Archives

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Once again
New Labour are aping the Tories. Jack Straw has rushed through rules making strike action
by the Prison Officers illegal, reintroducing rules brought in by the Conservative government in 1994. We need to defend the
rights of the POA and the principles of free trade unionism.

Last year’s conference of the
National Union of Teacher’s voted to ballot members of the union to vote in
favour of setting up a political fund. This successful vote was a significant
advance for the largest and traditionally more militant of the teacher trade
unions.

Thousands of Revenue and Customs workers are to start voting on
whether to stage a one-day strike and a ban on overtime in protest at job cuts
and office closures.

The walkout will be held on January 31, the deadline for self assessment tax
returns, if there is a yes vote by members of the Public and Commercial
Services union.

Socialist Appeal is British section of the International Marxist Tendency. We are seeking to organise class-conscious workers and youth around a Marxist programme to change society.

Despite an
international conspiracy of silence, as we have reported over the past year
Egypt has seen a major upturn in the class struggle. Workers have shown
fantastic bravery and made enormous sacrifices. The working
class, especially the massive Egyptian workers movement, is the key to the
future of the Middle East, not the so-called war on terror or the blind alley of
Islamism.

Did Blair and his right wing policies make Labour
electable? The defeats of the 1980s led many activists to despair. The claim that dominance of the Party by the left was
responsible for the defeats needs careful scrutiny, as it is completely
at odds with the facts. Like all other aspects of history, the story of
the 1980s has been written by the so-called victors and what actually
happened needs to be investigated.