"The Sun" Turns...

It was bemusing, to say the least, to behold the ire of Trevor Kavanagh, the former Political Editor (yes, there is one!) of The Sun tabloid newspaper railing against what he called heavy-handed police tactics in the latest investigation into News International's activities in acquiring stories for its gutter press. With thirty journalists under investigation for a range of possible offences involving bribery of police and other officials, as well as alleged phone hacking, Mr Kavanagh complained of families being upset by early morning police raids, and unwarranted intrusion into people's privacy.
"This witch-hunt has put us behind ex-Soviet states on press freedom!" he writes furiously in today's newspaper, blithely ignoring the significant changes in counties like Estonia in the last twenty years. He is angry that some of the legends of Fleet Street are apparently not immune from being questioned by police and are now on open-ended bail. More than slightly stating the obvious at this stage, complains that the police are investigating even although "Nobody has been charged with any offence, still less tried or convicted."
Now, of course, we have to wait and see the outcome of the investigation, but Kavanagh's complaints are disingenuous - it may have long been The Sun's take on its own targets that the conviction precedes the investigation, but thankfully, even in neoliberal Britain, there is still at least some observation of the need for an investigation before charging someone with an offence. So the absence of charges at present means nothing other than that the police are pursuing their inquiries as justice and good practice demands they should.


As far as Kavanagh's concerns about invasion of people's privacy, physician heal thyself comes to mind. The Sun, like its late and unlamented News International stablemate, The News of the World, has existed on a diet of intrusion and breaches of privacy against a host of people, famous, infamous and unknown. This is the newspaper that announced Charlotte Church's pregnancy to the world before she did - and before the 12 weeks point often crucial to safe pregnancies. This is the paper that intruded into the grief of the family of murdered football fan Mike Dye within hours of his killing with inaccurate and inappropriate insinuations that he was involved with a gang of trouble-seekers. 


As for witch-hunts, well this is the newspaper which routinely publishes wildly inaccurate, hate-filled and hate-inducing articles about disabled people, like one in January by its columnist Rod Liddle, who wrote:
"My New Year’s resolution for 2012 was to become disabled. Nothing too serious, maybe just a bit of bad luck or one of those newly invented illnesses which make you a bit peaky for decades – fibromyalgia, or M.E..There’s lots of money to be made from being disabled – your money, taxpayers’ money, as it happens."
This too is the paper that thrives on gossip about the most intimate lives of celebrities, including ones it creates so it can then knock down. It also does a good line on deaths - speculating even today with lurid headlines about singer Whitney Houston's tragic death: was she on "Jacko drugs"? Was her head underwater?


The Sun, whose huge profits subsidise Murdoch's supposedly respectable but loss-making Times newspapers, was defended just last week by its editor, Dominic Mohan at the Leveson enquiry into the Press as a force for good, which must rank as a prime contender for the biggest piss-take of the year so far. The News International stable has in fact been involved in some of the most pernicious press campaigns of recent years.
Both the News of the World and The Sun were prominent in advocating the so-called Sarah's Law, after the murdered child Sarah Payne, which would provide parents with details of convicted paedophiles living in their area. Keen to get in on the act, N.I. undertook its own name and shame campaign which, as well as indirectly encouraging vigilante law, led to the beating up of innocent people mistakenly identified as paedophiles by mobs and in one case the hounding from her home through vandalism and death threats of a paediatrician, her job title confused with the appellation for a child molester.


All this while running lurid front page stories on under-age sex, like this one on the left, one of many.
So Mr Kavanagh can moan all he likes, but, few will shed tears for his colleagues (although distress to their innocent kids and partners is another matter) as the police undertake their enquiries. Whatever the legal outcome, the employees of N.I. currently under scrutiny will do well to consider for a change what it feels like to be on the receiving end of intrusion and suspicion. And may hell mend them.

Jesus For President?

As would-be Republican party Presidential nominees fall over each other to out-Christian their rivals (never mind Nazi-Communist Obama), American TV host Bill Maher speculates on a last minute entry to the race by the Big Man Himself...

Visconti's "The Leopard" (Il Gattopardo)

(from October 2010, separate blog)

Watched Visconti's "The Leopard" currently doing the rounds in cinemas after some restoration work on this 1963 film. Starring a dubbed Burt Lancaster in an unlikely but successful casting, it traces the story of a Sicilian noble, the Prince of Salina, at the time of Italian Unification and his reluctant yielding to the turmoil sweeping around him while lamenting the enduring futility of the human condition.

"Something had to change so that everything else could remain as before," he observes laconically, a comment as applicable to now as 19th century Italy.

He feels humans will never learn the pointlessness of their greed and rapaciousness because they already believe themselves to excel in everything (though of course he speaks with some in-built advantage in this). A noteworthy scene shows the Prince commenting on how some visiting soldiers have exchanged the redshirts of Garibaldi for richly decorated blue and gold uniforms. "We are now soldiers of the Royal Army!" comes the proud reply, to the Prince's cynical if weary approval.

  

His dilettante nephew, played by Alain Delon, falls in love with the daughter (Claudia Cardinale) of a vulgar "nouveau riche" who, after supporting political change to secure his own position of influence, remarks approvingly when the army execute some rebels he had previously allied with, "This Government does things properly. Now we can take things easy."

It is indeed a meditation on social change and how elites accommodate, absorb and ultimately neutralise challenges to them. On a more individual level, it is a reflection on love ("One year of fire and passion; thirty years of ashes!") and age. Best viewed, I am certain, on the big screen - sumptuously filmed at a pace which provides a visual feast of Italian landscape, languid summer picnics and a sweeping set-piece ball filled with rich colours, swirling music and lavish costumes - it is very much worth catching on its current run.

Trailer here:

Nuclear Weapons That Can Hit London: from Israel

Who is the real threat?

ISRAEL:
- has invaded its neighbours countless times: Jordan (1951), Egypt (1956), Egypt, Syria and Jordan (1967), Lebanon (1978), Lebanon (1982- 1984), occupied Lebanon (1984-1990), Lebanon (2006) and Gaza (2009).
- has repeatedly intervened in the Palestinian areas of the West Bank and Gaza, besieging their inhabitants, bulldozing thousands of houses and constructing huge barriers and walls to hem people into large concentration camps
- carried out airstrikes on Iraq's nuclear energy reactors in 1981
- sponsored terrorist organisations - supporting Hamas to undermine the PLO
- carried out terrorist attacks, car bombing four Iranian scientists in the last few years, as well as being involved in assassinations and abductions around the world, often in collusion with the US and "friendly" Arab dictatorships
- has attacked and seized aid ships in international waters, killing several unarmed occupants - even including attacking a US warship and killing 34 American sailors.
- has developed a large arsenal of nuclear weapons - well over 200, making it the fourth or fifth largest nuclear weapons state in the world. In this, it was helped by France and Britain in the 1960s. It has never admitted to having nuclear weapons, but their existence was revealed in the 1980s by the former nuclear technician, Mordechai Vannunu, who was jailed for his troubles. Israel is believed to have developed or be developing a longe range missile - the Jerhico 3 - that will have a reach of over 5,000km, making it feasible to target and hit London; maybe even within the fabled 45 minutes Tony Blair lyingly claimed for Saddam Hussein's non-exisent WMDs.
- has repeatedly refused to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and refuses all access by the International Atomic Energy Authority to its civilian and military sites
- receives over $8 millions every day from the US in military aid.

OR

IRAN:
- has not invaded a neighbouring state (or any other country) in nearly three centuries
- has no current links to any international terrorist organisations: it did sponsor Hizbollah in Lebanon for a time, but somewhat at arms-length and bearing in mind that Hizbollah (now a peaceful, mainstream political party with support across the faith divides) was formed in response to the Israeli invasions of the Lebanon. But there is only very patchy evidence linking Iran to any other violent acts in other countries - some Iranian elements may have been involved with some Shia groups in Iraq in the middle of the last decade, but this was after the US had invaded and largely destroyed the country on their doorstep. In fact, after 9/11, Iran arrested and handed over scores of al-Qaeda suspects to the USA.
- has no nuclear weapons
- has signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and has allowed International Atomic Energy Authority officials to inspect its nuclear facilities
- receives no funding from the USA.

Any attack on Iran will be self-defeating, massively damaging in human costs, and will make a difficult situation far worse. President Obama originally promised to extend the hand of friendship to Iran, but quickly his outstretched palm clenched into a fist, his intransigence aiding rather than hindering the elements in Iran that do favour confrontation and understandably rallying Iranians to an anti-American position. Bear in mind many Iranians can still remember the toppling of Iran's first democratically elected government by the CIA and MI6 back in 1953 when it dared to nationalise the British and American owned oil industry. Premier Mossadeq was put under house arrest for life and the Shah was reinstated to become an absolute monarch employing brutal terror and repression against his people.

But above all, an attack on Iran for developing nuclear weapons it does not have by the only nuclear weapons state in the Middle East - Israel - will isolate tens of millions of Muslims and others there and around the world even further from a West that increasingly functions very openly on the basis of total self-interest and hypocrisy. The key issue here is simply wanting to ensure the continued compliance of governments across the Gulf Region with the national interests of the USA and its allies; so who is the real threat?

Disablism Update: Big Rise in Abuse of Disabled People following Government Attacks

Several national disability charities are reporting significant increases in verbal and physical abuse of disabled people following their stigmatising as scroungers by both the Government and populist media. The regular Scope survey of the experiences of disabled people has shown a rise in disabled people experiencing at least one incident of abuse from 41% of respondents to nearly two-thirds over the four months to last September alone. Anecdotal evidence since then suggests no decline in this level of hostility - rather the opposite.

This rise in hostility has been parallelled by the passage of the Welfare Bill through its first two (of three) stages in Parliament and has been accompanied by increasingly hostile press coverage. Ministers have added to the atmosphere by portraying disabled people as scroungers and muddling their own pronouncements on benefits, including Nick Clegg's assertion that he wants to get 400,000 people off of disability living allowance and back into work. However, Disability Living Allowance is not actually an out of work benefit - instead it is a payment intended to support disabled people's additional costs in participating in society. Many DLA recipients already work - without it, many may no longer be able to afford to get there and end up on the dole.

But of course, with a Prime Minister who thinks its ok to make jokes in Parliament about disability, what chance is there?

More on this here.

Booze, baccy and the Minister for Public Health

In a week when, with the passage of the Welfare Act through its second reading in the Commons stripping it of the fairly minimal amendments proposed by the Lords, it seemed that the Conservative-Lib Dem Coalition couldn't get any more offensive or vicious towards the weak and sick, the ill-titled Public Health Minister, Anne Milton MP, has decided to pile on the agony.

In a bizarre tirade against people living in the north of England, this woman, in whose hands supposedly we are meant to believe the NHS is safe, has blamed the higher than average early death toll in the north to be down to the locals supposed over-indulgence in ciggies, beer and sex. Clearly things that Ms Milton eschews for herself, her view is that if only these promiscuous, fag-and-booze swilling miscreants would mend their bad ways, then the 37,000 premature deaths in the north-east and the 5 year lower life expectancy in the area compared to the prosperous south would vanish.

In her mind, poverty, poor life chances and a disproportionately high reduction in health services to the poorer areas in our country have nothing to do with people's well-being. Dangerously, she also ignores the fact that poorer London Boroughs show similar health outcomes to the north-east. To her, it is all to do with some sort of retarded regional culture. In saying this, she goes against the findings of years of non-political, evidence-based research which shows precisely that poverty equates to bad health. This may in some cases include some bad personal choices - but if you've few chances and even less hope, and zero to negative self-esteem, perhaps the odd extra pint, (shock) one-night stand or even a nice hot pie might let you forget the misery for a few hours.

The answers don't lie in castigating and condemning people who have no way out. They do lie in supporting them and their communities to find some purpose and control over lives and economies which at the moment are in the hands of people like Ms Milton. Yet with her bigoted views of people she has not met, Ms Milton seems unlikely to do the things which, in her well-paid role, she has, along with her Conservative and Lib Dem colleagues, the power to do.

As well as tackling inequality and unemployment, the answer also lies in investing in proactive health services and in ending the scandalous power of the food manufacturing lobby, which the Coalition has permitted regular access to government ministers in order to continue to promote the sale of high-fat, high-salt and high sugar foods. And, of course, in order to make high profits from poor people.

Some people just don't know when to stop...

The Coalition might also take a look at some of the initiatives by the Scottish Government and other governments abroad to tackle the scandalous sale of low price alcohol, including the deliberate pitch to underage children of so-called alcopop drinks (which with their garish colours and labels masquerade as the next "adult" step up from kiddies fizzy drinks). There seems little chance of this, however, as the Government has stacked the alcohol advisory body with representatives of the alcohol companies.

All these remedies lie in the hands of Ms Milton and her Con Dem colleagues, including the Deputy Prime Minister, who, demonstrating the Coalition's concern for self-restraint, claims to have slept with "no more" than thirty women. But we will ourselves expire if we hold our breaths waiting for them to adopt any of the real solutions when they can of course spend their time understanding even less and condemning even more.

For more on health and poverty try the Socialist Health Association link here

Disablism, Con Dems and Lib Dems: No More Excuses

From The Morning Star newspaper

As I write, the Con Dem Government is comprehensively voting down in the House of Commons various amendments passed a couple of weeks ago in the House of Lords which would have partially mollified some of the harshest aspects of the new Welfare Act. These amendments included extending from one to two years the period of time people previously on Incapacity Benefit would keep the new Employment Support Allowance before it becomes means-tested (at which point, if the disabled person's partner earns more than £7,500 p.a., they get nothing). This amendment has been removed today even although the Government acknowledges that at  least 94% of those on the new ESA Work group will not find employment within twelve months.

The Lords' amendments also included exemptions from loss of benefit for cancer sufferers and widening eligibility criteria for young people. However, the Coaliton MPs have swept these aside and, a few minutes ago, they voted to cut disability living allowance (to be renamed personal independence payments) to disabled children.

Concerned that the Lords might reimpose their amendments when the Bill goes back there for its next reading, the Government has invoked the Parliament Act and declared the legislation to be a financial measure. Now, to be sure, the Act will involve spending money; but on this basis, virtually all legislation would be classified as financial. The Parliament Act was introduced a century ago to ensure that the Lords could not block indefinitely a Budget passed by the Commons - so it is stretching the spirit of the law far beyond breaking point to try this sort of ruse. But, there again, as the Government has already written to many disabled people informing them of the changes to their benefits from April, when the necessary legislation has not yet been passed by Parliament, perhaps they are in a bit of a hurry.

Never has the assault on the literally most vulnerable people in our society been so full on, so evident and so utterly vicious. The whole Act is petty and narrow-minded in its conception and unyielding and bigoted in its execution. This Government, led by a Prime Minister who has had to apologise for making so-called jokes about disabled people, is the most unashamedly wicked in modern history. Not even Thatcher pushed through such mean-spirited legislation.

"Proof the Tories know nothing about real life!" I noticed someone blog today.

Well, yes, many people do think we have a Tory Government. It has certainly out-Toried every previous one by a long shot. But never, ever let us forget that this is not a majority Conservative Government. It is a Conservative-Lib Dem Coalition. And today, these measures have been passed only with the vital support of Lib Dem MPs. Oh yes, a handful of them rebelled, and plenty of them doubtless wrung their hands and muttered about the deficit. But they still put their hands up to support this pernicious assault on some of the poorest and sickest people in Britain. They are not passive bystanders helplessly witnessing some unfolding tragedy; rather, they are active participants in a crime against society.

Yes, they whine and shake their heads apologetically alongside people like Nadine Dorries MP who declare people not to be disabled if they are able to text or twitter; alongside people like Philip Davies MP, who thinks people with mental health problems should be exempted from being paid the national minimum wage, and alongside Tories who echo and support the words of Cllr Luke MacKenzie of Basildon who thinks "unwashed" disabled people should move to North Korea.

I am married to a disabled person who got her letter informing her of her ATOS assessment for future eligibility last week. She had been expecting it for some months but needless to say, the prospect of an employee of a French IT company deciding whether or not she is disabled enough after a forty minute interview (if it lasts that long) is not an appealing prospect. And in the climate of hostility engendered by the Government, with its peddling of myths about scroungers and the workshy, she has, like many others (including police statistics) tracked a rising degree of overt hostility from complete strangers in recent months. This is fuelled by the lies repeated over and over again by Con Dem MPs, who often muddle things like Incapacity Benefit and Disability Living Allowance - I choked with bemusement and anger listening to Nick Clegg talking about the need to get people off DLA and back to work last year: DLA is not an out-of-work benefits, but rather paid in recognition of the higher costs faced by disabled people in participating in society. Frequently, DLA is the vital aid that ensures many disabled people CONTINUE to work. Without it, tens of thousands now in work will end up on the dole.

To be fair, the Lib Dem federal conference voted substantially against most of what the Government is doing. Many Lib Dems are far more than slightly uncomfortable about the changes. But Lib Dem members can't have it both ways - their MPs and Peers have, with a handful of honourable exceptions, consistently voted for this legislation. Their leader and parliamentarians have ignored their demands and concerns. So if ordinary members really disagree with this most disgraceful piece of legislation, targeting vulnerable people and using dubious parliamentary methods to rush it through it time, the only true course left to them is to leave their party. If they genuinely hold to any shred of socially progressive belief in the welfare state or a vaguely humane society, they will walk away from a party which is now simply one of the twin engines of a vehicle driving forward on full-throttle the most extreme rightwing project in British history. There can be no more excuses.

If they don't leave, if they stay in collusion with the rank disablists who run our government, then as the saying goes, by their friends shall you know them.

UPDATE: New survey by Scope shows massive increase in abuse of disabled people following Government and media stigmatising of benefits claimants. More here.

A Joke No More...

Housing - the Benefit of Mutuals

Hidden as a footnote in the BBC business news today is the report from the mutual Building Societies Association that in 2011, approved lending in this not-for-profit sector rose by a substantial 15% overall, with a massive 49% increase in mortgage lending. At the same time, the corporate banking sector saw a small decline in overall lending in spite of the increasingly desperate efforts of the Con Dem Government to get the "Masters of the Universe" as the financial PLC sector used to refer to themselves to lend cash to get the economy out of the doldrums.

Mutuals have long been advocated by many in the socialist and green movements as a key part of the solution to a free market economy based on speculation and accumulation. Formed out of mutual aid friendly societies as long as the late 18th century, British building societies have always worked on the basis of sufficiency - never lending more than came in and limiting what members could take at any one time; and, critically, not seeking profits for any purpose other than reinvesting in the business. There are no shareholders, no owners and no money taken out.

The result was that by the late 1980s, the sector was large and healthy, and at that stage still relatively diverse in spite of a trend of mergers. But the Thatcherite era saw an infusion of new possibilities for financial mutuals first of all to diversify their services and then to "go public" - become publicly listed companies making profits for shareholders. In other words, to become banks. Key to this was the 1986 Building Societies Act, as Thatcherite a piece of legislation as you could possibly find, which paved the way for the cash-grab of the bankers.

I briefly worked for the Bradford-based National & Provincial Building Society in its last days as a mutual. As its Board tilted towards de-mutualisation, scores of high paid executives were imported from the banking sector in a veritable frenzy of backslapping bonus-sharing as they strove to find ways to become a bank. In just three years, the number of Directors increased from six to over 60. Many staff in what had been a major local employer and a means of fostering modest home ownership and savings became uncomfortable about the sponsorship of a culture of greed and pie-in-the-sky notions that, in future, N&P as it became, might sell anything at all - "even hamburgers!" one over-excited director declared.

The vanishing mutual: N&P's Bradford city centre branch, long since empty..

As it was, a couple of years after I left, the first big housing recession kicked in and their plans came to nothing. Instead of sailing their way into corporate supremacy, the financial wizards had to settle for being swallowed up first by Abby National PLC before in turn vanishing into the giant Santander PLC. The headquarters, a large building in Bradford city centre that appeared to have been architecturally inspired by lego windows, was symbolically dynamited as hordes of locals looked on, uncertain how to react other than run up the hill when the dust clouds billowed out much further than anticipated.

The intervening decade and a half up to 2008 saw the bankers egotistical bubble inflate and stretch horrendously. Old shibboleths that limited lending went by the wayside. Anything could be borrowed and repaid. Buy-to-let mortgages, where people could borrow to purchase property to rent out, were introduced after decades of being illegal - causing massive inflation in the first-time buyers sector and pricing many younger people out of the housing market for good. Mortgage limits, once pegged at 80% of house value, rose to 120% and beyond as the poison of overlending reached everywhere.

The banks have failed and failed comprehensively. Nearly four years on from the crash of 2008, most remain in hoc to the Government, which in turn is punishing ordinary people through higher taxes and reduced services, grinding the whole economy to a halt. The housing market is flatter than flat, with unscrupulous private landlords the sole beneficiaries. In spite of repeated demands from the government, small businesses especially complain that it is nigh impossible to get loans for vital investment in their businesses. Stagnation results, with unemployment and low wages driving the consequent cycle ever down.

In all, with offers of a few hundred pounds in shares to members, ten building societies took the crooked path from mutuals to plcs. Read the list now, and they have virtually all vanished or, in the case of Bradford & Bingley and the pisspoor Northern Rock, were nationalised after collapsing only for their profitable sections to be sold off to the private sector once more.

The Green New Deal, proposed just before the last election by a range of green economists and politicians, including GPEW leader Caroline Lucas, argued for the hastily nationalised banks to be broken up and re-mutualised rather than sold off. In this way, the link with the need to make profits would be broken and they could focus again on building communities and local businesses and co-operatives.

But the Government is not listening. The profitable bits of RBS are being sold off to Santander, all of which will go firmly back into the private banking sector, in spite of all the signs that it has not learnt its lessons from the avaricious mess it has got itself and all the rest of us into. 

But of course, the building societies don't make donations to the Conservative Party - perhaps the one investment that does still count these days.  

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO STOP BANKING WITH BANKS, LINK TO THE NEW MUTUALS CAMPAIGN TO VOTE WITH YOUR CASH - MOVEYOURMONEY.ORG.UK

Minding Your Ns and Qs on WMDs - IRAN, not Iraq! Doh!

Well, it's an easy mistake to make...

From Facebook - "Labour: Taking Back Our Party" group


CHECK OUT - THE FIFTY AMERICAN MILITARY BASES SURROUNDING IRAN @ THE ECOSOCIALIST- click HERE

BUSH: "This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. And having said that, all options are on the table."
OBAMA: "“No options off the table means I’m considering all options (on Iran).”

WHY THE LONG FACE?

Public Say No to Porker Capitalism

Everything has its price - capitalism eats itself!

The last week has seen executive pay high in the headlines in Britain again as we saw first the damp squib of the Con Dem government's supposed assault on overpaid corporate bosses followed by the same Government's decision to allow a bonus of nearly £1 million to be paid to Stephen Hester, the head of struggling state-owned bank, RBS. With both their report and Hester's pay, they resorted to their faux calls for responsible capitalism and for him to "do the decent thing" and hand the money back. Needless to say, there is no sign of either on the horizon.

Repeatedly, all three main parties have taken part in a mindnumbing dance of twisting and turning on executive pay. They all condemn the huge disparities in pay awards - nearly 50% increases for directors and senior managers in the FTSE 100 this last year in spite of the same bosses insistence on pay restraint among "ordinary" employees. They rail against the soaring ratios of 500:1 and higher in the top to bottom pay in some companies - a far cry from the 10 to 1 ratio seen as the "acceptable face of capitalism" back in the 1950s, not that that face showed itself quite as often as some apologists of reformist capitalism like to fondly remember.

And yet when it comes to action, they all baulk at anything effective. The furthest the Government has gone has been to propose an exceedingly modest increase in shareholder control over executive pay; but nothing on punitive taxation of bonuses; nothing on giving workers a say on the remuneration boards of big companies; nothing on squeezing down the immoral and outrageous inequalities in pay in spite of the spiralling social misery and potential disorder this is creating. In spite of their failure to pay fair or even any tax and their track record of business failure and short-sighted greed, these people, the politicians argue, are too valuable to risk them leaving Britain.

Fortunately, the public do not agree.

An opinion poll published by ICM today shows that only 7% of the public believe any executive should be paid more than £1 million. Just 1% - one per cent - of the 2,003 people surveyed agreed that the very top executives currently earning £4 million per year are worth it. Two thirds want to see workers on remuneration committees - an option ruled out last week by Business Secretary Vince Cable on the bizarre grounds that where companies have employees working overseas, it would be too difficult for them to elect representatives to sit on these bodies. Risible to say the least.

So in spite of the clear antipathy of the public to the eye watering inequalities in pay, none of the main parties offer any political action to tackle these effectively. Meanwhile, of the parties "bubbling under" in national opinion polls, only the Green Party commits itself to taking mandatory action on pay.

Three years back, I was involved in a Green Left proposal to the Green Party of England & Wales conference to set a maximum pay rate as well as the current minimum wage rate. At that time, we suggested £150,000 p.a. - roughly ten times the living wage rate. The proposal received significant support but fell short of being passed. The following year, however, the Greens adopted a policy that commits them to statutory measures to enforce a ratio of ten to one between the highest and lowest wages within any company or organisation; and the party is committed to higher tax rates for higher earners, with an emphatic endorsement of progressive taxation.

So for progressives, there is a genuine option for action on pay inequality. And as "The Spirit Level" report by Wilkinson and Pickett showed, a more equal society is one where there is much less crime, better health, stronger communities and higher levels of happiness. It also paves the way to a more sustainable fostering and use of resources at a time when many of the most basic are under increasing pressure. So everyone would benefit.

Meantime, under the Old Grey Parties, Britain remains firmly set on a course towards social disintegration. Austerity and authoritarianism are the watchwords of our gradually more and more embattled elite as it seeks to suppress rather than resolve the despair of the squeezed majority. Like the ancient Spartiate nobility in its decline, terrified by the growing resentment of its helot underclass, British capitalism is teetering over the abyss between chaotic collapse and social fascism.

Another news item today, on the BBC website, highlights that in Papua New Guinea, the price of a bride is four pigs. Checking the current price of adult saddleback pigs in Britain, the monthly pay of someone on the national minimum wage is worth less than two pigs - and of course that falls to zero when compared to the cost of the greedy porkers sitting in the boardrooms of "broken Britain."

Trickle down economics - from The ConDem Effect

Tilting At Windmills - the Imaginary Crusade of Vince Cable

Con Dem heavyweight, self-styled "free radical" Vince Cable, Britain's Business Secretary, today unveiled his much touted crusade against crony capitalism and grasping executives. After a 4,000% (yes, four thousand per cent) real terms increase in the pay of the FTSE 100 executives over the last 30 years, quite a few of us have suggested for a while now this was more than past the time to take real action.

Let us briefly remind ourselves of how Vince's mate, Nick Clegg and his boss David Cameron trailed this latest Con Dem initiative.

Cameron talked of the executive pay merry-go-round of Directors sitting on each others remuneration committees and of "market failure" as top pay rocketed by 33% in one year, while corresponding company share values rose by only 24%, and ordinary staff pay by somewhere less than 4%. On 8 January, he promised real action - no gimmicks - in creating "responsible capitalism".

Clegg, meantime, promised to "get tough"on the abhorrent levels of executive pay back in early December. Like Cameron, he wanted shareholder power to be given legal status to ensure that company AGMs could vote down excessive pay awards (at the moment, such votes are not binding) and similarly he complained about the "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" arrangement of mutual participation on each others remuneration committees.

So, finally, today, Vince the Crusader unveiled his heavy hitting package of regulatory reform as he fearlessly TOOK ON the pirate captains of British industry:

ZAP!: shareholders will be allowed to have a binding vote on executive pay, if they ask...
POW! : shareholders may also be able to "demand more clarity"on executive pay deals...
KERCHANG!: Company boards are to be "more diverse" by ensuring that two people on each board should not have been board members before...
BLAM!: the views of ordinary staff should be "taken into account" if they ask for them to be..although Vince pointed out that this is already the completely ineffective and almost entirely disregarded law in large companies...
WHOOOOSH!....er...er...well, that's it really...

Cable's Crusade - the mask slips....

So much for the great assault on crony capitalism. The new shareholder right to have a binding vote is not unwelcome, but given the massive logistical difficulties of anyone wanting to communicate with and organise a majority vote among the shareholders of these huge companies, it is hardly likely to set the heather on fire. On the BBC tonight, Cable admitted that "no (executives) will be quaking in their shoes over this..." And earlier in his statement he had been at pains to stress the Government has no plans to "micromanage" company pay. Indeed, he was not even willing to give his opinion on the touted seven figure bonus due to be awarded to the head of the state-owned RBS bank. Apparently, any speculation was "above my pay grade."

It is hardly surprising. In spite of all the rhetoric of the last few weeks, it would have been far more of a shock if a government of committed neo-liberals and free marketeers had done anything at all to tackle the excesses of the moneyed class. It is striking that the sole piece of legislative action - the possibility of binding votes on pay - supports the owners of companies. The Government had made noises about supporting the High Pay Commission's call for a worker's representative to be put on each remuneration committee; but Cable turned this down on the pathetically laughable grounds that, as some companies have overseas employees, it would apparently be too difficult for them to participate in electing a representative. And as for Directors on each others remuneration committees, the shocking corruption condemned so fiercely by both Clegg and Cameron? Vince the Bold says it happens so rarely that "it isn't actually a problem..." So, no need to do...anything, after all.

And so, with both government parties sympathetic to cutting income tax for higher rate tax payers - the Lib Dems have opposed it mainly during the recession; many in their party, including Clegg ally David Laws still see cutting top rate tax as a longer term aim - the chances of any genuine redistribution of income or wealth are lower than zero under the current regime.

The upward climb of the rich goes on unabated. The ever-pompous Cable, meanwhile is revealed as the Don Quixote of delusional reform; except even his windmills are imaginary. If this is responsible capitalism, only the Invisible Hand can save us now.... Erm...

Supermarket Sweep

Frozen Planet Shock New Footage from The Poke on Vimeo.


When I read the other day of supermarket uberchain Tescos £5 billion collapse in its share values, I was unable to sleep...for celebrating. After initially pondering exactly just how much cheese and wine "celebrity" chef Anthony Worrall-Thompson had taken from their shelves, I reckoned that those who live by predatory capitalism will die by it too - apparently over Christmas, marketing initiatives by the other big chains, Sainsburys especially, made big inroads to Tescos customer base. And so now the shareholders are worrying about their dividends following the company issuing a profits warning - coincidentally just after their Chief operating officer sold some £200,000 of shares for "necessary family expenditure"; must be quite a family!

Really? What exactly?

Of course, given just how totally unethical Tesco has been in its rampant takeover and destruction of local high streets, reaching a point now where it has a third of the food trade in the UK and a fifth of the clothes trade - nearly one in every four pounds spent by Britons is handed over in one of its outlets - the prospect of one of the other three big chains (Asda-Walmart, Morrisons and Sainsburys) benefiting from its decline is frankly cold comfort. Between them, these four outlets supply nearly 80% of our food - a dangerously high concentration in anyone's book for a whole variety of reasons.

All the supermarkets behave in questionable ways - undercutting small local shops, hammering suppliers to produce goods at ridiculously low cost (which is passed on in the form of higher profits to shareholders, not lower prices for consumers), paying low wages to marginalised workers on insecure contracts and using production and distribution methods for their "Just-In-Time" delivery systems which are environmentally devastating.

With the focus in the last three years on the corruption and crisis in the banking and financial sector, the retail food sector and the supermarkets have quietly continued their aggressive expansion into every nook and cranny of our lives. With even corner shops and petrol stations now sucked up by the four chains, they have moved online as well with home delivery - so that you buy even more of your needs from the one capitalist supplier. Relentlessly pushing the concept of convenience, they provide everything - food is nearly a byline set next to any household good you might want, books, dvds, clothes, medicines and even banking and insurance.

The result is a super-concentrated and inherently precarious system of supply - as the petrol dispute ten years ago showed, when supermarket bosses warned they had only 3 days supply of food in their stores, any significant disruption to their national distribution arrangements could spell real crisis for ordinary people. Imagine a major dislocation of energy supplies, or severe weather, or a financial crash that bankrupted a couple of these chains - the bailout required by Governments would totally eclipse the banking crisis. With hunger a real prospect within a few days, the potential for riot and chaos predicted in the NEF publication "Nine Meals from Anarchy" would be a direct result. We could face a national emergency of unprecedented proportions.

So, ecosocialists and any others concerned about sustainable and just societies need to ensure that the food retailers and supermarkets are as much a focus of campaigns like Occupy as the banks. The damage they have done is arguably more significant than the financial sector's misdeeds and the continuing risk they pose is massive. We need to legislate to create local, community food initiatives and revive small-scale production and supply of food and other goods. It is not just good for the planet - it is safer for society too.

The Greek Myths: retirement at 55, lazy workers and a bloated public sector

On BBC TV on Sunday morning, our beloved Prime Minister, David Cameron, did one of these things he does so often to endear himself with the masses - he told a lie. Shock horror!

Yet, to be fair to the blue-blooded, blue-nosed Old Etonian, it may not have been a deliberate lie. It may well just have been another example of his arrogant sloppiness in half-baked factology, first detected with his rubbish about record national debt, etc.

Mr Cameron repeated something which a surprising number of commentators, politicians and the public believe - because, thanks in part to comedians, Conservatives and the corrupt xenophobic media, most British people seem to think that Greek people retire at 55 years of age, and that this has contributed to their economic woes which have so badly rocked the Eurozone and beyond.

In fact, this is a total nonsense.

May Zeus strike them! The neolibs fibs about Hellas

The average retirement age in Greece is over 61. As in the UK, some jobs do allow early retirement at 55, but in fact 86% of workers do not enjoy such a scheme. The normal state pension age in Greece is 65 years of age - the same as at present in the UK, though it is rising in both countries over coming years.

In the UK, because women still retire earlier than men and a significant number of men retire early (many at 55 or even earlier), the average British retirement age is just above 63 now, just a little older than Greece.

So, yet again, the rightwing mythmakers have been at work, stigmatising an entire nation as lazy good-for-nothings. The truth, of course, is that Greece is in trouble because it is tied into the Euro and no longer has any control over its own currency - if the drachma was still in use, they could have devalued it and be well on their way to fiscal recovery. But because they are tied into strict limits set by the European Central Bank, which has appointed the unelected neoliberal technocratic Prime Minister (the inappropriately named Mr Papademos, which translates as Father of the people!), Greece is unable to print its own money - hence it is trapped in the Euro-snare where the Central Bank rather than the elected governments calls the tune.

Greece's problems also stem from some rather dodgy lending to the previous New Democracy (conservative) Government by international financiers just after the millennium. But of course, the neolibs are not going to own up to that one, so they are more than content to pander to racist lies about lazy people and, of course, a supposedly bloated welfare state. In truth, the Greek public sector, accounting for less than 12% of all employees, is the 4th smallest in all the Eurozone countries and Greeks on average work over 160 hours longer each year than Germans and over 100 hours longer than the European average.

As ever, our politicians and media ignore the huge concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny rich elite in Greece, in line with the trends in most other austerity-focused states, seduced as ever by the half-truths, lies and twisted statistics of our political-economic masters. They are myths we buy into at our own peril - because it feeds the plans of the elite to continue to grasp and command more and more of the wealth of all nations. And, as part of that, force all of our retirement ages up and up until our leaving does can be combined with our wakes. 

Scottish and Wry...

David Cameron, George Osborne and Muppet-in-Chief Danny "Beaker" Alexander have managed to get themselves totally twisted and hoist on their own petard today over the prospect of a Scottish independence referendum. Concerned about the plans by the SNP Scottish Government to play a long game of slowly building up to a referendum in 2014, with a multiple choice of status quo, more devolution within the UK and total independence, they have decided to bring forward legislation to force the vote to be held sooner.

Citing secret discussions between Cameron and Osborne and "global business leaders", the Con Dems have warned any further delay will damage the Scottish economy and, for alleged clarity, the punters are to be given only two choices - yes or no to independence.

Beaker and Osborne - taking Britain forward to oblivion

It is testimony to the total ineptitude of the so-called unionist parties that by their actions they have completely validated the SNP's claims of central government ignoring the wishes of the Scots - who voted in large numbers for the majority SNP Government, which had made its referendum plans clear - and have almost certainly hastened the break up of the UK.

So which is the worst piece of amateur, overgrown schoolboy brinkmanship? :
- Westminster politicians from the Tories and Lib Dems, both of whom were comprehensively routed in the Scottish elections, with the latter pretty close to the wipe out zone, lecturing the elected government in Scotland on when it is to hold a vote? And besides, didn't both these parties vehemently oppose calls by then  Scottish Labour leader Wendy Alexander to call the SNP's bluff and hold a "bring it on" independence referendum four years ago? Had they supported her then, the issue might have been voted down for a generation. Now, they just look deeply interfering to the point of bullying; and with no small whiff of despair in their deeds.

- Cameron and Osborne declaring that the vote on the future of Scotland (and indeed, the entire UK, by default) should be held on a timetable dictated by big business?  It may have escaped their notice, but now is perhaps not the best time to cite the grasping pirate captains of capitalism as the motivating factor behind your cause.

- Cameron, Osborne and Beaker thinking it is clever to deny people a third option of enhanced devolution, presumably calculating that by doing so, enough devolutionists will baulk at all-out independence and opt for the status quo. Dave Cameron's old University mate and former President of Oxford Uni Tories, BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson, obligingly spouting the latest Downing Street cheat sheet, suggested this morning that a multiple ballot wouldn't be possible because "no one would know which option had won" if none got more than 50% of the vote. Presumably the Lib Dems haven't got round to explaining AV to the Tories; oh, sorry, bad language...

- Changing the law to make any referendum result binding, unlike all the other referenda held in the UK, which have been consultative. Presumably they are gambling that the apparent finality of a binding referendum might scare some people off voting for change.

- Cameron, Osborne and Beaker saying anything at all about Scottish independence. After all, what better advert for Edinburgh breaking away from the union is there than a reminder that these smug people, with little support among Scottish voters, are still ultimately in charge?

I am a Scot, living in England. I am no nationalist of any type and no advocate of independence. But after this amateurish farrago of blatant political fixing, which these pathetic irridentists seem so blindly determined on pursuing, I can only feel that the day the Saltire is hauled above a fully independent Scottish Parliament has come much closer - and, for the first time in my life, I really wouldn't be in disagreement with a basically social democratic country that wants to cut its ties with the junta that is driving Britain to the neoliberal dogs.

Obama Campaign To Launch...Missiles at Iran?

OBAMA TO LAUNCH ELECTION CAMPAIGN ON THE END OF A PATRIOT MISSILE

From the Jerusalem Post:
"Last week, Lt.-Gen. Frank Gorenc, commander of the US’s Third Air Force based in Germany,
 visited Israel to finalize plans for the upcoming drill, expected to see the deployment of several thousand American soldiers in Israel."
http://www.jpost.com/Defense/Article.aspx?id=250249

It has long been anticipated, but it increasingly looks as if American-Israeli strikes against Iran are drawing near. This is in spite of repeated assessments by the Intelligence community that Iran is not actively developing nuclear weapons and in spite of the long standing historical fact that Iran has never attacked another country in modern times. It is worth reflecting though, that Iran is surrounded by hostile nuclear weapon states, including Israel and other US satellites.

But with rightwing Republicans cheered by the emergence of Rick Santorum in Iowa's primary caucuses, Obama will be wanting more than ever to appeal to the voters the surging challenger thanks God for wanting to "cling on to their guns and bibles!"

A bad new year looms in the Gulf. As ever. Arab Spring, followed by nuclear winter?

Iran's nuclear noose:

Iran's nuclear noose - its' neighbours India, Pakistan, Russia and Israel are armed with nuclear weapons, while US & UK forces based nearby in Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf, Iraq and Cyprus have ready access to atomic arsenals.

NYPD Raids OWS Livestream Studio, Arrests Volunteers | AlterNet

Click on the link: NYPD Raids OWS Livestream Studio, Arrests Volunteers | AlterNet 

Freedom of speech is struck another blow in the USA as Republican voters split 2:1 in favour of homophobic racists in Iowa.

Happy New Year - let the social cleansing begin...

The Chartered Institute of Housing has published a report showing that, as new housing benefits rules come into effect from this month, there will be a short fall in the availability of rented housing set against the permissible housing benefit levels to be paid of some 800,000 properties, many of them family properties. In effect, millions of adults and children are to be left with stark choices - eat or have a roof over your head; or, perhaps even more tellingly about this government's real intentions, walk the streets where you are now, or move...preferably far away.

The problem is at its worst, unsurprisingly, in the better off boroughs of London, where at a stroke, tens of thousands of people in need will no longer have their housing costs met in full. The result will be a huge increase in demand in poorer areas, which are already struggling to cope, and so the anticipation is that these social outcasts will move away altogether to inhabit the dead zones of many of our decaying seaside resorts, far away from their social superiors, and also from any prospect of living in areas where there might be some reasonable chance of decent employment.

It is unsurprising that this is happening - the Government has trailed it long enough, with the Lib Dems contented support, as part of its combined strategy of deficit reduction and breaking so-called welfare dependency. The Housing Minister, Grant Shapps, has even suggested people should move onto boats - perhaps hoping these new Boat People might be conveniently washed away, out of sight of Tory voters.

Yet how is it that driving people away from areas they have lived in and may have some work, however limited or low paid, is going to break welfare dependency if they end up in some poky bed and breakfast in Southend? Or is it just another way of creating a large pool of even cheaper seasonal staff to service the well-heeled on their summer jaunts down to the coast? Someone to do retired Aunt Agatha's shopping for a few beads and nuts when she heads off to her retirement flat in Eastbourne?

Driving people out of their homes and communities - somehow, this perhaps more than anything else we have seen from the Con Dems, is the epitome of the drive back to a society that would make Victorian times look like a paean to egalitarianism. It is moving beyond gated communities to entire boroughs and counties with gates which might be invisible, but no less firm and unyielding than the iron ones that close off the cowering middle class revanchists keen to cling onto their material wealth.

It is a social cleansing that will lead only to more division, more tension and isolation between different groups in our battered society - at a cost far, far greater than any pounds or pennies saved through this most bitter turn of the screw on some of the most vulnerable people in our town and cities.

Imagine

The British tax authorities were accused by MPs yesterday of conniving with big businesses to help them avoid paying their tax. The biggest culprit appears to be Vodaphone - there are claims they have had up to £8 billions in tax written off by Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs - they deny this, but whatever the truth, they have been given a whole 5 years to pay £1.25 billion in long overdue, unpaid tax - with no interest to pay!

The head of the HMRC meantime, has enjoyed on average of one meal per week with the owners of the very businesses he is meant to be chasing up to pay their tax. I'm sure it was always a very tense soup course. We should be thankful that the activist group UKuncut is pursuing legal action to make big business pay its taxes - though it looks like it will be in for a long haul.

In total, HMRC has written off around £27 billions of tax due but not paid by corporations in the UK. Worse still though it that when you take into account the tax lost through legal but highly unethical methods like moving money offshore, the loss to the Treasury rises to around £75 billions or even more. This includes the family trust fund of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, so no conflict of interest there.  To put into context, the Government annual deficit for the current year could be cut by nearly 60% if these grasping spivs were made to cough up their due. But somehow they are excused on the basis that it would be damaging to the nation if enforcing their tax payments drove them away - apparently we would no longer have the benefit of their presence.

Really? What a shame. Much better to give disabled kids a hard time instead then.

MAKE THEM PAY!

HELP UK UNCUT FIGHT THE TAX AVOIDERS

DONATE BY CLICKING HERE

Crohn's, malnutrition, osteoporosis and a stroke - and that's still not enough to get disability benefit / Britain / Home - Morning Star

Compassion in Con Dem Britain: from today's "Morning Star"

Crohn's, malnutrition, osteoporosis and a stroke - and that's still not enough to get disability benefit / Britain / Home - Morning Star

Taking Tea With Adolf - the Tories' Nazi Fetish

Aidan Burley MP (right) said he regretted the behaviour of the others in the party...

Just hours after the Prime Minister called for "Christian values" to save Britain from moral decay, a Tory MP, Aidan Burley, has been fired from his post as Private Parliamentary Secretary at the Department for  Transport. The Cannock Chase parliamentarian had been seen as a rising star until he was photographed at a stag party where the groom was dressed as a Nazi. Although initially claiming (after the photo was published in a Sunday newspaper) that he had felt uncomfortable and should have left the party sooner, it came to light that he had actually hired and paid for the fascist outfit and was more than a tad instrumental in setting the theme for the evening. At this point, Prime Minister Cameron decided he had to go, more it seems to avoid the bad publicity than through any real regret about the offence caused/

So far, so tasteless, but Burley is far from the first Conservative activist to have a more than passing fascination with things Nazi and a strange desire to dress up in the clobber Hugo Boss designed and supplied (latterly using slave labour) for the Hitler Gang back in the inter-war years.

Hugo Boss: by appointment to Hitler

Both in the UK and USA, the supposedly respectable right in the Tory Party and the Republicans appear to have a good number of people in their ranks who have a taste for SS-chique. Last year, for example, a Republican candidate for Senate in Ohio defended his regular dressing up as a Nazi Waffen-SS officer to re-enact the glories of the Hitler years. And a letter in Private Eye in 2007 alleged that, while at University in the 1970s, former Tory MP and now UKIP big wig Neil Hamilton joyfully paraded with henchmen dressed in Nazi-style brownshirts.

Anyone involved in student politics in the 1980s, the heyday of Thatcherite triumphalism, will recall the rumours and the real sightings of members of the Federation of Conservative Students enthusiastically sieg-heiling each other after a few beers and the (particularly) odd ones who seized any opportunity at all to don alleged "fancy dress" with some sort of Nazi theme. But this is hardly surprising when you look at the actual politics of these people.

Tory students, 1980s

The FCS in the 1980s was well known for its extreme positions on a range of policy fronts, with racism and a taste for authoritarianism ranking high in their pantheon. This, after all, was the group that, under the chairmanship of current Speaker of the Commons John Bercow MP, repeatedly called for Nelson Mandela to be hanged and very enthusiatically voiced its support of vicious military regimes in Chile and elsewhere. In at least one case, its members sought to make common cause with the British National Party, formed by John Tyndall, who also had a strong liking for donning Nazi outfits. It was disbanded by the main party only after its 1985 conference at Loughborough University deteriorated into a drunken riot.

The BNP's Tyndall (left)

But today, their successors are little better - just a few weeks ago, Conservative students at St Andrews University burned an effigy of Barack Obama and just a few days before that Oxford University Conservatives were put under investigation after claims of members singing Nazi songs celebrating killing Jews at one of their "Port & Policy" meetings - one committee member who resigned in protest said that this is a regular event among a group which counts the current Prime Minister and Chancellor among its alumni and which is seen as a nursery for future Tory leaders and PMs.

Many Conservative have been repeatedly found sympathising and actively engaging with the most odious far right groups - Cameron himself pushed the Tories out of their links with mainstream Christian Democrats in the European Parliament into an alliance with very extreme, homophobic and fascistic eastern European parties. This includes blatantly neo-Nazi sympathisers in the Baltic states and Polish politicians who derided the election of Obama as the end of white civilisation.

So in spite of David Cameron's claims to have transformed the Tories from the nasty party of the past to one that represents the allegedly Christian values of the country, it seems if you scratch the surface, the putrid odour of racism, violence and repression is not far away at all.

British values? Fighting moral decay? I hope not.

2010 General Election debate in Hammersmith - the Tory candidate defends Cameron's alliance with European neo-Nazis. In the election, Hammersmith was one of only two seats where there was a swing towards the Labour Party.