Earlier this week two
hundred angry North London residents packed into an emergency meeting convened
by Islington’s Labour MP, Jeremy Corbyn, after a government document was leaked
revealing plans to close Archway’s Whittington Hospital Accident &
Emergency department.
The TUC has worked out that the richest folk in the land get
subsidised massively in their old age by the rest of us. No change
there, then. £37bn is set aside by the Treasury as tax relief for
pension funds. This tax break is, of course, worth much more to those
on the higher rate of income tax. They get their hands on 60% of the
£37bn. Of this sum, nearly £10bn is grabbed by the top 1% of the
population, people on more than £150,000 a year.
Saturday November 14th saw the Scottish Defence
League’s attempt at a Glasgow
city centre rally fail miserably. The group spent most of the day confined in a
pub, protected by hundreds of police, before being forced onto chartered buses
in the face of a much larger counter demonstration. However, the story is not
simply one of the far right being driven from the streets by a left wing
demonstration. There are many political lessons to be learned from Saturday’s
events and the lead up to it which are important for those attempting to
effectively oppose the English Defence League and its Scottish ally
The Glasgow North East By-election was billed by political
commentators as a final test for Gordon Brown and his leadership of the Labour
Party. If he was to loose another Labour heartland seat in Glasgow to the Scottish National Party (SNP)
then he would struggle to hold on to his position as party leader. Despite many
early predictions to the contrary, Labour held on to the seat (formerly held by
the speaker and therefore previously benefiting from no opposition from Tories
or Lib-Dems) and actually managed to increase their percentage of the vote. But
this hides the real story. Labour got 3,000 less votes than they did in 2005, these
votes did not fall to the Nationalist, who lost 1,000 votes on last time but
instead fell into mass abstentions making this the lowest turn-out in a
Scottish by-election ever.
Last week, a mob from the English Defence League (EDL), a rag-tag collection of football
‘service crews’ and other assorted hooligan and racist elements, mobilised in
the northern city of Leeds. Clearly hoping to capitalise on their ‘successes’
in Manchester (where they managed to mobilise several hundred people) and Luton
(where the absence of any counter-mobilisation by the labour movement allowed
the EDL’s thugs to attack Muslims in the street), several hundred of these
fascist yobs gathered in City Square. Over 1500 (see picture) came to oppose them.
Internationally, capitalism is
emerging from its worst crisis since the 1930s. There is palpable
relief in the ranks of the ruling class at avoiding a financial
meltdown. However, despite heated talk of green shoots, there is a
universal gloom about the current situation.
While the leaders and lieutenants of capital
continue their assault on the pay, conditions and jobs of workers everywhere,
strikes have broken out sporadically across the UK,
including in transport. As was the case with the bus drivers of Essex and
Greater Manchester, in August the workers of GoNortheast in Washington in the
North-East of England also walked out of pay talks after rejecting a pitiful
offer of just 2% over 18 months.
Waste, big salaries and huge pensions, that’s the image the
Tories are trying to present of the public sector in Britain today. It’s a bit
rich coming from them, at a time when their rich backers in the City of London
have been exposed as a bunch of greedy parasites.
It was only a few months ago that public anger against the banks and an
unprecedented crisis of capitalism seemed to have an almost
revolutionary tone. Public consciousness and official opinion seemed to
have shifted decisively to the left. Yet this rage seems not to have
effected any political change at all and somehow the public debate
(i.e. the editorial line of the press and the rest of the media) has
swung far to the right. But the anger and opposition to bank bailouts
has not disappeared.
In March of this year, the People’s Charter was launched at the House Of Commons and has since been backed by many labour movement organisations, trade union leaderships and the TUC. Based around six demands, the aim is to present a way forward which will ensure that the burden of the preesent crisis is not borne by working people. How effective are these demands? How could they be actually implemented? As part of the discussion which the Charter has opened up, we present the first of a number of articles which will seek to examine these demands from a Marxist perspective.
Nearly two decades ago. Robert Maxwell – former Labour MP, newspaper
tycoon and (so it turned out) conman died after ‘falling’ off his luxury
boat. Soon after all the scandals he was involved in were revealed to
an amazed world. He was living a great big lie and – worst of all – it
was at the expense of those former and then-current employees of the
Maxwell-owned Mirror Group who discovered that their pension fund had been milked dry by Maxwell.