On the 17th and 18th March there was a well supported strike by PCS
members in the Department for Work and Pensions, which was a further
two days of strike in protest at an imposed pay offer. The imposed
offer means 40% of staff receive no rise this year and the lowest paid
staff receive an increase that will only take their wages to 24p above
the National Minimum Wage.
On Saturday the 29th of March the Socialist Youth Network
(SYN) held its 3rd annual conference at the ULU building near
Euston. The Socialist Youth Network is the youth wing of the Labour Representation Committee (LRC), the left wing of the Labour Party led by John McDonnell. Youth comrades from Socialist Appeal attended the meeting reported here.
It is easy to write off Boris Johnson as a buffoon. There is
a real danger he will be running London, a city of 7½ million people in a
couple of months time. Make sure Johnson is not made London’s Mayor in the May
1st elections. As Compass points out, “his buffoonery conceals a
hard line right wing set of views – a type of Norman Tebbitt in clown’s
uniform. The quotes below are taken from their pamphlet Boris Johnson – a man of the Tory hard right.
May 1st, May Day, will see one of the tightest and most important
elections to hit London for some years. The election of London Mayor is
being hotly contested between Ken Livingstone for Labour and Boris
Johnson for the Tories.
125 years ago, on March 14th 1883, Karl Marx died. Marx was a
revolutionary above all else. His most celebrated scientific discovery
explains how the working class is exploited under capitalism. Where does profit come from? This is the
central mystery of economics, a mystery that was solved by Marx in his
most famous work, Capital.
The nineteenth century was an era of price
stability. It was also the age of the gold standard. Inflation can have many
triggers, but it always involves an increase in money emissions at some point
in order to give expression to higher prices. It is difficult to increase the
money supply quickly if you have to mine precious metals, so runaway inflation
just didn’t happen back then. The government can’t really control inflation.
Now it’s back!
In a bizarre but brilliant turn of editorial line, BBC’s
Newsnight has launched an apparently socialist documentary series on China. At
least, that was how it appeared on the basis of Paul Mason’s excellent report
on Wednesday 26th March, to be followed up the following week.
At a meeting in London on 13th March a couple of
hecklers were attacking John McDonnell for being a member of the Labour Party.
Veteran trade unionist Harry Whittaker answered them in his typically
forthright Scottish manner. He said: “What would a working man do if he had
spent years building himself a house only to find it had become infested by
rats? Would he give up his home and move elsewhere, leaving the house
completely in the control of the rats? Of course not! He would never give in to
the rats; he would fight them and he would not rest until he had rid his house
of the last vestige of this verminous infestation. And this is exactly the same
course of action which the true socialist must take with the House of
Labour."
We
need to take over the banks to bring order out of chaos and growth out of
stagnation. In future months we will be urged for the need to nationalise
loss-making financial institutions. We are not just interested in nurturing
losses. Those who incurred the losses can look after them – and that’s not us.
We need to take over the lot. We need to separate the fat cats from their wads.
We need to run the banks in our interests as part of a socialist plan. We need
to run them under democratic workers’ control and management. And we need to
start organising ourselves to do this now.
Imagine you have a known terrorist in your custody. He holds
the information that could be used to disarm a bomb. With this information you
can save the lives of thousands, perhaps millions of innocent people. But he
will not give you the information. What do you do?
World stock markets are still reeling from yet another shock to the
system brought on by the so-called credit crunch that has enveloped capitalist
financial markets since last summer. The latest shock was the biggest yet. Late on Sunday night, 16 March, the US
Federal Reserve Bank announced that Bear Stearns, America’s fifth-largest investment
bank, was bust.