Corbyn, Labour and Independence

First of all can I say that if I lived in England I would vote labour tomorrow. No if, no buts and no hesitation. Anything is better than the Tories.

But I would vote in the full awareness that the Labour Party is riddled with treachery, deceit and betrayal and has been for generations. They have had period after period of government and done very little to advance the country to socialism. Far from abolishing the House of Lords, despite the opportunity many times they have never attempted it and most of their former leaders, even the ones who purport to be socialists went on to sit in the Lords. They will always betray the working class. It’s in their DNA.

They spectacularly failed to support the miners when they really needed it. The miners were far too left wing for them. They love to complain about the press barons but as soon as they get a chance they cosy up to them. That’s why, despite all of their false posturing, we still have a media dominated by the right and which ruthlessly attacks and mis-informs working people. Labour had had many chances to put that right and they do nothing. They have no interest in an informed working class. We are just here to be exploited by a team which in the matter of the expenses scandal were not a bit better than the Tories.

As for Corbyn, he has been the subject of the treachery and betrayal which is endemic in his party. They have tried and failed to get rid of him because they think he’s too socialist for them. But they needn’t have bothered because he’ll join the betrayal of the working class just like the rest of them, it might just take a little longer. We already know he has a penchant for deceit. Three times he was elected on a Blairite manifesto and over a hundred times he voted against his party. To some that might point him out as a man of principle but to me it just says that he was quite willing to vote with or fail to oppose the Tories if it suited him. But his supporters seem quite proud of that. He will either betray them or he’ll be betrayed. They just can’t help themselves.

But as I said at the start, if I lived in England I would vote Labour but only as a slightly better option than the Tories.

But I don’t live in England. I’m a supporter of an independent socialist Scotland and since the Labour Party in Scotland are even worse I see no likelihood of them delivering any kind of socialism to Scotland. When Corbyn is knifed, and it won’t take long after the election is lost to the Tories, it is Labour in Scotland who will be in the lead among the plotters. They still worship Blair and Brown and see socialism as a retrograde step. So given that the road to socialism is temporarily blocked off for me I look at my other objective and I will cast my vote, however reluctantly to try to advance nationhood. We are lucky in Scotland that we can manufacture the opportunity to reboot our social system and start anew in an independent country. Even that won’t be easy but it will be far less difficult than turning around the Tory juggernaut that another five years of austerity will impose on us.

So I propose to vote for nationhood and to strengthen those who support it despite my reservations. Nothing else can stop the Tories from breaking the working class of Scotland and that has to be the first priority for me.

Paddy's Market

The proposed plans by Glasgow City Council to re-develop the site of Paddy's Market should be a source of some sadness for the people of Glasgow, even if it has become a run-down area. I presume it is going to become another gentrified city centre development for the middle classes to occupy while they consider where they really want to live when city centre lifestyle becomes too fraught (when they have kids).

Paddy's market has a long history. It was where the immigrant Irish of the East end of Glasgow went to buy second hand clothes for themselves and their children after they had been evicted from their lands and suffered from the potato famine. They were welcomed in Glasgow but found the same sort of poverty for working people there as they had left. Paddy's market was a necessary evil. The real sadness is that it still exists today for nearly the same purpose. Among the rip-off DVDs and CDs there are still stalls selling second hand clothes for the really poor. On a recent visit my son remarked that it was terrible that people had to sell this kind of stuff to live, but it is worse that people have to buy this kind of stuff to live.

Re-develop Paddy's Market by all means, but re-develop it as a memorial to the plight of working people. It is a piece of working class history, you might even call it an International Working Class Heritage Site, but there was never a member of the aristocracy living there so it won't count, will it?

The Heilan-man's umbrella (under the bridge at Central Station, for my foriegn readers) also served as a dossing down place for Highlanders dispossed in the Highland clearances, hence the name, and it is still in use by the homeless whenever Strathclyde's finest don't move them along.

Just more working class heritage messing up the post-modern image that Glasgow tries to promote by completely invented heritage like the 'Merchant City'. Real heritage is far too 'gritty' for them.

The Coronation of Gordon Brown

There was no choir giving us 'Zadok the Priest', but the elevation of Gordon (the big clunking fist) Brown to the status of Prime Minister elect was something of a coronation.

The fact that a left candidate from within the Labour party couldn't even get on to the ballot paper surely tells us that any notional loyalty to the working class, which some Labour supporters were clinging to, has gone completely and forever. There is no way back from this that leads left, the bridge is burnt.

All those, like TKMax, who believe that, as puny district councillors in opposition, they can present any challenge to the inexorable rightward stampede of the Labour party are either liars, clinging to their Labour rosettes in the hope of being able to re-join the gravy train, or fools.

For better or worse we have got Big Humble Gordy, and he has much to be humble about when we consider the growing inequality he has created.

Departure of the Seven Dwarves: GOOD RIDDANCE

I've just been on Terry (TKMax) Kelly's blog where he is singing the praises of the Renfrewshire Labour Councillors who have decided that they have done enough damage to Paisley and are now going to run away (but not before trousering a large wad).

To read Terry you would believe that these people had made a contribution apart from running Paisley into the ground, but they were always only political cannon fodder for the Labour party, they voted for the most part with no real thought for local people, only party instructions, or Paisley wouldn't be in the mess they have left it in.

The bold new initiative from Labour is to reverse the changes that these numpties made to the town centre traffic and parking arrangements and to hope that the damage isn't irreversible. Yet they are allowed to walk away with the money leaving others to clear up the mess. They have not even the decency to apologise to the businesses which had to close or the workers who lost their jobs as they turned Paisley town centre into a desert. I can only say good riddance to bad rubbish.

Pensions Crisis and the Financial Services Rip-Off

It is well known that I am no fan of Gordon ‘the big clunking fist’ Brown, but the current obsession with pensions crisis needs a more simple explanation, so it will be my cause to give it a try

Firstly, private pension provision is only available to those who can afford it, but speaking to some less well off people they believe that it is the state pension which is under threat. They do not appreciate, because the papers do not properly explain it, that if the better off pay more tax, then the less well off might be required to pay less. The papers try to give the impression that what is good for the middle classes is good for the whole country. Obviously in their agenda the less well off who may have no private pension don’t matter.

Secondly, the crisis arises because the financial sector of the economy by buying and selling stocks and shares at ever higher and unjustified values and trousering the profits put themselves in a position that, because of the high value (completely notional) of those shares as assets on their books, they believed that they were financially sound and their pension schemes were in surplus.

Because they imagined a surplus they gave themselves a ‘contribution holiday’; in other words, the money that they should have been investing in the pensions of their employees was paid out to their shareholders. The employees were never told that they had too much money in their pension fund and that they didn’t need to contribute for a while. Not bloody likely.

Now they find that they were too greedy and since their bubble has burst and shares have fallen to more realistic levels it is everyone’s fault but theirs. But who will suffer as a result of the fact that workers’ entitlement was given to shareholders. Well, not the shareholders. Certainly not the greedy directors and financiers. Yes, you guessed it, the employees.

Just another disgraceful episode in the world of high finance (grand larceny) that is capitalism.

I hope that this clarifies my views on the subject, I certainly feel better for getting it out