The Ultimate Theft

Posted on May 28, 2013 by Pam Field @earwiggle

How Britain’s Family Silver was Stolen Through Open Doors

The Ultimate Theft

Growing up in the fifties it was customary to leave the back door open in many homes. Friends and neighbours would pop in and out, sharing resources and helping each other out. Material possessions were few.

Such practice is unusual today. Locks and alarms are fitted to houses, cars and even garden sheds. We live in a world of envy; we live in a materialist world where things matter, and it seems people don’t any more. Advertisers feed on greed, along the lines of “Be the Envy of your Neighbourhood, Buy Me!”.

A mobile phone is safely tucked away. Insurance companies grow ever richer by our need for Things, our need to keep Things safe, and our mistrust of one another. Front doors are firmly locked against potential thieves – that’s everyone as no one trusts anyone any more. Meanwhile, through the back door, those assets we treasure most are stolen. Theft of our most basic needs, and of our right to access them is The Ultimate Theft. It is no accident that social housing, public utilities – Water (1) and Energy (2), transport (3), Elderly Care (4), The NHS (5), Hospitals (6), Schools (7), the Post Office (8), Fire Service (9), Prisons (10), Probation Service (11) – everything is being wrenched away from us, handed over to private Bankers, at home and abroad, in order that the rich elite can accumulate riches more than they can ever need. It’s real, it’s still happening now. We can ask why and how it has happened, and what we can do to stop it, for stop it we must.

What drives the Ultimate Theft?

Why do the very rich who possess more than they can ever need crave more and more? Like a drug gives a false happiness, addiction is a replacement for some missing need.

You may recall The Who’s lyrics from Tommy:

“The Who‘s lyrics proved so spot-on that a pleasurable dopamine hit convinced me to feature them in a second post about self-actualisation”

From: The Dopamine Project (12)

“I’m free, I’m free, and freedom tastes of reality
But you’ve been told many times before
Messiahs point you to the door
No one had the guts to leave the temple.” : The Who

The glitch that keeps us from reaching our true potential can be traced to primitive ancestors who cultivated natural cravings into addictions to food, sex, safety, power, acceptance, approval, attention, esteem, and status. To complicate matters, our more recent ancestors added unnatural addictions to dopamine-triggering substances, beliefs, and behaviors, e.g. money, religion, and drugs. Then they bequeathed their addictions to newborns who were indoctrinated by societies controlled by of out-of-control money, power, status, and/or religion addicts.

Since we’re talking about the same dopamine that junkies trigger with heroin, it’s no surprise that the symptoms are the same, i.e. self-deception, denial, and the dishonesty that allows addicts to continue doing the only thing addicts care about = vigilantly protecting dopamine flow.

Freedom tastes of reality = honesty = self-actualization.
Dopamine addiction tastes of delusion = dishonesty = denial of self-actualisation.

George Monbiot observes that “The politics of Envy is keenest among the very rich. (13)” The means justifies the end. There is no pleasure in attainment and as drug addicts self control is minimal.

In order to grant the rich these pleasures, the social contract is reconfigured. The welfare state is dismantled. Essential public services are cut so that the rich may pay less tax. The public realm is privatised, the regulations restraining the ultra-wealthy and the companies they control are abandoned, and Edwardian levels of inequality are almost fetishised.

Think Left’s article “Increasing the sum of global well-being should be the ultimate and arching for every politician and party (14) ” emphasises that unregulated markets do not make people happy. Indeed, it seems very few people achieve happiness from unbridled capitalism. It is like a computer virus let loose, like a parasite which, while neglecting its host’s well-being is doomed. Parasites are what the very rich are. They make nothing. They do nothing. They just consume, and leave their toxic waste in their wake. In consuming their host which produces or modifies necessary resources, they cannot thrive. So, the driving factor of the ultimate theft is an obsession, a madness in pursuit of unattainable happiness. Such a habit has been proven to be a disaster to the world and its inhabitants which is totally out of control. Like the emperor who wears no clothes, we all know it is flawed, but no one dares say so.

How was the Ultimate Theft Achieved?

The Ultimate Theft has been premeditated and manipulated. It has been meticulously planned since Thatcher and Reagan started their Neoliberalist Experiment. There is considerable evidence that the current government, whilst claiming to protect front line services had this intent. Think Left’s “Who said the NHS will be shown No Mercy (15)”, and the Independent’s recent “Secret Memo shows Michael Gove’s plan for Privatisation of Academies (7) ” refer to this, and there are countless other examples of evidence. Lack of clarity, and vagueness in plans is typical, and since election manifestos did not make such policies clear, the Coalition have no mandate.

Clause 39 of The Magna Carta, in 1215. (16)

states: “We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right”. The Guardian reports that some privatisation of the Courts System (17) has already been planned, and there is confusion as to what will be sold off.

The justice secretary is a huge fan of outsourcing, and has a talent for ignoring troublesome evidence, however compelling. He also regards anything which smacks of rights – constitutional or human – as an irritant, an outmoded obstacle to thrusting reform, and to be dispatched as swiftly as possible. Certainly an 800-year-old prohibition on the sale of “justice or right” is not going to stand in his way. Not when there is money to be made by big business.

One tactic to achieve the Ultimate Theft was to divide the working class by brainwashing them into believing that it was in their interests to buy shares into something they already owned (18). Like Pyramid Selling, the politicians themselves are bought by lobbyists to adopt policies to which they themselves have a conflict of interests – and yet the reality is that everyone is doomed by the continuation of a capitalist system which cannot work.

George Monbiot: continues: Politicians justify these changes, when not reciting bogus arguments about the deficit, with the incentives for enterprise that they create.

Behind that lies the promise or the hint that we will all be happier and more satisfied as a result. But this mindless, meaningless accumulation cannot satisfy even its beneficiaries, except perhaps – and temporarily – the man wobbling on the very top of the pile.

The myth that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector is yet another myth which we are invited to believe. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary. Indeed, the simple fact is that the first responsibility of private companies is to their shareholders, and so the quality of service is secondary (Think Left Public Service or Private Profit (19). The attempt to justify this is to frame the argument that a service is failing, and then seek to take it over.
Governments cite “research” by Right Wing ‘Think Tanks’ funded by the rich, such as this recent article which justifies prison privatisation (20). The Huffington Past articles contradicts the claim. “ Privatisation will not Rehabilitate our Prisons (10)”
The attempts to control the means of communication of the Press and the media is not new. The BBC is in itself owned by the people of Britain, yet did not and does not present a true picture of the plans to privatise public services such as the NHS.
Creating distractions in the “News” is a well-used tactic, populist ideas of relive unimportance, celebrities and TV shows grab the headlines, burying bad news and hiding the Truth.
Alarming and frightening the public is often a deliberate tactic. “The Shock Doctrine” (21) or disaster politics (22) will have people running into line, like lemmings off a cliff. As Herman Goering (23) observed “The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peace makers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country”.
It is a natural instinct for a social animal such as mankind to feel pride in one’s family, in ones’s community. It may be 1.8 million years since some of us began to migrate out of Africa (24) , and we became divided, but today, communication and travel has brought us together again. Politicians abuse the idea of patriotism for their own ends (Remember the Falklands?), and so divide the working people, so each blames the other. I have heard UKIP supporters claim that there are too many people in this country. There is plenty of land. The truth is that there are not enough jobs, because the global capitalists just want the cheapest labour available. Oxfam states (25) that the richest 100 billionaires could put an end to global poverty four times over.
Then there is the argument that we cannot afford public services because we cannot afford it, because of the Deficit. They say that Gordon Grown spent all the money. This is an argument based on lies, reinforced by the media (see Osborne and Cameron’s big deficit myth(26). It is the banks who are seen to have developed such a powerful system , a plutocracy that they can bring down an entire country at will. (Gordon Brown didn’t spend all the money- the Banks did! (27)

The same applies to collective growth. Governments today have no vision but endless economic growth. They are judged not by the number of people in employment – let alone by the number of people in satisfying, pleasurable jobs – and not by the happiness of the population or the protection of the natural world. George Monbiot

One of the first actions of this parliament was to set up a fixed term parliament. Unable to achieve an overall majority, they knew it would be a one term parliament.

Nevertheless, their actions now are planning for further cuts beyond the next General Election. Signing up to US/EU trade agreements would mean that the sell off of valued services such as our NHS would be lost forever. The warning from US officials is, if Britain leaves the EU, US trade agreements would be a risk. A Europe signing such agreements will surrender But in return, Europe would have to give up existing protections on its agriculture, film industry and public services. (Guardian). (28)

Where is the democratic process? The British people did not vote for this and do not want this. It must be openly discussed by our media. Is it?

The Ultimate Solution:

The madness is unsustainable. Money, by itself has no value, or meaning. It is just a token by which we can register exchange of labour, resources or skills. We can do the same by bartering – see example (29) If I grow some cabbages for your table, will you teach my child to read? These days, money is just a figure on a computer somewhere in the world. If all the computers in the world were to crash, would we then starve? It would depend on the labour of those of us who can grow food as to whether we can eat. Bankers would be redundant. They wouldn’t be missed!

The Labour Party must make a break with the madness of neoliberalism which Blair had continued , and be truthful about the deficit, and debt. Labour must pledge to reverse the privatisation of public utilities and services. Labour must work for tax justice, put an end to tax avoidance and support country-by-country-reporting, if not go it alone. Our elected representatives must work for the interests of people, not rich bankers. Britain does not need to accept control from global banks. This is not democracy. With our own currency, it would be possible to wipe out any debts by a Modern Jubilee as suggested by Steve Keen. (30)That is the way to put this at an end.

The modern “debt jubilee” is characterised as “quantitative easing for the public”. It has been boiled down to a procedure where the central bank does not create new money by buying the sovereign debt of the government. Instead, it takes an arbitrary number, writes a check for that number, and deposits it in the bank account of every individual in the nation. Debtors must use the newly-created money to pay down or pay off debt. Those who are not in debt can use it as a free windfall to spend or “invest” as they see fit.

Modern Germany was built on a debt jubilee, this is the way to end the madness. In recovery, we should be planning for full employment, democratically owned and monitored public services, and building a just and more equal society, as Atlee’s government began in the Spirit of 1945. We need a new Spirit of 2015.

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

(Dopamine Project) “The self-deceptions, denials, and dishonesty we “re-lie” on to protect dopamine flow keep us from being here now, self-actualizing, experiencing true freedom, and fully comprehending what it means to be human beings sharing an impossible, incomprehensible, mystical, unfathomable, amazing, spiritual experience.”

References and Further Reading

“Tories ousted by Labour coup?” Worcester or Westminster?

Posted on May 22, 2013 by Pam Field @earwiggle

Tories Ousted? What Coup? ….Westminster or Worcester….?

Something interesting happened recently in Worcester – The Labour Party, Lib Dems and Greens formed a coalition and ousted the Conservative leader who had led the council for seven years. This was because Worcester woman and man returned a council with No Overall Control.

During angry exchanges in the council chamber, deposed council deputy leader Councillor Marc Bayliss lambasted it as an “unprincipled coup by a new socialist alliance”, claiming it was about “national ideology, not the performance of the administration or leader.”“What the party opposite could not achieve through the ballot box, they are now forming through a shady deal,” he said.

Fellow Tory Councillor Andy Roberts, who lost his £5,985 role as cabinet member for finance, said it was a “shameless” agreement done behind their backs.

Some might be surprised at the reaction considering the situation following the General Election when there was no party in parliament with overall control. “Shameless agreement behind backs?” Who can forget the days following the General Election when it was unclear who would be the governing party? It seems that those Worcester Tories cannot see the parallels between Worcester and Westminster. Some might say that rather than a government with no overall control, this is a government out of control. Certainly, they are pushing through policies from no party’s manifesto.

The Tories act as if they had won overall control, a working majority. The Liberal Democrat vote was boosted by some centre left voters, who had trusted Clegg’s pledges. Those voters see little difference now between either members of the Coalition, the social democrat element of the LibDems having been engulfed by a government more right wing than Thatcher. The Tories realise this, and, clutching at straws hope for a Clegg replacement which might retain those votes which enabled this fudged coalition.

(New Statesman: Conservatives for Cable – Why the Tories want a new Lib Dem leader)

If it is to win the next election, Cameron’s party needs a Lib Dem leader who can win over Labour voters in Tory-Labour marginals. At present, after the defection of around a third of 2010 Lib Dem voters to Labour, the Tories stand to lose dozens of seats at the next election (Corby was an early warning) – there are 37 Conservative-Labour marginals where the third place Lib Dem vote is more than twice the margin of victory.

The suffering inflicted by this government will not be forgotten so easily by the electorate. What impact have the Liberal Democrats had on the direction of this extreme right wing government? What principles have been thrown away at the cost of power? During that seemingly interminable weekend immediately after the election and before the Coalition agreement, there were contradictions. Shirley Williams warned Nick Clegg about going into a coalition with the Conservatives. Paddy Ashdown spoke on Andrew Marr show, some excerpts here..

“The nation has spoken and in so far as we can determine what it’s said, it’s said you guys are … we’re going to give none of you power to govern alone; you’ve got to learn the habit of working together….”

“We want to preserve frontline services… “

“I don’t believe that anybody can now establish a new government who is deaf to the calls from the British people for a reform to our political system.”

Vince Cable said in December 2010, that he could quit the Coalition. Think Left’s “contradictions of Liberal Democrat Opportunism” examined the focus of Liberal Democrats on power over principle. Many Liberal Democrat voters and grassroots now look to other parties especially Labour, and must wonder why the party they worked for at the General Election have voted for a Bill leading to the break up and privatisation of the National Health Service? This was sold for a referendum on AV which was duly lost. Was this really a price worth paying?

“Why do the Lib Dems stay in the Coalition?”

We might well ask this question following the failures of AV and House of Lords reform, that being in government has not given them a ‘sufficient legacy’. John Kampfner’s extraordinary piece in the Guardian ‘The Lib Dems are in a stronger position than the Tories – but hide it well” – Cameron needs Clegg more than Clegg needs Cameron – so why won’t the Lib Dem leader show some muscle?’

The much vaunted Pupil premium was supposed to be ‘the reddest of the Liberal Democrats’ red lines’ with an additional £2.5 bn for the education of disadvantaged children. But, in fact, the pupil premium was ‘robbing Peter, to pay Paul’… the majority being recycled from within the education department’s budget’ – largely from the abolishing of EMA.

Another LD ‘achievement’ was to raise the personal allowance, ‘taking the poorest out of taxation’, but Patrick Collinson in the Guardian dismissed it as an ‘empty gesture’ As income goes up benefits will go down, and a million more basic-rate taxpayers are set to move into 40% tax band.

Lib-Dems claimed that they went into Coalition with the Tories because the UK was on the verge of becoming like Greece, and that the Labour government had irresponsibly overspent on public services. Not only was the national debt inflated by the of banking losses rather than by public spending , but this would never have been the case for the UK, with its own currency.

The popularity for the Lib Dems in 2010 by the younger generation, and by students in particular, was no doubt boosted by the pledge to abolish tuition fees, yet we learn Clegg intended to abandon the pledge well before the election.

Lib Dems would do well to consider these arguments from Hucknall’s Councillor Jim Grundy, against their support of this Tory government. The recent by-election in South Shields showed the measure of anger from the electorate, as the Lib Dems were annihilated.

Every day that the Liberal Democrats continue to support this government, they let down the British people. Crossing the floor of the House of Commons might just earn them some respect before they inevitably suffer death throes and subsequent extinction.

The Mysterious Disappearance of Jobs and Skills

Posted on May 20, 2013 by Pam Field @earwiggle

The Mysterious Disappearance of Jobs and Skills

When Norman Tebbit made a notorious comment that jobs could be easily found merely by hopping onto a bike, he made an assumption that it would solve unemployment because that’s father what his did, apparently. He repeated such advice this February by saying if Eastern Europeans migrate for work, why can’t the Brits?

How starkly this contrasts with what we are hearing Tory back benchers cry in the wake recent success of UKIP! Are we seeing a sudden surge to the extreme political right and 1930s divisions in society as ordinary people blame one another for high rates of unemployment, increasing poverty and unaffordable housing?

Deborah Orr (Guardian) comments: People are told EU migrants steal jobs – in truth bosses want cheap labour . People are told that immigrants stole their jobs. In truth, it was employers who wanted a ready supply of workers unused to the living conditions that it took the second world war for the ordinary people of Britain to achieve. The goal of neoliberal globalisation is supposedly a redistribution of wealth around the planet. It also, as the EU itself is discovering, redistributes poverty.

History has led to migrations of the workforce. In Cornwall, tin and copper had been mined for 4,000 years. Closure of the majority of Cornish tin mines forced whole communities to migrate in the 19^th Century, leaving behind empty villages, graveyards surrounding them (Gwennap) the evidence that communities were once busy with industry.

Cornish tin miners faced

increasing competition

from alluvial mines abroad

Families were forced to move – or else starve. The simple fact was that the mine owners closed the mines, not because there was no longer a need for copper or tin. It’s because there was more money to be made elsewhere. Cheaper labour makes those looking to line their own pockets to ignore the plight on those who have come to depend on them – because they had the power to do so.

In the 20^th century a few mines survived, but the shortage of work put pressure on the working people. A row of differential pay rates resulted in a strike which pitched miner against miner, family against family, and only ended with the onset of WW2 and the greater demand for tin. Cornwall has never really recovered from the decline of this millennia old industry, and poverty exists there today.

How and when did these mine owners come to own the land and mines?

Why did such a few people have power over the many?

Who benefited from metals extracted from mines?

Removal of workers’ autonomy, their rights to sell labour for a living wage leads not only to their downfall, but that of everyone. The very rich may have the power to determine who shall have work and who shall not, yet their own very existence requires the same basic needs, provided by those workers. The race to the bottom, the search for the cheapest, poorest labour is fundamentally flawed, only a fool will argue otherwise.

Mankind’s survival has always involved work or labour – growing food, making clothes, caring for the community. Much of this work did not involve payment. Because of a division of labour, we can trade our skills, each contributing and receiving. Having a tradeable skill empowers us. If we can no longer cook a meal without a ready meal or grow our own food, we become yet more dependent on the supermarkets and their global supplies and speculation.

If we can no longer make garments, we buy-in fashion produced cheaply and unethically, thousands of miles away. In Bangladesh, cheap clothes come at human cost as health and safety of workers has no importance resulting in a deadly fire where hundreds died.

Yet, even now, the ConDemNation Coalition government aim to return UK to Victorian conditions, and have already removed workers’ right to health safety in the UK workplaces, and abolished the agricultural workers wages board. (See 114 year workers’ rights scrapped by Coalition government) Then UKIP, clearly trading on fear of unemployment and poverty, do not speak for working people. They are no party, but a bundle of individuals with extreme, bizarre attitudes, for example, Geoffrey Bloom, who advocates that employers should not employ women of childbearing age.

Deskilling a population disempowers them, to say nothing of lack of self-respect, independence and the prospects of lives in poverty. Thatcherite policies of attacking trade unions, decimating British manufacturing, closure of coal mines, ship-building, car industries, clothing and so on, led to massive unemployment, and broken communities, just as in the Cornish tin mines. Even food is being imported unnecessarily, for cheapness, and recent the recent horse meat scandal exposed the dangers of lack on control and monitoring. Lack of investment in education and training will not create a skilled workforce.

The Labour Party are setting out plans for full employment

“For Labour, that goal of full employment has always been the foundation for getting our country back on its feet. It was for Atlee’s Labour. It was for New Labour. It will be once more for One Nation Labour. Today the goal of full employment is important for a very simple reason. The faster we return to full employment, the faster we can pay down our debt. And the faster we can put the “something for something” back in to social security.

The Tories’ problem isn’t just that they are failing, but that they lost a belief in full employment many years ago, and never rediscovered it. That means more money spent on unemployment, so there is less to go around for working people and less for care.

After three years of failure we’ve got to find new ways to break out of this viscous circle. Seventy years ago, we set out a new path to full employment. Just as the Beveridge Report is a still a good roadmap for today, so too is the 1944 White Paper on Full Employment. It teaches us to be radical reformers to bring down the costs of social security; building exports; supporting public investment; fanning consumer demand – and taking determined action on jobs. It is a long road, but tackling poor places would be a big first step to getting our country back to full employment.’

From the New Statesman

If the British electorate are concerned about unemployment, they also have a very clear sense of injustice. They see bankers’ bonuses, they see politicians benefit from lobbyists, seeking to line their own pockets rather than serving the people, as they were elected to do. This week Ed Miliband’s Labour Party has pledged to address the Tax Justice.

He’s specifically committed to:

■ Pursue a new global system where multinationals must publish their revenues, profits and other key corporate information useful to revenue authorities in each country in which they operate.

■ Force multinationals to publish such information in the UK even if international agreement cannot be found on the issue, as they do in Denmark.

■ Make it a legal requirement for multinationals operating in the UK to disclose details of any tax avoidance schemes they are using globally.

■ Seek reforms to “transfer pricing” rules to stop companies from shuffling money to other parts of their firm based in tax havens in return for spurious services.

■ Open up the ownership of companies sited in Britain’s tax havens to the UK revenue authorities, but also seek to allow developing countries access to such information.

Whether the popularity of UKIP is a blip, a protest, or anger, it certainly represents an alienated electorate. Those in work feel they are working for the benefit of the rich and powerful. Those without work have little hope of finding work which pays a living wage. Women are hit hard by childcare costs, and equality with men has taken a backward step. Cuts hitting the disabled will make it more difficult, if not impossible for them to work, and those who are old or ill live in fear. It is time to do things differently, let us hope for a socialist Labour government, with policies which will unite people once again.

References and Further reading

For the Benefit of the Conservative Party – “FOR SALE – Local Hospital and Schools “

Posted on May 9, 2013 by Pam Field @earwiggle

For Sale – Hospitals and Schools

For the Benefit of the Conservative Party

It is a testament to the Labour movement that ordinary people accept the norm that they have a right to education and free health care. Indeed, it is such an intrinsic part of their lives, that many have become complacent, younger generations almost believing it was always thus, when in fact this has all happened within living memory, and can be forgotten just as quickly.

“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few. The manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day or it is rotten. The living sap of today outgrows the dead rind of yesterday. The hand entrusted with power becomes, either form human depravity or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continued oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot; only by unintermitted agitation can a people be sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity” (1)

So while, we go about ordinary lives, quietly, innocently even, working, bringing up families… a government without a majority is taking advantage, by stealth.

Health:

Reports show more hospitals are considering private ownership. My own local hospital is Weston General Hospital. ”Weston Area Health NHS Trust has announced that, as a small DGH (district general hospital), it is unable to achieve the Foundation Trust status that the Health and Social Care Act 2012 (HSCA) mandates that all NHS acute (hospital) Trusts must achieve by April next year. As a result, it is inviting ’expressions of interest’ from the ‘health market’:

The Guardian has reported how conditions in private hospitals have deteriorated so much that NHS have stooped referring their patients there due to damning reports on lack of basic hygiene. This is a national scandal and must be halted.

The Mount Alvernia hospital in Surrey, run by BMI Healthcare, one of Britain’s biggest private healthcare providers, agreed to suspend surgery earlier this week after the damning Care Quality Commission (CQC) report.

Care failures cited by the CQC report included a surgeon who operated without gloves in blood-stained shirt sleeves, and a child who was not seen by a paediatrician for seven hours despite their condition deteriorating.

Education

The Coalition’s practice to ensure privatisation is to force schools to become academies, either by bribery of head teachers, of unjustified OFSTED criticism, claiming schools are failing.

The Local Schools’s Network reports how individuals have been able to benefit at least half a million pounds and probably much more, while those working with children see their pay frozen. Such “consultants” can set up lucrative businesses, for example a Ms Griffin, in which she is listed as a consultant at the DFE and a Director of Griffin Taylor Consultancy Ltd. And here is some information about her company’s financial position. As it is an exempt small company, with only two directors, facts are limited but one thing seems clear, the DFE consultancy business is a very comfortable one.

Some schools who have had experience of such pressure have taken the alternative option to form co-operative schools rather than to hand over such assets to private companies. Local Schools should be run as consortia, working together, not competing for profits and results.. schools should be about children, and their needs. Furthermore, Harold Wilson’s Open University was intended to provide access to life-long learning for all, and not to be subject to unaffordable tuition fees as introduced by the Coalition.

What we see happening is privatization of the NHS and state education, owned by us, you, me, and were intended for future generations. These are services built by thousands of working people: teachers, lecturers, nurses, midwives, doctors, cleaners, construction workers, electricians, IT specialists, cooks – those who are seeing job cuts and wages frozen. Now these precious state assets have become a source of income for friends and contributors to the Conservative Party via Hedge Funds.

It is a myth that private outperforms public. How do you measure performance of organizations such as the NHS or state education – by a healthy, well educated, highly skilled and employed workforce – or by the off shore bank balance of Conservative friends? The newly privatized organizations are answerable to their owners, not their users, their workers, or citizens contributing to society for mutual benefit, whatever their skills are.

The evidence shows a deterioration in quality, where the profit motive is a priority. Labour must commit to a reversal of privatization of public services, and to bring again into democratic ownership and control, our essential utilities and public transport. We must ensure that such services are exempt from US Trade agreements, and this is a platform on which Labour can challenge the likes of UKIP.

Please sign this petition to exempt the NHS, and support the challenge to exempt education too.

After all, the purpose of government is to assist people in achieving a civilized society, and to allow all that live in that society. It’s not just to line their own pockets. It’s time to put an end to it, if it’s not too late.

Think Left

The purpose of Think Left is to present a view of politics from a left-wing perspective.

Author Archives: Pam Field @earwiggle

The Ultimate Theft

How Britain’s Family Silver was Stolen Through Open Doors