Loads Of Money For The Crooked And Corrupt

Over a quarter of million votes were collected for the petition below

Last push: stop the 11% MP pay rise!

Tanya Byk

Manchester, United Kingdom

31 May 2015 — The time has come to send a strong message to David Cameron that an 11% pay rise for MPs is unacceptable. Over 359,000 signed this petition to share their views. 

It’s been over a year since the petition went viral and gained huge support in a short space of time. I can’t thank you enough for signing, sharing and taking the time to write your personal stories and comments. 

I decided to wait until after the General Election to hand in the petition, to ensure the person in charge would be around long enough to make any changes. It happens to be David Cameron again, so he now has the time to apply the brakes on IPSA’s proposal.

Most people who signed have been negatively affected by austerity, or know someone who has. David Cameron should spend time reading our comments on this petition as they show the true meaning of the campaign; Britain is feeling the strain, with the most poor and vulnerable in society paying the price. 

David Cameron has the power to change this, and he has the power to say no to the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority who is suggesting this huge pay rise.

MPs shouldn't be rewarded while austerity and public service cuts are in place for the rest of Britain.

With only one week to go until the petition is taken to Downing Street, please give it one last push and share with your friends and family on Facebook, Twitter, email, phone, telepathy, Morse code, or however you communicate. 

Let’s send a strong message that if Britain isn't getting a pay rise, neither should MPs.

Keeping A Beady Eye On You

The Queen's Speech

Another Betrayal By The Trade Union Bureaucrats

A national rail strike, due to begin  today, May 25, has been suspended by the Transport Salaried Staff Association (TSSA) and the Rail Maritime Transport Workers union (RMT).

Working hand in glove with the management, the union bureaucrats have sought at every turn to undermine the balloted strike action, which was called in furtherance of pay increases and job protection.

As the World Socialist Web Site pointed out last Saturday:- 

To break through the strait jacket of the trade unions, new, genuinely democratic organisations of class struggle—action committees guided by the perspective of international socialism—must be formed in a rebellion against the union bureaucracy. They have proven time and again that they will sacrifice the living standards, jobs and democratic rights of the working class to maintain their upper middle class lifestyles and close ties with big business.

The Horrid Legacy Of The Catholic Church

Paedophile priests, the Magdalene Sisters and a Nazi pope who tried to sweep everything under a Vatican carpet has resulted in a big snub to this religious outfit in Ireland and not before time.

The country becomes the first to legalise same-sex marriage by popular vote and the Catholic church is reeling.

The Face Of Modern America

Looks a bit like a row of terraced houses somewhere in Britain, but guess again. This is Baltimore in the USA where the police have a nasty habit of shooting black people dead just for the fun of it.

Hold Your Head In Shame Gerry Adams

Below the words written by James Connolly in 1911 on the occasion of the visit of King George V to Ireland. In 1916 Connolly was shot dead by the British.

Fellow-Workers,

As you are aware from reading the daily and weekly newspapers, we are about to be blessed with a visit from King George V.

Knowing from previous experience of Royal Visits, as well as from the Coronation orgies of the past few weeks, that the occasion will be utilised to make propaganda on behalf of royalty and aristocracy against the oncoming forces of democracy and National freedom, we desire to place before you some few reasons why you should unanimously refuse to countenance this visit, or to recognise it by your presence at its attendant processions or demonstrations. We appeal to you as workers, speaking to workers, whether your work be that of the brain or of the hand – manual or mental toil – it is of you and your children we are thinking; it is your cause we wish to safeguard and foster.

The future of the working class requires that all political and social positions should be open to all men and women; that all privileges of birth or wealth be abolished, and that every man or woman born into this land should have an equal opportunity to attain to the proudest position in the land. The Socialist demands that the only birthright necessary to qualify for public office should be the birthright of our common humanity.

Believing as we do that there is nothing on earth more sacred than humanity, we deny all allegiance to this institution of royalty, and hence we can only regard the visit of the King as adding fresh fuel to the fire of hatred with which we regard the plundering institutions of which he is the representative. Let the capitalist and landlord class flock to exalt him; he is theirs; in him they see embodied the idea of caste and class; they glorify him and exalt his importance that they might familiarise the public mind with the conception of political inequality, knowing well that a people mentally poisoned by the adulation of royalty can never attain to that spirit of self-reliant democracy necessary for the attainment of social freedom. The mind accustomed to political kings can easily be reconciled to social kings – capitalist kings of the workshop, the mill, the railway, the ships and the docks. Thus coronation and king's visits are by our astute neversleeping masters made into huge Imperialist propagandist campaigns in favour of political and social schemes against democracy. But if our masters and rulers are sleepless in their schemes against us, so we, rebels against their rule, must never sleep in our appeal to our fellows to maintain as publicly our belief in the dignity of our class – in the ultimate sovereignty of those who labour.

What is monarchy? From whence does it derive its sanction? What has been its gift to humanity? Monarchy is a survival of the tyranny imposed by the hand of greed and treachery upon the human race in the darkest and most ignorant days of our history. It derives its only sanction from the sword of the marauder, and the helplessness of the producer, and its gifts to humanity are unknown, save as they can be measured in the pernicious examples of triumphant and shameless iniquities.

Every class in society save royalty, and especially British royalty, has through some of its members contributed something to the elevation of the race. But neither in science, nor in art, nor in literature, nor in exploration, nor in mechanical invention, nor in humanising of laws, nor in any sphere of human activity has a representative of British royalty helped forward the moral, intellectual or material improvement of mankind. But that royal family has opposed every forward move, fought every reform, persecuted every patriot, and intrigued against every good cause. Slandering every friend of the people, it has befriended every oppressor. Eulogised today by misguided clerics, it has been notorious in history for the revolting nature of its crimes. Murder, treachery, adultery, incest, theft, perjury – every crime known to man has been committed by some one or other of the race of monarchs from whom King George is proud to trace his descent.

“His blood

Has crept through scoundrels since the flood.”

We will not blame him for the crimes of his ancestors if he relinquishes the royal rights of his ancestors; but as long as he claims their rights, by virtue of descent, then, by virtue of descent, he must shoulder the responsibility for their crimes.

Fellow-workers, stand by the dignity of your class. All these parading royalties, all this insolent aristocracy, all these grovelling, dirt-eating capitalist traitors, all these are but signs of disease in any social state – diseases which a royal visit brings to a head and spews in all its nastiness before our horrified eyes. But as the recognition of the disease is the first stage towards its cure, so that we may rid our social state of its political and social diseases, we must recognise the elements of corruption. Hence, in bringing them all together and exposing their unity, even a royal visit may help us to understand and understanding, help us to know how to destroy the royal, aristocratic and capitalistic classes who live upon our labour. Their workshops, their lands, their mills, their factories, their ships, their railways must be voted into our hands who alone use them, public ownership must take the place of capitalist ownership, social democracy replace political and social inequality, the sovereignty of labour must supersede and destroy the sovereignty of birth and the monarchy of capitalism.

Ours be the task to enlighten the ignorant among our class, to dissipate and destroy the political and social superstitions of the enslaved masses and to hasten the coming day when, in the words of Joseph Brenan, the fearless patriot of ’48, all the world will maintain

“The Right Divine of Labour

To be first of earthly things;

That the Thinker and the Worker

Are Manhood’s only Kings.”

Britain’s anti-terror law and the global assault on democratic rights

In the year marking 800 years since England’s Magna Carta, which asserted that kings could not simply impose their will without oversight and freemen could not be punished unless they violated the law of the land, Britain’s new Conservative government is preparing a massive assault on civil liberties.

The Tories are set to enact new legislation targeting “extremists” that poses a fundamental threat to political opponents of the government and to the working class. The claim that the new law is aimed simply or primarily at Islamic terrorists is a lie.

Under the legislation’s provisions, the authorities will be able to punish anyone engaged in “harmful” behaviour, ranging from public disorder to threatening the functioning of democracy. Individuals or groups subject to “extremist disruption orders” and “banning orders” will be compelled to submit to the police all material they intend to publish, including on social media. Individuals may also be prohibited from attending public gatherings and speaking at demonstrations or protests.

Prime Minister David Cameron indicated the sweep of the government’s intentions when he proclaimed that Britain has been a “passively tolerant society for too long, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone.” Freedom from persecution by the state will no longer be guaranteed, even to those who obey the law.

Read More Here

Fenian Traitor

Unmasked

Big Brother Cameron

UK government counter-terrorism bill would criminalize speech, political activity

By Jordan Shilton of WSWS

The Conservative government in Britain is preparing to enact new legislation that, under the guise of the “war on terror,” will vastly expand police-state powers and essentially criminalize speech and other political activity.

Presented officially as an anti-terrorism bill, the proposed measures will be targeted at any popular opposition to the government’s policies of aggressive militarism abroad and austerity measures in Britain.

Read More Here

Je Suis Winston Smith

Before very long David Cameron is going to become my big brother and he's going to become your big brother too.

How's that possible you may be thinking. Well according to Cameron Britain is too “passively tolerant” and should not leave people to live their lives as they please just because they obey the law. Cue the introduction of the 'Thought Police'.

No kidding! The draconian package of powers first proposed last spring would allow courts to force a person to send their tweets and Facebook posts to the police for approval. So the final arbiter of what's acceptable would be the proverbial filth. And the same would apply to this blog I suppose.

Theresa May went on to outline the bigger strategy behind the introduction of the 'Thought Police' which she said involves actually promoting British values, the values of democracy, rule of law, tolerance and acceptance of different faiths.

Now when Cameron introduces a better democratic system than the existing first past the post nonsense in order the people get a truly representative government and not one that nearly four fifths of voters have rejected then I might start to take the man seriously.

In the meantime can I recommend a move to Scotland.

A Band Of Losers

Crisis envelops UK Labour leadership contest

By Paul Mitchell of WSWS

Labour Party leader Ed Miliband resigned last week following the party’s rout in the May 7 general election, but a crisis is already enveloping the contest to find his replacement.

Front-runner Shadow Business Secretary Chuka Umunna announced his withdrawal on Friday, just days after declaring his leadership bid. Umunna told reporters that the pressure and scrutiny he had undergone in the last few days was not “a comfortable experience” for him or his family. He insisted that there was no scandal behind his decision to withdraw.

Earlier this week, former army officer Dan Jarvis, MP for Barnsley Central since 2011 and currently shadow minister for justice, announced that he would not be putting his name forward in the contest after all. Jarvis declared, “It’s not the right time for my family. My eldest kids had a very tough time when they lost their mum [in 2011] and I don’t want them to lose their dad.”

The Labour leadership contest is a poisoned chalice. Despite years of austerity and attacks on social conditions, the Conservatives still managed to win 331 parliamentary seats and 36.9 percent of the vote, giving them an unexpected 15-seat parliamentary majority. Labour ended up with 30.4 percent of the vote and 232 seats—the party’s worst defeat since 1987.

In Scotland, once a heartland for Labour, the party lost all but one of its seats. Many of its leading lights were kicked out. The Scottish National Party, campaigning on a supposed anti-austerity ticket, swept the board. Labour fared no better in England, seeing a significant part of the anti-Tory vote going to the United Kingdom Independence Party and the Greens.

Labour’s response is to lurch even further to the right. Immediately after the election, Miliband was roundly condemned as being too left-wing, focusing on the party’s “core” working class vote and failing to appeal to “aspirational” Conservative voters. A chorus of demands erupted for a return to “New Labour” and the legacy of Blair.

Both Blair and his chief strategist Peter Mandelson threw their weight behind Umunna, a suitably shallow and opportunist vessel. After becoming an MP in 2010, the former solicitor served as Miliband’s parliamentary private secretary before being rewarded with the post of shadow business secretary less than 18 months after entering Parliament.

His politics find suitable expression in a posting on the ASmallWorld website, known as “Myspace for Millionaires”, requesting the name of nightclubs in London where he didn’t have to mix with the “trash” and “C-list wannabes”.

Umunna’s ability to “not come across as political” won the praise of the head of the Confederation of British Industry’s employers’ group, John Cridland, who assured reporters that he was “a guy with whom we can do business”.

During the election campaign, Umunna insisted that Labour would be a “resolutely pro-business government”. Afterwards, he insisted that Labour had to say it was not “afraid to say we want to help people make their first million”. He declared, “We need a different, big-tent approach—one in which no one is too rich or poor to be part of our party,” along with “drastic” political reform including a “massive” devolution of power to our cities, regions and towns.

Umunna has penned articles promoting “Blue Labour”, the “Flag, faith and family” project pioneered by the academic Maurice Glasman, which stands for the dismantling of social provision utilising nationalism, anti-immigrant measures and a more corporatist relationship with the trade unions.

Trade union leaders had said they would block Umunna’s leadership bid. Len McCluskey, general secretary of the Unite union, criticised those who claimed that Labour lost the general election because it was too left-wing. He declared, “Labour didn’t lose votes by proposing to tax the wealthiest a bit more, or intervene in the housing and energy markets. It did lose support because of its muddled message on austerity.”

This is just hot air. In 2013, he enthused over Miliband’s adoption of Conservative “One Nation” rhetoric and that Labour was “the natural, historic, vehicle” for the working class. Shortly before the election, he repeated that the Labour Party “is our party. We built it, to serve us, the people” and that Miliband’s flagship pledges are “our policies.”

Miliband’s flagship pledges included the assertion that his party would be a more “sensible” advocate of austerity, and would implement a “budget responsibility lock”, clamp down on immigration, defend the European Union and maintain Britain’s role as a leading military power.

Reports suggest that McCluskey and other trade union leaders are contemplating backing the right-winger Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary. Elected an MP in 2001, he was regarded as a Blairite technocrat, dedicated to the New Labour project as culture secretary, chief secretary to the Treasury and health secretary. In that role, he laid the groundwork for the privatisation of the UK’s first NHS hospital at Hinchingbrooke.

In the leadership contest following Gordon Brown’s resignation, Burnham came in a miserable fourth place after campaigning on the mantra of “aspirational socialism”. Today he says, “Our challenge is not to go left or right, to focus on one part of the country above another, but to rediscover the beating heart of Labour,” adding, “That is about the aspirations of everyone, speaking to them like we did in 1997.”

Yvette Cooper, who became an MP in 1997 and is forever tainted with the Blair-Brown years, wants Labour to “move beyond the old labels of left and right” and states, “Labour lost because we didn’t convince enough people in all parts of the country that we had the answers to match up with their ambitions.”

Cooper has been shadow home secretary for the past four years, during which time she attacked Conservative Home Secretary Theresa May from the right on border controls, immigration and extremism. In March 2013, she delivered a major speech, apologising that Labour had let in too many Eastern European workers and calling for immigration to be “properly controlled.” She criticised the Tories for failing to reduce “net migration” and presiding over a system that “isn’t working at the moment and [it] has got significantly worse since the election.”

Liz Kendall, elected MP for Leicester West in 2010 and currently the shadow minister for care and older people, called for “a New New Labour.” She has said that in the NHS, “What matters is what works”, whether it be public or private.

Historian Tristram Hunt, MP and shadow education secretary, declared the party should take its time to carry out a “brutal post-mortem” about its “underlying philosophy and thinking”. Labour would only win if the party championed “aspirational” voters, he said.

According to the New Statesman, “the left of the party is also hoping to get a candidate on the ballot paper” in the form of Labour Party deputy chair Jon Trickett or former National Union of Mineworkers president and parliamentary Trade Union Group chair Ian Lavery. But that they will get nowhere is borne out by the decision of Socialist Campaign Group chair John McDonnell not to stand. He told the magazine, “I’ve done it enough times and been blocked from getting on the paper. How many times can I be hit by that?”

In 2010, when he stood as the candidate of the party’s putative left wing, McDonnell withdrew when only 16 out of a total of 258 Labour MPs were prepared to support him. The WSWS wrote then, “The simple reason for McDonnell’s defeat is that the left wing in the Labour Party is an insignificant and impotent rump” and that his “alternative programme” setting out “a radical new course to challenge the consensus” within the Labour Party were “anathema to the party for which he functions as a loyal political apologist”.

A Bad Day For The Human Race

SS Labour - A Sinking Ship

A fellow blogger John Hilley wrote the following

Despairing people in England and Wales can take comfort from the tsunami of resistance that's been unleashed in Scotland. Bereft of meaningful choices, the crushing of Labour may be hard to take, but the Miliband lifeboat was really just another pirate neoliberal ship, corporate owned and dutifully captained. Take heart from its sinking, and remember all those "radical" apologists who tried to sell it as a seaworthy vessel for meaningful change.

Hilley also added:

We also need a new assault on every part of the establishment-serving media, from the simpering Guardian to the gutter Sun.

One Betrayal Too Many

The Death Of British Labourism

It is a measure of how right-wing the Labour Party is that the rout it suffered in Thursday’s UK general election has prompted a chorus of demands for a return to “New Labour” and the legacy of its former leader Tony Blair.

Both Blair and his chief strategist Peter Mandelson have intervened to reinforce the message that Labour lost because it failed to make an appeal to the aspirant middle classes. Worse still, according to Mandelson, was that it gave the impression that it was “for the poor, and it hated the rich.”

Following the resignation of Ed Miliband, a leadership contest is underway in which there are already seven potential candidates, with more likely to follow. All are careerist nonentities, strident defenders of unregulated capitalism, privatisation and militarism. They insist that Labour’s defeat was because Miliband was too left-wing and focussed his strategy on mobilising its “core” working-class vote. Instead, Labour must return to Blair’s strategy of the “big tent” and efforts to win over Conservative voters.

Talk is of a 10-year process to rebuild Labour, underscoring the fact that no one can expect even the feint of opposition from this discredited party of the state.

The election does indeed prove that Labour’s core constituency has been eaten away. But workers have deserted it because they already view it as a Conservative Party Mark Two, with almost one-third of the electorate seeing no point in voting at all because no party has anything to offer them.

Miliband’s feeble tack to the left was entirely unconvincing, coming from a party that was pledged to austerity and that is incapable of putting behind it the actual record of Blair and his successor Gordon Brown as a tool of big business and architect of the Iraq war.

For this reason, there is barely any reference to the fact that Labour’s most significant losses came in Scotland, where the Scottish National Party (SNP) falsely declared itself to be opposed to austerity.

The SNP were able to successfully deflect class anger against Labour in a nationalist direction. It meant that the Conservatives were successful, in part, due to their whipping-up of British, and even English, nationalism. It also helped the UK Independence Party to make significant inroads into Labour’s former strongholds.

The pseudo-left organisations bear chief political responsibility for sowing divisions in the working class and strengthening the hands of the nationalists on both side of the border.

For years, they have championed the SNP and Scottish separatism as a progressive alternative to rule from Westminster. In the run-up to the election, they attacked Labour not for its betrayal of the working class but for its defence of the Union.

In the aftermath of the SNP’s victory, their perspective centres on some form of alliance with this party of the Scottish bourgeoisie, or, failing that, pressuring it to “deliver on its promises” to oppose austerity and fight for independence.

South of the border, the pseudo-left gave a howl of despair at Labour’s defeat. But again they offer nothing to the working class other than bankrupt pleas to push the Labour Party and the trade unions to the left.

Left Unity speaks of another Tory victory in 2020 and urges efforts to be directed towards helping “unpick the Tory lies.” The Socialist Workers Party states that “trade union leaders…have to be pressured to start fighting.” The Socialist Party, which constitutes most of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, puts its hope in “Len McCluskey, General Secretary of Unite, [who] suggested that if Labour could not even defeat the Tories, the time had come to look at a new party.” The “trade union movement as a whole” should begin discussing this, it states.

None of these tendencies speak for the working class. They are wholly integrated into the structures of bourgeois politics. They represent a privileged layer of the middle class, anxious only to secure positions for themselves as political advisers to the major parties, leading trade union functionaries and the developers of bourgeois policy within academia.

Their particular role is to oppose the development of a revolutionary socialist movement and subordinate workers and youth to the political representatives of capital.

The events of May 7 were long in gestation and do not lend themselves to a quick fix.

Decades of political betrayals by the Labour and trade union bureaucracy in the UK, and social democracy and Stalinism internationally, have taken their toll. At every turn, they have blocked the class struggle while waging a relentless ideological offensive against any socialist political consciousness in the working class.

Indeed, Labour’s rout is far more than the failure of just one party. It is the failure of an entire political perspective and of all the parties and organisation based on it. Across Europe, the former social democratic organisations are disintegrating. Having long ago abandoned their reformist pretentions in response to economic globalisation and capitalist breakdown, whether in Britain, France, Greece or elsewhere, they have become the ruthless exponents of austerity and war.

This presents workers and young people with grave dangers. They face a government that has already pledged billions of pounds in additional cuts and to rush through a new “snoopers charter” to strengthen the powers of the state and security apparatuses. It will seek to step up nationalist tensions, not only in the UK, but on the issues of immigration and Europe.

Moreover, this takes place under conditions in which capitalism is teetering on the brink of another financial crash and in which military aggression by the US, Britain and other major powers threatens to plunge the world into a bloody conflagration.

A road out of this nightmare depends on the building of a genuinely socialist party. There is no way forward through a return to national reformism, only a shift to a new axis of struggle—that of socialist internationalism. The productive forces of society must be freed from the fetters of the profit system and the division of the world into competing nation states. World economy must be run on the basis of planned production to meet social need, not private profit.

Only the Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International advance such a socialist programme and offer a means through which the working class can be unified internationally in a struggle against capitalism, which is the root cause of austerity and war.

The building of the SEP must proceed through the clarification of the most politically advanced and selfless workers and youth in the crucial historic experiences of the workers’ movement, above all the decades-long struggle waged by Leon Trotsky and the Fourth International against Stalinism and of the ICFI up until today for the perspective of world socialist revolution.

Chris Marsden and Julie Hyland of WSWS

General election produces political earthquake in Britain

By Chris Marsden and Julie Hyland of WSWS

9 May 2015

The Conservative Party has won a narrow majority after Thursday’s General Election. With 331 seats in Westminster out of 650, it will not have to rely on support from Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party or the Liberal Democrats, as some had predicted.

The result owes nothing to popular support. The Conservatives polled approximately 36.9 percent of the vote, a small rise on 2010, but due to Britain’s first-past-the-post constituency-based system it increased its number of seats by 24.

This is an election that Labour lost rather than one that the Tories won. There was actually a swing of 15 percent against the two governing parties, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, who won 59 percent between them in 2010 and only 44 percent Tuesday. But the entire brunt of this fell on the Liberal Democrats, who won only eight seats, compared to 57 in 2010.

Labour saw a slight increase of its overall vote and won a dozen additional seats in England, but this was more than offset by its spectacular collapse in its former stronghold of Scotland, where it was wiped out by the Scottish National Party (SNP). There is now a solitary Labour MP in the whole of Scotland—and just one Conservative and one Liberal Democrat—as the SNP swept the board, securing 56 seats compared with six in 2010.

The stark contrast between the fate of the two parties is primarily because the SNP made a pitch to anti-austerity sentiment, whereas Labour did not.

Labour leader Ed Miliband centred his election campaign on an assertion that his party would be a more “sensible” advocate of austerity, which would still allow for some growth in highly circumscribed areas. He combined a pledge for a “budget responsibility lock” with a promise to clamp down on immigration, to defend the European Union and maintain Britain’s role as a leading military power.

This enabled the SNP to exploit widespread hostility to Westminster, especially to Labour itself, and to channel this sentiment behind its nationalist agenda. In this it was aided and abetted by the pseudo-left groups such as the Scottish Socialist Party and Solidarity Scotland, who endorsed an SNP vote.

The SNP is now the third largest party in Westminster, with major ramifications for the future survival of the United Kingdom as a unitary state. In many constituencies in Scotland the swing against Labour was well over 30 percent.

High voter turnout in Scotland masks a national figure that would otherwise have been lower than in 2010.

The election has claimed the scalps of three party leaders.

The Labour Party is decapitated. Within hours of the result, Miliband resigned as the anticipated last-minute surge to Labour failed to materialise. Deputy leader Harriet Harman said she would step down as soon as a successor was elected. The party’s shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, and Douglas Alexander, shadow foreign secretary, lost their seats.

Labour was unable to offset its losses in Scotland with any significant gains in Tory marginals and its vote even in major urban conurbations was poor—leaving it almost 100 seats adrift of the Tories in its worst result since 1987.

The UK Independence Party is the third most popular party on 13 percent, having picked up support from both the Conservatives and Labour. Nonetheless, with around 4 million votes—nearly triple the total of the SNP—it took just one Westminster seat.

Nigel Farage resigned as UKIP leader after he failed to win his Thanet constituency. UKIP’s main donor, Arron Banks, had called for a vote for the Tories in the seat because Prime Minister David Cameron has pledged to hold a referendum on British membership of the European Union by 2017.

The result for UKIP mirrors the success of the SNP, not in its right-wing nostrums, but from the essential standpoint of the dangerous cultivation of nationalist sentiment.

Liberal Democrat leader and former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg also resigned, after his party suffered what he described as a “cruel and punishing night. Clegg only narrowly managed to retain his own seat due to tactical voting by Tories, with the majority of Conservative gains coming from former Liberal Democrat seats. All other leading Liberal Democrat figures, such as former Business Secretary Vince Cable and former Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander, lost their seats—leaving a parliamentary group of just eight Liberal Democrats who could travel to Westminster in a minibus.
Caroline Lucas remains the Green Party’s sole MP, despite the party quadrupling its national share of the vote due to its nominally “left” programme.

Britain’s ruling elite got the result they had wanted. Virtually all the media and leading business figures insisted that a Tory majority was necessary for the “stability” of the financial markets—the only constituency that counts.

But it is a pyrrhic victory. It heads a government that not only might preside over a British exit from the European Union, but also the break-up of the United Kingdom. Moreover, it commands the support of just 22 percent of the electorate, under conditions in which it is pledged to further savage cuts that will devastate the lives of millions.

The overriding message from the election is that, for the vast majority of people who sought change, it will not come through parliament and certainly not from the Labour Party.

Labour is a bureaucratic organisation with no real base in the working class and no ability at all to make a popular appeal to their fundamental concerns. They are not seen as an opposition tendency, but rather as a pale copy of the Tories.

It has already responded to defeat with complaints that it drifted too far to the left and calls to recapture the glory days of Tony Blair.

There has never been an occasion where the gap between the sentiment of the broad mass of the population and the structures of official politics has been so vast. This is only the ideological reflection of the gulf which has opened up between the super-rich oligarchy, who dictate the policies of all the major parties, and the working class.

This situation will have explosive political consequences.

Parliamentary democracy is in a state of advanced decay and cannot be revived. The working class must intervene independently and in its own interests if it is to combat the ongoing destruction of jobs, wages and social conditions and the growing danger of militarism and war.

It can only do so on a socialist programme.

The Socialist Equality Party stood two candidates in the general election, Katie Rhodes in Glasgow Central and David O’Sullivan in Holborn & St. Pancras, London. Rhodes secured 58 votes and O’Sullivan 108. The purpose of the SEP’s campaign was to raise the necessity of a new socialist movement of the working class, one based on the fight for a workers government in Britain within the framework of a United Socialist States of Europe and a world socialist federation.

The prerequisite for the development of such a movement is the historical and political education of the most advanced and self-sacrificing elements in the working class, especially the young.

In the course of our campaign, the SEP distributed thousands of election manifestos and spoke to thousands more. Our candidates addressed almost a dozen hustings and wrote extensively on the programme and class character of all the major parties, as well as the pseudo-left groups that gravitate around them.

Most importantly, the SEP placed the International May Day Online Rally against imperialist war, hosted by the World Socialist Web Site, at the centre of its campaign. Two highly successful meetings were held in Glasgow and London to listen to the event.

The outcome of the election is a stark confirmation of the programme and perspective advanced by the SEP. We urge workers and young people to respond by taking the decision to join our party.

Up Yours Cameron

The Scottish people have spoken. No nuclear weapons in Faslane. Stick them in Clacton or Bognor

Bourgeois Democracy Doesn't Work

Excluding the Ulster parties and all other small parties in the UK the votes cast for the main parties last Thursday were as follows:-


Conservative    11,334,726                    Labour       9,347,324
                                                           UKIP         3,881,099
                                                           Liberals      2,415,862
                                                           SNP          1,454,436
                                                                        ____________
                                           
                                                                             17,098,731               Total




In other words these above mentioned four parties polled a whopping 5,763,995 more than the Tories who under the stupid and plainly undemocratic first past the post system were able to get a small majority of seats.

Now you know why bourgeois democracy stinks.

An Unholy Alliance

Britain’s general election: The need for a socialist alternative

The austerity freaks and warmongers will still be in charge tomorrow. Here's what the World Socialist Web Site has to say about the dire state of British politics..

Britain goes to the polls today under conditions of an unprecedented and worsening crisis gripping the entire political system.

At stake for the ruling elite is the growing threat to British imperialism’s standing as a world power. Whoever forms a government, the election raises the prospect of a possible exit from the European Union, a further deterioration in British relations with the United States and even the fragmentation of the United Kingdom itself.

Each of these political factors in turn is seen as a major threat to the UK economy—the second largest in Europe and the fifth largest in the world.

Yet, publicly at least, these questions are discussed only in the most superficial terms, if at all.

Most significantly, a political blackout has been imposed on the advanced preparations for a massive expansion of militarism and war—under conditions in which Britain is committed to operations in Iraq and Syria and is playing a key role in the NATO-led provocations against Russia.

During the election campaign, the UK hosted massive naval exercises off Scotland and air war games over South Wales involving 13,000 NATO troops, fighter jets and ships against Russian vessels. On Tuesday, the Royal Navy’s flagship HMS Bulwark began operations off the coast of Libya, on the pretext of rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean.

The overriding concern of the ruling class is which party can form a government that will be able to continue with the savage programme of austerity imposed since the financial crash of 2008.

The search for a “stable government” is, however, a thankless task.

The Conservatives relied in 2010 on the Liberal Democrats to form a government. But having implemented the most severe spending cuts since the 1930s, both parties are widely despised.

Moreover, there are concerns in the ruling elite over Prime Minister David Cameron’s pledge to hold a 2017 referendum on membership of the European Union—a prospect regarded with growing concern in Washington and Berlin.

Despite this, the City of London, the major corporations and all newspapers, with the exception of the Guardian and Daily Mirror, have come out in favour of a second Tory-led coalition—even if this means bringing in a combination of Northern Irish parties and the UK Independence Party.

Labour is also pledged to austerity, which is why it has been unable to capitalise more successfully on anti-Tory sentiment. Nowhere is the divide that now exists between Labour and the majority of working people more apparent than in Scotland, where it faces a wipeout.

In its efforts to re-ingratiate itself with big business, Labour has pledged itself to a “budgetary responsibility lock”, opposed a referendum on EU membership, pledged to strengthen relations with US imperialism—especially on the military front—and ruled out any formal agreement with the Scottish National Party.

Even so, Labour leader Ed Miliband’s timid suggestion that cuts can be implemented more slowly is considered impermissible. More important still, concerns over the future stability of the UK due to a minority Labour government’s potential dependence on the SNP presently outweighs fears of a “Brexit” under the Tories.

Coming out for the first time in favour of a Tory-led government, the Independent editorialised: “Britain has entered a long period of relative decline, as emerging powers such as China and India acquire greater influence. To splinter our country, either through Scottish independence or withdrawal from the EU, would be fatally stupid...”

It continues, “Any partnership between Labour and the SNP will harm Britain’s fragile democracy. For all its faults, another Lib-Con coalition would both prolong and give our Kingdom a better chance of continued existence.”

This is an extraordinary statement that points to a fundamental crisis of rule in Britain. However, the crisis in Britain is only a particular manifestation of the global breakdown of capitalism and its nation-state system and the explosive growth of national and, especially, class antagonisms.

Whatever government is eventually formed, it will be unable to paper over these intractable and strategic fault lines. Its agenda will be set by the rapacious demands of the financial oligarchy, which has no answer to the economic and social catastrophe other than more of the same.

It will have no legitimacy in the eyes of millions of working people who have made clear again and again their desire for an end to the constant assault on jobs, wages and vital social provisions.

It is this that explains the stampede into the arms of Labour by the SNP, Plaid Cymru (Party of Wales) and the Green Party. Under the banner of a “Progressive Alliance” to keep out the Tories, they are offering to prop up Miliband so he can impose Labour’s anti-working class agenda.

The innumerable pseudo-left groups are seeking their place within this political fraud—either through an alliance with the SNP in Scotland or with sections of Labour and the Greens elsewhere in the UK. Their discussions of a post-election “realignment of the left” are modelled on Syriza in Greece, which is pledged to implementing the attacks on workers and youth dictated by the EU and the International Monetary Fund.

The Socialist Equality Party and its candidates, Katie Rhodes in Glasgow Central and David O’Sullivan in Holborn & St. Pancras, offer the only genuine alternative for workers and young people.

We advance an independent political perspective to mobilise the working class against the twin threats of austerity and war through the fight for a workers’ government based on a socialist program. There is no parliamentary solution to this crisis because the obscene levels of social inequality and escalating militarism are incompatible with democratic forms of rule.

As our manifesto explains, “As in 1914 and 1939, the basic contradictions of the world capitalist system—between globalised production and the division of the world into antagonistic nation states, and between socialised production and private ownership of the means of production—threaten humanity with catastrophe.”

The fight for socialism in Britain must be understood as an integral part of a unified offensive of the European and international working class. The prerequisite for such a struggle is the building of the International Committee of the Fourth International. All those able to do so should vote for Rhodes and O’Sullivan. Most important of all, we urge you to join the SEP and build it as the new socialist party of the working class.

Eating His Own Words

In an unbelievable about turn the 'comedian and activist' Russell Brand has urged a vote for the Labour Party in today’s general election in the UK.

The World Socialist Web Site says of Brand's betrayal:-

His followers have reason to be angry and disappointed. Brand after all won popular support for standing out against the very claims he is now making—that Labour represents a “lesser evil”—and for insisting that politics is ultimately determined by the power of big business, not by voting for which of its representatives holds office. But what is most important is to understand why it is that he has capitulated to the siren voice of the innumerable pseudo-left apologists for Labour.

Russell Brand may be a sincere, likable and funny man, but politics is not a joke. It is a deadly serious business that demands not only empathy with the plight of the oppressed and hostility towards the rich and powerful, but proper study and thought and the coherent political outlook provided only by Marxism.

Remember, Labour is a political creature of the financial oligarchy. If it is elected, no monopolies will be broken up. Austerity will continue as before. The NHS will continue to be decimated. Labour will scapegoat immigrants and the poor. And it will carry through the agenda of militarism and war.

A Triumph Of Experience Over Hope

Dr. Johnson once described a divorced or widowed man getting hitched again as a triumph of hope over experience. The same goes for voting as it goes for marriage. How many times must we be betrayed by the political parties before we sensibly come to the conclusion that voting is a pointless exercise and desist forthwith.

This would be a triumph of experience over hope.

When we wake up on Friday morning we are still going to have the austerity freaks and warmongers in charge taking their orders from big business on a daily basis. So what's the point?

We must look for other ways to change things. Bourgeois democracy has passed it sell-by date.

Thought For The Day

There are no political mechanisms within the existing political system through which any of the grievances of the vast majority of the population can find expression. Everything that has passed for “progressive” or “left” politics—including the politics of austerity and war—has been exposed by events. It is precisely this that terrifies the ruling class, and explains its ever more direct resort to force and violence.

The rights of the working class can be achieved only through revolutionary struggle, uniting workers of all races and religions in an independent political movement in opposition to the Conservative and Labour Parties and the capitalist profit system they defend.