MorningStar | ukwatch.net

Tame the fat cats

Alex Doherty — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 18:25:15 +0000

The surge of support for a one-off windfall tax on energy firms’ obscenely excessive profits may be on the point of becoming irresistible.

When even those on the fringes of government, such as Rob Marris and Steven Pound, feel emboldened to nail their colours to the mast, it is fair to say that times are changing.

To some extent, this is because of the perceived weakness of the dead man walking in Downing Street, but it is also because increasing numbers of the parliamentary Labour party can see the dole queue beckoning.

They realise that something must be done to show that the Labour Party is reconnecting with its grass-roots supporters or, currently, non-supporters.

And there are few fat cats as brazen as the energy bosses, apart from, say, the water and rail privateers.

But even the parasites presently living in luxury on the basis of our plundered railways and water services would find it difficult to compete in the daylight robbery stakes with the gas and electricity companies that have already put up prices twice this year and are returning for a third bite.

The so-called energy regulator Ofgem ought to be prosecuted for taking money under false premises, smiling benignly as the big six companies have imposed double-digit price rises.

Every shoddy justification for this blatant profiteering is nodded through by Ofgem, including the lie that prices to consumers have to rise because wholesale prices have gone up.

Wholesale prices were lower this month and last, but still the oligopoly pushes up domestic prices.

The big six also blame suppliers in Europe for overcharging us, but it is the companies themselves that neglected to build adequate storage facilities, in contrast to publicly controlled companies in other parts of Europe.

And there is also a false dichotomy between wholesale and retail companies.

Most gas suppliers are also gas producers, pushing up prices to their subsidiaries to be passed on to consumers and taking a double bite of profits on the way.

And these super-profits that they make are not, despite corporate propaganda, being ploughed into investment in new resources. Nearly half of their £4.3 billion profits last year were paid out as dividends, £1,813 million worth of them, to the financial institutions that dominate shareholdings.

Association of Electricity Producers chief executive David Porter tried to coax water out of a glass eye with his sob story that every £1 million taken by government from company profits would have to be raised elsewhere.

Rubbish – this implied threat of passing on the cost to consumers could be countered by a legal price freeze. Let the shareholders take the pressure for once instead of working people.

And as for his warning that a windfall tax would scare off investors, let them go. They are not investors. They are ponces on the energy wealth created by government investment.

The energy companies, including the oil transnational companies, have become too used to a sweetheart relationship with new Labour. It’s time to tame these fat cats.

Justice cries out for an immediate substantial windfall tax on the super-profits and, indeed the return to public ownership of the energy sector.

But Where To Next?

Ellie Keen — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 21:45:19 +0000

The Morning Star welcomes every indication of Britain’s soldiers being extricated from an unwinnable war, but this is too little too late and the likelihood is that withdrawal presages a greater presence in Afghanistan.

There is no positive role for occupation troops in Iraq. They should all be withdrawn without further delay.

The Prime Minister’s spin doctors have let it be known that Mr Brown had favoured a greater reduction in British troops numbers but that the White House had prevailed upon him not leave Basra province to Shi’ite militia groups and the border with Iran unguarded.

Washington’s reasoning is, apparently, that US forces are already stretched to the limit in Baghdad and the so-called Sunni triangle and would not be able to deploy sufficient numbers to replace the British presence.

Both US Republican leaders and front-running Democratic presidential candidate Hilary Clinton have insisted that there should be no speedy evacuation of occupation forces from Iraq because it might be interpreted as a military defeat.

No matter how long the invaders remain, they have already been defeated. Their hopes of normality through occupation are in tatters.

The sooner that this reality is taken on board in London and Washington, the less likelihood there will be of the imperialist states launching wars of aggression in central Asia or anywhere else.

Mr Brown paid lip service to the “courage, professionalism and bravery” of Britain’s troops, claiming that “the first thing on my mind today is the security of our armed forces.”

He ought to have gone down on his knees in apology to them for being part of the conspiracy led by George W Bush and Tony Blair to launch an illegal war, under false pretences, to secure regime change in Iraq, control its oil resources and assert US military domination.

All those who have perished as a result of this war stand as a permanent memorial to the duplicity and shamelessness of new Labour.

Amid an ocean of militaristic claptrap, shadow defence secretary Liam Fox was right on one point in his speech to the Tory faithful – Mr Brown’s attempt to get through Labour Party conference with the barest mention of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The coupling of Mr Brown’s effusive praise at Tuesday’s military photo op with his 126 words on the wars at conference lays bare his political opportunism.

But Mr Fox’s pledge to beef up our miitary budget is precisely what we do not need when public services, manufacturing, council housing and pensions are still underfunded.

The PM should not be able to get away with a continuation of Tony Blair’s imperialist vainglory, wrapping himself in the butcher’s apron and talking up military exploits.

The empire is gone and he should remember this.

In case of selective amnesia, next Monday’s Stop the War Coalition march to Parliament, which Mr Brown’s government has banned, using legislation that was passed before this country had adult suffrage, should serve as a reminder.

Crimes of the Empire

Ellie Keen — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 06:56:47 +0000

THERE is something surreal about Gordon Brown mounting his high horse and telling European and African government leaders that they must choose between his attendance and that of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe at a summit in Lisbon on December 8-9.

The Prime Minister insists on Mr Mugabe’s exclusion from the summit because of the Zimbabwean president’s “abuse of his own people.”

He declares that there is neither freedom of association nor freedom of the press there. And, further, there is “widespread torture and mass intimidation of the political opposition.”

Without excusing in any way, the excesses of the moribund and authoritarian ZANU (PF) regime in Zimbabwe, are the crimes denounced by Mr Brown unique to Zimbabwe?

Aren’t they also endemic in such states as Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, which are not only regarded as international forces of moderation but are also fully fledged participants in the US-led fraudulent “war on terror?”

Then again, horrific as torture and intimidation are, do they begin to compare with the international war crime of illegally invading and occupying Iraq?

Before claiming the moral high ground, all British government ministers should examine their own hands for blood.

Our Prime Minister, as Chancellor of Exchequer, was totally implicated in Tony Blair’s collaboration with the White House in preparing for war for oil and military domination while passing it off as a means of controlling weapons of mass destruction.

He provided the finance for the invasion and pledged to make available whatever it took to back Washington’s self-appointed role of global policeman.

And what has been the result? A 2006 study by the respected medical journal The Lancet suggested that 655,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the March 2003 invasion.

And, last week, a new report by the Opinion Research Bureau, a polling organisation that has been engaged to conduct studies for the BBC and the Conservative Party, reported that no fewer than 1.2 million Iraqi citizens “have been murdered” since the invasion.

When the PM insists that Britain will stand by its responsibilities, he should also acknowledge his own responsibility for the mayhem that is Iraq. Nor are Britain’s hands clean with regard to Zimbabwe. Ministers and media vie with each other to condemn the nationalisation of white farmers’ land and foreign-owned businesses in Zimbabwe, but they don’t examine why this happens.

When the British empire conquered what is now Zimbabwe in 1889, it allocated 70 per cent – the most fertile areas – of land to white farmers to raise export crops. Africans received no compensation.

At the 1979 Zimbabwean independence negotiations in London in 1979, white settler land ownership was enshrined for a decade and, following that, the British government was to fund land sales to landless Africans.

Britain suspended that agreement in 1997-8 when Zimbabwe rejected a World Bank structural agreement programme, halted privatisation and introduced tariffs to protect local industry.

The country has since suffered an imperialist economic blockade, provoking political and economic crises. The struggle for basic freedoms in Zimbabwe, including trade union rights, will not be assisted by being confused with a sinister outside-directed conspiracy to impose regime change that is acceptable to the US and Britain.

Free Market Falls Over

Ellie Keen — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 22:41:32 +0000

If it is not one thing for Prime Minister Gordon Brown, it’s another. Following hard on his stony reception by the TUC, his public dalliance with Margaret Thatcher put him in deep trouble with all trade unionists and anyone else who remembers the damage done by her fetishist free-market government.

Mr Brown will not profit by his public association with the Friedmanite disciple, especially since conviction is growing that his own economic analysis is that way inclined.

And the Northern Rock crisis won’t help his case with the voters, since nothing illustrates the grotesqueries of the free market better than this appalling housing cock-up.

Faced with soaring house prices and rising mortgage interest rates, the last thing that Mr Brown needed was a public display of the speculations and reckless gambles that fund private housing provision.

The role of the mortgage lender is, in theory at least, a simple one.

People save money with it and it pays them a rate of interest on their savings.

Those savings are lent out to mortgage borrowers at a higher rate of interest, which covers the company’s costs, its profit line and the interest paid to the savers.

Which, given that mortgage lenders generally pay at least twice the cost of their houses in repayments, should satisfy the most ardent of capitalists.

But, unfortunately, that just isn’t the full story. Inject into the mix a new Labour government that has actively curtailed the role of local authorities in providing social housing and encouraged free-market speculation to such a degree that private house prices have effectively trebled over its period of tenure.

Then add a company hungry for growth and profits which pays its chief executive £1.36 million a year and looks for profits around the half-billion level and what do you get?

You get a company that borrows on the money markets to lend. You get a company that, with only £24 billion of savings assets on its books, lends out over £100 billion and buys cheap and insecure US sub-prime debt in the hope of turning a swift buck, borrowing from whoever it can to do so.

And, therefore, you get a company which grows to fifth biggest lender in Britain on the back of borrowed capital.

So, if anything goes wrong with the US market – as it has – this company is vulnerable.

The banks are more reluctant to lend cash and are tightening the purse strings.

And Britain’s fifth biggest lender becomes Britain’s biggest problem.

Some advert for the free market.

It gets complex when you look at the figures, because that £100 billion-plus, as soon as it is loaned out, shows up as an asset, making the company look, at least to the uninitiated, healthy and secure.

But, such is the nature of the free market that those assets are only only worth what the big banks think that they are worth and, should their confidence go, it’s up to – Yes, you’ve guessed it – poor old Joe Public and the nation’s assets to bale them out via the government and the Bank of England.

So much for the “freedom” of the free market that Mr Brown sets so much store by.

But what an argument for public-sector rented housing the private sector vultures have gifted to us, if we only had a Labour government with the guts to use it and to start killing off the predators of the private sector.

Priced Out of a Home

Tim Holmes — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 00:59:22 +0000

A 30 per cent rise in the number of home repossessions may not herald the immediate return of the “negative equity” phenomenon that epitomised the collapse of the housing market in 1989.

But it does illustrate that a growing number of people in Britain are being priced out of the housing market altogether.

It is already the case in most regions that average house prices equate to between six and eight times average income.

This has led some banks and building societies to offer mortgages on the basis of five times an applicant’s income rather than the historically approved three times.

Such adventurism is justified on the basis of an annual average house price inflation rate of 10 per cent, but this is neither sustainable nor desirable.

It may have been sustainable at a time of low, stable mortgage interest rates, but the Bank of England has imposed five interest rate rises in the past year, taking the base rate to 5.75 per cent and adding about £150 a month to the outgoings for a £150,000 interest-only loan.

About one in seven borrowers is already having difficulty in meeting their monthly mortgage payment and the ever-tightening cost of borrowing is likely to lead to further mortgage defaults.

And it will mean even more people joining the 1.6 million already stewing on the waiting lists for council accommodation.

New Labour has not taken the festering housing crisis seriously, being content to allow a seemingly endless rise in house prices to finance a spending-led economic boom and private pension provision.

It was not until the Labour deputy leadership election, in which Dagenham MP Jon Cruddas found a growing audience for his highlighting of housing problems, that Gordon Brown realised that he would have to say something about the matter.

But his Queen’s Speech response was woolly and inadequate.

Its main failing was new Labour’s consistent Achilles’ heel – reliance on market forces to tackle a problem, when, with regard to housing and a number of other problems, it is blind obedience to the market that has stoked up difficulties in the first place.

While chatting about a target of three million new homes, the Prime Minister remained within the economic straitjacket of private-sector provision.

He dangled the carrot of offering “surplus” public land to the construction moguls instead of relying on the public sector, as was done in the 1950s and ’60s, to crack homelessness through providing millions of decent, modern, secure council homes at reasonable rents.

Many people prefer to rent rather than buy and, for many millions, the choice is academic by virtue of low income.

The government should not be forcing people on modest incomes to choose between shared equity schemes in which they “own” as little as 10 per cent of their home or renting accommodation from private landlords at exorbitant cost.

It ought to be ending the right to buy local authority stock, authorising the “fourth option,” whereby councils can upgrade homes without having to sell them off, and financing a new generation of council housing to meet widespread need and, indirectly, to reduce runaway house-price inflation.

Relying on Hunches

Tim Holmes — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 17:07:10 +0000

THE British government takes upon itself the right to lecture the rest of the world on the need for democracy and respect for the rule of law.

But its own record falls far short of these noble sentiments and not solely because of its contempt for international law regarding the illegal invasion of Iraq.

Just as the US acts as though it has the right to make up international law as it goes along, provided that it cites the phoney “war on terror,” the British government feels that it too can dispense with legality in the interests of what it pronounces to be national security.

Its reliance on control orders is, effectively, a means of criminalising suspects without resorting to the justice system.

It is bizarre that, in the midst of the rejoicing over the release of BBC journalist Alan Johnston, who was held without justification by an extremist group, our government should be demanding the right to confine unconvicted and uncharged individuals to indefinite house arrest.

Ministers claim that they have no alternative to using these draconian methods in order to protect our hard-won freedoms.

Equality before the law and a fair trial are principles which cannot be abandoned without undermining the very freedoms that have been built in this country by generations of human rights battles.

None of our democratic rights and freedoms was conceded without being demanded and fought for.

They must not be cast aside on the basis of authoriarianism’s well-worn excuse that police or intelligence know that they’ve got the right people but can’t prove it because of a technicality.

Those tempted to fall for this old chestnut should look back at the court cases of the 1970s and ’80s when the IRA was planting bombs in England and the combined incompetence of the security forces and legal establishment caused several innocent people to be tortured and locked up for years.

Anyone with unlimited confidence in the ability of the secret services to get in right – even without government manipulation of their findings – should recall the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six, Maguire Seven and Judy Ward cases.

All pronounced guilty beyond doubt, all backed up by forensic evidence, all given long jail sentences and every single one blameless as charged.

The short cut then of beating and terrorising confessions out of the innocent came back to haunt the international reputation of Britain’s justice system.

Today’s short cut of giving the courts a body swerve in favour of imposing control orders will have a similar effect.

It will be seen as prioritising expediency over legality. And, above all, it will fall short of the legal norms adopted by the international community, which is why it will be condemned, if it is referred there, by the European Court of Human Rights.

Far better that the Law Lords improve on their record of a previous era and insist that the government respects legal norms.

This means that the police and intelligence services must provide evidence acceptable to a court to secure a guilty verdict and not to rely on hunches or intuition.

Assault on Democracy

Tim Holmes — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 17:21:04 +0000

Tony Blair’s last foreign policy performance at the European Union summit was as duplicitous as his previous acts.

He and his fellow heads of member-state governments had spun the summit as being concerned simply with tidying up a few loose ends over how the EU operates.

In reality, the discussions were about how to enshrine as much as possible of the rejected EU constitution in a treaty without consulting the electorate.

The whole point of the constitution was to give legal status to the EU, with its own president, foreign secretary, legal framework and neoliberal economic system.

It was rejected by the Dutch and French voters and would surely have met the same fate in Britain.

The determination of new Labour to proceed in a Eurocentralist direction without consulting the electorate was made clear by Europe Minister Geoff Hoon.

The man aptly nicknamed Buff suggested that Labour’s pledge to offer a referendum on the EU constitution could be invalidated simply by removing a single comma since it would no longer be the same document.

In the event, incoming Prime Minister Gordon Brown has dropped the principle of a referendum because the document cobbled together in Brussels is called an “amending treaty” rather than a constitution.

The member-state leaders, who broadly share the goal of an unaccountable, imperialist EU superstate, know that they cannot take the giant step that they planned in the constitution past their voters.

So they are prepared to take a number of smaller steps in the same direction.

That’s why the treaty provides for an indirectly elected EU president, a foreign high representative and an extension of qualified majority voting into 40 more areas.

To pretend that this is not a further stride towards a state called Europe is to insult people’s intelligence.

If that was not the purpose of the summit, then the summit had no purpose, since the existing Nice Treaty was quite capable of providing the basis for the ongoing expansion of the EU bloc.

Current arrangements needed no tidying up. The only tidying up required was for future concentration and centralisation of political power in the hands of the most powerful and populous states, namely Germany, France and Britain.

That’s why it provides for binding decisions to require the support of 55 per cent of member states representing 65 per cent of the EU population to be phased in from 2014.

The Eurocentralist elite is playing a long game, but it is utterly fixated on the end result and it is not prepared to be diverted from that goal.

Newly elected French President Nicolas Sarkozy made great play of striking out a reference to “free and undistorted competition” in the treaty preamble, but Gordon Brown and Tony Blair were united in their successful insistence that this still underpins EU economic policy. This is the basis of the Bolkestein services directive and other directives that undermine public services though the imposition of marketisation and privatisation.

This treaty, far from being just an amending treaty, is a further pernicious assault on democracy and popular sovereignty. It should be submitted to referendum and overwhelmingly rejected.

Rampant Avarice

Tim Holmes — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 17:17:24 +0000

At one time, when our new Labour government was still proclaiming its opposition to the Tories’ privatisation of our rail network, it insisted that prohibitive cost alone stood in the way of renationalisation.

It even dreamed up a tendentious set of figures that were intended to dispel forever the idea of a publicly owned and operated rail network.

The lie of unaffordability was exposed when, in the wake of the Connex South Central and South-West shambles, services were provided for a time by South Eastern Trains, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Strategic Rail Authority.

Services improved, as did passenger satisfaction, but such was the government’s obsession with the idea that private is good that the franchises were handed over to privateer Arriva.

And so it has continued to the present day, with the government ignoring the opportunity to take back lapsed franchises in-house and to operate them on the basis of public service rather than private profit.

Its award of the newly created East Midlands franchise to Stagecoach, which is headed by gay-bashing bigot Brian Souter, is inexcusable.

Privatisation of the railways has already proved a goldmine for Mr Souter, his sister Anne Gloag and the anonymous bankers who backed the Stagecoach phenomenon.

The £175 million bonanza payout shared by the siblings has been paid for by the public purse, Stagecoach staff and the long-suffering and overcharged passengers.

Apart from the questionable morality of handing over yet more millions of public money to someone who funded a campaign to legalise discrimination against people on the basis of their sexual orientation, the franchise makes no financial sense.

It will sting rail users, with unregulated fares rising by 3.4 per cent over inflation and supposedly regulated fares by 1 per cent over inflation.

This is after Stagecoach has already increased off-peak fares by 25 per cent in five months, cut back on off-peak trains and is threatening to sack guards who show any sympathy for passengers who have to board trains without a ticket, having been prevented from buying one by booking office queues caused by inadequate staff numbers.

The only privatised industry that comes near to rail in terms of rampant avarice, inefficiency and disregard for the public is water.

When the privateers took possession of our water company assets, they wasted no time in liquidating land resources to finance an investment splurge – not investment to cut down on leakage or improve services but to buy up other utilities at home and overseas.

Some have simply walked away from water and sewage services, preferring to spend more time with their ill-gotten gains.

In this they have been assisted by a “regulator” as fierce as any bulldog with rubber teeth.

Witness the “massive” fine of £8.5 million – barely 1 per cent of profits – imposed on United Utilities for contracting out services to its subsidiary companies at above-market prices to enhance profits.

Compare the billions of pounds of government-approved profits made by the privateers with the treatment of public-service workers – job cuts and below-inflation pay – and it’s no wonder that their unions are fed up and ready for industrial action.

In Blair's Footsteps

Tim Holmes — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 13:29:03 +0000

There are honeymoons and then there are honeymoons, but surely there can’t be a shorter honeymoon than the one between the labour movement and Gordon Brown.

Many trade unionists have persuaded themselves that a revived real Labour, progressive Mr Brown will emerge, phoenix-like from the flames, in the wake of war criminal Tony Blair.

Self-delusion is a terrible thing, because who else can you blame?

You certainly can’t blame Mr Brown, the Iron Chancellor who has steamrollered through the neoliberal policies that have destroyed over a million manufacturing jobs, ripped the heart out of civil and public services and lost the exchequer billions because of his obsessive commitment to private finance initiatives.

No matter what he may have whispered in intimate last-night tete-a-tetes, Mr Brown has never given any indication that his political approach will be markedly different from that of Mr Blair.

He has lost no opportunity to confirm his commitment to the private sector and is never happier than when addressing business people.

His Wednesday night Mansion House speech to an audience of City slickers was typically gung-ho and patently transparent.

“In future, every single secondary school and primary school should have a business partner,” he declared, inviting his well-heeled audience to jump in and fill their boots.

The term he actually used was “participate,” but no-one is daft enough to believe that the motive force of private-sector companies is altruism.

Mr Brown is simply going one step further than his “city academy in every town” new Labour co-conspirator to demand that business should call the shots throughout the state education system.

And he is actually mimicking his predecessor in laying down detailed operational instructions for schools without any attempt to discuss, let alone negotiate, with teachers and their trade union representatives.

He would have been far better off having in-depth discussions with teachers’ unions rather than offering cushy jobs to pompous, self-satisfied and unelected Lib Dem peers.

When did he ever raise this issue with Labour Party conference, the party’s national executive committee or its too compliant by half backbenchers?

The Chancellor ought to learn, as teachers’ union ATL general secretary Dr Mary Bousted says, that “teachers and lecturers are not sales staff and learning is not a commodity.”

The same goes for Britain’s caring services, where Mr Brown plans to bring in big business to sponsor children in care.

Once again, business executives will only do that if there is profit for them in it. Education and welfare need adequate finance and that should come from the exchequer, not from privateers with their eye on the main chance.

The money is there if Mr Brown drops his dogmatic refusal to get the rich and powerful to pay their fair share of taxation.

Yet, while many workers feel taxed to the bone, of about 400 people in Britain who can pull in £10 million or more a year, just 65 pay any tax at all.

That is the Britain produced by new Labour economic policies. It is a situation that must be met by resolute labour movement opposition to create a more just and less stressful society.

With Help Like This

Tim Holmes — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 10:48:23 +0000

The European Union decision to resume direct aid to the new Palestinian government of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad is presented as a humanitarian gesture.

But it is a hard-headed political decision that is intended to convey EU determination to smash any opposition to Israel’s role as imperialism’s regional policeman.

“We have to continue helping the Palestinian people. We cannot let them down at this moment,” said EU foreign policy spokesman Javier Solana.

What else has the EU been doing over the past 40 years apart from letting the Palestinian people down?

International law is clear, as is UN security council resolution 242, requiring Israel to withdraw from territory occupied in the 1967 war.

Yet the EU, in common with the US, has glossed over the need for a negotiated, two-state solution based on 1967 borders and extends the most favourable trade terms to Israel.

And not just Israel. Israel’s illegal settlements on captured Palestinian land label their produce as Israeli and have it sold in British supermarkets and throughout the EU.

Despite dozens of UN resolutions condemning Israel’s colonial dictatorship, Israel’s war crimes, including the use of illegal weapons, the slaughter of children and collective punishment against civilians, the EU has ignored the Palestinians’ pleas for action.

Instead, Brussels danced to the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy when the Palestinians voted, in a democratic election, for Hamas.

The election did not indicate that the Palestinians had suddenly converted overwhelmingly to the cause of a state based on sharia law.

Their choice arose from negative responses to the corruption and arbitrary rule associated with Fatah, the party of President Mahmoud Abbas. But it was also due to the presidential party’s patent inability to make progress towards independence despite falling in with every demand required of it by Israel and its imperialist backers.

This reality should raise justifiable suspicions when President Abbas’s sacking of the coalition government headed by Hamas is lauded by those forces that have sidelined him since his election.

People in the West Bank, especially those on the Palestinian Authority pay roll, will welcome the resumption of aid and payment of outstanding wages.

But the situation is likely to get worse in the Gaza Strip, where living standards are even more dire. Israel’s callous announcement that it will tighten further its blockade of the strip is calculated to intensify suffering and desperation.

The likely scenario is that US-armed Fatah forces, especially those controlled by quisling character Mohammed Dahlan, will press ahead with the military solution for which they had been preparing prior to Hamas’s assertion of control in Gaza.

Palestinian civil war is the goal that Israel and the US have pursued for years, estimating that a crushed and disillusioned people would have no alternative but to accept whatever crumbs Israel was prepared to throw them.

Our government must be told that Britain’s people are opposed to this cold-blooded, inhuman plan.

The Palestinians can reunite and put their differences aside if they are treated decently and if the international community tells Israel that its colonial expansionism is unacceptable to world opinion.

A Right To Be Cared For

Tim Holmes — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 16:45:05 +0000

IF there was ever a service that should not need the advocacy of a trade union to defend it, it is the home care service provided to those whose only other alternative is residential or National Health Service care.

And yet, in one of the biggest economies in the world, that is precisely what UNISON is having to do in order to defend a service that is struggling to survive in the face of continuing cutbacks and, at the same time, increasing demand.

A growing elderly population will, of necessity, present demands on the care services, but those services are being steadily reduced as local authorities struggle to balance their budgets and fall back on restricting home care to cases that are critical or high dependency.

But, as UNISON general secretary Dave Prentis points out, such cutbacks are a false economy when looked at at a national level.

Government estimates that reducing the rate of hospital or care home admissions among older people by just 1 per cent a year would save the country £3.8 billion tell the story clearly.

Thousands of lives could be saved, as could millions of pounds, by simply directing funds toward the home care services and providing services to elderly people that maintain both their dignity and their ability to run their own lives.

Neglect those services and what happens is there for all to see. Elderly people are shunted into private-sector care homes at enormous cost both to government and to the elderly themselves.

Their lives are no longer their own and their right to make their own decisions goes out of the window along with their autonomy and, in many cases, their self-respect.

But the funding of care services is at best a tug-of-war between local councils and central government.

The government insists that anyone with savings of over £21,000, including property, must pay for their own care.

This discourages tens of thousands of people from receiving the support that they need.

And private-sector providers are driving costs ever higher, meaning that councils are stretching their budgets to breaking point.

Even government ministers admit that the system is in a mess. Ivan Lewis, the minister responsible for care services, has acknowledge in a radio interview that the funding issue is desperately in need of overhaul.

But robbing pensioners of their homes to fund care is no way forward.

And neither is passing the buck to council tax payers, or allowing councils to avoid supplying services by tightening the definition of critcal need to debar everyone except the desperately ill from receiving care services.

The government’s own figures show the way forward very clearly indeed, if the government had the will to act on them.

A home care service funded centrally and available to all in need of them would cut back on the government pouring money into privateers’ pockets. It would reduce demand for the enormously expensive residential care by far more than its own cost and, importantly, it would enable elderly people to live their lives with the dignity and the assistance that they have earned.

After a lifetime’s work, it should not be too much to expect that society cares for you as you have cared for it – without stealing your home or subjecting you to a postcode lottery.

A Medical Mistake

Alex Doherty — Mon, 07 May 2007 12:00:19 +0000

Over recent years, it has been a pleasure to see the British Medical Association adopting and publicising some fairly progressive and radical policies.

It comes, therefore, as rather a disappointment to find it falling into all the old traps in its pronunciations on the rising cost of treatment in the NHS, the impossibility of funding them all and, thus, the necessity of “rationing.”

Of course, pseudo-progressive papers such as the Observer leaped onto the story like hungry pussy cats, lapping up what they described as a “new honesty.”

But new honesty it is not. Rather, it is an old misconception coming back to haunt us, recycled as yet another excuse to lambast resource allocation in the NHS.

It is highly misleading to refer to any limit on the ability to treat people as “rationing,” with its evocative overtones of shabby lines of people clutching coupons.

And it is premature to look at the necessity of limiting treatment while the entire medical and pharmaceutical sector is so grossly deformed by excessive profit-taking and the effects of privatisation.

While we are all seeing reports of ward closures and staff cutbacks in the NHS, it is instructive to look at the excessive profits of the major drug companies.

Glaxo, for example, made pre-tax profits of £2.14 billion on sales of £5.59 billion in just the first three months of this year.

While Swiss-based Novartis declared £1.1 billion profit in the first quarter of 2007, Merck, another pharmaceuticals giant, made a leap in profits of 10 per cent over the same period.

In fact, that company has such an appetite for profits extracted from the sick that Brasil’s President Lula Da Silva authorised his government to break the company’s patent on an Aids-related drug on Friday, because of the super-profits that it was extracting from Efavinens, and buy a generic replacement from India at one-third of the price.

If the NHS was not pouring around 15 per cent of its income into the coffers of these avaricious companies, there would be little need to talk of rationing.

And if new Labour had not laid out a huge proportion of its NHS expenditure to promote Tony Blair’s favourite fiction of “choice,” otherwise known as progressive privatisation of the health service, the BMA would not have to confront such stark choices as treatment restrictions and would not have been deluded into arriving at such erroneous conclusions.

It costs a great deal of cash to deal with the pharmaceutical empires and, if you add to that the cost of fuelling the developing private medicine sector with public money, cutbacks in treatment appear inevitable to the non-socialist medical Establishment.

But they are not. Granted, the remedies are on a huge scale. The nationalisation of the drug transnationals is a huge proposition, as is removing the pernicious influence of the private sector from the NHS.

And neither of these clear and necessary measures will even be considered by Gordon Brown or any of his new Labour, free marketeering ilk.

But the alternative of turning medical treatment into an economic live-or-die lottery is no alternative at all.

May Day Greetings

Alex Doherty — Tue, 01 May 2007 12:53:52 +0000

May Day greetings to all working people at home and abroad and especially to the 200,000-plus PCS members who are on strike in protest at their disgraceful treatment at the hands of what passes for a Labour government.
Government ministers, with Chancellor Gordon Brown at their heart, have chosen the public sector as their target to impress big business with their intent to force working people to pay the price of an emerging economic crisis.

The Chancellor, it will be remembered, showed his scorn for the trade union movement by announcing the slaughter of 104,000 Civil Service jobs in the House of Commons without any prior notice to their union.

Behind Mr Brown on that day, serried ranks of new Labour MPs guffawed, cheered and clapped at this example of “firm” government.

Civil servants, many of whom will have been lifelong Labour voters, must have looked on this spectacle wondering what planet these MPs imagined themselves to be on.

And there is no doubt that these people, who have sewn up their own salaries, expenses and pensions very nicely thank you, will back up the government on its assault on low-paid workers’ living standards.

Apart from job losses, Mr Brown is imposing a pay rise of just 2 per cent, which, because of rising inflation, amounts to a cut in purchasing power.

It’s not as if Britain was a poor country and could not afford better living standards for working people.

Trade unionists celebrating May Day must wonder how it is that, in the fourth-richest country in the world, we have the worst wealth distribution in Europe, the worst childhood poverty in Europe and the highest military spending in Europe.

And, in two days time, working people will be urged to show their class loyalty by voting Labour in Scottish parliamentary, Welsh assembly and some English local elections.

Many will refuse to vote for those who sack them, price them out of housing, cut their living standards and send their sons and daughters to fight imperialist wars.

Others will continue to vote Labour, because of good local candidates or specific policies such as the abolition of prescription charges by the Welsh National Assembly – or simply to keep out the Tories.

But, without a drastic change in Labour government policies, how long will this last?

Public-service unions UNISON and GMB plan to meet to discuss arrangements for balloting their members on a new Labour leader. Very good – affiliated trade unions should play their part in the workings of the party they set up.

But, unless there is a real political choice when the leadership election takes place, there will be the same new Labour diet of job cuts, privatisation, lower living standards and war.

The unions must not only champion more progressive policies but also put pressure on MPs to eschew a coronation in favour of supporting the nomination of John McDonnell to enable an alternative socialist approach to be considered.

No Health or Safety

Alex Doherty — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 15:19:54 +0000

Health & Safety Executive boss Geoffrey Podger’s response to the Centre for Corporate Accountability report into workplace deaths smacks of complacency.

The centre’s report, which was drawn up on behalf of construction union UCATT, reveals an increase in the death toll on Britain’s building sites and a drop in the number of prosecutions against employers.

No-one – least of all the report’s compilers or UCATT – would suggest that every case of a death at work is the same or that prosecution should follow in every case.

But Mr Podger’s patronising response, in which he admits that all an employer has to do is put his firm into liquidation to avoid prosecution over a death at work, is unsatisfactory in the extreme.

An increase in the death toll of 25 per cent on construction sites is no small matter and the executive must have a duty to investigate a situation in which responsibility is so lightly dismissed.

That convictions over deaths at work is falling reflects several factors. First, that the executive has adopted a far more hands-off approach than of yore and, second, that the number of inspectors and inspections has declined as a matter of deliberate policy.

In a period when the life of working people is taken so cavalierly, to tolerate such an approach is to be complicit in needless and often horrifying loss of life.

The postcode lottery in death is a serious and disturbing fact of British industrial life. If, as the statistics show, it is three times more likely that a conviction will occur in the south-west than in the east Midlands, this can only be because officialdom is somehow working to differing sets of standards in different areas.

And to find that the life of a working person is ever valued at less than £5,000 is an insult of unbelievable proportions levelled at workers in this country.

That the executive’s chief can so lightly dismiss this report is symptomatic of an organisation which has lost its way and fails abysmally to comprehend the misery and distress caused by deaths at work.

To quote CCA executive director David Bergman: “The Health and Safety Executive must act urgently on the findings of this report. Systematic underenforcement of health and safety law following deaths leaves bereaved people without the accountability they deserve, and puts all of us at risk by failing to provide a deterrent to companies whose actions can cost lives.”

A lone piper’s lament in the Liverpool street where a Polish building worker died in a crane collapse will launch activities by T&G members today.

But that lament must not sound on its own. Cuts in the HSE budget must be reversed and the laissez-faire policies which it has adopted must be scrapped.

This new Labour government, if it has any scrap of decency left, cannot continue to treat workers’ safety as something eligible for cutbacks and economies.

If Gordon Brown had any vestige of the principles that should drive Labour MPs left, he should have marked Workers Memorial Day with an announcement that fresh resources would be found to slow and to halt entirely the brutal waste of life that mars our country’s industry. He did not.

Energetic Fiddling

Alex Doherty — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 17:06:09 +0000

The regulator’s comments might have been a little more illuminating if it had said that their prices were static, while other companies have reduced theirs. But illumination has never been an Ofgem strong point.

From there, rather than damn the offending companies for avarice, incompetence or a mixture of the two, the so-called regulator goes on to berate customers for not changing suppliers.

How many times, given the ridiculous fluctuations in domestic energy prices, does the regulator feel that people have to do this?

Every year – or every time that the prices change, bearing in mind that they changed three or four times last year? Does this regulator really think that working people have the time to mess around like this every couple of months?

Or is it simply that it suits the phoney, mock-market that new Labour has invented, rather than the regulator having to tell companies to cut their prices?

But, if that happened, to whom would the regulator issue these orders?

Certainly to EDF, which put up gas prices by 8.1 per cent, 15.5 per cent, 14.7 per cent and 19 per cent since January 2005 – to the casual observer, a rise of 57.3 per cent, but, remembering that they are cumulative rises, actually nearer to 72 per cent.

Certainly to Scottish Power, which put up its gas prices by 8.1 per cent, 12 per cent, 15 per cent and 17 per cent over the same period, again, an actual rise of 62 per cent.

But what of the other companies, which, by suggesting that customers migrate to them, the regulator appears to be praising?

What of npower? Cumulative gas rises of around 55 per cent in 2006 alone – followed by a measly 16 per cent cut in April this year, leaving a rise of 39 per cent in a period during which inflation never topped 4.5 per cent by any realistic measure and during which pensioners’ income never even kept up with inflation.

British Gas – even worse. An accumulated rise of 57 per cent followed by the same picky little cut of 16 per cent in April – a 41 per cent gross rise.

One should also consider that Scottish Power boosted its profits by 77 per cent over the first half of 2006, British Gas reported a surge of 145 per cent profits in August 2006 and all the other companies showed similar results.

And, in case you swallow their guff about oil and gas price rises, in just one week in April this year, oil prices fell by a full 6 per cent.

One can blame Blair and Bush’s dirty resource war in Iraq for the rise in oil and gas prices over the last three years or so.

But one should never underestimate the sheer greed of the power companies – or the blatant conspiracy to misdirect the public which has been entered into between a regulator who doesn’t regulate, power suppliers who price their product almost out of poor people’s reach and a government which desperately wants to disguise the effect of its maladministration.

First blood to protest

Alex Doherty — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 16:57:41 +0000

The news that tax exile and wannabe City Academy sponsor Andrew Rosenfeld has withdrawn from his involvement in the attempt to set up a new academy in the London borough of Brent gives a boost to the campaigners who have fought so hard to defeat the Blairite privatisation swindle.

Their protest camp, pitched on the Wembley Park sports ground that is the proposed site of the academy, has scored a notable success against a Blairite measure supported by the ruling Lib Dem council.

The coalition of teachers, parents, local residents and sports enthusiasts which has seen off the intrusion of tax avoider Rosenfeld has much to congratulate itself for.

But ATL and NUT national executive member and Brent resident Hank Roberts is right to stress that the fight doesn’t stop there.

Desperate to save their sordid little adventure into the marketisation of education, the Lib Dems have dredged up, wouldn’t you just believe it, a tatty group of hedge fund speculators as a replacement to front the project.

Not that this group, which is linked to Goldman Sachs – a company that gives its leading pirates bonuses bigger than the annual wage packets of all but the richest of Brent residents – is going to have to shell out all that big a percentage of the costs in order to have a disproportionate say in the education of Brent’s young people.

The going rate used to be up to about £2 million, but that is peanuts compared to the real cost of these establishments.

The two city academies singled out by the National Audit Office as poorly performing schools last year cost the taxpayer around £100 million to run.

And the government, having failed to find enough sponsors to live up to the £2 million price tag, first added on the codicil in cash or in kind and then dropped the price tag altogether, announcing that sponsors no longer needed to put money up front at all, merely commit to making “endowments” at some vague and unspecified future time.

As Jack Straw commented on the sponsors of their predecessors, the city technology colleges – in 1990, that is, when he was Labour education spokesman – sponsors tended to be “second-order companies whose directors were interested in political leverage or honours.”

Well, we all know where that scenario has left Labour. Its Prime Minister interviewed by the police, members of its staff arrested and so forth.

But these are not the only reasons that this shabby, back-door privatisation measure should be fought wherever it appears.

The real danger is that our children could end up being educated, given the very real nature of the influence over curriculum and direction that sponsors are accorded, by a pack of mercenary dog-eat-dog City villains with about as much in the way of morality or civilised values as the normal hedge fund or private equity company – and that isn’t much.

So good luck to Mr Roberts and the campaigning citizens of Brent. You have seen off one maurauding capitalist and, given reasonable luck and the support of the entire movement, you will see off his successors. More power to your elbows.

Plotting to Rob Iraqis

Alex Doherty — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 13:03:44 +0000

It doesn’t take much to get the seriously well-adjusted Foreign Office minister Kim Howells frothing at the mouth.

So, when he uses the term “paranoia gone completely loopy” to describe criticism of new Labour machinations in Iraq, you can be pretty sure that the government has been caught bang to rights.

How could anyone be in the slightest doubt that the British government is committed to the welfare of the Iraqi people, apart from the reality that about 700,000 of them have perished in the past four years, as a result of Tony Blair’s connivance to send thousands of British troops to Iraq in breach of international law?

But, as committed as the Blair administration is to the Iraqi people, it is even more committed to the interests of the transnational oil corporations.

And the oil giants, while doubtless sympathising with the plight of Iraqi civilians, have an even greater call on their sentiments, which emanates from their shareholders.

That’s why British diplomats, at the government’s behest, have been “facilitating” contacts between the oil companies and the submissive occupation-approved “government” in Baghdad.

And those contacts have been concentrated on giving the Baghdad government advice in secret talks that have lasted about a year on how best to exploit Iraq’s legendary hydrocarbon reserves, which could be the second or third largest in the world.

Most countries that have vast energy resources insist on retaining them under public ownership, even if private companies extract and market the oil.

The Iraqi draft law, which is expected to be nodded through the Baghdad parliament this month, pays lip service to public ownership, but it covers up the real intent of handing over control and the bulk of Iraqi oil profits to the oil majors.

It would allow exploitation of the oil resources through contracts known as production-sharing agreements, which would guarantee the lion’s share of profits to the oil companies to compensate them for their start-up costs before settling down at a 25 per cent share – over double the normal rate in other oil-rich states.

The law also provides for the establishment of a Federal Oil and Gas Council, which would be controlled by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and could vary agreements with the oil companies without further reference to parliament.

The draft law is a Trojan horse to enable the global oil moguls to regain their control of Iraq’s oil wealth, which they lost when the country’s resources were nationalised 30 years ago.

If anyone were in any doubt about the value to big oil of Iraq’s resources, the International Monetary Fund has made a write-off of part of Iraq’s debts contingent on the Maliki government’s agreement of a blank cheque to the oil transnationals.

Iraq has the skills and the experience to exploit its own wealth, in co-operation with less rapacious international partners.

It ought to be able to borrow the £20-30 billion cost of reconstruction, set against its oil wealth, without having to hand over control of its resources to some of the world’s most ruthless companies.

Economic Illiteracy

jo — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 18:19:52 +0000

In his frantic search to find a big idea to provide a Trojan horse in which to transfer large numbers of working class votes to his party, Mr Cameron seeks inspiration from Margaret Thatcher’s premiership.

He wants council tenants to convert their rents into mortgage repayments and be owner-occupiers rather than rent-payers.

And, realising that the 1980 Thatcherite right-to-buy policy has resulted in 2.3 million properties – the most desirable – being lost to the ever more hard-pressed public sector, Mr Cameron suggests that shortages can be overcome by getting councils to build more.

Does it never cross his mind that the reason that councils stopped building homes in the wake of right-to-buy legislation was because it was economically unviable?

Borrowing money to build homes only makes sense if a council can pay off its debts by being guaranteed rental income though the life of the homes.

That relationship is currently skewed by legislation that allows properties to be sold off at discounted rates to tenants.

Mr Cameron’s wheeze is based on the view that most people would prefer to be homeowners rather than tenants – a preference that has been further encouraged by the above-inflation rise in house prices and a growing tendency to rely on housing equity to fund second pensions as an expression of lack of confidence in private and company pension schemes.

But it does not take account of the large number of council tenants who are dependent on state benefits for the rent.

Nor does it reckon with the likelihood of default and repossession that many low-paid tenants would face once they take on responsibility for repairs and other hidden extras.

But Mr Cameron’s main failing, which he shares with the new Labour privatisation zealots, is that he equates housing with personal enrichment rather than recognising it as a basic human need.

This is because housing in Britain is treated as a commodity rather than as a social service.

Prices are bound to continue increasing – amid intermittent hiccups – because there is an inadequate supply and almost limitless demand.

Homeowners may congratulate themselves on the appreciating value of their family home, but the real benefit is reaped by the landowners, banks, building societies and large construction companies whose shareholders thrive on the marketisation of this basic necessity.

Council housing, which played a major role after the second world war in meeting housing needs and replacing the slums owned by rack-renting private landlords, curbed the housing market.

That is why those politicians who have sold themselves to private housing profiteers hate the public housing rented sector and will do all they can to destroy it by selling it off.

Ending right-to-buy and financing a new generation of good public housing is the only viable means of ending homelessness and profiteering by the land racketeers.

One-sided Approach

jo — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 17:05:00 +0000

Someone should certainly be in the dock over the secretive use of Prestwick airport by Washington to transport lethal weapons to Israel for its onslaught against Lebanon.

But it is not the seven Trident Ploughshares campaigners who were arrested at the airport yesterday and are to appear in court today.

And it’s not the four people who have been held in custody since Sunday after breaking through security fencing and running onto the main runway and who face court proceedings tomorrow.

Those who oppose Israel’s destruction of Lebanon’s infrastructure and who expose the collaboration between Tel Aviv and the leading imperialist states, the US, France and Britain, are acting in the interests of peace and international law.

Tony Blair has a team of spin doctors working full-time to try to persuade us that he is leaving no stone unturned in his personal efforts to create the conditions for a permanent, lasting settlement.

But his efforts are devoted to grinding down international opposition to a UN resolution that offers Israel a chance of achieving through diplomacy what it has been incapable of winning militarily.

Western leaders have made much of their support for Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora, stressing a new chapter for the country following the withdrawal last year of Syrian forces from Lebanon.

But their objections to occupation of Lebanon aren’t based on principle. They change with the identity of the occupier.

The US-French resolution envisages a ceasefire and demobilisation of Hezbollah while the Israeli occupiers are given carte blanche to consolidate their occupation of southern Lebanon.

This one-sided approach designates Hezbollah as the main problem rather than Israel’s penchant for invading its neighbours, annexing their land, murdering their civilians in huge numbers and holding thousands of Arabs indefinitely in their jails.

If Paris and Washington had any real empathy with Mr Saniora, they would not have rejected his own serious peace proposals.

These involve an immediate ceasefire, followed by the release of Lebanese and Israeli prisoners, Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, including the Shebaa Farms region, and the return of Lebanese displaced by the fighting.

Israel and those who act in its interest are opposed to the return of refugees to south Lebanon, since they have convinced themselves of the need for a “buffer zone” in the area to safeguard Israel’s security.

There is no such thing as unilateral security. There will be no lasting security for Israel as long as it imposes insecurity, death and destruction on its neighbours.

The current war ought to have concentrated the minds of the imperialist states on the need to deal with the root cause of conflict in the region, Israel’s denial of the Palestinian people’s national rights.

Instead, they are continuing their time-dishonoured twin-track approach of combining pitiless military pressure with the search for pliable local representatives.

If Mr Blair can’t offer anything more imaginative than that, then he should go on holiday without delay and, preferably, stay there.

Sacrifice To Arrogance

jo — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 16:40:01 +0000

The heart-rending story of the kidnap, detention and eventual murder of aid worker Margaret Hassan quite rightly attracted condemnation from across the world, from organisations and individuals as diverse as British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the Muslim Council of Britain.

It was an appalling atrocity, made no less hurtful to her family and friends by the harrowing video footage of her ordeal released by the group that abducted her.

Ms Hassan’s killing was also commented on by then foreign secretary Jack Straw, who said at the time: “It is repugnant to commit such a crime against a woman who has spent most of her life working for the good of the people of Iraq,” and, surely, no-one would disagree with him.

But, in common with almost everything connected to Iraq and the occupation by the Bush/Blair axis and its troops, there was more to this situation than met the eye.

According to the family of Ms Hassan, four calls were made from the kidnappers to her husband in Baghdad during the period of her captivity, in which the hostage-takers demanded to speak to a member of the British embassy staff.

However, Mr Hassan had been told by the British that they would not speak to the kidnappers and the family has concluded that the refusal of the British government to open a dialogue with the kidnappers cost his wife her life.

There was no question of the motives of Ms Hassan for being in Iraq. She had lived there for 30 years and was dedicated to the welfare of the Iraqi people.

And yet the government refused even to attempt to intercede with the kidnappers.

Such an abandonment of a British citizen by her government seems almost incredible and yet, with the hysteria of the British and US responses to the crumbling situation in Iraq, such a ludicrous position becomes only too believable.

The government’s prolonged resistance to making representations to the US over the plight of British residents held in the Guantanamo concentration camp is of a piece with this intransigence.

Mr Blair and his minions are determined to have no truck with anything which will disturb their fixed intention neither to talk to, make any concessions to or come to any terms with Iraqis short of the absolute capitulation that the invaders demand.

Nor will they countenance any disturbance in their cosy relationship with their US allies in aggression.

And, just a year after Ms Hassan was killed, US marines were running riot in the village of Haditha, murdering innocent men, women and children.

Too much of our humanity has been surrendered in this filthy war.

The family ends their statement by saying: “Margaret, who was vocally opposed to the war in Iraq, was sacrificed for the political ends of Blair and Bush.”

In that, her ultimate solidarity, she joined tens of thousands of Iraqis and occupation troops in a monument to the stupidity and arrogance of an international capitalist edifice which has abandoned its humanity and expects that we should abandon ours.

The best tribute to Ms Hassan is to continue the struggle to end this brutal war and the system which demands it.