Ed Miliband promises no end to working class austerity... Ed Miliband gets booed at trade union rally

      I mean, was it something he said? No, the funny thing is this mild booing (why boo when you can throw bottles?*) is being put down to the SWP brigade. I'd love it if we had a brigade. Labour hacks seem to have a recurring collective nightmare that all that stands between proper decent society and a ruthless, tentacular conspiracy to unleash working class insurrection, is them. Ed Miliband wants to save capitalism, you understand?

The only other explanation is that a large number of trade unionists have had enough of austerity, attacks on their working conditions, standards of living and the services they provide, enough to boo the leader of the Labour Party when he suggests there will be more attacks on their working conditions, standards of living and the services they provide... On Planet Miliband does not compute.

It's down to us, the working class movement, trade unions, tenants groups, student groups and broad campaigns to make a difference. Step one is march. Step two is strike.

*Online police take note, I am not suggesting this be done, merely that Ed Miliband will get over being booed. He really will.

The abyss stares back

The link here is to a short, simple piece on the fundamental deception of American political debate. There is such fundamental agreement between the two mainstream parties, public debate narrows down to secondary, often peripheral issues. Because ‘issues’ like teaching evolution in schools, the veracity of climate change or the authenticity of Obama’s birth certificate can be argued relentlessly to no practical conclusion, they serve to mobilise various political bases (although the Republicans are always more interested in motivating their core support than the Democrats) and sustain the illusion of urgent debate.

You know it. I know it. It’s seems hardly worth pointing out, except the same grim parade rolls out every four years and no one does anything about it. America is politically null, excepting the Occupy movement, which, rather like council communism without councils, is a moot point if it’s not able to occupy anything. It would take an event so colossal one almost dares not imagine it to open space for a radical alternative. If America means anything it serves as a warning, this is what happens when the labour movement is permanently sidelined.

Meanwhile Polly Toynbee ponders the Tory options in the run up to their conference. David Cameron needs a national vote of approximately 42% to take an overall majority in parliament, 6% more than he got at the last election, and support is ebbing away. There are plenty of Tories with a mind to blow up Labour ‘client state’, i.e. its basis in the wider working class. This combined with a set of irresistible populist measures may yet work. And these measures need not cost anything. Imagine if Cameron led the country out of the EU just as it collapsed.

Feeble though our efforts may be even something like the October 20th democan start to head off that kind of future.

I can has strikes?

It’s approaching conference time, and TUC leader Brendan Barber is putting out press releases about the stark condition British society is being forced to endure. There is an undeniable element of “I’m still here”, like Len McLuskey’s occasional fighting talk, and Brendan Barber’s plan, his only plan, is to ask nicely, but it is also the run up to a major demonstration: A Future That Works.

It is an A to B march, and we have been here before. But we cannot pull strikes out of a hat, not in our present condition. The fact that the British trade union movement seems to need a set-piece demonstration to work itself up for any kind of confrontation with the government (not forgetting how quickly these confrontations are also abandoned to apathy), should be cause for debate. I am a trade union member, not a battle hardened convenor or rep but enough of a member to know we need a change of direction.

We have been here before with mass demonstrations. We need to find a way for demonstrations to become strikes and for strikes to stick. We need what’s known as a rank and file perspective. It’s all very well saying people need confidence before we start building, but we will be forever be in the hands of the likes of Brendan Barber and Dave Prentis, the kind of leaders who would not stir themselves even if they were the last union members left alive, let alone in work. There’s nothing like starting now to build confidence.

None the less, let’s be on the October 20th demo, in large numbers. The government and 

the mass media will want to pretend austerity is popular, or at least accepted, for as long 

and hard as possible. A big demonstration will be another blow to the Tories.

Ruled by loonies

Oh yes we are. Two more pieces of evidence. Millionaires to inspire the poor:

Emma Harrison is the founder of Action for Employment (A4E), and she is establishing Working Families Everywhere on Cameron's behalf. You may know her from Channel 4's The Secret Millionaire, where she gave £50,000 away in front of a TV camera in 2007, after the poor had proved their worthiness for her bounty. The scheme is being piloted in Hull, Blackpool and Kensington & Chelsea, and will roll out in the next four years. Volunteers with no prior experience of social work, creepily renamed "family champions" (FCs), will enter "never-worked" families with drug, crime and child protection issues, and turn them into "working" families. Once polished, these families will inspire others, like a game of Social Democratic dominoes, but backwards. "Family champions are going to stalk the streets, they are going to find the jobs," says Harrison, who is clearly, like Margaret Thatcher, a Nietzschean. They will get a small wage and priority access to all other services the family is using, and they will be handpicked by Harrison. They may also get badges, but this is not confirmed.



Why does this feel so dodgy? I called Harrison's PR and asked her what will happen if there are no jobs. What then? "Emma believes there are jobs," she replied. "There are hidden jobs." Oh yes, those hidden jobs, buried under trees and lying at the end of rainbows. All the unemployed need is the imagination to see the invisible, and maybe a magic shovel and a friendly elf to hug them on the way to Mordor. So a slab of government policy is being handed to a woman who is in denial about the scale and cause of joblessness. The statistics are nowhere in the Working Families Everywhere material. There are 2.49 million people unemployed today in the UK.

Haringey to be twinned with Greggs:

Retailers Asda and Sainsbury's are among businesses that have signed up to a charity initiative that will see senior store and project managers despatched to work in deprived areas such as Tottenham and Lambeth, which were badly hit by this month's riots.



Ten companies, including BT, Dairy Crest and Greggs, have signed up to the pilot scheme run by Business in the Community. So-called "business connectors" will be seconded to communities for at least six months to provide assistance to residents and groups trying to tackle issues such as youth unemployment, educational underachievement and a weak local enterprise culture. Its chief executive Stephen Howard said it was a "crucial time" for businesses to get involved in communities: "I believe healthy back streets create healthy high streets."

This sort of nonsense must be stopped. The organised working class has been off the scene since June 30th. The trouble is the Tory loonies are working day and night to transport us back to 1811. The TUC demo outside the Tory Party conference will be something - but far from enough.



Name the day for the next strike now.