News of the legal action was broken in The Guardian, along with stories from jobseekers who had been on workfare schemes at companies like Tesco and Poundland, whilst Corporate Watch have exposed TK Maxx, Matalan and others as taking advantage of the scheme.

Boycott Workfare, a group campaigning on this issue, welcomed news of the legal action: “Workfare undermines human rights and the minimum wage, whilst once more boosting the profits of big corporations. It doesn’t make economic sense and we look forward to seeing the government’s plans exposed as not only unjust and immoral, but illegal.”

This is nothing new. Under Labour, Flexible New Deal had workfare components, and similar schemes occurred under Thatcher. This time though the coalition have gone a step further and stripped away the funding for training that was usually attached to work experience-type schemes in the past. This means that only large companies with unskilled work will take part in the programme – smaller companies could not bear the cost of training someone to do a semi-skilled position every 4 or 5 weeks, and larger companies will not. The scheme itself is indiscriminate and it will catch many for whom it has no relevance at all. What is the value for someone with a trade, or years of experience in an office or factory, of a month of stacking shelves?

Supporters of workfare say that it will help jobseekers back into work and claim that there might even be a job at the end of it. However, the opposite of this is true. Workfare undermines paid positions by providing labour that is free to the companies using the scheme. Why would a company hire an extra person when they have people on workfare placements?

The ultimate paradox of workfare is that because they are unpaid positions, companies have to say that these are not jobs that the company needs doing. This means that there is no possibility of someone being taken on to do the job they’ve just got experience in, because if a company did, it would mean that they had broken the rules of the scheme by placing a jobseeker in a job that was required by the company.

This government is systematically attacking benefit claimants, aided enthusiastically by an ongoing campaign of scapegoating claimants in sections of the media. If you are unemployed you are lazy, and told anyone can get a job if they try – despite there being just 327,000 vacancies to go round between 1,500,000 JSA claimants. And that 1.5million figure doesn’t tell the whole story – 2.5million are unemployed (not everyone can claim JSA), and there are more than 9million people who are economically inactive.

The levels of unemployment we see today are not the result of laziness, or a welfare system that is too comfortable to live on, it is the result of 30 years of neo-liberal policies that are directed towards big business and economic focus on inflation and interest rates, rather than full employment.

Ultimately unemployment is the result of the capitalist system that uses the army of reserve labour to keep wages low. Workfare represents the ultimate expression of that use, with business paying absolutely nothing towards the wages, and no doubt looking to shed paid positions where they can. And it is the most vulnerable who will be most strongly affected – it is only unskilled positions that can be performed on workfare placements, so the threat to jobs comes to minimum wage employees first, and management never.

And it is the taxpayer who is supposed to bear the cost of the scheme – paying to allow companies to make more profits, for even bigger wage bills for their executives. We are undermining our own jobs and pay, and handing over wadges of cash to the bosses at the same time.

How long will it be before we start hearing of people who have lost their jobs and then been told by colleagues that they have been replaced by people on workfare? When will the first scandal break of a Poundland or Tesco whose entire team of shelf-stackers are there on workfare programmes?

We need to take action on this. A legal challenge is one thing, but we can also campaign for companies involved to withdraw from the scheme. December is a month of action against ATOS and benefit cuts. As part of that you could draw attention to workfare, or start a local group to campaign against attacks on benefit claimants and call for welfare not workfare.

Conference can tend to be a reminder of the fragility of the Greens in Northern Ireland, but, happily, the story of conference this year could have been so much different to the way it turned out. Instead we can talk of putting party leader Steven Agnew into the Assembly, and growing activism in local groups – Agnew spoke of this year seeing the greatest surge in Green Party activism since he joined the party.

It was a chance to recharge batteries and a starting point for the next election cycle, after spending the last three years fighting four successive elections – European, Westminster and local & Assembly. It’s been exhausting and we’ve had little room to breathe.

Consequently, the party’s purse hasn’t had much room to breathe either. A big challenge as we look towards the next set of European elections is party finance. During the first item of business, reports from the party executive, one party official noted how the PTA of his children’s school had a bigger budget than the GPNI. This remark is a stark reminder of how the party operates on a shoestring. As the only party in the Assembly that don’t take corporate donations, we need to redouble our fundraising efforts if we want to make gains in the future.

Technical motions were discussed early in the day – a proposal to cut links with the Green Party in the Republic of Ireland – of which GPNI is attached – was heavily defeated. Delegates noted the support given to the GPNI in its times of need in the past, and now that the roles were reversed, that it would be inappropriate. Others highlighted the fruits of good relations with Camohantas Glas – the mutual canvasses, the sharing of knowledge and collaborative efforts on green issues that don’t recognise the border. (On the subject of down south, the heartening 400% increase in the Green Party vote in the recent Dublin West by-election gives some hope for the future recovery of Camhoantas Glas)

50-50 gender representation for constituency delegates to the party executive was also retained with overwhelming support. Bloggers from Slugger O’Toole noted that they believed that the Greens had the ‘best gender balance I’ve seen yet at a party conference…and wide range of ages.’ That’s good, but considering this is Northern Ireland, it’s not the greatest accolade, and we must do better still.

Motions on party policy tended to cut across a broad cross-section of some of the main issues that the NI Greens are currently concerned about. Motions to support social tariffs and investment to fight pensioner poverty and fuel poverty were passed.  A motion to oppose oil and gas exploration licenses in NI was voted through. Exploration licences have already been issued for environmentally sensitive areas such as Larne Lough, Lough Neagh and Rathlin Island. The issuing of these licences could lead to hydraulic fracturing (or ‘fracking’) methods being used to extract oil and gas, damaging our health and our environment. The profits will go offshore and the local people and environment will be left with the costs – similar to the American corporation AES that currently owns two out of three of the North’s major power stations. (An interesting motion on making it party policy to establish Canadian and Scandinavian-style provincially-owned monopolies on alcohol sales narrowly failed to pass.)

Following Steven Agnew’s re-election as leader, his keynote speech laid out the big challenges ahead; being the critical opposition in an Assembly where 105 out of the 108 MLAs are in government. The need to contest the upcoming European elections, and to have more Greens join the Assembly chamber in 4 years time.

But perhaps most interesting of all is Agnew’s forthcoming Private Member’s Bill, which would place a statutory obligation on government departments to cooperate. To anyone not familiar with Northern Ireland’s complicated consociational system, this might seem innocuous. But with departments headed by rival parties and rival traditions, this legal duty (Which exists everywhere else in the UK) has the potential to end unnecessary duplication of services, inefficiencies and could provide a cure to Stormont’s gridlock.

Special guest at the conference was Minister for the Environment, Alex Attwood. Personally, I wasn’t sure what to make of this. Yes, Attwood’s status as a vaguely centre-left, non-climate denier makes him probably the best environment minister devolution has given us yet. But the bar hadn’t been set high, and it was arguably inappropriate for a member of another political party – especially a man vying for leadership of said party – to address conference. There was talk of a chance to influence, but as one party member is fond of saying, ‘we’re not Friends of the Earth with knobs on,’ and influence is fine, but whether conference is the place to do it is debatable.

More than that, I feared that the small amount of coverage that the media are legally obliged to give this party conference would be dominated by talk of Attwood speaking to the Greens about ‘the environment,’ – akin to him addressing an NGO – which would make us look small and single-issue.

But in the end the media largely chose to focus on something which didn’t spark that much debate – the defeat of the motion to split ties with the Green Party in the south. Two minutes out of an entire day defined the whole conference for the BBC.

While pensioners shiver in their homes due to the greed of utility companies, while the Assembly schemes about a tax cut for big business and while our economy flounders despite a ready-made green jobs-based solution waiting in the wings, casting the whole frame of the conference as being some kind of sectarian north-south brawl was dishonest and lazy.

Clearly we’ve still a long way to go.

For an outsider’s view of conference and links to speeches, see below: http://sluggerotoole.com/2011/10/31/green-party-ni-conference-the-visit-of-alex-attwood-and-criticism-of-mlas-who-cant-read-or-believe-the-speeches-written-for-them/

So, I was able to have a righteously leftist angry breakfast on Saturday courtesy of reading this article in the Guardian. The jist of it is that the Foetal Homicide Law that some states in America have introduced to protect women and their unborn from violent attacks from ex-partners etc, has now started being used to prosecute women who’s babies die, either in or outside the womb when the mother has taken drugs while pregnant. Medical proof of the drugs causing the babies’ death appears to not be required.

The most shocking case is 15 year-old Rennie Gibbs who took cocaine while pregnant, and who gave birth to a stillborn at 36 weeks. She has been charged with “depraved-heart murder”. Yes, I know. What is shocking is that there is no link between her cocaine habit and the death of her child, what is more shocking is that anyone with a cocaine habit while pregnant is in need of help, support and compassion long before their child is born, what is even more shock is that she is 15. Anyone pregnant and with a cocaine habit at the age of fifteen is in need of… do I need to say?

So, we all get to shake our heads at the casual disregard American’s have for women’s and human’s rights. Get to thank our lucky stars that we live in a more secular society which means that fundamental religiosity does not get to twist laws that are meant to protect people. However that is not the case. This is not a case of good law gone bad. This is a case of an attitude being expressed through law, and it is an attitude that I have seen and still continue to see in Scottish society.

I blogged on how I feel that the way breast feeding is promoted by the Scottish Government is inherently sexist. What surprised me the most was the down right nasty comments received from other women, and if they weren’t nasty, they could be very patronising. Why these reactions? Because these women had decided to conform to the message sent out, and it wasn’t enough that they conform to it, everyone else should. By questioning the message and the evidence it is based on I was either stupid, and seen as a justifiable target for “scathing comments” or in “need of healing” i.e. if you disagree you are not right and I will be either angry at you or sad for you. It’s not just breastfeeding, the most emotive subject surrounding pregnancy and motherhood, but it even comes down to the unscientific advice on what you can or can’t eat when pregnant (let alone what you drink, smoke or snort). I could list hunners of anecdotes from myself, my friends, my family, all of which illustrate the fact that people who know nothing about you feel they have a right to tell you what to do and how to behave as soon as you are pregnant. However the blog post isn’t long enough. Buy me a pint and I’ll go into detail.

In both this society and America, women are immediately seen as public property as soon as they become pregnant, they are infantilised by those around them. Their worth as individuals is decided by how much they conform to prevailing, and sometimes unscientific, attitudes towards pregnancy. That is not to say that I think women should be taking all kind of narcotic substances when they are pregnant, but as a society we are so obsessed with women as being agents of risk for their children, we forget that the women who are in behaving in this way are desperate, and in need help, but we would rather judge them than provide that. Shame on America. Shame on us.

Mairi blogs at www.alumpinthethroat.wordpress.com and is on Twitter: @lumpinthethroat

Marx was committed to using science to burn away the mysticism of obscurantist beliefs, so it seems a great tragedy, that his name has been repeatedly hijacked to both legitimise various dogmas he never endorsed and delegitimise his true legacy. As G.A Cohen points out it is a shame that the socialists that followed Marx did not follow him in referring to his work as scientific socialism. ‘Isms’ exist for classifying dogmatic sets of beliefs, held to be self evidently true. For example, Catholicism and Protestantism.

Marx’s work was the opposite of this; it was a set of theories created from a process of applying the most advanced social science to the human condition as Marx understood it. Marx played a central role in the creation of what is now sociology. As well as having a massive impact on a whole set of other social sciences.

This is similar to how Galileo founded what went on to become physics. This being the case, it follows that asking someone if they believe in Marxism is as nonsensical as asking a physicist if they subscribe to Galileoism. Galileo like Marx and all theorists was correct up to a point about some things and incorrect about others.

Being a Marxist, then, cannot mean subscribing to a certain set of dogmas, if used at all, it can only  in any faithful sense refer to someone concerned with the application of the most advanced social science to the emancipatory project of replacing capitalism with a more humane social system.

Cohen along with John Roemer and John Elster founded a group known as the No Bullshit Marxists. Bullshit being encapsulated by the idea that ‘Marxism’ contains within itself, its own dialectical method; which is more real and superior to ‘bourgeois science’. This is of course nonsense. If Marx’s work is to have any value beyond simple rhetoric, then it must be able to stand up to analytical and empirical critique.

Dialectics are clearly false: not everything has a direct opposite with which it combines to create a synthesis. Marx suggested this in saying that he had uncovered the same rules in economics as Darwin had in biology i.e. evolutionary not dialectical laws. Dialectical thought can be a useful way to conceptualise something but it pales in comparison to the rigours and power of modern analytical philosophy.

Further bullshit is the Labour Theory of Value (LTV) – the idea that embedded labour is the source of value. In the 1850s LTV was taken as fact by mainstream economists and thus Marx followed suit in using it to develop his theory of exploitation. But contemporary economics has proved, beyond doubt, that LTV is incorrect. This is because LTV should result in more labour intensive industries being more profitable; as there is a greater potential pool of labour which can be exploited, however, there is no empirical evidence that this correlation exists. Marx would surely, have recognised this flaw if he had the power of modern economics or 150 years of hindsight at his disposal.

But there is still much value in many of Marx’s insights; however, these insights must be wedded to the corner stone’s of modern social science: analytical thought, empirical investigation and a reflexive approach. When combined in this way many of Marx’s theories can maintain great utility. Whether the use of analytical philosophy by Cohen to develop and defend restricted historical materialism, the use of modern economics by John Roemer to develop a theory of exploitation not reliant on LTV, or the use of modern research techniques by Stuart Hall to develop theories of ideology.

Some self declared followers of ‘Marxism’ argue that such theorists are revisionists, but this is exactly the point; all theory must be revised in the face of fresh evidence, otherwise it becomes dogma. This is why ‘Marxism’ has always done Marx a disservice and should be retired from the lexicon of the left. But those who see no value in the work of Marx are throwing the baby out with bathwater, ignoring many insights which are still pertinent today, for example the role of class, alienation and exploitation.

In fact, if the Marxian tradition is the employing of science to further emancipation, then surely Bright Greens are the real inheritors of the Marxian tradition; it’s time to take back that inheritance and take Marx beyond ‘Marxism’.

With the current spate of activism, it’s interesting to look at how people learn to campaign. Because the skills required by activists are learnt just like any others. And across the UK, one of the main organisations training and inspiring new activists is People & Planet – Britain’s biggest network of students taking action for global justice. People & Planet has groups at about 50 Universities across the UK, who are trained and inspired to run campaigns on their campuses and nationally, and runs an education program that reaches thousands of teenagers every year.

Fed up with sponsoring goats? This year, sponsor a student activist, and they'll change the world for good.

And it works. For example, when Fruit of the Loom sacked thousands of Latin American workers for unionising and demanding a living wage last year, People & Planet students linked up with students in the States, and forced Fruit of the Loom to re-hire these women, pay them a living wage, give them the rights they had demanded, and full compensation for their time off. At the same time People & Planet students were taking the Treasury to court over the RBS bail-out, getting their uni’s to cut thousands of tonnes of carbon emissions and educating a whole new generation in the basic skills needed to change the world.

And those skills come in handy. If you look at many of the people populating the most exciting progressive campaigns in the country, you will see People & Planet graduates (and undergraduates!) – from UK Uncut-ers accross the country to the Friends of the Earth offices; from the Camp for Climate Action to the ActionAid HQ; from Political Scrapbook and the New Internationalist to student occupiers. Skilled activists don’t just appear. They learn. They gain skills. They get better. And, so often, the generation of activists running the most exciting campaigns today has been trained by People & Planet. Campaigning to change the systems which cause oppression is a very efficient use of money. But it does cost – expert staff to train and support activist groups, events, campaign materials for groups.

As the famous saying goes, “give a man a fish, and he’ll feed his family for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll feed his family for a lifetime.” I would add: help a whole generation gain the skills they need to mobilise their friends, neighbours and families, and we can change the world for good.

To help ensure the energy generated by a newly politicised generation is converted into lasting change, you can sponsor a student activist this Christmas.

The last month of student protests, culminating in the Parliamentary vote on Thursday in favour of trebling fees and thoroughly marketizing British higher-ed, have delivered what well could spell the beginning of the end of the Liberal Democrats in British politics.

Hovering now around just 10% in the polls, the Liberal Democrats have broken their promise to the young, to the hopeful with aspirations to achieve their full potential in life. Many young people from working class backgrounds who feel they have something special to offer society have told me or fellow Greens / fellow academics that they will now be put off studying at University because of the back breaking chain of debt that weighs them down if they decide to pursue their dreams. How can a Party that got their MPs elected on the promise that not only would they refuse to increase tuition fees, but would actually scrap them after a few years, look at themselves in the mirror after the last fortnight? In Norwich South, Lib Dem MP Simon Wright won by just 300 votes because his Labour opponent Charles Clarke – who introduced tuition fees – refused to promise students of tomorrow something he couldn’t keep. The prospects there (here, where I live) now look very good for the Green Party, who scored over 7000 votes – for how many people are really going to vote for the LibDems in seats like Norwich South, next time? Every political party wants to win votes where possible, but the kind of u-turn we have seen from the LibDems will undoubtedly stick in students’ minds and in their craw for generations to come.

And it is important to be clear, of course, that these fees were always going to come in, from the moment the coalition agreement was signed. The whole dance of which LibDems were going to vote for the fees, which to abstain, and which to vote against was just for show, and to try to minimise the damage to the LibDems in student seats – there was no way that the LibDems would let the vote actually be lost, because that would have put the Coalition itself at risk. Don’t be fooled by some LibDem MPs having voted against fees in the end – they were in effect allowed to do so because there was no risk of the bill itself being defeated.

People are fed up with lying politicians from the old Parties.  People are sick to death of their broken promises: here, the LibDems are merely the latest in a long line, and Nick Clegg is surely bitterly regretting his ‘No more broken promises’ theme during the General Election campaign!  And, with their role in government, comes greater attention to the tension between the LibDems’ alleged credentials on political reform, and the reality of their being on the ground the dirtiest campaigners of all. Many people can no longer stomach the twisted attacks the Liberal Democrats direct at other political parties and candidates (see the ‘Straight Choice‘ website, etc. ad nauseum ). It is striking how dirty they are already playing in the byelection to fill Phil Woolas’s seat – very ironically, given the reason for Woolas’s resignation!

The Liberal Democrats may be thinking, despite the backlash against their student-fees u-turn, that if a week is a long time in politics, five years of coalition politics may be enough to turn around the perceptions of the people.  Voting reform may ‘do the trick’ after all, and Nick Clegg tells us this was the real reason he came into politics.  But this is merely wishful thinking.  Millions of young people around Britain are just too adversely affected by this decision by the coalition government to weigh them down in debt before their working lives begin.  We’re taking about debts between £30,000 and £50,000 for each and every student once our stars of tomorrow graduate.

And the reason the Lib Dems are finished, not just in 2015 but for good?  The protesters who felt so incensed about the maximum £9000 per annum tuition fees co-authored by the Lib Dems were not just current 16 year old and above A-level students but also children in their early teens, 14 and 15 year olds. These schoolkids came out onto the streets in unprecedented numbers in the last weeks.  These are the people who will be voting not just in 2015 (when they will vote for the first time) but in the next 10 general elections.  These are the people whose children will vote with the knowledge of the treachery the Lib Dems waged on their parents.  And these are the people who won’t be placing the Lib Dems favourably in their AV voting preferences if it is selected by the people next year…

The LibDems will now be taught a lesson; when you promise the voters of tomorrow the earth and you deliver a black hole, as a Party you’ll never see the light of day again…

Who stands to gain from the LibDems’ loss?

Labour have been doing well in recent Council byelections – but so, in a number of cases (e.g. in Lewisham, in Manchester) have the Greens. Recent opinion polls have shown the Green Party on level pegging with the LibDems in Scotland, and poised to win our first seat ever on the Welsh Assembly, in our target area there. If we break through into Wales, then we will be represented in every nation of these islands – a distinction unmatched by any other political Party.

There is still an abiding distrust of Labour among many former LibDem voters; and Labour is very weak now, barely-existent, in large parts of the country. Furthermore, it is of course Labour who began this whole fees farrago – they come out of this smelling of something the opposite of roses…

Only the Green Party emerge from this whole thing with any credit. Buoyed up by the historic moment that was constituted by Caroline Lucas’s election in Brighton Pavillion, the Green Party is poised to advance significantly on many Councils next year, and possibly to take over the running of one or two, which would be another historic moment in British politics. And our prospects in the devolved elections in Scotland and Wales may be particular bright, given the Libs’ fall from grace. (Of course, the fact that the fees voted for on Thursday are for England only makes the contrast between the devolved nations and the Westminster centre all the more striking…)

Three times in British history, the Liberals have propped up a Conservative government. Each time, it has ended in electoral cataclysm for them, the junior partner, and in a fullblown split of one kind or another. The historical omens are grim for the neoliberal clique that has taken over the LibDems – and rightly so.

Meanwhile, around the world, Greens are growing in strength. The Green Party has overtaken centre Parties in Germany and in France, and is running there at its highest ever levels in the polls. In Australia, the LibDem equivalent Party, the ‘Democrats’, have collapsed, and the Green Party, which also won its first seat in the lower House there this year, now stands unchallenged as the 3rd Party of the country.

The Liberal Torycrats are discredited. As the Party of the future, the Green Party here is now following the Australian, French and German Green Parties in the march toward power.

The vote last Thursday makes the beginning of the end of the Libs as a party. Every time they have gone into government with the Conservatives in the past, they have ended up splitting – and now we see the start of the same splitting process here, in their chaotic 3-way split over fees. This split is very real, between the neoliberal / right-wing clique around Nick Clegg who actually agree with this awful, regressive policy of marketizing higher education, and the ‘social liberals’ / more social-democratic MPs in the Party including several former LibDem Leaders who emphatically do not.

The chaotic and shoddy outcome of last Thursday’s vote shows that the LibDems are on the way down and on the way out – and it is increasingly clear that the only growing progressive force in British politics is the Green Party.

For those who have been betrayed by the LibDems, for those who are being cut, whose futures are being mortgaged, who are paying through the nose so that the bankers can laugh all the way to…the bank, for our soldiers dying in pointless wars, for our children who are poised to inherit a ravaged Earth; for all these and many more, the rise of the Greens won’t be a moment too soon.

George Osborne thought his smokescreen was working. It looked for a while like the people of Britain were going to accept the biggest cuts to public spending seen in the Western world in a century. He had, it seemed, delivered a sleight of hand that would impress even the most slippery magician.

The trick he’s been using to great effect is, though, an old one. It works something like this: in a crisis, people panic. They accept something big has to happen to solve it. But massive crises are complex, and a global economic collapse is particularly hard to understand – we aren’t taught the basics of economic history at school, we learn that these are matters for clever men in suits who use long words.

And so what George Osborne spotted is what right wing politicians around the world have known for the last 40 years: a disaster is a great time to radically change a country. From the privatisation of New Orleans’ schools after Katrina, to the corporate plunder of Iraq after the 2003 invasion, this trick is nothing new. Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine describes in detail how it has been used the world over.

There is a big problem. People understand this might require a big solution. And so they accept policies they would never normally countenance – policies not designed to solve the problem, but to radically change society in a way no one ever voted for.

And like this sleight of hand, Osborne’s “solutions” too are nothing new. The Conservative students I studied with at university – the generation who were born under Thatcher, and are now the researchers and aids to this government – were arguing for 30% spending cuts long before the recession. And their predecessors did too – in fact, in 1910, the Conservative Party brought down the Government rather than allow the people’s budget, the foundation of the welfare state, to pass. And they have used every opportunity since to rid this country of what they see as a dangerous socialist experiment.

And this “solution” is, of course, nothing of the sort. The idea that you solve a deficit caused by unemployment by cutting jobs is economically illiterate. Don’t take it from me – look at what is being said by the world’s leading economists, including most recent Nobel prize winners: Britain is embarking on a radical economic experiment which is not only un-necessary, but probably going to make the recession worse.

But because people have been taught that economics is too complex for us, many people seem to stop listening when you try and explain why the cuts are a bad idea. And I’ve tried lots of ways:

I’ve tried explaining that the Treasury’s debt really isn’t that big: it was bigger for most of the 20th century, and, compared to the size of our economy, is one of the lowest on earth.

I’ve tried to explain that most of the debt is owed to people in the UK: our pension funds buy government bonds. If, as the Tories predict, borrowing did get more expensive, that would just mean that Britain’s pension funds would get fatter – money the Treasury could tax back.

I’ve tried pointing out that the borrowing isn’t getting more expensive, but cheaper. And this is extra-ordinary. Before the election, the excuse that they gave for cutting public spending was that they believed we’d be punished by the bond markets if we didn’t: investors wouldn’t buy government bonds. They were wrong. What has actually happened is that investors have decided that they don’t want to risk buying shares in companies which might collapse, and so they have rushed to buy government bonds. As a result, borrowing is cheaper than it’s almost ever been. The reason they gave for cutting has evaporated. They were just plain and simple wrong.

And I’ve tried explaining the multiplier effect. The way out of a recession is to invest in jobs. Once you’ve created a job, that person buys stuff and pays taxes. The Tories like to compare the national economy to a household. But, when I buy stuff in the shop, I don’t get lots of the money back in tax. And I don’t get even more back in tax when the shopkeeper buys her stock or pays her staff. And again when the staff buy things, and so on. And so the way out of the recession is to look at the real problem – unemployment – and take advantage of record cheap borrowing, by investing. As Nobel winning economist Joseph Stiglitz – former economist for both the World Bank and Bill Clinton – tells us, cutting now could well lead to higher long term debts.

I’ve pointed out that we tried this all before. Cutting spending to pay the debts of WW1 caused the great depression. Building the welfare state allowed us to build our way out of the debts left by WW2.

And I’ve reminded people that it wasn’t public spending which caused this crisis, but listening to crazy right wing ideologues like George Osborne who thought that we should shut down everything and hand our economy to the bankers.

And I’ve tried explaining that public services aren’t a cost to the economy but an investment in the civilisation which makes our economy possible. If we don’t invest in them now, we make our future economy less prosperous, and this will cost far more than our record cheap, very low debt.

And I’ve pointed out that the impending climate crisis means we urgently need to invest to create jobs building a new economy – this can’t wait, and the legacy we leave if we don’t will be unimaginable.

And I’ve tried many more arguments besides. And these arguments work – sometimes. A little discussion of why the great economists of our age think that George Osborne is either mad or bad or stupid often does leave people convinced.

But many turn off at the wiff of a discussion of economic theory. And you don’t get the chance to have that little conversation with everyone in Britain.

However, there is one more argument: one I haven’t yet mentioned, which doesn’t require so much explanation – an argument which convinces almost all who hear it. A fact so compelling that once shouted, it will echo throughout the country:

If the government collected the taxes it’s owed, we wouldn’t have a long term deficit. Instead, they let the mega-rich and big corporations dodge billions every year.

And of course, all of these arguments are what the Labour Party would be explaining, if they were brave enough to challenge Britain’s entrenched corporate power. But they aren’t. And so, with the noble exception of our one Green MP, and a few on the Labour left, it it falls to us, the people, to make this case.

But that’s ok. It’s ok, because this is nothing new. Public services were won by social movements who shouted, and screamed, and withdrew their labour, and occupied, and built new political parties, and, yes, smashed windows. And it’s ok because the fact that they don’t teach economic history in school doesn’t mean that we don’t remember this lesson. It was our grandparents and our great grandparents who won a state pension, who invented the NHS and who built affordable council houses. That was their legacy to us.

And it’s ok because our thanks to them will be to use the technology that our parents with their state funded education invented for us, to organise a resistance to the Tories so strong that our children will never forget. Because the history of Britain is a history of ordinary people fighting the Tories to win a fair share of our country’s wealth and power.

And as UK Uncut have shown, it is not a history that our generation will soon forget. Because people are realising that George Osborne’s smoke screen stinks. And as we blow it away, we will have a chance to learn the lesson Osborne teaches us, and take the chance to work out, together, what kind of country we want to build from the ashes, and leave for our grandchildren. And, if nothing else, that’s worth fighting for.

So, what could NUS be doing to provide practical support to the wave of people across the country taking direct action over the coming winter?

Well, first, there will be a need for legal support. NUS used to have a fund to help activists who were up in court for non-violent actions. It was abolished a couple of years ago. I remember sitting with Tim Gee (now of Political Dynamite) and being amazed to watch as no one else bothered to stand up for this fund. Tim and I were assured that, if it was needed, this support could be brought back – it just didn’t need a separate budget line. NUS must now find a bank of lawyers, and be prepared to defend their members on the front line. And they will need to scrape together some funding to deliver this support.

Activists will also need training in non-violent direct action. If people are going to do it – and they should, and they will, then they will need to understand their legal rights, and the likely consequences of their actions, and unless people and trained in, and practice, techniques for remaining peaceful, they are likely to lash out at high pressure moments. NUS could be helping organise “train the trainer” courses to help disseminate this information widely. Lots of people would happily run such courses for free – in fact, some are already doing so. But NUS have un-rivalled access to student organisers across the country. They could help organise and publicise these trainings better than anyone else. They should.

Direct action will be a crucial tactic. It is already changing the national story and so people’s minds. But it is only one tactic. NUS will also have an important job in doing the sorts of things their party political trained activists are good at – door knocking, leafleting,talking to the press .

But, most importantly, as NUS president, Aaron will always be seen as a face of the movement. Standing by people taking action will be crucial, and even when they are rowdier than he might like. Students are angry. That anger will manifest itself in a number of ways. NUS will not be able to capture or direct or lead it. But they can get people’s backs, they can help deliver the practical support of local student unions, and they can help mobilise. And that’s lots.

A little under a month ago Edinburgh University Settlement was declared bankrupt and I started to consider how I would write this piece. Let me put my cards on the table up front, I was asked to write this because I was once uniquely positioned to witness the activities of Edinburgh University Settlement (EUS) in its steadily accelerating decline to oblivion. To say that the years I spent involved with EUS were amicable (for either me or some of the management of EUS) would be untruthful – I have over the years been called many things, but ‘trouble causer’ is one that I actually don’t mind – sometimes things just need a little shaking up!

Having said that, the concept behind EUS was courageous and worthy, the projects were pioneering and met the needs of some of the more vulnerable and often forgotten members of our society, and the majority of the staff employed by EUS were conscientious and always put their clients’ needs first. I want to pass my condolences to those staff and clients who lost so much at the end of October 2010; you are the real victims of this debacle. No one I know (even the most avid critic of EUS) wanted the charity to fail, indeed, their objections were always founded on the belief that if the EUS ship did not change course it was going to hit the rocks very hard, but we are jumping the gun a little. In short, EUS as a charity was valuable and will be much missed and none of what follows should be taken as a criticism of the concept, the projects or the majority of the staff.

So what went wrong?

I’ve not bothered with the history of EUS. As someone far more eloquent than myself put it, “history is just one damn thing after another” and in this case would be a dated list of new projects interspersed with property deals and arguments. Quite a good synopsis of the recent history of EUS can be read in Tychy’s post ‘Too Big to Fail?’ There is also an alternative and somewhat rose tinted view by Ericka Duffy (an ex-employee of EUS) on the Guardian Edinburgh website. The history is not as interesting as the ethos that existed within the organisation, and in my view, it’s this ethos that crashed EUS, not a list of disassociated events. More importantly, it’s the story of this ethos that should serve as a warning to other charities and other trustees on how not to run a charity!

Let’s be clear, in my view (and probably that of OSCR), trustees are where the buck stops. They set the priorities for any organisation, charitable or otherwise. They set the long term strategy and they hire the key management staff. They then work with the management staff to create a business plan (in line with that long term strategy) and then leave the staff to advance that plan with regular updates on progress. It’s not rocket science! Unfortunately as Mr Cartwright of PWC is no doubt discovering, this wasn’t the model that EUS appeared to follow.

Many years ago they employed a Director, Nick Flavin. Now Ericka Duffy in her piece has described Nick Flavin as a “flamboyant and kind-hearted” man, and whilst I would not agree completely with that description, I recognise that others did see him in that light and indeed some members of staff could even be said to have idolised him. Nick Flavin is a very articulate and engaging character; he speaks with passion and will go out of his way to meet your needs, even when they directly conflict with the needs of others whose needs he has also agreed to meet.

I am fairly sure that when Nick Flavin began his directorship of EUS, that agreed model of Trustee responsibility was in place, however, over the “28 odd” years that he remained in post, there was a seismic shift in responsibility. The board of trustees (or Executive Committee as EUS called it) ceased to be the prime movers in policy and strategy and became no more than a rubber stamp for the ideas and pet projects of the Director. Times have been hard for a while in the sector and attracting volunteer board members has been difficult for many years as I am sure many others involved in charitable/voluntary organisations will agree.

As EUS had no specific trustee recruitment policy that I could see, the responsibility fell on the Director, who obviously recruited friends and associates, who in turn trusted the Director at his word, leading to a tacit transfer of power. This was not an overnight sensation, but more a long drift towards the present situation.
Don’t get me wrong, there were opportunities for others to become involved, indeed friends of mine were once on the Executive. Their experiences are telling. They talk of meetings where bank loan documents were circulated at the beginning of the meeting and the Executive told to take 5 minutes to read them and then vote to approve them. Not a lot of time for the Trustees to partake in careful consideration of the financial ramifications or the impact on the long term strategy of the organisation. Indeed, come to think of it, I do not at any point recall seeing an EUS strategic plan. My assumption from this is that the majority of the Executive (the Flavin camp as we could call them) were more than happy to accept that the strategy was in Nick Flavin’s head, and that was sufficient.

Now I want to make it clear, at no point do I think that Nick Flavin intentionally set out to take the real power of EUS into his own hands, it’s just something that happened gradually, almost invisibly, and he thought that what he was doing was for the best. We all know where a road paved with good intentions leads us though!
The elephant in the room here is David Duff – how did he get involved? Well, for those that have read the brief bio of Nick Flavin, you’ll notice that there is not a lot of business experience in there. The fact is that running a charity in Scotland now is akin to running a business, the only difference being that instead of making a profit for your owners/shareholders, you make a surplus to reinvest (well, that’s the general idea – not always adhered to).

Nick Flavin’s lack of business experience could be said to have contributed to a number of issues, not least a lengthy legal battle in 2005/6 over the GRV lease as well as a failure to understand the full ramifications of the 2005 charity legislation (indeed, the Executive were convinced that they were not classed as Trustees as only the Holding Trustees were liable – wonder how many had a rude surprise when they were told that they might be financially liable for any outstanding debts).

As such, David Duff came on the scene to advise the Director and the Executive on the best business course of action. EUS had previously employed financial staff, but they all retired or resigned within a week of each other (a hint of trouble brewing possibly). Following that they employed a Charity Business consultant, but his services were no longer required when he proposed selling off property to alleviate short term debt. Indeed, Nick Flavin had been convinced by David Duff that this was a foolish course of action, that investing in property was the way forward and David Duff even assisted in drafting the proposal and letter severing the relationship with the business consultant he ended up replacing.

In short, David Duff became a shadow director of EUS. Nick would rarely move on an issue without checking it with David Duff. The charity was paying for a Director who had convinced his trustees to pay for a consultant to do most of the work that you would expect the Director to do. I even discovered once that the monthly Director’s reports to the Executive were written by David Duff and emailed to Nick Flavin to send out to the Executive. Paying two people to essentially do one job at a total cost of close to £100,000 could be one of the reasons that EUS was overspending by £300,000 annually.

The quality of the advice David Duff gave, or the intentions behind it are neither here nor there to me. Likewise his previous convictions are irrelevant. My view is that he gave the advice that he thought would keep EUS going as long as possible, and therefore keep his consultancy fees and expenses coming in. If he has made any unjustified material gain from EUS, I suspect Mr Cartwright will discover that.

So who, if anyone, should have stepped in, the University, OSCR, SCVO? All organisations who might have had a chance, but only if EUS had recognised its problem. EUS and its trustees were likely in denial right up to the end. When the University pulled its funding of student activities from EUS, that could have been taken as a not too subtle hint that the organisation was off course.

The trustees could have re-examined their position, their way of working and turned things around. Instead they claimed a sense of entitlement and berated the University for ‘baring a grudge towards EUS’. I suspect this position was taken as a consequence of stories told by Nick Flavin, now synonymous with EUS and vice versa. Perhaps OSCR’s letters of concern would have been the spark, but instead they just assumed that the letters were prompted by disgruntled ex associates and dismissed them with a cursory response telling OSCR what it wanted to hear, again at the prompting of Nick Flavin no doubt.

The only people who could have prevented this from happening were Nick Flavin and the trustees of EUS. For that to have happened they would have had to take the uncomfortable step of admitting that they had made some poor decisions in the past. Unfortunately, either collectively or individually, they could see nothing wrong in their previous actions, and the difficulties were all caused by external forces. I wonder if they still hold that view now.

The Tory spending cuts are based on ideology, not sound economics. This
is becoming more and more clear as the scope of the cuts are revealed.
Recent revelations in the Tories’ plans to increase the tuition fee cap
to £9000 per year will block hundreds of thousands of potential students
from attending university, particularly the elite universities which
already have a disproportionate number of students from private and
public schools.

The latest cuts to be announced are to the legal aid system. Ken Clarke announced this week that the Tories plan to slash £350m a year from the legal aid bill. The legal aid system is already critically underfunded; it was neglected by Labour and is now being destroyed by
the Tories.

There hasn’t been an increase in spending on legal aid in more than 10 years, whilst costs including inflation have soared. This amounts to a real-term 25% cut in spending over the last 10 years. Further cuts won’t just restrict access to legal representation, they risk the collapse of the entire system.

Due to the lack of funding over the last decade, the Legal Services
Commission, the body that controls legal aid in England and Wales, is so
underfunded that it cannot afford to hire enough staff to process legal
aid bills from solicitor firms. This has the knock-on effect that these
firms cannot pay their overheads. Many are on the verge of bankruptcy,
others have stopped offering a legal aid service.

The cuts to the legal aid will impact on almost every area: clinical negligence, education, employment, immigration, benefits, debt, housing
and certain family law cases. These are all areas that significantly affect many people on low-incomes on a daily basis, many of them needing
this support to keep their homes, jobs and families. The repercussions
of these cuts will have far-reaching consequences for the rest of society also.

If legal aid is taken away from employment cases, this will allow
employers to exploit their low-paid workforces with impunity, safe in
the knowledge that they don’t pay their staff enough for them to be able
to afford legal representation. Included under employment law is sexual
harassment in the workplace. If women, already disproportionately
affected by the cuts as well as workplace harassment and exploitation,
cannot get legal representation the pay-gap will increase and women will
suffer further exploitation and oppression in the workplace.

There are exceptions for domestic violence cases written into the changes, but this won’t be sufficient to protect people, particularly women and children. It is estimated that only 2.5%-15% of domestic abuse cases are reported. If victims fear they could be left in crippling poverty due to legal fees fewer cases will be reported and more people will live their lives in fear and oppression.

Reform is desperately needed in the legal aid system but not because we
need to make cuts and not by cutting peoples’ access to services. Whilst
the vast majority of solicitors earn very modest sums from legal aid,
particularly considering the amount of work they do, there are a handful
of barristers who earn disproportionately more. Many of the top Queens’
Counsels can bill the legal aid system for up to £500,000 per year, on
top of their salaries for private cases. I would suggest this is where
the savings can be made, not by taking the services away from the people
who need them and the overworked and underpaid solicitors.

Free access to legal representation for those who need it is a cornerstone of a fair and equal society. The cuts to the legal aid system will lead to increases in exploitation, sexual harassment, discrimination, segregation, poverty, debt, homelessness, domestic violence, abuse….

Doesn’t sound much like a fair society to me.