UK

G4S strikers say ‘privatisation has to stop’

PCS union members are demanding an end to poverty pay

Confidence on the G4S strike picket line on Whitehall (Picture: Guy Smallman)

By Judy Cox
Friday 08 November 2024

SOCIALIST WORKER

Striking security workers were dancing in defiance on Whitehall on Thursday during the second week of their two-week strike.

The PCS union members, who are outsourced to multinational G4S, work at government departments in central London.

They are fighting for the same pay and conditions as workers who are directly-employed by the civil service.

One of the strikers told Socialist Worker, “The companies’ last offer was 5p more—not exactly tempting. It was an insult. They are making big profits.

“They outsourced our jobs to the company that would do it on the cheap. That means less pay, less sick pay, less paternity and maternity pay for us. People’s taxes go into making profits for this company.”

Strikers’ whistles, music and spirit of solidarity have livened up the streets of Whitehall for the last two weeks.

The worker said, “Now Labour is in, but it has cut student grants and fuel allowances for pensioners. Money gets invested, but it’s going to shareholders not to the workforce. Privatisation just has to stop.

“They subcontract out the jobs to companies who exploit vulnerable people, like students who need to work for cash in hand. We want to be respected, but we are just numbers to them.”

Striker Mohammed told Socialist Worker, “We are striking for a better pay deal and better terms and conditions.

“At the moment, there are staff who are only entitled to statutory sick leave which is not enough. Everyone should have basic sick pay for 20 days a year.”

He added, “Our strike is solid. We don’t just do chanting—we play music and dance. We want to show that our spirit isn’t easy to break. A big favourite is Bob Marley’s ‘Stand up for your rights’ and a really old one, ‘You can’t touch me, I’m part of the union’.

“People come from our PCS union and they give speeches and give us support and keep us informed. We are a very multicultural workforce—we are Asian, African, European and English and we are ­showing unity and solidarity. We believe in what we are doing.”

The strike has boosted workers’ confidence to stand up to the bosses. “If one person stands up, they can be victimised,” one striker said. “If two or three stand up, they can be ignored. But if we all stand together, they have to listen to us.”

Mohammed added, “This is my first time on strike. You gain confidence as the days go by. On the first day, we didn’t know what to do. By the second day, we realised we needed whistles, so we got them delivered.

“We need to be loud, to be noticed. I’m always on the megaphone—you can tell my voice is going.”

Trade unionists should raise solidarity for the G4S security guards.

Right’s lesson from US election is ‘culture wars work’

By dividing and confusing the left, culture wars enable the wealthy to pose as anti‑establishment despite benefitting from the system



By Judy Cox
Saturday 09 November 2024 

SOCIALIST WORKER

The far right in Britain celebrated Trump’s victory. Tommy Robinson claimed he had turned cartwheels in his prison cell. Nigel Farage cheered at Trump’s watch party in Pennsylvania.

The Conservative Party too shared this delight. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch could not wait to nail her colours to Trump’s mast. She demanded that Labour foreign secretary David Lammy apologise for having once called Trump a “neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath”.

Keir Starmer and David Lammy offer no challenge to this right wing juggernaut. Their only strategy is to make concessions, to promise action on illegal immigration and to ramp up state racism. This will only feed the beast.

Others on the left see the election as a reason to stay away from “identity politics” and concentrate instead on economics. But the right will seize on Trump’s election success to stir up ever nastier culture wars.

It believes that Trump has established a new model of success with his vicious attacks on migrants and women and his posing as an insurgent outsider boldly standing up to the “elite”.

Culture wars are about forging new alliances between groups of people with different aims. They have the potential to unite racists and Islamophobes, sexists and anti-abortionists, transphobes, climate change deniers, anti-vaxers and apologists for the British Empire into one movement.

Those drawn to the right get a purpose and a sense of importance. The right tells them they are defending their families, their country and Western civilisation from “enemies within”.

Culture wars also create a bridge between the far right and the mainstream right.

The Great Replacement Theory, for example, promotes the idea that global elites are replacing white people with black and brown immigrants. The theory was spawned by Nazi ideologues but is now regularly trotted out by conservative politicians.

Tory former home secretary Suella Braverman speaks about “cultural Marxism”, a revival of a Nazi conspiracy theory. It suggests Jewish intellectuals are attacking the West.

Kemi Badenoch gushed over US billionaire conspiracy theorist Elon Musk, saying, “I think Elon Musk has been a fantastic thing for freedom of speech. I will hold my hand up and say, I’m a huge fan of Elon Musk.”

This was after Musk fed Britain’s racist riots by repeating claims of police collusion with the Palestine movement.

Culture warriors claim that the left has captured all the key institutions in society—universities, the media, the civil service, public services and even the cops. And, if the establishment is run by the left, only the right wing can be anti-establishment.

Badenoch argues that Western civilisation is in decline, strangled by the “liberal elite”. This bureaucratic elite dominates society, stifles entrepreneurial spirit and risk‑taking, she says.

“In every country,” Badenoch asserts, “the rise of ‘safety‑ism’, stifling of risk, and a bureaucratic class to regulate and control us and protect the marginalised is rising steadily.

“The result of this has been a collapse in average advanced economy growth rates, from 2.7 percent in the 1980s to 2.1 percent in the 1990s and just 1 percent in the 2000s and 2010s.”

This is the height of economic illiteracy, but it makes for easy‑sounding solutions. Just tear up the red tape, drive out the lily-livered civil servants and free the bosses to conjure up economic growth.

The aim of culture wars is to divide and confuse. They demobilise opposition to slashing the welfare state, to tax cuts for the rich and to enriching the very elite they claim to stand up to.

They allow the super-rich to pose as insurgent outsiders. And they have the danger of becoming far more than a debate among politicians and commentators.

Some among the culture warriors know that, sooner or later, these “battles of ideas” will have to be settled with fists and boots.

Trump and the American Nightmare

Tomáš Tengely-Evans explores why Trump’s lies proved so persuasive in the election

Friday 08 November 2024 

SOCIALIST WORKER Issue

The Rust Belt a damning indictment of the US governments’ failures (Photo: Wikimedia commons)

When Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020, he dismissed Donald Trump as an “aberrant moment” in United States history. Trump’s landslide victory this week showed he is anything but.

Its scale was a shattering confirmation of a society in advanced stages of decay. Out of that decay and the Democrats’ failures, Trump and the far right are growing and pulling it rightwards.

More than 40 years of ­neoliberalism have built a traumatised, fearful and ­violent society. The US presents itself as a leader of the “free world”, but it’s a world leader in ­suicide rates, locking people up in prisons, gun violence and drug deaths.

Free market policies, pushed by Republicans and Democrats, depressed ­working class people’s wages, destroyed decent jobs and fuelled inequality.

The US is now one of the most unequal societies in the world. Some 20 percent of wealth flows to the top 1 ­percent—and the top 0.1 ­percent holds roughly the same share of wealth as the bottom 90 percent.

Human suffering and pain lie behind those economic statistics. In 2022, a record 49,500 people killed themselves and the suicide rate was as 14.3 per 100,000 people. That was the highest rate since 1941—until the following year when it rose to 14.7.

Addiction rates are on a ­similar trajectory. The US death rate from drug misuse is the highest in the world at 18.75 per 100,000 people. The world average is 2.08 per 100,000. An epidemic of opioid addiction—flowing from Big Pharma drug-pushing—claimed the lives of over 100,300 Americans in the year ending in April 2021.

Johnstown, Pennsylvania, is a city that knows the toll of drug deaths all too well. For decades its ­skylines were dominated by the vast plants of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, once an icon of US capitalist prowess.

They shut in 1992 and very few of the thousands of steel jobs are left today. Vape stores, fast food ­franchises and boarded-up shops dominate Main Street.

Johnstown is one of many towns and cities that symbolise US decline and form the ­heartlands of “Trump country”. Trump has successfully fed off the accumulated anger and grievances at the effects of neoliberalism.

“Career politicians like Joe Biden lied to you,” Trump told people in Johnstown. “He abused you. He crushed you, your dreams and ­outsourced your jobs to China and distant lands all over the world.”

But Trump, a billionaire backed by a substantial section of big business, offers ­nothing for working class people whether white, black or Latino. So why has the far right, not the left, benefited from the crisis of the neoliberal centre?

First, Trump simultaneously feeds off the crisis caused by the neoliberal centre and builds on its ideas. Politicians justified those neoliberal policies with a liberal ideology that market competition and dog-eat-dog individualism were the basis of human flourishing.

In Neoliberalism’s Demons, US writer Adam Kotsko argues it “confronted us with forced choices that served to redirect the blame for social problems onto the ostensible poor ­decision making of individuals”. So, the response to the deep social crisis in the US can be more right wing solutions, rather than looking to a collective class response.

Mainstream politicians ­pushing racism to deflect blame for their own failures gives the likes of Trump fertile ground. For example, Kamala Harris celebrated the Democrats ­presiding over “lower undocumented immigrants and illegal immigration than Trump when he left office”. She criticised Trump for only building “about 2 percent” of the US-Mexico border wall.

Second, Trump and the far right play on nostalgia for the “American Dream”, a period most associated in the decades that followed the Second World War. It was an era of full ­employment, rising living ­standards and economic boom—the apex of US power in the world. But it was always a nightmare for black people, women and LGBT+ people.

The 1950s was the era of the racist Jim Crow laws in the Southern states, segregation and lynchings. It was the era that ­idealised the “nuclear family” with strict gender roles for women in particular. The ideology of the American Dream presented prosperity as a “birthright” for white Americans.

Many working class people did win the higher living ­standards they had in the 50s off the back of struggles. Workers’ militancy, such as the General Motors sit-down strike in 1936-37 in Flint, Michigan, had forced the US ruling class to make concessions.

Fear of greater revolt pushed the US government and sections of big business to come to an accommodation with trade union leaders. At the same time, they smashed the left for a generation in the “anti-Communist” witch-hunts of the 1940s and 50s. The idea of prosperity as a “birthright” chimed in the popular consciousness.

Trump’s infamous Madison Square Garden’s speech in New York this month dripped with racism and sexism and revealed the far right play book. He tapped into the social crisis facing millions of people, slamming Harris for ­“shattering our middle class” in “less than four years”. He latched onto that deep pain and twisted it against migrants.

“I will protect our workers. I will protect our jobs,” he said. In the next breath he said, “I will protect our borders. I will protect our great families.

“I will protect the ­birthright of our children to live in the ­richest and most powerful nation on the face of the earth.” The American Dream’s notions of birthright were ­interlaced with the deep racism of US society used to divide workers and the poor.

In 1965 Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King said the “Southern aristocracy gave the poor white man Jim Crow”. “When his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not ­provide, he ate Jim Crow, a ­psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man,” he said.

That too is part of Trump’s strategy. He has channelled a lot of people’s anger through whipping up racism, scapegoating migrants and deflecting it onto ­“liberal elites”. It diverts anger and ­attention away from the real elite—­billionaires, bosses and ­bankers—that Trump belongs to.

Four years ago, he promised a Johnstown rally, “We’re going to bring in tremendous numbers of factories.” That was a lie he didn’t deliver on, but he hasn’t lost support.

He promises to restore ­people’s worth and sense of status by going after criminals, drug dealers, migrants and the “woke left”.

This US crisis doesn’t have to benefit the right. Powerful social movements have rocked US society—for example, Palestine on the campuses, Black Lives Matter and the mass opposition during Trump’s first term as president.

Millions of people looked to Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and the “Squad” who call themselves democratic socialists.

They promised a Green New Deal that would invest billions into decent, well-paid jobs for working class people. That became Biden’s Build Back Better programme that curtailed those promises.

Then, Bidenomics effectively turned into an armaments programme with very few green jobs attached. But Sanders, AOC and Co. all defended Biden and the politics of working through the Democratic Party. They lined up behind an administration that deepened the crisis and did little for workers.

In the election, Trump’s message was “Make America Great Again”. The Democrats claimed that “America” was already great. People saw this lie—and the Democrats’ vote collapsed from 2020.

Instead, to combat Trump’s racist agenda, we need a left that doesn’t line up behind the Democrats and looks to struggle on the streets and workplaces.

We saw a glimpse of that with the recent Boeing and dockers’ strikes and there are big class battles ahead with Trump’s agenda. Alongside fighting the far right and racism, the left needs to pose a genuine alternative to capitalism.

In the 1930s Langston Hughes, the great black American poet, poked at those who used nostalgia for an imagined American past. “America was never America to me,” he said.

He said the real task was to “make America again”—to build a different sort of society free from the ravages of exploitation and oppression. “Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, the rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,” the people “must redeem” the country and its vast wealth.

We can only win that through struggle against the far right—and the system that produces it.

 

The UK Government needs a plan to fix our broken food system and turn the tide on the public health emergency

November 7, 2024

Rather than blaming individuals for ‘lifestyle choices’, we need to regulate the food industry, argues Frank Hansen.

Of course we’d all like to see reform/abolition of the House of Lords and the establishment of a democratic system. However, one of the ironies of the UK’s system of bourgeois/feudal “democracy” is that on a few occasions the House of Lords may actually come up with proposals which are better researched and much more progressive than the elected Government. In fact, the headline above is the key conclusion from a report, published last month, by the House of Lords Food, Diet and Obesity Committee.

The report, ‘Recipe for health: a plan to fix our broken food system’, finds that obesity and diet-related disease are a public health emergency that afflicts millions and costs society billions each year in healthcare costs and lost productivity. It demands that the Government should develop a comprehensive, integrated long-term strategy to fix our food system, underpinned by a new legislative framework. It is a report that Labour Party members should welcome and demand that the Government implements.

The Committee was formed in response to the steady increase in obesity, type 2 diabetes and other chronic diet-related conditions. For instance, in the UK, two-thirds of us are overweight, and one-third have obesity. Diet-related conditions are an epidemic, cutting millions of lives short. According to leading nutritionist Professor Tim Spector, who submitted evidence: “One of the main drivers of this increase in ill health is the increase in consumption of industrial, ultra-processed foods (UPFs).

“Large-scale studies show that people who eat the most UPFs have an increased risk of type 2 diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, depression, heart disease, and unhealthy levels of blood fats. We also have evidence from tightly controlled clinical trials that UPFs are linked to increased energy intake – around 500 extra calories per day, coupled with increased hunger.

“Over recent decades, food manufacturers have become experts at producing easy-to-eat, delicious food-like substances that lack beneficial nutrients. With no fibre but masses of sugar, saturated fat and additives, these products play a pivotal role in the health crisis we are currently navigating. The food industry, which only cares about profits, has free rein to create and market these hyper-palatable products that are making us sick. When it comes to UPFs, the UK has some of the weakest standards in Europe. Currently, 60% of the calories we consume in the UK comes from UPFs.”

Health Minister Wes Streeting may recognise the problem, but his ‘solution’ is far from comprehensive, let alone integrated. He appears less concerned about the health of the millions who suffer from diet-related, metabolic health problems and more concerned with productivity and getting ‘obese people’ back to work. No mention of the food industry and its role in the crisis, certainly no mention of regulation.

Apparently his focus, which must be music to the ears of Big Pharma, is to give ‘weight-loss’ jabs, based on the latest generation of drugs, to unemployed people to “help them get back to work”. On the day that Starmer hosted an international investment summit, the Government announced a £279m investment from Lilly, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company to undertake trials in the UK. Streeting added: “The reforms this Government will put in place will open up the NHS to work much more closely with life sciences to develop new, more effective treatments.” Where have we heard that before?!

Unlike the Tories, who shunned ‘nanny state’ intervention, Labour at least recognises that something has to be done to address what is now a national health emergency. But is this the right approach? These are new drugs and the long-term effects are unclear. They are very profitable and costs are high, partly due to rising demand as people seek them out as a ‘quick hack’ for cosmetic as well as health reasons. Do they supply a sustainable solution to weight problems, or do people have to come back to them time and time again?

After all, Big Pharma doesn’t tend to make its monopoly profits from drugs that are ‘one off’ and ‘cure’ people, but from drugs that alleviate symptoms and deliver a long term income stream. There are also ethical issues. Dr Dolly van Tulleken of Cambridge University points out “there are serious financial and efficacy considerations… such as measuring people based on their potential economic value, rather than primarily on their health needs.”

Using these type of drugs may well be part of a more integrated approach, particularly for people who have suffered serious weight-related issues. Currently, the NHS uses bariatric surgery – an operation that makes changes to the digestive system and physically restricts overeating. It is intended for people who need to lose weight, but have not been able to do so through other means. It has proved effective, but is difficult to access on the NHS and has obvious side effects.

However, drugs and surgery should be seen as a last resort not a quick fix for everybody. After all, two-thirds of adults are overweight and an increasing number of children and young people are now affected by diet-related illnesses, including Type 2 Diabetes. Given these numbers, a national integrated approach is needed – currently specialist weight management services only treat 49,000 people a year. A more natural programme of healthy eating could help ease the problem – but we need to define exactly what is ‘healthy’. 

The problem with Wes Streeting’s approach is that he doesn’t really identify the causes of the health crisis, but deals only with quick fixes to tackle its effects. He says that despite the new drugs, individuals still need to remain responsible for taking “healthy living more seriously” as the “NHS can’t be expected to always pick up the tab for unhealthy lifestyles.”

In effect, he blames individuals and the victims for – ‘unhealthy lifestyles’, rather than addressing the real causes – the food we eat, the way it has been industrialised and processed over the past 50 years and the lack of regulation and information over the way it is produced, sold and advertised. This is what has been driving ‘unhealthy lifestyles’, making it very difficult for consumers to make sensible decisions, while delivering excess profits to big food companies, not just in the UK but globally.

In contrast, the House of Lords’ report addresses some of the real causes of the crisis, particularly Government failure to regulate the food industry and its effect on our health.

It notes that “there has been an utter failure to tackle this crisis. Between 1992 and 2020, successive governments proposed nearly 700 wide-ranging policies to tackle obesity in England, but obesity rates have continued to rise. The food industry has strong incentives to produce and sell highly profitable unhealthy products. Voluntary efforts to promote healthier food have failed. Mandatory regulation has to be introduced.”

The report identifies key issues, including the preponderance of sugar, chemicals and UPFs in the food chain and calls for regulation and further research. The proposals may not cover everything, but they provide a solid programme of action with which to start.

The Labour Government needs to have the courage to regulate the food industry, no matter how difficult. If it is done in the right way and combined with community initiatives, involving councils, schools, voluntary groups and local health services, then millions of people will benefit. 

We should lobby for the main recommendations of the report to be adopted by the Government. These are:

• Make large food businesses report on the healthiness of their sales and exclude businesses that derive more than a defined share of sales from less healthy products from any discussions on the formation of policy on food, diet and obesity prevention.
• Give the Food Standards Agency (FSA) independent oversight of the food system.
• Introduce a salt and sugar reformulation tax on food manufacturers, building on the success of the Soft Drinks Industry Levy. The Government should consider how to use the revenue to make healthier food cheaper, particularly for people living with food insecurity.
• Ban the advertising of less healthy food across all media by the end of this Parliament, following the planned 9pm watershed and a ban on paid-for online advertising in October 2025.
• Commission further research into the links between ultra-processed foods (UPFs) and adverse health outcomes and review dietary guidelines to reflect any new evidence. The rapidly growing body of epidemiological evidence showing correlation between consumption of UPFs and poor health outcomes is alarming. Beyond energy and nutrient content, causal links between other properties of UPFs and poor health outcomes have not at the present time been clearly demonstrated. To understand any links, more research is needed.
• Immediately develop an ambitious strategy for maternal and infant nutrition and drive up compliance with the school food standards. This will help break the vicious cycle by which children living with obesity are five times more likely to become adults with obesity.
• Enable auto-enrolment for Healthy Start and free school meals and review the costs and benefits to public health of increasing funding and widening eligibility for both schemes. This is essential to help families living in poverty afford healthy food and to begin closing the gaping inequalities in unhealthy diets and obesity rates.

The main issue that the food industry will resist is the one that will most affect their profits – the regulation of UPFs. At least the Committee has opened up the debate on these, which it describes as “alarming” and called for more research. There is a growing community of scientists and practitioners who are more than willing to accept this challenge. There is also state-of-the-art guidance on healthy eating from Tim Spector’s ZOE organisation and others, which can be accessed free of charge (but not participation) in their app-based programme.

  Frank Hansen is a former Councillor in the London Borough of Brent.

Image: https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/leisure/2024/05/28/study-links-ultra-processed-foods-to-higher-risk-of-early-death/ Licence: Attribution 4.0 International CC BY 4.0

 

Britain’s outdated tax system needs to shift from earnings to capital

November 8, 2024HubMP2012

By Stewart Lansley

Reaction to Rachel Reeves’s long awaited budget has been mixed.  The boost to public spending is to be welcomed, but there were also some big gaps. One of them was the missed chance to begin tackling one of the most fundamental flaws of the tax system: its bias to taxes on income from work rather than from assets (on dividends, capital gains and inheritance). Such a shift could not happen at speed, but the first budget of a new government faced with multiple economic and social crises was a perfect opportunity to signal intent.

While income is taxed at an average of around 33%, wealth is taxed at less than 4%. Yet despite its dismal economic performance since the millennium, Britain is increasingly asset-rich.  As chart 1 shows, private wealth holdings are worth close to seven times the size of the economy, up from three times in the 1970s. Moreover, most of this great surge in wealth has been captured by the already rich.  It also has little to do with a leap forward in wealth creation that would have served the common good. Most of it has been unearned, the product of endemic corporate wealth extraction, the rolling sale of former public assets, and state-induced asset inflation.

Chart 1: Wealth as a ratio of GDP, UK

Strengthening economic performance and social resilience requires a phased and modest shift in tax from income to capital. High levels of tax on earnings distort choices about work and enterprise and weaken the state’s ability to generate sufficient tax revenues.  Through political inertia, the tax system has failed to catch up with the growing importance of wealth over income in the way the economy operates, and does little to dent the growing concentration of wealth holdings at the top. The Gini coefficient for wealth – a summary measure of the inequality gap – is much higher for wealth than income.

While wealth offers security to households, those who need it most are the least likely to be able to fall back on private assets. Indeed, the share of all wealth held by the poorest half of the population has never exceeded a tenth, and has actually fallen since the 1970s. Even a modest shift towards capital taxation would help to build a more progressive overall tax system.

The fall-out from the low taxation on wealth is well illustrated by the role of inheritance. An accident of birth, this remains the dominant source of both aggregate wealth holdings, and a household’s rank in wealth levels across society. Its significance has also risen sharply in recent decades. Those born in the 1980s are likely to receive more than twice the sum relative to their income compared with those born twenty years earlier. Inheritance is the key source of the reproduction of the privileges of the past and plays a big role in Britain’s persistent failure to tackle the great and growing gap in life chances. Moreover, the scale of the transfer from the so-called ‘baby boomer’ generation to the young is set to dwarf all previous wealth transfers, and drive even higher levels of wealth inequality. 

Asset holdings are often little more than passive resources, while big inter-generational wealth transfers can play a counter-productive role in the economy, even more so when they are lightly taxed. Around 36% of all wealth is stored in property and mostly only realised when passed on through inheritance and gifts, where its benefits are enjoyed by the already privileged, and often spent on property. Little of this process contributes to more productive activity, with one of its primary and malign effects to fuel higher house prices.

These fault lines have long been recognised.  “A power to dispose of estates forever is manifestly absurd,” declared the patron saint of economics, Adam Smith, 250 years ago.“The earth and the fulness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity.” 

Smith’s wisdom was often quoted by Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States and the primary author of the founding  Declaration of Independence  in 1776.    Progressive taxation –with those with the broadest shoulders paying more proportionately – is a fundamental principle of tax fairness endorsed by a succession of tax commissions in a variety of countries. Achieving this requires wealth to play a bigger role in financing wider social needs.

Only 3.7% of deaths in the UK result in an inheritance tax charge. This compares with 10% in Germany, and 9.3% in Japan. Chart 2, shows that capital taxes, including in inheritance, make a tiny contribution to the public purse.

Chart 2: Sources of tax revenue, UK, 2023/24 (percentage of all tax revenue)

Note: Capital taxes include stamp duty, inheritance and capital gains tax

A modest and phased shift to capital taxation would help to reduce the illiquid and passive role played by wealth holdings. Even modest rates would release resources for social reconstruction that would otherwise play a negative economic role.  An important effect of higher taxes on top layers of wealth, for example, would be to weaken the volume of what the Italian-born radical journalist and future British MP, Leo Chiozza Money,  called “wanton extravagance”, extreme levels of luxury spending on “non-productive occupations and trades of luxury, with a marked effect upon national productive powers.” One of the most damaging effects of lowly taxed wealth concentration is the way resources are steered away from meeting high social value basic needs to feed the often low social value demands of the rich. Hence the rising social crises facing affluent countries.

Reeves did take some steps to raise the revenue from both inheritance and capital gains tax, but these were too modest to alter the overwhelming dominance of tax on earnings.

An effective strategy for reconstruction, to meet the growing needs of an ageing population and strengthen fiscal resilience, needs to harness, through taxation, a little more of the country’s ill-used and immense private wealth base. 

Stewart Lansley is a visiting fellow at the University of Bristol, a Council member of the Progressive Economy Forum, and the author of The Richer , The Poorer,  How Britain Enriched the Few and Failed the Poor, a 200 year history.

An earlier pre-budget version of this article appeared on the Fairness Foundation’s blog.

Review: Shooting Crows: mass murder, state collusion and press freedom

7th November 2024Leave a Commenton Review: Shooting Crows: mass murder, state collusion and press freedom

“If you read Shooting Crows as fiction you could become critical. Not believable, you would think. Too many dead bodies. Too many evil psychopaths. Too many conspiracy theories. Yes, it might be set in Ireland, but even there, things were surely not that bad”

Geoff Bell reviews ‘Shooting Crows: mass murder, state collusion and press freedom’ by Trevor Birney, published by Merrion Press

If you read Shooting Crows as fiction you could become critical. Not believable, you would think. Too many dead bodies. Too many evil psychopaths. Too many conspiracy theories. Yes, it might be set in Ireland, but even there, things were surely not that bad. Even there, right-wing fanaticism was not that deranged. Even there, the forces of the state were not so deep in collusion with the red, white and blue crazies.

The thing is that Shooting Crows is not fiction. It is not the work of an over-active imagination. It is a real and recent story, or to be more precise a series of stories, each one as shocking as the other. Indeed, “shocking” is something of an understatement.

The first story concerns the historical record of unionist violence in the North of Ireland. Principally, this is how, in the early twentieth century, the Protestant community armed themselves to take on the then British (Liberal) government in protest at its plans for a limited form of all-Ireland self-rule. This was when the gun was brought back into British/Irish politics and stablished a tradition future unionists would look to and follow. The name of the private militia set up in 1912-14, the Ulster Volunteer Force, was adopted by loyalists in the mid 1960s who started killing Catholics, because they were Catholics. This was before the civil rights campaign got underway and before the emergence of the IRA. Thus, the pattern of unionism initiating violence was re-established. 

 Birney then retells the story of one of the most horrific examples of this, the massacre of six Catholic men as they were watching Ireland winning a World Cup football match on television in 1994. The loyalist gang burst into a pub in Loughinisland, County Down, shouted “Fenian bastards” and opened fire on everyone there. None of the victims had any association with the IRA. Again, they were targeted because they were Catholics.

Birney first told this story when he and fellow journalist Barry McCaffrey produced the film No Stone Unturned in 2017. This also named those involved in the massacre and revealed that leader of the gang, Ronnie Hawthorne, was a police informer. One of the sources the filmmakers used was a written testimony from Hawthorne’s wife, others came from within the police.

In the aftermath of the massacre the police declined to properly forensically examine evidence linked to the murders – for example, the car used and then abandoned by the killers, and the clothes and weapons they dumped. The forensic failures were not carelessness: the priority of the police was to protect Hawthorne, not pursue a case against him and his fellow fanatics.

It was not just the police who sought to cover up. The guns used in the massacre were from a shipment bought by the loyalists from apartheid South Africa. The British army and MI5 were fully aware of this deal and did nothing to prevent many of the weapons falling into the hands of known sectarians. Again, protecting their agents who informed them what was happening was their priority.

This is the story No Stone Unturned told. After it was screened, it seemed, the Police Service of Northern Ireland were finally investigating the Loughinisland Massacre, and they even brought in the Durham Police to help them.  But it was not the massacre they investigated, nor was it the state collusion that sanctioned and covered it up. It was Birney and McCaffrey, who were raided in early hours of the morning and eventually charged with breaching the Official Secrets Act and stealing police documents. There was no evidence of this.

Perhaps, the most shocking incident, was when the police were questioning the journalists and asked if they regretted the “hurt and pain” they had caused Hawthorne. Both the journalists and their lawyers could hardly believe their ears. A lawyer asked the police, “I’m sorry, are you asking my client if he regrets causing hurt and pain to a man who the police said murdered six people.” The question went unanswered.

The journalists’ nightmares continued for some time until the Northern Ireland High Court strongly condemned the action of the police and a lower court judge for issuing a search warrant in the first place. Eventually, they were awarded substantial damages.

Such is the horror story meticulously told by Birney in this important book. And remember this. The cover-up of the massacre was undertaken by members of the old discredited Royal Ulster Constabulary, but also by the supposedly “reformed” Police Service of Northern Ireland. The attack on press freedom was sanctioned by the British state; the raids were conducted after the Good Friday Agreement was meant to confine such attacks on civil liberty to the bad old days of the Special Powers Act. And the one British politician who attended the Northern Ireland High Court hearing to show his solidarity with the journalists was David Davis, a Conservative.

 No charges were brought against the Loughinisland killers.

---

• You can grab a copy of ‘Shooting Crows: Mass Murder, State Collusion and Press Freedom’ here or in major outlets.
• Labour for Irish Unity is holding a public meeting at the Wilson Room, Portcullis House, 18 November, 7pm. Speakers include Colin Harvey, Ireland’s Future, and Daniel Holder, Committee for the Administration of Justice (NI). The prospects for Irish unity and legacy legislation that could deal with Loughinisland and similar incidents will be discussed.
• Geoff Bell is an author and an executive member of Labour for Irish Unity. You can follow Labour for Irish Unity on Facebook and Twitter/X.

Managed by robots

November 9, 2024

Mike Phipps reviews Cyberboss: The Rise of Algorithmic Management and the New Struggle for Control at Work, by Craig Gent, published by Verso.

Despite the technical-sounding title, this is fundamentally a book about who wields power in the modern workplace. Gent dismisses from the outset the idea that robots will take over our jobs. “The fact is that, for most practical work, human workers are simply cheaper, more reliable and easier to replace than robots. Rather than being replaced by computers, it is instead the case that ever more workers are being managed by them, by virtue of workers being subject to algorithms.”

Algorithms are now the lifeblood of industrial innovation, contends Gent, affecting care providers, courier services, courts and much more. He looks in detail at the nature of this work and the increasingly invasive technology used to supervise it. Workers already wear ‘smart’ goggles to steer them around complex warehouses. Now Amazon has patented ultrasonic bracelets for use by employees in its ‘fulfilment centres’ that would electronically ‘nudge’ workers towards particular shelved items. Gent labels them “cattle prods-cum-manacles.”

Such technology is trumpeted as helpful to the workers: in fact, it is an aid to ever more controlling supervision of them and the intensification of their workload.

Organising workers in these environments is challenging, especially as many of the larger companies involved are highly adept at thwarting trade unions. Many of the bigger unions have either given up their attempts to get union recognition or else have gone for general agreements at the macro-level that do little to confront the daily exploitation of workers. Newer, smaller unions have tried to address these failings with mixed results.

Alongside the union-busting tactics of the companies, one challenge to organising is that increasingly workers begin shifts at different times and in different locations to each other and are required to stagger their breaks. This is deliberate. As Gent notes, “While attempts to stop workers talking are not novel to algorithmic management, there is a breakdown of sociality that is a by-product of the organisation of workflow for an algorithmically managed worker.”

One worker told the author: “‘I never had a job where I talk less.” Another said that despite more than meeting his productivity target, he was told off by a manager for talking. He described his workplace as “like being in the mafia… like a code of silence.”

Feedback to management is actively discouraged. Workers are repeatedly told to “trust the system” – something that is beyond criticism by mere humans. Consequently, it is not useful for workers to have broader knowledge of the overall logistical process of which they are part, and this ignorance is another aspect of managerial power. Deliveroo workers, for example, are not provided with an explicit performance target – only an email to say whether they achieved it or not. Equally, riders have no idea on what basis orders are distributed between them and whether that changes over time. Yet, from a trade union perspective, demanding greater transparency in how the algorithm works may be a distraction: knowing more about it may not reduce the exploitation involved.

Taking industrial action in such workplaces is also difficult, particularly if the algorithm is robust enough to fill gaps in labour, or redirect work processes to other locations in real time. Gent discusses ways in which workers can subvert the automated process, but many of these methods are individual workarounds and don’t embody collective action. He plays up  the significance of what might be called ‘organised slacking’, but this expression of alienation is a long way from the collective pride in one’s work that effective trade unionism can express.

Workers in these jobs are often highly atomised and the workplace prevents few opportunities to communicate. How much appetite do union organisers have for bringing workers together outside the workplace to help build trust – and would the workers themselves see this as useful, given the high turnover in such work? Can local authorities play a role in enforcing better health and safety at such workplaces, not just on a physical level, but in promoting the psychological wellbeing of workers in their jurisdiction?

More broadly, the business model of much of this exploitation is based on keeping the customer satisfied. But what if consumers stopped using these systems? This looks far-fetched. But Gent’s pessimism about effective workplace resistance suggests we may have to think the improbable.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, our culture of consumption, contributing to widespread commercial manipulation and alienation, is bad for us as individuals, as a society and as a planet. Increasingly people are exploited by financial institutions on the basis of their indebtedness; and meaningless, exploitative jobs are just another mechanism for wage-workers to service their debts. The system needs to be – and can only effectively be – challenged in its totality.  

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.

‘We must be relentless in demonstrating an alternative to right wing demagoguery’

Jovan Owusu-Nepaul   

9th November, 2024,

Credit: Denny Pictures/Shutterstock.com

As the Democrats begin to dissect their loss, progressives around the globe will undoubtedly insert their hot takes as they try to undergo a political sociology of the election to further empiricise American voter behaviour and contrast it against their own.

And shamelessly I will present mine.

It was clear that the simplicity of the Trump campaign tapped into a type of emotion and instinct, which was able to be underpinned by a counter-factual narrative. An emotional rage that was presupposed around a sense of decline, and a libertarian instinct that is cautious of government and its ability to yield positive results.

Why Trump won

Trump’s effectiveness has always been his ability to reimagine the future of America. Deriding the record of his opponents in office, and harking to a past that never was, and a future that could never be.

However, in so doing, the political aspirations and re-imagination by Trump’s Republican Party transpired into a meticulousness in broadening their electoral base, election after election.

Courting a new generation of voters, disrupting consensus, and demonstrating that no political party has an absolute monopoly on any community.

By leaning into harsher narratives on immigration, stricter laws on reproductive rights, and a more protectionist economy, Trump was able to acknowledge and differentiate the concerns of a core constituent of American voters, that despite his anti-immigrant rhetoric resonated across a swath of American society.

Like Britain, first, second and third generation communities may be informed by immigration but not defined by it.

And just as it is here, progressives are waking up to the fact that diverse communities constitute an irrefutable body of voters where political allegiances are not forged solely by approximated value, principle or ideology, but rather aspiration and state effectiveness to deliver.

Delivering to bring down the cost of living, to protect the border and to reassert the nation state on the global stage. Voters who the Democrats once regarded as their own, evidently no longer command their support.

Rise of right wing populism

And, if it wasn’t apparent before, the re-emergence of Trump affirms little room for complacency.

Here in Britain, I think we can draw some correlations to the rise of right wing populism and the potential hindrances it presents for those who want to see a progressive society.

Today, socialists and social-democrats alike, have to do away with an assumed ignorance that attempts to scientifically understand lived realities and visceral political emotion.

Arguably, there needs to be a return to the understanding of material conditions – how does labour and capital actually interact with each other in a modern economy and what are the outcomes, as well as re-developed critique of the current political economy and a re-imagination as to how our society can be organised.

Interrogating who it serves, and how can is this reimagination essential to quell the rise of the populist right here at home.

British right wing populism may not arrive in the form of a hyper-celebritised figure whose career has been carefully curated to maximise power and influence, but equally, it could do.

Progressives in western democracies must not concede ground in the face of right wing populism and a world that is in retreat. Rather, as the world tilts ever closer to the new axis of populism to win elections, socialist and social-democratic governments must reassert and renew our values and political methodology for today.

This means ensuring our political programme in government delivers on the promises of the modern social contract, and clearly identifies a broad and multifaceted constituent in our society. For me, that would be ‘the working class’.

A political programme that addresses fundamental concerns around poverty, inequality, wage stagnation and migration, but centres community cohesion as the method to address issues. An international community as well as a local one.

In acknowledging the limitations of the centre-left in power, we must, with value and principle, facilitate community and individual agency to counter growing disaffection, and provide scope for answers to emerge from ‘below’.

Finding an alternative

As the adage goes, a hungry man is an angry man; – with that in mind, our efforts must be relentless in demonstrating an alternative to right wing demagoguery and collectively embrace something new, bold, and necessary.

With community, individuals and the state working in collaboration, there is always scope to address the pertinent issues that global capitalism as arranged today presents.

Trumpsters weren’t just the rallying ralliers attending MAGA coated stadiums, waving placards and chanting ‘Build the Wall’. Trump voters truly were the silent majority.

And here, if we don’t resonate and attend to the silent majority, our ability to truly create an equitable and prosperous society becomes more hastily limited.

Jovan Owusu-Nepaul

Jovan Owusu-Nepaul was Labour's candidate in Clacton for the 2024 general election.

View all articles by Jovan Owusu-Nepaul

UK

36,000 people sign petition calling for Keir Starmer to stand up to Donald Trump

Chris Jarvis 

Yesterday
Left Foot Forward

It calls on Starmer to 'confront him directly and stand up for our values'.

More than 30,000 people have signed a petition calling for the prime minister Keir Starmer to ‘stand up’ to Donald Trump following his election as president of the USA. It calls on Starmer to ‘confront him directly and stand up for our values’.

After Trump was declared the winner of the election, Starmer congratulated him on his victory.

The petition brands Trump a ‘rogue’ president and criticises his positions on the climate crisis, Vladimir Putin and the inclusion of the NHS within trade deals.

It goes on to conclude: “we need to ensure that our PM starts off on the right foot. We need to let him know that the country is asking him to be bold, to be brave and to hold the values we all hold dear front and centre when dealing with Donald Trump.”

The petition is hosted by campaign group 38 Degrees.