War On Public Sector Workers

NEW Labour Ministers have declared war on the wages of 5.5 million public sector workers, invoking the spectre of the 1978-9 Winter of Discontent, when millions went on strike against crucifying wage cuts from the then Labour government of Jim Callaghan.
Chancellor Alistair Darling (of the rich) has declared his government’s plans for 3-year pay deals across the entire public sector, in order to ‘stabilise the economy’ and ‘defeat inflation’.
The proposal is married to New Labour’s oft-declared diktat that no public sector worker should be allowed a pay rise of more than 2 per cent.
Thus they continue to peddle the crude myth that wage rises create inflation when in truth, wage rises are often the first victims, especially amongst the low paid.
In the same week that these measures were threatened, official figures emerged that Retail Price Inflation is up to 4.3 per cent - higher than the previous month.
The government is seeking to dodge this troublesome fact by fiddling inflation figures down to the lower Consumer Price Index.
But anyone who eats, heats their home or lives in a house, knows that the cost of living is letting rip, and that wages are failing to catch up.
Announcements of 17 per cent (£1000 a year) hikes in the price of electricity and gas come hot on the heels of the price of a litre of petrol breaking through the £1 barrier, and an escalation in food prices, by the biggest rate in 14 years.
A quick stroll round your local supermarket will tell you that prices have risen far more than the 2 per cent Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling want to suppress wages to - and far more even than the official inflation figures.
New Labour hope the imposition of their three year deals will prevent industrial action for inflation-linked wages rises this side of a Westminster election, which must be held within that time-span.
They are aware of the looming economic storms blowing across the Atlantic from the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the US. They have been jolted by the Northern Rock disaster, where they happily bailed out profiteering bankers to the tune of £25billion, so that some new profiteer can be seduced into buying it; a case of temporary nationalisation to prop up the profit-crazed banking system.
But Labour want the working class to pay for this crisis not of their making.
The credit crunch adds to the pressure on working class families who have staved off catastrophe through several years of extended credit, paid for in exorbitant charges to the robber banks.
Thus wages that match inflation are, for many, a critical matter.
Already, workers are falling behind, as evidenced by recent IDS figures showing that average pay rises for 2007 stood at 3.5 per cent, whereas inflation stands at 4.3 per cent.
Leaders of both the GMB union and the Police Federation have rightly asserted that there is absolutely no evidence that public sector pay is key to inflation.
In fact, public sector pay rises are lagging behind the rest of the economy, with increases at their lowest since May 1998.
As the GMB union leader Paul Kenny put it, “Can you tell me what the price of a litre of petrol is going to be in two years’ time?”
The stark fact is that under a capitalist economy, where private profit is the central motivator, the government cannot hope to control price rises - but they do have the power to hold down wages, especially in the public sector. Provided the unions let them get away with it.
This was the central lesson of the 1974-9 Labour government fiasco, which imposed pay cuts across public and private sector jobs, whilst inflation ran riot.
In 1978, pay was restricted to 5 per cent whereas inflation was well above 30 per cent.
That crude wealth transfusion from workers to bosses, from the poor to the rich, is what triggered the explosion of anger manifesting in the mass strikes of 1978-9.
Whether New Labour’s new version of a very old idea is allowed to forge ahead, or whether workers across the entire public sector stop them in their tracks, very much depends on what leadership is offered in the unions.
Workers have plenty of direct experiences of New Labour’s multi-year pay deals.
Low-paid NHS workers have just suffered a pay cut with a phased rise of 2.5 per cent over 2 years in England and Wales.
Prison officers are up in arms at a similar form of pay cut, and at the recent announcement by New Labour that the Tories’ ban on their right to strike is about to be re-imposed.
The Police Federation are demanding the right to strike - denied them these past 90 years - and threatening demos outside Westminster, because of the government’s phased pay award.
Currently civil servants in the Department of Work and Pensions are striking back against an imposed 3-year deal that means 2 per cent in 2007, zero rise in 2008 and 1 per cent in 2009.
The lowest paid of these workers earn just 24 pence above the government’s derisory minimum wage. Of course, pay limits below inflation are not applied to everyone under the glorious free market economy. Last year, the bosses of the FTSE 100 top companies enjoyed ‘pay’ rises of 37 per cent ... to an obscene average of £2,875,000 (each, that is).
And now those elite ‘public servants’ - MPs - are pondering how to disguise their own greed and hypocrisy whilst demanding such severe pay limits on millions of other public sector workers.
Their Salary Review body recommends 2.8 per cent.
Gordon Brown and others are urging ‘restraint’ - that is, a ‘mere’ 1.9 per cent - so as to reduce the blatancy of their hypocrisy.
What he fails to remind the general public of is that 1.9 per cent on an MP’s salary of £60,675 is a damned sight different from the same rise for civil servants on as low as £11,000, or the vast army of public sector workers on £15-20,000 a year.
Nor does Brown broadcast the fact that MPs’ pay has risen by 127 per cent in 17 years - compared to official inflation figures of 72 per cent in the same period.
The government’s sweet talk about aiming at stability, at workers knowing what pay to expect in two years’ time, is absolutely bogus. It already has a shoddy record of reneging on such deals amongst NHS and local government workers, teachers and others.
Not even Gordon Brown can guarantee the levels of inflation two years hence.
He cannot even own up to last year’s.
Workers need the option of taking industrial action if annually negotiated pay rises fall short of the rising cost of living.
The need for united resistance across the entire public sector screams out at the union leaders, who agreed coordinated action at September’s TUC conference.
Even the threat of unified action has paid dividends in the recent past, forcing big concessions on pension rights for civil servants, teachers and health workers two years ago.
We need all bear in mind the lessons of the 1974-9 Labour government’s wage cutting Social Contract, which provoked the strikes of 1978-9.
Be warned. In the coming hard times, the government wants to share out the pain, but only amongst those at the lowest end of the pay scale.

Stagecoach continues to bully and harass gay couple

ON Friday 11 January, Mark Craig and Steven Black, a young gay couple from Old Meldrum in Aberdeenshire had been in Aberdeen visiting Stevenís mum.
At around 10:30 they left to catch the last bus back to Old Meldrum.
They arrived at Berryden Road bus stop at around 11:00pm and waited. Mark said:
“The bus arrived at around 11:30. It pulled in to the bus stop as Steven and I were waiting. The bus doors opened slightly and the driver looked at us then looked around him and closed the doors and drove off leaving us standing on the street in the freezing cold.
It was the same driver that tried to kick us off for hugging in the back of the bus last year.”
Last October Mark and Steven were on the last Stagecoach bus of the night from Aberdeen to Old Meldrum, when the driver suddenly stopped the bus and demanded they get off. This was supposedly at the behest of a fellow passenger, for sitting with their arm around the other, as many couples do. The driver then forced Mark and Steven to separate before continuing on the journey, leaving them shocked and humiliated.
After hearing about this incident, the Scottish Socialist Party organised a mass email campaign to Stagecoach’s Director of Corporate Communications, Steven Stewart. Hundreds of gay rights activists and ordinary members of the public appalled by this sotry asked for an apology for illegally discriminating against the couple.
Stagecoach ignored all of these requests, and made it clear that they thought the driver had done nothing wrong, and had stood by him 100 per cent; accusing everyone else of not knowing the facts of the case.
With the bus company refusing to apologise for illegally discriminating against the couple and fully backing the driver, ‘hug-in’ protests by same sex couples and friends took place on Stagecoach busses around Scotland, with members of the SSP retracing the same route from Aberdeen to Old Meldrum with Mark and Steven.
Now these two courageous young men need our help and support once more. The Scottish Socialist Party is standing fully behind the couple, as we did last year, because homophobic bullying is totally unacceptable, especially when it is perpetrated by a company with monopolies on many of the bus routes in Britain. We ask that the LGBT community and straight allies alike to stand with us and Mark and Steven in opposition to this continued bullying and harassment.
Please contact Steven Stewart, the Director of Corporate Communications at Stagecoach (Steven.Stewart@stagecoachgroup. com, Tel: 01738 642040 or fax: 01738 443076) to demand that this clearly anti-gay bus driver be suspended from his job pending review and diversity training, and for a full and immediate public apology to be issued to Mark Craig and Steven Black for the appalling way in which they are being treated. This harassment and bullying by a multi million pound company against one, young, gay couple is utterly disgusting and totally illegal.
Nobody should suffer it, which is why we are asking everybody to demand an end to it.

Coming Home To Roost

Roz Paterson

What price do we really pay for our food? Not just financially but also ethically. The television at the moment is full of celebrity chefs extolling the virtues of free range and organic foods. Roz Paterson looks at the issue of intensive factorry chicken farming and Ken Ferguson looks at the big business behind the fayre on our dinner plates.
IN a time of rising mortgage rates, escalating fuel bills and creeping food prices, surely we can’t be expected to turn up our noses at a cheap chicken?
Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall think that’s exactly what we should do. But before we write them off as a couple of celebrity chefs with no idea of how the other half lives, here’s a thought...a chicken retailing at a mere two quid might seem like a bargain, but chances are that its meat will be of such low quality that it will provide only one meal for a family of four. A free-range chicken, retailing at double that, should be sufficiently nutritious and tasty to provide a decent family-size roast, a curry with the leftovers and a risotto, using the stock.
You do the maths.
Fowl Dinners, a campaign led by Oliver, whose campaigning work famously included a heartfelt drive for decent school dinners for the nation’s kids (an experience which left him reeling at the cynicism and sheer slipperiness of government ministers), is lifting the lid on the dark and nasty world of the factory farmed chicken, in a bid to make us reject the cheap chicks in favour of real meat, reared in a decent and humane manner.
Not solely because there is something undeniably sick about a society that treats its animals like so much shit, but also because factory farmed fowl is bad for the environment and bad for us.
This last may come as a surprise to many, given that chicken has become the UK’s most popular meat dish - we eat 12 times as much of it as we used to 30 years ago, amounting to an almost indigestible 855 million broilers a year - partly because it is seen as a healthy alternative to red meat.
But 95 per cent of those 855 million are reared in such unnatural and overcrowded conditions, that they need to be pumped full of growth enhancers and antibiotics to compensate, all of which bodily pollution ends up in our food chain and, ultimately, our bodies.
Factory farming dates from the 1930s, when US farmers with sufficient capital sought ways to meet the huge demand for foodstuffs from America’s burgeoning cities, matching those sprawling epicentres of industrialisation, where human beings were treated like cattle, with industrial epicentres of their own, where cattle were treated like breathing carcasses and the farmhands, truckers and meatpackers, little better.
The factory farming pioneers discovered that they could raise chickens in lots of tens of thousands at a time, in giant sheds where ‘nighttime’ was kept short so the birds stayed awake longer and thus ate more and thus grew more.
They discovered too that they could dispense with seasoned hands, thanks to feeding machines, the practice of binning dying birds rather than bothering to save them, leaving them to wade through their own waste for the short period they would be alive, rather than waste resources cleaning the sheds, and cut-price slaughtering methods.
Make no mistake, factory farming dehumanises its workers too.
In modern America and Europe, a typical broiler chicken - that is, one reared for meat production - lives to only five weeks. It used to take twice as long for a chicken to reach maturity but thanks to selective breeding and drugs, tiny chicks can swell to adult proportions in less than 45 days.
These sudden adults crowd each other in the dimly-lit sheds wherein they spend their lives, to the degree that many die prematurely of suffocation, or suffer ‘hock burn’ - leg ulcers caused by living shank-high in their own excrement - and heart and lung problems, brought on by their need for more and more oxygen to fuel their unnaturally speedy growth.
Given how weakened these creatures’ immune systems are, and how closely they co-exist, it’s little wonder that disease is a constant risk.
And given that we eat these animals, that risk is passed on to us.
Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) states that between 1992 and 1999, one fifth of all reported food-borne sicknesses in the UK were related to poultry consumption.
Until recently, antibiotics were routinely administered to factory farmed birds to try to prevent outbreaks of disease, and also to promote growth.
That’s a lot of antibiotics. In fact, the World Health Organisation estimates that fully one half of all antibiotics produced worldwide are used in farming animals and all because, says CIWF, farmers need to compensate for the appalling way in which they rear livestock.
Antibiotics are only used in humans when necessary. Not so in the case of factory farming.
And because antibiotics are so widely used in this latter, bacteria are widely exposed to them, causing it to mutate into antibiotic-resistant strains, which cause infections that cannot be treated with antibiotics.
These strains can be transmitted to humans in a number of ways, including direct contact, to farm workers for instance, through eating meat contaminated with this resistant bacteria, or contaminated eggs or milk that is insufficiently cooked or pastuerised, or even through consuming fruit and veg that was grown using manure contaminated with the bacteria.
There have been moves to limit this orgy of drug abuse.
In 1997, the EU suspended the use of avoparcin, a noted growth promoter, because it produced a bacterial strain resistant to the antibiotic vancomycin, which is used as a drug of last resort in human medicine. Put simply, if this bacterial strain got you, you were untreatable.
By January 2006, the use of antibiotics as growth promoters was being phased out of European farming.
But it’s not enough, says CIWF, which is calling for a ban on antibiotics being routinely administered as a prophylactic.
This latter will be strenuously resisted by factory farmers, on the grounds that their method of livestock-rearing is untenable without drugs to control the inevitable diseases that such conditions promote.
Another problem with intensive farming is the amount of toxic waste it produces. Human waste, by law, must be treated. Animal waste, however, needn’t be. It can be used as fertiliser, which means it seeps into the food chain by another route, and runs off into watercourses, where it pollutes ecosystems and disrupts wildlife cycles.
But could we survive without mass-scale farms, called ‘operations’ in the US, where chicken stocks can number 100,000 at a time?
Wouldn’t we starve?
Probably not, if you consider that we throw away, as a nation, around 40 per cent of all the food we buy, partly because it’s so cheap, because we’re bombarded with inducements to buy more than we need, and partly because, thanks to long working hours and such ‘progressive’ innovations as the transformation of domestic science from the teaching of cookery skills to an indoctrination into the merits of the processed food industry, we have lost our skills base when it comes to having our chicken and cooking it too.
Furthermore, if our diet was less laden with meat, and more inclined to vegetables and cereals, we would not only be healthier, but there would be much more to go round, meat production requiring much more land and resources, including water, than agriculture.
Chickens going cheep? It’s no joke, you know.

Soaring Food Prices And Energy Bills Pile On New Year Misery

AS bumbling Labour minister Hain ‘forgets’ he had been given £150,000 back in the real world people are counting the pennies as soaring prices bite into shrinking pay cheques.
For while Wendy Alexander and Hain talk airily about mismanaging a few thousands given to them food and fuel price hikes are piling on the pressure for real families.
As first snows fell consumers were confronted with rises in gas and electricity prices which have now been followed by escalating food bills.
The increases recorded in food prices are the steepest since records began† fuelling a rise in the average family’s shopping bill of £750 a year.
And away from the world of New Labour’s champagne socialists it is basic prices which are soaring with Tesco’s frozen peas up from £1.19 to £1.79 and 2.5 kilos of spuds up from £1.78 to £2.18.
Clearly the High Street monster takes it own slogan to heart when it comes to price hikes - “every little helps”.
Meat prices have gone up by an average of almost 4 per cent in the month of December alone.
Now the well oiled PR machines of the big food retailers are being wheeled out to justify the latest price hikes with explanations which range from floods through rising oil prices to the Chinese eating a more varied diet.
However what they fail to mention is that one area where there is no call for belt tightening is in the profits going to shareholders. Indeed in a world of retail gloom and early sales to boost flagging sales food stores are, unsurprisingly, the exception.
Supermarkets continue to see profits rise amidst the gloom and no amount of Bob Hoskins voiceovers and minor celebs wheeling their trolleys across our TV screens can conceal that fact.
Taken with the squeeze on credit and high mortgage rates experts are predicting growing debt, hard times and in some cases bankruptcy for many families in the months ahead.
Yet what relief is offered from a supposed Labour government for people struggling to pay their bills?
No price freezes but a stern lecture from Gordon Brown on how we must tighten our belts, that the ‘nation’ can’t afford extravagant pay rises to pay bills and probably we should all sign three year pay deals.
There will, of course, be one likely exception to the call for pay cuts. MPs are likely to award themselves above inflation rises despite crocodile tears from Brown.
And of course 3.5 per cent of £65,000 a year is rather more than 2 per cent of a low paid workers £15,000.
For older Voice readers this will all have a ‘seen it before’ feel as the first call made in any economic crisis certainly since WW2 has been to freeze wages but leave profits alone.
Despite grave assurances from the chameleon like Chancellor Darling and former socialist Prime Minister Brown all the signs point to 2008 being a year of economic crisis.
The Northern Rock crisis has consumed £25billion so far and all the signs are that private buyers don’t want to touch it with a barge pole.
Even the normally headline hogging Richard Branson has disappeared from the fray.
However Northern Rock is but one sign of a massive financial crisis in which Billions in bad debt threaten the entire globalised money casino.
Indeed so bad is the crisis that key banks and financial institutions are refusing to admit how much bad debt they have and are hiding it in a rich man’s version of putting the unpaid bill behind the mantlepiece clock.
Add in the ingredients of continuing war in Iraq and Afghanistan and the continuing desire by the Bush White House to take on Iran before his political death and a frightening picture emerges.
In 2008 the left will need to maintain its opposition to imperialism and war and deliver solidarity and support to workers who refuse to carry the burden of the crisis through sackings and pay cuts.

A Mighty Heart

Paramount Home Entertainment DVD out now

by Alex Miller

THIS film tells the tale of Daniel Pearl, a journalist working for the Wall Street Journal, who was kidnapped and murdered by a jihadist group in Karachi in January 2002.
However, it focuses mainly on Pearl’s wife, Mariane, who was heavily pregnant at the time of the kidnap, and on the ultimately ineffectual search for Pearl carried out by the Pakistani and US intelligence services.
The acting is certainly very effective, and Angelina Jolie in particular is very convincing in the role of Mariane.
And director Michael Winterbottom does a good job of capturing the tense, chaotic nature of Karachi.
However, the film, regardless of how well it performs at the box-office or in the DVD sales charts, is ultimately a political sleight-of-hand.
While it justifiably highlights the terrible suffering of Pearl’s wife and family, it portrays the various non- American characters in the film as (at best) mere mouthpieces.
I don’t know if it was just the DVD version that I watched, but for long stretches of the film (including some key moments) the dialogue was primarily in Urdu, with no subtitles available.
While this may have helped to capture the tension felt by those non- Urdu speakers who were actually present as events unfolded, it also created the impression that there is an uncrossable divide between the incomprehensible non-white hordes and the fully human and transparent beings speaking English in American or European accents.
Although bits of the film are genuinely realistic, other bits are almost laughingly unrealistic, such as the avuncular portrayal of the American intelligence officer who reassuringly tells Mariane that they’ll find Pearl once a few preliminary arrests have been made, because of the methods ‘they’ (the Pakistani secret services) are happy to use.
The unspoken implication that “they” but not ‘us’ use or condone torture will fool no one acquainted with the basic facts about “extraordinary rendition”.
That the terrorists are always “they” and never western governments acting in our name is made clear by Mariane’s comments following confirmation of her husband’s murder.
In a radio broadcast she informs the audience that Pearl is not the only victim of terrorism that month: at least 10 Pakistani’s have been murdered by Al Qaeda in the same period.
Fair enough, she’s just lost her husband in horrific circumstances, but that this is the best the film can do by way of citing other examples of terrorism - at a time when American B- 52s are pounding countless innocent Afghani civilians into the dust - reveals clearly the assumption underlying the film: western governments, unlike the dark-skinned and incomprehensible jihadists, are themselves incapable of terrorist activity.
Overall, then, although the film is dramatic and compelling, its entirely one-sided portrayal of the “war on terror” won’t go unnoticed by anyone with a bare modicum of political nous.

Haggis, Neeps & Politics

People’s Festival Celebrates Burns the Radical

BURNS scholar Patrick Scott Hogg and stand up comedian Bruce Morton will top the bill at the Edinburgh People’s Festival’s ‘Alternative Burns Supper’ next week.
People’s Festival spokesman Kevin Ferguson believes their celebration will be like no other held in the city this year. He said:
“We reclaim Robert Burns the ‘People’s Poet’ from the prosaic and honour the working man who rebelled against his designated social status, the corrupt politics of his day and advocated international solidarity supporting the progressive revolutionary movements in France, Britain and America.
“In recent years Patrick Scott Hogg and other prominent Burnsian scholars have established beyond doubt the revolutionary political leanings of Robert Burns.
“We are delighted that Patrick, who is in such huge demand at this time of the year, has agreed to join the Edinburgh People’s Festival Burns night celebration. And we are equally delighted to have the one and only Bruce Morton performing too.”
The Edinburgh People’s Festival’s ‘Alternative Burns Night’ takes place on Friday 25 January at 7.30pm in the upstairs function suite of the Meadows Bar, Buccleuch Street. Tickets, including traditional supper are available via the People’s Festival website and are priced £7 and £4 unwaged. [1] www.edinburghpeoplesfesti val.org

The Wild Brunch
Keef Tomkinson

Keef casts his eye across life’s more leisurely pursuits in order to put a wee bit of CULTure into our lives.

I Am Keef - I Believe In Taking Sides* 

Was just writing a column about the American Presidential elections. Taking the piss out of armchair revolutionaries who muse over it and finding the most comical way to say I would vote Democrat in a flash if only see young republicans cry.
But who cares? While it’s the most bling political battle in the world its almost beyond parody. So what to write about?
Bridge cables? Naw. Sport Scotland? Snore. Old Wendy ‘Smudgie Face’ Alexander? It’s funny enough just watching her squirm. Culturally what’s going? Currently I am watching Sam Peckinpah’s, The Getaway. It’s a distraction.
My head is a mess. Should I buy a new TV? Where should me and the little lady go on holiday and when? Why do have so much gas?
Anyhoo. Why not a film review of sorts. I went to that Tom Hanks film on Sunday, Charlie Wilson’s War. For me it was really unsatisfying. It had a great trailer. Tom Hanks is Mr Likeable and there was the hope of a lil’ politics with the fun.
Wow, it’s hitting off in The Getaway. Bank just got robbed and folk got gunned down.
My biggest problem with the film (Charlie Wilson’s... not The Getaway) was that it could not decide what it wanted to be. A film about the Russians being driven out of Afghanistan or a film about the guy who helped organise America’s support to the Afghans.
It certainly does not manage both and fails to give enough background or an exposition of the conflict while skimming over Wilson’s character. Sorry, if you don’t know, he is supposedly the Congressman who helped rally America’s covert agencies to provide billions and training for the Mujahideen.
In terms of the conflict no explanation is given to why the Russians are there or what they want out of the occupation.