Election in Greece

Greece will have an election on jan 25th or feb 1st 2015. 

Syriza will get the biggest vote and might get an overall majority.

The European political crisis has started.

British capitalism is gravely ill! We need emergency services.

Cameron's Guardian article (Nov 17) is cynical. It tries to undermine Labour-voting, white-collar public sector workers who read the Guardian, by emphasising how bloody foreigners look set again to wreck Britain's economic progress so far achieved under the Coalition government. This is designed to reduce any possible confidence that a Labour government would have the means to restore public services and that the priority is still the much more basic need to 'save' the economy and therefore to vote for a 'steady pair of hands.'

The British economy is shakier than Cameron admits. In 2014 the Coalition have increased the government's spending deficit, despite deficit reduction being the government's number one purpose, despite falling unemployment, despite the low rate of inflation and low interest rates, despite wage increases creeping above inflation in the last quarter for the first time in 4 years and despite all the cuts. Why? Because British working class people have had the greatest reduction in the value of their incomes over the shortest period since records began. (For example 4 million people now 'work for themselves.' They are, on average, two-thirds poorer, not including pension and holiday benefits, than they were when they were employed.) And the British system has still managed to saddle them with the highest personal debts of any European country. So, their taxable income is less than it used to be historically, and the Treasury miscalculated.

The deficit is here to stay. It is not only the poor who pay less taxes. Besides the hacking away of services, of welfare payments and of incomes of the working and non working poor, the rich are also not paying much tax and they are certainly not investing. In the case of the rich it is the increases in their incomes that has led to their reduction of tax payments. The spectacular concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich in the last ten years, notwithstanding the 2008 banking bust (which saw precisely no brokers or bankers jumping from office windows) has led to immense new centres of wealth in tax havens, amounting, according to a recent UN report, up to $40 trillion. (The wealth of everybody in the world, including all of their possessions, is estimated to be $241 trillion.) In addition, none of the big corporations based in Britain pay anything like their national tax bills, as these giant companies are now technically located behind a brass plaque on a post office door in a Swiss village called Zug (in the case of Boots) or Luxembourg (in the case of Vodaphone) or Monaco (in the case of Top-Shop.)

Additionally big corporations in Britain are on investment strike. They are holding vast reserves of Capital estimated at £75 billion. Why? Because Britain is a mainly low tech, service economy. Speculative enterprise on the stock exchange (boosted as it was by huge injections of Quantitative Easing) and investment in the BRIC economies seemed to be the ticket, but even these possibilities are now fragile. The idea that there will be sizable private investment in new technologies and production is laughable. Just look at the profits guarantee over 20 years that the pro nuclear government needed to make in order to get one power station built.

What all this boils down to is that the government's deficit spending can only be resolved through further cuts and tax rises on essential spending. And so the Tories are winding up for a new package as severe or more severe than the last. (Labour says it will reduce the deficit but 'more fairly.') Britain will then become a country where for a decade (at least) major social services were cut to a half or less of their size, and the new, shrivelled provision that emerged after this decade becoming a permanent fixture, but one dealing with an older and larger population. And of course even this prediction may be optimistic. There is no reason to assume that productivity (fuelled by investment) or incomes (fuelled by stronger bargaining power of workers) or increased taxes from the rich (fuelled by law and coercion) will rise to a point where the government's overall tax base stops dwindling. No. The total reconstruction of British capitalist society, towards the privatisation of all essential services, in the direction of the USA, or more realistically Japan, may well be well underway and will shortly become irreversible. They may have to be rebuilt from the ground..

Which means that austerity, whoever promotes it, and however they present it, is the road to hell. The reality emerging after the first five years of this policy is that it is, and has to be, a virtually permanent priority for our rulers. They are prescribing a revolutionary change to the world of the workers, the sick, the old, indeed the whole of the working and non working poor. They are rolling back all the main social gains of the struggles of the 20th century.

Equally radical measures are as required to reverse this future as those being used to create it. Only the boldest government, determined to reduce inequality by direct measures like removal of all anti-union laws, which would increase the power of workers to expand their portion of national income and therefore their tax payments, and to force open investment in new production by law and by punitive seizure in the event of recalcitrance, can reverse this destructive process.These and other far reaching inroads into the tremendous resources and power that big capital has now built up will be required.

The first step in this direction will be taken as a truly politically independent, mass movement against austerity emerges that will provide the engine room for the political developments needed. The Peoples Assembly is the best step yet taken in that direction. Its growth and success can be a real factor in changing our future.

You say you want a revolution ... Greece's future

We are reaching a new focal point

It is shattering to face the indisputable evidence that the much-mocked bureaucrats of the European Commission and the European bank, bolstered by the IMF, have deliberately caused the destruction of a modern European society. This programme of despair was subsequently supported by all Greek's main parties as well as all those who already had wealth and power in Greece and across Europe. Most of the Greek population, who had to deal with the effects of the international austerity plan, had no reference point to compare with the conscious and organised dismantling of their health service, the dramatic reduction of their living standards, the rise in the national death rate, including infant mortality and chronic diseases, the new hunger faced by what the UN designates as a third of the population - nothing to compare it with, except for the very oldest people in Greece who remembered the impact of the Nazi occupation.

How can soft-skinned euro bankers and commissioners, who have only ever had to worry about ensuring the best seat in a restaurant, preside over, then regularly monitor, enthusiastically promote and defend the destruction of millions of people's lives? Who better? These people and their families will never experience the effects of what they are doing. 

In 2011 Greece rose against its tormentors. The public squares became occupied territory. The police were cowed and governments fell. Most important, those who saw the possibility of a new future started to build Europe's most successful new party, Syriza. And for months now Syriza has led all the polls. Next February, say Syriza's leaders, they will probably form a government. And that is what Europe, indeed the world, and certainly the left must study and prepare for. 

The current Greek parliamentary majority may fall next February over a technicality; its inability to muster a two thirds majority to initiate the new Presidency. But there is much behind this technicality. First is the claim of the current Greek government that Greece has pulled through; that Greece has succeeded in dealing with the debt and the economy is recovering. The government's claim has no credibility in Greece, and nor does it register in the centre of the euro zone, where, today, they are preparing for a new crisis. Second, the current Greek government have stated that they intend to continue with full blown austerity measures even when the 'memorandum' with the EU, the ECB and the IMF is over. This closes all hope of a reasonable future for Greek's majority by way of the current political leadership. But the Greek majority is not crushed and does not accept endless austerity for itself or for its children. 3 million (from a population of 10 million) have already used the Syriza solidarity clinics and markets initiated barely a year ago. This amounts to an immense political act of defiance.

A Syriza led government by next February may yet be avoided by chicanery or corruption in Parliament. But the critical political contradiction in Greece will not be dodged in the next period. The future of Syriza has now become the next battlefield for Greek's contending social classes and for the struggle against euro-austerity. The potential, the promise, the successes or otherwise of an anti-capitalist government in Greece will mark the whole next stage in the future of all the social classes of the country and reshape European politics as a whole.

Syriza

Syriza is a conglomerate of various left strands in Greek politics. Its leadership, assembled around the charismatic Alexis Tsipras, is partly drawn from the Euro-Communist movement (although a movement emerging in very different conditions to that of Italy, France or Spain.) Some ex PASOK people have broken from the Social Democrats. The main Trade Union spokesperson for Syriza is an ex member of the traditional Greek Communists - who up to now have taken a deeply sectarian position on the new party. Greens play a major role. Finally a significant far left trend comprising ex anarchists, Maoists, Trotskyists etc., have formed a substantial part of Syriza's most active cadre. Additionally there are tens of thousands from no particular political tradition who have been won to its non-sectarian approach, its undogmatic message and its ability to turn, in the terms of its own slogan, 'hope into practise.'

For the last four years Syriza has developed a coherent opposition to austerity and through its non-sectarian and active politics driven deep roots down in the urban centres and started to develop them, through initiatives like the 'no middlemen' markets, in the countryside too. And now Syriza's support and alliances, both internally and across Greek society, are about to be tested to their limits.

An anti-capitalist government?

In a summer-storm of abstraction (full of sound and fury but ...) all sorts of potential futures for Greece with a government led by Syriza might be envisioned. The historical experiences of Chile and more close to home, of the Greek Colonel's coup, loom threateningly across a political landscape partly created by the fear of a Syriza government among Greece's traditional rulers. But rather than issue magisterial warnings from a singular distance and from a place with no such experience in living memory, to those currently committing everything to winning popular change, it is perhaps more useful to see the Greek perspective through the eyes of the anti austerity activists on the ground as they grapple with the problem of a new and different future for their country.

For many of these militants, who come from the battle of the squares, who are building collective solidarity not charity, their most fruitful repository of radical thinking comes from the most recent experiences in Latin America. This starts with an acute understanding of the social interpenetration of what used to be called 'first' and 'third world' conditions. The social character of Greece is marked by 30% unemployment (60% of youth) and by the fact that 95% of those who are employed are working in businesses with 10 or less employees. Only 8% are employed in industry. There are 4000 unions mainly organised on a local or regional basis and while new workers formations have been built, for example between groups of workers occupying employer - deserted factories, the traditional union movement is highly bureaucratically led with a 'special interest' perspective in many cases. About 13% of workers (not including owners or renting farmers) work on the land. 24% of Greek's population live there.

This is the world of the mass movement. Class identity here flows from social and political action taken by 'the people' in the streets. It does not stem from the great units of production as in Petersburg in 1917 or Germany in 1919. The mass movement, including cooperative and self-help actions, are the living profile of a new class 'becoming' itself.

What moment has a subversive and radical government in this constellation? Inevitably it takes the political form of centralising and thereby providing the piston for the movement's energy. We have witnessed this before. Bela Kun's government in 1919 Hungary was an early and unsuccessful example. More recently and more successfully we have experienced the Latin American and more particularly the Venezuelan experience. The government leaders are a leading part of the movement itself. That is how they have won the election and why they sustain power. The government is a popular force in its own right which amalgamates the power of the administration with the power of the streets. Most important of all, it relentlessly and systematically defends, supports and advances the cause of the poor. The government is seen as an extension of the movement by the poor. The cause of the poor is the cause of the government.

Of course promoting the lives and conditions of the poor means making decisive inroads against traditional wealth and power, through taxes, through seizures of property, through fines and other legal punishments. It may also mean, in the Greek case, the repudiation of bankers' loans from the EU and even a change of currency. And it means having a decisive policy in relation to forces that sit at the centre of the state. Greece has an army of 130 000 and a population of 10 million. (The UK has a population of 60 million and an army of 80 000.) Greece (still) spends more per capita than any other European country on its armed forces. Greece has 50 000 police, about 450 for every 100 000 of the population. And the force is highly politicised by fascists. Following the end of the Colonel's coup in 1974 and the strong links between many poorer Greek families and their relations in the army it is unlikely that the army will mobilise against a genuine peoples government unless a deep crisis in their social alliances emerges. Nevertheless, the police's loyalty will be a difficult issue to resolve from day one, and the peoples' movements may need to cordon off certain units and departments of the force as part of their action against provocation and racist disorder, with associated and prompt government remedial action.

No promises in history

There are no promises in history. Many groups of leftists, including inside Greece, already write off Syriza's capacity to take the step of becoming what would be, ultimately, an anti-capitalist government. Unfortunately at this time of possibility and hope they choose to stay outside the political front that will create a new goverment of Syriza, the better one supposes to critisise it and prepare for its 'betrayel.' Others doubt the reemergence of the mass movement that dominated Greek politics in 2011 and 2012.  In reality the defence of a government that really did defend and promote the lives of the poor would emerge in greater volume of numbers and with a clearer set of objectives that anything that has happened before in Greece. It would be the greatest moment of their history. So much has been proved over and over again, including in Greece, in parallel situations. So much is clear.

But the project; to set up and then defend a government in Greece whose main priority is the poor; must surely be decisive political priority for every leftist in the world and especially in Europe. The evolution of this project will no doubt take many turns. Life is infinitely more creative than any theory. But, surely the point is 'On S'engage; Et Puis, On Voit!'

China fever; the world in peril; a short essay.

According to some indicators, China already has the largest economy in the world. China's growth, as it embraced the international capitalist market, was by far the main feature of the end of the 20th century and the early part of 21st century history. Why? Because, in twenty years, nearly a billion Chinese people, one sixth of the world's population, were lifted out of mind-numbing poverty while the Chinese economy became the engine room of a new stage in the development of international capitalism.

Apologists for capitalism argue that the economic progress of China is a proof of the preeminence of the market system when it comes to potential world-wide economic growth. Capitalism, in this conception, will just go on and on developing the world. Others, including Chinese scholars, comprehensively rejected this abstraction and instead argued that an immense weakness of western Imperialism at the end of the 20th century had combined with a huge Chinese state effort to create national infrastructure and transport, to mean that the relatively well educated and very cheap labour force of China could be accessed by international capital, but without foreign powers being able to dictate terms, or push over the Chinese leadership and carve up Chinese political and social organisation and create a structural dependency in China on the Imperialist centres. The strength of the 1948 Chinese revolution - with its successful twenty year war against Imperialists led by the Japanese invasion and their domestic allies - was sufficient to allow the emergence of the biggest market in the world in China without it liquidating key domestic political and social priorities. At the same time, western Imperialism, the strongest force on the planet, was already coming to the end of its unquestioned international dominance. (For example after the Vietnam defeat in 1974, local ruling classes in the Middle East created their own investment capital by means of their ransom of the west over oil prices. Since the outset of the catastrophic 'war on terror' parts of Latin America have partially or completely broken with US hegemony.) Moreover, Imperialism even found itself no longer able to routinely export its own internal conflicts and the various crises that they produced, to its various empires.

In this rather different perspective, rapid Chinese economic development was not 'organic' to capitalism, but rather it emerged as a result of a particular political and economic conjuncture where, on the one hand, the 1917 revolutionary wave had been definitively defeated but, on the other, where that same global struggle over the legacy of 1917, and its world wide consequences, had exhausted Western Imperialism, its main enemy. The West found it had no alternative but to mount vast new internal offensives against its own labouring classes to shift the accumulated balance of forces at home while simultaneously making concessions to key, previously colonial or under developed countries, which included having to accept the terms of the Chinese leadership, in order to open up Western profits from China.

A new and different capitalist future?

Is China to become the equivalent of Britain, the first capitalist world power that built its vast reserves of capital through a century of domination of the slave trade which then powered the industrial revolution and helped it dominate one fifth of the globe for a century? Or is China to be a 'new' US which, through the industrial exploitation of its own continental market and its policing of the world, reorganised global capitalism, created new technologies and launched the new electronic revolution? In other words will China now begin to usher in a new period of growth of the world's productive forces in the way that previous leading nations and their empires did? And if so, will this new form of dynamic capitalism cast off the political trappings of western democracy with the rest of western dominated history?

US and other western thinkers talk and write of a new leadership of the capitalist world now emerging. They shake their wise old heads and despair that the new power in the world wide capitalist system will not be led by the benign democracies of the west as previously. Instead the autocratic and centralised Communist Party of China and its vast machine will be the world's ultimate capitalist political 'model.' It is interesting that both the main party idealogues in China and the intellectuals in various western agencies and think tanks, like Chatham House and the 'Foriegn Affairs' journal, basically share the same view. Abandoning relatively recent assertions (eg GW Bush) that it is capitalism that produces democracy, the more pessimistic oracles of the 21st century seem to have a different take on the relationship between succesful capitalism and democracy it seems. As do their counterparts in the CCP.

But this line of reasoning is a cul de sac. In fact, historically speaking capitalism has had little to do with democracy. Those democratic gains forced open in the West in the first part of the twentieth century by workers and the women's movements have been effectively marginalised for decades. G.W. Bush may think that it matters which millionaire wins the US presidency. The poor in the US and the rest of the world have little regard for the impact on them of this sort of 'democratic' exercise. No. The key question for understanding the growth of China and its impact on the rest of the world is nothing to do with idle speculation about the integral links, or otherwise, between democracy and the market system; it is rather the question can China lead the world out of the capitalist crisis, opening the world to a new period of development? Is capitalism, albeit unevenly and brutally, creating, via China and the rest of the BRIC economies, a new epoch for itself and therefore for the rest of us?

Where are we now?

China's per capita GDP in 2013 was $6807. (GDP per capita is the worth of goods and services produced per year, per head of the population.) The US's was $53143. China's per capita GDP rose by nearly half since 2009. In the US it rose by $6000 approx. As Chinese Communist Party leaders often say, China, from the point of view of the overwhelming majority of its population, is still a developing country. It is the sheer size of China's population that means that China's overall GDP will outstrip that of the US's in the next decade or so.

It turns out that China is far from opening a new epoch for capitalism. China has been brutally effected by the current capitalist crisis and deep contradictions are emerging from beneath the surface of every day Chinese life.

It has been the case for a decade that UN figures show social upheaval in China competing with that of South Africa as the most prononounced in the world. Now government debts in China have balooned to 240% of GDP as more and more social measures are required to 'flatten' social unrest and deal with the estimated extra 30 million thrown out of work by the collapse of the US import market. As government debt has expanded so quickly debt interest is high. This year China is set to pay an interest bill of about $1.7 Trillion (an amount that is larger than the total economies of South Korea, Mexico and Indonesia.)  The Chinese population have, in the meantime, been exhorted to 'work hard and live plainly; do not wallow in luxuries and pleasures' by President Xi Jinping. At the end of October this year Chinese officials announced the lowest quarterly growth rate in the economy for five years (7.3%) and warned the Chinese people that they should prepare for 'a new normal' of slower economic expansion.  But when an estimated 32% of new credit received by companies and agencies is used for paying off interest in loans and $1290  of China's per capita GDP (see above) is debt servicing, then productive expansion is undermined.

These trends show how modern China, with one leap, is moving from the productive expansion of its economic life, initially stimulated by the market ushered in by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1980s, directly to the economic 'debt model' followed by the decaying West for the last forty years. There is not a new model of capitalism here; there is no great rennaissance of the market system with a new vision of a dramatically reorganised world premised on its emergence. Rather the slow, painful history of vigour and victory followed by decline and decay witnessed over a century in Britain, rather less in the case of the US is now repeating itself, this time not accompanied by great new technological breakthroughs, over a period of a few decades, in the case of a barely developing China. The historical cycle of capitalism is repeating itself, in compressed ways, less creatively, with less hope for the future.

The leadership of the CCP is of course responding to these realities but in the classic way of those bureacratic castes that have emerged, increasingly distantly from some great social tumult which remains the entirely theoretical grounds of their own legitimacy. In fact they respond in all the colours of the political rainbow, levened only by self interest. As the market grows in its power and influence in Chinese society so the bureaucracy defends its role in meeting society's needs by being the managers of that market. Moral and judicial campaigns are carried out against corruption in the state machine as greater demands are made on the people encouraging the virtues of thrift. The reality is, as the sea of corruption bubbles over, that the market is remaking the political leadership in China and not the otherway around. Indeed some of the main targets of the CCP's anti-corruption campaign have been seen as political critics of the leading CCP faction rather than the source of greedy malpractice. The growing political corruption of the CCP echoes the growing day to day dynamics of the relations between the people and their state, the state with enterprises, the enterprises with the state, and on it goes. The political crisis in China is supressed only by the governement's perceived role in the massive expansion of living standards. It is no longer seen as a moral force. The vast majority of ordinary Chinese people will therefore not willingly 'prepare for the new normal.'  And capitalism has not embarked on a new stage of history; a new global adventure. It turns out that project will be of an entirely different character and be in entirely other peoples' hands.                                                                                

Simple Simon

Ex New Labour Councillor (1998 - 2002, Brixton) Simon Stevens is the recently appointed Chief Executive of the English NHS. Today he issued a report on the NHS over the next five years.

Simon was busy between 2004 - 2013 working in the various offshoots of an outfit called UnitedHealth. He was variously the President of the European bit, then the Chief Executive Officer and Vice President of the whole corporation. In 2013 his speakers' notes described his job as follows:-

'His responsibilities include leading UnitedHealth’s strategy for, and engagement with, national health reform, ensuring its businesses are positioned for changes in the market and regulatory environment.'

The Guardian did a profile of the NHS's new chief in October 2013. They wrote:-

'He is an advocate of local pay in the NHS. One option is that he could join forces with hospital trusts to introduce that, to try to stop staff costs consuming 70% of the NHS's £100bn budget, to free up funds for the rising demand for its services. Health unions would fight that.

He believes that competition between hospitals drives up standards. And he has suggested that the NHS could get its own equivalent of Michael Gove's free schools in the shape of independent GPs who would compete with existing surgeries for patients.'

Stephen's NHS report says that another £30 billion can be squeezed from the Health service in the next 5 years on top of the £20 billion extracted in the last 5. About £8 billion of the last squeeze came from the 15% cut in NHS workers' wages. This time NHS workers will have to do the extra work, just like before, but they will perhaps get some part of the increase in inflation year on year partly covered by small increases in their salaries. (Although local pay would undoubtedly sort all that out.)

Tory Health Secretary Andrew Lansley's £3 billion 'GP led Trusts' NHS reorganisation - that pushed the privatisation door, already opened by New Labour, even wider, - are still busy 'buying' NHS services. So far 10% of total NHS spending has gone private. (Not including the £63 billion outstanding PFI costs inherited from Labour.) Simon is sanguine. He says:-

'I think that the vast majority of care that’s provided for NHS patients will continue to be provided by NHS providers, but ultimately it’s patients that should make that choice, not someone sitting in an NHS office.'

Privatisation continues to be the main worry in all opinion polls taken on the future of the NHS. Even with Labour Simon in charge.

Fair warning

Robert Chote had a cheery chat with Evan Davis on the new look Newsnight (October 21.) Chote is the chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility that was set up to make sure that only one approach to the financial crisis, reducing government expenditure, is acceptable. These two young lions of current British economics were mulling over the curious fact that this financial year's budget deficit is likely to be the same or larger than last year's.

Employment is up. Economic growth is up. Perhaps its the fact that wages are low and therefore less income tax is being paid. Possibly that plays a role, our scions agreed. (50% of British workers now earn less than £10 000 per year.)

Then they considered the thrilling idea that the damage to the British economy caused by the 2008 crisis meant that what we were seeing was a long view of the future economic life of the country. Robert Chote laid it out;

'Wage growth is weak  ... due to low productivity growth.' And increasing wages without productivity going up just causes inflation. So no dice there then. (But no matter how hard you sweep, or clean or care, productivity barely moves. New machinery and technology spur growth. There is a massive capital investment strike in Britain. Companies, many of whom pay little Corporation tax, are holding vast sums of money estimated at nearly £1 Trillion.) Chote and Evans therefore went on to consider what had to happen if our current difficulties turned out to be 'structural' (permanent.)

Chote helpfully agreed that the OBR had done some calculations in light of this possibility and in light of all of the main Westminster parties' commitments to reduce the deficit to nil.

'Look over the next 5 years .. the economy rebuilding will not do much for you ... (it is) the day to day expenditure on public services that will have to reduce the deficit ... public services share of national income would be at their lowest level since the 1930s.'
'Fascinating' murmured Davis.

Public services are 45% of national income today (5% lower than Germany.) In the 1930s they were 25% - 30% of national income. This course of action will take British public expenditure to a lower proportion of national income than that of the USA (currently 37%.)

Fascinating.

Turning hope into practice

The Greek Solidarity Campaign organised another one of their delegations to Athens. The group met and spoke with politicians and cleaners, doctors and farmers who are building a peoples' movement against austerity while working out the route to a new society.

What they saw and what they heard opened their hearts and their minds.

This is what the delegates saw and heard.

Alexis Tsipras, the leader of Syriza said
'Syriza will probably the next government.' And 'our prediction is it will be be the next government after February. (2015)'
He said that Syriza's principle was that not one cent would go to the payment of interest on the loans until the needs of the Greek people had been met.

He said that pensions would be restored to pre 2008 levels as would the minimum wage. (They have been cut by a third - more if inflation is taken into account.) He said anti-labour laws would be repealed. He said banks would be socialised and forced to create loans for new business and employment.

'It is necessary to find the money to meet the needs of the Greek people.'

Sorting out the 60% youth unemployment would be front and centre. He said a health service would be rebuilt. He said taxation would be reversed from its current position where 70% of income tax is paid by workers, the unemployed, pensioners and 30% by business and the wealthy. And where 60% of the tax burden is carried by indirect taxation. These and other priorities would be enacted
'Directly. Without delay.'

The OECD says that in Greece, today, 17%, 1.7 million Greek people, do not have enough to eat. The delegation saw and heard that this figure is a serious underestimate. The reality is much worse - in every direction. For example 33% do not have health insurance which costs 400 Euros a month. (Pensions are now 500 Euros.) Primary care has gone. Childrens' vaccines cost 70 Euros each. Support for births costs 600 Euros, 1200 if you are not Greek or there are complications. One nurse in station for 47 patients during the day, 60 at night. No insurance - you pay. You do not pay -  then your income is taxed. You can't pay the tax they take your house or your car or you go to prison. Birth without money becomes criminal.
'What do you do about this?' the delegation asked.
'We break the law' said the nurses.

But when you have 1640 patents in an A&E with 5 nurses over 16 hours, even if you ignore the law, people die. The delegation learnt that each year gets worse and they saw the mental health patients lined up on both sides of two corridors on their trolleys, all of them quiet and still and unfocused, outside the 25 bed Psychiatric unit.

'The medical crisis' said the doctor 'has become a crisis of public health.'

Last year there was a 40% increase in infant mortality. Last year there were 300,000 official abortions (at 250 Euros each) and last year was the first year since the Nazis ruled Athens that more died in Greece than were born.

The delegates saw the new solidarity clinics. They saw clinics and pharmacies and solidarity markets where farmers provide produce directly to consumers and 2% is left for free distribution in the solidarity food, education and advice centres. They are all self managing. When a young man came to a clinic with no more money in his family for his leukaemia drugs, the clinic put out an appeal across the solidarity network. Sufferers sent small quantities of their own drugs. One women in her sixties sent two weeks worth. The clinic found out her address and thanked her but said she should not sacrifice herself. She said she was old and the young man needed to have a life.

Today the mass actions in the squares and the roads have diminished. But Syriza's polls go up and 3 million have used the solidarity network - born barely a year ago.

Solidarity not charity.
Rights not gifts.

Until people win a government and a state that will defend and carry out their human rights the solidarity movement helps people to stand up, to act, to carry their hopes into practice.

A student delegate said that what he saw was the endless groups of police, hanging around the city like groups of youths in a shopping centre.  Except they were armed for a public war, with machine guns and pistols, riot shields and gas and retractable metal batons that clicked above the noise of the streets as the bored, nervous police flicked them out and in - as their eyes flick about the street. A nurse told the delegation how her leg had been smashed by a policeman's boot as he had chased her into a hospital after a march broke up. They wait for the action to come.

If there is a new anti-memorandum, anti capitalist government in Greece in 2015 a new mass movement of millions of the Greek people will be needed to defend it and to ensure its direction is true. Similarly, those who are preparing; big capital, the police, the Colonels, Golden Dawn, the EU and IMF and even NATO; to defend their money-given right to rule, will need to be challenged by a European, even world wide movement in defence of the Greeks allowing them the space to become again, the hope of the world.







 

A 21st century cockpit of horror and hope

Consider. A small middle eastern town, bordered by dusty hills and a long wire fence is now at the centre of the whole world. We are following the story of the siege of Kobane by Islamic State and its defence by Syrian Kurds. Behind the fence separating Syria from Turkey are rows of US made tanks and howitzers, dug in less than a mile from the town. They point across the fence into Syria. 

In front of the border fence, battle has been raging for two weeks, most recently on the eastern side of Kobane. The street by street fighting follows on from days and nights of bombardment by I.S. using the tanks and cannon taken by them from the Iraqi army that fled from Mosul in northern Iraq. These weapons, like those of the Turks, were also made in the US. Meanwhile regular sorties of US led 'coalitiion' jet fighter/bombers fly overhead, pounding their missiles into the hills around Kobane that have been occupied by I.S. The Kurds in the streets of Kobane are the least well armed of all. They have no US militaria. They will get none. Their main weapon is the Kalashnikov rifle and some machine guns brought in from the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq.

The Turkish armed forces are watching their traditional enemy, the Kurds, having just broken off negotiations for measures of Kurdish autonomy in Turkey. The Turks fear that the Kurds of northern Syria, led primarily by the the Kurdistan Workers Party, the PKK, will join together in time with the Kurdish community in a disintegrated Iraq, and their Turkish based cousins, and create a new country, dividing up Turkey in the process. 

The US and now the UK's armchair general, the right honourable Philip Hammond, have already countenanced the fall of Kobane. They claim if Kobane falls it will not be significant in the big picture. They point to the disappearance of I.S.'s advances in northern Iraq demonstrating the impact of their coalition's fire power. Soon, they promise, it will be Syria's turn, where I.S. has its centre. Meanwhile the ariel defence of Kobane by the coalition's jets, let alone the idea of equipping the Kurds with weapons is an embarrassment for the US. 

Help for the Kurds offends Turkey, a key NATO link. NATO has already dubbed the PKK as a terrorist group to keep Turkey sweet and the US secretly opposes the Kurdish right to self determination across Turkey, northern Syria and northern Iraq. If I.S., defeat the Kurds in Kobane, it is therefore no bad thing, as far as the US/UK are concerned. It clears the decks and establishes who really has to be in charge. The West wants its victories on the ground firmly in the hands of its so well trained and financed Iraqi army and the ghostly shadows of the 'moderate', read pro West, Syrian opposition. And they know that will take a decade to set up that fantasy, if ever. 

Meanwhile like the Turkish leadership, Assad of Syria hopes his two enemies, I.S., and the Kurds grind each other to dust under the bombs of the third, the US. 

Of course if you live in Syria or Northern Iraq and you need to fight I.S. as they will cut your throat because you are a Shia, or a Christian, or for that matter the wrong type of Sunni, or even an atheist, everybody there knows that your best bet are the Kurds. 

Why? Because the social and political organisation of the Kurds is the most developed in terms of a model of the leadership of the whole of the Middle East. 

Kurdish history, in the Kurds' struggle for self determination, has passed through many stages. They have had to fight huge and bitter wars against many of the stooges that the West have used in the last century to prop up their interests in the Middle East. In the course of which the Kurd's minority status and constant political and military struggles have created a vision of not just national identity but a way of many different national identities and seperate cultural and religious groupings avoiding conflict and yet asserting a combined and collective right in the world. 

The Kurd's current negotiations with Turkey (if resumed) are for an autonomous and federal solution within the Turkish state. In Northern Iraq, the Kurdish enclave has established a similar entity, while committing to a federal Iraqi type solution. These are not theoretical observations by distant scholars. These ideas derive from the most 'concrete analysis of the concrete situation' and form a precious germ of the future for the whole of the Middle East. They potentially answer the failure of grotesque formulations such as those dreamed up regarding the question of Palestine, which is drowning in blood under the fantastical search for its two state solution. Yet the federal autonomy that the Kurds demand, within their wider nations and as a result of their history, includes their right, taken in practice in Iraq, to bear their own arms. These are potential models for a Jewish, indeed for any minority, seeking its assurance within a future United Arab federation of the Middle East. But the absolute precondition for such progress, and for that matter progress in Iraq and Syria, and against I.S. today, is complete and utter independence from the dinosaurs of the West - a truth that the Kurds have learned and re-learned.

Unhealthy secrets

The NHS is the biggest single market for health products in the world. There is a 360 degree attack underway against the NHS's public status - and it is ratcheting up. US firms that sell drugs and other aspects of health care like HCA International, and general companies with a medical section and an associated general investment arm like GHG, are 'front and centre' in the flock of vultures now circling the NHS - or already established within it. We know all this.

Less easy to know is who is on what side when it comes to defending the public Health Service. For instance while we know that Vince Cable is in charge of the big new plan between the EU and the US to force private competition into all state commissioning, and we also know that many Tory MPs have financial interests in the private health companies; on the other hand Andy Burnham, Labour's shadow minister for Health seems to be facing both ways. And he is not alone.

In Andy's case he told us at Labour's recent conference that Labour would
'Reinstate the NHS as our preferred provider. The public NHS; protected with Labour. Not for sale. Not now; not ever.' Andy got a cheer. He had forgotten that with health deficits all over the shop due to chronic underfunding and constant reorganisation, it is almost impossible for NHS bodies to bid for commissions. That's what happened to him in 2010 when as Health Minister he outsourced Hitchingbrooke hospital. He was quite right about the disastrous consequences though. The Care Quality Commission found a poor quality of care and Andy's junior now shadow minister, Jamie Reed, said in last week's Health Service Journal;
'This is exactly what we warned would always happen. David Cameron should learn this lesson ; privatising hospitals does not work . Patients pay the price.' (See Private Eye 1376.) Did Jamie send a memo to Andy too? Is Andy now warned?

This piece of crap would be laughable if it wasn't so depressing.

What is less laughable are the results of Gordon Brown's PFI experiments with the NHS. Labour leader Miliband announced at the conference an extra annual £2.5 billion for the NHS if Labour won the General Election. This is good as it will cover the £1.9 billion annual PFI bill for the NHS deals signed up by Labour. Labour committed the NHS to a total PFI bill of £63 billion stretching forward from April 2015.

More worrying still is the secret list. There is a quiet discussion going on in some major trade unions about the information recently uncovered by union researchers. At the moment union members in the know are being told that it cannot be used. Not only can the information not be brought into the light, it is also blunting the attack on the Tories over health. The researchers have discovered a long list of Labour MPs with connections to private health firms. This means some union leaders are shy about raising the equivalent Tory involvement. If their union research can dig up this new brand of Labour links then so can the Tory investigators. The Tories could then accuse Labour of being the same greedy unprincipled bastards as they are with an interest in a private NHS. And then where would we be?

Just as a small matter of information, Labour's list includes 'men of the people' like Blunkett and Prescott.

Can Labour really defend the NHS? What do you think?

A short essay on Parliament

We have had a referendum on Scottish independence. We are to have another, if the Tory party form any part of the government post May 2015, on membership of the EU. What do we imagine would happen if there were a referendum on austerity? Given the consensus of all the main Westminster parties, including the Labour Party, on continuing the austerity drive (and therefore the tacit agreement on the associated further redistribution of wealth and resources away from the majority to the rich) how could we even get to a referendum? When we see the immense debate about society and the future that the Scottish referendum stirred who would let that particular genii out of the bottle? You might say that the SNP's victories in Scotland forced the Scottish referendum and that UKIP forced the Tories to hold one on the EU. Do we need a new party in Britain to force the issue on austerity? Is it possible, even now, that Labour might be reformed? Or can the British Parliament be moved directly to ask the people whether to continue with austerity, given the solid unanimity of our present political leaderships? The question, how to win for the people against the establishment, including the main political groups dominating Parliament, is an old one.

There have been many arguments among socialists about Parliament down the years. For example it has long been a point of honour for genuine social democrats that western parliaments are the platform for the social and economic advance of the working class. The social democratic point of view therefore logically places their group of MPs at the very centre of their politics and sees election work as the main priority for action. 

In the late 19th and early 20th century Marx and then Lenin noted the limits of Parliamentary power within the capitalist system and therefore thought that Parliament, even with universal suffrage, could not generally act as the political agency for the transition to socialism. (To be strictly accurate, Marx's writing was ambiguous on this question in the case of Britain and the USA.)

In Lenin's writing his consideration of Parliament and the possibilities flowing from universal suffrage were a subordinate part of his theory of the state, and of the capitalist state in particular, based on Marx's writings about the Paris Commune. He argued that the democracy of parliamentary systems were crimped by the inability of Parliament to genuinely represent the whole of the working people, by its limited role in dealing with fundamental issues of society which were decided elsewhere and by the fact that its decisions were not carried through by the deciders but by inaccessible organisations and agencies that were part of the state and commanded by the ruling class and that therefore Parliament was unable to either to lead or to learn. It could not be either responsible or accountable. 

There are nevertheless continuing arguments among socialists who reject the social democratic philosophy and claim to be revolutionists, about the role of Parliament. For example, as recently as the early part of this century a group that emerged from the old 'Militant' / RSL (Revolutionary Socialist League) were still arguing that in Britain we needed a (radically reformed) Labour Party that would win a Parliamentary majority and then pass an enabling act that would allow for the nationalisation of the top 250 monopolies. Perhaps they are still around? This group either kept secret or had not considered their policy on the capitalist state as a whole in the transition to socialism. 

More familiar will be 'The British Road to Socialism', a strategy apparently personally endorsed by Stalin at the end of WW2. This rehearsed the main line of march of the pre WW1 German Social Democrats. The SDP planned to win a majority and pass socialist policies through Parliament. The British communists were given the role of hand maidens to the Labour Party in the British version ... And communist led trade unions and mass movements would also be required to buttress the action taken by a reformed Labour Party in Parliament. This latter idea was much more radical than the views of most European social democrats by 1945 and distinguished the communists from social democracy. 

'The British Road' was based on a certain view of the Attlee regime in 1945-48 and turned on the understanding that the Labour Party could and would continue to be transformed. Several famous Labour MPs tried to follow 'the British Road'. Mass trade union actions were built against the Heath government in the 1970s for example. The Daily Worker and the Morning Star were obligatory reading among the 250,000 strong shop stewards movement. All now long gone. But some of the older CP cadre and 'fellow travellers' still salute this approach, cautioning the rest of us for our impatience and minutely studying the Labour Party for any hopeful trends. 

Again, there is little reference in the 'British Road' to the limits of Parliament, the structural role of the capitalist state and the other ruling class agencies that actually control the country, let alone to the blindingly obvious direction that the real Labour Party has taken since the defeat of Bennism in the 1970s and 80s, a direction that has all but severed ithe party's ties with its historic class base.

But the critical consideration today, here and now, is not so much the objective limits of Parliament's attenuated and marginalised powers in modern global capitalism or the degeneration of Attlee's Labour Party. It is that the mass consciousness of the working class in Britain (parallel with most of the working class in France and Italy) has reached a deep understanding that Westminster and ALL the main parties will do nothing for them and instead belong to a political class that stand for themselves.  Scotland is an example of the fact that working class people, previously entirely alienated from Britain's political system, have started to identify with new ways to deal with Westminster's failure. 

It would be crude and false to say that Parliament has lost all significance for both major classes in Britain. Certainly the working class is not represented there. (It is a matter of historical analysis now, but there are strong arguments that Labour never represented the working class as such, rather that Labour was always the political twin of the huge and powerful bureaucratic leadership organised by the Tade Union leadership over decades.)  And the ruling class has not used Parliament to run the system for years. Nevertheless Parliament has been used, indeed forced into action, at key moments of crisis. For the ruling class there are moments when popular legitimacy is claimed through Parliament, as with Blair's Iraq war, in order to carry through painful and unpopular acts. In an exceptionally bold move, comparable with any of the most damatic moments of the whole twentieth century, £3 trillion, the largest sum of capital ever mobilised at one time by BritaIn, was rubber stamped for the defence of the banks if required, with Parliament's agreement. A few weeks ago Parliament agreed to restart bombing Iraq. 

This last case provides a useful example of how Parliament is utilised by the ruling class. The pressure came from the US, from NATO, from cross Atlantic security agencies and even from global oil companies, as well as some oil producers. They needed BritaIn to increase the world wide legitimacy of renewed war. Parliament was necessary. Which brings us to the question of how the working class interest has also effected and used Parliament.

Since 1968 Parliament was forced to support Britain's lack of involvement in the Vietnam war; it was forced to revoke Heath's Industrial Relations Act; it had to introduce Abortion and family planning rights and defend them at various junctures; it was forced to recognise the Equal Pay struggle, the long war with racism and discrimination and the battle for LGBT rights; it had to drop the Poll Tax (and Margeret Thatcher); the anti Iraq war movement came very close to outright victory - certainly finishing Blair and exposing Parliament's distance from popular opinion, and most recently the anti-war movement stopped the bombing of Syria. So Parliament can be pressurised by both classes and both classes can make advances through action to force Parliament. 

None of this is meant to suggest that Parliament is some kind of neutral institution, somehow separate from the capitalist state. Our rulers have the three mainstream parties, virtually all of the media and the money as well as the influence, personal networks and patronage when they require something specific from Parliament. Consequently Parliament does their bidding in 99 cases out of a100. But Parliament can be used to try and moderate the temperature in society, to release some of the steam, and, on occasion, when it has no other choice, accept that if it does not grant reform, it may get revolution. 

Can Parliament be used to overturn and recreate our society then? Is it a central part of a strategy to win change? 

Those who saw the reform of the Labour Party and its ability to take a new radical programme like 1945 to 48 through Parliament as a winnable objective are no longer a serious current of working class opinion. The Labour Party continues to move in one direction only. Parliament and all of its main parties are seen by a large section of the working class as part of their problem and not an answer to their difficulties. Because of the direction taken by Labour working class politics is now in serious flux. UKIP is the rightwing expression of the frustration of many English working class people. However some progressive political leaders of the working class are also emerging. They are evolving out of the struggles that working class people and their allies are having against austerity and war. Here and there new leaders of real stature become noticeable in society despite the trivialisation of life and the banal 'common sense' promoted by most of the millionaire mass media. As the battle with austerity organises and concentrates (today, only the People's Assembly is carrying out that task) so a new policy and a new active and front line leadership is emerging. 

Over the next years, perhaps decades of struggle, what is absolutely certain is change. But not the sort of change that can be sucked from a magician's thumb. Larger waves of protest and mass action of the working class and its allies may come to temporarily overwhelm Parliament again, as they have in the past. A new leadership might find a way to represent that movement and win to enough elections to be able to speak nationally from Parliament for the anti-austerity movement. Some of them might even be from the Labour Party, but we can be sure it would be from a Labour Party that was crashing. What is certain is that if a new leadership of a new working class movement in action did emerge and took that route into Parliament, its first priority would be for the creation of a completely new type of Parliament, one that was immediately accountable, that was able to master politics by breaking up the old state machine and the informal but deadly power of our current rulers; as well as taking the power to reorganise the economics of a new society while sharing the living standards, experiences, the life and the income of average working class people. 

There is a deep political crisis going on in Britain. The anti-austerity left need to understand and relate to that fact and start raising the discussion about what politics, what institutions, what forms of organisation would be required to defeat austerity and secure its alternative. We could start with the call for a referendum on austerity, a political call like others (on Scotland and the EU) that has the potential to regroup politics even amongst mainstream parties and, most importantly, awaken political and social enthusiasm for real politics among the mass of the people. 

A tale of two conferences

Jim McNaughty, the BBC Radio 4 journalist, was puzzled today by the ebulliance of the Tory party conference compared with Labour's conference last week. Labour are ahead in the polls. The Tory figures continue to flatline on 35 percent. But experienced commentators believed that the Tory conference felt like the party was expecting victory while Labour's conference had been an uncertain shambles. 

Miliband's fatuous speech may have something to do with it, while at least Tories can read autocues. But that seems a bit superficial! A more likely explanation (given that the main parties show little in their central policies - we will carry through austerity - we will save the NHS - that distinguishes them) is the shadow cast by the Scottish referendum. 

Despite Labour's official position in support of no, it is estimated that nearly a million previous Labour voters in Scotland voted yes. The Labour conference felt like the left in British society had just lost a key political fight and not at all as though the right had been held at the pass. The feeling, unlike the platform and Miliban's memory, was accurate. 

The Tories on the other hand sensed that the right in Britain had scored a major, if pyrrhic, victory. And that spurred them on, despite UKIP, in the belief that they could still win.

Feelings at party conferences are not significant in the broad political picture. But a certain sort of line in the sand has just been drawn across British political life for the next period; a line that shows where the new left in society is gathering and where the right will have to continue to make a stand. 

The meaning of Britain's political crisis.

The mechanics of Britain's blossoming political crisis are becoming more obvious. Lord Ashcroft, who funds the candidates in Tory marginals, doesn't think the Tories will win the next election. Pundits have decided that the next government will be another coalition. UKIP snaps at the heels of both Labour and the Tories. The Scottish referendum won't lie down and die. With whatever shade of government we get, there is an enormous crisis over Europe built into the first two years of the new Parliament. And we cannot forget the farce of the 700 plus House of Lords that represents nothing but itself and individual member's and parties' corruption. Finally there is the most vital consideration of all, the deep contempt, derision and alienation felt by millions for all MPs and for Parliament itself. 

This is a ruling class political crisis. But its mechanics do not tell anything like the whole story. As it is a ruling class crisis, it effects all of the society that they dominate. All classes, all sectors are touched, even violently perturbed, by its impact. The British economy, dominated by an overblown global-facing finance industry, will feel the tremors undermining Britain's much vaunted political stability. Scottish independence is not now off the agenda for 30 years. It has instead been firmly located on the political agenda for the next 10. As we examine all the main aspects of politics, economics and the wider society then we see that the Britsh ruling classes' political convulsions and decay mark everything and change everything for all classes in society.

The British labour and trade union movement experienced a deep crisis of direction in the late 1970s and 80's. It was an expression, albeit partial, of the political crisis of the working class at that point (which was itself a product of a new period of heightened class struggle after WW2.) In the event the labour movement bureaucracy was able to defeat, just about, the emerging class-struggle based left wing of the movement. And then Thatcher did the rest. Today it is absurd to imagine that Blair and now Miliband's Labour Party would be the fulcrum of such a key battle (although inevitably even the modern Labour Party would feel some impact should such a battle arise.) The Labour Party therefore is also part of this story. But what has brought about the weakness of Britain's main political institutions today? What has caused the British ruling classes' current political crisis? 

The political collapse in Britain is a result of the general crisis of political representation. This may be a common observation in the debate inside those political agencies that purport to argue for a working class position - but it is actually true of the whole of society. As parliament has expanded, as PM's question time has become more raucous, the actual power of Parliament and its leading parties, and their leaders, has diminished, under peacetime conditions, to a greater degree than at any time since the late 17th century. Globalisation, represented in Britain most exquisitely by the satiric title of 'The City of London' but underpinned by the slogan of all the mainstream parties that 'Britain is open for business', has torn away even the shreds of parliamentary power that was left after WW2. Political power, at least that part traditionally based on the popular vote and Parliament, has little current function in Britain. Of course the ruling class rules. Of course its networks and corporate alliances manage most of our world. But not much is left for elected politicians. 

It is true that Labour does not represent working class people. But In the wider scheme of things that is only a part of a greater totality which could be described (in large areas of the so called democratic west) as traditional 'demcratic' politics not representing society as a whole. Western democracy is failing. And so it becomes a show. Its participants become actors. The media platform is where the show is performed. On all decisive matters and now many subordinate issues, there are, in reality, huge arcs of agreement between main parties - if it is only the agreement that nothing can be done. Certainly nothing of the slightest strategic importance is decided, or mostly even debated, in Parliament.

There are partial reactions to this state of affairs all over the place, between and within different classes. UKIP is one. 'Let's do something! Anything to assert ourselves!' they cry. But these convulsive reactions to our dying democracies are, with the rare exception of the new left formations that are emerging directly from anti-austerity class struggle as with Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, full of dangerous baloney. They get nowhere near the main issue. They signal a ferocious step backwards to a place that never was.

When Parliament was reorganised as the instrument for a new ruling class in England at the end of the 17th century, secure in its compromise with the aristocracy and its new constitutional monarchy and its 'freedom' to trade, it was absolutely necessary for its real debates and for the decisions it had to make on the real and decisive issues, to express the united will of the whole new ruling class. The repeal of the Corn Laws; Imperial preference; working class franchise; all these matters were decisive for the whole of society and had to be organised politically through Parliament and by the ruling class. Latterly, the emergence of the working class, the Russian revolution, anti colonial struggles and women's suffrage meant that Parliament had to become the cockpit regulating key class relations in society. As it was in 1945 to 48 when it gave reform 'or they will give us revolution!' (Quinton Hogg 1943.) 

Today these historic functions have almost dwindled to nothing in Parliament. Repressive law is still relentlessly rolled out and that is a product of a desperately weakened organised labour movement. Parliament and its parties nod through wars with the odd honourable exception but never otherwise address the key issues in society. And at the margins, and always repressively, they still 'manage' outbreaks of domestic social and class struggle through their control of the police. Objectively the ruling class no longer needs Parliament (except to allow its more punitive actions some legitimacy) and the working class, in large part, no longer believes that Parliament and the main parties represented there can change anything important. 

Consider the two decisive issues of our time; the West's wars defending its industrial/military dominance in the world and, since 1978, the massive increase in social inequality. Neither of these questions are frontally addressed by Parliament. Neither of them are presented as the key issues of our time by any of the main parties. None of the mainstream parties have any serious difference on these questions with the others. Parliament and its parties are unable to decide on any aspect of ruling class behaviour in these fields (which is directed more from the Pentagon and the board rooms) and Parliament promotes nothing for the advance of the working class either. It seems that a shaky and rapidly eroding status quo is all that is available to the overwhelming majority in our society - at least from today's Parliament and its mainstream parties. This is the crisis of ruling class politics which has such an effect on both of society's major classes. 

We need some representatives who will speak for the working class and a new democracy.

Welfare crime committed by Osborne

It is significant that Osborne's latest crime against the poorest in society is being promoted by him not as a sad necessity but as a Conservative Party Conference cherry, designed to keep Tory votes and possibly win Labour votes. Why is this possible? Because just as with reducing immigrants, official Labour joined the race with the other mainstream parties to attack welfare 'scroungers.' There was no immediate response from Labour in defence of the poor, or indication that they would reverse this latest Tory drive to increase poverty and immiseration. Osborne's measures are therefore more accurately called a completely mainstream, cross-Westminster party drive to squeeze the poorest, 'until the pips squeak.' The Westminster coalition is much wider than just the government. 

But the dynamics in wider society are shifting and Osborne et al have made a mistake. In Scotland the referendum drew out thousands of those at the poorest margins of society. New social actions, in housing, in defence of hospitals etc., are breaking through, led by groups that traditionally had been excluded from participation in the national debates that have swirled around single mothers, the unemployed, criminalised youth and the millions on the minumum wage or less. The general public now know that the majority in receipt of benefits are the working poor. They are aware of food banks. They know child poverty is increasing dramatically. They watched the TV debates about Benefit Street. They heard the teachers who tell us their pupils need food when they come to school. Bashing welfare is no longer the star turn it once was. 

So the debate is turning again, albeit belatedly, in Westminster. Not against austerity as such in any of the three mainstream parties, (although it is virtually the main feature of all extra parliamentary activity.)  But rather the establishment's discussion centres on austerity's 'distribution.' Even Osborne has to bash the US multinationals over tax in his speech. And some 'experts' are publicly wondering if pensions can continue to be let off 'so lightly'. (But pension changes - in terms of the delays in the access to them, and their low levels compared with most of the rest of Europe - have already provided an additional £500 billion saving to the state over the next 20 years according to the Institute of Fiscal Affairs. Additionally pensioners remain active politically, and those beneath pension age know it was not pensioners that pulled up the ladder.)

With roughly £25 billion already cut and £25 billion to go - none of the pro-austerity options for part two of Osborne's plan or Ball's repeated commitment to no new spending and no reversing the cuts already made, are looking feasible, let alone bearable. The sense of the need for a deep alternative direction is growing. Those who require welfare are increasingly forcing themselves into the argument. We need some new politicians to give the real political life of the country some expression. 

Britain bombs Iraq.

News just in tells us that two British Tornados are off to join the cloud of warplanes above Iraq. The new Iraqi government, that the US has just bought, were told to ask for Britain's feeble support by their masters in the Pentagon. The UK's modicum of high explosive now targeted for Syria and Iraq would not normally give rise to so much as a text message request from a minor Bagdad civil servant in terms of its fire power. But it is, apparently, the UK's wisdom and historical experience in Iraq that was the clincher for Iraq's new Foreign Minister. Perhaps he means the experience of Britain's involvement in Iraq's 36 wars and armed conflicts which, starting with Britain's war against the Iraqi revolution in 1920 (where Britain used some of the stock of poison gas left over from WW1) has involved Britain many times in Iraq's destiny. Such wisdom! Such experience! 

Cameron is not so much interested in Iraq's future as in the future of oil and his relations with the US. He has started to march to the Pentagon's war drum because the US has called. It is a political matter of the continued legitimacy of the whole western debacle in the Middle East that is at stake for the US, and Britain's involvement (or not) in the current charade remains essential for that purpose. 

The military geniuses into whose hands the west's 'fly boys' and their weaponry have been put have already ordererd up the bombing of bits of Syria as well as Iraq. And already we have seen not so much 'mission creep' as mission 'skid'. US ships have 'diverted' some tomahawks to have a high explosive pop at a new group of snarling Islamists that they have called the 'Khorasan'. This little side show was necessary because the Khorasan (that no one with knowlege in the field as ever heard of) were about to move on the US we were told. We might wonder who else will need 'tidying up' on the margins before this latest rain of death is over? 

The word from one expert from the Royal United Services Institute (Today, BBC Radio 4, Sept 27) suggests that the current IS offensive against the Syrian-Kurdish town Kobane is a reaction to the IS having to abandon set bases and concentrate in battle - preventing 'clean' and 'surgical' responses from the US and its allies. And that more rolling offensives are likely to be IS's response to attacks from the air. The US led war has already created the first tentative moves for a common front by all the Syrian jihadis against the West's intervention; a disasterous result for the Syrian people. 

As more civilians die, as more particular scores are settled by annihilation, so the Brits will find that they have been hustled into promoting another disaster for all concerned. Blaire's enthusiastic 'hurrahs' from the sideline tell it all. 

Once as tragedy; once as Farage

UKIP's head honcho believes Cameron has called Parliament back today to take the vote on bombing Iraq (rather than yesterday or last month) to draw media attention away from the UKIP party conference - which opens today, appropriately enough in Doncaster Racecourse. 

Apparently 33 percent of the population regarded Farage as 'weird', which is some solace to Labour as only 31 percent thought Miliband 'weird'. Unfortunately for both Miliband and Cameron, Farage scores highest as the politician who 'comes across most like me' in the same poll. And that is one of Mr Farage's most important qualities. Despite being a rich banker with funds in a tax haven, who does TV adverts for Paddy Hill, Farage has that chameleon quality where many utterly disgusted or disassociated with Westminster politics in England can find in him their own reflection in his 'hale fellow, well met' persona and his amusement with mainstream politics and politicians. His amusement is really cynicism. His cheery bonhomie covers his contempt even hatred for the 'common man' as he would have it, and a deep, not to say furious commitment to complete the Thatcherite revolution. 

It is obvious why such a personality (just like London's 'cheery' Boris) would sound like chalk screeching on a blackboard to Scottish voters - especially those who voted yes in the recent referendum. Their withdrawal from Westminster has a positive, humanitarian and progressive project to define their political choices. Farage appears to them as he is, a rich man taking the piss. To dispossessed and long term ex Labour voters, and even the swathes of Labour voters in northern England and the sea-side towns who have continued up to now to turn out for Labour, a vote for Farage may in reality be an exercise in their own sense of worthlessness and alienation, but it will feel like it is they who are now taking the piss out of Westminster and all of the mainstream political leaders in the British establishment. 

This is Farage's access to elements of mass and class psychology today. He acts for many as the lightning rod for feelings of invisibility, of lack of representIon, of despair. His conference policies will mean little except in their ability to increase fear of foreigners. The tax policies for middle earners will make few inroads among public sector workers who have a real fight on their hands battling austerity. His opposition to today's decision by Parliament to bomb Iraq will not attract a single anti-war activist vote. 'England for the English; hurrah! Thank God we can now say it out loud! And Farage himself, dead weird he is, like me. He'll get right up their noses.' 

Labour has no answer to any of this. It endorses the second (more brutal) half of austerity. It wants British jobs for British workers. It fancies sending messages of death to the Middle East. And Miliband may be weird, but in the wrong way. What the Scottish referendum showed is that when leaders call the people together to fight the establishment, to really move, in action, to take them on for specific and concrete and life changing aims, the sky (way beyond UKIP's dismal dance in the gutter) really is the limit. 

The West's permanent war

In what the media are beginning to call Gulf War 3, the US are leading yet another wave of western destruction in the Middle East. The one time that Labour Party leader Miliband could actually do something significant to effect peoples' lives he bottles it, and the Labour opposition will back Cameron's desire to jump on the US bandwagon, and Britain (of course) will tag along. 

The most recent of the West's wars in the Middle East has lasted on and off, in different phases, for twenty four years. The 8 year war to overthrow the earlier western puppet Saddam Hussain (2003 - 11), itself a maelstrom of death and destruction, has directly created the conditions for the most recent eruptions. And the West's permanent war in the Middle East is now to be upped yet again as another rain of missiles, rockets and bombs stamp their deadly authority on foreign soil. 

The Middle East is a permanent target for the west because of oil (of course), because of 9/11, because the West needs to 'encourager les autres' and because the Middle East is virtually owned by Western Imperialism. The Brits, the French and the US have between them set up virtually all of the countries in the region and, over the last century, populated their ruling houses. The west needs to keep 'tinkering.' The set up they created keeps fraying, first at the edges and then falling apart. 

But the mechanism is bust. As all the western war mongering has already revealed you cannot burn, bomb and torture the missshapen Frankenstine that you have created (and continue to create) into life. Instead your interventions, piling mistake onto mistake, just create new versions of hell. 

Surely the first humanitarian 'task' for the world to achieve is to get the west out of the Middle East. The local tumult, even civil wars will continue and may even spread on such an exit.  Genuine humanitarian aid - as in the Syrian case today - will be essential. But without the direct, constant and deadly pressure of the western imperialist war machine there is at least a chance that the nations and peoples' of the Middle East will find their way to a transregional and muti-ethnic and multi-faith solution. The faint echoes of the historical goal of the first revolutionary nationalists that fought imperialism in the 19th and early 20th century for a united Arab nation in the Middle East, can stiil be heard even now. For example while the sectarian warlords of IS face the west's technological terror with their own medieval brutality even in that repository of reaction the urge for a new Caliphate, a new, wide, Arabic centred civilisation surfaces, albeit in a distorted form. Even in the dust of destruction there can be building blocks for the future, if we can stop the west's latest bout of military madness.

Miliband's ten year plan.

Miliband senior was no Stalinist so Ed didn't get his idea for a plan from dad. Commentators round the Labour Party Conference in Manchester made some sad jokes about Stalin only having 5 year plans. Was the steely Miliband twice as good? 

Stalin and his successors had a lot to answer for as a result of their undemocratic, brutal and often disastrous planning regime, but at least the memory of the revolution had given them some ambition!  Miliband's ten year plan proposed meagre outcomes and contained no planning whatsoever.

The only significant suggestions that Miliband made were that his NHS proposals (for 36000 new personnel by 2025, when the projected population rise will mean Miliband's plan will provide about the same ratio of NHS staff to patients as now) would not require any increase of the deficit. Tax loopholes would be closed (again.) Houses valued £2 million plus would attract tax (the LibDem policy) and tobacco companies would face a profit tax. (Unless they were centred in a British tax haven.)  The rest, like a Green Bank or an unspecified housing policy that would provide 'as many houses as we need' by 2025, were purest fluff, or, like the reaction to Miliband's statement that his plan was to deal with 'the biggest fall in living standards since 1871' there would be a 'bigger reform of banks' and that the 'unions and government should cooperate.' As Balls made clear yesterday, unions will need to cooperate with austerity for the foreseeable future. 

Miliband junior is no Marxist. Nevertheless you would have expected him to make an attempt at a link between the economy and his political and social projects, however empty they may be. Admittedly Miliband understood some of the lessons from the recent Scottish independence vote and proposes enfranchising 16 and 17 year olds. (One wonders if they will lose their vote again if they refuse a £3 per hour apprenticeship - also to be widely 'on offer'.) He has also honoured a new factotum aiming to bring the rest of the world up to speed with Britain's apparently enlightened LGBT policy! But nowhere in his epic peroration did he tell us Labour's 2 year, 5 year or 10 year plan to shift the wealth and power between the super rich - getting richer, and the rest of us. What will he DO about the £ billions of NHS resources now in the hands of the privateers?: what will he do about the annual £4 billion subsidy to the private railways - for an overcrowded and overpriced service?: what does his ten year plan say about wage freezes; anti union laws; foreign wars and the £40 billion cost of nukes? Nothing. They are not part of Ed's 10 year plan. They are all part of the 'business as usual' silent part of his speech. 

Miliband hopes that his £2.5 billion a year for the NHS (which will not cover the planned £20 billion deficit in 2015) and his promise that he is sticking to the EU will cover both the working class vote AND big business's interests. 'We'll do it together' he says. Do what? Plan to keep the status quo. Plan to get Miliband into number 10. But I'm afraid Ed, it's all gone much further than you planned. 

Miliband - the firebrand fizzles out

Miliband speaks tomorrow at the Labour Party conference. He was advised to say something bold last weekend by his advisors in order to shake the media clear of Cameron's 'battle for England' and turn attention Manchester-wards.

His announcement, that a Labour government would increase the minimum wage to £8 an hour by 2020, did produce a flurry of interviews with assorted Mancunian youth, working in fast food chains, all saying that yes, £8 would be better than £6.50 (the minimum wage as of the end of October '14). It was 'not good enough' fumed Miliband, that one in five people in the UK were on low pay. His proposed increase would be higher than the rate of inflation. 

The current inflation rate (August) is 1.5 percent. Miliband's raises will be higher. But every Economist and certainly every low paid worker knows that a percentage increase, even one slightly higher than  our currently record low inflation figure, but that starts from a very low pay baseline, is guaranteed to amount to peanuts.

Miliband's legal minimum wage - will rise by 30p an hour each year for the next five years. (Of course this legal minimum is only one of the 'legal minimums.' If you are forced to take a full time working apprenticeship you are on a 'legal minimum' of under £3 per hour.) But just in case this lurch to the left by the worker's friend, Miliband, worries the bankers, shadow Chancellor Balls will announce today that Child Allowance will be frozen for years. 

Who are these people? 

On October 18 we must march against austerity among other things to make sure that the TUC stands by its policy of £10 an hour for the minimum wage today! 

The UK's political system is in big trouble

One theme that has been picked up by this blog (among other sources) is Britain's political crisis. (See 30/5 and 5/6.)

There is a new twist in this story but before looking at this in detail it is worth stepping back for a moment to consider what is at stake. It has been the proud boast of British capital for more than a century that it has established a secure, stable and flexible set of state institutions that have always been the 'envy of the world.' From 'the mother of parliaments' to the incorruptible civil service, British rulers have managed to crow about their historical achievements most credibly in the political sphere. Political stability; no domestic revolutions for centuries; checks and balances; ingenious compromises like the House of Lords; a well worn route for the most trusted candidates to gain access to state and judicial power via specific schools and universities; incorporation of potentially disruptive forces (e.g. women and labour); avoidance of either communism or fascism; this is the package that sells the City of London to Arab Sheiks and Russian billionaires. 

Of course for centuries imperial Britain exported its corruption to its overseas possessions, along with its savage, counter-revolutionary violence and despotism. That allowed the political state 'at home' to retain its liberal fringe and meant that any poison in particular institutions was definitely the product of the odd 'rotten apple' rather than an endemic feature of the whole hypocritical set up.  Britain's imperial enterprise is dying (although its wars, its financial chicanery, its slavish association with the US and its continued possession of most of the world's tax havens, still exports poverty and chaos to parts of the world.) And Britain's political system, embedded in its state machine, is beginning to show signs of wear and tear.

What to do in England, Wales and Northern Ireland after Scotland's referendum? A large part of the 1.6 million Scots voted yes because they despise Westminster politics, politicians and control. This popular mass movement generated (even in the account given by the leaders of the no campaign) a tremendous and unparalleled surge of political interest and participation in Scotland. These two facts, the rebelliousness of a significant and mainly working class section of the Scottish population and the fact that they had access to the means, at least start to carry out their rebellion, have thrown British politics into a new turmoil. Cameron short sightedly wants to make Labour pay for their devolution experiment by slicing away any potential Labour control over the whole of Westminster's business from now on. He also believes that waving the English flag will stem UKIP. 

Cameron's clownish response has the potential to do serious damage to political stability by strengthening Britain's right wing in a contest to promote Englishness and the English. If he gets away with it he will have also contributed to the beginning of the dissolution of the Labour Party as it would no longer offer a route to national, institutional, political influence and thereby begin to dissolve the main raison d'etre for a large part of the labour bureaucracy. Under conditions of the likely continuation of a coalition government after May 2015, AND the EU referendum, the famous and historic British political stability, will begin to look distinctly like a thing of the past. And the City (whose base is paradoxically entirely global despite its highly valued British credentials) would consider its next move.   

Britain has not been in a political crisis like this since the need for the National Government in the 1930s but this time Britain is without the immense resources available to underpin bold political manouvres and shore up the system. 

The contest between Britan's classes has now very prominently spilled into the establishment's political sphere - an arena which despite, or perhaps more accurately, because of the new Labour Party, is virtually unavailable to the modern working class. The Scots have challanged all that.  It is now more critical than ever that there are some voices in this unfolding crisis who, by the elections next May, have the credibility and political reach to represent those who want an end to austerity and a chance for a fresh start. We urgently need new voices to be heard from inside the new mainstream political arena as the ruler's crisis unfolds and, as Scotland shows, that will be based on a mass movement that is capable of creating its own new political reality.