In his preface to the new Ofsted report on the “most able” school students, the organisation’s head, Michael Wilshaw, says:

Almost two thirds (65%) of high-attaining pupils leaving primary school, securing Level 5 in both English and mathematics, did not reach an A* or A grade in both these GCSE subjects in 2012 in non-selective secondary schools. This represented over 65,000 students…

These outcomes are unacceptable in an increasingly competitive world. If we are to succeed as an economy and society, we have to make more of our most able young people.

Now, Michael Wilshaw has a record both of being poor at maths, and of dishonest presentation of research findings, but this new report (and the fact that his organisation has devoted an expensive research project to it) takes things to a new level.

Let me explain.

The challenge to non-selective schools set out in the new report is that, in order for their outcomes to be “acceptable”, they will need a marked increase in the percentage of students who gain level 5 at primary school who go on to get A or A* at GCSE. (The accompanying media coverage even provides a comparator: 59% of selective school students getting level 5 at primary school then go on to get A or A* at GCSE.)

That sounds reasonable, except that it is a mathematically impossible challenge.

The simplest way to show this is to quote from Ofqual’s initial report into the 2012 GCSE grading scandal:

“The comparable outcomes process will produce similar results year-on-year if the cohort for the subject is similar, in terms of ability, in each year.”

Now, each school year (cohort) is measured for similarity of ability by looking at the SATS levels achieved at the end of primary school. What the comparable outcomes process then does is to adjust the grade boundaries up or down so that more or less the same percentages get the same grades each year (see note 1 below).

Thus, as Fiona Millar has explained:

A prediction about GCSEs is made based on the KS2 results of the cohort in question. If that cohort exceeds expectations then the English exam regulator forces down the GCSE grades to bring them into line with predictions…

But if GCSE results are based on KS2 predictions, how can schools do what is expected of them in terms of the performance tables, RAISEonline and Ofsted? All these key measures of accountability rest on how well schools enable their pupils to make progress from KS2.

The idea that non-selective schools can ever significantly, as an overall group, increase top grade percentages for level 5 students is therefore, mathematically, an absurdity. Certainly, some schools may (and do) improve their percentages, but logic dictates that this must always be at the expense of other schools, whose percentages of higher grades must drop (see note 2 below).

None of this is to say that comprehensive schools shouldn’t be doing their best for the most able students, but for the challenge to be properly set grading will need to reflect the actual achievement by those students, rather than the achievement exam boards decide students should be achieving on the basis of data from 5 years earlier, quite irrespective of what secondary schools do for them in the meantime.

For Wilshaw to set the comprehensive system up to fail in this way – either through ignorance of the way the current exam grading system works, or as deliberate chicanery in support of the Gove ‘revolution’ – is itself “unacceptable”.

Perhaps even worse, education journalists are falling for it all hook, line and sinker.

Note 1: More recent, possibly unwitting, evidence of the way in which grade boundaries are adjusted to ensure that similar percentages of students get the same grades comes from exam board Edexcel’s blogpost in the aftermath of last week’s A level Maths paper problems:

When examiners write a question paper they try to make sure they’re of a similar standard to previous question papers. However, they can’t know before the exam is taken how students will perform, or which questions they’ll find easy or hard.

So, once all the papers have been marked, senior examiners decide grade boundaries – the minimum mark you need to get a certain grade. The grade boundaries are always set for individual papers, based on student responses and statistical analysis. This helps us to ensure that students are rewarded fairly for their performance, regardless of which exam paper they sat.

This process happens after every exam session and this year’s C3 paper will be no different. If there is evidence that the exam you took was more challenging, the grade boundaries will reflect this.

Note 2: Grammar schools may be top of the pile at the moment, but as their student numbers amount to less than 20% of those in non-selective schools, even a massive drop in their top grade achievement would create little ‘space’ for non-selective school to “achieve into”. In any event, such a drop is massively unlikely, not least given the fact that selective schools get to select the primary school pupils who achieve right at the top of level 5 (a broad level which is itself separated into three sub-levels).

Further, as the Sutton Trust has made clear, even the higher performing non-selective schools are, in reality, deeply socially selective, meaning that if they increase their A/A* outcomes for primary school level 5 students, they will do so disproportionately at the expense of poorer students.

The post Ofsted: Setting comprehensive schools up to fail appeared on Socialist Unity.

This is a message/statement to all those people who have been organising clean ups and/or picking up litter. We have been overwhelmed with messages from people who have been doing this and thinking it means they are being supportive. Whilst we appreciate your well-intentioned sentiments, and efforts to help our communities be clean, we feel like we need to explain how this is actually the opposite of being supportive.

A strike is used when all other methods (e.g. negotiations etc.) have failed. It is the last resort, and means that workers democratically and collectively decide to withdraw their labour (this means workers do not get paid and do not work) in order to pressure their employer to give in to their demands. With something as emotive as rubbish, we recognise that this can mean we are potentially in a strong position, as us not working is instantly noticeable and inconvenient and disruptive for people. This puts even more pressure on the employer and hopefully makes them more willing to negotiate, and change/withdraw what they are proposing. This is the whole purpose and aim of a strike. Any attempts to lessen the impact of a strike completely undermines our action. (Also, refuse collection and street cleaning can be a dirty and dangerous job. We receive training and adequate protective equipment to enable us to do this safely and we certainly do not want any residents to be injured by carrying out our work for free.)

We wholly recognise that Brighton is not a pleasant place to be at the moment, and we apologise to all residents for the state of our city and for the inconvenience caused to you by this disruption. However, please remember that we are residents here too, and we also would like to live in a clean city and return to doing our work as soon as possible to make this the case. But the council are threatening to cut our take home pay by a substantial amount of money and we feel this is the only course of action left available to us to defend our wages. Therefore, if you would like to support us, the best thing you can do is to support us in our action – which means not carrying out the work that we would normally do. This will add to the pressure on the council to withdraw their threats to cut our pay. Hopefully then the strike can be over as soon as possible – which is the thing we can all agree that we all want – and we can return to our jobs and get working on getting our city cleaned up again. Thank you for your support.

.

The post Statement on Brighton community clean ups appeared on Socialist Unity.

Tony adds:

The post GMB members at Brighton CityClean on the march appeared on Socialist Unity.

There is no doubt the Caroline Lucas is not only the best known Green Party member in Britain, but that she is also one of the most widely respected politicians in Parliament, having won a hatful of awards (the Observer’s ‘Politician of the Year’ three times and the Independent’s ‘Best UK Politician’ in 2010, for example). It is therefore quite extraordinary that at its meeting on Saturday, the Green Party’s Executive Committee defeated a resolution backing her and Brighton Green Party in their support of the CityClean workers.

Despite the severity of the mess into which Jason Kitcat and his bare majority of the Green Group on the Council have got the party, the crisis was not even on the published agenda of the Executive and was only discussed at the insistence of one of its minority of Green Left members. A resolution supporting Lucas and the local Green Party in their backing of the CityClean workers was defeated.

The party leader, Natalie Bennett, proposed that the Executive simply minute that ‘Brighton was discussed’. After some discussion this was extended to a daring statement that the dispute in Brighton was discussed and that GPEX encouraged all parties to negotiate. After much more debate and a very close vote, it was finally agreed that the minutes should include an additional statement ‘encouraging the involvement of ACAS should it become necessary’.

Notwithstanding the deep personal commitment to socialist ideas of many on the left of the party and their protestations that the GPEW is different from Green parties elsewhere, the disgraceful behaviour of the Green Group on Brighton Council and the refusal of the national party to do anything about it suggests that, when push comes to shove, they are wrong.

The brutal truth that this mess reveals is, of course, that despite having a very good left MP and despite the best efforts and protestations of a small group of socialists in the party, it IS fundamentally like all the other green parties that it has sought to differentiate itself from for the past few years.

Open letter to Jason Kitcat

Dear Jason,

We are fellow members of the Green Party from all over the country who have been watching events in Brighton & Hove with growing horror. We have watched as you persuaded Green Councillors to vote with Tories to hand over control of negotiations on council workers’ pay and conditions to senior (and very well paid) officers. We have watched while very modestly paid workers in CityClean, doing hard and unpleasant, but essential, work for the community, were ‘offered’ pay cuts of, in some cases, several thousand pounds. We have watched while you have ignored the clearly expressed views of Brighton Green Party, Brighton’s Green MP and a significant number of your fellow Green councillors. We have watched while a group of workers have been forced into taking strike action against a Green Council – a Green Council! – in order to defend their livelihoods. We cannot watch silently any longer.

Jason, you do not speak for the Green Party – neither in Brighton nor in the country as a whole. Your determination not to admit that you are wrong and your refusal to accept the democratically decided policy of your own local party are bringing the Green Party into disrepute everywhere. Unless you are prepared – even at this late moment – to change course, we believe the best thing that you can do for our Party is to resign.

Yours sincerely,

Sean Thompson
(and fifteen others)

The post Brighton: Green Party Executive paralysed + open letter to Jason Kitcat appeared on Socialist Unity.

Here’s a brief synopsis:

‘The Gaza border, January 2009, just before the IDF launches a land invasion of the Gaza Strip as part of Operation Cast Lead – Israel’s land, sea and air assault designed to destroy the capability of the Palestinian resistance to launch rockets at Israeli towns and settlements adjacent to the Strip.

Waiting for the Israelis are members of the Palestinian resistance. Among them is 22 year old Azzam. On the other side, waiting to begin the assault with IDF’s elite Golani Brigade, is Gabi.

The story of both men unfolds in the hours preceding the assault. It is the story of a decades long struggle between two peoples who refuse to accept they are the Children of a Lesser God.’

The post Children of a Lesser God appeared on Socialist Unity.

It’s ridiculous. If you’re a classroom teacher working in England you have a choice of three TUC-affiliated unions competing for your membership. If you’re a teacher in Wales you have a choice of four. That could mean separate union notice boards, separate teacher union reps, separate workplace union meetings – and that’s just the teaching staff. It’s wasteful of resources and more importantly, time and again, employers and government have exploited these divisions to the detriment of both teachers and state education.

The Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) evolved from professional associations based in the old grammar schools but nowadays recruits in all sectors including colleges. The National Association of Schoolmasters, Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) is an amalgam of a 1920s breakaway from the NUT by male teachers opposed to equal pay for women teachers, and a union of female teachers who campaigned for equal pay. It tends to be stronger in the secondary schools. The National Union of Teachers (NUT) was formed by the coming together of geographically based teacher associations in the Victorian era to end the scourge of ‘Payment by Results’ (now reborn as performance-related-pay in this neo-liberal era).

Back in 2003, the then TUC general secretary Brendan Barber wrote In the NASUWT magazine Teaching Today; “Having worked with the (teacher) unions quite closely on different issues over the years, it seems to me inexplicable why there should be this organisational difference . . . The people they serve are pretty much identical . . . there are some differences but the common issues absolutely overwhelmingly outweigh their differences.”

Perpetrators of ‘betrayal’

Writing in Education for Tomorrow (81) the next year, Bill Greenshields, (NUT president 2008-09) commented;

“Remember the ‘gladiator’ scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian in which a nervous Brian approaches a small group of revolutionaries to ask hesitantly, ‘Are you the Judean Popular Front?’ ‘Fuck off!’ comes the indignant reply from their Leader, ‘We’re the Popular Front of Judea!’

“Now ‘fast-forward’ to the 21st Century in Britain, with the three main teachers’ unions about to meet separately at their National Conferences.

Three unions divided, apparently more seriously than ever in recent times, in terms of policy, activity and organisation.

“The NUT has for some months publicly attacked its teacher TUC fellow affiliates as ‘Government Unions’ and latterly as perpetrators of ‘betrayal’. The NASUWT has recently responded with a communication to all its members asking ‘Has The NUT gone NUTs?’, and has followed this up with an instruction to all their full-time and lay Officers and Officials to withdraw from all joint working with the NUT. References in their material suggest that the ATL shares their view, and may be about to say so publicly.”

Since then we’ve had a change of government, further attacks and joint industrial action by first the ATL and the NUT, with the NASUWT abstaining, and then by the NASUWT and the NUT with the ATL abstaining.

In 1996 an organisation was set up to promote professional unity amongst teachers. First named ‘Professional Unity 2000’ and then relaunched as ‘UNIFY – one education union’, Its organising secretary is Hank Roberts, a member of all three unions and currently national president of the ATL. At the UNIFY AGM in 2012 he reported;

“In 2002, the teachers’ unions came close to unity. The NASUWT general secretary Eamonn O’Kane supported it, as did the NASUWT officers. The ATL general-secretary Peter Smith was in favour. The NUT had professional unity as its policy. An independent TES survey showed a majority of the members of all unions in favour. The media had it as a done deal. Unfortunately it fell at the last hurdle.
“If it had succeeded would we have been in a better position today? Would it be Nirvana? – certainly not. We would still have serious problems. The neo-liberal privatising agenda would still be being pressed by finance capital – the super rich and their government. But we would have been better placed and more successful in our resistance.”

Merger

The recent merger of the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE) and the Association of University Teachers (AUT) to create the University and College Union (UCU), should have set an example to schoolteachers. On a whole series of issues teacher unions have been victims of government divide and rule tactics. With thousands facing pay cuts and reduced promotion opportunities as management allowances are scrapped and replaced with teaching and learning responsibilities, schools are thrown into chaos, teacher unions snipe at one another over who’s to blame and the government gets on with its anti-democratic, anti-working class, pro-elitist education privatisation agenda unhindered.

“With trade unions merging at an unprecedented rate, school teacher unions alone continue to defy gravity,” commented Hank.

Yet at a local and workplace level there’s near unanimity over what needs to be done and staff can find ways to overcome these national organisational differences. Campaigns against academies and free schools have been successful in at least slowing down the pace of privatisation and have brought new forces into the struggle.

The joint action by the NASUWT and the NUT in defence of pay, conditions of service and pension rights has been a hard fought-for advance. As Kevin Courtney, NUT Deputy Gen-eral Secretary, wrote in the Summer 2013 issue of Education for Tomorrow:

“Unity in action between the NUT and NASUWT, representing the vast majority of classroom teachers is our best hope to protect teachers and defend education. All the elements of our joint campaigns – the rallies, the action short of strike and the programme of strike action – are important parts of trying to change the balance of forces in the argument with Government. NUT and NASUWT activists need to be planning together at every level on how best to take this campaign forward.

“It won’t be easy and will require much work but who ever told us trades unionism and the defence of our education service would be easy?”

Martin Brown (Editor, Education for Tomorrow)

EDUCATION FOR TOMORROW is produced by a collective of teachers of like mind most of the time and certainly on all vital matters of education and politics. It does not claim to represent any political party of the working class. Nonetheless its aim is at all times to speak in the interests of that class and indeed of all working people. Visit the Education for Tomorrow website here.

The post Defying gravity – the teacher unions appeared on Socialist Unity.

I first came across Anne Marie Waters when she put herself forwards for the South Swindon selection, and very unusually for a Labour politician Waters gave as her personal reference a Central Committee member of the Worker Communist Party of Iran, Maryam Namazie. It was also very difficult to get a straight answer from Ms Waters what she actually does for a living, and how it is funded.

Both Namazie and Anne Marie Waters signed a letter in 2010 to the Guardian opposing the state visit of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI to the UK.

In February 2013 Anne Marie Waters appeared in a short Channel 4 film, where she made alarmist, ill-informed and dangerous remarks about immigration – view it here. Anne Marie Waters self-describes herself in the film as “an anti-Sharia campaigner”, and says that Islam is a religion that, in her words, is “new to Europe”, and that she “is frightened of”. In the film she makes it clear that she thinks that religiously observant Muslims should leave the UK.

The campaign that Waters is co-director of, One Law for All, wants to see Sharia law outlawed in the UK, as Anne Marie Waters makes clear in this article from February 2013. Her arguments for it are completely inflammatory, implying that the most extremist views of some Muslims characterise all who hold that faith. It is clear from this article that the views of Anne Marie Waters are as ignorant and extreme as those of “Tommy Robinson” of the EDL.

Bizarrely, Waters knows very little about the subject she has devoted her life to. She seems to believe that Female Genital Mutilation is a practice deriving from Islam, when it is actually a cultural practice dating back some millennia, and practised in a wide arc across North Africa, by people of many different religions, including Christianity. It is in any event already illegal in the UK, and all that is needed is for the current law to be enforced.

She seems to believe that women are coerced into using Sharia courts, but actually for someone who – for example – wants to remarry within her own religious community, getting an Islamic divorce may be a prerequisite. I discussed this question in this article from 2008, in response to very cogently argued remarks by Dr Rowan Williams.

To outlaw the exercise of religious authority within a faith community would be tantamount to a state ban on organised religions.

We must recognise that people who choose to self-identify with a religious community, and its associated laws and ethics have a right to do so. The actual, and so far relatively successful, experience of multi-culturalism and convergence towards consensual liberal values in British society has not been on the basis of any campaign for secularism, but has succeeded by offering choice and empowerment.

The issue here is not only that the views of the “One Law for All” campaign are dangerous in a society experiencing a rising tide of Islamophobia and intolerance – giving a cod-leftist gloss to the rantings of the ‘counter-Jihad’ movement and the street thugs of the EDL – but that someone who defines their main political priority as being an “anti-Sharia” campaigner and promotes extremist intolerance against not only Islam but all religions, and who also uses dog whistle comments opposing immigration, is a very unsuitable person to be a Labour candidate for parliament.

There is no doubt that any election campaign, especially one for Westminster, that Anne Marie Waters was involved with would be dragged into distracting controversy, and she would be actively opposed by immigrant communities and faith groups, thus alienating a wide swathe of Labour voters.

The post Anne Marie Waters – the worst possible potential Labour PPC appeared on Socialist Unity.

picture from @GMBSussexBranch

The GMB has launched a regional dispute fund in support of a number of disputes across the region, including the most recent Brighton Council Cityclean workers and the Mytime Golf Course workers dispute. This fund will be used to help support our members in hardship. If you would like to make a donation, please click the donate button on the site:

Click here to donate to the CityClean workers

The post Link: Brighton CityClean workers strike fund appeared on Socialist Unity.

It comes as little surprise to learn that sitting at the top of the table is Manchester City, which currently pays on average over £100,000 a week to its first team players. Just behind them sits Real Madrid at just over £90,000 per week, then Barcelona, and so on.

Focusing in on the English Premiership, the gap between the top paying club, Man City, and the second, Chelsea, is quite considerable at £100,764 per week against £78,053 per week respectively. Meanwhile, at the bottom of the Premiership league table for salaries, is Norwich City, paying its players a comparatively modest £19,434 per week on average.

If anybody was still in any doubt that the relationship between the real world and top flight football was at best now a tenuous one, a cursory glance at these figures should end them. Football has become an increasingly corrupt global business that reflects the very worst excesses of a free market gone haywire in its corrosive impact on wider society. Ostentation and obscenity sits at the apex of football, just as it does in every private multinational business, with no time for anything approaching restraint or decency. It is particularly telling that it is in Spain and the UK where the highest salaries in top flight football are paid, considering that it is in these countries where ordinary people are paying the highest price economically and socially under the weight of the worst global economic crisis since the 1930s. In fact, more than telling it’s an insult.

But it’s not only in the relationship between top flight football and wider society that we come up against such outrageous and unjustifiable contradictions. They exist within football itself.

Palestinian footballer Mahmoud Sarsak, who spent three years in an Israeli prison without being charged of any crime, is currently on a UK-wide speaking tour. On the Edinburgh leg of the tour he was joined on the platform by Tony Higgins, Scottish representative of the international footballers’ union FIFPro.

Addressing the meeting, Higgins, himself a former professional player, explained how the inordinate attention paid to the small minority of players and clubs at the apex of the sport has distorted our understanding of the game on a global level. Around 90 percent of professional footballers around the world struggle to make ends meet on low salaries, he revealed. In many instances these salaries are not paid on time if at all by unscrupulous club owners. He also revealed that in parts of the world players are routinely threatened, intimidated, and on occasion murdered by criminal gangs engaged in match fixing.

It was fitting that Tony Higgins was on the platform alongside Mahmoud. Higgins played a central role in organising a petition calling for Sarsak’s release from Israeli detention that was signed by over 2000 current and ex-professional footballers around the world, most notably Eric Cantona. The petition was presented to UEFA President Michel Platini, who along with FIFA President Sepp Blater joined the international campaign calling for Sarsak to be released.

After spending over three months on hunger strike, he was finally released in June 2012. I wrote a couple of articles on the plight of Mahmoud Sarsak and the 2000 Palestinians that were engaged in a mass hunger strike over their detention at the time. They can be found here and here.

Speaking through an interpreter, the Palestinian described the harsh conditions of his detention. He suffered torture, extended periods of isolation, and humiliation at the hands of his captors – treatment compounded by the fact he was never charged with any crime or allowed to see any evidence against him. He was held under a category known as administrative detention, which Amnesty International has urged the Israeli government to end. Sarsak, it should be recalled, was detained at an Israeli checkpoint on his way to Nablus from Gaza to join up with the rest of his team for training. His description of his detention was made more poignant by the fact that, in the same week in which he was embarked on his speaking tour, Israel was hosting the UEFA Under-21 International Football Championships.

Indeed, it is sobering to think that while the cream of Europe’s young footballers have been on display in front of adoring fans and the world’s media in Israel these past few weeks, 5000 Palestinian political prisoners are being held in its prisons.

The extreme disparity that exists between the rarefied world inhabited by those at the top of football and those struggling at the bottom is proof positive that the sport long credited with bringing the world together in a spirit of egalitarianism and joy has lost its soul.

If anything, The Beautiful Game has grown ugly.

The post The ugly business of the beautiful game – how football lost its soul appeared on Socialist Unity.

BBC1 10.35pm

The post George Galloway and Nigel Farage on Question Time tonight appeared on Socialist Unity.

This Friday, Green Party members across the country will face an immense dilemma – the choice between supporting our own minority Green council, or the hundreds of its refuse workers going on strike for a week against proposed pay reductions that could see some losing up to £4000 a year. That’s a choice most Greens would a few years ago have never thought they’d face. In the midst of massive local authority cuts, the Greens are in office but seemingly not in power.

Many local parties and individuals – including the local Brighton & Hove Green Party, Caroline Lucas (who has pledged to join the picket lines), and university branches such as my own – have spoken out against the bin worker pay cuts in a thus-far shambolic dispute that has seen a noble attempt to equalise pay between male and female staff leading to up to £95 a week income reductions for the (largely male) CityClean workers, idiotic comparisons to the winter of discontent, accusations of potential strike breaking, and the outsourcing of the pay proposal decision altogether in order for Greens to claim ‘it wasn’t our decision’. Yet the council leader, Jason Kitcat, seems determined not to budge. It is, to be blunt, a mess.

Serious internal discussion about this sorry state of affairs has sadly been minimal at best, stifled at worst. This won’t suffice. The party is coming under attack over this from all other sections of the left, and Labour (as well as every other supposedly progressive grouping) will exploit this to its fullest unless the Green group in Brighton change tack and handle the situation properly. If Greens don’t tackle the issue head on, other parties will do so. Greens need to talk about Brighton – partly because everyone else is.

Neither is it good enough to say, as some have, that since the Greens are a federal party ‘it’s up to Brighton’. Brighton Greens – both the local branch and our only MP- have spoken clearly on this issue. It’s now up to the rest of the party nationally to back them up in this. Brighton is, bar a sizeable number of honourable exceptions in the likes of Alex Phillips and others, a rogue council, refusing to cede to the wishes of its local party, its constituents, and (from what I gather) the rest of the party nationally. Disappointingly, the Green Party Executive (GPEX) and leader Natalie Bennett have appeared quiet on the issue.

Worthy though bringing in a Living Wage, leading the ‘no evictions’ fight over the bedroom tax, and attempting to equalise pay between male and female workers is, a Green council should never cut the pay of some of the least well off. That should be a given, particularly after enshrining social justice into the party’s Core Values last conference. As a party which has the strongest record on workers’ rights in terms of policy, strike busting should never have even been rumoured, let alone a potential possibility.

The bin workers are by no means living gold-plated lifestyles – a Living Wage is a solid base, but it should be a minimum and something to build on, not to undermine through slashing allowances. And though the motives of the Labour-affiliated GMB union aren’t entirely pure, the grassroots members’ reasons for going on strike (on a 96% majority) are.

There are some hopeful signs however. Leading figures in Brighton & Hove Greens have at last made public statements about the strike action, though still seemingly refusing to back down over the pay proposals. The GMB has agreed to re-enter negotiations. And the candidate for the Hanover & Elm Grove by-election, David Gibson, is a solid trade unionist who opposes the measures to equalise pay down instead of up.

Nonetheless, myself – and I imagine thousands of other Greens – never thought we’d have to ever be in the position of backing workers striking against our own council. There needs to be a serious discussion about the possibility of setting ‘needs budgets’, and if not, discussing whether we should be in office at all if we are forced to act as a mere smoke-screen for Tory-Lib Dem cuts. At what point does the party start to consider that to stay in office and continue to implement cuts would be to breach fundamental principles? As the Green Party conference in Brighton approaches, it’s time to get backtracking on the proposed pay cuts, and time to start talking.

Josiah Mortimer (@josiahmortimer on Twitter) is a Green Party activist and student based in York.

The post We need to talk about Brighton appeared on Socialist Unity.

The breadth and depth of cuts in public sector jobs, pay and frontline services might lead some to believe that austerity exists and public spending is being reduced. However, public spending is actually 4% higher today that in 2010. We are not experiencing short term disruption to balance the books, we are experiencing the controlled demolition of the welfare state – transferring the UK from a social democracy to a corporate state.

Schools

Successive governments have dissolved the model of state owned schools, staffed by public sector employees. Today, our children largely attend privately owned schools, where the majority of services in the schools are delivered by private sector staff. The results have seen costs soar and quality plummet.

Academy Schools are publicly funded independent state schools (limited companies)– this means they receive their funding from central government and are accountable directly to central government, rather than their Local Authority. Contrary to the ‘Localism Agenda’ lauded by both mainstream parties, the trend is towards centralising control in Westminster. The schools are also able to make changes to staff pay and conditions, that is pay less.

During thirteen years of New Labour government, 203 state schools were turned into Academies. In just three years of the Coalition – this has risen more than twelve fold, to more than 2,600 (with a further 500 in the pipeline). This might suggest the programme was so successful it called for rapid national roll out. But it doesn’t.

A recent report by the Public Accounts Committee, the parliamentary select committee responsible for ensuring value for money for the tax payer, condemned the programme as ‘complex and inefficient’, leading to more than £1bn over spending. This £1bn had to be met by the budgets for other non-academy schools.

The report does not mince words and reports major issues across the programme including: poor cost control, a lack of transparency over expenditure, a governance and compliance framework prone to failure (exacerbated by significant staff cuts at the Department for Education), and confusion over roles, responsibilities and accountability.

Yet the programme continues apace.

Despite claiming to protect the Education budget, spending figures from last year demonstrate the Government are doing quite the opposite. Last year, the budget for education was cut by 5.7% in real terms. Whilst infrastructure spending was cut 81%, and the Non-Academy Schools Budget was cut 4.31%, the budget for Academy Schools was increased by a whopping 191%.

The state sector is being starved of funds, while the Academy sector enjoys a glut of funding which it spends inefficiently and opaquely.

The majority of schools built since 1992 have also been built under Private Finance Initiatives – were the government borrows from the private sector instead of raising the funds itself. PFI loans are at least twice the rate of interest of ordinary government loans, and repaid over 25-30 years. A recent report by the Treasury Committee condemned the Private Finance Initiative, as “always…more expensive than government borrowing”.

An Audit Commission Report ten years ago found “that the quality of PFI schools was significantly worse than that of the traditionally funded schools” (p.24), and the recent Treasury Committee report held the same findings a decade on.

It was recently revealed that there will be a shortfall of 250,000 school places by 2014, whilst the tax payer has picked up a £70m bill for PFI schools which had to close.

The Academies Programme and PFI are built to fail, and equivalent to setting charges to destroy the state education sector from within. Meanwhile, they allow the transfer of both education services, and the physical schools themselves, out of the public sector and into the waiting hands of corporations in advance of implosion.

Health

A similar model has been used in Health. The Health System is being gutted by endless and costly reorganisations, rampant commercialisation and outsourcing, and unaffordable PFI contracts.

The latest major reorganisation of the NHS, under the Health and Social Care Act, will suck another £4bn out of the health service. This comes on the back of £780m blown by New Labour on 70 reorganisations in just four years between 2005 and 2009. Anyone experienced in change management can tell you that this level of change, which does not allow for new systems and processes to bed in or for their benefits to be measured, is simply madness.

Each of these reorganisations has been centred not on the patient, but on vague concepts of ‘choice’ and ‘competition’. These are bywords for privatisation – the attempt to force open a closed market to the rabid private sector we already shunned in favour of our public service.

There is a growing trend across the country for NHS Trusts to become mere managers overseeing almost entirely privatised healthcare. To give just two examples:
Southampton Primary Care Trust has outsourced a third of its elective procedures to private providers.

Serco was recently awarded a £140m contract to deliver all of Suffolk’s community health services. Both areas have seen serious performance issues and large reductions of staff.

A report by corporate finance consultancy Catalyst, published in September, estimated that newly privatised healthcare services will be worth up to £20 billion over the next few years. Private companies Circle, Virgin Care and Serco have won contracts worth £700m to provide NHS services just this year. NHS outsourcing to private providers rose by 10% in a single year last year, and is set to increase to 40% of all services by 2020.

At the same time, 22 of the 103 NHS trusts to enter PFI are facing financial difficulty due to the exorbitant PFI repayments. Some hospitals are having to handover a fifth of their annual budget on paying for the PFI deal.

Big Banks are now setting up shell companies in offshore tax havens, which they use to buy up these struggling hospitals for a pittance. HSBC, recently found guilty of building an entire subsidiary bank to launder money for Mexican drug cartels, now owns three NHS hospitals outright in Barnet, West Middlesex and Middlesex. The shell company set up to buy the banks is registered in Guernsey, so no tax will ever reach the UK treasury.

New Labour laid the groundwork and the Coalition have expedited the break up, sell off and end of our National Health Service. We are left with just the brand and the funding mechanism. Given the clearly doomed fate of these services to prove financially viable, it will not be long before the case is made that we can no longer afford a public health service, and we will lose the last surviving principle of the NHS – free at the point of use.

Social Security

The underpinning of any social democracy, is a generous welfare state that ensures citizens finding themselves unable to work through involuntary unemployment, sickness, disability or age receive enough to live in dignity. Social Security means working people are less likely to be exploited by poverty wages, as they are in nations without a welfare state. Social Security means those who find themselves unable to work are not abandoned to the whims of charity or philanthropy. Social Security creates a guaranteed minimum standard of living for every citizen, regardless of their circumstances of birth.

These concepts are anathema to neoliberalism – which knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

It is no surprise then, that in the last three years, a story has been whipped up to paint anyone who relies on these noble intentions as an unaffordable burden or a scrounger. This has been done to enlist public support for a raft of cuts and schemes including the Bedroom Tax, the Granny Tax, Universal Credit, PIP, and Workfare. Both the story and the cuts are having a catastrophic impact on the most vulnerable communities in the land.

• 350,000 poor children will lose access to Free School Meals
• There are 3.6m children living in poverty in the UK today, this will rise by 300,000 by 2015.
• Hate crimes on disabled people rose by a quarter in just one year as disabled people were painted as scroungers on the take.
• 32 people are dying every week after being assessed ‘Fit to Work’ and having their sickness/disability benefits removed.
• 33 people have committed suicide, citing fear of impending poverty as a result of these welfare reforms as the principal reason.
• 420,000 households containing a disabled person face rent rises of more than £700 a year as a result of the Bedroom Tax.
• Cuts to Council Tax Benefit have seen the poorest facing up to 333% rises in their Council Tax bills.
• More than 350,000 people had to rely on Food Banks in order to feed themselves and their families last year, a rise of 300% in a single year.
• One in five people retiring this year will be forced to live below the poverty line due to pension cuts.

Our pensioners, our disabled people, our working and jobless poor – all have fallen toward a promised safety net only to find it has been replaced by a bed of nails.

It’s Not Temporary, It’s the New World Order

All this is happening in what is purported to be one of the wealthiest nations on the planet. What is the point of having the world’s 22^nd largest GDP, if we cannot feed our children?

Meanwhile, the fortunes of the FTSE100 companies is at record highs, Chief Executives are seeing 23% pay rises, taxes are being reduced for or simply not collected from the wealthiest individuals and corporations, MP expenses rose 25% last year and the Queen is about to receive a £5m pay rise from the public purse.

This is not a case of poor people suffering austerity while the wealthiest live large. It is a case of poor people suffering austerity in order that the wealthy live large.
Austerity is nothing more than the controlled demolition of the welfare state, and social democracy itself. The nation we are turning into is a less compassionate, less equal, less just nation than we have been before. This is a great step backwards and will cost us not only in human suffering, but in human lives.

Click here to read Part II – Law and Justice.

Take Action

The campaigns working to halt the destruction. Follow them and support their efforts.

Move Your Money – do you have an account with a big bank? Move it!
Boycott Workfare – the campaign against Workfare
Disabled People Against Cuts – inspirational campaign by disabled people.
Keep our NHS Public – save our NHS.

The post ‘Austerity’ is the controlled demolition of the welfare state appeared on Socialist Unity.

The latest instalment of the hugely ambitious After Neoliberalism Manifesto from the politics and culture journal Soundngs has just been published.

Geographer Doreen Massey is the author. In her contribution she makes a key argument that has an increasing currency on the Outside Left, that to construct a radical politics a vital starting point is to find a new language. The newspapers, radio phone-ins, TV news programmes are full of the vocabulary of the necessity of austerity, the inevitability of a marketed version of globalisation, the monetisation of the public good. It is this more than anything else that creates an everyday commonsense of despair. ‘We are all customers now’ is the rubric of contemporary non-citizenship.

Contrast this with Marx’s wonderful phrase of yesteryear: ‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.’ Evocative and at the same time resistant. Doreen Massey cites the keywords that construct a popular understanding of today’s world and frame a debate which excludes this kind of critique, in the process ruling out of order the prospect for any kind of alternative. Choice, growth, work, expenditure have all come to be defined in a particular way which then narrows the political options to only what the mainstream offer. She suggests that for any kind of Left revival we need to start by challenging these definitions, explore, illustrate and articulate different ways of understanding. And that such a politics is rooted in the shaping of a new commonsense.

Such an approach fundamentally challenges much of traditional Left practice, rooted as it is in its own jargon, a culture that is pre-existing and thus often unchanging, where the sharpness of the slogan will often miss out any opportunity to engage and attract. Mind your Language? Not bad for a watchword towards the next Left.

You can download the full version of Vocabularies of the Economy by Doreen Massey for free here

The post Mind your language appeared on Socialist Unity.

As Dylan Thomas wrote:

‘Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’

Erdogan’s in trouble.

The post You know you have a revolution on your hands when… appeared on Socialist Unity.

Meanwhile, GMB has welcomed a commitment from the leader of Brighton Council, Jason Kitcat, that no agency or contractors will be used during any period of industrial action. The committment was made in an e-mail from Kitcat who after a period of evading the issue finally confirmed:

“This administration will not sanction the use of agency or contract workers to do the regular work of legitimately striking Council staff whilst those staff are out on strike. Accordingly, I am able to announce that all agency workers currently engaged in refuse collection and street cleaning will be withdrawn from service by 10pm on Thursday night, the day before the strike is due to begin, and agency workers will not be deployed in these areas during the strike week.”

As a result of this commitment GMB has confirmed that it will engage in negotiations with the Council to see if a way forward can be found. According to Mark Turner, GMB Branch Secretary:

“This is a small first step for the Council on the way to resolving this dispute. As a result GMB has confirmed that it is willing to attend talks to listen to what the Council have to say.

I will however say that there will need to be substantial movement in their position for industrial action to be averted. Whilst our members do not take strike action lightly, they cannot be expected to accept these reductions to their take home pay. I would like to thank those Councillors in the administration who have supported our members and brought about this decision.”

The post Brighton: Green Council has last chance to avoid bin strike appeared on Socialist Unity.

China successfully launched its fifth manned spacecraft late Tuesday afternoon, sending three astronauts on the country’s longest space trip.

With 10 astronauts and six spacecraft launched into space in a decade, China is speeding up on the path of exploration and building a home for Chinese in the galaxy.

At a see-off ceremony held hours before the launch, Chinese President Xi Jinping extended good wishes to the three astronauts.

“The mission’s crew members carry a space dream of the Chinese nation, and represent the lofty aspirations of the Chinese people to explore space,” said Xi.

The President later watched the launch at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China, and shook hands with staff at the center after the successful launch.

Unlike the space trip of Yang Liwei, China’s first astronaut who boarded the Shenzhou-5 spacecraft in 2003, of less than a day, the three astronauts will stay for half a month.

In its journey, Shenzhou-10 will dock with the orbiting space lab Tiangong-1 twice, once through automatic operation and the other manual, and a lecture will for the first time be given on board the assembled orbiter to a group of teenage students on the ground.

The three-member crew were all veteran Air Force pilots before being selected as astronauts. Nie is the first general visiting space while his teammate Wang Yaping is China’s first space traveler born in the 1980s, a generation growing up in era of reform and opening up.

All of them are members of the Communist Party of China.

Yang Liwei, the country’s first astronaut, once told Xinhua that Chinese astronauts might not pray like their foreign counterparts do before they set off on a space mission; however, Communism, as their shared faith, supports them.

“If the country has its own space station, Chinese astronauts, who are Party members, might set up a Party branch up there,” Yang said.

from Xinhua

The post Communist Party in space appeared on Socialist Unity.

Walmart store workers have launched their most ambitious effort yet to improve conditions at their giant, stubborn employer. More than 100 walked out of dozens of stores this past week, in the longest strike attempted so far. Previous strikes at Walmart have lasted one day.

The protest coincides with the company’s Walmart Shareholders Week, when hundreds of company-picked workers attend company-boosting events, including an Elton John concert, near the corporation’s headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas.

Although they were not invited, the strikers, members of Organization United for Respect at Walmart, converged on Bentonville anyway by bus, joined by fired California warehouse workers, unionized workers at Walmart stores in Latin America, and even a Bangladeshi garment worker leader.

OUR Walmart’s week of events will culminate Friday in protests outside—and inside—the shareholder meeting. Kalpona Akter of the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity will address the shareholders to push Walmart to pay for garment factory safety improvements in her country and create a worker-led inspection process. Dozens of companies have already agreed to the plan.

The buses headed to Arkansas made stops at Walmarts in several states, leafleting stores and picking up a few more strikers on the way. Buses visited 30 cities in a “Ride for Respect,” hosted at union halls and by community groups. In Chicago, supporters pursued Walmart board member Linda Wolf and confronted her with a letter asking that she meet with workers in Bentonville. In Palo Alto, California, OUR Walmart picketed two other board members’ fancy homes.

In Bentonville, the strikers have held events and protests all week. On Thursday, they delivered checks for $8.81 to billionaire Walton heir Jim Walton’s house, indicating the average hourly wage at Walmart. The strikers want Walmart to pay $13 an hour. They carried a banner reading “Walton Billionaires, Hear Us Now.”

Retaliation

The U.S. Walmart workers are in Bentonville to protest retaliation for their activism. OUR Walmart member Dominic Ware of San Leandro, California, said his hours were cut two weeks ago. In protest, he walked out and got on the bus.

Two workers were recently fired, too—but the story has not been all negative. In some stores, OUR Walmart has already been able to extract changes from management.

In Laurel, Maryland, the OUR Walmart chapter convinced managers to post open shifts so that workers can get the hours they want, said member Alan Forrest. It’s a big change. When the organization first started at his store, managers retaliated by forcing Forrest to hand out sales leaflets outside, during a summer heat wave, and an activist co-worker had her hours cut.

Overall, though, working conditions in the stores have only gotten worse since OUR Walmart was founded in 2011 as a project of the United Food and Commercial Workers. According to Bloomberg, Walmart has added 455 stores in the U.S. in the last five years, while cutting its workforce by 20,000. The resulting short-staffing has led to empty shelves and chaotic stores with long checkout lines.

Each shift gets more stressful, and workers cannot get enough hours to survive, they say. OUR Walmart members blame a system that provides bonuses to store managers who keep labor costs down.

Barbara Andridge, an eight-year store worker from Placerville, California, said management there promised to fix a broken scheduling system so that workers who wanted more hours could get them. But “now, six months later, it has made another announcement about what it’s going to do.”

Andridge says she lives in low-income housing, needs public assistance, and can’t afford health care. “One week I may get eight hours and another week 40… But the health care costs don’t change,” she said.

Carlton Smith has worked for Walmart in Paramount, California, for 17 years, moving up from overnight stocker to department manager. He was an employee-of-the-month last year, but was fired May 8 because of his activism, according to OUR Walmart.

Two California warehouse workers who move goods for Walmart were also fired recently. Forklift driver Javier Rodriquez went on strike with co-workers last year to protest extreme heat and broken equipment at a Riverside County warehouse.

Since then, he said, he has been teaching co-workers about their rights to minimum wage and overtime pay, and how to report injuries. In March, he was fired by the Walmart subcontractor he works for.

Safety in Bangladesh

In the wake of the worst factory accident in world history in Bangladesh, when a building collapse killed 1,239 garment workers, Bangladeshi worker organizations have convinced more than 40 brands and retailers to sign an agreement to pay for fire and building safety with independent auditing.

U.S. firms Abercrombie & Fitch and Phillips-Van Heusen have signed on, as has the Swedish company H&M, currently the largest clothing buyer in Bangladesh.

Walmart is the second-largest, but along with Gap, it has resisted signing, complaining that it might become legally liable if more workers die.

That’s not the real reason Walmart won’t sign, said Akter, a former child garment worker and now a leading voice for workers in the country’s garment industry. In reality, the company doesn’t want to spend the money for safety improvements, and it doesn’t want to work with worker organizations—because then workers could learn about their rights, she said.

Walton family members own a controlling share of the company, but Akter and supporters are pushing the shareholders to support a proposal “which would allow shareholders to call a meeting on critical issues affecting the company,” according to OUR Walmart. The issues could include Bangladesh safety accord and conditions in stores and warehouses.

Coinciding with actions at Friday’s shareholders meeting, OUR Walmart supporters will visit Walmart stores around the country, talking to managers about fair scheduling policies, and leafleting workers. The Corporate Action Network lists dozens of events.

Walmart planned for this week’s demonstrations by getting a local judge to issue a restraining order. Unless you’re a current Walmart employee, the order says, you’re not allowed on Walmart property in Arkansas, except to buy something.

The post “Show some real employee appreciation”, say Walmart strikers appeared on Socialist Unity.

Look, I get it. No one needs to tell me that the antipathy towards the unemployed, the disabled, and anyone else forced to subsist on social security payments has been carefully but repeatedly orchestrated for over 30 years. Labour have historically not just gone along with the collective hounding of benefit recipients; during its time in government the party led from the front. We also know the demonisation that has poured uninterrupted from our establishment like a waterfall of filth from a stinking effluent pipe have consistently talked up recipients as scroungers who shamelessly ponce off the taxpayer. Hence we have a situation where 72 per cent believe “too many people were able to claim benefits who should not have been entitled to do so”, some 0.7 per cent of payments are estimated to be fraudulent. You’ll not hear many politicians suggest that, as a proportion of GDP, the social security budget has more or less remained constant.

The media and governments past and present don’t mislead over social security. 

They lie.

Their propaganda isn’t widely believed because people are stupid or that the media is all-powerful. It gets traction because it chimes with a lot of working people’s experiences. There is always one person in every family, every friendship group, every community that – without any evidence beyond perception and gossip – is strongly suspected of being a dolewaller or lead-swinger. For my mum, it was the bloke down the village on the social with a bad back who was on the take. For a disabled guy I recently helped out, it was the youths sat around Longton town centre of a weekday morning smoking and necking cans of Carling. And for younger folk I know, it’s the one who seemingly sits in their bedroom all day battling orcs on on WoW. The majority go to work to provide for themselves and their families, so the idea there are others who do nothing and live a “life of riley” off their backs exercises a negative pull on the popular imagination. Who, after all, wants to be taken for a mug? So you can understand why “truth-telling“, tales of hardship, and stat-mongering has barely shifted public attitudes. And, unfortunately, it is not likely to do so in and of themselves.

Political crisis

The crisis facing social security is not an issue of economic sustainability or public finances. It’s a political crisis, but that does not make it any less real. The question we, as socialists or social democrats have to ask is how can popular consent be rebuilt for a social security system whose very legitimacy is questioned by the same working people it was founded to help?

Enter stage left Ed Miliband, with this week’s important speech on this very topic. Important, as this is the shape of what’s to come should the polls bear out and Labour wins in 2015. And also because it represents a marked shift from the policy deadweight bequeathed by New Labour.

Contrary to what some have been writing, the revealed social security policy orientation is not a swing to the right. A lot of this stuff has been trailed for a long time, and it’s miles better than anything James Purnell led on. Nor do I accept it’s a capitulation to neoliberal austerity (of which more another time). Ed’s One Nation schtick is communitarian and rests on social contract thinking – everyone enjoys certain rights, but along with them come certain obligations. Hence, this approach to social security affords payments to those who need it provided they meet their responsibilities, such as seeking appropriate work or attending regular meetings with the relevant DWP advisor. On society’s part, in addition to making basic subsistence payments it will, under these plans, provide a guaranteed job for the long-term unemployed – on pain of sanction. This we have already seen.

Rent cap

On housing, Ed will give local authorities the power to negotiate on the collective behalf of private tenants to set rents. Effectively a rent cap by another name, monies saved from the housing benefit budget will be ploughed into council housing. And on the scandal of tax credits or, as it should be known, low pay subsidy; Labour also expects private sector providers of government contracts to pay the living wage and set this as a public sector ‘minimum wage’, and ‘shame’ companies into paying their staff decently. Zero hour contracts are out, too.

On top of announcements addressing joblessness, housing and tax credits come the controversial bits. First, the idea of a cap on social security spending. And second, reintroducing a contributory element.

Capping spending. Well, you might as well say cutting spending. But not all cuts are cuts. Saving money by creating jobs through a sensible, investment-led economic policy is a world away from saving money by slashing dole. As anyone can find out in 30 seconds with their favourite search engine, Labour will use targeted investment spending to get the economy moving again and with it sort out unemployment. Though no one will say it, the cap is not about the sustainability or otherwise of the bill. It’s about politics, and about showing that Labour has a handle on benefits and will not let the cost spiral out of control – though it is no danger of doing so, in reality.

Toxicity

The contributory principle of paying out more JSA than the standard £71/week to people who have been in work longer and more consistently is designed to give workers who may never or fleetingly go on the dole the idea their contribution counts and it’s there when they need it. Quite how this will work for single parents – women particularly – and workers who, through no fault of their own, are locked into insecure and casualised labour markets remains to be seen. But there is danger that resentment diffused in one place will merely be repatriated to another.

But, in sum, this isn’t “right-wing” let alone neoliberal. Do these, if enacted, give capital a stronger hand vis a vis labour? No. But it does represent an attempt to circumvent the toxicity of the social security debate by refusing to demonise recipients, looking at ways of getting people off the dole and into jobs by stimulating the economy, bringing down housing benefit without cutting support available to tenants, and giving a wider layer of workers more of a stake in the system. And Labour aims to do so without handing the Tories and their friends in the press a stick with which to beat them – a stick that, sadly, is very effective for the reasons already stated.

There is a lot of detail to come between now and election day, and every bit of it needs critically scrutinising. But taken as is Ed’s speech represents an attempt to re-win popular consent for the very idea of social security under very difficult political circumstances. If readers have an alternative that can, to use an ugly phrase, ‘deliver fairness’ and rebuild wide support, I would be very interested to hear it.

The post Labour and rebuilding Social Security appeared on Socialist Unity.

From the moment the current global economic crisis hit these shores with the collapse of Northern Rock in September 2007, the singular objective of the right has been to turn what was and is a crisis of private greed into a crisis of public spending. It was a campaign given political credence with the election of the Tory-led coalition government in 2010, unleashing a political and economic assault on the poorest and most vulnerable section of society under the rubric of austerity.

In economic terms austerity is doomed to failure. The empirical and historical evidence leaves no doubt that in periods of economic downturn a government must spend more not less in order to re-inject the demand sucked out by the refusal of the private sector to invest as profits tumble

Investment strike

A story that appeared in the Express in April revealed that the government’s own Office for National Statistics had calculated that UK corporations, other than banks, were sitting on a combined surplus of £318 billion in the final quarter of last year – up from £304 billion in the previous quarter.

This is an investment strike by any other name, which the government has responded to with tax cuts for the wealthy and other inducements to invest in the shape of subsidies, grants, tax breaks, and so on. Picking up the tab for all this has been the poor and those reliant on the welfare state and public services in the form of swingeing cuts to public spending.

If we factor in the £375 billion pounds the government has thus far fed to the banks in the form of Quantitative Easing since 2009, what we have seen over the past five years of the economic crisis is the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich on a grand scale.

The fact that the government has been able to get away with this without meeting significant or effective resistance is a consequence of two processes that are interlinked. The first is the traction and persuasiveness of the simplistic analogy that the Tories and their bag carriers in the right wing press have drawn between a national economy and a household budget.

Contraction of demand

Yet as the US economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman reminds us – unlike a household budget, when it comes to a national economy one person’s spending is another person’s income. Under the aegis of austerity, if no-one is spending then no one has any income, resulting in the contraction of demand leading to the stagnation we are currently witnessing.

The second of these two interlinked processes is a government initiated campaign of demonisation against the unemployed and those claiming benefits, resulting in the creeping criminalisation of poverty. Shifting the responsibility for poverty onto its victims – away from the vicissitudes of a free market economic system that could not function without creating poverty – has been one of the most vicious and callous policies of any British government in modern history. Sadly, as stated, it has met with inordinate success, reflected most recently in Ed Miliband’s speech on welfare reform, which amounted to the Labour Party leadership’s abandonment of the principle of social solidarity that underpins the welfare state.

The specific contents of Ed Miliband’s speech set out a pledge to in building homes in order to bring down a housing benefit bill that currently sits at £95 billion annually. Set against the paltry £4.5 billion the government devoted to building affordable housing last year, it is inarguable that the current expenditure in housing benefit is unsustainable. However its size indicates an out of control private rental market on the back of a three decades long housing crisis.

Bedroom tax

While any pledge to address this housing crisis is welcome, the lack of any policy on rent control to deal with exorbitant rents charged by private landlords – the real beneficiaries of housing benefit – is instructive. Also instructive, not to mention disappointing, is the lack of a firm pledge by Labour to repeal the present government’s iniquitous Bedroom Tax if and when elected, with its disproportionate impact on the disabled.

Listening to Ed Miliband’s capitulation to the right on welfare reform, the words of US billionaire investor Warren Buffet immediately sprang to mind:

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

The post Labour’s embrace of welfare reform is a victory for the right appeared on Socialist Unity.

At my Unite branch meeting tonight, we heard the welcome news numbers had increased by an additional 47 people on last month. That, combined with recently released figures that tentatively suggest a reversal of trade unions’ downward spiral is heartening. After all, getting greater numbers into Britain’s largest membership civil society organisations is what all labour movement people are, or should be, about. Now, as you might expect, especially over the course of a long decline, there has and continues to be extensive debates on how to get our unions relevant again. Some comrades believe that offering bold, fighting alternatives will see millions of working people march back into trade unions. Others suggest offering a fancy credit card and discount holidays is just the ticket

Whether it’s political messages or gimmicks, getting ordinary folk to pay attention is still a difficult job. You can therefore understand the trade union enthusiasm for Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. They offer quick, efficient and cost-free ways of putting a message across without having to rely on a middleman. But, for whatever reason, the outlets we have massively under-perform. My union’s official Twitter feed only has 19,000 followers. For a behemoth of 1.2m members, that’s not great. The TUC’s media account is in fact worse, managing just 12,000 followers. Sadly, their respective YouTube presences are equally featherweight. Unite’s channel has 439 subscribers and 277,727 views. For the TUC channel it’s only 185 subscribers and 107,057 views. Sadly, these are typical of trade union social media in general. Clearly, a lot of thinking and work needs doing around the content offered and how it should be used strategically. But that is a book, never mind a blog post, in itself.

Alongside the sexiness of the new media, I do think a lot of trade union press departments are enamoured with the printed word. Like mainstream parties, radicals of the left and neanderthals of the far right, the stories and spin that clogs the dailies are still front and centre in our movement’s media people’s minds (and not a few activists too). And to a degree, it’s right that this is the case. The national dailies still have a paid circulation of approximately eight million, and a reach way beyond that. But, apart from The I, all papers are locked in stubborn, long-term decline. A mass audience is there but it is shrinking. And, of course, taken as a whole Britain’s newspapers are structurally biased against trade unions.

But I think a trick is being missed. What about television? I mean, when was the last time you saw an advert for a trade union on our screens? I can’t remember ever seeing one, though this – courtesy of Unison – did the rounds in the late 90s:

Yes, primetime TV advertising can be expensive, but not prohibitively so for the larger unions or the TUC collectively. Where else could a union reach a captive audience of millions without having its message edited and distorted by some latter day Kelvin MacKenzie? So instead of pouring time and effort into media work with comparatively little to show for it, shouldn’t unions embrace a little bit of 20th century thinking and look again at television to publicise their work and get the members in?

The post Trade Unions and Television appeared on Socialist Unity.