Ukraine is not “Abkhazia” or “South Ossetia”

John Eden
It was just over a year ago that I started this blog but never published it, I want to add to the title ‘Ukraine is also not “Transneister”.<I am keeping the Quote from the unpublished blog which will be at the end of more recent comments.
Clearly things are very different than just over a year ago in Ukraine, then the Kremlin controlled the political and economic life of the country though the pro-Russian Party of the Regions, that party no longer exists. The attempt to annex the east has clearly failed, the territory under the control of the Russian back separatists constitutes no more than perhaps 3 or 4 percent of Ukraine.
The Minsk agreement does not suit everyone the separatists would like to achieve there dream of 'New Russia' the ten oblasts (regions) of Eastern and Southern Ukraine, the Ukrainians want to get full control of their territory. Most Ukrainians and Russians welcome the ceasefire, they only want the fighting and killing to stop. This is a major problem particularly for the Russians, nobody wants a war, there is no appetite for all-out war amongst the Russian people. But all-out war is the only way that the elite of Russia can achieve their dream of becoming a great power through the creation of their much vaunted 'Russian World'.
What ever one thinks of the regimes in Ukraine or Russia, what ever one thinks of who is responsible for the conflict, the fact at present is that Ukraine is no longer in the 'sphere of influence' (itself a reactionary concept) of Russia, and never will be again without a war! The rest is from the unfinished blog of one year ago'Tymoshenko calls for restraint and diplomacy" From the Guardian  website 1st March 2014

Yulia Tymoshenko, the former prime minister who was freed one week ago, has called for Ukrainians to remain calm in the face of provocation and avoid falling into the trap that Georgia did in 2008. She said that the Ukraine must engage with the UN and EU.

Russia has just committed another act of intimidation against Ukraine. Thus Russia wants to kill the independence of Ukraine, to get us to surrender. We are a peaceful people , we are a peaceful country  but if we accept  the ultimatum now from Russia – we lose our country.

I propose to act, but to keep calm and not fully react against Russian aggression and not to act according to their plans, exacerbating the situation. They want a war scenario like Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia.

Ukraine must now become a gathering place for the entire democratic world.
We must make sure that when Russia will meet in Ukraine to shoot ,  then she should know that at this moment it will shoot the entire  democratic world , which at that time will be in Ukraine.
I  ask all Ukrainians to unite in this  difficult time . Our main weapon is complete peace of mind’ >            

WHAT’S AN MP WORTH?

Malcolm Rifkind, caught out last week trying to sell his services to a phoney Chinese business, had the effrontery to claim that he needed a second job as MPs were paid so poorly.  Like many other MPs, Mr Rifkind chooses to ignore the fact that the average wage of people lucky enough to have a full time job in the UK is only around £26,000 while MPs’ salaries are set to rise to £74,000, almost three times this amount. Furthermore, at a time when final salary occupational pension schemes in the UK have largely disappeared, MPs’ retirement pensions have recently been improved from 1/50 final salary per year of contribution to 1/40. Meanwhile, most of their constituents are expected to subsist on the state old age pension of £5,876 a year.

Michael Heseltine provided another explanation last week for why MPs need a second job. It wasn’t poverty, Lord Heseltine explained, it was because an MP’s job was not really full time! Given the length of the parliamentary recess, he may have a point here. But surely the remedy would be not to pay MPs during the recess. After all, there are lots of zero hour jobs out there. At the last count, 700,000 of their constituents were ‘benefitting’ from this readily available source of employment.

So what is an MP worth? Ignoring the obvious, cheap retort, it’s necessary to remind ourselves that, in one way, Lord Heseltine was right. Being an MP is not, or rather should not be, a job at all. Many MPs mistakenly think of themselves as part of a profession. How often do we hear them refer to themselves as having a ‘career’ as a parliamentarian. Being an MP isn’t a job, it isn’t a career – or at least it should not be. It is, or should be, for a limited time, to be the servant of those who elected them. MPs’  pay should therefore be sufficient to enable them to discharge this service – no more and no less. The average full time wage, £26,000 per year, can provide a useful yardstick for this. It would also give MPs an incentive, that they currently lack, to work to increase this average. Isn’t that what we pay them for?

Would candidates of a ‘suitable calibre’ come forward for election on such supposedly meagre terms? Of course they would! They might not want to hang around for 40 years to collect the (under this proposal much reduced) pension, but so much the better for that.

There is, however, one, possibly insurmountable problem to implementing such a sensible arrangement. Under our current , capitalist society there is a huge disparity in wealth and income. If MPs’ salaries were constrained to the industrial average, Parliament might revert to its profile at the beginning of the last century – stuffed with individuals with private wealth who don’t need any salary to be an MP.  There is, of course, a remedy for this. Get rid of capitalism.

Newspaper Ownership

The revelation of The Telegraph’s lack of coverage of HSBC’s illicit tax evasion business in Switzerland did not come as a surprise. The ownership of a national newspaper is attractive to multi-millionaires with assets to protect and other business interests to promote. Rupert Murdoch (Times, Sun) the Barclay Brothers (Telegraph), Lord Rothermere (Mail) and Richard Desmond (Express) don’t own their newspapers for philanthropic reasons or even for the profits they generate. They own them for the influence it gives – influence to protect their other commercial interests and to promote and project their political views. This projection isn’t even primarily at their readers. It is directed at the established political parties and the governments they form. This is clearly undemocratic. But what is to be done?

One solution would be to require every national newspaper to be owned by their readers on a one-member-one vote basis and to limit their dependency on commercial advertising. This is the model employed by the Morning Star and it works well. It has enabled the Morning Star to secure a readership well beyond that of card carrying members of the Communist Party. The Morning Star still faces a struggle for survival, largely as a consequence of being shunned by the other mass media, including the BBC. The model, nevertheless, has been shown to work and the resulting loyalty of its reads is far above that of any other national newspaper.

What of newspapers that don’t wish to re-structure as reader co-operatives or to limit their dependency on advertisers? Should they be shut down? Would that not be undemocratic?

In the internet age, the contribution made to democracy by large, privately owned newspapers is questionable. Shutting them down might well be justified in some situations – as it was, for example, in Cuba after the revolution, although the actual course of events there was more complex, having been triggered by an exodus of newspaper owners and editors to Miami and the election in their absence of new editors by newspaper workers. In less revolutionary times, the continued publication of newspapers not owned by readers could be tolerated if they were subject to a non-linear tax, not on the newspaper’s profits, which are often small or even negative, but on their annual revenue, circulation and advertising and losses. At least the benefits accruing to the owners would then be taxed and, if supplemented by a requirement that owners must themselves be resident and domiciled in the UK, at least some measure of fairness would be established. This idea is briefly discussed in the pamphlet From Each According to Their Means from the Economics Commission of the Communist Party that I mentioned last week, with a proposal for how the non-linear tax could be constructed dealt with in the supporting paper underpinning the pamphlet.

THE HOUSING CRISIS

House prices in Croydon in 2013 were 7.57 times average local earnings, more than twice the same affordability ratio in 1997. Yet the Bank of England has instructed banks to lend no more than 4.5 times annual salary. This means first time buyers in Croydon with average local earnings will have to save three times their annual salary to find the deposit. They will then face interest repayments that would consume more than half their pre-tax salary when interest rates exceed 11% – as they are likely to do when the government’s policy of quantitative easing ends.

Looking for a home in an adjacent borough won’t help. The affordability ratios in Sutton, Bromley and Merton are 8.56, 9.99 and 11.29 respectively – and their house prices tend to be higher.

The government’s solution is the Help-to-Buy scheme. This enables first time buyers to put down a deposit of ‘only’ 5% on homes costing up to £600,000. That’s great for wealthy first time buyers (and the banks) but not much use to the rest of us. In order to buy a two bedroom flat in Croydon costing, say, £220,000, an income of £49,000 and, even with the government scheme, a deposit of £11,000 is required. Meanwhile the Help-to-Buy scheme is helping to fuel mushrooming house prices.

What are the alternatives facing young people desperate for housing? There is little prospect of a council house: the stock is still being eroded by Right-to-Buy and waiting lists are long and have tough criteria that are tending to get tougher. In Croydon 5,015 were on the list at March 2014, a significant proportion of who were officially classified as homeless[1]. The despicable bedroom tax is symptomatic of the shortage of council houses. Then there is shared ownership and the private rented sector. The former is a useful compromise between renting and buying but monthly outgoings can be high. The latter is largely unregulated, expensive and offers almost no security of tenure. Finally, for those with secure family backgrounds, there is living with Mum and Dad. Currently a quarter of all 20 to 34 year old working adults in England – 1.97 million people – are living with their parents[2]. Hardly ideal!

Labour and the Tories continue to make claims about the number of affordable houses that will be built if they are elected, but the private sector makes more money from building larger and luxury homes. Their claims are spurious and, even if fulfilled, would not be sufficient to house our growing population. So how would Communists do things differently? As Marxists we see housing as something that should be cherished for its use value, not its exchange value. For us a house is a home, not a slice of capital on which to speculate in the hope of passing on some capital to our heirs. Our strategy as communists would therefore be to resume the building of council houses for those who want them, and for others who value a sense of ownership and security, we would seek to uncouple ownership from speculation, thereby make homes more affordable. This could be achieved by land nationalisation, but much the same effect could be achieved, at least initially, with a Land Value Tax (LVT). LVT ensures that the community at large benefits from increasing land values – the primary cause of increasing house prices. This is as it should be. The gains home owners accumulate don’t come out of thin air: they represent transfers of wealth from those who don’t own houses to those who do. If not eaten up in care home fees, these unearned gains end up as inherited wealth – inherited in many cases by the same people who couldn’t afford to buy their own home when they were younger.

If you wish to find out more about LVT, have a look at the pamphlet From Each According to their Means I mentioned last week[3] .

[1] Freedom of Information Request https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T1dlZ0QH2zhW5jyW1A4ZG1RS_RqhW5aIGVPhkoA-0n8/edit?pli=1

[2] http://england.shelter.org.uk/news/july_2014/

[3] Available for £2.50 including post from the Communist Party, 23 Coombe Road, Croydon CR0 1BD, http://www.communist-party.org.uk

Businesses don’t vote!

The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) concluded this week that PWC, otherwise known as PricewaterhouseCoopers, was guilty of promoting tax avoidance schemes on an “industrial scale”. The seriousness of this finding is difficult to over-estimate:  PWC is one of our ‘Big Four’ business consultancy, accountancy and auditing firms. Their businesses have been constructed on the back of statutory audit, essentially a monopoly granted by government to ensure the truthfulness and fairness of the published accounts. Audited accounts are the bedrock on which business is taxed, albeit after a multiplicity of adjustments required by our tax legislation.

The PAC’s finding is a timely one, coming at time when the Tory press had been railing against Miliband’s modest criticism of tax avoidance by big business. These press attacks, claiming that (horror of horrors), Labour is ‘anti-business’ have been made to look pretty silly. Miliband’s response, that Labour will move within six months of being elected against tax havens in Crown dependencies, is welcome. Perhaps he has been reading the recent discussion document from the Economics Commission of the Communist Party on how our tax regime should be reformed[1]. If so, he will now know how to respond to the malign influence of PWC and the other ‘Big Four’ accountancy firms in the UK. The Commission proposed:

• A ban on the revolving door between HM Revenue and Customs and these firms and on them working on government tax policy
• An end to secondments between the Civil Service and the Big Four
• A ban on government contracts going to any firm that devises aggressive tax avoidance strategies – no more running with the hare and the hounds.
• Legislation to abolish limited liability partnerships, the form employed by the Big Four to conceal what they are up to.
• Complete separation between the auditing and consultancy businesses – divestment, not token walls
• A statutory requirement to publish accounts to the same level of disclosure required of companies

Endorsing these recommendations would be seen as a declaration of war on the Big Four and would trigger a further onslaught on Labour in the Tory press. But perhaps Labour is at last waking up to the fact that, short of capitulation to a Tory agenda, they are going to receive such an onslaught whatever they promise. Most encouraging of all, perhaps it has at last dawned on Labour that businesses don’t vote – people do.

.

[1] From Each According to their Means, £2.50 including postage from the Communist Party, 23 Coombe Road, Croydon CR0 1BD  or from http://www.communist-party.org.uk/shop.html

DIGITAL DEMOCRACY

Earlier this week the Speaker’s Report on Digital Democracy was published. The report from a group of MPs led by John Bercow, the Speaker of the House of Commons, was prompted by falling voter turnout and recognition that Parliament and MPs are held largely in contempt by the public. This threatens parliamentary democracy and something needs to be done if we are not to lose our hard won democratic rights. The recommendations in the report are, however, an inadequate response.

This is not to say that the report does not contain some sensible proposals. Parliament’s procedures and customs are more suited to a public school or Oxbridge debating society than to a modern elected chamber. Such arcane practices as putting on a top hat to attract the speaker’s attention and the bear fight that is Prime Minister’s Question Time may provide a comfort blanket for the many MPs who imbibed their politics in these arenas, but they don’t belong in a modern elected chamber. Certainly, MPs should, as the report recommends, be able to vote electronically – provided they have bothered to attend the preceding debate and are present in the chamber at the time. Being herded like sheep through lobbies by the oh so appropriately named ‘whips’ belongs to the nineteenth century, not the twenty first. Of course, as the report recommends, Parliament should be more transparent to the public. Ordinary voters in parliamentary (and local government) elections should, as the report recommends, of course be provided with an electronic voting facility – but only if the widespread abuse currently attaching to postal voting is first eliminated and steps are taken to ensure such practices are not take up with e-voting. All these reforms are all quite possible, but not when political parties are funded by rich individuals and unaccountable businesses and when the regulator is the present rather feeble Electoral Commission. But, even in their entirety, they are not enough.

 There are several reasons why Parliament and MPs are held in contempt by a large proportion of the public: -

 a. The first past the post voting system is unfit for purpose. Most voters cannot cast a meaningful vote, i.e. one that will make a difference. The rejection by referendum of one inadequate alternative does not make first past the post acceptable.

 b. MPs are not representative of the people they are supposed to represent. Their earnings are a significant multiple of voters’ average earnings; their pension entitlement is much better than that of the average voter; and many of them have second jobs and well paid sinecures. Furthermore, most MPs are either drawn from the upper middle class, with professional qualifications or business backgrounds and Oxbridge educations, or they are upwardly mobile careerists from local government.

 c. the MPs’ expenses scandal. The public was sickened by the ‘we were only following the rules’ defences put forward by so many greedy MPs caught with their hands in the public till.

We must be on guard against attempts to undermine parliamentary democracy. Certainly the current system leaves plenty of scope for improvement, and these improvements will be supported by communists. But the siren calls for more power to be given to the establishment – judges, political appointees, spooks and the ubiquitous “Crown” – must be resisted. Such democratic rights as we have secured by struggle must not be thrown away. Communists recognise, however, that parliamentary democracy, under which we have a choice every few years to choose between two parties with similar policies, and perhaps a string of smaller parties with little hope of forming a government, is an inadequate expression of democracy – rule by the people. We need democracy throughout our society: in our local government, where adequate funding and a return to the Committee System is a prerequisite; in the workplace, where electronic voting for strike ballots would help level the playing field between unions and employers; and we certainly need to oppose the Tory proposal, if elected, to count abstentions in strike ballots as votes against striking. Most significantly, however, as communists we have a vision for a real, participative democracy in which ordinary working people discuss and debate and then take decisions without being bullied or misled by the rich and powerful and their servants.

BIG PHARMA

The threat to the NHS is not confined to the way it is being slowly privatised by the Tories and their Lib-Dem stooges – a process which was shamefully initiated by the last Labour Government and about which Labour remains largely silent in the run up to the General Election. The other threat is of even longer standing and relates to the way the big pharmaceutical companies, Big Pharma, operate. This was illustrated this week by two news items. First, it was announced that NHS England is to delay the introduction of Sofobuvir, a drug that can save the lives of people infected by the hepatitis C virus because the manufacturer, Gilead, is charging too much. In the US Sofobuvir costs $1,000 a pill. Gilead want to charge the NHS a still exorbitant £35,000 for a twelve week course or £75,000 for the 24 week course many patients will require.

The other news item is the report from Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) that the price of life-saving vaccines has skyrocketed leaving some countries struggling to fully immunise children. MSF say there has been a 68-fold increase in prices between 2001 and 2014 and it  accuses Big Pharma of overcharging, especially developing countries.

When accused of over-charging, the response by Big Pharma is always the same: they say that their pricing reflects the cost of research and manufacture. These businesses are, however, almost completely opaque organisations, depend on states to afford them extended patents, research what is most profitable and spread this highly secret research, and their manufacturing and marketing, internationally, enabling them to play off one country against another and to take full advantage of tax havens. Essentially they charge whatever they can get away with.

A partial remedy would be provided by the tax reforms and more transparent accounting called for in a recent discussion pamphlet from the Communist Party From Each According to Their Means[i].Reform of the tax system and more transparent accounting would, however, not be a complete remedy. Capital will always find a way to secure its own interests, whether by buying the politicians or by outright deception. What’s wrong with the pharmaceutical industry is what’s wrong with capitalism as a whole: it’s run without consideration for the wider good and to benefit a small group of shareholders, especially those with significant amounts of capital at their disposal. It is not run in the interests of people who need the products and services generated, whether they be poor people in developing countries or the working people in developed countries like the UK.

The complete remedy is a democratic society in which investment, including pharmaceutical research, is organised and planned in order to meet the needs of ordinary working people, not the interests of the capitalist class – essentially the 1%. What’s this system called?  Socialism! Or, as we prefer to call it when it has been fully developed, Communism.

[i] Available from the Communist Party, Ruskin House, 23 Coombe Road, Croydon CR0 1BD. £2.50 including postage.

TTIP: WHAT WE NEED TO DO NOW

On 19 December I commented on the threat to democracy posed by the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) currently being negotiated in secret by the US administration and the EC.  Under the proposed Investor-to-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), it would allow US multinationals to override laws protecting the environment, consumer rights, workers and food standards by enabling them to sue EU governments and local authorities who dared to pass or enact legislation that stood in their way of making profits. This could prove the death knell for the NHS but has implications that extend to the entire public sector and provision of services by the state.

It is now reported that, after an unprecedented 150,000 objections across the EU, ISDS has been ‘set aside’ by negotiators. We thank everyone who themselves ‘set aside’ their legitimate doubts about whether anyone would be listening and registered their objections. We are also grateful to the few Labour Party MPs who spoke out in parliament against TTIP.

‘Set aside’ does not, however, mean abandon. When the US-EU talks resume next month, ISDS will not be discussed, but the European Commission will be in a position to decide after our general election whether to return to it. The Tories and their stooges, the Lib Dems, remain keen on TTIP in its entirety. UKIP is hostile to the EU for largely xenophobic reasons but endorses the pro-big business, anti-worker philosophy behind it. Thus if, after the general election, these parties are in government, they will undoubtedly work behind the scenes to get TTIP, including ISDS, adopted by the EU. The UK will then have no say in its implementation.

What of the Labour Party leadership? It has maintained a shattering silence on the matter.  It is therefore essential that we keep up the pressure on Labour Party candidates at the forthcoming general election, asking them to come out openly and oppose TTIP – and to commit to continuing to do this once elected. Local hustings and the forthcoming Croydon TUC statement of commitments asked of all candidates standing in Croydon at the general election can have significant roles to play here. Please make your contribution to seeing that this happens.

Democracy for sale

In the 2010 election campaign the Tories claimed to have spent £16.6 million and they received around 10 million votes. Labour spent £8m and received 8.6 million votes. That works out at around £1.70 and 90 pence per vote respectively. In reality, their costs per vote were significantly higher, not only because they are neither averse to concealing and artificially deflating recorded election expenditure but because they both benefit, especially the Tories, from extensive media coverage, none of which they have to pay for and much of which is pure propaganda. The Communist Party’s cost per vote is harder to estimate as, due to the cost of lost deposits, £500 per constituency, it cannot afford to stand in many seats. In those seats in which it did stand in 2010 it averages some 0.3% of vote. While this does not seem, at first glance, very impressive, it does correspond to 8,900 votes nationally. The CP raised £28,000 for the 2010 general election for campaigning, i.e. election expenditure other than lost deposits. Thus its cost per vote in 2010 was only 32 pence per vote. Who knows what could have been achieved if we too had resources equal to those of the big parties and a fair hearing in the mass media?

What will election spending be in the forthcoming general election? In the past four years the Tories have raised £78 million.  This is five times their 2010 spend and thought to be about three times what the Labour Party are thought to have – some £26 million. The Communist Party is, on the other hand, planning to raise only £13,000 from its members this time to fight the election. Clearly, we are heading to win the lowest cost per vote again. We can take some comfort from this, but it’s hardly a triumph for democracy.

Almost a third of the Tories huge election war chest has been donated by the owners of hedge funds. In return the Tory Chancellor has granted them huge tax concessions and turned a blind eye to their exploitation of tax havens. This is a gross distortion of our democracy.

How then should our democracy be paid for? Here are my views. For a start, only those who pay tax in the UK should be allowed to vote in UK elections. Then entitlement to donate to a political party should be confined to this electorate. The only exception should be the trade unions as they enable individual workers to act collectively to counter the influence of wealthy individuals. Equating the political donations of trade unions with those of businesses, as do the Tories, is risible. That a significant Blairite rump in the Labour Party appears to agree with the Tories on this tells us more about their politics than they would probably wish us to know.

The final reform of how we pay for our democracy should be an annual cap on donations by individuals equal to, say, 10% of average annual earnings. Not their average earnings, the average earnings. The donations by trade unions could be set at the same level but determined in aggregate using the total membership of the union other than those who have opted out of the political fund or who cannot vote in UK elections. This would still leave wealthy individuals with an advantage as they could most easily afford to pay up to the ceiling, but this advantage would at least be partially offset by the collective nature of donations by trade unions.

The predictable response of the Tories, UKIP, LibDems and Blairite Labourites to these reforms would, of course, be to demand state funding. How else could they continue to dominate and distort the electoral process? This should be resisted. The Communist Party asks for no such state support – at least this side of the revolution! If we can function without state support in a capitalist society, so can they!

After the revolution, the responsibilities of the Communist Party (and trade unions) would change. State funding for both might then well be required in order to reflect their new responsibilities. Roll on the day!

85th Anniversary of the Morning Star

This year marks the 85th anniversary of the Morning Star. The paper first came out on 1 January 1930 under the title, the Daily Worker. It changed its name to the Morning Star in 1966. The paper is the voice of organised labour. It’s the only paper that reports on the industrial and political issues that matter to ordinary people. And it will play a crucial role in this general election year as the political debate sharpens and we fight to get rid of the Con-Dems in May.

We need more people to buy the Morning Star to cover production costs and ensure the voice of socialism is heard. Please encourage your friends and colleagues to buy the paper by placing an order at your local newsagent or buying a subscription to the e-edition: http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/subscribe