One Eighth of Bristolians Living in ‘Fuel Poverty’

‘Points West’, the local BBC news show for the Bristol region had a little report Wednesday night on the number of people in Bristol living in ‘fuel poverty’. This term, they explains, applies to anyone, who pays more than ten per cent of their income in heating costs. And there are 25,000 of them in Bristol. This is one-eighth of the city’s population. This is higher than in the surrounding country districts, but nationally about 11 per cent of the population are hit by it. They programme then interviewed some of the people, who had a choice between heating their homes, or eating.

They also talked to a Tory MP from over the other side of the country, who is trying to introduce legislation to improve matters. This won’t address issues like low wages and benefits, which are the root cause of this. No, he just wants to make sure everyone has proper loft insulation. David Garmston, the interviewer, tried to press him about the problem of low incomes, but he refused to be drawn, merely saying that he thought that Theresa May was concerned about this issue, and returning to his main concern of getting people cheap loft insulation so that everyone has it. And there the interview ended.

1/8 of the population of Bristol, or indeed, anywhere else, in fuel poverty is too many by far. The Tory’s plan for everyone to have state-sponsored loft insulation is a good starting point, but it’s only a starting point, not a solution.

And I don’t believe that Tweezer or any of the other Tories have any interest in the plight of the poor or those on low-incomes. Indeed, Tory policy for the past eight years or so has been solidly based on keeping wages and benefits low. Wages have either been frozen, or when they have been raised, the increase is deliberately set below the level of inflation. Benefits are being cut, and new ways invented all the time to throw the poor and disabled off them.

May and her squad of privileged thugs have promised that they’ll introduce a cap on energy prices, but this will not arrive for several months. Always assuming that it will arrive at all. The Tories have form for broken promises, and this is going to be one of them. I think they only made the promise because the problem of fuel poverty was too great to ignore, and that Corbyn and the Labour party had promised to solve it by renationalising part of the electricity grid. The prospect of any assault on the precious free market and private industry absolutely terrifies them, even when it is absolutely obvious to anyone not blinded by Thatcherite ideology that the free market doesn’t work. And so to stave off the threat of nationalisation, they’ve had to make a few promises of their own to regulate energy prices. Promises that I doubt they have any intention of keeping.

It’s been estimated that if the electricity network had been kept within the state sector, electricity prices would be 10 to 20 per cent cheaper.

This could all come back in Corbyn gets in and nationalises the grid. Which will mean cheaper electricity for consumers, but reduced profits for the energy companies, who donate to the Tory party, on whose boards no doubt many Tory MPs sit, and whose interests the Tories are keen to represent, against the wellbeing of the rest of us.

Don’t believe Tory lies. If you really want to see fuel poverty reduced, vote for Corbyn and the renationalisation of the electricity industry.

Code Pink Urges US Institutions to Boycott Arms Industry

This is another important piece by RT America on attempts by American peace activists to stop the war machine that is currently killing and making homeless millions of innocents in the Middle East, as well as the courageous American and allied squaddies sent to fight in it, and which has also resulted in massive cuts to public programmes in order to fund it.

The left-wing peace group, Code Pink, has launched a conference to encourage universities and financial institutions to boycott and divest from the arms industry. The group’s leader, Medea Benjamin, states that the reason these wars have dragged on so long is because they are incredibly profitable to the arms manufacturers. Every time Trump goes to Saudi Arabia, for example, to announce a multi-million dollar sale of armaments, the share price of companies like Lockheed Martin goes up. So, she says, they are simply following the money and trying to get institutions to stop funding and supporting these ‘merchants of misery’.

Vijay Prashad, the director of International Studies at Trinity College, states that even though millions are being killed in these wars, there is no accountability, no outrage, no pity for the victims and no sense that anybody should be dragged before an international tribunal. Instead, the victims of these wars themselves are blamed, as is happening now in Syria, while the reality is that these wars are destroying country after country.

The Black American activist, Ajamu Baraka, who was the Green Party’s presidential nominee, also makes the point that in order to fund this war machine, the American state is cutting vital welfare services and programmes. These include those for the homeless, support for education, such aid for the poor to go to college, environmental protection policies will be cut, energy assistance for the poor and elderly will also be cut, all in order to find the money to provide the £696 billion granted to the US military. It’s money that has been supplied at the expense of poor people’s basic needs.

The clip ends with Medea Benjamin stating that the conference is designed to get people together to say ‘enough is enough’ and that institutions no longer want to make profits from the military and their wars.

All of this is correct. People in America, as well as those over here, are seeing welfare budgets slashed partly to provide funding for the continued wars in the Middle East and elsewhere. These are not being fought for democracy, or the defence of the West and its allies against evil dictators. They are being fought to provide profits for American arms contractors, who provide millions of dollars in funding for American politicos. Iraq wasn’t invaded because it had weapons of mass destruction. That was a lie. It was invaded because the Saudi-US oil industry wanted the Iraqi oil reserves and its industry. American multinationals also coveted Iraqi state enterprises, and Israel hated the aid Saddam Hussein was giving to the Palestinians.

And the same is true of Syria. The neocons want to destroy it, because its an ally of Iran and Russia and a potential threat to Israel. They and a group of Arab states, including Qatar and Jordan, also want to oust Assad because he’s blocking the construction of a massive gas pipeline, which will stretch from Qatar to Turkey. In fact, these nations even told the Americans they’d pay for the war if America attacked Syria.

And the neocons have already destroyed Libya, they’d like to destroy Somalia, Sudan and Iran. Hence Trump’s step in decertifying the Iranian nuclear deal with Obama.

General Smedley Butler described all this back in the 1930s in his book, War Is A Racket, detailing the way American big business had profited from the First World War. As for the poor suffering because of the need to cut services to fund the military, I think it was president Truman, who described it has taking food from the mouths of the poor, and denying the construction of schools and hospitals.

I’ve already said in my last article about the revelation that the CIA was staging fake academic conferences as part of its campaign against the Iranian nuclear programme, that Lobster had published an article expressing similar concerns about the way some of Britain’s universities were also supporting the British war machine. Millions are being plunged into poverty and death, including American and British squaddies, all for the profits of the merchants of death and big business like Haliburton. It’s time for this obscenity to end, and universities and investment houses to pull out of supporting the war machine.

RT on House of Lord’s Opposition to £200 million Going to Syrian Opposition

This clip from RT covers the opposition in the House of Lord’s debate over the British government spending £200 million of taxpayer’s money on the Syrian opposition groups. Only £14 million of this money was for ‘political purposes’. One member of the Lords asks the obvious question about what the rest of the money is for. A government spokesman replies that it is to help the Syrian people stand on their own feet, and that £39 million has gone towards roads and such. Another peer states that the British people would be outraged if they knew how much money was being spent in this way, and feels it would be better spent against fuel poverty in the UK.

Baroness Caroline Cox argued that we should not be sending this money to the Syrian opposition groups, as they are not moderate and will use the money to purchase arms that will be used against us. Interviewed by RT afterwards, she states that she has gone to Syria to see what the situation was really like there, where she met President Assad. She states that there was much opposition to her when she came back, as the government really didn’t want to go, arguing it was unsafe. But she felt she had to go after working with women and children, who had fled the war. She states that she certainly does not condone many of the things Assad has done, but she went to see what the Syrian people wanted.

Cox is quite right to object to this money being spent supporting the opposition groups. They are by no means moderate. They include al-Nusra, which used to be the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda, and ISIS. They aim to set up another hardline Islamist state. Syria at the moment, while not a democracy, is a secular state. If the opposition groups take over, they will begin exterminating Christians, Shi’a and moderate Sunni Muslims, and any other religious or secular group that they considered the enemies of Islam, just as they have done elsewhere in Iraq. The weapons they use will be passed on to other Islamist militants, who will use it against us.

The claim that this is to promote a genuinely democratic regime in Syria is a lie. The Likudniks and neocons have been pressing for regime change in Syria for a long time, not least because Assad is supported by Russia and Iran. They, and an alliance of various Arab countries, also want to topple Assad because he is blocking the construction of an oil pipeline which they would like to run from Qatar to Turkey. Assad has refused on the grounds that it would damage the oil interests of his Iranian and Russian allies.

We should not be funding the Syrian opposition. They represent only more sectarian violence and butchery. If they win, the country will destroyed, just like Iraq and Libya. But it will allow the oil multinationals to loot the country, just as they did in Iraq.