Tuesday, June 12, 2007
A King's Ransom
Class and the class-room
The Millennium Cohort Study also found large differences between children living in families above and below the poverty line.
The poorest children were 10 months behind their wealthier peers in tests of their grasp of shapes, numbers, letters and colours known as "school readiness" tests. And they were five months behind their wealthier peers in vocabulary tests.
One of the researchers, Professor Heather Joshi, said: "The advantaged children tended to be way ahead of the average and the disadvantaged children were lagging behind. If you look at the front-runners and the runner ups - there's almost a year's worth of differences."
These results will not be a surprise to education experts or government policy advisers [ Nor a surprise to the members of the Socialist Party either ] who have long known that parents' educational achievement and family income are indicators of a child's educational success.
An earlier BBC report describes that little progress has been made to close the achievement gap between rich and poor pupils . Children from poorer homes (eligible for free school meals ) are almost half as likely to get good GCSE results as pupils from richer homes .
Monday, June 11, 2007
The New King of Wall St.
AN EYE OPENER
PRISONERS OF WANT
DOWN AND OUT DOWN UNDER
Sunday, June 10, 2007
CANADIAN CAPERS
Friday, June 08, 2007
Marks and Sparks
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Rich Pickings
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
It's Sick , isn't it ?
Part of the treatment can either be 2 pills a day that cleanses their blood of life-threatening excess iron - a side effect of the frequent blood transfusions needed to treat the disease -- or alternatively , insert a needle into their stomach for eight to 12 hours a night at least five nights a week .
While the drug is available in Scotland, most patients in England are not able to get it because local NHS organisations are refusing to pay for a drug that costs £10,000-£15,000 for a year's supply for a young person. So now it's back to these injections which many families find highly stressful and do only infrequently, thus endangering the child's life.
Dr Farrukh Shah, a consultant haematologist at the Whittington Hospital in London, said: 'All patients who would benefit from Exjade should get it without arguments about who's going to fund it. They are being made victims of NHS internal politics. It's all down to people passing the buck financially between hospitals and Primary Care Trusts.... It's distressing for patients and their parents. Patients are struggling to maintain the needle treatment and desperately want to get Exjade, but many can't. When I tell them that their PCT has refused to pay for something that would make their life a whole lot easier in many ways, many end up crying.'
Vanessa Bourne of the Patients' Association said :"..you can't expect a parent to put a needle in their child's stomach every night because that treatment is so horrible to administer. Would PCT bosses, as parents, wish to do this to their child every night?..."
And while we are constantly admonished to care for our young , Capitalism simply counts up the pounds and the pence .
Monday, June 04, 2007
COUNCIL TAX OR FREE ACCESS?
The SNP through Alex Salmond want to replace the Council Tax, not all at once, first no raising of tax for two years and then, to quote,
“The SNP will abolish the unfair Council Tax and replace it with a local income tax system based on the ability to pay. The local tax will be set at a rate of 3p on income excluding savings income. The reform will represent a major progressive change to taxation in Scotland and the biggest tax cut for Scots in a generation.”
Pensioners have protested bitterly that the council tax has more than doubled over the last ten years and not having the industrial muscle they may have had, are not able to increase their income through industrial action. They of course have a voting strength and the South Lanarkshire Council decided to recognise the depreciation in their income by returning £50 to all pensioner households. This decision was taken and payments made before the election took place, some were saying "it's a bribe", evidently if it was a bribe, it failed. So what is the socialist solution, below is an article published in the May 2004 Socialist Standard, give it some thought.
COUNCIL TAX OR FREE ACCESS
Pleased with your latest council tax bill? This tax on property was introduced in 1994 by John Major as a replacement for Thatcher's poll tax,which was removed (along with Maggie) after it caused widespread public resentment and riots. Council tax has risen by up to 60 percent since 1997. It leapt 12 percent on average last year, and after the latest increases it's also now causing considerable upset and anger.
This government like previous ones wants to stay in power, so while it likes to be seen attempting to improve services delivered by local authorities, like education and policing, it doesn't want to be seen raising taxes to pay for them. Whitehall and local governments both understand and play the resulting game: get what you can from each, but blame one another - and blame other parties - if and when the public complain. Councils blame central government for not providing enough money, and the government accuses councils of inefficiency, mismanagement and proclaim that they will cap unacceptable increases.
While the government is worried about a popular revolt against council tax - something Gordon Brown tried to diminish in his March 17 budget with a £ 100 reduction-cum-sop for pensioners over 70 - it seems likely Labour will keep this property tax but reduce future increases by allowing councils to raise additional money by charging for more local services.
The council tax is a property tax but it is only a pinprick for those who own the most property. In fact, the more property you own the less painful it is. While the Duke of Westminster, worth £4.6 billion and owner of some 190,000 acres in Britain is able to live a luxurious life in the grandest of mansions, his council tax bill will be no more than a few thousand pounds. Rich aristocratic and agro-industrialists who represent just one percent of the population but who own 70 percent of the land in Britain, are actually paid property subsidies and grants of tens of thousands each year.
Those on high incomes can also shrug it off. Tony Blair and Cherie's council tax can be paid off with just a half-day's worth of their earnings, Michael Howard and Charles Kennedy's with a mere couple of days worth of theirs. This reflects the inequalities of ownership and income that are at the basis of present-day society.
Despite appearances, in the end it does not matter to most people what form or level taxes take. To enable us to remain fit to work, our wage, salary or benefit has to cover all the normal costs of living, including any taxes. Abolishing or reducing taxes wouldn't leave us any better off since it only allows them to pay us less. National and local finance is not really our problem. Whatever the system's politicians decide, our after-tax income is never going to be much more than enough to keep ourselves fit to work.
Free access
We in the Socialist Party say people should have full access to services like public toilets, education, properly maintained roads, refuse collection, libraries etc, but we ask you to reject taxation or direct charges as ways of providing them. Instead, we ask you to support free access to these vital services as well as to all other needs, like food, housing, public transport, domestic appliances, furniture, gas, electricity, clothing etc.
A society of free access to whatever people need is readily achievable by replacing today's capitalism with a new system where we all collectively and directly own and democratically control the means of production and distribution (i.e., farmland, factories, raw materials, power stations, water supply, roads network, railways etc).
If we all directly own and control these assets - rather than them being owned by private individuals and, or, the state - then we will also collectively own all that they provide, resulting in free access to all goods and services. People don't have to buy what's jointly theirs already.
Nothing will have a monetary cost with real socialism. In fact, money, having no function at all, will be redundant. People will still work, but the purpose will then be for meeting society's needs - not making profits for, and rewarding, a tiny minority class who have taken possession of the vital resources and machinery that make life possible.
Do you want to stick with council tax, local income tax, national income tax, value added tax, stealth taxes, National Insurance - a tax by another name - or get rid of the lot of them, along with the time-wasting, bureaucracy, confusion, stress and worry they cause, by choosing to have classless moneyless leaderless free access from democratic real socialism instead?
Mental well-being and Capitalism
Staff with depression were said to take an average 30 days off annually.
Those with stress were reported to be away for 21 days.
This confirms an earlier finding by a survey of 250 doctors . The poll of GPs reveals most believe firms do not do enough to prevent workers falling ill, and blame companies for failing those who are ill, and not doing enough to help them back to work.
94% of the doctors quizzed blamed employers for failing to take responsibility for their workers' health and well-being.
Capitalism is actually literally a depressing system to work under.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Socialist Standard June 2007
Socialist Standard June 2007
Introducing the Socialist Party The Socialist Party is like no other political party in Britain. It is made up of people who have joined together because we want to get rid of the profit system and establish real socialism. Our aim is to persuade others to become socialist and act for themselves, organising democratically and without leaders, to bring about the kind of society that we are advocating in this journal. We are solely concerned with building a movement of socialists for socialism. We are not a reformist party with a programme of policies to patch up capitalism. We use every possible opportunity to make new socialists. We publish pamphlets and books, as well as CDs,DVDs and various other informative material. We also give talks and take part in debates; attend rallies, meetings and demos; run educational conferences;host internet discussion forums, make films presenting our ideas, and contest elections when practical. Socialist literature is available in Arabic, Bengali, Dutch, Esperanto, French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish as well as English. The more of you who join the Socialist Party the more we will be able to get our ideas across, the more experiences we will be able to draw on and greater will be the new ideas for building the movement which you will be able to bring us. The Socialist Party is an organisation of equals. There is no leader and there are no followers. So, if you are going to join we want you to be sure that you agree fully with what we stand for and that we are satisfied that you understand the case for socialism. Print off the form on bottom of page 3 of Socialist Standard and send it to the Socialist Party for a free 3-Month trial of the Socialist Standard. Britains oldest Socialist journal published since 1904. Consistently making the case for socialism. |
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Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Butlers
The Guild of Professional Butlers is now reporting an explosion in the numbers of super-rich households who want to be waited on hand and foot.
There simply are not enough butlers .
Charles MacPherson, the vice-chairman of the International Guild of Professional Butlers explained . "If we doubled the number of butlers, they wouldn't be without work,"
Jane Urqhart, the principal of the Greycoat Academy which trains butlers, said that demand for "good butlers" was soaring.
"What's happened is that there has been a growth among those people with a lot of money who want to emulate the old traditions, such as having a butler. So they buy the manor house but they also want to hire someone from the days when the house was staffed by a butler..."
Ivor Spencer, 81, a butler with service in 14 of the grandest houses in England, runs a butler-training school and agency. He says that one can still expect certain standards from a butler .
Mr Spencer warns: "You must never do it just for the money. You must put the family before your own family."
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Tesco drivers' strike
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Wealth Gap Widens
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Salesmen or Soldiers
Scotland on Sunday 27th May 2007
Carling takes on rivals with £7m new beer launch
by WILLIAM LYONS
CARLING, part of the US-based Coors group, is to wage a full-scale war on Scottish & Newcastle and Belhaven with the launch of a new beer and a multimillion-pound marketing push north of the Border.
It will spend £7m on launching a new dark beer, Maclachlan's, as it moves to outgun John Smith's and Belhaven Best.
Who will go down? Result of friendly fire!
enjoy your pint, if you can. even if it is launched at you.
Friday, May 25, 2007
The Bitter Price for Better Life
Spotted by a Maltese armed forces reconnaissance plane on Monday morning 80 nautical miles south of Malta, roughly halfway between the coast of Libya and the southernmost point of the EU. At around the same time, some of the 53 people on the boat, all of them from Eritrea, were begging their friends and relatives in Europe by satellite phone to help them, saying the boat's engine had stalled, that the sea was rising and that the boat risked being swamped. Calls were placed to Malta, towns in northern Italy and to London.
"We continued the search until dark," reported Malta's armed forces chief, General Carmel Varsallo, "extending the zone a further 10km in the hope of finding something, but found nothing."
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
The Big Dream
The Slow City
By the early years of the 21st century, more Glasgow voices increasingly question the city’s preoccupation with shopping begin to suffer consumption fatigue, and slowly renounce the addiction and thrill of compulsive shopping. By 2020 many have abandoned preoccupations with wealth, conspicuous consumption and rewarding talent with money. Instead there is a widespread sense that there are more profound issues at stake: finding some deeper meaning to life, investing time and love in bringing up children, caring for neighbours, the vulnerable and the old.
Kaleidoscope City
Glasgow has exploded into a kaleidoscope of diversity and visible vibrancy. The city is known for its open doors policy to newcomers and its tolerant cosmopolitan atmosphere. Waves of newcomers have arrived and been absorbed: the Poles, the Bulgarians, the Romanians, the Somalis, the Iraqis, the Lebanese. Old divisions and identities are barely remembered by the younger generations and new Glaswegians .
We of the Socialist Party will add our own option for the people of Glasgow to choose
Socialist City
Men and women of Glasgow , in co-operation with the peoples of the rest of the world , taking charge and taking responsibilty for their daily lives through a net-work of inter-linked decentralised democratically-controlled committees , based on local neighbourhoods and places of work , rising to regional and then world-wide administrations , which will decide production and distribution requirements of society , based not on the ability to pay -but upon need . The abolition of money . The abolition of prices and wages . The abolition of private and State property. A Glasgow of free access .
Abundance instead of Scarcity .
child poverty - again
Barnados have released their latest report on child poverty . One-in-four Scots children is living in poverty - 250,000 youngsters are currently living below the breadline ( that's families it said are living on less than 60% of the average household income , less than £301 for a couple with two children and £223 for a lone parent with two children, after housing costs) .
Martin Crewe, director of Barnardo's Scotland, said: "Today in Scotland children are missing out on what most of us would consider essentials. Although the Scottish Executive has taken steps to reduce child poverty, we should be ashamed that one-in-four children is still living in poverty in Scotland today, when the UK is the fifth-richest economy in the world."
Barnados recommend certain reforms . Free school meals for children with parents on the maximum working tax credit , a special commission to be established to identify the policies needed to meet the Scottish and UK governments' targets of halving child poverty by 2010 , an investment of £3.8billion .
We said it in an earlier blog .
"Poverty is an inescapable part of capitalist society. It can be abolished, but only when there is a fundamental change in how we organise society. That is way beyond any policies or even concepts of the Labour Party...Because it relies on the uncertainties of the market system and the use of money, the hope of any Labour government ending child poverty is impossible. Labour and Tory governments having been making the same promise for many years and they have all failed. "
The same will apply to any SNP Executive .
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Paternalism is a common attitude among well-meaning social reformers. Stemming from the root pater, or father, paternalism implies a patria...