Scottish Communists

Conjuring up images of a toffee-nosed public school boy with a crumpled exam cheat sheet in his back pocket, the Prime Minister boasts: "On all the big issues that matter to Britain, we are heading in the right direction and I have the evidence to prove it."

It is here that reality flies off into fantasy.

But only if you are one of the millions of ordinary people being punished on the orders of the Tories and their banker friends.

For Cameron and co, things are going just swimmingly.

Surely never before in British political history has so much been wrecked for so many, by so few, in so short a time.

The capitalist classes globally, and their prominent local representatives of various hues within and outside Parliament in Britain, have been first off the blocks since their early wobble during the 2008 financial plunge.

Then, they temporarily had stripped from them the fig leaf of certainty with which the ideologues of the right, consumerism and greed dressed up their crazy system of financial speculation and dismissed all alternatives as outdated or unworkable.

----

They soon ensured it was put back in place.

But a systemic crisis in the capitalist system remains barely concealed behind this withered leaf.

Annual global economic output stands at around £40 trillion. At the same time just a few thousand people around the world are estimated to be evading tax on a secret accumulated wealth of upwards of £13 trillion, let alone their known riches.

Globally hundreds of trillions of debt in the form of derivatives is passed around like a deadly parcel between a complex web of capitalist institutions. It is the result of unfettered capitalist speculation - gambling not even based on the real fruits of people's labour - and is so large that it is near impossible to repay.

But the greedy few want to ensure that they do not lose their investments. In fact, in another example of the true nature of capitalism, despite the crisis they are accumulating more wealth even as you read this.

Since 2008 the fig leaf has been repositioned, loosely sellotaped over the failed system's private parts via a continued stream of public cash - our cash.

The seemingly successful bid to hoodwink ordinary people into accepting the financial burden of a crisis not of their making is what Cameron refers to when he tells us "we are heading in the right direction."

----

His government is one of many in the developed world now pursuing lower tax for big business and massive spending cuts in the public sector. Both represent a wholesale transfer of wealth from us to a tiny, greedy minority.

The road Cameron is taking us down represents a return to the brutal past for millions of people.

The few embellishments to people's lives, in national insurance payouts to help us when we hit hard times, in decent retirement incomes, a free health service, and reasonable wages are being systematically rolled back.

This is class war in its most brazen form.

As we head into a new year it falls to us to rally the defence and turn it into the required assault on the system that enslaves us.

The People's Charter represents a set of simple demands around which we can rally.

We must educate, agitate and organise.

And through militant industrial action and civil disobedience we have in our hands the ability to shake the all too comfortable corridors of power.

Let 2013 go down in history as the year the fightback against this capitalist offensive began in earnest.

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/127723

Leon Kuhn cartoon http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/121084

In a new year message Mr Kirby said next year will be "just as challenging" for public services after a "tough" 2012.

"We will continue fighting to protect jobs and services in specific sectors - including our long-running campaign on police staff jobs and in the further education sector - where fierce cutbacks are being imposed," he said.

"We know the whole issue of pay is bound to feature strongly on our campaigning agenda in the coming year and the TUC and STUC will consider co-ordinated action to defend and improve the position of our members and the important services we deliver.

"We have been winning the argument for the living wage and will continue to fight to have this extended not just to directly employed public service staff but to those working in the private and third sectors."

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/127732

Rob Griffiths, General Secretary of the Communist Party

When I placed a series of adverts in the South Wales Echo during the Cardiff South & Penarth by-election the paper's editor demanded changes in presentation and political content.

He was not happy with the statement "Britain is ruled by an arrogant, wealthy and corrupt elite."

Readers might take the statement as one of fact rather than opinion, even though it was in quotation marks and alongside a photograph of me as the Communist Party candidate.

He insisted that my remarks be modified to read: "In my view, Britain is ruled by an arrogant, wealthy and corrupt elite."

Nor could I refer to "another careerist politician," because it implied criticism of the retiring MP (a former Labour minister).

Would such changes would have been demanded of other candidates?

For example, would a Tory advert saying "the City of London plays a vital part in the British economy and we must protect it

" have been required to include the preface "in the Conservative Party's view"?

We don't know because the Labour, Tory and Lib Dem campaigns contented themselves with pumping out hundreds of thousands of full-colour brochures and tabloids.

These featured their candidates in various poses, grinning, pointing to holes in the road and greeting party supporters as though they were unknown local residents.

The idea that all working people should fund such an avalanche of vacuous drivel at every election is grotesque.

State funding of political parties would mean that the electors should pay for the dubious privilege of being flattered and deceived.

Which brings me to one of the most significant features of the past year.

I cannot recall another one in which so much has come to light to confirm the dishonest, corrupt and greedy character of the British ruling class.

Of course, it will come as no surprise to communists, socialists and other Morning Star readers that the British state operated death squads in northern Ireland, fitted up the miners at Orgreave and held working-class Liverpool football fans responsible for the deaths at Hillsborough.

Now, despite out-of-court hush money paid to at least 17 victims so far, more is coming to light about British complicity in the kidnapping, transportation, torture and incarceration of British and other citizens as part of the bogus "war on terror."

However, the British government refuses to admit liability. No names of guilty British officials and agents are exposed. Nobody is put on trial or even demoted - nor were they in the Birmingham Six, Guildford Four and countless other cases.

Just as those who organised and prosecuted the illegal Iraq war have escaped justice.

Indeed, they have either advanced higher up the career ladder or gone to work for merchant banks and armaments companies.

Two High Court cases this year have highlighted the use of internment, torture and summary execution in the former British empire.

But the British politicians, intelligence agents, military officers and colonial administrators responsible in Malaya and Kenya have long since retired with full honours and sumptuous pensions.

Of course, we have long known that many of those who run Britain's big business corporations are venal, greedy liars with psychopathic personality disorders.

Even so, it still comes as a mild surprise that some bankers went that extra mile to help Mexican drug barons - most of them mass murderers - to launder their proceeds on a vast industrial scale.

That hundreds of City dealers also habitually fiddled interest rates to enrich themselves and their employers is hardly earth-shattering.

Far more astonishing is the claim that that their superiors were innocently unaware of what their little elves were up to in the dealing rooms.

Recent revelations confirm the scale of tax-dodging undertaken by the rich and big business in what they like to call "Great Britain plc."

For many of them, aided and abetted by a score of statelets under British jurisdiction from the Isle of Man to the British Virgin Islands, paying tax on their British-made profits is voluntary.

While a host of public bodies pretend to do something about corporate tax avoidance, bribery and fraud, our Cabinet of millionaires has decided to reward the culprits with cuts in top-rate income and corporation taxes.

Then there are the lying, prying, tax-dodging misanthropes who own so many of Britain's national newspapers.

Here's an Xmas quiz. Which press proprietors initially made their fortune from (a) peddling pornography, (b) inheriting daddy's media empire, (c) dealing in stolen state property and (d) inheriting banks founded on slavery and the slave trade?

Don't send the answers on a postcard to Lord Leveson - he's not interested.

These are the glorious guardians of Britain's free press, who daily preach the virtues of private enterprise and family values.

Naturally, they hate trade unionism, but take a little more kindly to Labour politicians who bend the knee and take the shilling.

Their papers report and help shape a political spectrum which begins in the centre and ends on the far right.

The BBC happily participates in this intellectual trickery, referring to the Guardian and the Independent as the "left-wing" press while systematically excluding the Morning Star from all coverage.

One wonders how much longer the BBC Radio Four Any Questions discussion programme can get away with such blatant bias in its choice of panellists.

All sections of Britain's state and monopoly mass media are united in presenting the same world view.

Capitalism equals freedom and democracy. Socialist ideas no longer exist to be reported. Profits are good and play no part in price rises. Trade unions can only be too strong, never too weak. Nato and the monarchy are beyond serious criticism. Other countries are beset by corruption, which barely exists here in Britain. Our institutions are basically sound and popular, but occasionally lapse from their normal state of grace. And any alternative would be worse, especially for the lower orders.

And yet many people know that Britain is ruled by an arrogant, corrupt and wealthy elite - although not the full extent of that arrogance, corruption and greed.

But they do not believe that much can be done to change things for the better.

At the same time, majority public opinion is in favour of progressive taxation and public ownership of the railways, water, gas and electricity.

It is against Britain's military role in Afghanistan and can be won against benefit cuts and huge new spending on nuclear weapons.

This shows the potential to unite masses of people and the labour movement in favour of the People's Charter in 2013.

Plenty of people still remember the slums of Gorbals, Cowcaddens and other inner-city areas of Glasgow.

Each floor of a four-storey tenement would be endlessly subdivided, with five, six or seven front doors.

Repairs would be minimal, sanitation rudimentary and the stench sometimes overpowering.

These houses were owned by private landlords. Subdivision increased income and limited the impact of rent control.

Most of these slums were demolished between the 1950s and 1970s. They were replaced by brand-new council houses, fulfilling the Beveridge pledge to end the squalor of pre-war Britain.

Rents were directly subsidised. Homelessness, while present, was massively reduced.

Today the private landlords are back. In 1991 they controlled about 10,000 of Glasgow's properties. Now they own over 35,000. And houses are being subdivided.

The reasons are not hard to find. Glasgow's council houses were either sold off or demolished and those remaining made over to Housing Associations.

The direct rent subsidy was ended long ago and rents pushed higher and higher as a proportion of wages.

Increasingly only those on housing benefit could afford to live in "social housing."

And now the coalition government is cutting housing benefit.

Last April they drastically increased the contribution demanded of non-dependents and offspring aged over 18 and still living at home - forcing many to leave.

This April coming we have the cynical sequel.

Tenants "under-occupying" face massive cuts in housing benefit. One unoccupied bedroom will mean a 14 per cent cut. Two, 25 per cent.

Tenants are being told they either have to find the difference - up to £80 a month for those with two spare bedrooms - or move to a smaller house.

The Scottish Federation of Housing Associations estimates that there are up to 95,000 such tenants.

Such "downsizing" might be reasonable if there were plenty of empty smaller houses in the socially rented sector.

But there are hardly any - and the government knows it.

It and its predecessors are the ones who stopped the money for building new socially rented homes.

The implications of this for tenants were brought home at a packed public meeting in Govan recently.

One middle-aged woman told her story. Her children had left home and her husband was dead. She was employed part-time on a minimal wage and depended on housing benefit.

She had phoned up her "social" landlord, the biggest in Glasgow. What would happen if she could not pay the full rent?

The answer came back - she would be evicted. From the house where she had lived all her life and the garden she loved.

And she would probably lose not only her house but her friends and her community. The likely option would be a room in the private rented sector somewhere else in the city.

The Govan meeting was remarkable in two ways.

The first was its unity. The independence issue has made Scottish politics increasingly tribal.

Yet the local Govan MSP, Johann Lamont, leader of the Labour Party, sat beside Humza Yousaf, the SNP Glasgow list MSP and Scottish Minister for External Relations, and jointly discussed ways in which the Scottish Parliament could intervene.

Their unity reflected growing revulsion and anger on the ground. Also present on the platform were representatives of the small local community-based housing associations whose very existence is threatened by the cuts. At least one has now pledged that no tenant will be evicted for "bedroom tax" arrears.

The meeting was remarkable in a second sense as well. This was the return of a practical radicalism, the conviction that some kind of action was possible.

Dave Moxham, deputy general secretary of the Scottish Trade Union Congress, reminded the meeting that it was Govan in 1915 that led the first great rent strike against profiteering landlords - ultimately forcing the government to introduce rent controls.

And he also reminded the meeting, as did a local Labour councillor, that the Scottish Parliament has legislative power over housing - even if it did not control housing benefit.

It could impose rent controls on private landlords just as in 1915 and change the whole dynamic of the housing market.

Govan Law Centre solicitor Mike Dailly took this practical radicalism a step further. Housing law could be amended to make evictions for bedroom tax arrears illegal - and substitute other forms of debt recovery. He has since drafted the required amendment.

By chance, the meeting was held in the Mary Barbour room of Govan's Pearce Institute. Mary Barbour was the Govan housewife and socialist who led the 1915 rent strike and later became Glasgow's first woman Labour councillor.

In 1915 it was the unity between tenants and trade unionists that forced the government to act and also created the beginnings of a new positive sense of working-class identity and power.

Rent regulation was not socialist revolution.

But it bred a whole new confidence. Today also there are the makings of such an advance if the necessary organisation and pressure can be created - and on this Scotland can lead a fightback for the rest of Britain. Scotland possesses a parliament with at least some of the necessary powers.

Taken from the Morning Star http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/127094

Upwards of a thousand campaigners took part in an emergency protest outside the Israeli embassy in west London on Saturday while thousands more demonstrated in Edinburgh, Cardiff, Manchester and Wrexham.

The demonstration was called by Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Stop the War Coalition (STWC) and CND in response to the escalating crisis, which by Sunday had seen the death toll rise to 66 as thousands of Israeli troops massed on the border.

CND general secretary Kate Hudson read out the names of people who had died and led the crowd in a moment's silence.

STWC national officer John Rees told the crowd: "We are very clear in our message to the Israeli government. There is no equivalence between Israel, the fourth-largest military power in the world with its F16s, tanks and missiles and the Palestinian resistance.

Israel is "on the side of the oppressors," he said.

"We will never stand silent while Palestinians are being murdered day after day by the Israeli state."

He also had a stark message for Foreign Secretary William Hague, who has claimed that Hamas bears responsibility for the crisis.

"We will be at war with this government until it stops supporting the oppressors," he declared.

Palestinian ambassador to London Manuel Hassassian stated: "Crimes against the Palestinian people go unpunished due to the hypocrisy of the international community. This is a badge of dishonour.

"The West is putting victim and victimiser on the same footing. What is our crime? Our crime is to want freedom and justice."

He also hit out at the Western media, and the BBC in particular, accusing them of blatant bias in their coverage of the situation.

Glyn Secker of Jews for Justice for Palestinians accused the Israeli government of "a cynical escalation of violence" and Benjamin Netanyahu of "cold blooded, lethal electioneering."

"Who has the power? Who started this cycle of violence? End the occupation, end the demolitions and settlements. Establish civil rights and justice for Palestinians."

A further demonstration has been called for this coming Saturday with a march planned from Downing Street to the Israeli embassy in Kensington.

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/126252