The Green Party Promises £165 per week pensions

The Green Party's policy on pensions is great news for pensioners in the UK. See the GP news release below:

Today, on National Pensions Action Day (Monday 6 April), the Green Party announces its key election pledge for pensioners - a £165 a week non-means-tested citizens' pension for every pensioner in the UK. The pledge will form part of the Green New Deal for Older People, which the Green Party will launch in the build-up to this year's elections (1).

Jean Lambert MEP, the Green Party's spokesperson on social affairs, said today:

"The Green Party today celebrates Pensions Action Day with possibly the best action a political party could take for British pensioners: a policy that would lift all our pensioners out of poverty."

The National Pensioners Convention (NPC) have been calling for a pension at or above the official poverty level, which is defined as 60% of median population earnings less housing costs.For 2007/8 this would have meant a single person’s pension of £151 per week - compared to the actual full state pension of £90.70 and a pensions credits guarantee level of about £120 a week. The NPC has recently pointed out that:

- Between 1997 and 2006, the number of British people living in severe poverty – defined as living on less than 40% of median population income – increased by 600,000.

- Last year the poorest quarter of UK pensioner households saw their incomes rise by less than 1%, well below inflation. The poorest single pensioners saw their real incomes drop by 4%.

- At least 15% of UK pensioners – over 1.5m older people – are living in persistent poverty (below 60% median population income for three out of the last four years).

- Pensioner poverty in the UK has risen in the last year by 300,000 - equivalent to 822 people a day - and now reaches 2.5m (1 in 4 older people). Two thirds of these pensioners are women.

Jean Lambert, who was elected in 1999 as London's Green MEP and now sits on the European Parliament's Inter-Group on Ageing, commented:

"If the other parties are unwilling to lift pensioners out of poverty, then it's clear pensioners will need to elect Greens to fight their corner. Voting Green is about building a better future - and that includes a secure economic future for older people."

Jean Lambert MEP will lead the Green Party delegation in support of the NPC demonstration in London. She will be joined by Darren Johnson AM, the Green Party's trade & industry spokesperson and its parliamentary candidate for Lewisham Deptford, and Cllr Romayne Phoenix of Lewisham Borough Council.

The G20 Protests

Being someone who has attended demonstrations and taken part in pickets I have experienced police brutality first hand. For example, during the miners strike I was kicked on one picket line and on another one the pickets, including women - some with young children in pushchairs - were taunted by the police - this included throwing stones at us - they wanted to provoke a response so they had an excuse to pile in and give us a beating. On that occasion nobody on our side reacted - we continued to picket peacefully.

So, our police have a history of battering demonstrators - it even happened on the Countryside Alliance demo when we had the amazing sight of toffs being battered by police on our tellies. There is no doubt that some police officers enjoy the chance to exercise gratuitous violence with impunity. Why impunity? - because they always get away with it. Hardly surprising when the they get unconditional support from the 'free' press who always brand protesters as violent/anarchist/loony leftist/ terrorist agitators. Clearly the press were looking for a good riot on April the first. If you watch footage of the protests you will see that in many shots there are more photographers than protesters.



The police know that a good ruckus is great PR for them. They can provoke trouble and batter people and then claim that they need more powers, equipment and money to deal with 'public disorder'. Governments, who slavishly support the police and their operational independence, are only too happy to oblige.

So we come to the sad death of Ian Tomlinson who followed in the footsteps of Jean Charles De Menezes and Blair Peach. The Guardian's video footage shows him being batoned and knocked over from behind by a riot policeman as he walked away peacefully. Did this assault contribute to his death from a heart attack several minutes later? No doubt there will be many arguments about that over the coming months.

One thing is certain though, if a demonstrator had assaulted a policeman and he had died a few minutes later from a heart attack, that demonstrator would have been arrested and would now be on a murder charge.

Green Party Spring Conference 2009

The spring GP conference was held in Black pool last weekend. I went down for the Friday and Saturday sessions. It was odd being back in Blackpool after such a long time, The place isn't at its best in March but it is certainly suffering at the moment with many shops closed and boarded up. No doubt some will re-open when the season starts but the whole place looks badly run down.

The conference was held in the Winter Gardens, which have seen better days, but also have a faded grandeur. On the Friday we had a speech by party Leader Caroline Lucas which can be seen here. Caroline attacked the government for failing to take steps to implement a Green New Deal which will provide much needed employment and investment in infrastructure to help combat climate change.



A number of motions were passed including:

C01 - Alternative Economic Strategy - which commits the party to campaign for an emergency programme of economic and social reconstruction, based on the proposals of the Green New Deal pamphlet, but broadened and reinforced to transform fundamentally the current financial and industrial system.

C02 - Migration - which noting that migration is going to be an important issue in the forthcoming European elections, and the need for a progressive and humane policy, the migration policy of the European Green Party was adopted as our own.

I attended a workshop given by the Green Economics Institute. Miriam Kennet gave us an interesting talk which revealed she has has recently been invited to give talks to various government departments on green economics including GCHQ! I'm not holding my breath waiting for the spooks to go green!

On the Saturday I attended two workshops on Transition Towns and Climate Ge0-engineering. The first included a discussion about the situation in Totnes and we talked about our ongoing frustration with green activists who don't want to get their hands dirty by getting involved in real politics. The Climate Ge0-engineering workshop focused on Biochar - that's charcoal to you and me. It seems there are plans to plant millions of hectares of monoculture forest around the globe, then chop them down and pyrolise the biomass to produce fuel and bury the resulting biochar in the soil. There is a very good article by George Monbiot in today's Guardian which exposes this potty idea. Biochar has the potential to do enormous damage so lets hope the article helps to sink it.

One Law for All - Stop Sharia Law in the UK

On 7th March a rally was held in London to protest against the creeping adoption of sharia law in the UK. Sharia law is reactionary, regressive and misogynistic. At its extremes it can lead to people being stoned to death or executed. Proponents of sharia such as Rowan Williams the Archbishop of Canterbury have claimed that sharia should be used for the settlement of civil matters and our anti-secular government is sympathetic to this idea thinking that it will improve social cohesion. This is totally misguided.

It is unacceptable to have a parallel legal system, overseen by sham courts, which will deny UK citizens their basic human rights. The adoption of sharia is merely pandering to extreme political Islam. At the rally A C Grayling said -

'Once you start fragmenting society, once you start allowing different groups in society to apply different standards, you get very profound injustices and it is almost always women who suffer these injustices. We have to fight hard to keep one law for everybody.'

And he is absolutely right. If you want to find out more and help stamp out this injustice visit the One Law for All website by following this link. Complacency is not an option.

Our fundamental freedoms are under threat from organised religion

I am an atheist. I always have been except when I was young enough not to know any better. It's never bothered me that other people are religious, even though I think the Abrahamic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - are a bad thing, until recently. The fact is that, worldwide, religion is in decline except where it has been re-inforced by force in theocratic countries like Iran. As religion gets pushed into a corner it becomes more strident, more extreme, less tolerant (and those religions have never been good at tolerance), and more violent.

The response of Islam has been to threaten with death anyone who 'defames' - i.e. criticises it - such as Salman Rushdie for writing the book The Satanic Verses. Rushdie was famously subject to a fatwa - a death sentence - by the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei for offending Islamic sensibilities. To their credit the British government of the time protected Rushdie though one wonders if the same would happen today. The violence and bullying of the Muslims has , to some extent, worked. When the infamous Danish Cartoons of Mohammed incident occurred, provoking a violent Muslim backlash, many Western governments failed to rush to defend free speech. The European Union was notably silent.

Now Christians, having seen the success of the Muslims, are jumping on the bandwagon. They haven't resorted to violence yet - except in the United States where abortion clinics have been attacked and doctors and nurses have been threatened and killed - but they have resorted to a vindictive and dishonest campaign against atheists and those who seek to undo religious privilege in the UK. A good example of this was a recent post on CiF in which Mary Kelly said that Christians were being persecuted in the UK. This is typical of the line that British Christians have adopted. Kelly starts her post by writing that Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor - head of the Catholic church in the UK - is being elevated to the House of Lords and then goes on the talk about Christians being persecuted????? The persecution claim is simply untrue. Why? Well, the Queen is head of the Church of England, there are 26 Bishops in the House of Lords, Christians control thousands of schools in the 'state' education system. Need I say more? What is happening here is that Christianity is declining. The only bit that is growing is, like Islam, the more extreme evangelical wing. As it declines it becomes more strident, and in the case of Christians apparently, more dishonest.

Meanwhile the Muslims appear to be using all the means they can to silence dissenters or critics of their religion. Fifty seven Muslim countries, the largest block in the United Nations, are attempting to pass a binding resolution which would outlaw 'defamation' of religion. The aim is to silence anyone who dares to criticise Islam - globally. The UN used to be the global defender of freedoms with its Universal Declaration on Human Rights. Now it is in danger of becoming the enforcer of theocratic tyranny. If you want to know more watch this video with Christopher Hitchens.

I have no doubt their are decent Christians and Muslims who deplore both the dishonesty and the tyranny but we never seem to hear from them. Its time for them to speak out and defend human rights and the benefits to all of living in a secular society. If they don't their religions can only become more extreme, more violent and more irrelevant to the majority of humans on the planet. Meanwhile, if you value your freedom to think for yourself you can help fight the religious threat to your freedom by joining and supporting the National Secular Society.

The Age of Stupid

I don't usually promote or review films or books on this blog but this is a special case. The Age of Stupid is a film where the action takes place in 2055, on an earth ravaged by climate change. Pete Poselthwaite stars as a man living alone who looks back at archive footage of 2008 and wonders why we didn't do more to combat climate change.

He is not alone. There are many of us now who wonder why so little action is being taken by our government, and other governments. We have a climate change minister and bill and the promise of 'green' jobs being created by the government, but little in the way of positive change. What's more the government appears to want to renew 'business as usual' which not only means fat cats snouts in the trough but an endless quest for growth which the environment cannot sustain.

Hopefully, The Age of Stupid will influence more of the undecided that they need to adapt their lives by reducing carbon outputs, developing more local, resilient economies and demanding real government action.

The Age of Stupid premiere's on Sunday 15th March and can be viewed in cinemas around the country.

Back to the workhouse

Well, it had to happen. New Labour's mission to take us back to the nineteenth century is nearing completion with the latest welfare reform package. The claim that the reforms are there to help people back to work rings very hollowly indeed. Lavish handouts to bankers contrast with the battering that those who the bankers have made redundant can expect.

The whole package, modeled on the American workfare system, amounts to the privatisation of welfare in the UK. And guess who designed it? David Freud a banker and chum of Gordon Brown's who has since defected to the Tories. While bankers still get their taxpayer bailout bonuses the unemployed are expected to subsist on a humiliating £60.50 per week, and for this, they will have to jump through a number of degrading hoops. Single parents, with children as young as one, will be dragooned into seeking work. If we had a decent child care system like they have in Sweden it would be far easier for single parents to look for work with the confidence that their children were being properly cared for but no such luck in Gradgrind Britain.

When I was unemployed in the 1970's unemployment benefit, payable to people for twelve months, was an entitlement - not a hand-out. I'm sure that the million-plus people who lose their jobs for no fault of their own in the next year will appreciate New Labour's 'generosity'. I suppose at least they are not being expected to sweep the streets wearing Day-Glo vests with 'unemployed' or 'welfare recipient' blazoned across them - not yet anyway.

What is wrong with protectionism?

Have you noticed how Gordon Brown and other world leaders have been banging on recently about the dangers of protectionism? Apparently, protectionism is bad and if we became protectionist that would make our difficult economic position even worse. Before we look at protectionism its worth remembering that these are the same leaders who supported the neo-liberal economic policies which have caused so much damage to people's lives recently - so would you trust them to get this right?

For these are the very same people who support globalisation, and globalisation is a system of economic imperialism in which the giant capitalist corporations loot the riches of poorer nations - minerals, oil, coffee, rubber etc - whilst being able to freely exploit their people as cheap labour. Globalisation is presented to us as an inevitable development of international and national economies, but there is nothing inevitable about it. Globalisation is maintained by capitalist rules enforced through the WTO, IMF and World Bank. Globalisation increases world poverty by moving wealth from the poor to the rich.

So what about protectionism? Well protectionism - trade and tariff barriers - was what made us - Americans and Western Europeans - relatively wealthy. We practiced it a century or so ago and built up our economies in the process. Now we seek to deny that opportunity to developing nations by forcing them to open up their markets to the big corporations and by privatising their infrastructure. No wonder Gordon and Co. are so keen on knocking protectionism. Protectionism is bad for capitalists but good for the developing world.

In a recent excellent Guardian article, Larry Elliot slayed the myth of the evils of protectionism and showed that it is necessary for economic development:

"The historical evidence is conclusive: free trade is good, protectionism is bad. Except that isn't what the evidence actually shows. The Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang has demonstrated that no country since the dawning of the modern age has managed to industrialise successfully without protectionism."

The same article showed that the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff - oft quoted as worsening the Great Depression - did nothing of the kind.

The truth is that protectionism is bad for the economic exploitation inherent in the globalisation project. That is the real reason why Gordon and the G7 are against it. But countries have an absolute right to protect their economic infrastructure from the chill wind of capitalist exploitation and the race to the bottom in terms of labour and environmental standards. Cheap labour is simply unfair competition. We need fair trade, not free trade.

The Paymasters of the Universe

Bankers certainly know how to pay themselves even if they don't know how to run banks. And once again we are being told to lay off the big bankers and their bonuses. Apparently, even though the men and women who bust the world's financial system, did it whilst receiving eye watering billions of dollars, we still need more of the same. You see if we don't pay these people vast amounts of money they may leave. Lets hope they do. Then we may end up with a system which works and protects pensions and savings.

The truth is that there has been a massive bean feast at our expense. Not only bankers and traders but company executives have had their noses in the trough, paying themselves ludicrous amounts of money. But I know that my old granny, bless her, could have run a bank better than that - its not rocket science - and she wouldn't have expected to be paid millions either. Recently on BBC 2 there was a programme where they took a group of people and gave them eight weeks to become city traders. Here is the blurb:

Eight ordinary people are given a million dollars and a fortnight of intensive training to run their own hedge fund. Hedge fund manager Lex van Dam wants to see if they can beat the professionals

It was naff TV, boring really - lots of nose picking and looking a flashing lights on screens, but guess what happened? At the end of the series at least half of them had done OK. From what I can remember only two were outright failures. You see being a trader isn't rocket science either.

What has been going on is a racket. One which those who benefited have ended up costing ordinary people millions in lost jobs, houses and pensions, not to mention the harm to future generations. We have been shafted. The perpetrators should be made to pay compensation by handing back most of the billions they pocketed. Those who committed fraud, and there must be some, should go to gaol. There is absolutely no way that we should stand for any return to business as usual. We must do all we can to prevent it. Support Put People First and join the demo on 28th of March if you can.

Ever heard of the World Social Forum?

If you hadn't I wouldn't be surprised. You see our great 'free' media has pretty much ignored it completely. There was an interesting post on CiF which I read today but that is all I have seen. Contrast this with the wall to wall coverage of the World Economic Forum in Davos.

The reason why the World Social Forum, which was attended by 100,000 people, hasn't made the papers is because it presents an alternative to the world capitalist domination which is celebrated so avidly annually at Davos. Rupert Murdoch, owner of associated newspapers, is a regular attender so its no surprise that his papers aren't keen to lavish column inches on the World Social Forum.

This years World Social Forum was held in Belem, Brasil and hosted by President Lula. In all five South American leaders, including Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales attended the forum and criticised the failed neo-liberal economics of Rupert and his wealthy chums in Davos. There is an excellent quote from Lula in the posting I referred to above:

"The economic crisis affecting Latin America, cried Lula, was not caused by "the socialism of Chávez" or by "the struggles of Evo" [Morales, the president of Bolivia], but by the bankrupt policies and lack of financial control of wealthy states outside the continent. "And who is the god to whom they have appealed?" he asked rhetorically. "Why, the state!""

Nice to see gloomy faces at Davos and Lula sticking two fingers up to them. Maybe with our crumbling economy next year the capitalist press will have to start taking some more notice of the World Social Forum. Whether they like it or not.

Capitalism is the problem not the solution

As the whole of our economic system teeters on the edge of meltdown, it's worth just taking stock of how we got here. Capitalism is an economic system which relies on greed and exploitation. Capitalists appropriate the surplus value (profit) of worker's labour for themselves. Workers create wealth, capitalists expropriate that wealth. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Marx and Engels were the first people to analyse capitalist exploitation, and in doing so put socialism on a sound intellectual footing.

In the twentieth century the Soviet Union, based on the principles expounded by Marx and Lenin, was created to put power in the hands of the working class, to end capitalist exploitation, and to give the workers the fruits of their labour. The Soviet Union succeeded in ending capitalist exploitation but failed to find a successful alternative economic model. Various theorists have argued that the Soviet Union simply substituted 'state capitalism' for capitalism.

Capitalists have seized upon the collapse of the Soviet Union as 'proof' that alternatives to capitalism cannot succeed. The reasons for the collapse are complex. The Soviet Union didn't just fall apart - it was actively and relentlessly undermined by Western Capitalist agencies such as the CIA. But when it fell most of the people of the Eastern Bloc and Soviet Union didn't want to return to red-blooded capitalism - that was rapidly forced upon them by leaders like Yeltsin who ensured that the conditions were created for what was in effect a capitalist coup. The mineral wealth and industry of the Soviet Union was put into the hands of Yeltsin's capitalist cronies. The Russian people were ripped off in one of the biggest heists in history. Capitalists wanted to make absolutely certain there was no chance for the people of Russia and former Soviet states to create an alternative socialist model.

In the West, neoliberal economics propounded by the likes of Reagan and Thatcher became the new orthodoxy and is the direct cause of our current malaise. The aim of neoliberalism is to undo all the democratic gains that our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents made through the trade union movement, and political parties of the left. The plan is to make the rich richer and the rest of us poorer. They get more, we get less.

Alongside neoliberal economics, we have globalisation. This is sold to us as panacea which will make us all richer, but is in fact a means for corporations and the rich to loot the wealth and resources of whole countries - not just people. Capitalists and their corporations enforce globalisation through effective control of institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade organisation and the European Union, and have written the rules so that they favour profit making over welfare, democratic rights and the environment. This stitch up means that it is very difficult for individual nations to opt out. In the case of the UK, we are bound by European Union rules.

The construction workers demonstrating in the UK have discovered too late that the European rulebook allows foreign companies to bring in cheaper non-unionised labour to carry out work here. Very neat. It undermines trade unions, rates of pay and workers rights - all in the name of greater profit - making UK workers poorer and capitalists richer. Of course the construction workers are right to walk out and show solidarity with their colleagues but this is not enough. Other workers should support them. What we need is a national protest against these laws organised by the TUC - and quickly. Labour MP John Cruddas seems to have just noticed what is going on. Read this article - its good. But what have Cruddas and other 'left' MPs been doing for the past eleven years? Sitting on their hands whilst a New Labour government supported legislation and deregulation in Europe which has got us into this mess!

So how do we turn things around? It isn't going to be easy. We need to work hard in the trade unions and political parties to influence public opinion and create a socialist narrative which voters and understand and relate to. We need to get candidates elected locally, nationally and in Europe who will oppose neoliberal economic ideas a re-assert the supremacy of democracy over profit making.

But even more than this we need to start setting up social enterprises and cooperatives, owned and controlled by the people who work in them, which will take over the economy from capitalists. That, historically, is where the left has failed. In the end, we can only beat capitalism economically - by creating wealth for ourselves.

Obama's inauguration shows up our rotten democracy

I don't believe that the US is better than the UK. For a start we don't have 45 million poor people without access to healthcare. But Barack Obama's inauguration shows, that in the USA at least, there is hope of change for the better. We must wait and see if President Obama lives up to even modest expectations of making the USA a fairer and more equal society.

But can you imagine such a thing happening here? I can't. I don't just mean a black prime minister. I mean the election to government of a person or party with social justice at the top of its agenda. A party that could roll-back the damage that has been done to our society by nearly 30 years of Thatcherism. Why not? Well there are two big sticking points; one - we don't have a major political party with social justice at the top of its agenda. The closest we get to that is the Lib Dems - but does their programme inspire anyone? Two - we have an electorate which seems hidebound by the way it has voted in the past. In the UK voting is almost like supporting a football team. You adopt a party and stick with it through thick and thin. Yes, there are floating voters but not nearly enough of them for my liking.

If you look at the polls about the very best we can hope for is a hung parliament. People have predictably moved away from an unpopular incumbent government to the Tories. Why not give the Lib Dems a chance? Of course I would like people to switch to the Green Party but I accept that is not a realistic prospect at the moment. I know some will and we have hopes of winning a few seats but unless there is a dramatic swing like there was in 1989 when we won 15% of the national vote at the European elections we will probably have to settle for about 8% of the vote.

And as for the rotten democracy in our moribund parliament well the depressing list of events goes on and on. Recent examples include failing to take to task the bankers who have wrecked our economy, trying to thwart international attempts to clamp down on tax havens, and trying to hide MPs expenses from freedom of information requests.

What hurts most about this supine parliament and our rotten democracy is that you get the government you deserve. Things won't change quickly here because people won't change their voting habits. Just imagine if Obama had lost. the US would be facing the possible prospect of another eight years of Bush style presidency. That didn't happen because American voters had the courage to vote for change. Maybe we can learn something from them. I hope so.

The collapse of capitalism?

Those of us who are socialists are pretty relaxed about the collapse of Capitalism. After all Capitalism is just a scheme for making a few people rich and a lot of people poor. It is a society based on greed not need. And furthermore it is a system which cannot work without a set of rules made and enforced by governments. These include money as debt, limited liabilities and property rights. When the Soviet Union collapsed the first thing the capitalist vultures were desperate to do was re-introduce the concept of private property.So, it becomes not too difficult to work out that if we change those rules capitalism isn't going to be able to function.

The problem for capitalists at the moment is that the banks are bust. Without massive support from you and me they will go under, and when people like Will Hutton start to get brown trousers you know this is a real possibility. Part of the problem is that we don't know what the liabilities of the banks are, and neither does the market, which is why bank shares are plunging. The liabilities of RBS are said to be £1.8 trillion - that would increase our national debt by 370%!. There is a very real danger that UK Plc cannot cover the liabilities of these banks and that it may go bust. We could end up like Iceland. Lets just imagine that happened. How bad would it be? Not as bad as you might think. First we would have to cancel that debt - yes cancel it. There is absolutely no way we could be expected to pay off the private sector debts of our banks. That is a nuclear option because it would destroy the reputation of the City. Then we would fuse the rump of the bust banks into a state controlled bank which would return to er.. sound banking practice. While this is going on we will almost have to nationalise some of the major UK companies to prevent them from going under. Then we need to institute the Green New Deal.

We are in uncharted waters. None of this is as unlikely as it sounds. We have become so conditioned to accepting the system as it is that its hard to imagine things any other way. The great irony is that some of these things may be brought to pass by a New Labour government near you.

New Labour is now the nasty party

George Monbiot said it - the third Heathrow runway is New Labour's final betrayal. But it is one of many betrayals of party members, those on the left and progressives everywhere. Although I anticipated this betrayal early on in New Labour's reign - remember King Tony? - it has taken many years for many of us to fully understand the scale and depth of the betrayal. In 1997 we elected a Thatcherite party to replace an er... Thatcherite party. But most of us didn't know it at the time. If we had would New Labour have won so convincingly?

So what can we include in the long list of New Labour betrayals and failures? - Well they failed to re-nationalise the railways; they failed to stop the private finance initiative; they introduced a raft of legislation criminalising everyone from peaceful protesters to smokers; ID cards; surveillance of all emails and telephone calls; privatisation of education; the destruction of the Royal Mail; mass post office closures; blocking European social legislation; failure to have a referendum on the European Union constitution; giving the Police police state powers; pandering to religious extremists; shameful treatment of asylum seekers; failure to provide social housing; privatisation of the health service; refusal to repeal Tory anti-trade union laws; student tuition fees; standing by shamefully while Israel bombed Lebanon and Gaza; the Iraq war; doing nothing about climate change and fuelling the debt bubble which helped to wreck our economy.

And what have New Labour done for us? Devolution and the minimum wage and that's it - two good things in nearly twelve years. No wonder we can safely regard New Labour as the new nasty party. They have got to go at the next election - but have no illusions about the Tories - nothing much has changed there. Nor can the Liberal Democrats escape the neoliberal tag - they wouldn't have done things much differently had they been in power. If you want to reverse New Labour's nastiness and vote for a genuinely progressive party of the left - we’re here - come and join the Green Party.

When are the bankers going to be brought to book??

The question a a lot of people are asking is - 'When are people going to be held to account for the trashing of our economy?' That includes politicians and economists as well as the bankers. But lets focus for now on those directly responsible.

We know that mortgages were mis-sold on a massive scale in the US ( and the a lesser extent here), we know that complex financial instruments which were supposed to mitigate the risk were mis-sold, we know bankers were culpable for buying them, we know that rating agencies failed to rate these products properly, and we know that while all this was going on the bankers were lavishng themselves with massive handouts to the tune of billions of dollars. So when are these people going to be brought to book?

What we also know is the current policies being pursued by New Labour won't get us out of this mess. People are beginning to wake up to the fact that the £500 billion bail out isn't working and that we need to take control of the banks, as I pointed out in this post last October. We need to be prepared to nationalise not just the banks but leading companies like Land Rover. We must protect our skills base. Bringing these companies into the public sector will strengthen our economy. We can run them profitably as public enterprises - just like the French have. When we bring them into public ownership we must give the workers a real stake in running and controlling them.

None of this is likely to happen because Gordon and his chums are wedded to the neoliberal economic orthodoxy which got us into this mess in the first place. Hang on tight - its going to be a rocky ride.