WORKERS' MILITANT ACTION KEEPS CALMAC FERRIES PUBLIC

Thursday 19th May 2016 will become what has been all too rare in the calendar in recent years - a day when organised trade unionists fought and won an outright victory.

After nearly two-and-a-half years of uncertainty and threatened privatization, the Scottish government has awarded the 8-year contract for the Clyde and Hebrides ferry services to the public sector CalMac.

This is a victory for united, militant and determined action by the unions - in particular the RMT - without which the shareholders of private sector bidder Serco would have been rubbing their hands in glee, drooling at the prospect of guaranteed profits from this lifeline service.

A purely commercial decision? Aye, right!

The SNP government might try to palm us off with claims that their award to CalMac is purely a commercial decision. Aye, right!

The clutch of Labour MSPs who joined us - as they charged eagerly towards the cameras - at the celebration organised by the RMT outside parliament today, might try to claim it a success for Labour's stance on the issue. Aye right, again!

The original decision to put the west coast ferries out to tender happened in 2006 - when the Labour/LibDem coalition ruled at Holyrood. They peddled the same excuses that their SNP successors have repeated for the past two years: that EU regulations forced them to do so. That has been proven to be nonsense, under EU clauses and legal rulings that allow continued public ownership for social and economic reasons, with no obligation to conduct competive tendering - the Teckel Exemption.

In denial about privatization

For at least the past 12 months the SNP, including Nicola Sturgeon, have denied that an award to Serco would be privatization. They poured out press releases claiming that if the contract went to Serco it "would remain a public service".

Serco is in business to make profit, end of story. In this instance, as the ferry routes don't make a profit, economists have shown it would rely on government subsidies of £110m to £120m for each of the next 8 years. Tha would be a £1billion handout from taxpayers to the profit margins of a company that has been investigated by to the Fraud Squad over their prison tagging contract; made catastrophic errors leading to withdrawal from all clinical health contracts; lost the Woolwich Ferry contract in 2012 after being found guilty and fined for causing the death of a teenage deckhand through lack of health and safety; and who have cut terms and conditions for ferry workers on the northern isles service.

The SNP awarded Serco the Northlink ferries contract in 2012. Was that not privatization? And it took strike action by the RMT to halt assaults by Serco on members' conditions in Serco Northlink.

It took strikes to keep it public

On the current case of the Clyde and Hebrides ferries, it took a series of RMT strikes a year ago against threats to jobs, wages and pensions rights to make the SNP government waken up to the consequences of going ahead with privatization. They still publicly denied it would be actual privatization, and still refused to announce the outcome of the tendering process prior to the recent Scottish elections - despite demands for this by the RMT and their allies, including the SSP - thereby disenfranchising the Scottish people on this vital decision.

It was the relentless public campaigning by the RMT and their supporters which won this victory for public ownership, public service provision and workers' conditions. It was the strikes; lobbies of parliament; RMT-commissioned documentary research on the economic and social advantages of public ownership; the silent protest by RMT delegates with their luminous yellow T-shirts demanding 'Keep CalMac public - and carry on', when Nicola Sturgeon addressed the recent STUC congress; the vigorous street campaigning with postcards to MSPs... all these actions and more by the RMT and their allies have forced the Scottish government into this welcome decision.

To do otherwise would have meant the SNP relying on the new batch of Tory MSPs to force through privatization - because after doing the very same thing themselves in 2006, Labour decided it was politically opportune to recently oppose the SNP's potential privatization.

Keep on fighting - after the celebrations!

As Dan, one of the RMT leaders, said to me at the celebratory protest today, "Make no mistake, this is a victory for the solidarity of workers and our supporters, like yourselves. Without that Serco shareholders would today be celebrating. We should celebrate this victory today, and then move on to the next big battles, which includes the process for the 2018 Northlink ferries contract."

The SSP can honestly join in on the RMT's celebrations, having made at least a modest contribution, giving public platforms and publicity to the RMT's case when the other parties ignored them, and joined in their protests on the streets, on their picket lines, and in their postcards campaign aimed at MSPs - especially through the Ayrshire SSP branch.

We will do the same in the looming battle to stop driver only trains being imposed, whilst persevering with our common cause of democratic public ownership of all forms of transport.

THE STATE IS ROTTEN: Hillsborough, Orgreave, Shrewsbury, blacklisting...

There is something rotten at the heart of capitalism.

Not just a few bad apples, but a whole stinking barrel of cover-ups, collusion in lies, corruption and cruel, class injustice that goes to the very top of society.

But the priceless courage and tenacity of a group of mostly working class people has exposed the corrupt state, and put the Establishment perpetrators on the run.

The jury's verdicts on the Hillsborough Disaster provide devastating confirmation of the cruel deceits, shameless lies and corruption at the tops of the police, the media and successive governments. 

The revelations of details and footage of 96 fans being crushed to death - at the inquests and subsequent TV documentaries - are heartbreaking. Try to imagine what it was like for friends and relatives of the 96, as they sat in the hearings for two long years, listening to police chiefs still trying to blame the fans for this slaughter of the innocents, 27 years on, right up until the jury's verdicts, as they dragged out proceedings in a callous attempt to cover up their own culpability.

Weep in Anger and Admiration

I am far from being alone in weeping every time the issue is mentioned on TV, for the unimaginable suffering of the 96 innocent victims and their families, and survivors (some of whom I knew) whose lives were irreparably damaged after being on the brink of death. Tragedies caused by negligence by police chiefs, owners of the clapped out Sheffield Wednesday stadium, the FA, and a Tory government that vilified working class football fans as sub-human hooligans, herding them into pens like cattle, surrounded by high fences that turned these prisons into a death trap at Hillsborough. 

But grief merges with anger at the systematic campaign to smear and frame the dead, and all Liverpool fans. At the collusion in the Establishment's cover-up between South Yorkshire Police chiefs and the heartless, vindictive Maggie Thatcher and her Tory government. At the disgusting, unforvigeable lies of Rupert Murdoch's gutter press. 

And tears flood too in admiration for the superhuman tenacity of the Hillsborough families and their allies, as they refused to be defeated over 27 years' pursuit of Justice for the 96, their persistence vindicated by the jury's 14 decisions - including that the fans bore no responsibility for the worst sporting disaster in UK history, and that the 96 were "unlawfully killed". 

The detailed sequence of events - the real truth, known to most of us since that fateful day in April 1989, but now officially confirmed by the longest legal hearings in UK history - have been spelt out elsewhere (including in my 2012 blog article). 

From Orgreave to Hillsborough 

To fully grasp the explanation for police attitudes and actions at Hillsborough, and the enormity of the subsequent collusion between police chiefs, government figures, members of the judiciary and a major part of the capitalist media, we have to look back at 1984, and especially to the Battle of Orgreave on 18 June 1984. 

Secret Cabinet papers, released in January 2014 under the 30-year rule, confirmed what trade unionists and socialists knew and argued 30 years earlier. They exposed how the Tories consciously planned to shut 75 pits, wipe out over 75,000 miners jobs, smash the NUM union, and impose destitution on entire communities. They targeted Yorkshire for their opening salvo in a class-based civil war without bullets. And they prepared well, beefing up police pay, police powers and national coordination of police actions - stripping away elements of local control, effectively turning the police into a paramilitary wing of the government and Coal Board bosses. And nowhere more so than in South Yorkshire.

Police trap laid

Three months into the 1984-5 miners' strike to defend jobs, communities and the future, the NUM got word of the British Steel coking plant at Orgreave, near Rotherham (8 miles from Hillsborough) being on the brink of running out of supplies. Temporary closure would have been a mighty boost to the strike, so they called a mass picket to stop lorries carrying coke supplies. 

Up to 10,000 pickets came from far and wide, in magnificent solidarity. To their amazement, buses and cars full of pickets didn't face the usual police roadblocks that had turned Britain's coalfields into a diluted version of apartheid South Africa's pass laws. Instead, police politely invited and ushered them onto the piece of land near the coking plant. Too late, the pickets found themselves surrounded on three sides by massed ranks of about 5,000 police, drafted in from all over the country. 

Police carnage 

As pickets in tee-shirts and trainers - some of them stripped to the waist in the glorious sunshine - peacefully milled around on the hill, unable to get near the lorries, the police unleashed an unprovoked assault. 

Riot police, with helmets, shields and batons, smashed into the front lines of pickets. With military precision, they periodically opened up to let through heavily-clad cavalrymen, mounted police, who charged with long truncheons flying, their horses trampling people underfoot, whacking fleeing pickets' heads as they tried to escape. 

The cavalry charged through the village. An eyewitness recalled seeing a Derbyshire lad sitting on a bridge eating an ice cream, only to have a police truncheon smash through the cone and into his face. Others saw two coppers pin down a Nottinghamshire picket while a third battered him senseless, until an inspector said 'That's enough, you're going to kill him', whereupon they dragged him off and wiped away the blood before photographing the half-dead picket. 

This was unprovoked carnage, a pre-planned display of naked state violence by overpaid thugs in uniform, hired by a frightened ruling class who were out to teach the miners and wider working class a lesson in who rules whom. 

Decades of lies

The physical violence was rapidly followed by shameless violence against the truth. The BBC was as brazen in pumping out lies as the Sun and most of the press. Footage of the police carnage against defenceless pickets was literally reversed, to make millions watching TV bulletins think South Yorkshire Police were acting in self defence from picket violence. Many of the victims of police attacks were arrested and 95 charged with riotous assembly, which at the time potentially carried a sentence of life imprisonment. 

Here's the link with the police action at Hillsborough, five years later: the charges were dropped when documents showed police statements were fabricated, often identical, dictated to junior officers by detectives who weren't even at Orgreave. 

Quietly, in 1991, when pickets sued them for assault, unlawful arrest and false imprisonment, South Yorkshire Police settled out of court, awarding 39 pickets £500,000, which also gagged the miners from exposing the truth. 

Fabrication by police chiefs 

Documents from the Hillsborough case have now exposed not only that the same fabrication of police evidence occurred at Orgreave as at Hillsborough, but that several of the same senior police officers and the same SYP solicitor (identified as 'Mr H') were involved at both! Junior police officers testified that at Orgreave they were told not to write up their reports in their notebooks [which are like sacred documents and are used as gospel by the Courts] - just as happened at Hillsborough. Their statements were often written up months afterwards. 

The Snowman was here!

One of the police top brass active at both events was John Nesbitt, former Chief Superintendent of SYP. He was the stuff of legend during the miners' strike, having ordered coppers in a Range Rover to ram a snowman built by pickets as a petty show of power, only to discover the miners had built the snowman round a concrete bollard, which wrecked the police vehicle, and earned Nesbitt the nickname 'Snowman'! 

He was the one who arrested miners' leader Arthur Scargill at Orgreave, and then tried to claim his head injuries were the result of Arthur falling over before the events that day! But in January this year, at the Hillsborough inquest, a policemen (David Frost) who was there when the 96 died, testified how Snowman Nesbitt - a Chief Superintendent of SYP by then - had met a group of junior officers and told them to alter their initial statements, stating: 

"We have all got to get our stories straight or a lot of senior officers' heads will roll."

Acting with Impunity

The top brass in SYP orchestrated the state thuggery on behalf of Thatcher's thuggish Tory government at Orgreave, to cow miners - dubbed 'the enemy within' by Thatcher - and the wider working class. They unleashed state terrorism that day, and were then encouraged and aided by the Thatcher regime in covering up the truth, slandering and trying to jail their victims. No police officer was ever charged or even reprimanded for assault, let alone perjury and perversion of the course of justice.

Orgreave taught them to think they could act with impunity, an outlook that seeped down the police ranks. And that outlook towards working class people, and arrogant assurance they could get away with lies and fabrications, was sustained by the very same SYP and some of the very same top brass and solicitor five years later. If the state - up to and including Thatcher's Cabinet - hadn't got away with these monstrously corrupt practices at Orgreave, some or all of the 96 might never have died at Hillsborough. 

Orgreave Inquiry 

Top civil servants briefed Tory Home Office Ministers admitting 'mistakes or worse' in the Orgreave policing, but arguing against a public Inquiry for political reasons, and Tory Home Secretary Kenneth Baker publicly declared he was "glad to express my sincere admiration for the work of the police". 

Successive governments - Tory AND Labour! - denied demands for an inquiry into the role of the police and government at Orgreave, to cover up who gave the orders for this display of unbridled state terrorism against its own working class. 

It was only after a BBC documentary in October 2012 that South Yorkshire Police referred themselves to the (ludicrously misnamed) Independent Police Complaints Commission. At one stage, in 2014, the IPCC had to threaten legal action to force SYP to hand over five boxes of documents, which SYP had refused to relinquish for five months, subsequently claiming they were in the hands of their insurers!

The IPCC proceeded to delay and prevaricate over whether a scoping exercise on the evidence merited a public investigation - only to declare 2.5 years later, in June 2015, that "due to the length of time that has elapsed" an Inquiry into Orgreave wasn't appropriate! You couldn't make it up - but they did.

It was also the cataclysmic revelations of the Hillsborough Independent Panel in 2012 that encouraged the birth of the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign, which was further boosted in its demands for a full-blown public inquiry by the recent victory of the Hillsborough Justice campaigners. 

Breaking down the barriers 

Now the barriers erected for over 40 years by a venal ruling class - their police chiefs, judiciary, press and governments included - have begun to crumble and collapse in the face of relentless campaigns by ordinary working class people with extraordinary dedication, based on burning anger at injustice. A public Inquiry into Orgreave is about to be granted. 

The new Chief Constable of SYP, Dave Jones, last week tried to distance himself from the stinking corruption of his predecessors by declaring his support for an Orgreave Inquiry. 

In a very telling declaration from an incredible source - former Manchester Police chief Sir Peter Fahey - the wider guilt of the entire system was hinted at. Describing Orgreave accurately as "a police army of occupation", Fahey went on to call for an Inquiry...

"...into policing of the miners' strike, not just Orgreave, and the role of the police, but also the role of politicians. We need to look at the wider context of the way the police were used and the agenda set for them by government. Clearly it was about national control of the police in pursuit of a political agenda."

Prosecute ALL the Perpetrators!

The truth confirmed about Hillsborough should now lead to prosecution of those who caused the cruel carnage at a football match, at a day's entertainment, but also those up to their necks in decades of systematic lies and fabrications designed to shift the blame from the perpetrators to the victims, in an exercise dripping with class hatred. 

And not just David Duckenfield, but other SYP bosses; the West Midlands Police chiefs who staged a bogus inquiry in full knowledge of the cover-up; the football bosses who ignored safety for short-term profit; the media who smeared and demonized the dead and the city of Liverpool; and indeed the government figures who colluded in the decades of corrupt cover-ups. 

Labour's shame 

And whilst Labour's Andy Burnham is currently basking in the praise heaped on him for ordering, in 2009, the Hillsborough Independent Panel, whose revelations in 2012 blew this tower of lies asunder, there are some stubborn facts we shouldn't forget. In common with the rest of his Labour Cabinet of the time, he'd done nothing to challenge the lie machine until he met a torrent of angry chants from the terraces of "Justice for the 96", when he spoke at Anfield at the 20th anniversary event in April 2009. Worse still, his predecessor Jack Straw cynically deceived the Hillsborough families when Labour won office in 1997, promising them a full-blown Inquiry, then setting up a one-man legal 'investigation' that was stage-managed to conclude there was no justification in holding any Public Inquiry [see my 2012 blog for detailed documentary evidence of this episode].

Systemic corruption 

The Orgreave and Hillsborough scandals are interwoven by a thousand threads, but they are also part of a bigger fabric of state corruption and class injustice. Back in 1972 the Shrewsbury pickets were framed for daring to strike in defence of pay and jobs, with six of them jailed under obscure laws like the 1875 Conspiracy Act, and then drugged and tortured in jail. 

Nor did these practices stop at Orgreave or Hillsborough. Decades of blacklisting in the construction and other industries has ruined thousands of families' livelihoods and lives. Undercover secret service infiltration of protest groups - stooping to sexual relationships and having children with protestors as a cover for spying - are not just the stuff of the excellent recent TV drama, Undercover, but frightenly common in real-life Britain. Recent Tory legislation makes such methods, and state snooping on people's communications, all the easier - and legal!  

System change 

Capitalism is a system of rule and exploitation of the 99% by the 1%. It wouldn't succeed in holding onto power for the ultra-privileged few without a complex web of propaganda, deceit, lies, anti-working class laws, an upper-class judiciary steeped in the same class ideology and interests as the owners of economic wealth - and ultimately the naked brute force of state forces like the police, deployed in times of conflict between working people and those exploiting them.

So we need to press on with demands for full exposure of the methods of all these forces - including their hired politicians - demanding justice for Hillsborough, Orgreave, the miners as a whole, the Shrewsbury pickets, blacklisted workers... 

But to prevent constant repetition of these crimes against the majority working class population by those with power, we need to strive for a socialist democracy, a society where the wealth producers own and control the wealth, and where forces like the police are democratically controlled citizens' forces, not weapons in the hands of a tiny minority class of exploiters and their corrupt politicians. 

AT LAST! JUSTICE FOR THE HILLSBOROUGH 96!

“At last!”
That was a common response in Liverpool today to the monumental decision by the jury – in the inquests into the Hillsborough disaster on 15 April 1989 – that the 96 Liverpool FC fans who died were “unlawfully killed” and that the match police chief, Detective Superintendent David Duckenfield, is “responsible for manslaughter through gross negligence.”

Families of the 96 took the song “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from the Kop to the court room in Warrington where the outcome of the two-year-long inquests was announced. One of them shouted “God bless the jury” as they announced they’d voted 7:2 that fans who left home to enjoy the FA Cup semi-final on a sunny Saturday were “unlawfully killed”.

FANS BLAMELESS
On top of that decision, the jury were unanimous in other conclusions: that the fans were entirely blameless for the tragedy; the Sheffield Wednesday ground did not have a legitimate Health & Safety Certificate; the police had triggered the crush that killed the 96 by opening the Leppings Lane gate (instead of delaying the kick-off) and then directing thousands down the tunnel into the overcrowded middle terraces whilst the side terraces were half empty; police and ambulance chiefs caused people to die by failing to promptly declare a major incident; they then systematically doctored statements of rank and file police and ambulance crews criticising the operations, as part of a disgraceful burial of the facts – a smear campaign against the dead victims, their families and Liverpool fans.

“WE NEVER, EVER GAVE UP DESPITE ALL THE KNOCKBACKS"
Those women and men who’ve fought for Justice for the 96 for an incredible 27 years wept, sang, hugged and spoke with a devastating mixture of sadness, relief, sense of vindication and anger at the inquests’ revelations and outcome.
On top of the devastation of losing family members – 71 of whom were aged 27 or under (the length of time it’s taken to publicly prove the truth) – many lost their livelihoods, others were taken into care as children through loss of their mother, and all suffered the stigma of the smears issued by the authorities against the fans for all those years.

These indescribably brave campaigners have been forced to fight for justice for the loved ones they’d lost after the 1991 Coroner’s Report concluded “accidental death”. For 25 years the smear that it was drunken, ticketless, riotous fans that had caused the disaster hung over the memory of the 96 and the entire city, their families especially. Their efforts were rewarded when the verdict of accidental deaths was quashed in 2012 by the Independent Inquiry Panel, which insisted on the recent inquests.
What incredible courage it took to fight on! As one of them said today, “We never, ever gave up despite all the knockbacks.”

ESTABLISHMENT LIES TO THE BITTER END
Families had lost sons, daughters, husbands, wives, siblings. One daughter today wept at how her father had been thrown in a gym covered by a black bin bag.
Relatives had to relive the grief over two years of inquests, because right to the bitter end, police authorities persistently lied and blamed the fans, dragging out the inquests by an extra year or more. Just last year, Duckenfield eventually admitted his blunders and apologized. Bereaved women did a TV video declaring they would never accept his apology, “after he made us live a lie for 26 years, which is beyond cruel.”

At last, the truth is confirmed. Amidst many other crimes against working class people, evidence proved how the police chief called for police dogs before requesting ambulances, treating fans like thugs when in fact they were desperately trying to escape the crush or rescue others. Whilst some police officers tried to help, the majority were lined up across the pitch as if to stop a riot, when the fans were literally fighting for their lives. The ambulance service was lied to about the situation being a crowd riot – only three ambulances ever entered the ground – one of them an hour after the fatal mayhem started – whilst others were parked outside.


Having herded fans into the overcrowded middle terraces of a venue that was unfit in the first place, police chiefs added to the death toll by massive delays in acting to save lives. And then they lied, accusing the fans of having broken down the gate into the Leppings Lane end that the same police chief had ordered open. Rupert Murdoch’s Sun then vilified the dead, other football fans, and the entire city of Liverpool, and Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher colluded in this monstrous frame-up of the dead.

JUDICIAL LIES
The judiciary played their part in trying to hide the truth. The 1991 inquiry that decided ‘accidental deaths’ refused to take or consider any evidence after 3.15pm, making the false claim that all the victims had died by then. In fact, the current inquests proved some didn’t die until as a late as 5pm, underlining the cruel fact that prompt actions by the police and ambulance chiefs could have saved a majority of the 96!

NOT YET JUSTICE
At last, the names of the 96 have been cleared. At last, some degree of closure for relatives. But not yet justice. As most of the Justice for the 96 campaigners today said, criminal prosecution needs to follow on from the jury’s verdict. The current South Yorkshire Police chief admitted his predecessor “got it catastrophically wrong.” Families of the 96 have called for criminal prosecutions.
But it shouldn’t just be Duckenfield who is charged. What about the owners of Sheffield Wednesday who refused to repair a clapped out stadium despite warnings that fans reported crushing at Liverpool v Nottingham Forest the previous year? That doctors at the match confirmed there wasn’t a single defibrillator in the stadium?

“Liverpool’s failure to acknowledge, even to this day, the part played in the disaster by drunken fans at the back of the crowd who mindlessly tried to fight their way into the ground that Saturday afternoon.” – Boris Johnson

What about the Sun – a dirty rag – and Kelvin Mackenzie, its editor who ran monstrous headlines about LFC fans robbing and defiling corpses?
Or the West Midlands Police who held a fake inquiry into their South Yorkshire force?
Or Thatcher, who of course is no longer available to answer for her role in collusion at a callous, calculated cover-up, when she met with the police chiefs the next day?
Or the cynical manoeuvres by subsequent Labour Home Secretary, Jack Straw, to stitch up a bogus Inquiry, whilst promising justice to the families?

At last, the truth is out, the fans and the family campaigns totally vindicated – but justice must be done. And nobody – including people too young to fully grasp what all this signifies, because they weren’t around or conscious of the heartbreaking disaster of 1989 – nobody should fail to register how monumental the jury’s decision is. As one woman who lost her son at Hillsborough said today, with angry tears:

“This is a defining moment in the history of social justice, when the Establishment was taken on by ordinary people and the Establishment lost!”

DON'T GET APRIL FOOLED! - £7.20 is not a living wage

The Tories must think we're all April Fools. 

On 1st April, their much-trumpeted and obscenely mis-named 'National Living Wage' takes effect. But you have to be 25 or over to qualify. And £7.20 an hour is nothing like a living wage. In their own hidden government documents, Cameron and Osborne more accurately label this a 'Minimum Wage Premium'. It's an extra 50p for those reaching their 25th birthday, compared to the miserly National Minimum Wage suffered by millions aged 18-24, not to mention the insulting pittance earned by younger workers and apprentices. 

The Tories' scheme is a conscious campaign to confuse the hell out of people about what constitutes a real living wage - as well as being yet another layer of age wage discrimination, which also threatens to displace 'older' workers with dirt-cheap younger wage-slaves.

No Street Parties!

Anyone over 25 getting an extra 50p an hour will welcome it. Even more welcome is the £8.25 Living Wage Foundation figure which 500 employers in Scotland have now signed up to - voluntarily, as this scheme has no legal standing, and is purely at the whims and fancies of employers. A scandalous 29% of women and 18% of men still earn less than this £8.25. 

But street parties are not about to break out across the nation! Neither the £6.70 minimum wage for 18-24-year-olds, nor its £7.20 'premium' rate bear any resemblance to a living wage that guarantees a  decent life for workers. Nor indeed is the voluntary, unenforceable £8.25 - even according to its own authors! Back last summer, the Living Wage Foundation admitted that if their calculations stopped assuming reliance on a full uptake of in-work benefits - such as Child and Working Tax Credits - the London Living Wage rate would have to rocket from £9.15 to £11.65! 

And of course the Tories are hellbent on slashing such in-work benefits. Despite being forced to temporarily retreat on their more blatant version of cuts to Tax Credits a few months ago, they are still brutally cutting them by a combination of a freeze on the amount paid, literal cuts through the new Universal Credit, and new sanctions against part-time workers they deem to not be sufficiently seeking additional hours of work. 

Taking these attacks into account, the Resolution Foundation recently calculated that despite the Tories' misnamed 'National Living Wage', by 2020 the poorest 30% of the population will lose an average of £565 a year, with the example of a low-earning couple with three kids being a shocking £3,000 a year worse off.

SSP Pioneers of £10 now!

The Scottish Socialist Party has consistently and persistently fought for a legally enforced national minimum wage set at the modest level of two-thirds male median earnings - £10-an-hour in today's Scotland. That's the minimum required to climb out of depending on top-up benefits. That's the least required to afford a very basic standard of living. It's still just £18,200 a year for somebody working a 35-hour week, hardly the route to becoming a millionaire. 

We have always demanded that the multiple lower youth rates should be scrapped, with the £10 minimum guaranteed to all workers and apprentices from the age of 16 upwards. That would also help prevent employers turbo-charging their profits by displacing older workers by super-exploited young people, which is precisely one of the Tories' motivations in their bogus 'National Living Wage' at 25. 

The demand for a £10 minimum for all workers was unanimously agreed at the TUC conference way back in September 2014. The time is rotten-ripe for the unions to act on this policy. Not for a £10 minimum in 2020 or some other distant date, but now. Unlike all other parties, that's what the SSP is demanding, as are our allies in the May elections, RISE. 

Slashing Real Wages 

In fighting for this modest but radical wage rise, the unions and socialists also need to organise ferocious resistance to cuts in other payments, conditions of work and hours of work that are - right now - transforming hourly pay rises into actual pay cuts for tens of thousands of workers. 

Capitalist employers have howled their anguish at even paying £7.20 to those old enough. Other profiteers have won massive Brownie points in the media for signing up as Living Wage Employers, giving a grandiose £8.25 to those who produce profits frequently measured in £billions rather than £millions. Meantime, behind the backs of society, smothered in silence from the mainstream media, these same employers are systematically slashing the incomes of many of their workers.

Retail giants like Tescos and Morrisons have scrapped double time premium payments for working Sundays.

In response to the Tories' £7.20 for over-25s, B&Q have just forced workers to 'sign up or be sacked' to a package that reduces many workers' wages by thousands of pounds, including loss of winter and summer bonuses equating to 6% of annual salary, and removal of double time for working Bank Holidays. 

McVities biscuit factory has been handing out 6-day weeks in recent months, on the miserable £6.70 minimum wage, but days before the £7.20 rate came into being, suddenly announced a lack of orders for the next two months and told workers they'd get no work at all - whilst denying they employ these people on zero hours contracts! 

The 15% leap last year in the numbers suffering the cruel insecurity of zero hours contracts is a sure recipe for capitalist employers - and cost-cutting public sector employers - to compensate themselves for a piddling pay rise by slashing hours of work, with the added, backbreaking workload on staff that accompanies these cynical steps to reduce the overall wage bill. 

Unions Need Action 

The unions need to step up to the task of organizing a battle to win their own declared policy of £10-an-hour minimum for all workers - regardless of age - and to defend and enhance premium payments for working unsocial hours, such as weekends, nightshift and public holidays.

Unions in Scotland's local authorities - who employ about 250,000 staff - need to organize appropriate industrial action to stop councils slaughtering these premium payments, and build a campaign to win back the funding off Holyrood and Westminster to defend all jobs, wages and local services.

Socialist Alternative 

This whole issue raises the need for power over the minimum wage (and employment law) to be devolved to Holyrood - this side of outright independence - so workers can organise and demand a £10 Scottish minimum wage without any loss of hours, jobs or premium payments. And within the private sector it points up the need for the socialist alternative of democratic public ownership - to remove the dictatorship of capital, where profiteering capitalists hold workers hostage, slashing hours of work, jobs and other conditions in order to boost their profit margins, whilst basking in the kudos of signing up to a marginally higher hourly wage rate. 

Join SSP 

Join the SSP in campaigning within the unions and on the streets for an immediate £10 minimum wage for all at 16, without loss of hours, jobs, premium payments or working conditions. 

Vote for that in the Scottish elections by using your second vote - the regional list vote - for RISE, Scotland's Left Alliance, to elect SSP members and other socialists to boost the battle for a legally enforced living minimum wage of £10-an-hour, without strings. 

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YOU'VE READ THE ARTICLE, NOW BUY THE BOOK!

If you want to read far more extensively into the issues surrounding and underlying poverty, pay and profit - and a vision for an entirely different (socialist) future - buy a copy of my recently published book, Break the Chains.

And for all the stories, statistics and socialist arguments it provides, it's cheap at twice the price! You get 276 pages for less than an hour's wages in the kind of system we want here and now!

Order online at www.scottishsocialistparty.org

Buy, read, enjoy and use it - and let me know what you think. 

SOLIDARITY WITH WORKERS IN MINI STRIKE-WAVE

A flurry of strikes has hit Scotland this week, with public and private sector workers fighting back after sweeping majorities in union ballots for collective action, primarily in defense of their wages.

The Scottish Socialist Party has no hesitation in offering 100% support and solidarity to all these trade unionists, who are showing tremendous courage in the frenzied anti-trade union atmosphere coming out of Westminster, which has served to encourage employers to think they can ride roughshod over workers' pay and conditions.

Grangemouth Port

Workers at Scotland's biggest port, at Grangemouth, have started a two-week all-out strike, to be followed by an overtime ban, after Forth Port bosses stonewalled Unite union's requests for a negotiated settlement. Crane drivers and cargo handlers taking this action will hit the port hard, an action they voted 100% in favour of in a 97% turnout!

This strength of feeling is in response to imposed changes of shift rotas that will slash £1,600 a year from weekend premium payments and another £200 a year from nightshift allowances.

This is an increasingly common form of attack on workers' incomes, in pursuit of even higher profit margins and public sector cuts. Those affected also include whole swathes of retail workers and thousands in budget-slashing local government - regardless of whether run by Labour, SNP or various coalitions at council level.

FE Colleges 

Thousands of college lecturers are taking their first sustained national strike action in over 20 years. As with the Grangemouth port workers, these members of the EIS Further Education Lecturers' Association (EIS FELA) voted by a sweeping majority to strike; 93.5%.

At the heart of this dispute is the demand for equal pay, to end pay disparities of £10-13,000 between different colleges across Scotland. Their determined action is further fueled by frustration at years of education cuts, and fury at obscene 'golden parachutes' awarded to Principals and other senior management figures during the SNP's mergers and centralisation of colleges.

The SSP not only offers unqualified support to the EIS-FELA union members taking this action, but in fact we have campaigned for restoration of national pay bargaining since our formation in 1998, and even produced a special edition of the SSP's Scottish Socialist Voice on the issue about 15 years ago.

It is to their eternal discredit that the SNP government has carried on where their Labour-LibDem predecessors left off, failing to step in and remove these outrageous pay disparities, with salaries dependent on which college, in which town, lecturers doing exactly the same job happen to work.

On top of that, the SNP's centralisation of colleges has led to no educational improvements, has reduced jobs, and contributed to the loss of at least 144,000 places for students - overwhelmingly working class students; hardly a track record matching the SNP's claims to be 'Stronger for Scotland'.

Council Workers

Smaller workforces are continuing their strike action against Labour-controlled Glasgow city council, and it's arms-length offshoots, Cordia and Community Safety Glasgow (CSG).

About 130 Unison members - school jannies - have staged a 3-day strike as part of their long-running battle to win payments they deserve for duties their job includes, including dirty and heavy jobs. Parity with other workers doing the same type of work would mean an extra £500-1000 a year for the jannies.

CCTV staff, employed by CSG, who earn the giddy sum of £8.25 an hour, have started strikes for parity with others employed by the same CSG - who get payments of up to £7,500 for doing the same anti-social, 24/7 shift patterns as the CCTV staff.

And in neighbouring Labour-run West Dunbartonshire council, teachers in the EIS union have staged several days of strike action, and are now voting on whether to accept the council's new offer on restructuring of schools that would have meant savage attacks on kids' education, being a cost-cutting exercise falsely dressed up as shiny new 'modernized' restructuring of staffing and departments.

Solidarity with the Strikers

The Tories are doing their damnedest to eliminate the last vestiges of collective action by trade unionists. Labour pretend to be the new-found friends of the unions, ahead of the looming elections - but when in power, attack conditions and pay like the worst employers. The SNP make warm, cooing noises towards the unions, but show their unwillingness to take sides in situations where they could make all the difference, such as the FE colleges.

The Scottish Scoalist Party has an unrivaled record, spanning nearly two decades, of taking the side of workers, and building support for their struggles. We offer that ABC solidarity to all those taking action right now, in defiance of attempts by employers to crush their wages even further in favour of profit, and despite the vicious anti-union laws being made even more repressive by the Tories.

POVERTY KILLS - £10Now! a matter of life and death!

Poverty kills people. 

That's the clear conclusion to be drawn from yet another damning report on health inequalities in this rich nation. And since the prime roots of poverty and inequality are rampant low pay and cruel cuts to already miserly welfare benefits, this makes the struggle for a national minimum wage of £10Now! - and an end to benefit cuts - matters of life and death.

The authoritative Glasgow Centre for Population Health (GCPH) has issued a Report proving that life expectancy is a lottery, dependent on what district and income bracket you're born into. 

Overall, during the past 20 years there's been a rise in life expectancy in Scotland and its biggest city, Glasgow. But the wealth-based gap in the length of life a man lives has remained static, with the rich living 13 years longer than the poor. For women, the situation is even more backwards-going. The latest figures show a rich woman living on average 85.2 years, compared with a near-neighbour who is poor only living 74.5 years. That gap has leapt up from 8.1 years to 10.7 years over the past 15 years.  

The Great Health Divide 

Glasgow suffers shorter life expectancy than the Scottish average. But within the same city, and indeed the same corner of the city, we get examples that illustrate the chasm that separates the rich from the rest of us. Women in Drumchapel, Ruchil and Possilpark can only expect to live 73.1 years, whereas a short drive along Great Western Road, those in relatively affluent Kelvinside and Kelvindale enjoy 84.3 years. And that says nothing about the relative quality of life; the prevalence of illnesses in later life that those on low incomes suffer far more than their rich contemporaries.

The GCPH Report's authors write that "health inequalities are intrinsically linked with social inequalities: household income, life circumstances, education and opportunity..." and go on to cite "a third of Glasgow children live in poverty, which is set to rise - in part as a consequence of current and proposed welfare reforms. Related to this, around half of the population living in poverty in Scotland come from households where at least one adult is working."

Health Experts Confirm Socialist Case 

For many of us, there's nothing new in this Report, nor the root causes it identifies, nor indeed the solutions it proposes - which include, to quote, "progressive tax systems on income and wealth, a national living wage and adequate welfare support", with their conclusion that "reducing inequality is the most effective way of addressing inequalities in health or educational attainment". 

But the great advantage of this Report is that a team of health experts have confirmed - in the cold, harsh statistics they've researched - what socialists have been arguing for decades. 

The Price of Profit

Poverty stunts people's lives. And the ruthless, relentless race for maximum profits by the rich who rule society is at the heart of inequality and poverty, including health inequality. 

The same week this GCPH Report was published, a few random examples of the rotten system we have to challenge and eradicate also emerged. 

Energy giant nPower announced plans to slash 2,400 of its 11,500 workforce, the same week their profits in the UK alone reached £154million. 

The government admitted another rise in the numbers suffering the chronic, stressful, health-threatening insecurity of Zero Hours Contracts - where the average weekly wage is £188, compared with an average £479 for permanent employees. 

Shocking statistics on deaths and serious injuries on building sites showed the horrendous consequences of Tory government cuts to the Health & Safety Executive budget, as a means of letting profiteers cut corners to boost their margins. The number of inspections, enforcement orders and prohibition orders on dangerous sites by the HSE have all plummeted by over 50 per cent compared to 2012/13, endangering workers' lives in the name of profit.

£10 is a real Living Wage 

Governments of several party stripes are instrumental in upholding or worsening the levels of poverty and inequality in capitalist Scotland, alongside their allies in big business. 

The Tories have consciously sown utter confusion in the minds of many about the National Minimum Wage, the National Living Wage, and the Living Wage. As of 1st April, workers aged over 25 will have a miserly enhancement of 50p on the pitiful £6.70 national minimum wage 'enjoyed' by those aged over 21. They'll get the brutally mis-named National Living Wage of £7.20. Not to be confused with the Living Wage Foundation's recommended 'Living Wage' of £8.25 an hour!

This deceitful Tory package belittles the concept of a decent living wage, and actually introduces another layer of inequality, designed to divide, rule and exploit the working class. 

Howls from the Profiteers 

Capitalist companies, including in retail, cleaning and catering sectors, are howling at the horrors of having to pay people £7.20 - whilst they pile up profits measured in £billions rather than mere £millions in many cases. 

Even those firms - such as in retail (the biggest single concentration of low pay) - which have granted an hourly pay rise and won plaudits in media headlines for their generosity, are busily, quietly slashing the terms, conditons, hours of work, jobs and premium payments of their staff to pay for the headline-grabbing pay rates. 

That doesn't reach the mainstream media! But at last week's Scottish Divisional Conference of my own union, Usdaw, when I proposed coordinated action to resist this theft of payments and working conditons, numerous other Usdaw reps agreed, and told of people ripping up their union cards after the Usdaw leadership recently accepted and recommended the deal in Tescos which slashed double-time for Sundays and other premium payments. With Westminster plans to extend Sunday trading, and its consequences in Scotland, this problem is set to escalate. 

Labour and SNP pay cuts 

The SNP government can rightly attack cuts to their budget from Westminster, but when they meekly pass on real-time pay cuts to NHS staff with a 1% rise this year after successive years of below-inflation settlements, the unions should organise to force them to issue a decent pay rise, overcoming the recruitment crisis faced by Scotland's NHS, and then mount a struggle to win the funding off Westminster's dictatorship of and for the rich. 

Labour councils, including Glasgow, have provoked strikes by underpaying the likes of the school Jannies and CCTV staff, whilst boasting they are 'Living Wage Employers'.

Join the Struggle for £10Now!

The rampant disease of poverty pay, galloping attacks on premium payments, alongside vicious benefit sanctions that throw people into literal starvation, are the primary causes of the criminal divide between the rich and the rest of us, including the length of life a child is born to expect. 

That's why it's a matter of life and death importance that the demand for an immediate national minimum wage - for all over 16 - of £10-an-hour, and for enhancements to benefits, not sanctions, is stepped up. That's what the SSP has fought for persistently for years. That's what the TUC congress unanimously agreed in September 2014. That's what candidates of the RISE electoral alliance - to which the SSP is affiliated - are committed to. 

Don't let the robbing rich steal years off our lives in their hunger for profit. Join the struggle - inside your union and in the SSP - for £10Now! and against all benefit cuts, as part of the broader struggle to redistribute wealth and enrich the lives of the millions, not the millionaires. 

STRIKE BACK AGAINST ALL CUTS!

Councils are setting budgets that plunge the knife into the heart of workers' jobs, working conditions and the services available to children, the elderly, sick and disabled vulnerable people.

TORY CELEBRATIONS

For the Westminster Tories this is grounds for champagne-fueled celebrations. It's hacking away at the public sector, which they detest on principle, and boosting the prospects for profiteering by the private sector - and to hell with the human consequences.

For the SNP government, it's a case of much hand-wringing, justified attacks on Westminster's cuts to the Scottish block grant, and then meek and supine devolution of Tory butchery to local authorities, college and university boards... and ultimately the workers and service users who voted in their droves for the SNP as an allegedly 'anti-austerity' party.

For Labour and SNP councillors, all we see is jockeying for propaganda advantage in advance of the May elections, with councils run by both parties 'regretfully' wielding the axe to an estimated 15-20,000 jobs over two years, and countless losses of vital services in the working class districts most in need of a safety net. 

DEFY WESTMINSTER! 

Instead of passing on cuts - £350million this year alone - the SNP government, and councillors (Labour and SNP), should be standing up for the people who gave them an anti-Tory, anti-austerity mandate, and set No Cuts Budgets in defiance of Westminster, to mount a mass campaign of workers and communities to demand back some of our stolen £billions. 

Alongside that they should be declaring emergency legislation in the Scottish parliament to scrap the Council Tax and replace it with an income-based Scottish Service Tax, shifting the burden from low-and middle-paid workers to the bloated minority, thereby doubling funds for council jobs and services from £2billion to £4billion, on last year's figures.

TAKE THINGS INTO YOUR OWN HANDS!

However, those facing horrendous job insecurity, mind-wrecking workloads, and cruel cuts to daily life necessities, would be wise not to wait for either SNP or Labour politicians to discover a spine and rescue them! 

Labour carries out cuts whilst proposing to increase taxes on workers. The SNP implements cuts and has now - according to a speech by Nicola Sturgeon yesterday - dropped their pledge to abolish the Council Tax, after winning tens of thousands of votes on that promise.

Increasingly, council workers support the call for No Cuts budgets, but also see the need to take things into their own hands, by staging industrial action. 

STRIKING BACK

West Dunbartonshire teachers are staging courageous strikes in defence of children's education, threatened by cost-cutting reorganization. They've resisted brutal attempts by the Labour council to pitch parents against the teachers. 

The Justice for Jannies campaign is gathering steam in Glasgow, as school janitors stage prolonged strikes against a Labour council which has stooped to hiring non-union staff to cover up the chaos.

As cuts budgets are set, with disregard for the opposition of workers and communities, the union leaderships, STUC and socialists need to help prepare workers for united, coordinated action against the cuts. 

A COUNCIL WORKER'S VIEW

I spoke to a Glasgow City Council worker about the impact of cuts, and the need to prepare strike action. 

"Previous years of funding and job cuts have cascaded down to people in most need. For example, under 'personalization' of care, last year people were entitled to five days a week at Day Care Centres, but due to Centre closures, this year they only get two days. People can't afford to buy the placements, so with Social Workers bogged down in bureaucracy, trying to deal with ever-decreasing budgets, the burden increasingly falls on carers. Many are elderly, in some cases parents in their 70s caring for children in their 40s.

Glasgow City Council want to shed 3,000 jobs over the next two years by non-filling of vacancies. But already, after years of job cuts, stress related illnesses are rocketing. Managers are reluctant to let Social Workers go because they know the post won't be filled. 

Non-replacement in Social Work has led to increased caseloads and stress, increasing sickness, meaning a worse service to the vulnerable people in need of attention, and back-breaking workload, a vicious spiral.

Goodwill hours are built up through flextime. Staff don't build up flexi to take a day off, because their diary is filled up for four weeks in advance. So it's really unpaid overtime.

I know of people off sick but using annual leave and earned flexi time to cover sick absence because they're scared to build up their sickness stats, in case it leads to disciplinary action.

Senior management were surprised at the level of uproar about the planned attacks on flexitime and other terms and conditions. We're surprised that they were surprised! 

The system couldn't function without goodwill, where staff stay behind half an hour or more to deal with urgent cases. The council wanted to take away payments for this, through attacks on Flexi-time. They also wanted to cut annual leave to new employees - if we ever get any! - from 28 days to 25. And to give up 6 days of public holidays for annual leave, which would mean refuse collectors and residential care staff losing out thousands of pounds on enhanced payments, plus the childcare complications. 

These attacks, clawing back about £4million from workers' terms and conditions, is one of the reasons we've had record levels of attendance at union meetings, including 350 at the UNISON branch AGM.

The fury that erupted over these attacks has forced the Labour council to back down, at least for now. But we need to be vigilant. They'll come back at us, when they think the time is right, for example after the elections are over!

The mood of our UNISON branch AGM was electric, and determined to fight all cuts. All £131million. If they get away with that, what next year? The 350 members there felt it will take strike action to stop these cuts. And not just token one-day strikes either.

Through individual strikes by small sections of workers we've already cushioned the blow in recent times, winning victories and regradings. People acknowledge we've prevented some cuts through struggle, but they're worried about their security longer term, committed to the job they do, but unable to see themselves working until they're 67! 

This is a savage attack on local government, and it's being carried out by the SNP. In previous elections I'd have given the SNP my first, constituency vote. But what's the point? They're carrying out the attacks."