Solidarity 093, 11 May 2006

...And what happens to it

SERCO is one of the government’s favourite PFI firms. Among its many public sector contracts is one for running the electronic tagging scheme for convicts on early release. The company is required only to report breaches of court orders by tagged offenders within 24 hours — fairly simple, you would think — but in a remarkable 22% of cases they fail to do so. While Serco were failing to report one offender’s disappearance to the police in 2003, he was committing a murder in Nottingham. A Serco spokesperson explained with disarming simplicity that they were so incompetent because “we were not...

Where the money goes...

TONY Blair said something quite revealing to the “New Health Network” bosses’ forum at the end of April. He said that the Tories’ health “reforms” in the 80s and 90s — such as the internal market and GOP fundholding, both of which Blair was against — were right, but had failed because the Tories didn’t invest enough in the health service. How so? Well, consider Patricia Hewitt’s latest planned privatisation, NHS Logistics. This organisation has won international awards for excellence, and is so efficient that it returned £3 million to the NHS last year as a rebate. Now Hewitt wants to sell it...

Hot shoe reshuffle

RUTH Kelly is to leave the Department of Education and take up responsibility for local government, which has provoked sighs of relief in some quarters, particularly teachers and parents not keen on religious schools. Surely her more off-the-wall, Catholic fundamentalist opinions will have no effect in her new job? Hold on, though — Kelly’s new job also includes responsibility for women and equality, something the government has carefully not publicised. And this is the Opus Dei fellow-traveller whom a fellow-fundamentalist praised for being “straight down the line” on opposition to all...

Imperialist and proud?

THE headline of Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s article on the Euston Manifesto group in the 10 May Guardian is “They should come out as imperialist and proud of it”. Wheatcroft suggests that the Eustonites should support a new era of colonialism, adopting the slogan “Progressive, democratic, imperialist, and proud of it”. He adds that they “might even provide some recruits for a new colonial office”. What do you reckon, comrades?

“Not revolutionary”

I’VE noticed that the SWP have taken to defending Galloway and various other people they’re shacked up with by pointing out that said scumbags are “not revolutionaries”. In the case of Galloway, this (absolutely indisputable) fact apparently justifies every crime from demanding at least £150,000 a year to hob-nobbing with Ba’thists to supporting the Pakistani military dictatorship. Similarly, I remember Socialist Worker explaining Livingstone’s scab-herding on London Underground by pointing out that he is, after all, a “reformist politician”. This oh-so-revolutionary position in fact lets...

Galloway: “anyone but Labour”

ON 2 May, two days before the local elections, Metro’s regular “60 Second Interview” was with George Galloway. In answer to the question “How can Metro reader make the world a better place?”, the Gorgeous One replied: “The most immediate thing is to vote for anybody but Tony Blair on May 4th. If Blair can claim a victory, you’ll have him for the next three and a half years and we will get everything we fear and more. If, however, May 4th is a disaster for New Labour, they will have him out by the end of summer and that’s a prize worth fighting for”. Do we really need to explain the awfulness...

A socialist platform in the Green Party?

Anyone who encountered the Green Party during the recent local elections will be aware of their incoherent and even janus-like politics, claiming to transcend “traditional” left-right divisions and appealing to everyone from Labour voters disillusioned with Blairism to Tories with a “social conscience”. Where they have gained local influence, the Greens’ record has been far from radical, sustaining right-wing townhall coalitions (Lib Dem in Oxford, Lib Dem-Tory in Leeds) which have carried out cuts and privatisations with at least as much zeal as New Labour. On the other hand, the Green Party...

But is this progress?

Ira Berkovic reviews Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the rise of raunch culture, by Ariel Levy JENNA Jameson, apparently the world’s most famous porn star, recently had her autobiography How to Make Love like a Porn Star advertised with an enormous billboard featuring her semi-naked self in New York’s Times Square. Whatever you think about Times Square, advertising, Jenna Jameson or porn, you can’t deny that it was significant. Pornography — seedy, illicit, marginal, surely? — being not only advertised but celebrated in the glitzy neon heartland of mainstream consumer capitalism. Seem weird...

This is capitalism

Maria Exall reviews Enron – the smartest guys in the room Enron was the seventh biggest corporation in the US, valued at 70 billion dollars; it was a big player in the global energy industry. When it collapsed in 2001 there were 30,000 redundancies. They discovered massive deficits in the employee pension funds. Several leading Enron executives had cashed in hundreds of million dollars in shares in the run up to the bankrupcy announcement. But this was no ordinary story of corporate mismanagement. No commonplace event where workers are forced to carry the lions share of economic pain. This...

Workers' news round-up

Indonesia A wave of protests — including on May Day — by Indonesian workers has forced the government to put off its draft labour law. According to union leader Dita Sari, the stakes are high because the labour law “will become a normative regulation that will be binding on workers for years and years into the future”. However the overall situation for workers is not great. One danger is the government’s emphasis on copying China and Vietnam, which have lower wages than Indonesia and no independent trade unions. Sari said: “The president’s reference to Chinese and Vietnamese models of labour...

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