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.

Gaza is a gigantic prison, but the real criminals are on the outside

If the Israeli attack on Gaza was one thing it was predictable. The Israelis have always used violence and terror to achieve their aims and have always got away with it. So far. The state of Israel was founded on terror. In fact the Israelis have not only used violence but have acted illegally, and are in breach of numerous UN resolutions.

They have illegally occupied the West Bank and Gaza for over forty years; they have built, and continue to build, illegal settlements in the occupied territories and are building an illegal 'security' wall.

In 2006 the Israelis invaded Lebanon and killed over one thousand people displacing about one million others. Most of the victims were Lebanese civilians. This was a wholly disproportionate campaign of mass murder intended to punish the Lebanese people for allowing Hezbolla to fire rockets from Lebanon into Israel.

When the Israelis 'withdrew' from Gaza and removed their settlements some people thought it was a step towards peace. But no. The Israelis simply created a prison for 1.5 million people which they control, denying the Palestinian 'inmates' the chance to work and live normal lives.

David Milliband on the World at One today said that the Israeli government is democratic and Hamas are terrorists. This is just crass Israeli propaganda and Millband ought to know better. Hamas my be an Islamist organisation but it was democratically elected by the Palestinians. And it is no more terrorist then the Israeli state.

We are told that Hamas are terrorists because they launch rockets into Israel. So lets look at the facts. There is a war going on between the Israelis and Palestinians. The Israelis have tanks, jet fighters and all the latest weaponry. The Palestinians have small arms, mortars, stones and rockets. In the past eight years 20 Israelis have been killed by Hamas's rockets. In the past five days 370 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli bombs. We are told by the Israeli propagandists that Israel has the right to defend itself. But the Palestinians have an equal right to defend themselves - albeit it is a one sided war that is being fought - but you would never know that if you only listened to to the likes of David Milliband, . George Orwell said "During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. " - as far as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is concerned we are living in times of universal deceit.

We must not forget that the Americans are fully complicit in Israel's crimes. They provide the ammunition which kills Palestinian children. The European Union is also complicit in this violence, having supported Israeli aggression and done little to protect the Palestinians. Unless Barack Obama speaks out soon to condemn Israeli aggression and its wholly disproportionate response he is in danger of losing respect amongst his supporters. Its time that the promotion by the US of Israeli aggression and lawbreaking came to an end.

The Israelis cannot create a settlement and a lasting peace by the use of force. The attack on Gaza will create a new generation of Palestinians determinded to resist Israeli domination. It will also create animosity towards Israel around the world. In the longer run it may well prove Israels undoing.

Once a Nazi, now just a bigot

I've had occasion to blog about Joseph Ratzinger aka Pope Benedict XVI before, when I was discussing his absurd claims that the incidence of pedophilia amongst Catholic priests in America was more the fault of American society than of the priests themselves.

Now he is at it again, this time making an even more nonsensical claim that transexuality is as a big a threat to the human race as destruction of the rain forests. Before he became Pope, Ratzinger attacked homosexuality in 1986 as - " a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil".

But if anything is morally evil it is the views of the Pope himself. For too long Christians, Muslims, and oher religious groups have been able to get away with fomenting hatred against all those who don't fit into their repressive sexual straitjackets - a group which includes unmarried heterosexuals - but particularly homosexuals. Homophobia is no better than racism and religious belief can never be an excuse for this kind of bigotry.

Franco Grillini, of the Italian association Gaynet summed it up beautifully when he said - "What keeps the Pope awake at night is the idea that human beings might be able to seek out their own sexual identity to have a happy life".

How you(ng) people have been screwed

In June I posted about how children get a raw deal in the UK. But how about young adults? When I was eighteen, in the mid seventies, I expected to go to university as a right - with a student grant and full payment of my fees by the local authority - and that's what happened. Yes, the grant was means tested - as it is now - but the fees were paid upfront - no question. Would I have gone if they hadn't been? No. The thought of being in debt was pretty much unthinkable in those days. I had no money and neither did my parents. So I had the chance to go to university, without getting into much debt - my rent on campus was £7 per week and I think my grant was about £14 per week - my overdraft was £70 by the end of the first year. That seemed like a huge amount at the time. It was more than a monthly salary for most workers. Of course I paid it off - and it was also eaten away by high inflation rate at the time. Although it was no fun, it wasn't an albatross like the kind of debt students take on today.

Later, I was able to buy a house during the slump in the mid 1990s - £60k for a good sized terrace in Chorlton Green, Manchester - a location fit to get Phil Spencer salivating. So I got on the housing ladder. I also have a final salary pension - albeit the Tories are trying to shaft me. So I aint going to be able to retire at sixty, I guess I'll have to work until I can afford to retire - unlikely to be before I'm sixty five. So, enough of my biography, I'm not one of the golden generation but neither am I one of the young adults who is being shafted at the moment.

If you are under 30 you are probably one of those people who have been screwed. Tony Blair & Co. benefited from the same things that I did, but then they pulled the ladder up after them. Now, you go to college, end up with £30k debt, can't afford to buy a house and end up without a decent pension. Of course New Labour lied, and claimed that you would earn so much more with a degree that you would be able to pay off your debts no problem - fat chance! Many graduates are unemployed, as they were before the credit crunch and many other earn less than the average wage.

Why is this happening? In simple terms blame it on the collapse of the Soviet Union. As long as the Soviet Union existed, there was a realistic alternative to capitalism. The capitalist class couldn't afford to alienate the workers and middle classes by squeezing them too hard and they also had to try and convince workers in the Soviet Union that capitalism was a much better bet for them. So, workers had an easier ride than they have now. That doesn't mean that everything in the workplace was rosy. A large part of the reason why workers did better in capitalist societies in the late twentieth century was because trade unions were a lot stronger then than they are now.

The post-war consensus in the UK was about one nation that had fought the war - hence the reforms pushed through by the 1945 Labour government, In the USA there was a huge economic boom, fuelled initially by the war effort. In Europe there was a more benign form of social market capitalism. This was a time of increasing prosperity - when we never had it so good.

All that, like the American Dream, has now gone pretty sour. Trade unions are weaker, hidebound by legislation, capitalists have no serious opposition, since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Communist China has become openly capitalist. So now the capitaists are turning the screws. They want to roll back all the gains that our parents and grandparents made - the welfare state, free higher education, decent pensions, pay, and working conditions. That is what Thatcherism and New Labour is all about. That has been the free market project of the last 30 years.

If you're not a capitalist - and there are very few of them - no, they're not people who earn £150k per year, they are the Bransons, Murdochs and Gates of this world - you are going to have less pay, shorter holidays, crap pensions and poor housing. The situation will be worse for your children as the screw gets turned further.

Oh, and I nearly forgot to mention - you have to pay for the credit crunch, brought about by free market Thatcherite capitalism, and er... there is the small (sic) matter of climate change and peak oil. This is a long, complicated story, but if you want a succinct distillation of it you could do a lot worse than watch this.

So what can you do? Well you can put up or shut up. Either accept it or fight back, and the only way to fight back is political activism - join a trade union, join a political party of the left, tough as it is get off your arse and fight for the things your parents had. Why are the Greeks kicking off? Because they are getting poorer - just like you. As Margaret Thatcher once said - 'There is no alternative'. But then she was lying.

Let's stop pretending its not happening......

We are living on the edge of a precipice. The most recent scientific evidence points towards a potentially catastrophic swing in climate, which could lead to rise in global temperature of more than 2oC, threatening the fabric of our society. Beside that, the credit crunch will seem trivial. This is the climate crunch.

There is still uncertainty and denial about climate change. This is hardly surprising, we have all been brought up to be consumers in a Capitalist society. To us, consumption has become a kind of addiction. Many people see shopping as their favourite leisure activity. We have the great new temples, shopping centres, to cater for this 'need'. And like a drug addict, consumption is killing us.

If you want to understand how we got here, I suggest you watch (at least) Part 1 of Adam Curtis's excellent documentary - The Century of the Self. It explains how Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's Nephew, created consumer Capitalism and changed the world. Since then, we have all learnt that we can be 'fulfilled' by consumption. Watch this film and you will know where you come from. We, in the West, have been sold a cosy materialistic dream, one which we find very difficult to wean ourselves from. What on earth are we going to do with ourselves if we cease to consume?

The immediate answer is go cold turkey. Suffer the withdrawal symptoms of consumption. But its not all bad news. There are some upsides to not consuming. And since consumption was only 'invented' by Bernays in the 1920s, we know that there was life before consumer capitalism - a time when people acted on need, not their wants.

So its really not too difficult, we can exist without constantly consuming, and along the way we can can experience some real benefits. We can get more exercise, we can eat better, we can live more locally, get to know our neighbours, and appreciate our local environment. In short, we can have a better quality of life. We don't need to live in caves, give up the telly or healthcare, but we do need to live a much lower energy lifestyle. We've done this before, and we can do it again, except this time we will have the benefits in terms of technology. We don't have to give any of it up - just change the way we use it. But we are still a long way off pursuading the majority of people of the changes we need to make.

For example, the vote in Manchester today against the congestion charge was entirely predictable. If I still lived in Manchester I probably would have voted against it myself. If you seek to impose extra taxes on people they will inevitably vote against them, unless you can give a very good reason indeed. But why should we have to have a congestion charge to fund better public transport? That is a nonsense. We need to provide people with an alternative to the car - now! Well, yesterday actually. But to try and finance that by an extra tax is just daft. We already have the means and money to make public transport available. That is what we should be campaigning for. Because the time when we will have to use it isn't that far away.

For a start we can stop wasting taxes on subsidising the profits of bus companies like Stagecoach and rail companies like Virgin. We can take the £24 million that Richard Branson trousered last year and put it to good use.

We have a great capacity for working together and we can re-discover it. The last time we really had to use it was 1939-45. The coming challenge is as big as any of our grandparents and parents faced during that time and they came through - to a better and more equal society. We now have the opportunity to do the same and the chance to grasp change with both hands.

Ahead of a general election New Labour turns to bashing the poor

The government has announced new plans for benefits claimants which may mean cuts in benefits and people being forced into unsuitable low paid work.

This 'new' approach will no doubt be applauded by Daily Mail readers and the private sector companies who plan to profit from the easy money on offer for 'placing ' the unemployed in jobs.

The people the government are aiming at are single parents and those on incapacity benefit. I have to ask what is the point of forcing a single parent to go into a low paid job so she can (just about) afford to pay a child-minder to look after her children when they would be better off belong looked after by her?

Of course, those looking for work will be offered 'help' in the form of writing CVs. This is likely to be a great help when unemployment is set to rise to 3 million in the next year or so.

Many of those who aren't working are doing so for good reasons, but what must never be forgotten is that unemployment is an essential part of the Capitalist economy. Capitalism requires unemployment to keep labour costs down. - "...unemployment is not an aberration of capitalism, indicating any sort of systemic malfunction. Rather, unemployment is a necessary structural feature of capitalism, intended to discipline the workforce." - see this link.

If we want a decent welfare system, which combats the poverty endemic in the capitalist system, we need a citizens income, which is Green Party policy. At a time when capitalists are benefiting more than ever from corporate welfare why should the poor be made to suffer in this way? Answer - because it will play well with the Tory voters that New Labour wants to attract back before the next election.

The Tories plan to make pensioners poorer

One of the great scandals of the past quarter century in the UK has been the way pensions have been handled and pensioners treated. Pensions have slowly but surely been devalued and the result has been misery for millions in old age. So why has this happened? Well for much the same reason as everything else. The neoliberal free-market deregulation project, championed by Thatcher and Reagan, was always about making the rich richer and the poor poorer. The aim of this project has been to undo all the gains made by working people in the last century or so. Every dollar or pound a Capitalist pays into a pension is one less dollar or pound in his pocket - hence the attack on wages, terms and conditions and pensions.

Go back 25 years in the UK and you'll find many workers in the private and public sectors on final salary pension or defined benefit schemes but these have been whittled away to almost nothing in the intervening years. Workers in the private sector now have to rely on defined contribution or money purchase pension schemes which are worth much less. When Gordon Brown became Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1997 he made tax changes which made it more difficult to sustain final salary schemes in the private sector and New Labour have much to answer for in the pensions debacle. But its not just about Gordon. Many companies have taken pensions 'holidays' - periods when they failed to contribute to their own schemes. The same is true of local government. Capitalists can simply save money by refusing to contribute to employees pensions.

As a gulf has opened up between pensions in the private and public sectors there have been howls of rage from the right. It is claimed that public sector pensioners are living in the lap of luxury while their private sector counterparts are living in poverty. This is nonsense. Certainly private sector workers are suffering but most public sector workers are low paid and earn less than the average wage, hence their final salary pensions are still very low.

David Cameron in a speech to business leaders said "We have got to end the apartheid. We are getting into a situation now where pretty much everyone in the private sector has gone to defined contributions and the final salary schemes are closed." Now we all know what that means don't we. The Tories are planning to slash public sector pensions just as the Daily Mail have been urging them to do. The Daily Mail complains that private sector workers are living in poverty and public sector pensioners are better off - its solution, like David Cameron's - is to make all pensioners live in poverty by ending public sector final salary pensions - smart huh?

We need better pensions for everyone. If public sector pensioners are benefiting from final salary pension schemes its time to create the conditions in which private sector workers can also enjoy those benefits, by legislation, if necessary. Here is a quote from the Green Party's policy on pensions - "The Green Party would introduce a Citizen's Pension that would pay pensioners a livable amount, without means testing and would be linked to the rise in average earnings. Independent studies by the National Association of Pension Funds have shown that a citizen's Pension could be afforded today within current net expenditure on state pensions."

We live in a society with an aging population its in the interest of all of us to ensure that we can have a dignified old age.