It's not the snow stupid!

Ever heard the one about the wrong kind of leaves on the line? That's the much mocked excuse that has been used by rail companies for some train delays in the UK. Now the Tory-led coalition government is blaming the contraction of the UK economy by 0.5% in the last quarter on the weather! The snow may have had some impact, but not nearly as much as the governments ideologically driven economic polices.

The office of National statistics (ONS), which published the figures earlier this week, said that without the effect of the bad weather the economy would have been flat, meaning no growth at all. As long ago as June I predicted that the government's deficit reduction plan would result in an economic collapse. That may have been a dramatic use of words but as I've said before you cannot cut your way out of a recession. This was demonstrated in the 1930's when the same policies were followed leading to a slump which lasted until the second world war.

The only reason the economy came out of the longest recession in its history, after the crash caused by financial capitalism, was due to Alastair Darling's stimulus package in the dying days of the Labour government. Since then, the Tories have been lying about the cause of the structural deficit by blaming it on Labour. Osborne has called the Shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls, a deficit denier but it is Osborne who is a deficit liar. Now the Tories are losing sleep because they know that the worst effects of the cuts and tax rises haven't been felt yet. In addition, inflation is set to rise to 5%, and, as Mervyn King admitted recently, incomes for working people have fallen by 12% in the past three years. If interest rates rise as they will probably have to, the already moribund UK housing market will be hit harder and repossessions will go up. This toxic mix is likely to drive the economy down further, possibly into the double dip some have been predicting. That is why Osborne announced recently that the government were likely to reduce fuel prices in the forthcoming budget - a cynical move to curry favour with the electorate.

With their reckless shock and awe tactics of £80 billion in cuts the Tories were confident that they could dump the costs of the financial crash onto the UK public and get away with it, protecting their capitalist chums in the process. They are in a hole and still furiously digging. They have a choice. They can continue on the same course, in which case they risk busting the economy and the collapse of the coalition or they can do a u-turn and try to put together a stimulus package which might save the coalition. Either way their reputation for economic competence will be ruined. The chickens are coming home to roost. Pity we all have to suffer in the process.

"Free" market corporate domination means mass unemployment - forever

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The secret policeman's ball

How about this for a job? You get well paid, travel all over Europe, good expenses, false passport and can have sex with anyone you fancy. Welcome to the world of the undercover cop. Now I know that this kind of work can be dangerous, when dealing with real criminals, but I also know people from the environmental movement, and believe me, going undercover with them must be a fairly good gig. This is what Mark Kennedy (Stone?) did for seven years, spying on environmental protestors, at a cost of £250,000 a year - will that be affected by the cuts - I doubt it!

I was only a few weeks ago that I posted about the Metropolitan Police being out of democratic control in relation to their policing of the student protests and other infamous incidents such as the death of Ian Tomlinson. Now we find that the guardians of the state are snooping on people involved in legitimate democratic protest and peaceful civil disobedience. How can this be justified? It can only be justified if you have a police hierarchy which has become a law unto itself, and timid politicians who have neither the guts or the gumption to bring the police back into line. This was brilliantly summed up by Simon Jenkins in a recent Guardian article, please read it - especially the stuff about ACPO.

There is also something else which is sinister and serious here. The police are meant to act in the public interest, but what has become clearer through this debacle is the police are acting in the interest of big corporations. This came out in the policing of the protest at Kingsnorth power station. The police are not supposed to be some sort of rent-a-cop free service for the unelected, unaccountable private sector. This is just another step in the direction of a police state - and it has to be stopped.

The greenest government ever - huh?

So, this is the greenest government ever? I guess quite a few of us are scratching our heads on this one. As the Tory (nasty) Party went thorough it's re-branding with Blairite poster boy and PR man David Cameron, we saw Dave cycling to work, followed by a car carrying his suit and briefcase, installing a wind turbine on his house, and cuddling polar bears at the North Pole (OK, not quite be he would if he could have - no doubt).

Of course, this was all a PR con, or as these things are known these days - greenwash. Lets get down to the facts. The Tory-led government is in thrall to the corporations, and if there is one thing corporations hate its environmental regulation which prevents them dumping costs onto the environment in the form of pollution. It's not difficult to work out that we are going to see a weakening of environmental regulation and a knock down sale of our environmental assets.

So what is the "greenest government ever" doing? Well, its scrapped the Sustainable Development Commission and the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution for a start. It's downsizing the public bodies which protect the environment like the Environment Agency and Natural England. It's planning to sell off our forests, its scrapped the fleet of emergency tugs which are there to protect the marine environment, and it wants to start building new uneconomic and unsustainable nuclear power stations - like the Olkilouto plant in Finland which has been an outrageously expensive botched cock-up.

Behind much of this is the disaster of The Public Bodies Bill which gives the government powers to scrap public bodies at will. The bill is audacious, mendacious and dangerous for the environment. These bodies were created by parliament but parliament will have no say in their merger or removal.

The reality is that this is likely to be the least green government ever with falling environmental standards and failure to tackle our greatest problem - climate change. This won't be a surprise to anyone in the Green Party. It's exactly what we expected. We had the right policies to create a green economy whilst providing a million new jobs and protecting public services. We now have to face five years of going backwards environmentally with nothing being done to deal with the most serious issues that face us.

Unite and fight!

Good to hear that Len McCluskey, the new leader of Unite, has called today for trade unionists to oppose the cuts and work with all the other groups who are fighting cuts. He called for co-ordinated industrial action to fight the cuts in public services, including education. Of course, no sooner had the words been published than the usual suspects - in this case via a Guardian editorial - began to attack him on the predictable basis that this was a return to 'old fashioned' 1970's trade unionism.

These people are daft enough to think we should hold on for five years until the general election in the hope that another (Labour?) government will make things better. Well, don't believe it - that is the politics of failure. Why? Because there is no guarantee that an incoming Labour government would reverse the cuts, in fact it is unlikely that they would do so. What we have is a Tory lead government which is desperate to change Britain for good - to slash the welfare state and privatise what is left of the public sector. At best this would take us back to the 1930s.

This is a government which has no mandate for this change. Cameron and Osbourne kept quiet about slashing welfare during the election and suddenly found after being elected that it was 'necessary'. This is also a government which is vulnerable to pressure and nervous about the recovery that they have promised. In June I predicted that there would be an economic collapse and that we would slide back into recession. At the moment, that is looking like a pessimistic view but I'm still sticking by it. With the rise in VAT, a stagnant housing market, the remaining mountain of toxic debt and rising prices forcing a rise in interest rates there is a very good chance that we will have a jobless 'recovery' and economic stagnation in the longer term - which I also predicted.

There is cause for optimism. The coalition can be cracked apart under the pressure of protest. But McCluskey and trade unionists have to box clever. We need to forge alliances with all the other groups who are affected by the cuts. We have to support the protests of the students, UKuncut, the Coalition of Resistance and all the other community groups who are fighting the cuts. Strike action will play a part but it must start when we have those groups behind us, not beforehand. I think McCluskey has recognised this in his article today. Now we have a short break before we have to begin again in earnest in the new year. I'll be active in Cheshire West Against the Cuts, and if you live near here I hope you'll join me.

Capitalism defies the laws of physics

How long have we had capitalism? In its modern form, in the UK, less than 200 years. According to Karl Polanyi, capitalism started in Britain in 1838, with the introduction of the Poor Laws. It was these laws which finally lead to the commodification of labour, a necessary condition for capitalism.

The title of this post is slightly flippant but the point is this; because capitalism has existed as an economic system for nearly two centuries people think it is inevitable - like the laws of physics. Of course, capitalists would like you to think this, and since it's the only economic system you have ever known it's not surprising if you do. But capitalism isn't like gravity. It is neither inevitable nor necessary. It exists because the conditions it requires to function have been manufactured and are maintained. In other words the rules are set to enable capitalism to function - through legislation. In his book, The Great Transformation (an essential read if you want to know how capitalism came about) , Polanyi focussed on three key conditions; the commodification of land, labour and money. There is no reason why any of these things should be commodities, and they weren't in the past.

Lets take money as an example. Money can be simply a means of exchange. There is no particular reason why it should be a commodity in itself. There is no need for people to be able to buy and sell money. Neither does labour need to be a commodity. Because it is a commodity, workers need to sell their labour to capitalists in order to survive - work or starve. But before the commodification of labour, 'workers' (who at that time were not workers in the modern capitalist sense) had no need to sell their labour because they had alternatives, including access to land to grow food and have a measure of self-sufficiency. Of course, they could choose to sell their labour if they wanted to, and often did. The point is they were not forced to sell it as they are now. Part of the process of forcing 'workers' to sell their labour was the enclosures of common land - essential to the process of commodification of labour.

The idea of 'workers' being able not to have to sell their labour is simply unacceptable to capitalists. If you and I were able to choose freely to work for others when we felt like it, because we had a large measure of independence, it is very easy to see that capitalism couldn't work. We therefore have to be forced to do it. And that is what happened in the 18th and 19th centuries here in the UK.

It is clear, therefore, that socialists must end the commodification of land, labour and money. This is what happened in the Soviet Union. However, the mistake the Communist party made was to put everything into the ownership of the state, on the basis that it was 'owned' by all. This didn't work, as we know, because of the lack of democracy and the dictatorship which was established by Josef Stalin. Land, for example needs to be put into common ownership, not state ownership, as some of it was here before the enclosures. Naturally, there are some people who cannot conceive of how that collective ownership could work - but the point is that it did work then - and there is no reason why it could not work again.

Capitalism is not inevitable - it was created, and we can choose democratically to change the rules to create a more equitable society in which people are freer and not dependent on the whims of the capitalist system. When the rules have been changed capitalism will melt away like the snow did last week.

Please note that this post needs read within the wider context of previous posts such as this one and this.

Solidarity with the Miners

I thought I'd post this as a reflection on what happened the last time we had a Tory government determined to attack working people:

In 1984, I was a student at Essex University. When the Miner's Strike started in March 1984 I was in my second year. Essex University in those days was ‘Red Essex’. In my first year, the Communists dominated the student's union. By the second year, the ‘Broad Left’ had taken over. From what I can remember now, this was an unholy alliance of the Communists, Labour and Liberals. Naturally, I was a part of the left opposition to this ruling clique. We consisted of non-aligned socialists, lefties Labourites, Troops Out, the SWP, and anarchists. I was an anarchist.

Thatcher’s government pulled out all the stops to beat the miners and the police were drafted in from all over the country to the front line, which was south Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. Along with the cohorts of police - reputedly on £500 a week - in 1984! – came the army, who posed as policemen in unmarked uniforms, as well as special branch and all manner of spooks determined to break the strike (read GB84 by David Peace). It was a bloody battle, as close as we have come to civil war since the General Strike in the 1920s. Whole parts of the north Midlands and South Yorkshire were a ‘no-go zone’ controlled by the police. Towns and mining villages were occupied. The police set up illegal roadblocks to try and stop the miner’s flying pickets.

So what has Essex University to do with this? Well, as the strike wore on, the government pulled all the stops to try and break it. Essex University is a campus university outside Colchester and near to the Essex port of Wivenhoe. The government started to ship coal in through Wivenhoe and soon after flying pickets arrived at the university. There were about 300 in all. From as far afield as Yorkshire, Durham, Kent and South Wales. This was their first time at university and didn’t they, and we, enjoy it.

Essex University had two bars at the time. The University Bar, which was where the Tories went, and the Union bar, which is where the rest, that is most of us, went. The Union Bar was a great cavern of a place, with subsidised (decent) beer at about 60 pence per pint. It was always heaving at night, and you had to queue to get served. When the miners came, the place exploded. And wasn’t it just wonderful? The singing -“ Here we go, here we go, here we go, here we go, here we go, here we go-o, here we go, here we go, here we go, here we go, here we go!” - the carousing, the craic – as it is known in Ireland - was fantastic!

I spent many nights in that bar drinking with miners, and they were some of the best nights of my life. Yes, we were separated by class – but so what? We all wanted the same thing – to beat Thatcher and bring down the Tory government. Nobody had any illusions about that. As an anarchist, it was nirvana. I felt privileged to be taking part in a struggle, however small a part that was, alongside the vanguard of the working class. And the miners enjoyed it too, for sure they had all left problems at home, but at Essex, they were welcomed with open arms, with beer, fags, wacky baccy, and young women of a socialist persuasion who wanted to shag a miner. And those women were real feminists – not the effete lot you get these days. So, all in all, it was an education for them and for us. But we got on like a house on fire. Even the Tories treated the miners with respect. They had very little choice.

All these goings-on didn’t impress the University - but those were different times. The student union was strong. We had won on a number of issues whilst I had been there. They took us seriously. And that was the best of the students’ union – we had our internal battles, but they always backed their members – even the lefties like us - like a proper union should. It was very difficult, if not impossible, for the University to pick out and victimise a student there. So, although the university wanted to get rid of the miners – they couldn’t. The miners were there for the duration, and once they arrived, it wasn’t long before things began to hot up.

My best friend, and socialist activist, S, had deserted me and gone off to university in the USA. He went with a mutual friend, A, and they got into a number of political scrapes over there, including getting arrested and being chased by gun-toting security guards. S and I had been involved in a number of escapades at Essex including an exam boycott - where we had to jump out of a first floor window to avoid getting caught out. When he returned in the third year we immediately got hold of a couple of buckets, plastered ourselves in Coal not Dole stickers, and got down to Colchester town centre every Saturday collecting money for the miners. Colchester is a Tory, and army garrison town so we got a fair amount of stick as you can imagine. But we didn’t give a fuck. The best of it was we collected a fair amount of dosh. Little old ladies and gentlemen, and ‘housewives’ gave us money. I would guess that on most Saturdays we collected between 30 and 50 quid. Not bad money for those times.

There were a number of mass pickets of Wivenhoe, and it’s a testament to the times how organised the enemy were. At the ‘big picket’, which I remember clearly, there must have been about 1000 police officers and 1000 pickets. The picket consisted of miners, students and local ne'er-do-wells (local people who supported the cause). The night before the picket I went out with my mate Nigel - who was a committed socialist and really great bloke. Despite getting completely leathered, we were up at five am to get to the picket.

One of the many legendary photos from the miners strike 1984-85

As the whole thing got off the ground, Nigel* and I were at the centre of the picket near the gate. I remember quite clearly a wagon coming in – regardless of the pickets - someone could easily have got killed. It was slowed by the crush of bodies at the gate, and Nigel jumped up and managed to stick his head through the driver’s window, giving him a load of abuse. He was grabbed and carted off by several police officers. There was lots of pushing and shoving as the police tried to keep us away from the gates. The pickets linked arms and the melee swayed backwards and forwards. I lead a charmed life that day. At one stage the police lifted the guys on either side of me, but I survived. I guess that is because they were burly miners, and I was a weedy student. The police grabbed a friend who was already on bail for an 'offence' committed during the strike, and a frantic tug of war over him ensued. We knew he couldn’t be nicked again. With a gargantuan effort, we wrested him from the police, and he was passed backwards along the ground through the legs of the pickets to safety.

The bad news for N was that when they got him back to the station, they searched him and found some speed in his jean’s back pocket, so he got busted. He’d forgotten to take it out the night before. As for the students who got arrested, they were piled in police vans, driven about thirty miles into the middle of nowhere and left to walk home. Suffice to say, a lot more happened, including the infamous disciplinary committee that I was elected to serve on. Not to mention real picketing after being smuggled into south Derbyshire in the middle of the night. But the miners stayed at Essex University until the end of the strike, and one or two of them were still on campus about six months after it ended.

The end of the strike was traumatic for all of us. The miners and their wives, and families were heroes. They were a million miles away from the smug bankers and Capitalists who have been riding on our backs ever since. We had invested a lot of time, energy and passion in the strike. We didn’t have as much to lose as they did. The unemployment, repossessions, marital break up, crime, and shattered communities. But we cared. I hope they look back on that time of solidarity with as much fondness as I do.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!

*Sadly, Nigel died a few years later in a bicycle accident.

Its time that the Met Police were brought under democratic control

On Thursday 9th December the ConDem government managed to pass legislation increasing tuition fees to up to £9,000 per year in the face of student protests. The protests were once again mainly peaceful and good natured. There was some damage to property around Parliament Square including the Treasury and the Supreme Court. As usual, the media had a field day, focussing almost entirely on damage to property. But something has changed. There was a reasonably widespread questioning of police tactics, which I have no doubt provoked much of the violent response.

I watched a couple of hours of live coverage on BBC and Sky and it looked to me that the Met Police had come with an agenda to break a few heads - which they succeeded in doing. One of the protestors, Alfie Meadows, was beaten unconscious by police and had to be taken to hospital. Incredibly, according to reports, the police objected to him being treated at the same hospital as some of their own officers and tried to have him turned away. What have we come to in this country where this sort of barbaric behaviour by police officers can be tolerated?

This is the same police force that lied about the death of Jean Charles De Menezes and the death of Ian Tomlinson and recently kept schoolchildren kettled for nine hours in freezing temperatures without food water or access to toilets. It seems to me that the Met Police are out of any kind of democratic control and are becoming a law unto themselves. Of course, I wouldn't expect our democratically elected government to do anything about that - that would be too much to expect.

The kind of tactics we have seen from the Metropolitan Police cause problems rather than solve them. High profile aggressive policing of the kind we saw last week is not the way to police demonstrations. Even the 'good folk' of the Countryside Alliance experienced that during their demonstration. Of course a cynic might argue that the Met have a vested interest in this type of policing. The more violence they can provoke the better they can argue for more resources and draconian powers. If our current set of 'waste-of-space' parliamentarians (with one or two exceptions) continue to let the Met Police behave in this way it is inevitable that the police will come to be seen as merely an arm of the state - which in truth they are - and that they will end up alienating a whole generation of young people, their parents and supporters.

We have lived for many years with the fiction that the police are there to protect us but their real role is to defend the interests of the British State which are the same as the interests of international neoliberal capitalism. I witnessed that first hand myself during the Miner's Strike, and it has no place in a democracy.

Coalition of Resistance Conference

On the 27 November CoR held its inaugural conference in London. I travelled down by train from Cheshire and was joined by 1200 others in the Camden Centre. The train was delayed so I arrived a bit late, by which time the main hall was full. The morning consisted of a plenary session with speakers from the Labour Party, Green Party and trade unions including; John McDonnell MP, Bob Crow RMT, Mark Serwotka PCS, Jean Lambert MEP, Ken Loach, Clare Solomon NUS, and Lindsey German. After a chilly journey the speakers soon got the audience warmed up and there were some particularly good contributions from Mark Serwotka and John McDonnell.

The plenary was followed by a series of workshops on such topics as; organising against the cuts locally, mobilising the unions, and analysing the crisis. I attended a couple of these workshops, both of which were absolutely packed. The most promising thing about the workshops, and the whole day, was the fact that there were many young people attending. There was a really positive atmosphere of co-operation and determination. The now well worn arguments about the causes of the crisis were aired but what interested me most was alternatives. It's not enough to want to stop the cuts, the left has to have a workable alternative agenda, and that is one of the things I have been focussing on in my blog - see here and here. It's early days but it's not clear yet exactly how this agenda is going to shape up. The afternoon passed in similar fashion ending with some rousing speeches, and a standing ovation for Tony Benn, who was elected as President of CoR. He was looking frail but was truly inspirational.

On Thursday night I attended the first local meeting of an embryonic campaign against the cuts in West Cheshire. All in all, I'm very optimistic that the anti-cuts movement can wring changes from the ConDem government and crack the coalition apart. The problem is - what happens next? The Labour Party is paralysed by its past 13 years in power and unable to articulate an alternative to the government's programme of austerity. The Green Party, alone, of all the mainstream parties has a robust, costed and viable alternative but we are not going to be in a position to implement that programme after the next election. Our task has to be to persuade others to adopt the economic programme. Meanwhile the students continue to inspire us all with their campaign against tuition fees, and the anti-cuts movement is still taking on the tax avoiders. Next, I will be doing my best to promote the campaign here in West Cheshire.

Out of the mouths' of babes

So the saying, which originated in the Bible, goes. In our response to the economic crisis here in the UK we are being shown the way by the nation's youth. They are the ones who are fighting back. Whatever happened to the left in the UK? Whatever happened to the battalions of the unions who fought so hard for social justice? When are they going to react?

The student protests on Wednesday 24 November have given an example to the rest of us. Not only did students, but also schoolchildren, protested, not just in London but all over the country. There were major demos in Bristol, Brighton, Liverpool, Manchester and other towns and cities. Twelve universities were occupied. Predictably the demo in London, during which a police van was wrecked, drew the biggest media coverage. Some schoolgirls tried to protect the van from further damage after it had been attacked. Many demonstrators were later 'kettled' by the police for 9 hours. That is - they were unlawfully held without food and water , or access to toilets in freezing conditions. What sort of police force is it that does this to our children?

The students are showing us the way, and leading the fightback against the cuts which are being inflicted upon the poor, unemployed, low paid and working and middle classes. What they have shown is that protest marches are not enough. We need to fight back with non-violent direct action. This will inevitably include the occupation, not just of universities and colleges, but libraries and other local authority buildings and factories that close, or are threatened with closure, as a result of the attack being waged on our communities by the ConDem government. Where the students have lead the rest of us must follow. If we don't we will lose the fight of our lives.

We don't need private sector banks

As we witness the humiliation if the Irish people who are being bullied into accepting the rule of the IMF to bail out "their" reckless banks, Eric Cantona has stepped into the ring with a suggestion that we all withdraw our money from the banks, in protest against their behaviour, on December the 7th. I won't be participating but that's not because I think it's a bad idea. I've never been very keen on banks but neither do I want to keep my hard earned money under the mattress.

I've put my money in the Co-operative Bank, which by the very low standards of most banks is superb. It's not going bust anytime soon, and it even has genuine ethical policies. If only more people would do the same we would be less vulnerable to the kind of crisis which has rocked the world economy and slain the Celtic Tiger recently.

Predictably, Deborah Hargreaves, has written in the Guardian that Cantona's idea is a foolish one because we all need banks as much as they need us. But this is complete nonsense! We may need banks but the point is that we don't need irresponsible, unaccountable, out of control, private sector banks that we have to bail out every decade or so - if you think this is the first banking crisis in 50 years just take a look at what has happened in Sweden and Japan in recent times.

What we need is nationalised banks and community banks under democratic control. Full stop. Private sector banks are far too irresponsible to be allowed to create money from debt. That is unacceptable. Perhaps Deborah can be forgiven. She appears to be infected with a disease called capitalism, and being a business writer for the Guardian and the FT its easy to see why she should be trapped in a conventional view.

Don't be fooled. The banks, even now, are far too powerful, and completely unaccountable, and unregulated. Our politicians are way too timid and blinkered to be able to find a solution to this problem. We need radical change. In the meantime - withdraw your money on the 7th December and put it in a half decent bank. There are a few around.

In a time of class war...

..... people are radicalised and come together to resist the ruling capitalist elite.

There has been a lot of controversy in the past few years in the UK about the 'radicalisation' of Muslim youth in the UK. In July 2005 we had to suffer the atrocity of multiple suicide bombings in London which claimed the lives of 52 people in London. In the USA, there was the horror of the attack on the World Trade Center in New York, which killed 2,752 people.

But what was the cause of these atrocities, and what bearing does that cause have on what is happening now in the West? If you want a simplistic explanation of the terrorist attacks in London and New York, you'll choose to believe they were simply the work of deranged fanatics, madmen who were intent on destruction. But it's essential to analyse the root cause, and the root cause for both of these atrocities was, and is, Western capitalist interference in middle eastern Muslim countries. This interference has a long history because of the strategic importance of the region, which is largely based on oil.

In 1953, Mohammad Mossaddegh, the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, was overthrown in a coup d'etat organised by the CIA. Why did this happen? It happened because Mossaddegh threatened the strategic interests of the USA and its capitalist corporations, by nationalising the oil industry, and by introducing progressive reforms which favoured the Iranian people and was against the interests of the ruling Iranian elite. As a result of the coup, the Shah of Iran was installed as a puppet ruler to serve the interests of the Iranian elite, the USA, and western capitalists.

Of course, we could go back even further to British imperial interference in the region, but suffice to say the autocratic rule of the Shah lead to the Iranian Islamic revolution and the creation of the modern Islamic State of Iran which is still a bugbear to western capitalism. There's more, much much more, western interference in Egypt, Palestine and Afghanistan - including the CIA backed support to the war lords and Islamists who resisted the Soviet 'invasion' of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

The point is that the continuing meddling by Western powers in these Muslim middle eastern countries has encouraged the development and formation of extreme Islamist groups, including Al Qaeda. These are the terrorists who now pose a threat to 'our way of life', but these monsters are entirely the creation of western meddling in Muslim countries. In fact, now that the Soviet Union has ceased to exist groups like Al Qaeda provide a convenient way for our political leaders to keep us all on their side, because they promise to protect us against a terrorist threat - which they have created.

Now, because of the crisis in capitalism that we are going through, a crisis which has lead to ordinary people here, in the USA, and in Europe, being made to pay to bail out the banks and financial system, and to suffer unemployment, homelessness, and deprivation as a result of austerity - ordinary people in the west are being radicalised by the extremes of western capitalism - just as their counterparts in Muslim countries have been, and continue to be.

One of the responses to the capitalist crisis and the bank bailout in the USA has been the Tea Party, which is a manipulated and deluded outburst of anger because Main St has been screwed by Wall St - see here. Elsewhere, in Greece, Ireland and France we have seen outbursts of anger, with mass demonstrations against the austerity imposed on ordinary people by the politicians, who are acting in the interests of the capitalist elite.

This is good, old fashioned class war being waged by the capitalist class against the rest of us, and the crisis is so serious that it's the middle classes who are suffering, not just the working classes and the poor. And that is where capitalist class and their tame politicians have a real problem, because if the middle classes and the working classes can unite to fight back, the capitalists may well have to retreat, and foot some of the bailout and debt crisis bill themselves, through losses to investors and bondholders.

But will this happen? The reality is that, on the back of the danger posed by Islamist terrorism, Western governments have been introducing ever more repressive police state legislation to contain the anger of the victims of austerity. This police apparatus, in the UK, represents a genuine threat to civil liberties and is expressed in an ever more restrictive attempts to criminalise legitimate protest. A recent example of this was the closing down of the Fitwatch website, and the demonisation of students who protested against rises in tuition fees.

I'm sure that the people who run the UK would like to think that the old days of revolutionary socialism and communism are long dead and buried. But if you oppress people and screw them, you radicalise them. Here, in the UK, hardly a day goes by without a fresh attack on the poor, women, disabled, disadvantaged, and the middle class, on the pretence that we are all in this together and we have to reduce the deficit. Well no, no we don't. Austerity is an ideological choice on the part of the Coalition government, and not a sound economic response to the crisis we are in.

Where will this class war, and the fightback against, it lead us ? Its hard to tell but the crisis of capitalism is far from over - as the recent forced 'bailout' of Ireland has shown. There are still many $billions of toxic debt in the world financial system, and banks in the USA and Europe are teetering on the brink of collapse. The crisis threatens to bring down the Euro, and threatens the whole European Union project.

In the UK, resistance to the austerity measures to pay for the crisis is growing as more and more people face the daily reality of reduced incomes, unemployment and the danger of losing their homes. A key problem is that people no longer have a mainstream political party to represent their interests, because New Labour abandoned them long ago. Only the Green Party offers resistance to the austerity programme. We live in interesting, if difficult times. We are witnessing the biggest heist in history - pulled off by financial capitalism aided by our democratically elected politicians. Will they get away with it? I don't think so - but it remains to be seen exactly how and when they will be brought to justice.

The Irish people are being screwed

The Irish people find themselves in a similar situation to the Icelanders. As an island state with a small population, Ireland was feted for its spectacular growth - as the Celtic Tiger - during the 1990's and the early part of this century. But that economic boom was built mainly on two things: undercutting corporate tax rates elsewhere in Europe; and an unsustainable property boom. Now the Irish, like the Icelanders, are mired in debt and austerity.

The first of those two - corporate tax breaks - was a classic example of globalisation - leading the race to the bottom - to the advantage of the corporations and at the expense of people in other nations. It's the stuff capitalist economists love. Let the market rip. Deregulate. Get countries competing with each other to offer to best bonanza to capitalists and sod the effect it has on the people and communities that suffer as a result. Privatise the gains and dump the costs onto taxpayers. At the moment Swiss cantons are luring away corporations based in the UK with promises of ever lower tax rates, and as our tax base shrinks we will become poorer as a greater and greater burden is placed on working taxpayers. Only the corporations and their shareholders benefit from this.

As for the unsustainable property boom - we have seen the effects of that here and in the USA - a global crisis not dissimilar to that which happened in the 1920s and 30s. In Ireland the banks recklessly lent eye-watering amounts of money, now the 4 million people of Ireland are picking up the bill - £15 billion in cuts to welfare and the public sector with more, much more, to come.

Property prices in Ireland (as here) are still falling, and as they do, the debts of the Irish banks continue to grow. Of course it's absolutely insane that the people of Ireland should be expected to bail out these banks. It's not their fault the banks went bust, and not one Irish banker has been held to account for what happened.

So why weren't these banks allowed to go bust? - as they should have been. Granted the ordinary depositors should have been protected but apart from that the rest of the debt should have been allowed to go hang. But wait a minute....... if that had happened not only would wealthy and powerful people lost their money but other banks in the UK, France and Germany would have lost money, and possibly been driven under as a result.

So the Irish, just like the Icelanders, are being made to pay for the failures of a capitalist system for which they bear no responsibility. Just as Ireland was bullied into a second referendum over the EU 'constitution' now it will be bullied into accepting another bailout by the EU so that european banks and investors will be protected. The Irish people have been screwed - but that is how capitalism works. Many years ago I went to a heated university debate about Ireland. One of the speakers said the Irish should get off their knees and fight. Never were those words more applicable than in Ireland today.

Lets condem the real perpetrators of violence

On Wednesday 52,000 students marched through London. The demonstration was peaceful and good natured. It is good to see that a new generation of British students has woken up and begun to realise that the class war being waged by the ConDem government against the poor, unemployed, disabled and low-paid extends to the right to have a higher education.

During the demo a few thousand students occupied 30 Millbank, which is the site of the Tory Party HQ. Windows were broken, placards were burned, there was the usual pushing and shoving with the police, and some idiot threw a fire extinguisher off the roof. This, and in particularly the latter incident, was manna to the right wing press who described the occupation as an orgy of violence. It was nothing of the sort. It was an expression of the righteous anger of a generation of students who know that they have been screwed, and betrayed by the politicians who promised not to let that happen. This is the same media who were cheerleaders for a war in Iraq where 1 million people died.

The reality is that higher education has been privatised, not out of necessity, but because of Tory 'free' market ideology. The Liberal Democrat MPs, Like Nick Clegg, who all pledged to end tuition fees for students, are entitled to change their minds. But what they cannot do is claim that a rise in fees is necessary, that is the real dishonesty of Nick Clegg's position. The rise is fees from £3000 to up to £9,000 is a matter of choice not necessity. The Lib Dems said they would phase out tuition fees within six years.

Of course, it has been claimed that only students benefit from higher education, and that they should pay. Funny that very few people thought that at decade ago. We all benefit from higher education by having a better educated population that has people with the skills that this country needs. Students often don't get well paid jobs and the idea that they all end up on top salaries is nonsense. The tuition fee rises row hides that fact that the government are making massive cuts of 40% in higher education. Many courses, particularly in the arts, and some universities, will close. We will all be the poorer as a result. These cuts are being driven by 'free' market fanatics who are bailing out a failed capitalist system. These people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

The breaking of windows and throwing of a fire extinguisher are being used by the political right to hide the real violence which is being perpetrated by the ConDem government against the most vulnerable in our society. Violence means causing people harm - that is what this government is doing.

The 'free' market is responsible for our housing benefit problems

The UK has a housing benefit bill of £21 billion. This is a huge sum. But how did it come about? The seeds were sown in 1979 when the incoming Thatcher government introduced the right to buy for social housing. This pledge gave a boost to the Tories in the polls but some of us were aware that it was storing up problems for the future. The Tories believed the benefits would be more than electoral. They believed that it would turn working class Labour voters into people who perceived themselves to be middle class, and that it would reduce working class militancy because mortgage holders would be less likely to go on strike. They were almost certainly right about that.

Councils were also prevented from building new homes to replace those lost. Of course, the inevitable result was that over the years the social housing stock became depleted. Subsequent governments failed to reverse either of these policies, relying on the private sector to build houses. But the private sector doesn't want to build social housing because it's not as profitable as building executive homes.The consequence of all this has been the housing crisis we now have in the UK. There are now 4.5 million people on the waiting list for social housing.

The government claim that the victims here are taxpayers who are having to pay for the unemployed to live in luxurious apartments that they could not afford themselves. But most of the people who will be hit by the housing benefit cap, at £400p.w., and made homeless, are not unemployed but the working poor or pensioners, and lot of these people live in London where rents are exorbitant. It has been estimated that more than 135,000 people could be made homeless. As far as the current debate about housing benefit is concerned most commentators seem to be missing the key point.

It's the working people on housing benefit who are the real victims because they are being screwed from two directions. One - pitifully low wages from employers and the second exorbitant rents from private landlords. Housing benefit is not a subsidy for them, it is actually subsidising the corporations who employ them and the private sector landlords. Just like tax credits for the working poor It is really a form of corporate welfarism which allows companies to pay wages that people cannot live on. By paying low wages they pocket the profits whist dumping the costs onto the rest of us. This is such a typical feature of how the free market works that hardly anyone notices or mentions it. This kind of cost dumping is taken for granted.

So what is the answer? Clearly we need a lot more social housing but this isn't going to happen overnight. Nor can we rely on the market to provide that housing. We need a new programme of council housebuilding funded by government. We also need to legislate to make companies to pay a living wage to the people they employ, and we need to re-inroduce rent controls to prevent landlords robbing their tenants and the taxpayer. Instead of blaming the victims its time we took some real action to force the culprits to change their ways.