Pakistan's poor caught in the middle

The political and moral crisis wracking Pakistan in the wake of the assassination of Punjab governor Salman Taseer concentrates all the ills of our 21st century world - but also demonstrates the need for a revolutionary alternative.

Divisions have reached civil war proportions over Taseer’s violent death in Islamabad’s fashionable Kohsar Market. Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP) activists and opponents of religious fanaticism plus campaigners for democratic and economic rights are mourning Taseer as a courageous and cultured hero. He was close to the persecuted Bhutto family and suffered imprisonment when Pakistan was under martial law.

On the other side, Mumtaz Qadri, Taseer’s assassin, has a Facebook page dedicated to him and supporters are rallying for his release, showering him with rose petals as he gets taken to and from court. Qadri shot the man he was supposed to protect over 27 times because Taseer wanted to amend Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy laws.

But the religious powder keg could blind us to the deeper contradictions that are dividing the country. Nuclear-armed Pakistan is considered a frontline ally of America, sharing as it does, a long border with eastern Afghanistan, the stronghold of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters.

But the billions in military and civilian aid poured in by the Obama administration have failed to achieve either economic improvement or military success. The frustrations of millions of poverty-stricken people in the country are summed by comments given to a reporter by Arif Fasiullah, 35, from the central city of Multan: "There is no electricity, no gas, no jobs, and they are fighting one another. They do not pass any legislation. They just do dirty politics."

Pakistan, with a population of more than 180 million, faces chronic power failures that can last up to 16 hours per day in some areas during the scorching summer, and up to a third of its people lack access to clean drinking water. Average income per capita is less than $3,000 a year, and most adults have less than five years of schooling.

The International Monetary Fund, which has provided Pakistan with billions of dollars in loans to keep its economy afloat, has demanded the country implement significant changes, including deep cuts to its deficit and a revised general sales tax. These have proved highly unpopular.

Even as you read this, US war planes are continuing drone attacks on north-west Pakistan, which have killed four people in the last 24 hours, with a hundred raids carried out in 2010. Despite all the dollars and US efforts to keep Pakistan onside in the so-called war against terror, the relationship between the US spy agency, the CIA and Pakistan’s equally sinister Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), the operation against south and north Waziristan has reached an all-time low.

It is the economic crisis of global capital which sparked the IMF’s demand that the government raise taxes. That led to an increase in petrol prices (since withdrawn) plus the sacking of a minister that caused the collapse of the parliamentary coalition just before the crisis over Taseer’s murder.

No wonder that reactionary religious leaders seek to cash in on cruel suffering of the majority. Those seen as favouring “western democracy” and supporting “the war against terror” can be rightly be denounced as maintaining the rule of a rich and corrupt elite while others suffer.

Neither the secular bourgeois “westernisers”, nor the military nor the Muslim establishment can take Pakistan an inch forward or resolve the extreme poverty that affects the majority. The development of a secular leadership campaigning for People’s Assemblies to challenge for political power is the issue of the day.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

New Labour hits the buffers

It was yet another New Labour panacea. Bringing in private finance would make public spending go further and transfer the risk from the taxpayer to companies. Who cared whether it was public or private sector that financed and/or delivered services and projects – what mattered, we were assured, was “what worked”.

Well, it has turned out to be yet another New Labour con-trick. The collapse of the National Express rail franchise and the failure to find to a buyer for part of Royal Mail, are sure indications that the entire policy is in ruins – and that taxpayers and workers will be made to pay the price if the government gets half a chance.

The whole approach was, in any case, founded on the serious illusion that global capitalism had an infinite appetite for “public-private partnership” (PPP), and that the world had entered a new period of endless, stable economic growth. There was enough spare capital to replace what the state used to do.

So the state’s role was simply to facilitate the corporate-driven globalisation process. A key departure, started under the previous Tory regime, was to privatise state assets, including rail. New Labour took this further and before long the state was a “commissioner”, inviting the corporate sector to get involved on a grand scale.

And it did. Under Brown as chancellor and Blair as prime minister, the value of contracts for public services held by the private sector grew to over £80 billion. A third of all services are, in one form or another, contracted out to companies and charities, a higher proportion than any other major economy.

We are talking about school building, school services, schools themselves in the form of Academies, hospital projects, health services, air traffic control, employment services, welfare provision, London Underground, sections of the legal and justice system, prison building, large parts of council housing, defence technology – in fact, you name it and it is almost certainly been given the PPP treatment.

Now both outright privatisation and PPP is floundering as the economic meltdown gathers pace. Metronet pulled out of the London Underground project and left passengers to pick up the tab in higher fares. Many college and school building projects are in difficulties.

National Express – or should that be National Excess because their fares are eye-wateringly high – have reacted to falling passenger numbers on the East Coast route by simply walking away from the contract struck with the government in 2007. The company is simply not going to pay the £1.4bn due to the government by 2015.

The transport secretary, one unelected Lord Adonis (whatever happened to the Commons?), plans to take the franchise into state ownership later this year – and then retender it in 2010. But no one expects bidders (if there are any out there) to offer what National Express paid. One of the factors behind the franchise’s demise is that the government itself got greedy and encouraged bids that were in practice dependent on impossible increases in passenger numbers.

So we are left with the situation where neither the capitalist state nor capitalist corporations are in a position to deliver on contracts or services that are essential in a modern society.

The state, as we know, is essentially broke after giving the banks vast sums in a futile bid to prop up the financial system, while the corporate sector is slashing jobs and shutting down operations in every sector. What will happen to the pensions of Royal Mail workers, for example, now that capitalist firms have failed to come to the government’s aid?

This is an unacceptable position. Britain is not a poor country. Its workforce creates vast amounts of added value when it has the opportunity. The economy has just been hijacked and then wrecked by the political class and its corporate friends. There can be no stronger case for removing their power to do any further damage.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor