News and analysis

The
events of the past year or so, financial meltdown, political instability,
uncertainty over jobs and the threat that many workers could lose their homes
represents a huge shift in society, both internationally and especially in
Britain where the effects of the “credit crunch” have been particularly acute.
In the context of such a deep crisis the halcyon days of the “feel good factor”
and the “15 years of unbroken economic growth”, seem like ancient history.

Whose fault is it that nearly 30,000 workers have lost their jobs
with the closure of all the Woolworths stores? Not the workers, that’s for
sure. We are due to see an avalanche of job losses after Christmas. Unemployment
is nearly 2 million already, and due to hit 3 million in 12 months’ time. None
of these workers deserve to lose their jobs. They are the victims of a
capitalist system that is just not working. How can we make things better? If
we fight for work or full pay, the bosses would soon find them something to do.

In 1848 The Communist Manifesto opened with the line, "A spectre is
haunting Europe – the spectre of communism. " The spectre of Marx haunts
world capitalism still.The years of steadily rising living standards, of relatively full employment
have gone, never to return. This year, and for years to come, workers look with
trepidation at their future. Will they have a job? Will they still have a roof
over their heads?

The government has thrown its weight behind the
Hooper Report and decided to sell 30% of its stake in Royal Mail.
The background to all this is that Royal
Mail has been making shed loads of profit for us as a publicly owned company
for years. The trouble was that the Treasury has been using the Post office as
a milch cow all that time, siphoning off all the money. Then the government
complains that the firm hasn’t invested. No wonder!

2008 makes for a sad story, and in 2009, the working class will
begin really paying for it. Some of the worst to be affected will be young
unskilled workers; cleaners, shop-workers and caterers, like myself. Minimum
wage workers at the best of times, we have, during the period of boom (which
apparently was the last 10 years, although no one told us) eked out an
existence, hovering from one place to the next for as long as moral holds out.
Most I have worked with were young, often migrants, demoralised but unorganised
and so usually without contracts of employment and subject to very poor working
conditions.

Buried on page 11 of the Guardian on 1st
November is an article, extremely enlightening in its simplicity, reporting the
‘news’ that during office Blair was only too happy to do Rupert Murdoch’s bidding.
According to Lance Price, former Downing Street
spin doctor, Murdoch was ‘one of the four most influential people in the
administration’. Never mind that he was totally unelected, not actually a part
of any ‘administration’, or that he is a US citizen whose company (News Corp.)
pays no net tax.

If you’re a fan of the writer George
Orwell then you may find Gordon Brown’s recent proposals to install lie
detectors into phone lines at benefit offices frighteningly reminiscent of the
novel ‘1984’, which was about a draconian totalitarian state that constantly
monitored its citizens, and brain washed them into submission. Well, it seems
that Orwell was only 24 years out.

One of our regular readers sent this letter to the Prime Minister. Strangely, he did not get a reply

The economic and financial crisis has dominated the whole year. Speculation and uncertainty in the US led to the price of oil hitting
$100 a barrel by January 2nd, followed shortly after by the first stock
market crash of the year amid fears of a global recession caused by
last year’s crisis in the sub-prime mortgage market. The world has entered perhaps the most disturbed period in the whole of human history.