The 'free market' is ruining our economy

I've posted many times here about the 'credit crunch' crisis which has done so much damage to our economy. That crisis is still ongoing. The UK and the USA have suffered more than most other major economies as a result of the crisis. The latest figures show that the UK economy shrunk by 0.2% in the last quarter. That is now the longest recession in our history.

So why have we been hit harder than the French and Germans? The answer is the pursuit of free-market economics - or rather neoliberal politics dressed up as economics. The UK and USA follow a particular brand of 'free-market' economics known as 'anglo-saxon'. This is 'free-market' economics in its purest and most fanatical form. In this version, everything is up for grabs. Everything must be privatised and sold off to the highest bidder without any thought for the social consequences. Labour must be 'flexible' i.e. subject to restrictive anti-trade union legislation so that workers are reduced as near as possible to wage-slavery. We have been following this brand of economics since the late seventies, first under Thatcherism and then under er.. Thatcherism - now known as New Labour. In the USA the same policies were known as Reaganomics - after President Ronald Reagan - see my post here.

After forty years of this nonsense, our economy has been ruined. Manufacturing has become almost non-existent. Factories have closed and moved abroad - many to Europe where industries are supported by the governments there. The economy has become dominated by socially useless financial casino capitalism of precisely the kind which has got us into massive debt. On top of this our utilities, airports, banks, postal services etc are now controlled by foreign multinational companies. We don't even own key parts of our economy any more (not that 'we' ever did but I'm sure you know what I mean).

The French and Germans also pursue 'free-market' economics but of a different kind. They protect their companies and their economy. As a result, they have sheltered their people from the worst aspects of the recession and are recovering more quickly. Their economic approach has a social dimension that is completely lacking here.

So we have very little productive or useful economy left. Which leaves us in the mire. In the 1990s there were economic crashes in South America and Asia. At the time anglo-saxon 'free- market' economists lectured these people on how they should run their economies. These economists knew best. They had the superior model. Now that lecturing is starting to look very hollow.

If we continue to go down this path, privatisation, outsourcing, flogging off key parts of our economy as the anglo-saxon model dictates we will continue to decline as an economic power - just as the USA will. We will have increasing social problems of unemployment, crime, drug abuse that go with that decline, and we can only look forward to a Tory government which will exacerbate this situation.

We need to reject 'free-market' economics and build our economics around a social model. The very least our people should be able to expect is the same 'economics' that the French and Germans get.

Merry Xmas everybody.

This judgement is a disgrace to democracy

As UNITE said tonight the judgment to strike down the British Airways workers strike is a disgrace to democracy. According the BBC Judge Laura Cox said

"the timing of the strike would have been particularly painful for passengers and company alike. "A strike of this kind over the 12 days of Christmas is fundamentally more damaging to BA and the wider public than a strike taking place at almost any other time of the year."

Hmmm....but what does that have to do with the law on strike action? Not a lot as it happens. This comment shows that this class-biased verdict was entirely political.

New Labour never bothered to change the Thatcher anti-trade union laws introduced in the 1980s. These laws were designed to make it difficult for unions to take strike action with the intention preventing working class people from defending their livelihoods.

The judgement today was entirely predictable. Some of us can remember the judge Lord Denning striking down the Greater London Council's Fares Fair policy in the 1980s. Once again an unelected middle class judge has undermined the democratic choice of working people.

The free market fanatics

I caught a bit of a discussion on the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning as I was travelling to work (held up by traffic jams and roadworks as usual). It was a debate between Raj Patel, author of The Value of Nothing who had some sensible ideas about the social implications of capitalism and Mark Littlewood a free market fanatic from the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) . As you can probably guess the fanatic was going on about how the 'free' market can solve all our problems if only we would get rid of regulation, big government etc. etc.

Ok, so here is why that fanatic was wrong. Lets just imagine that the 'free' market did run everything. Take transport as an example. Start with roads. You would only be able to travel on main routes - busy motorways and A roads. All other roads would fall into disrepair. Why? - because they would be 'uneconomic'. Same with the railways. You might be able to travel on what they used to call 'Intercity' or mainline routes. All other lines would be closed - for the same reason as the roads.

The take the Royal Mail - its still a public service - just. But if that was left to the 'free market' you would lose the universal postal service. In large swathes of the UK you would be unable to post or receive any mail - apart, of course, from commercial junk mail and packages from Amazon and the like.

Take another example. Housing. We have a housing shortage in this country which has contributed to the house price boom and a crisis in accommodation. Why? Because successive governments have left housing supply up to the 'free' market. The market only wants to build the most profitable houses i.e. four bedroom detached houses with tiny gardens and double garages on greenfield sites. Not for them social (or 'affordable') housing or housing on brownfield sites which isn't as profitable. In fact if it wasn't for the fact that sometimes developers were compelled to build social housing we would never have any built at all. Result - yet more misery and deprivation for working people and the poor.

Then there is healthcare. If that was privatised we would go back to a situation like we had in the 1930's where people couldn't afford medical treatment. I could go on......and on.

Does anyone actually want any of this nonsense? Apart from the rich - who won't be affected - and twerps from the IEA like Mark Littlewood - I think not. Lets never forget that these fanatics are directly responsible for most of the social problems that we have in the this country today.

What we need to understand is that these fanatics for the 'free' market are impervious to any kind of commonsense or notions of social justice. They are are more akin to religious fundamentalists than economists - and just as dangerous. If the numpty (northern word meaning one who is stupid), Mark Littlewood, from the IEA wants to debate this with me anytime I am more than happy to demolish his potty arguments.

The Wave - 5th December 2009

I travelled to the climate change demo on Saturday from Stockport with The Co-op. Good to be journeying first class on Virgin Trains to London for £15. Thanks to the Co-op and their all volunteers for organising a really good trip.

But what of the demo? Well it was a really good day - long - but well worth it. There isn't a great deal of climate change activism in deepest Cheshire apart from a few pockets of stirling work like Ashton Hayes. I have been struggling to get a group going in my village so I went with some friends from a small local group a couple of miles away. I'm an experienced protestor and I hate to come across as churlish but there was a flaw - no final rally. A finish in Trafalgar Square with a few good speakers would have left everyone leaving on a high. As it was the demo ended in an anticlimax.

Those of us who believe in man-made climate change are having a tough time at the moment as I noted in this recent post. There is a backlash going on and there are two main reasons for it:

1. powerful vested interests in energy and other sectors feel they have much to lose if we adopt the measures necessary to combat climate change. They are working hard to prevent those changes from happening.

2. selfish individualism - this has become much more chronic in my lifetime. The more people have - the more they want. Its a form of addiction as serious as heroin or nicotine. All this has been fostered by governments and the media in the past 30 years - since the advent of Thatcherism. There's a large estate near me - four bedroom detached houses, gigantic TVs, four cars on every driveway, a Nintendo Wii in every house - no doubt. Its not that some of these people don't care but there is a terror of having to give some - in fact - any of this up. Public transport? Cycling to work? - not me thanks!

I won't labour the last point because I've dealt with it before - see the previous post I referred to. The reality is that we are living an unsustainable lifestyle. Things will have to change soon - whether we like it or not.

Interesting to see that Gordon Brown and David Milliband have been attacking the climate change deniers with some vigour. How do they square this with New Labour's deep love affair with the 'free' market and unsustainable growth?

Footnote: nice to have Gordon's approval for attending a demo. Was he there? I didn't see him - or David.

Public sector workers are the latest scapegoats

If you read the Daily Mail you might be tempted to believe that public sector workers are the new fat cats. The Daily Mail has waged a sustained campaign against 'gold plated' public sector pensions as its recent reporting here shows. Tory leader David Cameron has pledged to end the pensions 'apartheid' which separates public and private sector workers.

Do public sector workers have good pay and pensions? Well er... no we don't. The overwhelming majority of public sector workers are low paid. They may have final salary pensions but being low paid those pensions won't amount to much - we are talking a few thousand pounds a year - and most of these people will live in poverty in their old age.

Private sector workers have had their pensions shafted in the past decade or so. Final salary schemes - which offer the best pension and security on retirement - have been closed to millions of private sector workers and replaced with 'money purchase' or defined contribution schemes. These alternatives offer far less to workers and are based on the vagaries of the stockmarket which we know may well go down as well as up.

Why have private sector workers had their pensions reduced? Allegedly because they are no longer 'affordable'. Companies have deficits in their pension schemes. But these deficits arose because the companies took pension holidays where they paid no contributions into the pension fund - opting instead to hand out more money to shareholders and executives. Private sector workers are now paying the price for this. Of course Gordon Brown's decision to reduce tax breaks for pensions has contributed to this mess.

The right wing press, led by the Daily Mail, have exploited this situation to attack public sector pensions and we now hear regularly from disgruntled private sector workers grumbling about privileged ' fat cat' public sector workers. But what these workers ought to do is get off their backsides, like their parents did, join a trade union, and fight to restore better pensions for themselves - put up or shut up - rather than trying to do their fellow workers in the public sector down.

Public sector workers are now the scapegoats in an economic crisis entirely of the capitalist class's own making. The pensions issue is being used to drive a wedge between public and private sector workers.

We are facing a pensions crisis. The crisis is about millions of British workers spending their retirement in poverty. The real culprits are the capitalist corporations and their chums in New Labour and the Tory party. This is simple class war - transferring wealth created by workers back to capitalists and their cronies. They get more - we get less. Its about time workers in the private and public sector stood together to get better pensions for all. That is how we got decent pensions in the first place.

Privatisation of the Royal Mail is a con

We are being told that privatisation or part privatisation of the Royal Mail will make it more efficient and provide us with a better service. Apparently private sector companies can move in and give us all a better deal.

This is nonsense. Private sector companies have only made inroads into deliveries in the UK because the government has forced Royal Mail to allow them to cherry pick the most profitable parts of its business. That is one reason why it has problems. A while ago had a parcel delivered by TNT. I had to go and collect it because I wasn't in at the time. Instead of going to my local post office - 2 miles away - I had to travel to a bleak industrial estate 16 miles away. It looked like it was situated in crack alley - I didn't feel safe even though it was the middle of the day. The building was an anonymous fortress with an intercom - no one on 'reception'. When I was eventually, reluctantly, admitted I noticed that most of the notices on the walls were in Polish.

What this means is that these companies employ anyone they can get their hands on - at minimum wage rates. Can anyone explain how this 'efficiency' is better for me or workers in the postal industry? It isn't. Its naked exploitation of working people so that the shareholders can rake in the profits.

Give me Royal Mail as a public service anyday with postal workers paid a decent wage. Privatisation is a con. Neither the customers or the postal workers are better off. The only people who benefit are the rich - surprise, surprise. Customers and workers are being shafted. The Royal Mail should be run as a public service, publicly delivered. That is good value for customers and that is what most of us want.

Support the postal workers and public services!

Eyes wide shut

I'm beginning to feel a bit sorry for George Monbiot. Like many of us who are aware of the dangers of climate change he is doing his best to alert people to the problem and suggest positive solutions. But he appears to be banging his head against a brick wall. Whenever he puts up an article on Comment is Free he usually attracts plenty of invective. Eco-fascist is a common term used. It appears that the numbers of people who believe climate change is a fact are diminishing.

I know how George must feel. I've been trying to set up a local climate change group with little success so far. When I was delivering my flyers last week I handed one to a guy who lives down my street. As I turned to leave he called me back. "I'm not interested" he said. Not interested? How can anyone not be interested in climate change? I should have remonstrated with him but I had a schedule to meet.

It seems that many people feel those of us who want to move to a low carbon lifestyle are trying to impose a hair shirt lifestyle on them. Say goodbye to wandering around in your T-shirt and shorts with the central heating on full blast; no more gadgets; having to travel on a bus or train with your fellow citizens instead of luxuriating in the privacy of your own car; cycling to work in the rain etc etc.

I'm not a gadget fiend but like most of us I would be bereft without my Ipod and the internet. But as I pointed out in a previous post life in low carbon economy need not be hair shirt - if we make the changes in time. There are positive benefits too - such as leading healthier lifestyles that would help us deal with problems like obesity, and having stronger communities. We could all do with a bit more cycling and walking and getting to know our neighbours better instead of clinging to the selfish 'benefits' of the consumer age. Who knows I might even get to know the name of the guy down the street.

Consumer capitalism has encouraged us to be selfish individuals. We feel comfortable in our own little fortresses with our circle of family and friends. But things are going to have to change. It ought to be obvious that even if weren't for climate change we can't continue to consume to Earth's resources - including of course oil - and increase our population, as we are doing. There are no magic fixes. Our lifestyles will have to change so lets make the change positive. Transition offers us a way to do that. It offers a practical, common sense and achievable vision of how we can adapt without leading miserable lives. If we don't go down that sort of route the alternative is far, far bleaker - believe me.

Bye bye Tracey bye bye

I guess I'm a bit late on this one but that's because I've been busy. The government intends to impose a 50% tax rate on those who earn over £150,000. That sounds fair to me. The people who can most afford it should be prepared to make an extra contribution in these difficult times - well permanently actually . They, after all, are the ones who benefited most from the unsustainable boom, built on debt and the housing market, during the years of Gordon Brown's Chancellorship. As it is, ordinary hardworking families are being expected to pay for the excesses of the banks during the boom years, and the bankers already have their noses back in the trough to the tune of £6 billion after the £1.4 trillion taxpayers bailout.

But, as you might expect, those who benefited most have no intention of helping out. Tracey Emin, one of those beneficiaries, has threatened to quit the UK when the Tax is brought in in April next year. According to the Sunday Times she is likely to be joined by up to 25,000 others. Well, fine, if they want to go they should go. Some of us can remember that various members of the rich and famous, including Andrew Lloyd Webber, threatened to leave if Labour were elected in 1997. None of them did that I am aware of.

Would we be worse off without these people? The simple answer is no. The capitalist so-called 'free' press have been working hard over the years to persuade us that there is a magic band of people - chief executives and entrepreneurs - who we cannot do without. If we didn't have this master race to look after us we would all be starving. This is complete nonsense, and the excuse for those at the top to take an ever larger slice of the cake.

My Granny, who died at the age of 95, could have run RBS better than Fred Goodwin. She had a deal of common sense and was very good with money. Banking isn't rocket science. You borrow money at 5% and lend it at 6%. Simple as that. A fact that escaped most of the 'masters of the universe' who brought our economy down. There are plenty of able people in our society, many of whom's talents are wasted through deprivation and unemployment. There is no need for anyone to earn over £150,00 a year - period.

The simple truth is that it is the poorest people in our society who pay the most tax. Marginal tax rates for the poor are much higher than for the better off. Let these 25,000 people go. We can do perfectly well without them. In fact our society would be fairer and better if they weren't here at all.

New socialism: how to build a new socialism for the 21st century

If you've read previous posts on this blog, you'll know that I've been blogging about how we build a socialism that will work for the 21st century, just as the Communist Party tried to make socialism work in the 20th Century. In order for socialism to succeed, it's vital to create a viable economic alternative to capitalism, an issue I explored in a previous post. I've also looked at how a socialist government could drive lasting change in our society. Here I want to further explore two key requirements for building socialism. They are:

1. capitalism cannot be replaced politically, it must be overcome economically

2. socialism must empower individuals and social groups to take control of their own lives and communities. The key to this control is economic control.

Real power is economic power. If socialists want to transform society, they must gain economic power. Simply winning political power in elections is not enough. Historically, socialist and social democratic governments have been able to use the power of the state to ameliorate the excesses of capitalism without ever shaking its grip on society. Real power has always remained with those who own the means of production.

The traditional socialist answer to this has been to put the means of production in the hands of the state, thus ending the power of capitalists to dominate society. This didn't work in the Soviet Union - why? Because it didn't fulfill the requirement in 2. above. People weren't empowered economically. They swapped a capitalist employer for a state employer without ever gaining economic control over their own lives. They lacked the incentive to create real wealth for themselves and the communities they lived in.

To gain economic power, socialists need to start creating wealth. Workers create the world's wealth. Marx's development of the idea of surplus value in Das Kapital enabled socialists to understand how capitalists expropriate that wealth for themselves, leaving the crumbs from the cake of wealth creation for the rest of us. To gain economic power, socialists must enable workers to create wealth and keep it for themselves. How can workers do this without becoming capitalists? The answer is mutualism. There is nothing new about this. Robert Owen advocated this 150 years ago. In the UK there are over 4000 successful co-operatives with a turnover of £27 billion. This may be small beer compared to the whole economy but it has the potential to grow.

Co-operatives are socialism in action. They are democratically controlled enterprises in which the workers own the means of production. They create wealth for workers and communities instead of for capitalists. Co-operatives tend to have a greater success rate when started up than capitalist companies. Many socialists feel uncomfortable with the notion of making profits and commercialism of any kind but this is how economies work. Profits can be used to make co-operatives grow and benefit communities. Commercialism does not have to be of the rapacious, dehumanising capitalist variety. One of the historical weaknesses of socialism is that it has failed to meet the aspiration of people to improve their material condition. Co-operatives allow workers to do just that without the need for capitalism.

Co-operatives are social enterprises . They can be not-for-profit or explicitly for community benefit. The key is that workers have control over their own economic destiny, and are able to improve their own and their community's well-being. The beauty of this is that we can do it now. There is no need to wait for a general election or a socialist government. If you want to help to bring about socialism, go out and start up a co-op. Demonstrate that we can create wealth democratically and equitably without the need for capitalism. Co-operatives completely undermine many of the arguments of the right - that socialism doesn't reward individuals or encourage enterprise, and can't create wealth. Every successful co-op diminishes capitalism.

I'm not suggesting that we don't need socialist parties, or trade unions, or that we shouldn't be trying to create a socialist state. But doing those two things without creating a viable economic alternative to capitalism won't bring about a socialist society. I'm in the process of trying to set up a co-op for community benefit in Cheshire, and I'll keep you up to date with developments via this blog. As a socialist, I've no doubt it's one of the most important and useful things I've ever attempted.

Support the Communication Workers!

The recent news that the Communication Workers Union members had voted for a strike a Royal Mail came as no surprise. Support for industrial action was strong with three quarters voting in favour.

The Government has actively been undermining the Royal Mail for some years. Unfortunately, thanks to our so-called 'free' capitalist media the truth hasn't got out. Most people think that Royal Mail is in trouble because of a decline in the sending of letters now that increasing numbers people use electronic means. The real reason is that the government has been encouraging private operators to cherry pick the most profitable parts of the Royal Mail's business. In addition, Royal Mail has been forced to pay these operators peanuts to deliver their mail for them.

If you listened to Mandelson you would think that the gaping £9 billion hole in Royal Mail's pension fund was the fault of the postal workers. But the deficit was caused by the government taking a ten year pensions holiday in which it made no contributions to the fund.

The government intend to privatise the Royal Mail. Nobody except the private operators and bureaucrats in Brussels want them to. Neo-liberal EU legislation is driving the process. Ideology disguised as economics. The end result will be a poorer service, redundancies and pay cuts for postal workers and nice fat profits for the private operators. The costs will be dumped onto the workers - as usual. The communication workers are in a tough spot but they deserve out wholehearted support.

The Party's over

The reasons for the decline of New Labour are obvious. There is no room for two main parties of the right in British politics. The Tories are the party of the right and that leaves New Labour er.. nowhere. The Blairite clones are so addicted to neo-liberalism that they will continue to push the party in a rightward direction. They have no support amongst the electorate but still hold the reigns of power in New Labour. The Labour Party conference did them little good with Brown predictably trying to recover some core support with 'half promises' about scrapping ID cards and electoral reform - too little, too late.

The only logical thing to do is split the party a get rid of the Blairite rump - they can join the Tories if they want to. Only the trade unions can make this happen but they haven't the guts to do so. It is going to take a wipe out at the general election to make that seismic shift remotely possible - otherwise the unholy alliance will continue and leave NL at the margins.

Although New Labour did the right thing by 'big government' intervention to prop up the banks a year ago they are still paralysed by their worship of the market and are unable ideologically to do anything other than return banks that were bust to the private sector thus dumping the costs on taxpayers. They still labour under the illusion that what they are doing is progressive or even social democratic.

Nice to see that Clegg and Cable effed up the Lib Dems conference even more than Brown did New Labour's. Clegg's talk about savage cuts was a spectacular own goal. If Clegg and Cable had any real nouse they would have shifted the Lib Dems decisively to the left in an attempt to wipe out NL as the opposition. But they are just as ideologically trapped in neo-liberalism as New Labour.

If the Labour Party were able to throw off its New Labour shackles and move to the left it would still have a chance of beating the Tories - whose plans for cuts will shift the country even further into the economic mire - but its too late for that. Its a bleak prospect but we can only hope that in a wipe out the Blairites will go down with the sinking New Labour ship.

The Tories are the purveyors of poverty

Tories have a deep love of poverty. Not their own of course but other peoples'. How do I know? Because their policies always make the rich richer and the poor poorer. We have now had 30 years of Thatcherism in the UK. In the early days of the Thatcher government the Tories cynically exploited public concern about industrial action and introduced anti-trade union laws designed to hobble the unions and undermine the ability of working class people to defend themselves. We were told that the trade unions were over-mighty and a threat to our democracy. Tory cuts in the early eighties meant that unemployment rose to over three million. But the real motive was making workers poorer and capitalists richer. Along with this came attacks on the welfare state. Benefits for the unemployed were cut.

Now we find ourselves in an even worse situation. - not that New Labour haven't continued the Thatcherite policies of privatisation and reductions in the pay and conditions of workers - but we are facing an election of a Tory government determined to make us pay for the capitalist economic crisis. The costs of bailing out the banks will be passed onto us. Privatise the profits and nationalise the losses. We are facing the biggest rip-off in British history. The cuts and debt agenda which has taken over the media in recent weeks is a smokescreen designed to obscure that rip-off. Yes there is a crisis, but it is a crisis of capitalism and unemployment. Debt is not the problem, capitalism is.

Eric Pickles - good comedy name that; crap comedy routine, not funny at all, not one bit - was interviewed on Today yesterday. Pickles is a Thatcherite, who like David Cameron is being 'nice' ahead of a general election claiming that the Tories have 'progressive' values. But the Tories are still the nasty party. Behind poster boy Cameron we have not only Pickles but all the other monsters from the crypt of Thatcherism like William Hague. So unpopular are New Labour that the country is sleepwalking into a disaster. As if the Tories offer any hope after thirteen years of New Labour misrule. It is worth following the link to Pickles. If you do nothing else read about his comments of the death of Ian Tomlinson. That reveals the sort of man Pickles is. A man, who like his colleagues has contempt for any kind of social justice and fairness in society.

Time to rebuild the Berlin Wall?

Remember when the Berlin wall came down? It was the end of communist repression in eastern Europe and the subject of much rejoicing. I was amongst the rejoicers but unlike many I was skeptical about what would happen next. Of course the theory was that East Germany, the former GDP, would join West Germany in an age of prosperity after unification. It hasn't happened. Not only that but the 'East Germans' are voting with their feet and leaving in droves.

According to an article in Guardian online by Kate Connolly:

"About 90,000 people a year are leaving to find work elsewhere, typically to the western states, Switzerland or Scandinavia. Some communities are preparing to close down altogether."

Hang on... capitalism is meant to bring prosperity, isn't it? Surely the East should now be as prosperous as the West or getting there? But is isn't, nowhere near it in fact. So why has this happened? Its because when the wall came down and the capitalists moved in - they asset stripped the place and closed down the factories. They were interested in making money, not rebuilding the country. So East Germany has made almost no economic progress in 20 years and there is no sign of it making any. In the GDP there was virtually no unemployment. Now there are no jobs.

So perhaps its about time they rebuilt the Berlin wall to stop all those people escaping from the East. The lesson to be learnt here is that capitalists are only interested in creating wealth for themselves, not for society as a whole. Capitalism creates great wealth for capitalists but poverty for the majority. Thats how capitalist economies work.

Tories plan public services lite

We know that if the Tories get into power there will be swinging cuts in public services. The Taxpayers Alliance, a bunch of Tories who claim that they represent taxpayers, and the Institute of Directors (IOD), are pressing for cuts of £50 billion according to an article in the Guardian today. The simple question is who will benefit from these cuts? The answer is the better off, including no doubt company directors. This is just another example of making the poor poorer and the rich better off. But its not just the poor who will suffer. The vast majority of us rely on public services and we will all lose out as a result if these cuts are implemented.

Of course the cuts are being demanded because of government debt which has soared because taxpayers have been asked to stump £1.4 trillion up to bail out the banks. Who caused this problem? Capitalists. Who is being expected to pay to prop up the bankers and their bonuses? We are. I wonder how many of these bankers are members of the IOD?

But just think about this. The bankers cause a crisis. We pay to bail them out by er.. borrowing money from them and getting into debt. That's nice work if you can get it. They must be laughing all the way to the er... bank.

In addition we are told that the Tory wunderkinds in local government have come up with a number of wizard wheezes to help meet our debt problems by giving us public 'services' lite. Cunning plans to save money include allowing people to jump queues for things like planning permission if they pay more for the privilege. But the whole point of public services is that we all pay taxes and we all get equal access to those services. Who benefits? The better off. Beginning to see a pattern? Cuts mean that the costs of the bankers recession will be dumped onto the poorest and most vulnerable people in society.

The Tories are the party of the rich. Always have been and always will be. When in power they look after their own. If only the Labour party could do the same. Well actually New Labour are also the party of the rich and have been doing a pretty good job of looking after their own so far. It is madness for ordinary people to vote for the very people who are exploiting them. But that looks like what is likely to happen next May. Its high time the left fought back. John Cruddas called upon the Labour Party to re-discover itself. Personally I don't trust him. But if he can help to get Labour back to social democracy that will be a step in the right direction. In the meantime the only party with policies to defend public services and help anyone but the rich is the Green Party.

Stalin and Hitler and the Second World War

There's been a lot of controversy about Josef Stalin recently. In Eastern Europe, as they commemorate the beginning of the Second World War 70 years ago, there has been a right royal row going on about how Stalin was as bad as Hitler, and therefore the Soviet Union must have been as bad as Nazi Germany. The Poles have been trading verbal blows with the Russians. The zealots of the right would have us all believe that the Soviet Union was equably to blame with Nazi Germany for the war. But it wasn't, and Soviet communism was in no way equivalent to the Nazism.

Stalin was a brutal dictator who did immense damage to the Soviet Union. On the eve of the war he authorised a secret non-aggression pact with the Nazis - the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact . Its worth quoting from the Encyclopaedia Britannica article about the pact:

"The Soviet Union had been unable to reach a collective-security agreement with Britain and France against Nazi Germany, most notably at the time of the Munich Conference in September 1938. By early 1939 the Soviets faced the prospect of resisting German military expansion in eastern Europe virtually alone, and so they began searching about for a change of policy"

The pact was a pragmatic, if cynical, piece of diplomacy on the part of the USSR because it divided eastern Europe into spheres of influence, including the division of Poland. But at the time there must have been doubts that the USSR could resist a German invasion. Following the outbreak of war the USSR carried out a massacre of Polish army leaders and intellectuals at Katyn. Non of this is forgivable but it does not mean that Soviet communism was as bad as Nazism.

Some people would have us believe that a simple body count is all you need to decide if one regime was as brutal and corrupt as another. But nothing in politics or history is that simple. Stalin was responsible for the deaths of millions in the Soviet Union. Many of those people were good communists who had supported the revolution. In the 1930s leading Bolsheviks such as Zinoviev were eliminated by Stalin in a series of show trials. Zinoviev and the others confessed in open court that they were counter revolutionaries. They undoubtedly did this because of torture but also, I believe, because they wanted to preserve the revolution and believed that in the longer term they would be exonerated.

After Stalin's death the new Soviet leader Khrushchev denounced Stalin and exonerated those who had been executed. Lenin in his last Testament said that Stalin should have been removed as general Secretary of the Communist Party. Stalin was condemned by Soviet communists.

So where does that leave us with Hitler and Stalin? Hitler embodied Nazism. He was the only leader of the Nazis and responsible for policies which lead to the murder of six million Jews, and many hundreds of thousands more socialists, communists, homosexuals and Roma. The total has been estimated at somewhere between eleven and seventeen million. He was the undoubted aggressor in the Second World War. He has never been denounced by any of the the Nazi leaders or their successors. In fact he is revered by them.

Twenty million Russians died in the Second World War. That is very hard for us to begin to imagine. That is why they call it the Great Patriotic War, and that is why Stalin is still seen by some in Russia as a great leader. Winston Churchill was a fervent supporter of the British Empire - how many people died because of the Empire? In fact there was no doubt that as Prime Minister during the Second World War one of his main aims was to preserve the Empire. He also deployed troops against striking miners in 1910. He is still regarded with respect in Britain as a great war leader.