I was privileged to attend the socialist party conference this weekend. What was significant was that it was addressed by two executive members of the Rail Maritime and Transport union (RMT) who congratulated us on our role in leading the Lindsey oil refinery strike. Where we skilfully turned around the slogan “British jobs for British workers” to building trade union links with the Italian workers on the site and links with the Italian trade unions and 102 jobs created in effect workers unity and aimed the struggle at the bosses not other workers.  This victory has given the Socialist Party some respect and Authority in the wider workers movement.

 See www.socialismtoday.org/126/fight.html for a more detailed analysis of the strike.

The reason they came was to appeal to the Socialist Party to take part with them in an electoral block to stand in the Euro elections in June. So that workers that don’t want to vote for the any of the main pro big business parties have something to vote for in their interests, instead of the BNP who are an anti working class party of racism and hate but are gaining some support because of the vacuum that exists  in working class representation.

The programme the RMT put forward, we support (see their website http://no2eu.com/ ) but as socialists we would go further. This initiative may come to little but could also take on a momentum and become the pre formation to a new mass workers party, attracting the advanced layer of workers and activists at this stage. It was the rail union at the end of the 19^th century that set up the Labour Party which at the bottom had a base amongst the working class but at the top it supported big business. It had that working class base right up till the end of the 1980s but then became a party of capitalism through and through.

Why do I think this initiative might work where other projects such as Respect, Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, the socialist alliance and the Scottish Socialist Party failed? This time it is backed by a major workers organisation the RMT and we, as one government minister put it “are in the worst economic crisis for over 100 years”. It is only a matter of time before workers political consciousness catches up with events and mass struggle develops. Then this new formation could, maybe, take on a mass character and at long last give working class people a political voice!

The views expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Socialist Party see www.socialistparty.org.uk

Often people think socialism is just about sharing out from the rich to give to poorer sections of society. They then say where would the incentive be for people to work if there isn’t the possibility you can get rich at some point? But socialism isn’t just about sharing out what there is now but also producing more of what is needed. Although the top 150 companies in Britain (with the banks they own and control 85% of the economy) make enough profit each year to give everyone a decent paid job, a car, a home, free education and health care. Also Latin America produces enough food to feed the world 10 times over but sometimes it’s destroyed to just keep the price up. So the world is not overpopulated and no one should go hungry. Socialism would be about planning democratically with all the technology, engineering and technique that now exists it would seem straight forward to put a plan into action to end the world hunger crisis. Under capitalism of course, you get planning but only in that one particular company and that is to make profits.  But it is very limited, and the capitalist system is very anarchistic. We were told that with the super profits being made there would be a trickledown effect from the rich to the working class and poor. But now we have the most severe capitalist crisis possibly for over 100 years, which is exposing that particular lie. In fact the opposite has happened as working people are paying taxes to bail out rich bankers and the capitalists are making workers pay for the crisis through wage freezes, redundancies and short time working.

Human nature

Another argument put out against socialism is that people will never co-operate “it’s a dog eat dog world”  and that socialism is against human nature but if that was the case, millions of ordinary people would not give to relief funds when there is a natural disaster, such as an earthquake, tsunami or major flood.

 History shows us that before different classes developed in human society everything was done by the group from child care to hunting and everything was done through democratic planning although on a primitive level with primitive low level production. There may have been elders and chiefs but they would have played an advisory role giving their wisdom and experience, final decisions would have been taken as a whole, by the whole tribe. This was observed by studies of red Indians and other primitive tribes around the world in the nineteenth century.

Socialism would change human nature to a more co-operative instinct. People would much more like going to work for the benefit of society rather than to make money for a rich minority in society. Especially as workers would have better pay, job security, less working hours and better working conditions. And of course a real say in how things should happen in the workplace.

In the first instance in the transitional phase, socialism would raise the standard of living of the working class the majority in society. (See the program below). In the second phase when things had moved on and all the problems left over from capitalism had disappeared. Well it is almost impossible to predict or imagine how far human progress could take us freed from oppression and the constraints of capitalism and class society.

A socialist program for the trade unions and a new workers party.

Work & Income

• Trade union struggle to increase the minimum wage to £8 an hour without exemptions as an immediate step towards £10 an hour. For an annual increase in the minimum wage linked to average earnings.
• All workers, including part-timers, temps, casual and migrant workers to have trade union rates of pay, employment protection, and sickness and holiday rights from day one of employment.
• An immediate 50% increase in the state retirement pension, as a step towards a living pension. Reinstate the link with average earnings now.
• Reject 'Welfare to Work'. For the right to decent benefits, education, training, or a job, without compulsion.
• Scrap the anti-trade union laws! For fighting trade unions, democratically controlled by their members. Full-time union officials to be regularly elected and receive no more than a worker's wage.
• A maximum 35-hour week with no loss of pay.

Public services

• No to privatisation and the Private Finance Initiative (PFI). Renationalise all privatised utilities and services, with compensation paid only on the basis of proven need.
• Fully fund all services and run them under accountable, democratic committees that include representatives of service workers and users.
• Free, publicly run, good quality education, available to all at any age. Abolish university tuition fees now and introduce a living grant. No to academies!
• A socialist NHS to provide for everyone's health needs - free at the point of use and under democratic control. Kick out private contractors!
• Keep council housing publicly-owned. For a massive building programme of publicly-owned housing, on an environmentally sustainable basis, to provide good quality homes with low rents.

Environment

• Major research and investment into replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy and into ending the problems of early obsolescence and unrecycled waste.
• Public ownership of the energy generating industries. No to nuclear power. No to Trident.
• A democratically planned, low fare, publicly-owned transport system, as part of an overall plan against environmental pollution.

Rights

• Oppose discrimination on the grounds of race, sex, disability, sexuality, age, and all other forms of prejudice.
• Repeal all laws that trample over civil liberties. For the right to protest! End police harassment.
• Defend abortion rights. For a woman's right to choose when and whether to have children.
• For the right to asylum. No to racist immigration laws.

New workers' party

• For a new mass workers' party drawing together workers, young people and activists from workplace, community, environmental and anti-war campaigns, to provide a fighting, political alternative to the pro-big business parties.
• Trade unions to disaffiliate from the Labour Party now and aid the building of a new workers' party!

Socialism and Internationalism

• No to imperialist wars and occupations. Withdraw the troops immediately from Iraq and Afghanistan!
• Tax the super-rich! For a socialist government to take into public ownership the top 150 companies and banks that dominate the British economy, and run them under democratic working-class control and management. Compensation to be paid only on the basis of proven need.
• A democratic socialist plan of production based on the interests of the overwhelming majority of people, and in a way that safeguards the environment
• No to the bosses' neo-liberal European Union! For a socialist Europe and a socialist world!

I have a  friend who asked me recently. Should single parents be able to bring up children on state benefits and not have to work?

Firstly I think most people have a right to have children and most people have a right to work. The former even being in the human rights act. Can the two go together? Obviously yes, as there are more women in the workforce than ever before and lots of single parents are part of that but like everything in life under capitalism the question of class comes into the equation. If you’re a CEO or even a manager on a high salary then it will be easy to pay for childcare.  If you have a lower paid job on the minimum wage in retail or a Mc job then without state support childcare costs will likely cost more than is taken home in wages. Already billions is given in child and family tax credit to families. This in effect is a subsidy to the bosses as they clearly are not paying enough in wages for families to make ends meet. At the same time they have been taking plenty in profits by exploiting the workforce which the latest figures show are a majority of women in the workplace, especially in the lower paid sectors of caring and retail.

New Labour that is exposing its self as a party for the rich and against the poor.   With it’s welfare reform bill, which will hit benefit recipients hard especially single parents.  The bill will force single parents to work or lose benefits. (Of course if you’re a rich banker then state handouts are no problem).  In affect if you have a partner and bring up children then that is ok but if you’re a single parent then you will be forced to work, punished for being a single parent. The facts are most parents want to work but it is the cost of child care, low wages and travel costs that is a barrier to that. Of course the same reactionary anti poor brigade that bang on about the ills of society being the fault of breakdown and lack of discipline in the family. Won’t be campaigning against this bill which will leave children coming home from school with no one else in the house because their parent has been forced to work. The government's draconian proposals will cause insurmountable difficulties for many lone parents. Those who wish to stay at home to care for their children should not be forced to work; this is even a benefit to the capitalist system as they are bringing up the next generation of workers to be exploited. Nevertheless, if jobs on decent wages were available to them, many more would choose to work than can at present.

A socialist program for single parents

At work

• For the unions to take immediate action to implement their current minimum wage demands, as a step towards a legal minimum of £8 an hour.
• For a minimum income of £320 a week.
• No exemptions. For an annual increase in the minimum wage, linked to average earnings.
• Equal pay for work of equal value.
• Full-time rights for part-time workers. Employment protection from day one of employment.
• Paid maternity leave for at least twelve months on full pay, with the right to return to work part time if required.
• Paid parental / carers' leave.
• Scrap the anti-union laws.

Benefits

• A mass campaign involving the trade unions to stop the welfare reform bill.

• A minimum income linked to the minimum wage for carers, students, pensioners and all those unable to work.
• Restoration and uprating of lone parent benefits.
• No to compulsion in Welfare to Work. For the right of women to choose whether to work or stay at home with children.
• Maternity and child benefits to reflect real costs.
• Scrap tuition fees. Reinstate the grant. Free education for all.
• For a fair and flexible maintenance system that benefits lone parents and meets all children's needs.

Services

• A network of good quality, publicly funded childcare, including pre-school, after school and holiday schemes, accessible to all parents who want them.
• Stop privatisation. For a massive increase in spending on housing, education, health and other public services.
• The right of women to choose when and whether to have children.
• An increase in refuge provision, 24hr help lines and other facilities for women experiencing domestic violence.

Every week we have a SP meeting in Reading. Someone speaks for up to 20 mins then we have a discussion with contributions then the speaker sums up the discussion. The we go though the business part.  We discuss a number of subjects last week we discussed the NHS where the idea was put forward that if all the private, including the drug companies that make money out of the NHS, were publicly owned then all the profit they make could go into the NHS solving the funding crisis.

 This week’s branch was on the situation in Zimbabwe we said while we don’t support the regime the question has to be asked why are the media and other governments picking on Zimbabwe they don’t on Saudi Arabia and other countries that have an undemocratic and appalling human rights record. Also that the opposition MDC leadership have only the policies of the IMF and World Bank, which is the same policies that Mugabe followed of cuts and privatisation and what is needed in a new workers party with a socialist program.

Next week we are discussing a way to rebuild the trade unions and how workers can transform them from sometimes selling workers out to being fighting democratic organisations.

We meet every Tuesday 7:30pm Kings Tavern, Kings Rd, Reading. Come along and discuss with us if your interested in socialism and fighting back against this rotten capitalist system.

According to the BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7351867.stm  the so called pillars of society, big business have been up to no good, colluding with each other to price fix building contracts for local councils etc. I doubt whether any one will go to prison for such fraud. Of course we will still see and hear the adverts against so called benefit fraud. Which in most cases are just people trying to make ends meet.  As neither benefits nor low paid work provides anything hear a decent standard of living. What needs to happen is not a fine which if it means a hit on profits they will make workers pay through redundancies. 

A Socialist alternative

·         Public ownership of the big construction companies under workers control and management.

·         A massive program of building social housing, schools and hospitals.

·         Properly enforced health and safety for all construction workers.

·         A maximum 35 hour week without loss of pay.

·         A socialist plan of production to carry out all of the above

Since I last wrote or even copied an article here, the world economy according even to the British chancellor could be heading for the worst crisis since the great depression of the 1930’s. For the past 15 years we have been told that the market works. Globalisation is the best thing ever. Giving us cheap food and other consumer goods. Even people in the third world would benefit. Tell that now to the poor people who can’t even afford the price of rice. Marxism teaches that everything turns into its opposite under certain conditions most workers and poor people are finding that out for themselves with the massive increase in prices for food and other goods. At the time of writing oil is at an historical high at over $112 a barrel even in real terms.

Socialists quite rightly argue that under capitalism there is no way out of what is happening and what is to come. The capitalists of course will try to find a way out on the backs of the working class and poor, through price rises, job losses pay cuts, public spending cuts etc. The British Prime Minister said today that he will take difficult decisions to help the economy by that he means below inflation increases for workers and spending cuts.

Workers will have their own ideas on the 24^th of April there will strikes of public sector workers but to find a way out a different approach and a different party is needed, a new workers party with socialist policies. Nat ionisation of all the banks and finance companies under democratic workers control as part of a socialist planned economy is one of those policies. This would mean money could be spent on social housing and anyone in trouble with their mortgage instead of  being repossessed could then rent back their home at a reasonable rent. Also we could reverse the cash crisis in health and education.

The near collapse of Northern Rock bank, accompanied by the most astonishing scenes of panic for generations outside its branches, has serious political implications for Britain and the government of Gordon Brown. This was the first open run on a British bank since 1866. Peter Taaffe examines some of the key features that led to this crisis and looks ahead at what is to come.

Capitalism could drag millions of working people into an economic and social abyss.

Peter Taaffe, General Secretary, Socialist Party (England and Wales)

In 1866, Overend, Gurney and Co, a discount house and a ‘banker’s bank’, second only to the Bank of England, almost brought London’s banking system down. It had a reputation for financial ‘probity’, associated as it was with Quakerism in Norfolk before it became a major bank. But it became involved in ‘ill-judged’ speculations on railways, shipbuilding and other ventures. The poor Quakers of 1866 were, it seems, duped by fraudsters and middlemen, including a Greek novelist and a wheeler-dealing Irish parish priest! The bank’s directors ended up in the dock for their misdemeanours. They were acquitted but were disgraced.

Northern Rock chiefs have had, by comparison, a light slap on the wrist. Northern Rock is less important in today’s financial system than Overend, Gurney and Co was in 1866. Nevertheless, its involvement in the sub-prime mortgage market and its risky lending policy is typically witnessed in all stages of a boom cycle of capitalism.

Karl Marx pointed out that credit can extend the life cycle of capitalism beyond its ‘natural limits’. But like a piece of elastic, it can only be stretched so far before it breaks. Because the financiers are not directly linked to the process of production – for instance, the incomings and outgoings which the individual capitalist in the 19th century knew in his factory - it inevitably spawns what Marx called the “most colossal form of gambling and swindling”, which is imbued with the “pleasant character of swindlers”.

Hence, during booms, the rise of financial crooks like Stavisky in France, in the 1930s, Leeson in the Baring Bank catastrophe in the 1990s, and now Applegarth, the Chief Executive Officer of Northern Rock. Applegarth paid himself £1.3 million while the house of cards he presided over threatened to crash and with it the savings of thousands who had invested their life savings in many cases in this enterprise.

Northern Rock used depositors’ money to speculate in the sub-prime market like many other firms which have gone bust or have threatened to do so in the US. Its recklessness is shown in that in the first six months of last year, net lending grew by 47%. The sub-prime market – lending to ‘high risk’ borrowers at high rates of interest – accounts for 7-9% of the UK mortgage market.

It has also dabbled in the US sub-prime market, which has turned into a slow-motion car crash for the US economy. This market amounts to $1.5 trillion, with an estimated $200 billion “valueless debt” parcelled out and distributed throughout the financial system. This is now described as “toxic” by bankers and financiers.

Moreover, nobody knows where this debt really is. One British financial commentator compared the task of discovering where this debt is to a Microsoft computer game called ‘Minefields’. In the course of the game, if a mistake is made, the ‘bomb’ goes off. The sub-prime bomb has already exploded with serious consequences for the US economy and globalised capitalism.

Workers pay price

In the real world, this is not a game. Working-class people pay a big economic price, like the million families who have lost their homes already in the US because of the general slowdown in house prices and now compounded by the sub-prime catastrophe.

Another one to two million home owners face ‘foreclosure’ and could be out on the street. There are 200,000 home owners in the US who are in immediate ‘dire straits’ and face imminent repossession of their property. In a feature in the British newspaper, The Guardian, on Cleveland, Ohio, one poor black woman faced with increased mortgage payments was shown to be desperately trying to hold onto her house for her family. She was already in a full-time job but was seeking another one which would mean a 16-hour working day!

This sums up the character of this capitalist boom, praised to the skies by Gordon Brown and others until this bombshell, which The Socialist and the CWI predicted, exploded. It has been based upon a sea of credit, with British households possessing accumulated debt of over £1 trillion, exceeding even the gross domestic product of Britain. This was perceived as an endless financial stairway to an ever-richer future, fuelling a consumer boom. On the very eve of the collapse of Northern Rock, one stockbroker urged his clients to buy its stock: “Load up, get your children, grandmother, your goldfish” to buy. The result was a threat of financial meltdown, more serious than anything we have witnessed in the recent past.

Contagion

Even the British secondary banks crisis of the 1970s, which was largely on the periphery of the banking system, did not result in a breakdown of ‘interbank’ loans, which was the case this time. Moreover, one month ago, when the sub-prime crisis became contagious and spread to the rest of the world from the US, Barclay’s Bank, a pillar of the British banking system, could not make payments because other banks would not lend it the resources. The Bank of England was forced to step in overnight as the ‘lender of last resort’. One commentator from a big investment bank wailed to the Financial Times: “What we are seeing now is like a natural disaster. Whole parts of the financial system which we took for granted have stopped working. But that was not something that people had really prepared for.”

Marxists and socialists had “prepared”, by warning working people of the fragility of this boom. These events are not a “natural disaster” or an act of God but arise from capitalism, an unplanned and blind system which, through the so-called law of ‘supply and demand’, works chaotically, and behind the backs of society. Capitalism’s contradictions are dramatically revealed in financial and economic crises. The phraseology of the so-called financial experts is an indication of the seriousness of the situation: “The economy has had a heart attack”; it is a “systemic” banking failure.

The financial excesses of the past involved ‘rocket scientists’ in the City of London, employed to devise ever more ingenious ‘financial instruments’, such as cutting up debt and distributing it blindly throughout the world. This has now blown up in their face. The collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market in the US, and the crashing of ‘hedge funds’ – multi-billion dollar betting syndicates – has spilled over into similar collapses in Australia, Germany, France, and many other countries. The result has been a worldwide ‘credit crunch’. The word credit originates from the Latin ‘credo’ which means trust. In this financial crisis, trust evaporated, and threatens to break down completely.

The Northern Rock events will help to change political consciousness in Britain. It is the equivalent of the Tories’ ‘Black Wednesday’, in 1992, which saw the Tory government, and its chancellor, Norman Lamont (who was backed up by his then aide David Cameron), fleeing from the Exchange Rate Mechanism of the European Monetary System. This effectively sealed the political fate of the John Major government and led to New Labour coming to power in 1997.

We have yet to see the political consequences of ‘Black Monday’ when Chancellor Darling was forced to overrule, in effect, the prevarications of Mervyn King and the Bank of England. He underwrote the savings of Northern Rock depositors and by implication, all British banks. This represented not just a technical U-turn but a severe blow against the ideas and practices of the unrestrained, unregulated free market capitalism of the last two decades

Darling’s actions were a form of ‘nationalisation’ of bank deposits, as even pro-capitalist experts have remarked. It immediately raises the question in the minds of previous victims of financial swindles, why did they not get the same treatment? Expect now a clamour for compensation from the victims of Equitable Life’s meltdown in 2000, which Brown refused to intervene in when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer.

What about those swindled out of their life pensions by gangsters like deceased press tycoon Robert Maxwell and other well-heeled captains of industry? Even the holders of endowment insurance policies had their final payouts slashed by the arbitrary vagaries of the stock exchange.

Also, why is it that this government can step in to save depositors and not the thousands of workers thrown on the scrapheap by, for instance, the closure in the recent period of companies such as Rover? Deregulated capitalism is okay, it seems, when the volcanic eruptions do not break to the surface and wreck the lives of millions. The example of Darling’s intervention will be invoked if industries begin to collapse as the result of a recession. As with the railways today, the demand of victims of capitalism will be for nationalisation of failing industries.

This crisis also reflected the massive collapse in the trust of British people in all authority and capitalist institutions. Initially, there was no trust in the banks by depositors; why should they when only the first £2,000 of savings was 100% guaranteed to be paid out? The government was not initially believed when Alistair Darling made his first ‘reassuring’ statement. “Why should we trust this government when they lied on so many other things such as Iraq?” said a woman interviewed on TV. When this did not work, the government had to take over the ‘independent’ powers of the ‘independent’ Bank of England and act as the guarantor, the ‘lender of last resort’.

Up to this point, the bankers and the capitalist press, particularly the Financial Times, semi-official organ of the City of London, were full of warnings of ‘moral hazard’. When the capitalists and their hirelings speak about ‘morals’, keep your hand on your wallet! ‘Moral hazard’ is not a lap-dancing club in the City of London which stockbrokers and financiers are warned to avoid. It is a code for free marketeers’ opposition to government bail-outs of firms and industries. They opposed in the past ‘deposit insurance’ which is greater in America – where depositors receive 100% of their savings up to $100,000 – than in Britain. But Darling is now likely to introduce an American-type system in place of the partial insurance for depositors that exists now. So, also, the previously ‘unswerving’ Mervyn King, Brown, Darling and the government have endorsed ‘moral hazard’ when faced with the possibility of financial meltdown by providing facilities of £10 billion for ‘interbank transactions’.

US economy

At the same time, US interest rates have been cut by a hefty 0.5% - 50 basis points – by the Federal Reserve. This action has been taken by Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve chairman, to provide a stimulus to the US economy when it is heading for recession. The so-called ‘wealth effect’, arising from the upsurge in house prices, with home owners using their property like a hole-in-the-wall machine – is running out of steam. In fact, one Yale economist, speaking to the US Congress, feared “the collapse of home prices might turn out to be the most severe since the Great Depression”. The Center for Responsible Lending also predicted that the foreclosures on sub-prime loans will lead to a cumulative loss of $164 billon (£82 billion) in the value of homes. Investment banks are suggesting the cost to financial institutions could be more than $300 billion.

The present upswing in the US and the world has been fuelled by the consumer boom in the US, combined with an investment boom and cheap goods, which have flooded world capitalism from China. Without the maintenance of US consumption, the Atlas of world capitalism, the whole of the world will fall into a recessionary tailspin. The idea has been raised that the group of countries known as the ‘BRICs’ (Brazil, Russia, India and China), through increased consumption, could provide a lifeline to America. This is an illusion; these countries are ultimately dependent on the growth of the world market as providers of commodities (Brazil and Russia), a provider of business services (India), or as provider of cheap-labour manufacturer (China), which jointly powers the world market with the US. If US consumption stalls, so also will the factories of China, and exports of commodities from other countries.

Moreover, the rise in the price of oil to $90 a barrel or possibly $100 together with the rise in prices of food and other basic commodities, are adding to inflationary pressures. The rise in the cost of food in the US, in particular, could fuel pressure for an increase in wages. Once the immediate crisis appears to be over, the financial sharks will recommence speculation. This means further and bigger financial shocks in the not-too-distant future. If the cut in interest rates – Britain could follow the US – does not work as is likely, this will probably result in a reduction of another 0.25% in the US.

An even bigger drop in the value of the dollar than has already taken place could also develop. A ‘dollar crisis’ could now replace – or combine with – a financial crisis.

The main holders of dollar assets, China and Asian capitalism, when they see the value of their reserves diminishing, are likely to sell off a large portion of these in favour of the euro. This has risen to new and crippling heights for European industry, increasing the cost of exports, partly as a consequence of the drop in the dollar. All of this points to a recession in the not-too-distant future.

Following the 1998 Russian crisis, capitalism found an escape hatch through the dotcom bubble, which then crashed in 2000 and resulted in a recession in the US. After this, the increase in asset prices, particularly housing, was the main motive force driving ahead the economies of the US, Britain, Ireland and Spain. The latter two, like Britain, are on the edge of a financial precipice, with house prices set to decline, maybe quite dramatically.

Britain is one of the most, if not the most, exposed economies. The virtual abandonment of developing manufacturing industry means the lion’s share of growth comes from financial and business services, which account for almost 30% of GDP. In the second quarter of 2007, whereas the economy grew by 3.1% as a whole, the City boom and housing market meant that financial and business services grew by more than 5%. Charles Dumas of Lombard Street Research summed up the situation in The Guardian: “Britain is threatened by its position as globalisation’s epicentre. Any seize-up of global financial markets affects London and the British economy more than others. Lower real incomes combined with tight monetary conditions, and the overhang of a very high exchange rate, could hammer growth during 2008.”

Larry Elliott, the Guardian’s Economics Editor, concluded: “The opposition parties are right to sense political vulnerability. Beneath the surface, the UK is in worse shape than it was when the Conservatives left power, because at least during the post-Black Wednesday period Kenneth Clarke made an attempt to use devaluation of Sterling to good effect. Manufacturing exports thrived; the consumer was shackled with high taxation.” But since 1997, the pound has risen to record levels, crippling manufacturing exports. The policies of the Blair government, and now Brown’s, favoured the financial sector.

Election timing

Looked at rationally, and viewing future economic prospects in Britain and worldwide, PM Brown should go for an early general election. The immediate aftermath of his ‘Black Monday’ has not had the same catastrophic effect, as yet, as Major and Lamont’s Black Wednesday. The Tories, in the midst of economic problems, and having just come through an election where they lied about Britain’s economic prospects, were pilloried by the British people.

In previous financial crises, like 1931, 1967 and 1976, Labour’s standing in the polls suffered. Now, New Labour is a pillar of capitalism. Darling’s underwriting of savers’ deposits has, it seems, from the polls, temporarily assured ‘Middle England’ of the government’s financial ‘prudence’. The Tories, moreover, are still marked by their past crimes against the British people, despite the ‘smiling diplomacy’ of Cameron, the Tory opposition leader. But if an election is not held soon, the advantage that Brown has in the polls now will not last.

The floods in the summer were much easier to handle than the sea of debt, which threatens to drown the consumer boom in Britain. Once repossessions climb and jobs are lost, the government will be blamed. Brown hesitates, however, because of the volatility in Britain – notwithstanding the polls – that may yet blow up in his face. He does not want to be seen as ‘Gordon the brief’, if he is defeated in an election held soon. His tenure of office would then be the shortest since George Canning died in office in 1827. If Brown delays, then he may be forced to go the whole term until 2010, such are the economic rocks which loom that could imperil his government. Either way, a Brown or Cameron government would not offer economic and social salvation for the British people.

At this week’s Labour Party conference in Bournemouth, Gordon Brown will knock the last nails into the idea that Labour still somehow represents working-class people. Even veteran socialist Tony Benn now accepts that the emasculation of the trade unions at conference for a spurious ‘influence’ at the National Policy Forum means the end of Labour as a trade-union based, and, therefore, working-class, party.

Yet, instead of boldly calling, as has railway workers’ union leader Bob Crow, to begin to assemble the forces for a new party, Tony Benn proposes more of the same. Campaigns outside parliament, in effect, on single issues, are our only hope now, in the vain expectation that this will influence legislators to respond to pressure. Tony Benn’s claim that there are “20 socialist parties outside of the Labour Party” is an excuse for passivity. It is like the proponents of ‘Lib-Labbery’ in the Liberal Party at the end of the 19th century, who looked down in disdain on the efforts of the Independent Labour Party, of Friedrich Engels and of Keir Hardie, to raise the banner of an independent working-class party freed from the coat-tails of the two capitalist parties of the time.

We now have three capitalist parties – New Labour, the Lib Dems and the Tories – and the current economic crisis shows that they offer no way out. If the working class is not to be left politically leaderless then the idea of a new party must be energetically fought for at all levels of the labour movement. Such a party would use the Northern Rock scandal to raise the need for bank nationalisation.

Capitalism could drag millions of working people into an economic and social abyss. Only a socialist democratically-planned society can avoid this catastrophe. The instrument to prepare the way for this is a mass party that will give confidence to working people, firstly by linking the day-to-day struggles to the vision of a new socialist society.

A version of this article appears in this week’s Socialist, newspaper of the Socialist Party (CWI in England and Wales)

Fundamentally unsound

Over the last week, billions of pounds have been wiped off share values worldwide as stock markets plunged.

Editorial, The Socialist newspaper, Socialist Party (England and Wales), London

 The capitalists have watched, horror-struck, fearing that their finance system could face a drastic fall like a house of cards collapsing. The UK stock market dropped by around 10% - officially classified as a sharp correction. Twenty per cent or more is classified as a crash.

Two German banks have filed for bankruptcy, several hedge funds have imploded and Countrywide, the largest mortgage lender in the US is teetering on the edge of collapse.

Hedge fund managers have been splashed over the press during the last few months for their conspicuous consumption on an obscene scale. The top 25 took home $14 billion last year. These residents of Richistan routinely spend more than half a million dollars to join a golf club, or buy a watch, or a pen.

Now these masters of the universe, most of whom pay a lower rate of tax than their cleaners, are hitting the headlines for a different reason, as they demand state or bank intervention to rescue them as they hit financial crisis. Unfortunately, it will not be hedge fund managers but small investors and individuals with private pensions and mortgages who will pay the highest price for the crisis.

Stock markets

On the stock markets irrational exuberance has swung wildly to deep gloom. Jokes amongst hedge fund managers include the development of a new q.t.m (the mathematical models used to decide where hedge funds should invest) - a dartboard, and that the only certainty is that stocks in mattresses will rise as investors desperately search for somewhere safe to stash their cash.

Millions of people are following the gyrations of the world’s stock markets because they fear that they will tip the "real economy" into recession. The fear is well-founded; it is likely to happen. When, is a more difficult question to answer.

In an attempt to avert recession, the European Central Bank has injected $100 billion into the money markets. The US Federal Reserve, America’s central bank, also stepped in, cutting the cost of lending to commercial banks and hinting that it could cut overall interest rates in September. It had previously hesitated to do so, hoping that the developing crisis would lead to a correction and a gradual deflation of the bubbles in the US economy without it effecting the real economy. Now, however, in an indication of how serious the situation is, Fed chief Ben Bernanke, implicitly recognised that recession had become more likely and that he had no choice but to act, stating: "Financial market conditions have deteriorated, and tighter credit controls and increased uncertainty have the potential to restrain economic growth."

The utterly blind, short-term nature of the financial markets means that no-one knows whether the liquidity being pumped in will be sufficient to avoid recession in the short term. It is a method that the central banks have used repeatedly, to avoid, or lessen the effects of, financial crises over the last fifteen years.

However, at a certain point there will be a crisis that they can’t avert and, like a hangover after a party that went on too long, the accumulated problems of the last period will come home to roost.

What is more, there are factors that make this crisis likely to be more serious than those of the 1990s.

The ‘slow motion car crash’ in the US housing market seems to have reached the point of collision. One fifth of US mortgages are in the sub-prime sector mortgages given to those who have great difficulty paying back the debt. More than 20% have already defaulted and one million Americans have lost their homes.

Even if the central banks avert a credit crunch now, this will not alter the underlying processes being played out in the US, which is what, at base, the markets are reacting to. Most capitalist commentators keep insisting that the fundamentals are sound, but this is not true. In the second quarter of this year US consumption growth slowed to 1.3% and initial figures suggest it is falling further in the third quarter. US consumers have played Atlas for fifteen years, holding up the world economy by buying the world’s goods. They have only been able to do so because of unprecedented levels of government and personal debt. Now high oil and gas prices, falling home values and slackening labour markets have combined to force US consumers to tighten their belts. At a certain stage this will rebound against all countries dependent for growth on exports to the US, including China.

Whether a recession in the US economy comes now or a bit later, and whether it is sharp or more gradual, could however depend on events in the finance markets over coming weeks. Over the last week the financial consequences of the sub-prime crisis have spread like oil on a pond.

One of the features of the recent stock market frenzy has been the securitising of all kinds of assets. This means that assets are cut up into small pieces and then bundled together with other assets into packages that are bought and sold on the world’s stock markets. This is meant to spread the risk in a positive sense, but now crisis has hit, it has had exactly the opposite effect, it is spreading the panic.

Globally, no-one knows who owns pieces of the US sub-prime market, and as a result, no-one wants to loan money to any company that might be affected. The credit crunch which this has set off, if it is not reversed by the concerted efforts of the major capitalist powers, could ultimately trigger a sharp recession in the US, and as a result the world economy.

The current boom has relied on vast sums of money sloshing around the world’s stock markets. This has only been possible on the scale it has because of the role China, Japan and the South East Asian countries have played in using their trade surpluses to invest in US government bonds in order to sustain the US economy and its unprecedented trade deficit of over $800 billion dollars a year. They have done so in order to sustain a market for their goods. The capitalists worst fear is a rapid breakdown of this interdependent relationship, creating a massive world economic crisis.

Unstable system

Last week’s events have also led to disruption in the carry trade (where international speculators borrow in one currency - mainly the yen - and then change it into another) which has been another source of global liquidity. As a result the yen rose against the dollar, creating problems for Japanese exports to the US. If financial crisis causes the value of the dollar to drop dramatically, forcing the South East Asian countries to start to sell their dollar reserves, a sharp recession, even an absolute drop in world growth, would be posed.

There are many possible scenarios, as there are many fault lines in the world economy, not least the inability of US consumers to keep on buying.

Capitalism in the twenty first century is a more parasitic system than ever before. The capitalists are making mega-profits but they are not investing in production - capital expenditure is at an all time low in the US and Europe.

The current boom has been defined by the increasing chasm between the ultra-rich and the rest of the population. While a few roll in money, wages for the majority have stagnated, and public services have been cut. In the US, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of gross domestic product since 1947. Ultimately the falling share of wages in national income is restricting the market for capitalism and increasing the tendency towards crisis.

Enormous anger has built up during the boom years at the unequal nature of society. A job (albeit often low paid and insecure) and the availability of relatively cheap credit, have softened the blows that have rained down on working-class people.

However the onset of world recession, when it comes, will profoundly alter that situation, as billions of working-class people will be expected to pay for the crisis. There is not a mechanical connection between economic developments and the consciousness and combativity of the working class, but whether sooner or later, the coming economic upheavals will lay the basis for a massive increase in radicalisation.  

New face, same pedigree, Cartoon by Alan Hardman with apologies to 'Romulus and remus and the she-wolf' , photo Alan Hardman

WITH ALMOST the entire parliamentary Labour Party backing him, Gordon Brown was anointed as successor to Tony Blair without a contest. Brown had pretended to want a contest, but when left wing challenger John McDonnell was struggling to reach the required 45 nominations, Brown refused to ask some of his own supporters to nominate McDonnell.

He said it would be "dishonest" to do so and that he could not "ask people to trade their conscience".

But there would have been no trading of conscience if at Brown's bidding some MPs had declared their support for Brown but their nomination for McDonnell. Instead, they collectively decided to deny every Labour Party member and Labour-affiliated trade unionist a vote in the matter, in fear of suffering some exposure to criticism of their anti-working class agenda.

With most concerned only about their career prospects, in an unseemly rush to crown Brown, ardent Blairite MPs together with other former Brown opponents were 'changing their religion as the dying monarch's life ebbed away' as one backbench MP put it.

John McDonnell deserves congratulations for trying to present a challenge. If he had succeeded in getting on the ballot paper it would have led to welcome publicity for a programme against cuts, privatisation and the Iraq war and in favour of free education, a decent minimum wage, civil liberties and trade union rights. It would also have been a chance for workers in Labour-affiliated trade unions to vote in favour of that programme.

New face, same pedigree, Cartoon by Alan Hardman, photo Alan Hardman

However, as the socialist warned, an eventual victory by John McDonnell against Brown was not going to happen, given the nature of New Labour today.

Labour membership has halved during Blair and Brown's ten years in power and the remainder has become predominately Blairite and inactive. Rather than there being an influx of new workers into New Labour as John McDonnell hoped, with Brown determined to continue with a pro-market agenda, the stage is set for a further decline of the remnants of the Labour left.

An FT Harris poll on 21 May showed that 80% of British voters think that hospitals have not improved during the last ten years of New Labour government and 72% think that education has not improved. However, Gordon Brown has made it clear that he will continue with privatisation and cuts. There will be changes in style and presentation, some relatively minor progressive promises and probably an earlier withdrawal of troops from Iraq. But the basic diet of pro-big business measures and attacks on workers' living standards will go on.

The contest for the deputy leader of the Labour Party, while actually having some challengers, also does nothing to indicate any turn to the left. The candidate supported by the major trade unions, Jon Cruddas, did oppose higher tuition fees and a renewal of Trident missiles, but he also nominated Gordon Brown for the Labour leadership! And Blairite candidate Hilary Benn only managed to get on the ballot paper through getting some final nominations from members of the parliamentary Socialist Campaign Group whose 'socialist' conscience amounted to only nominating him out of sympathy for his father, the left-wing Tony Benn.

A vital task for all socialists now is to prepare to assist the inevitable workers' struggles that will break out under the Brown-led government.

Much of the public-sector workforce is seething with rage at Brown's 2% wage limit, effectively a pay cut. Other battles are looming, such as against Royal Mail plans to axe 40,000 jobs and close a further 2,500 post offices.

Working-class people are hugely relieved that Blair is going and a layer are desperately hoping that Brown will break free of the Blairite neo-liberal agenda and reveal himself as different in substance as well as style. However, there is also a layer who know well that illusions in Brown are futile, who are already drawing the conclusion that industrial action will soon be necessary. Building for a good turnout of trade unionists at the RMT-initiated shop stewards' conference on 7 July will be an important step in preparing for such action.

But as well, socialists need to step up the campaign for a new political party that can represent workers' interests.

The successful second 'campaign for a new workers' party' (CNWP) conference on 12 May was a step forward on the path to realising this aim.

John McDonnell, now clearly obstructed in his aim of furthering workers' interests inside the Labour Party should join socialists outside the Labour Party who are campaigning for a new party. However, unfortunately, he confirms in his interview with the socialist this week, that he believes he should remain in the Labour Party at this stage.

The call for a new party receives enthusiastic support among rank and file trade unionists, community campaigners and young people whenever it is raised in meetings and on picket lines etc by Socialist Party members and others. The socialist will continue to argue for the urgent need to build the CNWP and for all socialists, trade unionists and others not yet part of it, to get involved in helping to build this vital campaign.

Curtain falls on disastrous reign

Editorial, The Socialist newspaper, Socialist Party (England and Wales), London

Ten years of ‘unremitting’ attacks on the working class and poor for the benefit of the rich, blatant corruption – symbolised by the Ecclestone affair at the beginning of his reign and ‘cash for honours’ at the end – the systematic undermining of the NHS, the continuation of the dirty work of the Tories through privatisation. Above all, the obscenity of the Iraq war with its 650,000 civilian victims and the country plunged back almost to medieval barbarism. This, and not the sycophantic blandishments by Blair and his media allies in the last week, is the real ‘legacy’ of his disastrous reign.

Thatcher was a modern Genghis Khan as her capitalist barbarism swept over Britain, leaving its mark to this day in the industrial wastelands and the monumental poverty which scars the country. New Labour’s accession to power deepened this, despite claims to the contrary. 1997 and the defeat of the Tories did, indeed, seem to be a ‘new dawn’ for millions of working-class people seeking deliverance from Thatcherite Tory despotism. Many hoped against hope that Blair and his government was the agency for this change.

These illusions were not shared by the socialist and the Socialist Party – we warned he could turn out to be as bad or worse than Thatcher herself – nor by the serious representatives of capitalism who knew precisely where he stood… in their camp. The Financial Times wrote before the election of 1997: "The New Labour ‘project’ looks increasingly like Margaret Thatcher’s final triumph."

The gradual realisation that this was, indeed, the real agenda of Blair and New Labour has led to the almost excoriating hatred with which Blair is viewed by working-class people, the young and, above all, the organised labour movement. Despite the stage-managed emotion of a few New Labour toadies in his Sedgefield constituency, his departure evoked hisses, boos and catcalls, rather than the hosannas and the crowd ‘calling for more’ ludicrously suggested by his coterie.

The representatives of the ruling class recognised his worth to them as he departs. Tory former chancellor Kenneth Clarke, appearing on BBC Question Time, praised Blair for "finishing off socialism" in the Labour Party. However, he correctly added that the "heavy lifting" – witch-hunts against the left and Militant in particular – was started by former Labour leaders, Neil Kinnock and John Smith. The result of all this for the Labour Party was underlined by John Curtice, the election commentator, in the Independent: "The party that was originally founded to provide working-class representation in Parliament is no longer regarded as a working-class party. In 1987, the British Election Study found that 46% of the electorate thought the Labour Party looked after the interests of the working class ‘very closely’. By the time of the last election, only 11% did."

According to Mori, the pollsters, at the last general election, Labour’s support among "A/B professionals was eleven points higher than in 1992. In contrast, its vote among the D/E, the working class, was a point lower." The ‘electoral wizardry’ of Blair and the New Labour machine resulted, in the recent local election, in New Labour attaining almost the same share of the vote as Labour did under Michael Foot in 1983. At the time, this earned Foot the jeers of the right and their press that Labour’s electoral manifesto was the "longest suicide note in history".

The idea that Blair himself was responsible for the victory in 1997 is punctured by Curtice: "Mr Blair did not enable his party to secure a double-digit lead in the opinion polls, he inherited one. Thanks to the ravages of ‘Black Wednesday’ [1992] Labour already enjoyed a 23 point lead over the Tories in May 1994, the month that Mr Blair’s predecessor, John Smith, died." In other words, it was the massive unpopularity of the Tories, rather than support for the programme of Blair and New Labour, which hoisted him to power in 1997.

But, protest the Blairistas like Peter Mandelson, thousands of children have been lifted out of poverty. Yet the UN recently declared in a special report that the position of children in Britain was the worst in the advanced industrial countries. Moreover, today, a million children live in overcrowded, run-down, damp or dangerous housing. The number of homeless people in Britain has risen to 391,000; across the UK 93,000 families are living in temporary accommodation, twice the number when Labour came to power. The average price paid by first-time buyers has doubled in five years. House prices are now beyond the reach of first-time buyers in 93% of towns, up from 37% in 2001.

But there is a minimum wage, isn’t there? Yes, of a miserly £5-35 an hour! This is at a time when the Sunday Times rich list – featured in a previous issue of the socialist – showed that the combined wealth of the UK’s 1,000 richest people had risen by 20%, to a staggering £59 billion in the last twelve months. A previous renegade socialist once declared that he believed in the ‘emancipation of the working class one by one, beginning with myself’. Blair has put this cynical philosophy into practice. When he leaves office, he will no longer have to ‘struggle by’ on an annual salary of £180,000 a year. His wife, Cherie, earns an estimated £100,000 a year plus £30,000 every time she gives a ‘lecture’. He is entitled to a backbench salary of £60,000, redundancy pay of £31,000 and a retirement pension of £63,000 for life. When he reaches 60 he will be eligible for another pension for his long service as an MP. This will be worth another £40,000 a year. The dosh will pile up as he lectures to the like-minded rich throughout the world.

But he leaves in his wake massive discontent and a broken-backed party which has no real connection now with the working class which historically created this party and hoisted its leaders on its backs into power. Contrast Blair’s reign with that of previous Labour governments. By no means a full-blooded socialist government, the Attlee government of 1945-50, under colossal mass pressure, did preside over a ‘quarter of a revolution’ by nationalising 20% of industry and creating the National Health Service.

Blair has presided over the dismantling of this previous monument to Labour rule. Listen to David Hinchcliffe, an ex-Labour MP and former chairman of the MPs health committee and an opponent of Socialist Party members in the Wakefield area, who declared recently: "We never envisaged that a Labour government under Tony Blair would go further with the Tory market reforms in health than Margaret Thatcher would ever have dared." This is why there is colossal anger on the NHS and other attacks on the public sector.

It would be even greater but for the fact that the British economy, allegedly now the world’s fifth-largest and richest, is in what capitalist economists describe as its ‘15th year of uninterrupted growth’. This is not down to the ‘management’ of Gordon Brown and New Labour but is the product, in the main, of the devaluation of the pound under the Tories in 1992. This created a certain economic breathing space for the British economy, together with the upswing in the world economy through globalisation and other factors.

But this, for the mass of the population, has been a ‘joyless boom’, one that has been marked by increased exploitation of the workforce – resulting in super-profits for big business, at their highest level for 50 years in Britain. It has gone together, also, with bullying in the workplace and increased stress. An attempted management counter-revolution has taken place against the rights, conditions and union organisation of the working class. Consequently, the situation in the workplaces and factories could be compared to a lake of petrol which an accidentally dropped match could ignite into an explosion. Public-sector workers, faced with a big increase in prices, will refuse to accept the diktat of Brown’s 2% limit on pay. Post office workers are threatening to strike.

The situation that Brown will inherit is entirely different to that of 1997 or of any time since. The British economy, like the American and many others, such as Spain, is floating on a sea of credit. Home repossessions have jumped by 65% to a six-year high of 17,000 last year. Personal debt has reached a record $2.6 trillion and, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, UK household debt, as a percentage of annual disposable income, hit 159% in 2005 – the latest year for which data is available – compared with 135% in the US. There is a growing deficit, presently at 3.5% in the trade current account. Interest rates have been pushed up to 5.5%, the fourth rise in nine months and a six-year high. Even a fervent Blairite like Will Hutton recently declared in the Observer newspaper: "The crash is coming, and it could be soon." And yet, the CBI (the bosses’ trade union) demands its pound of flesh, a further squeeze on public spending, attacks on public-sector workers, privatisation and a further shift in the balance of wealth and power in favour of the capitalist class.

Tony Blair facilely declared in 1999: "The class war is over. But the struggle for true equality has only just begun." This itself was a concession to the opposition to the gross and widening disparities in wealth. But inequality is not just an ‘unfortunate leftover’ from previous ‘uncivilised times’. Inequality is woven into the very fabric of class society, with the rich compelled to squeeze the share of the working class in order to boost its profitability, and the working class itself equally forced to resist. Sometimes that resistance is muted by conservative trade union leaders, but the ‘class war’ inevitably breaks over the heads of even this stratum who invariably rush to catch up. Britain is on the eve of such an outburst of working-class fury.

Despite the plaudits of the rich and powerful, Blair, in the words of Leon Trotsky to the Mensheviks in 1917, is about to go into the "dustbin of history". But, unfortunately, Blairism/Thatcherism will still dominate New Labour under Gordon Brown. Mandelson shows the real character of New Labour when he declared: "No Labour Party manifesto would now propose to repeal Mrs Thatcher’s trade union law, reverse privatisations or remove the right to buy a council house." (Evening Standard, 8 May)

The weakness of the left in the Labour Party is indicated by the difficulty, as we go to press, of John McDonnell reaching the 45 required nominations. Brown’s acolytes are reported to be struggling to prevent McDonnell appearing on the ballot. This is clearly because this would then put many trade union leaders on the spot in the Labour leadership election. While these leaders, almost to a man and woman, are prepared to drag behind Brown, their own members could exert pressure for a vote for McDonnell.

However, even if John McDonnell gets on the ballot, this will not prevent a Brown ‘coronation’. He has already re-emphasised that he is the joint architect, with Blair, of New Labour. There will, of course, be some concessions to the labour movement and the working class. But, fundamentally, Brown will continue the same policies as Blair but maybe not in the same brutal, blundering fashion.

Blair is considered, even by establishment figures, as an ‘American neo-conservative with a British passport’. Tariq Ali informs us in the Guardian that, "senior diplomats have told me it would not upset them too much if Blair were tried as a war criminal". Certainly, the Iraq disaster is the worst foreign policy catastrophe for British capitalism and imperialism since the Suez crisis of 1956. A man who once said that his could be the first generation who may "live our entire lives without going to war or sending our children to war" actually took British troops into five wars: Kosovo, ‘Desert Fox’ in Iraq, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Brown is not likely to make all the same disastrous mistakes. Nevertheless, his government, even with cosmetic changes in policy, will amount to little more than a ‘re-spray’ of New Labour, with the same Blairite/Thatcherite policies as the foundation of his government. Therefore, the real lesson of the last ten years is that the ruling class, through the medium of right-wing trade union and Labour leaders like Blair have succeeded, unfortunately, in destroying the former mass political expression of the British working class, the Labour Party, replacing it with the capitalist New Labour. There is, therefore, no time to be lost in creating the basis for a new force for the British working class, a new mass workers’ party.

The ‘new dawn’ of 1997 for the British workers turned out to be a false one under the stewardship of Blair and Brown. However, a new future can open up if the work of the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party, shown at the splendid national conference at the weekend, was built on, as it will be, in the struggles that will unfold in the next period in Britain.

Editorial from The Socialist, paper of The Socialist Party, cwi in England and Wales

Vote socialist on 3 May

Time for a new workers' party

THE ELECTIONS on Thursday 3 May will be a chance for voters to reject New Labour and a last chance to reject it under Tony Blair's leadership. Blair is expected to hand over the job of prime minister to Gordon Brown in July. The verdict is likely to be damning, with Blair leaving with one of the lowest ever popularity ratings for a prime minister, and with Labour losing a large number of council seats.

Judy Beishon, speaking at Socialist Party congress 2007, photo Paul Mattsson

Judy Beishon

For many people, Blair's biggest crime was helping US president Bush with the war on Iraq and occupation. A grim total of 110 British soldiers have now lost their lives in Iraq and Iraqi civilians are dying at the terrible rate of over 70 a day.

One in seven Iraqi people have fled their homes, to become refugees. A majority of those who remain face constant bloodshed and lack of basic necessities such as sanitation, clean water and adequate food.

Blair had the nerve to complain last week of a "relentless focus on the negative". What positive conclusions can be drawn from the nightmare in Iraq? The news of sectarian bombings and other killings just gets worse every week.

The journalist Polly Toynbee lamented in the guardian (20.4.07): "What have we done, what have we unleashed ... This is our war, our fault, our bloodshed for aiding America's reckless and incompetent invasion and for failing to stop civil war".

But it is not our war or our fault. Ordinary people expressed strong opposition to the war when two million marched in London in February 2003. It is Bush and Blair who are to blame, and a majority of people in both Britain and the US can't wait to see the back of them.

The 3 May elections will also be a verdict on Blair and New Labour's home policies. Most people see them as highly negative too. In a poll by the Observer, only 10% of people said that Britain is a more pleasant place in which to live in 2007 than it was when New Labour was elected in 1997. A majority said that the standard of NHS care in their area has deteriorated over the same ten years.

However, what alternative is on offer in these elections? Many people face a choice between the three big business parties - Tories, Liberals and Labour - who will all make further cuts in living standards and quality of life if elected.

Fortunately though, there are a growing number of left and independent, anti-war and anti-cuts candidates standing. In areas where they are standing, a walk to the polling station is worthwhile.

And where Socialist Party candidates are standing - as Socialist Alternative on the ballot paper - voters are not only able to vote against cuts and privatisation, but can go a qualitative step further and support a party that is building a socialist alternative to the parties of big business.

General election called for 24 May

Stephen Boyd, Socialist Party, Dublin

Hundreds of people languishing on trolleys in A&E departments, tens of thousands on hospital waiting lists, €415,000 for an average house in Dublin, commuters wasting hundreds of hours a year stuck in traffic jams, the second highest class sizes in the EU.

These are just some of the problems that working class people in southern Ireland have to contend with and are the backdrop to the general election on 24 May.

The Celtic Tiger is long gone and now the South is facing into the prospect of an economic downturn, house prices are falling, consumer confidence is way down and there are major crises everywhere you turn.

This is the legacy of ten years of Fianna Fail and Progressive Democrat government, huge profits for big business and mounting problems for workers. The Southern Irish general election is a contest between two right-wing political blocs. Fianna Fail and the PDs are seeking re-election and a coalition between Fine Gael and Labour are trying to oust them. It is unclear who will win the election, but what is clear is that the next government will be right-wing and will continue to implement a neo-liberal agenda based on privatisation and attacks on workers' wages and conditions.

The Greens and Sinn Fein portray themselves as anti-establishment, but both parties have said they would be prepared to go into government with either Fianna Fail or Fine Gael. This will be a sell out for anyone who hoped these parties would be a radical alternative because inevitably they will be part of governments implementing a big business agenda.

The Socialist Party will not be part of any big business government. We are putting forward an alternative based on planning for people's needs before private greed.

We are standing four candidates. For the last ten years, Joe Higgins has been the only TD (Member of Parliament) who has voiced the anger of working class people and he has used his position to organise and fight for their rights. Clare Daly is tipped to win a seat in Dublin North, and will join Joe Higgins in the Dail to strengthen the real opposition. The Socialist Party is campaigning hard to also get Mick Murphy and Mick Barry into the Dail.

Winning more seats in parliament will help the Socialist Party to fight on the real issues that affect workers and will be an important step forward in the building of a new party that really represents working class people.

Socialist Party candidates

Joe Higgins TD - Dublin West

Joe Higgins has been correctly described as "the real opposition" in the Dail [parliament] He is the only voice of opposition to the anti-working class policies of the establishment. He lives on the average worker's wage, spent a month in jail for his opposition to bin charges, and successfully fought against exploitation and the race to the bottom at GAMA.

Councillor Clare Daly - Dublin North

Clare has an unrivalled record of representing working people in Dublin North. She has campaigned tirelessly for over ten years on many issues such as water charges, the bin tax, and against the privatisation of Aer Lingus and for sustainable planning. Clare also spent a month in jail for her opposition to the bin tax. Clare narrowly missed out being elected at the last general election and is tipped to win a seat this time around.

Councillor Mick Murphy - Dublin South West

Mick spent three weeks in jail for his active opposition to the bin tax. Shortly after being elected to the Council, he uncovered the scandal at the multinational construction company GAMA which was paying migrant workers only €2.20 an hour!

Councillor Mick Barry - Cork North Central

Mick went to jail fighting the bin charges, co-founded the home helps' movement that ended low pay for home helps and has organised and led a series of successful housing campaigns - Mick Barry has always been a consistent campaigner for the rights of working class people.

From www.socialistpartyaustralia.org

US hip hop artist Snoop Dogg has been denied entry to Australia this week. The cancellation of his visa means he will not be appearing at the MTV Australian Video Music Awards in Sydney this weekend. Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews said Snoop Dogg was being issued with a notice of intention to cancel his visa after he failed to pass the requisite 'character test'.

Andrews said "He doesn't seem the sort of bloke we want in this country. What that character test does is allow the minister to refuse the grant of a visa if the person doesn't pass the character test. It can also include a person's associations, their past and present criminal conduct, and their general conduct.

"This man has been a member of a Los Angeles gang - and is still associated with it apparently - that's been involved in murder, robberies and drug dealing in the LA area." Andrews said.

The hypocrisy coming from the federal government is absolutely unbelievable. Whether or not Snoop Doog has been involved in criminal activity or not is one thing but Andrews thinks it is perfectly acceptable to refuse entry to people like Snoop Dogg but to welcome criminals like George Bush with open arms!

George Bush, allegedly like Snoop, has also been implicated in murder, robbery and the drug trade. Bush like Snoop is a member of a 'dangerous gang' they are called the Republican Party! Bush has instigated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which have led to the murder of hundreds of thousands of people. Bush has also been linked to a string of corporate corruption scandals in which money has been robbed from ordinary people.

It has also been reported that Bush was arrested in 1972 for cocaine possession. He also now admits that he was convicted of drunk driving in 1976 and in 1966 he was arrested for disorderly conduct. His 'general conduct' is also in question as he has been found out lying on many issues including over the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Not to mention the lies and corruption associated with Bushes election 'victory' in 2000!

Even given this track record Howard and Andrews plan to roll out the red carpet for Bush when he attends the APEC summit in September. The Socialist Party, alongside thousands of other Australian workers and young people will be protesting against the rotten policies and track record of Bush. We will be organising a fleet of ‘Red Buses to APEC’ from Melbourne to Sydney for the event. We are taking expressions of interest for seats now. If you have had enough of the policies of Bush and the hypocrisy of the Howard government you should join us! From www.socialistpartyaustralia.org

Standing for the millions

not the millionaires

Stop the endless cuts in jobs and services

While the government is busy taking backhanders from big business; local services are being cut to the bone in every area of the country.

Yet since 1997 the council tax has increased in real terms by more than 80%. Millions struggle to pay ever-rising council tax bills while local authorities use the courts and the bailiffs to retrieve arrears.

The council tax is a deeply unfair, regressive tax where the poor pay most. Those living in the most expensive properties pay only three times as much as the lowest. This means that the Blairs, with an income of at least £450,000, pay less than £1500 in council tax.

The government tries to claim that rises in council tax have nothing to do with them, but they’re lying.

 Councils only raise 25% of their income from council tax, while 75% comes from central government. So a small increase in council spending or, more likely, a cut in the central government grant, results in a high council tax increase. In addition, under New Labour the government grant is tied by a thousand strings to specific spending projects, mainly linked to privatisation. This leaves local councils with a pittance to spend on providing basic local services.

But local councils are not blameless. Whether Labour, Liberal or Tory they have wholeheartedly accepted a diet of cuts, privatisation and council tax increases. A socialist council would set a ‘needs budget’ based not on the dictats of central government, but on the needs of local people. We would then launch a mass campaign to demand the necessary funds from central government.

For a budget to meet peoples’ needs

For example, last year in Stoke on Trent Socialist Party councillors proposed a 'No Cuts in Jobs and Services - No Privatisation' budget. This budget called for no cuts in jobs and services, an end to the freeze on job replacements, no privatisation, and no increase in council tax together with a broad-based campaign to fight for the return of money taken by years of government cuts.

New Labour councillor, John Beech, raged that this budget would "send out the wrong message" and claimed: "We got elected to do a job". But no-one votes for councillors because they want to see cuts in jobs, services and increases in council tax.

Vote Socialist Alternative

We say to the many thousands of councillors who are voting through cuts in services around the country –

"if you are not prepared to fight for the people you were elected to represent, stand aside for those that are. "

And we say to the millions who are fed up with endless cuts –

 "if you want councillors who are going to stand up for you – to fight against tax increases and cuts in services – you should vote Socialist Alternative wherever we are standing on 3 May. "

We also support all other genuine anti-cuts and anti-privatisation candidates, and are standing in an electoral coalition with other socialists and campaigners called the Socialist Green Unity Coalition.

If you are an anti-cuts campaigner or trade unionist who is reading this and feeling frustrated because you are in an area where your only ‘choice’ in this election is between the big business parties we appeal to you to join us in the struggle for socialism and consider convincing your campaign to contest the elections on ‘no cuts, no privatisation’ platform.

All Socialist Party members who are elected to public positions take only the average wage of a skilled worker. While Blair has a £4 million mortgage Socialist Party MPs and councillors live the same lifestyles as the working-class people who put them into office.

Campaign for a New Workers’ Party

The Campaign for a New Workers’ Party (CNWP) was launched in 2006.

It brings together socialists, community and trade union activists who believe that New Labour today – whether led by Blair or Brown – is an out-and-out party of the billionaires, and want to see the formation of a new mass party of a totally different kind – a party that fights for working-class people – not for the fat cats.

So far more than 45 trade union National Executive Committee members and 2,500 activists have signed up to support the campaign.

The CNWP is holding its second national conference on Saturday 12 May.

The conference will bring socialists and anti-cuts and anti-privatisation campaigners together with trade union activists to discuss the way forward after the local elections.

In the last year over 20,000 NHS jobs have been cut.

Hospitals, emergency departments and wards are being closed.

The NHS was one of the great achievements of the 1945 Labour government.

New Labour is systematically destroying it.

The basic premise of the NHS – that free, high quality, health care should be available to all – is being rapidly eroded.

Meanwhile big business is raking in the profits from the NHS at our expense.

Firstly, they have made a mint from the Private Finance Initiative (PFI).

Even the Commons public accounts committee branded the refinancing of Norfolk and Norwich hospital PFI scheme as "the unacceptable face of capitalism" because it increased big businesses rate of return from 16% to 60%.

Norfolk and Norwich hospital’s experience is typical. Overall business is expected to reap £3.3 billion in profits from PFI. And at the same time, the extra cost of private (as opposed to public) sector borrowing means that PFI costs the public purse an average of 40% more than the same hospital would built in the public sector.

In other words, PFI results in a direct money transfusion from our services into the pockets of big business.

And now, New Labour is qualitatively expanding privatisation of the NHS with the introduction of foundation hospitals and privately run Direct Treatment Centres (DTCs).

They’re all the same!

The Tory Party, which began the current dismantling of the NHS when it was in office, is now trying to pose as defender of the NHS, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Both their and the Liberal Democrats policies are virtually identical to those of New Labour.

Cameron’s chief policy strategist, Oliver Letwin, blurted out the truth to the Sunday Times, when he explained that the Tories, like New Labour, oppose any limits on private companies running parts of the NHS.

Step up the fight back! For a mass national demo!

Only by protesting can we halt the attacks on the NHS.

 Hundreds of thousands of people have already taken part in local NHS protests against cuts.

The Socialist Party is campaigning they should be brought together into a massive national demonstration against health cuts and privatisation, as a step towards further national action, including strike action.

The leadership of UNISON, the public sector trade union, has now said it will call a national demonstration in October – however, we are continuing to argue for an earlier demonstration – in June or July.

A socialist programme for the NHS

A socialist policy for the NHS would mean an immediate end to privatisation and a reversal of all the privatisation already introduced.

However, this does not mean that we just want to go back to the NHS of a decade or more ago.

The NHS needs to be democratically run with the full involvement of NHS workers and users.

It also needs to be better integrated (between hospitals, primary care, community care, social services, dentistry etc) in order to give people the best possible service.

All charges for health care, including for dentistry and eye-care, should be completely abolished.

How could this be paid for?

A socialist government would redirect money currently spent on war and occupation into the health service.

We would also take the pharmaceutical and drug companies into democratic public ownership.

In 2002, the wealth of the global pharmaceutical industry was estimated at $406 billion.

It is a closely guarded secret exactly how hefty a chunk of the billions the pharmaceutical companies make in profit comes from their sales to the NHS, but there is no doubt that it would save the NHS billions if it didn’t have to buy drugs from the drug profiteers.

In addition, a nationalised pharmaceutical industry would direct research at finding cures for diseases and developing treatments for less common illnesses which the current drugs industry ignores – because it is not profitable to do otherwise.

At the same time a socialist government would carry out measures to increase living standards – such as a decent living pension, increased annually and linked to earnings, and the right to a job with a living wage for all.

It should not be underestimated how much such measures would improve peoples’ health.

Ill health remains a class issue – even according to government statistics, low-paid workers are almost three times as likely to suffer from chronic ill health as high-level managers.

A high-quality, affordable home is one of the most crucial elements of a decent standard of living.

If effects every aspect of our lives. Recently, a research programme compared the health of the residents before and after a major renovation of an estate in Hackney, London.

Just having their existing homes refurbished meant that residents’ health improved and they made 30% fewer visits to the doctor.

Yet a high-quality, affordable home is a right now denied to most of us.

Half a million people are literally homeless.

But the problem is much wider than that - there are now more than a million adults who are still living with their parents – even though they are approaching 40!

As house prices soar, it is impossible for many young people to stretch to a mortgage – on average, the lowest-paid quarter of the population would have to earn five times their current wages to buy a property.

Private sector renting is all that is available to increasing numbers of people. Millions of people are being forced to live in sub-standard, overcrowded private rented housing – a return to the Rachmanite landlords of the 1960s.

And private sector rents are following house prices into the stratosphere.

We campaign for the reintroduction of rent officers with the power to force landlords to pay a fair rent.

To begin to solve the housing crisis local authorities need to provide affordable, secure, good-quality public housing to be provided for all those who want it.

After all, from 1949–54 an average of 230,000 council houses were built per year.

The Socialist Party is campaigning for a programme on a similar scale that would refurbish existing stock and build enough new homes to genuinely solve the housing problem.

In complete contrast to a socialist policy New Labour is hell bent on worsening the housing crisis.

They are attempting to systematically sell-off what remains of council housing. Although they haven’t yet met their target of selling off 200,000 homes a year, they have succeeded in selling off more council houses in the nine years they’ve been in office than the Tories managed to sell off in 18 years!

New Labour claims to be ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’.

It is neither.

It is true that record numbers of people are being locked up, many for crimes of poverty, such as inability to pay extortionate council tax bills.

But on the other hand last year Britain's 54 billionaires paid an average of 0.12% of their income in taxes.

Others, mainly young people, who have been ‘ASBOED’ are being sent to prison without having ever being convicted of a crime.

Yet no matter how many people New Labour locks up violent crime is still increasing in many parts of the country.

The Socialist Party is opposed to all criminal and anti-social behaviour, and supports democratic community action to tackle these problems.

It is working-class communities, young and old, that bear the brunt of crime.

The super-rich have always been able to protect their homes and goods with sophisticated security measures.

Now they can go one better and ‘rent a cop’! Several police forces, while complaining about being under-staffed, are renting out their services to the rich.

In Devon and Cornwall, for example, you can have a constable for £350 a day or a chief inspector for £365.

Meanwhile many ordinary people no longer bother to phone the police when they are burgled, because they know that nothing will be done.

At the same time, in working-class communities throughout Britain, nothing is being done to provide young people with the hope of a decent future – a good education, a good job and a decent home.

Youth clubs and other facilities are being closed down.

Yet there is no doubt that the provision of such basic rights would prevent the vast majority of a new generation being sucked into crime.

To really defend local communities you have to provide decent public services

All the mainstream parties’ election propaganda centres on the importance of local communities – yet their policies, at local and national level, are destroying local communities.

Under New Labour 3,000 local Post Offices are closed or threatened with closure. When Post Offices close local communities lose a vital local service.

Every kind of service that helps local communities to function is under attack – from nurseries, to youth clubs, to libraries.

In the first six months of this year alone, 21 (1.4%) of the country's libraries have closed, five are due to close and 67 are under review for closure according to figures in the Bookseller magazine.

No to the BNP!

Protest against fascism 2005

The far-right, racist British National Party (BNP) claims that it is on the side of working people.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The BNP is a racist party that lays the blame for the problems local communities face – poor housing, privatisation and council service cuts – at the door of ethnic minorities and asylum seekers. This is easy for the BNP, after all, the government and the tabloid press use the same kind of propaganda.

By whipping up racism the BNP diverts blame from the real culprits for the problems of working-class communities – big business, the government and local councils.

Whenever the BNP has been elected it has done nothing to fight for the local people it claims to represent.

In Burnley, the BNP councillors didn’t even turn up to the council meeting where council tax rises and £1 million worth of cuts were voted through.

In Stoke, BNP councillors voted in favour of a dramatic rise in council tax equal to almost double inflation.

It is not enough for anti-racists just to condemn the BNP's record of racism, prejudice and hatred.

We need to offer a clear socialist alternative based on working class unity.

New Labour's Tory policies of cuts and privatisation boost support for the BNP whilst the government’s attacks on the right to asylum for refugees fleeing torture, repression and war help make the BNP look more legitimate and respectable.

The campaign to stop the BNP must expose its real agenda but, more importantly, offer a positive alternative including mass community and trade union campaigns to improve council services, stop cuts and privatisation and prepare the way for a new mass workers’ party to genuinely represent working people.

It is not a lack of wealth that has resulted in 25 years of cuts.

There are now 946 billionaires in the world according to Forbes magazine, and their total wealth went up last year to an incredible $3.5 trillion.

Britain is home to 54 of those billionaires.

If they paid even the measly 40% tax that New Labour asks for £50 billion would have found its way into the states coffers.

Instead they paid just £14.7 million in tax.

Needless to say no action has been taken against them.

The policies of all the mainstream parties are dictated by the interests of the big corporations that dominate the British economy.

Tony Blair recently boasted that the World Bank had described Britain as being among the most "lightly regulated" countries in the world.

In other words big business can do pretty much whatever it likes.

And big business in the 21st century is driven more completely than ever by the short-term desire for the maximum possible profits – so for them public services can never be too paltry, or wages too low – because the less we have, the more profits they make.

So while the government has no problem spending money (for example, Trident II is predicted to cost £76 billion and current costs for the invasion and occupation of Iraq are running at £5 million a day) it does everything it can to resist spending money on improving our living conditions – because it is not in the interests of big business.

This is the brutal logic of the system we live under, capitalism.

But we do not have to accept that logic. Across Britain workers – such as benefit and job centre workers and the nursery nurses in Scotland – have been forced to take strike action over pay.

The Socialist Party stands in solidarity with all those workers fighting to defend or improve their pay and conditions.

Within the trade unions our members, including the 24 currently serving on trade union national executives, campaign for union leaderships who are prepared to fight on their members’ behalf.

The Socialist Party also campaigns as part of local communities against cuts and closures in our services.

If we put up a fight it is possible to win victories, like, to give just one example amongst many, the nursery nurses in Huddersfield who have just managed to force the council to pull back from closing three nurseries.

For a socialist alternative

The Socialist Party is fighting for every possible improvement in working-class people’s lives, but we recognise that under this profit-hungry capitalist system, we will always face a constant struggle to defend our living conditions.

That is why we are fighting for socialist change.

We don't want the kind of regimes that existed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe which, while they were based on a planned economy, were completely undemocratic.

Socialism can only work with the fullest democracy.

We want real socialism – a democratic society and economy run to meet the needs of all instead of the profits of a few.

Based on co-operation and equality, socialism would lay the basis for an end to poverty and all forms of discrimination and oppression.

Join the Socialist Party

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CLAIM AND counter-claim from the Iranian and British governments has followed the Iranian government's capture of fifteen British marines and sailors, allegedly for trespassing into Iranian waters. Both the British sailors and the Iranians recently captured by the US should also be released. [Since this editorial was written, the sailors have been released.]

Regardless of whether the British sailors did enter Iranian waters, the New Labour government bear responsibility for these young men and a woman having become pawns in an international political confrontation. It is Blair's total support for the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq that led these marines and sailors, along with around 8,000 other British troops, to be stationed in Iraq in the first place. It is no accident that one of the most popular proposals to solve the crisis on the BBC's discussion board was to offer to swap Bush and Blair for the fifteen sailors!

The occupation has created a living hell for the population of Iraq. Even the British government no longer denies the estimate that 655,000 Iraqis have died as a result of it. In addition, over one hundred British and over three thousand US soldiers have been killed, with more than 20,000 seriously wounded.

Far from resulting in an increase in US imperialism's power and prestige, as Bush and the neo-cons fantasised it would, the occupation has, as we predicted, led to an enormous undermining of US imperialism and its most loyal lieutenant, the British ruling class. This is graphically demonstrated by both powers' impotence in the face of Iran's capture of the sailors.

One of the many unintended consequences of the invasion of Iraq has been the strengthening of Iran as a regional power. (For more analysis on Iran see April's Socialism Today).

US imperialism sees this as a threat to their interests in the region. But, as we have explained, despite Bush's posturing, a ground invasion of Iran has always been ruled out given the enormous 'overstretch' in the US army as a result of the Iraq debacle, and the undoubted determined mass resistance they would face from the Iranian population, much greater than was faced in Iraq.

Even the bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities by the US or Israel would result in the deaths of large numbers of Iranian civilians and would cause an enormous increase in regional conflict and hatred for imperialism amongst the masses of the Middle East.

Iran could in that situation block the Straits of Hormuz and therefore much of the world's oil supplies, probably provoking a worldwide economic crisis. For these reasons a majority of the US ruling class oppose any such measure and want instead to take the 'diplomatic road'.

Against this, however, the Bush regime has further provoked conflict by the capturing of five Iranians in Iraq that it claims were part of an 'elite squad' of Iranian soldiers. In fact it has now been revealed that this was part of a US attempt to abduct two senior Iranian security officials who were on an official visit to northern Iraq. Having failed to take officials it seems they took ordinary soldiers.

Iran retaliated by taking ordinary British sailors. As ever it is the working-class men and women in the armed forces that suffer the consequences of imperialism's policies.

Imperialism's record

THE BRITISH sailors and the Iranians captured by the US should be released. Yet when hundreds of individuals are still being detained without trial in Guantanamo Bay, appearing on TV in chains, Bush's shrieks of outrage about Iran's "inexcusable behaviour" will ring hollow amongst the masses in Iran and the Middle East.

Anger with US and British imperialism in Iran did not begin with the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The imperialist powers dominated Iran, like the Middle East as a whole, for over a century; firstly via direct colonial rule and then by backing regimes that would act in imperialism's interests.

Hence British and US imperialism's backing for Saddam, including providing him with chemical weapons, in the brutal eight year Iran/Iraq war. In 1988, near the end of the war, US missiles shot down an Iranian civilian plane, killing all 290 passengers. The US has never apologised and it is widely believed in Iran that this was not an accident but an attempt to force Iran to end the war which it did a month later.

British imperialism carries particular odium amongst the Iranian population for its central role in encouraging the CIA to organise the 1953 coup against Dr Mohammed Mossadegh, a democratically elected prime minister, and installing the brutal dictatorship of the Shah, which was only overthrown in the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Mossadegh's 'crime' was to nationalise the Anglo-Iranian Oil company (now British Petroleum).

It is therefore unsurprising that the Iranian regime is using the capture of the British soldiers to make 'good theatre'. While the small demonstration outside the British embassy in Tehran appears to have been largely staged by the Revolutionary Guard, it is probably true that the parading of the British sailors on Iranian TV is gaining some popular support.

The Iranian regime is based on right-wing reactionary political Islam and is increasingly unpopular amongst the Iranian masses, particularly youth. While President Ahmadinejad initially won popularity by attacking the Iranian elite's privileges, his policies are fundamentally pro-capitalist, as he demonstrated with the brutal suppression of the Tehran bus workers' strike. He is now increasingly unpopular.

There are splits within the regime with a section considering Ahmadinejad's nationalist rhetoric a liability, particularly those who would like to move towards opening up the Iranian economy and introducing more neo-liberal policies and would therefore like to find an accommodation with US imperialism.

Neither imperialist interference in Iran or Iraq, nor interference by the Iranian regime in the region, offers a way forward for the peoples of Iran or Iraq. The key to a just and democratic solution to the problems in the Middle East lies with the region's workers and peasants, supported by the international working class.

HOME OWNERSHIP in England fell last year. There were 14.62 million owner-occupied homes in 2006, 25,000 fewer than the previous year. This is the first break in the growth of home ownership since 1953.

Rocketing house prices are making it hard for many first-time buyers to get on to the 'property ladder'. Fewer people bought a house with a mortgage while the proportion of home ownership, currently 70%, is below the peak of 71% in 2000.

House prices have gone up by 11% a year since 1997, well above average earnings. The rising inequality of income is also pushing up house prices and encouraging private builders to concentrate on building expensive housing for the top end of the market. You cannot trust the private housing market to provide decent, affordable housing options.

Sinn Fein and Democratic Unionist Party change position to supporting water charging now elections are over.

Peter Hadden, Socialist Party, Belfast

Over 800 people took part in the anti-water charges demonstration in Belfast last Saturday. (31 March) This was an excellent turn out given the decision by the government and local parties to postpone the introduction of the charge. Had water bills been about to arrive through people’s doors, as was the original intention, the demonstration would have been many times bigger.

Indeed, earlier in the week, at a meeting of the Coalition against Water Charges, some of the trade union leaders had suggested calling the demonstration off, arguing that only a couple of hundred would turn up.

The attendance of many hundreds of activists from working class communities was mainly down to the work of the We Won’t Pay Campaign in building for the demo. This was reflected on the day itself with by far the largest and liveliest contingent marching behind the We Won’t Pay banners. The march from start to end was a sea of We Won’t Pay placards.

Platform speakers included Glasgow Solidarity MSP, Tommy Sheridan, Dublin Socialist Party TD, Joe Higgins and Pat Lawlor, a UNISON convenor in the Royal Victoria Hospital, who represented the We Won’t Pay Campaign.

The main message from the platform, and especially from these three speakers, was that it was the threat of mass non-payment that had forced the government and the local parties to put the charges back. But a delay is only a partial victory. The other clear message was that we can’t trust any of the local politicians. If they can get away with it, they will introduce the charges next year. But if non-payment can defeat them this year it can defeat them next year as well.

This message was repeated at an excellent Socialist Party meeting of 50 people held immediately after the demonstration. The need for the working class to develop a political voice so that we can have representatives like Tommy Sheridan and Joe Higgins to challenge the local parties in a future Assembly was also spelt out.

As it turns out the warnings about the politicians have proved very timely. Two days after the demonstration the four main parties met to divvy out the spoils of ministerial office. In a dry run for what will happen on 8 May when the Assembly will be set up the parties indicated which ministerial positions they would take.

Sinn Fein chose the poisoned chalice of the Minister for Regional Development, the department that will be in charge of the water service.

Generally we expect politicians to wait until they get into power before they sell-out. Not Sinn Fein though! In their election literature for the 7 March Assembly election Sinn Fein had deadlines defiantly declaring: “A vote for Sinn Fein is a vote against water charges.”

On 2 April, just after announcing their new ministerial team and their portfolios, one of the key Sinn Fein spokespersons, Mitchel McLaughlin, in a television interview said: “If we separate out the legacy cost and we set in front of the people the legitimate cost of running and delivering a clean and healthy water supply to people’s houses, people are fair minded – they will pay that.” His comments were then echoed by a DUP spokesperson - Paisley’s son, Ian junior.

So, a month before the Assembly is due to meet, the DUP and Sinn Fein have clearly set out their stall. They will bring in water charges next year. They may make some concessions, packaging the charges differently and starting them at a lower rate, hoping that this will draw some of the unions as well as the professional “community” sector away from their current support for non-payment.

The We Won’t Pay Campaign has already made its position clear, issuing a statement condemning this u-turn by Sinn Fein and the DUP. The mass opposition to water charges is because it is understood that this is a double tax. People already pay for water through local taxation (rates) and are not prepared to pay twice. It is also generally understood that the real reason for the introduction of separate water bills is to prepare for the privatisation of the water service.

Our response therefore to Mitchel McLaughlin and Sinn Fein will be – “people are fair minded – We won’t pay that.”!

It looks like the work done this year to prepare to resist the charges if the bills had gone out in April will be a dress rehearsal for next year when the battle will be directly against Sinn Fein’s new Minister for Water Charges.

Postscript: Since this article was written Mitchel McLaughlin has issued a press statement headed “We Won’t Pay Campaign gets it wrong again”. In it he says: “Firstly politicians have no control over how television producers edit pre-recorded interviews but I have to say that even in the interview referred to by Mr Mulcahy (Secretary We Won’t Pay Campaign) at no time did I say that the Assembly would introduce water charges”.

What Mitchel McLaughin actually said is quoted above so readers can make up their own minds whether the comment “people are fair minded – they will pay that” signals a clear intent to bring in water charges or not.

Mitchel McLaughlin’s hasty response shows that how sensitive Sinn Fein are on this issue and also the impact mass non-payment would have on an Assembly.

DO YOU want to be referred for an operation by Tesco or Sainsbury's? Would you trust Asda to prescribe the medication that is best for you? New Labour is proposing that supermarkets should be able to provide GP services. But private companies' priority is always profit, and they won't agree to provide healthcare unless profits are guaranteed.

Naomi Byron

To help the profiteers, New Labour are also proposing to restrict the treatments everyone is entitled to on the NHS. That brings us another step closer to the disastrous US system where a whole family can be wiped out financially if one member needs medical treatment that isn't covered by their insurance.

The only way New Labour can get away with these proposals is if the enormous support that exists for the NHS is not mobilised to defend it.

The medical profession is not usually known for its militancy. But over 10,000 doctors, junior doctors, medical students, friends and family marched through London and Glasgow on 17 March to protest about changes to the training of junior doctors which mean that 8,000 will be left without any training post this year.

The protesters demanded the scrapping of the new online application system MTAS (Medical Training Application Service). As a third-year medical student told the socialist: "MTAS, the MMC (Modernising Medical Careers) scheme and the mess they created are a symptom of the government's reluctance to put enough money where it's needed in the healthcare system."

Placards on the protest read "Protect our training - protect your NHS" and "10 years' medical training wasted". Marchers chanted "What do we want? Jobs! When do we want them? Now" and "MMC - RIP". There was huge support from the public along the route.

Many demonstrators were eager to sign the petition to support a national demonstration to defend the health service and pointed out that it wasn't just their jobs they were marching for, but against attacks on the NHS as a whole.

There must be no more delays in naming a date for a national demonstration to defend the NHS, uniting all health staff and trade unions as well as local campaigns against cuts, closures and job losses.

THE SOCIALIST Party has been at the forefront of the campaign to get the trade unions to call such a demo for over a year.

We must apply maximum pressure to ensure that the UNISON health executive's decision to call for a national demonstration in London in June or July is not blocked by the right-wing leaders of UNISON nationally. They value their relationship with New Labour more than the jobs of their members and the healthcare of the public.

The doctors' march was called by remedyuk - an organisation set up very recently by junior doctors in frustration that their professional organisations like the British Medical Association and the Royal Colleges of medicine were not doing enough to fight against the huge problems trainee doctors were facing. Yet once the march was clearly unstoppable the BMA supported it.

If the union leaders are not forced to call a demonstration by pressure from below, one must be organised anyway - like the 1 November demonstration in London organised by various local anti-cuts campaigns, London Keep Our NHS Public and the National Pensioners' Convention.

"THE FAR-right BNP were there on the High Street, then this crowd gathered shouting 'racist pigs'. Eventually four police officers formed a line in front of the BNP. The angry crowd of about 30-40 people of all ages confronted them and the police told them to get out before a riot kicks off. The BNP then left."

Nick Parker

This was the eye-witness account of a Socialist Students member in Lincoln on 17 March. The campaign against racism and fascism in Lincoln escalated this month when the BNP leader, Nick Griffin, was given a two-page interview in the Lincolnshire Echo, owned by the same company as the Daily Mail.

In it, he blamed women for the shortage of dentists, effectively denied the Holocaust, and said homosexuals should be shamed back into the closet! Saturday's edition, however, provided anti-fascists with a page to reply. Two Socialist Party members explained the link between support for the BNP and people's hatred of the mainstream pro-capitalist parties.

Lincolnshire Socialist Party used its Saturday stall to oppose the BNP and to put forward a clear working-class alternative to the anti-worker policies of the three main parties and the BNP. We were overwhelmed with the response. Long queues formed to sign up to our campaign, and hundreds of mostly young people supported us.

We sold 46 copies of the socialist and raised over £40 in fighting fund. Many young people gave us everything they had, keeping only what they needed for their bus fares!

The local Labour Party's position, that an anti-fascist campaign has to be non-political to get support, now looks even more ridiculous. The Socialist Party has been in the forefront in organising a demonstration of 200 people against racism and fascism in December.

This gave other people confidence to oppose the BNP too, as seen on Saturday. We have linked it to the need for all working-class people to unite together to fight for decent jobs, homes, and services.

These are the issues that the BNP raise, grossly distorting them by blaming migrant workers. We are the only local party to take them up by actually campaigning to save local bus services and the NHS. In May, the BNP say they will stand in every ward in the city. The Socialist Party will give working-class people the opportunity to oppose the BNP and the three main parties with a fighting socialist alternative.