The postal strike is our strike by John Pilger

The postal strike is our strike by John Pilger

New Labour has done its best to destroy the Post Office as a public institution. Postal workers deserve our solidarity

The postal workers' struggle is as vital for democracy as any national event in recent years. The campaign against them is part of a historic shift from the last vestiges of political democracy in Britain to a corporate world of insecurity and war. If the privateers running the Post Office are allowed to win, the regression that now touches all lives bar the wealthy will quicken its pace. A third of British children now live in low-income or impoverished families. One in five young people is denied hope of a decent job or education.

And now the Brown government is to mount a "fire sale" of public assets and services worth £16bn. Unmatched since Margaret Thatcher's transfer of public wealth to a new gross elite, the sale, or theft, will include the Channel Tunnel rail link, bridges, the student loan bank, school playing fields, libraries and public housing estates. The plunder of the National Health Service and public education is already under way.

The common thread is adherence to the demands of an opulent, sub-criminal minority exposed by the 2008 collapse of Wall Street and of the City of London, now rescued with hundreds of billions in public money and still unregulated with a single stringent condition imposed by the government. Goldman Sachs, which enjoys a personal connection with the Prime Minister, is to give employees record average individual pay and bonus packages of £500,000. The Financial Times now offers a service called How to Spend It.

Best of Britain

None of this is accountable to the public, whose view was expressed at the last election in 2005: New Labour won with the support of barely a fifth of the British adult population. For every five people who voted Labour, eight did not vote at all. This was not apathy, as the media pretend, but a strike by the public - like the postal workers are today on strike. The issues are broadly the same: the bullying and hypocrisy of contagious, undemocratic power.

Since coming to office, New Labour has done its best to destroy the Post Office as a highly productive public institution valued with affection by the British people. Not long ago, you posted a letter anywhere in the country and it reached its destination the following morning. There were two deliveries a day, and collections on Sundays. The best of Britain, which is ordinary life premised on a sense of community, could be found at a local post office, from the Highlands to the Pennines to the inner cities, where pensions, income support, child benefit and incapacity benefit were drawn, and the elderly, the awkward, the inarticulate and the harried were treated humanely.

At my local post office in south London, if an elderly person failed to turn up on pension day, he or she would get a visit from the postmistress, Smita Patel, often with groceries. She did this for almost 20 years until the government closed down this "lifeline of human contact", as the local Labour MP called it, along with more than 150 other local London branches. The Post Office executives who faced the anger of our community at a local church - unknown to us, the decision had already been taken - were not even aware that the Patels made a profit. What mattered was ideology; the branch had to go. Mention of public service brought puzzlement to their faces.

The postal workers, having this year doubled annual profits to £321m, have had to listen to specious lectures from Peter Mandelson, a twice-disgraced figure risen from the murk of New Labour, about "urgent modernisation". The truth is, the Royal Mail offers a quality service at half the price of its privatised rivals Deutsche Post and TNT. In dealing with new technology, postal workers have sought only consultation about their working lives and the right not to be abused - like the postal worker who was spat upon by her manager, then sacked while he was promoted; and the postman with 17 years' service and not a single complaint to his name who was sacked on the spot for failing to wear his cycle helmet. Watch the near frenzy with which your postie now delivers. A middle-aged man has to run much of his route in order to keep to a preordained and unrealistic time. If he fails, he is disciplined and kept in his place by the fear that thousands of jobs are at the whim of managers.

Subversive forces

Communication Workers Union negotiators describe intransigent executives with a hidden agenda - just as the National Coal Board masked Thatcher's strictly political goal of destroying the miners' union. The collaborative journalists' role is unchanged, too. Mark Lawson, who pontificates about middlebrow cultural matters for the BBC and the Guardian and receives many times the remuneration of a postal worker, dispensed a Sun-style diatribe on 10 October. Waffling about the triumph of email and how the postal service was a "bystander" to the internet when, in fact, it has proven itself a commercial beneficiary, Lawson wrote: "The outcome [of the strike] will decide whether Billy Hayes of the CWU will, like [Arthur] Scargill, be remembered as someone who presided over the destruction of the industry he was meant to represent."

The record is clear that Scargill and the miners were fighting against the wholesale destruction of an industry that was long planned for ideological reasons. The miners' enemies included the most subversive, brutal and sinister forces of the British state, aided by journalists - as Lawson's Guardian colleague Seumas Milne documents in his landmark work, The Enemy Within. Postal workers deserve the support of all honest, decent people, who are reminded that they may be next on the list if they remain silent.

Link: New Stateman
Link: CWU
Link: The key issues behind the battle in the post - Socialist Worker
Link: Respect - Unite behind the Postal Workers

Lest we forget - the Tory years.

Lest we forget - the Tory years and not so long ago. Never again!!!!!
Adolf Hitler & Margaret Thatcher On Spitting Image via YouTube
Link: Maggie "Scum-Bag" Thatcher - YouTube
Link: YouTube link

Cameron: The man who would return us to 1979 by George Galloway

Cameron: The man who would return us to 1979 by George Galloway.

But the economic crisis unleashed by the collapse of Lehman Brothers last year has not only exposed the dangerous underpinning of free-market capitalism, it has also brought the return of the big ideological questions on how our society and affairs should be organised.

That was the backdrop for David Cameron's address to the Tories in Manchester this week.

He's done a good job in knocking the most unpleasant edges off what Theresa May once called the nasty party - though some rather ugly facets remain. The association with the anti-semitic dregs of eastern Europe is one of them and it's fitting that that has come under some scrutiny.

The liberal media's outrage about it, however, is somewhat undermined.

So many of those columnists share the basic thrust of the Polish and Latvian right-wing populists' propaganda, which is to trivialise the barbarity of nazism and its collaborators by claiming that they were comparable to or less than the record of the Soviet Union and Red Army.

The Labour front bench and its supporters are similarly hobbled when it comes to challenging effectively the thrust of what Cameron threatens to inflict on the country.

The centrepiece of his speech was a Reaganist-Thatcherite assault on the idea of collective solutions to the misery inflicted by the untrammelled market. His leitmotif could have come straight from 1979 - an end to big government and freedom for big business.

Some of you will have experienced first hand what that meant at the time. A generation thrown on the scrap heap.

Every one of you is living with the legacy.

Think of some of the most appalling instances of the breakdown of local communities and then recall the places from where we read reports of damaged children, drug epidemics and violence - Doncaster, the poorest parts of London, south Wales. All of them places that were devastated a generation ago.

The problem is not too much government but too little.

And what there is is all too often directed at the wrong things.

Is the problem for vulnerable children in Haringey that the social services are too vast, overstaffed and too engaged in their lives?

Or is that they are barely holding together even before the public spending axe falls?

Make no mistake about this - the scale and savagery of the austerity measures Cameron and George Osborne are contemplating threaten to make our country a far more bitter and dangerous place to live.

They've yet to come clean with what is to be axed. Osborne announced £7 billion in cuts. The amount they are after is more than £100bn, with the axe swinging the moment Cameron sets foot in Downing Street.

Of course those who would do the cutting are from the most privileged layer in society. Cameron may have sought to rebrand his party, but his shadow cabinet is made up of old Etonians and millionaires.

It's a point made by some on the Labour side. But it is somewhat vitiated by the friendships and associations they have chosen over the last 15 years - assorted Russian billionaires and a former leader who has made £15m since leaving office.

Labour is similarly hobbled when it comes to refuting the Tories' claims about big government and the public sector.

There are three reasons. First, so many of Labour's measures have amounted to authoritarian interference in people's lives under the guise of rebuilding communities or protecting security.

The ever-widening scope and application of so-called anti-terror laws is the most extreme example.

Second, extra money on public services has gone on an army of consultants and privateers. So it doesn't feel like progress in east London when the rebuild of the Royal London Hospital under PFI will cost more than it would have done in the public sector and leave us with fewer beds as a result.

Third, they accept the false economics which, having brought the world economy to the brink, now insists on switching off the life support machine of an enfeebled patient.

It's true that Britain's deficit is set to hit about 13 per cent of national output this year and that the total debt burden is rising.

But so it should.

If the private sector is unwilling to invest and spend, then the public sector must - or risk a vicious circle leading to depression.

The surest way to bring debt down is to generate economic growth.

But Labour is not making that case. Indeed, Gordon Brown abandoned the idea of fighting the election on Labour investment versus Tory cuts. So the entire mainstream consensus is that spending and government must be slashed.

I'm sceptical of claims that the public are clamouring for that. In any case, there's a big difference between being asked if there should be spending cuts in general and then being told that it means your children's school, your hospital, your pension, your benefits or your housing estate.

Many, many people are going to respond in horror and outrage when they discover what the reality of these cuts will mean. But by then it will be too late.

Link: Morning Star
Link: Respect - find out more.

Conservative Conference: We have been warned: the nasty party is still with us - Seumas Milne

David Cameron quaffs £140-a-bottle bubbly with his rich chums just hours before the Tories announced a pay freeze for millions of ordinary workers (and ups the o.a.pension age to 66!) - Daily Mirror.

Conservative Conference: We have been warned: the nasty party is still with us - Seumas Milne

Strip away the spin. Cameron's cuts and his friends in Europe give the lie to compassionate Conservatism.

There is nothing like the smell of regime change to turn the head of the British media. Just as in the runup to the 1997 election, when Tony Blair was given the easiest of rides, so David Cameron's Conservatives can now hardly put a foot wrong for press and broadcasters alike. Every set-piece speech is a dazzling performance, every policy initiative a bold and tough choice. Wherever the Tory government in waiting declares the territory to be staked out, the media caravan follows.

At the party's conference in Manchester, it has been the turn of George Osborne to be elevated to the ranks of the political greats. The shadow chancellor had "come of age", the Sun declared, as the BBC's Newsnight compared his oratory to Winston Churchill's. His declarations that the burden of overcoming the crisis will be fairly shared have been accepted at face value. And the Tory claim that the budget deficit is the "defining issue" facing the country, as Cameron insisted today, has become the starting point of political reporting.

But the reality doesn't begin to measure up to the billing. Osborne certainly presented his case for cuts on Tuesday as if he were demanding sacrifices across the nation. The Tory high command is acutely aware that most voters regard the idea that they should pay the cost of an economic crash visited on them by bankers as anathema, and some recent polling shows opposition to spending cuts to pay off public debt running at two to one.

So Osborne's endless repetition of his "we're all in this together" mantra made perfect political sense. Excluding those earning less than £18,000 a year from a public sector pay freeze and the poorest households from the abolition of child trust funds was designed to demonstrate that "compassionate Conservatives" look after the vulnerable. Meanwhile capping mandarins' pensions and declaring no public employee will be able to earn more than the prime minister without the chancellor's approval is intended to give the appearance of toughness for the top end.

But the idea that Osborne's cuts could by any stretch of the imagination be regarded as a fair shares package is clearly nonsense. The initial pain is to be borne by a real terms pay cut for 80% of public sector workers, including those earning nearly £9,000 less than the average wage; by low-paid manual workers who will have to work an extra year for their pension while their life expectancy is up to seven years less than the well-off; and by the half a million people the Tories plan to move off incapacity benefit who stand to lose £25 a week.

As for those at the other end of the income scale, Osborne offered only the discomfort of having to endure Labour's 50% top tax rate at least until the pay freeze is lifted. And for the bankers themselves, there was the less than terrifying warning that "we reserve the right to take further action" if public funds continued to be "unreasonably diverted into bigger pay and bonuses".

Add to that the refusal to ditch plans to abolish inheritance tax below £1m – half the benefit of which would go to the 3,000 richest estates in the country – and the truth of who is to shoulder Osborne's burden couldn't be clearer. And his £7bn worth of cuts of course represent only a fraction of those the Tories intend to make, and Osborne this week repeated plans for tax cuts, on pension funds for instance, which imply still deeper reductions in spending.

The most dishonest of all the "honest choices" Cameron and Osborne claim to be making, however, is that the crisis facing Britain is one of public debt, rather than of recession, growing unemployment, bankruptcies, lack of demand and a continuing squeeze on credit. As the Financial Times' economic commentator, Samuel Brittan – no kind of radical in anyone's book – argued last week, the country is facing a "largely imaginary budget crisis". If there is a normal recovery, the deficit will shrink; if not, it shouldn't.

In fact, industrial output and lending are both still falling. The kind of cuts Cameron and Osborne are talking about, including a pay freeze, could only deepen the downturn and delay recovery, while the Tories are even less prepared than the government to use publicly controlled banks to drive up investment and boost growth. In fact, contrary to Osborne's claims this week, the Conservatives opposed several of the crucial measures taken over the last year to halt the crash – including bank nationalisations, fiscal stimulus and quantitative easing.

Whether Labour is in a position to challenge that dishonesty or the sincerity of the Tory embrace of compassionate Conservativism is another matter. But the reality behind the public view, that Cameron's makeover of the Tories is only skin deep, was on unmistakeble display over Europe this week. First Cameron signalled that, if denied the chance of a referendum on Europe's Lisbon treaty, a Conservative government would seek to negotiate a British opt-out from social and employment rights: one bit of the Brussels edifice that is actually popular in Britain.

But the Tory response to the exposure of their new rightwing European allies to the light of day has also been deeply instructive. It has been known for some time that Cameron's new Conservatives and Reformists group included a motley array of east European antisemites, homophobes and climate-change deniers. But faced with the evidence that its ultra-nationalist Latvian member party supports annual parades of veterans of Hitler's Waffen-SS, the reaction of Tory leaders has been bizarrely to accuse foreign secretary David Miliband of falling for "Soviet smears", deny the facts or, even more extraordinarily, defend the SS veterans as people who were fighting for their country.

Another tack has been to counter that a number of Latvian parties back the parades. In fact, the Conservatives' Latvian ally, the For Fatherland and Freedom party – whose leader Roberts Zile has been a Tory guest in Manchester this week – is at the extreme end of an ugly spectrum: in September 2007, for example, it tried and failed to have a law adopted in Latvia's parliament giving full military pensions to the SS veterans, some of whose volunteers took part in the mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust. It's a reminder not only that the "nasty party" never went away – but that the Conservatives remain the party of Neville Chamberlain, as well as of Churchill.

Link: The Guardian

The Tories - Keep the old axe flying

Keep the old axe flying - Morning Star Comment.

It's almost a relief to see the tail lights of Labour's conference vanishing in the distance and the Tories' vehicle approaching like a bright blue boy racer.

Mind you, that vehicle seems to be a 1982-style Mark V Cortina rather than a more up-to-date model, from what's coming out of the Tory conference.

It seems that it's goodbye to caring sharing Dave now that there's a hint of approaching government, and it's back to the old red-in-tooth-and-claw Tory policies that Margaret Thatcher taught us to hate.

Off ducks the purported friend of the poor and the disadvantaged and up pops the real Tory David Cameron from behind the flimsy mask of social responsibility that has suited him so poorly.

For the Tories have abandoned virtually everything they were wearing like a carnival costume and have turned up in mufti for their last conference before the general election. And what a set of clothes that is.

There's a £25-a-week aid cut for up to half a million claimants on incapacity benefit who will, the Tories expect, be found fit to work after all 2.6 million claimants are tested and will thus be transferred to the lower Jobseekers' Allowance.

There's a windfall for private firms which are going to be paid public money to get people into non-existent jobs out of the £600 million that Mr Cameron expects to squeeze out of the disabled.

There's a 10 per cent reduction in the cost of student loans, but only for students who go into posh, high-paid City jobs or have rich parents - in other words, for those who can repay their loans early.

These early repayments, according to the Tories, would enable them to fund 10,000 extra student places next year, although the mathematics of that proposition seem fragile, to say the least.

Although not, apparently, for the National Union of Students, whose president Wes Streeting commented that this is "an acceptable short-term fix."

For you, perhaps, Mr Streeting, but not for the taxpayer who will have to fund those 10 per cent rebates. There's nothing comes for nothing, Mr Streeting, as you will learn one day - especially from the Tories.

But, back to the Tory electoral jalopy. Another wizard wheeze from the Old Etonians concerns the NHS which, if you remember, is one of only two budgets the Tory opposition guaranteed would be spared the axe if it took power.

Well, it appears that the Tory definition of "being spared the axe" involves cuts of £4 billion in administration costs over four years.

Oh, and around another £1 billion from primary care trust budgets, of course. Apparently, since this is not coming out of "front-line" funding, it doesn't count as a cut, according to the Tories.

At least they seem to be learning something from new Labour, which has the same peculiar conception of accounting. But neither they nor new Labour seem prepared to say who is going to do the administration if the admin budgets are slashed to threads.

The odd idea of front-line services running efficiently without back-office support seems to have come into general currency without anyone ever saying that it is nonsense.

Large enterprises need large administrative support and cutting that support simply means slashing jobs and putting more people on the dole right at the time that the economy needs to stimulate demand, not plunge ever more people onto benefit.

All in all, then, it's welcome back to Maggie's Tories. We know that you really never went away, but it's good to see you come out of the closet again after hiding your Tebbits and Thatchers away for so long.

Keep up the axe-waving and perhaps we will find the electorate seeing you for what you are.

Shout it loud, you're mean and proud - and you lie like the Tories of old.

Link: Out-Torying the Tories - Morning Star
Link: Morning Star Comment

Crikey! Its the Tories

David Cameron as Robbing Hood: robbing the poor and retired to help the rich!
Posted by Tetrasoft on YouTube.
Link: YouTube