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.
You
couldn’t make it up! About two years ago the banks in Britain, the USA and all over the world began to
go bust. It started over here with Northern Rock and culminated in the USA with the
collapse of the giant Lehman Brothers, the biggest corporate bankruptcy in
history. The problem for governments was that the banks were threatening to
take whole chunks of the capitalist system over the precipice with them. The
banking collapse and the ‘credit crunch’ were the triggers for a general crisis
of capitalism.
Cuts, cuts and even more cuts. This is the
message now being shouted by the leaderships of the Tories, the
Liberal-Democrats and – disgracefully – Labour. Indeed they are all trying to
outdo each other in presenting ever more severe programmes of public spending
cutbacks as part of what has been called a ‘race to the bottom’ on the part of
the three parties.
This Thursday 17th Sept will see a Day Of Action taking place in
support of the sacked Vestas workers. Meetings and rallies will be
taking place all around the country. 600 jobs have been lost at the Vestas
plant on the Isle Of Wight. Workers from the closed factory were at the
TUC in Liverpool this week and got a great reception. The demand
remains: nationalise the factory, keep the jobs.
In Will Hay’s classic farce ‘Oh, Mr Porter!’ the new stationmaster arrives to
be greeted at Buggleskelly ticket office with the words “Next train gone.” For thousands
of travelers on the modern day farce of London Midland network last Sunday it was a case of “No
trains coming.”
Hard on the heels of Donald Trump’s Aberdeen golf complex for
the rich and famous comes an even more exclusive playground, not for the rich,
poor things, but for the super-rich! According to a report in the Scotsman newspaper: ‘The Dall
Estate, on the shores of Loch Rannoch, is set to become a "mini
Monaco" in the heart of the Scottish countryside – a home from home for
billionaires, Russian oligarchs, heads of state, the international glitterati
and Hollywood and sporting superstars.’
Last Saturday, activists from around the country assembled in the Derbyshire town of Codner to protest at the presence in the area of the BNPs "Hate Fest." Here are two reports by supporters of Socialist Appeal who attended the protest.
During the summer much was made of Tory
leader David Cameron’s unfortunate use of the ‘T’ word during a radio
interview. One cartoonist later commentated that he would have got into more
trouble with the Tory hierarchy had he used a different four-letter word,
‘cuts.’ Cameron has gone out of his way not to give the impression that the
Tories will bring in massive public sector cuts should they win the next
general election. Indeed he has gone on
record as saying that the budgets for overseas aid and – more to the point –
the health service will be protected. Can we believe him? We think not.
Although the spin doctors have been hard at work – for them anyway – trying to convince people that the ‘green shoots’ of recovery are starting to appear, the reality is still grim for the UK economy.Company liquidations have gone up by 40% this year according to the Insolvency Service.