SOCIALIST UNITY

Another suprising policy being announced by Gordon Brown’s government. From the Guardian:

The government will nationalise recession-hit private schools by turning them into state-funded academies, ministers have confirmed. Headteachers predict that some struggling fee-charging schools will seek to join the scheme to stave off closure, as more parents desert the private sector.

There are warnings, too, that thousands of pupils may seek places at already-stretched state schools this September if private schools fail.

The schools minister, Jim Knight, said the government would consider applications for academy status from fee-charging schools affected by the downturn in areas where there was demand for more school places.

Anthony Seldon, the headteacher of Wellington College, said becoming an academy would not be the “move of choice” for many private schools, but it could be their only option. Teachers’ leaders said it amounted to a “bail-out” for failing private schools.

Five private schools, including two in Bristol, have already joined the academies scheme and another is to follow in September. In areas with many private schools, competition is fierce.

Under the programme, private schools in England can convert to academy status by dropping fees and entry tests, and promising to comply with the admissions code and teach the core national curriculum. They gain state funding but retain more independence around employing staff and their wider curriculum than other state schools.

Knight said: “The current economic situation might lead to a greater interest in the academies programme from independent schools. We will continue to consider applications from independent schools in areas where there is a need for additional good secondary school places, and where that independent school becoming an academy can support this goal.”

He insisted any private school joining the programme would have to adopt “fair, non-selective, admissions policies”.

Local authorities are already warning of an influx of pupils who would normally have gone to private schools. In west London, councils report record applications for state schools this year. An Audit Commission report last month revealed a surge, triggered by families wanting to take their children out of fee-paying schools, with London worst hit.

John Dunford, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, thought it likely that some schools would approach the government. “In the recession, the numbers applying to private schools will inevitably fall. Some independent schools will choose academy status rather than closure.”

Seldon said: “In some cases, it’s possible schools will want to become academies. There are benefits - above all, avoiding closing down.

“It’s not a move of choice. People want to retain their freedoms, and independent schools still have more freedom than academies. I’d expect more schools to become academies, which is at least a way of keeping your tradition, staff and students together. I would expect more mergers, takeovers by chains of schools, and slimming down in the sector. There is huge anxiety, a lot of preparation, but as yet very little pinching being felt.”

Nearly 600,000 pupils attend private schools, around 7% of the total school-age population. Private school numbers held up in 1991, the first full year of the last recession, but then fell and took seven years to recover. They have since climbed to levels not seen since the 1960s. Over the same period, academic results in the state sector have also improved substantially, in some cases rivalling private schools.

Tony Little, the head of Eton, said in a newspaper interview earlier this week: “I think it’s pretty evident that for everybody there are going to be difficult times and there are going to be casualties. We are entering uncharted territory. I think we are going to be in for a difficult time, and may have difficult decisions to make.”

Opponents of the academy scheme said it was a major shift. Academies were devised to target children in the poorest areas. John Bangs, of the National Union of Teachers, said: “It’s bail-out for those schools. It’s the antithesis of the original expectation of the programme to meet the needs of disadvantaged pupils.”

The five private schools which have become academies say their conversions were not prompted by financial troubles, but two are in Bristol, which has among the highest concentrations of private schools in the country.

In an extremely significant develpment, Gordon Brown has empowered what could be the biggest council house building programme since the 1950s. As the Times reports:

Treasury rules that have stopped local authorities from building social housing should be relaxed to allow councils to borrow more money and to keep the proceeds from rents and sales, the Prime Minister said.

The changes, which could be introduced within months, would help to reverse the dramatic fall in homes built by councils since Margaret Thatcher introduced the right to buy policy in the early 1980s. Last year only 375 council homes were built.

Thousands of houses could be constructed by councils in the next few years on land that already has planning permission but where cash-strapped private developers hit by the recession have pulled out of projects. …

Mr Brown told council leaders in London yesterday that town halls had a vital role to play in getting Britain out of the recession. “In the past we have placed restrictions on local authorities delivering social housing,” he told a conference held by the New Local Government Network. “But, today, let me be clear: if local authorities can convince us that they can deliver quickly, and cost effectively, more of the housing that Britain needs . . . then we will be prepared to give them our full backing and put aside anything that stands in their way.” ….

Council chiefs welcomed the opportunity last night to take a bigger role in housebuilding, although they have privately warned officials that the changes will not be easy to implement. Land would have to be identified and town halls would have to secure finance from banks or public bonds at a time when credit is hard to come by.

Last night the Local Government Association said that the proposed changes would give real incentives for councils to build more housing for some of society’s most vulnerable people and for the thousands of people who are being repossessed.

This represents a major shift in government policy, and one that should be entirely welcomed by the left and the trade union movement

Galloway: ‘It’s about decent jobs, available to all’

Reacting to news of wildcat walkouts from construction sites across Britain, Respect MP George Galloway says:

“Despite attempts to confuse and misreport, the fundamental issue that’s led thousands of construction workers to defy the anti-union laws and walk off the job is simple: decent jobs, open for all to apply for.

“These walkouts come after years of the construction conglomerates trying to weaken union organisation, divide up workforces and introduce super-exploitation across the industry.

“Union activists have told me of unofficial blacklists operating, made all the more widespread by a culture of subcontracting to cut-throat companies.

“We used to have a nationally-owned energy sector, which provided secure and relatively good jobs as well directly employing building workers and entering long term contracts with construction companies.

“Now we’ve got privatisation, chaos and a race to the bottom where employers across Europe are attempting to drive down pay and conditions.

“That’s why the defence of national agreements is so important. It is the only way whereby working people can raise up conditions in the worst companies to those where unions are better organised and have won a fairer share.

“So those little Englanders or downright racists who claim they are supporting the construction workers’ walkouts are doing no such thing, because they oppose the very trade union strength that makes a national rate for the job possible.

“The Unite union – including the TGWU, which I’ve been a member of for over 30 years – has always stood against scapegoating and discrimination. And it’s stood against the exploitation of foreign workers as a means to lowering pay and conditions here.

“The union has been calling for national agreements to prevent undercutting, and for jobs to be open to all construction workers, without blacklisting or discrimination.

“That’s got my support. If Gordon Brown really wanted to help construction workers he would rigorously enforce the highest employment standards instead of playing to the right wing gallery with slogans about British jobs, for British workers.”

STRIKE ACTION ESCULATES AS WORKERS FIGHT FOR THE RIGHT TO WORK, But it should come as no surprise!

I spoke to Jerry Hicks a few minutes ago. Jerry is the left candidate in the forthcoming election for General Secretary of the Amicus section of Unite. Jerry tells me he has been in touch with the strikers, and this is very far from being a racist or reactionary strike. Indeed, one protester contacted Jerry after reading one of his election leaflets, and had decided to join Unite on the basis of Jerry’s socialist arguments - there is no way that a racist would agree with Jerry Hick’s explicitly socialist campaign.

Jerry points out that socialists, and members of Respect are very welcome at these protests, and we should oppose the attempts by the far-right BNP to hijack these working class protests towards their own racist and anti-working class agenda.

Earlier today Jerry Hicks released a statement reminding us that an emergency meeting of the national construction shop stewards forum took place in London as long ago as the 8th January. The meeting discussed the escalating crisis in construction following a series of protests in November and December of last year, over employment rights and also the proposed exclusion of UK workers by foreign companies on power stations and other major UK contracts.

The meeting was originally called for at Newark on the 3rd December following a series of protests at the gates of Staythope Power Station. At the meeting shop stewards voted overwhelmingly to organise a programme of demonstrations toward targeted construction projects within the UK power generation sector.

Shop stewards and trade union activists find it is hard enough as it is to get a job in the industry because of the black listing by the employers. It is a way of reducing their costs and attempting to break union organisation on the major projects.

Rank and file members are preparing for mass disruption on projects throughout the country that refuse to recognise union national agreements. There will be organised demonstrations strikes and mass disruption. We are preparing for a battle to defend our jobs. Jerry Hicks a candidate in the coming election for General Secretary in the UK’s biggest union Unite-Amicus is supporting the action. He was present at a recent protest at Staythorpe power station where he sustained a fractured leg, having been assaulted by the police.

He said “This should come as no surprise to anyone. The employers have deliberately and actively been looking for ways to exploit cheap labour while covering their eyes and ears to the growing rage of discontent and ignoring all the warning signs, it’s outrageous”, Mr Hicks went on to say, “To its shame the union leadership failed miserably to grasp the nettle months ago when the dispute was a crisis in the making. The union needs to confront the employers and organise a national campaign for industrial action.”

The employers watch and listen to everything we say and do. If the union does little and says even less they drive the boot in harder and our situation gets worse. This is not about race or prejudice it is about the exploitation of labour, playing one worker against another. It is about the employers trying to break nationally agreed arrangements and in doing so it is an attack on the union.

Gordon Brown, who at the last Labour party conference said ‘British jobs for British workers’, has created a huge problem all of his own making. He can no longer simply sit on his hands waiting on the sidelines.

Meanwhile, other energy companies are observing what happens next as they seek to further exploit the cheap foreign labour market.
This issue is as a result of the Employers deliberately exploiting a situation, the union leaderships woeful lack of response and Browns pronouncement, Now they act like the like the three monkeys. Hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil.

Hundreds walk out of their workplace. On the second day the strike spreads, pulling up to a thousand workers out on secondary action across sites in Northern England and Scotland - much of it illegal under the anti-trade union laws Labour has, to its eternal shame, left on the statute books. In short, an outbreak of the very ’spontaneous’ actions of our class that would normally excite the left in this country. Except there appears, at first glance, a racist fly in the militant soup.

According to the BBC, on Wednesday the Lindsey oil refinery in Lincolnshire awarded a portion of a £300 million construction project to an Italian firm, which, according to reports, will be using Italian and Portuguese workers. At a time of rising unemployment, you can understand why the local union, Unite, and many of the workers are angry about this development. Quoted on the BBC, Unite’s Bernard McAuley says “there are men here whose fathers and uncles… built this refinery from scratch. It’s outrageous.”

But, somewhat surprisingly, it is left to the Daily Star(!) to show this dispute is about class, not race. An anonymous scaffolder tells the soaraway Star “we need to make a stand now. This is not a racist protest. I’m happy to work hand-in-hand with foreign workers, but we are not getting a look in. There are guys at this site who had been banking on that work and then it gets handed to an Italian firm. It’s about fairness.” No doubt some of these workers will have attitudes a lot less enlightened than the chap above.

British bosses are past masters at using race, ethnicity and nationality to divide and conquer both at home and abroad in their former colonial possessions. Drafting in migrant labour from overseas is a tried and tested method of undermining the pay and conditions of workers. Turning on the workers who come in to take advantage of employment opportunities opening up plays directly into the bosses’ hands - it obscures the fact it is they who are attacking and driving down wages, and therefore the responsibility lies with them. Unsurprisingly, the mainstream of the labour movement has a less then spotless record when it comes to this. For example, while in the North West the T&G arm of Unite have done some good work amongst Polish workers, trade unions as a whole have done little to combat knee-jerk xenophobia of this type.

When the bosses divide our class along the lines of race and nation, we are weaker. Instead of capitulating to the anti-immigrant sentiment fanned by the gutter press, unions must demand legislation that prevents employers from taking on workers at below the basic rates of its workforce. Unfortunately, as this appears to be beyond the political imagination of many a trade union leader, it falls to the small and scattered forces of the left to make this case at the refinery gates.

This piece also appears at A Very Public Sociologist.

One of the salient features of the political crisis surrounding the economic downturn is the lack of any alternative economic policy commanding consensus on the left.

Yesterday’s article in the Morning Star by Ian Johnson denigrating “quantative easing” is profoundly misplaced. Quantative easing is essentially the idea that the government should print more money

Now it has to be said that printing more money is a strategy that is not working so well in Zimbabwe at the moment, and as Ian Johnson reminds us: “The policy of printing money was notoriously tried by the Weimar Republic in Germany with catastrophic results. In January 1921, there were 64 marks to the dollar. By November 1923, this had changed to 4,200,000,000,000 marks to the dollar. ”

But in modern day Zimbabwe, and in Germany in the 1920s the problem was runaway inflation, whereby creating more money was fuelling the crisis as wages became progressively more worthless. This simply isn’t the problem we are facing in Britain today, where a much greater problem is debt deflation, and there is effectively no inflationary pressure.

In a nut shell, with house prices falling, and in many cases wages falling (as companies suspend bonus payments, or trade unions negotiate wage reductions in exchange for keeping jobs) - this means that those millions of households who have big mortgages, and large unsecured debts suddenly see the real value of their debts increasing relative to their income and declining asset values.

This is particularly true as the net interest rate which really affects you as a borrower is the difference between the nominal interest rate and inflation. For example, if inflation (and wage increases) were running at 15%, then a nominal interest rate of 16% is only a net interest rate of 1%. But if the inflation rate is LESS than your interest rate, then the true value of your loan repayments is becoming an increasing proportion of your income.

In these circumstances, the economically rational response on an individual level is to cut back on spending, and try to reduce your debt levels. But while this diverting of income to debt reduction is rational and beneficial for each individual, the collective effect over millions of borrowers doing the same thing is a dramatic decline in consumption, leading to lower sales, in turn impacting the manufacturing, distribution and retail sectors. This further decreases economic confidence, contributing to a liquidity crisis, as banks refuse to lend to companies they suspect may go under. Capital investment dries up as it no longer seems rational for capital to invest in manufacturing or retail.

It is a spiralling Teufelkreis  that has a disastrous impact upon the real economy.

That is why Ian Johnson is so misguided to argue that Gordon Brown “is unable to grasp the fact that money is a measure of value and the tactic of simply printing more money with no corresponding real value means that, ultimately, he is printing worthless “promises to pay,” creating yet more fictitious capital.”

Money and debt are an integral part of the economic system, and there is nothing fictitious about the huge levels of debt that most working class people endure in Britain today.

Dave Osler wrote a very good article this week, that I recommend you to read. This is realy good socialist journalism, explaining complex ideas clearly and insightfully. As Dave points out: “IF YOU want one statistic that neatly summarises the impact of the credit crunch on the non-banking classes, try this one; the number of new car sales in Britain last month was down 47.5% on December 2007.”

Dave correctly describes the government response: “Essentially, the bulk of the £2.3bn headline figure is not even cash up front, but comes in the form of guaranteeing that amount in loans from the European Investment Bank and others.

“That will at least provide liquidity, and hopefully help with the development of more eco-friendly vehicles. Good. But it still leaves motor manufacturers with the basic problem that they are producing products that not enough people can afford to buy. This is, in other words, a clear manifestation of what Marxists rightly call a crisis of overproduction”

Dave concludes: “to limit government intervention to supply side measures, as the business secretary has effectively done in this instance, is clearly hopeless. Instead of coming up with a series of piecemeal as-and-when assistance plans, sector by sector, the priority should be to deliver a co-ordinated massive fiscal stimulus across the entire UK economy.”

So why not just stimulate the economy by reducing the threshold for the lowest tax band, and thus directly giving money to people? Well in its own right that would be a progressive and useful measure, but it wouldn’t solve the problem if people only used their extra income to pay off the debts, as that would still amount to giving money to the banking sector – although by a circuitous root.

The different tack is “Quantative easing”, combined with forcing interest rates down as low as possible. Essentially, printing more money dilutes the value of the bank’s debts.

Graham Turner argues that while the government’s current measures may have some merit, they are insufficient:

“These bailouts were aimed at the symptoms, rather than the cause. Money markets are frozen because nobody knows how far property prices will slide, or the scale of losses banks will suffer. Banks are deemed insufficiently capitalised for the same reason.

“The policy response of Western governments has, therefore, been back to front. If they solved the underlying problem – chronic property deflation on a scale not seen since the 1930s – liquidity will eventually return.”

Yesterday’s refusal by the Republicans in Congress to back President Obama economic policies, and David Cameron’s Tories continuing love affair with laissez faire, represent a break in the economic consensus between the major parties. Or perhaps more accurately, the new interventionist tilt of Obama and Brown represents a discontinuity with neo-liberalism. Quite simply there really is a developing and significant difference between Obama and Brown on one side; and the Tories and Republicans on the other.

Although it would be correct in the abstract to argue that the crisis of capitalism could optimally be solved by a socialist economic system, we are not in a political context where that argument has any resonance with the political mainstream. Therefore in Britain, the interventionist measures taken by Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling should be offered qualified support by the left and the trade unions as a step in the right direction: however we should be arguing for more boldness, nationalising the banks, cutting interest rates still further, and quantative easing.

Please publicise widely and demonstrate against the Colonel Geva Rapp,
deputy commander of the Israeli Ground Forces in Operation Cast Lead against
Gaza. He should be charged for War Crimes and should not be
travelling freely in the UK.

DEMONSTRATE TODAY
*Day & Date: Thursday 29th January (today)
*Time: 6:00pm (Talk starts at 6:30pm)
*Venue: The Jewish London Student Centre in Euston, 163 Euston Road.*
*Speaker: Colonel Geva Rapp, the head of the ground operations in Gaza
(Operation Cast Lead)!

STOP THE WAR COALITION NEWSLETTER
No. 1082 29 January 2009
Email office@stopwar.org.uk
Tel: 020 7278 6694
Web: http://www.stopwar.org.uk

VIVA PALESTINA:
A LIFELINE FROM BRITAIN TO GAZA

A convoy of aid will be leaving Britain for Gaza on Saturday
14 February. The Viva Palestina convoy was initiated by George
Galloway MP, who says, “The death toll in Gaza is rising,
while the world’s leaders and media look away in search of a
new story. We will not look away. The Palestinians in Gaza
need our help now, just as they did when Israel’s bombs and
illegal weapons were dropping.” (See the Viva Palestina
website: http://tinyurl.com/awonzd  )

The Viva Palestina convoy now has volunteers across the
country, collecting aid and organising vehicles. There are
already 20 vehicles in the convoy, including a fire engine,
ambulances, trucks and a boat.

The response to the aid collections has been tremendous. All
the convoy vehicles in the London area have been filled. The
convoy no longer needs medicines. Collections for clothes and
other items are still taking place outside of London. If you
want to contribute or help in the collections, contact the
convoy organiser in your area or contact the volunteers
co-ordinator. For contact details see
http://tinyurl.com/au2lfm

The convoy will travel through France, Spain, Morocco,
Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and through Rafah into Gaza. A
map and details of the route can be seen here:
http://tinyurl.com/dmwn28

Viva Palestina is being funded by donations. See here for how
to donate: http://tinyurl.com/araqp2

The Viva Palestina convoy is supported by the Stop the War
Coalition, the Anglo-Arab Organisation, several British trade
unions and a large number of Muslim organisations.

HOW TO CONTACT VIVA PALESTINA:
Go to http://tinyurl.com/cjllo3