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.

After the General Election: FOR WORKERS' ACTION, not pleas to capitalist politicians

The woman serving me a coffee at the STUC Conference in Ayr racecourse spoke volumes in a short chat. After asking where I was from, and me explaining I was representing the SSP, she said: "I've always been from a Labour family, but I don't know who to vote for. I can't stand Labour, but I'll never vote SNP. I don't trust Nicola Sturgeon," she added in a whisper, as if in fear of upsetting polite society. 

But her most telling comment was her parting shot, after we exchanged views and experiences of low pay in retail and catering. "No matter which of them wins I'll still have to come to work on the 8th of May."

Do any of the main parties represent workers?

The election and media circus will move on, but reality will remain for the working class majority: the struggle to survive on poverty pay, Zero Hours Contracts, part-time and insecure jobs, and the ongoing brutality of savage cuts to vital public services.

WORKING CLASS

But the potential power of the working class to change all that is reflected in the language of the competing parties. Back in the 1990s the fabulously rich Tony Blair declared "Now we are all middle class"! In the 2015 General Election, all manner of political parties have suddenly discovered the need to harp on endlessly about "hard working people" and how much their rival brands of capitalist visions 'represent' us.

Even the Tories shamelessly claimed to be "the party of working people". 

Jim Murphy and Ed Milband have borrowed their spin doctors' phrases, e.g. "Scotland succeeds when working people succeed". 

The SNP bid for traditional Labour voters with talk of being "the voice of working people", alongside their central slogan of "standing up for Scotland."

Looking beyond May 7th, workers (and their unions) need to cut through the fog of slick spin and vague promises, and get back to basics. Those joining the annual May Day celebrations of international workers' solidarity need to recall the fundamental features of the society we live in, and how workers internationally have ever won any improvements in life, living standards and rights.

TWO SCOTLANDS

The SSP quite consciously entitled our Election Manifesto "Standing up for Scotland's Working Class Majority."

We are courageous enough to tell the truth. There are two Scotlands, divided by a chasm of class differences.

The Scotland of the richest 100 with combined wealth of £25billion, and the Scotland of 5 million others depending on £30billion from Westminster's block grant budget for the Scottish government to provide jobs and services.

The Scotland where 432 landowners have grabbed half the nation's land, including arable land, and the Scotland of food banks, where 100,000 (36,000 of them children) rely on food handouts to avert starvation.

The Scotland of millionaires like Brian Souter who fund the SNP from the fortune gained through privatisation of transport, and the Scotland of workers socially isolated because they can't afford the fares.

There is a party for the Working class in Scotland...

CLASS

Class is at the heart of society. Class exploitation is the very nature of capitalism. Soaring profits are sourced from the unpaid labour of the working class. 

It requires collective organisation and collective action by the working class majority to overcome that exploitation, that class division, where the richest 10% of Scots own 20 times the combined wealth of the poorest 30%.

Yes, we need to demand the maximum reforms and redistribution of wealth from the millionaires to the millions through whatever combination of parties takes over the reins on May 8th. And the seismic upheaval of Labour being swept aside by an SNP that stands a bit to their left will immensely increase expectations of radical wealth transfers from the rich to the rest of us.

But to secure that requires lighting bonfires beneath their backsides, with rallies, demos and even strike action, or it won't happen - because every single one of the parties likely to be in that government ultimately stands up for big business, for capitalist Britain or capitalist Scotland - not for the working class who produce the wealth of goods and services. 

It's wise to not forget the basics.

The class system - your life in their exploitative hands...

BIDDING WAR ON WAGES

The growing clamour for an end to poverty pay, the modern plague of working people, has forced the rival parties into a bidding war - for votes.

The hateful, upper-class Tories claim the minimum wage will 'naturally' rise to £8 by 2020. 

Labour promises an £8 minimum, with whispered asides "by 2020" - which would make it virtually no rise at all on today's pitiful £6.50.

The SNP have very belatedly gone beyond - or at least given the appearance of going beyond - their previous mantra of "supporting the Living Wage", £7.85. That cleverly appeals to workers desperate for a pay rise, without upsetting big business, because the Living Wage is entirely voluntary! Now, to outbid Labour, they've declared for an £8.70 minimum wage, but again not until 2020. In reality that would be less than today's £7.85 Living Wage, although with the saving grace of being legally enforced.

£10 NOW!

Standing out from all this noise about what they'll do for us in five years' time, the SSP has unequivocally demanded a living minimum wage, legally enforced, of £10 NOW, in 2015. Based on the modest formula of two-thirds median male wages. The other critical difference is that we demand it for all workers and apprentices over 16, whereas both Labour and the SNP would retain the monstrous age discrimination of lower youth rates.

Read the latest Scottish Socialist Voice HERE

WHAT'S NOT EXPLOITATIVE ABOUT THEM?

The same milk-and-water promises are made into headlines by Labour and the SNP on the modern serfdom that is Zero Hours Contracts. 

Both of them repeatedly talk of "tackling", or "clamping down", on what both Labour and SNP insist on calling "exploitative Zero Hours Contracts".

When are they not exploitative? Why not just pledge to abolish the lot, and bring in secure contracts with guaranteed hours, full-time or part-time?

Labour has elaborated that they will introduce a system where after 12 weeks of regular hours worked, that would become the contract hours. But what's to stop employers dodging such 'regular hours', or simply shedding workers and replacing them after 12 weeks - like the avoidance tactics used towards improved agency workers' rights?

The truth is that it's only because some unions and the likes of the SSP have spearheaded persistent campaigns demanding £10 NOW, and outright abolition of Zero Hours Contracts, that these mainstream parties have gone as far as they have. 

And the underlying reality is that only collective action by workers, up to and including strike action, will enforce either a decent living wage or secure job contracts for all.

WORKERS' RIGHTS NOT MENTIONED!

That's where the strangling repression of workplace rights - the most vicious anti-union laws in Europe - play their part in holding down workers' conditions. Which makes it all the more significant that in contrast to the noisy bidding war of words between Labour and SNP over wages, there is deafening silence from both of them on repealing the anti-union laws - invented by Thatcher's Tory governments of the 1980s, fully retained by Labour from 1997-2010, and made substantially worse since by the Tory/LibDem Coalition.

It is no accident that wages as a share of national wealth, GDP, peaked in 1975. That was an era of massive union membership and several waves of strike action for better wages. The reign of terror of the last 30 years has reversed that process, leaving wages at their lowest share of GDP on record. 

It is no accident that inequality was at its lowest when 83% of workers were covered by collective bargaining, through their unions, whereas inequality is now at its worst, when only 23% are covered.

STRIKES IN THE USA

Workers learn from international experience too. In the heart of the capitalist beast, the USA, wages have plummeted since the 1970s. For most of that time, labor union leaders capitulated, merely begging the capitalist Democrats to be their friends. 

Since 2012, a wave of courageous actions have been taken by brutally low-paid workers in the fast food and retail sectors. Several strike days and protest marches by Walmart workers and fast food staff have won more concessions on wages from their multinational employers than 40 years of pleading by union bureaucrats. 

Wednesday 15th April saw the biggest fastfood strike in history with 60,000 workers involved in over 200 cities, demanding a minimum wage of $15 (£10). Walmart recently conceded $10 and McDonald's pledged to beat each state minimum wage by $1 an hour. Cities like Seattle and Chicago have agreed to phase in $15.

INTERNATIONAL LESSONS

So as we head for the ballot box, and march on May Day events, working class Scots should take inspiration from the struggles of our own past, and the present struggles of fellow workers in the USA. They have defied anti-union laws, taken militant action, marched for decent wages, and at least won substantial concessions. 

Those are the methods of struggle, the collective action, that will be required to squeeze something out of whatever government is elected, and off the unelected, obscenely overpaid boardroom bosses of companies whose whole source of profit is the wages they don't pay workers.

REIGN OF TERROR

The anti-union laws have been instrumental in enforcing a reign of terror on the 'shopfloor' in recent decades. That's why they need to be repealed, and replaced with a Charter of Workers' Rights. 

That's why those workers rightly abandoning the Labour Party that long ago abandoned them, should not in turn be blinded by the SNP's kindly rhetoric.

Not once, ever, has the SNP or Nicola Sturgeon pledged to dismantle the anti-union laws. 

They make welcome noises about "embracing the unions", "respecting the unions' voices", "recognizing the value of collective bargaining". 

Compared with Labour, both in words and deeds during 13 years of Labour government, this is very welcome, and sounds "progressive", to use Nicola's current buzz word. But it's mostly all candlelight and mood music, a wooing of the working class, with no sharp, defining, concrete measures to guarantee workers' rights and ability to organise collective action. 

SOCIAL PARTNERSHIP

It's very akin to the Social Contract of 1970s Labour governments, with their talk of partnership between employers, unions and government, denying the fundamentals of conflicting interests between the profiteers and the workers who produce the profits. 

That ended in massive strikes by the lowest-paid, and massive disillusionment with Labour, as prices and profits rose like a rocket, whilst wages fell like a stick.

WORKERS' ACTION

Post-election, workers need to organise in action for a living minimum wage, secure jobs, redistribution of wealth, resistance to escalated austerity cuts, and workplace rights - with collective action, where necessary in defiance of the anti-union laws concocted to help the capitalist minority rob wages and public services off the working class majority.

Workers will need to organise and demand concessions from a government that will be in crisis, as the ruling-class panic at the demise of their most reliable prop in the working class - Labour. Not as spectators at an election circus - heavily populated by clowns and opportunist politicians juggling words and principles - but as the one reliable active force for change and progress. 

The socialists of the SSP will continue to stand up for and with the working class majority in pursuit of a fundamental redistribution of wealth and power. We will not plead for crumbs off the capitalist politicians, but advocate and take workers' action to win a decent life for the likes of the woman at the STUC coffee bar. No matter who wins on 7 May, we will be back to work for socialism on the 8th!

STANDING UP FOR SCOTLAND'S WORKING CLASS MAJORITY

It was Easter Monday. As I drove to work, the car radio announced the next programme, 'Wake up to Money'. Aye, right, is that what they call £7.13 an hour, at this hour of the day, on a public holiday?

At least many of my workmates get double time for working a public holiday, but I arrived in the job an infuriating five weeks too late; five weeks after they altered the contracts to just pay plain money on a day when many other people enjoy a day off. Nothing unusual about that nowadays, unfortunately. It's all too common in the private sector, but also chunks of the public sector.
And our national union did absolutely nothing to challenge it at the time; they claimed not to even know about the change of contracts when I contacted them about it as a new member, seven long years ago. Weak national union leaderships plus profit-hungry multinationals equals working for £7.13 an hour at anti-social times on a Bank Holiday.

Still, it could be worse. I could be on the £6.50 minimum wage paid to the contract cleaners in our place - with absolutely no nightshift premium when they start before 6am, and a miserly £7.50 for all the additional responsibilities of being a supervisor.

'WAKE UP TO MONEY'! 
Back to 'Wake up to Money'. Some analyst from Aberdeen was bemoaning the latest report by KPMG on the profits of the five biggest banks. Apparently he found it disappointing they only mopped up profits of £20.6billion in 2014 - a 62 per cent leap compared to 2013.
Seems like some people really do 'wake up to money', mountains of it!

But they're a tiny handful, the 1 per cent: the wealth owners, not the wealth creators. We live in an ill-divided world, a class-divided Scotland, with 510,000 workers in 'severe poverty' whilst a handful of bankers 'wake up to money'.

'WE'LL TAKE CARE OF THE BOSSES'
Which brings us to the general election campaign. A spat between the Tories and LibDems has erupted - is there an election or something, forcing the spineless, treacherous LibDems to try and appear different from their Tory partners in crimes against the 99 per cent?

Apparently a 'senior Tory' told LibDem Coalition Minister Danny Alexander: "You take care of the workers and we'll take care of the bosses".

Well, one part of that is true: witness the 100 top bosses publicly declaring how good the Tories are, calling for their re-election. They wouldn't be doing that if the Tories were clipping the power, profits and privileges of the bloated rich.

On the other hand, did the 'senior Tory' fail to notice it was ever-so-Liberal Vince Cable who has spearheaded many of the vicious anti-worker laws introduced by the Twin Tory Coalition, such as Employment Tribunal fees, which charge a minimum of £1,200 to take a case towards a hearing, pricing workers out of justice?
But this incident inadvertently highlights one simple, central truth: we live in a society made up primarily of millions of workers and a very few, but very rich and powerful, bosses.

THE PROSPEROUS AND THE POOR?!
So since Labour's Jim Murphy launched his leadership bid for the Scottish branch office of British Labour a couple of months ago with the preposterous slogan "Standing up for the prosperous and the poor", he has some explaining to do.

Is Murphy really standing up for the low-paid Usdaw union members in retail whose votes he relentlessly courts, workers who 'wake up to very little money', on wages hovering around the pathetic national minimum wage? Or is he doing what he and his Blairite Labour Party have done for decades, standing up for the supermarket bosses, bankers and billionaires, who have plundered society's wealth for booming profit margins - with the help of the Thatcherite anti-union laws kept by 13 years of Labour government, and the most deregulated labour market in the whole of Europe, as his mentor Tony Blair boasted, when Prime Minister? 

FILTHY RICH
Has Murphy ever attacked his erstwhile collaborator and co-thinker Peter Mandelson for infamously declaring himself to be "Intensely relaxed about people becoming filthy rich", now that Labour needs to salvage the votes of 'people becoming intensely poor' as a result of basement level wages and benefit cuts which the Tories proposed and Labour MPs voted for?
What are Murphy and Labour planning to do to enhance workers' rights, including the ability and facilities for unions to organise workers in battles for better wages? 

CONVERSION ON THE ROAD TO DOWNING STREET 
Labour has belatedly discovered some rhetoric about 'working people', after years of telling us, in the infamous phrase of Tony Blair, "We're now all middle class". Not so much a conversion on the road to Damascus, as on the road to Downing Street.

In their desperate bid to con workers into voting for them, these Labour chancers are making a couple of carefully choreographed claims about what they'll do for us 'working people'. They promise "an £8 minimum wage", and to "tackle exploitative Zero Hours Contracts". 

Two immediate, vital health warnings are required to protect the ill-informed from Labour's trickery.

An £8 minimum wage seems attractive to those who do NOT 'wake up to money' - including the 1.2 million languishing on the pitiful minimum wage, or the millions more below anything like a living wage. Well, it would be a substantial improvement if it was introduced now, immediately, in 2015! But Labour has no intention of such a bold gesture towards fighting the scourge of poverty pay. They only pledge £8 by 2020 - leaving millions to struggle with the bills for another full five years, with the promise of a minimum wage which by 2020 wouldn't be worth much more - if any more - than today's £6.50! 

ABOLISH - NOT AMEND - ZERO HOURS CONTRACTS 
And as we have forewarned in previous articles, when it comes to Zero Hours Contracts, these Labour vote-seekers speak with forked tongues. What do they mean 'exploitative' Zero Hours Contracts? They're all exploitative! They should be abolished outright, straight and simple.
But Labour curries the favour of working class voters whilst dodging this clear, honest solution of unqualified abolition. They want to amend Zero Hours Contracts, rather than abolish them. To have a scheme where after 12 weeks on one of these contracts, you'd get a contract for the average hours worked. Certainly, when or if that happened it would represent an improvement. But it leaves the power with employers to dodge and weave, cutting down average hours worked, or dismissing and replacing workers after 11 or 12 weeks to avoid this clause, especially as many of the jobs involved are relatively low-skilled, fairly easily replaced by a new batch of temporary workers.

In any case, we can be forgiven for doubting Labour's promises on Zero Hours Contracts; Blair promised to abolish them back in 1995 at the Labour conference, but in contrast to the rhetoric, despite 13 years of subsequent Labour government, Zero Hours Contracts have in reality rocketed to an estimated 200,000 in Scotland alone.

LABOUR MAKES IT EASY FOR THE SNP
Labour's lamentable stance on these issues makes life easy for the SNP, making it easy for them to sound much more radical and worker-friendly than the party originally founded by trade unionists and socialists over a century ago.
But before giving carte blanch to Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP, workers need to listen carefully, both to what they say and what they do. 

£8.70 - BUT NOT 'TIL 2020!  

On the issue of poverty pay, the SNP make all the right attacks on the uphill struggle to cope faced by working people in 21st century Scotland. Up until their very recent conference, the SNP confined themselves to their headlined support for the so-called Living Wage - currently £7.85 an hour. A very welcome short-term boost to many workers, but with the fatal flaws of being entirely voluntary, at the whims and fancies of employers, unenforceable by law - and still far too low to merit the name 'Living Wage', given the current cost of living.
At their recent pre-election conference/rally, the SNP sought to outbid Labour's cooing sounds towards workers by pledging not £8, but an £8.70 minimum wage. At least that would have the merit of being legally enforced. But again, not for another 5 years, not until 2020, at the very best making it worth no more than today's £7.85 'Living Wage', but in all likelihood worth substantially less than that when inflation rises again, as predicted by the economists. 

WHAT ABOUT REPEALING THE ANTI-UNION LAWS?
At least up until now, the SNP has regularly used the same phrase as Labour's about 'abolishing exploitative Zero Hours Contracts'. So far, no unequivocal announcement of total, unqualified abolition of them all.

And whilst the SNP have spoken and written about 'embracing the trade unions' and 'the advantages of collective bargaining' - in positive contrast to the words and deeds of modern Labour - they have nowhere and never committed to outright repeal of the battery of anti-union legislation that makes this country the most repressive, in terms of workplace rights, in the whole of Europe.

STANDING UP FOR SCOTLAND - WHICH SCOTLAND?
The SNP make much of 'Standing up for Scotland'. Sounds good, to people downtrodden by undemocratic diktats from Westminster for decades, suffering the theft of our natural wealth and taxes by a business elite concentrated in the City of London and the stockbroker belt of the Home Counties.

But which Scotland do the SNP claim to 'stand up' for? 

Over the past four years, in contrast to their current promises to oppose austerity, the SNP government in Holyrood has failed to 'stand up' to about £4billion in cuts to the nation's funding by Westminster. They've passed on these cuts to local authorities and the likes of Further Education colleges.

In councils they control, the SNP has just as shoddy a record of imposing cuts to jobs and services, and of keeping apprentices on the slave-labour rates of £2.73 an hour, as their Labour councillor counterparts. And in the case of Edinburgh council, the SNP has joined forces with Labour in an axe-wielding coalition.

They've restricted Scottish public sector workers' pay to derisory, below-inflation levels.
Certainly the SNP has shielded the likes of the NHS from the worst excesses of cuts, closures and privatisation imposed by successive Labour and Tory Coalition governments down South.

THE GREAT CLASS DIVIDE
But a party that imagines you can 'stand up' for everyone in Scotland is ignoring the stark truth that there are two Scotlands, divided by class, by a gaping chasm of differences in wealth and power - and by a fundamental clash of interests, where the increased profits of one class are the decreased wages of the other (majority) class.

Which Scotland are the SNP offering to 'stand up for'?

The three richest families in Scotland - or the poorest 20 per cent of the population, the one million Scots, whose combined wealth doesn't even match that of the three richest families in the same nation?

The Royal Bank of Scotland with its £2.64billion profit in 2014, or the 510,000 Scottish workers officially living in extreme poverty, according the Scottish government's own recent report?

The Scotland of the 432 individuals who own half of the entire land in the nation, including the vast tracts of rich, arable land - or the tens of thousands (including employed workers) who rely on the indignity of food parcels from food banks, for three days at a time, to avert literal starvation?

FOR THE MILLIONS, NOT THE MILLIONAIRES 
The Scottish Socialist Party doesn't hesitate to declare which Scotland we side with. We will stand up for Scotland's working class majority. For workers, not the bosses who exploit them; for labour, not capital; for the millions, not the millionaires.

We are a working class socialist party out to end the dictatorship of capital, for socialist democracy, including in our workplaces and communities.

In stark contrast to the carefully chosen phrases of the other parties, we want outright abolition of all Zero Hours Contracts. We want secure jobs with guaranteed hours - either full-time or part-time. 

GUARANTEED HOURS - SECURE JOBS
In conjunction and consultation with the unions and their members, we want to campaign not only for a maximum working week of 35 hours, as the first step to a 4-day week - crucially, with no loss of earnings - but also for employers to be obliged to offer a minimum number of guaranteed hours per week. This could be, say, contracts of at least 16 hours a week - as I've negotiated in my own workplace in the last year - with the proviso that if a worker wants fewer hours they could freely opt into that.

In contrast to talk of £8 or £8.70-an-hour minimum wage a full five years down the road, in 2020, the SSP demands £10 NOW, in 2015, based on the modest formula of two-thirds median male earnings, with equal pay for women - rising with wages or inflation, whichever is the greater.

SOCIALIST DEMOCRACY - NOT ILLUSORY SOCIAL PARTNERSHIP 
Instead of empty pre-election mood music towards the working class from Labour, or the social democratic illusion of a partnership of interests between workers and capitalist big business as espoused by the SNP, Scotland's socialist party has a proud, consistent track record of siding with the working class majority, against the rapacious profiteering of capitalist companies.

We stand up for outright repeal of the whole array of anti-union laws, and the implementation of a Charter of Workers' Rights. That to include: full employment rights from day one in the job; the right to join and organise unions without victimization; full facilities for elected union reps to recruit, organise and represent members during working hours; full and equal employment rights and in-work benefits for part-time, fixed-term contract and agency workers; the constitutional right to strike, after a simple majority vote, including the right to take solidarity action with fellow workers, and removal of the ban on so-called political strikes; full union recognition and free collective bargaining in all sectors and workplaces where members join; workers' control of health and safety through elected union health & safety reps.

PUBLIC OWNERSHIP AND CONTROL 
We stand up for public, democratic ownership of the profiteering banks, all forms of energy, transport, construction, big industries, services - with majority control by elected workers', communities' and government representatives on the boards of management, not a few token 'worker directors' outvoted by capitalist owners whose sole aim is profit maximization.

WAKE UP TO CHOICES!
For those millions of working class people in Scotland who do not 'wake up to money', we need a party that stands up for the millions, not for Scotland's millionaires. We need to 'wake up to the choices' between profit and pay; between decent, dignified and secure jobs or the curse of casualisation designed to exploit workers for profit maximization; between the full and democratic rights of the working class majority, or the untrammeled right to get rich, at our expense, for the 1 per cent. The growth of support for the SSP amongst Scotland's working class majority is a vital part of that awakening.

WORKERS ASK: WHOSE SIDE ARE THE PARTIES ON?

You could be forgiven for forgetting that the working class make up the vast majority of the population, judging by how our interests and aspirations are ignored or trampled on by politicians representing the tiny minority who have grabbed most of the country's wealth - the 1%.
Then the election looms, so mainstream politicians who hold the working class in contempt suddenly spout nice-sounding promises in a cynical drive for votes.
Last week we suffered the spectacle of Old Etonian George Osborne declaiming that "Britain is the comeback country", "Britain is walking tall", "Jobs up, unemployment down, wages up"...etc.
Even this remote, upper-class snob has been advised by his focus groups that jobs and pay are critical factors in how most people vote.

JOBS - REAL JOBS!
Jobs is one of the critical issues to judge the competing political parties on.
The Tory/LibDem Coalition makes hay of falling unemployment. But scratch the shiny surface and you find an ugly reality. Unemployment figures have fallen as a result of 1.5 million new jobs since 2010. But a new wave of self-employed makes up an incredible 32% of these. Far from this signaling a flourishing of entrepreneurial genius and affluence, new research shows 80% of the self-employed are living in poverty! These are mostly people who would rather have a secure job but can't find one and end up self-employed rather than rely on insecure, part-time and temporary jobs - the main types created since 2010.
As the TUC reported, only one in 40 of the new jobs are full-time and permanent. There are still 80,000 fewer full-time jobs in Scotland than before the 2008 recession.
The working class have been plagued by the curse of casualisation over the past 30 years, and this has accelerated with dizzying speed in recent years.
Many of those removed from the unemployment figures are eking out an existence on low-hour contracts, typically of 8-12 hours a week. This gives all the power to the employers, who can tap into this ready-made pool of reserve labour to do extra hours - but with no premium rates of pay for 'overtime' - when busy spells in their business demands it.
Underemployment has become the new variation on unemployment.
All too often workers rely on two or three different part-time jobs to try and pay the bills. They miss out on breaks and mealtimes as they rush from one job to the next, dreading the day they get sick, as they usually don't qualify for sick pay.

ZERO HOURS CONTRACTS - ZERO RIGHTS
The ultimate in casualised labour, the pinnacle of job insecurity and lack of workplace rights, are Zero Hours Contracts.

An estimated 200,000 workers in Scotland alone are living the cruel insecurity of Zero Hours Contracts (ZHCs). This gives all the flexibility to the employers, all the risk and low incomes to those working for them. It means being contracted to work for a particular employer, but with absolutely no guarantee of how many hours of work you will get each week - if any!
Workers on ZHCs have absolutely no automatic entitlements to sick pay, holiday pay or redundancy pay. They are expected to be on call, unpaid, waiting by their phone or emails to find out when they're wanted. And real life experience proves that contrary to the baloney about the flexibility afforded to workers, when people decline a shift offered to them, they frequently aren't offered any more for days or weeks after, as bosses exercise their power to punish them.
These obnoxious forms of modern serfdom are not isolated to the outer fringes of the economy: they are rife and spreading in every High Street and retail park.
Over 90% of McDonalds workers are on them: 82,000 in total. Boots employ at least 4,000; 80% of JD Wetherspoons staff; Burger King; Dominos Pizza; Sports Direct; Pizza Hut; Subway; Next; Cineworld; universities... Social care relies on a vast army of ZHC workers - including the social care wing of the Church of Scotland!

ABOLISH ALL ZERO HOURS CONTRACTS 
The Tories and LibDems have shown in action they are parties that view cheap, casualised, insecure jobs as a virtue.
Labour has belatedly tried to appease the demands of the working class voters they rely on by promising measures on youth employment. And they repeatedly trot out the same two phrases about Zero Hours Contracts, phrases that should be seen for the cruel deceit they are!
Labour promises to "tackle Zero Hours Contracts". What the hell does that mean? Why not say clearly they will ABOLISH them?
Their other phrase, especially used when they are targeting trade unionists for votes, is that Labour will "abolish exploitative Zero Hours Contracts". Unfortunately, that same phrase has also been repeatedly used by the SNP leadership. Watch out for the deceit in that word 'exploitative'. Does that mean they'll keep 'good, non-exploitative Zero Hours Contracts'?!

WHEN ARE THEY NOT EXPLOITATIVE?

In fact, Labour has sometimes elaborated that they will reform ZHCs so that if a worker actually works an average of, say, 15 hours a week over 12 weeks, that should then become their contracted hours. A mild improvement indeed, but one which the experience of new Agency Workers' rights should warn us about; bosses find ways of dodging these averages, or for instance could simply cut the average hours they offer each ZHC worker over the 12 weeks.
The SSP has an honest, simple alternative to the dodgy word-games played by both Labour and the SNP: abolish ALL Zero Hours Contracts. They're ALL exploitative, so scrap the lot and instead offer secure contracts, with guaranteed hours, whether part-time or full-time.

JOB CREATION PLANS
When it comes to job creation, the SSP again stands out a mile compared to the rest.
With 157,000 families on the housing waiting list in Scotland, there's a crying need for a massive housebuilding plan of at least 100,000 new social sector homes over the lifetime of the parliament. Houses for affordable rent, built to the highest environmental standards, thereby tackling fuel poverty and helping combat climate change - as well as creating thousands of jobs and apprenticeships, giving decent wages and dignity to young and older workers alike.

A GREEN SAUDI ARABIA!

Another potential area of vast job expansion is green energy. Scotland's offshore energy potential alone has been rightly described as the Saudi Arabia of green energy.
Osborne's recent Budget handed over £1.3billion in tax cuts to North Sea Oil operators - some of the biggest corporations on the planet. If they'd been taxed at the same level as in Norway, that would have raised an extra £118bn over the last decade for investment in clean green energy.
The SSP unashamedly demands public ownership of all forms of energy, including renewables, to democratically plan investment, job creation and production that would benefit both people and planet.
Another unique policy pioneered by the SSP is free public transport. That would overcome the poverty and social isolation suffered by hundreds of thousands of Scots who can't afford the rising fares in the privatized, profiteering transport system. It would also create skilled manufacturing jobs to build fleets of trains, buses and ferries, as well as direct jobs on an integrated transport network.

BANISH POVERTY PAY 
Jobs are not the only issue working class people need to judge the rival parties on. Pay is equally important.
The much vaunted new jobs are overwhelmingly low paid, as well as insecure. Two-thirds of people who found a job in 2014 are paid less than £7.65-an-hour.
The government - and its allegedly impartial adviser, the Low Pay Commission - have the audacity to boast that a full 1.2 million workers will 'enjoy' the 20p rise on the over-21s national minimum wage next October, rising to the giddy heights of £6.70 an hour. That should be a source of shame, not boastfulness.
But what do the other parties offer?

LABOUR WAGE CON-TRICK
Labour is trying to work the biggest con-trick in modern times with their pledge cards promising an £8 minimum wage. What they coyly hide from the casual reader or listener is that they won't introduce it until 2020!
So what do they expect millions to survive on for the next 5 years? And how much better than today's £6.50 will that be worth by 2020, if any? And what about the fact they make no promises of scrapping the lower youth rates?

SNP OPPOSE £10 - EVEN IN 2020!
The SNP headline their support for the so-called Living Wage, currently £7.85. For workers on or just above the miserly £6.50 minimum wage, this would be a very welcome pay rise. But apart from the fact it is still too low to be accurately described as a 'living wage', it is entirely voluntary, not legally enforceable, which of course allows the SNP to sound good to workers whilst not offending businesses who have no intention of voluntarily paying that rate.

SSP SAYS £10 NOW!
And to underline their stance, for anyone not paying proper attention to the policy of the SNP, they blocked and amended a Motion in the Scottish parliament last week which called for a minimum wage of £10 an hour - not now, but in five years' time, 2020. Even that modest plan, put by the Greens, was far too much for the SNP, as well as - predictably - Labour MSPs.
By way of contrast with all the pro-big business parties, the SSP has persistently demanded a war on poverty pay by the introduction of a living minimum wage - currently of £10 an hour, for all over 16, abolishing the lower youth rates. We call for that £10 NOW, in 2015, not 2020 or some other distant date - based on the modest formula of a legally enforced minimum set at two-thirds median male wages in Scotland.
It's a policy we share with the Bakers' union (BFAWU) and indeed the entire TUC. It's time the trade union leaders fought for this fine policy, instead of handing members' funds - and trying to hand members' votes - to a Labour Party that has neither a track record nor any intention of seriously banishing poverty pay.

WORKPLACE REPRESSION 
This general election comes just after the 30th anniversary of the 1984/5 miners' strike. That defeat for the NUM, at the hands of Thatcher and the entire state apparatus, was a decisive turning point in the fortunes of the working class - a defeat that could easily have been an historic victory if the leaders of other unions and the Labour Party had shown an ounce of the courage displayed by the miners, their families and communities.
It is no accident that the 30 years since have been marked by growing poverty and inequality in the midst of vastly increased wealth for the 1%. One of the chief weapons fashioned and used by the employers and their governments to drive down workers' wages is the battery of anti-trade union laws - devised by Thatcher's Tories, retained by New Labour during their 13 years in government, and added to by David Cameron, Vince Cable et al since 2010.
Where is the hue and cry about this vicious apparatus for keeping the working class in 'their place'?

LAWS TO DRIVE DOWN WAGES
The Tories are increasingly shrill in their threats of making it virtually impossible to exercise the basic human right to withdraw your labour, to strike in defense of wages, jobs or rights at work. They openly talk of legislating for a 50% threshold for the turnout before any majority vote for action is legal. This from the Tories who seized power in 2010 after only 23% of the UK electorate voted for them!
Labour's silence says it all. They have absolutely no intention of repealing the worst, most repressive employment legislation in the western world. They kept it intact for 13 years in office. They have just as much desire to help boost business profits by holding workers in check as the Tories do.
The SNP make welcome statements about embracing trade unionism and 'the benefits of collective bargaining'. But nowhere have they ever unequivocally pledged to repeal all the anti-union laws.

CHARTER OF WORKERS' RIGHTS 
In contrast, the SSP shares the demands of most trade unions for outright repeal of these laws. Laws which price workers out of justice through £1,200-plus fees for Employment Tribunal hearings; make it virtually impossible to recruit openly to the unions in most workplaces; hamper the ability of union reps to function and represent members; and ban united action, including solidarity strikes and those deemed 'political'.
We want to collaborate with workers and their unions to instead demand a Charter of Workers' Rights, including the right to join, be active in and organise unions without fear of victimization; for full, open access to workers for union reps and officials; full legal rights from the first day of employment (not after two years!); the re-establishment of free collective bargaining; the right to strike after a majority vote, including the right to take solidarity action with fellow workers; and ultimately for boards of directors to have a majority of elected workers' representatives on them, for real workplace democracy.

JUDGE THEM BY THEIR DEEDS! 
Jobs, pay and workplace rights are central issues to judge any party by. And on their track record, not just their election-time promises! These issues put them to a central test: whose side are they on? Working people, or the profiteers?
The working class majority population will remain when the general election circus moves on after May 7th. We should put the politicians on the spot, spear their falsehoods and vague words, and resolve to build a mass, working class socialist party that stands up for decent, secure, well-paid jobs and workplace democracy.
Scotland's socialist party, the SSP, is here to stay beyond May 7th, to play our part in that struggle.

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.

A TALE OF TWO CLASSES: MPs' and workers' wages

                                             

A tale of two classes; or two planets, more like! 
All that is rotten and unequal about the capitalist economic system is reflected in the accompanying political system and the capitalist politicians, regardless of whether Tory or Labour.
Tory MP Sir Malcolm Rifkind shamelessly asserted this week: "It's quite unrealistic to believe MPs will go through their parliamentary career being able to simply accept a salary of £60,000 a year", as he told us mere mortals that he is "entitled" to earn "far, far more than that."

20p - or far, far more?!
With unfortunate timing for those who want working class people to put up with what we get and shut up from complaining, on the very same day as Channel 4 broadcast the sting operation that exposed Rifkind and Labour's Jack Straw promising favours and access to diplomats and EU officials for cash in their hands, the Low Pay Commission's annual report was published. It recommended a whopping 20 pence an hour rise on the UK's national minimum wage next October! 

That's £6.70 an hour if you're 21 or over; apprentices should be suitably thankful for the 7 pence rise the LPC has proposed for them, to a giddy £2.80! 

And their proposals were headlined in the same media as 'inflation-busting', the 'biggest increase since 2008', and other paroxysms of excitement at the glories on offer to millions of workers!

Artificial Increase?! 

The bosses' Confederation of British industry had no hesitation in telling the working class to shut up and count their blessings. Spokesperson for the engorged rich, Katja Hall, said the CBI "welcomes this balanced approach", adding "Any artificial increase due to political expediency will help no-one and ultimately damage one of the most successful government policies of recent years."
Artificial increase?! If the national minimum wage had increased by the 243% rise enjoyed by company executives in the 15 years since it was introduced, it wouldn't be £6.50, or £6.70, but £18.89 a hour - now!

Great Wages Robbery
These creatures at the heart of big business buy politicians to do their bidding, shaping the tax laws, employment legislation and rampant privatisation that fattens their profits with obscene success. 

Systematically driving down workers' wages as a share of national wealth has been a central mission of successive Tory and Labour governments for the past 40 years. Otherwise, if wages as a percentage of GDP were at the same level today as they were in 1975, a worker currently on £12,000 would be earning £21,300; one on £20,000 would instead enjoy £31,300; and a worker on the current average wage of £27,200 would instead be on £35,931!

Coy Crook
Two former government Ministers who played their part in hampering workers' trade unions, hammering workers' wages and helping boost capitalists' rent, interest and profit are the disgraced reprobates Sir Malcolm Rifkind and Jack Straw. 

Rifkind obviously takes the 'far, far more than £60,000' that he believes he's 'entitled to'. In fact he's on £81,936 as an MP and chairman of a Westminster Select Committee. Not to mention the £800,000 he's grabbed in the last 5 years from the 5 jobs outside parliament that he actually declared.

In the undercover journalists' sting operation, posing as a Hong Kong communications agency backed up by a fictitious Chinese businessman, Rifkind was recorded boasting:

"You'd be surprised how much free time I have. I spend a lot of time reading, I spend a lot walking. I am self-employed. Nobody pays me a salary, I have to earn my income, but when I'm not doing something I can do what I like." 

The coy crook fails to mention his parliamentary salary of £81,936, paid for by those 'nobodies', overwhelmingly working-class and lower-middle-class taxpayers. 

Self-employed or Self-seeking

Rifkind proceeded: "One sensitive issue, but I have to mention it. You mentioned there would obviously be remuneration...I would simply give it as an example, but when I did a series of presentations on the Middle East...it wasn't a whole day, it was usually a whole morning or an afternoon, and that was somewhere in the region of £5,000 to £8,000."

The 'sensitive' Sir Malcolm obviously feels 'entitled' to a damn sight more than the growing band of self-employed people that has sprung up in desperation at the lack of jobs available since the 2008 bankers' crisis. Their median incomes fell by £4,000 - a massive 28% drop - between 2002 and 2012.  

Entitled... Rifkind

Cheap at Half the Price
Labour's Jack Straw admits he earns - in one day - nearly as much as the annual wage of a worker on the £6.50 minimum on a 20-hour contract: "Normally if I'm doing a speech or something it's £5,000 a day, that's what I charge". Cheap at half Rifkind's price!
Up until he was caught on tape boasting about the price he can be bought for, Straw subscribed to Labour's promise of an £8 minimum wage...but not until 2020, making it barely any more than today's pathetic £6.50.

Bloodsuckers
When Tory millionaire David Cameron recently told the assembled business fat cats of the British Chambers of Commerce that "Britain needs a pay rise", you know there's something happening in the real world. 

First and foremost, there's a general election in two months' time. 

Secondly, the ruthless ruling class Cameron is part of are increasingly scared a revolt is growing against the outrageous system of poverty pay these exploiters rely on to make record profits, directors' bonuses and dividends to the big parasitic shareholders. 

That's how the 3 richest families in Scotland own more wealth than the poorest 20% of people, and how Britain's richest family has more in their pocket than 12.5 million people in the UK!
These capitalist bloodsuckers have drained workers dry, leaving one in five workers below the breadline; creating the longest, deepest fall in real wages since 1856; making the average Scottish worker £1,900 a year worse off than in 2010.

Stark Political Choices
One of the central issues in the May general election is poverty pay and galloping inequality. People face stark choices in those seats where the SSP has been able to afford to stand candidates. 

Vote for Labour to continue their obnoxious track record of suppressing workers' wages with the help of the Thatcherite anti-union laws they retained in 13 years of Labour government. 

Vote for their bogus headline of an £8 minimum wage, ignoring the stark reality they are only promising this figure 5 years from now, in 2020, with inflation on life's basic necessities meantime wiping out any meaningful increase this figure would mean.
Vote SNP, with their welcome but extremely limited support for the £7.85 Living Wage. Limited, because the level is still far below what is required to match the mounting cost of living, and limited because it's entirely voluntary, not legally enforceable, left to the whims and fancies of employers.
Or people disgusted by corrupt, careerists politicians can vote for the SSP, and our relentless, determined campaign for a £10 minimum living wage for all over 16 - now, not in 2020 or some other distant date.

Straw:  Usually on £5000 a day...

Socialist MPs on a Worker's Wage
MPs are so divorced from the struggles of everyday life faced by the rest of us that they have no interest in combating poverty pay. 

Their current basic salary is £67,060. That's set to rise to £74,000 after the elections. 

But even that is not enough for these greedy swine. When the body that now sets MPs' salaries - the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) - surveyed MPs' views on what they thought they should be paid, back in 2013, the AVERAGE response was £86,250!

And in stark, stinking contrast to the CBI's talk about a 20p rise on the £6.50 minimum wage avoiding the pitfalls of "any artificial increase due to political expediency", the chief executive of the IPSA justified the 11% rise for MPs, to £74,000, with the following comments to the Sunday Telegraph:

"MPs' salaries have fallen behind others working in comparable public sector roles. The £74,000 is now seen by some as at the low end. 

Pay needs to be fair to attract good candidates. They are there to represent us - to form laws, to send young people to war. It's not an easy thing to do. We want to have good people doing the job and they need to be paid fairly." 

Dry up your tears of sorrow for these poor, underpaid MPs! Tighten your belts, because 'we're all in this together'. Pity the poor warmongers who send young, working-class economic conscripts to the killing fields of Iraq, Afghanistan or elsewhere, to kill and be killed.

Nice Little Earners - and Day Jobs

Of course MPs from all the 'mainstream' pro-capitalist parties will gladly pocket the full 'rate for the job' - and on top, many of them grab hundreds of thousands more on jobs outside parliament, treating being an MP as their 'day job'.

In fact, just the ten MPs with the highest earnings outside parliament last year grabbed a combined additional income of £3,378,857. That's an average of £33,789 each! 

Top of the pile was Labour's Gordon Brown, who coined £962,516 on top of his MP's salary. 'Gorgeous' George Galloway reached 4th place on the charts with £277,350 on his Commons Register of Members' Financial Interests for 2014. 

The future is not what it used to be!

In contrast, any SSP MP or MSP will only take the average skilled worker's wage, to stay in touch with the working class we seek to represent and help fight for a sweeping redistribution of wealth through socialist measures.

Two classes; two planets! The SSP knows which class we fight for. 

The despicable Malcolm Rifkind once said, in a completely different context, "The future is not what it used to be"! 

Let's make sure of that by organising for a socialist future that banishes poverty, inequality and corrupt

The SSP Podcast

I recorded a piece for this weeks SSP podcast on Council budgets. Councillors who cannot protect their electorate from Tory/ LibDem imposed cuts should stand down and allow socialists to take their place.