In 1848 The Communist Manifesto opened with the line, "A spectre is
haunting Europe – the spectre of communism. " The spectre of Marx haunts
world capitalism still.The years of steadily rising living standards, of relatively full employment
have gone, never to return. This year, and for years to come, workers look with
trepidation at their future. Will they have a job? Will they still have a roof
over their heads?
The Labour Party has selected David Shaw as its candidate for an East Ayrshire council by-election. A Ferrari-driving multi-millionaire with a fortune from the milk trade, he is a former chair of South Ayrshire Conservative party. During the miners’ strike he enjoyed toasting Margaret Thatcher in the area’s pubs, the better to annoy the locals. Where do they dig these people up?
The two biggest pubcos in the land, Punch Taverns and Enterprise Inns, have seen more than 70% wiped off the value of their shares. Dividends have been cancelled and concerns expressed as to their long term viability. So what happens? The chief executives of the two firms have collected long term incentive awards of £1.17m. Incentives for failure, presumably? Both bosses have laden the chains with debt, careless of the future. Nils Pratley (Guardian 10.12.08) comments, “Punch is an extreme example of the pub industry’s love affair with debt and financial complexity in recent years. The biggest six quoted operators […]
London residents Lakshmi Mittal and family have lost £21.4bn on their shares in the family firm since June as stock markets have plummeted. Mind you, they’ve still got £12bn left. Vladimir Kim has lost £3.28bn, and Anil Agarwal £2.95bn.
At Labour Party Conference Malcolm Wicks criticised energy regulator Ofgem on the grounds that they had “not understood fuel poverty”. To a shocked silence, he went on: “They haven’t been a force in social policy when it comes to all of this. When I met some of them, years ago now, some of their technocrats told me about the wonders of switching. They had no idea that many of my constituents are nowhere near a computer and had other priorities than switching from supplier to supplier every month. So I think, sociologically, that there’s been an ignorance there.” For the […]
The government has thrown its weight behind the
Hooper Report and decided to sell 30% of its stake in Royal Mail.
The background to all this is that Royal
Mail has been making shed loads of profit for us as a publicly owned company
for years. The trouble was that the Treasury has been using the Post office as
a milch cow all that time, siphoning off all the money. Then the government
complains that the firm hasn’t invested. No wonder!
The
Tories on the Council of the London Borough of Barnet intend to set up a “joint
venture company” with the private sector, transfer 4,000 workers out of local
authority employment and leave a skeleton staff of commissioners and auditors.
They are proposing to privatise the Council!
In Ireland unemployment is rising at the fastest rate
since the records began in 1967. It’s
now standing at 295,000, having grown by120,987 in the last year. The only
thing growing faster than that is opposition to the Israeli onslaught against Gaza. The dole figure now
stands at 8.3%. Since December 2007 male unemployment has gone up by 83% and
female by 50% (although this is likely to be a big underestimate). Among young
people under 25 it’s gone up 24%. Estimates from the state training agency FÁS
indicate that unemployment will reach 12% this year.
2008 makes for a sad story, and in 2009, the working class will
begin really paying for it. Some of the worst to be affected will be young
unskilled workers; cleaners, shop-workers and caterers, like myself. Minimum
wage workers at the best of times, we have, during the period of boom (which
apparently was the last 10 years, although no one told us) eked out an
existence, hovering from one place to the next for as long as moral holds out.
Most I have worked with were young, often migrants, demoralised but unorganised
and so usually without contracts of employment and subject to very poor working
conditions.
A
statement of the Iranian Marxists on the recent Israeli attack on Gaza, that
explains the need to build a genuine Marxist leadership throughout the Middle
East in opposition to the Zionist regime in Israel, the reactionary Arab
regimes, and also Islamic fundamentalist movements that offer no real way out
to the masses.
Jerry
Hicks is standing for general secretary of the Amicus section of Unite. Jerry speaks to ‘Socialist Appeal: "Workers rights, trade union freedoms, decent state pensions, pay and
conditions, public ownership of utilities is the way forward especially now
during the chaos that the free market has created. Our arguments have never
made more sense. The last thing I’d like to say on this is I’m not afraid of
the ‘S’ word – socialism."