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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.
The world of international finance has been shaken by the
default in Dubai.
Shares have taken a tumble all over the world. Commentators have suggested that
this could be the cause of the recession moving into a double dip, of a further
downturn in the world economy. Mick Brooks looks at the unfolding crisis in the, until last week, ‘money no object’ world of Dubai.
From 7th to 18th December
2009, delegates from 192 countries will be gathering in Copenhagen, Denmark,
in order to create a new, “legally-binding”, global treaty on climate change.
The UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen (known
as COP15) marks the culmination of two-years of negotiation to try and generate
a replacement for the Kyoto
protocol, which is due to expire in 2012.
At the opening session of the PSUV
congress Chavez made a very radical left-wing speech, calling for the
setting up of a new international, explaining that it was necessary to
destroy the bourgeois state and replace it with a revolutionary state,
but also referring to the bureaucracy within the Bolivarian movement
itself. It was clearly a speech that reflects the enormous pressure
from the masses below who are getting tired of talk about socialism,
while real progress towards genuine change appears to be frustratingly
slow. Alan Woods reports on the start of the PSUV congress in Venezuela.
At a recent meeting of a local Labour Party
Branch in Worcester,
a slick high tech presentation was given by a group called Transition Worcester,
who said they had the answer to the environmental crisis. It is to turn the
clock back 200 years to a mythical age where all trade was local and people
enjoyed the benefit of locally grown meat, fruit & veg. Within this presentation were ideas such as we
should no longer trade with developing countries and we should therefore export
our unemployment to the third world.
The situation at the University of Arts London is part of the bigger picture of course cuts,
redundancies and deficits across the whole of the public sector in
Britain. Why should students and staff pay for the economic crisis with
their jobs and education? UAL Marxists have organised a meeting for Tuesday 24th (6pm at the student
hub, 65 Davies Street) to discuss the course cuts and redundancies that
are taking place in UAL. A serious situation is emerging, which
ultimately could affect all the students and staff at the university.
Your education, your job, the quality of your work, all are under
threat.
We reproduce here a translation of an interview with Alan Woods published in a daily newspaper in Venezuela during his current visit to the country
The working masses and poor of South Africa overthrew the old hated
Apartheid regime as a means of improving their living and working
conditions. Instead what we have is a party in power, the ANC, which
was created by the working masses but which is presently carrying out
policies in the interests of the rich. This contradiction must be
resolved and the only way is for the working people to take back
control of the party they created.
Honduras: In a previous article we pointed to
the fact that the Tegucigalpa/San José Accord signed on October 30 was
a farce. Events have now confirmed that we were right. To accept the
agreement now would be a betrayal of the mass movement. What is
required now is an active boycott, combined with mass mobilisation for
the overthrow of the present illegitimate regime
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.
New
Labour, the government that introduced tuition fees and student loans in 1998 and
then narrowly passed a bill to introduce top-up fees of £3,200 per year from
2006, have recently launched a “higher education finance review” to look into
raising the cap on tuition fees (possibly up to £7000 per year) and examine the
way in which universities should be funded. The appointment of Lord Browne, a
friend of Peter Mandelson and former chief of the multinational oil-giant BP,
to chair the fees review has not done anything to encourage university
students, who already face the prospect of an accumulated debt of over £23,000
upon graduation.