December 2007

The findings of a report conducted by the Sutton Trust into the educational achievements of working-class and poor children compared with their better-off peers were recently published. The Trust tested three-year-olds to determine their intellectual capabilities, their intelligence and ‘brightness’ in other words. It may come as no surprise to learn that those children who came out top but were from working-class families had, by the age of seven,  fallen far behind children from middle-class and well-off families who had been in the bottom segment at the age of three.  

Labour Research has looked at the 2006-7 pay round. We’re getting poorer! “the median (midpoint) increase in pay was 3.6%, well below the 4.1% average Retail Price Increase growth reported over those 12 months.” So over the past year wages have fallen behind the rise in prices.

Metronet bosses have been paid out £1.2 million to get rid of them. Metronet went belly up in the summer leaving us with a farewell present of £2 billion debt. Metronet got the contract to maintain two thirds of the tube network, despite the opposition of Mayor Livingstone and pretty well everyone who lives in London. Metronet is not actually a firm. It’s a consortium of companies such as Balfour Beatty and Thames Water. They contracted  the work out to firms who actually did the repairs, firms such as Balfour Beatty and Thames Water. Presumably they cut cards to share […]

The papers have been reporting that people all over the country have been pulling out their own teeth with pliers and filling their cavities with Polyfilla. It seems they can’t find a NHS dentist anywhere near where they live.What happened to a health service free at the point of use?

In the present financial volatility, American bank Merrill Lynch has lost between $8 and $12 billion. The man who made it all happen by betting on the sub-prime mortgage market was chief executive Stan O’Neal. He’s got to go. The bank is paying him $159 million to go. The reward for failure?

From the Guardian October 25th: “Last week India’s biggest real estate dealer made a paper fortune of £500m in a day. Government figures show that the average expenditure of countryside household India to be just 500 rupees a month or about 20p a day.”

How well prepared was US imperialism for the invasion of Iraq? Was their planning based on high precision satellite spy technology? According to Barbara Bodine, formerly of the State Department in the TV programme No plan, no Peace, their main instrument for information about the country was a 1990s version of the Lonely Planet Guide to Iraq.

The two month strike by staff across Glasgow day care centres
ended on December 6th with a slim majority vote of 11 in favour of a return to
work. Unison leaders are being heavily criticised by the strikers, many
of whom feel they were ‘bounced’ into accepting the union’s advice to call off
the action.
At the same time they claim union leaders did not tell them of developments.

Seventy-seven workers were killed in the year 2006-7, with thousands more injured, some seriously. The ragged trousered philanthropist is alive and well in 2007. If you are a building worker and have not read this book by Robert Tressell, then you must. You will find the story is re-lived on many of today’s UK building sites.