07.09.1995

It’s you! On the bosses’ hit-list

As millions dream of escape through the lottery, Tory and Labour alike seek to blame capitalism’s victims for the slow but sure economic tumble-down which is causing unemployment, poverty and alienation. Are you on the hit-list yet?

JACK STRAW, shadow home secretary, came top for nauseating creeps this week. He was not alone. The scramble to find scapegoats and claw back more profits from the lowest paid continued relentlessly.

Never fear: workers’ unions are here. Forget it. Unison and other health unions have successfully sold out their members this week by accepting local pay deals without even bothering to wait a couple of days for the result of their ballots for industrial action.

TUC bureaucrats are busy making back-room deals in the run up to conference next week in a desperate attempt to ensure that the minimum wage remains firmly off the agenda.

Jack Straw has lined Labour up behind the most rightwing bigots, such as New York police chief, William J Braton, and mayor Rudolph Guiliani. They want to ‘reclaim the streets’ from the un-employed and homeless, put there by the bosses’ drive for profit.

Straw’s outburst on the homeless and ‘squeegee mer-chants’ should not surprise us. It is in line with Labour’s ‘tough on crime’ policy. It is also in line with their empty rightwing rhetoric, designed to pose more right than the Tories. The bosses’ sick and irrational society will be safe in Labour’s hands.

Homelessness and crime are not spontaneously born out of someone’s gene make-up. They are the result of poverty and alienation in society. And who causes this? The criminals in the Armani suits who have to battle their way through the homeless on the way to their luxury office block. Is Labour going to flush them out of the City? What’s your guess?

The Tories are banging away at the old benefit scam. You know the one: it’s all you people we made unemployed that are squeezing the country dry. Not the men in Armani suits. Having children is apparently too expensive for this society, so the Tories apparently want to take away child benefit payments for single parents.

It is also a ritual at this time of year for the government to howl about ‘dole scroungers’. It shows the Tory backwoodsmen at conference how tough the party is, how it is going to bring back the cat o’ nine tails, the rack and hanging, drawing and quartering.

In its crackdown on ‘scroungers’ the government gets only about three pounds for every pound ‘invested’. Even by their calculations that is much less lucrative than if it chose to wage war on income tax fraud - those men in the Armani suits again. Their motives though are not financial, but political: to scapegoat unemployed workers and keep them in such poverty that the wages of all workers are dragged down to the lowest possible.

But remember, it is not just the Tories. Labour is determined to keep stum on setting a minimum wage. Harriet Harman, Labour’s employment spokesperson, is still pushing her plans to turn young people into an army of cheap labour by setting some unspecified, but low - very, very low - minimum wage figure for them.

In the face of all this John Monks is cheerfully making sure that the TUC is nothing more than an elaborately ineffective publicity campaign. A TUC report reveals that 40% of trade unionists are manual workers, while 70% are ‘service’ workers (including teachers and nurses). Many once-professional workers have seen their wages driven down to such an extent that they have joined the ranks of the working class. The one-time myth that technology and boom would make the working class extinct has been rudely turned on its head. John Monks confidently announces that “We are all working class now.” But he includes Britain’s top bosses and ignores the huge pay gap between them and the lowest paid. He is looking for a new era of “social partnership”.

In the face of a concerted attack on all workers by the Tories - and scheduled to continue under Labour - we are being left defenceless. The task of building independent working class organisation must become urgent for us all.

Unemployed condemn lottery robbery

MEMBERS of the Unemployed Workers Charter appeared on The Time The Place morning TV chat show on the national lottery last week. They called for collective struggle to raise the whole of society against individual get-rich schemes which can often turn into nightmares in this society.

A single mother told of how she was addicted, spending £5 a week on tickets in the hope of giving her children a better future. Lee-Anne Bates for the UWC said, “The lottery advertising is aimed at the lowest paid and only perpetuates the gap between a tiny minority of the wealthiest people and the mass of low paid and unemployed workers.”

One young winner said she had not done much with the money except to buy a few clothes. Winning may make you rich, but it does not change the impoverished world around you. Many of the wealthiest showbiz personalities in Hollywood are lonely, tormented and deeply alienated from society.

Stan Kelsey for the UWC received warm support from the audience when he said: “The whole system is based on profit. We have to fight to get rid of that system together to achieve any kind of dream.”