The Trade Union voice is now the only voice of moderation in England

In the post-election social climate which is emerging in England, we begin to see just how much in the coming years the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer.  We are left to ponder where the voice of moderation and concern will come.

While we know that the right wing propaganda of the national press, the BBC, the Conservative Party and sadly some misguided elements of the Labour Party insist to the contrary, the trade union voice is now the only voice of moderation in England.

Among many other things trade unions believe in are:

• the fair distribution of the resources and wealth of our country,

• sustaining a caring, concerned community for all, supported by everyone and financed proportionately by everyone,

• proper jobs with fair wages and a welfare system that supports all those in our community who for any reason need help,

• the end to exploitative zero hour contracts,

• publicly owned utilities, water and energy, provided to meet the primary needs of each of one of us and not to enrich the shareholders of private profiteering companies, 

• a National Health System, paid for from the public purse  -   not exploited by "for profit organisations"  -    to meet the health needs of all in our community,

• an education system offering everyone, according to their needs, an opportunity to enjoy the same standard of education, funded and run by the local community as a community resource, and not open to private companies wishing to make a profit out of our children,

• welcoming immigrant workers where there is a demand for them to take jobs which pay a living rather than a minimum wage and is not so exploitatively low that it puts local people seeking work at a disadvantage, 

• good quality public services provided from the public purse which employ workers who enjoy wages and conditions at the rate they were before they were slashed away by the cost machete of the profit seeking privatisation process,

• allowing people to live in the communities they have always lived in and reversing the process of the social cleansing of people from their own neighbourhoods to far flung places in order that landlords can make more money,

• the utter idiocy of retaining the Trident nuclear weapon merely for the purpose of allowing politicians to fantasise about how big their organ is. 

These are just a few of the moderate ideas from voices within the trade union movement.  It would be good if our media and even our politicians would acknowledge and perhaps act upon them.

The post-election New Labourites : the working class can kiss my arse, I've got the foreman's job at last.

That nice, soft, self-satisfied, ageing yuppy middle class Bohemian section of the newly trounced Labour Party have found their voice again. They tell us that we Labour voters must become middle class and aspirational just like their splendid hero, the illegitimately warlike and very wealthy Mr Blair used to tell them way back when they first started to repay their student loans.

They claim that the man in the pub - that's me -  is all wind and piss when I complain they are less interested in ending poverty and inequality and more interested in earning more spondulix for themselves.  They say I am not sufficiently aspirational. But why shouldn't I have an aspiration that all adults in the UK should earn at least £20,000 per annum ?  I mean within the next year not in a notional never arriving future.

In demanding that I stop complaining and take action, do they mean I should rob a few banks and hand out the money to the poor? What actions will they take ? Will each of them earning more than £50,000 a year, in addition to the taxes they pay, donate an annual  £10,000 of their salaries to share equally amongst the less well off people ?  Or will they all agree to have the same pay as an office cleaner ? Now that would be action.

Should I just shut up when I meet with parents receiving benefits who, while they struggle and try their best with the personal resources they have, are described and treated as scroungers on society ?

Should I be happy that an MP earns such a high salary while a 23 years old graduate earns zilch one week, £25 pounds the next and the following week is told that she's not needed anymore. Ah ! the convenience of the zero hour contract !

Who is going to shout out for people who are struggling personally and financially ? Who is going to take urgent action on their behalf? Certainly not our political representatives. Over the years I've sent emails and written letters to Tony Blair, "Lord" Mandelson and to a number of other Labour politicians about the matters I am writing about here.  I have never received a personal reply that particularly addressed the issues I raised. Most of the time I have received no reply at all. I guess they were all doing more important things.

As well as being running scared of a discredited media, Blairites/New Labourites are capitalists. They are with the bankers. That's OK.  For them at least,  it's a free country and they can believe in whatever they want but they should not be representing the Labour Party. They should start a new party  : "The Foreman's Job Party"  Oh! but maybe that was what they did in 1997.

So what am I and others like me supposed to do? As a person who votes for the Labour Party, I don't want to be - as the Blairites insist I should  -  an aspirational member of the middle class.  I, along with millions of others, aspire to share with true equality the earth's resources. Instead of blowing out their hot air in the Commons, in The Lords and on Question Time why don't they actually roll up their sleeves and get working for a fair and just human community. Take action. Make something happen now.

They won't be doing this because for them at a personal level the risks are too great and the financial rewards are not sufficient.

They won't be doing it for another reason too and I'll tell you about it. Last year I went to my bank to say my £1,000 of savings was giving me an annual interest of less than one quarter of a percent which meant the value of my money was actually decreasing. I asked if they had an account with an interest that would maintain the value of my savings. I was told they did not but if I had savings of £5,000 they would have been able to give me an account with an interest rate of 2%. I asked why I couldn't get that rate with my £1,000 savings. "That," I was told, as any self-satisfied aspirational Blairite will know, "is not the way it works." If you earn more than £50,000 per annum there's a chance you might be able to spare £5,000 to save if you're on £15,000 a year or less, or working on a zero hour contract you've no chance.

And that folks is how the rich always get richer and the poor get poorer. Let's have a Labour Party focused on dealing with sharing the resources of  the world fairly rather than on media easy style and self-aggrandisement.

It is easy to understand why the issue of Scottish independence is once more dominating our political scene.

The majority of Scottish voters must be puzzled that so many of their English neighbours have a lemming like drive to be "ruled" over and certainly pushed over by a small band of privileged, rich and powerful "superiors."  Why do they vote themselves into relative poverty and at the same time create downright poverty for so many others ?

The Scottish National Party has said it wants to bring an end to austerity and to confront the factors that create inequality. The Scottish people deserve credit for voting so overwhelmingly for these humane intentions. The Scottish National Party will find it difficult to achieve these aims with a Conservative  government at Westminster. Given that the Scottish National Party has 56 of Scotland's 59 Westminster parliamentary seats and the Conservative Party has only one, the Tories cannot in all conscience govern Scotland with any sense of legitimacy without the assent of Scottish National Party MPs. Considering that the two parties are diametrically opposed on so many issues, any Conservative hopes of relying on the acquiescence of  the Scottish National Party at Westminster are likely to be dashed. 

It is easy to understand why the issue of Scottish independence is once more dominating our political scene.