#realbrokensociety

A Vulture Fund is a hedge fund that buys up National debt at a tiny price because the debt is about to be defaulted, and pursues it vigorously through the courts. Liberia, a Nation in deep poverty, one of the World’s poorest Countries, had debt that was bought up by a Vulture Fund owned by Hedge Fund manager Eric Hermann. He took war torn, poverty stricken Liberia to court, in which his Vulture Fund won £12m from Liberia – 5% of their annual budget, for debts from 1978, before his Vulture fund was even set up. The debt, plus interest earned the Vulture Fund a nice profit, that would otherwise be used to build half a million homes in Liberia. The funds thrive on poverty. In 2010 a bill came through Parliament aimed at stopping these Vulture Funds. It took up a lot of time, and right at the last minute looked likely to pass. Tory MP Philip Davies then penned an amendment to try and stop the bill passing. It didn’t stop the Bill. But suddenly, a Tory MP on the front bench shouted “object” (a silly Private Members bill rule), and so the bill failed to pass. All the Tory front bench sat with their hands over their mouths so no one would know who made the bill fail. #realbrokensociety

According to the Telegraph:

Six-year-old Abdullah Qadoos was hit by cluster bombs fired by the British Army as they took the Iraqi city of Basra in March 2003. Shrapnel smashed through the window of his home, cut off his arm and tore open his abdomen.

- The UK government banned clusterbombs years ago. But a loophole in the law means banking institutions can invest in companies that manufacture clusterbombs. Royal Bank of Scotland, which is pretty much owned by the taxpayer, has invested more than £115m in Alliant Techsystems and Lockheed Martin – two clusterbomb manufacturers. Given that Cameron deplored a “culture that glorifies violence“, will he be closing this loophole? Well, no. Of course not. Mainly because when a kid suggests looting a Footlocker on Facebook it’s a great evil, but when rich companies fund violence, it’s fine. Number 10 said:

The issue of indirect financing is for individual institutions to consider. We as a government have made it very clear that direct financing of cluster munitions is illegal. We would encourage NGOs to come together and engage with the banks to find a mutually agreeable approach to indirect financing.

- Encouraging banks to self regulate? Really?
#realbrokensociety

Ex Chief Exec. of RBS presides over bank that loses £24.1bn of other peoples money. The biggest loss in Corproate history. Described by the Guardian as one of the 25 people at the heart of the financial meltdown Worldwide, and is punished, by having his pension reduced to £342,500 a year from £555,000 a year. Meanwhile, a man in Manchester is about to face jail for “looting” an ice cream cone and two scopes of ice cream. #realbrokensociety

Jeremy Isaacs, donated £190,000 in the past five years to the Tories, and who happened to be the boss of the Asia/Europe branches of Lehmann when it collapsed and engulfed the World. #realbrokensociety

Npower just announced profits of 130% larger than last year. Still, they think raising gas prices by 15.7% is “necessary“. Elsewhere, Bolton County Council have had to sell a painting by the great English painter Sir John Everett Millais to an American art collector, meaning the painting will probably never be in this country again, just to help fund its arts and culture sector which has been needlessly slashed. #realbrokensociety

“If you are old enough to commit these crimes you are old enough to face the punishment” bleated David Cameron, in response to the rioting across England two weeks ago. In the 1980s, Cameron was a member of the notorious Bullingdon Club Elite, who ritualistically smashed restaurants and pubs up. New members only become aware that they have been accepted, when they find their rooms trashed and smashed. After rioting, the Bullingdon Club chant: “Buller, Buller, Buller! Buller, Buller, Buller! We are the famous Bullingdon Club, and we don’t give a fuck!“. When the Bullingdon club were out one night, a plant pot was thrown through the window of an Oxford restaurant. Eye witnesses say they saw a bunch of men including David Cameron run away. This week, two men imprisoned for 4 years for inciting riots on facebook which didn’t actually lead to any trouble. #realbrokensociety

Sir Philip Green was asked in 2010, to write a report into Government spending and procurement. He reported that there were mass failings in Government procurement. The entire procurement professional dismissed the report as nonsense. Philip Green’s Arcadia Group business has thus far avoided £25bn in taxes. In 2005, his dividend on 92% of the shares in Arcadia, gave him £1.2bn. My home city of Leicester was found to be home of a sweatshop factory in a basement, where workers were paid less than minimum wage, providing clothes for Top Shop. Top Shop is owned by Sir Philip Green. Meanwhile, a rioter is imprisoned for 6 months for stealing a water bottle worth £3.50. #realbrokensociety

Clive Goodman, jailed in 2007 for hacking the phone of Prince William, had penned a letter to the News of the World, which stated that Coulson among others, had regularly discussed phone hacking, and told Goodman that if he didn’t implicate the News of the World in the scandal in 2007, he would be given his job back when he got out of prison. The letter was sent from the solicitors Harbottle and Lewis who are investigating internal N.O.T.W emails, to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee two days ago. Hacking into the voicemail of dead schoolgirls, and then covering it up, and then becoming the Prime Ministers chief of communications. #realbrokensociety

The Minister in charge of deciding whether Murdoch should be allowed to buy BSkyB, and decided in favour of take over, is Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt. In 2009 a ‘sleaze watchdog’ found that he had allowed his friend to stay rent free in his tax payer funded house, whilst claiming expenses for both of them. Fraud, I believe it is known as. Will he face jail for looting the public purse? “If you are old enough to commit these crimes you are old enough to face the punishment” according to Cameron. Well, no. He said sorry. So he only have to repay half of the £20k he fraudulently claimed. Whilst claiming for that house, he was also fraudulently claiming for mortgage payments on another house. But it’s okay. He said sorry. #realbrokensociety

One in four UK households are now classed as fuel poor. Fuel poor means when the cost of heating your home exceeds 10% of annual income. Roger Carr, the Chairman of Centrica which owns British Gas and has just announced a 25% increase since December 2010, is also the President of the CBI. The CBI have called for deeper spending cuts than have been so far imposed, and have opposed any tax rise on Capital Gains tax. Effectively, meaning they wish to see Winter Fuel Allowance for the neediest cut drastically, but the taxes on their huge profits lowered. #realbrokensociety

The maximum tax credit of £54 a week for families with a disabled child will now be cut to £27 a week. Thousands will be plunged into poverty due to this cut. Meanwhile, Transport Secretary Philip Hammond, who is worth £7.5million, pays himself in dividends rather than a salary from his company Castlemead, saving him money on tax. Also, to avoid the 50p top rate of tax, he moved his shares into his wive’s name, who pays a smaller rate of tax, allegedly saving the Transport Secretary £25,000 a year. On Question Time, he called it “rearranging my affairs“. #realbrokensociety

I think it’s about time the Prime Minister instilled a sense of humanity and moral decency in his own household before he continues this ironic moral crusade.

The Right of the Week

It has been a funny old week for the right wing. Here are a few example:

Across the pond in the US, it seems that tonight, the Republican Party has decided it isn’t all that bad an idea for the supremely rich to pay a bit extra tax instead of the entire World falling into bankruptcy. The term “job creators” has been used to defend the mega wealthy and ensure the public see these people as some sort of benevolent overlords who should be spared any financial pain whilst they insist on public sector cuts for the least wealthy. The falsity stands in the fact that the rich do not create jobs. Demand creates jobs. The businessman doesn’t give you a job out of the goodness of his heart; he does so, to ride the wave of demand in a certain sector, thus making himself a small fortune off the back of the labour of those who will now have to endure cuts. So whilst you now have to sell your labour at the lowest possible price just to survive, because the Republicans are actively trying to destroy any sort of safety net, those at the top will make even more money from squeezing you for as little pay as possible, whilst enjoying lovely big tax breaks. Thanks Republicans!

Hopefully the Democrats on the newly created “Super Congress” will push for tax hikes on the wealthiest, despite the Bush tax cuts being off the table.
Overall, the substance of the bill is tipped firmly in favour of Tea Party Republicans. Obama showing again, intense weakness.

Interestingly, the debt ceiling was raising 18 times under the Reagan administration. Over the Obama four years, it has increased by 45%. Under Reagan – 199%.

Back in the UK, the City of Westminster Police showed how much they hate the new Blackburn Rovers Red and black away kit, by announcing:

“Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy. Any information relating to anarchists should be reported to your local police.”

- Correct me if i’m wrong, but most of the Tory front bench consider the State to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful. Can we report them? The last line, that any information on Anarchists should be reported to the police is worrying. Remember when the entire Right Wing threw a collective tantrum whenever New Labour introduced legislation that the Right considered to be an attack on civil liberties? Where are those protesters now? Surely i’m allowed to hold Anarchist sympathies without the police having to know? Do I need to ring my local police station to inform them that I have a number of Chomsky books and am quite a fan of Bakunin? Am I a danger?

The Tory blogger Guido Fawkes has immersed himself in a plethora of hypocrisy today, having created a campaign to reintroduce the death penalty. So, essentially he doesn’t trust the State to run hospitals, disability services, schools, libraries, museums, and nurseries, but he absolutely trusts them to murder. He, being Tory, is absolutely against Shariah Law and its primitive retributive justice system, but absolutely in favour of a Western primitive retribution justice system. Taxation on the Right, is considered State theft. Murder by the State is perfectly acceptable apparently. There is absolutely no value; moral or otherwise, in State murder. I can envisage people from low socio-economic backgrounds ending up on the “to hang” list, way above anyone else. What a silly campaign they are running over at Guido. They back up their desire to see the restoration of State backed murder, by saying:

When the public are asked about the death penalty the results have consistently shown a majority in favour, when they are asked specifically about child killers, the numbers change dramatically with a range of polls showing two-thirds to three-quarters in in favour. On this issue there is definitely a clear regressive majority in Britain.

- The problem is, as far as I can tell from my research so far, there has only been one poll (a Yougov poll) in the past 15 years, of 2011 people. 50% were for the death penalty. I am not entirely sure we can back a death penalty restoration off the back of 1000 people, from a population of 70,000,000 backing it. Such is the logic of the Right. When the say the “results have consistently shown a majority in favour“, what they mean is, if you read the exact same result from a variety of media outlets, it is surprisingly consistent! Though, there was one other poll, by The Sun, of 100000 people, in which 99% of them said they support the Death Penalty. Not surprisingly, it was the same time as the Sun itself backed a campaign for the restoration of the death penalty.

Yougov quite unequivocally states:

Support for the death penalty has fallen over the decades – it used to be over 70%, these days roughly half of the population support the death penalty for “standard” murder – indeed there was a YouGov poll in 2006 that showed marginally less than half of people in support of it, the first time it had occured. More recently, a YouGov poll in September 2010 found 51% supported the death penalty for murder, 37% opposed. A MORI poll in July 2010 found 51% supported the death penalty for adult murder. An Angus Reid poll in 2008 found people supported the death penalty for murder by 50% to 40%.

One of the MPs supporting the campaign, is Tory Phillip Davis. I have an entire blog entry dedicated to Philip Davis. Not only is he for State sponsored murder, but he also thinks disabled people should agree to work for less than minimum wage. He voted against the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations, which state that it is unlawful to discriminate when selling goods or services, education or facilities based on sexuality. He also said of a group of vandals who turned out to be white, British, and not at all muslims:

“if there’s anybody who should fuck off it’s the Muslims who do this sort of thing.”

Guido is genuinely happy to have the support of this idiot?
The State is not above the law. What if the State murders someone who it later turns out is innocent? Can we therefore murder Guido Fawkes and all his supporters? It’d be retributive justice after all right? For the sake of sanity, we must ensure our Country is run on the basis of the rule of law, not the rule of the lynch mob. A Nation killing a person to show that killing is wrong, is beyond my comprehension of what is morally acceptable.

Quite amusingly, The English Defence League has gone on a massive defensive campaign since the Oslo murders. Whenever a Far Right organisation gets questioned, or challenged in any way, they insist that those doing the challenging are part of a Left Wing Liberal Media Elite conspiracy to silence them. To paint them as Nazis when all they want to do is protect “our way of life“. They seem unable to accept that perhaps we just don’t like them, nor do we consider our way of life, to be synonymous with the Far Right. Now it has been proven that Right Winged Christians are just as dangerous as any other political or religious grouping, the EDL have sought to go on a huge defensive.
Breivik had posted on EDL forums weeks before he carried out his act of terrorism. Under the pseudonym Sigurd Jorsalfare (the 12th Century King of Norway, whom led the Crusades, Breivik said:

“The biggest problem in norway is that there is no real free press, there is a left-wing angle on all the political topics so most people are going around like idiots. And offcourse with our norwegian labour party beeing in power for most of the last 50 years dont help. but i i think there is an awakening now atleast i hope so. Do some of you know the truth about what happened to the ndl, there was some clames that neo-nazis had hijacked the organisation, but on the ndl site i cant really say i noticed anything like that. So may guess is that there were some kind of police pressure to stop the movement. Anyone here heard anything?”

- A typical response, as I said earlier, is to blame lack of enthusiasm for a wholly Fascist doctrine, on a left wing media.

Breivik claimed he’d been to a meeting of the anti-immigration “Knights Templar” in London, in which he met his British Mentor named “Richard”. Coincidentally, a man called Paul Ray, runs an anti-muslim website on which he calls himself “Richard the Lionheart“, with the logo being Knights Templar. He describes himself as one of the founders of the EDL. The links are pretty clear. On his blog, after denying he is Breivik’s mentor, and after blaming the media AGAIN, he shows his potential insanity by relating his far right views to a Christian goal, a 12th Century Christian goal:

A Knight is chosen by God, and anyone professing to be a Knight not chosen by God is not a Knight. A little group and a secret ceremony does not make a Knight that is just a group of men with ideals and agendas dressed up in the clothes playing a pantomime without the power and authority.

- How does one prove that he is ‘chosen by God’? Mr Ray sounds oddly like the Fascist Islamic militants he claims to be fighting against. They are one in the same.

Breivik on the EDL forum goes on to state, when asked if he was part of the Norweigen Defence League:

“I was but, the site has been put down now. There was to be a demo in Oslo on the 26 of February but after the police security service put us on the “danger-list” the the internet site was sadly shut down.”

- The NDL Facebook Group is administered by a man called Jeff Marsh. Marsh is a convicted football hooligan, and was once in prison for stabbing two Manchester United Fans.
At an NDL rally in Oslo, one of the speakers was Darren Lee Marsh, an EDL activist who is also good friends with the leader of the Youth EDL. The links between the EDL, the NDL, an Breivik are pretty clear, without the need for some sort of Commie media perceived by an entirely irrational and paranoid group of Fascists. It isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that the EDL isn’t exactly the peaceful organisation it claims to be. On July 21st this year, a man called Christopher Payne of the EDL pleaded guilty in Nottingham to sticking the decapitated head of a pig onto a pole, and rammed into the site of a new Mosque being built, with the words “No Mosque here. EDL Notts” sprayed on the pavement. On July 22nd, vandals broke into a Mosque in Luton (a Mosque not connected with extremism) and spray painted “EDL” and a swastika on the walls. Now, for a group that claims to simply be against Militant Islam, one has to wonder why they seem to pick on random Mosques with no connection to Militancy? By their logic, they should not be targeting sites of potential Church’s, because Breivik was a Christian Terrorist. That is the irony in EDL bullshit. They will stigmatise all Muslims as extremists, by breaking into Mosques and vandalising and intimidating Muslim residents who have done nothing wrong, but when people start to equate far right EDL thought with far right terrorism, they go on the defensive and insist there is no link. Irony at its finest.

In his cherished manifesto, Breivik wrote:

“I used to have more than 600 EDL members as Facebook friends and have spoken with tens of EDL members and leaders. In fact; I was one of the individuals who supplied them with processed ideological material (including rhetorical strategies) in the very beginning.”

- Pretty conclusive. His manifesto is worrying for all of us who are not members of groups like EDL. Because it shows the mentality of those that groups like the EDL consider to be enemies. In it, he attacks Muslims, liberals, those he calls “Cultural Marxists” and journalists. He even lists ways in which he could kill journalists, and other targets he considers “traitors“. It is not a leap to describe these groups as Fascists and dangerous. The British flag and the cross of St George have been hijacked by the far right for too long. I no longer want to feel like a fascist if I see an English flag. It needs to be taken back, and the true nature of Britain – diversity, tolerance, respect, cultural understanding and awareness – restored.

In his manifesto, Breivik quoted Daily Mail journalist Melanie Phillips often. She was criticised but then decided to have a little bit of a typical right winged tantrum in her column claiming that liberals are trying to bully her into silence. Moreover, she provides a sort of defence, a reasoning behind the Oslo attacks, with a nice little disclaimer first:

This shouldn’t need saying, but it does: there can be no excuse, justification or rationale whatsoever for the atrocity perpetrated by Anders Behring Breivik. The reason it unfortunately needs saying is that I have been reading too many weaselly equivocations about this, along the lines of ‘Yes, it was indeed a most terrible atrocity and one’s heart bleeds for those poor victims; but Norway’s politics towards Israel do stink/Norway’s Labour Party stinks/Quisling’s country, say no more/the Islamisation of Europe stinks/it was only a matter of time before someone was provoked by the railroading of public opinion into doing something like this’.

- So, in essence, she is blaming centrist, centre right, and centre left politics for this. As if she is saying “if we all agreed that Islam is evil, Palestinians do not deserve their own state, and Labour party politics should be criminalised, we’d all be fine now!” I am a leftie Atheist. If a Leftie Atheist suddenly start killing hundreds of people, I wouldn’t say “I know it’s bad blah blah blah, but religion is a right bastard!” She should have stopped talking with “there can be no excuse“. She incessantly needs to remind us that not everyone with a slightly far right view on the World is an evil racist. Unfortunately, she fails to employ this same logic with this:

Muslims not only despise western secular values as decadent, materialistic, corrupt and immoral. They do not accept the distinction between the spiritual and the temporal, the division which in Christian societies confines religion to the margins of everyday life. Instead, for Muslims the whole of human life must represent a submission to God.
This means that they feel a duty to Islamicise the values of the surrounding culture.

- All of them? Really?
Everything she says reads more like a Glenn Beck rant, though she is quick becoming his UK counterpart. Attempting to shut her up? The chance would be a fine thing; her excessive and extreme ramblings keep on plaguing journalism as an institution on a regular basis. In an article in the Spectator, Phillips genuinely refers to Obama as a “revolutionary Marxist“. One wonders, after almost a full term, what Obama has achieved that is so revolutionary and Marxist? I’m pretty sure a major bank bail out package cannot be considered Marxist. Perhaps the persistence of the Bush Tax Cuts? I’m sure Guevara would have approved of those! In fact, the enlarging of the State through the stimulus package, could not be considered Marxist either, given that it simply tried to kick start Capitalism after its horrific failure in 2008. I don’t see any workers groups taking control of the means of production? I don’t see Obama referring to private property as a great sin? So short of us liberals wanting to bully her into shutting up, I’d suggest we simply want rational and coherent journalism rather than a mess of poor logic and misrepresentation. Oh, and this extends to her claim that Obama is a secret Muslim having “adopt[ed] the agenda of the Islamists“. Here:

“We are entitled to ask precisely when he stopped being a Muslim, and why. Did Obama embrace Christianity as a tactical manoeuvre to get himself elected?”

- She wants to be taken seriously? Stop the hysterical over reactions and outright bullshit. Problem solved. So as well as the Muslim Obama, the bullying Liberal media, and Marxists, who else does Melanie Phillips believe is part of a grand conspiracy to silence people like her?

“For years we have watched helplessly the undermining of the traditional family, which has been relentlessly attacked by an alliance of feminists, gay rights activists, divorce lawyers and ‘cultural Marxists’ who grasped that this was the surest way to destroy Western society.”

- Lawyers and gay people. I consider myself pro-gay rights. I am not sure I have ever sat and conspired with gay people, Marxists, Feminists, and lawyers about the easiest way to destroy the West. In short, Melanie Phillips is certifiably insane. A typical paranoid right winger who insists that anyone who doesn’t support her very narrow minded view of what it means to live in a Western Country, is surely conspiring to destory it. Whilst she is correct in her assertation that she is not responsible for the awful terrorist attack committed by Breivik; she is however implicated in promoting a far right discourse because she has the media presence to do so, by basing her articles on absolute nonsense and extreme over reactions to events. She is partly responsible for the hysteria that has infected the West, when it comes to Islam. So yes, for that, she is entirely to blame.

There is an internet forum principle that says whenever someone invokes Hitler during a debate, the debate should end there and then, because it has reached a level of absurdity not worth continuing with. So I will end on a Melanie Phillips quote regarding Climate Change:

“It was no accident that Hitler was a green.”

The wisdom of Philip Davies, MP

A couple of nights ago, Twitter was alive with the news that Tory MP for Shipley, Philip Davies had stood up in the House of Commons and said this:

“If an employer is looking at two candidates, one who has got disabilities and one who hasn’t, and they have got to pay them both the same rate, I invite you to guess which one the employer is more likely to take on.

“Given that some of those people with a learning disability clearly, by definition, cannot be as productive in their work as somebody who has not got a disability of that nature, then it was inevitable that, given the employer was going to have to pay them both the same, they were going to take on the person who was going to be more productive, less of a risk.

“My view is that for some people the national minimum wage may be more of a hindrance than a help.

“If those people who consider it is being a hindrance to them, and in my view that’s some of the most vulnerable people in society, if they feel that for a short period of time, taking a lower rate of pay to help them get on their first rung of the jobs ladder, if they judge that that is a good thing, I don’t see why we should be standing in their way.”

Philip Davies ideal England is one in which sweatshops, full of people with disabilities create cheap goods for the overly privileged Tory benches to feed from, whilst the sweatshop bosses drive up to the gates of Downing Street in their brand new Mercs, accompanied by a lovely big donation for the Tory Party.

Perhaps we could use the £161,300 in expenses he claimed rather dubiously in 2009, on top of his £65,000 a year salary, to pay people a better salary? On the subject of his expense claims, he claimed the most of all Bradford MPs, and claimed £10,000 more on his second home allowance than Bradford North MP Terry Rooney. I am not entirely sure how that’s warranted, or helps him does his job to a greater degree. Incidentally, claimed for more in second home allowances than my dad makes in a year. Unsurprisingly, he clings onto this gravy train by opposing much needed Parliamentary reform. The lobby for Parliamentary reform, Power 10 label Philip Davies as one of the six MPs who will happily block reform of Parliament. This isn’t surprising, given just how much he has financially benefited from the current corrupt nature of Parliament.

Nevertheless, there is an unnerving essence to a member of our national legislature, insinuating that a person’s worth should be based solely on their physical or mental capability, and then using defensive rhetoric, heartfelt sentiment, to sound as if he only wishes to help disabled people, rather than line the pockets of his Party’s donors, and make it easy for employers to exploit without worry. It is equally as unnerving for a politician to tacitly suggest that wage discrimination is not only acceptable, but entirely the fault of those who are being discriminated against. His words sound as if he is suggesting being disabled is a lifestyle choice, that requires a bit of a punishment. That punishment should apparently be an agreement to work for less money that one needs in order to live, along with the added expense that comes with certain disabilities.

It would be right to point out that those with disabilities, who Davies wants to be paid less, did not cause the financial problems we’re now in. Ironically, for Davies, it was the private sector’s excessive greed (of which he clearly has no problem in promoting) that caused the mess, through unproductive excess profit being used – not to pay people better even when it had accumulated enough to easily manage paying more – but on dodgy asset deals. The problem in 2007 wasn’t that there appeared to be a lack of capital caused by the need to pay disabled people, or anybody a national minimum wage, but by the fact that there was an abundance of concentrated excess capital that wasn’t being put to good and productive use. Wages were stagnating for the majority of people, whilst wages at the very top climbed higher and higher. That, is entirely the fault of the private sector. Is Davies saying that if we dropped the minimum wage, wages would flourish, failed Tory economics would be proven right, and disabled people would be working shorter hours, for a loyal boss, who paid wonderfully? Because I foresee a bunch of employers driving even bigger Porsche’s whilst their £2 an hour disabled employees can no longer afford adequate care. Davies certainly didn’t offer any added benefits that some disabled people may require due to being paid below minimum wage. Grants for specialised equipment? Incomes and the ability to pay for necessary care and equipment cannot always be planned for even on a week to week basis, for those suffering certain disabilities. To promote the idea of wage discrimination against those with disabilities, at the same time as cuts to Disability Living Allowance take hold

It is a minimum wage for a reason. Do we really believe employers wouldn’t use an “opt-out” for their own advantage? Wages at the top are already obscenely high in the private sector. In 2009, for example, the chief executive of the Anchor Trust, which provides home for the elderly, took home £391,000. Anchor Trust is a charity! Whilst donations are down and employees are facing redundancy it is ludicrous for a CEO of an organisation that so many people rely on, to take home almost £400,000 a year.

I continue to be of the opinion that if an employer cannot afford to pay somebody a decent enough wage to live on, he/she shouldn’t be running a business. They are a danger to the public. £5.89 is not a lot of money, and to suggest that the rest of us are entitled to at least that, whilst a disabled person is entitled to less, purely because of a natural affliction is sensationally regressive.

The far right narrative is the problem, not minimum wage legislation. Philip Davis is attempting to remove responsibility for fair pay away from the employer, and onto the employee. Citizens UK found that of the companies in London willing to sign up to paying their lowest paid members of staff a “National living wage” rather than a “National minimum wage”, of £8.30 an hour, they managed to lift 3500 families out of poverty in 2009. It didn’t have an adverse affect on prices, in the same way as the minimum wage introduction in the late 1990s didn’t have an adverse affect as many Tories claimed it would. Campaigners for a National Living Wage are screaming out at Tesco, who have failed to ensure their cleaning staff are paid a fair living wage, despite the company making £3.8bn profit last year. Employers do not, ever, take paying their staff a respectable wage seriously. Ever. Surely if they were made to pay more, of which they can definitely afford, the money would be divided among a workforce who would pay more tax, and use the added disposable income on goods and services from businesses across the Country, rather than wasting it on the very very small band of wealthy elites?

A study in America called “Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination.” , found that job applicants with a white sounding name are 50% more likely to be asked back than an applicant with a white sounding name. The researches sent out 5000 applications in sales, marketing, clerical and customer service positions. The names they used were a mix of white sounding names, and black sounding names. The report showed that white applicants with stronger resumes than other white applicants received 30% more callbacks, whereas black applicants with stronger resumes than other black applicants received just 9% more callbacks. It proved that regardless of credentials, black applicants were 50% less likely to get a callback than a white applicant. I wonder if Philip Davis thinks black Americans should agree to work for less money than their white counterparts, purely because they are black? What about a black person with a disability? Back to slavery?

We should though, not be surprised by the ignorance that Philip Davis displayed. Here is an MP who voted against the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations, which state that it is unlawful to discriminate when selling goods or services, education or facilities based on sexuality. Davies therefore thinks it is acceptable for a school to expel a gay student. Or for a shop to ban a lesbian lady purely for her sexuality. He also voted against removing hereditary peers from the House of Lords. So, he wants more freedom for shop owners to ban people based on sexual orientation (individualism and all that Libertarian bollocks) yet that same individualism, he doesn’t extend to the most privileged of people passing that privilege onto their children, who may or may not have worked or produced anything worthwhile in their entire lives? Oh the hypocrisy.

In 2011 he even invented his own logic based on a lie, when it comes to making cigarette packaging plain:

“I believe that the introduction of plain packaging for cigarettes is gesture politics of the worst kind. It would not have any basis in evidence and it would simply be a triumph for the nanny state and an absurd one at that.”

- The objection I have with the line “it would not have any basis in evidence” is that it does have basis in evidence. Cigarette companies spend millions on their packaging, and over the last couple of decades, they have used the idea of “light” packaging to sell products to people who believe smoking “light” fags, means less danger. A 2004 British Medical Journal research article found that:

The increase in lung cancer risk is similar in people who smoke medium tar cigarettes (15-21 mg), low tar cigarettes (8-14 mg), or very low tar cigarettes (≤ 7 mg)

- So smoking a cigarette from a package that claims to be “ultra light” means nothing. But do people really believe “ultra light” means they are at less of a risk of developing lung cancer? Does the advertisement on the packaging work? If it does, then Davis is either a liar, or a massive idiot. Well, surprisingly……. he’s a liar or a massive idiot. A University of Toronto research paper, titled “‘Light’ and ‘mild’ cigarettes: who smokes them? Are they being misled?” published in 2002 found that:

In 1996 and 2000, respectively, 44% and 27% smoked L/M (light and mild cigarettes) to reduce health risks, 41% and 40% smoked them as a step toward quitting, and 41% in both years said they would be more likely to quit if they learned L/M could provide the same tar and nicotine as regular cigarettes. These data provide empirical support for banning ‘light’ and ‘mild’ on cigarette packaging.

- The policy of plain packaging is absolutely based on evidence. It is time we started to ignore the “nanny state” hysterical screams from manic, misinformed, ignorant right wingers.

Not only that, but in 2006, after an act of vandalism was initially blamed on a group of Muslim men, Davies said:

“if there’s anybody who should fuck off it’s the Muslims who do this sort of thing.”

- It later turned out that the act of vandalism was caused by white men. Davies did not apologise, nor did he take the same tough far-right, BNP-esque line with the white vandals as he had done when he imagined the vandals were all muslim.

You might think the incessant stupidity stops there. You’d be wrong. In 2009 Davies asked:

“Is it offensive to black up or not, particularly if you are impersonating a black person? Why it is so offensive to black up your face, as I have never understood this?

Maybe he would be happy for black people to take a pay cut after all.

Racism in America: Today

When the United States was beginning to form, there was a hierarchy of oppression that kept everyone subservient to someone above them. The King of England demanded goods from the Jamestown white elite who exploited and controlled the white frontiersman who, in order to appease the elite with money and land, slaughtered Indigenous people and brutalized African slaves. Many whites joined Indigenous and African rebellions. The white elite worked to stop this because they knew such an alliance would become too powerful and would succeed at overthrowing the control that the elite and the King had. So in order to separate the whites from everyone else, they started giving more privileges (land and better treatment) to the white servants. This worked. The working class whites effectively abandoned the movements for change and to this day these groups have problems working together.
- Howard Zinn, 1980.

46% of American Republicans in the State of Mississippi believe that interracial marriage should be illegal. I will elaborate on and explain this later.

After my blog on the racism of Abraham Lincoln, I wondered whether race is still a divisive issue today as it has always been, in America. In the UK, race is still an issue, though it is far more subtle and much less noticeable, but it exists nonetheless. There isn’t this notion of white supremacy, nor do we have the history of the “founders” being slave owners or massive racial segregation up until very recently. We don’t have a KKK equivalent and we didn’t fight a civil war to protect the rights of States to own slaves. Race is certainly a problem in the UK though. We tend to become far more Nationalist during times of economic hardship and the need to blame immigrants or anyone who doesn’t happen to fit the narrow band of what it means to be “British” becomes an almost accepted narrative. Political parties push immigration reform to the top of their agendas, giving credit to such racial tension. Race is used as a divisive mechanism to subvert attention away from a failing class system.

Here in the UK, with talk of economic austerity, it was only a matter of time before the issue of race was introduced into the equation. We know that poorer areas like inner city Liverpool, Manchester, and Hackney are going to face the toughest council cuts. Low socio-economic areas are predominantly mixed race or black and Asian. So it was only a matter of time before David Cameron would bring race into the mix. He then suddenly made a speech against multiculturalism, in which he mentions the words “islam” and “muslim” 36 times, and “Christianity” once. Race is yet again being used as a divisive wedge.

Back to the USA, and the 19th Century, before the Civil War. It has long been argued by the rather hermetic Southern America that the Civil war was a war between the States (the South) and the big bad Federal Government (the North). Yes. The States rights to own and perpetuate slavery. The charge against a big bad Federal Government invading the lives of its citizens does not hold up when you look at the evidence, and is actually rather rudimentary.

The American lawyer and journalist William Walker, in 1854, after a failed attempt to set up a Republic of Sonora in Mexico, with the intention of it becoming a State of the Union; invaded Nicaragua for control of a vital trade route between New York and San Francisco. He succeeded in his efforts, and took control of Nicaragua, renaming it “Walkeragua” (seriously, i’m not making this up). In 1856, President Franklin Pierce, officially recognised Walker’s regime in Walkeragua as legitimate. His regime began to Americanise Walkeragua, by instating slavery, using American currency, and making English the official language. He advertised his new Country to American Southern businessmen by advertising the fact that his new quasi-State was pro-slavery and would remain so. By the time Walker revoked Nicaragua’s 1824 Emancipation Act, the rest of Latin America took note, and invaded. He fled and was bought back to the U.S where he was welcomed as a hero of the South. As “States rights” go, invading another sovereign nation and revoking its anti-slavery laws, is about as big and as bad as a Federal Government can get. He died before the Civil War kicked off, but the South referred to him throughout the Civil War as “General Walker“. The South did not just fight to preserve the institution of slavery, they wanted to expand it, on a grand scale, to the point where Senator John Crittenden of Kentucky proposed that the 36°30′ parallel north be a line that separates the northern free states, and the southern slave states, all the way down to the tip of South America. American racism has always been rife.

In 2011, membership of white supremacist organisations has increased tremendously. According the the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks white supremacist organisations in the US, the number of members is up by 48% since 2000. Jeff Schoep, head of the National Socialist Movement (the Nazi Movement) in America, who the FBI classify as terrorists, said:

“The immigration issue is the biggest problem we’re facing because it’s changing the face of our country. We see stuff in England and Spain like this. … They are turning those countries into a Third World ghetto.”

Well, I live in England, and he’s right!!! Here is the River Thames in Central London a few years back:

Here is the River Thames in Central London today:

Sad times.

The largest white supremacist group in America; Stormfront have a website with a forum, which includes systematic attacks on white jewish people. They appear to use “Jew” as a term of race. White, black, Jew. On a discussion about the economic crises, a member called “Crowstorm” whose nationality he has set as “Jewnited States of America” says this:

The problem is, Jews look White so when people see a Jew do evil, they don’t say “look at the evil Jew”… no, they say “look at that evil White man.

- It is an odd statement to make for a variety of reasons. First, a Jewish person is not the colour “Jewish“. It isn’t white, black, jew. If he’s a white man and Jewish, then he’s a white Jew. Jewish is not a race. But not just that, but race itself is not biological. It doesn’t exist. It is a fantasy. An abstraction. Like Nationality and Religion. All man made abstractions, meaningless nothingness used to create tension between low socio-economic groups to ensure disunity. If poor white people are blaming poor black people for all the trouble in New Orleans after Katrina hit, then their attention is on each other, and not on the very rich folk in Washington (both white and black) who washed their hands of the plight of anyone who isn’t a very wealthy lobbyist decades ago. And lastly, no one says “look at the evil white man”, because for the vast majority of people, race isn’t an issue; if you’re evil, I don’t care what colour you are.

Another quite extraordinary post on Stormfront was from a school teacher who taught apparently in black schools. Here are some of the quotes from it:

I was away about two minutes but when I got back, the black girls had lined up at the front of the classroom and were convulsing to the delight of the boys.

Many black people, especially women, are enormously fat.

Blacks, on average, are the most directly critical people I have ever met: “Dat shirt stupid. Yo’ kid a bastard. Yo’ lips big.” Unlike whites, who tread gingerly around the subject of race, they can be brutally to the point.

When a black wants to ask, “Where is the bathroom?” he may actually say “Whar da badroom be?”

Many black girls are perfectly happy to be welfare queens.

There is something else that is striking about blacks. They seem to have no sense of romance, of falling in love.

Pregnancy was common among the blacks, though many black girls were so fat I could not tell the difference.

My white students came back with generally “conservative” ideas. “We need to cut off people who don’t work,” was the most common suggestion. Nearly every black gave a variation on the theme of “We need more government services.” One black girl was exhorting the class on the need for more social services and I kept trying to explain that people, real live people, are taxed for the money to pay for those services. “Yeah, it come from whites,” she finally said. “They stingy anyway.”

It is impossible to get them to care about such abstractions as property rights or democratic citizenship.

- The “teacher” goes on to say he doesn’t understand why his black students think he his a racist. Surely it isn’t racist to think that black students are inherently lazy, fat, illiterate, racist, anti-democratic, communist sluts who just don’t understand why being indoctrinated in Conservative ideology is a wonderful learning experience and are incapable of love?

The days of burning crosses and wearing silly costumes are over. White supremacists tend now to fight their cause with mainstream language like “We just want to protect our children and live in a safe environment“, the language is manipulative because they are simply masking the fact that they blame anyone with slightly darken skin for why their neighborhood isn’t safe.

A study by the American economic review between July 2001 and May 2002 entitled “Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination.” , found that job applicants with a white sounding name are 50% more likely to be asked back than an applicant with a white sounding name. The researches sent out 5000 applications in sales, marketing, clerical and customer service positions. The names they used were a mix of white sounding names, and black sounding names. The report showed that white applicants with stronger resumes than other white applicants received 30% more callbacks, whereas black applicants with stronger resumes than other black applicants received just 9% more callbacks. It proved that regardless of credentials, black applicants were 50% less likely to get a callback than a white applicant.

Institutional racism is particularly subtle, and so less noticeable. If you are black, you are three times more likely to be pulled over in your car and searched for drugs than if you’re white, despite the fact that if you’re white, on the few occasions when you are pulled over you are four times more likely to have drugs on you. If you are white and you drive past the police without them pulling you over, you are experiencing the privilege of being white. The war on drugs then, is not a war on drugs, if it were, those statistics would be a hell of a lot different. The war on drugs would go where the drugs actually are, not where the people with dark skin are. It is a racist institution.

Christopher Columbus is hailed as the founder of America. He has a day named after him. It is not taught in any history class at American schools the true horror that started the day that Columbus found an island in the Lucayan Archipelago in the Bahamas that he named San Salvador, though it was actually already named, by the population who lived there, as Guanahani. Within years, Spanish adventurers had captured thousands of the native Taino population, enslaved them, and took their women captive as wives/sex slaves. The Spanish had utterly devastated the Taino population by the turn of the 16th Century. Epidemic disease brought by the Europeans was bad enough, but the Spanish settlers placed too much strain on local crop farmers, and the survival of the Spanish was considered more important than the survival of the Taino’s and so the food naturally ended up in the hands of the Spanish. Columbus when he landed, wrote of the natives:

“We can send from here, in the name of the Holy Trinity, all the slaves and Brazil wood which could be sold.”

- We know what he had planned. Nicolas Ovando, the governor of the Indies from 1501 to 1509, decided he needed to ensure the Taino’s knew their place once and for all. He did this by inviting the much loved Taino queen Anacoana and local tribal chiefs to a dinner to celebrate his governorship. When they were all in the room, the Spaniards set it on fire, killing most of those inside. The ones who got out, were tortured for days on end and then killed. Queen Anacoana was tortured and hung. By 1510, the Taino’s were virtually extinct.

To be honest, there really isn’t much you can celebrate about Columbus. Apart from bringing with him the biggest genocide in history, he was a rather simple man. He believed Cuba was in Asia, that he hadn’t discovered a new land, that the entire continent of South America was an Island, and to pay his debt to the Spanish crown he raped his way across Central America taking as many as 1200 women and children slaves for Europe; children who had, without a second thought, been stripped away from their families. But don’t take my word for, take it from the man himself:

“We shall take you and your wives, and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and we shall take away your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, and we protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault .”

I cannot think of a worse man to idolise.

Back to the present day, as if Stormfront and institutional racism and selective history aren’t enough to convince a person that racism is deeply ingrained in the American psyche, certain lovely little advertisements have deep racist connotations, still.

Aunt Jemima, a trademark for breakfast food owned by Quaker Oats is still going today. Aunt Jemima represents the notion of a good little black ex-slave girl who just loves her servile role as servant to a white middle class consumer.

Equally as subtle, is Uncle Ben’s rice. It would be ridiculous for a company now, to have as its fictional spokesperson, a black man using the name “Uncle” which was a term used by the children of white slave owners to refer to their slaves. If a newly formed rice company were to say “Well, you know that we white people used to ship Africans in to farm our rice fields, as slaves? Well why don’t we make our spokesmen black?” they would be lambasted as a hugely racist company. But Uncle Ben is a tradition, and so it appears acceptable, though the stereotype behind it perpetuates the racist sentiments it subtly encourages. This kind of subtle cultural racism has not gone unnoticed. In an episode of the Sopranos (the greatest show on TV) Tony warns a black guy away from his daughter. Tony then has an anxiety attack when he sees a packet of Uncle Ben’s.

Public Policy Polling of Raleigh North Carolina, found that 46% of Republican voters in Mississippi think interracial marriage should be illegal. 14% said they weren’t sure. I cannot comprehend that number. It does indeed show that race is an issue, and especially with Republican voters. There is still the essence that the white race is superior and should be protected. This sentiment has found its outlet with the Tea Party movement of recent months. Whilst Glenn Beck spews his bullshit, insisting on top rated “news” channel that Obama has a deep seated hatred for the white race, his equally as vacant and mind numbingly moronic viewers stalk the streets with signs like this:

And this:

And this:

And this:

And this:

Now I wouldn’t immediately jump to the conclusion that the Tea Party is an inherently racist organisation, it is mainly a vehicle to promote the incoherent ramblings of an uneducated economically far right puritanical Republican group wholly run by Corporate America to advance its interest at the behest of even the idiots who indirectly fight for the rights of Corporate America, now slowly morphed to include racism as part of their base.

It is sad to see notion of race being such an issue in 21st Century America. One would have hoped that the social wedge of racism, placed to draw attention away from class and a deeply unequal wealth system would have crumbled away, or intellectually and politically dismembered for the disease that it is. Race is not real. Class is.

The necessity of Marxism

As most of you are accutely aware by my interpretation of political events, I am a Marxist. I believe Marxism can and should be used to explain the financial crises we’ve just been through, as a matter of urgency rather than consigned to the history books of failed economic orders. Because if we ignore the warning cries from Marx, or even Keynes, that there is inherent danger and crises in capital accumulation, we are simply going to repeat those mistakes.

I am a Marxist, but I understand that there is currently no working class movement any more. I do not call for the abolition of all Private property and a vanguard party to destroy Capitalism from within like a new age Soviet State. I do however believe that when the contradictions of an economic order become so vast and dangerous that they keep descending into crises, the economic order becomes unsustainable and collapses, and that is a matter for history to sort out. I don’t think we’re ready for the collapse of the economic order of Capitalism. Marx expressed that this time would come at a moment when Capitalism was at its most advanced stage. To me, we are not at that advanced stage, but we are heading there. Using Marxist dialectics, we can see that Feudalism was absolutely always going to become Capitalist, because skilled work produced better “things” and was more respectable, but eventually society progressed to a stage where skilled workers were greater in number, and Capitalism rewards skilled workers where Feudalism does not. Marx argued that Capitalism also had a problem; those with property always pitted against those without property, and the eventually those without property would not stand for their plight any longer, and socialism would follow. The argument being that if I have a nine hour day, and I have made the money after six hours that will pay my wage, the extra three hours I have to work I am essentially working for free. But that extra money is used by the Capitalist to expand the business, or to (as recent history shows) gamble it on dodgy stock options. A tension becomes apparent between the economic order and the cultural order of the day….

In Capital, Marx says:

In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension an affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.

When the economic order moved away from an industrial base in the UK, to a financial sector base, suddenly there became a new tension. Instead of expanding, or money “trickling down” as it was promised to do, excess profit was ploughed into unproductive financial gambles, like naked short selling. (Which has just been an accepted practice by the Tory government in the UK, despite being banned everywhere else). The tension grew between the limitlessness of the accumulation of money with the limited notions of production, exchange, labour power, and consumption.

Marx wrote very little on the order of a communist society, because he wasn’t exactly sure how it would look. He was an historian and a theorist. Way ahead of his time. George Osborne is not even in the same league as Karl Marx. Marx wrote extensively on the failures of Capitalism and its inherent crises prone nature. In fact, I would suggest Marx (much like myself) would accept that Capitalism is extraordinarily efficient, but is naturally self destructive.

The tension today I would suggest started at the moment of the industrial revolution, and has perpetuated ever since. After the second World War is was considered the fault of protectionist policies that led to a tension between Nation States and so the United States placed itself as a force for the promotion of free capital flows and pushed for decolonisation whilst opening up markets for as much surplus capital absorption as possible across the World. Though, they did all of this not for the good of humanity, but for their own benefit. In 1944 Keynes suggested the creation of a single global currency outside of the control of any nation state. Keynes saw the contradiction between Nation States and Capitalism and that it would lead only to further tension. The U.S rejected the idea, insisting that the Dollar, backed by a fixed exchange rate against the gold, take the role. Therefore, to all other currency, their “gold” was the U.S Dollar.

There is no viable left wing alternative to the prevailing and powerful neoliberal order perpetuated by key institutions like the IMF. There are little socialist groups that have failed to leave the early 1900s, there are student socialist groups who offer nothing of any substance. There has been a rather concerted effort to discredit any form of left wing alternative for a number of years. The charge that the fall of the Soviet Union represented the fall of the entire doctrine of Marxism is a nice little gimmick as a tool of propaganda, but it simply isn’t true because the Soviet Union was not in any way Marxist. Marx argued that the State needed to begin to whither away for a truly democratic Marxist revolution to take place. The Soviet State was notoriously inflated. A system of wages still existed. The Soviet Union was one big Corporation. Money filtered upwards, and the workers had no say over investment, it was left to “management”. The Soviet Union was State Capitalism. The Menshevik exile Fyodor Dan argued prolifically, that Stalin’s Russia was entirely State Capitalist. Surplus value was still sucked out of the worker, by means of separating him from the means of production.

Accumulation by dispossession has always been a mightily popular tool for Capitalism to exploit, much like its feudal predecessor. Today this economic violence first appears as stock market gambles, and then the crises that inevitably creates is imposed on the citizens of a country who are told that austerity is the “only way”. Privatisation is used as a tool to dispossess common property like water, and hand it to very few people, whilst an effort is made by the media (the Feudal system of old used Religion to try to legitimise why it had to take things from people, today the media plays that role) using words like “freedom” and “choice” and “giving power back to the people”. It is very transparent, and yet it is essentially allowed to happen. Asset losses today is simply a way of the unfortunate majority losing so that the wealthy few can buy the assets cheap at a view to selling them as the market picks up some time in the future. In short, the crises for the many equals financial christmas for the few. So whilst religion constantly focuses on the judgement day, when those who aren’t fortunate enough to believe in their horrendous myth will end up burning in hell whilst the believers are brought into Paradise, so to financial speculators often gamble on the system falling to its knees for the many, so they will be rewarded. This can be seen on a grand scale. Blackstone Group (private equity firm) take over companies at a low price when they are struggling (not failing), strip them of assets, lay off huge amounts of staff, broke union obligations, and then sell them off for a massive profit. Goldman Sachs is rather good at this.

Nobel Prize winning economist, Milton Freidman, the man responsible for the Thatcher and Reagan revolutions, the 20th Century’s version of Adam Smith, the biggest name in free market economic proposals that has perhaps ever existed, once wrote of the Soviet Union:

In the labour market individuals are seldom ordered to work at specific jobs; there is little actual direction of labor in this sense. Rather, wages are offered for various jobs and individuals apply for them – much as in Capitalist countries.

Two things to note here. Firstly, Freidman refers to other countries as Capitalist. Whilst pro-market fundamentalists who comment on my blog insist on telling me as often as possible that no country has been Capitalist, their hero says differently. Secondly, Freidman is implying, by his acceptance of their being a wage system within the Soviet Union, that it was not Communist. Communism requires the abolition of private property, not a perpetual wage system.

Over time, Freidman-ite followers within the Chicago School tradition have changed their tune in recent decades. They seem to be tacitly implying just how insanely wrong they were in their adherence to market fundamentalism. Rajan, Thaler, and Vishney, of the Chicago school tradition said recently:

“The Chicago School never said we wanted blind deregulation … We should really ask who were the people in 2000 who decided markets don’t need regulating. Those were not Chicago economists. Some of them were Clinton officials, and some of them are now advising Obama”

- They have seemingly moved to the Left apparently. The deregulatory obsession with free markets of the Freidman tradition is now worming its way out of its failures, and suggesting they were in favour of regulation afterall. The anti-state, regulation = impeding human freedom lobby, have now decided that government intervention is not ALWAYS a great evil afterall. In other words, they accept, they were massively wrong.

Freidman has been used by the Republican Right in America, Pinochet in Chile, Thatcher and Cameron in the UK to promote a Corporatocracy that actually is far departed from what he was arguing. Whilst I disagree entirely with Friedman’s premise, I note he was a great economist and his theories (much like Marx) have been wildly abused.

The ideological committment to deregulation, and spending cuts is what Naomi Klein calls a shock doctine. Forcing austerity on a Country that has recently experienced crises (like Chile did after the coup) simply to wipe the slate clean and attempt a neoliberal experiment. Neoliberal experiments are absolutely always a cover for the accumulation of more and more capital concentrated in fewer hands. The one great evil in my view perpetrated by Government is its attempts to limit itself through neoliberal doctrine. Government never limits itself, it simply moves its power around.

In fact, businesses in general are authoritarian by nature. Every so often a member of the human race will have a bit of an authoritarian nature about him. He will want to tell people how they should speak, how they should dress, how they should act, what being “professional” means, when you can eat lunch, how little money you will get for your labour whilst he takes the majority of it, all for the sake of profit and power. We are told we should thank these people for giving us a job. For allowing us not to starve to death. How ridiculous. They should thank us for allowing them the opportunity to acquire surplus value from our work, to fund their new Mercedes fund. At the point of setting up a business, the initial capital needed is the most important aspect of that business. But after that, the cogs, the human labour is the most important aspect. They hold the keys to true power, not the Capitalist. If the boss walks out of his workplace, it will continue without any problems. If the workers collectively walk out, the business is doomed. To ignore this power situation is for the Capitalist to pretend it isn’t there and that a struggle between the two doesn’t exist. It is authoritarian by its very nature. Lots of little Soviet states known as businesses. It is not the height of human freedom, it is oppressive, it alienates people, and it uses class division, race division, and sexual division to perpetuate itself. Labour and capital are vastly opposed.

The more right winged people I discuss the economic crises with, the more I am affirmed in my belief in Marxism, because I am yet to meet a Conservative supporter who can argue his or her case, without resorting to simple cliches that he or she has heard in the press. Cliches like “if you are in debt, you have to pay off your debt, that is why we are paying our debt as a nation, that the Labour party forced upon us“. The fallacy here is the comparison between National sovereign debt and individual debt. It is a fallacy for a number of reasons. Firstly, if an individual is in work and cannot reach his or her repayments, he or she cannot just start to work more. A Nation in debt that is cutting away the public sector necessarily has a flood of unemployed. It is the equivalent of a credit card company saying “you have to pay off your debt, whilst working only two hours a week”. That would be a more accurate representation of National debt during economic hardship, and individual debt. Secondly, individual debt like National debt is not necessarily a bad thing. A mortgage is not a bad thing. Similarly, a government investing when aggregate demand is low in order to keep people in jobs and homes, whilst the private sector is in no position to take on the horrendously inflated unemployment market, is not a bad thing. It is an investment that will be paid back.

The comparison of the UK to Greece is laughable. We still have the ability to pay our debts. We’re triple A credit rated, which suggests our spending patterns under Labour were not out of control as the right wing would have us believe (if they were, we certainly wouldn’t have the highest credit rating you can possibly wish to attain). 80% of our debts mature in 14 years. Greece has three years to pay 80% of its debts. We are not like Greece. Don’t believe the bullshit.

Norway is the second richest country in the World. It ranks bottom in the Forbes Failed States Index. And yet it has a public health system, a high standard of living, and 32% of its work force are employed in the State sector, the highest in the OECD. Tories would try to reform this, and say it’s “broken”. Norways basic egalitarian values have resulted in the gap between the lowest paid worker and the CEO being far smaller than anywhere else in the World.

I am yet to understand why it is that when Labour spent money they “didn’t have” to keep people in jobs and homes, it was deemed bad, but when the Conservative government spend money they “don’t have” (the debt is set to rise higher), at the same time making people unemployed, and presiding over out of control inflation, it is acceptable? Why is cutting Corporation Tax and the 50p top rate of tax whilst cutting winter fuel allowances for pensioners during a time when fuel is at an all time high and VAT a huge burden, along with inflation in general, perfectly acceptable?

Let’s be honest, freezing police pay, at a time when inflation is high, fuel is out of control, and on top of both of those, VAT is up….. whilst you cut tax for the wealthiest few, is not about sorting out the debt (in fact, it is tacitly accepting that their is no debt problem), it is ideological.

When your Country has a triple A credit rating, and is the fifth biggest economy in the World it is a lie to suggest we’re about to go bankrupt, or anywhere near bankrupt. It is a lie to say we are like Greece. To suggest, the UK is anywhere near unsustainable debt levels, we must look at the evidence. Here is a graph of the UK’s net debt since 1900:

I’d say that’s quite conclusive. We are not in a debt crises. We never were.

As inflation rises, as more people become unemployed, there is inevitably less disposable income, and so less money being spent in the private sector, because the pound in your pocket is worth less and you now have less than a pound in your pocket anyway. The public sector should be investing in infrastructure, education, and health. This is the best and only way to aid the growth of the private sector. The private sector, which is being expected to take up all the jobs that are being thrown away. In the long run, it will cost us more. Because with 12 people chasing 1 job, only 1 person can get the job. Therefore 11 need supporting. They need retraining. They need protecting. Who pays for them? Who gives them the money that will be spent in the private sector, to boost revenue and growth? When purchasing power of the main bulk of consumers is destabilised by mass unemployment, what then? Allow the private sector to employ people without the need for worker protection because if the worker wishes to negotiate terms for the buying of his labour power he can just be told “We wont hire you then, we’ll hire someone who will be as close to a slave as possible“. Whenever a right winger tells you what they are doing is for your “freedom” or your “choice”, note that it is for the freedom of the wealth to dictate terms of employment. What an awful prospect. There is great merit in government investment in infrastructure projects during economic hardship. When a perceived “crises” is barely even a “problem”, cutting so drastically exits the realm of necessity and enters the realm of ideology. The UK is facing massive ideological attacks.

It is apparent to me that the public sector did not fail. It was fine. The crises of the financial sector eventually moved the crises to the public sphere. The issue is and always will be (from a Marxist perspective at least) the crises of capital accumulation.

Understanding Marx is not about condoning Stalin.

The Tory banking Legacy

‎”Last Friday I visited Rawlins community college in my constituency and spoke to a very bright group of economics students. We discussed the fact that Governments cannot spend money they do not have. The students understood that; why does my right hon. Friend think the Opposition do not”

- screamed Nicky Morgan, Conservative MP for Loughborough in the House of Commons today asking the Prime Minister a deep and probing question (as you can see) about the financial situation. Another wonderfully planted question that was met with the usual hysterical “yeeaaah” jeers from the Tory back benches, the same joyful jeers they gave when George Osborne announced 500,000 extra jobs losses last year.

I cannot stand planted, pointless, useless, deceptive and simplistic questions on PMQs, they undermine the entire political landscape, they make it weak and simply theatre with half truths and just plain bullshit. It should be treated with the contempt that it treats the public with.

I emailed Morgan to ask her about that. I said:

Hi Nicky,
Today in Parliament you stood up and asked quite clearly a planted question along the lines of “Why does no one understand that Right Winged economics is the only way to run a Country” (clearly ignoring the horrific legacy the IMF imposes whenever it feels the need) and how all the economics students you spoke to at Rawlins agreed.

She opened her reply with:

Thank you for your e-mail which I have read and you have got your many points across. And thank you for insulting my intelligence – I am quite able to prepare my own questions. Do you assume I am not able to do so because I am a woman or a Conservative or both?

There is so much wrong with that opening, I struggle to know where to begin. It is not me who is insulting her intelligence. Firstly, she is insulting the intelligence of the entire electorate who have to put up with the pantomime that she perpetuates with such childish questions, every week. And if I were her, I would rather people believed the question was planted because the question: “The students understood that; why does my right hon. Friend think the Opposition do not” is not suitable for the very short time the PM gets to answer questions during what is supposed to be an adult debate over a subject that is going to cause people misery for years to come, to ask such pointless questions. It is insulting to all of us. It isn’t a fucking game. To the people who will struggle to put food on their families tables, standing out in the dole queue week after week, who can’t afford Christmas next year, disabled people who will lose their support and have no idea how they will cope now; it isn’t a fucking game. It is people’s lives. Real lives. Nicky Morgan is treating peoples lives like a game. She should be ashamed.

To suggest it was “insulting her intelligence” that I didn’t believe she devised the simple question herself is also illogical. I think she is far more intelligent than that, and was given that question. If she truly believes it took an intelligent mind to practically say “Does the Prime Minister agree that he’s a God?“, and believe that is a suitable question to ask, then she is definitely an idiot and her intelligence should certainly be called into question at the next election.

Secondly, suggesting sexism? Really? Is that even worth commenting on? How did such a pathetic person get elected? When you have to invoke sexism or racism or anything of that calibre in a debate that has absolutely none of the characteristics of a sexist or racist argument, you are drastically clutching at straws. If I’d have said “Thank you for your time, oh by the way I have some ironing that needs doing“, I could understand.

What a woefully simplistic idiot she (and Tories in general) really is. This is a woman who came to our University and told us all that businessmen make the best MPs, so it is unsurprising that her view is so intensely, well, wrong.

Firstly, I hope Nicky Morgan practices what she preaches, and doesn’t have a mortgage, an overdraft, or any other outstanding debt. Because to spend money she doesn’t have, would be a little bit hypocritical of her.

Secondly, One wonders what Nicky Morgan thinks was likely to happen when her Party deregulated the banking industry in the 1980s, and when William Hague in 2001 told reporters he would promote people to his Shadow Cabinet on the basis of their commitment to banking deregulation. Did she think that would encourage responsible banking? If she did, she is massively naive, if she didn’t then she is just massively hypocritical.

Firstly, it is essential to note that the value of money doesn’t exist. It is an illusion. It is not backed by gold or silver or anything. It is just an idea; the collective idea of a population. Other than it being an idea, it is just paper and metal. You could use anything as money that is not backed by gold or silver. If we all believed each hair on our heads was worth the same as a pound coin, then we’d use the hair on our heads. There is no reason why not. We invented this concept of money, assigning mystical value backed by nothing important, and now that money controls our lives. Money is simply a medium of exchange now, like any other. Fish was used as money on the East coast of Colonial America once. The idea of money is good, because it is flexible in size and it is always in demand. The idea of money is bad, because for it be portable, its value must be high for a small amount. For that, you need a source that is in scarce supply with a high price (gold). Paper money attached to nothing, is worthless. In fact, gold has all the qualities one would require for a medium of exchange. It is durable, it is scarce, it is portable, it is divisible, far more so than any other commodity.

Banks in the UK can back the money with worthless IOUs. This is known as fractional-reserve banking. What it means is a bank only has to hold a relatively small amount of money in its reserves, the rest it can lend out.
So for example:
Person A deposits £1000.
The bank keeps 10% as reserves.
So the bank keeps £100.
The bank lends out £900.
The bank can lend that £900 as an IOU promissory note to more than one borrower (for the purpose of this example, we’ll say it can lend to three different borrowers).
Over time, each of those borrowers pays back the £900.
So the bank gets the £900 back, and an extra £1800, in new money.
The bank can then take that £2700 it now has, and keep 10%, and lend the rest out.
So the bank has made a fortune, yet only actually has £900 in reserves.
Banks issue many IOUs based on the single deposit.
So if we all marched to Lloyds TSB and demanded our money from our accounts at the same time, the bank would not have it.
In essence, the bank is lending money it doesn’t have, on a grand scale.

The free market advocate of the 19th Century, Condy Raguet noted that credit expansion in the Financial sector will always result in depression. He advocated strong regulations on the banking sector, which he had deemed to be a bit of a beast in need of taming.

Morgan, in her email, said:

I’m afraid I totally disagree with your remarks. In particular you refer to the deregulation of the financial sector and easy credit – which happened during the 13 years Blair and Brown were in power.

- No it didn’t. It was perpetuated under Blair and Brown, but it definitely didn’t begin under Blair and Brown. Another vast manipulation of the truth; something Conservatives are becoming quite the professionals at. The 1986 Building Societies act and the Financial Services Act for example, were definitely key de-regulatory acts, brought into being, under Thatcher. The influx of credit card users and the housing market boom that followed, in the early 1990s through to 2007 (and looks set to continue) was both Tory and Labour’s fault. The entire economy, since at least the 1980s has been based on debt and debt alone. Debt, by definition, is money we do not have.

Nicky Morgan should be fighting tirelessly to stop the fraudulent nature of the banking industry, opposing the deregulation that her own party introduced, and insisting that tuition fees be abolished (debt, money we don’t have), mortgages be abolished (debt, money we don’t have) and in fact every other form of debt, if she truly cares about not spending money we don’t have.

Cameronism

Neoliberalism: The tyranny of Big Business, under the mask of “Freedom“.

I have always wondered how the very fortunate manage to convince the very unfortunate that perpetuating that system is to everyone’s benefit. Thatcher managed to convince a mass of people that the Unions were evil, and were strangling the Country. She killed off the Unions, and bosses began the biggest exploitation effort since the 19th Century. Jobs shipped abroad daily, wages kept lower than ever before, and homes repossessed with the homeless rate doubling. How were people convinced that that was a good thing for the Country? Northern England still hasn’t recovered from what she did. It would seem that if you add the words “freedom” and “giving power to the people” to the end of a speech that is essentially going to destroy those people, you will have convinced them.

One has to wonder, if this was a people power thing, why not mention it during the run up to the election. Such a social and class engineering project doesn’t come into being over night, it takes years of planning. They knew this would be the case. So why not mention it, if it’s so great? I’d suggest because if a political party was to suggest privatisation of the NHS and the public services, before an election, they would be so massively unelectable, they would have no MPs left. So, the answer is to manipulate a population into voting for you, and then systematically destroy their life.

The fact remains, no one has given the Tories a mandate to do this. They did not win the election. More people voted for a slower reduction of the deficit, and less cuts. More people voted centre and centre-left political parties, than who voted for the Tories. Economically, if not socially, the Tories have no democratic right to be doing what they are proposing to do.

Any time mass privatisation is suggested, the phrases “more power to the people” and “freedom” are banded about. I am always very suspicious of this, because it never quite turns out that way. It was “freedom” that drove Thatcher to privatise British Gas and the railways. British Gas is now run by one CEO who rises prices in line with an increase in oil prices, but then when the oil price lowers, he keeps British Gas prices high, raking in massive profits. For charging customers obscene amounts of money for no legitimate reason, boss of Centrica (which runs British Gas) was Knighted for “services to business“. The Chief Exec, Sam Laidlaw (who went to Eton, unsurprisingly) increased the cost of gas for consumers by 35% in 2006, for no reason whatsoever, and made record profits, when asked about it, he answered “Well, I am not about to apologise for making a healthy profit“. FOR THE PEOPLE!!

One wonders how long they can keep blaming Labour, given that unemployment and the deficit were shrinking in May 2010. They’re now both on the rise.

David Cameron does not have the mandate to be privatising the entire public sector. And yet, in the Telegraph today, he shamefully used his dead son as justification for the most worrying of plans I’ve yet to hear him say:

And though I was always so grateful for the tremendous care my eldest son received, I never understood why local authorities had more control over the budget for his care than Samantha and I did.

I never understand why my boss, where ever I choose to work, has the right to be as rude and obnoxious and speak down to us as he so wishes. But apparently that’s “freedom“. What a wretched freedom it is. Allowing business the freedom to dictate terms and conditions for its workers, with absolutely no balance, is not freedom. Replacing democratic oversight with a dictatorial boss whose only objective is to make more money, is not freedom.

I would never use a dead relative to promote a political agenda. He should say it like it is; Cameron and Osborne are Libertarians. It is why there is a mass of tax cuts for the very wealthy whilst the public sector is being gutted. It is why the banks are not being hit. It is why he is demolishing the NHS and the public sector as a whole. It is something beyond scary.

“Instead of having to justify why it makes sense to introduce competition in individual public services – as we are now doing with schools and in the NHS – the state will have to justify why it should ever operate a monopoly.”

What the hell? Damn right you should have to justify privatisation, logically because you are changing the system. You have to justify why you are changing the system. But mainly, because it has never fucking worked as promised in the past. The Tories privatised the railways, and now no one can afford to go anywhere. The Tories sold off the Council Houses, effectively entirely privatising the housing system, and now no one can afford homes. The Tories privatised electricity, and now old people die because they cannot afford to heat their homes in winter. So damn right you have to justify why you are handing even power to big business. FOR THE PEOPLE!!

One of the most worrying aspects of these proposals, is that the White Paper will lay out plans to make the proposals irreversible. Cameron said the Government would:

“make it impossible for Government to return to the bad old days of the standard state monopoly”

It is an ideological attack. It is Social engineering on a grand scale. Because those of us on the Left would argue that the bad days, especially where British Gas and the railways are concerned, and looking at the private health service in America; revolves around the private sector. It has to be resisted. By making this right wing plan irreversible, he is ironically presiding over the biggest Government in decades, because he is forcing Right Winged tyranny on those of us who oppose it completely. He is effectively banning the Left Wing. What if the Labour government had given more power to the Unions, and made it irreversible? Surely we’d be hearing how Orwellian that actually is?

What if recession hits again. Which it will. It means that the only legal response, would be to do nothing. Keynesian economics would be entirely banned. What basis do they have to ban it?

The difference is, the power. The Unions represent hundreds of thousands if not millions of ordinary people. Their power is legitimate, if we are talking about giving power to ordinary people. Syndicalism, is not a bad idea. Giving power to a very narrow set of businessmen is not, and could never be considered the height of human freedom.

It amazes me that we have got to a position where we are being convinced en masse, that privatisation is “handing power back to the people“. It is such a falsity that it is almost funny. When we elect a politician, we know their face, we know their name, and if we don’t like them, we vote them out. By privatising the public sector, they are practically selling democracy to the man with the most money and calling it “power to the people“. We are getting to the stage where local representatives cannot do a thing, because their power is being handed to faceless businessmen, who we do not see, ever, never mind elect. Corporations act as little Stalinist States, where money is forced upwards, from the bottom. Those at the very top are always going to want more. Those at the bottom are always going to be squeezed for as much productivity and as little money as possible. We are therefore ruled by a Stock Market system, that relies on very very dodgy deals that have no social benefit whatsoever. Has it enriched our lives thus far? Longer working hours, ever more slimy bosses with a deluded sense of superiority? Stagnating wages with no real chance of an increase? Unions unable to exercise any power? An out of control financial sector? No housing? Gas and electricity more expensive than ever before? Less job security and more worry than ever before? I have argued previously that Democracy and Capitalism are entirely incompatible. This proves it. We are not a Democracy. We are wholly run and controlled by the power of big business. FOR THE PEOPLE!!

Orwell’s worry about an overbearing Government should not come to symbolise just the abstract concept of a State. Corporations are just as dangerous.

There is a reason why the Public and Private sectors are separate. They have different values. Profit seeking should never place itself in the public sector.

It took a Labour backbencher, Labour MP Chuka Umunna, to force Barclays to admit that it had only paid 1% Corporation Tax in 2009, even though it made profits of £11.9bn. That is absolutely obscene and completely unjustifiable. Unless you’re a Tory, obviously. Bob Diamond, the CEO of Barclays told the Treasury Select Committee that Barclays paid £2bn in taxes in 2009. It turns out he was very misleading, because those taxes are payroll taxes and its employees National Insurance. It paid just 1% Corporation Tax. It is paying bonuses worth £3bn. FOR THE PEOPLE!!

If that wasn’t enough, Barclays (remember, the tax it saves, is obviously for our benefit, for the people!) helps to fund Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe. It lent £750mn to Zimbabwean officials who had siezed land from White farmers, in 2007 alone, in order to “boost farm production“. Didymus Mutasa, the National Security Minister of Zimbabwe got a large chunk of Barclays money, even though he masterminded the ousting of white farmers….. who were left homeless. Mugabe has three farms, that he was able to take over, thanks to the funds from Barclays. FOR THE PEOPLE!!

If you’re disabled, tough. If you’re a child in a low socio-economic area, tough. If you want a borrow a book from a library, tough, it’s closed, fuck off. If you’re the CEO of a tax avoiding, corrupt regime propping up Bank…. great, have a bonus! FOR THE PEOPLE!!

So that begs the question, why is David Cameron focusing purely on the public sector? The public sector did not fail to the extent that he is suggesting. The public sector didn’t cause the biggest financial crises we’ve ever seen. The private sector has failed miserably, far far worse than the public sector could ever imagine. The private sector created a culture of short term gain at the expense of long term stability. It gave everyone credit cards to artificially inflate demand, to keep wages at the very top getting higher and higher whilst (unsurprisingly) wages for the rest of us stagnated. It is the reason that my boss can keep us on minimum wage, and squeeze extra work out of us, without ever offering a pay rise, and talking to us as if we are socially inferior. It is a class system. The neoliberal system. And it doesn’t work. It is a hopeless, dire, miserable little system.

David Cameron is focusing purely on the public sector, because like all Tories, he is unable to recognise the absolute failure of the Private Sector, and instead focuses all his energy on attacking the public sector. He constantly mentions benefit fraud, as do most Tory supporters. People cheating benefits is their big gripe. Yet it costs just £900mn a year. Corporate Tax avoidance (like Barclays) cost us £25bn. Get your fucking priorities in order.

I am unsure how the Liberal Democrats can continue to let this happen. They have no shame. If they keep referring to themselves as Progressives, it is going to be the main source of ridicule politically for years. Freedom, for a left of centre party, should never mean the freedom for big business and a class of business elites, to control every inch of our lives.

I hope to God that one day humanity opens its collective eyes to the absolute abuses of this horrendous right winged economic system we are force fed. It is not here to work for you and I. It is here to work for a very narrow wealthy elite.

I smell Class War.

The Unions, the Student movement, UK Uncut, and anyone who relies on public services, and anyone who hasn’t got an essential part of their soul missing, should fight back. The last thing this Country needs, is Cameronism. I give it a month before England has its name changed to McEngland, or Nike Air England.

Thatcherism and its supporters like to boast that they beat the dragon of Socialism. The Country and the World will never be truly free until it has immunised itself from the disease of Neoliberalism.

Neoliberal Democracy: Of the rich, for the rich, by the rich.
FOR THE PEOPLE!!

The Pig Society Part II

The Big Society grows ever stronger, and support grows ever wider, charity bosses and workers applaud it and sing its praises, because it is a wonderful plan that is definitely not a cover for a mass of Corporate tax cuts.

That is what delusional Conservatives believe.
Except, it’s bullshit.
The voluntary sector is being absolutely gutted of funding.
As the previous post pointed out. But to make it clear, the Guardian today featured a story of a lady named Denise Marshall. She is Director of Eaves and also the Poppy Project. These charities work with victims of domestic abuse and sex trafficking. She has dedicated her life to this cause. She has fought some pretty high powered members of the criminal underworld across Europe. Eaves provides housing and counselling for victims of abuse. They offer up to 35% savings on gas and electricity and other necessities for vulnerable women. In short, Denise Marshall is a heroine. She was recognised for this in 2008 by being given an OBE. She is one of the very few who actually deserve the honour.

Denise is now handing back the OBE, to David Cameron personally, because she has said that the extreme and needless cuts to funding for charities and organisations like Eaves, means she will no longer be able to support and fight criminal gangs who traffic women for the sex trade. She feels that she would be hypocritical and unworthy of an OBE when she can no longer protect the women she has the award for protecting.

Marshall said:

“I received the OBE in 2007 specifically for providing services to disadvantaged women. It was great to get it; it felt like recognition for the work the organisation has done.

But recently it has been keeping me awake at night. I feel like it would be dishonourable and wrong to keep it. I’m facing a future where I can’t give women who come to my organisation the services they deserve – I won’t be able to provide the services for which I got the OBE.”

“If you run a refuge where you don’t have the support staff it just becomes a production line, where you move people on as quickly as possible to meet the targets. You’re not helping women to escape the broader problems they face. They may get a bed, but no help with changing their lives and moving out of situations of danger.”

“I’ve worked in this sector for almost 30 years. I don’t want to sound melodramatic but I don’t think I have ever felt as depressed and desperate as I do now,”

How then, do the Big Society advocates justify the fact that on the same day as a true heroine feels she can no longer protect very very vulnerable women in her care, the Tories are trying to stop an EU law on the banning of naked short selling (which I shall try to explain as much as possible shortly)? The EU law, if the Tories get their way, will not affect the UK on naked short selling. Germany have banned it, the U.S have banned it, Australia have banned it, Hong Kong have banned it, Japan have banned it. We have kept it. It makes a very small elite group of speculators very rich, whilst risking money that is not theirs. How are these people protected, yet the vulnerable women like those that Denise Marshall represents have their funds slashed. The Government and its banking friends and business associates are sitting sipping champagne, whilst Rome burns. Nero would be in awe.

Short Selling (not naked short selling) is a little confusing, and utterly absurd. It has no social use. It is not to the benefit of any of us. It is dangerous and it should be banned. When you buy shares, you buy them in the hope that the price will rise and you can sell them some time in the future, to make a nice bit of money. It is all to do with how you obtain shares. You and I would buy shares. Naked short sellers borrow shares in the hope that the price will fall. So, if for instance I was to borrow 5000 shares from Broker A. I will then sell them at £1 a share, so £5000, hoping the price falls. Say the price falls by half. I now buy back all the shares, at £2500. I have netted myself a nice little £2500 and I give the 5000 shares back to the Broker A.

Naked Short Selling is different, because you don’t even borrow the shares you’re selling. You don’t have them. You’re selling a promise that you will obtain the shares that you’ve just sold, at some point in the future. You may as well walk into a bank, take all of their money, and promise to give it back at some point in the future. There is then an incentive for short sellers to wreck companies, because the share price has to fall for them to meet their promise. On a grand scale, this can lead to massive crashes.

This little practice lead necessarily to the 1997 Asian Financial Crises, that left millions in poverty. This wasn’t the fault of too much Government interference in people’s lives, or too many people on the dole. It was a direct result of unproductive short sellers and a massively deregulated financial sector.

The law looks to ban naked short selling in the EU. The UK will be trying to exempt itself from that banning.

This of course comes days after the announcement that there would be vast changes to the offshore tax laws, which mean that large and medium sized businesses who offshore their profits and then move them back to the UK, no longer have to pay the difference between the tax they paid in their tax haven and the tax they pay in the UK. They no longer have to pay any tax on profits that are made outside the country and brought back to the UK. Not only that, but they can claim expenses against tax they pay in the UK, to fund their overseas departments. That represents one of the biggest changes to Corporate tax law, and a massive shift of wealth from the poorest due to cuts, to the very wealthiest on a level far beyond anything Margaret Thatcher could have dreamed of. Suddenly the veil of an omni-benevolent Tory government is falling off, to be replaced by a face stamped with the logos of Diageo and Barclays.

On the 9th February, George Osborne told the House of Commons:

Those entrusted by us to regulate those bankers and run our economy washed their hands.
Meanwhile the rest of the country is left paying every day for their failures.
The government has to pick up the pieces.

It would seem that what Osborne believes is “picking up the pieces” entails giving away massive tax cuts, destroying the voluntary sector, and inviting the World’s naked short sellers to come and set up home in Britain.

Welcome to the Pig Society.

Let them pick fruit

Tory Councillor David Shakespeare recently suggested that those Northerners who will inevitably suffer from higher VAT, higher unemployment and rising prices across the board, should be made to pick the fruit of the richer southerners. He stated that Northerners should “replace the Romanians in the cherry orchards“. Let them eat cake pick the rich’s strawberry fields.

During the French Revolution, as the National Assembly promised to help relieve the plight of poor, who were massively ignored during the successive reigns of Louis XV and the soon-to-be-headless Louis XVI. Prices were rising and unemployment was out of control. The National Assembly were soon seen to be failing to actually change anything at all.

According to Christopher Hibbert in his book “The French Revolution”:

….with bread still expensive and in short supply, with unemployment increasing due to a bad harvest of 1788, riots erupted in towns and villages. Millers and farmers suspected of hoarding grain were assaulted, walls and fences were pulled down. At Troyes the mayor was killed. At Agde the bishop was dragged from his house and forced to relinquish all rights to his mill…..

The Lieutenant de maire of Saint Denis on the Northern outskirts of Paris was chased through the streets by an angry crowd for contemptuously refusing to reduce the price of bread. Chased to the top of the Church steeple he was stabbed to death and decapitated.

One of the Ministers in Breteuil’s reactionary government Foullon de Doue, who was believed to be speculating in the grain trade and plotting a counter-revolution met an even more horrible fate. Accused of having said the people should be made to eat hay if they were hungry, a collar of nettles was placed around his neck, a bunch of thistles was thrust into his hand, and a fistful of hay shoved between his lips. He was then hanged on a nearby lamp post.

His son in law, Bertier de Sauvigny, the Intendantof Paris, was accused of similar abuses and murdered as well. His heart was torn out of his body and brandished at the windows of the Hotel de Ville. Then his head was cut off and paraded with that of his father-in-law on a pikestaff through the streets and down the arcades of the Palais Royal, the one head being pushed against the other to the cries of “Kiss Papa, Kiss Papa!”

Just saying…..

Rise of the filth

When we were kids, the police were known by their more mellifluous title of “the filth“. They managed to gain this nickname, by insisting on turning up and supervising any group of teenagers standing around doing nothing. The result was not only a bunch of teenagers standing around doing nothing, but a bunch of police standing around doing nothing, and both groups inherently disliking and mistrusting each other. The difference between the two groups standing around doing nothing, was that the taxpayer didn’t fund teenagers to stand around doing nothing. If public funds were directed more at the kids, maybe we wouldn’t have been so bored we ended up standing around doing nothing, and maybe the police could concentrate on, you know, their job.

As we grow up, we learn to respect the police a little more. You note that they protect your property rights and at times, it must be difficult for them. And, we all love Gene Hunt. We suddenly respect what they do a little more, because we know we’d need their support if our house was broken into. Granted, that support would turn up 45 minutes after the actual brake in, take notes, and then spend the rest of the evening not actually finding your stolen stuff and instead supervising the next generation of bored teenagers in case they light up a spliff; but it’s nice to know they exist. But the respect we have for the police, does not give them the freedom to be vicious thugs.

The Metropolitan Police in London seem to have gained even more reason for the public to refer to them as “filth” recently. They are a formidable force of filth. Whenever they are on TV explaining themselves, I find I am more and more inclined to dismiss everything they say, as a crock of shit.

This tendency toward my absolute dismissal of everything the Met say (so that’s The Met, The CBI, and The IMF), stems entirely from the fact that they are, in fact, a crock of shit. First, the shooting in the head seven times, of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell Tube Station, by the Met, because he looked a bit like a terrorist. Despite an IPCC investigation, which found that not only did the Met kill an unarmed innocent man, in the most violent of ways, but they tried to cover it up. It stated the Met:

made or concurred with inaccurate public statements concerning the circumstances of the death. The alleged inaccurate information included statements that Mr de Menezes had been wearing clothing and behaving in a manner which aroused suspicions.

The Chief of the Met at the time, Sir Ian Blair even tried to suppress an investigation, wishing instead to conduct an internal inquiry. Internal inquiries always clear the party involved. It is the equivalent of being your own judge at your murder trial. You’re not likely to send yourself down. Later, it became known that Metropolitan police surveillance officer codenamed “Owen” had deleted files off his computer, that involved a recording of deputy assistant commissioner Cressida Dick saying that de Menezes was not a threat at all.

The Crown Prosecution Service decided it would not press charges against anyone in the shooting of de Menezes. Shooting an innocent man seven times in the head apparently doesn’t even come under manslaughter.

And then we move onto the infamous G20 protest in London in 2009. The Met used the kettling technique to contain the crowd. A bystander on his way home named Ian Tomlinson had a heart attack and died during the kettle. First, the Met denied they had anything to do with his death. Suddenly, a youtube video appeared, showing PC Simon Harwood hit Ian Tomlinson with a baton, and then push him to the ground with ridiculous force, about a minute before Tomlinson had a heart attack and died. The police do not help him off the ground, instead they stand there, smug, doing nothing. A fellow bystander helps Tomlinson back to his feet.
Again, the Crown Prosecution Service said that they were unable to bring any charges against PC Simon Harwood. Harwood was known to have taken his police number off, and covered his face, to avoid detection. In 2009, a second and third postmortem on Ian Tomlinson revealed that he had died as a result of massive internal bleeding caused by a shock to the abdomen. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to point out that Harwood first hit Tomlinson with a baton, to the abdomen, and then shoved him to the floor…… a pretty closed case.

This is where the Met tend to act like great saviours in a land of crazed Anarchists, just trying to protect us all. They released a statement four hours after Tomlinson had died, stating that the police had noticed a man collapse, and had tried to rush in and help him but were bombarded by missiles from protesters. Those damn protesters. The only problem was, another youtube video surfaced, minutes later, after Tomlinson had collapsed. It shows police surrounded him, but not actually helping. It shows a female protester trying to help and saying “these are the bastards that did it“, and curiously, absolutely no “missiles” at all. This video surfaced just after The Sun, in its vast attempt to insult all protesters whilst masturbating furiously over the wonders of The Met, lead with:

“Man dies as bottles lobbed at rescuers.

POLICE were battered with beer bottles and cans as they desperately tried to save a dying man at the height of the G20 riots in London last night. But when cops struggled through the crowd to reach him, they were pelted with missiles. They finally got to him and set up a cordon as two ambulances rushed to the scene. ”

It’s amazing “journalism“. The Sun appear to have received a press statement from the IPCC, and manufactured a story around it. What is even more amazing, is that Harwood was hired by the Met, even though he had previous disciplinary action taken against him over the past decade. The Met are hiring lunatics.

Skip forward to the Student Protest in London last week.
Alfie Meadows, a Philosophy Student from Middlesex University is found wandering in a dazed state covered in blood, by his Philosophy Professor also at the protest. Meadows had been struck on the head by a police baton, with such force that he required brain surgery. The Met were kettling again at this point, and when the Professor begged them to let him and Alfie out of the kettle, they only allow Meadows to leave….. on his own……. in the middle of London……. needing brain surgery. Despite students and reputable professors from across the Country all claiming the violence started after kettling began, and after several unprovoked horse back charges by police took place, the media and the government still seem intent on keeping quiet on the subject of police brutality, instead choosing to focus their crocodile tears on a bit of paint on Charles’ armoured car.

This monday night, the BBC conducted a shameful interview of a man named Jody McIntyre. They asked him if he’d been throwing rocks at the police and if he were a “revolutionary” attempting to paint him as violent. The reason for this, is a video surfaced showing a Met officer pull Jody McIntyre ……. from his wheelchair…… which he can’t operate without the help of his brother, because of his celebral palsy, and dragged across the street. The BBC interviewer asked him if he’d provoked the attack….. by wheeling toward the police…. the muscular, trained, armed police. The BBC surely shouldn’t be acting as a mouthpiece for the angry right wing who are stuck in a tornado of shouting “omg it’s political correctness gone mad” arguing for “sanity” whenever it suits them, but claiming rather outlandishly that they’re second class citizens whenever someone with slightly darken skin complexion gets a job ahead of them? They aren’t the Daily Mail. Although The Daily Mail took it one step further, by comparing McIntyre to Andy from Little Britain, with the quite insufferable turd Richard Littlejohn stating:

“…he should have kept a safe distance.

Jody Mcintyre is like Andy from Little Britain.
‘Where do you want to go today, Jody?’
‘Riot.’
‘Are you sure? Wouldn’t you rather go to hear Bob Crow speak at the Methodist Central Hall. You like Bob Crow.’
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘So, we’ll go there, eh?’
‘Riot!’
‘Ken Livingstone will be there, too. He’s your favourite.’
‘Riot!’
‘All right, then.’
Five minutes later at the riot . . .
‘Don’t like it.’ ”

Littlejohn apparently thinks disabled people should not stand up for what they believe in, and if they dare to, they apparently shouldn’t complain when police drag them out of their wheelchair.

The Tory Party aren’t exactly the friends of disabled people, what with cutting adult social care funding for those suffering a disability. But Tory Councillor Phil Taylor took it one step further, when, on his blog, he said:

” Although he presents himself as a cerebral palsy victim in a wheelchair he does not mention that by his own account he walked up the 9 stories of stairs of the 30 Millbank building during the student riots of 10th November.”

- How utterly irrelevant. Even if he did an elegant handstand, all the way up the stairs, with a cartwheel finish, into a double somersault….. it still doesn’t justify police dragging a kid from a wheelchair and throwing him into the street.
Taylor posts a quote from McIntyre’s website, in which Taylor highlights certain areas of the text, that in Taylor’s odd opinion, paint a picture of a disabled kid who deserves to be pulled from his wheelchair by The Met. Let’s take the sections of McIntyre’s blog that Taylor highlighted one by one:

The sun was shining on the morning of November 10th, and our blood was boiling.

- Yup. That was the feeling among all 50,000 of us. I was there too. We didn’t go down to show how happy we are with the Coalition. Absolutely no reason to highlight this. Also, John Major, the former Tory Prime Minister, and a man who lost his personality in the 1970s, told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, that Labour’s attacks on Coalition policy……. “makes my blood boil“. The violent bastard. The Met need to be kicking the shit out of the ex Tory PM for that. They can count on Phil Taylor’s support too!

We passed Trafalger Square, and half way down Whitehall found ourselves approaching the main bulk of the demonstration, which had assembled there. It was an endless sea of people, but unfortunately, they had been corralled by police and NUS stewards into one lane of the dual carriageway. Me and Finlay immediately set to work, tearing down the metal barriers which separated the two lanes.

- Good! I’m glad someone did. We were squeezed in. For a guy in a wheelchair, it couldn’t have been easy. Even if he were stood up and walking, it couldn’t have been easy. I moved a barrier twice, to make a bit more space. There was no reason for the divide whatsoever. Taylor wasn’t in the mesh of people being held together like sheep.

A group of 200 followed, including me in my wheelchair, and Finlay pushing at full speed.

- Erm, okay. So he quite likes to go fast. I’d hate to see how angry Taylor gets at the Paralympics. “THEY AREN’T DISABLED!!! THEY’RE GOING TOO FAST TO BE DISABLED!!!” presumably.

We continued down the sixty stone steps at the other end of the Treasury road without so much as a pause for breath. We were on the rampage.

- It’s a figure of speech. He wasn’t literally on a rampage, shooting innocent bystanders (or pushing them over inducing a heart attack). It is a figure of speech, and its a soundbite. Like when Taylor himself refers to a man in his constituency who said “I see broken windows as being totally justified compared with the damage being done to the public sector. This is just the beginning“, as a “Leftie, nutter headbanger“…….. he isn’t literally saying that the man quite likes to bang his head, nor is he even suggesting that the man in question listens to music one might “headbang” to. Figure of speech, Phil. The same sort of figure of speech that he used, when in his latest blog about a rather useless cowboy builder, with the phrase “It took a lot of kicking and screaming from local councillors to get this site sorted out“……. if we are to go by Phil’s new found literal approach to sentences that quite clearly, aren’t meant that way, we must presume that local councillors Taylor is speaking of, literally did kick and scream……. the violent thugs.

It was an epic mission to the top. Nine floors; eighteen flights of stairs. Two friends carried my wheelchair, and I walked.

- Having just spoken to my lovely girlfriend Ashlee about the effects of cerebral palsy (she is a physio at a disabled kids school, and deals with this everyday), she has informed me, after watching the BBC interview herself, that of course McIntyre can walk, but judging from his posture, and the way he spoke and his twitching, he would find it difficult to get too far without help. It would take him a long time to get to where he was heading, he wouldn’t be able to balance himself properly for very long at any one time, and he’d get overly tired very very quickly. So, he should be commended for fighting for what he believes in, at the same time as going through the trouble it must have been to achieve it. But, the fact remains, the police considered it perfectly okay to pull a man from a wheelchair and drag him across the street. Phil Taylor, is a tremendous scrotum. His entire blog is drivel. Right winged, miserable, vicious drivel in which anyone slightly left of Reagan is considered a thug. It is people like Taylor that make me proud to wear the badge of the Left Wing, with pride.

Tory Blogger Guido Fawkes waded in on the subject, stating on his blog:

“Jody Macinytre, radical pro-Palestine supporter and sufferer from cerebral palsy”

- They are his only two attributes apparently. He also isn’t “radical” pro-Palestine supporter, although even if he was, i’m not sure why that’s a bad thing. Fawkes continues:

“However he has revelled in, and incited, violence on his website……”

“Macintyre can’t hide behind his disability when the police treat him like any other violent trespassing thug. It’s called equality…”

- Yes he can. Because he’s disabled. And the police are fully armed, trained guards. And also, because 1) he wasn’t trespassing, and 2) he wasn’t being violent. What a horrible sense of equality Tory bloggers have. Disabled people causing no problems are apparently just as equal as the rest of us causing no problems, in being beaten by the Met. We should all be thankful for that little gem of equality.

The point is, despite the talk of violence from protesters…. the only serious injury, was caused by the police, and the only shameful attack on a disabled man, was caused by police. The media tend to tread carefully with the issue, because criticising an institution like The Met, who they clearly still consider to be a reputable source, could provoke anger amongst right winged commentators like Phil Taylor and Guido Fawkes, who would inevitably refer to the BBC as “left wing” if they dared to criticise the police. The Government keep telling us that the “full force of the law” will come down on violent student protesters, but never mention any such repercussion for Police. The Met are not on a higher moral plateau. They are dangerous, provocative, murdering, violent, lying…………. filth.

The Theatre of New Labour

This is going to be the one time I ever give the Conservative Party any credit.
They are the only Party in mainstream UK politics, that stick to their ideology, and argue the case for it eloquently and precisely. The Labour Party is a party that has utterly compromised all its traditional values, for the sake of trying to appeal to the middle class, despite the middle class being collectively wrong, on many many issues. The Tories are not prepared to compromise values for popularity. They will tell the middle class when they believe they are wrong. Labour will pander to them (especially on immigration; see the utterly horrendous, slimy, principle-less Phil Woolas). Gordon Brown called Mrs Duffy a bigot. She was a bigot. He was right. But when he had learnt that he had been overheard referring to her as a bigot, he backtracked and apologised. Why? The woman was a bigot? New Labour is a theatre performance; to the public, they are just characters giving the audience what they want to hear. In private, they are entirely different people. This is true of all political parties to an extent, but New Labour epitomise the theatre of politicians.

The process of modernisation with the Labour party; leading to the rise of New Labour is an interesting subject. It would seem that the conventional wisdom (especially within the Labour Party itself) is that modernisation was something that needed to happen in order for Labour to become electable. The problem with this, is it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, because it presupposes that during the modernisation period when the country was under the rule of the Thatcher government, the Labour Party in its old guise, in its traditional and ideological guise, the guise that makes it a party of Labour, was dead. The truth is, it wasn’t.

Infact, by 1990, Labour had been ahead of Thatcher’s Tory Party in the polls, for a year and a half. For a Party that was apparently killed off by its attachment to Socialist values, beaten by a superior Neoliberal system, I would have expected them to be far far below the Tories in the polls, after ten years of Thatcher. Surely this great new system of Financial ingenuity/gambling that Thatcher had created and was going to enrich us all via a method of trickle-down economics, would have made her incredibly popular and created an amazingly strong economy. In fact, quite the opposite happened. Labour were ahead in the polls, recession was about to hit, mass unemployment reared its ugly head, inflation was on the rise, the CBI had now became the most powerful Union in the Country (and still is) and poll tax riots had taken control of the Country. She had also set in stone the failings of the Financial sector, that was to bring England and the World to its knees 20 years later. Which makes it even more funny, that her resignation included this:

Eleven years ago we rescued Britain from the parlous state to which socialism had brought it.

In the 1992 election, Labour lost, again. Neil Kinnock was still leader. He just wasn’t popular. But, Labour cut the Tory majority since 1979, from 144, to 21 seats. They were well on their way to victory come 1997, due to Black Wednesday and other economic and social worries, long before Blair became leader of the opposition. John Smith would have been our next Prime Minister, had he not died of a heart attack in 1994. Labour, under Smith, in 1994 were 21 points ahead in the polls. The Tories in May 1994, received their biggest defeat in Council elections for 30 years. Smith, was far more to the Left than Brown or Blair. Smith would have won the 1997 General Election.

But apparently Blair and New Labour agreed that the Party needed to move to the right, and so modernised to suit Thatcher’s rather twisted vision of “rescuing” Britain. John Major presided over a Tory England that went deeper into recession, offered no support for anyone during it, and saw unemployment at record highs. One has to wonder why Blair thought it necessary to move to the Centre; closer to Major economically, than ever before, given that Major and Thatcher had both caused major economic woes. Black Wednesday say interest rates, under Major rise from 10%, to 12%, to 15%, back to 12%; all within the space of one day. Black Wednesday also caused the Tories to pull sterling out of the ERM. All in all, it cost us £3.3bn.

From 1997 onwards, New Labour did absolutely nothing to reverse Thatcher’s policies. They didn’t reform the banking sector. They believed the bubble could go on forever. New Labour were essentially running on the power generated by the Thatcher government’s policy on finance.

When Thatcher won her third term in ’87, she gained 42.2% of the popular vote to Labour’s abysmal 30.8%. Now, this wasn’t down to Labour’s ideological stance at all. It is a cop out to suggest Socialism was killing the Labour Party. It was entirely due to the fact that Labour had no coherent message on the important issues of the day, and this was down to in-party fighting between an ever powerful future Blairite faction of upper middle class Thatcher-lites, and the old Labour party who were trying to argue that Socialism was not a discredited system. Two problems persisted because of this in fighting.

Firstly, the rhetoric was weak. They could not win the battle of words. Much like they were unable to do in 2010, despite people like me and other Progressives on the Left knowing it is damn easy to discredit much of the Tory rhetoric. I tried to do so at our University Question Time event. I think I succeeded to a degree too. If I were Gordon Brown, I’d have been stood on the steps of Downing Street saying:

Okay, we messed up. We followed the Tory line on economics, we modernised to suit this vision of Neoliberal heaven, and it failed miserably. We are as much to blame as they are. We thought the Financial Sector would act like a Government, protecting people, and growing to support the economy on the whole. We were massively mistaken. The Neoliberal modernising aspect of the Labour Party failed. Time to rethink our values, and reshape our core beliefs. Let us never move to the centre-right again.

Note, I will not use the term Centre-Left, because I find it a cop out, and a synonym for centre-right.

Secondly, the problem for the old Labour faction was that there was a concerted effort to paint them the same colour as the Soviets, who were at the time, perceived as a great threat, and about to crumble. It was a joint effort by a media who require a strong middle class in order to make money, and a government that liked to paint itself as the saviours of Britain, despite rioting and mass unemployment suggesting otherwise. No one in the Labour Party had the courage to point out that whilst Stock Markets might be growing, and the Banking system expanding; mass unemployment was still rampant.

Rather amusingly, in 1994, Blair took a swipe at the financial sector; a sector he would soon come to embrace like a child does its mother:

‘the new establishment is not a meritocracy but a power elite of money-shifters, middlemen and speculators people whose self-interest will always come before the national or the public interest’

An amazing statement to make. Amazing, because it is exactly right. It is also foreseeing the problems that were to come 13 years later. Which begs the question, why did he do fuck all to curb this new “power elite“, because it was on his Party’s watch, that the entire system collapsed. Thatcher created the new “power elite” Blair speaks of, but Blair and Brown perpetuated the problem ten fold. If being “centre-left” means capitulating to an inherently destructive Financial sector; a Financial sector that will never cease being inherently destructive, not least because it has the power to just create money out of thin air – then i’d certainly never wish to associate myself with the centre-left.

Blair did not try to discredit Conservative Party rhetoric on the power of the markets, or the disenfranchising of the unions, or on the subject of Nationalism, or on any other ground to which as a Labour Party politician (whether you agree with the Left or not) he really should have done.

Those of us on the Progressive Left, even now, would say that calling an economic system built entirely around financial capital as “recovering” just because the stock market is picking up, despite people still losing their jobs and homes on a mass scale, is so absurdly wrong, it’s irrational. New Labour “modernised” by convincing themselves, that this new breed of Thatcherite financiers was, in Gordon Brown’s words, an “inspiration“. Thatcher could point to the success of the Financial sector in 1987, and say “look, we’re growing, I saved you all”. Except, we weren’t growing. The financial sector was growing beautifully. Unemployment was stagnantly high, wages were stagnating, house prices were rocketing, and more people were homeless than at any other time since the 1940s. Labour did not jump on the opportunity to point out that the Financial Sector had in fact only managed to grow, by offering cheap credit backed by money that doesn’t actually exist.

Blairism, and New Labour were not a new product in the political market. They represented, and still do, a capitulation to Thatcher’s legacy, and a curious understanding that propaganda through the media wins elections, not truth or reasoned argument.

Peter Mandelson sums up Labour’s capitulation to Right Winged economics with:

‘differences between left and right are obsolete, there is no alternative’; we have no objection to people becoming filthy rich’

Mandelson is saying that the economics of the Right Wing, and its financial sector commitments are correct, and there is no other way. That, from a LABOUR PARTY politician. It is staggering.
So, who do those of us on the Progressive Left now turn to, to place our vote? The ‘Third Way’ meant a commitment to Corporate Welfare, and an attack on social welfare. The spin of “social justice” and “Third Way” are weak when examined up close. Foundation Hospitals were spun to suggest a great social construct in the spirit of the Labour Party of old, as opposed to the reality; a class based healthcare system and creeping Privatisation. This isn’t a surprise given that Blair said that Labour’s commitment to the Public service, was going to force the public sector to:

deliver in a modern, consumer-focused fashion

Thatcher had created a consumer obsessed population fuelled by a system of very easy non-existent money. The failure of the Labour Party, was the failure of intellectuals within it (and still is), to apply Marxist scientific theory to critique and express the current abnormal and unbalanced purchasing power of finance capital related to the non-power of labour, and the future problems that would cause. This is reflected in the absolutely awful poll ratings of the Labour leader at the time, Neil Kinnock. Whilst Thatcher was at her most unpopular, even within her own Government, Kinnock was still far more unpopular. He was not strong. He could not communicate the position of the Labour Party, and he was weak dealing with the new breed of modernisers.

That is New Labour. CBI Labour. A synonym for the “Second faction of the Business Party“. A Labour Party should not exist to further promote the notion that the only true value to society is economical value. A Labour Party, built on the concept of social justice should never preside over thirteen years of the richest few in society having a bigger share of the Nation’s wealth, than they ever did under a Tory government. That is not modernising. That is becoming Conservative, and cannot be defended.

I will sum up what I believe “modernisation” means to the New Labour experiment: The total and unmoving capitulation to the idea that the power of finance capital and the stock market is far more important and needs to be protected and encouraged by government, than the power of labour. Coupled with the relentless rhetoric in the media and throughout the Party that anyone on the Left, is out of touch and out dated and negatively referred to as “old Labour”. The argument being that the Private sector needs to be defended by government because it provides the economic value of the Nation, and the public sector is less important purely because it’s societal value is beyond simple economic value.
That is the pathetic legacy of the modernisation of the Labour Party.

Thatcher created New Labour.

The Winter of Awakening

“Nick Clegg is the biggest joke in British politics.“
- David Cameron, before the election.

As students take to the streets for a second round of marching, London is bracing itself for more direct action. Thousands and thousands are marching as I type this, across London in what they are calling “Day X”. It is another chance for the voice to be heard, over the subject of tuition fees. Students have balls. As I said in a previous blog, we need to not worry about what Middle England thinks.

The BBC is reporting how awful direct action is. How they think students stayed home because it got violent last time. 0.26% of the protesters last time got violent. I personally wish more direct action would take place. But nonetheless, hardly any of it got violent. The BBC is becoming the voice of Middle England, and no one else.

The police have blocked Parliament Square. I have no idea why.
The protests are happening across the Country. London is getting violent at the moment, Cambridge has a large scale protest taking place with them invading their Senate House, Bristol’s protest is massive. 2000 people have circled Sheffied Town Hall. I wandered through Leicester earlier, and spotted a couple of hundred people protesting. Liberal Democrat HQ in London is ringed by police, and the street cut off. A show of solidarity from our Scottish friends, as they are doing a sit down protest outside Lib Dem HQ in Edinburgh.

It is a Winter of awakening.

I hope they break the police line and burn Lib Dem HQ to the ground.

The great John Pilger:

“There is no other way now. Direct action. Civil disobedience. Unerring. Read Shelley and do it. Born of the “never again” spirit of 1945, social democracy has surrendered to an extreme political cult of money worship. This reached its apogee when £1trn of public money was handed unconditionally to corrupt banks by a Labour government whose leader, Gordon Brown, had previously described “financiers” as the nation’s “great example” and his personal “inspiration”.

This is not to say parliamentary politics is meaningless. It has one meaning now: the replacement of democracy with a business plan for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope, every child born.”

- John Pilger

Back in April, Nick Clegg, and the Liberal Democrat Party won the votes of thousands of students, including my own, with his solemn pledge to abandon tuition fees altogether. They got into Coalition, and have instead chosen to raise the tuition fee cap from around £3,300 to £9000. That is a massive increase. I certainly wouldn’t have considered coming to University had that been the case.

Yesterday, a Nick Clegg who seems to have lost all credibility and support, said this:

“Examine our proposals before taking to the streets. Listen and look before you march and shout,”

I am not sure the man could be more patronising if he tried. We have examined the proposal. In fact, I sat last night and read through it, again and again, trying to see what i’ve missed, what is it that is good for us students, what have we got from this? I came up with this list; The tripling of tuition fees, to £9000 a year, also came with the policy of pay-nothing-back until you earn over £21,000 a year, compared to the £15,000 limit in place now. Most Universities will rise tuition fees to around £6000, with top Universities charging up to £9000. This is meaningless. I don’t care if i’m paying back £1 a year, the fact that I would leave university with well over £40,000 of debt, when you include living costs, before i’d even reached my 21st birthday, is ludicrous. If I have three children, and they want to go to University, that is going to amount £110,000+ worth of debt that my children end up with. Couple this, with the fact that England’s University budget has been cut by £449m, the teaching budget cut by £215mn, and Educational Maintenence Allowance (which I relied on to get me through college) scrapped, this does not represent a progressive plan for students.
Clegg talks as if we should be thanking him for tripling fees as opposed to scrapping them. As if we don’t understand the proposal. We understand perfectly well, we’re just not despicable Tories. Clegg is. There is nothing positive or progressive in the plans. Absolutely nothing.

The Universities Minister David Willetts said the proposals represent a:

“‘good deal for universities and for students”

Firstly, this isn’t a “deal”. We didn’t agree to this. Students and Universities are having this forced on them, by a Government that does not have a mandate to do it.

Interesting comments from Willetts. This from a man who went to University when it was free. This from a man who claimed £2,191 in Parliamentary expenses, for, amongst other jobs around the house that contribute in no way to his duties as an MP; paying workmen to change 25 lightbulbs in his house. Another £1,400 on plumbing work. Not to mention the £143,764 Mr Willetts claimed of taxpayers money he claimed on his second home allowance.

The BBC present it all one way. The real story is not the smashing of a few windows but the smashing of the welfare state. We will continue, until they change their policy, or we bring the Government down.

– Simon Hardy, student leader, interview on BBC News.

What would represent an even greater deal for students, would be if the Government hadn’t just allowed Vodaphone to get away with not paying the £4.8bn they allegedly avoided paying in tax. Allowing them to get away with such widespread abuse, whilst punishing the youngest and the most vulnerable, ie; placing the burden of the debt on the shoulders of the poor, and of 18 year olds, is going to cause mayhem.

I encourage the future generation to disregard anything the older generation has to say on who has the right to go to university. They got it wrong on the economy over the past thirty years, on housing over the past thirty years, on the climate over the past thirty years, on every-fucking-thing they touched.

To hear them lecture us on who deserves to go to uni, and who can come to Britain, is laughable. You had your chance, you failed. Fuck off.

Especially the Conservative lot. In love with free market Tories like Thatcher and Cameron, yet absolutely anti-free market in practice, more so than me. They want government to decide who deserves to go to University, they want government to decide what degrees are worthwhile, they want government to decide what migrant workers can come in. They want to tell government exactly whom companies should be employing, based on their place of birth. They want government to interfere with the market when it suits them. And then they expect us to take them seriously?

They appear to think that the only objective to education, is to earn money and nothing else. It is a deliberate attempt to rid us of conscientious people. Thatcher once told a girl in around 1988, that her degree in “Ancient Norse Literature” …was… “What a luxury“. Thatcher saw no value in a study of another culture and history, because there was no immediate economic value. We need people like that girl, people need to know about these things, their knowledge enriches culture. “What a luxury” suggests if there is little direct economic value, there is no value. That is the view of the older generation. We do not want a market based education system.

And again, if the past thirty – forty years had been amazing, then i might be inclined to agree with them. In fact, we’ve got a fucked climate that no one seems to give two shits about, the rise of the far right and xenophobic racism, wage stagnation on a level never seen before, illegal wars, no houses, and the biggest financial crash in living memory. They started the fire, and now they’re telling us how to put the fire out, and it appears to be with a bit more fuel. Forgive me for thinking they deserve no credibility whatsoever.

If the economy is to go on being as it was; i.e based entirely on easy credit, and money that doesn’t actually exist yet, and speculating that it might do in the future (which in turn causes crashes like subprime) then yes, we should follow the demands of the older generation. The generation that caused all the problems in the first place. If we want change, and a new way of doing things, then we should stick two fingers up to them, and tell them to stop fucking lecturing us on what a young person should do with their life. We need critical thinkers and a massive range of experts in as many fields as possible, so we don’t all become like the older generation. It is worth a try, because the old way didn’t work, it failed us all miserably.

Clegg today told the BBC he “massively regrets” having to break his pledge on tuition fees. If these new proposals are so great, why does he regret it? Apparently us students should be mightily happy.

Fight the cuts.
Fight the coalition.
Occupy headquarters.
Sit ins throughout Universities.
Close off the streets.
Break police lines.
Fight Clegg.

Direct Action across the Country.

The fight back begins

A letter of congratulations to the students and the EVIL ANARCHIST RIOTERS (who I happen to fully support, and whom were not Anarchists at all) has emerged, signed by some of the Nation’s most intellectual researchers and Professors.

Here is the letter:

Dear Sir/Madam,
We the undersigned wish to congratulate staff and students on the magnificent anti-cuts demonstration on Wednesday (‘Riot marks end of era of consensus’, Independent, 11 November). At least 50,000 people took to the streets to oppose the coalition government’s devastating proposals for education.

We also wish to condemn and distance ourselves from the divisive and, in our view, counterproductive statements issued by the UCU and NUS leadership concerning the occupation of the Conservative Party HQ. The real violence in this situation relates not to a smashed window but to the destructive impact of the cuts and privatisation that will follow if tuition fees are increased and if massive reductions in HE funding are
implemented.

Wednesday’s events demonstrate the deep hostility in the UK towards the cuts proposed in the Comprehensive Spending Review. We hope that this marks the beginning of a sustained defence of public services and welfare provision as well as higher education.

Signed:
Emma Dowling, Queen Mary, University of London,
Dr. Matteo Mandarini, Queen Mary, University of London,
Liam Campling, Queen Mary, University of London
Dr. Alberto Toscano, Goldsmiths, University of London
Dr. John Wadworth, Goldsmiths, University of London
Dr. Des Freedman, Goldsmiths, University of London
Dr. Nina Power, Roehampton University
Clare Solomon, President University of London Union
Dr. Peter Thomas, Brunel University
Dr. Alex Anievas, University of Cambridge
Matilda Woulfe, Queen Mary, University of London
Dr. Victoria Sentas, King’s College London
Toni Prug, Queen Mary, University of London
Prof David Miller, Strathclyde University
Matthew Woodcraft, Goldsmiths, University of London
Richard Iveson, Goldsmiths, Goldsmiths, University of London
Dr. Carrie Hamilton, Roehampton University
Dr. Nicole Wolf, Goldsmiths, University of London
Dr. Gavin Butt, Goldsmiths, University of London
Marsha Bradfield, University of the Arts London
Manuela Zechner, Queen Mary University of London
Dr. Matthew Fuller, Goldsmiths, University of London
Prof. John Hutnyk, Goldsmiths, University of London
Dr. Luciana Parisi, Goldsmiths, University of London
Dr. Maud Anne Bracke, University of Glasgow
Janna Graham, Goldsmiths, University of London
Heidi Hasbrouck, Goldsmiths, University of London
Gordon Asher, University of Glasgow
Dr. Goetz Bachmann, Goldsmiths, University of London
Gerry Mooney, Open University
Dr. Catherine Eschle, University of Strathclyde
Dr. Filippo Del Lucchese, Brunel University
Dr David Lowe, Liverpool John Moores University
Tom Bunyard, Goldsmiths, University of London
Danai Konstanta, Goldsmiths, University of London
Bue Ruebner Hanssen, Queen Mary, University of London
Dr Alana Lentin, University of Sussex
Dr. Armin Beverungen, University of the West of England
Bipasha Ahmed, University of East London
Dr T L Akehurst, University of Sussex and Open University
Alex Anievas, University of Cambridge
Gordon Asher, University of Glasgow
Dr Maurizio Atzeni, Loughborough University
Camille Barbagallo, Queen Mary, University of London
Dr Armin Beverungen, University of the West of England
Dr. Maud Anne Bracke, University of Glasgow
Liam Campling, Queen Mary, University of London
Dr Svetlana Cicmil, University of the West of England
Dr Caroline Clarke, University of the West of England
Dr Chris Cocking, London Metropolitan University
Katherine Corbett, Middlesex University
Dr. Michael P. Craven, University of Nottingham
Dr John Cromby, Loughborough University
Dr Dimitrios Dalakoglou, University of Sussex
Prof Massimo De Angelis, University of East London
Filippo Del Lucchese, Brunel University
Prof Marie-Bénédicte Dembour, University of Sussex
Dr John Drury, University of Sussex
Benoit Dutilleul, University of the West of England
Leigh French, Glasgow, editor Varient magazine
Dr Fabian Frenzel, University of the West of England
Dr Matthew Fuller, Goldsmiths, University of London
Dr Rachel Fyson, University of Nottingham
Dr Sara Gonzalez, University of Leeds
Hugo Gorringe, University of Edinburgh
Janna Graham, Goldsmiths University of London
Prof Peter Hallward, Kingston University,
Dr Kate Hardy, University of Leeds
Dr. Carrie Hamilton, Roehampton University
Georgia Harrison, Goldsmiths, University of London
Dr Kaveri Harriss, University of Sussex
Prof Stefano Harney, Queen Mary University of London
Dr David Harvie, University of Leicester
Dr Stuart Hodkinson, University of Leeds
Dr John Hutnyk, Goldsmiths, University of London
Daniel Jewesbury, Belfast, editor, Variant magazine
Dr. Daniel Kane, University of Sussex
Jeanne Kay, Goldsmiths, University of London
Koehler-Ridley, Coventry University
Danai Konstanta, Goldsmiths, University of London
Dr Les Levidow, Open University
Dr Simon Lewis, University of Leeds
Gwyneth Lonergan, University of Manchester
Dr Rob Lutton, University of Nottingham
Luke Martell, University of Sussex
Conal McStravick, Artist, Glasgow, member of Scottish Artists Union
Dr Shamira Meghani, University of Sussex
Dr Eugene Michail, University of Sussex
Keir Milburn, University of Leeds
Dr. Filippo Osella, University of Sussex
Dr Dimitris Papadopoulos, University of Leicester
Dr Luciana Parisi, Goldsmiths, University of London
Kathleen Poley, Goldsmiths University of London
Dr. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, University of Leicester
Andre Pusey, University of Leeds
Prof Susannah Radstone, University of East London
Dr Olivier Ratle, University of the West of England
Dr Gavin Reid, University of Leeds & Vice-President Leeds University UCU
Bue Rübner Hansen, Queen Mary, University of London
Bert Russell, University of Leeds
Dr Lee Salter, University of the West of England
Jordan Savage, University of Essex
Dr Laura Schwatz, St Hugh’s College Oxford University
Jon K. Shaw, Goldsmiths, University of London
Dr Stevphen Shukaitis, University of Essex
Dr Anna Stavriasnakis, University of Sussex.
Stephanie Tan, Glasgow School of Art
Dr Claire Taylor, University of Nottingham
Dr Amal Treacher Kabesh, University of Nottingham
Jeroen Veldman, University of Leicester
Dr Paul Waley, University of Leeds
Dr Kenneth Weir, University of Leicester
Matthew Woodcraft, Goldsmiths, University of London
Hélène Samanci, Queen Mary, University of London
Dr Clément Mouhot, University of Cambridge

The picture on the left, is Nick Clegg holding a pledge which read “I pledge to vote against any increase in fees“. He has just voted to increase fees from £3,300 to £9000.
I hope more names can be added to that list of Professors any time soon.
Support for direct action, when it is in the face of the needless and harshest shock capitalism thrown at us in years, is what we need. To sit back and take it, is a waste of time, and my generation will regret refusing to act, or acting ‘peacefully’, as we watch homeless rates shoot up and misery ensue. Tuition fees is the start. When the cuts hits, when there are no jobs and yet the Government start making people work for the £1 an hour benefit; there will be mass rioting; it is inevitable. The young people are not the apathetic lifeless drones, the older generation like to suggest.

Students at Manchester University kept the momentum going, and took over a main room at their University, refusing to move. They issued the following statement:

“Students at Manchester University have peacefully occupied the John Owens building and are lobbying the finance board over the coalition attack on higher education.
We are demanding that the university opens its books so that we know where the cuts will fall, how many voluntary redundancies have already been made and to highlight the fact that the vice chancellor is paid 20 times the average salary. The financial director has denied any cuts are planned despite the fact that voluntary redundancies have been announced and the combined studies department has already been cut.
We are here to support lecturers and administrative staff who will be losing there jobs. To oppose the rise in tuition fees that will price out most working class students. And to oppose the privatisation of our universities.”

The more grey haired fat businessmen and politicians who masturbate furiously over them complain about direct action, the more I support it. The more Tories tell me it is entirely “unacceptable” the more I will promote it. The more Nick Clegg insists that raising tuition fees to £9000 a year, is in some way “progressive” and a “good deal for students”, the more I will protest, and demand my vote back.

I look forward to the many protests I will take part in over the coming years.

The Spirit of England

Try as I might, I cannot condemn the violence at the protest in London yesterday. The public fight back.
It is easy for Journalists to talk about it as if it is the end of the World. It sells papers. Middle Class England doesn’t particularly like disorder, because it might upset their consumer paradise. They don’t want disruption. They speak about how awful it is for about 1% of a student protest to end up breaking into a building, whilst they do their clothes shopping at Primark; famed for it’s awful record on using sweatshops and child labour. Journalists are happy to post pictures of a student or two smashing a window, but seem wholly reluctant to show any images of Afghan children dead at the hands of the pointless British war machine. Middle Class England doesn’t want to see that, they want to go to HMV and Starbucks and moan about the Left Wing. Middle Class England has a new Call of Duty game to rush home and play. Middle Class England wants to refer to all striking workforces as greedy, simply because it might interrupt their day. How dare anyone want better pay and working conditions whilst you’re rushing home to watch Neighbours? The bastard lefties. Middle Class England, is a hypocritical, mindless robot. The media know it, and they make a lot of money from it. Do we really believe that suddenly The Sun and The Telegraph and The Mail have a new found sense of morality? compass? Their morality is entirely market based.

It is easy for the media to tell us that a bunch of crazed Anarchists took over the protest. This just isn’t true. I am not an anarchist, and I fully support them.
The New Statesman agrees:

Not all of those smashing through the foyer are in any way kitted out like your standard anarchist black-mask gang. These are kids making it up as they go along. A shy looking girl in a nice tweed coat and bobble hat ducks out of the way of some flying glass, squeaks in fright, but sets her lips determinedly and walks forward, not back, towards the line of riot cops.

Most of them, were students who think like me. One post graduate student echoes my thoughts, when he told the New Statesman:

“Look, we all saw what happened at the big anti-war protest back in 2003, bugger all, that’s what happened. Everyone turned up, listened to some speeches and then went home. It’s sad that it’s come to this, but…” he gestures behind him to the bonfires burning in front of the shattered windows of Tory HQ. “What else can we do?”

Students and Unions should now unite.

There is something poetically beautiful about standing by Conservative Party Headquarters, whilst thousands of Socialist leaflets float aimlessly to the group from above. It made me a little bit proud. I hope it’s a sign of things to come. When a Government introduces life destroying aggressive policies, it will also provoke aggressive reactions. Simple protests do not work. They “make a point“. A large majority of the students yesterday voted Liberal Democrat to avoid these kinds of measures. The violence was not anti-democratic; the Liberal Democrats are wholly responsible for the anti-democratic nature of England, and a lot of people are not likely to stand for it. You cannot destroy education; destroy job prospects and dreams; destroy 500,000 jobs in less than a day in Parliament, and expect people to simply “make a point”. Poll tax riots defeated the Thatcher government and brought her down. Civil rights riots defeated the awful program of segregation. 2,000,000 people marched in London against the Iraq War in 2003…… and yet the war carried on for 7 more years and thousands more dead. Civil disobedience works.

The great Australian journalist, John Pilger sums it up perfectly, with:

The BA workers, the firefighters, the council workers, the post office workers, the NHS workers, the London Underground staff, the teachers, the lecturers, the students can more than match the French if they are resolute and imaginative, forging, with the wider social justice movement, potentially the greatest popular resistance ever. Look at the web; listen to the public’s support at fire stations. There is no other way now. Direct action. Civil disobedience. Unerring. Read Shelley and do it.

Here are a few of my photos from yesterday in London:

Why I will protest next Wednesday

Protest against the raising of tuition fees to £9000. Protest against the cancelling of Educational Maintenance Allowance. Protest against the 35 business leaders who signed the letter of support for Cameron and Osborne. Protest against the cut to childcare credits. Protest against the loss of an estimated 500,000 thousand jobs. Protest against David Cameron using £80,000 of taxpayers money on his second home mortgage interest repayments. Protest against cuts to surestart. Protest against the Liberal Democrats becoming Tories. Protest against David Cameron putting his stylist, his wife’s stylist, and his photographer on Parliamentary payroll. Protest against the CBI supporting public service cuts whilst saying nothing about the FTSE 100 directors giving themselves a massive pay increase. Protest against David Davis’ hopelessly moronic idea that transport workers, firefighters, gas and electric workers, and NHS shouldn’t be allowed to strike. Protest against the empty rhetoric of “We’re all in this together“. Protest against the idea that business leaders are a credible source on economic matters and actually give a shit about any of us; they don’t. Protest against the “big society” bullshit. Protest Baroness Warsi stating that this government “does God“. Protest against Osborne’s £4mn offshore trustfund he stands to inherit yet did fuck all to earn. Protest against big business getting away with obscene tax avoidance whilst benefit fraud is treated like a crime worthy of capital punishment. Protest against the immigration cap. Protest against the jubilant Tory backbenches who jumped up with joy and swung their Parliamentary papers in the air filled with glee the moment Osborne had finished condemning millions to the dole queue. Protest against the constant “Due to the legacy left to us by Labour” bullshit in an attempt to justify every piece of disastrous legislation and cuts they introduce. Protest against a culture of debt. Protest the fact that for some odd reason, Boris Johnson is Mayor of London…… still. Protest against Vince Cable, Danny Alexander, and Nick Clegg. Protest against the cuts to policing and fire protection. Protest the obvious attempt to part privatise the NHS. Protest against the miserable private sector that has reduced our lives to big business bitches and brain dead consumers. Protest against the cuts to the BBC. Protest against the cosying up to the Murdoch family. Protest against the appointment of Philip Green. Protest against the Tories. Protest in support of widespread union action. Protest to get noticed. Protest for common human decency. Protest for everything……