Monday, November 25, 2019

Scotland in Poverty

The statistics for child poverty in parts of Fife are stark. A report in 2018 by End Child Poverty said that across the region there were 17,667 children – 24.47% –growing up in poverty. In Buckhaven, Methil and Wemyss Villages, the figure was 36.62% of children, while in the Kirkcaldy East council ward it was 38.68%.
Sam Royston, chair of End Child Poverty and director of policy and research at the Children’s Society, said at the time the figures were “scandalous”.
Reports out this year paint a similarly grim picture. Data released in June by the End Child Poverty Coalition revealed that 27% of children in the St Andrews ward were living in poverty – the highest in North East Fife, with East Neuk and Landward at 20 per cent.

Rhona Cunningham,  Fife Gingerbread’s chief executive, talking about the impact of austerity in Fife. “The welfare reform and how that has rolled out has practically devastated some of the most vulnerable communities,” she says. When she began working at Fife Gingerbread a decade and a half ago, child poverty was “not so much of an issue”. That was five years before the 2008 global financial crash plunged Britain into recession, and an economic crisis that was followed by a decade of deep cuts to public spending by Tory-led governments.
Cunningham and colleagues at Fife Gingerbread help people living in some of the poorest parts of the county. They include former mining communities that have struggled since the pits closed in the 1980s: towns such as Cowdenbeath, Lochgelly, Leven, Methil and Buckhaven, where the charity provides meals, clothing and emotional support to people on low incomes. 
Alleviating child poverty is an urgent priority for the charity. Over the last 12 months, it has helped 816 children and 328 adults. The 2019 Fife Gingerbread Christmas appeal Heat and Eat hopes to raise money for meter cards so families can put the heating on over the festive season. Most people seeking help are scraping by to survive, says Cunningham.
“There is no safety net,” she adds. “There is nothing at the back of them. The prospect of having £500 in the bank is like a lottery win. You’ve got whole communities who kind of feel like there’s no hope.” Cunningham says child poverty can be measured in various ways but gauging the issue at Fife Gingerbread is straightforward. “For us on the ground, it’s quite simple,” she explains. “It’s about families who have children, who don’t have enough income, and they have far too much expenditure.”
She talks about the poverty trap, and says people are struggling on zero hours contracts. They are paid the minimum wage. They struggle to pay high rents for homes in the private sector. The cost of food and travel rises, but pay doesn’t. Childcare is expensive. She says the introduction of policies such as Universal Credit, sanctions and the bedroom tax have caused severe financial problems for families, making them reliant on charities for essentials.
“Every single thing has kind of slowly chipped away at the bricks,” she says. “They’ve already drained their resources as much as they can. Basically they don’t have anywhere else to go.” Another effect of austerity, she adds, is that the benefit system has become “increasingly punitive”.
In May the United Nations’ special rapporteur on extreme poverty, Professor Phillip Alston, said “ideological” cuts to public services since 2010 have led to “tragic consequences”. His report said that close to 40 per cent of children are likely to live in poverty by 2021, adding the DWP had been tasked with “designing a digital and sanitised version of the 19th century workhouse, made infamous by Charles Dickens”.
As part of a drive to reduce child poverty, the Scottish government announced this year it will introduce a new Scottish Child Payment, a plan to give money to low-income families, starting in early 2021. But a report in October by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation urged the Scottish government to do more, arguing this plan alone will not be enough to reach its target of reducing child poverty to 10 per cent by 2030.
Fife Gingerbread has also been affected by cuts. In January, Cunningham went public about its financial crisis and said the charity needed £600,000 to keep operating at its current level. External funding had ended. At the time, Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon was urged to intervene after being warned the charity would be unable to serve two thirds of the 200 families it supports. 
“This is the world we live in. So it is a bit ironic that, at times, when the need is greater than ever, when poverty levels are way higher than they’ve ever been and show no signs whatsoever of reducing, that the services that support the most vulnerable, are the most vulnerable.”
Between 2010 and 2019 cuts of more than £30m have been made to welfare, housing and social services, according to the United Nations. Cuts have been made to budgets from policing to health.
Poverty has risen dramatically over the decade. Poverty in Scotland is rising, from an already unacceptably high level. More people are facing situations where they cannot afford the basics nor play a full role in society. Almost one in five people in Scotland now live in poverty, and for children the situation is worse, with one in four in poverty. The use of food banks doubles when Universal Credit is rolled out. Homelessness has increased and crime rates are up, as well as hospital waiting lists.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/how-austerity-means-scottish-families-are-getting-caught-in-the-poverty-trap/ar-BBXhCqg?ocid=spartandhp

Understanding People

The study of history has little purpose if it does not enable us to avoid errors of past generations that had not the advantage of being able to study history. We want the present generation to avoid the reformist errors of their fore-fathers. We live in unfriendly times. As neighbourhoods have made way for wretched anonymous tower blocks, so neighbourliness has become outdated. It is not that people have chosen to become careless and uncooperative; as social animals we are never happier than when we are able to behave in mutuality, empathy and compassion towards our fellow human beings. But the way that life has come to be organised conspires against our will to be human.

For the truth is that community is now little more than a quaint ideal. The depressing reality is that more than ever we live in a society which does not resemble anything very social. This sense of crushing alienation, which was once a mere term of jargon employed by those who had read Marx is now inescapable. The streets are settings for fear and loneliness. Housing is designed according to the cheap measurements of profits for rapacious landlords whose concern for comfort, dignity or social fellowship in the place where we live simply does not exist. The transport system is unsafe and its weary users shuffle ritualistically to and from wage slavery in various conditions of unease, stress and anger. Services are running down—the basic needs of workers are too expensive to bother with, so let us dwell amongst the refuse of late twentieth century squalor. This is our environment. For most of us saving our environment is not about trees and forests and fish ponds; they are out of reach and survival within the urban wasteland is about dodging the dog shit and hoping that it will be someone else’s house that they break into.

An alienated world of non-community turns others into strangers and strangers into enemies. People turn in on themselves and place barriers like stone fortress walls around their lives, their emotions. And within the darkness of these enclosed lives horrible, unthinkable abuses occur. People like to speak about “the freedom of the individual”, as if being atomised, isolated and excluded from social cooperation were somehow a form of liberation. It is not; it feels horrible inside those fragile, impoverishing, alienated humanity’s existence. And this is where awful nightmare’s come to life. Yesterday’s unthinkable becomes today’s headline and, perhaps, tomorrow’s routine. This capitalist system under which we all live—even if we many deny that they do, and most do not even know that they do—has committed against us the greatest of crimes. It has denied us our freedom to be innocent. We are born neither good nor bad. To imagine otherwise is as sensible as to imagine that we are born with a preference for Pepsi rather than Coke.

We are born to be within the world as it is. And the world as it is right now is not a happy place in which to be born.

Millions and millions of children are born into conditions of such material constraint that it is amazing they grow up fit for anything. Some do not emerge fit for anything. The wounds suffered as a result of authoritarian parenting, of sexual and violent abuse (both misuses of power) and of squalid and ignorant upbringings are injuries which were once unthinkable—or at least, unthought about. Perhaps, if capitalism had been removed long ago, these effects would have been of a lesser magnitude and we could go in greater innocence towards creating our futures.
 
The reformists, who were always wrong, now stand mute before what is to them an inexplicable breakdown in civilised culture. After all, had they not set up a welfare state, with its ever-ready social workers and free schools for the poor? But the kids can’t stand the schools and see no point in going when all they must learn is to become unemployed—sorry, “Job Seekers”. The churches talk about the collapse of the family, with their eyes carefully averted from the disaster zone of the family which heads their religion.

Now Tory ministers cry for moral education in the schools. But what reasonably sensible school student would for one minute accept moral instruction from that rabble of corrupt and callous rogues? And what moral depravity would characterise the child who received an A+ in the exam set by exploiters to test the sturdiness of the soon to be replaced exploited?

Sometimes, through the fog of confusion which is how life is viewed by many people, and despite the brutalised indifference which seems to be the price of keeping afloat within the relentless competition to afford any kind of a life, certain events make us especially sad. These events are very largely selected for us by unaccountable media chiefs whose employees orchestrate public grief on such occasions. That does not diminish the authenticity of our sadness. After all, we are human beings. We are social animals. And sometimes, after a terrorist bomb or a famine, a collective nerve is touched. And then what?

Socialists do not indulge in piety. That can be left to those who prefer to respond on their knees with their eyes shut. We leave moral self-righteousness as their monopoly as well. No sugary sentiments of love for little children will be heard from us. It is only under a system where the material stimulus to love and care is lacking that “loving thy neighbour” is promoted as some great virtue. No proposals here for teaching children what is right and wrong; not under a system which would have willingly taken those sane children only five years further into their lives and taught them to kill strangers as paid members of the British army.

Occasional sadness is a sign that we have not been wholly brutalised. Just as the fact that the overwhelming majority of children do not adjust willingly to the competitive, vicious and violent norms of the capitalist ethos is proof that this system has not and will not desensitise us all. To punish the dehumanised for what an inhumane world has taught them to become is as wise as to lock a dog in a kennel and then beat it for barking. The fact is that the kennel door is unlocked. It does not have to be like this.

Many people today are so little interested in politics that in all the parliaments of the present day world there is not a single person who can be said to represent their interests. This is true in Britain where there is a large Labour Party representation and where there have been labour governments. It is true in the United States where there is no Labour Party representation and where there has never been a Labour government. And it is true in Canada where Liberals and Conservatives have been changing places and holding hands in governing the country ever since Confederation.

Nothing is more certain than that workers are content to give their continued support to the system that enslaves them. At every election there are a few major parties and a varying number of smaller parties seeking the support of the electorate, and all of them propose to preserve the present order of society. They have this in common regardless of the features that seem to distinguish them. Leading the list are Labour and Conservatives. Behind them a few paces are the LibDems and the nationalists.

It is true that the Labour Party governments over the years have brought into effect an assortment of reforms which were all supposed to have added up to a better life. Great has been the abuse levelled against The Socialist Party because of the fact that from its inception it has steadfastly set itself against the advocacy of palliatives or improvements that strengthen the existing system of society. No other party in this country occupies a similar position, and many who were once opposed to it on this particular point have vanished from the political scene.

 To those who still persist in such advocacy let us ask: "What are you out for?" Some will probably reply: "We are out for socialism, but we know the working class cannot understand and struggle for socialism until they are better fed and better housed than at present."

 And so they concentrate on feeding, housing, etc. If there were evidence to show that all well-fed and well-housed workers were in the forefront of the revolutionary struggle, one could understand their attitude. But there is none. Does it follow that those who throw off the shackles of religion, or who secure a "clear head" by giving up alcoholic liquors become socialists? No, in very many cases they are pronounced anti-socialists. And is the study of socialism taken up and revolutionary change advocated by the flunkeys or by those whose efficiency as wage-slaves is studied by such "model" employers and the like? There is no more justification in arguing that the working class must be well fed, well clothed and decently housed before they can understand and organise for socialism than there is for the opposite attitude that it is necessary to starve and grind them down before any real consciousness of their position and determination to alter it will possess them.

While the mineral wealth of the world, along with the other means of life are in the hands of the capitalist class, places like the Congo with its geographic importance and its riches in resources will remain the objects of plunder for any gang of rulers who get the chance. The alternative to these continuous thieves' quarrels is obvious. It is to make all the natural and industrial assets of the world the common property of all mankind, to finish with buying, selling, profits and wages, and start producing for free distribution on the basis of people’s needs. This alternative can only be made operative by the workers first understanding the need for it and then organising for it.

 To bring these necessary conditions about will take a lot of work, but looking at Africa and looking at capitalism today, the need could hardly be more pressing.



Sunday, November 24, 2019

Revolution - the only answer to capitalist misery.

The Socialist Party recognises the class struggle between the capitalist class and the working class, and the necessity of the working class organizing itself politically for the establishment of socialism. The Socialist Party is the world party of socialist revolution. Any doubt that capitalism has any solutions for its many social problems is rapidly being dispelled by the mass of statistics

Under the system of private property the welfare of the community and of the individual are at war; and the antagonism of interests leads every capitalist to sacrifice the common good to his private ends. Capitalism, or in other words the private ownership by a small minority of the land and all other things necessary to the life of the community, is the curse, the terrible sore. The reformists apply palliatives and soothing measures to this terrible social evil. That is are able to do; it is all can be done. It is true also these soothing policies often allay the pain just as the pain from a rotten tooth is allayed by the application of some novocaine. The tooth, however, still continues to decay until the pain becomes unbearable, the sufferer at length decides to remove the cause by means of the care and instruments necessary for that purpose; or in other words to completely remove the cause of discomfort by means of revolution,’ applied to social or political matters. The palliatives do not remove the cause of pain, they only temporarily abates

The real indictment against our present industrial system is not that it involves an unfair distribution of the product, but that it mismanages, misdirects, and therefore unduly limits production itself. A huge waste of potential wealth undoubtedly exists yet second only to our waste of land is the waste of our mineral resources. We are socialists because we holdthat socialism will solve the misery of the world — give sustenance to the man and woman who is hungry give to little children the right to be born free.  We believe socialism is practical. We see no way out save in a complete overthrow of the capitalist system. Anyone who casts a vote for the continuance of that system is as much of a murderer as if he or she took a gun and shot their own child. But we see all around us signs of the dawning of socialism, and with our comrades everywhere we will work for the coming of that better day.

The Socialist Party is opposed to militarism. We are the world’s peace party. Socialism and militarism are necessarily opposed to each other. Socialism is the common ownership of all natural resources and the application of all social forces in for the satisfaction of peoples’ needs. It, therefore, involves not merely co-operation between individuals and groups of individuals, but also co-operation between those in every land. This would ensure peace; because the chief essential characteristics of such global collaboration would be the conservation of wealth and the elimination of all forms of waste. In a system of universal co-operation for production for use, all destruction of wealth, all waste, would be sheer loss. And all war is waste. Under the present system of capitalism – with its class ownership and control of all natural resources and all means of production – with capitalist competition and production for profit, waste means gain for the minority, and is not only inevitable but necessary. And war, in such circumstances, is indispensable. Production for profit involves the production of a surplus of wealth – over which those who have produced it, and who most need it, have no control – over-production, the glutting of markets, commercial and industrial crises, bankruptcy and ruin. Production for profit stops the wheels of production, closes mills and factories, throws men out of employment, and produces widespread misery and want. Under present circumstances, therefore, the waste and destruction of war, with all its indescribable horrors, are blessings to mankind. Even if it were possible to eliminate war, therefore, under capitalism the horrors of peace would far transcend those of war. But it is not possible, because that very frenzy of production forces the competing producers into conflict with each other for the mastery of markets in which the surplus can be disposed of. So hideously, in the capitalist system, do all things work together to produce the conditions essential to capitalism that the very over-production of wealth which makes war and waste so useful also makes war inevitable. 

The wars of to-day are essentially economic in their origin and their object. However it may have been in the past, and we are no longer concerned if they were previously dynastic conflicts between opposing royal families or between different religion, and so on. The real cause and object today is the conquest of commercial markets, securing trade routes or the acquisition of raw materials. That being so, it must be quite clear that capitalism and peace are incompatible, and that however sincere and well-intentioned bourgeois advocates of peace may be, their plans are foredoomed to failure, and world peace cannot be established while capitalism exists. It is idle and utopian to dream of establishing peace in the midst of capitalism. Pacifists talk of  disarmament. But any person who has taken the trouble to understand the operations of the capitalist system must recognise that disarmament under capitalism is impossible. For sure there only a few who does not find the cost of armaments burdensome, or would not willingly seek some arrangement by which defence costs might be reduced. But, suppose some such arrangement were arrived at, and assuming, further, that, acting on that agreement, every country were to disarm. The causes of conflict still remain, and there is nothing in the way of any nation organising a predatory attack against its neighbour, and nothing can prevent its doing so. We are thus face to face with the inevitability of armament spending under present conditions.

Instead of preparing people for war we seek for them to establish the co-operative commonwealth.