Whose side are you on?

This week presented a rare opportunity for opposition politicians to come together in the House of Commons to oppose the deeply unfair reforms of the public sector pensions. By supporting a motion laid by the SNP and Plaid Cymru which called for the UK Government to reverse unfair changes to public sector pensions, the Labour Party could have sent a clear message that this issue was more important that party politics. Labour MPs could also have sent a message to the two million or so people who stood on picket lines and marched on rallies last Wednesday that their fight was their fight and their number one priority.

Instead, Labour politicians showed that tribalism is more important than the protection of the public sector pension scheme. They took the side of the Con/Dems on Wednesday. The motion was defeated 242 to 11.

This debate was the first one to be heard in the Commons in the last year-and-a-half since pension changes were first mooted. In this time, there have been 36 opposition debates held by Labour where public sector workers and their pensions have been ignored. A significant number of Labour MPs also crossed picket lines at Westminster last week even though some vowed not to.

I was proud to visit a number of picket lines last week and march with my fellow Plaid Cymru members, including our leader Ieuan Wyn Jones, during the Cardiff rally. Labour politicians were conspicuous by their absence; a fact that did not go unnoticed by many of the people taking part in the rally. This non-committal position reflects the deep malaise their leader Ed Miliband now finds himself in by refusing to back the strikers and going as far as condemning the withdrawal of labour.

If Labour politicians cannot back the public sector workers on an issue as clear cut as the unjustified degradation of hard-earned pension rights then surely they should be asking themselves whose side are they on?

Plaid supports strikers

Tomorrow, one of the biggest days of industrial action will take place in the UK in living memory. I will stand with the many ordinary men and women who are calling for the pension schemes they signed up to and paid in to, to be honoured. It is not too much to ask for a retirement without poverty after a lifetime of work but that is exactly what is at stake if the Westminster coalition has their way with the public sector pension scheme.

This is precisely why this issue has garnered such wide-spread support, particularly from trades unions which have never previously taken part in industrial action. Refuse workers, teachers, nurses, civil servants, meals on wheels providers will all be screwed by this Westminster cabinet of millionaires. Yet if you swallowed the rhetoric, you would be forgiven for thinking that tomorrow’s strikers are greedy, self-serving and not living in the real world.

Education Secretary of State Michael Gove this week described some of the union leaders as “militants itching for a fight”; a statement rendered even more farcical by the emergence of pictures of him kneeling proudly on an NUJ picket line in the 1980s.

The Government’s lead negotiator with the trade unions is Francis Maude MP. This privileged son of a Tory MP has been hopelessly inept throughout the whole proceedings and shown an ignorance of Government policy that mystifies his appointment as the government's liaison person with the trade union movement. I'd say that it's the Westminster Coalition Government that is actually ‘itching for a fight’ with the public sector. After all, they have form when it comes to cracking down on the public sector in their brief, but incredibly destructive, 18 months in office.

In Plaid Cymru, we know whose side we are on. We recognise that public sector workers deserve to retire without facing grinding poverty after a lifetime of dedication. Most importantly, we are not afraid to declare our support for such a just cause….are you listening Ed Miliband? As a Unison member and chair of the cross-party PCS group in the Assembly, I will proudly take my place on the picket line tomorrow.

I have no doubt that moral argument is on our side. With solidarity and determination, victory will be ours too.

More for the bankers

The Westminster coalition has revealed plans today to “assist” the flagging housing market by underwriting mortgages with £400 million of tax-payers’ money. While the finer details of the plan and whether it applies to Wales are yet to be revealed, the stated aim of the 'Get Britain Building' initiative is to reduce deposits for newly built homes.

No one can deny that the construction industry is in need of a boost. That message came loud and clear last week with the launch of the Wales Construction Federation Alliance in Cardiff Bay. Housing building is undoubtedly one of the best ways to stimulate an economy. The housing charity Shelter, amongst others, has shown that for every £1 of public money spent on house-building, the economy gets £3.50 back. There is a strong imperative to provide affordable housing in Wales where social housing is more scarce than in England.

However, the latest gimmick from the Con/Dems is an ill-thought out response to these challenges. The banks, propped up with tax-payers cash have carried on their 'business as usual' with the culture of excessive pay and bonuses persisting unhindered by the mistakes of the past. With a 100% guarantee applied to their lending decisions, isn't there a big risk of mistakes repeating themselves? It was irresponsible lending in the US sub-prime mortgage market that lit the touch paper for the casino capitalism bonfire of 2008 that is still raging today. How do we know that George Osborne won't sanction even more reckless borrowing with a cast-iron guarantee to mortgage lenders? As Mervyn King said in August 2008:

"We don’t guarantee lending to other forms of borrowing; we don’t guarantee lending to manufacturing borrowing...it would be a very dangerous move to move to a situation where the government saw its major role as guaranteeing lending...why should the taxpayer take on the risk of borrowing by individual borrowers some of whom are risky it’s the lenders who should take the risk. And what we saw in the first half of 2007 was that not enough attention was paid to monitoring the riskiness of that lending.”

Furthermore, wrapped up in today’s announcement is an offer of a heavy discount on council houses – worth up to 50 per cent – in a bid to persuade people to buy their homes. This will further exacerbate the scarcity of social housing and increase waiting lists. When little or no social housing building is taking place, this is an irresponsible and ideological move by the Con/Dem coalition. Thatcher’s right-to-buy scheme of the 1980s may have had its supporters but the heavy discounts, allied with a failure to replenish housing stock, laid the seeds for the shortage of social housing we have today.

We need a major social housing programme to provide the much-needed shot in the arm for the construction industry and to shorten the creaking housing waiting lists of local authorities across the UK. This would provide an asset for the public who will own the housing at the end of the investment. Under today's announced plans there will no tangible pay-back to the tax-payer. Mortgage lenders, bankers and private house builders will be the main beneficiaries.

The Westminster Coalition is keen to trumpet at every opportunity how their interest rates on borrowing are very low because of its austerity programme (or socially regressive and ideological war on the public sector and people on the lowest incomes, depending on how you look at it). Why not use these low borrowing rates to carry out a bold and ambitious social housing programme that will give people homes, jobs and help to build up the public asset base? The answer is ideological.

End all wars

This week in the Senedd the Conservatives held a debate calling on the government to plan a commemoration of the start of world war one in 2014. This was my contribution to the debate, from the Assembly's Record of Proceedings:

Leanne Wood: This debate is timely, given that there will be many families remembering past and present wars, and the loss of their loved ones at remembrance services throughout the country this coming Sunday. Those who have lost their lives in the conflicts of the twentieth century, and the more recent ones this century, will all be remembered. As they are remembered, I hope that there will also be time for reflection on the war that sparked remembrance Sunday. That war, which ended on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, started almost 100 years ago. Let us not forget that that was meant to be the war to end all wars.

The last known survivor of that war was the late Harry Patch. I will take some time to remember Harry’s words; words that, in my view, powerfully sum up the dark reality of what war is all about. When he was 107, Harry Patch said

'We’ve had 87 years to think what war is. To me, it is a licence to go out and murder. Why should the British government call me up and take me out to a battlefield to shoot a man I never knew, whose language I couldn’t speak. All those lives lost for a war finished over a table. Where’s the sense in that?’

Later, he said

'Too many died, war isn’t worth one life’

He said that war was 'calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings’. I know from my involvement in the recently formed Justice Unions all-party group, which I have helped to set up, that the wars ongoing today are creating big problems that are impacting on families and communities up and down our country. Physical injuries are visible, but mental problems and, in particular, post-traumatic stress disorder, is all too often not dealt with. In many cases, it is not even diagnosed. Work carried out by the corresponding Justice Union group in Westminster and research carried out by my Plaid Cymru colleauge Elfyn Llwyd has uncovered the vast numbers of ex-service personnel with post-traumatic stress disorder in the prison system or living on the streets. Elfyn Llwyd has led the way in campaigning for better services for mentally and physically injured service personnel. We are hoping that the Wales all-party group can do something similar at a Welsh level. For everyone who has contributed to this debate today, and who is interested in being involved in that all party group, please let me know.

In remebering the first world war, and all other wars, I hope that we can also remember all people affected: soldiers and civilians on both sides. We must learn the lessons from the past wars? Will we heed the words of Harry Patch?

To conclude, I support the amendment put forward in the name of Jocelyn Davies, which calls for an exploration of the idea of setting up a peace institute. I ask people to look at what peace institutes do in other countries: in Norway, Finland, Catalunya, Ireland and Germany. We have the powers to do this here. A peace institute could be an important educational resource and a vehicle for bringing together peace-related research; for example, on conflict resolution and arms conversion. The majority of peace institutes elsewhere in the world are self-financing, so it need not be something that requires any major financial commitment. All of the existing peace institutes enjoy academic independence. The setting up of a Welsh peace institute, working with other peace institutes around the world, would be a good way for Wales to commemorate the first world war, by making a contribution to a project that aims, finally, to end all wars.

Occupy Cardiff

Today, the Occupy movement comes to Wales. From 2pm today, protestors will gather at the Aneurin Bevan Staute in Queen Street in Cardiff to be the voice of the 99%.

In her book Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein shows how the world's rich and powerful, the 1%, love a crisis.

"When people are panicked and desperate and no one seems to know what to do, that is the ideal time to push through their wish list of pro-corporate policies: privatizing education and social security, slashing public services, getting rid of the last constraints on corporate power. Amidst the economic crisis, this is happening the world over."

Speaking at Occupy Wall Street, Naomi said:

"today everyone can see that the system is deeply unjust and careening out of control. Unfettered greed has trashed the global economy. And it is trashing the natural world as well. We are overfishing our oceans, polluting our water with fracking and deepwater drilling, turning to the dirtiest forms of energy on the planet...The new normal is serial disasters: economic and ecological...

The task of our time is to turn this around: to challenge this false scarcity. To insist that we can afford to build a decent, inclusive society—while at the same time, respect the real limits to what the earth can take...

I am talking about changing the underlying values that govern our society. That is hard to fit into a single media-friendly demand, and it’s also hard to figure out how to do it. But it is no less urgent for being difficult."

Thanks Naomi. That covers it.

Fiddling While Rome Burns

From the Assembly's Record of Proceedings: 9th November 2011.
Plaid Cymru debate on the economic crisis:

"I am sure that everyone listening to this debate is familiar with the effects of the economic crisis and, as Assembly Members, I am sure that we are all well-versed, not just with the fast-moving news events, but also with the way in which the crisis is impacting upon people’s lives, by the very nature of the cases that are coming to our attention.

In Plaid Cymru, we are deeply disappointed with the lack of ambition and visible action from this Government on the economy. Our economy needs urgent, vast and long-term intervention. No longer can we sit back and cross our fingers, hoping that circumstances are going to change, because all indications are that things are not going to change, and that, if anything, things are going to get a lot worse.

The First Minister tells us that his door is open and that he is willing to listen to ideas. I have some ideas that I hope that the Government will now start to take seriously. We have no need whatsoever to reinvent the wheel. In a paper that went to the former Enterprise and Learning Committee on 15 July 2010 from the Co-operatives and Mutuals Wales, two international examples were given, which, if we could do the same in Wales, could transform our economy, particularly the worst performing areas of our economy. Clearly, all businesses need finance and we all know that, despite two rounds of quantitative easing, businesses are struggling to access finance.

The Enterprise and Learning Committee paper refers to the Capital régional et coopératif Desjardins in Quebec, which is an investment fund that was started in 2001. This fund raises development capital for co-operatives to invest in the 'resource’, or the less-developed regions of Quebec. In the first five years, the fund grew from $79 million to $587 million. By 2010, $905 million, raised from individuals and the private sector, was supporting, through loans, 225 co-operative enterprises. What is stopping us from setting up a dedicated fund, along the Quebec lines, to support the expansion of co-operatives and social enterprises in Wales?

The second international example cited in that paper, which could be considered in Wales, is the vast network of manufacturing co-operatives in the Basque Country. The Mondragon Corporation was formed with a technical training college in 1956 by a Catholic priest. It now employs over 90,000 people in 256 co-operatives. Within its structure, there are now two banks and a university, and its supermarket chain is the third largest in the Spanish state. It operates a maximum-wage policy, with a ratio of 5:1, so that the highest earner cannot earn more than five times the lowest-paid worker, which then assists with equality.

If our current precarious economic situation does not warrant bold and ambitious action on this scale, then what will it take? The Government has financially supported co-operatives, but where do they sit in the overall economic strategy? What outcomes does the Government hope to see as a result of that support? Why do we not make the growth of co-operatives a strategic economic objective? Why not pull together all the various interested parties to set up a co-operative growth fund, along the lines of the Quebec model, and why not pay a visit to the Basque Country to meet the people there and to discuss how we could set up something similar to their manufacturing co-operative network in Wales?

The First Minister has asked for ideas. It is a real shame that he is not here to listen to them this afternoon, but they are on the record and, hopefully, we will see some action on the co-operative front in Wales soon."

Benefits cuts to hit Wales harder

A new study by Sheffield Hallam University has shown that the UK government's incapacity benefit reforms will hit Wales harder than any other part of the UK. It has been estimated that up to75,000 people will no longer be eligible for incapacity benefit by 2014.

This is proof, if any further was needed, that we are not all in this together as David Cameron would have us believe. The Con/Dem coalition has no compassion for the very people for whom the welfare state was set up – how else would they be able to push through these punitive policies that will hit the former coalfield communities in Wales harder than any other part of the UK?

This will mean that more people in Wales will have to choose between heating and eating. More children will be pushed into poverty. More local businesses will go to the wall because the disposable income of their customers has been taken away by the UK government.

David Cameron and his cabinet of millionaires are deliberately and ideologically shrinking the public sector by launching a full-scale attack on our hard-won welfare system. It is a futile exercise to tell people to go and find a job when none exist. Too many people in Wales live in communities where the market has failed to provide jobs and that are yet to recover from the Thatcher policies of the 1980s. Some of those policies involved encouraging people to claim particular benefits to avoid the appearance of inflated unemployment figures. How will benefit reductions on this scale, with no jobs, help to turn these communities around?

These cuts have been designed to hit the worst off while the multi-millionaire tax evaders and avoiders get off scot-free. Will the Welsh government do or say anything about it?