Tuition Fees and The Fib Dems

Remember Lib Dem promises at the election to abolish tuition fees? Well, they lied. Instead, tuition fees could rise to as much as £12,000 per year!! One consequence will be to burden the vast majority of students with levels of debt they will carry well into their working lives.

There is speculation about a Lib Dem revolt. I really hope so. But I am not holding my breath. Both nationally and locally the Lib Dems have shown themselves to be a pretty slavish bunch when it comes to their Tory masters. For some, even hanging on to the coat tails of power corrupts.

Save the NHS

Until now, no party could realistically hope to be the government unless it declared that the “NHS is safe in our hands”. In his attempt to re-brand the Tories, David Cameron went so far as claiming that they were the “party of the NHS”.

But now the Tories are in power, the mask has slipped. Their plans for NHS reform – which weren’t mentioned in their manifesto – threaten the very existence of the NHS as a free public service. As an investigation in the magazine Red Pepper shows: “In place of a public service we will have a profit-driven healthcare market.”

Red Pepper sets out how powerful business interests have lobbied for years to get access to the huge NHS budget. New Labour tried to bring the market into the health system, and only partly succeeded. But now there is a government that is determined to change the face of the NHS once and for all.

Already, cuts of up to £20 billion are being made in the NHS. And these cuts are going to have a devastating effect. Hospitals around the country are cutting back on essential operations – cataracts and hip replacements for example.

This is just the beginning. If the NHS becomes a marketplace for private companies to trade, then many more people will be told it just isn’t ‘cost-effective’ to treat them.

As the Red Pepper article concludes: “..the injustice that will flow from the loss of the NHS will be massive. It will change the face of English society more profoundly than the poll tax. And it will be for all practicable purposes irreversible – unless we stop it now, all of us resisting in whatever way we can.”

Housing crisis and asylum seekers

Earlier this year, the Red Cross described the way our immigration system treated those whose claims for asylum have been denied as 'shameful'

“Asylum seekers last in the housing queue” said the Daily Mail as John Lines, the Cabinet Member for Housing, secured the headlines he wanted. But asylum seekers were never in the front of any queue, and are among the most desperate and destitute people in our society.

As the recession bites, we can expect a lot more of this kind of unscrupulous 'blame the victim' politics from the Tories and Lib Dems. We got a taster at the Tory conference with its creeping Victorian values of the 'deserving' and 'undeserving' poor.

Thousands of people are having their homes repossessed as jobs are lost. What would make a difference to the homeless figures is if banks, bailed out by public money, were unable to turf families onto the streets if they couldn’t keep up mortgage payments. But politicians would rather play ‘blame the foreigner’ than ‘blame the banker’.

What would make a difference to the housing crisis would be a government programme of house building, putting people back to work and boosting the economy. But with unemployment set to rise dramatically, and people losing their homes as a result, we can expect politicians to point the figure at anybody but themselves.

There are different ways we can respond to this recession. One response, with a long and ugly pedigree, is to scapegoat the vulnerable, the weak, and those unable to defend themselves. The other is to challenge the economic madness of slashing public spending in the middle of a recession, and to challenge the political logic which says that ordinary people losing their jobs and homes is a price worth paying for the criminal recklessness of a rich elite in the financial sector.

Are we in it together?

David Cameron says it is time to pull together to help reduce the national debt. But he has only given us his plan about cuts in public services and reducing the benefits for the poor. He has failed to put the burden of reducing national debt on the bankers and the mega rich of the country. 

OK then here is a suggestion. How about this idea? A one-off tax of just 20% on the richest 10% would practically clear the national debt at a stroke. And without having to slash public services and throw people on the dole.

Seems fair to me. The total wealth of the top 1,000 increased by a third in the last year. The top 200 people alone on the rich list were worth a collective £228.8 billion and the richest 10% are worth over £4,000 billion!

Think the Tories will go for it? Not in a million years. When Cameron talks about spreading the pain, it is not the rich he has in mind who will be doing the suffering.

(Watch Respect Party's Ken Loach make the same case for taxing the rich on Newsnight from earlier in the week).

World Day for Decent Work

Across the world this Thursday, 7 October, will be marked by Trade Unions as 'World Day for Decent Work'.

The campaign's core message for an economics that puts people first couldn't be more timely with the Con-Dem government onslaught on jobs and working conditions.

In any global race to the bottom in labour standards, then Bangladesh is where the finishing line is.

Thankfully, a national campaign for the country’s three million garment workers has been able to lift the minimum wage from a medieval £15 per month, up to £27 per month.

This  is still short of the modest £46 that unions were asking for and the police repression against workers and unions has been terrible. At least 21 garment factory employees and labour rights activists have been arrested. Many more have gone into hiding or faced threats of imprisonment, and worse.

I'm pleased to say that the British TUC has been at the forefront of international solidarity with our brothers and sisters campaigning in Bangladesh for decent work and the leader of the country's textile workers trade union, ZM Kamrul Anam, will be speaking this Thursday at the TUC's Stand Up for Decent Work event

Child benefit cut, bankers bonuses rise

Two weeks ago, the Liberal Democrat conference voted to “Safeguard universal child benefit in conjunction with progressive taxation in order to provide a reliable source of income protection throughout childhood.”

But, as we all know by now, the Lib Dems are only useful for keeping Tories in power, and this week the Tory conference was told that child benefit would be withdrawn for any family where a parent was paying higher rate tax.

The Tory plans are full of holes. A single parent earning £44,000 will lose child benefit, but a couple earning £43,000 each, that is total household income of £86,000 will keep it. More than a million families will lose out.

But there is a bigger principle at stake. By focussing on the issue of child benefit being paid to better-off families, the Tories are looking for an easy target. It seems illogical to pay benefits to some people who clearly don’t need it. The evidence shows, however, that universal benefits are extremely successful, and child benefit is one of the most successful of all.

As Kate Green, Director of the Child Poverty Action Group, said last year: “Simple, straightforward and easy to claim, child benefit reaches more children living in low-income families than any of the complex means-tested benefits or tax credits intended for them. With a take-up rate of 98%, it provides financial security in households that are struggling to keep afloat.”

The Tories say they can “no longer defend paying out £1bn a year to better-off families”. But at the same time, as the Independent reports, cash bonuses to bankers will reach £7bn in this year alone. If the Tories were genuinely interested in 'sharing the burden', they could start with the bankers. This attack on child benefit is just another part of the ideological drive to roll back support for the welfare state.

(For another look at whether the cuts are a necessity or ideologically-inspired, see this video by Guardian journalist, John Harris at Sunday’s demonstration outside the Tory conference.)

Getting some perspective

A defensive David Cameron is busy trying to downplay the impact of the cuts by saying we need to put them into 'perspective'. Yes we should. As this excellent article by John Lancaster points out, 'the £82b worth of cuts that George Osbourne is going to announce in 2 weeks time are unprecedented. No government has ever achieved anything like that reduction in public spending. To put it in perspective, since 1950 there have been only two periods during which public spending was cut for two years in a row. The coalition is proposing to cut it for six consecutive years. Their cuts will exceed anything Margaret Thatcher did.'


Indeed she oversaw the return of mass unemployment, greater inequality, increased social tension, and riots on our streets. The new Thatcherites want to achieve what the old ones could not quite manage; a permanent reduction in the size of the state and an end to extensive public services. If they get away with it Britain will be a more divided, a more unequal, and a more unfair society for generations to come.

Respect Rejects Racism

It has come to my attention that a prominent Respect member in Tower Hamlets has made antisemitic remarks.

We can't stand racism. It rots the core of our humanity. It is the tool of those who seek to divide and rule. It especially angers me when people who have been victims of bigotry themselves, and who know what that feels like, make bigoted remarks against others. I won't tolerate it, and neither will the Respect party.

I completely endorse the decision of our national officers to expel the member in question with immediate effect. We cannot give an inch to racism, prejudice, and intolerance, whether directed against Jews, Muslims, women, immigrants, the Roma community, homosexuals or any other section of society. Antisemitism has proven to be one of the most virulent forms of racism through the ages. It has to be opposed whenever and wherever it raises its ugly head.

With racism set to increase as the full impact of the recession kicks in, we need to hold on even more tightly to the political wisdom and deep morality in the old trade union slogan 'an injury to one is an injury to all'.

It's not David

Let’s start with the good news. The new Labour leader is not David Miliband. By the narrowest of margins, Labour has decided not to elect the person who was ‘unrepentant’ about the Iraq war but who believes that Labour should raise the white flag in the face of the Tory war on public services.

And there’s more good news. Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, and the rest of the authoritarian, warmongering and privatising Blairites, have tasted another defeat. In fact, with Ken Livingstone having won a crushing victory over Oona King the day before to become Labour’s candidate for Mayor of London, the Blairites have not had a good week at all.

Call to Freeze Pakistan's Debt

The global anti-poverty campaign ONE International is Calling upon the IMF to freeze Pakistan’s debt as the country recovers from one of the worst natural disasters ever recorded.

More than 20 million people have been displaced by the floods that hit Pakistan in July. A fifth of the country was under water, with 2 million acres of crops destroyed. Thousands of people have lost their lives and millions more have lost their homes. Severe threats of water-borne disease and malnutrition are putting survivors of the initial floods at further risk.

With 60% of the population already living below the poverty line, Pakistan will need all its available resources to help it recover from this crippling crisis and to fight long-term poverty. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) – the institution that oversees debt repayments - can play a key role in this. By freezing Pakistan’s estimated $3billion annual debt repayment for two years, the international community can give Pakistan vital extra resources to spend on recovery and rebuilding, rather than debt-repayment. Currently every dollar spent on debt servicing is one that could be spent on the flood victims. Strong oversight mechanisms should be put in place to ensure this money reaches the people who need it most. Head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Khan, is the target of the petition.

Please sign the petition here