The Socialist Issue 220

TONY BLAIR asks union leaders to help 'modernise' public services. But, even they know, like millions of others, that he means more privatisation of health and education.

Threatened with limited opposition from the union leaders, Blair has done his usual trick of pretending he means the opposite of what he says. His verbal contortions are not fooling working-class people.

A MORI poll in the Times, published just before Labour recently outlined its education plans, showed that half of all people believe health and education should be provided entirely by the public sector and two-thirds believe that they should be provided completely or mostly by the state.

But Labour's idea of listening to this groundswell of opposition is to press ahead with plans to give Education Secretary Estelle Morris new powers to hand 'failing' schools over to profit-making companies. Their argument is that they need the private sector to deliver a better public sector.

But all the experience so far of private-sector involvement in running public services has been an absolute disaster: look at Railtrack; the passport office; PFI hospitals and Housing Benefit to name a few.

Now the first private company to run a state education authority has been fined £300,000 for failing to meet its target and improve GCSE results. Cambridge Education Associates took over the running of schools in Islington, north London and not only failed to improve standards but in some schools the pass rate actually declined. Out of nine secondary schools in the borough, three slipped back.

Yet, Labour insist on pressing ahead with privatising education. It is an ideological commitment which benefits their big business friends.

Union leaders say they are going to oppose New Labour's privatisation plans. We'll put pressure on them to try and ensure they keep their word. But they've been seduced by Blair's weasel words before.

A real campaign of opposition to privatisation of public services must be built, uniting all local struggles against privatisation into an unstoppable mass movement, including strikes and protests, to force Blair and New Labour to retreat.

End The Bosses' Pay Spree

NEXT TIME the credit runs out on your mobile phone and you need a fiver for a Vodaphone top-up card, think how that firm's top executives benefit from your cash.

Chris Moore

Last year Vodaphone chief executive Sir Christopher Gent's 400% 'top-up' brought his pay up to £9 million. Two directors who left the company received £10 million severance pay to cushion the hardship.

When Vodaphone took over German company Mannesmann last year, Mannesmann executives got £40 million compensation. Chief executive Klaus Esser collected £9.1 million, despite the bursting of the dotcom bubble sending Vodaphone's share price down 63% from 12 months ago.

A recent Guardian survey showed that the fat cats are getting even fatter. The top 100 company directors gorged themselves with pay rises of 28%, while insisting workers' pay is held below 5%.

Many directors benefited from complicated performance-related schemes, despite a slowdown in many companies' profits. The average worker had a pay increase of 4.8% in the last year, with many receiving less.

Last year top British directors almost certainly got their biggest salary rise ever. They 'earn' more than in any other European country and are second only to the USA.

British bosses earned the equivalent of 45 workers' pay, in Japan the figure is ten, in Sweden 13. Rentokil's Sir Clive Thompson earns 115 times his workforce's average wage.

More than 140 executives in the top 100 companies took home £1 million or more last year. Meanwhile British manufacturing workers are among the worst-paid in the developed world.

Privatisation has added to the widening gap between rich and poor. Directors earn huge salary increases, with share option deals and other perks while workers in those industries face job cuts and attacks on pay and conditions.

Anger is brewing against the system in the workplaces. Last year the number of days lost through strikes in the Post Office doubled to 400,000 as workers start fighting the government's privatisation plans.

But trade union leaders like John Edmonds of the GMB merely call on executives to show pay restraint. Action is needed not appeals to fat cats' better nature!

As the world moves into recession, workers will need industrial action as the bosses try to slaughter jobs. These companies should be taken into public ownership under democratic workers' control and management. A socialist plan of production could then start to rebuild the economy and abolish these huge pay inequalities.

Expose Asylum Lies

Unite Against Bosses' Racism

THE CRISIS surrounding refugees aboard the Tampa and at the Sangatte Red Cross refugee camp in France has allowed the media and governments to intensify their racist divide-and-rule tactics about asylum.

The Australian government has used the crisis to try to divert attention from their domestic problems in the run-up to an election. In Britain a Labour government - facing mounting opposition to its proposed privatisation of public services and growing unpopularity - uses the issue to divert attention from its inability to solve the problems of either workers in Britain or the asylum seekers.

Undoubtedly, fears exist among sections of working-class people that Britain cannot cope with an influx of asylum seekers. Public services are already overstretched and decent housing is in short supply. But it's the Labour government through its lack of funding that is responsible for these shortages not the asylum seekers.

The Western leaders are mired in hypocrisy. Their policies of globalisation and neo-liberalism have created the appalling conditions that force millions of people worldwide to move from their homeland hoping for 'a better life'. They continue a modern-day 'slavery', which sees the world's poorer countries paying out $42 million a day to service debts of the world's richer countries.

Many refugees are fleeing instability following wars and civil wars or oppressive regimes like the Taliban in Afghanistan, which Western capitalist governments hold a major responsibility for creating.

Other refugees, it is claimed, are middle-class professionals, the very people the government claims to want to bring in to plug so-called labour shortages in key public services.

Many refugees are drawn to advanced capitalist countries because they believe there is an economic boom. They are desperate to escape recession and economic collapse in Asia or Eastern Europe, caused by the very capitalist system the Western leaders uphold.

Asylum laws are so restrictive that nearly every refugee now has to enter 'illegally'. Those who can afford it are left at the mercy of unscrupulous gangsters - human traffickers. Those who can't afford to pay end up taking potentially fatal risks to get to their destination.

On arrival asylum seekers are dealt with in an oppressive way, denied basic human rights and treated as criminals, not allowed to work or entitled to the basic requirements of human life and dignity.

Barbaric treatment

HOWEVER, IT is not enough just to expose the hypocrisy of Western leaders. Socialists need to address it in a way that undercuts any fears or prejudices that exist among workers in Britain, Europe or internationally.

We must advance the interests of all working-class people, showing that workers worldwide have more in common than divides them; fighting a common foe in the capitalist class worldwide.

The fate of millions forced to flee their home countries should not be left in the hands of those who uphold the interests of big business against working-class people worldwide.

The bureaucratic procedures implemented by Western governments are barbaric and shambolic. Instead of increasing repression, refugees should be treated humanely and allowed to enter legally while their applications are processed. Instead of continually further restricting the right to asylum, Britain should be striving to give humane, practical effect to this basic human right.

All applications should be dealt with in a reasonable time and applicants given a right to a full public hearing before their case is decided. If rejected, applicants should have a right to appeal to an elected tribunal, including representatives of trade unions, community organisations, welfare and legal rights organisations etc.

While waiting for a decision applicants should be able to work, rather than stigmatised as 'workshy' people or 'benefits spongers'. In fact asylum seekers are forced to live on half the level of minimal income support, using the humiliating voucher system which should be scrapped.

We feel such an approach will undercut the lies and distortions of the right-wing media and governments. Otherwise, when economic recession begins to bite, the tensions already whipped up against asylum seekers will be utilised by the capitalist class to divert working-class people away from struggling against their real enemy - the bosses and capitalist class internationally.

World Economy: The Panic Spreads

A RECENT Economist special report on the world economy, 25 August, sums up the panic now gripping the capitalists internationally. The report's opening line states: "One by one, economies around the world are stumbling. By cutting interest rates... the Federal Reserve hopes it can keep America out of recession. But in an increasing number of economies... GDP is already shrinking. Global industrial production fell at an annual rate of 6% in the first half of 2001."

We have stated on many occasions (see issue 217 for most recent article), the US economy is the Atlas that held up the world economy. Now, it threatens to turn into its opposite and drag world capitalism into an economic abyss.

Technically, the US economy is not yet in recession (described as a drop in production in two successive quarters) although US manufacturing industry is in a deep crisis.

Serious capitalist economists agree with The Socialist that 1997 was the turning point. Stephen Roche, Morgan Stanley's chief economist argues that "the global recession of 2001 is very much a by-product of the previous downturn of 1998... indeed... the two downturns should be viewed more as a continuum of one long, drawn-out global business cycle... that could go down in history as the world's first recession in this modern era of globalisation".

The Economist also agrees with us that this recession or slump will be much more synchronised than any other post-1945 economic contraction. In other words, much worse and more prolonged.

A whole series of defensive battles for jobs and conditions by the working class internationally is inevitable. The preparedness of workers to struggle is magnificently highlighted by the two-day general strike by five million workers in South Africa (see page 4).

Despite the worsening economic situation, we have also seen offensive struggles such as the refusal to accept a wage increase of 10% by Volkswagen car workers in Mexico. Public-sector workers in Brazil have been on strike for a 74% increase in wages.

Europe has experienced important strikes in the past period, and these will intensify, reflecting the changed economic situation. There were important metalworkers' strikes in Italy, even prior to Genoa. In July, Belgian transport workers struck against privatisation. In Spain, 40,000 telecommunication workers came out on strike in June.

Clearly a new period is opening up for the working class and socialists should prepare now for future struggles.

AS A new academic year begins, all the problems in education that existed under the Tories have only got worse under New Labour while Blair has added a few new problems of his own making. BOB SULATYCKI, secretary of Kensington and Chelsea National Union of Teachers, writes in a personal capacity:

Profits Bonanza But Education In Crisis

IT IS a measure of how bad things are when Mike Tomlinson, new head of the school inspectorate OFSTED, contradicts official government spin to expose the depth of the burgeoning teacher shortage crisis in England and Wales. Conveniently, he forgets OFSTED's own role in causing this flight from teaching.

An astonishing 40% now quit teaching within their first three years. As the Socialist Party predicted, performance-related pay has led many thousands of teachers to decide 'enough is enough' and leave the profession - the opposite to what former Education Secretary Blunkett said would happen.

Meanwhile, in areas such as London, pupil-teacher ratios, and therefore class size, are at their worst for 30 years.

Inadequate levels of pay and deteriorating conditions of service lie behind the shortage crisis, but there are other factors too. Job satisfaction levels are at an all-time low. There is widespread frustration with the new culture of tests and more tests, of inspections and ever more remote and target-obsessed management regimes.

Frustration often turns to despair. In the last year over 12,000 teachers phoned Teacherline (a counselling service) of which 27% indicated high levels of stress, anxiety or depression.

The new competitive culture of league tables, 'beacon schools', 'failing schools' - dubbed free-market Stalinism by one commentator - creates a climate of setting school against school. Studies in London by researchers from King's College show far more polarisation between schools for middle-class and working-class parents. That is the completely predictable result of introducing a market philosophy.

In Bradford the Commission for Racial Equality reported how so-called parental choice had helped create segregated schools, leading to growing intolerance and racial division.

Meanwhile the government now plans to increase the number of religious schools, and to encourage such schools to have preferential funding and more power to select their intake on the basis of 'aptitude'. Working-class pupils and those from religious minorities will increasingly enjoy only a second-class education.

Testing times

THE OBSESSION with tests and tables places increased pressure on pupils. This summer the Times Educational Supplement showed that most pupils sit at least 30 formal tests or teacher assessments before they reach secondary school; some take as many as 43. The country with the next highest total in Europe has eleven!

Many agencies, including ChildLine and the Samaritans believe that tests and exams increase anxiety and thoughts of suicide. Even the Institute for Public Policy Research, which normally supports the government, argues that there is a testing mania leading to growing mental health problems amongst the young.

At least one in ten school-age children now suffers from some kind of psychiatric illness. The irony is that standard assessment tests (SATs) by themselves have no value for an individual child; no employer or college is ever likely to want to see evidence of a student's SATs results!

But tests and league tables serve the double advantage for the government of appearing to be doing something about 'standards' while at the same time exercising complete central control over the curriculum. And it's also quite cheap!

In fact, for all Labour's much trumpeted increases in education spending, resourcing remains a fundamental issue. Of the £19 billion "increases" - much of it double-counted, very little reaches the classrooms.

According to an OECD report this June, government spending on education under Labour remains well below the average for developed countries. The pupil-teacher ratio lags behind all other OECD countries except for the Czech republic, Mexico, Korea and Turkey.

Britain is also cited as a country with an acute divide between educational haves and have-nots. All these problems are likely to worsen in the coming months; many secondary schools, for instance, are likely to face big budget shortfalls over the next year.

Labour's forlorn hope is that business and private money comes to the rescue of state education. But business will only get involved if there's profit to be made. Where they do, it will not be to the benefit of the education service.

Ed Mayo of the New Economics Foundation recently gave a small, but telling example of the motives of business in education:

"News International and Walkers joined forces to offer coupons on crisp packets and in newspapers for parents, children and relatives to collect and cash in for schoolbooks. This resulted in 2.5 million free books going to schools - about the same number that are funded by the government annually.

"In reality, the campaign was also a carefully constructed money-spinner. The only eligible book provider was Harper-Collins, part of the Murdoch empire, and a company angling for contracts in the education sector.

"As a News International insider commented when the campaign picked up a Business in the Community Award: 'There is no doubt that Harper-Collins has benefited commercially from this initiative, and probably considerably so.'"

Fight privatisation

LABOUR IS more obsessed with involving the private sector in education than any previous government. Education Action Zones (EAZs) were an early attempt to bring the private sector into the management and administration of schools.

"EAZ policy is not about business making a profit," said David Blunkett, then Education Secretary, in 1999. But Labour now talks openly of businesses running schools for profits. Governing bodies of schools will be allowed to pass management of the school to a private company or, even more bizarrely, individual departments within secondary schools may be hived off to the private sector.

Companies are demanding - and are likely to win - the right to hire and fire staff. This employment right is now held by the local education authority and the school governing body.

Meanwhile, there has been wholesale privatisation of local education authorities such as Hackney, Islington and Bradford. A private company, Capita, which had taken over the education services of Leeds and Haringey, increased its operating profit by 62% to £31.3 million in the six months up to June.

Capita's shareholders will enjoy an increase in dividends of 36%. Meanwhile, in a direct threat to local authority workers, it plans this term to launch Capita Education Direct in order to "market, sell and deliver the full range of our services directly to schools."

Alongside Capita, Nord Anglia and WS Atkins, there has been a proliferation of private teacher agencies, supplying teachers from around the world to fill gaps created by teacher vacancies, but making their profits by paying the teachers on their books below the nationally set rates.

Once these companies establish a foot in the door, they are much harder to push out - many have by now got into the living room and are pilfering the family silver.

The threat of privatisation, alongside the Private Finance Initiative programme, is forcing the NUT leadership into more forthright verbal opposition, alongside the public service unions UNISON and the GMB.

But we cannot rely on the words of union leaders alone. We need grass roots campaigns of teachers, education workers and parents and other users, as has happened in Waltham Forest, east London over privatisation of the education services.

These local campaigns need to be linked together in a national offensive against privatisation.

Argentina: No Light At The End Of The Tunnel

ARGENTINA'S FINANCIAL crisis is threatening an economic meltdown which could also sink the economies of South and Central America and have a catastrophic impact on the world economy. US imperialism and Argentina's rulers are attempting to make the working class pay for this crisis. But these attacks have unleashed a massive movement of strikes and demonstrations including seven general strikes in the last 18 months. ANDRE FERRARI of Socialismo Revolucionario, (CWI-Brazil), reports.

THE ANNOUNCEMENT of a new International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan of more than $8 billion will not solve the most serious crisis in Argentina's history.

The first $5 billion will do no more than shore up Argentina's dollar reserves after a $13 billion drain over the last few months. The other $3 billion will be freed next year if the government and the provinces move ahead with more far-reaching spending cuts to end the deficit.

On the eve of the new agreement, Argentina's finances were on the brink of collapse. Immediate bankruptcy has been avoided but the country is like a dying man getting a fresh oxygen tank. The real problem remains unchanged. At most, some time has been gained - perhaps until the elections expected in October.

The government of President De La Rua looks exhausted before its second year is up. It was elected in October 1999 as an opposition Alliance between the Radicals (UCR) and La Rua's FREPASO after capitalising on enormous dissatisfaction with the failure of Peronist president Carlos Menem's neo-liberal (free-market capitalism) policies.

But disillusion with the new government was quick to set in. Under La Rua, Argentina deteriorated economically with a series of unsuccessful plans, crises, corruption scandals, the resignation of vice-president Chacho Alvarez (FREPASO), the fall of two economy ministers, and finally, an unprecedented political and economic crisis!

La Rua fails

ARGENTINA HAS suffered more than three years of recession with terrible economic and social consequences. It has devastated working-class living conditions and financially crippled the middle classes, thousands of whom are queuing at foreign embassies trying to emigrate.

Poverty affects 37% of the population, unemployment and under-employment about 30%. Half of all wage earners get less than 500 pesos a month (around £345).

Public debt has shot up to $132 billion. There are no more external credits so debts are unpayable as the direct consequence of basing the economy on a peso/dollar parity in 1991 under ex-president Menem and economy minister Cavallo.

Illusions in the 'bullet-proofing' of the Argentinian economy through $39.7 billion IMF aid in December 2000 crumbled as the economy minister Machinea resigned in March. The threat of insolvency remained .

Then came savage public spending cuts of about $2 billion, caps on transfers to the provinces, a 13% cut in civil servants' wages and pensions, etc, that caused an uprising nationwide. Faced with this, Machinea's replacement, Lopes Murphy, became probably the shortest-lived minister in the history of the country.

In March this year, in a desperate attempt to win confidence from international speculators, De La Rua brought back Domingo Cavallo and gave him special powers. Cavallo was a minister in Menem's government and had been defeated by De La Rua himself in the 1999 presidential elections.

Cavallo once again played for time by attempting to reschedule much of the foreign debt from short-term to long-term repayment. That mega-swap was costly (with interest rates at 12%-14%) and will mean future pain. Even so, it failed to reactivate the economy.

More 'aid' from the IMF was delayed by differences between the US and the IMF over the crisis in Argentina. The US government demanded compulsory restructuring of Argentinian debt with an "orderly moratorium" on repayment.

The IMF was concerned over possible losses for international speculators, as well as the repercussions of an Argentinian debt repayment moratorium on the world financial system. In the end, it was decided to use some of the new funds from the IMF to voluntarily restructure and reschedule the debt.

If this attempt fails, a moratorium is likely as well as devaluation or total dollarisation of the economy.

Cavallo tried to boost exports by introducing a 'flexible' peso/dollar parity. He re-introduced an exchange market divided into a financial sector (maintaining peso/dollar parity) and commercial sector (with a devalued peso). This may well lead to a future massive devaluation with major consequences.

Peso/dollar parity was established in 1991 as the central pillar of Cavallo's anti-inflation programme in the Menem government but is now unsustainable.

But devaluation will be a devastating blow to the prestige of the ruling class and a pointer to the difficulties that will confront the Euro countries.

Devaluation would also have dire consequences since most companies and much of the population have debts in dollars. Argentina has no way out as long as the logic of keeping capitalist markets happy is followed.

People's uprising

THE DRACONIAN conditions imposed by the IMF will deepen social and political instability. The governors of the 23 Argentinian provinces - both pro-government and the opposition - reject cuts in transfers from federal budgets. There is already social chaos in the provinces with mass unemployment and destruction of public services. Public sector workers often go unpaid for months!

De La Rua and Cavallo will try to abolish the deficit with more attacks on public services, wages, pensions and people's living standards. All this to guarantee profits for international investors and the economic groups that dominate the Argentine economy.

Buenos Aires province's employees receive wages in the form of a bond, because there is no money. Local 'currencies' are used in other provinces as a form of bartering has developed.

The weight of the crisis falls on the backs of the poor, the unemployed and workers. But this has caused explosive reaction with the country experiencing some of the biggest popular struggles of recent years.

This fightback is the most decisive factor for the country's future. In the words of a politician linked to De La Rua: "The main problem is that the economic policies we need clash with current political conditions".

Public sector strikes and general strikes called by the unions have resulted in mass mobilisations, pickets and blockades of streets throughout the country.

Rebellion is no longer limited to the poorest provinces. The struggle in the capital, Buenos Aires, is also intensifying.

Down with De La Rua, Cavallo and the IMF!

THIS GOVERNMENT may fall due to the intensity of the crisis and the pressure of the mass movement. De La Rua is set to be defeated in the October elections and the future of government is hanging by a thread. Such is the discontent that any government of 'national unity' with Peronists (PJ), radicals (UCR) and FREPASO around De La Rua and Cavallo, would also be difficult to maintain.

Today, around 50% of the population want early elections although the scheduled year is 2003. Polls also show 70% of the electorate are against privatisations and 90% believe the government's policies will not solve the current economic crisis.

The union leaders, however, are taking a purely defensive approach. They have been compelled by the rank and file members to put up some resistance to the government attacks but without putting a clear alternative. This means the movement cannot go forward and challenge the capitalist regime. The trade union leaders end up allowing room to manoeuvre for the government and the capitalist politicians.

The powerful Argentinian workers' movement with all sections of the working class under attack after years of neo-liberalism must be armed with a clear socialist alternative.

The Argentinian crisis is not just the result of bad management of the economy. Or even of the limitations of neo-liberal politics adopted by Menem/Cavallo/De La Rua. It is the reflection of a crisis in the capitalist system.

The failure of De La Rua in implementing an alternative to Menem's economic policy is a clear sign of the fragility of the so-called 'centre-left' alternatives to neo-liberalism in Latin America.

In Brazil, the Workers' Party and its leader Lula will have to draw this lesson before the 2002 presidential elections.

The events in Argentina are part of a general process of collapse in dependent countries and capitalist globalisation. Starting in Mexico in 1995, South East Asia in 1997, Russia in 1998, Brazil in 1998-99 and Ecuador in 2000, we have seen the terrible effects of heightened imperialist oppression of the dependent countries.

The perspective of global recession will further undermine any way out under capitalism.

The powerful workers' movement in Argentina together with the urban poor needs to arm itself with a clear socialist programme for fundamental change. And it needs to build its own independent political party to fight for such a programme, to include:

Refusal to pay the foreign debt; nationalisation of the banks and the financial system together with the major monopolies that control the economy and the immediate implementation of a socialist economic plan, democratically drawn up and managed by the working class.

This anti-capitalist and socialist programme, if implemented by a government of the Argentinian workers' organisations, would inspire all of Latin America to combat the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas) and the increasing intervention by American imperialism in Latin America.

HAVING ENDURED shipwreck and then detained by armed SAS troops aboard a sun-baked Norwegian freighter, many of the 438 mainly Afghan asylum-seekers, instead of finding refuge in Australia, will now end up on the largely uninhabitable island of Nauru in the south Pacific. This dreadful treatment of people fleeing civil war is part of Australian Prime Minister John Howard's election strategy, as JIM O'CONNOR from the Australian Socialist Party explains.

Refugees Are John Howard's Scapegoats

RECENT STATE election results and opinion polls indicated that John Howard's Liberal Party was likely to lose the next Federal election expected in November.

In desperation, Howard appears to have decided to use refugees as scapegoats and attempt to build his popularity and steal votes from Pauline Hanson's racist and xenophobic One Nation party.

He has been aided and abetted by the capitalist media in creating an atmosphere of near mass hysteria against the refugees.

In the past week, as a result of his cynical manipulation of the fears of the voters, his popularity has increased to the extent that now he could retain government.

The Socialist Party condemns the Howard government's refusal to allow the 460 refugees on board the Tampa to land on the Australian territory of Christmas Island.

Howard has spent A$21 million in the past week keeping the refugees off shore - that's $50,000 per refugee! The argument of Howard that this is about saving taxpayers' money is therefore destroyed.

Racist history

THE AUSTRALIAN state built on land stolen from the indigenous inhabitants, has a long track record of genocide, racism and xenophobic exclusion of immigrants.

Since 1992 asylum seekers have been kept in detention centres most of them in remote desert areas. Asylum seekers wait for months and in many cases years in these camps. They are operated by private corporations, subsidiaries of the American multinational prison operators ACM.

The Socialist Party has played its part alongside other organisations campaigning to free the refugees from the detention centres.

We have advocated the method of mass civil disobedience and promoted the idea of a sanctuary network. In the last week we put out a call for a High School strike and walkout on the issue. Although not well, attended because of the short notice, many passers-by stopped to sign our petition.

We recently initiated and participated in a 24-hour sit-in in a city square inside a cage as an act of solidarity with the detainees.

Our members in the Construction Union were also recently successful in obtaining union funds to participate in a "Freedom ride" by bus to the outback town of Woomera [where a detention centre is located] later this month.

The Australian national anthem proudly boasts of "endless plains to share" as well as "wealth for toil". Socialists understand that it is no coincidence that the capitalist class, that is so determined to exclude newcomers at present, is the same class that takes the lion's share of the wealth created by the toilers - both workers and small farmers.

It is the task of the Socialist Party to patiently explain these facts to young people, trade unionists and working-class communities.

We understand that it is workers' struggle and solidarity that is the best antidote to the poison of rascism and xenophobia that the capitalist class and its lackies use to divide us.

The Socialist 7 September 2001	Stop The Private Profiteers!
Stop The Private Profiteers!	TUC Must Put Words Into Action TONY BLAIR is asking union leaders at the TUC conference to help 'modernise' public services. But, even they know, like millions of others, that he means more privatisation of health and education.
End The Bosses' Pay Spree	NEXT TIME the credit runs out on your mobile phone and you need a fiver for a Vodaphone top-up card, think how that firm's top executives benefit from your cash. By Chris Moore
Expose Asylum Lies	Unite Against Bosses' Racism THE CRISIS surrounding refugees aboard the Tampa and at the Sangatte Red Cross refugee camp in France has allowed the media and governments to intensify their racist divide-and-rule tactics about asylum. See Also Refugees Are John Howard's Scapegoats
World Economy: The Panic Spreads	A RECENT Economist special report on the world economy, 25 August, sums up the panic now gripping the capitalists internationally. The report's opening line states: "One by one, economies around the world are stumbling. By cutting interest rates... the Federal Reserve hopes it can keep America out of recession. But in an increasing number of economies... GDP is already shrinking. Global industrial production fell at an annual rate of 6% in the first half of 2001."
Profits Bonanza But Education In Crisis	AS A new academic year begins, all the problems in education that existed under the Tories have only got worse under New Labour while Blair has added a few new problems of his own making. BOB SULATYCKI, secretary of Kensington and Chelsea National Union of Teachers, writes in a personal capacity:
Argentina: No Light At The End Of The Tunnel	ARGENTINA'S FINANCIAL crisis is threatening an economic meltdown which could also sink the economies of South and Central America and have a catastrophic impact on the world economy. ANDRE FERRARI of Socialismo Revolucionario, (CWI-Brazil), reports.
Australia: Refugees Are John Howard's Scapegoats	HAVING ENDURED shipwreck and then detained by armed SAS troops aboard a sun-baked Norwegian freighter, many of the 438 mainly Afghan asylum-seekers, instead of finding refuge in Australia, will now end up on the largely uninhabitable island of Nauru in the south Pacific. JIM O'CONNOR from the Australian Socialist Party explains. See Also Expose Asylum Lies

Stop The Private Profiteers!

TUC Must Put Words Into Action