By David Walsh
This coming week will see the banners, bands and uniforms at cenotaphs and war memorials up and down the nation. It always seems a pity that one memorial never seems to get much attention at this time. This is the memorial to Teessiders who were prepared to put politics and principles to the supreme test when - between 1936 and 1938 - they left the factory or the office, and the homes and streets of Teesside to fight for right in Spain.
The majority fought under the colours of the British International Brigade, a smaller number enrolling in the ILP battalion or the Irish Connelly Brigade. This small number made up a part of an international force of volunteers who went to help the Spanish people to resist the Facism of Franco and the guns and warplanes of Franco's friends, Hitler and Mussolini.
Earlier articles on this site (see http://republic-of-teesside.blogspot.com/search/label/International%20Brigades) have told this story in greater detail and have given some notes from past IB'ers from this area. The memorial is now the only physical remain of their history. You can find it on the upper corridor of Middlesbrough's Municipal Building, sited between the doors to the Council Chamber and the corridor leading to the Committee Room section.
But whilst most people will be aware of Teesside marching to war in Spain I suspect no-one will be aware that this war, in a very real physical sense in terms of gunfire came almost to Teesside's doorstep, and led to an act of bravery from a Tyneside merchant steamer, its Captain from Blaydon and a crew probably recruited from the four corners of the North East.
I found this from the Hayes Peoples History Website (worth looking at if you are interested in Labour history) and I cite much of what is below from their article and from other odd facts I have gleaned over recent days.
The story centres on a grey North Sea when, at 3:30pm on the 2nd November 1938, a Spanish Republican merchant ship the Cantabria captained by Manuella Ardulles was half way into a voyage between Gravesend, a Thames estuary port and Sunderland, when it was caught in an unprovoked attack by the rebel Spanish fascist gunboat the Nadir in the North Sea, seven miles west of Cromer light vessel, Norfolk.
The bulk of the Spanish Navy had gone over to Franco when he launched his coup d'etat in 1936 and there was a nucleus of warships able to blockade ports still held by the republic and to harass and indeed, sink, shipping bringing food and war materials into these ports. The 'non-intervention pact' agreed to by Britain and France meant that the only source of guns, motor vehicles ammunition and aircraft could only be sourced from a distance - primarily the Soviet Union.
In consequence what Spanish republican shipping there was, was watched closely by the Francoists and their allies abroad. Much of this was co-ordinated by the German intelligence services who both tracked radio traffic and also had agents on the ground in many Western European and US port cities.
The fact that the Cantabria was, after leaving Sunderland, to sail to Leningrad was obviously of interest. Put simply, this ship was not likely to be picking up a cargo of potatoes !
Hence the shadowing of the Cantabria from when it left the Thames estuary and took its northern course for Sunderland.
The shadower, the so called merchant ship 'Nadir', was actually the 1,132 ton auxiliary cruiser of the Francoist Navy, the 'Ciudad de Valencia'. It was armed with a 120 mm main gun, two 105 mm cannons and two heavy duty 37 mm machine gun cannons. The weight of armament it carried could have taken the unarmed Cantabria apart.
It was clear to Captain Ardulles after many hours that this mystery ship was following him very closely and he started to make a zig zag course. The fact that this was exactly replicated led him to draw the obvious conclusion and the old steamer went to full speed to try and make UK territorial waters.
At that point the hidden guns on the Nadir were unveiled and the first shots were aimed at the defenceless Cantabria. The bombardment rattled windows of houses in genteel Cromer and crowds gathered on the cliff tops to witness the shocking events.
Shells and heavy calibre machine gun fire began to rake the Cantabria. Both the bridge and the engine room was hit, and the Cantabria's wireless operator sent out a dramatic SOS saying what was happening and calling for help from other ships.
The Coatguards also raised an alarm and the Royal Navy Auxiliary Cruiser Monkwood was dispatched to investigate the attack upon the Cantabria but as Britain was part of a "non intervention pact" and both ships were still just outside the three mile limit, it did not react in any way to the bombardment despite the fact that the Nadir's shellfire was hitting home and great loss of life was threatened.
Enter on the scene after the wireless alert the SS Pattersonian, a North East Collier registered in Newcastle and owned by Smith, Patterson & Co. Ltd., Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, its Captain from Blaydon, Captain J. Blackmore and his north east crew who - in an act of utter bravery and from decisions taken in seconds - forced the Pattersonian between the attacking gun boat and its shells and the unarmed Republican merchant ship so as to try to rescue the crew from the now plainly sinking boat.
Despite the Cantabria flying white flags, the Nadir continued to bombard the steamer, whilst bravely the Pattersonian moved in even closer to rescue eleven crew members including Captain Ardulles, his wife Trinidad, his two children and members of the crew, despite continued attempts by the Nadir to ram the Pattersonian.
If they had succeeded the loss of life would have been even greater as the Pattersonian was heavily loaded, but at only 315 tons gross weight, very vulnerable.
A further five crew members were rescued by the Cromer lifeboat and the remaining crew by another collier the SS Monkwood, with a total of 45 crew members being rescued.
Tragically one of the Cantabria's crewmen, a Juan Gils was killed by shellfire, whilst the radio operator Eduardo Collade, his wife and two children were captured by the Nadir, their fate still unknown to this day.
After landing, the surviving crew made their way to London by train. At their destination huge cheering crowds gathered to welcome them and show support for the Republican cause, those present including Senior Alvarez Buyllis Spanish Consul General.
Today this attack by Franco's rebel forces would be labelled a War crime, in 1938 the Conservative National Government was still pursuing a policy of appeasing fascist governments and attempted to play down the incident. Despite the fact that shots were fired in anger only miles from the East Coast, and that North East seamen were physically shelled and attacked by a Francoist warship, only a short exchange was made in Parliament, when, in reply to a question from a Scots Labour MP, Robert Gibson, the duty minister R A (Rab) Butler could only say that, as no UK lives had been lost, the issue was irrelevant.
(see http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1938/nov/23/spanish-ship-attack-north-sea) One Tory MP, a Lieutenant Colonel Heneage, broke into the exchange to observe that 'the socialists seem to want to go to war with everyone now'. 10 Months later we were at war, and it was the victory of Francoism, both in Spain and in the cold waters of the North Sea that paved the way.
Saturday, November 12, 2011
Wednesday, November 02, 2011
City of London Corporation: "the home of the devilry of modern finance"
An excellent essay by Nicholas Shaxson published in New Statesman earlier this year:
The tax haven in the heart of Britain
Nicholas Shaxson, 24 February 2011
There is an institution with a murky history and remarkable powers that acts like a political and financial island within our island nation state. Welcome to the Square Mile and the City of London Corporation.
... The term "tax haven" is a bit of a misnomer, because such places aren't just about tax. What they sell is escape: from the laws, rules and taxes of jurisdictions elsewhere, usually with secrecy as their prime offering. The notion of elsewhere (hence the term "offshore") is central. The Cayman Islands' tax and secrecy laws are not designed for the benefit of the 50,000-odd Caymanians, but help wealthy people and corporations, mostly in the US and Europe, get around the rules of their own democratic societies. The outcome is one set of rules for a rich elite and another for the rest of us.
The City's "elsewhere" status in Britain stems from a simple formula: over centuries, sovereigns and governments have sought City loans, and in exchange the City has extracted privileges and freedoms from rules and laws to which the rest of Britain must submit. The City does have a noble tradition of standing up for citizens' freedoms against despotic sovereigns, but this has morphed into freedom for money.
... The City Corporation is different from any other local authority. Here, hi-tech global finance melds into ancient rites and customs that underline its separateness and power with mystifying pomp. Among the City's 108 livery companies, or trade associations, you will find the WorshipfulCompanies of Loriners (concerned with stirrups and other harnesses for horses) and Fletchers (arrow-makers) as well as the Worshipful Company of Tax Advisers, among whose four prime aims is "to support the Lord Mayor and the City of London Corporation", and the Worshipful Company of International Bankers, whose heraldic "supporters" are the griffins, guardians of treasure.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
The Battle of Stockton: some links of interest.
A couple of months ago, David Walsh wrote a very well received post on ‘the Battle of Stockton’, which can be found here. It was also published in the Northern Echo. An article by Chris Lloyd on the same subject was also published, and can be accessed here.
Walshy and Chris then appeared on Radio 4’s making history programme, which can be found here.
Note: The Making History programme from 18th October 2011.
Walshy and Chris then appeared on Radio 4’s making history programme, which can be found here.
Note: The Making History programme from 18th October 2011.
Monday, October 17, 2011
Harder, faster, deeper: Britain will be Great again
As has been widely suspected, it turns out that some people on the Tory right get sexual thrills from inflicting misery on the rest of the population, as the Young Britons' Foundation has admitted in a particularly cringe worthy poster:
"You can see the English psyche collapsing under the weight of the illicit pleasures it has been enjoying -- the permissiveness, the consumption, the goodies. It's all false -- tinsel and froth ... And now we have got to advance in a different way. Mrs. Thatcher speaks to this 'new course'. She speaks to something else, deep in the English psyche: its masochism. The need which the English seem to have to be ticked off by Nanny and sent to bed without pudding. The calculus by which every good summer has to be paid for by twenty bad winters. The Dunkirk Spirit -- the worse off we are, the better we behave. She didn't promise us the giveaway society. She said, iron times; back to the wall; stiff upper lip; get moving; get to work; dig in. Stick by the old, tried verities, the wisdom of 'Old England'. The family has kept society together; live by it. Send the women back to the hearth. Get the men out on to the Northwest Frontier. Hard times - followed, much later, by a return to the Good Old Days. She asked you for a long leash - not one, but two and three terms. By the end, she said, I will be able to redefine the nation in such a way that you will all, once again, for the first time, since the Empire started to go down the tube, feel what it is like to be part of Great Britain Unlimited. You will be able, once again, to send our boys 'over there', to fly the flag, to welcome back the fleet. Britain will be Great again." - Stuart Hall
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Globalised Tomb Robbing - the story of the S.S. Gairsoppa
By David Walsh.
This is a copy of a piece published in the Northern Echo on the 1st October.
It was subbed somewhat, but here is the full version, in which I divulge some long last family shame.....................
I'm normally an easy going kind of fellow, or so I like to think. But just now and again I read of something that leads me into a paroxysm of anger. And when I heard of the projected stripping of a cargo of silver from a British merchant ship torpedoed in the last war, that anger rose to boiling point.
Why ? Actually from a very tenuous link. I want to speak of my late Uncle Albert, a fellow who made fleeting visits to our house when I was a schoolboy. Now Albert (he always insisted on his full first name, hating the use of Bert) was a man, who, in later adult life, I would have done my best to avoid.
For starters he seemed to be a bit of a chancer, or to frank, a waster. He was obviously the black sheep of the family on my mothers side. But as well as being a black sheep, he was also a black shirt, signing up to Sir Oswald Mosley's pre war fascist movement. This wasn't out of any love of their ideology - merely that their London HQ barracks provided free bed and breakfast for him when he was kicked out of the house.
He quietly dropped this part of his life when the prospect of war loomed, and thinking that he was in danger of the call up (and thus losing what to him was central to his life - his 'beer and bint' as he put it) he signed up for the merchant navy.
Big mistake. In the army, he might well have ended up in a cosy number somewhere, as many did. Instead he joined a profession which was at war from day one, as a sitting target for Hitler's U-Boats. For many crewmen their voyages were one way trips, with death coming through drowning, being scalded by superheated steam, burning alive in oil covered water, or, worst of all, slowly sinking into black oblivion while hanging on to wreckage or a half submerged lifeboat.
The dangers were immense. The rewards negligible. Indeed, the moment a torpedo burst through the hull of a ship, the unfortunate crew were struck off the shipowners pay book. It was those stories that Uncle Albert told me that stuck in my mind, and in a way, helped to absolve his many shortcomings.
So when I heard that Odyssey Marine, a U.S. based salvage and diving company were planning to strip the S.S Gairsoppa to recover a load of precious silver ingots, my blood began to boil. This, to me, is simple and pure grave robbing. The Gairsoppa, a humble tramp steamer originally built on the Tyne, went to the bottom of the Atlantic on a dark, wintry night in 1941. Only one man survived from a crew of 40.
Odyssey put a nauseous PR crafted spin on their activities. One of their managers was quoted in the Echo as saying 'by finding this shipwreck, and telling the story of its loss, we pay tribute to the brave merchant sailors who lost their lives'.
To this I can only reply with a four letter word - Tosh. (I would have wanted to use another four letter word, but it would not have been allowed by the editor).
The stark, simple truth is that there is cash here - big cash. The cargo of silver in the guts of this ship is worth £132 million if sold off on today's overheated metal markets.
If Odyssey are so concerned about homage to our dead merchantmen, then why are they not diving on to a ship that was carrying tins of corned beef ?
The answer is a short one. Greed.
You would have thought that someone in our government would have exhibited some moral qualms. After all, war wrecks are the property of the government. But not a bit of it. The Echo quoted a Transport Department suit as saying 'whilst we do not comment on the specifics of commercial arrangements, Odyssey were awarded the contract as it offered the best rate of return to HMG.'
So there we have it. The state has been often accused of selling the family silver for short term gain. But this takes us to a new grisly high - forcibly breaking into the coffins of brave men who died an appalling death. The fact that this, in the dry language of a Whitehall bureaucrat, is seen as a 'commercial transaction' is a measure of how eroded and how devalued the moral compass of our state has become.
I hope that when Odyssey's power shears and windy drills start to slice through those steel plates originally riveted in place by the men at Palmers Yard in Jarrow, the ghosts of all those men like my Uncle Albert rise up as one to haunt the imaginations and dreams of these millionaire desecraters when they think they are safely asleep in their Tampa penthouses.
This is a copy of a piece published in the Northern Echo on the 1st October.
It was subbed somewhat, but here is the full version, in which I divulge some long last family shame.....................
I'm normally an easy going kind of fellow, or so I like to think. But just now and again I read of something that leads me into a paroxysm of anger. And when I heard of the projected stripping of a cargo of silver from a British merchant ship torpedoed in the last war, that anger rose to boiling point.
Why ? Actually from a very tenuous link. I want to speak of my late Uncle Albert, a fellow who made fleeting visits to our house when I was a schoolboy. Now Albert (he always insisted on his full first name, hating the use of Bert) was a man, who, in later adult life, I would have done my best to avoid.
For starters he seemed to be a bit of a chancer, or to frank, a waster. He was obviously the black sheep of the family on my mothers side. But as well as being a black sheep, he was also a black shirt, signing up to Sir Oswald Mosley's pre war fascist movement. This wasn't out of any love of their ideology - merely that their London HQ barracks provided free bed and breakfast for him when he was kicked out of the house.
He quietly dropped this part of his life when the prospect of war loomed, and thinking that he was in danger of the call up (and thus losing what to him was central to his life - his 'beer and bint' as he put it) he signed up for the merchant navy.
Big mistake. In the army, he might well have ended up in a cosy number somewhere, as many did. Instead he joined a profession which was at war from day one, as a sitting target for Hitler's U-Boats. For many crewmen their voyages were one way trips, with death coming through drowning, being scalded by superheated steam, burning alive in oil covered water, or, worst of all, slowly sinking into black oblivion while hanging on to wreckage or a half submerged lifeboat.
The dangers were immense. The rewards negligible. Indeed, the moment a torpedo burst through the hull of a ship, the unfortunate crew were struck off the shipowners pay book. It was those stories that Uncle Albert told me that stuck in my mind, and in a way, helped to absolve his many shortcomings.
So when I heard that Odyssey Marine, a U.S. based salvage and diving company were planning to strip the S.S Gairsoppa to recover a load of precious silver ingots, my blood began to boil. This, to me, is simple and pure grave robbing. The Gairsoppa, a humble tramp steamer originally built on the Tyne, went to the bottom of the Atlantic on a dark, wintry night in 1941. Only one man survived from a crew of 40.
Odyssey put a nauseous PR crafted spin on their activities. One of their managers was quoted in the Echo as saying 'by finding this shipwreck, and telling the story of its loss, we pay tribute to the brave merchant sailors who lost their lives'.
To this I can only reply with a four letter word - Tosh. (I would have wanted to use another four letter word, but it would not have been allowed by the editor).
The stark, simple truth is that there is cash here - big cash. The cargo of silver in the guts of this ship is worth £132 million if sold off on today's overheated metal markets.
If Odyssey are so concerned about homage to our dead merchantmen, then why are they not diving on to a ship that was carrying tins of corned beef ?
The answer is a short one. Greed.
You would have thought that someone in our government would have exhibited some moral qualms. After all, war wrecks are the property of the government. But not a bit of it. The Echo quoted a Transport Department suit as saying 'whilst we do not comment on the specifics of commercial arrangements, Odyssey were awarded the contract as it offered the best rate of return to HMG.'
So there we have it. The state has been often accused of selling the family silver for short term gain. But this takes us to a new grisly high - forcibly breaking into the coffins of brave men who died an appalling death. The fact that this, in the dry language of a Whitehall bureaucrat, is seen as a 'commercial transaction' is a measure of how eroded and how devalued the moral compass of our state has become.
I hope that when Odyssey's power shears and windy drills start to slice through those steel plates originally riveted in place by the men at Palmers Yard in Jarrow, the ghosts of all those men like my Uncle Albert rise up as one to haunt the imaginations and dreams of these millionaire desecraters when they think they are safely asleep in their Tampa penthouses.
Friday, October 07, 2011
"It's survival of the fittest and sometimes it's not pretty."
We let it slip, Bank governor Mervyn King tells unions
"Before the crisis, steady growth with low inflation and high employment was in our grasp. We let it slip - we, that is, in the financial sector and as policy-makers - not your members, nor the many businesses and organisations around the country which employ them. And although the causes of the crisis may have been rooted in the financial sector, the consequences are affecting everyone, and will continue to do so for years to come."
Hedge Fund trader: 'Capitalism is survival of the fittest, and sometimes it's not pretty'
"People seem to say, everything is the bankers' fault, or everything is the computers' fault. They tend to point to the crashes as evidence of this. I disagree with both. I think crashes are simply part of the system. That's why you always hear 'the worst crash since'. Crashes are an intrinsic part of the system, they clear out deadwood. You can't have capitalism without crashes. It's survival of the fittest and sometimes it's not pretty.
"Accidents happen, that's how the principle of survival of the fittest operates. In Fukushima we'll find out what caused it and learn from it ... We all know that California will be totally destroyed at some point by a huge earthquake. This is going to happen. Surely it's madness to live there – so why do people still do it? It's because until the earthquake happens, life is extremely nice over there. The benefits outweigh the cost, even if ultimately the cost will be their own lives."
Thursday, October 06, 2011
Savage cuts to decimate communities in Middlesbrough
The proposed cuts will quite clearly be devastating. From today's Evening Gazette.
And this is just the beginning: £3m in savings still have to be found to meet next year’s spending limits and cuts of £12.3m and £11.7m in the two years after. Welcome to Tory Britain.
The cuts being proposed in Middlesbrough include:
Environment
1. Cease current funding for Shopmobility service, to save £40,000.
2. To cease all current subsidised bus services, to save £60,000.
3. Reduce the number of Street Wardens by 16 posts, to save £450,000.
4. Introduce a £20 charge for Residents’ Parking Permits, to generate income of £100,000.
5. Increase allotment charges to £60 per annum for full sized plot and remove concessions, to generate income of £20,000.
6. Introduce a £10 charge for all “junk jobs” to generate income of £150,000.
7. Reduce the Environmental Education Service by up to three posts to save £50,000.
8. Cut budgets for streetscene, countryside management, street lighting and highways, which will result in up to 21 front-line posts being lost and around 10% reduction in standards, to save £525,000.
9. Close the Council depots at Lloyd Street and Prissick and the land sites be offered for sale.
10. All service units from Lloyd Street, Prissick and Stewart Park be relocated to Cargo Fleet Lane depot to save £150,000.
Regeneration
11. Cut the library service Book Fund, to save £50,000.
12. Close the mobile library service, to save £50,000.
13. Reduce library management by 1.5 posts, to save £36,000.
14. Reduce the council’s contribution to Tees Valley Unlimited, to save £59,000.
15. Reduce the council’s contribution to the Stockton / Middlesbrough Initiative, to save £38,000.
16. Withdraw from the Tees Archaeology Service, to save £23,000.
17. Reduction in staffing in mima and museums to the equivalent of one FTE, to save £25,000.
18. Reduce Council Officer support to Community Councils, to save £20,000.
19. Reduce Community Council Annual Grant allocation to £500 per community council, to save £60,000.
20. Reduce financial support to public events, to save £15,000.
21. The removal of the Big Screen after the completion of the Olympic Games to save £15,000.
22. The reduction of one post in Culture and Events Section and savings through a new box office system, to save £20,000.
23. Reduction of one post in the Town Centre Management team plus associated marketing costs to save £45,000.
Social Care
24. Reduction of three posts in the Community Inclusion service, to save £100,000.
25. Obtain increased income and contributions from Health, in providing residential support to people at risk leaving hospital, to generate income of £200,000.
26. To secure a price freeze on residential and non-residential service care contracts, which have a current value of £25m. It will save £1.1m.
27. Introduction of an Information Technology system that automates administrative processes. This will result in the loss of eight to 10 posts, to save £100,000.
28. Close the Dial a Ride service, which will result in the loss of around four drivers’ posts and a saving of £250,000.
29. Introduce contributions for the supply of “everyday” equipment such as special cutlery sets to people suffering from disability, to save£50,000.
30. Reduce personal care package costs on the basis of need, to save £200,000.
The Partnership
31. Reduce service provision across all services provided by Mouchel, to save £399,000. This will include efficiency savings from technology and from the corporate review of administration.
32. Termination of external lease of Rede House and relocation of staff, which to save £282,000.
Strategic Resources
33. Merge the Financial Planning and Procurement teams, to save £159,000.
34. Merge ex-Mouchel and council accountancy staff, to save £190,000.
35. Reduction in at least two Asset Management posts within the TAD and Enterprise Centres, to save £37,000.
36. Reduction of one post within the caretaking section, to save £13,000.
37. Reduction of one post due to the merger of CFL Asset Management and Corporate Asset Management, to save £16,000.
38. External audit fees to be reduced, to save £20,000.
39. Reduction in the Audit Plan specifications, to save £25,000.
40. Reduce the frequency of cleaning of all Council buildings and therefore reduce the number of posts by 15 FTE, to save £250,000.
41. Reduce the costs of maintaining all council buildings with regard to the following areas and result in a saving of £363,000:
Repairs and maintenance
Ensuring buildings are more energy efficient
Improving the procurement of building services
Children Families and Learning
42. Close Lanehead Outdoor Education Centre to save £87,000.
43. Reduce the support services funded by the council to schools (e.g. behaviour, language, attendance and careers support), to save £150,000.
44. Reduce the cost of Special Educational Needs by providing better support to children and young people at an early stage. This will result in the reduction of six posts and a saving of £500,000.
45. Reduce the costs of long term placements by using part of Gleneagles as a provider of long term residential care, which will result in a saving of £350,000.
46. Joint council working in the training and recruitment of foster carers and redeucing costs in the use of social work agencies to save £150,000.
47. Price freeze and contract savings from renewal of residential care contracts to save £90,000.
Legal and Democratic Services
48. Reduction in the working hours of the Members Office Manager and other non-staffing savings, to save£50,000.
Chief Executive and Assistant Chief Executive Department
49. Reduce the numbers of staff by up to about six posts to save between £70,000 and £110,000.
50. Reduce ICT costs and corporate training and remove long service awards and Middlesbrough News/Middlesbrough Matters. This will result in a saving of £78,000.
Senior Management
51. Reduce further the number of senior managers and support by approximately 30 across the Council, to save £1,525,000.
Community Buildings and Services
52. Close Grove Hill Youth & Community Centre.
53. Close Beechwood Youth & Community Centre.
54. Close Kader Youth & Community Centre.
55. Close North Ormesby Youth & Community Centre.
56. Close Thorntree Youth Centre.
57. Close Newport Neighbourhood Centre.
58. End the council lease for Park End Community Centre.
59. Close Brambles Farm Community Centre.
60. Close Grove Hill Library.
61. Close Easterside Library.
62. Close Marton Library.
63. Close Thorntree Library.
64. Close Coulby Newham Children’s Centre, which is based at Rosewood, St Augustines and The Avenue Primary Schools.
65. Close Acklam Children’s Centre, which is based at Green Lane and Newham Bridge Primary Schools.
66. Close Breckon Hill Children’s Centre.
67. Close Brookfield / Kader Children’s Centre, which is based at Acklam Whin and Kader Primary Schools.
68. Close Children’s Centre venue at Archibald Primary School.
69. Close Children’s Centre venue at Newport Primary School.
70. Close Children’s Centre venue at Thorntree Primary School.
71. Close Children’s Centre venue at Brambles Farm Primary School.
72. Close Mill Hill Recreation Pavilion.
73. Close Thorntree Park Pavilion.
74. Close Middlesbrough Deaf Centre.
75. Withdrawal of subsidy from Langdon Square Community Centre.
76. Close the Southlands and Pallister Park Centres and relocate their indoor leisure provision to the Neptune Centre. The existing outdoor sports facilities will continue to be available for public use. (Joe Waltons brand will be retained at the Neptune Centre). The council will work with those businesses currently based at the Southlands Centre in identifying alternative premises.
77. Close Clairville Stadium and sell the site.
78. Close Tennis World and offer the sites for sale. Receipts from the sale of it and Clairville Stadium site will be used for the development of a Sports Village, which could be located on the Prissick site.
Closure of the community buildings and services will save £1.5m.
And this is just the beginning: £3m in savings still have to be found to meet next year’s spending limits and cuts of £12.3m and £11.7m in the two years after. Welcome to Tory Britain.
Tuesday, October 04, 2011
Workers strike at Lucite International
Attendees at the March for the Alternative rally in Manchester on Sunday may remember Unite General Secretary Len McCluskey telling the assembled thousands that "civil disobedience is the oldest form of democracy". Well, there's been an unofficial walk out at Lucite International (manufacturer of acrylic-based products) up here on Teesside in the last few days, involving so-called “unlawful secondary picketing” after workers struck in solidarity with 14 colleagues who were laid off after asking for their pay to be made equal with the rest of the workforce -- and it looks as if Unite have not only refused to back the action, but have condemned it. According to today's Evening Gazette: The Gazette has seen a copy of a letter from Len McCluskey, general secretary of Unite, to members stating the union will give no support to the unofficial action. 'If you fail to work normally you will be taking part in unofficial action,' he warns. The Gazette explains the background to the dispute:
One comment on the Gazette website by a former Hertel worker provides some context:
And a worker from Lucite International comments:
Crowds of around 100 people have been reported at the company’s entrance in recent days in an action which has delayed planned maintenance work. The protest comes after 14 scaffolders and labourers were escorted from the chemical company’s site - triggering a disagreement which saw other workers join the dispute.
A source at Hertel, which employs the workers at the Lucite site, said the “unofficial strike action” had been going on for several days and involved the “unlawful secondary picketing” of the premises. He claimed many of the demonstrators had no direct connection with the work in question, adding the firm had written to its employees to “counter false allegations that the dispute is in any way linked to pay or that the men were forcibly removed from the site.”
The source said Hertel had ended a temporary scaffolding contract last week due to a reduction in the planned scope of scaffolding work required at the Cassel Works site. The decision meant that around 14 scaffolders out of a total of workforce of around 160 contractors employed by the company were given a week’s pay in lieu of notice. The company says that is in line with the agreed terms of the temporary contracts.
But the workers claim their action comes after they were laid off following a pay review request. Advanced scaffolder Tony Seaman last night told the Gazette he had taken a letter of grievance to management last Wednesday. He said workers were asking for Hertel to set up a meeting with union officials regarding payments for a planned shutdown. The 41-year-old, of Ormesby, claimed workers got £10.46 a hour and wanted £14. They say that is in accordance with NAECI (blue book) rates, but Hertel has said Lucite is not part of that agreement. “We believe they don’t want to pay the correct rate for the shutdown and for the new build which is going on,” Mr Seaman added. “I can’t describe how we feel.”
One comment on the Gazette website by a former Hertel worker provides some context:
Being ex hertel, they have been paying under the odds for years, paying pink book and maintainance terms on blue book sites this was going on in the 90s when i was there. The workers are only asking what they are entitled to and are codemmed as troublemakers and will no doubt be black listed by the firm. The bigger picture is that they want to drive down costs and destroy trades so they can employ anyone they want for monkey nuts,withuut these guys making a stand it will spread to other firms and be the end of trades as we know it. They tried it with dilultey laggers in late eighties/early nineties nearly destroyed the trade singlhandedly and ended many mens lively hood without the stand made by others this would have come to pass. They did the same empolying foriegn labour on Wilton for far less money and without the requred skill to match the proper time served tradesmen. Good luck lads and keep making a stand.
And a worker from Lucite International comments:
just like to clarify a few things,yes we knew what the starting pay was but assumed it would go up during the shutdown,why should we work alongside other trades who are on £14 a hour while we get £10? with the bonus that goes to £12.50 not £15 which was quoted by someone on here,it's not being greedy,we don't want anymore money than the next man,just the same,we're tradesmen and want the blue book rate on a shutdown,same as what the other trades on teesside get! NOT MORE,THE SAME!
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
It's times like these
A few years ago, in the middle of the epic European adventure which took Boro to Eindhoven, the Times newspaper suggested that the transformation of Middlesbrough Football Club from minnows to contenders was a classic case of “reinvention through sport”. The football side, it observed, had become the area’s ambassador, to be worn as a badge of pride by the people of a town with little else to celebrate. In this, it drew a comparison with Liverpool in the 1980s: “The area may have been downtrodden by economics, but the people never were, for two reasons – The Beatles and the best football team in the world.” Southgate, Viduka, Downing and co. were now performing a similar role for Teesside, the paper argued. Through their heroic exploits, the Infant Hercules would rise again.
What a maudlin bag of sh**e, eh? Well, not entirely. After all, if ever a football club embodied the spirit of the times, it was Middlesbrough Football Club. When the town took a battering at the hands of the Thatcher governments in the 1980s, its football club faced an existential crisis of spectacular proportions, one from which it almost never recovered. In the long economic boom of the mid-to-late 90s, when jobs, money and Euro 96 brought with them a mood of national buoyancy, Gibson made sure Boro were in on the act as well, and a decade of prosperity ensued. Yet when that credit-fuelled bubble burst and the economy nose-divided again in 2008, so did the fortunes of MFC. For me, 2008-10 will always be remembered as a dark era of relegation, job losses and the dread of forthcoming austerity. The intervening period has been like a long, bleak winter of discontent. In the wider world, that winter looks set to last a good while longer.
Thank god, then, that football can sometimes make us forget how bad everything is in the outside world. At least for 90 minutes on a Saturday afternoon, if the Boro play well, all else is temporarily forgotten. For a long time we were simply awful, which made everything else seem even worse – but then suddenly the clouds opened and there emerged the saintly figure of Tony Mowbray, accompanied by two angels blowing trumpets. When was the last time it felt this good to be a Boro fan? (It can’t last...) Mowbray has moulded a team which is young, hungry and exciting to watch. They play for each other, the manager and the fans. Even when we stumble (which we inevitably will), we should still cherish the times we’re living in – Mogga’s classical, purist football philosophy, his status as local hero and local legend. These are great times.
One question remains, though. We’ve got Tony Mowbray, but who are our Beatles? Well, Middlesbrough is no Liverpool, or Manchester or Edinburgh or Newcastle, for that matter. But it does punch well above its weight. If you want an example of how culturally vibrant Teesside can be, even in these dark days of economic recession, you could do a lot worse than check out local gig promoters The Kids Are Solid Gold, who routinely bring world class music to venues such as the Westgarth Social Club, the Georgian Theatre and Newcastle’s Cluny. It’s a magical feeling to watch Mowbray’s Boro stroke the ball around at leisure in another attacking display, before popping along to a packed Westgarth with other music fans (of all ages) to watch a band who’ve travelled all the way from New York, Tennessee or Los Angeles to little Middlesbrough (or vice-versa for the Friday gigs). We might not have the Fab Four, but we’ve still got a world of enjoyment on our doorstep. Enjoy yourself.
The above piece originally appeared in football fanzine Fly Me To The Moon.
Friday, September 16, 2011
A Social-Democratic look at a troubled world - Then and Now
By David Walsh
Let us look at a troubled world
It seems that international capitalism was on the verge of meltdown.
The collapse of the banking system in recent months sent shock waves through Europe, bringing governments to their knees and thousands out onto the streets of London, Paris and Berlin and Athens.
In the United States, an increasingly careworn president and his congressional critics fought a bitter battle over government spending and tax rises.
And in Britain, with the Labour government broken by the economic crisis, a Conservative-dominated coalition with the Liberals imposed the deepest spending cuts in a generation, slashing benefits in an attempt to restore confidence in the nation’s finances.
With the banks refusing to lend, and millions of people thrown out of work, capitalism itself seemed utterly discredited.
In other countries, many may be tuning to far Right solutions.
And, in Britain, a generation of intellectuals perhaps turned their backs on capitalism and social democracy, placing their faith instead in a form of a far more utopian socialist idealism.
But enough, for the moment, of 1931
For decades afterwards this 80 year old extraordinary historical moment — when capitalism itself appeared to have failed — was forgotten, and looked like the stuff of ancient history.
But in the summer of 2011, with the eurozone in chaos, the British economy stagnant and the U.S. crippled by debt, with social mobility at a standstill and millions of ordinary families squeezed until they can barely breathe, it feels disturbingly familiar.
In the past two months alone, whilst all eyes were on Libya and the riots, stock markets have been in free-fall across the capitalist world.
Take Europe alone.
Greece is now a basket case, and its default is a matter of when, not if.
And with investors manifestly losing confidence in Spain and Italy, two of Europe’s biggest economies, a second devastating world recession cannot be ruled out.
Although the share-price plunge does not yet come close to the infamous Wall Street Crash of 1929, the market mayhem is a chilling reminder of the sheer fragility of the capitalist system.
If the worst happens, if Spain and Italy go down and the euro crumbles, then the world economy really will be in trouble.
The weakness of the US economy will then go under the spotlight again - and potentially with more devastating results.
What a contrast to twenty years ago - 1991
Then, the capitalist West was congratulating itself on victory in the Cold War. The Berlin Wall had come down, the Soviet Empire had broken up, and American intellectuals were even proclaiming the ‘end of history’.
Marxism was dead, we were told, and capitalism triumphant, or so they said. Having lifted millions in the West out of poverty, having showered them with goods and opportunities, the free-market system could do no wrong.
Today, the picture is very different. For although large parts of the Left has still to come to full terms from the fall of the Soviet Union, capitalism has rarely seemed in a more desperate condition.
And with bankers still pocketing gigantic bonuses and Europe swept by a wave of austerity, even the Right are beginning to wonder whether the system is intolerably loaded in favour of rich metropolitan elites.
Only last month, for example, the Tory MP Douglas Carswell suggested that ‘the free market all too often turns out not to be a free market at all, but a corporatist racket for the few’.
Modern Conservatives, he said, should be ‘as suspicious of Big Business and Corporatism as we have been of Big Government’.
On the surface, this may sound odd coming from a Tory. Yet when you dig a little deeper, it is not hard to see why so many people like him have lost faith in the free market.
The entire premise of the capitalist system, after all, is that in a free market, hard work will produce its own reward. For capitalists, the important thing is equality of opportunity. If you put in the effort, then you can be whatever you want to be, regardless of your background.
That what was Margaret Thatcher, and before her, Ted Heath and Harold Macmillan, in different ways perhaps, believed.
But, by 1997, what an outcome we saw, and what a negation of the hopes of Margaret Thatcher and her kind.
It shows that you do not have to be a card-carrying Labour Party member to see why millions of people — not just in Britain but across the world — feel completely cheated.
Booms and busts are inherent in capitalism. It is inherently unstable. It can even destroy its own base if needs be.
Marx saw it as a revolutionary system, and contrasted to what had gone before.
Hunter gatherer societies and later societies based on slavery had lasted for many hundreds of thousands of years.
The first structured states - Rome and Greece - were around for a thousand years and then evolved into more modern but feudal states that had also endured for almost two millennia.
Capitalism then burst on the scene in the mid 1700's and within 60 years or so, had turned the world upside down.
Turned upside down too, were human relations.
Fixed sets of relations based on rank or land holding were shattered and shattered utterly.
In their place was a new meritocracy based on technical knowledge and learning.
And that meritocracy too, fused with mercantile interest in turn to both allow capitalism to develop and expand across the world, a growth also facilitated by the state's adoption of the capitalist mode of production.
A state / capital partnership came into being, firstly to the rest of Europe, then the Americas and finally, via the process of imperialism, to the rest of the globe.
It bought fabulous wealth to a few, but misery and degradation for many millions. And despite the 20th century taming of raw capitalism by, largely social democratic states or by state intervention as practised by Roosevelt's New Deal programmes and proto-Keynesian economics in the US, that inherent unfairness remains.
When most of us contemplate the results of the bankers’ greed, for example, talk of ‘fair incentives and rewards’ seems a sick joke.
In every corner of the US and Europe now, ordinary families, through absolutely no fault of their own, are paying an intolerable price for the outrageous avarice of the financial elite.
Recent figures for the UK show that City bonuses came to a staggering £14 billion last year, with one executive, Barclays boss Bob Diamond, pocketing an incredible £6.5 million — and that’s on top of his £8 million-plus annual pay package.
Yet at the same time, banks are refusing to lend to ordinary families and small businesses.
Indeed, in August the banks actually took in as deposits £3 billion more than they lent, which goes a long way to explaining why growth is virtually non-existent.
‘No wonder economic growth is barely visible to the naked eye,’ remarked the Coalition’s former Treasury spokesman, Lord Oakeshott, ‘when the banks keep sucking billions out of the economy.’
These are, incidentally, the same banks, such as RBS and HBOS, that British taxpayers had to save from the consequences of their own reckless gluttony - a behaviour trait well documented by Alistair Darling in his new book..
Three years ago, the Government spent £500 billion to bail out the collapsing banking system. And now, while the bankers toast themselves with vintage champagne or good single malts (no Cameron's Strongarm for them, despite its newly apposite name)), the rest of us are picking up the bills.
But the bankers’ greed is only one symptom of a wider malaise. The stark truth is that millions of ordinary families feel the system gives them no chance of success.
The facts are simply unanswerable. A child born in 1971 has less chance of moving up the social ladder than one born in 1951.
On top of that, the gap between rich and poor has grown steadily since the 1970s - and we have to remember, indeed never forget, that much of this had, by definition, come about during the 13-year New Labour regime.
Half a century ago, during the Fifties and Sixties, increased educational opportunity, burgeoning job opportunities in manufacturing and the death of deference in both daily life and popular culture meant that working-class children and young adults (like me - an 11 plus failure which I had worked hard to achieve) simply felt a more democratic (and wealthier) future was both obviously pre-destined and inevitable.
And in their different ways, state-school educated Labour prime ministers such as Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan and many of their ministers who came from the shop floor, train shed or the pit gave the impression that anybody could make it, regardless of their background.
Actually, in the Labour tradition, this was not all that new.
Even in 1931, during the last great crisis of capitalism I spoke of, Britain was run by a prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, who was the illegitimate son of a Scottish labourer and a poor housemaid, and who grew up in abject poverty like his mentor, Kier Hardie.
At a time when it would have been easy to imagine that power belonged exclusively to the rich, MacDonald was a shining example of social mobility.
True, unlike Hardie who seemed incorruptible, MacDonald sucked up the rich in a way even more embarrassing to what we may have seen from more recent party leaders. His dalliances with Lady Londonderry, the wife of a coalowner and a notorious right wing Tory would have scandalised the nation - if it had ever been revealed. Times never change, it seems.
Can we possibly look at our leaders and draw the same conclusion today ?
From Cameron, Clegg and Osborne — respectively the son of a millionaire stockbroker, a banker and the heir to a baronetcy — to Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, one the son of a North London intellectual, the other the privately educated son of a professor, British politics does seem to have become the plaything of a tiny self-regarding elite, totally out of touch with ordinary families.
The old joke about the inevitable descent from the leafy heights of North London on to any unlucky working class labour constituency who have an MP standing down is a standing joke - but it is more a tragedy than a joke.
Looking at our political class, you begin to suspect that modern capitalism is loaded in favour of those who already enjoy wealth and power.
And that it has become a closed system, impossible to penetrate unless you are incredibly lucky.
Other facts tell a similar story.
As the Tory minister David Willetts showed in a provocative book last year, 'The Pinch' Britain’s youngsters are being cut adrift.
Thanks partly to ferocious competition from overseas manufacturers, and the squeeze that this puts on UK firms, workers in their 20s today earn far less than their parents did at the same age.
And with house prices having soared and banks refusing to lend, they find it impossible to get onto the property ladder. As a result, the old Conservative dream of a ‘property-owning democracy’ is increasingly reserved for the silver-haired who managed to do well out of the past property boom, or for those lucky enough to be able to inherit estate from their parents.
Most social observers argue that home-ownership is one of the keys to a stable, prosperous, hard-working society — yet since 1997, home ownership among people in their 20s has steadily fallen.
Of course there was a time when education offered a leg-up: but those days are becoming a fading memory. Thanks to the abolition of the EMA and the cash squeeze on our unis, the chances of scaling the educational ladder from a comprehensive to high table is now simply unattainable to all but the privileged few
In a country that claims to value competition, it is nothing less than a disgrace that just four expensive private schools — Eton, Westminster, St Paul’s, St Paul’s Girls — send as many students to Oxford and Cambridge as 2,000 state schools put together.
Meanwhile, the Government’s education reforms mean that working-class children face the prospect of paying back £9,000 a year in tuition fees if they choose to go to university.
And this, despite the squeals from University bosses, this comes at a time when fat-cat vice chancellors, already rewarded with grace-and-favour residences and boundless expense accounts, are being paid an average of more than £220,000 each.
We have been here before.
Next time he is on holiday in Tuscany — something well beyond most British families — perhaps David Cameron should spend an afternoon with his great Tory predecessor Benjamin Disraeli’s book, Sybil.
In this work, first published in 1845, the greatest Tory statesman of the Victorian era warned in the words he put into the mouth of the books hero, that Britain had become
‘two nations … who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws: I speak of the rich and the poor’.
Disraeli was, of course, no socialist. But as an outsider himself, born into a Jewish family, he recognised that capitalism could only take root in ordinary people’s hearts and minds if it gave them a stake of their own.
But left to its own devices, it won't.
At bottom, capitalism depends on constant change, and what us called 'creative destruction'.
Mergers and acquisitions, mega takeovers, and the steady growth of corporations spanning the globe, mean that things like long familiar branded products have an even shorter shelf life - and a shorter and more insecure working life for the workers in these companies.
As Marx foresaw, it's not just brands that are constantly changing. Companies and industries are created and destroyed in an incessant stream of innovation, while human relationships are dissolved and reinvented in novel forms.
With constant change, the accumulation of wealth and innovation becoming the norm, and with no moral imperative to look after the weak, capitalism merely degenerates into cronyism and self-interest.
At its best, the free market can be a tremendous liberating force. During the Fifties and Sixties, it gave millions of people opportunities their parents could barely have imagined: happy childhoods, good schools, well-paid jobs and contented retirements.
But, as Marx said, this cannot be a normal state of affairs. Creative destruction and the underlying cycle of long wave boom and bust is in the DNA and bloodstream of capitalism.
In Marx's word 'everything that is solid melts into air'
That is what happened in 1871, and then 1931.
Eighty years on, capitalism has once again lost its way. With millions betrayed by their under-performing schools, locked out of the job market, forgotten by the banks and abandoned by their politicians, Britain is in danger of becoming two nations again.
So, Marx is back in fashion.
In this cycle of creative destruction, ladders of mobility have been kicked away, and even formerly middle class people find themselves facing penury, with eroded pensions, eroded savings, indebted children and no prospect of things getting better for the foreseeable future.
Again, Marx saw this.
When he argued that capitalism would plunge the middle classes into something like the precarious existence of the hard-pressed workers of his time, Marx anticipated a change in the way we live that we're only now struggling to cope with.
It seems that 160 years on from the publication of the Communist Manifesto, we are back in the world that Marx and Engels lived in.
But we have to remember that in that slim book, its authors wrote a hymn of praise to the wonders of the technical innovation that propelled capitalism. They sang of the new abundance that could be gained from the factory system, and the scientific advance of the age.
But it was the human price paid for this that they condemned, and their solution was a simple one of seeing the newly created working classes taking control of the state, and through this, taking over these new forces of production and re-modelling them in the interests of the many and not the few.
In that sense, Marx's statist socialism is not all that different from what we are here for in today's Labour Party.
Now, Labour, despite the pleading of some on the left, is not going to abolish capitalism.
It's tempting for us to join in the rejoicing of seeing a whole social and economic system in crisis. I do it all the time. We all do.
But as social democrats - and it is time we reclaim that name from the Ownenite and Toy Jenkins fan club usurpers - we must remember the sobering fact that any new Labour government will be taking power in a capitalist nation and having to make the changes needed to see that capitalism can deliver for the masses as well as the millionaires.
We must be, therefore, arguing for a reform of a capitalist state that goes beyond anything ever attempted before - and given the severity of the crisis we are living through, this is something that is cutting with the grain of informed public opinion, I believe.
Modern capitalism is not beyond redemption. But it badly needs imposed reform to insert a moral dimension, something missing amid the scramble to protect the privileges of a narrow metropolitan elite.
It is time that our politicians cracked down on non-domiciled billionaires, and time they made sure the rich elite paid their fair share of our national tax bill.
If Ed Balls really wants to rekindle the British people’s faith in our economic system, then he should go further. He should be drawing up legislation which could mean the next Labour government forcing the banks to lend more money to individuals and small businesses, and in this way, getting our economy moving again.
Labour should restore a culture of investment in excellence for our state schools, giving working-class children a genuine sense that they can climb the ladder. And we should make it a priority to encourage real jobs in real businesses, reinvigorating a manufacturing sector that has been abandoned for far too long.
We should not shirk from seeing if the utilities that are a key to good quality of life for all if us, and which power the productive economy - water, gas, electricity - can be bought back into public control.
The stakes could not be higher. Unless capitalism is reformed in this fashion, then an entire generation will conclude that it is no more than a fig leaf for the super-rich.
That would be a tragedy. For despite all capitalism’s weakness and evils — despite the flaws, inequalities and hypocrisies that are an inevitable part of any human endeavour — it remains the system that the world lives within.
Other systems have been tried, and they have collapsed in bloodstained ruins.
Only the pure concept of capitalism — the free exchange of goods, skills, services and ideas — has so far proved itself capable of survival and of offering a quality of life that most would aspire to.
As we said, that is not what it is offering at the moment - either for us here in a mature capitalist state, or more brutally, for those living and labouring in the slums of the emerging world, or in the vast electronic goods sweatshops of Guangdong province, the mines of Brazil, the shipyards and car plants of South Korea and Jarkata.
So the crusade to reform capitalism cannot be successful if it is to be only tried in one country.
That has huge implications for us as Labour Party members.
We have again to stress that we are internationalists.
And that in our own part of the world, we are Europeans, living in and building, the EU as an instrument for social democracy with our sister parties in Western and Eastern Europe.
That is something that I, as a guy who as a confirmed European in the 1970's and 80's when it was simply unfashionable in Labour circles, still adhere to.
And we have to go further.
By, in turn, fighting to see that the EU has a global reach - beginning with the acceptance of Turkey as the first Islamic nation to join the EU.
Only policies of this scale can succeed in the face of this crisis
For if they fail, then the results could be too dreadful to contemplate.
A popular phrase of the 1960's was 'Socialism or Barbarism'.
The socialists of the 1950's and 60's could, in many cases, remember how the crisis of 1931 paved a road that ended outside the gates of Treblinka and Buchenwald.
That potential danger is still there
We have, as democratic socialists, a duty to see this does not take root afresh.
Let us look at a troubled world
It seems that international capitalism was on the verge of meltdown.
The collapse of the banking system in recent months sent shock waves through Europe, bringing governments to their knees and thousands out onto the streets of London, Paris and Berlin and Athens.
In the United States, an increasingly careworn president and his congressional critics fought a bitter battle over government spending and tax rises.
And in Britain, with the Labour government broken by the economic crisis, a Conservative-dominated coalition with the Liberals imposed the deepest spending cuts in a generation, slashing benefits in an attempt to restore confidence in the nation’s finances.
With the banks refusing to lend, and millions of people thrown out of work, capitalism itself seemed utterly discredited.
In other countries, many may be tuning to far Right solutions.
And, in Britain, a generation of intellectuals perhaps turned their backs on capitalism and social democracy, placing their faith instead in a form of a far more utopian socialist idealism.
But enough, for the moment, of 1931
For decades afterwards this 80 year old extraordinary historical moment — when capitalism itself appeared to have failed — was forgotten, and looked like the stuff of ancient history.
But in the summer of 2011, with the eurozone in chaos, the British economy stagnant and the U.S. crippled by debt, with social mobility at a standstill and millions of ordinary families squeezed until they can barely breathe, it feels disturbingly familiar.
In the past two months alone, whilst all eyes were on Libya and the riots, stock markets have been in free-fall across the capitalist world.
Take Europe alone.
Greece is now a basket case, and its default is a matter of when, not if.
And with investors manifestly losing confidence in Spain and Italy, two of Europe’s biggest economies, a second devastating world recession cannot be ruled out.
Although the share-price plunge does not yet come close to the infamous Wall Street Crash of 1929, the market mayhem is a chilling reminder of the sheer fragility of the capitalist system.
If the worst happens, if Spain and Italy go down and the euro crumbles, then the world economy really will be in trouble.
The weakness of the US economy will then go under the spotlight again - and potentially with more devastating results.
What a contrast to twenty years ago - 1991
Then, the capitalist West was congratulating itself on victory in the Cold War. The Berlin Wall had come down, the Soviet Empire had broken up, and American intellectuals were even proclaiming the ‘end of history’.
Marxism was dead, we were told, and capitalism triumphant, or so they said. Having lifted millions in the West out of poverty, having showered them with goods and opportunities, the free-market system could do no wrong.
Today, the picture is very different. For although large parts of the Left has still to come to full terms from the fall of the Soviet Union, capitalism has rarely seemed in a more desperate condition.
And with bankers still pocketing gigantic bonuses and Europe swept by a wave of austerity, even the Right are beginning to wonder whether the system is intolerably loaded in favour of rich metropolitan elites.
Only last month, for example, the Tory MP Douglas Carswell suggested that ‘the free market all too often turns out not to be a free market at all, but a corporatist racket for the few’.
Modern Conservatives, he said, should be ‘as suspicious of Big Business and Corporatism as we have been of Big Government’.
On the surface, this may sound odd coming from a Tory. Yet when you dig a little deeper, it is not hard to see why so many people like him have lost faith in the free market.
The entire premise of the capitalist system, after all, is that in a free market, hard work will produce its own reward. For capitalists, the important thing is equality of opportunity. If you put in the effort, then you can be whatever you want to be, regardless of your background.
That what was Margaret Thatcher, and before her, Ted Heath and Harold Macmillan, in different ways perhaps, believed.
But, by 1997, what an outcome we saw, and what a negation of the hopes of Margaret Thatcher and her kind.
It shows that you do not have to be a card-carrying Labour Party member to see why millions of people — not just in Britain but across the world — feel completely cheated.
Booms and busts are inherent in capitalism. It is inherently unstable. It can even destroy its own base if needs be.
Marx saw it as a revolutionary system, and contrasted to what had gone before.
Hunter gatherer societies and later societies based on slavery had lasted for many hundreds of thousands of years.
The first structured states - Rome and Greece - were around for a thousand years and then evolved into more modern but feudal states that had also endured for almost two millennia.
Capitalism then burst on the scene in the mid 1700's and within 60 years or so, had turned the world upside down.
Turned upside down too, were human relations.
Fixed sets of relations based on rank or land holding were shattered and shattered utterly.
In their place was a new meritocracy based on technical knowledge and learning.
And that meritocracy too, fused with mercantile interest in turn to both allow capitalism to develop and expand across the world, a growth also facilitated by the state's adoption of the capitalist mode of production.
A state / capital partnership came into being, firstly to the rest of Europe, then the Americas and finally, via the process of imperialism, to the rest of the globe.
It bought fabulous wealth to a few, but misery and degradation for many millions. And despite the 20th century taming of raw capitalism by, largely social democratic states or by state intervention as practised by Roosevelt's New Deal programmes and proto-Keynesian economics in the US, that inherent unfairness remains.
When most of us contemplate the results of the bankers’ greed, for example, talk of ‘fair incentives and rewards’ seems a sick joke.
In every corner of the US and Europe now, ordinary families, through absolutely no fault of their own, are paying an intolerable price for the outrageous avarice of the financial elite.
Recent figures for the UK show that City bonuses came to a staggering £14 billion last year, with one executive, Barclays boss Bob Diamond, pocketing an incredible £6.5 million — and that’s on top of his £8 million-plus annual pay package.
Yet at the same time, banks are refusing to lend to ordinary families and small businesses.
Indeed, in August the banks actually took in as deposits £3 billion more than they lent, which goes a long way to explaining why growth is virtually non-existent.
‘No wonder economic growth is barely visible to the naked eye,’ remarked the Coalition’s former Treasury spokesman, Lord Oakeshott, ‘when the banks keep sucking billions out of the economy.’
These are, incidentally, the same banks, such as RBS and HBOS, that British taxpayers had to save from the consequences of their own reckless gluttony - a behaviour trait well documented by Alistair Darling in his new book..
Three years ago, the Government spent £500 billion to bail out the collapsing banking system. And now, while the bankers toast themselves with vintage champagne or good single malts (no Cameron's Strongarm for them, despite its newly apposite name)), the rest of us are picking up the bills.
But the bankers’ greed is only one symptom of a wider malaise. The stark truth is that millions of ordinary families feel the system gives them no chance of success.
The facts are simply unanswerable. A child born in 1971 has less chance of moving up the social ladder than one born in 1951.
On top of that, the gap between rich and poor has grown steadily since the 1970s - and we have to remember, indeed never forget, that much of this had, by definition, come about during the 13-year New Labour regime.
Half a century ago, during the Fifties and Sixties, increased educational opportunity, burgeoning job opportunities in manufacturing and the death of deference in both daily life and popular culture meant that working-class children and young adults (like me - an 11 plus failure which I had worked hard to achieve) simply felt a more democratic (and wealthier) future was both obviously pre-destined and inevitable.
And in their different ways, state-school educated Labour prime ministers such as Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan and many of their ministers who came from the shop floor, train shed or the pit gave the impression that anybody could make it, regardless of their background.
Actually, in the Labour tradition, this was not all that new.
Even in 1931, during the last great crisis of capitalism I spoke of, Britain was run by a prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, who was the illegitimate son of a Scottish labourer and a poor housemaid, and who grew up in abject poverty like his mentor, Kier Hardie.
At a time when it would have been easy to imagine that power belonged exclusively to the rich, MacDonald was a shining example of social mobility.
True, unlike Hardie who seemed incorruptible, MacDonald sucked up the rich in a way even more embarrassing to what we may have seen from more recent party leaders. His dalliances with Lady Londonderry, the wife of a coalowner and a notorious right wing Tory would have scandalised the nation - if it had ever been revealed. Times never change, it seems.
Can we possibly look at our leaders and draw the same conclusion today ?
From Cameron, Clegg and Osborne — respectively the son of a millionaire stockbroker, a banker and the heir to a baronetcy — to Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, one the son of a North London intellectual, the other the privately educated son of a professor, British politics does seem to have become the plaything of a tiny self-regarding elite, totally out of touch with ordinary families.
The old joke about the inevitable descent from the leafy heights of North London on to any unlucky working class labour constituency who have an MP standing down is a standing joke - but it is more a tragedy than a joke.
Looking at our political class, you begin to suspect that modern capitalism is loaded in favour of those who already enjoy wealth and power.
And that it has become a closed system, impossible to penetrate unless you are incredibly lucky.
Other facts tell a similar story.
As the Tory minister David Willetts showed in a provocative book last year, 'The Pinch' Britain’s youngsters are being cut adrift.
Thanks partly to ferocious competition from overseas manufacturers, and the squeeze that this puts on UK firms, workers in their 20s today earn far less than their parents did at the same age.
And with house prices having soared and banks refusing to lend, they find it impossible to get onto the property ladder. As a result, the old Conservative dream of a ‘property-owning democracy’ is increasingly reserved for the silver-haired who managed to do well out of the past property boom, or for those lucky enough to be able to inherit estate from their parents.
Most social observers argue that home-ownership is one of the keys to a stable, prosperous, hard-working society — yet since 1997, home ownership among people in their 20s has steadily fallen.
Of course there was a time when education offered a leg-up: but those days are becoming a fading memory. Thanks to the abolition of the EMA and the cash squeeze on our unis, the chances of scaling the educational ladder from a comprehensive to high table is now simply unattainable to all but the privileged few
In a country that claims to value competition, it is nothing less than a disgrace that just four expensive private schools — Eton, Westminster, St Paul’s, St Paul’s Girls — send as many students to Oxford and Cambridge as 2,000 state schools put together.
Meanwhile, the Government’s education reforms mean that working-class children face the prospect of paying back £9,000 a year in tuition fees if they choose to go to university.
And this, despite the squeals from University bosses, this comes at a time when fat-cat vice chancellors, already rewarded with grace-and-favour residences and boundless expense accounts, are being paid an average of more than £220,000 each.
We have been here before.
Next time he is on holiday in Tuscany — something well beyond most British families — perhaps David Cameron should spend an afternoon with his great Tory predecessor Benjamin Disraeli’s book, Sybil.
In this work, first published in 1845, the greatest Tory statesman of the Victorian era warned in the words he put into the mouth of the books hero, that Britain had become
‘two nations … who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws: I speak of the rich and the poor’.
Disraeli was, of course, no socialist. But as an outsider himself, born into a Jewish family, he recognised that capitalism could only take root in ordinary people’s hearts and minds if it gave them a stake of their own.
But left to its own devices, it won't.
At bottom, capitalism depends on constant change, and what us called 'creative destruction'.
Mergers and acquisitions, mega takeovers, and the steady growth of corporations spanning the globe, mean that things like long familiar branded products have an even shorter shelf life - and a shorter and more insecure working life for the workers in these companies.
As Marx foresaw, it's not just brands that are constantly changing. Companies and industries are created and destroyed in an incessant stream of innovation, while human relationships are dissolved and reinvented in novel forms.
With constant change, the accumulation of wealth and innovation becoming the norm, and with no moral imperative to look after the weak, capitalism merely degenerates into cronyism and self-interest.
At its best, the free market can be a tremendous liberating force. During the Fifties and Sixties, it gave millions of people opportunities their parents could barely have imagined: happy childhoods, good schools, well-paid jobs and contented retirements.
But, as Marx said, this cannot be a normal state of affairs. Creative destruction and the underlying cycle of long wave boom and bust is in the DNA and bloodstream of capitalism.
In Marx's word 'everything that is solid melts into air'
That is what happened in 1871, and then 1931.
Eighty years on, capitalism has once again lost its way. With millions betrayed by their under-performing schools, locked out of the job market, forgotten by the banks and abandoned by their politicians, Britain is in danger of becoming two nations again.
So, Marx is back in fashion.
In this cycle of creative destruction, ladders of mobility have been kicked away, and even formerly middle class people find themselves facing penury, with eroded pensions, eroded savings, indebted children and no prospect of things getting better for the foreseeable future.
Again, Marx saw this.
When he argued that capitalism would plunge the middle classes into something like the precarious existence of the hard-pressed workers of his time, Marx anticipated a change in the way we live that we're only now struggling to cope with.
It seems that 160 years on from the publication of the Communist Manifesto, we are back in the world that Marx and Engels lived in.
But we have to remember that in that slim book, its authors wrote a hymn of praise to the wonders of the technical innovation that propelled capitalism. They sang of the new abundance that could be gained from the factory system, and the scientific advance of the age.
But it was the human price paid for this that they condemned, and their solution was a simple one of seeing the newly created working classes taking control of the state, and through this, taking over these new forces of production and re-modelling them in the interests of the many and not the few.
In that sense, Marx's statist socialism is not all that different from what we are here for in today's Labour Party.
Now, Labour, despite the pleading of some on the left, is not going to abolish capitalism.
It's tempting for us to join in the rejoicing of seeing a whole social and economic system in crisis. I do it all the time. We all do.
But as social democrats - and it is time we reclaim that name from the Ownenite and Toy Jenkins fan club usurpers - we must remember the sobering fact that any new Labour government will be taking power in a capitalist nation and having to make the changes needed to see that capitalism can deliver for the masses as well as the millionaires.
We must be, therefore, arguing for a reform of a capitalist state that goes beyond anything ever attempted before - and given the severity of the crisis we are living through, this is something that is cutting with the grain of informed public opinion, I believe.
Modern capitalism is not beyond redemption. But it badly needs imposed reform to insert a moral dimension, something missing amid the scramble to protect the privileges of a narrow metropolitan elite.
It is time that our politicians cracked down on non-domiciled billionaires, and time they made sure the rich elite paid their fair share of our national tax bill.
If Ed Balls really wants to rekindle the British people’s faith in our economic system, then he should go further. He should be drawing up legislation which could mean the next Labour government forcing the banks to lend more money to individuals and small businesses, and in this way, getting our economy moving again.
Labour should restore a culture of investment in excellence for our state schools, giving working-class children a genuine sense that they can climb the ladder. And we should make it a priority to encourage real jobs in real businesses, reinvigorating a manufacturing sector that has been abandoned for far too long.
We should not shirk from seeing if the utilities that are a key to good quality of life for all if us, and which power the productive economy - water, gas, electricity - can be bought back into public control.
The stakes could not be higher. Unless capitalism is reformed in this fashion, then an entire generation will conclude that it is no more than a fig leaf for the super-rich.
That would be a tragedy. For despite all capitalism’s weakness and evils — despite the flaws, inequalities and hypocrisies that are an inevitable part of any human endeavour — it remains the system that the world lives within.
Other systems have been tried, and they have collapsed in bloodstained ruins.
Only the pure concept of capitalism — the free exchange of goods, skills, services and ideas — has so far proved itself capable of survival and of offering a quality of life that most would aspire to.
As we said, that is not what it is offering at the moment - either for us here in a mature capitalist state, or more brutally, for those living and labouring in the slums of the emerging world, or in the vast electronic goods sweatshops of Guangdong province, the mines of Brazil, the shipyards and car plants of South Korea and Jarkata.
So the crusade to reform capitalism cannot be successful if it is to be only tried in one country.
That has huge implications for us as Labour Party members.
We have again to stress that we are internationalists.
And that in our own part of the world, we are Europeans, living in and building, the EU as an instrument for social democracy with our sister parties in Western and Eastern Europe.
That is something that I, as a guy who as a confirmed European in the 1970's and 80's when it was simply unfashionable in Labour circles, still adhere to.
And we have to go further.
By, in turn, fighting to see that the EU has a global reach - beginning with the acceptance of Turkey as the first Islamic nation to join the EU.
Only policies of this scale can succeed in the face of this crisis
For if they fail, then the results could be too dreadful to contemplate.
A popular phrase of the 1960's was 'Socialism or Barbarism'.
The socialists of the 1950's and 60's could, in many cases, remember how the crisis of 1931 paved a road that ended outside the gates of Treblinka and Buchenwald.
That potential danger is still there
We have, as democratic socialists, a duty to see this does not take root afresh.
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