Unity! against austerity

Communist Party Workers of all lands, unite!A

pril

2016

THE SYSTEM of capitalistexploitation and inequalitylies exposed. One law for the

rich and another for the rest of us.Cameron’s family fortune is tuckedaway in a tax havens along with£trillions of rent, interest and profitswhich the rich have salted away.

Meanwhile our wages and savingsare held hostage to an unendinggovernment programme of wage freezeand spending cuts.

Osbourne’s Budget was packed withgiveaways for big business and banks.

Corporation tax is to be cut to 17per cent by 2020 even though Britain’s20 percent rate is already the lowest inthe entire G20.

Osborne’s pretence thattransnational tax avoiders are to betargeted was exposed the moment helet Google off the hook. Now the wholeworld knows how his Eton schoolmatesstand downstream to a fortune inuntaxed wealth.

Capital gains tax is also to be cut —the headline rate from 28 per cent to 20per cent and the basic rate from 18 to10 per cent in another bonanza for therichest. Business rates are to fall, withcalculations switched from CPIinflation to RPI inflation, and morecouncil cuts are coming our way.

Osborne says in future that allcouncil funds are to be raised locally.Another measure to ringfence the richand dump on working class areas.

How councils will make up for the

resulting losses without far greaterrevenue raising powers is notmentioned — because they won’t. Cuemore bed-blocking in hospitals aselderly patients cannot be safelyreleased due to gutted local careservices, more library and youth clubclosures, more women’s refuge andchildren’s centre closures — the furtherdestruction of communities.

Tory dogma dominates governmentthinking. Public ownership of steel isruled out and an industry vital forBritain’s economic revival as amanufacturing nation is left to marketforces while well paid and skilled jobsare abandoned. Alarmingly, even someLabour figures, including that EUretread Stephen Kinnock MP appear torule out public ownership.

From outlawing ethical investmentby local authorities to gerrymanderingparliamentary constituencies toattacking opposition funding andseeking to cripple trade unions, thisgovernment is dismantling democracy.

This was the first Osborne Budgetto be answered by a socialist leader ofthe Labour Party. The rejection of theentire austerity programme stood instark contrast to five years of mixedmessages from Labour over the lifetimeof the coalition government.

Recent developments in Laboureconomic policy show a renewedemphasis on public and co-operativeownership. Millions agree, includingmany Tory voters.

And John McDonnell’s fiscal rule,while clearly an act of positioning tochallenge Tory myths that Labourspending broke the economy, allowsthe party to move beyond Keynesianinspired sticking plasters and to look atthe fundamental causes of injusticesand inequalities in the British economy— which are not about how muchmoney we have but about who’s got it.

The Labour leadership remainsfragile, with significant hostility withinthe PLP, and the labour movement hasyet to understand the scale of the taskthat faces it — or the severity of theconsequences if it fails.

It is time we took on this challenge.The People’s Assembly stands at the

heart of community struggles to resistthe austerity of Osborne. TheCommunist Party is committed tostrengthening the People’s Assembly,which must become the street wing of alabour movement that can help realisethe true potential of the Corbynrevolution.

The Communist Party backs thejunior doctors and all health workers.We welcome the call from the teachers’unions for a combined effort of healthand education workers.

We stand with the housing activistsin London and throughout the countrywho are challenging homelessness, thesales of social housing and sky highrents. Communists call for controlledrents and massive programme ofcouncil housebuilding.

An expensive threatto peace and jobs

THE COST of the Tridentnuclear missile system is£167 billion over its lifetime.

Scotland’s annual share of this costwould be roughly £500m – almostexactly the size of the cuts beingimposed on local government overthe next few years.

The Trident nuclear missile system hasno realistic military purpose in terms ofthe threats currently facing this country. Itis simply a symbol of Britain’s status (asubordinate one) in the US alliance andNATO. Its renewal escalates the nuclearstakes and sets back the process ofdisarmament. It creates danger not peace.

The joint CND-STUC study in 2007found that the number of jobs sustainedby the nuclear-armed submarines inScotland at Faslane and Coulport isaround 500. All these workers couldeasily be transferred to other functionswithin the Faslane base or in the localeconomy. By contrast proceeding withTrident renewal will cost many morejobs – not least in the defence sector.Two years ago BAE were budgeting onbuilding 13 Type 26 frigates on the Clyde.Now the number has been cut to eight.How many less jobs will this mean forthe Clyde yards over the next twodecades ?

Communists call for theestablishment of fully-funded NuclearArms Conversion Agency within a remitto ensure that alternative work wasfound for the shipbuilders and engineersat Barrow and Derby and thoseemployed at Faslane. In the United Statessuch redeployment of defence workers ismandatory on the Federal government.

In Britain it could supply the skillsneed for redeveloping industrial capacityand creating a world-beating renewablesindustry. Trident is dangerous andwasteful. Cancellation would releasefunds desperately needed elsewhere.

Trident

Our health, homes,jobs and education

unity!

The Morning Star is the world’s onlyEnglish language socialist daily paper.Founded in 1930 as the Daily Worker, itis today run by a co-operative, thePeople’s Press Printing Society whosemanagement committee includes eightnational trade unions. The paper carriesarticles by leading figures from theLabour Party, Greens, Plaid, SNP and thetrade union movement. It provides day

to day coverage of the fight forworkplace rights and the struggle againstthe cuts and the Tory government. Until his election as Labour leaderJeremy Corbyn was a weekly columnist.The paper is available at all Co-op shopsand at RS McColls and Martins and canbe ordered at any newsagent.It is also available on line at

www.morningstaronline.co.uk Why the labourmovement needs are-think on the EUBACK IN THE 1980s when the trade union movement faced amassive onslaught from the Tories, Jacques Delors as presidentof the European Union Commission, spoke of trade unions associal partners. Over the following ten years he sought to givecontent to the term ‘Social Europe’ by introducing measureswhich gave the same basic rights on health and safety, workinghours, works councils and gender equality at work to allworkers across the EU. These measures were of significant assistance for trade

unionists in Britain and won many to give wholeheartedsupport to the EU as an institution – even though traditionallythe Labour Party had opposed the EU from Atlee and Bevan onto Michael Foot, Barbara Castle and Tony Benn.These measures were, however, directly accompanied by the

first great push to secure an EU Single Market: opening up localgovernment to private procurement and requiring publicutilities, rails, gas, electricity, communications and ferries, to bebroken up into competing and privatised units. It was claimed that this new Single Market would generate,

through the elimination of inefficiencies, massive new levels ofdemand and create five million new jobs – even thoughworkers would need to move on to where the work wasneeded. At the same time rules were laid down under the Maastricht

Treaty that banned governments facing economic crisis fromadopting Keynesian policies of deficit financing to prevent risingunemployment.Instead unemployment itself was meant to overcome crisis

by reducing wages and pushing workers to wherever labourmarkets remained tight.This has remained the basic economic principle of the EU

ever since and had been progressively tightened. In 2012 theEU Fiscal Compact banned ANY deficit at all. This is what theEuropean Congress of Trade Unions said at the time:Running as a red line through the programme of Economic

Governance is the idea of turning wages into the maininstrument of adjustment: currency devaluations (which are nolonger possible inside the Euro Area) are to be replaced by adevaluation of pay in the form of deflationary wage cuts. Toachieve this wage ‘flexibility’, labour market institutions whichprevent wages from falling are perceived as being a ‘rigidity'which should be eliminated.This is also why the EU has moved to dismantle collective

bargaining structures across all the ‘debtor’ nations and whythe EU Court of Justice has banned trade union action toenforce the same collectively bargained rates for local and‘posted’ workers. EU economics are neo-liberal. They require competition

between workers to be maximised. That’s why solidarity andcollective bargaining are off the agenda. So equally is economicdemocracy: the ability of parliaments to limit the powers of bigbusiness. This is why the movement needs a rethink. There is no basic

difference between the principles of the EU today and TTIP.

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Communist Review 79

Spring 2016theory and discussion journal of theCommunist Party

The 1916 Rising: A risen peoplechallenges the empireEugene McCartanState monopoly capitalism Part 2Gretchen Binus, Beate Landefeld andAndreas WehrMarxism versus reformism in the1926 General StrikeJack CohenPCF: The French anomalyJimmy JancovichWomen workers and the tradeunions: Review: Mary Davis

Global education reformEdited by Gawain Little, foreword byChristine Blower General SecretaryNational Union of Teachers£7.99 (+£2 p&p), 126 pages,

Building an economy forthe people An alternativeeconomic and political strategy £6.95 (+£1 p&p)

The Empire and Ukraine the Ukraine crisis in its context by Andrew Murray £11.95 (+£1.50 p&p) 138 pages

BOOKS FROMmanifestomanifestopress.org.uk

THE BATTLE FOR THELABOUR MOVEMENTMorning Star pamphlet

£2 frommorningstaronline.co.uk

Marching is not enough. The battle tochange policies takes many forms, allimportant, all necessary. But the battle to change the economic

basis of society, to do away withunemployment, house the homeless,safeguard our health service, win equalrights and free education and end warsmeans we must end the capitalist system.‘The aim of the Communist Party is to

achieve a socialist Britain in which themeans of production, distribution andexchange will be socially owned andutilised in a planned way for the benefit ofall.

This necessitates a revolutionarytransformation of society, ending theexisting capitalist system of exploitationand replacing it with a socialist society inwhich each will contribute according toability and receive according to workdone.Socialist society creates the conditions

for advance to a fully communist form ofsociety in which each will receive accordingto need.’ Communist Party ProgrammeIf you want the working class in power

your next step must be to join theCommunist Party. If not you, who? If not now, when?

Your next step

Stop the War and its criticsby Andrew Murray £4.95 (+£1.50 p&p) 34 pages