Miliband: Content Not Working (but not striking either)

Hundreds of thousands of public sector workers did not go to work today - instead they took to the picket lines and the streets to voice their fears about Government plans to cut pensions. It is just the first shots in what is likely to be a long struggle for the future of the public services much of the British population takes for granted to the extent that some won't miss them until they are gone.

I joined a rally in Huddersfield. My own union, Unison, was not striking and as someone working in the  voluntary sector, the dispute does not affect my employment or conditions, but it does affect the community I live in and the services I and others use. So showing support felt important, and it was good to know that not only Green Left and Green trade unionists were out around the country supporting the protests, but our party leader, Caroline Lucas, MP, joined picket lines in her Brighton constituency. "Fair pensions are worth fighting for," she declared yesterday.

A striking contrast indeed to Ed Miliband, the Great White Hope of the tattered remnants of Labour Party progressives. After a leadership campaign last summer in which he portrayed himself as a slightly-more-sort-of-left-of-centre-type-of-guy, Ed has flounced and floundered and finally flunked at the prospect of today's strikes. Ignoring the dreadful lies emanating from the Government about the alleged unsustainability of public sector pensions (the Hutton Report shows that their cost will decline in real terms), Ed declared "These strikes are wrong." He tried of course to slag the Government off as well, saying it has repeatedly acted provocatively and recklessly (Ed's words). Yet he still expects the unions to engage in what is clearly a farcical process of meaningless talks with a Government which has already decided on the outcome.

The Green Party leader was in somewhat less of a tangle. Rather than looking like a frightened rabbit caught in the headlights of the Tory Media, she simply declared her support and took part in the J30 events. While Ed flustered about how Clegg and Cameron would cope with having the kids at home for the day, Caroline Lucas acknowledged the inconvenience, but said:

"This isn’t something I do lightly. I regret the disruption caused by industrial action and think it must only be used in special circumstances – and would urge trade unions to work hard to ensure support from the wider public. Yet when teachers are being expected to pay 50% more in pension contributions, work longer and get less pension when they retire – and when negotiations are failing – targeted and considered action is clearly necessary."

Other prominent Greens also took part - with London Assembly members Darren Johnson and Jenny Jones (who is also London Mayoral candidate) joining the London march and hundreds of other party activists taking time to take part across the country.

Now is the moment for trade union movement (which was fundamental to Ed Miliband's election as Labour leader) to seriously ask itself if it really wants to persist with the shell that is Labour. It is a tired out husk, a brand rather than a belief. The thinning ranks of those with genuine socialist beliefs remain completely sidelined, as we saw when John McDonnell was barred from standing for the leadership last year via a nomination process that would have Putin salivating. Miliband offers a "choice" (for want of a better word) of a different set of managers to the Con Dems, not a different set of values.

The Green Party is a developing but in some respects still nascent force: it is better organised than ever before and has a wider range of values and policies than any of the other parties. What it still lacks in strategy, size and ideology it more than compensates for in its unity of purpose around social justice and environmental sustainability. And in leadership centred on conviction and values rather than soundbites, as we saw in the sharp contrast between the Labour and Green leaders during the last twenty four hours.

In the coming months, while Labour struggles to find a narrative that makes any sense, Greens, already gradually rising in the national opinion polls and at the local elections in May, have an opportunity to make their voices clear in favour not only of protest action, but in setting out the values of equality, justice and sustainability that are at the heart of both the Green Party and trade union movement. They are also values held by most ordinary people in our country. With new action planned for October, Ed's moment may have passed; but perhaps the Green one is finally coming.

Support the J30 strike. Today, across Britain.

As Britain faces its biggest day of industrial action for many years, with around three quarters of a million public sector staff striking over cuts to their pensions, the mass media have unsurprisingly rallied to support the Government (and the treacherous Labour Party Opposition) in condemning the action and repeating the long used lie about "gold plated" pensions.

The Daily Telegraph leads with a luridly dreadful piece of disinformation - 

Public sector strike: £500,000 pension pot of striking teachers revealed

The Telegraph claims that a teacher on £32,000 p.a. will retire with a pot of this size; which if they have worked and paid into the scheme for 40 years is perhaps not surprising. But what the article doesn't clarify is that the £500k is the pot that they might have to pay their pension out off for the rest of their lives, not the actual pension they receive. On £32,000, the maximum permissible annual pension payable (not the pot it is paid from) is 1/2 the final salary, i.e., a somewhat less impressive £16,000 p.a., well below the UK average salary of around £23,200 p.a. (although the state pension will plug some of this gap). It is hardly "gold-plated", nor is it typical - the average yield from state pensions for retired teachers is around £10,000 and for all public sector workers is under £6,000 pa.

"This is 20 times higher than the average private sector scheme, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics." Daily Telegraph.

The Telegraph frets that public sector workers are somehow treated unjustifiably well compared to private sector workers. They don't stop to consider, perhaps, that if their figures were actually true and £6,000, or even £16,000 p.a. really is 20 times more than private sector pensions pay, then this is not a comment on bad practice in the public sector. Rather, it would be yet another example of how the private sector's owners comprehensively shaft their employees, pauperising them while guzzling plentifully out of the trough for themselves.

Unfair comment? Not at all. The audit of public sector pensions shows them to be sustainable and actually to be set to decline as a cost in real terms over the next decades, contrary to Government assertions that they have become unaffordable. Moreover, as public sector workers are lectured (in the Telegraph again) by Treasury Secretary Danny Alexander (Lib Dem, Cairngorms National Park) on the need for austerity, it emerges unsurprisingly that private sector bosses have not just gold, but titanium armour-plated pensions awaiting them as they spin out their final days on God's golf courses.

Millions set aside for fat-cat pensions

The "Morning Star", Britain's only genuinely left-wing national newspaper, reports an Income Data Services survey that shows the Directors of the top private companies in the UK enjoy pensions averaging £140,000 per annum - that's their pensions, not their pots. These people are raking in something of the order of seven times the supposedly fat-cat teacher, and a massive 24 times the average public sector pensioner.

Green leader Caroline Lucas - the only party leader to support the action

So there we have it - Tory paper tells fibs about strikers. Not news at all, but yet another piece of propaganda to try to steamroller through the destruction of our public services by a process of divide and rule.

But the risk for the Telegraph and its allies is that while they may try to cleverly misconstrue what the real picture is via misleading comparisons (something the Star is also a tad guilty of at one point in its article), the anger of the mass public with the people who run our society, its workplaces and media is rising. Just as this week in Greece, protests turned violent, so the days of impunity on the part of the established order in the UK may be drawing to a close.

Today (June 30th), join the protests, join the strikers around the country - show your support for fair pay for pensioners and for the beleaguered public sector. Join the Green Party leader, Caroline Lucas, MP, on the picket lines or in marches and rallies, even if you don't work in the sector. Its fate concerns us all - the public services are about all of us, our communities and well-being.

Don't listen to the lies - JOIN THE J30 TODAY! 

 

Coalition of Resistance

Athens and Austerity: A Hymn to the Goddess of Democracy

It must have been one of the most inspiring sights of the year. Spread across the walls of the Acropolis, high above the Athenian plain which birthed the very ideal of democracy, Hellenic Communists demonstrated against the austerity package being forced through the Greek Parliament by pseudo-socialist PASOK at the behest of the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

With Greeks facing a further round of massive cuts in public spending - some €28 billions (£25 billions) in a country of just over 11,000,000 people - a general strike has begun and the streets of the capital have been filled for weeks with people from all walks of life protesting. The cuts come on top of a range of measures increasing taxes, cutting pensions and hiking the retirement age by 4 years, introduced last year in return for loans from the EU. With their nation staring bankruptcy in the face, demonstrations have turned to riots, with police deploying tear gas and a range of violent tactics to suppress the anger of the hundreds of thousands crowding in the city.

And on the Acropolis, the Communists unfurled their protest.

It was a dramatic scene, one played out with a message in English as well as Greek to speak to all the people of the European Continent as smaller states like Ireland and Portugal face the consequences of Austerity Diktats imposed by the Central Bank and the financiers. And who suffers from these measures, the consequences even now a wave rippling out of the whirlpool generated by the credit crisis and banking collapse of 2008? Not the bankers or bosses, whose wealth is now at greater than pre-crisis levels. Not at all. The hit is to be taken by the public services, the hospitals, schools, transport and social services that support the least well-off but often hardest working in society.

The Hellenic crisis is significantly enhanced by the neoliberal monetarist "shock doctrine" of orthodox economists who have run the IMF for decades and also prowl the corridors of the ECB. Their nostrums are about balancing books rather than investing in sustainable growth/equitable distribution of wealth, and consequently shrink economies further and further by sucking demand out of them. That these are also the underpinning of the single European currency, the Euro, adds substantially to the pressures on Greece. Indeed, it does not take a lot of examining to see that the real objective is far more about rescuing the Euro as a viable currency than about reforming or restoring the Greek economy.

Pallas Athena, Goddess of justice and workers

If Greece still had its own currency, we would not be here. There might still be problems with a large deficit, but these could be resolved by the Greek Government, free to take its own path and decide on, for example, expanding demand by printing money and generating wealth which in turn could increase the tax take and reduce the deficit. It could also devalue its currency in relation to other countries, improving its balance of trade and again improving Government revenues. In the Euro, with its fate tied to the desires of the Central Bank and larger economies like France and Germany, Greece has no such option.

By contrast, Iceland, which continues to enjoy financial sovereignty and control over its own currency, recently voted in a national referendum to default on billions of pounds of debts. Has it gone bust? No. Iceland remains at work, its economy readjusting itself, albeit with some short-term disruption, but still functioning and with economic growth now returned.

The same situation applies to Britain, which kept out of the Euro thanks to the punitive "five tests" created in 1997 by then-Chancellor Gordon Brown to deflect the starry-eyed desires of Premier Blair to join the super-currency. This far-sighted act has left Britain with control over its own currency and money supply. While, of course, we need to exercise prudence and cannot exist in isolation of the world economy, we retain the ability to increase the amount of money in the economy via the inelegantly named process of quantitative easing. Consequently, in spite of the hysterical nonsense prattled by the Con Dem Government, there is utterly no prospect of the UK going bust. Cameron and Clegg's often-voiced fears that the UK could end up like Greece are not merely inaccurate - they are downright lies. It is purely for reasons of ideology, not necessity, that they have worked so hard to impose the same neoliberal economic prescription of cuts and deflation on the UK economy as the IMF wants for Greece.

And so this week Britain too faces strikes, with somewhere approaching three quarters of a million public sector workers likely to strike for one day in protest at Government plans to cut their pensions. Again the Government have trotted out a load of exaggerations about the pension schemes being unviable. Rubbish has spewed from Ministers' greasy lips about "gold-plated pensions" for public employees, when the average pension is in fact no more than around £6,000 p.a. But, like PASOK in Athens, the Con Dems parrot the line of austerity and cuts for the less well-off while the super-rich continue to flourish to ever greater heights of prosperity.

The Communist demonstration on the Acropolis was not merely an imposing and inspiring sight. It was also symbolic in its location on the steps of the Parthenon temple, the House of the Hellenic Goddess Athena, deity of civilisation, workers and justice, and patron of the city where the concept of democracy was first fashioned into practice. On the same site where Socrates challenged the greed of the wealthiest and where Plato warned of eternal war between rich and poor, the battle is being fought for Europe's future - for a social Europe that values its people or for one based on the interests of secretive multinationals and a banking system that feeds on itself.

We must pray that the Goddess is listening. And then join the protests on Thursday.