Hain resigns: New Labour enmired in sleaze
New Labour’s indecent closeness to big business claimed another victim
as Hain resigned today. The police are now on his tail. The victim is
not Hain. His resignation will, after all, give him more time to count
his money. The victim is the working class who have voted for Hain and his mates in order for Labour to do a job for ordinary working people,
not grovel to big business.
Everything now clearly indicates that the
advanced capitalist world is headed for recession. The only question is when
and how deep that recession will be. In fact Merrill Lynch says the US economy
is already in recession. And that’s bad news for all of us. Here Mick Brooks at
what is really going on in the world economy.
Gordon Brown and Chancellor Darling are trying to cut public sector pay and impose three year pay deals, despite the price of basic goods rising. In effect the deals the are trying to impose are pay cuts. Why?
Right again – in issue 139 we reviewed the privatisation of Qinetiq, which was floated off from the Ministry of Defence and sold to the US Carlyle Group. ‘Daft, or what?’ was our headline. Ten top civil servants put in £540,000 in and saw their stake rise by 20,000% in a day. Caryle put in £42m and saw it rise to £374m on the day of the sale – a 786% profit. Another triumph for the Chancellor of the day, gormless Gordon.
In 2006 City fatcats ‘earned’ £8billion in bonuses. So will they be cutting down this year in view of the financial crisis – the mess they created, after all? Not much sign of it. The Movida nightclub has been selling a cocktail that costs £35,000 a glass for Christmas.
PFI alert: Socialist Appeal has been banging on about the waste of the Private Finance Initiative for years. Now the Treasury has costed it all. We are committed to pay back £170 billion by 2032 for schools, hospitals, and prisons that we’ll never own. Next time you want to waste £170bn, Gordon, use you own money – not ours.
Readers of our review of Michael Moore’s film Sicko (issue 158) will be aware of the scams used by private health insurance firms in the USA to avoid paying out. Here’s one consequence. Californian teenager Nataline Sarkisyan died after Cigna HealthCare refused to pay for a liver transplant. They said her healthcare plan did “not cover experimental, investigational and unproven services.” So she died. Her mother thinks the company should face murder or manslaughter charges. She is right.
A York woman borrowed £320 from the Early Payday Loan Co. At an annualised percentage rate of 2.6 million per cent. She has to pay £12.80 a day or £400 a month or £4,809.60 in total. EPDL manager Dawn Hodson said, “The charges on our loans are competitive in the market and we like to think we are responsible lenders.” Shouldn’t this be illegal?
We have seen the sharpest falls in stock markets around the
world for almost a decade. Billions have been wiped off share prices worldwide.
As we have predicted, fear mounted among the financial authorities that the
panic could lead to a full-blown recession.
On January 2nd the Guardian ran a feature under the headline
‘Fight for equality that could put jobs at risk.’ They interviewed
Rosaline Wilson who had engaged a no-win-no-fee firm of lawyers to
pursue an equal pay case against her employers, the local council.
Panic! The world’s
stock markets had their sharpest fall since 9/11 on Monday 21 January. Stock markets have had their worst start in the UK since records began! The UK is the most dependent of all the big seven
economies on finance, property and professional services rather than
productive sectors like manufacturing and transport.. So this world
downturn will hit it hardest of all.
The government is
desperate not to nationalise Northern Rock. As Trotsky says, “the banks concentrate in their hands the actual control over
the economy.” If the banks are
always to be bailed out because they are so important to the economy, then we
need to take them all over.