£10 NOW - outlaw poverty pay!

Poverty scars the face of Scotland. Poverty pay is at the heart of it. And the only thing more ugly than the national scandal of a million Scots struggling to survive on pitiful incomes is the fact there's absolutely no excuse for it. 

We live in a fabulously rich country - officially the 14th richest economy on the planet. A nation with a super-abundance of energy resources; a net food exporter; a leading centre of life sciences, with several world class universities; one of the world's financial centres; home to many advanced industries - and the priceless asset of a skilled, educated working class.
Scotland now 'boasts' its first billionaire, but is shamed by 220,000 kids living in poverty, a thousand foodbanks issuing handouts to the desperately hungry, and one in three households shivering their way through another winter because of fuel poverty - in a nation that has the potential to become the Saudi Arabia of green energy production! 
The ugly twins of poverty and inequality are a national disgrace, and we need urgent action to banish them from the face of Scotland.

Poverty kills
On a global scale, a child dies of poverty every 3 seconds. That's a devastating indictment of the system of capitalist economy we live under, a system that knows everything about profit for the tiny elite and nothing about the needs of humanity. A system where 65 multi-billionaires possess more wealth than half the global population.
A bit closer to home, the capitalist system of markets and profit means the richest five families in Britain have more combined wealth than the poorest 12.4 million people in the UK!
In the case of Scotland, the richest ten fat-cats have grabbed £13billion between them, just short of half the entire annual budget of the Scottish government. 
We live in a brutally class-divided society.

Forms of poverty
There are several sources of poverty in Scotland, all of them easily solved by a government with the vision, courage and political will to carry through sweeping change to the ownership of wealth.
Pensioner poverty needs to be eliminated by a decent level of state pension, in answer to the crime of older people being unable to heat and eat, after a lifetimes' contribution to society.
Fuel poverty is not for lack of resources; it's because the Big Six energy giants that dominate domestic supplies are ripping the profit out of us, jacking up prices to feed their greed for profit. And the green energy sector is equally a source of obscene profit for big landowners granting us a corner of their landed estates for a few wind turbines - paid a fortune through 'green taxes' on our electricity bills - and multinational marine engineering companies. 

Public ownership of all forms of energy, turning our natural resources into a public service, is at the heart of a solution - alongside public ownership of the construction industry, investment in free home insulation and the building of 100,000 new public sector homes for rent in the lifetime of a Scottish parliament, to the highest environmental standards.
The Westminster dictatorship of and for the rich are crucifying people on benefits, with even worse to come after their announcement of another £25billion cuts over the next two years. We need a serious, resolute campaign of resistance to this butchery, demanding a welfare and benefits system that protects people in need, instead of demonising the poorest, as part of their divide-and-rule strategy against the working class.

Poverty pay the biggest cause
But underlying all these sources of poverty is the biggest of them all: poverty pay.
An absolute majority of those below the breadline live in working households. Far from being a route out of poverty, having a job nowadays is one of the chief sources of being poor!
The cold statistics cannot begin to convey the stress and strain of working to stay poor - in a fabulously rich country. Over one in five workers (22%) in Scotland earn less than the so-called Living Wage of £7.85 an hour. That figure rises to 25% of women, and rockets to 43% of us who work part-time, and an appalling 72% of workers aged 18-21.
The wage freeze in the public sector has meant zero pay increases for millions for several successive years. With rip-roaring real-life inflation on the daily essentials of food, fuel, rent and transport, this means an Ice Age of pay cuts. 

On average, wages have fallen by £50 a week for every worker since 2008, when the bankers brought the economy to the brink of collapse and were bailed out from the public purse to the tune of £1.3trillion. It's publicly-funded bonuses for the banking executives, pay cuts and job losses for the rest of us (including bank workers!).

Minimum wage pittance
Back in the mid-1990s those of us who later founded the SSP fought for the introduction of a statutory national minimum wage to banish poverty pay. We welcomed its introduction in 1999. But from day one, the Labour and subsequent Tory governments made sure the national minimum wage was at rock bottom level, and included an outrageous batch of exemptions and exclusions. In particular, the lower youth rates have blighted a generation of workers seen by employers as a source of even cheaper labour to boost their profit margins, bosses' bonuses and big shareholders' dividends.
Right now the levels of legal minimum wage are a scandalous route to exploitation: £6.50 at 21-years-old; £5.13 for 18-20-year-olds; £3.79 for workers aged 16-17; and modern slave labour on £2.73 for Modern Apprentices!

Mass armies of the low-paid
Instead of being the legal minimum, with higher rates for many workers negotiated by their trade unions in free collective bargaining, these basement level wages have increasingly become the norm.
The biggest concentrations of poverty pay are retail, hospitality and care services. So it's not just a case of small, backstreet sweatshops ripping profit out of super-exploited workers. Huge armies of low-paid workers are producing £billions in profit for multinational giants - who are aided and abetted in their exploits by the government's minimum wage legislation. 

For example, in the pre-Xmas spending spree, with the commercial frenzy of 'must have' advertising bombarding low-paid families, retail workers are pounded into doing extra shifts - part-timers on flat money with no overtime premiums - to feed the tills of a handful of giant firms that could well afford a decent living wage for all. For instance, Tesco's are driving through all manner of cuts to terms and conditions for their workers, whilst paying just above the minimum wage, but whinge about 'only' enjoying profits of around £1.4billion this year! 

Ban Zero Hours Contracts
One of several devices used to maximize profits and minimise wages is Zero Hours Contracts. A brutal system of being at the beck and call of your employer, unsure of what hours, if any, you get next week; a recipe for mayhem in daily life. They should be banned outright - not just amended or reformed as proposed by Labour in their weasel words about "ending exploitative Zero Hours Contracts". Workers need guaranteed contracted hours, part-time or full time, and a decent hourly rate of pay guaranteed, as negotiated by fully recognized trade unions.

Living Wage 
The current minimum wages of £6.50, £5.13, £3.79 and £2.73 are a criminal guarantee of poverty for workers. And although the much-trumpeted Living Wage of £7.85 is a very welcome advance on these paltry incomes for the hundreds of thousands scraping by on them, it is not only still inadequately low, but fatally flawed by one simple fact: the Living Wage is entirely voluntary and not legally enforceable.
It is laudable that the Scottish Living Wage Campaign has helped cajole three times as many employers into becoming Accredited Living Wage Employers during 2014. But to highlight the problem of it not being a legally enforced minimum, that means it has merely risen from 23 to 60 companies in Scotland paying the Living Wage. Not a single one of them is in retail, one of the two big centres of poverty pay. And some of the same outfits might pay the Living Wage to their direct employees, but rely on lower-paid contract workers from firms not paying the £7.85.

£10 now!
Since our formation in 1998, the SSP has campaigned for a legally enforced national minimum wage for all at 16, calculated on the formula of two-thirds median male earnings. In today's figures that is a minimum wage of about £10 an hour. That is also the figure unanimously agreed at the recent British Trades Union Congress.
Some might say it's unrealistic. But nothing is realistic unless you're prepared to fight for it! 

And it's extremely modest compared to the cost of living. It's modest compared to the fact that if even the (paltry) current minimum wage had kept pace with the rise in income for directors of the top 100 companies since 1999 it would now be £18.89 an hour!
But should it apply to workers and apprentices from 16 upwards? Yes! When did you last see special discounts on the price of clothing, food, footwear or rents for the 16-21 year olds?! Abolition of the lower youth rates is a key part of banishing super-exploitation. And of course it needs to be coupled to a crusade to unshackle the trade unions, by repealing all the anti-union laws, allowing free collective wage bargaining by workers' unions, so that additional skills, responsibilities, anti-social hours of work and experience can be rewarded by rates above the national minimum.

Subsidies to low-paying profiteers

What about small firms that say they couldn't afford to pay £10 an hour to the handful of staff they employ? We would argue for open public inspection of their accounts, to look at wages, bosses' bonuses, profit margins and conditions of work. If a small firm is not a backstreet death-trap that deserves to be shut down and their workers redeployed, then the government could subsidise genuine cases from taxation of the rich and big business to help them afford to pay a legal £10 minimum. 

Right now we have the opposite, where it is mostly big, profit-hungry companies who are being subsidized by taxpayers to exploit their workers with poverty pay, through the likes of Working Tax Credits. We should turn this situation on its head, force big companies to dip into their profits to guarantee a living wage of £10 at least, and help smaller, socially useful businesses flourish with decent-paid jobs.

SSP: the workers' party
None of the mainstream political parties are willing to confront the national crime of poverty pay. The Tories and LibDems are opposed to national guaranteed minimum wages on principle. Labour is trying to appease the working class who are deserting their New Tory agenda by promising an £8 an hour minimum - but try to hide the fact they only aim at this by 2020, meaning it would barely sustain the current, pathetic £6.50 rate when you account for inflation.
The SNP say they support the Living Wage, which is very welcome, but also very limited as it's entirely left to the whims and fancies of company bosses rather than enforceable by law. 

And the SNP have belatedly joined the call by the SSP for minimum wage levels to be devolved from Westminster to Holyrood - but in the SNP's case only so that its level "will rise by at least inflation". Based on the bogus official inflation measures of today, that implies a pathetic 13 pence an hour rise on the current 'adult' minumum wage of £6.50!

Act on TUC policy 

The SSP is determined to make this issue the centrepiece of Scottish politics in 2015. We are demanding £10 now - not in 2020 or some distant date beyond that. The fact the TUC has voted "to campaign for a £10 per hour minimum wage for all workers" - with not a single union delegate opposing it - adds powerful potential force behind this battle for a decent living minimum wage.
The SSP stands up for the working class. We are Scotland's working class party.

Join the SSP in the campaign for £10 now, to outlaw the crime of poverty pay and Zero Hours Contracts. We live in a fabulously rich nation, but one scarred by the twins of poverty and inequality. We need to organise and demand a massive redistribution of wealth. The guarantee of secure jobs with at least a £10 hourly rate is a measure that would transform the lives of millions currently swimming in a sea of poverty and insecurity.

MASS DEFIANCE - NOT DEVOLVED DECIMATION OF JOBS AND SERVICES!

As I listened to the BBC Radio 4 feature on 'The Mersey Militants' on Saturday 8th November, it filled me with a mixture of fond memories and fury. 

Mass struggle won jobs and services in Liverpool 1984

Warm recollections of the titanic battles I took part in during the 1980s, as the Merseyside regional organiser of the socialists who led mass movements that defeated Thatcher's government. 

Fond thoughts of the fighting spirit, camaraderie and rich lessons in working class struggle that the events of 1983-7 displayed, as the mass movement surrounding the socialist city council waged war against Maggie Thatcher's Tory government - and won dramatic reforms that transformed the lives of thousands of Scousers.

Irreplaceable experiences for anyone who aspires to change society through and with working people's struggles.

Fury at the obnoxious distortions peddled by the likes of the treacherous windbag, Labour leader at that time, Neil Kinnock. Even 30 years on it makes your blood boil to hear his sneering mis-representations of the genuine - and successful!- socialist struggle and marvellous class fighters involved in that chapter of history.

LESSONS OF STRUGGLES PAST

And while it was uplifting to hear the defiant defense of what we did then from a few of my socialist comrades of the time who were interviewed, it rankled to hear opponents distort our record, and others totally understate the critical role of socialist policies and organised socialists in successfully leading a movement of tens of thousands of 'ordinary' people who became 'extraordinary'.

Anyone curious to hear an account I gave of the Liverpool showdown, in a speech about five years ago at Campsies SSP, can listen to the podcast they made, which is the very first posting on this Blog.

But rather than expand on the unforgettable struggles of the Liverpool people that I had the privilege of being in the thick of, the BBC feature made me think once again how lessons from our history are invaluable to the struggles of today.

COUNCILS WIELD THE KNIFE

Councils across Scotland are poised to wield the knife to jobs and local services in a renewed round of municipal butchery. Councillors of all mainstream party colours - including not just Tory and LibDem, but also Labour and SNP - are preparing budgets for 2015/6 and subsequent years involving tens of millions of cuts in most areas, with hair-raising attacks on workforces and working class communities.

This assault includes £150m slashed next year in just a clutch of the bigger councils - on top of hundreds of millions in recent years; but the BBC describes this as "a drop in the ocean compared with the following years."

Mass Struggle on the streets of Glasgow, 2014

MUNICIPAL VANDALISM

Glasgow Labour council plans £71m cuts in the next two years, hard on the heels of £175m 'savings' since 2010! Job losses accompany attacks on the most vulnerable communities e.g. 40 per cent cuts to funding of Glasgow Association of Mental Health.

Numerous councils are slashing education, the single biggest council service. Highlands and Fife are amongst those proposing to cut the school week, with horrendous effects not only on kids' schooling but also parents' childcare and work arrangements.

Inverclyde has included the ingenious idea of abolishing head teachers in their primary schools.

High-performing East Renfrewshire plans to increase class sizes for S1 and S2 Maths and English from its current 20 maximum to 30, and wants kids to run school libraries while the council shed full-time librarians.

Libraries face municipal vandalism, for instance with seven Moray rural libraries targeted for closure.

Stirling council workers are in dispute over the council's attempts to impose literal pay cuts plus extend the working week by an hour; combined, that means at least a 4.5 per cent cut in hourly pay.

Across Scotland, council staff have suffered two years of zero pay increase followed by 1 per cent this year, alongside devastating staff reductions and subsequent crushing workloads for those who remain.

But now compulsory redundancies loom, unless a ferocious fight is mounted for the necessary funding.

WESTMINSTER CREATES CUTS - SNP PASSES THEM DOWN

These attacks are the result of spending cuts imposed by the Westminster dictatorship of and for the obscenely rich, which has chopped the block grant award to the Scottish government.

But amidst all the fanfares for the phenomenal growth of the SNP in membership and opinion polls, their Holyrood government is passing down these Tory cuts to councils, rather than mount a mass people's rebellion to save jobs, conditions and services.

DEFIANCE 'NO CUTS' BUDGETS

Assuredly, there is an alternative. The SSP has every year demanded that the Scottish government and local councillors should refuse to pass on Westminster's cuts, instead set No Cuts Defiance budgets, and then link up with council workers' unions and community user groups in a massive campaign to demand back the stolen £billions off Westminster to balance the books. Simultaneously, we have fought for the Scottish government to use its power over local taxation to abolish the unfair, regressive Council Tax and replace it with a progressive, income-based Scottish Service Tax.

SSP councillor Jim Bollan has pursued this alternative annually in West Dunbartonshire council, winning the support of tenants' organisations and all the council workers' trade unions - but not a majority of councillors, who hide behind talk of having to obey the law and avoid being jailed. In fact no such threat of imprisonment exists, provided they sought mass support, rather than conduct a folded-arms gesture.

LIVERPOOL DARED TO FIGHT

Thirty years ago the socialist council in one city, Liverpool, dared to fight the Iron Lady herself - arch Tory hate-figure Maggie Thatcher - and won, in 1984!

We gained about £65m in grants and concessions off the UK Tory government, allowing the council to not only avoid all cuts, but march forward with massive reforms, building 5,000 new council houses for rent, new schools and nurseries, expanded social services, alongside a freeze on rents and service charges, and the creation of 12,500 building workers' jobs.

And despite threats and surcharges, not one councillor was ever bankrupted or jailed; we built a mass movement around them, cudgeled the intransigent Tory government into retreat, and raised the cash to pay the councillors' surcharges, raising tens of thousands of working class people to their feet in the fightback. All that in one isolated city, smaller than Glasgow.

IMAGINE A NATION IN REVOLT

So imagine what a whole nation could achieve, if the SNP government, with the wind in its sails after the referendum, took this courageous course of defiance. But that requires the political will that flows from a vision of an entirely different kind of society.

Instead of heeding and applying this precedent, the SNP has passed on about £3billion of Westminster cuts in the past three years, and the recent Scottish government budget included a further £500m cuts.

It's true that without the powers of full independence, any Scottish government is hamstrung by the limitations of the block grant handed over by Westminster, and the Tories' austerity drive has horrific consequences for all the Scottish services and jobs dependent on this shrinking pot of money.

SNP LACK SOCIALIST VISION

But that's where the severe shortcomings, the lack of socialist vision, of the SNP government comes to bear down on us. Instead of just blaming Westminster for the cuts but then meekly passing them down to councils, NHS boards, colleges, etc, the SNP government should be defying the Tory cuts, refusing to implement them, mounting a campaign of the Scottish people, demanding back those stolen £billions - with rallies, mass demonstrations, strikes and occupations of threatened facilities.

Look at the panic-stricken retreats and promises of the Westminster cabal (Tory, LibDem and Labour) in the face of a threatened Yes vote - and then imagine the power to win back funding that has been used to cut taxes to the obscenely rich, if a Scots rebellion was led and encouraged by the elected Scottish government!

SCRAP THE COUNCIL TAX - TAX THE RICH

About 80 per cent of council funding comes from the Scottish government, most of the rest from the Council Tax.

Setting No Cuts Defiance budgets at Scottish and in turn council levels would also buy the time to rush through emergency legislation to abolish the hated, unequal Council Tax and introduce in its place a progressive, income-based Scottish Service Tax that could raise far greater funds for council jobs and services. That's what the SSP had in our founding programme back in 1998, which we then costed thoroughly with the help of economists.


The latest detailed figures we compiled - four years ago - show that far from Scotland suffering devastating cuts at local level, our income-based Scottish Service Tax would mean about 80 per cent of people paying less than they do under the Council Tax, the super-rich paying a damned sight more, with the net result of increasing council funding from £1.8billion to £3.4billion a year (in 2010 figures).

DEEP FREEZE COUNCIL TAX!

Back in the 2011 Holyrood elections, the SNP scented the popularity of the policy the SSP had been conducting street campaigns and battles inside the trade unions for, adopted a bastardized version of it, and won a massive increase in their vote by promising to scrap the Council Tax and introduce what they called 'a local income tax'.

But once elected, the SNP failed to pursue this plan, and instead introduced the Council Tax freeze. Welcome though it is to lower-income families to not face massive hikes in their bills, in fact this disproportionately helps the higher-income households, and adds another squeeze to council spending abilities.

The SSP would not endorse Labour's demand to end the freeze and let bills rip through the roof for ordinary families. But instead of freezing Council Tax bills, the SNP government should put the entire Council Tax system in deep freeze! Scrap it, and tax the rich minority their fair share instead, boosting annual income for local services and jobs.

GIVE US BACK THE STOLEN BILLIONS!

As council budgets are debated, we need trade unionists, community groups and councillors to back the call for No Cuts budgets to be set, Defiance Budgets, with plans laid for campaigning on the scale of the referendum in workplaces and communities around the central message of 'give us back our stolen £billions - and scrap the Council Tax, to instead tax the rich.'

Heady Days: October 1986 - confirmation of our expulsion from Kinnock's Labour Party

FOR A PRO-INDEPENDENCE, ANTI-CUTS ALLIANCE FOR MAY ELECTIONS

As the SNP conference meets, the media are speculating that proposed changes to the SNP constitution are designed to "reward the wider Yes Scotland movement for its efforts in the referendum campaign by allowing the fast-tracking of activists to be party candidates at next year's General Election", adding this "paves the way for SNP constituencies to approve non-party members to stand as MPs under a different banner, such as Yes for Scotland, in May's poll." (Herald 14 November 2014).

The same article goes on to claim "The SNP has resisted calls from the Greens and Scottish Socialists for a pro-independence pact next year, but [if agreed, this constitutional change] ...would open up the potential for pro-independence campaigners who are not party members to stand under the SNP banner". 

As an aside, I'm personally unaware of whether or not  the Greens have called for such 'a pact'; certainly the SSP has asked them to back a pro-independence alliance for 2015, and we would hope they'd join forces with us in pressing for this with the SNP leadership.

PRESSURE FOR UNITED FRONT IN MAY 

But the SNP's plans reflect the massive pressure from their own ranks, especially those thousands of new recruits who fought alongside the SSP and others for a Yes vote, saw the value of a united front, now favour that being sustained for the Westminster elections, and look to SNP conference to agree it. Another indication of the mood for such a united front is the election of  Stewart Hosie as SNP deputy leader, after he had declared for some such arrangement.

However, and it's a big however, if the Herald has got it right, allowing people "to stand under the SNP banner" is far removed from a genuine alliance or united front. It's an attempt to square the circle; to go it alone as the SNP in the glow of mass recruitment and spectacular opinion polls, whilst trying to appease the demands of (especially new) SNP members for a continuation of the success that was the multi-faceted Yes movement. It wouldn't work! If they intend to suggest SSP or Green party members stand as SNP candidates it's a complete non-starter. 

FOR A GENUINE ALLIANCE TO CONFRONT TORIES AND LABOURIf, more probably, they hope to rope in Yes campaigners with no party affiliation to stand under the SNP banner, that's up to those individuals to decide, but they will have to face up to being held responsible for all that is negative about the SNP, as well as what is positive. In particular their track record on passing down Westminster cuts rather than mounting a mass campaign of resistance, whether at Holyrood, council, college or NHS board levels.

There is a powerful mood to unite in opposition to the Westminster Tory dictatorship and their cuts, and the SSP's call for a pro-independence, anti-cuts alliance for next May's elections matches the hour. 

So we hope the ranks of the SNP respond to our appeal for a genuine alliance of pro-independence, anti-cuts candidates - named as such in every seat - as outlined in the Press Release below that I sent out in the west of Scotland at the weekend.

......................................

PRESS RELEASE: for immediate use (9.11.14)
SSP calls for pro-independence, anti-cuts 'Yes Alliance' for 2015 Westminster elections 

The Scottish Socialist Party is campaigning for a Yes Alliance to contest the Westminster elections next May. This was agreed at the recent SSP national conference.

SSP west of Scotland regional organiser RICHIE VENTON told us:
"The savage cuts to benefits, pay, jobs and people's basic democratic rights announced in the wake of the Referendum has driven increased numbers of Scots to favour independence. And even those still unconvinced of full-scale self-government are strongly in favour of vastly increased powers for Scotland over benefits, taxation and measures to protect Scotland from the Twin Tory Coalition onslaught.

"Many of the same people want to punish Labour for their collaboration with the Tories in blocking independence, leaving us at the tender mercies of Cameron's dictatorship of and for the obscenely rich.

"The SSP is conducting a systematic campaign - in the streets, communities, workplaces and through local public meetings - for powers for the Scottish parliament to transform our lives, including the ability to set a £10 Scottish minimum wage for all at 16; establish a benefits system that supports people instead of demonising them; to ban fracking and take the Big Six energy giants and the green energy sector into democratic public ownership, to banish profiteering and fuel poverty; to repeal all the Thatcherite anti-trade union laws; and to implement progressive taxation of the very rich and big business to fund decent public services. 

"We have these distinctive policies, often radically different from those of the SNP. For that reason alone, we are not prepared to give a blank cheque to the SNP in the 2015 elections. We will not be calling on people to just vote SNP and forget their differences with them on key matters of policy.

"However, we are stepping up our appeal to the SNP, Greens and people of no political party who made up the very successful Yes campaign to sustain that united front in the Westminster elections. That's what our recent SSP national conference agreed unanimously.

"We want a pro-independence, anti-cuts alliance that agrees one candidate in each constituency, to challenge the Tories and Labour, appealing to not only the 45% who voted Yes, but to the No voters who want a radically fairer distribution of wealth and power.

"We believe the beauty of such an alliance is that it would appeal to outraged, disenfranchised Labour voters in a way that the SNP on its own never will, with socialists, greens, SNPers and independents standing as candidates in an agreed allocation of seats.

"And my message to the forthcoming SNP Conference is that they need to recognize the growing support for this idea at grassroots level. For instance, I have spoken at several local Yes groups that support such a multiparty alliance, including many people who have joined the SNP recently.

"The SSP will never drop its commitment to an independent socialist Scotland, but we are eager to reach agreement with others in the interests of resisting Tory attacks on the working class, and of keeping the flames of social justice and independence alight, through a pro-independence, anti-cuts alliance for May 2015."

UNIONS MUST BREAK FROM LABOUR TORIES: stop funding arsonists to torch your home!

On 1st July 2014 I wrote a blog - "Ructions after Referendum" - which included the statement: "The exposé of Labour as open collaborators with the avowed Tory enemy of workers has added immensely to the process of workers unshackling themselves from their old Labour loyalties...After September 18th we are likely to see eruptions, schisms and a haemorraging of members from Labour in Scotland."

Within weeks of the Referendum result - a No majority won primarily through the agency of Labour lies, scaremongering and false vows! - absolute ructions have erupted in Labour, with an intense squeeze on them from the hundreds of thousands of trade unionists who fund their party. 

Workers without a mass party 
The Labour party was founded 120 years ago by pioneering socialists and trade unionists who had seen through the false promises and capitalist ideology of the Liberals, who up until then had enjoyed the loyalty of big swathes of the working class. They sought to build an independent mass party of the working class, a political wing of the trade union movement. 

But that was then! History has turned full circle. Workers entered the 21st century with no mass party to represent and voice their aims, interests and aspirations. Labour's attachment to the UK state, displayed during the Referendum, is an expression of its deeper ideological devotion to capitalism. Since at least the 1990s Labour has transformed into an openly capitalist party, the New Tories.

Labour's shameful record
That was harshly exposed under the spotlight of Labour being in government from 1997-2010. Thirteen years in which Labour retained the most vicious anti-trade union laws in the whole of Europe; announced the slashing of 100,000 civil service jobs; scrapped the 10p tax rate for the lowest paid; implemented rampant privatisation; raided workers' pensions; allowed the worst levels of inequality since 1886, according to Oxfam; and dragged us into the blood-soaked killing fields of Afghanistan and Iraq. 
Not to mention Gordon Brown's boasts of having ended the capitalist cycle of 'boom and bust' being smashed to smithereens by the bankers' crisis of 2008; a crisis which Labour obliged workers to bail out and pay for through subsequent years of austerity.

Make the Break campaign 
Back in January 1999 the SSP launched the 'Make the Break' campaign, appealing to trade unions to end their funding of Labour's New Tories, instead demanding a democratic choice of pro-trade union parties that workers could help fund through their union fees - on top of what individual workers could do by joining the SSP to pursue the goals long since abandoned by Labour. 
Some unions did in subsequent years, but now the time is rotten ripe to 'Make the Break' and help build a mass, working class socialist party. Immeasurably more so than in 1999, especially after the mass politicization of working class people that the Referendum debate produced.

Millions for a party supporting millionaires!
Yet many trade union leaderships persist with Labour affiliation and funding of their own worst enemies. It might be only a few pence a month that each union member gives to Labour (usually without knowing it!) if they're in one of the affiliated unions. But over a period it adds up to £millions of members' hard-earned money going to an outfit that couldn't give a toss about low pay, inequality, workplace victimization or the shackles on workplace rights imposed by successive Tory and Labour governments.
Given their track record, it's obscene to note the level of trade union funding since 2001: Unite has given Labour £41.4million since then; Unison £19.6m; GMB £15.7m; Usdaw £12.29m; CWU £7.6m. And in 2013, the trade unions accounted for 77 per cent of the total funding enjoyed by Labour.
It's time to end this madness. It's equivalent to holding a whip-round at work to buy the fuel to hand over to an arsonist to torch your own home!

Don't resign - organise! 
Thousands of workers in Labour-affiliated unions are in revolt, rightly furious at the treacherous role of Labour in blocking Scottish democracy, the right to rule our own country. And at bottom this is a rebellion against the continued anti-working class policies of capitalist austerity on offer from Labour.
Hundreds in each of several unions have furiously - but foolishly - resigned from their union in disgust at being told to vote No by a leadership that failed to hold democratic debates or votes amongst members first. That includes Usdaw, GMB, CWU. 

Foolishly, because in most cases that leaves them with no alternative union that is recognized by their employer, leaving workers defenceless in the face of exploitation or victimization.
Hundreds have taken the much more constructive and wiser route of staying in the union but withdrawing payment of the political levy to Labour, by filling in exemption forms. And vowing to fight for democracy in their own union. To illustrate the scale of this growing force determined to punish Labour, almost half my own Usdaw branch members have completed these forms in the past few weeks - with more to come! And that includes many who voted No, but feel abandoned and betrayed by Labour.

Life's political
But it's important to avoid the pitfall of believing that "the unions should stay away from politics". That is impossible. Workers' conditions, incomes and rights are determined by political decisions.
Anti-union laws have helped reduce wages to their lowest share of national wealth in 60 years. The pathetic level of the minimum wage - which has become the norm rather than the minimum - needs to be challenged politically. Not with Labour's recent insulting promise of £8 by 2020 - which would barely even match inflation - but with the demand of the SSP for a £10 minimum here and now.
Political decisions on public services, privatisation, fracking, Corporation Tax levels and a multitude of other issues deeply affect our daily lives. Workers need an organised socialist voice and vehicle.

Democratise the unions 

And as hundreds of thousands demonstrated by their participation during the Referendum, we should never leave those decisions to an elite, the 'political class' of career politicians, most of whom have never done a day's work outside the machinery of their own party and parliament.
We need to demand union members' meetings and decision-making Scottish conferences, where as well as pursuing the fight for measures to tackle poverty, inequality and the dictatorship of capital, we can democratically decide which political parties members' fees can contribute to. A multiple choice of pro-trade union parties. That would assist workers in choosing to help construct a mass socialist party that stands up, unashamedly, for the working class against the profits, power and privileges of bankers, billionaires and bosses of big companies.

Murphy's Blairite claptrap

When contender for Scottish Labour leader, Jim Murphy, launched his mission statement with talk of "representing both the prosperous and the poor", he is repeating the nauseous, dishonest claptrap of Blairite New Labour. In reality they represent 'the prosperous', at the expense of 'the poor'.
At their recent Scottish Labour Gala Dinner, these worthies forked out £200 each in the city where people rely on foodbanks for handouts to avoid literal starvation.
They have countered the Tory Coalition's additional £25billion in cuts over two years with their own cuts over three years - of £27billion!

Murphy epitomizes all that is rotten about modern Labour: a capitalist party that tries to disguise its devotion to capitalism with empty sound-bites that try to hide and deny the class realities of society to their working class electorate, whilst cooing messages of reassurance to the City of London spivs and profiteering capitalist class. 

Murphy's former spin doctor, John McTernan, has claimed that the really significant vote in the Referendum wasn't the 53% Yes vote amongst working class Glaswegians, but the 61% No vote in Edinburgh's middle class. He concludes that Labour in Scotland should tack to the right and win over the "aspirational middle classes" as well as its traditional heartland working class. 

Facing both ways

Classic Blairism. But the material basis for this con-trick has melted away with the 2008 banking crisis, which burst the financial bubble that for a short spell in history had deluded not only "the aspirational middle classes" but also sections of workers that things were getting better under New Labour. Based on plastic wealth, credit, that inevitably turned into debt and demolished any temporary feel-good factor in the working class. 

Since then, the class divide has deepened, making it all the more untenable to keep up the pretense of simultaneously 'representing the prosperous and the poor' for any length of time. Something Labour is discovering as their support in working class Scotland plummets at an unprecedented rate. 

SSP upholds principles of the socialist pioneers
Workers and their unions don't have to imprison themselves with a choice of two factions of Thatcherism. They should stop funding their Labour enemy, demand democratic choices and membership control of their unions' political funds - and join the SSP in pursuit of the democratic socialist aims of the labour movement pioneers, often enshrined in their own union rule books.

DEMAND SCOTTISH £10 MINIMUM WAGE: demand the powers to transform our lives

                                                                    

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others", was the memorable satirical line in George Orwell's Animal Farm.
Well the pigs with the biggest snouts in the trough here and now in capitalist Britain would agree. As millions of people work to remain poor, we have a new obscenity on parade: the UK's best-paid boss, Simon Peckham of Melrose engineering investment company, last year 'earned' £31million! 

That means he grabbed 2,238 times as much as the annual wage of a worker on the so-called Living Wage of £7.65 an hour. Put another way, whereas it would take a worker a whole year on £7.65 an hour to earn £13,923, this chief executive only has to spend 49 minutes to get that much.
The mind boggles! And your blood should be boiling, your resolve to fight poverty pay hardened by such examples of the worst levels of inequality ever recorded.

A YEAR'S LIVING WAGE IN 49 MINUTES!
The directors of the top 100 companies in the UK only need spend one single day at work to earn a year's Living Wage; their incomes average £3.195m.
Most companies studiously conceal the facts about the incomes of their top dogs compared to those of the workers they hire to produce their profits. And no wonder! Just one example in retail tells the story they don't want told.
NEXT shops CEO Lord Wolfson last year grabbed a modest £4.6m for himself, which is 459 times as much as the average annual wage of workers in NEXT. They are paid a miserly £6.70 an hour - if they're 'adults'!
And 3 out of every 10 jobs in NEXT are 12 hours a week or less - one of the common causes of crucifying poverty in retail, where profit-crazed employers want workers at their beck and call, with very few guaranteed hours a week, but a reserve army of labour to work additional hours at busier times, without the overheads of holiday and sick pay for longer contracts. And of course many big companies go the whole hog and rely on Zero Hours Contracts, the ultimate in casualised, low-paid labour.

RECOVERY? WHAT RECOVERY?
We are told daily about the economic recovery. "What recovery?" is the universal reply of the army of workers who slave away without the reward of a share of the booming national wealth.
A clutch of charities published figures in March 2014 showing that a devastating 870,000 people in Scotland live below the poverty line. And although it was ancient news for some of us, their Report's most damning indictment of capitalist employers and capitalist politicians was the revelation that over half of those in poverty - 436,000 of us - are in jobs, working to stay poor!
80,000 kids in Scotland in 2014 suffer the hunger, disappointments, and stunted ambitions of growing up in poverty despite having one or more parent in work.
A more recent report confirmed that the root cause of this national scandal is the blindingly obvious: low hourly rates of pay.
372,000 workers in Scotland - 18 per cent of the national workforce - earn below the £7.65 Living Wage, which has been calculated as the bare minimum required for access to a decent life.
93 per cent of these workers are in the private sector: by far the biggest proportions are in retail and hospitality.

TORY CLASS WAR
Throughout the Referendum campaign we in the SSP warned of the horrendous consequences of remaining under the heel of Westminster Tory dictatorship for the working class majority population. We warned a No vote would usher in assaults on pay, benefits and public services on a scale unprecedented. 

But even we underestimated just how swiftly this revenge attack would be unleashed. Within a week of the No vote being achieved by a cocktail of lies, scaremongering and false promises for 'far more powers for Scotland', the Tories launched full-scale class war on workers and working class communities.
The obnoxious George Osborne declared war on benefits - including child benefits, working tax credits, income support and other in-work benefits - robbing an average of £480 a year off a million Scots, ten million across Britain. He further announced plans to rob people under 21 of Housing Benefit, and of all Job Seekers Allowance after six months unemployed.
In shameless contrast the same Cameron-Osborne Tory dictatorship slashed taxes on the rich, awarding the well-off at least £1,900 a year in tax reductions, and even more outrageously announced what Osborne boasts is "the largest reduction in the burden of Corporation Tax in our nation's history." 

CASH PILES STASHED AWAY
Corporation Tax is to slump to 20 per cent next year, the lowest in the G20 richest capitalist nations. That will mean £8billion less in big business taxes in 2016; £8bn less for vital services, job creation or - god forbid! - a decent minimum wage.
And it's not as if the big companies that hire the majority of workers - often on pitiful pay - are in need of a handout. Just the FTSE 100 companies alone have already stashed away a monstrous £53.3billion in what is politely termed 'cash piles'; wealth they refuse to invest in jobs, or modernization of their business, or improved wages. That's close to twice the annual budget of the entire Scottish government, salted away in the vaults of a mere 100 companies, waiting to be added to when they have to pay even less in Corporation Tax next year.

THE HUMAN TOLL
Reams of statistics fail to convey the human misery and insecurity caused by this ocean of poverty pay and rocketing inequality.
People in work are amongst those who have to swallow their pride and traipse to Foodbanks for a handout in this rich, food-exporting nation. People are literally starving whilst those at the top of the pile of wealth gorge themselves shamelessly, grabbing a year's Living Wage in a day, or in 49 minutes in the case of Simon Peckham.
We face another winter where many elderly people will suffer a cruel, avoidable death through hypothermia because they can't afford to eat and heat their homes. Because their pensions are the worst in Europe compared to average wages, whereas the chief executives of the supermarkets and the Big Six energy companies rake in utterly immoral levels of profit and personal perks.

POWERS TO TRANSFORM OUR LIVES
Others have reported the crime of poverty amidst plenty: the point however is to challenge it, fight to banish the root causes, fight fire with fire in the face of the Tories' class warfare.
For most of this year, the SSP campaigned on the streets of the west of Scotland with the slogan "Vote YES for a decent living minimum wage", arguing that independence would open the door to organise and demand such a central anti-poverty measure. We didn't get independence - yet! So now we need to link the battle to banish rock-bottom wages with the debate over what powers are to be granted to the Scottish parliament.
The Smith Commission on this issue speaks of "financial powers". The trade union movement, including the STUC, should join the SSP in demanding that Holyrood must have the powers to set the level of guaranteed minimum wage in Scotland; that's a key financial issue!

LIVING MINIMUM WAGE OF £10
There's a lot of confusion around terms like Minimum Wage and Living Wage. 

The National Minimum Wage is legally enforceable by government legislation - and the vigilance of the trade union movement, to outlaw wage-dodging cowboy employers. But it is set at a pathetic level: £6.50 an hour for over-21s, and the slave-wage £2.71 for Modern Apprentices. It is a recipe for poverty - and brazen profiteering by employers, who are more than happy to let taxpayers subsidise their low pay through Working Tax Credit.
As a reminder of the class-divided society we need to change, if the national minimum wage had kept pace with company chief executives' pay rises since it was introduced in 1999, it would now not be a miserly £6.50, but £18.89 an hour!

CAPITALISTS DON'T VOLUNTEER LIVING WAGES!

The Living Wage is the product of research and laudable campaigning by the Living Wage Foundation, Poverty Alliance and others. It is calculated as the bare minimum required for a basic standard of decent life, currently set at £7.65 an hour.
But it has two fundamental flaws: it is still far too low to match the mounting cost of living, and it is entirely voluntary, relying on the whims and fancies of employers. Employers are under no obligation to pay it; they can volunteer to do so and win 'Living Wage Accreditation' from the SNP government-funded Poverty Alliance/Living Wage campaign. But to highlight the problem, a mere 23 companies in Scotland have signed up so far!

What is needed is a legally enforced national minimum wage, set at a level to guarantee a decent life. A decent, living minimum wage. Which is why since 1998 the SSP has fought for such a minimum to be set at two-thirds male median earnings - about £10 an hour in today's figures. And that £10 an hour was agreed as the national minimum wage demanded by the recent TUC congress in Liverpool - unanimously!

POWERS TO TRANSFORM OUR LIVES
The recent STUC march to 'challenge poverty' needs to be urgently built upon with a systematic campaign in workplaces and on the streets demanding the powers to implement a £10 Scottish minimum wage - for all at 16, with abolition of the lower youth rates, and equal pay for women. Further rallies, demos, pickets of low-paying companies and support for workers who strike for better pay needs to accompany the demands on the Smith Commission.

And alongside that central demand we need a drive for other powers and policies to tackle poverty in 21st century Scotland. Powers to transform our lives. The power to implement a living level of state pension in Scotland, linked to a £10 minimum wage. Full powers over welfare and benefits to reverse the savage assault on the sick, disabled and unemployed by the millionaires' Westminster bootboys. 

SCRAP ANTI-UNION LAWS

And a critical issue is repeal of the battery of anti-trade union laws implemented by Thatcher, retained by 13 years of Labour governments, and made even worse by the current Coalition. Handcuffing workers and their unions was a central strategy in the fundamental redistribution of wealth and power to the rich and big business by successive Tory and Labour regimes. As recent academic reports confirm, inequality in Britain was at its lowest, its least obscene, in the years when 58 per cent of workers were in trade unions and 82 per cent of wages were covered by collective bargaining. Now, by 2012, only 26 per cent are in unions, and a mere 23 per cent of wages are determined by collective bargaining, by the combined efforts of workers banded together through their unions. And the gap between the highest and lowest incomes is the greatest it's ever been since records began.

DON'T PLEAD - ORGANISE!
The link between poverty and the most repressive anti-union laws in the whole of Europe is glaringly obvious. And the position needs to be reversed, if we are serious about banishing the poverty and inequality that scars the face of Scotland.
Likewise, the leaders of the 630,000-member trade unions in Scotland need to face up to a simple truth: begging and cajoling employers for a decent wage doesn't work! There's no excuse for poverty pay, or poverty pensions, or skinflint benefits. There's oceans of wealth surrounding us - but it's in the hands of 'the 1%'.
So those who fought for independence, plus those who didn't, should demand the power to tax the richest minority and big business by Holyrood, to fund decent pay, benefits, pensions and public services.

TAKE SIDES!
The Tories have launched ruthless class war on the rest of us in defense of the rich. That's in their political DNA, so no surprise there.
Labour has joined them at the hip in pursuit of profit for the millionaires and poverty for the millions. It's time the trade union leaders woke up to that reality too, and stopped funding a party that declared their own war on workers with plans for cuts of £27billion by 2017.
And those who have rushed off to join the SNP should pause and ponder some fundamentals: you can't appease the profit-hunger of the multinational corporations - including with pledges of even far lower levels of Corporation Tax than the Tories' 20 per cent - and at the same time hope to banish the crushing poverty of nearly a million Scots. When the rich and their political puppets unleash class warfare, you can't stand in the middle, or take both sides.
The SSP has no hesitation in taking sides with workers, their families, people on benefits and pensions, the millions in open conflict with those in charge of the massive wealth created by nature and generations of working people. Join us in a crusade against poverty and inequality, here and now, as part of the struggle towards an independent socialist Scotland.