It is a bedroom tax!

There is a curious debate going on the Chronicle & Echo's website about whether the coalition's 'bedroom tax' should be called a tax.
Some more reactionary contributors want it described as a benefit reduction and even claim that it somehow a measure to 'help' thousands of people on the housing list by redistributing homes eitherb those in the public sector or those belonging to housing associations.
It all seems so simple-there are people living in council properties with extra rooms, and there are people waiting for homes-whether bigger ones or just a home!
So the simple solution is that you decant those selfish folk living with an extra room and move them elsewhere!
Now it would seem that the legislation is not simply talking about  bedrooms, but if your old council property happens to have a dining room,then that is deemed a bedroom and subject to the legislation.Either move out or pay more!

My Auntie lived in a council house in Stranraer for many years.It was built with a wee dinettebetween the kitchen and the living room.
Would that be considered an extra bedroom?
Now apart from the brutally arbitrary nature of this legislation it has all the hallmarks of social engineering, or if you prefer it,urban cleansing.
It originated in the days of the Shirley Porter regime in Westminster when the Tory Lady hated the idea of working class families living in wards that might return Labour councillors,and so they were 'cleaned' from the area,making the likelihood of a Tory councillor.
It was also a policy that kept some areas free from the infection of poor people,never attractive to the eye of Tory grandees.
To suggest that a family perhaps settled in a home(for which they will have paid for many times over) should be required to move from their neighbours and friends,from their familiar environment,from the home they have built up over many years,is simply inhuman.

many of the ranters and ravers on the website were concerned about value for money, and feigned a concern for those on the housing  waiting list and their suffering.
The answer of course is not to shuffle people from place to place as their family size changes but simply TO BUILD MORE BLOODY HOUSES!

Of course the coalition has no problem with selling off council houses-then you can have as many empty rooms as you like, but all that means is the housing stock is reduced and there are even less houses available to rent,driving more people into the arms of private landlords.
And of course there is the insurmountable problem,both locally and nationally of the shortage of smaller houses and flats anyway.
Even if a tenant in Northampton agrees to downsize to avoid paying extra,there are no smaller properties available anyway.
Does that mean if there are no properties available then the 'tax' does not have to be paid?
I understand at the last count there was a tiny handful of small properties available,and evn less now NBC has promised priority to servicemen returning (and there will be more of them given the redundancies  in the armed forces!)
So the coalition is offering a cheap gimmick,designed to appease the Taxpayers Alliance and other assorted opponents of public housing and at the same time making no effort to really solve the problem of public housing.
No building programmes,the greedy bankers why have a stranglehold on any prospect of mortgages and of course the usual litany that seeks to blame the poor,the dispossessed and migrant workers.
This is a government with no shame,and the greatest shame is that the Lib-Dems are party to this and the Labour Party failed to build enough homes during their term of office.

However I have ome suggestion that might help.There is an elderly couple living in central London with a house that has ooh hundreds of spare bedrooms, they also have a large empty property in Windsor  a big one out in Norfolk and an enormous property up on Deeside.
They also have dozens of other big houses that they call 'grace and favour' residences dotted all over London.
Perhaps they could help?  
   

                        After Eastleigh- so what!

So the Lib-Dems 'won' Eastleigh-well hush my mouth!!

They actually held on to one of their safest seats,after all they do hold all the Council seats in the constituency.

And that is a cause for celebration in the Lib-Dem high command,so Huhne nips off to do some porridge,Lord Groper is put out to grass and wee Nick bleats on about a new dawn.

Of course they used the Lord Rennard election model, fill every possible street with Lib-Dem canvassers,stuff every letterbox (or orifice  with a Focus leaflet, and spend as much as it takes.

That's a really smart tactic, wonder why no-one else has ever thought of it?

The Tories were bound to lose, this time they did it quite spectacularly,coming a magnificent third, but then its the usual mid term blues,protest vote,government in power blah blah blah blah...

Labour trailed in a miserable fourth,but of course that's no surprise, 250th target seat, they won Corby, celebrity candidate whom no-one had ever heard of, the usual blah,blah,blah,blah......

Of course the talking point was the magnificent achievement of the Monster Raving Loonies,oh sorry I meant UKIP, storming into second place!

Well howdy doody, a party based on xenophobia,barely hidden racism,anti-European rhetoric(funny how all their MP's are in fact MEP's taking the euro-shilling) and led by a bar-room bore!

But then its a seat in rural Hampshire, where every four ale bar has a mini-Farage ranting half arsed jingoism to any passing spaniel. 

He's the bloke in the tappy sheepskin coat and the scuffed hush-puppies.

It was a by-election that meant absolutely nothing and it's only significance is to demonstrate the paucity of political thought and the vacuum that exists in British political life when everything is reduced to the strength of the party machine to break people's will and drag the unwilling squeezed 'middle' out to the polling station if only to stop the bloody Lib-Dems crawling through the letter box to drag the quivering voter out to vote!

As the immortal Jim Royle would say:

"Politics-my arse!"

Forty Years On

                          Forty Years On!-Lest we forget.


This September we will be commemorating the military coup that destroyed the legally elected Socialist government of President Allende in Chile.

Somewhat like the military coup that brought Franco to power in Spain in 1938 the bodies of those murdered by the junta are still being found.
Significantly there is a suggestion that the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda's body may be exhumed to see if the fascists poisoned him shortly after the coup.
Echoes of the murder of the great Spanish poet Garcia Lorca ,also a victim of the fascists.

But of course it is not simply poets and musicians and artists and intellectuals that the brutes  massacre.Workers and peasants and their children were all victims of the destructive power of such regimes.

Spain was 75 years ago, Chile was 40 years ago, and still throughout the world workers and peasants are being quietly massacred as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening.
Business as usual.
Of course it was just that in Chile, it was 'business as usual ' for the Anaconda Copper Company and the other US based multi-nationals who were terrified that the workers of Chile, alongside their elected government might just look across the Caribbean and see what the Cuban people had done to the American multi-nationals.
There would be no more 'business as usual' if the workers expropriated the corporations.

That was why Pinochet had the full support of the CIA,who spent billions destabilising Dr Allende's government.remember who was running the CIA at the time?
That evil bastard George.H.Bush, father of that other evil murdering bastard George W. Bush.


And remember who was George H Bush's biggest buddy- why Margaret Thatcher of course!
And who was George M Bush's biggest buddy when he launched the Iraq war-why Tony Blair of course!  

Northampton played a significant part in the solidarity movement for Chile.Our unions were magnificent, the TGWU 5/221 branch, the drivers branch producwed stickers 'No Truck with the Chilean Junta' and the TGWU branch over at Fords in Daventry raised funds like it was going out of fashion.

Solidarity was real and practical, as well as the endless fundraising Northampton Chile Solidarity produced, in Spanish  a handbook for young trade unionists who were replacing the murdered and exiled activists,and we were able to smuggle in the duplicator skins.

We also helped with the resettlement of many political refugees driven from their homes.
Amongst the most amazing were an elderly couple, Don Cisternas and his wife Mina.

His crime?
He had been a member of thye Communist Party and chair of the tractor committee in his village.
Don Cisternas provided us with one of those wonderful moments.At a party he was having a conversation of sorts with my father, who had been a farm worker many years ago.
One spoke Spanish, the other wild foul Scots and they were trying to communicate.
My Dad asked Don Cisternas what he did as a hobby.
"Parrot shooting", was the reply.
My old man was astounded:
"At your age-parachuting?"
A strange conversation, but in essence it always reminds me that workers have much more in common and don't need language all the time.
Two old men separated by thousands of miles but could share a joke and share a common humanity.
A people united will never be defeated!

It's time the Labour Party remembered it's roots, and remembered what solidarity is really all about.

Adam the First-Tsar of all the Northamptonshire's


After twelve weeks as the supreme commander of all that he surveys,Adam Simmonds,Northamptonshire's elected (by 10%of the population) Police and Crime Commissioner has been rumbled.
By no less a figure than Brian Binley, the MP for Northampton South and fellow Tory.
In his first 12 weeks Simmonds has issued more decrees than any Roman Emperor in his prime.
Any-time now Caligula Simmonds will appoint his pet rabbit a Deputy Police Commissioner and we will all know the fearful truth-he has passed from merely being a hapless booby to a rustic megalomaniac.
Consider his record of decrees since the first time he settled his 10% bottom in the Commissioners chair, and I have to admit that this is probably a partial list.
He has:
1.Promised to recruit 200 'territorial-style' part time officers.
2.Create more police cadets
3.Ensure there are more specials
4.Reintroduce blue police boxes all over the place.
5.Combat drug abuse with a special task force 
6.Combat every other social ill with a range of other task forces.
7. Move the police headquarters to the town centre
8.Disperse  a number of HQ functions throughout the County.
9.Sell Wootton Hall (or rather NOT sell Wootton Hall) as he's keeping bits of it.
10.Freeze Police pay.
11.'Merge' the police and fire service under a new supreme commander....guess who he has in mind?
12 Em sure that his election agent and an old mate from his NCC days are appointed (on a temporary basis you understand) as Deputy Crime Commissioners on £65k a year.Plus another two for good measure also on £65k a year.
13.And amazingly he will do all this without increasing the police precept by a single groat.

The man is an absolute marvel, because while he and his closely knit team are thinking up all these wheezes, it would appear for instance that the merger idea has been around for ooh...twelve whole weeks,he has also been signing executive orders by the shed load.

You see as well as being a master communicator he is also an expert on IT provision,sanitary supplies, office refurbishment,you name it,Adam's got it covered.
His particular experience as 'the youngest PCC in the land' as he proudly boasts is not quite extensive.He started his working life in Northants. as the political assistant to the Tory group on NCC.From whence he rapidly moved up the greasy pole to an important job at NCC.
Interestingly when he resigned from the County,by his own choice,to fight the PCC election, he managed to get three months severance pay for resigning!
All I can say is that Adam appears to have a very good union-perhaps other NCC employees should take note.
Other than his NCC career not a lot is really known about our dynamic crime buster other than he supported Jeffery Archer for London Mayor and belongs to an obscure evangelical cult.
But it would appear after twelve months he is being sussed out.Over the weeks the Chron's blog has had pages of criticism of his performance.The usual named suspects have been on there,Tony Clarke,Steve Ritches,me(he accused me of being 'political'and not a writer!) joined by Jim MacArthur (UKIP PCC candidate and someone with experience of policing) and Richard Church.

However the intervention of Brian Binley may well open the floodgates.Now it would appear that Brendan Glynnane has joined the fray.One might of course say about time for the leader of the opposition on NCC.
But then there is a bigger gap, a larger silence that is inexplicable.What has happened to the Labour Party?
Simmonds is a disaster no longer waiting to happen.
Where is the Council and possibly government in waiting?
Cat got their tongue?
The fire-fighters in this county are under attack,along with the police service and every citizen of the county.
Why so silent brothers and sisters,why so silent?
I bet you'll soon be knocking on the FBU's door asking for cash to fight the County Council elections. 

   

Standing on the shoulders of giants

From the moment I could read I was sure that capitalism would collapse.I was what Americans call a 'red diaper baby'.My family and all their friends were members or supporters of the Communist Party.
Our family were the 'reds in the village', our daily paper was 'The Daily Worker' and on Sunday we got 'Reynolds News'(the Co-op paper)I was the only kid in the village who didn't get The Sunday Post'.
Any Scot will tell you that the Dundee published Sunday Post is the heartbeat of mawkish sentimental Scotland.It combines a Presbyterian prudishness with a shortbread tin vision of Scotland.
it's ill named fun section had creatures who never existed in the real Scotland. Eejits  who used words like'jings' and'crivvens' and 'help ma boab'.
many of my relatives up there thought I had a deprived childhood, others thought I had a depraved childhood!

The Communist Party in the 1950's was a secure sort of place,we were cocooned in our belief system that we were the winning side, that Uncle Joe had it right and the innate superiority of the Soviet Union would justify everything.
Trouble was being in the party was a bit like being an exclusive brotherhood, a bit like a cult.

With the Khrushchev speech in 1956 the certainties started to fade,maybe we had got it wrong.
There was always the Trotskyite alternatives, if Stalin-ism was the problem, then maybe its polar opposite was the answer, and as we all knew capitalism was certainly doomed .
I found many of the Trotskyite sects alarming, they seemed dour and grim faced, and in truth their papers had all the attraction of a damp day in Skegness.The worst was the SLL that later became the WRP the grouplet led by Gerry Healy and paid for by the Redgrave's and a bunch of dodgy middle east states.

Whilst in Hackney YCL we came across Tony Cliff and his wife Chaimie Rosenberg, the founders of International Socialism that morphed into the SWP.
They were the most charismatic and generous ideologues I ever met, Cliff was a fiercely intelligent Marxist who welcomed discussion and debate and was always stimulating.
I might easily have fallen into the arms of IS, but the siren call of Maoism and the Red Guards convinced me that the revolution was only days,if not hours away and there really wasn't time for slow enterism of the Labour Party.
Why waste time in a petty bourgeois excuse of a party when we were already collecting hammers and nails for the street barricades!
Well the day has gone, communism collapsed in Eastern Europe and the USSR, China has reverted to a state capitalist economy(Cliff was right about that) and the old battle between Stalin-ism and Trotskyism is as dead as a dodo,or at least Uncle Joe.
But capitalism is now in it's death throws, and Marx was absolutely right.Yet the left has disintegrated!
The SWP is falling apart like every other cult, and is following the route of the WRP.
The Labour Party is now a hollowed out shell for careerists and as the crisis develops can only urge its supporters to 'go out and listen' It is not much better than the cults on the far left and has replaced any vision it once had with a lust for power at all costs.'Never mind the quality feel the width'.

Yet I believe that there is something stirring once again, and it's not the Neanderthal UKIP bunch.There is a political force starting to build again, from the bottom up, centred in issues not personalities  and looking at the bigger picture.
Right now it is inchoate, a directonless movement,sometimes ranting on the pavements,occupying buildings and wearing silly masks.
But there is something stirring, people are starting to look once again at the trade union movement.Not in the old craft way,or as organisations based in factories and workshops, but rather as organisations rooted in communities,representing not a trade or a profession,but rather a class.
The most exciting development has been the emergence of the Community membership of Unite.It is bringing the organisation and strength of trade unions to people in desperate need as capitalism bites into their living standards in the most brutal way.It defends the unemployed,the tenant,the patient,the pensioner,the homeless and the disaffected youth of our land.
I see a red sun rising,and as parties become increasingly irrelevant I( see a new giant emerging, to stand on the shoulders of those who went before.
And who knows, out of community trade unionism a new political movement might emerge, perhaps it's time to look for my hammer and nails!



 

A real New Year or more of the same old stuff? This year is likely to be as bad as last year.These are the dog days of a dreary government that is simply waiting for something to turn up. Without doubt this coalition is the most reactionary government I have ever lived through and it's getting worse.It is a Thatcherite government, red in tooth and claw,but with no resistance to its marauding instincts. It has incorporated the most feeble of coalition partners in the history of feeble partners. Whatever claims to dignity and political integrity the Lib-Dems once claimed has vanished in the grubby ambitions of a handful of mediocrities who wanted the ministerial limousines to comfort their fattening arses. I am always reminded of ee.cummings line when I see the smug face of Clegg: "A politician is an arse on which everyone sits except a man." facing the savage cuts in the welfare system, the dismantling of public education and the health service,the fragmentation of local authorities and the dismemberment of the police service- where is the opposition? Of course it must be very difficult for those in the Parliamentary Labour Party to summon up the spirit to fight hard this monstrous government.So many of the policies that they are enacting began life in the Blair sofa cabinet and were given breath and life by many of those still leading the Labour Party. The facile little jest that Liam Byrne left in the Treasury 'There's no money left' just about sums up what has happened, and the cheerful little japes between chums reflects the horror of a decade of dreams and hopes betrayed. We all fell for it, we needed a Labour government after the Thatcher/Major years, but tragically we paid far too high a price. For the protection of the bankers,the widening gap between rich and poor,the PFI's, the Academies programme, health service reorganisation,weakening of local government, and the hideous war in Iraq we paid the price. A party dominated by careerists and opportunists and the abandonment of those socialist values for which the Party of Labour was created for! We let it happen, those of us who were loyal members for decades, we were willing to sacrifice everything for power! And now we have the spectacle of a vicious government getting away with murder and an opposition so feeble. There are exceptions,there always are men and women of principle who ignore what's going on around them and plough a lonely furrow.Yet look at who the Party parade on TV as the voice of the Party.A bunch of sharp suited airheads who offer a clever but meaningless sound bite,and at the other end of the spectrum the pompous Keith Vaz and the detestable Frank Field. We are told that the party is waiting to see how things develop before presenting a political programme.Truth is that is the party's political programme, they will hang about offering the merest meaningless phrases and just waiting for their turn in office, where like Gordon Brown last time they will 'carry on with the Tories financial policies' They have had opportunities,the most obvious one being the elections for the Police and Crime Commissioners.It was universally agreed that this was a dumb idea, indeed a bad dumb idea.Labour peers put up a good fight in the Lords, along with Lib-Dem and Independent members. But in the Commons the fight was half-hearted and the pass was sold.A national campaign led by the Party to boycott the elections and urge either mass abstention or support for genuine independents might well have won popular support for an unpopular election. However as soon as the salaries were dangled in front of the traditional careerist wing, the battle was lost. Indeed the battle was doubly lost here in Northamptonshire.When it became clear that Lee Barron was ineligible to stand, the sensible thing would have been to turn that into a virtue, and to urge voters,particularly in Corby, to vote Independent. But such a course required political intelligence and a capacity to see beyond the party machine. labour will win seats in the May County Council elections, working not on any political or ideological point of principle but simply by sitting still,handing out a few mediocre leaflets and waiting for UKIP eating away the Tory vote and the Lib-Dem vote collapsing then they will reap electoral gains. But they will merely be electoral gains that will benefit whom? The people of Northamptonshire who are looking for inspirational leadership but will simply get more of the same. Where ion earth are the Trade Unions when we need them to give leadership?

A company of heroes...

'A company of heroes......' Familiar with the Christy Moore song? Northamptonshire Libraries have invited me to launch my book 'Geordie's Story-the Life of Jack Brent'in the Carnegie Room at the Central Library in Abington Street on Sunday November 4th at 2pm. The small book is about my uncle Geordie,who was born in 1912 and died ,aged 39 in 1951. He was brought up in a wee village in South West Scotland, ran away to join the army,ran away from that,drifted through the depression in the 1930's and was wounded badly in a military engagement. Not a lot different from thousands of younf men, well that's true except he was wounded by a machine gunner in February 1937 in the defence of Madrid in Spain. Geordie was just one of many thousands from all over the world that volunteered to fight in the International Brigade in the defence of the elected Spanish government against the fascist insurgents led by General Franco. He was what we now call a premature anti-fascist. It is likely that the machine gunner was a German or an Italian, practising skills that they would later use all over Europe. It was during the Spanish Civil war that the fascists perfected the tactics that they would later use all over Europe.From the blitzkrieg to saturation bombing of civilian towns. Franco had no hesitation in calling on his fascist allies as well as his mercenaries from North Africa to destroy the Spanish Republic and it's legally elected Socialist government. Geordie was an ordinary working class guy, with little formal education but a clear understanding that fascism was the greatest threat to mankind. I'm not naive enough to believe that World war two could have been stopped outside Madrid, but what is clear is that had the west not believed that non-intervention and appeasement was the route then the fascists could have been delayed, and the world might have been better equipped to confront the fascist tide. The men and women who went to Spain went with no illusions, they didn't go for money or power or even glory.They went in solidarity with the people of Spain.It was a simple act of solidarity and internationalism. There were of course weaknesses within the progressive forces, the internecine conflicts between the Communists,the Trotskyists and the Anarchists did hinder the anti-fascist struggle. Yet they fought with astonishing bravery and showed a unity of purpose undimmed after seventyfive years. Geordie when he returned struggled with enormous pain for the rest of his short life.Yet despite endless hospitalisation he managed to be a Communist Party activist,managed or organise Londoners to occupy the tube stations during the blitz and as the General Secretary of the International Brigade Association campaign to free Brigaders in internment camps all over occupied Europe,save the lives of many imprisoned comrades and ensure that the British Government used the skills and experience of former Brigaders in the British army. Times have changed, and the possibility of such interventions are not really relevant any more.I remember many years ago when as an ardent young communist I was part of a group who wanted to go and fight alongside the National Liberation Front in Vietnam.We met a delightful representative of the NLF who thanked us very gently but pointed out that the Vietnamese people could really manage without us,but extra medical aid would be appreciated! Some might argue that the young jihadists who volunteer to fight in the Middle East are part of that tradition. I think not,whilst it is right to get rid of autocratic dictatorships it is not a progressive move to replace them with theocratic dictatorships.To attempt to kill a child because she wants to go to school just about sums up the monstrousness. Internationalism is no longer a question of armed struggle,but never has the world needed an internationalism more. The capitalist system is the most organised and systematic international power ever created.Capital can move its resources and power at a whim with the press of a button. We need to be able to do the same,when the powerful cabal decide to close a factory here and open one elsewhere we need to be able to mobilise,not just the workers in one factory-but worldwide and simultaneously. Effective communication is now possible, and international solidarity is essential.I have been impressed by the growth and resilience of the worldwide Occupy Movement. That is the new internationalism,that is the lesson we must try and take forward from the struggle back then. And perhaps to give more hope, what was the slogan thosebrave young women wore in Moscow when challenging Putin and the theocracy? No Paseran! Look forward to continuing this discussion on the 4th of November-its free!