ZERO HOURS - ZERO RIGHTS

...a million modern serfs.


Zero hours contracts perfectly encapsulate the disgustingly exploitative system we live under.

These are the ultimate in casualised labour, the pinnacle of job insecurity, the worst extremes of the 'race to the bottom' on workers' rights and conditions. All in the name of profit maximization. 
And far from being on the obscure margins of the labour market, zero hours contracts are growing at an unprecedented rate, encouraged by the main employers' organisations and the mainstream pro-capitalist political parties.

Up until recently the Office of National Statistics estimated around 250,000 workers in the UK suffered these contracts; condemnation enough of 21st century capitalist Britain. 
But now a survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) has put the estimate at over a million - 4 per cent of the entire workforce - and growing astronomically in the last two or three years.


Fully flexible exploitation



Zero hours contracts [ZHCs] give all the flexibility to the employers and all the risk and insecurity to the workers on them. 

It means being contracted to work for a particular employer, but with absolutely no guarantee of how many hours of work you get - if any! - and insistence that the worker is on call, unpaid, ready to work whenever asked to.

Capitalist apologists for this system claim it suits people who want flexibility on the hours they work. That may apply to a tiny handful. But their argument is utter baloney, a cover-up for a system of ruthless exploitation. 

90% of Sports Direct workers on zero hours contract

One of the many High Street outfits using them - Subway - summarizes the reality in the wording of their contracts:

"The company has no duty to provide you with work. Your hours of work are not predetermined and will be notified to you on a weekly basis as soon as is practicable by your store manager. The company has the right to require you to work varied and extended hours from time to time."

And just to further clarify the surrender of rights involved, Subway make it a precondition of being hired that workers waive their rights (under European Working Time Regulations) to have the working week limited to 48 hours.

In other words, you could be dragged in to work over 48 hours one week, but literally no hours the next, and all along you are contracted to Subway, unable to get work with another firm, and only paid for the actual hours worked. And it's all perfectly within the law!


Choose punishment!



Allegedly workers on these contracts have the right to decline offers of work. In reality there's absolutely no such choice. 

Numerous reports give accounts of people being starved of hours after they have said 'No' to a particular shift. And they are frequently left with no work at all for weeks on end, because the employers can use Zero Hours Contracts as a weapon to reward, reprimand or punish people according to their whim - the exploiters' ultimate dream of control. 
As one woman reported, she'd been denied any work as a Home Carer for several weeks after asking for a day off for her child's medical appointment.


Zero rights



And such insecurity over hours and therefore wages are not the only consequences. Zero Hours Contracts also involve zero guarantee of sick pay, holiday pay, or redundancy pay. 

It makes it virtually impossible to plan your life, particularly for workers with childcare responsibilities or other care duties, let alone the impact on family and social life. 

Education is colonised by zero hours contracts

As one Edinburgh care worker explained, "You basically have to take what hours you're given. So on any typical week I might have a Friday off when I'd rather be working, but then have to make up my hours on a Sunday when I want to spend time with the kids."

It makes it a nightmare to meet the bills and budget for daily life - and because there is no fixed, regular weekly wage involved, it makes it almost impossible to negotiate the benefits system, such as Working Tax Credits and childcare allowances. 

And since it's widely accepted a major source of stress at work is lack of control over the job, these contracts are storing up an explosion of mental ill-health.


Low Payers' Paradise



The one million-plus workers subjected to this form of excruciating insecurity are also concentrated in the lowest-paid sectors of employment - and indeed that is one of the aims of these contracts. 

The Tory-LibDem Coalition might try to claim it just blesses workers with infinite flexibility without reducing incomes. On the contrary: according to the recent Resolution Foundation Report, the average weekly pay of those on ZHCs is £236, compared to £482 a week for workers on other contracts. And they get an average of 21hours work a week - compared to 32 hours for the rest. These figure also prove the simple, brutal truth: workers on ZHCs earn drastically lower hourly wages than other workers.


High Street cowboys



These contracts are not confined to the hidden undergrowth of the British economy - nor are they the preserve of unscrupulous backstreet employers or small firms struggling to survive and cutting labour costs. Quite the opposite. 

Big Mac Starvation Wages

The government's own Workplace Employment Relations Survey of late 2011 found that 6 per cent of workplaces with less than 50 workers used them, whereas twice that proportion (11per cent) of workplaces with 50-99 workers did so - and a whopping 23 per cent of workplaces employing 100 or more.

Household names exploit the power to dictate that ZHCs offer them. 
We've already mentioned Subway. Sports Direct has been exposed by protests against them hiring 20,000 of their 23,000 workers under ZHCs. 
Burger King and Dominos Pizzas use them extensively. So do McDonalds - with 90 per cent of their staff (82,000 in the UK) on them. JD Wetherspoons hire 80 per cent of their staff this way. Others include Boots (4,000); Tate Galleries; The National Trust; Buckingham Palace; the Kirk of Scotland's social care wing.


New Labour's slave labour



And Labour councils are up to their necks in this exploitation too: directly in the cases of Brent and Rhondda Cynon Taff, to quote two uncovered so far, and indirectly through work they've contracted out in vast numbers of councils.

That is perfectly predictable from the same party that spent 13 recent years in government doing absolutely nothing to scrap these pernicious contracts, and a hell of a lot driving forward the outsourcing, privatisation and public sector cuts that have driven hundreds of thousands into choosing between zero hours contracts and zero work.
One in four public sector employers use these ZHCs, as do one in three voluntary sector employers.

The areas of greatest concentration include hotels, catering and leisure; education, and healthcare. The health sector alone accounts for 100,000 people on ZHCs! 

And the ruthless Michael O'Leary's Ryanair - the biggest airline in Europe - employs an incredible 75 per cent of its 2,625 pilots on Zero Hours Contracts, as part of a regime of bullying and sackings aimed at gagging these highly skilled workers from raising concerns and criticisms about the frightening breaches of safety in pursuit of skyrocketing profit.


A long trend



Are these forms of employment new? And why are they growing with relentless speed?

The media has just now caught up with their existence, but ZHCs have been increasingly common since the late 1980s, and are indeed part of a much broader, deeper trend towards casualised, insecure work since the mid-1970s. 

But what is new is the sheer scale of their use.

For about 30 years after World War Two, governments - both Labour and Tory - tended to aim at full employment, reluctantly tolerated the strength of the trade unions, and generally thought rising wages and secure employment was good for capitalism. It provided a growing market for their goods amongst millions of workers on better wages than their parents or grandparents - and the power of organised workers' unions won wages as their highest share of total national wealth on record by 1975. 


Clawing back workers' rights

That changed with the first signs of crisis in their profit-based system in the mid-1970s, when UK governments began to claw back the gains working people had won in previous generations so as to boost the flagging rates of profit for the capitalist minority at the time. 
Thatcher's government in particular unleashed civil war against workers' conditions, seeking to smash the ability of trade unions to resist, deploying the weapon of mass unemployment to drive down wages. 
In subsequent years both Tory and Labour governments obeyed the orders of the bankers and capitalists, ripped manufacturing apart, concentrated far more on financial capitalism's interests and low-paid service sector employment. 

Dockers reporting for work -with zero guarantees

Alongside deregulation of work and globalisation of capitalism, this swung the balance of power decisively to the employers, unleashing a reign of terror in workplaces, which accelerated in the wake of the miners' defeat in 1985. 

New Labour governments carried on where the Tories left off in fashioning the conditions for maximum profit at the expense of workers' wages and conditions: neo-liberalism, what Tony Blair boasted was "the least regulated labour market in Europe". 

Robbie Fowler supporting Liverpool Dockers fight against casual Labour
Privatisation was a major driver, for instance fueling local authorities' current hunt for the cheapest bidder through outsourced contracts for the likes of homecare services, where a vast array of private companies bid for the care of as few as one elderly person, cutting costs to win the contract by hiring people on zero hour contracts. 

Privatisation invariably means cuts to workers' terms and conditions, and in recent years has helped create the longest fall in real wages since the 1870s!

The TUC reckon 4 out of every 5 new jobs created since the 2008 banking crisis have been in low wage sectors. 

Since the unelected Westminster Coaltion seized office in 2010, half a million public sector jobs have disappeared. These jobs were 'permanent'. 

The Westminster butchers of jobs claim to have performed a latter-day miracle of Biblical proportions by reducing unemployment in the midst of a recession. But this mirage is explained by the fact that most of the jobs created since 2008 are either agency work, enforced part-time, zero hours contracts, and half of them are temporary. 

The Tories manage to massage the unemployment figures, but workers can't even manage to cope with the rocketing cost of living as they plunge into insecure, low-paid jobs. 


Underemployment

In Scotland, just short of one in ten workers (9.8 per cent) are underemployed. Research shows this is double the rate prior to the 2008 bankers' crisis, and that the workers starved of hours and wages against their will want additional hours that are the equivalent of 50,000 full time jobs. 

This desperate need for more work amongst the precariously employed is mostly because wages have persistently fallen for 41 consecutive months, a relentless decline in wages clashing with mounting inflation; plus some have had their hours cut. 

And that puts paid to the rosy picture peddled by Cameron and Osborne of economic recovery making work available for the vast army of unemployed - whom they demonise and sanction for not getting jobs that don't exist, depriving them of even their miserly benefits, thereby driving desperate people into the clutches of zero hours bosses.


Casualisation: curse of the working class



That is the real context of the galloping growth of Zero Hours Contracts. 

They are not a lifestyle choice for workers who prefer 'flexibility'. They are one major strand to the package of casualised, insecure, low-paid work that is imposed on desperate people, in pursuit of short-term profit boosts to the employers. 
A consciously fashioned device to drive down wages through horrendous and chronic job insecurity, accompanied by a reign of fear in workplaces to keep workers 'in their place'.


The dockers' pen



Back in the mid-1990s, when many of us who were the founders of the SSP were at the heart of building Scottish workers' solidarity (over a sustained period of 3 years) with the 500 locked-out Liverpool dockers, I often wrote and spoke of casualisation being 'the curse of the modern working class'. 

That was a subject especially dear to the hearts of dockers, whose predecessors had fought fearlessly, and with terrible personal sacrifices, to end the casual labour system on the docks. 

A system that meant workers lining up in the dockers' pen of a Monday morning, hoping to be picked by the gaffers for a day's work at a time, praying not to be one of the many slouching home in despair to their starving families because they'd not been given work, maybe because their face didn't fit, they were too outspoken or active in the unions. 
Nowadays, instead of forming up in the pen, workers blessed with zero hours contracts sit by the phone or keep an eye on their emails, hoping to be offered work, never knowing exactly when or if the offer will arrive, nor for how many hours. That is 21st Century casualisation, a modern form of serfdom, where you're tied to an employer who in return offers absolutely no guarantees of work or other entitlements.


Back to Victorian times



The Institute of Directors praise this system as providing 'flexible labour'. 

Bosses' organizations boast it is better to have 20 hours one week and none the next than to be unemployed. 

They all oppose tighter regulation of zero hour contracts - as threatened by Coalition LibDem Minister Vince Cable. 

Vince Cable signals what workers can expect from the coalition

And Cable shares their opposition to an outright ban on these malicious practices, motivated by naked, profiteering greed. 

If ZHCs are so good for the health of the economy, why have any laws whatsoever that limit the 'flexibility' of workers' exploitation? 
Why not repeal the 1874 Factory Act that banned work by children under 10 in factories? Or the 1847 10-hour Act that limited child labour to 10 hours a day? Or the 1841 Mines Act banning kids under 10 from working down pits?


Fight to scrap Zero Hours Contracts



Every minor or major improvement in working class conditions, at work or in communities, had to be fought for in the face of vicious repression from capitalists, their politicians, their media and their state agencies - because under the system of wage-slavery known as capitalism, better wages and conditions eat into profit margins.

We can't rely on Vince Cable, let alone the Westminster millionaires' government, to outlaw exploitation. The trade union movement should launch a massive recruitment drive amongst unorganized workers, demanding the outright banning of all zero hours contracts, fighting instead for secure and permanent jobs for all - including full time jobs for all who want them. 

This should run in tandem with a militant struggle for a decent Living Wage as the guaranteed minimum hourly rate for all over 16.

By fighting to boost the hourly rates of pay, the working week could also be drastically reduced to a maximum of 35 hours across the board, without loss of earnings, ending the crazy contradictions of millions stressed out by working the longest hours in Europe, whilst millions of others suffer the poverty and insecurity of no work at all, or zero hours contracts, or part-time jobs with puny pay.


Independent socialist Scotland



There are vast areas of work that need to be done: in building decent affordable homes, hospitals, state-of-the-art local schools; in green energy and an integrated public transport network; in education with smaller classes to enhance development; in social care for kids, sick people, the disabled and elderly...to name but some.

But instead of foisting insecure work on a modern 'reserve army of labour' whose rights have been shredded by successive Westminster governments on behalf of the bankers and billionaires they represent, we need to build the crusade for dignity at work, decent and secure jobs, democratic rights at work, and a vast, radical shift in power and wealth from the capitalist profit-junkies to workers' wages and public services.

There is no prospect of such a vision being pursued by any of the parties contending for office in Westminster. All the more reason to link the struggle against modern serfdom in all its forms - including Zero Hours Contracts - to the call for an independent Scotland where we can build a socialist future that is founded on people, not profit.

Clear the Temples of Wonga Capitalism!

According to the Bible, 2,000 years ago Jesus Christ entered the temple courts to find them overrun by money-changers, fashioned himself a whip, overturned their tables, scattered their coins and drove them out.

And he sayeth, "all of ye but Wonga are to be cast out..."

Two millennia on, Justin Welby, the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury - and therefore one of the men claiming to represent Christ on earth - entered the debate about today's moneylenders, denounced Pay Day Loan giant Wonga - only to hastily retreat days later when it emerged his own Church of England has huge investments in Wonga! 

Archbishop- caught with the Wonga...

Rather than lash out JC-style with verbal whips, JW admitted to being "irritated" and "embarrassed" at the revelations of having such dodgy investments, and then heaped praise on Wonga chief executive Errol Damolin as "a very intelligent man, with a very professionally managed company", feebly mumbling "there are plenty of others much worse".

 


Listening to their flock

The Christian churches - whichever wing - are among the most enduring institutions in human history. One critical factor is their ability to tack and weave in response to the winds of change in social opinion, adapting just enough to hold onto their followers.

The Archbishop's mother was Winston Churchill's personal assistant. He is related to the 1950's Tory leader Rab Butler. He was Eton and Cambridge educated; went on to become an oil industry executive, and in 2008 defended disgraced bankers from being 'named and shamed'. 
But as he surveys the public outrage at the scourge of Pay Day Loan sharks, he tries to reflect some of that fury amongst his flock, pledging to "compete Wonga out of business" by promoting and assisting the growth of Credit Unions. 

Even the Tory-led Westminster Coalition are trying to perform the same, deceitful balancing act. They have pledged £35m in funds to Credit Unions, but rejected calls for a cap on the interest rates charged by the booming Pay Day Lenders like Wonga - whose 'representative' annual interest rate (APR) is a mind-boggling 5,853 per cent!!

This £35m is welcomed by the 400 local Credit Unions, who are currently going bust at a record rate and unable to match the escalating demand for modest loans off working class people. But it is entirely dwarfed by the £2,000m Pay Day Loan industry; by sixty times over, in fact.

 


Loan Shark Cancer

Loan sharks are a cancer at the heart of Britain's low wage economy. Pay Day loans are the product of a poisonous cocktail of poverty pay, mounting inflation on daily essentials like food and rent, and the failure of the High St banks to offer credit, let alone affordable credit, to the working class majority.

Last January, Which? magazine found that over half the population had used credit cards, store cards and Pay Day loans to pay for Christmas - borrowing on average over £300.

1.75 million adults in the UK are denied bank accounts. Another 9 million have accounts that deny them any credit. And those granted overdraft facilities are charged exorbitant daily rates for using them.
When the rent is due, and shopping for food unavoidable, but it's still a week to go to pay day, it's dangerously tempting to reply to the deluge of seductive emails and adverts from Wonga,Payday Pig and the whole array of offers of magic 'solutions'.

Recent surveys show that young workers aged 18-34 are far more prone to take out Pay Day Loans - because they generally suffer the lowest pay, often in the most insecure jobs. A horrifying one in six surveyed in that age bracket plan to incur such crucifying interest charges over the next 6 months.

When you borrow £100 off Wonga to buy food, you typically pay back £137 a month later - or roll over the debt, then take out more loans to pay it off, sliding into the abyss of mounting indebtedness.

Tempting ripoff.

Poverty Pay

The underlying cause is the pathetic £6.19 legal National Minimum Wage - and that's the 'adult' rate!

The higher level Living Wage - recently updated to £7.50 - is entirely voluntary, the product of campaigning pressure on employers. It is hardly a princely sum. But even that modest figure has been denounced this week by the Scottish arm of the Confederation of British Industry as a threat to jobs and the economy!

Low pay is the curse of the modern working class. Over one in five earn below the Living Wage. Oxfam Scotland calculate that costs Scottish society £6billion every year.

Growing numbers of bosses dodge even the measly legal Minimum Wage. 
This sea of poverty pay slashes spending power - endangering jobs. 

 


Cuts create a pool for the Sharks

Westminster Coalition cuts to in-work benefits have further driven workers towards the murderous clutches of the Loan Sharks - whether the backstreet versions that enforce repayments with a claw hammer, or the £2billion-strong 'legal' Pay Day Loan outfits.

Workers' wages are at their lowest share of national wealth in 60 years. Recent government figures admit 280,000 of us in Scotland who work are in officially recognised poverty. That is the pool trawled by these ruthless examples of financial capitalism.

People desperate to survive clutch at the Wongas of this system to tide them over, only to be drowned in a sea of rip-off charges. No wonder Wonga was named as Europe's fastest growing business in 2010; and these predatory capitalists stole £62.4million in profit off workers' wage packets last year.

Credit Unions







Credit Unions are a lifeline to many working class people. Their interest rates are capped at 2 per cent a month - about 27 per cent APR. Compared to the Loan Sharks like Wonga that is like heaven on earth. But their resources are limited. On their own, they can't possibly provide the cheap or interest-free loans that would be possible if the enormous resources of the banking system were taken over into democratic public ownership. 

Pouring a few drops into Credit Unions from the ocean of wealth in their hands by the wage-cutting, benefit-cutting Westminster bootboys is a dishonest bit of political posturing. It's in the same school of hypocrisy as Westminster driving half a million families into food poverty and then praising Food Banks. 

And Cameron is accompanying this token investment with raising the cap on interest from 2 to 3 per cent a month, a huge leap in repayment costs for those seeking refuge in Credit Unions.

Plans by the Anglican Church and the Kirk to set up their own Credit Unions as well as provide premises and volunteers for existing ones seems laudable. But it is fundamentally flawed because it does not confront the root causes of people's increasingly desperate reliance on loans. And Justin Welby has quoted annual interest rates of 80-90 per cent as necessary to make a profit in such Credit Unions - hardly in keeping with "blessed are the poor".

 


Clear the temples!




Unless the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Anglican Church and the Kirk in Scotland are prepared to challenge the rule of the bankers, wage-slashing employers and their hired capitalist politicians, they cannot hope to drive the latter-day moneylenders out of the temple! They cannot hope to overcome poverty and the ocean of debt that decent working people are drowning in.

And the Church as an institution is hardly clean when it comes to capitalist exploitation. The Church of England has investments worth over £5.6billion. They used to be the biggest landowners in the country, but now also invest heavily in property and international stock markets.
They seek to appease the moral feelings of their churchgoers by setting limits on the type of investments they profit from. The Church Commission's guidelines accept that they can make money from investing in companies where up to 25 per cent of profits come from gambling, alcohol or high-interest loans, and up to 10 per cent from the arms trade; anything above these thresholds would presumably be sinful!

Neither Wonga nor Welby - organise workers!






Workers in low-paid, insecure jobs can't rely on the Tories or the Church hierarchy to rescue them from the Hell of Loan Shark Britain - with it's brutal anti-union laws, designed to shackle workers and hamstring our efforts to increase pay to a Living Wage as a guaranteed legal minimum for all over 16. 

Workers in unionized workplaces have on average 12 per cent higher wages than their exact equivalents in places where the government's laws and the fear and terror used by employers have blocked the unions getting organised.

So rather than wait for Eton-educated Westminster Ministers or Eton-educated archbishops to challenge Wonga capitalism, (which they are tangled up in anyway), we need to organise and fight back ourselves, as workers, young and old, religious and non-religious. 

 


Living Wage - not living hell!

We need to demand a decent Living Wage as a legal minimum; full trade union rights at work from day one in the job; taxation of the bloated rich and big business; and democratic public ownership of the entire banking and financial sector, to then offer cheap loans to individuals, small businesses and the public sector.

When the plundering Wongas of this capitalist world slap us in the face, we should reject the philosophy of 'turning the other cheek' so they can smite that too. 

We need to overthrow the capitalist Coalition that dictates on behalf of the moneylenders and wage-thieves of big business. We need to fight back together, 'clearing the temples' of these obnoxious capitalist exploiters and their system.

A SOCIALIST CASE FOR INDEPENDENCE

I wrote this article on 22 June 2013 for the Yes Scotland website, at their behest.

Scotland’s egalitarian traditions are captured in the phrase "We're a' Jock Tamson's bairns". But under Westminster capitalist rule, old Jock must have disowned and disinherited the majority of us! 

We live in the 4th most unequal developed country in the world. 

The richest 100 Scots last year increased their wealth by £21billion, to a total of £39 billion. 

So 100 people have substantially more than the annual budget of the Scottish government, covering essential jobs and public services for the other 5.3 million Scots! 

The richest tenth of households are 273 times better off than the poorest tenth. 

And it's not just those on skinflint benefits or pauperised pensions that suffer; the biggest single group in poverty - and growing in number - is the working poor; currently 280,000 of us.

Just a few statistical reminders of the system we need to change; why Scottish workers need socialism.

But likewise, Scotland’s working class majority need to vote for independence to help tackle these obscene inequalities in our rich nation, in part because independence would hasten the prospects of a socialist future where we truly are “a’ Jock Tamson's bairns”, genuinely 'better together', sharing the fruits of our collective efforts in a fashion that would banish poverty, poor housing, mass unemployment and underemployment

As a socialist and internationalist I advocate independence for three main reasons. 

Firstly, as a democratic advance, so the Scottish people actually get the governments they vote for. There's never been a Scottish Tory majority since 1955, yet we've been saddled with Westminster Tory dictatorships for at least 34 of the subsequent years.

Secondly, as a devastating body blow to the power, prestige and imperial arrogance of the British ruling class, who lord it over Scotland like colonial masters (witness the poll tax), use Scotland as the dumping ground for their US masters' nuclear arsenal, and habitually mobilize disproportionate numbers of working class Scots to slaughter and be slaughtered in wars for oil and empire.

Independent self government of Scotland’s land mass, offshore waters, oil and gas, and the removal of Trident, would all undermine the arrogant rule of the rich, and indeed thereby vastly boost the prospects of the people of England and Wales confronting and defeating the same dictatorship of the rich.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, independence would hasten the prospects of radical socialist change, of a fundamental and irreversible transfer of wealth and power to the millions, away from the millionaires.

Contrary to the Tories’ Labour puppets in Better Together, voting YES in 2014 is not the same as voting for indefinite, unchallenged rule by the SNP.

A YES in 2014 would give the working class majority population their first-ever real choice of Scottish government, with the opportunity to elect a government of the left with the powers and political will to transform the lives of millions. 

Such a government could radically redistribute the fabulous wealth of the nation through measures that are way beyond the powers conceded by Westminster under devolution, or even various shades of Devo Max - including progressive taxation of the rich elite and big business; a Living Wage for all at 16, with equal pay for women; a fair benefits system for those unable to work; a state pension and education grant linked to a Living Wage; reversal of privatisation and extension of democratic public ownership into all services, transport, energy (including green energy), big industrial enterprises, construction and banks; reversal of cuts and expansion of public services; scrapping of Trident and an end to bloody imperialist wars. 

It could democratize society, scrapping all anti-union laws and blacklisting; constructing democracy in the workplace and communities; devolving key decisions to local councils, tenants and communities. 

Some in the trade union movement cling to the myths peddled by those on the 'left' of the Labour party - that independence would 'wreck the unity of the working class', and we're 'better together' in a 'redistributive Britain'.

Which particular planet have they inhabited for the past 30-40 years, during which all the post-1945 gains of the NHS and Welfare State have been systematically dismantled, not only by Westminster Tories but also Labour governments?

And if they succeeded in confusing workers into voting No, Westminster would undoubtedly unleash even more savage cuts to jobs and services, emboldened by our failure to seize the chance of democratic self-government. 

That is the grisly spectre under continued Westminster rule, based on the economic and social crisis created by the banks and big business. It would especially confront us if the real and present danger of a Tory or Tory/UKIP government ruled from Westminster, but also even if Labour won in 2015.

Labour have refused to even pledge abolition of the iniquitous Bedroom Tax, let alone the Thatcherite anti-union laws they retained; have abandoned the principle of universal social provision; and have warned that a Labour government will be 'ruthless', with 'iron rule' [their phrases] in carrying on with public sector cuts.

The unity and solidarity of working people has been cynically undermined by successive Westminster governments, and has never depended on one form or other of capitalist government.

Trade unionists share membership - and take joint action - across national government boundaries: in Britain and Ireland, north and south, across Scandinavia, and in North America. It is an insult to the proud internationalist traditions of the Scottish working class to claim they would cease all acts of solidarity with fellow-workers in England, Wales, Ireland, Europe or indeed further afield once we had gained the powers to radically improve the lives and conditions of the Scottish people through self-government.

Every day that we suffer growing poverty, inequality and stunted ambitions for the young generation is an argument for fundamental, socialist change – which is a far more realistic prospect in an independent Scotland than with the ‘choice’ of different factions of the same capitalist, pro-war Westminster machine.

A socialist Scotland will not emerge on 19 September 2014, but if we vote Yes, its time will come far sooner than if we surrender to Westminster rule by the rich. Workers need socialism and independence.

G8 SUMMIT:

Fracking Furious in Fermanagh 

by Richie Venton 

County Fermanagh, in the south west of Northern Ireland, is where I was born and brought up. 

Visiting my family there is always a tonic to the senses: the lush green rolling hills, the back roads bursting with birdsong, the stillness and glittering tranquility of Lough Erne. 

Stickers on a former butchers shop in Belcoo, Co Fermanagh, give the false impression of a thriving business!

Of course the price is almost guaranteed and persistent rain: as the local saying goes, half the year Lough Erne is in Fermanagh, the other six months Fermanagh is in Lough Erne! And at many points in the agricultural cycle, you get used to a powerful aroma of the most natural of all fertilizers, spread by the farmers to enrich the grass!
Not last week though! The all-too-rare glory of sunshine vastly enhanced the spectacular scenery, but instead of boosting the smell of manure, it increased the smell of fresh paint! Especially so in the county town of Enniskillen, where every street railing had a new black gloss to it; shop fronts boasted bright new colours; you could hardly turn a street corner without walking into painters up ladders or on cherrypickers. A family friend described in exasperation how he wanted to decorate his house but literally couldn't find a tin of paint for sale in any of the local shops!

Massive cosmetic cover-up

To say a full-blown cosmetic exercise has been launched would be a gross understatement: empty shops, idle work sites and derelict buildings are literally covered up with giant posters of idyllic Fermanagh scenery, in several villages and many approach roads. 

 The G8 invasion

Why? The 'masters of the universe' are coming to town!

David Cameron chose the luxurious Lough Erne Golf Resort hotel complex, on the scenic rural outskirts of Enniskillen, as the venue for this year's G8 summit of the leaders of eight of the capitalist world's biggest economies. 

Lough Erne Resort, venue for G8

Local people are generally glad to see the town and parts of some surrounding villages getting a paint job. They welcome the intensive road resurfacing that has been conducted over recent months, especially on the main Belfast to Enniskillen A4 route.

 An estimated £11m has been spent on road improvements, but mostly on the main routes that the G8 media circus might spot, not on rural roads most desperately in need of repair for those who live there. 

The short burst of employment this has created is welcome in an area of chronic unemployment; a family friend, a skilled tradesman, has had to turn away painting and decorating work because he can't cope with the demand, whereas he'd previously had to drive a tanker for a living. 
An English company has been handed the £450,000 contract by Fermanagh district council to mount vinyl pictures on shop-front shutters!

Behind the gloss

Lough Erne tranquility invaded by G8

But behind this gloss lurks a stark reality that will remain when the G8 caravan moves on, captured in one example: the luxurious Lough Erne Resort chosen to host the G8 exploiters' deliberations has until recently been put into administration, only temporarily re-opened for the G8 event, with workers taken back on... but on lower wages!

Most Fermanagh people aren't fooled by appearances, however pretty. In fact they are downright resentful at the hypocrisy of years of being ignored in their pleas for road improvements and investment in jobs and small independent businesses by the government - with pleas of poverty from the Stormont and Westminster regimes - now suddenly transformed into bottomless pots of gold to spruce up the place because eight capitalist heads of government and their entourage are descending on the county for a couple of days. 

 Armed occupation

But the G8 invasion of Fermanagh involves more than paint, pretty posters and pothole repairs. 

Lower Lough Erne

It includes an appalling extravaganza of taxpayers' money being splashed out on a 'security' operation that has many of the hallmarks of a police state, of an occupied, militarized zone.

Police boat patrol on Lough Erne

A massive ring of steel fencing round the Lough Erne Resort has cost over £4.2million. The Shore Road, that runs from Enniskillen past the venue, has been blocked off to general traffic from 1st to 26th June, with local residents having to show special passes to get home. This is part of a vast water and air exclusion zone - not just on 17-18th June when these imperialist lords land for their discussions on the carve-up of the world's resources and war plans, but for the entire period from 1st to 26th June.

School exams are being disrupted by the traffic exclusion zone, with students expected to get earlier buses on the days that heavily shape their futures. 

Non-emergency outpatient services are being suspended when Cameron's international cronies come.

A massive police operation is already underway, several weeks before Cameron, Obama, Merkel, Putin et al descend on Fermanagh for two days. On a short journey you will encounter at least two or three police patrols, on foot, in cars, with random checkpoints, people frequently stopped and searched, squads of motorbike cops on the streets, boats with police patrols on the lough, and police helicopters violating the tranquility of the county. 

Police dog handler checks car

CCTV cameras festoon every available lamppost or building. 
Already 730 police officers from England, Scotland and Wales have been trained to drive armoured Landrovers - a 'privilege' normally restricted to police in N Ireland - as part of an overall drafting in of 3,600 'mutual aid' police from Britain. 
Police armed with machine guns are patrolling the streets weeks before the G8, as are British soldiers.

G8 masters of violence 

The local media repeatedly pumps out the line they are being trained on 'how to deal with public disorder' - part of a massive propaganda hype about impending violence that is designed to demonise and demoralise the trade unionists, environmentalists, socialists, and human rights campaigners seeking to exercise their right to peaceful protest against the G8 jamboree.

Police training for G8

Water cannons are in position. Unmanned police drones, costing over £1million, have been bought to fly over and spy on people and protests.
The prestigious Killyhelvin hotel - normally reliant on weddings, family outings and tourists - has been literally taken over for weeks by a massive media horde there to report of the G8, no doubt on the prowl for any incident of violence by protestors that they can exaggerate, but very little exposé of the bloodcurdling violence perpetrated by the G8 leaders and their system of ruthless exploitation of people and planet.
By way of contrast, former British Army and RAF bases in Omagh and Enniskillen have been turned into 'custody facilities' for protesters - at a cost of £3.9million.

And the local council has declared itself unable to find a suitable camp site for protesters, whereas the bill for catering and cleaning alone at the G8 resort is £3million. 

Government Ministers have coyly declined to answer questions about plans to shut down internet access and social media at the height of the G8 - in stark contrast to the Department of Environment's fast-tracking of seven temporary new telecoms masts in the G8 conference centre itself and the main police barracks.

£50m police bill 

The British army has arrived to give back-up to the police, and army helicopters will fly the G8 entourage to and from the Lough Erne Resort. The place is crawling with hundreds of secret service operatives.
The Police Service Northern Ireland (PSNI) is spending an overall £50m in policing and so-called 'security'. That is an obscene squandering of public funds against the backdrop of vicious public service cuts, where the likes of my mother's home help service has been cut to the bone, and where charity volunteers collect on street corners and at stalls in the bigger Enniskillen supermarkets for life-saving services that are not rendered by the state.

Bear in mind this super-sized police and military operation is being conducted in an area where the biggest town, Enniskillen, has a population just under 15,000, which is roughly a quarter the population of the whole of Co Fermanagh. 

 Legacy of cuts and poverty

Much is being prattled about 'the G8 legacy' in Fermanagh. A crude reduction in people's civil rights is likely to be one actual legacy; they won't splash out on this monstrous 'security' exercise and then simply dismantle it.

Long term job creation it certainly will not bring. Two private security firms, including the notorious G4S, have been handed the contract for 650 staff for the G8 jamboree, but they don't even intend to recruit locally. 

The local RNLI has just launched a public appeal for £60,000 to build a proper shelter for this vital, life saving service, run by volunteers; not for them the bottomless well of public funding afforded 8 men and women who dominate our lives with their economic and social policies. Another local public appeal has just raised £15,000 for defibrillators, after a near-tragedy. 
Youth unemployment is officially 24 per cent, with low-paid retail jobs one of the few outlets. 

 Environmental carnage

One of the most outrageous 'legacies' of the G8, if they have their way, will be fracking in Fermanagh. The Fermanagh G8 Not Welcome coalition that is marching through Enniskillen on 17June has made opposition to fracking a central theme.

In 2001, the G8 endorsed High Volume Hydraulic Fracturing for shale gas, in support of the lobby of the oil and gas multinationals. Shattering rock, this releases gas, but also brings to the surface numerous toxins, such as benzene, lead, mercury and radioactive material. Fracking also contaminates water supplies along new fault lines in the rock, reaching into streams and lakes. As the lakelands of the north of Ireland, Fermanagh seems the last place on earth that fracking should be allowed. 
But the capitalists who lord it over us mere mortals couldn't give a frack about the well-being of Fermanagh - or anywhere else on the globe. 
The Belfast government has already granted permission to a company called Tamboran Resources to start work on two sites in Fermanagh, where they have plans for 60 'pads' - each a seven-acre site, concreted over, with heavy and noisy machinery, with air, water and noise pollution - a mere mile apart from one another.  

 Fracking mayhem

Scientists warn that more than half the water will be severely contaminated, with no means of decontaminating it. And the unusually shallow shale layers in the area - about a quarter the depth in other parts of the world - makes fracking in Fermanagh especially dangerous. 
And it can't even be sold to the local population with the cynical offer of jobs in an unemployment blackspot: Tamboran initially promised 600 jobs north of the border plus 600 in the south, but have now reduced their pledge to 3 jobs per pad, a miserable total of 180. 
Aside from the issue of dangerous and environmentally destructive jobs, that's hardly compensation for the 5,000 local jobs in farming or the 1,000 tourism jobs that will be jeopardized by this monstrous plan to frack Fermanagh. 

 Socialism at home and abroad

The G8 summit epitomizes all that is worst about the capitalist world we live in. 

Nauseating pomp and privilege for the powerful, alongside poverty, unemployment and outright hunger for the majority population. 
Food banks and charity collections for desperately needed services in the local community, alongside obscene gluttony, publicly funded, at this gathering of eight capitalist puppets. 

Over 3 billion people on the planet living below $2 a day, whilst 358 billionaires and a couple of hundred multinationals have a grip on the world's wealth. 

1.3 billion people subsisting on $1 a day, and somebody dying of hunger every 3.6 seconds.

Environmental destruction so that the giant energy corporations can make a fast buck. 

And deployment of state forces, armed to the teeth, to block the right of peaceful protest to people genuinely committed to a decent life, a living wage, public services, peace, and protection of the planet from destruction for short-term profit.

Capitalism means world starvation, poverty and war. Capitalism means the dictatorship of the rich, with the backup of armed forces prepared to deny the right to resist to the majority. 

The G8 occupation of Fermanagh is a brutal reminder of the world we need to change, of the need for socialism in Ireland, Scotland and around the globe these creatures are meeting to carve up. 

Join that fight now, before they lay waste to millions more people and the planet we share.