"The London police on strike. After that,
anything can happen", said Sylvia Pankhurst in 1918. The ground is certainly shifting in Britain. There has
been a continual build up of public anger at the government’s attempt to impose
a 2% limit on public sector pay. The Police are getting a paltry 1.9% rise, in effect a pay cut.
They were furious and making all kinds of threats against the Home Secretary
Jacqui Smith and Gordon Brown.

So if things weren’t bad enough for Gordon Brown, it looks like the
Labour Party has been taking big donations from Tory voters. Apparently, a number of confused members of the public have discovered that their bank accounts have been used to
transfer funds to the Labour Party. This all
sounds a bit fishy. Can we expect a new episode of "Our friends in the North"?

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.