Public sector workers are taxpayers too!

It’s an old line but it keeps coming up: public sector strikes against pension reform are unfair to the taxpayer. It came up again on this week’s edition of Question Time  (BBC1, 3 November) in answer to the first question of the night: ‘Is it right for the public sector workers to strike when they [...]

Death by credit rating…and neo-liberalism.

To paraphrase Karl Marx, a frightening spectre is stalking Europe: it is the age of the credit rating agency.  Although they have a long history, operating with a very low profile only now have their names etched themselves on the public consciousness. Denise Finney sums up their role thus: “Credit ratings provide individual and institutional investors [...]

Ireland. Don’t pay. Walk away.

This comes courtesy of Rab at Media Studies is Shit. (Created by Myles123. Source: xtranormal)

Ireland’s crisis explained

I came across this gem at The Cedar Lounge Revolution.  Priceless. (Created by Myles123. Source: xtranormal)

Dublin rocked by good-humoured demo!!

The Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) have organised a protest march in Dublin today and it’s just setting off on its way from Wood Quay to the GPO on O’Connell St. The demo is a protest against the government’s four-year austerity plan to raise €15 billion from the people to give it to the banks. [...]

The War on Jobs 5: The Spending Review – “Carefully crafted brutality”

So there we have it.  After months of speculation, CamClegg Inc has revealed the details of the Comprehensive Spending Review and would you believe it? The proposed cuts will hit the poorest and the public sector hardest, with half a million workers likely to lose their jobs in the next four years.  It was what [...]

The War on Jobs 4:The Philo Tax

Greg Philo, director of the Glasgow Media Group, was interviewed on the Jeremy Vine Show, BBC Radio 2, recently (14 September) to propose an alternative to the current war on jobs and the poor in Britain. His proposal sounds very reasonable: to impose a one-off tax on the top 20% of the British population that owns [...]

The Sun Gets Tough on Scroungers

I see that the Sun newspaper has launched a new campaign: “Help Us Stop £1.5bn benefits scroungers”.  It is appealing to readers to call its special hotline about those awful people next door who are earning “hundreds of thousands of pounds a week” on falsely claimed benefits at the expense of decent-hardworking-taxpayers. The paper promises to [...]

The Big (Selfish) Society: “Thinking the unthinkable”

BBC Newsnight last night (9 August) ended with a fascinating, albeit depressing insight into what the Daily Mail reading lower middle classes in Britain are thinking about the impending cuts to welfare and the public sector.  Recently, the consultancy wing of Price Waterhouse Coopers carried out  what the reporter called “an act of corporate citizenship” [...]

The War on Jobs 3: Echoes of Argentina

In The War on Jobs 2 (20 July), I wondered about how we should respond to the current economic crisis and if there are lessons we can learn from what happened in Argentina in 2002. But why Argentina eight long years ago? Why not an example nearer to home and more recently, such as Greece [...]