News and analysis

Pressures
have been building up in British society. High house prices, fuel and food
price increases and pay restraint and cuts particularly in the public sector
are all having a huge effect on workers. It’s obvious that there’s going to be
a change and the longer it is delayed the worse the storm is when it eventually
breaks.

At present gas prices are going up by 13.6%
in Britain. They’re rising by just 2% in the Netherlands. Prices are 25% higher
here than on the continent. By the end of the year household bills will be
£1,323 a year. This is twice as high as when Labour was elected in 1997. Some
estimate household bills could hit £1,500 next winter.

Public
sector pay is big news this summer. In fact, contrary to what the weather
forecasters might tell you, it could be a decidedly warm one. It doesn’t take a
lot to work out why either. Public sector workers are being made to pay for the
New Labour meltdown. Pay restraint is intimately tied into the government’s
finances and that means dinner ladies and civil servants footing the bill not
only for the ongoing occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan but also for the black hole
in public spending courtesy of the ex board members of Northern Rock. Alistair
Darling’s plea that the need to keep inflation under control "applies to each
and every one of us" will ring hollow in the ears of the civil servants
and other workers on the minimum wage or a marginally better pittance.

The bosses
are over the moon. “Boris Johnson’s London
will be a Tory laboratory” trumpets the Daily Telegraph (May 4th).  That makes David Cameron their Doctor
Frankenstein. Don’t let anybody
fall for the line that it can’t get worse after Blair and Brown. Already one of Johnson’s top aide’s has had to
resign for saying about immigrants who don’t like Tory policies "Well,
let them go (back) if they don’t like it here."

Brief as it was woeful, Wendy Alexander’s
leadership of the Labour Party in Scotland has come to an end.
Alexander was forced to resign after being given a one day ban from parliament
for breaking rules regarding donations for her campaign to become Labour Party
leader. Her actions were illegal – no doubt about it. No one is quite sure why
such large sums of cash were needed for what in effect became a coronation,
given the lack of an opposition candidate.

In the Mental Health Trust
where I work, now a Foundation Trust, the primary anxiety for workers is not
about pay but about the future of their jobs. Of course, rising prices and
a lousy pay deal – coupled with the Trust’s intention to hold an across
the board ‘banding review’ – piles on the pressure, but the fact that
repeated structural changes, resulting in cuts in the management structure,
have saved no real money and, now, all vacant posts have been abolished
(rather than frozen, as has been usual in the past) has drawn attention to
a very pressing threat to jobs.

The government is trying to push a proposal through Parliament to
increase the length of time a suspect can be detained without charge to 42
days. What argument does the government use as excuse for eliminating rights
and liberties we have defended for hundreds of years? Not much. The authorities
present the ‘war against terror’ as one that demands secrecy on their part.
They hint darkly that lives are at risk if they tell us what they know, but
that the situation is grim. Trust us!