September 22nd 2012: MARCH FOR INDEPENDENCE

Dont just talk the talk, walk the walk - All out on 22nd September.

Scotland Out of Britain - Britain Out of Ireland.

A couple more Red Action stickers from the early 1990s...

(Please note: All address' are long defunct - as is the organisation, if not the ideals)

"Against the common enemy...." Red Action stickers

A blast from the past... so to speak.

A couple of stickers put out by Red Action during the 1980's and early 1990's...

(Please not that the address given is no longer in use and the organisation no longer active)

China, Britain, the Olympics and capitalist media

China, Britain, the Olympics and capitalist media

By Caleb T. Maupin on August 18, 2012 » WORKERS WORLD

3

A revolutionary youth’s perspective

Four years ago, the Summer Olympics were held in China. The U.S. media, from right-wing Fox News to the liberal pundits of MSNBC, had a great deal to say about the host nation. Claims were made about China’s air quality due to pollution. Tibetan separatists assaulted a woman in a wheel chair while snatching the Olympic torch in Paris. The anti-China and anti-communist attacks and rhetoric seemed endless. The China bashers were given a multimillion-dollar megaphone, before millions of viewers, to call for the U.S. to boycott the Olympics and paint the Chinese government as the face of evil.

This year, however, the Olympics were held in London, and the tone of the press was quite different.

But here are some facts to consider about these two countries.

No corner of the globe has been untouched by the lust for wealth and profits of the British Empire, the British capitalists, or the plundering monarchs who preceded them. Their human rights violations have gone on for centuries.

Let us not forget the infamous “Opium War,” when Britain declared war against China for refusing to accept the importation of narcotics.

British settlers throughout Africa colonized, exploited and killed millions of people, indisputably. It was Britain that once colonized Zimbabwe, calling it “Rhodesia” after a brutal imperialist thug named Cecil Rhodes. The revolution led by Robert Mugabe kicked the British out, and they have not forgiven Zimbabwe, especially as it redistributes stolen land back to the people.

It was against Britain that the people of India fought for independence, only to face brutal repression. It was Britain that issued the Balfour Declaration, allowing the earliest settlements on Palestinian land, and paving the way for decades of Zionist terror, war and apartheid against the Palestinian people.

British troops currently occupy the North of Ireland, with a record of torture and murder there that is miles long.

British bombs recently tore apart Libya, as they helped lead a NATO crusade for oil. Britain has killed thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan.

British workers, youth face austerity

Conditions inside Britain itself are not so great either. The British government is imposing austerity. Public sector workers in Britain are being rapidly laid off.

College students are facing privatization and fee hikes, and being arrested when they protest these attacks. British youth are taking to the streets and fighting the police. Like many youth throughout the world, they face a future without hope inside a dying capitalist economy.

Fascist thugs like the English Defense League are terrorizing the immigrant communities. The open fascists of the British National Party represent the country in the European Parliament.

If a government’s real or alleged crimes are grounds for a boycott, Britain fits these criteria perfectly.

But such information hasn’t appeared in the Olympic coverage. The editorial pages and pundits of cable news have remained silent about Britain’s ugly history as a founding pioneer of racist colonialism and capitalist imperialism.

The banks and corporations that plunder the world have no problem with Britain. Many of their giant banks are even headquartered in London. The British government, from the right-wing racist Tories to the “socialists” in the Labour Party, are not merely their friends, but their hired stooges as they sit atop a world empire.

China’s story is quite different

In 1949, China had a revolution. The brutal autocrat Chiang Kai-Shek, who was adored by the British and U.S. ruling classes, was driven out. Mao Zedong announced, “The Chinese people have stood up!” The drug addiction which Britain reinforced with the Opium War was nearly wiped out in the following decades. The signs in China’s parks that said, “No Dogs or Chinese Allowed,” were removed. Women emerged with unbound feet.

Today, instead of trading with Britain, the old exploiter and colonizer, many African countries are happy to do business with the People’s Republic of China.

China’s history, as celebrated in its opening ceremonies four years ago, contains truths that are quite threatening to the banks and corporations. They show that the capitalist world order of profits and misery is not the only option. A quarter of humanity opted out of bondage with a people’s revolution in 1949, and they are better off as a result.

In the opinion of the ruling elite, Britain, with its unemployment, colonialism and racism, sets a much better example for the global 99% to follow. The last thing the global 1% who rule Britain, the U.S., and most of the world want us to hear, are the words Mao Zedong once said to the people of China: “It is right to rebel!”

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Tory housing plans for the poor: A recipe for ghettoisation

Housing is a devolved issue, but the tory war on the poor will not pass us by, the repercussion of theses attacks hurt us all. We need independence, our people should never be punished and impoverished because of the selfish electoral whims of the English middle-class. We must shape our social policies on the needs of our people not on the greed of Englands wealthy. - The REAL Scottish Defence League.

Comment

A recipe for ghettoisation
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/news/content/view/full/122898

Monday 20 August 2012

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Tories are obsessed with council housing - not searching for ways to improve it but on the constant lookout to run it down.

Housing Minister Grant Shapps suggested earlier this year increasing the incentive to council tenants to buy their homes and reduce the availability of council housing for homeless people.

Nick Boles MP is the latest comfortably off ex-public schoolboy to dream up a scheme to degrade what remains of council housing.

Needless to say, he's never lived in a council house, having grown up on the family farm in Devon before being educated at Winchester and Oxford and advising post-Yeltsin-coup Russia on the privatisation of state assets.

Doubtless this stood him in good stead for his latest project, fronting his Policy Exchange report Ending Expensive Social Tenancies, which advocates selling all publicly owned properties valued at more than the area average house price.

Not that he's opposed to all public funding of real human need. Boles felt justified in claiming £678 for Hebrew lessons to converse better with his Israeli partner.

Enough of Boles and on to Policy Exchange report author Alex Morton, who tells us: "Social housing tenants deserve a roof over their heads but not one better than most people can afford, particularly as expensive social housing means less social housing and so longer waiting lists for most people in need."

Quite how he comes to this conclusion is baffling since the reasons for a shortage of council housing are twofold - too much is being sold and too little built.

The report posits that selling off above-average-price housing - about 20 per cent of the total - would enable £4.5 billion to be raised each year to build new cheaper homes.

However, the government has told local councils that if they spend money on new-build housing they must raise rents to 80 per cent of the market rate and limit tenancies to five years.

As construction union Ucatt points out this is a recipe for ghettoisation, "with social housing tenants forced to live on the cheaper outskirts of towns and cities."

One of the most positive aspects of the Labour government's post-World War II council house-building programme was that council homes were not restricted to the poorest areas but spread across towns and cities, reducing social segregation.

The conservative coalition is intent on reversing this process by cutting housing benefit for private tenants to drive poor people out of better-off areas and even to relocate large numbers from London boroughs to the Midlands and north of England.

The Policy Exchange proposal is the other side of the same coin, reducing the overall value of public investment in housing and undermining tenants' choice of where to live.

The growing proportion of the population who cannot afford to buy their own home in the private housing market are under constant attack by the government and its private landlord allies, with private rents rising at double the rate of wages.

Housing charity Shelter reported at the weekend that the private sector has forced up rents to new record highs every month, causing families to "to cut back further on food and other essentials."

The problem lies with treating housing as a market rather than a service to meet need, which would be best resolved by a government-led and financed mass council house-building drive similar to that launched after the war.

Tories plan ghettoes for council tenants

Tories plan ghettoes for council tenants
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/news/content/view/full/122921

Monday 20 August 2012

by Tony Patey

True-blue Tory class hatred reared its ugly head again yesterday as the fast-buck jockeys embraced a brazen right-wing gimmick to hammer council-house dwellers.

Conservatives dropped their sanctimonious masks to slaver over a bizarre idea to sell off the most expensive council houses and use the dosh to build more, cheaper ones - a guaranteed ghetto maker.

Policy Exchange - once described as the largest and most influential think tank on the right - said in a report that selling top homes when they become vacant would raise £4.5 billion a year.

That's enough to build up to 170,000 new social homes and at the same time provide building jobs, the think tank claimed.

Social tenants deserve a roof over their heads but not one that is better than most people can afford, added the think tank cofounded in 2002 by Michael Gove, now Education Secretary, and Francis "Jerry Can" Maude.

Policy Exchange director Neil O'Brien told the BBC that social housing would still exist in very expensive areas under their proposal, but there would just be "less of it.

"I don't believe anybody has a right to live in the most expensive part of town. People do have a right to get housed but just not to be housed in the most expensive areas."

Housing Minister Grant Shapps said the ideas were "blindingly obvious" and that only "a perverse kind of left-wing dogma" was discouraging local authorities from implementing them.

But the National Housing Federation - the "voice of housing associations" - said the idea was "fundamentally flawed."

Chief executive David Orr said: "It could effectively cleanse many towns of hard-working people who can't afford to buy or rent privately."

And Defend Council Housing said the proposals were based on "false assumptions which fail to disguise the real intent - allowing developers to grab public homes and land."

Chairwoman Eileen Short said: "Tenants will make sure councillors reject this nonsense. Council housing has been paid for several times over by our rents.

"With 4.5 million people on housing waiting lists, homelessness soaring and with millions more trapped in insecure and inadequate housing we need investment in a new generation of council housing."

Construction union Ucatt general secretary Steve Murphy called the proposals "truly frightening" and said they wouldn't work.

"They would lead to ghettoisation, with social housing tenants forced to live on the cheaper outskirts of towns and cities.

"We should be increasing mixed developments, in order to break down social segregation, not reducing them.

"Selling off existing homes is morally wrong and will not generate significant investment."

D.O.A - CLASS WAR (1982)

1 minute and 40 seconds of FUCK YEAH!

"I want a war, between the rich and the poor. 
I wanna fight and know what I´m fighting for. 
In a class war, class war, class war,
class war, class war, class war, class war.
In New York and LA, City Halls are falling down.

There´s no escape, when a class war comes to town.
In a class war, class war, class war,
class war, class war, class war.
If I´m told to kill, in Beirut or Salvador,
there will be a class war, right here in America.
In a class war, class war, class war, this war,
That war, class war, last war."

RENTS OUT OF CONTROL! –families cutting food to pay the rent

WE NEED TO SECURE A DECENT FUTURE FOR ALL OUR PEOPLE, FREE FROM THE NIGHTMARE OF POVERTY, EXPLOITATION, DISCRIMINATION AND HOMELESSNESS. WE NEED INDEPENDENCE! - The REAL Scottish Defence League


Saturday, 18 August 2012
 http://wrp.org.uk/news/7834
RENTS OUT OF CONTROL! –families cutting food to pay the rent

Protesters in central London demanding the capping of rents and the building of council houses

HOUSING charity Shelter yesterday described the rental market as ‘out of control’ as letting group LSL revealed the average rent paid by private tenants in England and Wales reached a new record high in July, of £725 a month.

LSL said rents were rising fastest in London and the South East, with the average rent in the capital now at an astronomical £1,057 a month.

LSL, which owns the Your Move and Reeds Rains property chains, said average rents rose by one per cent last month and were 2.9 per cent higher than a year ago.

Shelter Chief executive Campbell Robb said: ‘What many forget is the devastating impact that every rent rise has on families who are forced to cut back further on food and other essentials.

‘Many will be wondering how much longer they’ll be able to stay in their home.’

The number of homes started by builders in England has also fallen again, to the lowest level for three years.

Government figures released on Thursday showed that only 21,540 new homes were started by builders in the three months to June this year.

That was a huge 24 per cent down on the same period a year ago and a ten per cent fall from the first three months of the year.

The dearth of new housing, allied to the rapidly growing population and continued rationing of mortgage funds for first-time buyers, has been a key factor behind the private landlords charging increasingly eye-wateringly high rents.

David Newnes of LSL warned: ‘The backlog of frustrated first-time buyers in the private rented sector showed no sign of clearing in July – in fact, it is still growing.

‘As lending to those without substantial deposits remains depressed, demand for rented accommodation can only go one way in the long-term, providing further upward momentum for rents.

‘The rental market is also entering its summer peak, as recent graduates and those with new jobs begin to look for new accommodation.’

With mortgage lenders now typically asking borrowers to put down a 20 per cent or 25 per cent deposit, many would-be home buyers have been in effect locked out of the home-buying market.

Figures earlier this year showed that owner occupation had fallen to 66 per cent of all households in England, which was back to the level of 1989.

Meanwhile, the proportion of households renting their homes from private or public-sector landlords has increased, to 34 per cent of households.

An unabashed Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) statement said: ‘Starts are now 54 per cent below their December quarter 2005 peak, but 27 per cent above the trough in the March quarter of 2009.’

Separate figures have reflected how wages have failed to keep up with the cost of buying a home in England.

In 2001, the average price of a house was £121,769 and the average salary was £16,557, according to the National Housing Federation.

A decade on, the typical price of a property is 94 per cent higher at £236,518, while average wages are up 29 per cent to £21,330.

‘Ten years ago the average amount that you would have needed for a deposit was about nine months worth of salary. Now you need three years’ worth,’ the federation’s chief executive, David Orr said.

'Defend our communities against racism and all forms of bigotry'

'Defend our communities against racism and all forms of bigotry'

PSL Vice Presidential Candidate Yari Osorio on Sikh temple racist shooting

By Yari Osorio

August 12, 2012

The Lindsay/Osorio campaign stands in solidarity with the Sikh community in Oak Creek, Wisc., in the aftermath of the massacre at the local temple of six people by white supremacist Wade Michael Page.

Satwant Singh Kaleka, 65, president of the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin,bravely fought back against the killer with a butter knife. He was killed but his actions allowed others to get to safety.

Racism and Islamophobia

Racism against Sikhs, who originate from India, has a long history in the United States. Sikhs immigrated to the United States in the late 19th century to get away from the oppression they experienced under British colonialism. Many ended up on the West Coast, working with other immigrants from Japan, Mexico and the Philippines in the fruit and lumber industries in California, Oregon and Washington.

Anti-immigrant racism took its toll as hate riots in Bellingham, Wash. (1907) and Live Oak, Calif. (1908) erupted against the Sikh community. The mob “stormed makeshift Indian residences, stoned Indian workers and successfully orchestrated the non-involvement of local police.” Sikhs were ethnically cleansed from Bellingham.

Islamophobia is a particular form of racism that provides the ideology behind the wars and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Obviously, Sikhs are not Muslims. But since Sept. 11, 2001, Sikhs have been the target of many racist attacks in which the victim was assumed to be Muslim.

In the hours immediately following the massacre, some mainstream media outlets ran stories on how to tell the difference between Muslims and Sikhs, as if it would have been acceptable for the gunman to kill six worshipers at a mosque! To underscore this point, just 24 hours after the Oak Creek massacre, a mosque in Joplin, Mo., was burned to the ground, the second such attack against the mosque in the past month.

Racist ideology for a racist war

Democratic and Republican politicians have rushed to condemn the shooting. President Barack Obama ordered flags flown at half-mast in mourning for the six lives lost. None of these politicians, however, will accept responsibility for their part in creating the climate of hate in which a racist like Page flourished.

According to Pete Simi, a researcher on white supremacists who interviewed Page on several occasions, Page was in the Army from 1992 to 1998. According to Simi:

"He once told me, 'If you don't go into the military as a racist, you definitely leave as one.'

"He also talked about meeting neo-Nazis in the military and being exposed to neo-Nazi literature while in the military."

In media interviews, Page's stepmother indicated that prior to joining the military, Page was “gentle” and had non-white friends. Laurie Page said she now questions his decision to join the military. “I don't know if the military was good for him.”

While the politicians rush to condemn this atrocity, they fail to acknowledge that racism is part and parcel of the military's effort to indoctrinate soldiers to fight imperialist wars. If soldiers believe that Muslims, Arabs and South Asians are less than human, it will be that much easier for them to kill those people who are fighting against the colonialist occupation of their lands. Neo-Nazis are officially frowned on by the brass, but in reality, the brass looks the other way as these hate groups attempt to organize among the rank-and-file soldiers.

Hate groups

According to a report released in March by the Southern Poverty Law Center, “At least 1,018 hate groups [operated] last year and ... the number of groups whose ideology is organized against specific racial, religious, sexual or other characteristics has risen steadily since 2000, when 602 were identified.”

Racist and hate-filled groups grew after 2001 when white supremacist and xenophobic attitudes were bolstered by the hyper-patriotism produced as part of the ruling class’ s response to 9/11. Page was a member of at least one of these hate groups and was described by Mark Potok, who tracks hate groups for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Alabama, as a “a neo-Nazi skinhead in the very thick of the white supremacist movement."

This white supremacist movement was singled out in 2009 by the Department of Homeland Security as the U.S.’s single biggest domestic terrorist threat, but nothing has been done since then to eradicate this threat. In fact, shortly after that study was published, the Obama administration withdrew the DHS report, saying it was “unauthorized,” in an attempt to appease the racist ruling class forces who did not like the idea of labeling “Americans” as terrorists.

According to CNN, the FBI reported that “between January 1, 2007, and October 31, 2009, white supremacists were involved in 53 acts of violence, 40 of which were assaults directed primarily at African-Americans, seven of which were murders and the rest of which were threats, arson and intimidation.” (CNN, Aug. 7, 2012))

Police, security guards and racist self-appointed vigilantes like George Zimmerman have killed one Black person every 36 hours in the first six months of 2012 alone, according to a new report released by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation believes in organizing our class, the working class, into a movement that prioritizes the defense of our communities against racism and all forms of bigotry. Without a political movement focused on fighting tooth and nail against racism, we will continue to be under the gun barrel of the police and their racist vigilantes.

If a socialist government were in power, we would use all of the power of the state to dismantle every racist and bigoted organization across the U.S. Instead of government resources being used to wiretap, infiltrate and disrupt organizations of the poor and oppressed, a socialist government would use those resources to eradicate hate groups from society. In fact, with a socialist government promoting multi-national unity among people of different communities, taking actions to address the historic injustices visited upon oppressed nationalities here and abroad, and abolishing capitalist exploitation, the material basis for the perpetuation of racist ideology will be eradicated.

Content may be reprinted with credit to VotePSL.or

First MP jumps Tory sinking ship / Features / Home - Morning Star

First MP jumps Tory sinking ship

Monday 13 August 2012

by Peter Frost

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So the first cracks are developing in Cameron and Clegg's coalition. After a lovers' tiff about Lords reform and constituency gerrymandering the previously smarmy couple have had as big a fallout as the love interest in one of Louise Bagshawe's raunchy chick-lit bestsellers.

This particular author is now better known as Louise Mensch and even better known as the first Tory MP who, after considering her long-term job prospects, has decided to jump the coalition ship and spend more time with Metallica - one of her new husband's bands in New York.

Mensch isn't just any Tory MP. She is perhaps the best known of the small band of A-list "celebrity" candidates specially selected by David Cameron himself for the 2010 election and dumped on unsuspecting constituency Tory parties up and down the country.

Mensch was landed on the people of Corby and East Northamptonshire and has proved good value for money for Cameron, if not for them.

She is a high-profile figure with frequent media appearances on programmes like Question Time. She even grabbed headlines by admitting a youthful use of class-A drugs.

Then the bombshell on August 6 - Mensch announced her decision to resign as a MP. This is despite rumours that she was likely to be promoted in the expected September government reshuffle as well as stories that she had cut the raunchier sex scenes from her latest novel so as not to embarrass the Prime Minister.

Tory backwoodsmen used her resignation to justify their disapproval of women, and particularly women with children in Parliament generally.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Norman Tebbit criticised Conservative Central Office for removing the right of constituencies to choose their own local candidates.

Other Tories, in various tweets and right-wing blogs, have demanded that the party select a traditional male Tory with some local knowledge to fight the Corby by-election - the first of this term. They know it will be a tremendous battle.

The election is widely predicted to be held on November 15, alongside the already organised elections for the new political police commisioners.

In reality it's likely to be a straight fight between the new Tory candidate and Labour.

Ukip didn't stand in the 2010 election in order to give the Tories a clear run. It may well have polled more than the winning 1,951 Tory majority.

The BNP, which polled just a little less than 5 per cent in 2010, has since worked closely with the local Tories.

Indeed the 2010 BNP parliamentary candidate Roy Davies signed one local Tory, Mark Taitt's, nomination papers for the 2011 council elections. He was one of two high-level BNP members who did so.

When questioned about this disgusting situation, Mensch developed a case of selective amnesia - claiming she had never heard of Roy Davies, one of just three candidates who had stood against her in the general election.

She consistently refused to offer any criticism of her Tory colleague and his racist supporters.

Labour selected its parliamentary candidate over a year ago. He is Andy Sawford, a son and grandson of Corby steelworkers.

Sawford's dad was steelworker turned Kettering Labour MP Phil Sawford.

What the Lib Dems will do is anybody's guess. Like Lib Dem organisations everywhere, the local party is haemorrhaging popular respect and support after Clegg's cosying up to the Tories.

The Lib Dems lost two seats in the 2011 town council elections leaving them just a pitiful three council seats.

In the same election the Tories lost four seats. Labour gained all six taking its total to 22 - a huge majority.

Corby By-Election: A peep into life in 'Little Scotland'

First MP jumps Tory sinking ship / Features / Home - Morning Star

A peep into life in 'Little Scotland'

Corby is one of Britain's most unusual places. It's a typical Scottish ex-steel town but one plonked down just 90 miles north of Westminster.

Let me introduce you to Billy. His family story will tell you a lot you need to know to understand Corby and its people.

I met Billy with his mates at the open-air cafe by the boating lake in Corby. This might sound like a "new town" idyll, but the heavy steel security screens, the graffiti and the general air of despondency take the edge off the romantic feel of the place.

Billy is 15. He feels he is destined to become one of Corby's many Neets (not in employment, education or training) on his 16th birthday next month.

Coincidently, Billy's mother was 15 when she had Billy at a time when Corby was often in the news topping Britain's statistics for underage pregnancies.

An intense health education programme was making a real impression on the number of schoolgirl pregnancies, but that campaign was one of the first victims of the coalition cuts.

Drug and alcohol abuse too has seen the town in the news, but again valuable work in this field has been halted by massive spending cuts in both voluntary and public sectors.

Corby has the highest proportion of population in England with low levels of literacy and numeracy limiting achievement and horizons for young people. This bodes badly for the future of the town.

Northamptonshire County Council, with a massive Tory majority, has been an early and enthusiastic supporter of central government's austerity programme.

The county has slashed its youth service to the bone. Another unpopular council cut has seen street lighting turned off, leading to public unease about an increase in street crime. Local trade unionists have launched a campaign against what they are calling the Blitz Blackout.

Ironically, in the real wartime Blitz Corby burnt oil and rubber waste to create a continuous dark pall over the town to hide the glowing Bessemer steel furnaces from nazi bombers. No bombs ever hit the town.

Billy's family and most of his friends and neighbours all speak with a Scottish accent, almost Glaswegian. They call it Corby Scots - yet neither Billy or his mum have ever been north of the border. Billy explains.

"My great, great, great-grandfather - another Billy - walked from Scotland to Corby in the 1930s. He had been unemployed since the General Strike and had heard there were jobs for steelworkers in a new steelworks in Corby."

Corby, it seems, sat on top of a huge deposit of ironstone ore. It gave birth to a steel town big and dirty enough to have featured in Danny Boyle's Olympic opening ceremony.

"It was 350 miles from Cambuslang, Glasgow, to Northamptonshire and he walked every step of the way. It took him over a month," says Billy.

"The walk was worth it. Billy Snr got a job and worked in the Corby steelworks, as did his son and grandson - that's my granddad. Three generations of steelmakers, a common story in Corby.

"Sadly there's no job for me in the steel industry today." Billy continues.

"They are just a shadow of what they used to be, making steel tubes for the Indian conglomerate Tata."

In the war Corby steel tube workers made the "Pluto pipeline" that took fuel across the Channel to the British army.

"Winston Churchill said the Corby steel won the war," Billy tells me, obviously repeating an old and proud local story.

Virtually all the steelworkers came from Scotland, along with a good few from Northern Ireland. The town was known as "Little Scotland."

The Scots and Ulster folk bought their culture and traditions with them. There are still Celtic and Rangers supporters' clubs in the town.

How Corby steel was tempered

Flags fly from flats in Corby as they have been all over Britain for the Olympics, but here they are all blue and white St Andrew's crosses.

Despite being only 90 miles north of London, Corby is a Scottish steel town where the steel industry has shut down.

Most Corby people came to work in the steelworks from Scotland or Northern Ireland bringing their culture and traditions with them.

Some of the traditions are ominous.

Last year Louise Mensch and Labour Mayor Gail McDaid had to get together to appeal, unsuccessfully, to the local British Legion not to let the Orange Order's Corby Loyalist flute band lead the town's Remembrance Day parade.

This in a town that only 16 years ago made national headlines with the sectarian killing of a 13-year-old Catholic girl who was kicked to death by a Protestant teenage girls' gang. Sectarian violence still plagues the town today.

Today Corby's industries are food - potato crisps, breakfast cereals and vegetarian ready-meals are specialties.

Distribution is important too, and huge warehouses circle the town but one, Argos, is due to close in October with the loss of another 440 jobs.

Unemployment in Corby is growing rapidly as local businesses shrink or close. Youth unemployment has doubled in the last year.

So why does the constituency have a Tory MP? When the constituency borders were redrawn in 1983 they incorporated some of the poshest towns and villages in the English Midlands.

The constituency includes traditional hunting Tory shires up to the Rutland border.

Mensch herself lives 10 miles from Corby town in the chocolate-box riverside town of Oundle, best-known for its £30,000 per year public school. It's still common to see the hunt in the countryside round Corby.

One positive factor in Labour winning the by-election would be the re-establishment of the local Trades Union Council.

The organisation came back to life last year as local trade unionists played their part in the fights and demonstrations against the public service cuts from central government and the county council.

Trades Council secretary Natalie Newby sums up the feeling of local people in that fight.

"This is a battle that simply must be won, because defeat will lead to lower living standards for all of us. Let's show this rotten Tory government we stand united and we're ready to take them on."

The Corby by-election will be a test both of the popularity of the Cameron-Clegg coalition and also of the country's attitude to Ed Miliband and the policies that Labour has put forward.

Miliband has already been to Corby to launch the Labour campaign. He has declared that unemployment will be the major issue of the election.

Now he needs to speak out with radical socialist policies that will unite the working people of Corby.

That way the tiny crack started by one Tory resignation could begin to crumble the whole rotten coalition government.

Ed's dad, Marxist Ralph Miliband, could have told him. That's the way the Corby steel was tempered.

Mere fleas on the wolf that is capitalism / Features / Home - Morning Star

The Morning Star

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Mere fleas on the wolf that is capitalism

Sunday 12 August 2012

by Bill Benfield

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It's getting to be hard times for capitalism's erstwhile spoilt-rotten banking fraternity these days.

Not that capitalist governments are trying to abolish the financial graft that passes for a market economy in these debauched times. Far from it.

But times are tough in the world of profits and margins and when thieves fall out, we all see the results.

Although it would have been gratifying to see the money men of the markets torpedoed by a huge worldwide socialist movement, let's take dissent in the boss-class ranks as a cheerful second best.

The Standard Chartered Bank has been the latest edifice of capitalism to fill everyone - on our side of the fence at least - with pure vindictive glee.

Shares in Standard Chartered PLC dropped sharply last Tuesday, down nearly 25 per cent at one point in early trading on the London Stock Exchange.

Why? Because the New York state department of financial services alleged on Monday that Standard Chartered had schemed with the US's bete noir, the Iranian government, to launder $250 billion (£160bn) from 2001 to 2007.

The regulator ordered Standard Chartered representatives to appear in New York City on August 15 "to explain these apparent violations of law" and to demonstrate why its licence to operate in the state "should not be revoked."

The agency alleged that Standard Chartered conspired with Iranian clients to route nearly 60,000 different US-dollar payments through Standard Chartered's New York branch "after first stripping information from wire transfer messages used to identify sanctioned countries, individuals and entities."

The regulators called the bank a rogue institution and quoted one of its executives as saying: "You fucking Americans. Who are you to tell us, the rest of the world, that we're not going to deal with Iranians."

And so it goes on. The order accuses the bank of falsifying business records, obstructing governmental administration, failing to report misconduct to the state quickly, evading federal sanctions and other illegal acts.

The bank, naturally, denies almost everything - as it would, being an insititution which up until this week boasted of being "boring."

Now, we hold no brief for US sanctions on Iran. They are a political manoeuvre by the US in its geopolitical chess-game to control the world.

But what's happening now is, or should be, a wake-up call to those innocents who fondly believe that capitalism and democracy can exist side by side in the same society. They can't.

The battle between the bourgeois-democratic US government and the money men of big capital should prove that adequately enough. In this relatively small battle it's likely that the US regulators will win.

But it is just a small battle, despite the eye-wateringly huge sums involved.

And the banks have already proved that they are so tightly enmeshed with the capitalist infrastructure that national governments won't let them fail because if the banks fail so, ultimately, does capitalism.

But that doesn't mean that the internecine struggle between the various anarchic and mutually hostile elements of capitalism for dominance is going to be allowed to drift.

After all, capitalists' big weakness is that they don't even like each other. Their very philosophy demands that they fight like cats in a sack.

Free-market capitalism is essentially a war of each against the other as well as a fight against the poorest and most numerous class - us - so any advantage gained by a fellow capitalist is fair game for trashing, unless you can get a share of it.

Another little tale emerging this month gives us a hint of just how this all works.

For many years now, the big entrepreneurs and any cowboy trader who had the imagination rushed off to avoid tax wherever they could.

And that meant our old mates the tax havens. But capitalist governments don't like you evading their tax when they need it to give to their mates the bankers, although you can avoid all you like if it's destined for supporting the poor, the weak and the sick.

So now, when the big banks need the big bucks or they'll keel over and take the good ship capitalism with them, those tax-haven sunseekers are ceasing to be the flavour of the month in the corridors of power.

Even the Cayman Islands is - or at least was - turning on its head and seeking a bit of payback from all those tax exiles lining up to beat the Germans to the sun loungers in the mornings.

And boy, did it shock those expats.

Caymans Premier William Mc-Keeva Bush was proposing what amounts to the territory's first ever income tax.

And it would fall only on expatriate workers - at a minimal 10 per cent.

But it provoked absolute outrage in the pages of the Telegraph. Well, it would, wouldn't it?

So much so that good old Premier Bush dropped it like a hot potato last week.And as someone once said: "Well, he would, wouldn't he?"

Because the Cayman Islands has democracy the way the rest of us have piles - a right pain in the bum when it plays up.

It's a wonderful democracy in the Caymans. There's nothing else quite like it. The territory has 56,000 people on a string of little islands.

But at last count in March 2011 it had 91,712 companies registered. It had 235 banks (not branches), 758 insurance companies and assets for the registered companies totalling $1.607 trillion (£1.25tn).

So you can probably see where the power lies there. It ain't in the democratic mandate.

Anthony Travers, the chairman of the Cayman Islands Stock Exchange, described the now defunct tax plan as "probably the single greatest existential threat to the Cayman Islands in over 200 years."

Which is about as far over the top as you can imagine. In fact it's verging on the hysterically nutty, but what would you expect from a man who notoriously described socialists who wanted expats to pay their taxes as the "Tax Taliban."

For now the forces of the exile army of profiteers and tax duckers - a collective noun which encompasses all those who don't want to pay their taxes whether by avoidance or evasion - has won the skirmish.

But the day of the island tax-dodgers is nearly over because the big boys want their money and people such as Mr Travers will be simply swept to the wayside by their own.

For the likes of tax duckers, however, there will always be another scam. They are, after all just the fleas and parasites on the back of the capitalist wolf.

That's why it's the whole system of capitalism, not just its more visible pests, that is the target for us of the Tax Taliban.