CHANGING THE ENVIRONMENT?

Former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott has defended his decision to accept a peerage, saying he never ruled out sitting in the House of Lords.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today programme, he said he took the peerage because he wanted to influence environmental policy.

And he made clear his decision did not come after pressure from his wife.

"I make my own decisions," said Mr Prescott, who stood down at the general election after 37 years as an MP.

 

 

Mr Prescott, who was Tony Blair's deputy for 10 years, said: "Of course I'll be influenced by my wife [Pauline], but I'm not doing it for that.

"It provides me an opportunity on environment," he added.

Mr Prescott once indicated he would not follow in the footsteps of other former Labour figures who have left the Commons and joined the Lords - like Lords Kinnock and Hattersley - reportedly saying: "I don't want to be a member of the House of Lords. I will not accept it."

John Prescott was made a peer in the Dissolution Honours on Friday. The list is made at the end of every Parliament to allow outgoing prime ministers to reward colleagues.

He and the others named in the list will only officially become peers once they have been sworn in.

The 71-year-old responded to his appointment on his Labour blog, saying: "I welcome the opportunity to continue to campaign in Parliament for jobs, social justice and the environment as well as to hold this Con-Lib government to account."

It's like reading a book, start on the left and move to the right.

Food for thought

The G8 and G20 meetings are to be held in Toronto at the end of June.
Preparations are costing almost $1 billion (according to the officials),most of which is for security. (Our local, new, state-of-the-art hospital is in the middle of cut backs dropping nurses and the physiotherapy program, we could use a few million!) How come popularly elected leaders need so much security, hide away in the bush and talk in secret? And don't we already have a G200 called the UN that should include all countries in a global economy? What arrogance these managers of capitalism show!

Is capitalism on shaky ground? On Thursday, May 6th. the stock market went haywire as stocks plummeted in unprecedented fashion, e.g. Shares Russell 1000 Value Index Fund, worth $95 billion, saw their shares drop from $59 to 8 cents and the Dow Jones Industrial average lost about ten per cent. The reason? A fat fingered trader in Chicago pressed the wrong key and made a sale of several million stocks into billions and all hell broke loose. Great, secure system, eh? The Toronto Star writer headlined his piece 'At least it wasn't a weapons system'.

IT'S AN ILL WIND FOR SOME

As an additive to Pawning, here in East Kilbride Town, the E.K. Mail ran an article on the climbing "Personal debt crisis", despite claims the recession is over.

"Statistics show that those in debt in East Kilbride owe around £1,000 more than the average of £15,036 "

It's noticeable that, in "Prince's Mall" we now have two pawn shops facing each other with a glittering array of jewellery, both only having arrived within the last three years.

Lots of shops are closing, there was recently even an everything for a pound shop having a close down sale of everything at 50% off.

David Cameron says we all will feel the pinch, not much left for some after the pinching.

ON LINE BROKER WOOS CASH STRAPPED HIGH FLIERS

An article in the Sunday Herald on  May 2010-05-31 by Catriona Stewart says  "Pawning is reborn"

It's hardly the typical pawn­broker.

Instead of wedding rings, it's looking for private jets; it would rather accept a rare work of art than a much-loved guitar; and a Rolex is preferable to a clapped out hi-fi.

Welcome to the topsy-turvy world of Borro.com – the world's first online pawnbroker, which caters for the likes of down-on-their-luck hedge-fund managers, bankers and even premiership footballers who have run into a spot of cash-flow bother.

Among Borro's main clientele are wealthy ­British-based EU ­nationals who have fallen on hard times due to economic instability in their home countries, and are now turning to high-end money-lenders trading in fine art, heirlooms and luxury cars to raise loans of up to £200,000.

But on the streets of Glasgow it's a different story …

There aren't many pawnbroker customers in Glasgow looking for a loan against their Banksy sketch or private Learjet. Not many stockbrokers or footballers are in the queues, either, hoping for a few hundred quid to keep their head above water until the next pay-day.

Instead, customers at one outlet in the city's west end are cashing in small items such as cheap jewellery and mass-produced electrical goods.

On the high street, the cash-strapped and desperate take away an average of between £100 and £150.

Rob, a postal worker, regularly uses the pawnbroker as a high-risk bank, taking out loans to tide him over between pay cheques.

"I flit between pawnbrokers as I don't want to become a familiar face," he says. "I'm a bit ashamed of not being able to manage my money well enough to stay away from the shop and I'd hate for anyone I knew to see me coming out."

Across the city, in one of Glasgow's more deprived areas, Marianne, 36, is trading in a gold ring to raise money for her daughter's birthday present. She has never visited a pawnbroker before, she says – but friends frequently do,

so she thought she'd give it a try.

"Times are tight," she says. "I am mortified I haven't put enough away for my wee girl's birthday but bills have to come first."

 

"PEACE-LOVING" BRITAIN

"Britain signaled a new openness on nuclear weapons yesterday, revealing that its stockpile will not exceed 225 warheads, including up to 160 that are ready for action. William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, said: "We believe that the time is now right to be more open about the weapons we hold." (Times, 27 May) RD

The Scheme - Poverty Porn ?

The Scheme , a 4--part series ( the final two episodes of the series have been postponed indefinitely because a 17-year-old male resident featured in the shows had been charged with assault) is a fly-on-the-wall documentary of life in half a dozen households in Onthank, a housing estate in Kilmarnock. Condemned by some as little more than "poverty porn", it has provoked debate.
In its depiction of six families in the Ayrshire community, a myriad range of social problems have been shown on screen, from poverty and unemployment through to addiction and anti-social behaviour. In the north-west pocket of Kilmarnock where Onthank lies, the statistics make for even more alarming reading. There, compared with other parts of East Ayrshire, four times as many children live in households where no adults work; almost three times as many adults are unable to work due to disability or illness; and nearly twice as many adults die as a result of heart disease.

Douglas Hamilton, head of Save The Children in Scotland explains "The face of child poverty in Scotland has been brutally exposed in The Scheme. For many viewers, I am sure that this programme has been an eye-opener to the experience of some of the poorest children growing up in Scotland..." he added "It is shameful that 95,000 children in Scotland live in families surviving on less than £33 per day."

However , many community leaders have called for The Scheme to be taken off air.
Social commentator and Herald columnist Pat Kane described it as 'poverty porn' and 'middle-class BBC television'. He told Newsnight Scotland: "I thought it was cartoonish. I thought it picked people who social work would clearly have to embrace over a long period of time and concentrated on them" .
Local MSP Willie Coffey condemned the series saying it lacked balance. He said: "The danger with programmes like this is that they give a misleading impression of an entire community..."

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has found that nearly two-thirds of the British public think poverty is either an inevitable part of life or related to an individual's own laziness but the organisation also predicts that, in any 10-year period, half the population will live in government-defined poverty for at least 12 months.

Similar deprivation and destitution can be experienced by other people on other housing estates in other cities and towns. Many people will readily condemn those who live off Social Security and the benefits system when they could be working, but yet will vigorously defend the rights of those people who live in luxury yet never work because they own capital.
We need a revolution because the reformers, social workers, charitable individuals, priests and other well-meaning folk have all failed. They are like medics on a battlefield, all they do is to keep wrapping on the bandages as the bloody slaughter continues around them.

The death of capitalism will be the beginning of a truly human society where we can relate to each other as members of a real community.

"MODERN" BRITAIN

There is a notion about that because in Britain we have a new political situation of political sharing that something has changed about the class division of society. It is just not true. "At St. James's club in London, a new toast is overheard: "To the Nineteen." This refers, as you no doubt spotted at once, to the 19 Old Etonians who have become prime ministers. Jolly good." (Sunday Times, 16 May) "Almost four-fifths of the new cabinet are millionaires, according to an analysis by The Sunday Times. As the government prepares to wield the axe on public spending, research reveals that 18 of the 23 full-time cabinet members have seven-figure fortunes, collectively worth about £50 million." (Sunday Times, 23 May) So modern Britain looks a lot like old Britain. The people who produce wealth - the working class are exploited by the owning class. Wake up workers we need a new society! RD

THIS IS DEMOCRACY?

"Almost four-fifths of the new cabinet are millionaires, according to an analysis by The Sunday Times. As the government prepares to wield the axe on public spending, research reveals that 18 of the 23 full-time cabinet members have seven-figure fortunes, collectively worth about £50 million." (Sunday Times, 23 May) RD

scottish child poverty

The number of children living in poverty has risen for the first time in more than a decade, figures have revealed.

Official statistics showed there were 210,000 youngsters in Scotland who were classed as being in relative poverty in 2008-09.

That is a rise of 10,000 on the previous year and means 21% of children are now affected by the problem.

Another success for the reformers !!!

Reading Notes

"In 1844, four years before Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto appeared, The Awl (Journal of the Shoemakers federation) wrote, " The division of society into the producing and non-producing classes, and the fact of the unequal distribution of value between the two, introduces us at once to another distinction – that of capital and labour…labour now becomes a commodity…Antagonism and opposition of interest is introduced into the community; capital and labour stand opposed." We hold that the state government functions as the legislative arm of the capitalist class, passing laws that legitimize and maintain theft and
exploitation by the capitalists. Zinn writes – " As soon as Jackson was elected president, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi began to pass laws to extend the states' rule over the Indians in their territory. These laws did away with the tribe as a legal unit, outlawed tribal meetings, took away the chiefs' powers, made the Indians subject to militia duty and state taxes, but denied them the right to vote, to bring suits, or to testify in court. Indian territory was divided up, to be distributed by state lottery. Whites were encouraged to settle on Indian land." A taste of things to come! John Ayers

Food for thought

In South Africa, two blacks were arrested for the murder of a white employer who had a reputation for beating and mistreating his employees and was even jailed for beating one farm worker so badly he was permanently brain-damaged. The black South Africans fear a white backlash – seems the more things change, the more they remain the same. Power structures seem to have continued much as before in that country.

For those who think we should start socialism within the capitalist system, a lesson is to be learned from the use of organic foods. After years of healthy growth, the appetite for these foods is shrinking because they cost more and when workers are being squeezed by the economy, something has to go. Organic food prices cannot compete with factory farming techniques. That's the system!

 If the Goldman Sachs fiasco weren't so tragic, it would be funny. Jay Leno commented," Just four days after Goldman Sachs cost investors $12 billion by failing to tell them that they were being investigated for fraud, they gave out another $5.4 billion in bonuses. Huh? Even Somali pirates are going, "Come on!" A Washington Post cartoon shows a policeman approaching two fat cat bankers under a Goldman sign. One whispers to the other," Tell him we're innocent, and we'll hedge that by betting against our acquittal." John Ayers

"MODERN" BRITAIN

"At St. James's club in London, a new toast is overheard: "To the Nineteen." This refers, as you no doubt spotted at once, to the 19 Old Etonians who have become prime ministers. Jolly good." (Sunday Times, 16 May) RD

THIS IS FRUGAL?

In an article praising the former Queen Mother for her parsimonious life style we learn that she even rented rather than bought a TV set for her Castle of Mey in Caithness. So how come she managed to run up an overdraft of £4 million with Coutts? We are told that she had threadbare carpets and wore the same Burberry raincoats for years and years. Before we sob gently into our tear-soaken handkerchiefs at such penury it is worth noting the last paragraph in this nonsensical article. "The Queen Mother received £643,000 annually from the civil list but still had to be bailed out by the Queen with a million or two a year." (Sunday Times, 16 May) RD

MONDAY MORNING BLUES

"The recession is raising stress levels so high that a quarter of workers are finding their weekends ruined by the Sunday blues - a dread of going back to he office the next day - according to a report. In a study to be launched tomorrow by the mental health charity Mind, employees were questioned about their levels of anxiety and more than 26% said they felt dread and apprehension the day before they were due to go back to work after a day or a weekend off. ...Other findings include effects on people's sleep patterns, high rates of illness and reports of extensive low morale. High rates of unpaid overtime were recorded, and almost all the people questioned were unhappy with their work-life balance." (Observer, 16 May) RD

city of discovery

In an article ex-Labour MP , John McAllion , describes his home-town of Dundee that provides some interesting statistics.

In the 19th century, the High Court Judge Lord Cockburn described Dundee as a "sink of atrocity which no moral flushing seems capable of cleansing". James Cameron, who began a career in journalism in the city in the 1930s, described the east coast town as a "symbol of a society that had gone sour".

A national study, "A Divided Britain", identified residents in many of the city's working class neighbourhoods as suffering from the "worst financial hardship in Britain". This was backed up by a contemporary Scottish Executive report showing that 46 per cent of resident households in the city had a net income of less than £10,000 a year while 55 per cent of the same households contained no-one who was working. A Joseph Rowntree Foundation report branded Dundee as a city of poverty, teenage mothers and poor mental health.Dundee GPs were issuing more prescriptions for mental health problems than anywhere else in Scotland. After Glasgow, Dundee had Scotland's next highest concentration of poverty, overcrowding and drug abuse. The city retained its title as the teenage pregnancy capital of Scotland.

At the beginning of 2009 an English-based research group published a report "Cities Outlook 2009" warning of the impact of the recession on 64 cities across Britain. It ranked Dundee 54th of the 64 cities, claiming that it lacked economic prosperity, suffered from a shrinking population and was scarred by stubbornly high levels of social deprivation and benefit. Only Liverpool had a higher level of benefit claimants as a proportion of its working age population.

Annual business statistics issued at the end of 2008, revealed Dundee losing 60 manufacturing firms and 3000 manufacturing jobs in the eight years following 1998. By 2006, the city had become a service sector economy with four times as many workers working in services as in manufacturing. The average annual salary in the service sector was £8,900 a year less than in manufacturing.

The Dundee story has been about low pay, persistent poverty, joblessness and benefit dependency in a city where the hard lives of thousands of its working class citizens have been erased from the official record.

A PAPAL VIEW OF SOCIETY

There are many ways to look at society. What are the most important aspects of present day society? Socialists might say the fact that a third of the world is starving, or that we live in a society that could be annihilated in a nuclear holocaust or even that in the drive for profits we risk the delicate balance of the global environment. None of these considerations entered into the reasoning of the Pope when he recently visited Portugal. "The Pope yesterday condemned gay marriage and abortion as "among the most insidious and dangerous challenges" to society, as Portugal prepared to legalise same-sex partnerships next week. Benedict also criticised Catholics "ashamed" of their faith and too willing to "lend a hand to secularism". Ninety per cent of Portuguese define themselves as Catholic, but Portugal's society is increasingly secular, with far fewer than a third saying they attend Mass regularly." (Times, 14 May) Starvation, worldwide slaughter or global warming? Not as important as abortion or same-sex relationships according to His Holiness - no wonder the pews are emptying! RD

CRISIS, WHAT CRISIS?

"A diamond auction in Switzerland has seen a new record price per carat, with a blue, cushion-shaped 7.64 carat stone fetching 8.93m Swiss francs. The diamond, set in a yellow gold and platinum ring, went for twice its estimated price. A white emerald-cut 52.82 carat diamond fetched 8.8m Swiss francs, while an Alexandre Reza ring mounted with a 5.02 carat blue diamond sold for just over 7m Swiss francs. (BBC News, 13 May) RD

BEHIND THE ADVERTS

In order to protect its markets and possessions abroad the British capitalist class have got to have a trained band of killers on tap. This British army has got to be recruited afresh all the time - they grow old, they are maimed, they die. We have all seem those TV adverts that depict a military career as exciting and adventurous. One of the old adverts used to be "Its a man's life in the army" It would probably be more accurate today to be "Its an alcoholics life in the army". "Soldiers, sailors and airmen returning from the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq have been hitting the bottle in a dangerous fashion but have not suffered the tidal wave of mental problems that was predicted, researchers report today. The British military appears to have avoided the heavy toll that the conflicts have exacted on their American counterparts, where rates of post-traumatic stress disorder in returning troops have soared. One in seven UK military personnel deployed to the two countries were drinking heavily "at harmful levels" after returning, at rates 22 per cent higher than among those who remained at home." (Independent, 13 May) RD

"LAZY" WORKERS AGAIN

"A study of 6,000 British civil servants found that those who regularly worked 10 or 11-hour days were up to 60 per cent more likely to suffer heart disease or die younger than those who worked shorter hours. The research, published online in the European Heart Journal, found that people who worked three or more hours longer than a seven-hour day put their health at risk, possibly as a result of being more stressed and having less time to unwind." (Times, 12 May) RD

Food for thought

Toronto council members 'tasted welfare for a week' (Toronto Star, 07/04/10). The daughter of one wondered what her friends would think when they came to lunch of tinned salmon, chick peas, and peanut butter. Another councillor worries he won't get enough calories to sustain his running regime, while a third noted his ration was 'heavy on starch and processed foods high in salt'. Maybe we should give them credit for the effort but will it make any difference in the long run?
Carol Goar (Toronto Star) cites a report by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities showing that poverty stalks our big cities but is not far behind in the smaller ones either. Poverty rates in the big cities was at 13.5% 19 years ago and today are at 21% for Toronto, 20% for Vancouver, and 15% for Montreal. Every level of government has been trying to down load the problem to those below them, "The federal government has capped its contributions to welfare and walked away from public housing and child care. The provinces have shifted part of their responsibility for social services to the municipalities " (who do not have the resources). On and on the problem goes, -the futility of reform. John Ayers