SHE SAID IT WITH A STRAIGHT FACE!
‘Invading a sovereign country is certainly against every principle of international law and international order.’ Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State to Bush. Guardian, 17 March 2022
Tel's Tales
TRADE UNIONS MUST RECRUIT, RECRUIT, RECRUIT
The P&O disgrace had highlighted that 19th century raw capitalism has not, somehow, gone away. (Marx would understand what is going on, much more than ignorant Blairites). Trade unions and the Labour Party were set up to counter raw capitalism. They need to step up to the mark.
The TUC has shown that workers are currently enduring the ‘largest pay squeeze for some 200 years’. Since Thatcher’s victory in 1979, the share of the economy’s output going to wages has declined from some 57% to 49% in 2018. Alongside this (and inter-related), the anti-trade union laws and societal changes have led to trade union membership falling from 54%in 1979 to 23% in 2018 (in the US, in the private sector only 6.2% of workers belong to unions). And collective bargaining coverage has fallen from more than in 70% in 1979 to only 26% in 2018.
The whole Labour movement needs to pull its socks up and recruit, recruit, recruit into unions.
Tel's Tales
RUSSIAN OIL EMBARGO WON'T CAUSE 1970s STAGFLATION.
*The UK consumes just 2% of Russian oil exports.
* 1973 – the UK consumed 2.23 million barrels of oil per day.
* 2019 – the UK consumed 1.53 million barrels per day (yet real GDP over 3 times higher than in 1973).
Tel's Tales
"MAKE WORK PAY" - THAT SLOGAN HAS NOT DELIVERED
At the 1979 General Election, Thatcher had a poster ‘Labour isn’t working’ showing a huge dole queue (the ‘queue’ was made up of 20 members of Hendon Young Tories – the poster makers had to photograph them again and again to get a long queue!!) Under Thatcher there were, of course huge dole queues for real.
And since the 1980s, there has not been a significant increase in living standards.
* A recent Report from the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) shows that workers born in the 1980s and on the median wage, earn no more than those born in the 1960s did at their age. And, when you factor in exorbitant house prices, they are far poorer.
* The IFS Report shows that self-employment is increasingly a byword for poverty pay.
* Recent figures show that British employees are now entering their third squeeze on real wages in just over a decade.
Tel's Tales
THE 'DAD'S ARMY OPERATION' COULDN'T STOP 'SUITCASES OF CASH LEAVING THE COUNTRY'. (LORD AGNEW, WHO QUIT AS THE GOVERNMENT'S ANTI-FRAUD MINISTER BECAUSE HE COULD NOT DEFEND THE INDEFENSIBLE).
Agnew said that he was ‘completely dumbfounded’ that the Emergency Covid Business Loans Scheme had not been properly resourced in order that it could have been effectively monitored. Officials took six weeks to develop arrangements to ward off fraudsters. Agnew added that by the time some ‘60% of the money had already gone out of the door. It was happy days if you were a crook during that period’. But of a potential 100,000 fraud cases, only a mere 49 suspects have so far been arrested. The Treasury has already written-off £4.3 billion, out of a likely £5.8 billion fraud total.
Guardian, 10 March 2022
Tel's Tales
LOOK BACK IN ANGER
‘Following the good showing in the 2017 General Election, it was assumed that Jeremy Corbyn’s position was secure. Instead Jeremy Corbyn was subjected to a blizzard of lying accusations, including ones of anti-Semitism from his internal enemies, from all the Establishment media, and even from some non-establishment ones, e.g. Private Eye. This treachery and slander played their part in enabling a bad joke in December 2019 to lie his way into Downing Street’.
Historian, Willie Thompson, Labour Briefing (Co-op).