Nadine Dorries is the Tory MP for Mid Bedfordshire. She’s a corrupt liar. She’s one of the greatest threats to reproductive rights in the UK through her attempts to get parliament to reduce the term limit for abortion. And she also exploits the very real problem of stalking and abuse to try and avoid criticism – in fact she doesn’t like people looking into her activities as an elected representative one little bit.
Nadine has been in the news this week because of a public spat with blogger Tim Ireland of Bloggerheads. He and some others have been working to document the frequent lies she tells and her flagrant corruption. She has responded by accusing him of being a stalker, but also by admitting that what she writes on her own blog is “70% fiction.”
Nadine was criticised in a Commons report last week for using her blog to try and make it look as if she was living primarily in her constituency, and lying to her constituents about how much time she was spending locally. She had been under investigation for her expenses claims, because she was claiming for her home in Bedfordshire as a second home, meaning she got about £24 grand from the public purse for it. But she was cleared of wrongdoing because although she wasn’t staying mainly in London, she also wasn’t staying in Bedfordshire – she actually lives in the picturesque Cotswolds in Gloucestershire!
Defending her lies on her blog about where she was at any particular time, she said:
“My blog is 70% fiction and 30% fact. It is written as a tool to enable my constituents to know me better and to reassure them of my commitment to Mid Bedfordshire. I rely heavily on poetic licence and frequently replace one place name/event/fact with another.”
She has previously attacked the media for “bullying” MPs over the expenses scandal (God forbid that journalists would look into how they’re spending our money!), famously saying on her blog that MPs were all checking up on each other because “everyone was fearing a suicide” (a post she later deleted when she realised how bad it made her look.) She again developed this theme to account for her blog lying:
“In the light of the bullying onslaught of the Daily Telegraph I used my blog to its best effect in reassuring my constituents of my commitment to Mid Beds. My commitment is absolute and is always my first consideration regardless of where I sleep at night. However, I have always been aware that should my personal domestic arrangements become the knowledge of my political opponents, they would be able to exaggerate that to good effect. Hence the reason for my blog and my need to reassure my constituents.”
Reassure them by lying?
She also went on to claim that she had been lying about her whereabouts to conceal them from the aforementioned blogging “stalker” Tim Ireland. However, the lies on her blog date back to before Ireland had even taken any interest her, and yet again she is trying to make herself look like a victim when she has been uncovered doing wrong, in a desperate attempt to deflect attention.
The story of how she came to be targeting Ireland is a complicated one, that he explains in full on his blog. However, it dates back to some investigative journalism he did that exposed some of the extremely dodgy activities of a group of Tory MPs and their associates. In January last year, he uncovered that a man called Glen Jenvey, a professional associate of the Tory MP Patrick Mercer (who btw is chair of the Commons sub-Committee on Counter-Terrorism), was going round the internet pretending to be an Islamic extremist. His aim was to create tabloid headlines and whip up anti-Muslim racism, based on lies.
When Ireland exposed this, he made himself a target for the Tory lie machine, who got hold of his (ex-directory) home address and started publishing it around the internet claiming he was a convicted paedophile and in league with Islamic terrorists. They handed this information to people who they thought were hostile, including members of the BNP. When Ireland began contacting Tory MPs to demand this stopped, they began the story that he was an “electronic stalker” who was bombarding them with emails and phone calls. This is a real misrepresentation of what happened, and I know if I was in his shoes I would be going considerably more ape shit than he appears to have done. From this however emerged the allegation that he was stalking a number of MPs, including Nadine Dorries.
One of the main people responsible for the attacks, a man called Charlie Flowers, said he was acting on behalf of Nadine Dorries. When this was brought to her attention, she claimed she had taken action (another lie) and then claimed she had reported Ireland to the police for stalking.
Ireland has responded to the allegation by asking for any evidence of the abusive emails she claims he sent, or even any evidence she has spoken to the police, as he has had no contact from them. She can’t even produce a crime number for her supposed report because it’s bollocks. Since then the cabal of Tory liars of which she has part have also initiated false allegations against Ireland’s children that they were guilty of criminal damage.
When a constituent tried to challenge Nadine on her smearing of Tim Ireland, she went on to launch a venomous attack against her as well. The woman in question blogs and tweets as Humphrey Cushion, and also has arthritis meaning she has had to give up her job as a carer temporarily while she waits for a foot operation. She does not qualify for benefits for disability, however, Dorries and chums decided to go all out describing her as a “benefits cheat”.
“Do you know of anyone else who has Tweeted more than 35,000 times in less than six months? If so, email my office and let me know. Or, better still, if it’s someone you know is on benefits, contact the DWP . . .
Twitter all day, every day about claiming disability benefit in one tweet whist arranging a night out in the pub in the next. If you tweet about claiming six months rent from the social fund whilst tweeting how bad your hangover is . . . then don’t expect someone like me not to a) inform the authorities and b) tell you to get off your Twitter and get a job.”
The hand of hope - on Snopes and everything
All this bizarre behaviour shouldn’t surprise us given some of Nadine’s wackier political outbursts. She’s most well known for her attempts to lower the abortion term limit from 24 weeks to 20 weeks, based on totally made up science and yet more lies. In the last parliament she put a private member’s bill up, which was defeated. In the debate she lied that polls show that 75% of women back her position (the real figure is 15% and only when it’s fed to them as an option.)
She also repeated the ‘hand of hope’ hoax. This is a photo that was taken during surgery on a fetus that it was claimed showed it reaching out to hold the surgeon’s finger, proof, claim anti-abortionists, that fetuses are fully formed little people and killing them is murder. Except it’s bollocks, the surgeon says what happened is he accidentally pulled the hand out of the womb, after which he tucked it back in. It’s an anti-abortion urban legend – it’s on Snopes and everything. (She does back up her scientific credentials however by being one of the MPs that backs homeopathic hospitals becoming part of the NHS.)
She also campaigned against what she claimed was an attempt by unions to “ban high heels at work.” The origin of the story was that the Society of Chiropodists and Podiatrists had submitted a motion to the Trades Union Congress asking employers (many of whom force women to wear high heels as part of a dress code) to consider the serious ill health wearing them all day can cause to the feet, legs and back. No call to ban, but that didn’t stop Nadine from smearing this perfectly sensible appeal as political correctness gone mad.
It's political incorrectness (lying) gone MAAAD!
And then there’s Channel 4 documentary, Tower Block of Commons, in which MPs were invited to live for a couple of days with people on welfare. Nadine took part, and managed to alienate the women she was staying with so much they set up a Twitter page called ‘I hate MPs’. They claim that she’d hidden 50 quid in her bra to avoid the reality of living on their income, and that she offered them temazepam!
“South Acton hates Nadine Dorries. Get her off the estate . . . Nadine Dorries is a lying two-faced bitch. I know first-hand,” they wrote.
All in all, Nadine is a bit of a train wreck of an MP, and if she was under proper media scrutiny rather than individuals on the internet being left to expose her she would have been forced to resign. Apart from being comedic in how much she lies, it’s good to read up on her as a cautionary tale as what we are up against in the Tories. And when it comes to the investigation that sparked all the trouble for Tim Ireland, it’s yet another warning that if we want to counter the politics of the SDL/EDL and the BNP, we should understand that the lies they tell about Islam and Muslims don’t just originate with them, but as much with members of UKIP, Labour and the Tories as well. In this case, there was in fact direct collusion with the BNP to promote a shared agenda.
The man in the above clip was going with his wife to a women’s health centre in Boston for surgery. It followed the devastating news that their unborn child had been diagnosed with Sirenomelia, otherwise known as ‘Mermaid Syndrome.’ The child had both legs fused together and no bladder or kidneys -- there was a zero chance of survival. The surgery was so the woman involved would not have to give birth to a stillborn baby.
On there way to what they describe as “the worst day of their lives”, they were accosted by two anti-abortion protesters, shouting “You’re killing your baby!” and holding up pictures of aborted fetuses. In his article, Aaron Gouveia describes what happened next:
Running on pure adrenaline, and without even a hint of a plan, I grabbed my cell phone and crossed the street. I didn’t know what to say or how to say it, I just knew I wanted to make public the cowardice of these protesters . . .
I learned a few important things from this encounter. First, these people aren’t used to being confronted. They prey on the weak and they pounce on the wounded. It’s easy to berate people and shame them when they’re too beaten down to fight back. But I chose to do just that, and you can see what happened.
They spout the same tired rhetoric passed out at rallies and subway stations. They don’t have one salient response to any of my questions . . .
Consider this my plea: stop terrorizing women. Stop adding trauma to their trauma. If you’re able, stand up to these bullies in nonviolent ways. Speak out. And if you have a camera, use it.”
Protesters today shut down Vodafone’s flagship shop in London, after it emerged that the government was going to let them dodge £6 billion in tax, just as it is taking £7 billion away from the poorest in the UK through benefit cuts.
Vodafone set up a subsidiary company in Luxembourg to try and avoid paying taxes on its profits at UK rates -- its front was paying only 1%. This is against the laws relating to tax avoidance. But HM Revenue and Customs have decided to let them away with paying just £1.2 million to get off the hook, when its profits over the period affected by this tax dodge have been billions. Independent assesment reckons that it’s up to £6 billion lost to the people of the UK.
No surprises then that it was discovered that the head of tax at Vodafone is John Connors, who until 2007 was a top man at the HMRC and is mates with all the people responsible for negotiating to let his company off the hook. Yet again, the government is exposed as working hand in glove with their personal friends in big business, in a collective shafting of the rest of us.
In a future with no Skynet, John Connor(s) is reduced to helping Vodafone doge tax
Except this time, some people decided they weren’t just going to sit back and let it happen. Mobilising over the weekend through the UKuncut twitter, lots of different people got together and moved in this morning to blockade and occupy the Oxford Street store before it could serve a single customer. Vodafone were forced to shut the shop, and it remained closed all day while protesters were outside.
Now they’re calling for people to join them this Saturday by shutting down Vodafone shops across the UK. Whaddya think? Vodafone have kindly provided a facility for you to find your nearest potential protest site. Can Scotland join a wave of occupations against them this weekend? Like their slogan says, Make the Most of Now.
Fourteen years after it first started, South Park remains one of the funniest comedy shows in the world. I am a massive fan, I’ve watched every single one all the way back to the start. Some of them are among the most powerful satirical statements of our time, like the way they absolutely nailed Mel Gibson’s obsession with torture to the one where they managed to make every single person involved in the Terri Schiavo sitation look evil.
I wanted to say all that to make it clear at least part of the reason I’m writing this is concern for the future of a show I love. Because although the most recent series still have hilarious episodes, there are more and more crap ones as well. And a big part of the reason is that South Park is increasingly depending on the “shock value” of rape jokes.
The absolute low point came a couple of years ago in season 12, with an episode about the newest Indiana Jones movie. In it, there were repeated scenes of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg raping Indy, as a comment on how crappy the 4th installment of his adventures was. Before we see this we see the boys having flashbacks, traumatised and crying, as they come to admit that “one of our friends was raped.” But then, da dum tsh, the joke turns out that the rape is of Indiana Jones. Ha ha, you never saw that coming did you?!
This episode was widely criticised for being insensitive, unpleasant and unfunny. As if to rub in our faces what they were doing, they didn’t make this joke once, but kept coming back throughout the episode to graphic and pretty horrible rape scenes that aped movies like ‘Deliverance.’
Since then the word rape crops up week after week. In this week’s episode, school councillor Mr Mackey comes out with “Don’t touch that or I will rape you in the mouth!” out of nowhere, before we see a scene of him being abused as a child. Last week they made a character from a US reality TV show into a weird monster which pounced on Cartman with him crying “It’s raping me! It’s raping me!”
Yet again, it seems, we need to go over why it’s not cool to make rape jokes. People who find rape funny are generally men, and generally have no idea just how prevalent it is in our society. The odds are that you know someone who has experienced rape or sexual abuse. A big part of the reason I can’t find these episodes funny is because when they start laughing about rape, I think about my friends and how it has affected their lives. Shows like South Park, Family Guy and The Mighty Boosh use rape so freely, as just another word to shock and get a laugh, that they rob it of how important it is. In their ignorance, they have no idea how many people are going to watch these episodes and suffer from real flashbacks, and genuine trauma, unlike the pretend horror and terror experienced by Stan and Kyle “for a laugh”.
Now, a common response to this is, yes, rape is awful, but so is murder, so why is it being singled out? The problem with that is it ignores the way rape is treated by the justice system throughout the world. Rape is a crime overwhelmingly committed by men against women. In Scotland, only 3% of those tried for rape end up convicted. There are two ways to explain this: either 97% of women who report being raped are crazy liars, or the justice system is systematically sexist and biased against women. These figures of course leave out all those who didn’t even go to the police because they knew at best it would be a waste of time, and at worst it could lead to their public humiliation in court and being branded a liar by the press.
In other words, our society doesn’t take rape seriously. We’ve come a long way from the past in terms of attitudes, but their remains the patriarchal social attitude that women basically deserve it (“What were you wearing? How much had you had to drink? Are you sexually promiscuous?”), and that rape basically performs a function of putting women in their place, and disciplining them for not being sexually available.
In that context, rape jokes help to normalise rape, help to make people feel that it’s not that bad. If rape is only as bad as the latest Indiana Jones movie, then what’s the big deal? When you try and pull someone up for making an unfunny, offensive and hurtful rape joke, inevitably they get defensive, because they find it hard to deal with being challenged. They will tell you that you’re being ridiculous, that it was just a joke, that you should calm down. The fact that big popular shows back them up on rape as comedy scenario is only going to make this worse.
Now, I also want to make clear that I know South Park deliberately sets out to offend. I have been watching it you know. And I understand that Trey Parker and Matt Stone are nobody’s political allies. They are just as happy to mercilessly rip the pish out of anyone from anywhere on the political spectrum. They are not feminists.
But there’s a difference between the rape jokes and, say, Cartman’s constant anti-semitic abuse. And that is that ultimately, you are not meant to respect and admire Cartman. He is ultimately a fat, unbearable spoiled little dick. And many of the targets of the show’s satire are well found – it is funny to laugh at the hypocrisy of liberal Hollywood actors for example. But laughing at the expense of rape survivors just isn’t funny. What South Park does best is forensically take apart why a person or group is hypocritical, full of shit or otherwise worthy of being mocked, and do it mercilessly. The rape jokes aren’t that, they are harnessing the power of rape to shock to produce a cheap laugh from ignorant, uncaring idiots. For the rest of us, it’s JUST NOT FUNNY.
There really isn’t much that’s funny about rape survivors, and they don’t deserve to have their pain mocked, or treated as if it’s the same as seeing a really bad film. Hurting or offending them is something I care about, in a way I don’t, for example, about Scientologists or John Edward. If the show isn’t funny, then it’s failing not just in terms of feminism or decent treatment of fellow human beings, but in terms of COMEDY.
FAO The Mighty Boosh: Changing the rapist to the Donnie Darko bunny doesn't make it funny
So I’m not just saying this because I am pro-feminist. I am saying it because I love South Park. I think it is genuinely one of the greatest and most daring comedies that’s been on in my lifetime. I know it will come to an end one day, but I don’t want it to have a slow death of seasons sprinkled with unfunny episodes. Constantly relying on rape jokes is a sign that the writing is weakening, that they can’t come up with the goods as often as they used to. I’ve seen it happen before, with the latest series of The Mighty Boosh, which was far less funny than the other two, and, not coincidentally, relied heavily on rape jokes.
Another thing that shows that South Park and The Mighty Boosh understand what they’re doing is the reliance on what initally look like cute things that then turn out to be evil. In the latest episode they go on a field trip to the woods, where there’s a mascot called Woodsy Owl that sings a little song encouraging the kids not to litter. As soon as I saw it, the first thing I thought was that it would turn out to be some kind of paedophile. And surprise surprise it turned out I was right. I’ve been trying to see if I can find if there’s a proper term for this phenomenon of the cute turning out to be evil, and couldn’t get any closer than coulrophobia or fear of the ‘evil clown’ (e.g. “Stephen King’s It”). But you’ll know what I mean when I refer to the Woodland Critters of the South Park Christmas special a couple of years ago for example.
Blending horror concepts with comedy can work and be funny, but the fact that I knew what Woodsy Owl was the second I saw him means that this particular trope is being overused and is losing it’s power. To me, it’s appearance was simply about using things that are cute, and therefore associated with childhood and innocence, and violating those expectations to give the eventual shock all the more power. Except it’s getting boring and predictable. But more importantly, the shock and horror of abuse are very real for millions of people, and by laughing at it you’re making them feel humiliated and angry.
I’m not saying that rape is a topic that can never be discussed or treated in TV or other media. Absolutely not. But I would like to see the makers of shows try and do it a bit sympathetically, with at least a token of trying to understand reality rather than sensational patriarchal propaganda that has no care for people’s feelings. Using the word and the act of rape as a cheap shock tactic to get a nervous laugh out of the audience (or, certainly, a big laugh from sexist, ignorant bastards) just isn’t good comedy. And it’s killing the enjoyment of one of my favourite shows for me. So consider this a plea to Trey Parker and Matt Stone to think a little bit more, and come up with more episodes of the show I love.
'Zombie marcher' Andy Bowden is capable of showing his opposition to cuts EVEN WHILE ASLEEP!
. . .at least on Saturday we did for a bit. While opposition to the cuts hasn’t got as cool in Scotland as it is in France yet, this weekend saw an important beginning for a mass movement to defeat the Tories and Lib Dems with an all-Scotland march organised by the Scottish Trade Unions Congress.
Over 20,000 people through the centre of Edinburgh the weekend after Gideon ‘George’ Osborne announced the government’s comprehensive plan for ruining your life. We were proud to take our place alongside all Scotland’s trade unions, as well as angry people facing cuts to services on which their whole lives depend.
Our materials for the day went down well, with socialist meerkats calling on marchers to Compare the Council Tax. With council tax set to become a big issue in the election campaign (the SNP want to continue their useless policy of freezing the level of it, Labour want it to go up, using the cuts as an excuse), the SSP’s policy of taxing the rich according to their income, so that most people pay less for local services but at the same time we raise an extra £1.6 billion to pay for them, is the only one that can deal with both cuts and poverty. Simples!
Welcome fool, you have come of your own free will to the appoined place. . .
Edinburgh also got completely plastered with our ‘Hey Tories, Gonnae no dae that’ stickers as well, which you can expect to see everywhere soon. Apart from these and some pretty homemade placards, perhaps one of our main political contributions was to popularise the chant, “Maggie Maggie Maggie, Die Die Die!” This brought a smile to the faces of everyone who was old enough to remember why it is all the forces of good in the Universe hate Thatcher.
Ending up in Princes Street gardens, the huge size of the crowd at the bandstand showed just how angry people are already, and the real grounds for a fightback there is. But when we all dispersed from the march, that wasn’t the end of the day of politics for SSY, not by a long shot, because we still had AN EFFIGY OF DAVID CAMERON TO DEAL WITH.
After some detailed tactical discussion in our political nerve centre Wetherspooons, it was ascertained that there were in fact some nearby Tory offices which would make the best place for the sacrificial victim to prove that we really are all in this together by burning for our amusement.
This being the posh heart of the centre of Edinburgh, we made our way past all the caviar and top hat shops to the bunker of the Tory occupation forces in Scotland, where Dave was to meet his ignominious end. Or so we thought -- but that was before a wormhole to the 1920s opened up across the street, and a very posh and disgruntled woman (with an amazing hat that made her look like a cockerel) popped out to put an end to the socialist ruffians daring to stand up against the fine gentlemen of Her Majesty’s Government.
YE SHALL BURN ME ONCE AGAIN?!?!
As the flames began to lick at Dave’s bin bag suit, she angrily demanded to know what we were doing, which surely was fairly obvious. She then intervened to bring the sacrifice to an end, but chose the method of blowing on the flame to put it out (we hate to break it to you, but that’s how you make flames get BIGGER). Realising this had failed, she then chose to KICK DAVE THROUGH THE RAILINGS into the front court of whoever is unlucky enough to occupy the premises below the Tory office. Assuming these are not just more Tories, then we can only apologise for the bizarre sight that must have greeted you of a half burned David Cameron on a stick, and assure you that we didn’t put it there!
More photos from the day:
Working class dogs hungry for a socialist message
. . . and he does!
Style and panache: decisive contributions of youth to the anti-cuts movement
Of course, Saturday’s march was only the beginning of the fightback against the Tory blitzkrieg, so keep checking back here for all the latest news about the resistance to the Tory occupation of Scotland.
Among the many things to make your blood boil coming out of the comprehensive shafting we all received at the hands of the government on Wednesday was the really crap plan to make us all work longer.
By 2018 (2 years earlier than previously planned) the retirement age will be equalised for men and women, and then by 2020 everyone will have to work on until they’re 66.
You’ve probably heard the argument from right wing tosspots about why this needs to happen: we’re all living longer than we did in the past. As a result of socialist ideas like the NHS people don’t always drop down dead in late middle age any more. The problem with this argument is that it treats retirement as if it was something in isolation from the rest of the universe, and decisions that need to be taken about retirement as being completely unaffected by anything else the government does.
By saying that because people are living longer they will therefore have to work longer, the government isn’t stating a fact, it’s making a choice. And that choice is to make workers pay more for their right to a decent life in old age, and to let the super rich and big companies get away with paying fuck all.
The retirement age is a promise that we as a society made to working people as they got older. That promise was: pay in to the social security pot by national insurance coming out of your pay. In return, you’ll get to retire at 60 or 65 and have an income to live on. People have worked their whole lives based on this promise. Now the government wants to break that promise, to betray workers and make them get less out of retirement, and work closer to the age at which they’ll die.
They’d rather do this than by putting very moderate taxes on the rich and big business. They’d rather finance the ongoing bloodbath of the Afghanistan occupation than let us have a decent old age. These are the choices being made, the priorities exposed.
The other problem, as most reading this will already know, with the “we’re all living longer” argument is that the average life expectancy is just that, an average. It includes the high end of the rich who will live in healthy conditions all their life and have access to the very best healthcare at all times. And it includes the low end, the people who do hard, physically demanding work, can’t afford to eat well and live in polluted communities, who die much younger. In fact, research published this year found that health inequality is worse now than during the Great Depression, and life expectancy for poorer people might actually start to fall. Health and wealth are easily proven to be directly related, and the more the government encourages the rich to hoard it, the sicker the majority will become.
That’s why it’s particularly unfair that those who need to be least worried about the attack on the right to retire, because they can afford private pensions, are likely to live longer than those who this will directly affect. Work in a capitalist society is hard and alienating, especially since the economy has moved from one where people made things to one where they answered phones or other less socially useful service businesses. Brutally put, hard work can kill you, and the effect is obviously going to be more serious for those who work harder. And hard work isn’t restricted to manual labour; even working class desk jobs are still stressful enough to have a serious impact on your health.
School students in Bordeaux fight back against raising the retirement age
That’s why society has for about 100 years recognised that there reaches a point in your life where you should get to retire. Older people have earned this right, more than that they’ve paid for it all their working lives. Why should the right of the rich to hold on to the majority of wealth in our society be prioritised over this right?
But it’s not just unfair on older people today and in the future. Raising the retirement age is also a disaster for young people right now. Youth across the UK are suffering disproportionately from the economic crisis, with way higher than average unemployment rates. It’s not hard to work out why – if we can get a job it’s likely to be insecure with little rights or conditions, i.e. the people that get the sack first if a business is making less money.
In a context where young people desperately need jobs, raising the retirement age is the opposite of solving the problem, because you are forcing people to stay on in jobs they could have retired from and opened up for someone else. The government wants to do this to save money that they would be paying out in pensions, but they’ll have to be giving it out in dole money again from people that could have got that job.
Raising the retirement age is the issue that’s driving the brilliant mass movements of strikes and protests France, that has seen school students and unemployed youth linking up with workers. High schools across France have been shut down by their pupils. French youth understand raising the retirement age is an attack on them, not just older people.
GET BACK TO WORK YOU LAZY BASTARD
And as if that wasn’t all enough, let’s not forget about the hidden contribution of retired people that has been completely ignored. Think of how much Grans and Grandads do for their families in terms of unpaid babysitting – if they’re still stuck at work it’s going to make it all the harder for younger parents. Then there’s all the unpaid voluntary and community work contributed by pensioners. The National Pensioner’s Convention says that there’s well over £30 billion worth of work done by these voluntary contributions. The government are taking that away exactly at the same time as they’re cutting back public services that people rely on, which will make life more difficult for everyone.
In fact, if we were looking at the situation properly, as a society what we would do would be to lower the retirement age. The only real solution to the economic crisis is to have massive investment in things we as a society need – public services and ecological restoration to prepare for and try and prevent climate change. This could employ most of the people desperate for a job. At the same time, we should be reducing working time, so that people can retire when they want to and have to work less of the week, while raising the minimum wage to a liveable level. This would create loads of work, and leave everyone healthier, happier and able to do more things with their lives than just working all time. It’s a great idea, but the Tories and Lib Dems will never even discuss it, because they’re a government for themselves, for the rich.
Socialism is about us all having a decent life, where the work that we do is meaningful and is something we want to be doing. To be able to build a decent and better society, as a first step we need to reduce the amount of work those who are working too hard are doing. Defending the right to retire is defending the rights of everyone.
Yesterday the Tories and the Lib Dems announced their plan to cut pretty much everything decent in Britain, transforming our society into a bleak vision of a grey hell hole conjured up by the imagination of Charles Dickens affected by low serotonin. With £81 billion coming out of stuff you rely on, cuts no longer seems like the right scale of wound to talk about what’s happening here. The government’s spending plans which they revealed yesterday won’t just leave public services cut, they’ll look more like a crater. A gigantic fucking open cast mine.
Over the next couple of days we’re going to try and bring you a few different articles looking at the way the government’s Comprehensive Spending Review will specifically make things crap for youth. But in the meantime, let’s recap about exactly what’s going on here.
I know I’ve posted the above film before, but I think it pretty well sums up the situation we’re in, and is worth watching again. The Tories fundamentally have a philosophy of a dog eat dog world, one where society does nothing to help people with problems, whether they’re poor, young, old or disabled. Because to do that would make us lazy, you see. Their idea is that everyone should have to fend for themselves, because if we do we’ll work hard, and we’ll be too scared to stand up to the people with money who are making us work.
They also know however, that their viewpoint is an extreme one, one that will always lose the argument if discussed honestly with the majority of people. Most people think it’s fair enough that we pay taxes so that if someone is too ill to work, or is homeless, or is old and needs help to get by, we do something to help them.
So to get what they want, they have to sneak it in by confusing us. The lie they’ve been pumping us all full of is that Britain must pay back it’s debts now, and so there’s no alternative to cuts. As anyone who has been paying any attention by now knows, that’s total bollocks. Something else we’ll bring you over the next few days is the ideas we could use to get more people in work, give everyone better quality of life and deal with the massive social and environmental problems affecting our society. But the Chancellor George Osborne doesn’t want to know about those. According to him “there is no Plan B.”
The simple fact of the matter is that the Tories ideas are the ideas of the rich. The rich don’t want to accept the fact that their wealth fundamentally comes about because they have robbed the rest of us. So their philosophy is that if you’re poor, it’s your own fault. They hold the poor in total contempt. Which is why yesterday they announced government plans that will hit the poorest in society absolutely the hardest. Here’s some of the ways:
The government's vision for the future of job seekers
-Welfare: £7 billion is being cut from the welfare budget. That’s on top of £11 billion already announced in the emergency budget back in the summer. It’s going to get really hard to access benefits, with more means testing. There’s about 1.8 million people who will lose a grand because of this. If you’re on incapacity benefit, after a year you’ll lose £50 a week. They’ll also crack down on what kinds of conditions mean you’re certified as unable to work, because if they say you can work then you’ll only get benefits for a maximum of a year. People with partners in work face losing their benefit, depriving them of their only independent income. This is taking money away from people who may be in actually hellish personal situations, by a bunch of heartless fuckwits.
The unemployed are going to be made to work for their benefits under the government’s new ‘Work Programme’. This means you can be forced to do a lot of the same stuff as people on community service, except you’ll have to more work than they’re legally allowed to! This, of course, will all be delivered by private companies who’ll be making a profit out of the welfare system and getting workers under virtual slave conditions.
If you’re on Jobseeker’s and Housing Benefit, after a year your housing benefit will be cut by 10%.
-Pensions: By 2020, the government want us all to be working an extra year before we retire. I’m going to do a separate post on why this is so spectacularly a shit idea, but for now let’s just restate the obvious: the more well off you are, the longer you live. The poor die younger, and are being forced to spend more of their finite lives working, instead of the retirement that society promised them.
Can I retire now please?
Public sector workers are also going to be made to contribute an extra £1.8 billion to their pensions, meaning they’ll have a shorter, poorer retirement and less money now. Nice one.
The government has also changed the way it’s going to measure the rate of inflation when working out how much to increase pensions year to year. No prizes for guessing they’re changing it to a method that means less money, put on a jumper if you’re cold etc.
-Housing: Instead of calculating housing benefit by the average level of local rents, it’s now going to be 30% of the average. In other words, a massive cut, which will make potentially millions of people homeless. As Shelter in Scotland put it:
“This is at a time when nearly half of claimants are already making up a shortfall of almost £100 a month to meet their rent. By ripping out this support from under their feet it will push many households over the edge, triggering a spiral of debt, eviction and homelessness.”
They’re also going to build 270,000 less new homes for social housing, leaving literally millions of people on a waiting list desperate for somewhere to live. Housing is one of the areas where what they’re up to is most clear: they want people out of being provided for by the state, and into the private market at the mercy of landlords. To do this they’re going to end tenancies for life.
For single people under 25, the level of housing benefit was already really shite. Now they’re extending that shite level to 25-34 year olds as well, meaning the age it which you can be discriminated against for being young just went up 10 years!
-EMA: In England, they’re abolishing the Educational Maintenance Allowance, money that gets paid to you by the government if you stay on in school after 16. The idea of this is to allow people from poorer backgrounds to be able to afford to stay on rather than have to leave and get a job. The government already want to make it harder for working class youth to go to uni by raising tuition fees, now they want to take that option away altogether from many by making it impossible for them to stay in school and get the qualifications they need to do so.
Although this isn’t happening in Scotland yet, don’t celebrate. The SNP government have announced they’re going to be reviewing EMA in December, to see if scrapping it would be a way of saving money. Edinburgh council (a renowned bunch of tossers from many reasons, such as trying to shut schools, not pay their own workers properly and ruin the Old Town) have already announced that they’re not sending out forms to apply in January because it might not exist by then.
Threats to EMA are an area where SSY needs to stand up and be counted. Check out the SaveEMA campaign.
-Train fares are going to be allowed to go up at 3% over inflation, meaning companies like First and Stagecoach are rubbing their hands, the rest of us will be walking more.
These are just a few of the ways that the cuts are going to make your life worse, we’ll be bringing you more details the more chance we’ve had to digest the enormous plate of shit stew that was served to us all yesterday. But it’s important to realise why this is all happening. As I pointed out already, the first part of the reason is that the Tories and the other Tories Lib Dems want to shrink the state and leave us fending for ourselves. The other part of the reason is that they don’t like the fact that there’s whole areas of life that no one is making a profit from. They’d like to take services like the NHS and hand them over to private companies, usually run by some of their own close chums, in order for them to make a lot of money.
The NHS is one of the places you can see this most clearly. The government claimed that NHS spending would be “ringfenced”, i.e. it can’t be touched. But like most of the things that come out of their disgusting mouths, it was a lie. In fact more and more NHS services are going to be contracted out to private companies, meaning they’ll be making a profit out of us, and the standard of service will fall, with dirtier, unhealthier hospitals and unhappier workers.
The multinational corporations in charge of healthcare in the US know that everyone in America who can afford it has health insurance. For their business to expand, they need to be allowed into the market for healthcare in Europe, but who will buy from them while the NHS is free? That’s why the Tories ultimate goal is to get rid of the NHS, piece by piece.
A lot of this stuff doesn’t affect Scotland directly yet, because it’s stuff that’s administered by the Scottish Parliament. But don’t worry, they haven’t forgotten about us! We just get to have cuts next year when the parly budget is set. When you add it all up Scotland is losing about 3 billion quid as a result of yesterday’s announcement. Both Labour and SNP, while saying this is rubbish, have no concrete plan to deal with it, and whichever one of them gets in to government here after the election next year is set to pass on the Tory cuts in the budget they set. Just one of the major ways we can fight back against the declaration of war made by the Tories and Lib Dems yesterday is to make sure there are socialist voices who will really stand up to the cuts in the Scottish Parliament next year.
But more immediately than that, if you’re not planning on going the national Scottish demo against cuts on Saturday, then drop whatever else you’re doing, go here to find out about a bus from your area, and get in to the streets to let the Tories and Lib Dems know they can’t get away with this shit.
Blonde hair and blue eyes brings a smile to her chops
Over the weekend, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a meeting of the youth wing of her Christian Democrat Union (CDU, kind of like the German Tories) party that multiculturalism had “failed, utterly failed” in Germany.
What this amounts to of course is a massive attack on the communities of immigrant descent in Germany, from the top of government.
Tourists stream into the Acropolis, watched over by riot cops
For the past few days employees of the Greek Ministry of Culture who work at the Acropolis in Athens have been on strike to protest the fact that they haven’t been paid properly for almost 2 years (!) and that they are due to be fired at the end of their short term contracts.
Workers blockaded the iconic site, one of the most well known historical landmarks in Europe and a birthplace of Ancient Greek democracy. They stayed entrenched for days until they were attacked viciously by riot cops on Thursday. The stormtroopers of the Greek government, which has surrendered control of the country to the dictatorship of the EU and the IMF, chased workers into the building and beat them, attacked passers by and journalists documenting their behaviour, and used tear gas.
Around the world, the capitalist press has been terrified by the militant fightback mounted by the Greek working class to the assault they face at the hands of the government, and have been twisting the info that we receive about what’s going on there to suit their own propaganda agenda. In this case, they tried to portray the situation as a clash between workers and cops, rather than a blatant attack on workers who have every right to be pissed off, having been used as virtual slaves by their employers. Another key aspect of their propaganda has been to focus on the tourists in Athens who haven’t been able to get in because of the strike.
Riot cops use tear gas on workers
In the light of this, the workers decided yesterday to take a new tack. Instead of blockading the entrance, they blocked the ticket booths, and declared that everyone would get in for free! Whilst the site remains under siege from riot cops, tourists have been streaming in to see the jewel in Athens historical crown.
In an inspired move, they’ve taken away the classic justification of the government that strikes are “bad for tourism.” How can tourists complain when workers’ direct action comes without a price tag?
The Greek mainstream press has accused the workers of “tarnishing a national symbol” (so what was the behaviour of the violent cops doing for it then?), and Greek Occupation Overseer Prime Minister George Papandreaou said:
“Nobody has the right to padlock the Acropolis and make this world heritage site their private possession. [Why then are you making unpaid workers charge for admission?]
“Such actions hurt the country. They are fodder for all those who are betting on Greece’s defeat and now rub their hands in glee.” [In fact Greece has been defeated and taken over by the international financial institutions, and it's his fault. Fortunately the workers are organising and mounting a resistance with their militant fightback.]
This of course isn’t the first time the Acropolis has become a defining symbol of the struggle against the austerity assault on the Greek people. Earlier this year the Greek Communist Party famously dropped a banner from it in an image that made headlines around the world, crying ‘Peoples of Europe: Rise Up!’
But the action of the Acropolis workers has shown that strikers can be creative in the way they try and get visitors on their side, and given us a little glimpse of the alternative future which we could map out to the one our governments are enforcing of cuts, environmental destruction and misery: a future in which you don’t need money to see our history, and the heritage of the human race is available to all for free!
(The workers have announced they will make a decision about their next move on Monday. We’ll bring you updates as we get them.)
This weekend you’ve got a unique chance to hear a heroic leader of the struggle for ecosocialism in Latin America speak in Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Hugo Blanco has for decades been a key figure in fighting for the transformation of society in his native Peru, and for the rights of indigenous peoples. On Friday (Oct 15th) he’s speaking at an SSP rally for ecosocialism, which is starting at 7.30 in Partick Burgh Halls. Then on Saturday (16th), Edinburgh Uni Socialist Society is hosting a dayschool on ecosocialism and Latin America, featuring a whole raft of workshops on struggles from across the continent and Hugo, again. It’s on in the Dining Room of Teviot House, Bristo Square from 10.30 – 1.
As a warm up for these exciting events, we thought it might be a good idea to give you an idea just who Hugo is, so that you don’t miss the chance to come and hear him speak.
Fourteen years after it first started, South Park remains one of the funniest comedy shows in the world. I am a massive fan, I’ve watched every single one all the way back to the start. Some of them are among the most powerful satirical statements of our time, like the way they absolutely nailed 
Among the many things to make your blood boil coming out of the comprehensive shafting we all received at the hands of the government on Wednesday was the really crap plan to make us all work longer.
“Such actions hurt the country. They are fodder for all those who are betting on Greece’s defeat and now rub their hands in glee.” [In fact Greece has been defeated and taken over by the international financial institutions, and it's his fault. Fortunately the workers are organising and mounting a resistance with their militant fightback.]
This weekend you’ve got a unique chance to hear a heroic leader of the struggle for ecosocialism in Latin America speak in Glasgow and Edinburgh.
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