You tell me Labour is doing well. Why is it that........

It is difficult to boast about the achievements of ten years of Labour. It is difficult seeing that previous to 1997 we had a vicious Conservative government that ruled for nearly 20 years and in the views of the many threw society backwards.

The minimum wage is the reform that I feel this government should be remembered for, also the improvements brought about to our working lives by the Working Time Directive. While these should be celebrated I fear they are only crumbs compared to the ever increasing wealth experienced by a small minority of the population that control our industry and therefore the destinies of every man , woman and child in the country.

Earlier when I said 'difficult to boast' I was looking at the situation Labour now faces only a few days before the Local Elections. Its difficult to impress a dwindling electoral base , uninspired by politics and politicians, to celebrate these important reforms. Knock a door,you get Iraq thrown in your face. The more thoughtful voter will throw the loans for peerages at you. Most though will take off their Daily Mail specs and moan quite rightly about rising council taxes and the loss in services that they are experiencing for their money.

I spoke to a voter the other day who was moaning about the local hospital.
Waiting times I asked?
No , it was having to find, then pay for in excess, to park. Her partner then railroaded me with 'You Labour used to stand for the public sector , used to condemn privatisation but now you are changing hospitals into supermarkets. They even refer to patients as customers!!'
At that point I retired to the pub to contemplate why everyone remembers what Thatcher did for home ownership but all Blair has done in the eyes of these voters, is invade Iraq and cuddled up to Bush.
Why have we lost the plot?

Maybe I am being unfair.
After all I have been a Labour party member for a long time now and should know the score about what Labour has achieved in the last ten years. The problem is it has not got through to the voters and it doesn't look like it will. The worst we can expect in a couple of years is Cameron and a reactionary Tory government and our dwindling band of members in our party will have little influence to stop it however many doors they knock or voters they canvass by phone.

We need Labour members to call a halt to this new 'suicide note' that Blair has written and Brown is going to post. We need to re-connect with our core working class vote ( yes , they do still exist!!) and introduce policies that will truly remain in future memory.

The debate is needed now.

John McDonnellMP: 5 nominations short

Read this in the Guardian.
Could be a debate if he gets the required nominations. I hope he does because a debate is what Labour needs and hopefully the many LP members will awake from their sleep and challenge the direction we are currently going.

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/labourleadership/story/0,,2062309,00.html

The (un-)Acceptable Face of Capitalism in New Labour Britain

Of course it is a tragedy when someone is killed in a car accident. A tragedy for the family that is left behind. It is a painful experience and my condolences go out to to all relatives.

But spare a thought to the workers who worked for his now defunct business which achieved notoriety by being sacked via text message.
These workers were not just victims of an unscrupulous employer but they were victims of the weakest employment laws in Europe. Victims of what Hazel Blears calls 'balancing protection for workers with the employers' need for flexibility!'

We need much stronger laws to protect employees and a future Labour leader must pledge to do this and win back millions of lost votes due to the current direction New Labour is taking.
At the moment only John McDonnellMP is pledging to do this.

It is worth a debate.

Details of Mark Langford, former boss of The Accident Group (TAG), tragic death can be found here http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/6541131.stm

HM Inland Revenue are still owed £4.1million in unpaid tax.

The other Martin Luther King

This article speaks for itself and is contrary to what kids are taught at school.(I know because my oldest son just told me!!)

The Martin Luther King You Don't See on TV By Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen, AlterNet. Posted April 4, 2007.
Every year on April 4, as Americans commemorate MLK's death, we get perfunctory news reports that fail to account for the last several years of his life -- and for good reason. Every year on April 4, as Americans commemorate Martin Luther King's death, we get perfunctory network news reports about "the slain civil rights leader."The remarkable thing about these reviews of King's life is that several years -- his last years -- are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn't take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever.Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they're not shown today on TV.Why?It's because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years.In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies. Network TV and national publications graphically showed the police dogs and bullwhips and cattle prods used against Southern blacks who sought the right to vote or to eat at a public lunch counter.But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation's fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without "human rights" -- including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for "radical changes in the structure of our society" to redistribute wealth and power."True compassion," King declared, "is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. "By 1967, King had also become the country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 -- a year to the day before he was murdered -- King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was "on the wrong side of a world revolution." King questioned "our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America," and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions "of the shirtless and barefoot people" in the Third World, instead of supporting them.In foreign policy, King also offered an economic critique, complaining about "capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries."You haven't heard the "Beyond Vietnam" speech on network news retrospectives, but national media heard it loud and clear back in 1967 -- and loudly denounced it. Time magazine called it "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi." The Washington Post patronized that "King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People's Campaign. He crisscrossed the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would descend on Washington -- engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be -- until Congress enacted a poor people's bill of rights. Reader's Digest warned of an "insurrection. "King's economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America's cities. He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its "hostility to the poor" -- appropriating "military funds with alacrity and generosity," but providing "poverty funds with miserliness. "How familiar that sounds today, nearly 40 years after King's efforts on behalf of the poor people's mobilization were cut short by an assassin's bullet.In 2007, in this nation of immense wealth, the White House and most in Congress continue to accept the perpetuation of poverty. They fund foreign wars with "alacrity and generosity," while being miserly in dispensing funds for education and healthcare and environmental cleanup.And those priorities are largely unquestioned by mainstream media. No surprise that they tell us so little about the last years of Martin Luther King's life.

Norman Solomon is the author of the new book, "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." Jeff Cohen is the author of "Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media."

'Idiots' standing in elections

This made me laugh the other day

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/dorset/6526687.stm

I find it amazing how some old laws still remain on the statute book.I am surprised that the local council here got away with it for so long. Still, it didnt stop the BNP from standing a candidate in Bournemouth!!

I am pleased to report that the BNP are not standing in Southampton or Portsmouth.

Construction News

http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php?article_id=11081

http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/2007/481/index.html?id=np1039.htm

http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php?article_id=11088

A collection of articles from the SWP and the SP. Presently I believe there is massive potential for recruitment in the Construction Industry. Both Amicus and the TGWU are waging campaigns on the sites especially against bogus self employment and the cuts in the HSE. The HSE cuts must be taken seriously on the sites with workplace deaths a serious reality for this group of workers.

No injuries. The Employer is responsible.

Increasing use of cheap migrant labour has been cynically used by employers to undercut terms and conditions. The resulting effect has pushed small sections of the workforce towards the destructive and poisonous arguments of the right wing nationalist groups such as the BNP.

The unions must boldly campaign and reach out to all migrant workers who would welcome the same terms and conditions and most of all a safe workplace.

Please note in the Socialist party link the reference to the text message from Hazel Blears to Tony Woodley.
That just about sums up New Labours attitude to workers in construction and indeed workers everywhere!!

Alex Ferguson and Bullying

Good manager.
Perceptive bloke who is known to make quite challenging observations.
Listening to his press conference the other day he had a few interesting things to say about the way Maclaren was treated by the Engerland fans at the Andorra game.

Fergie seemed to be blaming the media and in particular the media obsession with 'bullying' reality TV shows such as Celebrity Come Dancing , the BBC show.
He spoke about the way judges knock people back, overtly criticise and ridicule participants.

Hes got a point.

Representing members in the workplace I notice how more than a few managers think they are Alan Sugar or Gordon Ramsey and believe it acceptable to abuse their employees. Of course it could be argued that the law is there to assist employees. After all wasnt New Labour meant to bring in laws to support our employees in the workplace?

Unfortunately for workers the New Labour message of 'stronger employee rights since 1997' is lost on the majority of unorganised workers in this country. I hear stories on a weekly basis of Employers abusing their position and making workers lives a complete misery in their places of work.

Tony Blairs pursuit of complete 'flexibility' has let these workers down. We need much stronger support and stronger laws that benefit employees so that when a jack-booted, hot head bully of a manager is making their staffs lives a misery , they can be pulled down a peg or two.

Mind you a start would be to get rid of these shitty reality TV programmes which appear in my view, to make this type of behaviour acceptable.