Man from the Pru

Chief executive Tidjane Thiam remuneration for last year totalled £7.8 million.

He was censured by the Financial Services Authority in March after Prudential was fined £30m for two regulatory breaches relating to its aborted £23 billion acquisition of Asia-based AIA three years ago.

Shareholder Ian Michel told Prudential's annual shareholder meeting in London: "It seems to me that the executive pay is very high. I have no doubt everybody works very hard but the word 'greedy' is not entirely removed from my mind."


Another described Mr Thiam's pay as "obscene".

Steve O'Donnell, a representative of staff union Unite at Prudential UK, which has a large site at Craigforth, Stirling, questioned the bonus payout to Mr Thiam in light of the FSA fine.

The fight for houses

"Ever since the Highland Clearances in the 18th Century, ordinary Scottish folk have been pushed around according to the whims of property owners and their servants the politicians."

This pamphlet by the now defunct group Solidarity, although dated now, makes interesting reading.

http://libcom.org/library/housing-rents-tenants-struggle-scotland

State ownership or common ownership

The term “State capitalism” (sometimes misleadingly designated as State Socialism) is an economic form in which the state performs the role of the capitalist employer, for instance the Post Office(at least for the moment). Under State ownership or State control of industry, the exploitation of wage workers continues. Surplus-values are appropriated by the capitalist class just the same. The government now functions as the exploiting agent of the capitalists who receive their incomes in the form of interest on government bonds or on loans to the government. Although the exploitation may be less direct, the profits go to the capitalists as formerly. The workers are not any better off. That is what Engels meant when he said, “State ownership does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces.” Millions of employees are now in the State sector and the capitalist class are just as rich while the working class are just as insecure and just as poor, as before. But state property is not socialism for the workers are still not the masters of their labour conditions and remain separated from the production process.


“State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution... [in Marx and Engels’ view, for] neither the conversion into joint-stock companies nor into state property deprives the productive forces of their character as capital... The workers remain wage-earners, proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not abolished; it is rather pushed to an extreme.” (Anti-Dühring)

The Madness Of Capotalism

We are constantly being told that we are living in a time of economic recession and must learn to tighten our belts. That advice is not paid much attention to by the owning class.'An enormous Gerhard Richter painting of Milan's Piazza del Duomo (Cathedral Square) that was commissioned to cheer up the offices of the electronics conglomerate Siemens sold for $37m (£24m) on Tuesday, setting a new auction record for a living artist. .........It was bought by a Napa Valley vineyard owner, Donald Bryant, who punched his fist in the air after successfully buying the Richter at Sotheby's big contemporary art sale in New York.' (Guardian, 15 May) In case you think the owning class are mad to pay such prices for a painting it should be pointed out that the Milan painting was sold by the Hyatt hotel group achieving a price 10 times higher than they paid for it in 1998. It is not the art buyers that are mad - it is the capitalist system. RD

Transcending the trade union struggle

The working class are as our Chartist forefathers were not afraid to call it, a class of wages slaves. Yet today we are less preoccupied with the abolition of the wages system than ever. Reformists attempt to mollify inhuman social relations whilst preserving them intact. The old cry for a fair day’s pay echoes repeatedly time and time again. The essence of working-class enslavement is not impoverishment. Whether a worker’s wages be high or low his existence is imposed. It is necessary to abolish the basic condition of modern exploitation, wage slavery.


The old conceptions in the labour movement have become faulty and inadequate and working class organisations offer indecision and confusion, and are reduced to impotence.

Karl Marx counseled the working class many years ago that “they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, ‘abolition of the wages system.’ ”

When we fight for a demand like a wage increase, we are merely fighting against the effects of capitalism. Not merely that. We are demanding it from the capitalists. In other words, we envisage the continuation of the capitalist system. What trade union struggles really do is to fight to improve the conditions of the working class within the framework of the capitalist system. They do not challenge capitalism itself. That is why they degenerate to pure and simple reformism and, in the end, bolster up capitalism.

Every wage increase that is won by the workers is eventually offset by the employers by more intensive work. So, usually, the workers are back to from where they started.

What all workers should understand is that their misery is due to exploitation carried on by the capitalist class. Trade unionism merely restricts their struggle to attempts at lessening this exploitation. It does not fight to end exploitation i.e. to end the capitalist system and replace it by socialism. This is the limitation of trade union struggles. However, we should not oppose trade union struggles. It is essential to organise workers and help them to realise the value of their labour power in the fight for their day to day demands. And it is also in the course of these fights, that the workers can learn about the system of capitalist exploitation and the need to abolish it. They will not only discover how to fight for wage increases but also how to abolish the wage system itself.
The objective of the Socialist Party is nothing less than the socialist reconstruction of society, the abolition of the wages system. We press the workers to transform the economic struggle into a political struggle for the seizure of power by the working class. Otherwise we will sink into the morass of never-ending reformism.

The poor once again pay the rich

The Duke of Roxburghe could net £1.5 million a year from a wind farm on the Lammermuir Hills. The Earl of Moray is estimated to receive £2 million a year from a wind farm near Stirling. The Earl of Glasgow could be earning upwards of £300,000 a year from turbines on his Kelburn estate. These hang-overs from our feudal past earn large sums by renting their land to wind-turbine energy firms whose wind farms are in turn subsidised by extra levies on ordinary electricity consumers.


Alison Elliot, chair of the Land Reform Review Group (LRRG), said the issue would be investigated amid concerns that aristocrats are benefiting from the renewables revolution while the poor grapple with fuel­poverty. Dr Elliot told Sir Robert Clerk of Penicuik, a consultant for Smith Gore and a landowner at the centre of a storm over plans for wind turbines on his estate: “Land is implicated in providing food, space for housing and in overcoming fuel poverty.“We are an energy rich country so why do we have fuel poverty?”

The Church of Scotland said such figures represented a “significant transfer of income from domestic electricity consumers, including those living in fuel poverty, to landowners...The Church is concerned this redistribution of income is tending to promote inequality. The ownership of land in Scotland remains deeply inequitable and the new landed income from wind power entrenches that inequality.” It added: “A paradox of life in rural Scotland is that the rapid growth of renewable energy is matched by a growth in fuel poverty… This is unacceptable and if landowners are gaining financial rewards from renewables while a growing number of households are living in fuel poverty, then the strong case for re-examining land reform to ensure the financial benefits of renewables are shared more equitably is strengthened further.”

A taxing question

Amazon paid less in UK corporation tax last year than it received in government grants, its official company accounts show.
Its corporation tax bill was just £2.44m – less than the £2.5m it received from the Scottish Government in inducements to build a new distribution warehouse in Dunfermline.

Its corporation tax bill was just £2.44m – less than the £2.5m it received from the Scottish Government in inducements to build a new distribution warehouse in Dunfermline.

Alex Salmond has previously spoken of what he described as an “historic” deal that saw Amazon set up a distribution centre in Dunfermline, alongside its customer call centre in Edinburgh.
Peter Walsh, Scottish spokesman for union Unite, warned the latest Amazon tax payments were a “drop in the ocean” compared to its vast UK sales figures. “We desperately need to look at tax reform and how to achieve tax justice,” he said. “The taxes they pay, combined with the fact they are a low-wage, low-skills employer, poses the question as to what benefit they bring to Scotland and to the UK. We have put significant public funds into luring this employer here and this is what we get back.”

Sunday Morning Hypocrisy

On a Sunday morning throughout England the man of God in the pulpit will attack those who place reliance on material gains. 'Thirst not after the material things of life. Blessed are the poor.' he will declaim. That's all very well for lecturing his gullible flock but in real life the church is less unworldly. 'The Church of England will announce some of its best financial results in recent years today, with a 9.7 per cent return on investments for 2012. ........... The Church commissioners manage £5.5 billion in assets for the Church of England. (Times, 15 May) RD

who owns the north pole - part 58

China, India, Italy, Japan, South Korea and Singapore have been permanent observer status on the Arctic Council.


The Arctic Council has until now been an organisation for the environmental sectors of government but you are moving into real politics and that's a different game explained Leiv Lunde , a former special envoy on energy and climate change at the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Socialism = Communism

The Socialist Party repudiates any differentiation between socialism and communism. Socialism is communism, and vice versa. The words socialism and communism have the same meaning. Both entail the total abolition of money, buying and selling, and the wages system, a complete breach, both in practice and in ideas, with capitalism. They indicate a condition of society in which the wealth of the community: the land and the means of production and distribution are held in common, production being for use and not for profit. The community will ascertain what are the requirements of the people in food, clothing, housing, transport, educational and cultural facilities. Food, clothing, housing, transport, sanitation — these come first. Then will follow the luxuries.


It means the community must set itself the task of providing rather more than the people can use of all the things that the people need and desire, and of supplying these when and as the people require them. Socialism shall satisfy material needs without stint or measure from the common storehouse, according to individual and social desires. Private property, beyond that which is in actual personal use, will disappear. Everyone will be able to have what he or she desires in food, in clothing, education and travel. The abundant technology now possible removes any need for rationing or limiting of consumption. None will desire to hoard commodities not in use, since a fresh supply may be obtained at will.
In socialism, people will be free to co-operate, producing, inventing, studying, not under the compulsion of law, or poverty, or the incentive of individual gain, but from deliberate choice and with a zest for achievement. Socialism will provide the material and spiritual conditions which will make voluntary co-operative labour possible.

Marx and Engels on the power of the vote

It's often pointed out that our political system is completely corrupted by money yet history teaches that people's influence on their governments is much more powerful than we usually imagine. It's weakened primarily by people's failure to do anything and the mistaken belief that we don't have the power to shape the world as we wish it to be.


Marx and Engels strongly supported political action in the sense of participating in elections. They stressed the importance of the vote. Engels explains that universal suffrage "in an England two-thirds of whose inhabitants are industrial proletarians means the exclusive political rule of the working class with all the revolutionary changes in social conditions which are inseparable from it." Marx argued along the same lines, for example, in 1855, he stated that "universal suffrage . . . implies the assumption of political power as means of satisfying [the workers'] social means" and, in Britain, "revolution is the direct content of universal suffrage."

In 1852 Marx wrote, concerning the Chartists:

“But universal suffrage is the equivalent of political power for the working class of England, where the proletariat forms the large majority of the population, where, in a long though underground civil war, it has gained a clear consciousness of its position as a class and where even the rural districts know no longer any peasants, but only landlords, industrial capitalists (farmers) and hired labourers. The carrying of universal suffrage in England would, therefore be a far more socialistic measure than anything which has been honoured with that name on the continent. Its inevitable result, here is the political supremacy of the working class.” [Marx emphasis]
His meaning is clear - a working class majority in Parliament, backed by a majority of the population, can bring about the real transfer of power.

The Revolutionary Vote

If they won't vote for socialism, they won't die for it

The capitalist system fails to supply the needs of the vast majority of people and it must be overthrown before the workers can have freedom. The ruling class is never going to solve its problems through the capitalist system, therefore, the objective conditions for revolution are going to crop up over and over again. But there is considerable difference of opinions as to the means by which this can be accomplished. Some advocate the ballot, or parliamentary action; some armed insurrection, or military action; and some the general strike, or industrial action.

Armed insurrection to have any reasonable chance of success the workers would need to have as large and well equipped an army as the capitalists. Yet the working class are unarmed and most unskilled in the use of weapons. They have no military organisation. They have no means of securing arms. An untrained, undisciplined and badly equipped army of workers going forth to overthrow the system might as well be committing suicide. As long as the means necessary to equip, supply, and transport armies remains in control of the capitalists, it is impossible for the workers to gain military power. The revolutionary army would be slaughtered like sheep. The best tactics on the part of the workers is to avoid armed insurrection unless it is actually forced upon them andworkers should beware of those who urge them to armed insurrection.

Food for thought

There has been an uproar in Canada during the last two weeks over the hiring of cheap foreign workers. The super rich Royal Bank got caught with its pants down when an employee blew the whistle when he and many others were told to train these imported workers who would then replace the bank's workers for half the price. The government, properly outraged, has moved to stop this egregious use of their program that 'was never intended to put Canadians out of work'. Really! Who made up the rules in the first place? Meanwhile in the US, people and politicians constantly gripe about the Latinos in their country but they are quite happy to employ them at cut rates in their homes and businesses and the politicians who rage against illegals and want the border sealed, are strangely silent about enacting laws making it illegal to hire them. (Haroon Siddiqui), Toronto Star, 28/04/13). John Ayers.

Balls !!

The Royal Caledonian Ball is the oldest charity ball in the world. It is when Scotland’s elite high society descend on London for dinner, drinks and some traditional Scottish country-dancing, full of pomp and ceremony.

It was inaugurated in the Victorian era by the Duke and Duchess of Atholl first held in 1848. Since 1930 the ball has been held at Grosvenor House on Park Lane, the ­hotel with the biggest, grandest ballroom in London. Tickets cost between £135 and £225. There is a strict dress code. Gentlemen are expected to wear Highland evening dress, evening tails with white tie, or mess kit. Dinner jackets are verboten. Ladies should wear floor-length evening dress; tiaras are very much encouraged and tartan sashes are optional but encouraged.


Later, following the start of the grouse season, there will come a string of balls in Scotland – among them Oban, Skye, Angus, Perth, Lochaber and the Northern Meeting.

From here

Learning about schools and education

Children as such are not usually included among the oppressed. Yet they necessarily compose one of the weakest, most dependent and defenseless sections of the population. Each generation of children is not only helped but hindered and hurt by the elders who exercise direct control over them. Children are normally unaware of the social causes of their misfortunes and miseries and even the grown-ups may not know about them. Most parents cannot be held individually responsible for such misdeeds for they, too, have been shaped by the society around them and are obliged to follow certain ways out of necessity.


The class structure quickly impresses its stamp upon the personality, conditioning and regulating the relations between the sexes, the rich and the poor. This determines both the characteristics of the educational system and of the children tutored and trained under it.
Children soak up knowledge and retain it for use. The child learns best through direct personal experience. In the primary stage of education these experiences should revolve around games. They progress fastest in learning, not through being drilled by rota, but by doing work and experimenting with things. Occasionally children need to be alone and on their own. But in the main they will learn more by doing things together. By choosing what their group would like to do, planning their work, helping one another do it, trying out various ways and means of performing the tasks, involved and discovering what will forward the project, comparing and appraising the results, the youngsters would best develop their latent powers, their skill, understanding, self-reliance and cooperative habits. Participation in meaningful projects, learning by doing, encouraging problems and solving them, not only facilitates the acquisition and retention of knowledge but fosters the right character traits: unselfishness, helpfulness, critical intelligence, individual initiative.

As most people know free education and free schools were one of the first and most insistent demands of the working class in the last century. The bourgeoisie made this concession partly because it could afford to and mostly because it fitted in with its own interests.

However, history shows how subservience was bred and enforced in the schools. Business, big or little, directly or indirectly, has the economic, political and propaganda power to exercise a veto over the whole realm of education. The capitalists know what they want: schools which serve their profit system. Schools are institutions where children are indoctrinated with bourgeois ideology. They create an outlook that is warped and make apologists for the system, not careful investigators. The ideological submission of the working class is the most powerful shackle preventing it from taking power, and our education system is one of the factors in achieving this.

The way in which the class struggle is fought out within the educational system is as clearly apparent as the direct confrontation of classes on the factory shop-floor. Those involved in the struggle for better schools must face the fact that the functions of education in a class society is to give the working-class child only enough skills to enable him to be exploited in the work place and not to emancipate him from social drudgery. An illiterate work-force are of little usef to the modern employer. The class function of the school is to fit the working-class kid for the factory floor or the office desk – to exploit him and not to emancipate him. The educational process is deformed by the pressure of class interests. Education under capitalism must be conducted primarily in the interests of the ruling class.

One day we will have the power to make changes. Every movement that desires to change the social order must go to the people. An equalitarian society, functioning, not under authority and economic pressure, but by the common consent, can never flourish except by the active willing co-operation of the mass of people. There can be no socialism until the the majority desire socialism. An educational revolution is needed; is in fact overdue. The world will one day be ours, so let’s start fighting for it.

Artfull Dodgers

Workers are constantly being reprimanded by politicians and journalists for being "benefit fraudsters" but in fact whatever dodges they may get up to its as nothing compared to the tax evasion of the owning class. 'More than 100 of Britain's richest people have been caught hiding billions of pounds in secretive offshore havens, sparking an unprecedented global tax evasion investigation. George Osborne, the chancellor, warned the alleged tax evaders, and a further 200 accountants and advisers accused of helping them cheat the taxman: "The message is simple: if you evade tax, we're coming after you."' (Guardian, 9 May) Despite Osborne's threat this is a constant running battle between the government and the owning class's armies of accountants and financial adviser devising new and better methods of evasion. RD

The wealthy students

Research shows that of Edinburgh University’s ultra-rich graduates – those worth at least £20m – more than a quarter get their money from family fortunes. Edinburgh’s 80 ultra-rich graduates were worth around £52million each, but 26% of them sourced their money from inheritance. Japan’s Princess Mako is to study at the university. German aristocrat Prince Albert II, who can trace his noble lineage back to the Holy Roman Empire and has been described as the world’s youngest billionaire, studied economics and theology at the university. Other royalty to study at the university include Romania’s Princess Margareta and Princess Raiyah of Jordan.
And among Glasgow University’s wealthiest former students, almost a fifth rely on inherited cash, according to the study. At Glasgow University 18% of the 80 ultra-rich graduates sourced their money from inheritance.

Peter Murray McDouall (1814-54)

Jenny Wormald in her biography “Mary Queen of Scots. A Study in Failure” describes a Scottish monarch who lacked an interest in Scotland and who posessed an obsession in aquiring the English throne. In 1548, at the age of just five, Mary left Scotland for France. She returned to Scotland in 1561 following the death of her husband and continued to still own and manage considerable French estates, the legacy of the dowry settled upon her as a consequence of her brief marriage to the the French king. In Scotland, and even during her long imprisonment in England, Mary maintained a predominantly French household and a pronounced interest in French affairs. French was to remain her first language.

The Marie Stuart Society have now begun a campaign to raise about £100,000 for a full-size bronze statue of Mary.

However, Socialist Courier is always surprised, although we shouldn’t be, by our own forgotten Scottish working class history. The Chartist activist and friend of Marx and Engels, George Julian Harney was to recall, “no man in the Chartist movement was better known than Dr McDouall”.

Growing Old Disgracefully

Readers of the popular press are probably well aware of world hunger as a pressing problem, but they are probably unaware that this is not just a problem that affects people abroad. 'Most people think of the condition as a "third world problem", but one in ten older people in the UK are malnourished, the British Dietetic Association and the Malnutrition Task Force said. ..........."For far too long, malnutrition and dehydration has been thought of as a third world problem," said Helen Davidson, honorary chair of the British Dietetic Association - the professional body for UK dieticians. "The reality is, malnutrition and dehydration is a very big problem here in the UK."' (Daily Express, 9 May) Malnutrition Task Force task force chair Dianne Jeffrey claimed that one in ten older people are malnourished and estimates put the figure at about three million. That is capitalism for you, even in an advanced country like the UK old folk are malnourished. RD

Food Fact of the Day

The world loses 12 million hectares of productive agricultural land each year to factors such as desertification, land degradation and urbanisation.

If this land stayed productive it could have made 20 million tonnes of grain.