As the cuts continue to bite, the wages of workers remain stagnant and the economic outlook for the UK remains gloomy you’d be forgiven for thinking that the official opposition might just step into the breach and make a stand. You’d be wrong. Yesterday Ed Balls capitulated to the most ruthlessly pro-market government we’ve had in many years. The Labour Party, he said, would not reverse any of the Tory cuts or tax raises if they won the next election and they’d keep the freeze on public sector pay.

The reason given for the capitulation – and we heard this time and time again at yesterday’s Fabian Conference – is that the Labour party must be “trusted on the economy”.  In the main plenary Chukka Ummuna MP, the pollster Deborah Mattison and the former economic secretary to the treasury Kitty Ussher clambered over each other to proclaim the need for policies that look sensible to the public. Later in the day Polly Toynbee suggested that the Labour party must look tough on the economy now in order to gain power and do the things they really believe in.

The state of our parliamentary democracy could hardly be more dire. We have three parties who are singing off the same orthodox hymn sheet. The official opposition, lying down to die in the face of focus group studies and opinion polls which suggest the public believe cuts are necessary, have given up making the case for doing things another way. The few dissenters who remain, like the single Green parliamentarian, are accused by the Labour party of ‘playing into the Tories hands’. The cuts, we are told by all three main parties, will continue, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Instead of providing political leadership Ed Balls is using the public’s fear about the economy as a starting point for his party’s policies.

Let’s be clear: The Labour Party have hardly been a shining light of independent thought and radical ideas in their time in opposition. But Ed Balls’ rather sudden lurch to the right is still hugely disappointing. Defending public spending, while the government spew bile about a ‘bloated state’ and ‘extraordinarily levels of debt’, was hard enough already. But now, with the Labour Party abandoning the hope of persuading the reluctant public of any alternatives to austerity, those of us still calling for a change of course are set to become more marginalised than ever.

It’s all about looking like a party of government they say. But what the Labour leadership fail to see is that they are just looking like a less enthusiastic version of the Tories. The choice for the electorate is between a party who sound convincing while they make cuts and one who look guilty about it. The promise is that once they’ve seen the destruction of many of the services upon which people rely, they’ll reshape the economy to a fairer form of capitalism. It looks to me like the Labour party have run out of ideas.

Austerity isn’t working. The Labour Party have been saying it for months. But somehow, after an all-to-close analysis of the polls, Britain’s second biggest political party have done a monstrous u-turn. They’ve let down their members, many of whom must be questioning why they’re still in the party. They’ve let down the left, whose battle has just become ever more difficult. But mostly The Labour Party have let down the British public who will now be blindly led down the path of ignorance to austerity, with no-one in parliament fighting their corner.

This post first appeared on Matthew’s blog – Segment Politics

DISCLAIMER: I work for Jubilee Scotland but am writing in my own capacity.

The world is changing: debt and deficit are front page news, the general public is becoming educated in the language of financiers, and the relative virtues of IMF policies are being discussed down the pub. Well..maybe that’s just the pubs I go to. But the fact cannot be escaped that debt is dominating the global mindset in a way which has not been seen before by my generation.

Traditional discourse around debt cancellation has focused predominantly around poor countries (those formerly known as ‘third-world’) in Africa and South America. Where debt cancellation has occurred, it has done so after adherence to certain conditions pushed by lenders; privatisation of healthcare, say, or the hiring of a foreign firm to complete infrastructure projects. The growing ‘debt crisis’ in the West forces us to change the way we speak about debt and its legitimacy.

As a campaigner working for the cancellation of unfair and unpayable debt, where does this leave me? Is the increased knowledge of the wider issues around money-lending a positive thing for our message, or is it merely a distraction, reinforcing the common response to any development work of ‘charity starts at home’. The global Jubilee movement needs to consider these questions.

I think we must see this, the public perception of the debt crisis, as a positive. To ignore it, or worse, to attempt to use the situation in Europe as a way to highlight how much worst things are for Africa and South America can only lead to a perceived irrelevance of the Jubilee movement. Yes, the Western debt crisis is replicating a situation which has raged for generations in poorer countries, but to suggest that this means we should ignore all debt issues which do not relate to the world’s poorest countries is short-sighted and morally questionable. It does, however. leave us with the question of whose debt are we talking about? Which debt are we trying to cancel? How do we classify an unfair debt? And, taken to it’s logical confusion, should the Jubilee movement be calling for an end to all debt, to the very concept of interest, and lending for profit?

Debt campaigning, though much of it has been led by a desire for poverty irradication and atonement for colonial sins, must at its heart focus on justice. This means fighting both for the cancellation of debt which was created via dictators such as Marcos in the Philippines, or money lost through corruption, but also debt whereby the paying of it will restrict access to healthcare, education and basic infrastructure. This used to mean countries such as Malawi (one of the 40 countries who qualified for debt cancellation under the Heavily Indebted Poor Counties Initiative) where the deprivation was easily recognisable and the public was appalled by the nonsensical system which led to $5 flowing out of the country in debt repayments for every $1 that flowed in as aid.

Now this classification can be applied to Greece, where the International Monetary Fund have enforced such strict austerity measures that the people of Greece have repeatedly taken to the streets in protest. A shocking statistic which features in the recent documentary Debtocracy (watch it free here http://www.debtocracy.gr/indexen.html) is that in every country where IMF policies have been followed over a protracted period of time, average life expectancy has fallen by 5-10 years. Where debts are leading to deprivation and death, that debt must be deemed unpayable, and countries must have the autonomy to refuse to pay where their citizens are at risk.

This is a harder fight to win – it has always been easier to talk about debt in terms of poverty eradication, development, and the traditional language of aid. But fights should always be big enough to be worth fighting for.

Campaigning should be about finding alternatives. Not just cancelling old debts, but calling for an international financial system which doesn’t function by fleecing the poor and making money whatever the consequences. Where responsibility sits squarely with both lender and borrower, and where future generations are not held responsible for the crimes that went before them.

Both the Eurozone crisis and the events of the Arab Spring have highlighted the flaws at the centre of our current system. We must make the most of this – not by using it to show how a few very specific debt should be cancelled, but by using it to ask broader questions about the morality behind money.

I must say I’m quite surprised by the enthusiasm for greens opposing HS2, announced to get ahead today. People say the business model doesn’t imply it will cut CO2 and merely increases demand for travel, and that the money would be better spent on improving local services that communities rely on.  I can certainly think of a deserving local rail network desperate for investment – the South Wales Valley lines, which would give a huge boost to the chronically depressed regional economy if the lines were electrified and journey times reduced.

But this isn’t a zero sum game, if we are serious about investing to stimulate the economy, why can’t we build HS2 and pump billions into strengthening regional rail networks? This comes today along with news that the Treasury has sold bonds are negative interest and reports that Denmark, who recently elected a Government explicitly committed to increasing public spending, also has investors paying to give the Government money. All this will create jobs in sustainable industries and besides, if we expect people to switch to the train to cut emissions, how are we supposed to keep upgrading the system to serve both an adequate local service and inter-city trains? It sounds hugely expensive and painfully slow to me.

What I think I am seeing is a tendency to oppose a project because the current Government’s vision for it is apparently not in line with sustainable visions for the economy. People don’t believe it will cut CO2 emissions, but TGVs totally killed off domestic aviation in France, why wouldn’t it here, in a smaller country? People say that the Government has no plans to abolish the airport space freed up by high speed rail, but why shouldn’t that stop us happening in the future? People don’t believe it will ever reach beyond Birmingham, but is that a reason to oppose it, meaning if we actually want a high speed network in the future, we’ll be 15 years behind where we could be? I don’t really think that’s fair on Scotland for starters.

The point I’m making here is that we shouldn’t oppose potential progress on sustainable transport just because the people doing it don’t agree with us. Our job is to say “yes, we want high speed rail, but we want a different vision that respects the needs of a sustainable economy” not to oppose it because it’s not perfect. I’d rather have something to work with than holding the country back over issues that can be solved.

Paul Mason’s new book, out this month, made me laugh and made me cry. It gave me hope and helped me understand. “Why it’s kicking off everywhere” essentially does what it says on the tin. Building on his widely read blog post from early 2011 “20 reasons it’s kicking off everywhere”, the Newsnight economics editor tells the story of 2011 in a way that perhaps only he can.

Who else was on the steps of the Greek Parliament as it was stormed, in the slums of Cairo as they were mobilised and at the economic summits as dry eyed Finance Ministers struggled to understand? Mason retraces the route of Steinbeck’s Oakies to witness the new dust-bowl, travels to the slums of Manilla to meet the new urban poor, and stood on the steps of St Paul’s as they were occupied. The book tells the stories of his travels: the tales of one of the few to witness so many of the revolutions of 2011. But it does much more than that.

In his introduction, Mason insists that the book should be categorised as journalism, not social science. And it is – journalism at its analytical best, a wide angel lens on global society. To explain the uprisings, he references Marx and Engles, Slavoj Zizek , Deboard and Delius, @Ghonim from Tahrir and @littlemisswilde from the UCL occupation, The Matrix and The Truman Show, Picasso and a 1910 opera ‘so revolutionary that no one noticed’. His thesis on why its kicking off everywhere is essentially that spelled out in the blog – the interaction of changes in class structures, new technology – particularly social media and the failure of free market capitalism.

For me, most of it rings true. His macro-economic analysis of the collapse – only a small portion of the book – is as superb as you’d expect (if at times too despairing for my taste). His capacity to deftly draw parallel after parallel with uprisings throughout history shows not just his depth as a labour historian, but also his breadth of knowledge of culture and arts, and what they say about society and shifting ideologies (Wikipedia tells me that he was once a music teacher). He paints his case in academic multicolour: history, economics, social movement theory, sociology, business theory, psychology, philosophy, urban planning… And it is compelling. But one question constantly troubles me – has been troubling me for a while now.

For Mason much of the book seems to be a justification of his argument that “the network beats the hierarchy” – and to an extent that new technologies have made this possible. And I want this to be true. But I am not convinced he doesn’t slightly over state the case. Because whilst the networked protests in Tahrir square had immense power, it was when the army stepped in – with their own grievances with Mubarak’s neo-liberalism, that the old man fell. And whist much is made of twitter, little is made of the other, more centralised, information revolution in the Middle East – Satellite TV. How many more Egyptians, Tunisians or Syrians have had their world view changed by the thousands of dishes you find in any Arab city than have by their twitter feed? In Britain, he talks about the destruction of our movement that night in March that many of us slept in cells across London. Surely this shows the hierarchy of the police beating our network? At least for a moment. In Spain, in Greece, in Wisconsin, even in Egypt and Libya so far, our networks have lost either to the old enemies, or new ones. We can achieve shock and awe protests, but haven’t yet demonstrated our capacity to keep coming and coming – once attention drifts, the hierarchy swoops back. As Burns might put it:

“Or like the snow falls in the river,
A moment white-then melts for ever;
Or like the Borealis race,
That flit ere you can point their place;
Or like the Rainbow’s lovely form
Evanishing amid the storm.”

For me, this isn’t because his core thesis is necessarily wrong. It may be that our networks are, so far, too small. When he describes @littlemisswilde, introducing her as a character, he allows us to get the impression that she is typical – that there are hundreds like her. The truth is that within two sentences, I thought ‘oh, that’s Jess’. There’s only one of her. Our world is smaller than we like to admit. Our network, here in the UK at least, is weaker than we like to admit.

Mason often hints at this – in the original blog post, he talks about how “They all seem to know each other”. He implies this is good for protest movements. It isn’t. It shows how few we are, and that we are our own clique, not fingers into vast communities. In the book, he often talks about how young people in Cairo or in Britain or in Spain all speak the same language, have the same confidence, drink in identical Starbucks and have the same laptops and phones. Perhaps he is allowing us to join the dots, but he doesn’t himself. What this implies is a problem. Our networks – supposedly non hierarchical, empowering, are in fact led by the emerging international anti-capitalist elite. He writes too about the working class uprisings, about the differences in class, and how, in the 1840s, the bourgeoisie turned on the proletariat.

And so whilst the book gave me hope – it tells the tales of millions around the world who are now prepared to fight for our collective future – it also added to a gnawing fear I’ve had for a while: we don’t yet have the strength in breadth to win our struggle for humanity. That’s my worry. I may well be wrong. But I’ll return to this theme another day. Because I digress.

Here’s the point. The book is brilliant: educational, moving, sizzlingy written. If you want to understand 2011 – the year of global revolutions, then read it.

Today Unison signed a heads of agreement with the government over changes to NHS pensions. The agreement still needs approval from Unison’s health committee (and potentially the membership directly) and the full details aren’t yet public, but the guardian report:

Unison’s head of health, Christine McAnea, said the offer contained some concessions from the government, such as a pledge that staff less than 10 years from retirement will keep their existing pension arrangements, while those earning under £26,000 will escape a contributions increase next year.

That is a few workers get bought off and everyone else has the contributions increase deferred. We’ll see if the final agreement contains much more, but it’s hardly a resounding victory. Going forward all the government’s changes look like they will still happen, it’ll just take slightly longer for the full effects to work through.

The uprate for inflation will still switch from RPI to the (generally lower) CPI measure, staff will still have to work longer, contributions will still eventually increase to the same extent and schemes will still switch from final salary to career average (and not on an average equal footing).

Tomorrow we may hear of a similar agreement for the local government pensions scheme. Unison, UNITE and GMB have been in talks with the Local Government Association and are expected to set out a new set of principles and timetable for negotiations.

The unions are keen to stress that no final agreement has been made and state in a letter that “we believe that – if agreed – the principles under
discussion will provide a very positive framework for negotiations and potentially could lead to no change until 2014″.

To me, that sounds suspiciously like a very similar agreement will be reached to that in the NHS. Some concessions for staff near retirement, a delay in implementation but fundamentally the government get what they want.

Not all the unions are quite so willing to sell out their membership as Unison, UNITE and GMB, thankfully. Already over 1000 trade unionists – led by PCS, UCU and NUT though covering all the public sector unions – have signed a statement calling on the unions to reject the government’s ‘final offer’ and continue the fight.

On November 30th three million trade union members came out on strike. In Scotland fewer than 30 schools were open across the whole country, and many of them were only formally open and with significant disruption. We took part in the largest coordinated action in decades and took public support with us.

We need to continue this fight until we see real victories and improvements in our pension schemes. And next time we need even more people out on strike; we need to see the NHS staff out for their pensions; we need to work with grassroots movements in the private sector like the Sparks; we need to see private sector workers striking for their pensions too.

Trade unions won huge improvements in the working conditions, in pay, in pensions, in hours across all our lives (whether we are now members of a union or not) but we have to remember that we did it not through the skill of paid national officers and negotiating teams, but by mass direct action and solidarity between workers. If a few unions allow themselves to be bought off it undermines all of us, and it will undermine them when the government or employers come to claw back the next gain we made in the past.

We need to remain united, we need any negotiations that happen to happen in public not between small groups of officials behind closed doors and we need to realise that we have power and we have the potential to do more than “damage limitation”. The changes being imposed on our pensions are not necessary and are not inevitable. The trade union leaderships have a history of demobilising and selling out their memberships, don’t let this fight become another point to add to when they gave in too soon.

the Sparks' occupying - via their Facebook group

As reported on the site jibelectrician.blogspot.com:

THIS morning, Saturday 17th,  Scotland M&E workers are currently occupying the Glasgow BBC office. Police are on the scene but have informed them that as they have broken no laws, all they can do is advise that they leave.
They are at the BBC office to highlight the national media blackout on our struggle. For the last 16 weeks there have been protests across the whole of the UK and not one single mention by the BBC.

Sparks across the UK have had a long running and increasingly militant dispute over attempts by large building contractors, including Balfour Beattie, to significantly cut their pay under the Building Engineering Services National Agreement (BESNA).

In a sense, the European economic collapse isn’t that complex. After the crash of the 70s, richer people said that, if we handed our wealth to them, then they would invest it better. And so they would build for us a new world of untold prosperity and happiness.

And so we handed them the profits of our labour. We privatised to them, and we cut their taxes. We allowed them to bust unions so that their share packages could soar as average wages stagnated. We cut back regulations and we gave them every chance they asked for to ‘create wealth’. And they failed. Because if you give rich people money, they don’t invest it in those things society needs to become more prosperous. They don’t have some magic skill to spot a need. They just buy stuff they like. Or, if the mood takes them, they gamble with it. Building new factories or investing in genuine research – these things are hard. They take time to deliver a payback. Speculation, derivatives markets, these things give a quicker payoff. But they aren’t investments in a prosperous civilisation. They don’t create true wealth.

And so, having promised that they would deliver rapid economic success, they didn’t. Growth rates stalled. They did however, concentrate more and more wealth into their own hands. And with wages failing to rise with workers’ output they realised they had a problem: if people didn’t have enough money, how would they buy stuff from their companies? And so they needed to lend. We were all encouraged to believe that the houses owned by banks were really ours, and to borrow against this asset as its price rapidly grew as more and more sought to get in on the spiralling act.

Then, the bubble burst. We realised that the surplus tat we could now afford was paid for with money lent to us by the very people who had in the first place taken it from us on the promise of making us rich.

And now that this system – a system designed by the rich for the rich – has failed, we are told that the party is over. We are told that our future is bleak. For if the rich couldn’t make things better for everyone, then how can we make things better for ourselves? “If our way didn’t work” they tell us “then there isn’t a way which can”.

And this is wrong because it misses a fundamental point: this system failed to deliver happiness. It failed to enrich the majority, and it is killing the planet. We knew before 2008 that it had profoundly failed. We already needed urgently to replace it. And it is wrong because it misses this too: We were told that we had to hand our economy to the rich because they were the wealth creators, they were the Übermensch: Nietzscherian super heroes who would rescue us from the squalor of our ignorance, of our incompetence and of our idiocy. And this was always a lie. The truth is that humanity is awesome. As my brother, Gilbert, once wrote:

“It is a myth that the world contains only a handful of ultra brilliant people and that if one exhausts one’s stock of them, then one has lost one’s most important resource. Fifth century Athens, for example, produced in one generation some of the most important thinkers and writers of all time, geniuses like Plato and Euripides and Aristophanes. At the time, the population of the whole of Attica (most of whom were illiterate, of course), was about the same as present day Lowestoft. Humanity is swarming with geniuses. What matters is creating the circumstances to nurture them.”

I would go further. There is a glint of genius in everyone. In a society structured not to plunder material resources for the benefit of the few but to invest in, nurture, and release the potential of us all our collective capacity for improving civilisation would surely be boundless. Those who said they should be entrusted with our wealth and our power lied. They stole. They conned. And now their veil has slipped. And now we have something truly exciting – we have the chance to start again. To build something new, something which is ours.

What we will build we don’t yet know in detail. Ideas are forged in debate and in the fire of struggle. But we do know this: the utopia built by the rich was theirs not ours. Robert Peston tells us that The Party’s Over. He’s wrong. There was a party, but most of us weren’t invited. Our best days are ahead of us. The fall of the Übermensch allows for the rise of the people. We live in the early days of a better world. First, we just need to imagine it, and then to build it.

Never fear! The good folks at nef (the new economics foundation) have cordially invited readers of Bright Green to join them in a game of George Osborne Bingo. They’ll be overseeing proceedings through their Facebook page, and on Twitter with the #osbornebingo hashtag. Just cross each of the phrases off the list, and once you have them all, shout… or cry.

The game kicks off at 12:30.

That said, pensions are a significant cut, and for some of the unions, the only named reason for this strike.

Here are five things about pensions:

1)  The average pension for female local government workers is less than £2,800 a year. That’s before any cuts. I dare Francis Maude to go down to his local picket line an whisper the words “gold plated”.

2) “The first issue that the Hutton Commission Interim Report stresses is that public sector pensions in the UK are affordable in the long run, in the sense that pension payments are set to fall as a share of national income over the next 50 years.” – that’s the Institute for Fiscal Studies speaking to Channel 4′s Fact Check, summing up the authoritative report into public sector pensions. As Fact Check put it back in June: “That undermines one of the Government’s main arguments”.

3) According to the charity National Energy Action, something like 2,500 pensioners died because of fuel poverty last winter – ie they died of cold because they couldn’t afford to heat their homes. And this is before the government cuts pensions. Last year’s rich list showed a record rise in the wealth of the richest 1000 people in Britain – an increase of 30% or £77 billion.

4) The pension cuts would mean workers paying more into their pension schemes as well as getting less out at the end. This increase in contribution obviously means less take home pay. This comes in the middle of a public sector pay freeze and at a time when inflation is running at around 5%. Taking all of these effects into account, if the pension reforms also go through, the TUC calculate that a 9% fall in living standards by 2012/13 would not be uncommon for public sector workers.

5) Yes, private sector workers have also seen their pensions under assault. Just as wages have flatlined in recent years, so have pension contributions. Unless we end this trend, today’s workers will have to live in fear of freezing or starving in old age. Wednesday’s strike marks a line in the sand for all workers across the country whose pensions are under attack. That line has been painted by those in the public sector who are organised enough to stand up first. But unless we all stand with them, we can all look to retirement with fear.

Stretched across the tent town by the London Stock Exchange is a banner spelling out the slogan of 2011: “Real Democracy Now”. Go to the camp and many participants will tell you that it is not their demands which are key – it is their process. The old chant “This is what democracy looks like” is ubiquitous, the discussions are passionate. Whilst anger at banks and at inequality and at capitalism are key motivations, the vision – from Athens to Madrid, Wall Street to St Paul’s – is all about democracy – about everyone having their say, their share in each decision.

Since the drastic failure of Soviet style ‘socialism’ became clear, the left across the world has struggled to find its radical voice. In Europe and in North America, the response was rapid triangulation – running to the right. And so it was in Latin America, where the shock waves of the neo-liberal revolution now pounding the shores of Europe hit hard long ago that the new base was built, new ideas forged, tried, tested, and replicated.

While demands for “real democracy” may seem to Northern Europeans to be a strange new, and exciting response to a financial collapse, Europe’s occupations are standing on the shoulders of the giant movements of the Fevelas and the Barrios of Venezuela, and Brazil, and Bolivia. We are following in the footsteps of Latin Americans – for these policies were key to their re-imagining of socialism.

And so if we are looking to understand what real democracy looks like, protesters gathering at occupations in financial districts and waving their hands are far from the only example we will find. In 1988, the Brazilian Workers’ Party won the elections in the municipality of Porto Allegre – a city suffering intense poverty. Rather than craft the city’s budget himself, the new mayor declared it would be written by the people. And so to this day, every year, citizens come together in various gatherings of thousands, set priorities, elect delegates to push these, and ultimately choose how to allocate the couple of hundred million US dollars in their city’s budget.

The results of this process have led to widespread acclaim – including from institutions not famed for their support for the policies of socialist parties. And perhaps most flattering of all, it has been mimicked across the continent. From Argentina to Venezuela, thousands of cities and communities have established processes of direct democracy – people’s council’s, workplace co-operatives, constitutional assemblies, and community control. Radical democracy sits alongside nationalisation and investment in public services as a key tenet of the Bolivarian revolution. Whilst the governments of Lula and Chavez and Morales have had many differences – and many policies we might dislike – they have each overseen vast experiments in radical democracy. And as these experiments have delivered positive results, the anti-capitalist peoples’ movements of Latin America – and their governments – have reforged socialism for the twenty first century.

Of course, in its purest forms, communism was always about communities claiming control. From The Levellers in 1649 to the community buy-out of the Isle of Eigg in 1997, local control, decentralisation of power and radical democracy have a long legacy in Britain’s left. But their place as the counterweight to overbearing corporate control is what has secured the greatest successes of anti-capitalism in the 21^st century. And perhaps we are seeing in the occupy movement that these are ideas whose time has come in Europe too.