The Socialist Issue 153April 14th 2000 |
Fight Back Now! |
TONY BLAIR said a few weeks ago that he finds being Prime Minister “tougher than expected”. Millions of working-class people in Britain find living under Blair’s New Labour government tough too. |
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A MISERABLE band of 50 National Front fascists attempted a march through Margate last Saturday, trying to cash in on the anti-asylum seeker climate being encouraged by New Labour and the Tories. |
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THE ROVER crisis shows that BMW are typical capitalists, they’re double-dealing hypocrites. Rover’s last owners were prepared to fiddle the profit and loss accounts to justify whatever they wanted to do. THE BIG car companies always play one country off against another. BMW threatened to move Rover 75 production to Hungary in 1998 unless the government coughed up £250 million to develop the Longbridge plant. MSF Activists say “Take over Rover” DELEGATES TO West Midlands Regional Council of Manufacturing Science Finance (MSF), one of the main trade unions with members at Rover, have backed a demand for public ownership. |
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TONY BLAIR claims that he intends to abolish poverty in Britain within 20 years. The Sunday Times Rich List 2000 suggests that the opposite is happening |
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BARCLAYS BANK boss Matthew Barrett could get a £30 million bonus on top of his annual salary of nearly £1 million as his reward for closing branches and sacking workers. |
§ £30
million for Fat Cat bankers § 75p
increase for pensioners |
TONY BLAIR said a few weeks ago that he finds being Prime Minister “tougher than expected”. Millions of working-class people in Britain find living under Blair’s New Labour government tough too.
Pensioners, low-paid workers, disabled people, single parents, students, unemployed people and many others are at the sharp end of the Blair government’s attacks.
Pensioners are told to get by on a 75p a week increase. Single parents and disabled people get benefit cuts. Unemployed people face further harassment. Students face new fees and the end of the maintenance grant. Low-paid workers get minuscule increases in the minimum wage.
And Blair says he find it tough!
Labour are not nearly so hard on the fat cats. The super-rich have never had it so good as under Blair, increasing their fortunes by making our lives worse with no holds barred.
Banks and car bosses ratchet up their profits in ‘rip-off Britain’, New Labour does nothing to challenge it. Labour let Barclays Bank boss Matthew Barrett take home £175,000 a day while pensioners barely exist on less than £11 a day. Even government minister Jeff Rooker has to admit the injustice of the low level of state pension.
These same pensioners and poorer people will now have to make epic treks at extra cost to take their own money out of Barclays branches as Barrett closed 172 branches last week.
Get mad with the fat cats and New Labour’s soft treatment of them. The obscene wealth these people make should be taken away from them and used to begin to provide pensioners and working-class people with a better quality of life.
But get organised as well. We also need to take over the companies and industries the fat cats control and use them for working-class people’s benefit.
Join with the Socialist Party and make sure there is an alternative to the fat cats’ exploitation. Help build a socialist alternative that puts working-class people first.
A MISERABLE band of 50 National Front fascists attempted a march through Margate last Saturday, trying to cash in on the anti-asylum seeker climate being encouraged by New Labour and the Tories.
They were outnumbered four times by anti-fascists and drew little support from local people. But there’s no doubt that racism is being encouraged by the hostility being whipped up against asylum seekers by New Labour and the Tories, particularly in the run up to the local elections.
Much of the national and local media are ably assisting - as with London’s Evening Standard that screamed “60,000 seeking London asylum”, claiming that London councils would be paying out £243 million as a result.
Councils are dishonestly trying to blame cuts and council tax rises on the cost of accommodating refugees but, as the Evening Standard had to admit, they are reimbursed through government grants. Council cuts were happening well before refugees of the Kosovan war arrived in Britain.
In fact, immigration minister Barbara Roche admitted that the cost of support for asylum seekers in 1999-2000 is 19p per person per week - less than the government has spent on ‘useful’ projects like the Eurofighter, the millennium dome and armaments.
The Liberals are reporting New Labour and the Tories to the Commission for Racial Equality. This may show them up but it smacks of hypocrisy from the Liberals who have been more than willing to whip up racism, notably in Bermondsey and Tower Hamlets, to win local elections.
Tory MP Anne Widdecombe’s call for bounty hunters (a ‘removals agency’) to track down illegal immigrants that have supposedly ‘flooded’ into this country, are amongst the most blatantly hostile utterances.
But Labour can’t shift the odium from themselves either. It’s their policies which are denying asylum seekers enough cash to live on, forcing them to beg on the streets. Turning the screw, they’re now talking tough about fast-tracking ‘aggressive’ beggars through the system - the implication being that they’ll be fast-tracked out of the country as supposedly ‘bogus’ asylum seekers.
The government’s criteria for legitimate claims are so draconian that they exclude people like Mary Wandia Njuguna who fled Kenya for her life after blowing the whistle on a corrupt election official.
Far from Britain being a ‘soft-touch’ for refugees, it has become almost impossible to enter legally. Widdecombe’s assertion that because 80% of applications are rejected it proves that the bulk of them are bogus, is nonsense.
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Oppose Labour and Tory scapegoating of refugees.
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Build a united movement for civil rights, decent
housing and fully-funded public services for all.
See a report on the NF march on
page 5 of The Socialist
THE ROVER crisis shows that BMW are typical capitalists, they’re double-dealing hypocrites. Rover’s last owners were prepared to fiddle the profit and loss accounts to justify whatever they wanted to do.
At the same time they said they couldn’t reveal how they made their calculations because they needed ‘commercial secrecy’!
BMW have undoubtedly “cooked the books”. Rover’s claim of “huge losses last year” is widely seen as a figment of the BMW bosses’ imagination.
Harold Musgrove, former Rover chairman, accused the company of playing a “three card trick” over the claimed £750 million losses. “This is saying the losses were greater than the whole wage bill” he claimed, calling the whole operation a ‘rape’, not just asset stripping.
Musgrove admitted that the Longbridge workers had agreed to “flexible hours” and that “they couldn’t have done any more”. He should know. He was one of many managers who drove workers to produce more and more for less and less.
Longbridge in fact increased their productivity in 1999 by an amazing 70%, up from 30 cars to 50 cars per worker per year!
Albert Bore, Labour leader of Birmingham city council, said that BMW “have stripped out 4x4 technology from Rover and exported it to a plant in the USA to produce a BMW variant of the Landrover”.
The big international car monopolies know each other’s ‘commercial secrets’. They only hide behind “the threat to competition” to sow confusion into workers’ minds.
Price-rigging between the big companies is now well exposed. In Britain cars cost at least 15% more than the same cars on the continent. Big dealers in Britain secretly conspired with the manufacturers for years to keep their prices artificially higher.
Under private ownership, you can’t get to the bottom of the big monopolies’ financial jiggery-pokery. But the unions should demand complete transparency of the capitalists’ accounts.
The unions should use this demand to prove again the need for public ownership and democratic workers’ control in Rover and the rest of the car industry.
THE BIG car companies always play one country off against another. BMW threatened to move Rover 75 production to Hungary in 1998 unless the government coughed up £250 million to develop the Longbridge plant.
The government finally conceded £152 million but in the end, BMW pulled out altogether from the UK and didn’t “collect” the aid.
Rover’s predecessor British Leyland collected billions in state aid throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The Tories then gave Rover to a private company British Aerospace (BAe) for under £150 million. They also secretly gave BAe £250 million from a slush fund so grateful were the Tories to privatise BL.
The unions should ask what happened to all this state aid? Whose pockets did it line at the time it was given?
Discussions with the asset strippers Alchemy Partners, are due to conclude by Easter.
The government has washed its hands of the crisis. It’s up to the trade unions and Rover workers to fight the destruction of Longbridge and other parts of the company.
As a first step, Rover shop stewards should call a conference of unions within the car industry, including Ford, Vauxhall and their component suppliers. They could then put flesh on the demand to “open the books” and end commercial secrecy when it threatens workers’ livelihoods for the benefit of a wealthy few.
DELEGATES TO West Midlands Regional Council of Manufacturing Science Finance (MSF), one of the main trade unions with members at Rover, have backed a demand for public ownership. Delegate Dave Nellist, former Coventry Labour MP and now a Socialist Party councillor) moved the motion calling for public ownership, which gave “100% support to Rover workers and those in the component industry, in the battle to save jobs. “Unions should be given immediate access to the books of BMW to see how subsidies, profits and internal transfers have affected the financial health of the business. “With tens of thousands of jobs affected there should be no excuse of ‘business secrecy’ hiding the facts from those most closely involved. “[We] demand an end to asset stripping and no movement of production facilities without the agreement of all plants concerned.” The resolution concludes “the ownership of Rover, which BMW has given away, should now be transferred to the public sector.” |
TONY BLAIR claims that he intends to abolish poverty in Britain within 20
years. The Sunday Times Rich List 2000 suggests that the opposite is happening - the gap
between wealth and poverty is widening. ROBIN CLAPP writes.
THE MILLENNIUM fireworks may have long dimmed, but the champagne corks keep popping for the world's mega-rich.
Just three rich men now possess total assets greater than the combined annual production (GDP) of the 43 least-developed countries, with a population of 600 million.
For Microsoft’s Bill Gates, whose wealth had jumped from £36 billion to £53 billion in just 12 heady months, the recent publication of the 'Sunday Times Rich List 2000', is a confirmation that Eden on Earth has indeed been reached.
The world's richest 20% now consume 86% of all goods and services produced, but in the shadow of this opulence lie the stifled lives and tears of millions, the poorest 20% who consume just 1.3% of production.
On a planet where great technological advances are trumpeted daily, two billion people still lack access to safe sewers, while a further billion rely on polluted drinking water for survival.
Capitalism's rapacious appetite for profit has never been more intense. The reintroduction of private ownership into Russia and Eastern Europe following the collapse of the Stalinist planned economies, provided vast new opportunities for exploitation.
Former Soviet bureaucrats become dollar millionaires and Western companies seek to grow rich through the plunder of raw materials and the exploitation of cheap labour forces, but according to UNICEF capitalism has blighted the lives of over 100 million children through war, disease and social turmoil.
In this new century more than 80 countries have a lower income per head than they did in 1990. The gap between the income of the richest 20% and the world’s poorest has widened to a ratio of 74 to one.
Such a staggering disparity between wealth and poverty has never been seen before and is the most eloquent testimony to the need to rid the world of capitalism.
THE SUNDAY Times 'Rich List 2000' confirms that under Tony Blair, Britain is a bosses' paradise, with ten new millionaires graduating every week and even billionaires becoming passé. There were just nine in 1989, now there are 26.
The authors comment: "Britain's super-rich have never had it so good. The collective wealth of the top 1,000 has reached almost £146 billion, a rise of more than £31 billion on last year's list, or 27%."
It is in the new economic fields of software, the media, mobile phones and the Internet, that most wealth creation has taken place in recent years.
Setting the pace in the wealth charge have been the dot.com internet companies, which through flotation on the stock exchange magically and instantly produce unbelievable paper wealth. British Internet millionaires have risen from 10 to 63 in a year.
Martha Lane Fox's lastminute.com which The Economist rightly called a “glorified travel agent” found itself worth £732 million after one day's trading. Rising to a paper value of £845 million, the current value has since fallen to just £481 billion. Yet this firm is not expected to make any profit until at least 2004.
“It's all so click and easy” observe the authors of the Rich List before warning that “the Internet frenzy with its mad spiralling share prices is a classic example of an unsustainable bubble economy that may burst tomorrow.”
With the stock exchanges conjuring ever greater paper wealth for the coupon clippers, little attention is given to the irrationality of a system that tolerates Microsoft making £20 million profit daily, while stealing the same amount from sub-Saharan Africa through debt repayments.
The super-highway is to remain a closed road to the world's 160 million moderately or severely malnourished children.
The Rich List lifts the lid on the lifestyle of the international capitalist class and in so doing exposes the hollow claims of Blair and others that the market is the route to wealth for all.
In 1988 in the US, the average salary of a chief executive was 40 times that of the average employee. A decade later the differential had risen to 400 and is still growing.
IN BRITAIN too, the party goes on for the bosses of the 30 largest companies, who sit on personal profits of over £100 million. This is thanks in part to share options, which let them snap up shares at bargain prices.
The top 1% in Britain own almost 20% of all wealth, the bottom 50% just 7%.
Privatisation has fuelled this gravy train. The hated private rail companies are more heavily subsidised than under state ownership. In 1998 a rolling stock company, deliberately undervalued at the time of its sell-off, was put on the market again. It netted its former managing director an instant profit of £34 million.
The wealth transfusion has never surged stronger. Changes to National Insurance (NI) have meant that those in work between 1980-1997 paid £5.6 billion more NI. On the other hand companies coughed up £5.6 billion less!
Britain’s 1,000 wealthiest men and women are believed to have more than £108 billion stashed away and, according to the Independent, just 1,048 people control through their directorships, companies worth £1 trillion (£1,000 billion).
These are the puppet-masters pulling Blair's strings, who dictate to Gordon Brown that business taxes must be cut further, though collectively they still owe £14 billion in unpaid corporation tax.
Attacks on 'welfare scroungers' come raining down, but wealth scroungers are grovelled to. Since June 1987, Murdoch's News Corporation has made over £1.4 billion profits but paid no British corporation tax whatsoever.
He should have paid at least £350 million in this period, enough to build seven new hospitals, or 300 primary schools.
The lasting legacy of the Thatcher/Major regime was the vandalising of the welfare state, and the denouncing of the 'undeserving' poor. The consequence was that the number of people living in poverty tripled in 18 years and now stands at 14 million.
Despite seven years of economic growth which have seen the number of millionaires leap from 6,600 (1992) to 47,3000 (1998), the poorest 10% of the population have gained no real benefits from this bonanza.
The much-heralded Working Families’ Tax Credit again seeks to drive a wedge between deserving and 'undeserving'. Even Peter Kilfoyle, the MP for Walton and former Blair loyalist, has lambasted the recent budget for not getting to grips with the widening wealth gap in Britain.
BLAIR MAY claim that poverty in the north of England is diminishing, but a recent report by Richard Rogers says that in the most deprived areas of Liverpool, Manchester and other northern cities, local people are poorer than olive growers in Greece and Portugal.
Inner cities are becoming depopulated with unemployment twice the national average and early death rates a third above the norm. Many working-class estates are now 'food deserts' where people have to rely on high-price small shops in otherwise derelict precincts.
Social and health indicators highlight the poverty crisis. Health inequalities continue to worsen, with premature deaths becoming geographically concentrated in low-income areas, while young men without a known occupation are nearly four times as vulnerable to suicide as those in more affluent social classes.
Unskilled men’s overall death rate has gone from nearly double that of professional men to almost three times as high in the last 30 years.
Unsafe working conditions, poor diet and ever-present stress all contribute to this damning statistic.
Bristol University's 'The Widening Gap' points out that if people in the worst health areas enjoyed the same health as those in the best areas, 71% of deaths under 65 years between 1991-1995 could have been avoided. This amounts to 10,000 lives.
An increase in winter heating allowance and an insulting 75p extra in pensions, cannot disguise the facts - 300,000 pensioner households are still without a telephone and more than a million rely on state pensions and benefits alone.
Nor is inequality narrowing among the young. Britain is the worst place to be a child in the EU according to a study by UNICEF, with four out of ten children being born into low-income households. Half of this figure live in workless households.
One of the most disgusting aspects of welfare reform has been the targeting of those receiving disability benefits. 6.1 million British adults receive some benefit, around half of whom are on sickness or disability benefit. While these people are scapegoated for 'workshy' tendencies, no attention is drawn to the £6 billion unclaimed in disability benefits in 1998 alone.
POVERTY IS not created by an inefficient welfare system. It's a consequence of a capitalist system which wastes resources and squanders the talents of millions of people. The Asian economic crisis of 1997 wiped out $2 trillion from annual world output according to the UN.
It further estimates that the annual additional cost of achieving and maintaining universal access to basic education, healthcare, reproductive healthcare, adequate food, clean water and safe sewers is roughly £25 billion.
The richest 1,000 people in Britain alone have enough wealth to provide that for the next four years. Expropriating the wealth of the richest 225 people on the planet could underwrite that commitment for 25 years (see article opposite).
The Rich List makes complacent reading for its beneficiaries. For the rest of us it's an indictment of a system where 1.5 billion exist on less than a dollar a day, while 300 multinational companies control world trade and wealth.
As Marx would have said, the point is to change it.
BARCLAYS BANK boss Matthew Barrett could get a £30 million bonus on top of his annual salary of nearly £1 million as his reward for closing branches and sacking workers. This makes people burn with anger at the injustice of Britain's growing wealth divide.
As the article (left) shows this growing inequality has been fuelled by massive tax handouts and subsidies to the rich. Meanwhile most people in Britain are paying a greater share of their income in direct and indirect tax - the so-called 'tax burden'.
Embarrassed by pre-budget revelations about working people's increased 'burdens' under Labour, the government then argued that they were carrying out wealth redistribution (ie the rich are being taxed more) by stealth.
Yet working-class people know they now pay more taxes for less services from national and local government. The wealthiest are getting away with paying historically low levels of tax, while at the same time raking in massive share dividends and profits.
A NUMBER of groups on the Left call for increased taxation of the wealthy in order to redistribute wealth to the poorer sections of society and provide greater funding for public services.
The Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), for instance, is campaigning for the introduction of a Scottish Service Tax (SST) to replace the current council tax. The tax aims to make the rich pay more for local services and is based on people's ability to pay.
Anyone earning over £10,000 would pay the SST like they currently pay income tax - as a set percentage of income. In effect it's a progressive income tax. The SSP argue that the extra funding could provide better services and economic investment to help the poorest in society.
For instance Brian Souter, the multimillionaire head of Stagecoach, who has used his massive wealth to fund a bigots' campaign against repealing Section 28 in Scotland, would go from paying £1,516 at present to over £80,000. The academics who worked with the SSP in producing the proposals estimate that the SST would generate £100 million extra for Scottish government and councils.
Predictably the wealthiest in Scotland have talked of moving south of the border if the Scottish Service Tax became a reality. The Scottish media described the planned tax as "Tommy's plan to tax the rich until the pips squeak", referring to Tommy Sheridan, the SSP member of the Scottish Parliament.
All socialists would welcome a new tax that hits the rich where it hurts most - in their wallets. But while the Scottish media scream about the rich's pips squeaking, the Scottish Service Tax is in effect a mildly redistributive reformist measure rather than a thoroughgoing socialist redistribution of wealth.
The Scottish Service Tax is limited in how far it can reverse the massive shifts in wealth of the Tory and New Labour years. Additionally large amounts of what is known as the Social Wage, ie what working-class people gained in the post-war years through the introduction of the NHS, free education and universal benefits, have been massively eroded by the Thatcherite policies of the Tories and Blair's New Labour.
The Socialist Party agrees that rather than increasing the tax burden on working-class and middle-class people to pay for improved services, the super-rich should be much more heavily taxed. This can be done in the form of increased direct taxes by progressive taxation and a wealth tax.
But we also believe that these measures are not enough on their own lift millions out of poverty and provide long-term increased funding for public services. To achieve that a socialist plan of economic production would be needed.
This would take big business out of private hands and into public ownership through democratic working-class control and management
The massive wealth that big business accumulates could then fund a greatly increased minimum wage, reduce the taxes paid by working-class and middle-class people and adequately resource public services like health and education.
It could also fund a massive programme of public investment to provide jobs, housing and decent living conditions for the majority of people in Britain.