorer. If it succeeds your children will be poorer than you are and your grandchildren will be poorer than your children. You only have one option and that is to join together with people who are fighting the cuts and stop the greatest heist in history in its tracks.

Banker's bonuses: why we are being screwed

In September 2008 after the collapse of Lehman Bros bank it became obvious to economists and senior government officials that the world financial system was in danger of collapse, and that banks would be wiped out in the process. In the UK Gordon Brown's Labour government took action and bailed out Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and Halifax Bank of Scotland and pushed through a merger between HBoS and Lloyds TSB. In the process the taxpayer acquired 84% of RBS and 47% of Lloyds TSB. The full cost of the UK bailout taking into account Northern Rock and other banks was a whopping £1.2 trillion. The bailout was repeated in other countries, with the TARP, for example, in the USA, and lead to the stabilisation of the global banking system.

What is critical about this is that if the bailout hadn't happened all the banks would have gone bust - not just those who were directly bailed out by the taxpayer. Since 2008 'free' market apologists have tried to claim that banks such as Barclays and HSBC were always OK, as if they would not have crashed, but this is not the case, the fact is that the global banking system was saved by taxpayers.

Lehman Bros HQ

Up to the collapse of Lehmans a culture of huge bonus payouts had become the norm in banking, and in fact when Lehman's collapsed they were still trying to pay out $6 billion in bonuses. After the bailout the culture of huge bonuses continued even at taxpayer 'owned' banks, much to the dismay of the taxpayers themselves. The banking collapse lead directly to an economic collapse which in turn has lead to a sovereign debt crisis.In the process, the UK economy has contracted by 7%. Having paid for the bailout we are now paying for the crisis with the Coalition government's austerity programme. The cost is increasing unemployment, pay freezes, pension cuts  and an attack on the living standards of all but the wealthiest. Bad as things are in the UK, they are far worse in countries like Greece and Ireland, and the Eurozone is itself in danger of collapse.

What does all this tell us? It shows the power of financial capitalism and that our democracies are dominated not just by financial capitalism but also the other big corporations. In the West, which has been hardest hit, politicians have put the interests of financial capitalism above the rights and interests of their own people. The aim has been to preserve the capitalist system and to continue 'business as usual' at all costs, even though it is obvious that the austerity programme in the UK and elsewhere isn't working, at that it will probably make things worse rather than better.

The latest manifestation of the row about bankers bonuses centres around Stephen Hester who is the CEO of taxpayer 'owned' RBS. He was awarded £963,000 in shares as a bonus this year, despite the fact that RBS is still struggling and 33,000 employees have lost their jobs. David Cameron claims there is nothing the government can do about this but that is clearly not true. The Independent revealed that there is nothing in Hester's contract that would prevent the government denying him a bonus. There have been claims that the RBS board would have resigned but so what? They are not the only people who can run a bank. The fact is that the government is taking sides and its not our side, its the bankers side. They are putting the interests of capitalists above our interests. RBS is clearly not being run in the national interest. The bank should be fully nationalised and turned into a green national investment bank to make the loans that  businesses need to help create jobs. That is something that RBS and the other private sector banks are failing to do.

The benefits cap is an attack on the victims of austerity

You have to hand it to the political right. They are the real masters of the politics of divide and rule. Recently they have been busy dividing public sector workers and private sector workers over pay and pensions. Now they are dividing those in work against the unemployed over the benefits cap. Cleverly, they have come up with, as they always do, a simple ruse to get the support of those in work, for their attack on the victims of austerity - the so-called benefit scroungers. This is typically simplistic right-wing distortion of the truth and is very effective.

In case you want to jump to any conclusions about my views - I think that people should find work if they can. But the whole issue of work is far more complicated than the media would have you believe.The problem for people in the UK is that they live in a capitalist economic system which creates unemployment, which increases in time of inevitable periodic crises, thus preventing the unemployed  from getting meaningful work. There are three important issues which those who support a benefits cap don't want to discuss, they are;

1. If benefits exceed the average wage, that clearly means the average wage is too low. Low pay has been a chronic problem in the UK for many years. The introduction of a minimum wage under the Labour government helped to redress this problem, but the minimum wage is still not a living wage. If workers were realistically rewarded for the work they do this wouldn't be a problem.

2. Unemployment; the real issue which underlies this whole debate about benefit caps is the unemployment caused by the Coalition's austerity programme. The capitalist economic system has always produced unemployment. It was Marx who identified this problem as the 'reserve army of labour'. We need a government which has the guts and gumption to create jobs, rather than destroying them through austerity. In the Green Party, we explained how this could be done in our manifesto with a call for a Green New Deal to create one million jobs.

3. Housing benefits payments at £20 billion wouldn't be so great if we had enough social housing with controlled rents instead of reliance on the rip-off private sector. Over the past 30 years successive governments have failed to provide social housing on anywhere near the scale needed. The UK has a chronic shortage of homes with many of the poor living in substandard housing because of the market ideology pursued by New Labour and the Tories. Promises to build new homes simply haven't been met.

New Labour and the Tories have sought to hide their neoliberal economic failures by blaming the victims, and dividing the nation, through bashing the unemployed, and now, a benefit cap. What we need is real economic and social change to create a society where jobs are the priority, and hard working families receive the real benefits of the wealth they create. The only political party in the UK which has a costed and coherent programme to bring about that change within the context of the growing threat of climate change is the Green Party. Come and join us in making that change happen.

Forced free labour is pure Fascism

What do you call it when someone forces you to work for nothing, and who really benefits? Most people would call it slave labour, and rightly so, although I prefer to call it unwaged-slavery to distinguish it from wage-slavery. The latter occurs when people have to take low paid jobs, and I don't mean minimum wage jobs, because they have no choice. There is plenty of wage-slavery in the world and the beneficiaries are large corporations, many of which are household names. Wage-slavery is the basis of the Chinese 'economic miracle', how else do we get some many value-for-money commodities here in the West?

In the UK, as part of the latest project to humiliate and denigrate the 'benefit scroungers' - i.e. the unemployed - the Tory-led government has instituted a system where the unemployed are forced to work for corporations for no money, otherwise they lose their benefits. This is something I've blogged about in previous posts.  But now one of the victims of unwaged-slavery, Cait Reilly, who was forced to work in Poundland in order to get the princely sum of £54 benefit, has decided to fight back. She has instituted a judicial review of forced free labour and I wish her every success in her attempt to get back some dignity for the unemployed.

Of course, Cait's attempt to get justice for the unemployed in the face of the government's onslaught on the victims of capitalism has aroused to ire of pundits like the highly-paid Jan Moir, right-wing populist and uber-reactionary of this parish. According to Moir:

"........her stance is deeply insulting to those whose jobs actually do entail sweeping floors and stacking shelves. And who do so without complaint to feed their own families and to help to pay Cait Reilly’s benefits allowances. For nobody owes this girl a living. Least of all those who work for a living".

Wrong! Your stance, Ms Moir, is the real insult to all shopworkers, most of whom have to struggle on the minimum wage, which is little better than the £1.33 Cait was being 'paid' for her work. The truth is that unwaged-slavery of this sort can only undermine the conditions and pay for the paid shopworkers you profess to support still further, and the real beneficiaries are the corporations who make profits from this naked exploitation. "work for a living" is a nice way of putting it. Working to survive would be a more accurate description. Forced labour, which was used to such great effect by the Nazis, when an estimated12 million people were forced to work, and trade unionists were crushed, has no place in a civilsed society, it is pure fascism.

"Work sets you free" - the sign used at Nazi forced labour camps, most notoriously at Auschwitz 1

There is a solution for the 99%

Growing economic inequality in the USA, and throughout the West, is something that I have commented on before in this blog, and it is well documented. The incomes of middle class Americans have been stagnant or falling since the 1970's whilst those of the capitalist class have been growing. According to Rupert Cornwell in today's Independent:

"Income disparities are wider than at any time since the Wall Street crash of 1929, and almost 50 per cent of financial wealth in the US is now in the hands of 1 per cent of the population."

The American middle classes are really suffering the impact of 30 years of neoliberalism, and the effects of the financial crash, which began with the sub-prime mortgage scandal. Its important to make a distinction because 'middle class' means something different in the USA and the UK. In the UK, the middle classes are well-off professionals such as doctors and lawyers, whereas in the USA the term 'middle class' includes working families that would be described as 'working class' in the UK. Middle class Americans are crucial to the USA because they are at the heart of America.

Because the USA has always had privatised healthcare and higher education and a weak welfare system, the American middle classes have always lead a potentially precarious existence. If you get ill, you get large health bills, if you can't work because of your illness you can lose your job and your house. In a short space of time you could go from a fairly comfortable lifestyle to being out on the street. In the past the US economy has been strong enough to ensure that this didn't happen to most Americans. That is no longer the case. Millions of Americans are now finding themselves in a situation where they are living hand to mouth, knowing that if they lose their job they will lose everything they had. They are living in fear of joining the millions of families who have already suffered this fate.

We are the 99% is a website which documents the fears and suffering of middle class Americans. Many of these people are hanging on just one paycheck away from disaster and shouldering thousands of dollars of debt.

This photo is typical of the plight of people on We are the 99%

We are the 99%, like occupywallst, which I have been following from its start in mid September, is a reaction against the bailout of Wall Street, and growing poverty, unemployment and economic inequality. The Tea Party was also a reaction to the bailout which came largely from the middle class right and which was rapidly absorbed, manipulated and funded by the capitalist class as I reported here:

"That is what the Tea Party is all about. Millions of Americans are angry, bewildered and frustrated at the recent crash and the fact they aren't getting richer anymore. But there is a huge problem here - they are directing their anger against the wrong enemy. The people who caused the crash - the financial capitalists and corporations of Wall Street aren't being blamed. Instead, the anger is being directed at the government." 

Unlike the Tea Party, the occupywallst movement is really about social justice. It is a recognition that the growing inequality has to be reversed, and that the neoliberalist policies pursued by successive governments have failed the American people. As yet the movement appears to be leaderless and doesn't have a coherent programme and specific demands for change. But it is growing and spreading to other cities in the USA. It is beginning to cause concern to politicians like Obama, who have begun to take notice.

What should the demands of the occupywallst movement be? Well, it's not for me to say, but if you read about the problems of the 99% the solutions are fairly obvious. What Americans need is freedom from fear through access to jobs and public provision - in health, education and social security. These are things that we have in the UK, but we are in the process of losing, due to the Coalitions government's austerity programme, if we don't fight for them. Like us, Americans need a Green New Deal to provide jobs and tackle climate change, they need a properly funded system of public healthcare and higher education. What they need is social security as a right, not welfare as a handout.

One of the greatest of Americans tried to ensure that Americans had all these things but was unable to complete his project before he died. His name was Franklin D. Roosevelt and he enshrined the freedom from fear in his economic second Bill of Rights. His bill of rights is what the American middle classes need. The occupywallst movement don't need to invent a programme because they already have a ready made one, now they have re-discover it and fight for it.

Cameron is wrong about the riots

Since last week, when the UK riots came to a halt, apart from the universal condemnation of the looters, there have been two responses: one from the political right; and another from the left. The right have sought to paint the riots as being all about criminality, and about individual bad behaviour. David Cameron has re-iterated this theme a number of times in the past week, also calling for the rioters to be hammered by the courts. Its typical of the right that they should portray the riots in such simplistic terms. Firstly, most right wingers don't want the riots to be viewed by people in a wider context - the context of poverty, joblessness, exclusion and social despair. That's understandable because if people were to see the wider context they would appreciate how damaging and destructive the right's neoliberal ideology is; Secondly, they know that such a response panders to the prejudices of many of our citizens; Thirdly, its crucial for Cameron and the political right that individuals be blamed because the government might not survive if it was widely believed that it was responsible for the troubles. At the very least re-election would be a remote possibility. So, its hardly surprising that Cameron has been seeking to monopolise the media with calls for 'tough' sentencing which amount to revenge, not justice, as two men in Cheshire discovered recently.

Unlike David Cameron, the left have looked for the causes of the rioting. This is not to excuse the behaviour of the rioters, just simply a recognition the we don't live in a vacuum, and that people's behaviour can be affected by the environment they live in. Part of that environment is that people see our society's leaders, including politicians and businessmen, with their fingers in the till, and getting away with it. Cameron himself was implicated in the expenses scandal as were other cabinet ministers. The phone hacking scandal has implicated the police and other senior people in the media, and then we have the bankers who crashed our economy and carried off big bonuses as a result. Naomi Klein has written a perceptive article about the wider global political context of the riots. Its not just here in the UK that people perceive that the rich elites are robbing us and getting away with it. She said:

"Of course London's riots weren't a political protest. But the people committing night-time robbery sure as hell know that their elites have been committing daytime robbery. "

As said in a previous post, there is nothing new about the recent riots and academic research has shown that austerity measures of the kind we have seen in the UK, with £81 billion worth of ideological cuts imposed by George Osbourne on our society, can cause rioting. The researchers, Jacopo Ponticelli and Hans-Joachim Voth, concluded:

"Nobody knows where and when social unrest is going to happen again, nor the scale it will take. However, history suggests we should not underestimate the consequences of social chaos. Germans to the present day remember Heinrich Brüning, known as the "hunger chancellor", who led the country from 1929 to 1932. He presided over an unprecedented austerity programme. At the same time, the Weimar Republic, Germany's first attempt at democracy, disintegrated amid a wave of social unrest and political violence."

The fact is that David Cameron is wrong about the causes of the riots and wrong with his views on sentencing. Far from being squeaky clean Cameron has soiled hands. He has also flipped on this issue. Do you remember the infamous 'hug a hoodie' speech where Cameron said we should be understanding about young people who commit crime? If not read this. Cameron is the Tory's version of a Blairite poster boy who is not much more than a front for an extremist Tory Party whose favourites include Thatcherite monsters from the crypt like William Hague and Eric Pickles.

If you want to, you can choose to believe that the austerity measures in the UK have nothing whatsoever to do with the riots, or you can choose to say that despite austerity and poverty no one should ever be involved in looting and causing wanton damage to life and property, and that the people who have done this should have acted responsibly instead. So why didn't the bankers, politicians, phone hackers and corrupt cops, who are supposed to know better than the 'feral rats' who rioted, measure up to being responsible? Why didn't they set an example? Is it simply that they are too greedy or is it that they knew they would never properly be held to account and face the consequences of their actions? And don't forget, who was it who sought to excuse the actions of the bankers? Why non other than Mr David Cameron himself at the Tory Party conference.

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."

London riots - here we go again!

If, like me, you are middle aged, you will have seen many riots in the UK. Brixton, Broadwater Farm, and Toxteth are some of the the better known examples in the past 30 years or so. These riots are always triggered by an incident involving the heavy handed policing of members of an ethnic minority community, usually black. The Broadwater Farm riot was triggered by the death of a black woman, Cynthia Jarrett, when the police were searching her home. The riots always occur in  communities that are characterised by high unemployment, poverty and poor housing. Tottenham has a history of these problems, Broadwater Farm is just one example, and we still have not heard the true facts about the mysterious death of Smiley Culture, who died whilst in police custody in his own home in April 2011. Allegedly he stabbed himself. A thousand people protested after that incident. What the riots show is the simmering resentment that exists in many inner city communities in the UK.

In the case of the Tottenham riot, which took place on Saturday, supporters of the  family of Mark Duggan, who was shot and killed by the police last week, staged a peaceful protest. The police failed to respond to requests from the family to speak to a senior officer. The family and their supporters were kept waiting for hours. The police clearly failed to deal reasonably with the family, sparking further anger. After the Duggan shooting incident, we heard that a police officer had been shot, implying that Duggan had fired on the police, now we hear that both the bullets that were fired came from police weapons. Did someone fire on the police? We don't know. But what we do know is that the police have a history of putting out misleading information in the aftermath of incidents of this kind. In the case of Jean Charles De Menezes, in 2005, the police said that he had behaved suspiciously, and had vaulted a barrier at Stockwell tube station. This turned out not to be true. Jean Charles De Menezes was just a man on his way to work. The police killed an innocent man, and eye-witnesses to the shooting later claimed that they had no need to shoot him dead.

There is a clear pattern here. Communities plagued by unemployment, poverty and poor housing. Heavy handed, inept and racially dubious policing. The police putting out misleading statements about what happened. The police being used to keep a lid on the simmering community resentment. The establishment mouthing platitudes and making token gestures about investment and regeneration.  And so it goes on and on and on. This is 21st century Britain, a place where institutional racism and poverty are still being swept under the carpet, where mass unemployment, and four million people needing housing, has become acceptable . Riot inquiry follows riot inquiry but the same old pattern is still repeated. Kack-handed responses by Home Secretaries like Theresa May, who today launched a tirade against the "criminals" who burned and looted. Yes, Theresa, it was wrong and should be condemned, but why did it happen on your watch? Why were so many people involved? Why did it spread so widely? Tell us the answers to that Theresa, instead of mouthing off the usual platitudes about criminality.

The people who really suffer in the end are the people of the afflicted communities themselves. They are the ones whose houses and businesses are destroyed. I wonder what would happen if people took their resentments, arson and riots to Kensington or Mayfair? What sort of police response would we see then? A very different one to one we saw in Tottenham on Saturday night I'm sure. The point is that nothing will ever change until we have an economic system that can provide decent housing and jobs for all, and a police force which is there to protect citizens, instead of helping to keep them under control. Clearly capitalism is not that economic system, and as long as it exists, so will these problems.

"Free" market corporate domination means mass unemployment - forever

Ever had the feeling you've been conned? Well, you have been, because I've no doubt you've been told that the "free" market will make us all better off, because that is what we are told by politicians and economists on a daily basis. The truth is the opposite, the "free" market will make us all poorer, and that is what is happening in the UK today. But this isn't just happening in the UK, it's happening all over the world.

The most instructive place to find out what is really going on is the USA. This is where the "free" market ideology known as neoliberalism started, at the Chicago School in the mid 1970s. Since the late 1970s incomes for working people in the USA haven't risen in real terms but incomes for the rich (i.e. capitalists) have boomed. The result of this is increasing inequality and increasing poverty. Through globalisation, which is a form of corporate economic imperialism, neoliberalism has spread worldwide.

The principal outcomes of the neoliberal project, which uses methods such as privatisation, deregulation, outsourcing, downsizing and shareholder value, have been squeezing the living standards of the working and middle classes, creating ever greater inequality, rising poverty and rising unemployment.

Wherever you look, in Europe for example, you'll find mass unemployment, even in that much vaunted economic powerhouse, Germany. And unemployment is rising inexorably in the West - 10% (the real figure is nearer 20%) in the USA, 20% in Spain, 6.7% in Germany, 9.8% in France, 8.7% in Italy. The average for the EU is a staggering 9.6%. Moreover, unemployment in these countries mainly affects the young. There are over 1 million unemployed people under 25 in the UK.

I can remember a time, not that long ago, when full employment was an aim for governments in the West. This is no longer the case. Such is the "free" market corporate domination of our democratic systems that the modern assumption by politicians is that job creation is purely a task of the "free" market - governments shouldn't be doing anything about it. If the market can't create enough jobs - that's just tough, apparently. We are told that all will be better in the future. But there is no guarantee of this. In fact, if we continue down this road, things are inevitably going to getting worse. Remember the Banana Republics? - countries dominated by Western corporations with corrupt politicians, wealthy elites, and the mass of the population living in poverty. That is where we are heading. Perhaps the UK will become the world's first turnip republic.

In an interesting Guardian article, the macroeconomist Dean Baker reports how American economists - the very people who dominate economic policy globally - accept unemployment without a second thought. Not only that but they seem to think that it is a good thing that you and I should become poorer. This quote is very illuminating:

"The fact that the overwhelming majority of economists in policy positions failed to see the signs of this disaster coming, and supported the policies that brought it on, did not seem to be a major concern for most of the economists at the convention. Instead, they seemed more intent on finding ways in which they could get ordinary workers to accept lower pay and reduced public benefits in the years ahead. This would lead to better outcomes in their models."

How can this be possible? How can it be that one of the goals of economists is to make you and me poorer? The answer is that this isn't economics; it's right-wing political ideology masquerading as economics. Economics as a discipline has become completely subsumed to the ruling capitalist ideology.

How do we get out of this mess? We have to ditch the “free” market rules all ideology for a start. We need to have governments, which are free from corporate domination and are prepared to intervene in the economy and actively create meaningful jobs. We need a vibrant public sector providing services such as health and education without the profit motive. Most of all, we need political parties and politicians who recognise the need for positive change and can bring these measures into effect. Currently the Green Party is the only party in the UK that has these policies. Come and join us if you want to see real change happen.