CLOSE THE OBSCENE GAP: for a £10 minimum and a maximum wage

The gaping chasm between the incomes of millions of workers and handfuls of millionaire company chief executives is opening up ever wider, like the blades of a giant pair of scissors.

The case I expounded in my book, Break the Chains, for an immediate national minimum wage of £10-an-hour for all workers - regardless of age - and a maximum wage initially based on an overly generous 10:1 differential with the minimum (i.e. £100-an-hour maximum) screams out from every page of every recent report on workers' wages and bosses' incomes. 

The top dogs of the FTSE 100 biggest companies have just had yet another 10% pay rise - and that's before they rake in untold bonuses, shares portfolios, and bottomless pension pots. Since the 2010 recession, these capitalist overlords have had their salaries increase by a third! They now wallow like pigs in the proverbial, on average incomes of £5.5million!

Back on Planet Earth!

Meantime in the same country, but on a different planet, UK workers' wages have plunged by 10.4% in the same five years since the 2010 recession. As the Bank of England expressed it, most families have suffered "a lost decade of income". Mass unemployment has been replaced by mass poverty pay.

Again, as I spelt out in Break the Chains:

"Poverty pay impoverishes not only its direct victims - the growing horde of workers denied access to society on a par with their neighbours and contemporaries - but also impoverishes the whole of society. The lack of spending power that low wages curses affected families with, in turn depresses the wider economy."

That's one of the reasons even the Tories - those privileged mouthpieces for the moneyed class of parasites - felt obliged to superficially increase wages in April, through their obscenely mis-named £7.20 National Living Wage. 

Of course they also sought to divide workers, by excluding the under-25s, who are increasingly hired in preference to 'older', more expensive workers in the likes of retail and hospitality. 

And the other factor that drove the obnoxious George Osborne to do this was the fear of his class at a pay revolt, as workers become increasingly infuriated at the obscene contrast between their grinding poverty and capitalist chiefs' shameless opulence. 

Capitalism has no Solutions 

Poverty pay wrecks lives. It wrecks the economy. It shreds social solidarity. And its accompanying inequality demotivates millions of workers who observe company bosses on 183 times as much as 'their' workers' average wage. 

But that's where the lunacy of capitalism prevents a solution that would keep the rich in the wealth they're accustomed to, whilst paying the wealth-creating working class decent wages that boosts spending power. 

It's alright for Theresa May - or Cameron before her - to spout platitudes about "the irrational, unhealthy and growing gap", but what will they do about it? They promised to 'aim' at the National Living Wage (only for those past their 25th) reaching £9 by 2020. That's pathetic, totally inadequate here and now, let alone four years hence. But it's also provoked uproar amongst business sections, who scream blue murder about "having to make difficult choices". 

Employers in hospitality, the care sector and nurseries recently joined with the Federation of Small Businesses, Association of Convenience Stores and National Farmers Union in a letter to the new Tory Business Minister demanding he abandon such giddy extravagance as £9-an-hour for the over-25s in 2020.

Profit versus Pay

So here's the rub: it's to the advantage of the capitalist class as a whole to have reasonably paid workers who can therefore spend more and thereby boost overall profits for the ruling capitalist class. But in the jungle warfare of capitalism as a system, with each profiteering outfit vying with its competitors, every penny pay increase is a penny lost to their individual company profits. 

As I put it in the book: 

"David Cameron telling a room of capitalist bosses that 'Britain needs a pay rise' is like Dracula appealing to a conference of vampires for volunteers to donate blood. These bloodsuckers have moved mountains for the past 30-40 years to slash the real wages of workers, boosting their profits by driving down the share of wealth that goes to wages."

Organise For £10 Now and a Maximum Wage 

We clearly can't rely on the benevolence - nor even the naked self-interest - of either the capitalist employers or their political representatives to tackle poverty pay nor the opening scissors of inequality. That requires an entirely different approach: workers becoming conscious of how they're exploited by this system, confident of their own power to challenge that set-up when organised.

And a struggle for the likes of a guaranteed minimum wage of £10 now, in 2016 - alongside a legally enforced £100-an-hour maximum income - as the first, modest steps towards the eradication of poverty, inequality and all the social ills they create.  

CHOOSE DEFIANCE - NOT DESTRUCTION!

You couldn't make it up! 

David Cameron, Tory MP for West Oxfordshire, recently wrote a letter to the Oxfordshire Tory council leader, berating his local authority for (to quote his epistle) "cuts to frontline services - from elderly day centres to libraries to museums. This is in addition to the unwelcome and counter-productive proposals to close children's centres across the county." 

The MP, claiming "shock and outrage", goes on to demand why the council leader hasn't looked at "back-office savings" - a euphemism for sacking council staff.

Tory Tit-for-Tat 

The Tory council leader replies to the Tory MP that his council has already sacked 2,800 staff, that the cuts they now plan are the only ones left to make, and caustically corrects Cameron's claims in his letter by stating:

"I cannot accept your description of a drop in funding of £72million, or 37% of our budget, as 'a slight fall'."

And of course David Cameron, the Tory MP desperate to express feigned concern at cuts to frontline services, is the same David Cameron, the Tory Prime Minister, whose hatchet-wielding Westminster government has hacked the 37% off the local council in the area where he needs to curry favour with voters. 

Tory Axe Maniacs 

Cameron, and his companion in crimes against working class communities, George Osborne, are swinging the axe like maniacs. Osborne's Autumn Spending Review on spending plans for the next three years looms large and ugly. On top of the £35billion cuts last July, it's likely to detail the target of cuts to departmental budgets averaging 30%, a mind-boggling horror story for millions of people who depend on the public sector either for a job, a vital service, or both.

Block Grant Butchery 

One of the multiple cuts the Tories will impose is that to the Scottish block grant. And that comes on top of successive years of budget cuts. In the words of SNP Finance Secretary John Swinney, "since 2010 Scotland's overall budget has been cut by 9%, and its capital budget by 25%."

The crunch question that follows this savagery is stark: what will John Swinney and the SNP government do about it? 

Will they just do the equivalent of writing a letter of complaint before passing on the cuts, delegating the dirty work to further education college boards, Scotland's 32 local councils, and similar public sector services? 

Or will they kick up a storm of resistance, uniting workers, communities and students in a mass movement to stop the Westminster Tory butchery?

Passing On Cuts 

Past experience of the SNP government's reaction is not encouraging. They've rightly condemned Westminster cuts every year, but then meekly passed them on, to the tune of well over £3billion over four years. 

This year, they've even delayed the Scottish government's Spending Review from its usual September slot to the dead of December or early January, claiming this is because they won't know the amount in Scotland's block grant from Westminster until Osborne's pronouncement on 25 November. 

Some people suspect it's also an attempt to hide the consequential cuts to jobs and vital services from intense public scrutiny and organised opposition, made harder to build in the deep mid-winter.

Set a No Cuts Budget at Holyrood! 

If the SNP government seriously wanted to carry out its mandate, showing in deeds what they claimed in words about being 'anti-austerity', they could even take advantage of Osborne's timetable, by setting out their budget for Scotland early, without a penny cut to jobs, pay, capital investment or services, and then mount a full-frontal campaign of the Scottish people to demand sufficient funding off Westminster to balance the books.

It's been done before! 

It can be done. It has been done. I was at the heart of the struggle by the socialist council in Liverpool in the mid-'80s, when we organised mass meetings of council workers, communities and college students, called demos of up to 50,000, organised regional 24-hour general strikes - all to pound the hard-faced government of Maggie Thatcher into conceding the funds to build thousands of council houses, jobs and expanded services. 

We won back over £60million in 1984, through the defiance and mass struggle of one city, led by socialists and socialist councillors. Imagine that method applied to a whole nation - led by a government with a sweeping mandate to 'stand up for Scotland', as the SNP promised to do during elections?

For No Cuts Defiance Budgets

The same points apply to every local council in the land. They face a stark choice: defy the cuts or destroy the services and jobs of hundreds of thousands of people who elected them to oppose the Tories.

Labour and SNP councils alike are declaring mass butchery of jobs and frontline services, in a shameful refusal to stand up for the working class who elected them. 

Trade unionists, user groups, workers and students should pound these politicians to find a collective backbone, set No Cuts Defiance Budgets, and join in a massive movement to 'win back our stolen £millions', off Holyrood and Westminster. 

Pound the Politicians  

All five council workers' unions in Glasgow city council have adopted the fighting policy of setting a No Cuts budget. Union branches across Scotland should emulate this. And socialists in the SSP will stand four-square with council staff, the trade union movement, user groups and other anti-cuts campaigners in demanding that councillors choose defiance rather than destruction. 

Labour councillors have been advised by their party leader Jeremy Corbyn to 'resist Tory cuts'. The SNP won a landslide by claiming to be 'anti-austerity'. In both cases, let's see the colour of their money. 

Stand Up - or Stand Aside!

Empty talk won't save jobs or protect services. But a serious campaign to win back some of the £billions robbed off Scotland, and the £millions stolen off local councils and colleges, would ignite a movement of hope and determination to change the way we live, on a par with the enthusiastic Yes movement during the Referendum. 

Defiance or destruction: that's the choice facing MSPs and councillors. 

The SSP knows which side we are on. Join the battle to make the politicians in power fight the Tories - or stand aside for those of us prepared to do so. 

KILL THE BILL: stop Tory wipe-out of workers' rights!

Even before the election of the Tories - by a mere 24% of registered UK voters - Britain boasted the reprehensible record of having some of the most repressive anti-worker, anti-union laws in the western world. Now David Cameron and his Business Secretary, Sajid Javid, have declared a war on workers' rights that exceeds even the worst assaults the hated Maggie Thatcher dared impose.

Their Trade Union Bill - and three accompanying so-called 'consultations' designed to add an additional dose of repression to existing laws without having to pass primary legislation - are potentially the biggest threat to rights at work in at least 50 years, and possibly since the infamous Taff Vale Act of 1901.

The latter came about in the wake of powerful collective action by railway workers, but was aimed at crushing the power of all unions to function, by making them liable for any loss of profits caused by a strike. It triggered a wave of strikes and the formation of what became the Labour Party, to give workers a political arm to fight with. Waves of united action won repeal of the Taff Vale Act in 1906.

THATCHER'S ACTS - KEPT BY LABOUR

Fast forward to the 1980s, where Thatcher's Tory regime imposed six major anti-union Acts. They were a coldly calculated reaction to the growth of workers' militancy in the 1970s and early 1980s, when millions took collective action to defend themselves and their communities from a concerted onslaught by successive governments seeking to restore the profit margins of the capitalist minority.

Thatcher's laws - which are intact to this day, left undisturbed by the 13 years of Labour in government - throw up multiple obstacles to the functioning of unions as a defense force for workers.

They insist on secret postal ballots (with full media interference on behalf of the employers) prior to any industrial action, rather than the fulsome debate of workers mass meetings and a vote on the spot. They incorporate the legal requirement to give employers at least 7 days notice of a ballot and another 7 days notice of any industrial action arising from a ballot.

They tightly restrict the definition of a trade dispute, banning 'secondary' solidarity strikes or any deemed 'political', such as against privatization.

They include multiple legal hurdles on the wording and conduct of industrial action ballots, which employers' lawyers have crawled all over for years, winning numerous injunctions in the Courts to outlaw democratically agreed strikes.

They make unions prey to seizure of their funds and assets, which has made many union leaders quivering wrecks in the face of demands by members to take action when it's the only means of self-defense.

UNION WEAKNESS INVITES TORY AGGRESSION

But now we witness the ultimate paradox; the terrible consequences for workers of the failure of the majority of union leaderships to resist and defy this legal straitjacket for decades. The subsequent weakening of the trade union movement means the state and employers feel far less need to accommodate the unions than if they'd put up a concerted fight. The TUC and individual unions' readiness to embrace 'social partnership' with the employers, instead of independently standing up for workers' rights and distinctive class interests, has reduced the employers' need for social partnership!

They instead feel confident in resorting to brutal, undisguised class warfare. Not because there's been a massive wave of strikes, as the Tories try to tell the more gullible population in their 'justifications' for their new Trade Union Bill; last year saw 788,000 days of strike action across the whole of the UK, which was a rise compared to recent years, but on a puny scale compared with the 11.9 million strike days in the 1980s.
No, this new onslaught is born of a recognition that the unions - with 6.5 million members in Britain, 630,000 in Scotland alone - still represents a powerful foe as the Tories plunge the knife into benefits, jobs, services and pay...provided union leaders stop pussy-footing around with empty rhetoric and apply themselves to a coordinated plan of action to halt austerity.

So the Tory Trade Union Bill is not the result of some public clamour for action against already-existing strikes and protests by organized workers, but rather a savage attempt to cut off that path to working class people who are increasingly furious at the poverty and inequality we face.

BALLOT RIGGING

The measures included in their Bill and accompanying 'consultations' are a full-frontal assault on the human and democratic rights of working class people, and indeed in breach of various European Court of Human Rights articles - which is a core reason the Tories aim to scrap the Human Rights Act of 1998, and seek to negotiate Britain's exclusion from many European legal directives.

In flagrant breach of ECHR rulings that "only the votes cast should count", the Tory Bill insists on a threshold of at least 50% of all who are eligible to vote in any union ballot for action. So those abstaining are counted as a vote against the action.

In a move that goes even further in its attacks on democracy than even those mentioned in the Tory manifesto or subsequent Queen's Speech, they insist on another hurdle of 40% of all those eligible having to vote for the action in the case of what is now dubbed "important public services". This adds to their original list of "essential public services", so it now includes workers in health, transport, education (of all those aged up to 17), fire services, border security and nuclear decommissioning and waste disposal. A pernicious added clause includes workers who are ancillary to such "important public services".

So for the millions thus affected, it's not enough to get a majority of the votes cast, but it must also be at least 40% of all the members eligible to vote, regardless of whether many of them abstained.

This ballot rigging is from a Business Secretary elected by only 38% of his local electorate; in a parliament with 331 MPs elected without a majority; by a Cabinet whose number would be cut by half, and the number of Tory MPs would drop by 270, if they'd had to win the 50% and 40% votes they now want to impose on workers and their unions.

The only other countries with similar outrageous barriers in ballots on the right to strike are Bulgaria and Romania - states not frequently quoted as a model for progress by the Tories!

LEGAL MINEFIELD & ARMY OF STRIKE-BREAKERS

But those outrageous 'high hurdles' are just the start of the effrontery to the free functioning of unions in the Bill.

Ballot forms will have to give "reasonably clear details of the matters in issue in the trade dispute" (so bosses' lawyers can challenge whether they are 'reasonably clear'); "the types of industrial action" when it's not a strike (again, a recipe for legal challenges compared with the current 'action short of strike action'); and "the period or periods within which action is expected to take place" (so employers can plan to undermine its effectiveness, and legally challenge it if dates change because the situation demands tactical changes - and in any case, how in hell are unions expected to know the exact dates of action well over a month beforehand?).
Instead of giving 7 days' notice to employers, 14 days' notice will now be required; again, neutering the impact by giving bosses ample time to plan counter-measures. And among the latter options will be the hiring of Agency workers to do strikers' jobs, as the Tories plan to scrap the ban on that which has been in place since 1973 - including right through Thatcher's years!

So they are arming employers with a legal minefield to stop action, and an army of vulnerable Agency workers issued the choice of 'scab or be sacked'.

ORWELLIAN POLICE REGIME

If, despite all this, a strike goes ahead, new laws on picketing aim to criminalize workers with the courage to fight back. The current Code of Conduct on picketing that limits it to six will become a law, so any more than that would be committing a criminal offense. So the more popular a strike, and the bigger the show of support on a picket line, the larger the number of workers to be branded criminals!
Unions are to be legally obliged to have a Picket Superviser, named to the police, with a badge or other ID, always either on or near the picket line, and in possession of a letter to produce to the police "or any other person who reasonably asks". An outrageous intrusion on the privacy and civil rights of union activists, and a trampling on the autonomy of unions.

Unions will have to inform the government of pickets and protests in advance, and "whether there will be loudspeakers, props, banners, etc"!

And contrary to the loaded language of the Tories' 'Consultation on Intimidation of Non-Striking Workers', these police-measures are not aimed at some rash of threats by pickets in the past. In fact, they set up the 2014 Carr Inquiry to try and find some evidence of this, to justify themselves, but none was found!

It's purely to intimidate workers into not exercising the right to withdraw their labour - a right that should be enshrined in any democracy's constitution. On top of that, they are 'consulting' on a new criminal offense of 'intimidation on picket lines'.

In a further Orwellian outrage, unions will have to give 14 days' notice of intent to use social media during industrial action, and "what blogs and websites will set out", or face fines.

Local authorities are expected to use Community Protection Notices against protesters - a measure aimed at successful pressure campaigns in support of workers in struggle.

INTERFERENCE IN UNION AFFAIRS

A whole raft of other measures likewise not only seek to effectively abolish the right to strike, but are a gross invasion of the internal democracy of unions, and of union reps ability to actually represent members at work.
Public sector employers will be forced to account in minute detail for every hour of union facility time granted to the elected union reps, every penny in wages paid to them, and the government will accrue the power to overrule agreements between such employers and unions, with the power to stop all facility time for union reps. And this will not only apply to shop stewards/reps, but also Learning Reps and Health & Safety reps.
The trade union Certification Officer is to be granted vast new powers to interfere in union affairs - even when not a single member has complained or demanded intervention. These include membership registers; union elections; ballots on mergers; political funds and rules; power to demand handover of union documents; and to question union staff and officers. All on pain of a £20,000 fine for failure to fully comply. All the entire policing exercise on behalf of the state is to be funded by a special levy on the unions!

CATACLYSMIC ATTACKS REQUIRE DEFIANT ACTION

This battery of new measures is a cataclysmic attack on the right to be in a union that is in any way effective as a collective defense of workers' rights and conditions; the right to strike; the right to free speech and freedom of association.

Those union and Labour leaders who spent two years telling workers to vote against Scottish independence and wait for 'justice with Labour' have a lot to answer for. But waiting for independence is not an option either, given the scale of wipeout of workers' rights we face here and now.

Urgent, immediate action in confrontation with the Tories, combined with a clear vision of an alternative future, is the order of the day.

The Tories' bogus 'consultation' ends in early September, followed by a second reading of the Trade Union Bill.

The TUC has promised a day of action when that debate in Westminster happens, and a demo at the Tory party conference on 4 October.

Each trade union, the STUC and TUC need to act with utmost urgency, calling meetings and forums of trade unionists to arm them with the facts, motivate them into taking action with a harsh warning of what is threatened.

They should call a genuine day of action as an opening salvo, with strikes and rallies in every region or city, appealing not only to those workers most immediately in the firing line - those in 'important public services' - but all trade union members, and indeed non-unionized workers, such as Agency staff, who face the horrendous choice of being ordered to cross picket lines to undermine fellow-workers' jobs and conditions, or lose their own job.

DEFY ANTI-UNION LAWS!

Such strikes would often be in defiance of existing anti-union laws, let alone the new additional repressive measures being grafted onto them; so be it! Unless union leaderships have the courage to take such action, the Tories will continue to feel emboldened into pursuing their dictatorial measures against workers. And unless such a lead is given, workers will lack belief in the ability of the movement to defy and defeat the Tories.
On the other hand, bold united action would win widespread support and involvement from working class people not yet even in a union. They need a vehicle to resist austerity.

SCRAP ALL THE REPRESSIVE LAWS

In fighting to kill off the Bill, the trade union movement and its allies need to make two other things crystal clear: a readiness to defy the Bill's measures even if the Tories ignore opposition and implement it; and a call not only to Kill the Bill, but also to repeal the entire package of already-existing anti-union laws that these new measures are being grafted onto.

It's widespread failure by most union leaders to defy the previous 30 years of anti-union laws that has emboldened Cameron et al. In contrast, those groups of workers who have defied these laws have always won huge concessions e.g. oil refinery construction workers.

DEVOLVE TO DISSOLVE!

The battle to confront and finish off the Bill should be combined with the demand for power over employment laws to be devolved to the Scottish parliament. That will unify workers who voted Yes and No in the Referendum. It points to an escape route from Tory Westminster dictatorship. And whilst the SNP leadership have never once publicly pledged to repeal the anti-union laws - the most vicious in the western world - the unions have the potential power to pound Holyrood into traveling that road, with the demand for a Charter of Workers' Rights to be ushered in as an example to the rest of the UK and beyond.

That's what the Scottish Socialist Party has consistently fought for. That's what the 630,000-strong trade union movement in Scotland needs to take decisive action in pursuit of.

ELECTORAL UPRISING: NOW DEFY TORY DICTATORSHIP

Words fail to adequately convey the enormity of the political revolution witnessed in the General Election.

An unprecedented tsunami of support for the SNP swept all before it, winning 50% of all votes cast. Labour plunged to its worst election result in Scotland since 1918. The treacherous LibDems were wiped out, with the loss of 4 million votes, in punishment for their collaboration with the Tories the past 5 years.

But the results at UK level could not have been more profoundly different from those in Scotland - setting us on a collision course with the Westminster Tory dictatorship that will hasten the day when Scotland demands outright independence.

TOO LEFT WING?!

To judge what the people of Scotland need to do now, we first need to look at a few myths and fundamental features of the outright majority for Cameron's Tories, the cataclysmic downfall of Labour's 50-year domination over Scotland, and the sweeping parliamentary conquest by the SNP.

Some, including Tony Blair, David Miliband and competitors for Labour leader since Ed Miliband's resignation, have argued Labour was too left wing for England; that they need to woo 'the aspirational middle class' to compete with the Tories. Their underlying idea is that England has swung to the right. That is far too simplistic, and downright dangerous in its implications.

NO TORY LANDSLIDE

For starters, the Tories did not win some landslide mandate for their plan of brutality against the working class, benefits and basic rights; 63% of those who actually went to the polling stations voted against them.

They only got 24.4% of the total electorate. Their share of the vote crept up a minuscule 0.4%. They gained 26 of their seats from the spectacular, richly deserved collapse of the LibDems, especially in South West England.

There is a vast variation in voting patterns across the regions of England. In the richest South, with half the population and half the seats, the Tories gained from their relentless propaganda about their success with the economy, and critically the doubts of voters about the economic competence of Miliband and Labour. In areas of substantial opulence, this message fell on fertile ground. Significantly, in areas of multiple deprivation, like London itself, the Tories were rejected - but they won in rich suburban outskirts of the city.

PLAYING WITH ENGLISH NATIONALISM

The Tories abandoned all hope of winning Scotland, and stooped to unscrupulous anti-Scottish propaganda, with their scaremongering about a minority Labour government being in the pocket of the SNP, stirring up resentment amongst a minority in parts of England who already feel hard done by. But they only got away with this because of the abject failure of Labour to challenge the fundamental Tory narrative.

Labour more or less stood still in its share of the vote, creeping up by 1.4%, winning 10 seats off the Tories, but losing 8 to them elsewhere. After 5 years of savagery by Cameron's regime that is abject failure. And it's not because Labour was "too left wing for England"!

LABOUR FAILED TO INSPIRE

For decades - going back to the 1980s - Labour has abandoned its working class roots and origins, seeking to woo 'Middle England'. Even during the election campaign, including on TV debates, they emphasized their agreement with the Tories on the need for austerity cuts; hardly a message to inspire people to dump the Tories in favour of a Tory-lite Labour. They stumbled around, trying too little, too late, to win back workers' votes with half-hearted promises on 'tackling exploitative Zero Hours Contracts'; raising the minimum wage to an £8 level it would reach through inflation anyway by 2020; a mansion tax to fund NHS investment; a one-off tax on bankers' bonuses; a temporary freeze on energy prices. Significantly, it was when they highlighted these mild measures against bankers, rip-off energy companies and the obscenely rich that Miliband's and Labour's ratings temporarily improved in the polls.

But after their record in government, easily recalled at least by voters over 30, these belated whispers of reforms were drowned out by their noisy promises of austerity cuts, which meant large numbers in England who told the pollsters they'd vote Labour actually stayed at home and didn't vote at all. The overall turnout in England was 65%, compared to poll predictions of 74%.

WORST OF BOTH WORLDS

In a sense Labour got the worst of both worlds: they enraged the very rich with their milk-and-water measures against bankers, mansion-dwellers and energy multinationals, but failed to inspire millions of working class people that they meant business, in terms of radical redistribution of wealth that would transform the lives of those suffering the savagery of Cameron. And when Miliband effectively said he'd rather let the Tories win than join forces with the SNP to lock out Cameron, that not only sealed Labour's fate in Scotland, but repelled many potential Labour voters in England too.

ANTI-AUSTERITY APPEAL

As part of their indescribable surge in Scotland, the SNP also attracted the support of substantial numbers of English voters, precisely because in the TV debates Nicola Sturgeon spoke of being 'anti-austerity'. In fact, not only did I hear people in England ask on radio phone-ins whether they could vote SNP or join the SNP, but in some polls the SNP won 9% - in England and Wales!!

The anti-austerity message also chimed with the 1.1 million in England who voted for the Greens.

SCOTLAND'S BALLOT BOX REBELLION

It was this anti-austerity message that was key to the SNP's historically incomparable landslide here in Scotland. They battered Labour mercilessly, with swings from 20% to 40%. In large part, the 1.4 million votes for the SNP was a continuation of the 1.6 million who voted Yes in the referendum, with the SNP seizing a near-monopoly of the Yes vote, because those thwarted last September saw the SNP as the main vehicle to get the self-government they voted for. So despite Nicola Sturgeon repeatedly saying this was not a vote about independence - both during and since the election - in part it indisputably was. But only in part.

CORRUPT, REMOTE LABOUR DUMPED

The SNP won over ex-Labour voters who had voted Yes, but also many who had voted No. Partly by denying this was about independence; partly by reflecting the desire for more devolution with their slogan of a 'Stronger Voice for Scotland'; partly as an anti-Tory vote as Cameron whipped up xenophobic anti-Scottish scaremongering; but above all due to their anti-austerity theme. And the SNP were the overwhelming beneficiaries of a revolution in consciousness against a Scottish Labour machine that was rightly seen as remote, corrupt, and having inexcusably spent two years in bed with the Tories in the Referendum campaign.

The SNP's was both an anti-Tory and anti-Labour vote, but especially a vote for change, for an end to austerity.

TORY CLASS WAR LAUNCHED

After the euphoria of crushing Labour comes the reality check for all those who've invested their hopes of change in the SNP and 'Nicola'. What issues loom, and what will the 56 'Strong Voices for Scotland' do about it?

Despite the hard facts about 63% voting against them, Cameron's Tories feel immensely emboldened in their mission to destroy the remnants of the welfare state, which they ideologically detest. They imagine they have a popular mandate to carry out crucifying austerity cuts, which within days of being elected they've said will be fast-tracked, with the £30billion public spending cuts carried through in two years rather than three. Cameron has hopes of an immediate 100-day blitz. Before the election the Tories feared their plans would need to be watered down under a Coalition deal. But now they can let the dogs of class war off their leashes.

WELFARE BENEFITS WARFARE

Within that overall butchery is the £12billion cuts to welfare benefits, clobbering some for the poorest to satiate the appetites of the new influx of Tory MPs. Plans leaked or announced include means testing unemployment benefits; limiting Child Benefit to the first two children; taxing Disability Living Allowance and Personal Indpendence Payments; removal of housing benefit for young people; reduction of the benefit cap for any household from £26,000 to £23,000. They hope to slash the numbers getting Carers' Allowance by 40 per cent. And if anyone falsely imagines it's only those unfortunate enough to fall sick, be disabled or simply unemployed that are in the Tories' gunsights, think again; the reactionary outfit that Cameron had the gall to label 'the party of working people' plans to rob £3.8billion off Tax Credits, which low-paid workers rely on to survive.

PUBLIC SECTOR DESTRUCTION

Vicious measures like the Bedroom Tax will be implemented in full.

In brutal contrast to this systematic robbery off millions, with the claim it's 'necessary to wipe out the deficit by 2018', Trident will be renewed next March, at a cost of £100billion.

Savage cuts to departmental spending on jobs and services include councils and fire brigades, and NHS privatisation is set to rocket.

The Institute of Fiscal Studies predicts that the Tories' plans will wipe out 1.3 million public sector jobs by 2019. The same IFS reckon self-employed jobs (average earnings currently £10,000 a year!) will exceed public sector jobs by 2018. Zero Hours Contracts and insecure temporary jobs will let rip even more than before 7 May.

SMASHING THE UNIONS

And as an integral part of this plan to rob millions on behalf of the millionaires, the Tories have already made clear their determination to effectively wipe out trade union rights. They've already priced workers out of any semblance of justice with their 2013 introduction of fees for Employment Tribunals, starting with a minimum of £1,200. Now the new Tory Business Secretary, Sajid Javid, has announced that the Queens Speech on 27 May will include plans to make it virtually impossible to take strike action on jobs, wages or workplace victimization. They will pass laws that require a 50% turnout in any union ballot for action, plus a threshold of at least 40% of those eligible to vote - not 40% of those voting, but of all members.

And to establish even harsher dictatorship of big business over workers, they will also lift the current ban on the use of Agency workers to scab on strikes, so they can dragoon workers suffering terrible job insecurity to help undermine other workers' wages and conditions. This Scabs' Charter runs alongside the Snoopers' Charter planned, giving frightening powers to the police and secret services to spy on people's emails, texts and social media.

CHOICES FOR THE SNP 56

So what will the 56 SNP MPs need to do in the face of such wholesale butchery, which flies in the teeth of everything Scottish voters gave the SNP a mandate to pursue?

As the third-largest party at Westminster, the SNP carry the hopes of millions of Scots on their shoulders for stiff resistance to the Tory austerity which the SNP spoke out against during the election.

They've spoken about how they are there to be constructive, not to destroy. Of course they should use every parliamentary committee, every Westminster debate, every Prime Minister's Question Time to expose and oppose the scorched earth policies of the Tories towards benefits, jobs, public services, workers' rights, civil liberties, and against Trident renewal.

But they face a stark, simple choice: even if they convince some or all of the other opposition MPs to vote with them against Tory measures, they will still lose the parliamentary vote, and then either mobilize 'extra-parliamentary' mass movements, or end up impotent as a minority at Westminster.

When Labour had 50 Scottish MPs in the late-1980s/90s, they were dubbed the 'Feeble 50' for their refusal to lead a movement of mass non-payment of the Tory poll tax, imposed by Thatcher's parliamentary majority. The same fate awaits the SNP 56 if they were to repeat that failure to use their elected authority to spearhead mass movements on the streets, in workplaces and communities against what is probably an even more savage package of attacks than those of Thatcher.

MORE POWERS

The SNP have made the welcome demand for far more powers to be devolved to Scotland, including welfare, income tax, the minimum wage, employment law, business tax.

Cameron is likely to make at least some concessions on powers in the face of the SNP tidal wave, in the hope of not becoming 'the last Prime Minister of the UK'. It's not the most likely scenario, but you couldn't even rule out some version of 'Full Fiscal Automony' being granted by the Tories, as a device to let the SNP government carry out its own cuts, thereby undermining the attraction of independence!

MASS DEFIANCE - OR DEVOLVED BUTCHERY?

But serious questions need to be pondered by the 1.4 million who entrusted the SNP to oppose austerity - and especially the 80,000 new members who stampeded into the SNP to fight austerity and win full independence: are the SNP leadership going to lead a mass movement to defy and defeat the Tory butchery, or just make fine speeches in parliament and then pass on the cuts whilst blaming the Tories?

Will the SNP government at Holyrood refuse to pass down cuts to the Scottish budget from Westminster, and mobilize the newly awakened masses in a huge movement to win back our stolen £billions in defence of every job, service and pay packet? Or will they continue what they've done for the last four years, devolving about £4billion of Tory/LibDem Coalition cuts to colleges, councils, and public sector workers?

Will the SNP demand powers over employment law so as to repeal every single anti-union law on the statute books? And to replace them with a Charter of Workers' Rights, including the right to strike, and to take solidarity action with fellow-workers, even when the strike is deemed 'political'? Certainly they've never promised to do so up until now. Yet that is the minimum required in the face of Cameron's onslaught.

When they call for control over business taxes to be devolved, all their past policies suggest this would be in order to cut even further the taxes on profits paid by big business, rather than restore Corporation Tax to its pre-Thatcher 50 per cent level, as demanded by the SSP.

SOCIALIST PRINCIPLES MATTER

The SNP is at best a party that fuses civic nationalism, neo-liberal capitalist economic policies and social democratic reforms. It was the latter that mostly won them the landslide; they were better at being the old-style Labour than Miliband and Murphy's Labour Party ever could be. They are not, and never have been, a socialist party - contrary to the thousands of self-declared socialists who recently joined them.

And that's where the ideology and principles of a political party are critical. Without a socialist vision and mission they are not driven by the aim of fundamentally ending the rule of big business and the economic policies that follow.

They claim to be anti-austerity, but their 'modest spending plan' of 0.5% per annum would leave intact at least 15% cuts to the public sector already imposed by Westminster. And try telling council workers in authorities they control, or FE college students, that the SNP is anti-austerity!

BREAK THE ANTI-UNION LAWS

The looming Juggernaut of cuts by Cameron spells disaster unless a mass movement is mobilized to resist, defy and defeat the Tory Mission to Destroy.

As STUC general secretary Grahame Smith rightly wrote in the Sunday Herald, "Democracy is about more than politicians and parliaments...the unions are well placed to provide a legitimate and effective voice if the Tories' cruel plans are to be thwarted".

He also wrote: "New anti-union laws will be fiercely resisted and, if they remove our democratic right to organise, broken."

That's precisely the spirit that needs to become decisive action, and without prevarication.

Mass demos to garner public opposition to the cuts by a Tory government with absolutely no mandate in Scotland should be called the STUC, with or without the active support of the SNP 56.

These could build confidence for more decisive action, including coordinated strike days and civil disobedience, such as community occupations of threatened facilities.

Such mobilizations outside parliament should be used to pound the MPs, MSPs and councillors - whether SNP or what remains of Labour - to defy Westminster's cuts, set No Cuts Defiance budgets when the time comes at Scottish and local authority levels, and mount a struggle of the increasingly expectant Scottish working class to win back the funding off Westminster, rather than simply make parliamentary opposition speeches and then surrender to the inbuilt Tory majority.

STOP PROPPING UP LABOUR

Politically, the unions in Scotland need to stop propping up the bankrupt project that is Labour. We were told to reject independence last year and get 'social justice with a Labour government' in 2015. That's failed, utterly.

We've seen attempts by the biggest of all unions, UNITE, to drag Labour back to the left. That's proven utterly futile.

We now see a rising chorus of demands for Labour to return to undiluted Blairism, to appeal to 'the aspiring middle class'.

It's about time the union leaderships broke from these failed attempts to reclaim a party that is a shell, dominated by pro-capitalist place-seekers, with a Scottish Labour leader about as popular as herpes. They should instead combine with the SSP and all genuine socialists to build a mass, working class, socialist party to stand up for Scotland's working class majority population - not the ephemeral 'aspiring middle class'.

SECOND REFERENDUM

There's been an electoral mass uprising for change, sweeping change. But to tackle the underlying causes of austerity cuts, we need not only taxation powers, but the powers and political will to take the banks, energy giants, transport companies, construction and big business into democratic public ownership. That's why the socialist vision and socialist policies of the SSP are more indispensable than ever.

And rather than succumb to another five years of escalated class war from a Tory dictatorship at Westminster with absolutely no mandate in Scotland, we need to call for a mandate in the 2016 Scottish parliament elections for a second Referendum - and demand that the SNP leadership do likewise.

FROM BALLOT BOX TO THE STREETS

The political landscape has been transformed by an incredible movement through the ballot box. But to implement and achieve the aspirations of those who swept the SNP into the hallowed chambers of Westminster, we need a mass movement on the streets, in the workplaces and communities against Tory class-driven atrocities. It's mass movements that bring about real change; witness the downfall of the hated poll tax and its architect Maggie Thatcher, which founders of the SSP helped spearhead.

The unprecedented mass movement for change through the ballot box lays the foundations for a campaign of mass defiance on the streets against Tory dictatorship. The alternative is unthinkable.

RECOVERY: WHAT RECOVERY?

If you believe George Osborne, David Cameron and a chunk of the media, workers are back in the land of milk and honey. We're told our wages are exceeding inflation for the first time since before the 2008 recession. Reality is a bit less rosy for those working to remain poor.

Real wages plummeted by £50 a week in 2014. For the first time since the 1920s, real wages are lower at the end of a government's term of rule than when they seized office.

And a special report by Ernst Young ITEM Club last month punctured the Tories' celebratory balloons. Their chief economist, Martin Beck, wrote:

"Real wages have fallen by nearly 10% since 2008, but workers will finally see more money in their pockets this year. However, this is not a normal recovery. The move towards later retirement and huge increase in the workforce has depressed real wages as workers have priced themselves into jobs. We don't expect a return to boomtime wages any time soon."

ZERO HOURS BOOM

Try telling the 200,000 Scottish workers consigned to the pitiful pay and hellish uncertainty of life on Zero Hours Contracts that things are getting better!

In any case, any workers aspiring to be as well off as they were before 2008 severely lack ambition! This was already one of the most unequal states internationally, with some of the lowest pay, longest hours of work and shortest holidays in Europe.

The SSP campaign against dreadful Zero-hours contracts.

THE BRIBES DON'T WORK

But just in case we're not all convinced to rush off to vote Tory by their claims of rising wages, the Tories hope to bribe the gullible as the general election looms. Osborne's plans have leaked out: to raise the tax threshold "towards £11,000", with bogus boasts that this will rescue the lowest paid. In fact it wouldn't even touch many of the poorest people, because they're paying no taxes right now, due to earning below the existing £10,000 tax threshold.

That includes vast armies of part-time workers, women in particular. It includes hundreds of thousands in retail jobs, the biggest single employer in the country, and also the biggest single sector of poverty pay.

Nor will this minor tax threshold adjustment compensate public sector workers for the increased pension contributions they face next month - so they can work longer and get less in their pensions, if they aren't forced to work 'til they drop.

Very few will be fooled by the Tories' claims. Workers know full well that when VAT, Council Tax and other regressive taxes are added, the poorest 10% of the population pay 43% of their lowly incomes in taxes - whereas the richest 10% only pay 35% of the incomes they grudgingly declare! And of course they systematically dodge tax on an industrial scale, as the recent HSBC scandal confirmed.

SETTING THEIR PALS' PAY

Anger at the way wages make up a shrinking slice of the national cake of wealth is turned into justified rage when you look at the incomes of the giant employers - and of those who decide the salaries of their chief executives.

A recent survey of the incomes and directorships held by what's called the Remuneration Committees of the FTSE 100 top companies makes dangerous reading for anyone with high blood pressure! These bodies decide the pay of company executives. They consist of a narrow pool of directors of other companies, a cosseted elite who might as well be from another planet. The survey found that the average income of the members of these Remuneration Committees was £441,383 last year, 16 times the average worker's wage of £27,200. And the highest paid member of this self-serving clique of capitalists was awarded over £9.2million - an incredible 339 times as much as the average worker's wage for 2014.

OVERPAID LOW PAY COMMISSION

In stark contrast, workers eking out an existence on poverty pay have their very own 'Remuneration Committee' - the Low Pay Commission, which annually recommends what levels of national minimum wage the government should introduce. Their latest report shamelessly boasts of 'inflation-busting increases' for the minimum wage, claiming 'the highest increase since 2007' - because they've recommended a 3% rise on the over-21s rate...wait for it...to the princely sum of £6.70 an hour!

In case such 'inflated' pay might bust the allegedly booming economy, these worthies have proposed £5.30 for workers aged 18-20, £3.87 for 16-17-year-olds, and a slave rate of £2.80 for apprentices.

This Low Pay Commission has one distinct feature: none of its nine members has even the remotest idea what it's like to live on low pay! It's made up of employers, 'independents' and those allegedly from an 'employee background'. One of the two claiming the latter role is John Hannett, general secretary of Usdaw, the biggest union in the retail sector, with 45,000 members in Scotland alone.

STAND UP FOR WORKERS!

But those of us who are Usdaw members, working in retail on £6.50-£7.20 an hour in various firms, don't seem to be our general secretary John Hannett's first consideration; he and the UK leadership of Usdaw actually submitted a proposal to the Low Pay Commission for a £7 minimum wage from next October!

As reported in the Usdaw union magazine, our general secretary isn't on £6.50 an hour, nor even the £10 an hour he voted for at the TUC conference; he's on a salary of £94,514, plus NIC and pension contributions, plus a union car - in-work benefits totaling another £42,408! No wonder he's not storming heaven to mobilize workers in retail and other low-paid jobs to demand a decent living wage.

LOW PAID 'COMMISSION'

Far from feeling that all is glorious and comfortable for millions of workers, people are not seeing the benefits of the much trumpeted recovery in the economy, are struggling to cope with the household bills - and desperately need to become part of a massive campaign for a living minimum wage. We need our own, genuine, 'low pay commission', a force made up of the low paid and their allies, organized and determined to demand decent wages.

The SSP is determined to be at the heart of such a struggle, and are proud to have common cause with the Bakers union (BFAWU) and others battling for £10 now for all workers. We appeal to the leaderships of all trades unions to take up the cudgels in pursuit of the £10 minimum wage which every one of them voted for at the 2014 annual conference of the 7-million member TUC. And we appeal to workers to join us in the fight for union rights in every workplace - as part of the struggle to banish poverty pay, Zero Hours Contracts and the disgusting inequality created by capitalist profiteering.

CAPITALISM = CORRUPTION IN BREADLINE BRITAIN

There's a gut-wrenching stink of corruption arising from the body of capitalism right now.

The world's second-biggest bank, HSBC, has hit the headlines for providing a tax-dodging service to some of the world's biggest corporations, richest capitalists, and most corrupt crooks.

The public, and public services, have been deprived of £billions in unpaid taxes, in a conscious campaign of swindling on an industrial scale, thereby adding to the savage cuts to wages, benefits, services and the lives of millions. However, HSBC is but one link in the chain of corruption and graft known as capitalism, the system where those in power think all is fair in looting and profiteering.

HSBC

Back in 2007, whistleblower Herve Falciani leaked acres of documents showing how around 130,000 of the globe's wealthiest people, in 203 different countries, were systematically shown how to dodge taxes by the Swiss arm of HSBC.
In France, Argentina, Belgium and the USA these revelations have led to criminal investigations, such is the clamour for action against the bankers and capitalists who brought the world economy to the brink of ruin in the 2008 financial crisis. But in Britain, the self-proclaimed mother of democracy, where HSBC is actually based, a monumental cover-up of criminal tax-dodging has been conducted. Not only the perpetrators at the tops of the banks, but also the heads of HMRC and the Westminster government have been up to their elbows in burying the facts from public view up until now, not even 'naming and shaming' the con-merchants involved, let alone prosecuting them.

ONE PROSECUTION OUT OF 7,000! 

HMRC was handed the leaked documents in 2010, if not earlier. These revealed 7,000 UK citizens who had systematically evaded taxes with the active advice and involvement of HSBC's Swiss operation. Five years on, all the authorities have done is a series of shady out-of-court deals - this week boasting(!!) they have recovered £135m in taxes, interest charges and fines - with a sum total of ONE unnamed individual prosecuted.

Contrast that with the shameless, relentless prosecution - and indeed persecution - of those who falsely claim a few hundred pounds in benefits; it says it all about the class-ridden society we live in.
One stark statistic captures the values of capitalist government in the UK: HMRC employs a mere 300 staff pursuing tax evasion by the fabulously rich and big corporations, whilst they have 3,250 staff in pursuit of benefit fraud, even though the latter only amounts to less than 1% of the money lost to the state by corporate and fat cat tax fraud!

OFFSHORE TAX HAVENS

One of the chief means of dodging taxation is through offshore tax havens. As the BBC blithely states, "tax avoidance is perfectly legal, deliberately hiding money to evade tax is not". But that's precisely what HSBC has helped its rich clients do. Just a glimpse at a few of their methods should make your blood boil, and add steel to your determination to help dismantle the whole rotten edifice of capitalism.

They help advise rich clients on how to stay ahead of the law, such as how to dodge the impact of the European Savings Directive of 2005.

They supply wealthy clients with a foreign credit card so they can withdraw their undeclared cash at cashpoints abroad. For instance, Richard Caring, British tycoon and owner of the celebrity-packed Ivy restaraunt in London, on one day in 2005 thus removed £2.25million in cash in Switzerland - dodging his tax duties in the UK.

In Geneva, HSBC handed out 'bricks' of $100,000 a time, no questions asked, to American surgeon Andrew Silva, so he could then illegally post the cash back to the USA.

Amongst their other clients was Emmanuel Shallop, later convicted of dealing in African 'blood diamonds' - the blood-soaked, illegal trade that has claimed thousands of lives through wars on the continent. They opened up an account for him in Dubai.

Hollywood stars, royalty and heirs to some of Europe's biggest fortunes are on the HSBC list of criminal tax-dodgers. And only one of the 7,000 British citizens implicated in holding an estimated $21.7billion in HSBC's Swiss vaults has been prosecuted!

CAMERON'S SILENCE BOUGHT

But don't be fooled by the huffing and puffing of David Cameron about clamping down on those embroiled in tax evasion through offshore accounts.

For the past five years, the rich have bought the silence of the government on this scandal. When 500 mind-bogglingly rich donors to the Tory party gathered in London's Grosvenor House hotel this week at the annual 'Black and White Ball', forking out £15,000 a head for dinner to raise Tory party election funds, it was money well spent. They were there to buy the next government!

At last year's event, the 570 assembled worthies were 'worth' a combined £22billion in personal wealth. This year's crowd of parasites are likely to be in possession of even more; after all, Cameron and Osborne cut the top personal tax rate on incomes over £150,000 by 5% since April 2013.

More significant still, they've kept quiet about the tax swindling of these leeches on society, since the HSBC revelations in 2007. And the plot thickens.

Stephen Green was chief executive of HSBC from 2003-2006, then chairman from 2006-2010. He wrote books on "reconciling God and Mammon", in his mission as an evangelical Christian who portrayed himself as a saint in sinful times.

He was then made a Tory Lord. Cameron begged and cajoled the saintly Lord to become a government Minister during a trade mission to India in July 2010 - a clear 3 months after Cameron's government had received the leaked documents on the very 'sinful' deeds of Green's HSBC. Lord Green was appointed Minister for Trade and Investment, from January 2011 until December 2013. "To him that hath, more shall be given, tax-free!".

The Astors and the Camerons... corrupt tax dodgers.

CAMERONS' CORRUPTION

Cameron's stinking hypocrisy on offshore tax-dodgers doesn't stop outside the walls of the HSBC banking conglomerate. His wife Samantha enjoys a £100,000 salary as creative consultant to luxury leather and stationery firm, Smythson's. They're the company that advertise what every working class woman needs: python skin clutch bags at £850 a go, and crocodile skin clutch bags at a cool £3,200 each. It makes you puke; it would take nearly 6 months for a woman working 20 hours a week on the national minimum wage to earn what some creatures pay for a glorified purse.

Smythsons... clutching their obscene wealth

Smythson's UK parent company had a £29.9million turnover in 2013/14, helped out by a taxpayer-funded £1.6m National Loan Guarantee, a scheme the Tories devised. But here's the rub: they switched their official headquarters to Luxembourg - a favourite location for many corporate tax-dodgers.

FURNISHING THE RICH TAX-DODGERS

Samantha Cameron's family are already very familiar with such methods. Her mother, Lady Astor, is the founder of luxury furniture firm OKA DIRECT. She has 22% of its shares, in the company with £5.5m assets and £1.6m profits last year. Some of her customers were Tory MPs caught up in the expenses scandal, which revealed OKA was a favourite source of furnishing their second homes - paid for by you and me! But 50% of OKA's shares are owned by anonymous shareholders through accounts in Guernsey - one of Britain's many offshore tax havens.

And to complete the family circle, David Cameron's father-in-law, Viscount Astor, has a family estate of 19,000 acres on the isle of Jura. Up until November 2014 it was owned by Bahamas-based Ginge Manor Estate Ltd (named after the Astor family home in Oxfordshire), but then transferred to a company based in the British Virgin Islands - another British Caribbean tax haven. No cash was involved in the transfer, meaning it was purely a tax dodge.

THE SWINDLE INDUSTRY

The growth industry that is tax-dodging for the ultra-rich is not the sole preserve of one rogue bank, HSBC. On the contrary, they are a small point on the tip of a monumental iceberg. Some experts estimate a quarter of the world's wealth is held in offshore accounts, purely to avoid paying domestic business and income taxes. And over two-thirds of that is in British territories.


Four huge accountancy firms in the UK make a fortune for themselves and their capitalist clients by giving them expert advice on how to avoid and evade tax. One of them, PriceWaterhouseCooper, has promoted this swindle on an industrial scale, amassing a fortune for its owners in the process. They've just rewarded their executive board members with payouts of over £21million - an average £1.83m each. Legalised crime pays!

These accountancy firms are stuffed full of former top brass tax inspectors from HMRC, and the government hires the services of their representatives to help frame tax laws - which they help shape to suit the rich. And the accountancy firms then make money out of advising the rich on how to escape taxes...through loopholes they helped to devise in the first place!

It's not a case of a few rotten apples in the barrel, but of a system that is rotten and class-ridden to its core.

CAPITALISM = THEFT

Capitalism is a systematic swindling of the wealth created by the working class. But the rich don't leave anything to chance. They use accountancy firms, lawyers, tax experts, banks, politicians and the laws they frame to rip the profit out of the rest of us. It's a colossal machine constructed to redistribute wealth - away from the millions to the millionaires. And by god they've had some run of success!

BREADLINE BRITAIN

Whilst the pro-capitalist politicians try to distract our attention from the systemic corruption that is capitalism by chastising a few individuals that get caught red-handed, the latest figures on poverty and inequality reveal the consequences, but get little publicity.

Twenty million people in Britain are now below the breadline! Poverty has doubled since 1983. 3.5 million adults go hungry to feed their children. And an absolute majority of those in poverty - 52% - are in work.

Whilst the wealthiest 1,000 people have seen their obscene wealth virtually double in the last five years, to £519billion, workers' wages have dropped by £50 a week over the same period.

DEMAND £10 AN HOUR MINIMUM

We're told the SSP's demand for a living minimum wage of £10 an hour for all over 16 is 'unrealistic'. But the people preaching this are the ones who have systematically, consciously robbed society of £billions, not only through dodging taxes and buying politicians to keep taxes on big business and the rich at historic low levels, but through the entire system of profit itself.

In reply, the TUC needs to speak out in support of its own unanimously agreed policy of a £10 national minimum wage, and give a lead in demanding closure of the tax loopholes that help engorge the rich, and confiscation of the assets of companies and individuals found to have dodged taxes.

TAXATION - AND PUBLIC OWNERSHIP

Decent wages, expanded public services and new green industry jobs could all be easily funded if the rich were forced to pay proper taxes and the current annual loss of £120billion from tax avoidance, evasion and non-payment was halted. The jaw-dropping mountains of wealth accumulated by the richest 1% - in part through this monstrous international tax swindle - needs to be redistributed, with a wealth tax and vastly increased levels of Corporation Tax.

But taxation alone cannot rid society of the obnoxious inequality that the capitalist economic system is built upon. Why should the banks, accountancy firms, manufacturing and service industry multinationals have the ability to amass vast profits, dividends and bonuses for the owners and directors in the first place - regardless of whether they fancy paying the taxes they are meant to, or not?

CLEANSE SOCIETY OF CORRUPTION & CAPITALISM

This stinking corruption should embolden those of us who think the wealth created by the collective efforts of working people should be collectively owned, through measures such as democratic public ownership of the banks, big business and natural resources. That way the one in three people in Britain below the breadline could be raised to a life of plenty, with socially useful jobs created and decent wages for all, including the guaranteed minimum of £10 an hour. Capitalism equals corruption and cruel exploitation to create profits for the very few. Socialism would cleanse society of this foul system.

My blog pieces appear also in the Scottish Socialist Voice, fortnightly.