NEARLY 500
guards, drivers and customer service hosts on Southeastern Trains are to be
balloted for industrial action by Britain’s biggest rail union after the
company declared war on the safety role of the guard and insisted on an
extension of driver-only operation.

The RMT
ballot, which will open on August 21 and close on September 11, has been
sparked by the company’s intention to transfer control of power-operated doors
to drivers and scrap guards on its new Hitachi ‘Javelin’ 395 rolling stock.

After
avoiding meeting union reps for many months the company finally revealed that
it intends to remove all control of power-operated doors on 395s from guards,
along with the guard’s entire safety role other than train evacuation – in
breach of existing agreements.

The two previous parts of this article analysed the processes of change in England in the period from the late fifteenth century to the early seventeenth century and tried to explain why King and Parliament found themselves on a collision course which culminated in a bloody civil war.

 In this part we attempt to show how one major effect of the struggle against the King and other forces of reaction was to open up an unprecedented ferment of hopes and aspirations among the supporters of Parliament. As the war proceeded, these aspirations became increasingly polarized, reflecting the constantly changing balance of class interests and class forces within the ranks of the Parliamentarians.

In the first part of this article we attempted to identify the interacting economic, social and political processes which led to the crucial confrontation between classes known as the English Civil War. In Part Two we will examine these processes in greater detail.

The English Civil War was part of a social revolution. It was not a clash of personalities between King Charles, he of the flowing locks, frills and furbelows and Cromwell, austere and even dour though he may have been. It was not simply a clash between old and new forms of religious worship although there was always a suspicion that James perhaps, but Charles more definitely, wished to rehabilitate Catholicism. Nor was it simply a clash between a monarch who wanted absolute power and a Parliament defiantly determined to defend and develop its political influence. Material interests were involved. This was class struggle.

As I write, it is one year since the great
global credit crunch began. On 6 August 2007, America’s second-largest mortgage
lender American Home Mortgage Investment Corp filed for bankruptcy.  Three days later, France’s biggest bank,
BNP-Paribas announced that it was freezing redemptions on three of its
investment funds in sub-prime mortgages. 
Immediately, the European Central Bank announced it was injecting E75bn
into the financial system.  Only a few
days later, the US Federal Reserve Bank announced a 50 base points cut in its funds rate
and injected extra liquidity into the system. 
The credit crunch had begun!

One year on, this earthquake in the global
financial system has left banks, insurers, pension and municipal funds, hedge
funds and private equity companies tottering and falling.  Collateral damage has been immense and the
after- shocks are still to come.

“Outsourcing of public services to the
private and voluntary sectors has almost doubled to close to £80bn in little
more than a decade and makes up a far larger part of the economy than
previously thought.” (Financial Times 09.07.08) A third of all public services – far
more than previously thought – are now delivered by the private and voluntary
sectors, according to this report commissioned by the government.

Labour’s National Policy Forum took
place in Coventry over the weekend of the 25th, 26th and
27th July. The policy objectives were to be known as Warwick 2

The Forum took place against the backdrop of
the disastrous by-election defeat in Glasgow East. This in turn was only the
latest in a list of electoral humiliations over the past few months. The
Henley, Crewe and Nantwich by-election defeats, the council elections and the
defeat in London’s mayoral elections, are all a reflection of the utter
frustration felt by the working class electorate after ten years of New Labour
pandering to big business.

This is part one of a major five part article  on what was actually the English bourgeois revolution. We shall run it over the next two weeks on this website

None comes into the world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him. Richard Rumbold, Leveller.

Politicians, mainstream historians, constitutional lawyers and the like would have us believe that there is something uniquely decent about the way in which the British conduct their affairs of state. These are marked out, so they say, by tolerance, hatred of violence, a sense of justice and fairness, willingness to compromise and by gradual, evolutionary change. Not for us, they continue, warming to their theme, are the extremism, the violence and the awful revolutionary upheavals witnessed in France, Russia or elsewhere.

Put up or shut
up!

“They’re tearing
themselves apart, just like we used to do,” a senior Conservative MP said,
beaming in the sunshine. “God knows why he’s done it now.” This is a quote from
the Financial Times (31.07.08) about what the Tories think of David Miliband’s
‘coded leadership bid’.