Britain

Following on from the Hooper Report, the
government is proposing to part-privatise Royal Mail, the letter delivery arm
of the Post Office. There’s no silly nonsense about putting the arrangement out
to tender so we the taxpayers get the best deal either. They’ve already lined
up TNT to take 30% of Royal Mail. The announcement has roused fury among
millions of people – trade unionists and just ordinary people who use Royal
Mail, which is pretty well everyone. Why mess about with something that works
well? We have the cheapest postal service in Western Europe. We are the only
country in the European Union that still has a Saturday delivery.

As the
capitalist crisis deepens, more and more workers are coming under attack.
Vodafone has just announced huge lay-offs. There are plans to axe 1,000 jobs on
the railways. The sacking of 850 agency workers at the Cowley car plant in
Oxford is the latest in a string of redundancies. They received no redundancy
pay, no holiday pay and no sickness pay. All they were offered was their P45s
and a week’s wages. Wage freezes have also become common in the last period. Short-time
working has spread with Toyota closing its factory for four weeks.

High-ranking British police officers
have expressed concern that the country may be facing an outburst of street
protests. Superintendent David Hartshorn, head of the Metropolitan police’s
public order branch, and one of the highest ranking police officers in the
country, in an interview with The Guardian newspaper, spoke of the
possibility of riots like those that rocked the country in the 1980s, erupting
later this year as people who lose their jobs, homes or savings become
"footsoldiers" in a wave of violent mass protests.

The State Pension was
established 100 years ago on 1^st January 1909. This followed a ten
year campaign by social reformers and the Trade Union Movement.Pensions should be a right for those who have worked all
their lives. Instead the government is looking to whittle away the fragile
gains of a century of struggle.

The welfare ‘reform’ measures currently wending their way through Parliament are so right wing you might have thought they were drafted by the Tories. Funny you should mention it…David Freud, who drafted the White Paper on which the bill is based, has just defected to the Conservatives. This shows two things:

He’s a rat leaving what he sees as a sinking ship

New Labour sucking up to the Tories with anti-working class policies just paves the way for the real thing to take over and put the boot in further.

Coupled to the Bologna Process, though not explicitly included in
it, has been the privatisation of education and all that this entails. So now
not only are students faced with the fact that they will have to work harder
and longer hours for a shorter period of time, that the costs of their
education will also increase (so working on top of the hours required for
studying becomes more of a strain) but also that their courses may end up being
influenced by some company who’s only real interest in to create profit out of
the process…

The Private
Finance Initiative was always bonkers. The idea was that, instead of the
government borrowing to build infrastructural projects, they would hand the job
over to a private consortium to raise the money.This was
always daft. The government was always the safest borrower in town. When did
you last hear of a government going bust? Because its loans are completely
safe, the government can borrow at a cheaper rate than anyone else.

Yesterday it was David Blunkett and his
privately funded trip to South Africa, which he forgot to own up to. Today it
is Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and her £116,000 expenses claim. According to
the BBC: ‘Ms Smith reportedly claimed £116,000 in expenses for her home in
Redditch, Worcestershire, after telling the Commons that her sister’s home –
where she stays while in London – was her main residence.’ The tax-free
Additional Cost Allowance is worth up to £24,006 a year at present.