NEITHER COUNCIL CUTS NOR TAX HIKES - build mass defiance

As the butchery of jobs, services, community facilities, and workers' conditions looms large and ugly in the setting of Scotland's 32 council budgets, Labour and SNP politicians are knocking verbal lumps out of each other. 

But listening to their excuses for implementing savage cuts, and the feeble 'alternatives' they offer, we could be forgiven for quoting the lines from Macbeth's famous speech: 

"It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." 

The noisy clash between the SNP government and the non-SNP controlled councils signifies nothing but cynical party political maneuvers for the May elections, rather than any

 genuinely principled opposition to the Tory-initiated butchery of jobs and services. 

Not one council controlled by Labour, or the SNP, or both combined, has shown the courage to actually refuse to implement cuts. Nor has the SNP government, despite its monolithic mandate from the Scottish people, gained largely by their election talk of being 'anti-austerity'. 

Context of Cuts 

Context is key to mapping a route out of this nightmare. The Tories treat cuts to the public sector as a virtue. The class of super-rich and capitalists they represent have little need of public services, which they regard as a nuisance in their pursuit of profit, and they deliberately dismantle the services provided by councils in order to 'justify' privatisation for profit. 

For the past 20-odd years, successive Tory and Labour governments have felt emboldened to slash council funding, in the knowledge the overwhelming majority of councillors would act as their meek servants, rather than leaders of a rebellion.

In Scotland, successive Labour-LibDem and SNP governments have rightly and noisily condemned cuts to Scotland's budget by Westminster... only to then quietly pass on the cuts, devolving their dirty work to councils, FE college boards and the likes. 

Cut to the Bone Marrow

In the past four years alone, at least £3billion has been hacked off the flesh and bone of council expenditure. Now they are down to the bone marrow, with a further £350million cuts announced by John Swinney in his latest Local Authority Funding Settlement. 

The SNP repeatedly trot out the mantra that "this is a challenging but fair settlement for local authorities", as if repetition will take the pain away from the communities and council workers thereby hammered to an extent not seen before. 

Estimates of 20,000 job losses over the next two years; savage cuts to education; library closures; reduced care services for the elderly, children or vulnerable people; school closures; removal of flexi-time for sections of council workers; monstrously increased workloads for those who remain in a job; sky-rocketing charges for use of those community facilities that aren't simply shut down... these are but samples of the consequences of the 'fair settlement for local authorities'.

SNP Council Tax Freeze 

The crunch question, however, is what to do to avoid this butchery. 

The SNP has persisted with its 9th year of the Council Tax freeze, arguing it helps families facing attacks on their income by the Tory government. Of course, low- and middle-income families welcome respite from mounting Council Tax bills. But the richest minority, living in the biggest houses, least in need of frontline services, gain more from the SNP's freeze. And whilst they claim to be compensating councils for it, in reality it has added to the pressure on budgets. 

Raising Council Tax Bills?

The 'alternative' of ending the freeze, jacking up Council Tax bills, is entirely unacceptable, however. Tory-led Moray council, and Independent-led Highlands & Islands council were amongst those threatening to end the freeze - with Moray proposing an 18% rise on household bills. Unfortunately, some trade union leaders also advocate this as an alternative to continued cuts. 

But that's robbing the working class with one hand in order to mitigate the theft of their jobs and incomes by the other hand. And since the Council Tax only accounts for about 15% of total council income, the increases to Council Tax bills would have to be massive in order to claw back the sums stolen from councils by central government. 

The Deal Imposed 

Not content with blowing apart Tory and Labour councillors' planned tax-hiking 'alternative' by argument, John Swinney and the SNP government imposed their Council Tax freeze and £350million cuts settlement with the brute force of threatened multiple penalties, adding up to an additional £408million of cuts. That is the sum they threatened to withdraw from social care and education budgets if councils defied their Council Tax freeze.

Labour Tax on Workers 

Amidst the furore between Holyrood and the Town Hall leaders, Scottish Labour stepped forward with a proposal they hoped would outflank the SNP from 'the left'; a 1% increase on all the bands of the Scottish Rate of Income Tax being partially devolved to Holyrood this April. 

On the surface, confronted by drastic cuts, some people might initially see this as a better alternative, with its claims to raise £430million. But just like the option of a hike in Council Tax bills, it would disproportionately hit lower-paid and middle-income workers. The rules of the Scottish Rate of Income Tax concession are that the top rate of tax can't be raised without the same increase on the lowest tax band. So workers on incomes between £11,000 and £20,000 would face tax increases, another form of pay cut. 

An Election Bung!

Conscious of this, Labour proposed a £100 annual rebate to people in that income bracket. Apart from failing to deliver any detail on how this would work, Labour utterly fails to answer the charge that over a third of all those eligible for other existing rebates - such as Working Tax Credit - never claims them, which means about 150,000 low-paid workers would pay Labour's tax hike but never get the £100 lump sum back. 

Furthermore, since the average wage in Scotland last year was £27,200, the average-paid worker would be clobbered by Labour's 'Tartan Tax' without even the sop of a £100 bung... a sweetener designed to win Labour votes, rather than win the fight against cuts. 

Labour and SNP Cuts 

Just like the SNP's 1999 'Penny for Scotland', this is a regressive proposal, once again robbing wages off the working class to ease the theft of services and jobs from the working class! 

Likewise, the SNP's attacks on Labour's tax proposal - as "shifting the burden of Tory austerity onto working people" - reeks of rank hypocrisy, and electioneering opportunism, since their £350million cuts package is a grand theft of wages, jobs and public services from the same working class majority population. 

Demand No Cuts Budgets 

So what should be done to avert these, the worst attacks on council provision in memory? 

Since our formation in 1998, the SSP has persistently opposed a single penny in cuts to services, a single job loss, and advocated a twin-track alternative: defiance of Tory-inspired cuts by setting 'No Cuts' budgets both at Scottish and local government levels, as a platform to launch a mass rebellion demanding back some of the £billions stolen by Westminster, and immediate legislation in the Scottish parliament to abolish the regressive Council Tax and replace it with a progressive, income-based Scottish Service Tax. That's the alternative we've argued for in council unions, in community groups, on the streets and through SSP councillor Jim Bollan in West Dumbarton.

Increasingly, trade unions representing council workers have adopted a version of this 'No Cuts Budget' strategy - including all five unions in Labour-controlled Glasgow city council and those in SNP-controlled Dundee city council. 

Instead of passing on the punishment meted out by the 'Westmonster' Tories, the SNP government and Labour/SNP councillors should discover the collective backbone to 'stand up for Scotland'; the Scotland of workers and working class communities, not the Scotland of the millionaires and billionaires who are dictating public policy to a compliant Cameron government. 

Setting No Cuts budgets wouldn't on its own transform people's lives, but it would be a firm launchpad for a serious struggle to win back the funds to save jobs, workers' conditions and local public services. 

Rejecting Cuts and Buying Time 

As a very short-term tactic, to buy the time to build such a mass campaign of council workers and communities - and to simultaneously pass legislation to replace the Council Tax with one based on ability to pay - MSPs and councillors could devise budgets that avoid cuts by use of reserves, budget underspends, rescheduled debt repayments, and borrowing powers. 

For instance, the Scottish government budget for 2014/15 was underspent by £350million. And that's an annual feature (it was £444million the previous year), as the SNP seek managerial respectability, instead of even contemplating leading a serious fight to defy and defeat Westminster's financial butchery. 

A year ago, Audit Scotland reported that Scotland's councils had a combined total of £1.8billion in what they termed 'useable reserves'. 

So there's no basis for the plea by SNP and Labour politicians that 'we have to balance the books'; that they're obliged to pass on Tory cuts.

There's plenty of room for short-term devices that would buy precious time to mount a ferocious campaign to win back some of the £billions stolen off Scotland to fund tax breaks for the millionaires and big corporations. And to push through an income-based Scottish Service Tax which - based on 2015 figures - would double local tax revenue from £2billion to £4billion, but would also mean 77% of people paying less for council services than they do in Council Tax.

Defiance not Destruction 

With the exception of the SSP's Jim Bollan, no councillor has so far emerged willing to lead this route out of the swamplands of cuts and tax hikes that hammer ordinary people. So trade unions, community campaigns and socialists need to pound the MSPs and councillors in the squabbling Labour and SNP camps with demands of defiance, instead of different roads to destruction for workers and those depending on local services. 

The SSP and other socialists are advocating this alternative, alongside growing numbers in the unions; principled opposition to the butchery dictated by Cameron's capitalist Cabinet, rather than the vote-seeking posturing of both Labour and the SNP leaderships. 

Lobbies and demos at council meetings should be just the start of a struggle to resist and defeat cuts, even if not a single local authority, when setting its budget, discovers the courage to defy Holyrood and Westminster. 

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

SIGNPOSTS AND WEATHERVANES

- Labour's bedroom tax gymnastics

There are many issues and principles I would heartily agree with veteran socialist Tony Benn on. And as Labour assembled in Brighton for its September 2013 UK conference, one of the most apt is his view of political 'signposts and weathervanes', which I heard him refer to in a recent interview.

Signposts being people in life and politics whose beliefs are firmly rooted in principles, for which they stand firm, refusing to bend to passing fads and opinion polls, pointing the way forward even when they are an isolated minority.

 

In contrast, weathervanes are those people of no fixed principles, who spin round in all and opposite directions to court popularity, and in the case of professional politicians, to gain power, prestige and privilege.

The former deserve our admiration, the latter our contempt and eternal suspicion about their motives and reliability. The latter is rank opportunism, soaked in hypocrisy and cynicism.
Such is the stench, the insult, attached to the term 'political weathervanes' that the Quebec National Assembly has banned its use since 2007! All the more reason to use it to describe New Labour, as I hope to demonstrate.

Weathervanes at Brighton

As New Labour approached the Brighton beaches for their annual showpiece conference, the winds of change in social opinion howled like a gale, blowing Ed Miliband and his wavering weathervanes into declarations that are the direct, literal opposite to what they previously said - and more importantly, often in total contradiction to what they did in government up until their replacement by the (unelected) Coalition in 2010.

Two prime cases of this dizzying, sickening display of opportunism are the statements by Miliband et al on the bedroom tax and the assaults on sick and disabled people and their benefits.

Ed Miliband has declared that a New Labour government, if elected in the 2015 Westminster elections, will scrap the bedroom tax. For good measure, he has even said this would be funded by closing loopholes on taxation of hedge funds (the bloated rich's betting scheme on our futures), tax loopholes surrounding the Tory "shares for selling your workplace rights" scheme, and tax scams in the construction industry.
Such a declaration is profoundly welcome, especially to the 660,000 households clobbered by this vicious assault on incomes that has caused worry, stress, upheaval for families forced to move, and in several tragic cases, suicide.

Every such declaration of intent to scrap the bedroom tax is a nail in its coffin; added pressure on the besieged Westminster Coalition that presides over this daylight robbery of the poorest and most vulnerable sections of the working class.

Why not a year ago?

But why now? Why did Miliband and Labour not make a similar, unequivocal declaration two weeks ago (4th September) when he was taunted to come out into the open by Cameron during Prime Minister's Questions? Why not six months ago when the brutal bedroom tax was implemented on April Fools Day?
That's where the weathervanes come in; the cynical, unprincipled calculations of what is opportune - as opposed to a firm, consistent, reliable stance based on clean principles. Opportunist politicians rely on people suffering short memories. Ed Miliband, Liam Byrne and the rest of New Labour would prefer we forget their recent past, including on benefit cuts and the bedroom tax. So let's remind ourselves of a few stubborn facts about their real record.

Over the past year of campaigning and speaking as a socialist at public meetings for the abolition of the bedroom tax, I've been repeatedly asked why it doesn't apply to private sector rented accommodation. The simple fact is that a diluted, less extreme version of the bedroom tax DOES apply to private tenants. It's called the Local Housing Allowance - and it was invented and implemented by the previous Labour government.
In simple, stark terms, it caps the amount of housing benefit available to tenants of private landlords to a local average rent for the poorest quality housing. So if you manage to rent a relatively decent house, the punishment is a shortfall in housing benefit payments. Labour ushered in a scheme that punishes private sector tenants, but refused absolutely to do anything about capping the level of rents charged by private landlords.
Hence the burgeoning bill of £23billion annual housing benefit pay-outs; a public subsidy to rent racketeers in the private sector, where rents are far, far higher than in the social sector - where the bedroom tax has hammered the poorest.

Labour's bedroom tax!

In that sense, Labour actually invented the bedroom tax. Indeed, the man who devised the detail of this devilish scheme - Lord 'Eleven-Spare-Bedrooms' Freud, was part of the Labour government up until 2009, prior to becoming Tory Minister for Welfare in the present Coalition. He was instrumental, under Gordon Brown's leadership, in launching repeated assaults on low-paid civil service workers, their jobs, and the services they deliver to many of the same people now brutalized by the bedroom tax.
Don't forget that amidst all the din of conference speeches by Miliband and others.

Blowing in the wind

And it gets worse! After initiating the attacks on benefits during their tenure in No 10 Downing St, starting with cuts to single parents' benefits in their first year of office (1997), Labour never lifted a finger to expose and mount a serious public campaign of opposition to the Tory/LibDem 2012 'Under Occupancy' legislation, better known as the bedroom tax, when it was being debated.

We didn't have the faintly absurd sight of Ed Miliband in shirt and tie mounting a soap box in Brighton town centre to denounce and declare future abolition of the bedroom room tax last year. Nor anywhere else, anytime since...until this incongruous spectacle was (literally) stage-managed for the September 2013 Labour conference.

No, it took a hurricane of opposition amongst working class people to shift these New Labour weathervanes in the right direction - in words, at least. In early 2013, as people awoke to the horrors the bedroom tax signifies, the overwhelming majority of Labour councillors, Labour MPs and MSPs conspicuously failed - indeed, refused - to back the demands for 'No Evictions', or for reclassification of rooms to avoid bedroom tax liability.

The first motion laid before any Scottish council with these demands was put by the Scottish Socialist Party's councillor Jim Bollan in West Dunbartonshire. He had the full backing of the SNP and independent councillors - but the proposal was voted down by the Labour majority. So much for their concern about the impact on 'ordinary families and vulnerable individuals'. Back in March, Labour Shadow Cabinet Minister Helen Goodman spelt out the Labour view on YouTube:

"In the short to medium term we need to reduce the housing benefit bill. A future Labour government would keep the bedroom tax, but it should only apply if people have been offered a place to live and turned it down."

Labour evasions and evictions

Liam Byrne, Labour's Work & Pensions Secretary, under questioning about a future Westminster Labour government abolishing the bedroom tax, repeatedly hid behind these words:
"We will have to measure the cost and judge the economic situation." On 5th September, Byrne repeated "To write a Manifesto commitment we've got to prove the money can be found to drop the bedroom tax."

As recently as July, Labour-run North Lanarkshire council issued an eviction notice to a severely disabled mother of three, for the princely sum of £248 in arrears! And initially they stubbornly refused to follow the example of many other councils - starting with those run by the SNP - in pledging no evictions for at least the first year, "provided tenants take all reasonable steps to avoid arrears". Other councils and a few housing associations had conceded this under the pressure of anti-bedroom tax campaigns.
It took the howling winds of protest by local tenants to force North Lanarkshire Labour into dropping their vicious eviction and to join those social landlords who have at least taken a faltering step in the right direction: "no evictions, provided..."

Don't switch TV channels!

As the pressure mounted, the situation with Labour veered between tragedy and farce.
On the night of 5th September, Labour's position on scrapping the bedroom tax depended on which Scottish TV channel you happened to switch on. On one side, Anas Sarwar, Deputy leader of Scottish Labour said "if we were in power tomorrow we would abolish the bedroom tax."

On the other side, his illustrious Scottish Leader Johann Lamont was simultaneously refusing to answer the question of abolition, not once but three times.
The next twenty four hours saw breathtaking verbal gymnastics from the Labour camp, with Sarwar 'explaining' some guff about his comments on Labour being in power "tomorrow" being entirely hypothetical!
And days later, Labour's Jackie Baillie got into a lather of claim and counter claim with Labour's UK headquarters after blurting out the assertion that Labour would scrap the bedroom tax if elected in 2015. UK Labour rebutted her assertion with the comment, "We are not writing our next manifesto today, and we will have to take a view of the fiscal position near the time".

Of course, Jackie Baillie also suffered a memory lapse on her West Dunbartonshire Labour colleagues' inglorious opposition to outlawing evictions in her own constituency, when the SSP had spearheaded that basic, interim measure of protection for the victims of Westminster's theft of benefits.

The long and winding road

Labour has thus travelled the long and winding road from inventing the bedroom tax; not vociferously exposing and resisting its introduction in the House of Commons a year ago; refusing an unequivocal 'No Evictions' policy in Labour councils; to starting evictions - and then, on the eve of their UK Labour conference, announcing that Labour councils will avoid evictions ("provided they are satisfied tenants have taken all reasonable steps to avoid arrears...") and that the newly militant Miliband will abolish it...in 2015...if elected.

Why? And why now?

There are several factors, none of which do any credit to Labour, none worthy of winning our trust in their willingness to stand up for the working class.

First and foremost, we should take courage and encouragement from this Labour U-turn, which is what it clearly is. It is the principled tenacity of those of us - tenants, trade unionists, community campaigners, socialists - who have exposed, fought and resisted the bedroom tax that has forced Miliband and Labour into eventually promising it's abolition. This proves that 'people power', working class solidarity, if organized and directed at those in positions of power, can win concessions. The same lesson applies to other mainstream parties that we have helped push into a similar stance, despite their various positions on the issue 6 or 12 months ago.

Yellow Tories

The LibDems are the yellow Tory props to the blue Tories in implementing this vicious tax on the poor - whereas they abandoned their own conference policy of a mansion tax on the wealthy.

But the organized pressure of tenants, trade unionists, anti-bedroom tax campaigns and socialists helped to pound the recent LibDem conference in Glasgow into passing a motion against the wishes of Clegg & Co, which denounces the bedroom tax, and calls for a moratorium and review - opening the door to a concerted bombardment of Clegg to put forward a motion in Westminster for abandonment of the bedroom tax. People power pays off, provided it's organized.

SNP shifts

To their credit, the SNP (unlike Labour) has always said they oppose the bedroom tax. But initially, before the fury of working class people found organized expression through demos and demands on councils and the Scottish government, they tended to take the line "we have to wait for independence". That's the essence of Linda Fabiani's comment on BBC Sunday Politics on 3rd February: "Little can be done until the Scottish parliament has more powers."

Under pressure, the SNP were the first major party to declare "'no evictions, provided..." in all their local councils - although the SNP government of Hollywood has dismally failed to outlaw evictions across the nation, which would close the door to local Housing Associations chucking people on the streets. And since February/March, the SNP leadership has pledged to scrap the bedroom tax in an independent Scotland.

Labour spins on its axis

The positions adopted by both the SNP and LibDems are at least partial reflections of the demands from below, channeled by anti-bedroom tax campaigners, including the critical role played by the Scottish Socialist Party - who have been consistent throughout, not waiting for the hot winds of tenants' fury to point them in the right direction. The SSP have been signposts, not weathervanes. And the decisions of these parties have in turn been instrumental in spinning the Labour weathervanes round 180 degrees, from inventing the bedroom tax to pledging its abolition.

And not, in my opinion, purely for tactical electoral advantage on this one issue of the bedroom tax - though the upsurge of furious opposition to it has undoubtedly pummeled Labour into verbal abolitionism that was conspicuously absent for the previous 12 months! Nor is this belated somersault purely designed - as some commentators assert - to distract attention from the hair-raising revelations just published about the savage, self-centred civil war between rival egos in the Labour leadership of Blair and Brown, with methods that make Malcolm Tucker of 'The Thick of It' look like a mealy-mouthed English village vicar. Although, again, that will have been one factor in this panicky U-turn, with the spin doctors in overdrive. And whilst the precise timing is designed to boost Miliband's flagging reputation within Labour's own ranks - especially in the trade unions - as they hold their UK conference, I believe it is rooted in deeper, even more opportunist calculation.

Independence the target

This Labour volte face is also a cynical, desperate manouever by Labour's Unionists on the Scottish independence referendum.

For a few months, the people of Scotland began to grasp one of the stark choices they face: vote to remain in the UK and keep the hated bedroom tax, regardless of which combination of Tory, LibDem, Labour or UKIP wins in 2015; or vote for Scottish independence as a cast iron guarantee of the burial of the bedroom tax.

Labour and their Tory/LibDem cohorts in Better Together must have been having paroxysms at the prospect of that message sinking in. So Labour belatedly concedes to the winds of opposition and tries to channel them towards waiting for a Westminster Labour government in 2015.

Never trust a weathervane

Several questions arise. If it wasn't for the Referendum, and all that is at stake for the imperial arrogance of British capitalism, would Labour have even bothered to concede to 'public opinion' on the bedroom tax, after all their attempts to ignore it for the past year - and before that?

And the corollary to that question: if Labour were to con a majority into voting against independence next year, what guarantee is there that these Labour weathervanes wouldn't swing back round and find some 'economic' reason for keeping the bedroom tax after all - in the wake of Scots failing to seize the opportunity to rule their own country? After all they reneged - under Alistair Darling's chancellorship - on a promise to give pensioners an additional chill factor winter payment.

Labour hired ATOS!

Labour's attempts, this time through the aforementioned Liam Byrne, to win hearts and minds at their conference on the issue of ATOS is perhaps the most revealing warning not to trust the Labour weathervanes, even on the narrow issue of the bedroom tax, let alone the general issue of defending the living standards of the working class majority. And in turn, a warning of the dire consequences of continued Westminster rule! The Labour conference headlines are all about Liam Byrne denouncing ATOS, the French multinational paid to perform medical miracles on the scale of Lourdes - declaring sick, disabled and even dying people fit for work, thereby slashing their benefits.

He says they must be stripped of the contract. But before rushing off to rely on a UK Labour government to restore benefits and services, take a look behind the headlines.

Not a word from Byrne about scrapping the entire system that ATOS happens to administer on behalf of the government. And why would there be? It was the Labour government that invented this punitive scheme of attacks on the sick and disabled. It was the previous Labour government that awarded the privatized contract to ATOS back in 2008, well before the Tories took over their dirty work.

And it was the same rat, Liam Byrne, who reassured the baying reactionaries of the Daily Mail and Express that, to quote his phrase,

"Labour is not the party of shirkers. The clue is in the name."

Tough choices - for the working class!

And alongside the cheap demagogy against the hated ATOS, Labour Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls has used the same Labour conference to repeat his dire warnings that a Labour government would face "tough choices", would "stick with the Coalition's tight spending limits", with "iron discipline on spending control", that Labour "won't be able to reverse all the spending cuts and tax rises the Tories have pushed through", and "we will have to govern with less money. The next Labour government will have to make cuts too - they cannot magic the whole deficit away at a stroke".

All his own words and phrases, not mine!

Does that look like a vision worth voting for, or fighting for? So a Labour Westminster regime would still slash public sector jobs and pay; sacrifice public services on the altar of 'reducing the deficit'; demonize and further impoverish the sick, disabled and unemployed. With or without ATOS. With or without the specific measure called the bedroom tax.

Celebrate - but never forget!

So we should all celebrate the massive retreat by these hard-nosed capitalist apologists in New Labour which their belated pledge to scrap the obnoxious bedroom tax constitutes.

We should gain courage and strength from the fact our combined and relentless pressure - tenants, community activists, trade unionists and socialists combined - has not only forced the LibDem conference but now also the Labour leadership to promise abolition of this outrageous measure.

But we should also keep sober and vigilant in our celebrations, avoiding any political amnesia at the role of these parties.

Remember, the SSP has been steadfast and consistent in resisting, denouncing and seeking to dismantle the bedroom tax.

Remember, Labour invented it. The LibDems help the Tories impose it. Far from being an advert for waiting for a UK Labour government, the mind boggling somersaults of Labour on this issue is a warning that we need Scottish independence to elect and hold to account a government genuinely of the left. One that could tap into the enormous natural and human wealth of Scotland to build a welfare system worthy of this century.

Signposts to independence and socialism

Conclusions? Never trust a weathervane, especially a Labour one that has performed more twists and turns than Georgie Best at his peak. Instead, follow the signposts to independence and socialism.