Solidarity 344, 19 November 2014

The Citizens’ Advice Bureau and Step Change Debt Charity say that council tax arrears are now the main reason people contact them for debt advice, overtaking credit cards and loans. In the first three months of 2014, the CAB helped 27,000 people with council tax arrears. In 2013 Step Change helped over 45,000. The rise in arrears follows the Government’s abolition of council tax benefit for working-age people in 2013. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimated that some 2.4 million low-income households would have to pay. In April 2014 the rules governing bailiffs were changed. Renamed...

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The housing crisis in London has not bypassed student accommodation one bit. Currently students at UCL halls of accommodation in Camden are organising weekly meetings to fight back against worsening living conditions (including no hot water for two weeks) as well as above-inflation increases in rent year by year. UCL is one of the worst offenders for overpriced student housing, with an average price of £157.77 per week for a basic single room, and many rooms costing more than £200. Many students are having to pay more for their rent than they receive in their student loan. As well as this...

Working conditions in Qatar, in particular for migrant workers, are at an appalling level. Conditions have been recently compared by the International Trade Union Confederation to “modern day slavery”. University College London (UCL) is, along with several other European and North American universities, one of the many educational institutions to have a campus in Doha’s “Education City”. The University and Colleges Union (UCU) has been heavily critical of UCL’s refusal to do anything to ensure that the rights of the workers there, many of whom are migrants from South Asian countries such as...

Tory defector Douglas Carswell became UKIP’s first elected MP on 9 October, and another Tory defector, Mark Reckless, may win on 20 November in Rochester and Strood. We examine UKIP’s manifesto. UKIP: “Migrants are a drain on UK resources, including benefits and NHS” Solidarity: Researchers at University College London report that European migrants pay out far more in taxes than they receive in state benefits, a net contribution of £20 billion between 2000 and 2011. This is true for migrants from the “new” EU members such as Poland, Romania and Bulgaria as well as the “old” EU countries. Of 1...

‘Labour needs anti-cuts policy, not a Blairite new leader’ by Jon Lansman ( Solidarity 343) might have been appropriate for the comment section in the Guardian or the Observer, it was not appropriate for a revolutionary newspaper. Firstly, it should be noted that despite the headline the article does not argue for an anti-cuts policy, simply for not replacing Miliband as leader. Secondly, in as much as we agree that Miliband junior is the least worst bourgeois politician on offer to lead the Labour Party, what do we propose that activists should do about it? Move motions of support in their...

In her book Mind Change1 (reviewed by John Cunningham in Solidarity 342), Susan Greenfield says “We may be living in an unprecedented era where an increasing number of people are ... learning a new default mind-set ... one of low grade aggression, short attention span and a reckless obsession with the here and now”. The key word in that statement is “may”! The dangers of digital technology have become a major theme of Greenfield’s but what is less known is that this is way outside her area of expertise. This matters because Greenfield is a “public intellectual”, one who is listened to. A...

Before the tragic discovery that she has a brain tumour, Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis, the public figurehead of the CTU’s 2012 strike against the city’s Democratic mayor Rahm Emanuel, was preparing a mayoral campaign for next year’s election. Lewis’s national union, the American Federation of Teachers (the country’s biggest), had pledged $1 million. A Chicago Tribune poll from August 2014 put her ahead of Emanuel by 43 to 39%. Her victory, or even, perhaps, her campaign, would have been the most significant act of self-assertion by US labour in the political sphere for decades...

In an article published on LabourList on 13 November, Unite General Secretary Len McCluskey summed up the prospects for the Scottish Labour Party if Jim Murphy is elected leader. The ballot opened on 17 November and closes on 10 December. “Jim Murphy is the candidate of the past and the candidate of division. His victory would be all the SNP’s Christmases come at once. "He was a strong backer of the disastrous Iraq War. He backs extending privatisation in the public services. He is a pioneer of tuition fees for students. He supports austerity and 'economic credibility' with the City of London...

In Capital in the Twenty First Century, Thomas Piketty argued that the very richest in society are accumulating greater and greater wealth. As more wealth is handed down from rich parents to their heirs, as governments do less to tax this wealth, an increasing proportion of society’s resources become concentrated in the hands of the few, the 0.1% of the very richest. Mainstream economists have criticised this idea, but now a study of wealth in the USA has suggested that, if anything, Piketty has underestimated the degree to which the wealth of the US’s ruling class is growing. Wealth is hard...