Reform posted this short video, just over two minutes long, on their YouTube channel. In it, their current fuehrer calls for the partial, and rather half-hearted renationalisation of the water and power companies. He tries to connect this with Brexit, and has a dig at Starmer for initially backing it and then dropping it, saying he was no longer interested. Tice begins by stating that we are being badly served by the water companies, who are foreign-owned and so use various dodges to avoid paying tax. No other country allows vital parts of their infrastructure to be owned by foreigners. This is quite true, and Mike has been pointing this out on Vox Political since forever and day. This has been the case since they were privatised by the Tories great, molten idol of private enterprise, Maggie Thatcher, in the 1980s. He wants them partly renationalised – 50 per cent owned by the state, 50 per cent owned by pension funds, and placed under private management. This, he feels, will bring it the best of both state and private enterprise.
He’s wrong, of course. There is no magic solution behind private industry. When they’ve been handed state enterprises or institutions, their policy has always been the same: sack people and make those who remain work for less in poorer conditions in order to deliver profits and shareholder dividends. This has been done in the NHS, when hospitals and doctors’ surgeries have been handed over to private companies. In the case of GPs, this has also resulted in unprofitable patients being dumped and their surgeries closed. It also reminds me slightly of the restructuring of industry under the Nazis. Companies were linked together in a series of industrial associations, set up as private companies but membership of whom was mandatory under the Nazi regime. These associations were under the direction of the state planning apparatus running the economy. And the head of these industrial associations always came from private industry, even when the companies under him were state-owned. Obviously Tice isn’t calling for an extension of this system to British industry as a whole or its transformation into a centrally-planned economy. But he makes the same assumptions that Hitler and the Nazis, as well as the Italian fascists did, about the superiority of private industry. And as a true-blue Brexiteer he tries to link it to Brexit by saying that, as with the departure from the EU, this is all part of Britain taking back control.
Still, Tice has got something right, even though I think his speech is partly influenced by a BBC report today that Oxford Council has called for the end of water privatisation, as well as the outrage of the massive profits the private power companies have been making while energy bills have rocketed.. He’s clearly looking around for policies which he thinks will resonate with the public, and so has recognised, albeit grudgingly from the half-hearted way he wants it done, that the majority of the British public want the renationalisation of the public services. Of course, he’s still extremely right-wing in demanding more cuts to the welfare state, which he’s justified with the bogus explanation that British people need to move into low paid jobs in order to stop the British state importing more foreigners to do them. I posted a piece yesterday rubbishing that, and you should also read the comments on the piece left by the greater people reading this blog, who have added much more relevant information. But it is interesting that in this area of policy, Reform has moved left of Labour.
Not that I’ll believe they’ll keep their promises, anymore than I believe Starmer will.
Here’s a turn up for the books! Paz49 is a former squaddie and I think he may also have been a prison warder. He’s a patriotic, true-blue Tory who begins his videos with ‘Hello lefties’ and then begins to make it very plain that he thinks everyone on the left is well-below him in intelligence. He got a bit shirty with me a year or so ago for a piece I put up criticising him for applauding the ultimatum sent by a group of French officers and soldiers. This declared that they would take to the streets and fight unless the French government took a harder stand against Islam. This sounded to very many people like the threat of a far-right coup or civil war. Paz endorsed it, and then got angry when I described him as ‘far right’, which he took to mean ‘fascist’. Well, it can mean fascist. But equally it also means parties or organisations to the right of the Tories, of which the fascists are only one out of a number. UKIP were far right, in the sense that they were more extreme than the Tories, but they were national populist rather than fascist.
But it seems there is one left-wing policy Paz is prepared to support. He posted a poll asking his readers if they would support the nationalisation of the energy companies. He did, because they had got too greedy. I did the poll, voting yes, and it appears that over 70 per cent of his respondents did the same.
Which bears out the findings of organisations like We Own It that the renationalisation of the energy companies and public utilities in general is popular with people across the political spectrum.
It’s just the Tory government that doesn’t like it.
Yesterday I put up an episode of Michael Bentine’s Potty Time, in which an attempt to steal the crown jewels was thwarted by the police and the Beefeaters. The thieves were caught, and their leader revealed to be a computer. This was captured when it was down during a power cut. Trev, one of the great commenters on his blog, posted this remark describing how we don’t have electricity cuts just yet, but the high prices are leaving people like himself cutting back. Trev wrote
‘That’s great. I remember Potty Time and the power cuts. Now we still have power (for now) but can’t afford to use it. I’m only putting heating on for about an hour in a morning but in the evenings I’m wrapped in blankets and a wooly hat trying to keep warm. It’s not good. I don’t qualify for any of the discounts because the electricity account and bill are in the landlady’s name, and I don’t get the right Benefits to qualify for Warm Home discounts or Cold Weather payments (when they are due).’
This is what millions of people are being faced with, due to the greed of the energy companies, fully support by Sunak and the Tories. The energy companies’ vicious, exploitative avarice was even defended by Jacob Rees-Mogg back in the summer. It’s why we need to get the Tories out and Labour in, hopefully to do something that will really benefit the British public on this and other issues.
I got this email from the pro-public ownership organisation We Own It applauding Keir Starmer’s announcement that if he was elected, Labour would set up a publicly owned energy company: Great British Energy.
‘Dear David,
Public ownership in Starmer’s keynote speech, as one of Labour’s flagship policies?! This is HUGE.
Great British Energy, a publicly owned renewable energy generation company, would help tackle the cost of living crisis and the climate crisis.
Two months ago, we told the Guardian that Labour was being too cautious on public ownership and asked the question: “Why not set up a publicly owned renewable generation company to drive forward water and wind energy, while creating jobs and boosting the economy?”
You helped to share that article and spread the word – and yesterday Keir Starmer announced exactly that, so this is YOUR win!
Thousands of you signed the petition for energy in public ownership, which included Great British Energy as one of the demands!
Thousands of you shared polling about support for public ownership, showing how popular taking energy into public hands really is.
Of course we want Labour to go further by bringing the National Grid and an energy supplier into public ownership. But this huge victory helps shift the debate. After a long period of avoiding the question, it shows that public ownership is on the table again for Labour.
Starmer also stated that this policy would be rolled out in the first year of government. The next general election could be coming sooner than the Conservatives would like – so with Labour way ahead in the polls, these announcements matter. It’s people like you who will make sure they translate into action when the time comes. (Do read our blog for more on the politics of this announcement…)
We’re making progress. Let’s keep going!
THANK YOU for everything you’ve done to make this happen.
Cat, Alice, Johnbosco, Matthew, and Kate — the We Own It team
PS This isn’t the only public ownership announcement at Labour conference this year… Thanks to everything you’ve done to make the case, Labour announced that they would nationalise rail, lift the ban on municipally owned bus companies, and oversee a wave of insourcing.These are your victories!‘
I got this email from the Labour leader yesterday, along with the inevitable request for a donation. There are some great policies in there, such as a publicly owned energy company. The problem is that Starmer’s got plenty of previous on making promises he has no intention of keeping, and of watering down his proposals when he starts thinking he’s getting near power.
‘David James, if this year’s Conference has proved one thing, it is this:
Labour will deliver a fairer, greener future for working people.
Here’s how we’ll do it:
In my first year as Prime Minister, Britain will start its journey to becoming a clean energy superpower by setting up a new, publicly owned company: Great British Energy.
Publicly owned British power.
Creating hundreds of thousands of jobs, growing our economy and protecting our country from being held to ransom by dictators like Putin.
British power to the British people.
Clean hydrogen energy in South Yorkshire, in the East of England, across the river in the Wirral. Offshore wind in Scotland, Teesside, East and North Yorkshire. Solar power, growing rural communities, in the South East, South West and Midlands.
David James, to achieve this, Labour must win.
Will you chip into the General Election fund today, for a fairer, greener future tomorrow?
Heaven help me, I’ve agreed with ‘Hatey’ Katie Hopkins! You remember her, the supercapitalist, racist snob who came runner-up on The Apprenticeship and became a right-wing media pundit until her views were too toxic even for the Heil to keep her on. Since then she’s been knocking around with convicted stalker Alex Belfield, now looking at the possibility of going to the slammer. But in the video below she actually says something that I hope we can all get behind.
She criticises the way 45 million people by her estimation will be in fuel poverty this winter. This means that more than ten per cent of their income will be spent on heating. This is unsustainable. And she’s afraid that something like one million people will decide they can no longer face life in this country. She goes on to state that in her view, the energy crisis has been brought on by successive governments going green and shutting down the coal-fired power stations with nothing to replace them, at a time when India and China are building new ones. And our government has also thrown away concerns about this country’s fuel security. But, she says, even if you disagree with her views and are a complete ‘greenie’, can we all agree to unite against fuel poverty and the possibility that a million people may decide that life in this country is not worth living. And so she urges people not to pay their exorbitant energy bills.
I fully support people from both left and right coming to together against fuel poverty and put pressure on the various politicos and companies that are responsible for the present crisis. Tory icon Maggie Thatcher has had a large part in it, because the Tories closed down the British coal mines except for a very few in the ’90s or so. The argument for this was that it was supposedly cheaper to import South American coal. An additional, if not the real reason, was that she wished to break the miners’ union, the NUM, because of the way they’d defeated the Tories under Ted Heath.
But energy policy has been a mess. Cameron’s lot got the French nuclear power engineers in to build various nuclear power stations despite problems building them and the sustainability of this strategy as well. And this is apart from Jacob Rees-Mogg showing us all where his sympathies lie last week when the Beeb interviewed him on Radio 4. Instead of sympathising that the price rises were wrong when these companies were making massive profits, the Minister for the 18th Century and Bringing Back Child Chimney-Sweeps declared that those companies had only been able to pay their shareholders dividends of a few pence, and that they needed to do so as a reward on investment. Somehow I don’t think the shareholders only got a few pence as dividends. The companies’ directors certainly didn’t: they’ve pocket bonuses and salaries worth hundreds of thousands, if not a few cool millions.
I don’t really agree with people refusing to pay their energy bills, as I can see people being prosecuted as a result and going to prison, whereas it should be the energy companies and their bosses up before the beak.
Incidentally, it shows where the sympathies of the Heil are that they published an article about how the ‘don’t pay’ campaign was organised by middle-class ‘Corbynistas’. Oh those poor mega-millionaires, being persecuted by the evil middle class commie followers of the despised Trotskyite running dog Corbyn!
But even so, I agree with her that left and right need to stand together against this poverty and profiteering and look after those who may otherwise think that life is not worth living. Always assuming that she means suicide, and not people trying to flee abroad to live and so help to precipitate a demographic crisis.
There isn’t much to say about this cartoon, except that it was based on the film poster for David Lynch’s disturbing flick, Eraserhead. This is about a man with one of the weirdest hairstyles in cinema attempting to look after a weird, mutant baby, whose head resembles an eraser, hence the film’s title. It’s set in a crumbling, dystopian world, whose audio backdrop is in industrial noise. It’s been described as a horror movie, although it’s not quite that, as well as surreal, which it certainly is.
I thought it was a suitable metaphor for the Tory-Lib Dem coalition, as they’ve certainly done their best to make Britain as decadent and dystopian as possible. This is a Britain in which austerity killed 30,000 people in 2015 alone, according to researchers at Oxford University. Over a hundred thousand people are now forced to use food banks to stop themselves from starving, where 7 million people live in ‘food insecure’ households, where the family members don’t know if they’ll eat tomorrow. Families where the mothers are starving themselves in order to feed and clothe their children.
And all the while more people are forced into poverty through wage freezes, and cuts to welfare benefits. A country in which the poor, the unemployed and the disabled are vilified simply for being poor.
It’s a Britain where the NHS and the schools and universities are being privatised for the profit of private healthcare companies and school management companies, and in which uni students will graduate owing something like £40,000 worth of student debt.
This is a Britain in which homelessness is on the rise. Except you won’t see it, because local councils are passing laws to clear the homeless off their streets, so the site of them begging doesn’t annoy or upset the richer residents.
It’s a country where public services, like the trains, are being starved of investment so that their share value remains artificially high, and the bosses can award themselves big bonuses.
It’s a country where the private energy companies also keep prices high for the same reason.
It’s a country, whose natural beauty is in danger of being plundered and despoiled, as the government despises clean, renewable energy sources, and removes environmental protection legislation for the benefit of fracking companies.
It’s a country that’s heading rapidly towards dictatorship and authoritarianism, as New Labour, the Tories and their Lib Dem enablers passed legislation setting up secret courts, in which the defendant may be tried behind closed doors, with vital evidence and the identity of his accuser also kept secret, if the government decides this is required for reasons of ‘national security’. Just like the judicial system in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Stalin’s Russia.
But to make sure you don’t realise that this country is becoming a crumbling dystopia, the media do nothing but lie about how evil the left is, and how wonderful everything is under the Tories, including the BBC. A media dominated by a very few newspaper magnates – Rupert Murdoch, the Barclay Twins, Richard Desmond, Vere Harmsworth and a pair of Russian oligarchs.
So I drew David Cameron, Nick Clegg, George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith all in black and white with the same weird hairstyle as the film’s hero, played by Jack Nance, like the film’s poster.
This is the face of the Tory-Lib Dem government as it was a few years ago. But things haven’t changed since under Theresa May, who’s gone full steam ahead with all the old, wretch Tory policies.
Don’t have nightmares! Just vote for Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour poverty, to end austerity and the predatory capitalism that sustains it.
The Angry Yorkshireman has posted up yet another excellent, provocative piece. Entitled ‘Why 73% of UKIP supporters should actually vote Green’, the Angry One from the county of great cricket shows that the majority of UKIP supporters would be far better off voting for the Green party than with UKIP. Why? As I believe the Angry Northerner has already pointed out, the rank and file UKIP supporters have economic views that are the direct opposite of those of the party’s leadership. 78 per cent of them want the energy companies renationalised and 73 per cent want the rail service renationalised, according to a Yougov poll.
UKIP’s leadership, on the other hand, are more in favour of privatisation and Neo-liberal economics than the Tories. In fact one blogger – possibly the Angry One again in a previous article – referred to their policies as the Tories on stilts. If UKIP gets into power, then it really will mean the complete privatisation of the last remnants of the NHS and the education system, and the destruction of whatever’s left of the welfare state. This is basically what you’d expect from a party, many of whose politicians defected from the Right-wing of the Tory party, and which is funded by Tory donors. And, it might be added, whose predecessors include the Referendum Party of the obscenely rich and sinister James Goldsmith.
Most UKIP supporters reject their economic views. They only vote UKIP because they want Britain out of Europe.
And, as the Yorkshireman shows, the Green Party shares their scepticism. The Party has been an opponent of the Eurozone because of the way it forces a single economic policy on very different countries with very different economies. They also support a referendum on Europe because of the ‘democratic deficit’ at the heart of the EU. Legislation comes from the Commissioners, for example. It cannot come from the EU parliament itself. He supplies a series of quotes from the Greens which amply show their opposition to the EU, its Neo-Liberal economic policies, and its authoritarian, anti-democratic legislative policies. These quotations include this statement:
“Whilst the Green Party is opposed to the objectives, structure and policies of the EU as currently constituted, as long as the U.K. remains a member of the EU the Green Party will stand in elections to the European Parliament and elected Green MEPs will work for fundamental reform of the EU from within.”
He therefore recommends anyone serious about opposing the EU and ending the dominance of Neo-liberal orthodoxy over the current political consensus should vote for the Greens in the coming European elections in May 2014. These elections are held according to proportional representation, so there are no wasted votes. It’ll also be an excellent way to punish the Lib-Dems. At the moment the Greens are behind them with 6 per cent of the vote to the EU, while the Lib Dems have 8 per cent. If the Left-wing majority within UKIP, or even a few of them, switch to Green, this could end and the Lib-Dems be kicked into fifth place. On the other hand, he warns that if more people vote UKIP instead, we’ll have one or two more UKIP MEPs, who’ll either defect to the Tories like Marta Andreassen, or get kicked out of the party for spewing sexist bilge like Godfrey Bloom.
Go and read it. And if you want to send a clear message to the political class of Westminster that you are sick and fed up of Neo-Liberalism, and cannot see any point in voting Labour, then I would certainly recommend voting Green, or including the Green party as your second preference.
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 