JUST KEEP PUMPING

City AM  is worth a glance should you come across a not-too-soggy copy outside your local railway station. It’s aimed at aspirant but none too bright city workers and offers them on their now less frequent commute to the office lots of jargon-rich financial gossip. It doesn’t often stray into anything with a time horizon exceeding six months; and, like most financial reporting, it’s obsessed with the immediate effect of central bank misdirected attempts to manage inflation and includes a large dose of snake oil around new financial jargon and technology. There is, for example, a whole page in the edition on Monday, 13 May, on what might best be described as crypto-jargon.

City AM typically ignores the climate crisis except when it has some short-term effect on share prices. Thus in the same edition it reports Barclays Bank’s huge investment  in oil extraction but only as an issue which might affect their share price by upsetting nominally ‘ethical’ investment fund managers, not as criminally irresponsible behaviour. Another article in the same edition entitled  ‘Climate change isn’t a culture war, either we all win or we all lose’ might therefore be seen as a welcome departure from this short termism. A closer examination of this article dashes this hope.

The author of the article is Frances Lasok. She describes herself as a ‘freelance writer’ but is,  in reality, a Tory campaign manager, failed local government candidate and parliamentary hopeful, although her prospect for the last form of employment will have been adversely impacted by the current Tory meltdown. In her article, she recognises, contrary to the typical City AM line,  the seriousness of the climate crisis but then argues that “we are all in it together” and can be addressed with unspecified policies that are “necessary and fair”.  She criticises  environmental campaigners like Just Stop Oil for implying that the crisis largely affects the poor or, as she refers to them “people who don’t pay the bills” . She exhorts us to “support policies that incentivise rather than punish, unite rather than split and focus on the collective challenge”.  She doesn’t specify what these policies are  –  “Just Keep Pumping” perhaps?

Just Stop Oil’s tactics might be questioned, but not their goal. Fossil fuels have to  be kept in the ground if the climate crisis is not to engulf the world. To deny that the climate crisis  is a class issue is to overlook that the 0.1% , buffered by AI and their huge, accumulated wealth, will confidently expect to survive it for centuries. Meanwhile, the 1%, cocooned in the ethos of short-termism promoted by City AM,  will mistakenly hope to share in this outcome. Meanwhile, the rest the world’s population faces the prospect of extinction. Just Stop Oil, other environmental campaigners and the CP will continue strive, in their different ways, to organise and call for the climate crisis to be addressed.   

AFTER THE GENERAL ELECTION

Writing on ByLine Times this month, Simon Fletcher, a senior adviser to Jeremy Corbyn and a campaigns and elections adviser to Keir Starmer until 2021, argues that, until Labour is in office, Starmer will continue to be the beneficiary of anti-Tory sentiment. Once in power, however, a Labour government will face  tension between its self-imposed rejection of tax increases and the crises it will face over declining living standards, housing and underfunding of the NHS, public services and local government.

It’s difficult to disagree with this assessment. The CP has encountered huge voter apathy on the streets in the course of its own modest electoral campaigning for the local government elections today, but, despite this and the need to voter ID, Labour appears to be on course to win the forthcoming general election, notwithstanding a leader with all the charisma of a tailor’s dummy and policies to the right of John Major’s Tory  government. Once in power, however, the problems facing this Labour administration won’t be confined to the damage caused by fourteen years of ‘austerity’ to pay for the bail out of banks in 2008. It will also face the climate crisis and the consequences of its misguided alignment with US foreign policy, necessitating complicity in Israeli genocide in Gaza, a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and confrontation with China.

Fletcher’s prognosis is that the policies of  Starmer government will be fought through ‘the institutions of the Labour movement’  and also ‘on the streets’. It’s difficult to see how the former will materialise, given the grip of the Parliamentary Labour Party and the exodus and expulsion of so many socialists from the Labour Party following Corbyn’s defenestration. As for the unions and their influence on Labour, Labour has been seeking to replace the union’s core funding with donations from business and wealthy individuals. These donations come, of course, with strings and cannot be bought simply with appointments to the upper chamber.  As for Fletcher’s predicted opposition ‘on the streets’, for this to be effective it will require a greater degree of co-ordination, co-operation and mutual respect than currently exists across socialist, Marxist and single-issue organisers . This isn’t easy to achieve. Unlike the large political parties, including the Greens, whose concerns are limited to electoral success. parties to the left of Labour, including the CP, have our own histories and traditions and differing interpretations of Marxist theory and practice. But such co-ordination, co-operation and mutual respect is not impossible to achieve. This is an aim of the Morning Star, the world’s only English language socialist daily newspaper. It consciously avoids a sectarian approach by including a wide range of left opinion in its pages. The Croydon Branch of the CP warmly welcomed the  formation of the Croydon Morning Star Readers and Supporters Group to not only support the newspaper but also to provide a safe place for everyone on the left in Croydon to meet and discuss. This takes place with a star speaker around six times a year at Ruskin House, the trade union and labour movement centre in Croydon. To participate, look out for the notices in the Morning Star and also register your interest at croydonmorningstarrsg@gmail.com.

We will not forget

Croydon MPs Sarah Jones, Steve Reed and Chris Philp were not amongst those who voted in Parliament on 16 November for a cease fire in Gaza.

Sarah Jones MP, Steve Reed MP  and Chris Philp MP have chosen to acquiesce in their respective  party’s line to ignore Israel’s flagrant rejection of the UN Security Council’s vote on 26 March calling for an immediate cease fire in Gaza.

Sarah Jones MP, Steve Reed MP  and Chris Philp MP are not amongst the 108 MPs who yesterday called for an immediate halt to arm sales to Israel.

Personal advancement in their respective parties clearly comes before disassociating themselves from genocide. We will not forget their perfidy when they come to stand in the forthcoming general election.

Some things are for sale, some are not

The bid by an Emirati group led by Sheikh Mansour, deputy prime-minister and vice-president of the United Arab Emirates, to acquire  the Daily Torygraph and the Spectator has effectively been blocked by the government when it announced that it intends to introduce legislation to ban acquisitions of newspapers by foreign states.

We have severe reservations about Sheik Mansour’s ownership of Manchester City FC. Since his acquisition in 2008,  the club has a net spend of some £1.2 billion on  transfers, making a mockery of fair competition in our national game and highlighting the absurdity of deducting points from Everton and Nottingham Forest for breaching profitability and sustainability rules. Any fair and comparable treatment of Manchester City would surely result in sufficient points deducted to ensure their relegation to the Northern Premia League.

No such reservation arises in the case of the Sheik’s acquisition of the Torygraph and the Spectator. Both publications peddle  views that suit the Tory Party, capitalism and continued fossil fuel extraction. This will undoubtedly continue under the Sheik’s ownership; but his vast wealth won’t work the same magic as it did with Manchester City. Money doesn’t buy circulation, improve content or extend influence. Both publications will therefore remain what they are. The only conceivable objection to Sheik Mansour’s ownership is that, without it, we might be rid of both publications. This, however, seems unlikely as, despite falling circulation, some dodgy off-shore billionaire will doubtless buy them both and continue with the same editorial line.

Thank goodness for the Morning Star. We own it, so it’s not for sale.

Stoking up Islamophobia

There are some excellent journalists and commentators regularly contributing to the pages of the Morning Star. Amongst the best, in my personal view, are Andrew Murray and, when he can find time from managing Manifesto Press, Nick Wright. There is, however, one long-standing journalist who is neither a communist nor, obviously, even a socialist, whose views and analysis are invariably worth taking on board  – Peter Oborne.  He’s not, as far as I am aware, a contributor to the Star. Indeed , he wrote for the Torygraph until he resigned in 2015. Educated at  Sherborne and Christ College, Cambridge, he’s nevertheless something of a maverick. You can read his more recent journalism in ByLine Times; and, if you dig into the archives of the defunct and now largely forgotten trade union and Bennite monthly, Voice of the Unions, you will find his occasional contributions there.

Peter Oborne’s observations and analysis of the government’s recent attempts, regrettably supported by Keir Starmer, to stoke up Islamophobia in order to suppress demonstrations opposing our complicity in the genocide in Gaza, can be found here. They are well worth considering.

DAY OF JUDGEMENT

The vote by MPs tomorrow, 21 February, on the SNP amendment calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza won’t halt the Israeli genocidal attacks on Gaza; nor will it absolve the US and the UK governments from their complicity in this genocide. It will, however, have one tangible effect: it will render it impossible for people of conscience to vote in the forthcoming general election for any sitting candidate, of whatever party, who fails tomorrow to vote for the SNP amendment.

Sarah Jones,  Steve Reed, even the hapless Chris Philp – we will be watching how you vote.

HEADS I WIN, TAILS YOU LOSE

Quantitative Easing was the strategy adopted after the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008 under which the Bank of England increased the money supply by buying and holding large quantities of the UK government’s already issued fixed interest stocks (gilts). This version of resorting to the printing press was intended to counteract the restriction in the money supply caused by the commercial banks hasty retreat from banking activity following the GFC in order to protect themselves from the crisis they themselves had caused. Its purpose was to increase prices and stimulate the economy to counteract the threatened recession. To ensure that the beneficiaries of the strategy were capitalists, not workers, the Tory government of the day embarked on a savage policy of ‘austerity’, cutting public services and public expenditure on such socially useful items as teachers’ and nurses wages and overseas development while leaving military expenditure and the inevitable cost of misdirected foreign adventures untouched.

The Bank of England’s holdings of government stocks peaked at £875 billion. There is no ‘right’ amount of government stocks that the Bank of England can hold, but the revered high priests of finance at the Bank of England decided it was time to reduce its holding of gilts. By January 2024 these had been reduced to £738 billion, with more to come, by the reverse strategy called ‘Quantitative Tightening’. This reverse strategy naturally has the opposite effect to Quantitative Easing  – money supply is decreased, resulting in lower prices and reduced economic activity. To counteract these effects, so-called ‘austerity’ should also be reversed. More money should go into public services and public expenditure on beneficial  items such as teachers’ and nurses’ wages, and military expenditure, assuming any is needed, should not be increased. This, of course, is not what is happening. For workers, it’s very much a case of ‘heads I win, tails you lose’.

Such is the selection process in our main political parties that MPs are generally not amongst the brightest of people. The Treasury Select Committee, packed with Tories has, however, become dimly aware that something is not right with the Quantitative Easing/Tightening strategy. While not sensibly calling for public services to be restored to pre-GFC level, they have criticised the strategy in a report published on 31 January you can read here. Essentially, they are saying that the Bank of England has not, and still does not, understand the consequences of what it has been doing with Quantitative Easing/Tightening. Of course they don’t! None of the high priests at the Bank can have read, and certainly none of them will have understood, Banks and Banking, the discussion paper from the Political Economy Commission of the Communist Party, which you can read here. Like the selection process for MPs, it’s the most plausible defenders of capitalism who rise to become high priests of finance at the Bank of England, not the brightest and wisest, and certainly not anyone with a modicum of understanding of Marxist economics.

FIGHT THEM ON THE BEACHES?

Calls by General Sir Patrick Sanders, the outgoing Chief of the General Staff, for Britain to train and equip a “citizen army” to prepare the country for a coming land war might be seen as a signal for the men in white coats to escort him quietly to his new (secure) care home. It is, nevertheless, a sign of the times.

The General hardly had in mind training and arming workers in a workers militia. That’s an excellent idea for a state embarking on the perilous journey to build socialism, but probably not what he had in mind. His wish was presumably for an expanded Territorial Army – lots of politically conservative reservists who can be summoned from their peacetime occupations to fight on foreign soil. No doubt the General would be happy for them to be used, if suitably trained, to suppress unruly workers in UK towns and cities. They won’t, however, be needed to ‘fight them on the beaches’. Neither Russia nor China, however much the US might provoke them, will be storming up our beaches in the foreseeable future. Driven to confrontation, they could well react in other ways, but these won’t be ways against which weekend soldiers will be much use.

The risk of conflict reaching our shores should not be ignored. The correct response is not to increase our spending on conventional arms and illegal nuclear weapons, especially when the systems to deliver the latter are leased from the US and probably have a hidden mechanism to enable the US to disable them. Instead, we need an independent, ethical and humane foreign policy: one that seeks a resolution to the war in Ukraine instead of funding its continuation; one that doesn’t support menacing US fleets off China signalling support of Tiwan (how would the US react if China sent a fleet to support blockaded Cuba?); and one that doesn’t turn a blind eye to Israeli genocide in Palestine. Such a policy, would require us to quit NATO and AUKUS and free ourselves from the imperialist policies pursued by past and present US Presidents  – and who know what his possible successor will come up with?

The workers militia can come later.

HOW MUCH IS YOUR MP WORTH?

The decision by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) that MPs’ basic pay for 2023-24 will increase by 2.9% attracted little attention. This modest increase is in line with that for  public sector earnings according to the Office of National Statistics (ONS). What should have attracted more attention is that the award would result in an MP’s basic salary of £86,584 per annum. According to the ONS, the median annual earnings for someone in full time employment was only £34,963 in 2022-23. MPs also benefit from Parliamentary Contributory Pension Fund.  The taxpayers’ contribution to this is difficult to estimate as there is no requirement to balance the Fund as the taxpayer pays for the difference between benefits paid and MP’s contributions.  The Times has estimated that membership of the Fund is worth an extra £40,000[i] for every MP. To put this another way, the employer’s contribution is around 46%, compared with the statutory minimum of 3% paid by employers to the rest of us.

Despite  this largess, MPs are allowed to supplement their salaries with outside ‘earnings’. The Guardian estimated these to have totalled £10 million in 2022[ii].

Yet all is not well with our handsomely rewarded MPs. In an article in the Guardian on 30 December headed ‘You can’t be weak – MPs tell of hidden toll on mental health of a career in Commons’, Peter Walker describes, in heart rending detail, the trials and tribulations of being an MP. Mental breakdowns, feelings of low esteem, a sense of futility, public abuse and the inconvenience of constituency work. It is, however, Walker’s use of the term ‘career’ that most sticks in the throat. Could it be that MPs’ feelings of futility and low esteem arise from their failure to understand what they are for?

An MP is supposed to represent in parliament his or her constituents until the next general election. Nothing more, nothing less. They are not social workers – they lack the training to do this. They are not Party workers, even though many spend much of their time filling in the depleted ranks of party activists. In the case of Labour MPs, they are not even delegates from their Constituency Labour Party –  their allegiance,  as Andrew Murray points out in his new book[iii] , is only to the Parliamentary Labour Party. Don’t miss Andrew when he speaks to the Croydon Morning Star Readers and Supporters Group at Ruskin House at 7.30 pm on 18 January.

If aspiring MPs want a ‘career’ they should look to the Civil Service, the Armed Forces, the Police and what’s left of the NHS; but they need to be aware that a ‘career’ implies systematic assessments, performance reviews and a pay scale. MPs are not subject to any of these. In their world, advancement requires only ingratiation and patronage. They are already at the top of the pay scale from Day One. Aspiring MPs would, however, be well advised to forgo a career in teaching and the universities even if they were qualified, for such jobs offer very little career progression.

It’s still, no doubt, possible to have a career in parts of the private sector where outsourcing and casualisation have not totally undermined employment – but don’t expect a defined benefit pension. Banking and other forms of hucksterism do, of course, provide excellent ‘livings’ for some, as does drug trafficking, but the trick with both is, of course, not to get caught.

The ultimate socialist solution is that adopted in the Paris Commune as described by Engels[iv]

• all posts, administrative, judicial and educational, to be filled by election on the basis of universal suffrage
• All officials, high or low, to be paid the average wage

We are not there yet, but curtailing the excessive financial remuneration of MPs and prohibiting them from taking second jobs and accepting other sleazy income would be a start.

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[i] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mps-pension-perks-equivalent-to-extra-40-000-a-year-on-top-of-81-000-annual-salary-5st6pkmfb

[ii] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/aug/06/mps-paid-10m-for-second-jobs-and-freelance-work-over-past-year

[iii] Andrew Murray, Is Socialism Possible in Britain? Reflections on the Corbyn Years, Verso 2022

[iv] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/postscript.htm

NEW YEAR QUIZ

Our New Year Quiz this year only has one question –

Question: What do you do with a system that

• Allows extreme wealth to be accumulated and passed on by some while relying on foodbanks to support others.
• Is unwilling to curtail the extraction, importation and burning of fossil fuels sufficiently quickly to avoid climate collapse.
• Supports colonial expansion and genocide by its ‘allies’.
• Has no solution for the waves of immigration  caused by wars for which it shares responsibility.
• Fails to provide adequate housing for its own population.
• Under-funds its public health service and those who work for it.
• Claims that unproportional mass votes every few years choosing between two or three  undemocratically run and very similar parties represents ‘democracy’.
• Has a hereditary head of state and a second chamber stuffed with appointees, many of whom have donated to one of the above parties.
• Possesses at huge cost weapons of mass destruction targeted at civilian populations.
• Obstructs acts of solidarity by workers and imposes restrictions on their trade unions.
• Seeks to curtail demonstrations and prosecute demonstrators.
• Maintains a ‘free’ press owned by oligarchs.
• Turns a blind eye to tax havens and other methods of tax avoidance by the rich while imposing sanctions on those claiming its meagre levels of social support.

Answer:

You abolish it!

and start to build a replacement whose organisation and wealth distribution are initially based on the amount of work we perform or have previously performed.

To contribute to this task, apply to join the Communist Party of Britain by e-mailing croydon@communistparty.org.uk.

Happy New Year!