UKIP on the rise in local elections, a swing to the right in the UK ? or not ?

The UK media has gone berserk in telling us the the anti-EU, anti-immigration, right-wing UK Independence Party (UKIP) had a huge surge from nowhere in its vote. All the talk was that UKIP was about to win the biggest share of the vote and seats in the European Parliament when the results come out on Monday. It was now a 'major threat' to the centre-right coalition government and could even replace Labour as the main opposition and so on...... Actually, the local election results do not bear out that conclusion at all. It was Labour that polled the biggest share of those who voted in these minor elections, albeit only 29%. The ruling Conservatives also polled more than UKIP at 25%. UKIP was third at 23-24%, a leap up from last time, but hardly a victory. Indeed, this 'Poujadist' party will have no more than one-tenth of the council seats won by the two main parties, Labour and Conservative. And nearly all UKIP's seats will be concentrated in rural areas, particularly the better-off south-east and east of England (Scotland and Wales did not vote and UKIP is non-existent there). Actually the real winners, as usual, were the NO-VOTE party. The turnout for these elections was not more than 40%, so most people eligible to vote did not bother. Translating the share of votes into shares of eligible voters, we find that the winners of these local elections, Labour, got no more than one in eight potential voters to support them and the ruling Conservatives managed only one in ten eligible to vote. The government has been crowing about the return of fast economic growth that the UK economy is now experiencing under its policies. And there was apparently more good news in the this week's retail sales figures, which showed a big surge. But it seems that the British electorate does not agree that all is rosy. And we can see why when the latest data continue to show that average real incomes are falling as inflation outstrips wage increases . Even now, Britain's real GDP has not yet returned to pre-crisis levels, and with employment in badly-paid jobs and self-employment rising, the overall productivity of British capitalism has declined. Indeed, Britons are working harder and longer for less money. UK business investment was up 8.7% in the first quarter of this year compared with a year ago. That sounds good - until you see that investment is still some 18% below where it was in 2008 and this is nominal terms. The latest data show that the top 10% of British households own 44% of all household wealth (to use Thomas Piketty's definition) - they are not feeling the depression, only the 'boom'. And it's their sentiments that the government expresses. The reality is that there is increasing disillusionment with the mainstream political parties as we shall see when the EU parliamentary elections are announced In the UK, the combined Conservative and Labour vote in general elections has fallen to 60% from 80-90% in the 1960s, while separatist and other parties have risen from nothing to 12%. In this little local election, the combined vote of the top two parties was 54%. Voter turnout has plummeted from 75% in the 1980s to about 60% now, as politicians become increasingly divorced from their voters. Back in the 1960s, as much as 15% of MPs were manual workers, now it is less than 5% while those MPs who have never had a proper job and are just 'career politicians' is now 15%. The rest had jobs in the 'professions' and business and finance etc, with many millionaires among them. The 'surge' of support for parties like UKIP is a frustrated expression of people despairing at the main parties of capitalist democracy ever doing anything to improve their lot or even stop it getting worse. We'll see that sentiment expressed in the EU election results on Monday. I’ll takea further look at the European elections next week. reblogged and thanks to michael roberts at http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2014/05/23/what-a-surge/

Budget 2013 more austerity to come fightback needed!

As George Osborne got up today in the commons and declared Britain is open for business few believed him Tories cheered as well they might the rich is doing well in this crisis. As for everyone else it’s more austerity for us and it will go on longer than planned too. With no end of cuts and misery in sight the budget this year had very little for working people to get excited about. A cancelling of a fuel duty escalation and a cut of 1p off beer will do little to raise spirits in Britain today. The squeeze on living standards is set to continue into the next parliament whoever is in power be that Tories or labour with a lib dem mob by their side or not. The BBC reports that most government departments will face a cut of 2% of their spending over the next two years, amounting to about £2.5 billion. These cuts follow spending reductions of 3% for the next two years announced in last December's Autumn Statement. Even by Osborne's own standards the cuts aren't working. Deficit reduction has been a key aim but borrowing is expected to go up this year. 56 months after the start of the first recession in 2008, the UK economy is now more than 3% smaller. Grim outlook Roger Bootle, head of research body Capital Economics, said: "In my 30-odd years of analysing budgets, I have never known a situation as grim as this." But it's not just grim in terms of economic outlook - the outlook for people's living standards is appalling and getting worse. While hundreds of bankers are piling up million-pound bonuses new figures suggest the average worker will lose around £6,000 by 2014 as a result of wages failing to keep pace with rising prices. The Lib Dems have argued that they are softening the blows by campaigning for rises in the personal tax allowance, while supporting austerity in the main. TUC research shows that by 2015 low-paid workers will be losing up to four times more a year from the government's 2010 increase in VAT than they will gain from the raising of the personal tax allowance to £10,000. At the same time a further cut to corporation tax is predicted. This would follow a previous cut worth £3 billion a year by 2014. No wonder 'them and us' rage is boiling as low-paid and unemployed workers face the bedroom tax, council tax hikes, pay freezes and a host of other methods of immiseration. There have been attempts to sugar the pill, bringing the cap on social care costs down and introducing them earlier. But this is a pittance compared to what is being taken from us. Childcare vouchers worth up to £1,200 sound tempting but only families where no parent earns less than £10,000 will be eligible for the new cash. So this represents a further blow to the low-paid and those who are unable to find work or full-time work. Wednesday's jobs figures are predicted to show a slight improvement in the unemployment figures but this will not represent the end of the crisis of joblessness. A number of Labour and other pro-big business economic commentators have called for 'measures for growth' but none call for an end to cuts. But there is an alternative The news of the Cyprus savings theft brought shock and horror to workers across Europe. Here was a government planning to blatantly dip into workers' savings to bail out the banking system brought low by massive greed and profiteering. Instead, the owners of the financial institutions and big business should pay for the crisis that is of their own making. A socialist government could, for example, reverse the decades of corporation tax cuts and impose a 50% tax levy on big business's hoarded billions. The banking system should be nationalised under democratic popular control. Only on this basis would it be possible to get rid of the spivs and speculators, lined up behind the Chancellor, who are holding working class people to ransom. A genuinely nationalised banking sector would be run for the benefit of the majority, rather than for the super-rich. Those struggling to pay their mortgage could have it converted to an affordable rent; small businesses could get cheap loans, and public works such as a massive house-building programme could be cheaply financed. The need to build a mass party of working people which stands for this demand as part of a broader socialist programme has never been clearer. Socialist Party news and analysis Axe the bedroom With extracts taken from http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/issue/757/16364/20-03-2013/another-dooh-nibor-budget-stealing-from-the-poor-to-give-to-the-rich

Who are the real wealth creaters ?

There is a excellent article in todays Guardian. I've been very impressed with this writer named George Monbiot who writes for the Guardian. His article in todays paper titled .The 1% are the very best destroyers of wealth the world has ever seen focus's in on the myth that the rich and the ruling class known as the 1% are far superior and better at producing wealth than the ordinary workers. george absolutely destroys the myth that the rich are thre because they ahve earnt it and are the best in producing the wealth and making the world go around.

What we have been told for decades about the way the boss's are those who have the best expertise and know how to run business's and economies. This is looking increasingly false and a complete lie.
"If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren't responsible. Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes.

The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves. He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. For example, he studied the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers across eight years. He found that the consistency of their performance was zero. "The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill." Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply got lucky.

Such results have been widely replicated. They show that traders and fund managers throughout Wall Street receive their massive remuneration for doing no better than would a chimpanzee flipping a coin. When Kahneman tried to point this out, they blanked him. "The illusion of skill … is deeply ingrained in their culture."

So much for the financial sector and its super-educated analysts. As for other kinds of business, you tell me. Is your boss possessed of judgment, vision and management skills superior to those of anyone else in the firm, or did he or she get there through bluff, bullshit and bullying?

In a study published by the journal Psychology, Crime and Law, Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon tested 39 senior managers and chief executives from leading British businesses. They compared the results to the same tests on patients at Broadmoor special hospital, where people who have been convicted of serious crimes are incarcerated. On certain indicators of psychopathy, the bosses's scores either matched or exceeded those of the patients. In fact, on these criteria, they beat even the subset of patients who had been diagnosed with psychopathic personality disorders.

The psychopathic traits on which the bosses scored so highly, Board and Fritzon point out, closely resemble the characteristics that companies look for. Those who have these traits often possess great skill in flattering and manipulating powerful people. Egocentricity, a strong sense of entitlement, a readiness to exploit others and a lack of empathy and conscience are also unlikely to damage their prospects in many corporations.

In their book Snakes in Suits, Paul Babiak and Robert Hare point out that as the old corporate bureaucracies have been replaced by flexible, ever-changing structures, and as team players are deemed less valuable than competitive risk-takers, psychopathic traits are more likely to be selected and rewarded. Reading their work, it seems to me that if you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family, you're likely to go to prison. If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family, you're likely to go to business school.


Chief executives now behave like dukes, extracting from their financial estates sums out of all proportion to the work they do or the value they generate, sums that sometimes exhaust the businesses they parasitise. They are no more deserving of the share of wealth they've captured than oil sheikhs.

The rest of us are invited, by governments and by fawning interviews in the press, to subscribe to their myth of election: the belief that they are possessed of superhuman talents.

What has happened over the past 30 years is the capture of the world's common treasury by a handful of people, assisted by neoliberal policies which were first imposed on rich nations by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

These numbers need to be tattooed on our minds. Between 1947 and 1979, productivity in the US rose by 119%, while the income of the bottom fifth of the population rose by 122%. But from 1979 to 2009, productivity rose by 80%, while the income of the bottom fifth fell by 4%. In roughly the same period, the income of the top 1% rose by 270%.

In the UK, the money earned by the poorest tenth fell by 12% between 1999 and 2009, while the money made by the richest 10th rose by 37%. The Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, climbed in this country from 26 in 1979 to 40 in 2009.

In his book The Haves and the Have Nots, Branko Milanovic tries to discover who was the richest person who has ever lived. Beginning with the loaded Roman triumvir Marcus Crassus, he measures wealth according to the quantity of his compatriots' labour a rich man could buy. It appears that the richest man to have lived in the past 2,000 years is alive today. Carlos Slim could buy the labour of 440,000 average Mexicans. This makes him 14 times as rich as Crassus, nine times as rich as Carnegie and four times as rich as Rockefeller.


Until recently, we were mesmerised by the bosses' self-attribution. Their acolytes, in academia, the media, thinktanks and government, created an extensive infrastructure of junk economics and flattery to justify their seizure of other people's wealth. So immersed in this nonsense did we become that we seldom challenged its veracity.




Not any longer. Small voices at first but growing more by the day are starting to question this capitalist system and how it works. They are saying does it have to be this way ?

Of course it doesnt have to be. Karl Marx once told us philosophers have only interpreted the world the point for us now is to change it. That is exactly waht the occupations in London and around the world are discussing right now how to go about it. Of course it is early days but the crucial fact that they are starting to debate how we can change things is better than accepting the blind myths the ruling class feed us day in day out.

You can read the full article from George Monbiot at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/07/one-per-cent-wealth-destroyers?CMP=twt_gu

Latest retail figures show UK's growth is stalling

The British Retail Consortium (BRC) has recorded its worst fall in sales since records began in 1996, a further sign of difficult times on the High Street.

The BRC said total sales in March were down 1.9% on a year ago, although the early timing of Easter last year had an effect on the figures.

But the BRC said shoppers did not want to spend "unless they really had to".

Footwear was the only growth sector, as food and drink, clothing, homeware, electrical, and others all fell.


Meanwhile, like-for-like sales were down 3.5%, in their worst showing in nearly six years.

Internet sales, which have been defying the general downward trend, showed their slowest growth since records began in 2008.

Internet sales were 7.5% higher than a year ago, much weaker than the 10.4% in February.

Clothes and book sales suffered their largest declines since 2009 and 2005 respectively.

Falling disposable incomes and the fear of worse to come means people don't want to spend
Stephen Robertson

BRC director general
"We have seen an emergence of new, lower spending patterns since the middle of January, which are currently continuing to trend downwards," said Helen Dickinson, head of retail at survey partner KPMG.

"Many retailers will not be able to sustain this ongoing weakness in demand beyond the short-term and are hoping for some good news around the extended bank holiday period and a feel-good factor driven by the royal wedding."

The poor sales figures came despite the fact that more consumers visited the High Street, separate figures suggested.

Research group Springboard said that footfall in town centres and High Streets across the UK rose by 7.8% in March compared with the previous month, and fell by 1.3% against a year earlier - the smallest annual decline in four years.

"Whilst it is early days, this starts to tell a positive story about how consumers are returning to their local High Streets," said Steve Booth, Springboard's chief executive.


There has been a string of gloomy outlooks recently from the likes of Next, Mothercare, HMV, Currys and PC World parent Dixons Retail.

The BRC pointed out that "uncomfortably high inflation and low wage growth have produced the first year-on-year fall in disposable incomes for 30 years".

"Falling disposable incomes and the fear of worse to come means people don't want to spend," added BRC director general Stephen Robertson.

"There's only so much discounts and promotions can do to overcome that."


All this makes even more gloomy reading for George Osbourne and his pals at 10 Downing Street. Figures like th ese coupled with the inflation figures out soon will get them sweating as teh cuts start to bite they will be panicaing how to get the economy going again.

There is no catalyst to jump start the economy and i see none of the horizon either. I foresee a period of stagnation in the British economy in this next decade it will be interesting how this government and the next play it from now on.

Tories plans still not working

News today is telling us the British economy shrank by 0.5% in fourth quarter of 2010 instead of the 0.6% previously reported by the Office of National Statistics


Over the last three months of 2010, the total value of the goods the UK imported was £26.8bn higher than the total value of the goods it exported.

However, the UK exports more services than it imports, so the total goods and services trade gap is narrower, at almost £10.5bn.

The trade figures was released alongside the final revision of GDP for the fourth quarter of the year, which put it at -0.5%, slightly down from the previous estimate of -0.6%.


All this must look worrying news for George Osbourne and his tory friends inteh cabinet. It is even more worrying to those of us at the bottom of the scale who have no say in what happens at teh top. Decisions to cut spending now is looking increasingly foolish. No one is denying teh deficit has to be dealt with but these massive cuts on the working class which are far too disproportional in my view are simply unfair. As i've previously stated i'm against all cuts as a collection of tax evaders totalling roughly 120 billion pounds would more than cover our deficit. But will the tories do this ? i doubt it somehow, It would mean upsetting a lot of their friends in the city and we cant have that now. So the poor and the working class must suffer as usual. Figures like this just bring it home what the tories are doing to this country more harm than good that's for sure.

More figures like these will lead us back into a recession which i feel we're not too far away from now. Any minimal growth last year was carried over from before but now we're running on empty. As socialists we call on nationalising the banks and bringing them into workers ownership, public ownership. Not the semi nationalisation what happened with RBS in 2008 a total nationalisation of all the banks and demand they open their books for transparancy there is evidence that there is plenty of wealth sloshing around at the top lets see more of it used to protect our public services and stop this attack on the working class.

Why i feel we should be building more social housing in the UK

As we all know here in the south east of the United kingdom london and the surrounding areas there is huge housing problems with people finding themselves priced out of the housing market more and more.

Ever since Margret Tatcher allowed people back in the late 80's to start to buy their own councial houses's off the council and actually own them there has never really been a big attempt to refill that gap with more social housing.

With our population rising year on year and a aging population too i think we are going to be pushing our infrustructure to the limit before long.

Under Labour which was meant to be a forward thinking progressive government they failed to address this major issue creating tension in communities. With the levels of homelessness rising sharply too with the cuts to housing benifits this will becomg a greater issue in years to come. Labour had the chance during boom years to invest some of its surplus public money in building new homes - affordable homes for young families just starting out in life with a child or two. We are hearing now more and more young people are deciding to stay at home with their parents for longer now as they simply cannot afford to move out and get their own place.

I feel this is atravesty and we should be actively encouraging young people to get out of the family home and start a life for them. Whilst saying this i feel a lot of young people are being restrained and cant make ends meet to afford a basic rent in london and the south east a lot of the time.

For me when i came to look for a place of my own which i'm still not really progressing on it was an option between council housing list which i was told has a 10 year waiting list in our area or private which rents around Hertfordshire and London are ridiculously expensive. Apart from that there is no other route really. If i was to share a place with friends that might help but this is only really possible when you have a lot of friends say 4 or 5 to help share the rent to make it manageable.

I feel the lack of socail affordable housing has put added pressure on communities and ugly things like racial tensions become more apparent in certain communities also with a lack of aspiration can really affect a area especailly if it also has high unemployment.
Luckily i live in a good area with low unemployment but this is not the case all over the country or all over the south east for example.

Not only could building more houses, affordable ones at that for people to live in it would also provide construction and building firms jobs and work to be doing in these tough years we are currently in now. Overall helping the econemy.

Just a thought really ...