The Voice Of Anti-Capitalism In Guildford Strongly Supports The Socialist Party and CWI Oposition In the debate on The Causes Of The Great Recession

The debate on the causes of the Great Recession

Mick Brooks, Author of Capitalist Crisis: Theory and Practice, comments here on the debate within the Committee For a Workers’ International on The Causes of the Great Recession and Capitalist Crisis.

Mick Brooks, September 2013
Since the outbreak of the Great Recession Marxists have debated its cause. This is a vital theoretical issue for understanding the world around us.

The debate centres around the issue as to whether the present crisis is caused by falling profits as explained by Marx’s law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit (LTFRP), dealt with in chapters 13-15 of ‘Capital Volume III’. Others argue that the crisis can be explained as one of underconsumption.

This debate is bubbling under within the ranks of the CWI. The leadership of the CWI (as of the IMT) take what I would characterise as an underconsumptionist position. Already two blogs are circulating inside the ranks of the CWI that advocate the LTFRP explanation, in addition to an excellent short film, and debates are beginning to take place in the localities. Signs of intelligent life? It looks like it. Check out:
Marx returns from the Grave, http://69.195.124.91/~brucieba/
Socialism is Crucial, http://socialismiscrucial.wordpress.com/

It should be explained at the outset that all parties agree that a crisis of capitalism takes theform of overproduction, of unsold goods, as it says in the ‘Communist Manifesto’. Overproduction and crisis, however, are not permanent features of capitalist production. It remains to be explained why capitalism dips into crisis when it does.

The leadership, reacting to criticism, has resorted to an ‘underconsumptionist’ explanation of the cause of crisis. The crisis is caused, according to a quote from Chapter 30 of ‘Capital Volume III’ by “the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses.” (As one of the bloggers, CrucialSteve, points out this was actually a bracketed note added by Engels into the original text.)

The problem with the underconsumptionist explanation is that there is a permanent tendency for capitalism to restrict the purchasing power of the working class, because it is a system based on profit. Underconsumptionism therefore has no explanatory power as an explanation of crisis.

In any case not all commodities are produced for workers – pallet trucks and computer numerically controlled machine tools are capital goods bought by capitalists. There are also luxury goods consumed only by capitalists such as yachts and private jets. Why should there be a specific outbreak of overproduction of consumer goods intended for workers’ consumption such as jumpers rather than pallet trucks or yachts? Empirically crises of overproduction usually break out in the capital goods industries. Investment is the most volatile element in national income.

The opposition bloggers within the CWI have a powerful argument in their favour – the rate and mass of profit in the major capitalist countries fell sharply prior to the onset of crisis in 2007. Marx’s theory is confirmed! To take the case of the USA: “The US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) shows that in the 3rd quarter of 2006 the mass of profits peaked at $1,865bn. By the 4th quarter of 2008 it bottomed out at $861bn.” (Brooks – Capitalist crisis; theory and practice, p.32)

The facts confirm Marx’s analysis of the LTFRP as the fundamental cause of crisis. Why should this cause surprise, since we all agree that capitalism is a system of production of profit? The school of Marxian economists who support this analysis view the falling rate and also mass of profit only as an underlying cause of crisis. Essentially the argument is about levels of causation in the crisis. What about the financial aspect of the crisis – the housing bubble, crazy loans and collapsing banks? Of course this was all very important. These specific factors profoundly influence the depth and nature of the downturn. Every crisis is a unique event with its own characteristics. But, with or without a ‘financial crisis’ the fact that the mass of profits in the USA, the most important capitalist country, halved over two years would have provoked a big collapse of output in any case.

How does the leadership of the CWI deal with the detailed criticisms of their approach thrown up by the advocates of the importance of the LTFRP as an explanation of crisis? Lynn Walsh argues in ‘Socialism Today’ that profit and investment have become disconnected in recent decades. “Despite the staggering increase in the share of income taken by the top 1% in the US, investment declined.”(‘Socialism Today’, November 2012) So profits (with the share of the top 1% as a proxy) are supposed have soared at the expense of working people, but this has not translated into productive investment. Walsh concludes, “This factual data, in our view confirms the analysis of a crisis in capital accumulation put forward in ‘Socialism Today’ over many years” (ibid.).

If true, this is not an explanation for a pattern of booms and slumps. It presents a stagnationist perspective for the future of capitalism, a permanent slowing down of the rate of accumulation. Is the CWI serious about decades of stagnation? How do they explain the present crisis, where investment fell as a result of the fall in profits?

In fact there is a simple explanation for this alleged disjunction between profits and investment: the profit figures quoted are wrong. Michael Roberts has meticulously chronicled the rate of profit since the Second World War in his blog. Nobody has challenged his figures, which attempt to look beneath conventional statistics to work out a Marxian rate of profit.

Roberts concludes: first that there has been no return to the fabulous profits enjoyed by capitalists during the golden years of the post-War boom; and secondly that the rate of profit today in 2013 remains below that of 2007 before the onset of the great Recession. Andrew Kliman also carefully shows (in ‘The failure of capitalist production’) that the reason for lower investment in the years since 1974 is lower profits. There is just less to invest. Simples.

The CWI leadership buttress their ‘explanation’ as to why investment has been lower with recourse to the notion of financialisation. As Lynn Walsh argues in the same article, more and more funds have been gobbled up by financial shenanigans in preference to investing in industry. There is no mystery here. In so far as more “profits disappeared into the financial sector” (ibid.), that is a response to lower pickings to be made in production – because of the LTFRP itself.

Increasing exploitation of the workers over recent decades has not led to increasing rates of accumulation because of financialisation, it is asserted. This is part of the analysis of a whole school of thought, regarding itself as Marxian, which sees the current crisis as one of the neoliberal form of capitalism rather than capitalism as a whole. In fact this is the conventional wisdom of the majority of academic Marxist economists. A whole new stage of capitalism is supposed to have developed since about 1980, buttressed by the holy trinity of globalisation, neoliberalism and financialisation.

Dumenil and Levy’s book – ‘The crisis of neoliberalism’, 2011 – is an example. Phil Hearse writing in Socialist Resistance, the publishing house of the so-called Fourth international, also refers to “a neoliberal ‘regime of accumulation’”. The logic of this approach seems to be that neoliberalism should be destroyed rather the capitalist system overthrown. As we see, the CWI leadership has swallowed this analysis whole. By accepting the interpretation of this school the CWI is on a slippery slope indeed. We’re with the opposition within their ranks on this one.

To us, it’s an obscure shift of tax law. To the City, it’s the heist of the century

In David Cameron we have a leader whose job is to quietly legitimise a semi-criminal, money-laundering economy

‘I would love to see tax reductions,” David Cameron told the Sunday Telegraph at the weekend, “but when you’re borrowing 11% of your GDP, it’s not possible to make significant net tax cuts. It just isn’t.” Oh no? Then how come he’s planning the biggest and crudest corporate tax cut in living memory?

If you’ve heard nothing of it, you’re in good company. The obscure adjustments the government is planning to the tax acts of 1988 and 2009 have been missed by almost everyone – and are, anyway, almost impossible to understand without expert help. But as soon as you grasp the implications, you realise that a kind of corporate coup d’etat is taking place.

Like the dismantling of the NHS and the sale of public forests, no one voted for this measure, as it wasn’t in the manifestos. While Cameron insists that he occupies the centre ground of British politics, that he shares our burdens and feels our pain, he has quietly been plotting with banks and businesses to engineer the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor and middle to the ultra-rich that this country has seen in a century. The latest heist has been explained to me by the former tax inspector, now a Private Eye journalist, Richard Brooks and current senior tax staff who can’t be named. Here’s how it works.

At the moment tax law ensures that companies based here, with branches in other countries, don’t get taxed twice on the same money. They have to pay only the difference between our rate and that of the other country. If, for example, Dirty Oil plc pays 10% corporation tax on its profits in Oblivia, then shifts the money over here, it should pay a further 18% in the UK, to match our rate of 28%. But under the new proposals, companies will pay nothing at all in this country on money made by their foreign branches.

Foreign means anywhere. If these proposals go ahead, the UK will be only the second country in the world to allow money that has passed through tax havens to remain untaxed when it gets here. The other is Switzerland. The exemption applies solely to “large and medium companies”: it is not available for smaller firms. The government says it expects “large financial services companies to make the greatest use of the exemption regime”. The main beneficiaries, in other words, will be the banks.

But that’s not the end of it. While big business will be exempt from tax on its foreign branch earnings, it will, amazingly, still be able to claim the expense of funding its foreign branches against tax it pays in the UK. No other country does this. The new measures will, as we already know, accompany a rapid reduction in the official rate of corporation tax: from 28% to 24% by 2014. This, a Treasury minister has boasted, will be the lowest rate “of any major western economy”. By the time this government is done, we’ll be lucky if the banks and corporations pay anything at all. In the Sunday Telegraph, David Cameron said: “What I want is tax revenue from the banks into the exchequer, so we can help rebuild this economy.” He’s doing just the opposite.

These measures will drain not only wealth but also jobs from the UK. The new legislation will create a powerful incentive to shift business out of this country and into nations with lower corporate tax rates. Any UK business that doesn’t outsource its staff or funnel its earnings through a tax haven will find itself with an extra competitive disadvantage. The new rules also threaten to degrade the tax base everywhere, as companies with headquarters in other countries will demand similar measures from their own governments.

So how did this happen? You don’t have to look far to find out. Almost all the members of the seven committees the government set up “to provide strategic oversight of the development of corporate tax policy” are corporate executives. Among them are representatives of Vodafone, Tesco, BP, British American Tobacco and several of the major banks: HSBC, Santander, Standard Chartered, Citigroup, Schroders, RBS and Barclays.

I used to think of such processes as regulatory capture: government agencies being taken over by the companies they were supposed to restrain. But I’ve just read Nicholas Shaxson’s Treasure Islands <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/22/treasure-islands-tax-havens-shaxson-review> – perhaps the most important book published in the UK so far this year – and now I’m not so sure. Shaxson shows how the world’s tax havens have not, as the OECD claims, been eliminated, but legitimised; how the City of London is itself a giant tax haven, which passes much of its business through its subsidiary havens in British dependencies, overseas territories and former colonies; how its operations mesh with and are often indistinguishable from the laundering of the proceeds of crime; and how the Corporation of the City of London in effect dictates to the government, while remaining exempt from democratic control. If Hosni Mubarak has passed his alleged $70bn through British banks, the Egyptians won’t see a piastre <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_piastre>  of it.

Reading Treasure Islands, I have realised that injustice of the kind described in this column is no perversion of the system; it is the system. Tony Blair came to power after assuring the City of his benign intentions. He then deregulated it and cut its taxes. Cameron didn’t have to assure it of anything: his party exists to turn its demands into public policy. Our ministers are not public servants. They work for the people who fund their parties, run the banks and own the newspapers, shielding them from their obligations to society, insulating them from democratic challenge.

Our political system protects and enriches a fantastically wealthy elite, much of whose money is, as a result of their interesting tax and transfer arrangements, in effect stolen from poorer countries, and poorer citizens of their own countries. Ours is a semi-criminal money-laundering economy, legitimised by the pomp of the lord mayor’s show and multiple layers of defence in government. Politically irrelevant, economically invisible, the rest of us inhabit the margins of the system. Governments ensure that we are thrown enough scraps to keep us quiet, while the ultra-rich get on with the serious business of looting the global economy and crushing attempts to hold them to account.

And this government? It has learned the lesson that Thatcher never grasped. If you want to turn this country into another Mexico, where the ruling elite wallows in unimaginable, state-facilitated wealth while the rest can go to hell, you don’t declare war on society, you don’t lambast single mothers or refuse to apologise for Bloody Sunday. You assuage, reassure, conciliate, emote. Then you shaft us.

Even Tory Economists Are Lining Up Against Austerity

The UK economy shrank by 0.5% in the last quarter of 2010, proving that government claims of Britain’s recovery are lies.

Today’s updated GDP figures prove that the government’s austerity program is not working. Even the Labour Party, who let us not forget had its own cuts program, has issued a statement today arguing that cuts are being made too deeply, and too rapidly.

Economists were reported in the Guardian as saying that GDP for the last quarter was much worse than expected, which meant that Britain could now suffer a double-dip recession. With inflation hitting 3.7% last month, there are also growing fears the UK is heading for an unpleasant dose of “stagflation”. A term coined in the ‘70s for the twin economic problems of stagnation and inflation.

The news has sent the pound falling by nearly one and a half cents against the dollar to $1.575, and pushed the FTSE 100 index down. Not that we at the Voice Of Anti-Capitalism have any shares.

The ONS (Office of National Statistics) reported that the services sector – the dominant part of the UK economy – shrank by 0.5% in the last quarter, and construction declined by 3.3%. UK retail sales dropped 0.8% last month- and over the year have been flat. The retail sector suffered its worst December in 12 years.

Even the head of the CBI (Confederation of British Industry), Richard Lambert accused Vince Cable of hindering business and job creation through politically motivated austerity initiatives.

George Soros, hedge fund owner and criminal financial speculator, hailed as an expert by his Tory lackeys, speaking at the World Economic Forum yesterday said the government’s spending cuts were unsustainable. He warned David Cameron that the government would push the British economy back into recession unless it modified its austerity package. Nouriel Roubini, another Tory economist I’ve never heard of, was quoted as having similar warnings.

What this goes to show is that there are significant concerns in the government and among its business partners as to whether Tory austerity measures will provide the greater profits promised by the government. No matter what the Tory’s say in the press, the ruling classes have no solutions to the crises.
There are no solutions to the crises under capitalism. The system has been prolonged by massively increasing debt and fraudulently underestimating the risk associated with that debt.

Debt ridden institutions have been buying and selling other institution’s debt in a merry-go-round, and now the bubble has burst. The best our politicians can come with is to take the money out of our pockets and put it in to the banks. The result is no consumer spending and a resulting recession.

But we don’t have to play this game. We can take over the banks and cancel the debt. This generation can break the cycle.

US policies intensify world currency, trade conflicts

        As The United States declines trade war looms

In the wake of the fractious International Monetary Fund (IMF) meeting held October 9-10 in Washington, the descent into global currency and trade war has accelerated, with the United States playing the role of instigator-in-chief.

The US is deliberately encouraging a sell-off of dollars on international currency markets in order to raise the relative exchange rates of its major trade rivals, increasing the effective price of their exports to the US while cheapening US exports to their markets.

While largely responsible for the growing financial disorder, Washington is accusing China, in particular, of jeopardizing global economic recovery by refusing to more quickly raise the exchange rate of its currency, the renminbi (also known as the yuan). By working to drive down the value of the dollar, the US government and the Federal Reserve Board are placing ever greater pressure on the Chinese to revalue, ignoring warnings from Beijing that a rapid rise in its currency will harm its export industries, leading to mass layoffs and social unrest.

The protectionist cheap-dollar policy has an important domestic political function as well. It aims to divert growing public anger over the refusal of the government to provide jobs or serious relief to the unemployed away from the Obama administration and Congress and toward China and “foreigners” more generally. Among its most enthusiastic supporters is the trade union bureaucracy.

The US Commerce Department report Thursday that the US trade deficit widened nearly 9 percent in August, primarily due to a record $28 billion deficit with China, will be used to justify further trade war pressure against China.

The US policy and the growth of international tensions were on full display at the IMF meeting in Washington. US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner declared China’s currency to be undervalued and demanded that the IMF take a harder line against surplus countries, such as China, that fail to revalue their currencies and accept a reduction in their exports.

China’s central bank governor, Zhou Xiaochuan, charged that expectations that the US Federal Reserve would pump yet more dollars into the markets through quantitative easing were compounding imbalances and swamping emerging economies with destabilizing capital inflows.

With the representatives of the world’s first- and second-largest economies at loggerheads, the IMF failed to arrive at any agreement on the currency crisis. Washington’s allies such as Germany and Japan indicated support for a revaluation of the renminbi, but they balked at lining up behind a US-led diplomatic offensive against Beijing.

This, in effect, postponed the US-China confrontation until the upcoming G20 summit of leading economies, to be held November 11-12 in Seoul, South Korea.

The ensuing week saw an escalation of Washington’s cheap-dollar policy, as the Federal Reserve Board gave further indications that it plans to resume the electronic equivalent of printing hundreds of billions dollars, so-called “quantitative easing,” perhaps as soon as its next policy-setting meeting November 2-3. While it is doing so in the name of stimulating job creation, the main effect of a renewal of Fed purchases of US Treasury securities will be to increase the supply of virtually free credit to the major US banks and corporations and fuel a further rise in stocks and corporate profits.

Since August, when the Fed took the first steps toward the large-scale resumption of debt purchases, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has risen by more than 10 percent despite continuing declines in US payrolls.

In a much-anticipated speech Friday at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke broadly hinted that he favored an early resumption of quantitative easing. Speaking of the Fed’s policy-making Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), he said, “Given the Committee’s objectives, there would appear—all things being equal—to be a case for further action.”

Bernanke took the highly unusual step of declaring that the present inflation rate is too low and making clear that the Fed’s policy going forward will be to raise the rate of inflation to around 2 percent by means of monetary stimulus. “Thus, in effect,” he said, “inflation is running at rates that are too low relative to the levels that the Committee judges to be most consistent with the Federal Reserve’s dual mandate [to maintain price stability and contain unemployment] in the longer run.” [Bernanke’s emphasis].

The call for an inflationary monetary policy is not driven, as Bernanke would have the public believe, by a desire to significantly bring down the jobless rate. The Fed would not declare that inflation is too low unless it was confident that continued high unemployment will enable big business to proceed with its wage-cutting drive and prevent a rebound in wages.

In giving his speech, Bernanke was well aware that simply talking of quantitative easing and a policy of reflation would spark a further sell-off of US dollars. In the event, the renewed decline in the dollar, which began after the IMF meeting, accelerated on Friday.

On a trade-weighted basis, the dollar dropped 0.7 percent to a new low for the year after Bernanke spoke, and the Australian dollar reached parity for the first time since it was freely floated in 1983. The US greenback also fell to parity with the Canadian dollar.

In addition, the dollar fell to a new low against the Swiss franc. Virtually all Asian currencies rose versus the dollar, gold hit a new record high, and other commodities such as silver, copper and corn continued their upward spiral.

The dollar is now at 15-year lows against the yen and nine-month lows against the euro. The Wall Street Journal on Saturday published a scathing editorial bluntly summing up the currency- and trade-war implications of Bernanke’s speech. It began: “Amid the dollar rout of the 1970s, Treasury Secretary John Connally famously told a group of fretting Europeans that the greenback `is our currency, but your problem.’ If you read between the lines, that’s also more or less what Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said yesterday as he made the case for further Fed monetary easing.”

The editorial continued: “In a nearly 4,000-word speech, the Fed chief never once mentioned the value of the dollar. He never mentioned exchange rates, despite the turmoil in world currency markets as the dollar has fallen in anticipation of further Fed easing… The chairman’s message is that the Fed is focused entirely on the domestic US economy and will print as many dollars as it takes to reflate it. The rest of the world is on its own and can adjust its policies as various countries see fit. If other currencies soar in relation to the dollar, that’s someone else’s problem.”

Earlier in the week, Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf published a column similarly pointing to the unilateralist and nationalist essence of US policy. “In short,” Wolf wrote, “US policymakers will do whatever is required to avoid deflation. Indeed, the Fed will keep going until the US is satisfactorily reflated. What that effort does to the rest of the world is not its concern…

“Instead of cooperation on adjustment of exchange rates and the external account, the US is seeking to impose its will, via the printing press… In the worst of the crisis, leaders hung together. Now, the Fed is about to hang them all separately.”

The Financial Times on Friday gave some indication of growing anger within Europe over US monetary policy, quoting a “senior European policymaker” as calling the Fed’s policy “irresponsible.” The article cited Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin as saying one reason for the exchange rate turmoil “is the stimulating monetary policy of some developed countries, above all the United States, which are trying to solve their structural problems in this way.”

Following Bernanke’s speech on Friday, the Obama administration announced two further moves in its confrontation with China. The Treasury Department delayed the release of its semiannual assessment of the currency policies of major US trade counterparts, saying it would withhold the statement until after next month’s G20 summit in Seoul.

The administration is under pressure from leading Democratic lawmakers, backed by the unions, to declare China a currency manipulator in the currency assessment, an action that could lead to retaliatory duties and tariffs against Chinese imports. The administration, however, has resisted such an overtly hostile move that would, moreover, preempt G20 discussions on the currency issue. It prefers to build a coalition of European and Asian states against China.

At the same time, however, largely to placate protectionist hawks in the Democratic Party, the US trade representative announced that he was launching an investigation into a claim filed by the United Steelworkers union charging China with unfair and illegal subsidies to its green energy industry.
Global impact of US monetary policy

Washington’s cheap-dollar policy increases the pressure on the major surplus countries—China, Germany and Japan—as well as the emerging economies of Asia and Latin America to respond by devaluing their own currencies to offset the trade advantage of rivals with falling currencies, first and foremost the United States.

This is the classic scenario of competitive devaluations and “beggar-thy-neighbor” policies that characterized the Great Depression of the 1930s and produced a fracturing of the world market into hostile trade and currency blocs, ultimately leading to World War II.

All of the major powers and rising economic nations solemnly foreswore precisely this course of action at international meetings following the outbreak of the financial crisis in September 2008. It has taken less than two years for this much-touted global coordination to collapse into mutual threats and outright economic warfare.

Germany and Japan, while more than happy to force China to raise its exchange rate and prepared to fire some shots across China’s bow toward that end, are reluctant to fully enlist in Washington’s anti-Chinese crusade since they know that they too are targeted by the Fed’s cheap dollar policy.

Last month, Japan, whose currency has risen by more than 10 percent against the dollar over the past year, retaliated with a massive and unilateral one-day sell-off of yen, and this month the Japanese central bank announced a further lowering of its key interest rate and its own program of quantitative easing, through central bank purchases of $60 billion in Japanese government bonds.

Emerging economies such as South Korea, Thailand, India, Taiwan and Brazil are reeling from the upward pressure on their exchange rates fueled by waves of speculative dollars seeking a higher return through the purchase of government and corporate bonds of these faster-growing countries.

The Institute of International Finance, which lobbies for major banks, estimates that $825 billion will flow into developing countries this year, 42 percent more than in 2009. Investments in debt of emerging economies alone are expected to triple, to $272 billion.

Last month, the Brazilian finance minister warned of the outbreak of a global currency war and earlier this month his government announced the doubling of a tax on foreign purchases of Brazilian bonds in an attempt to stem the inrush of capital and the relative rise of the nation’s currency, the real.

This past week, Thailand took similar steps, announcing a 15 percent withholding tax on the interest payments and capital gains earned by foreign investors in Thai bonds, in an attempt to arrest the appreciation of the baht, which has already risen by 10 percent against the dollar this year.

The eruption of currency and trade war is being driven by the general slowdown in economic growth to anemic levels that make impossible any genuine recovery from the deepest slump since the 1930s. Faced either with slumping domestic demand or stagnant foreign markets, or (as in the case of the US) a combination of the two, the major economies are all intent on increasing their sales abroad. As the prospects dim for a revival of economic growth to pre-recession levels, the system of multilateral currency and trade relations dating back to the agreements made at the end of World War II is collapsing. So too are the chances of genuine multilateral coordination.

Ultimately, global coordination of economic policy between the major powers in the post-war period was anchored by the economic supremacy of the United States, embodied in the privileged position of the US dollar as the world trade and reserve currency. This has irretrievably broken down, with the palpable decline in the world economic position of the United States.

The result is a struggle of each against all, combined with a general onslaught in every country against the working class, which is to be made to pay—in the form of wage-cutting and austerity measures—for the breakdown of the global capitalist economic order.

By Barry Grey
18 October 2010
WSWS

Election Surrey 2010: Anne Milton’s Tory Sleaze

Rumours of Anne Milton’s Tory Sleaze Continue! 

Yesterday we put out the call for some local Tory sleaze. “If you have some dirt on Anne Milton share it with us” we said. – “We will always post it and we never give away our sources”.   

Since then The Voice of Anti-Capitalism HQ, has been receiving a trickle of tit bits about the conduct of our local Tory adminstration. We’ve had reports of a Tory slander campaign against Anne Milton’s opposition, unethical electioneering practices, and accusations of the bullying of Anne Milton’s rivals. Follow the link for the full story:
https://suacs.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/tories-in-surrey-tory-sleaze-theyre-the-same-everywhere/

We’ve learnt that Anne Milton’s Tory team have even made repeated nuisance phone calls to the work places of Anne Milton’s opponents. 

Today We’ve received the vid, embedded below from an anonymous ‘fighter for truth and justice’. Or more likely – a local malcontent, just as right-wing and dodgy as Anne Milton herself

However all donations are gratefully received. We liked the Vid and hope you do too.

If you have any dirt on Anne Milton – Give it up, don’t be Shy
And remember Only the Lib Dems can keep the Tories out.

For More updates join our Guildford Against Fees And Cuts Facebook page.

Or for more stories of miss deeds:
Visit Surrey Tories:
http://surreytories.wordpress.com/2006/01/04/guildford-mp-awol/
Visit Bloggerheads:
http://www.bloggerheads.com/anne_milton/labels/royal%20surrey.html

Focus On The Election: The Trade Union and Socialist Coalition

 Trade Union and Socialist Coalition

“The £11 million spent on Labour by the Unite union does nothing else than allow them to kick us in the teeth” said Hannah Sell, deputy leader of the Socialist Party as she opened last night’s launch rally for the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition.

The Trade Union and Socialist Coalition, ‘TUSC’ is standing in many constituencies across the country to give voters an alternative to Labour in the general election. Chris Baugh, assistant general secretary of the PCS union said “we are all being told to pay the cost of the bosses’ crisis.” This coalition can “restate the idea that another world is possible.”

Last month’s launch rally was attended by more than 300 delegates and a large media presence. Speakers included Karen Reissman, a mental health nurse who was sacked from her job for ‘whistle blowing’ over patient care. She is standing for the Manchester Gorton constituency.

Brian Caton, leader of the Prison Officers Association spoke from the platform as did Dave Nellist, a Socialist Party Councilor standing in Coventry North East. Some of TUSC’s London candidates delivered strong speeches about their campaigns. Steve Hedley, of the RMT London region announced the breaking news of strike action on the railways.

 We won’t pay for their crisis
A key argument from speakers was that billions have been given to the rich bankers, whilst workers and public services are being made to pay the cost. Chris Bough spoke about the propaganda campaign by the media to enforce this injustice.

To laughter in the audience, and in a snub to the media he joked about the number of hedge-fund managers who have recently appeared on the BBC’s Newsnight programme. He said the media had launched a “torrent of abuse” against trade unions, with the British Airways strike being a good example. But he said, “The public are with the unions. They are way to the left of the politicians. 50 per cent of the public don’t think that cuts are necessary”.

Karen Reissman agreed and continued along this theme. “People say to me: we’re glad you’re standing, representing what we think.” She said, “There are millions of people who don’t think they should be made to pay.” Tottenham candidate Jenny Sutton, a college teacher, said that education was a good example of what is happening to public services everywhere. “We are being absolutely hammered.”

We need a new party
Brian Caton said that working class people need a new political party “by the people, for the people. It’s time for socialism to become real. I supported Labour all my life and got nothing in return.”

Dave Nellist also called for a new workers’ party. He said the difference between Labour and the other parties could be reduced to whether the full extent of public sector cuts are brought through in “six years or seven.” “Indeed, last night, Alasdair Darling told the BBC that Labour would cut deeper than Thatcher.”

Nellist went on to say that success for TUSC won’t just be measured by the number of votes, but will “plant it’s flag in the ground – saying that an alternative is possible.” He said that TUSC could be the start to building an “independent trade union and socialist voice.” Hannah Sell said, “This is the modest beginning of something historic. We hope this will start the development of a mass party.”

Some TUSC candidates should do quite well – at least save their deposit. Karen Reissmann and Jenny Sutton (London regional secretary of UCU), for example. Dave Hill of Socialist Resistance is expected to do well in Brighton– And of course Paul Couchman in the Spelthorne constituency in Surrey. If 5-6 candidates save their deposits or do even better, then the pressure for a new party would be very high.

Paul Couchman is a paragon of what a candidate for a new workers’, anti-capitalist party should be. A Socialist Party branch organiser, he is a Unison branch secretary. He has consistently been involved in the community over many years and takes an active part in many local groups. He is the founder of “Save Surrey Services”, and is the founder and organiser of the campaign to save Surrey’s care homes. Paul is well known and respected throughout West Surrey and is known for his campaigning to keep schools and hospitals from closure. 

For an anti-capitalist party!
When the capitalist parties like Labour, Tories and the Lib Dems are about to launch such a huge assault on working class people, it is important that many TUSC candidates and supporters recognise that we need a new party to defend ourselves.

But speakers also made clear that there are many obstacles we will have to overcome to form such a new party. Onay Kasab, a Unison branch organiser standing for Greenwich & Woolwich spoke about how he had been witch-hunted by the Unison leadership. The union is currently victimizing left-wing activists. He told us that a memo had gone round to branch secretaries telling them that to lobby for non-Labour candidates in the general election would result in expulsion from the union. He told a disgusted audience that the Unison orders were “gobs shut for Labour.”  This is a declaration of war by the Unison leadership – vote Labour or else!

Steve Hedley said that the RMT union would only be supporting left-wing Labour candidates, although he admitted that these candidates were standing for the wrong party. He said that we urge left MPs like Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell to break from Labour.

In doing this, RMT leaders are stepping back from the kind of fight that is necessary for a new party. Some candidates, including the Workers Power candidate in Vauxhall, Jeremy Drinkall, were barred from standing for TUSC because they were standing against ‘left’ Labour MPs (in Vaxhall this is Kate Hoey). PCS leaders have been similar in their procrastinating, whilst the Labour government have been laying the way for civil service job cuts by attacking redundancy pay.

Despite the potential of the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition, its weakness is that left-wing trade union leaders ultimately have a veto over all the decisions that are made. The launch meeting was very weak on the question of socialism with almost no mention of a goal for the coalition how to achieve it.

The PCS, RMT and other unions outside Labour – along with groups like the Socialist Party and Socialist Workers Party should have organised a mass conference to decide on the politics and policies of this coalition. They could have used it to galvanise support from workers and youth all over the country who are in struggle against the economic crisis with the explicit aim of forming a new political party to destroy capitalism for good.

This new formation should be federated and it’s members free to belong to other political organisations which support the new party. The branches of such a formation should act as pluralistic campaigning groups, and encompass anarchists, radical environmentalists and syndicalists as well as trades unionists and socialists. In-fact, all those who appreciate that capitalism is not working and that we need to fight for a better future, free from the rule of profit, the threat of war, fascism and global warming.

This has not been done. TUSC drafted its manifesto in secret meetings behind closed doors, asking workers to ‘like it or lump it’. As a result there are major weaknesses with the TUSC programme reducing it to an ‘old Labour’ manifesto seeking to reform capitalism, rather than abolish the rotten system for good.

Such a conference should still be called, to start preparing the ground for a new party. The next few weeks are due to see a huge number of strikes – highly unusual in the run-up to the general election. Why not call for such a conference now and bring in the BA, RMT and British Gas workers, civil servants and teachers who are all taking industrial action to save their jobs? Then socialists could start having the arguments around the kind of action and international solidarity needed to protect the class as a whole. -And begin to build an alternative society with an alternative economy – where workers and communities are the ones who control it.