The political system is part of the problem not the solution

The somewhat contrived outrage by politicians of all parties over the hacking of phones by the News of the World should not blind us to the permanently changed relationship between Parliament and corporations that goes well beyond Murdoch’s News Corp.

Those who talk of a “triumph for democracy” and the “will of the people” as expressed through the House of Commons following Murdoch’s withdrawal of his bid for the rest of BskyB’s shares, are fooling themselves as well as the electorate.

New Labour became infatuated with Murdoch precisely because his was a global corporation, exercising media power on both sides of the Atlantic. He was symbolic of market-driven globalisation that Blair and Brown embraced before they took control of their party in the mid-1990s.

They sought and won Murdoch’s support at the 1997 general election because New Labour actually believed in his free-booting style of capitalism that symbolised the period. Built on debt, Murdoch’s empire was to be admired, notwithstanding the destruction of trade unions at his British papers.

New Labour, according to the author and journalist Peter Oborne (whose book The Triumph of the Political Class foreshadowed what has been revealed), went on to develop a “corrupt, complicit, and conspiratorial system of government” that in essence matched the way the corporations functioned.

During its heyday, Murdoch’s malign influence was matched by a range of other corporate “interests” equally favoured by New Labour:

- the banking and financial sector, further deregulated and freed from any significant supervision by the ever-so-tame Financial Services Authority

- major supermarkets, allowed to take over and destroy high streets (with Sainsbury and Tesco executives sitting on government ‘task forces’)

- energy corporations like British Gas who allowed to drive up fuel prices according to “market conditions”

- rail companies who fleece commuters and charge the most expensive fares in Europe

- big contractors, who were given access to £90 billion of public sector contracts on exceptionally favourable terms through the so-called public-finance initiative

- house builders who were given control over the market for new homes, driving up the cost of land beyond the reach of housing associations

- IT corporations like Microsoft who became partners in education programmes

- Private health firms that provided treatment centres for profit financed out of NHS funds.

The fact that this relationship turned sour when Murdoch switched back to the Tories in 2009 coincided with the collapse of the whole period of corporate-driven globalisation championed by New Labour.

And, as we well know, when the banks went belly-up, prime minister Brown rushed to their support and used taxpayers’ money alongside unlimited state guarantees to prop up a financial system that was no longer sustainable. Parliamentary sovereignty had come to express no more than the power of the banks.

None of the major parties could or would challenge this effective merger between the parliamentary state and corporate power. As a result, the political establishment lied about the spending cuts that inevitably followed last year’s general election campaign. The Coalition that emerged has no democratic mandate for the onslaught on living standards that has taken place over the last year but instead takes its marching orders from financial markets.

The shock and horror at the underhand, criminal methods used by the Murdoch press is an attempt to get people to view Parliament in a better light, as an institution that will stand up to powerful interests. However, it is window dressing because global corporate power is very much alive in the hearts and minds of ministers, opposition leaders and MPs.

As the Real Democracy Now movement in Spain established, the existing political system remains very much part of the problem and not the solution. A deconstruction of the capitalist parliamentary state and its recreation along truly democratic lines, around a system of people’s assemblies, is an alternative way forward.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

A very British coup

The political marriage between David Cameron and Nick Clegg in a ceremony in the garden at the back of Downing Street yesterday is not simply the result of a general election that failed to produce a party with an overall majority. Britain’s first coalition government for 70 years also shows that the process that produced New Labour is still at work.

In 1995, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown persuaded their party to ditch Clause IV of its constitution, which aspired to common ownership of the means of production and popular administration of the economy. Adopted in 1918, the clause was anathema to the “modernisers” who were busily creating “New” Labour.

The Blairites were adapting to a new world order summed up in the term “globalisation”. Where the Tories were divided on the issue, revealed in the splits over Europe, New Labour would embrace the free movement of capital, deregulation, public-private partnerships, the European Union, the World Trade Organisation and promote an “enterprise economy”.

Even before New Labour’s loss of nearly 100 seats last week, voters were turning their back on a government that had created vast inequality, put an end to social mobility and encouraged a casino economy. When a globalisation driven by the banks and corporations finally crashed in 2008, the die was cast and the raison d'être for New Labour was terminated.

With the Tory Party deeply divided between a right-wing that believes that anything not purely Anglo-Saxon is suspicious and “modernisers” who understand the world has changed, the electorate understandably failed to give them a mandate to govern alone when they went to the polls on May 8.

Cameron is astute enough to recognise that the old-style bourgeois party politics – based on some worked-out framework and an ideology related to things purely British – is dying. No single party seems likely to win an overall majority again. The election deadlock propelled this understanding into a swift and dramatic realignment with the Lib Dems. This is, in effect, Cameron’s Clause IV moment.

He and Clegg have in practice staged an audacious joint coup against their own parties, ignoring dissent and rumblings from rank-and-file members who only last week were at each other’s throats as they fought for votes. In some respects, the logic of their alliance might even signal the end of their parties in the shape that we know them now.

Both the prime minister and his deputy, for example, say they have put party politics to one side to govern in the “national interest”. In other words, they have taken the politics out of politics, a process that began with Blair and Brown who reduced government to a grinding form of managerialism.

The spurious “national interest”, as we know, is a not-so-clever mask for the interests that really count. These have everything to do with what the financial markets are demanding and nothing to do with those on the dole and the millions who will join them as Lib-Tory cuts and tax rises get going. New Labour saddled all households with £135,000 in debts. Cameron-Clegg's role is to make sure we make the payments.

As we pointed out yesterday, the global financial meltdown is visiting one country after another. In Spain, the Socialist Party government yesterday rushed through a ruthless cuts package to appease the money markets. Greece’s government – also claiming to be “socialist” – did so last week. Given half a chance, New Labour would have done the same.

In Britain, we now face what amounts to a “government of national emergency”. How will long will it before we are told that all opposition to the cuts is anti-patriotic behaviour? The new boys in Downing Street are a ruthless duo yet their bonhomie cannot disguise their relative weakness and isolation from their own parties. That is what lies behind the rapid march away from what is left of parliamentary democracy with a five-year, fixed term for the government and raising the bar for a no-confidence vote to 55%.

We certainly need a “new politics” and that’s the subject of our May 22 conference, Taking the Revolutionary Road.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Voters in for 'the shock of their lives'

Nothing that happened during this election has persuaded us that our call on people to hang on to their votes and instead focus on building the framework for a new political democracy in Britain was mistaken. In fact, quite the opposite.

As the campaign came to resemble a TV game show, it was clear that none of the major parties was prepared to admit that if elected to office they would have to make cuts in public spending on a scale that could easily destabilise society. Even when august bodies like the Institute for Fiscal Studies said as much, the conspiracy of silence persisted.

Little wonder then opinion pollsters found record levels of undecided voters who were unable to believe anything they had heard since the election was called. The turbulence in the polls equally reflected as the Independent’s Steve Richards put it, the fact that “a majority of voters yearn for a new way of conducting politics”.

There is no apparent enthusiasm for any party among those intending to vote today. Most people are voting against something rather than in favour of this set of policies. For example, some will vote New Labour to keep the Tories out even while admitting that Blair and Brown’s governments have pursued free market capitalist policies that even Thatcher shied away from in the 1980s.

Richards hopes that a hung parliament will enable to the Liberal Democrats to exact proportional representation as the price for supporting either the Tories or New Labour if, as seems likely, no party wins an overall majority and there is a hung parliament. But PR wouldn’t even begin to solve the political crisis – in fact, it could even intensify it. In any case, it’s a distant prospect when more immediate issues are crowding in.

The ruling classes disassociate themselves from the crisis in Greece, saying that the British economy is far stronger and there is no risk of struggling to make the repayments on the equivalent of a £163 billion mortgage, which is the current size of the budget deficit. Yet at 11% of the value of the country’s annual production, Britain’s deficit is larger than Greece’s.

And keeping it under control presupposes a growth in the economy which is simply not there. Unemployment is rising and output is stagnant. The eurozone is in crisis following the near-default by Greece with German chancellor Angela Merkel declaring that the future of the European Union itself is at stake. A slump on the continent will take Britain down with it.

For the truth about what happens next, you have to turn to the bankers’ own newspaper, the Financial Times. As its weekend editorial declared: “Whichever party wins this election will need to sack public sector staff, cut their wages, slash benefits, reduce pensions and axe services. None, however, has deigned to explain that.”

It forecast that voters “are in for the shock of their lives – and will respond with fury when they learn the truth”, warning: “Their anger, moreover, will not be directed at bankers or bureaucrats. It will be aimed at the politicians who hid their plans from the public.” The FT even went so far as to claim that no party would be able to claim a mandate to cut the state because each had hidden the truth from the electorate.

So, not only has this election been a massive fraud on the electorate, there is no way out of the emerging political and financial crisis through the existing parliamentary system. A popular revolt is on the cards. The second half of our call – to start the campaign for People’s Assemblies to challenge and ultimately replace Britain’s failed state – is right on the money.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Political pop idol comes to Britain

Such is the decline in traditional political allegiance in Britain that one appealing TV appearance can thrust an average performer to apparent super stardom as the general election comes to resemble a TV talent show rather than a political campaign.

The political version of Britain’s Got Talent or Pop Idol has propelled Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg from an also-ran to the one to beat, according to the pollsters. Clegg’s rise to fame certainly makes a hung parliament more likely than not.

There is no other way to explain the violent swing in the opinion polls since Clegg’s triumph over Gordon Brown and David Cameron during their TV debate last week. Faced with the prospect of either a New Labour or Tory government, voters have understandably taken fright.

Whatever Clegg is, he is not Brown or Cameron! Never mind what he stands for – he is young, appealing and pours scorn on the two parties that for almost 70 years have taken turns in running the country in a Tweedledee-Tweedledum act.

Disgust with New Labour runs deep for a variety of reasons. Watching Lords Mandelson and Adonis outside Downing Street, explaining why the volcano eruption in Iceland is bad news, is enough to put you off on its own. Both are courting the Lib Dems because essentially that is their natural home.

Mandelson came within a whisker of defecting to the Social Democratic Party in the 1980s, while Adonis was a member of the outfit that broke away from Labour and subsequently joined with the Liberals (Britain’s oldest capitalist party, going back to the mid-19th century) to form the Lib Dems.

New Labour – with the support of the Tories – enabled Britain to become an offshore haven for global financiers and left the economy to stagger and eventually collapse under unparalled debt burdens. Add in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the undermining of human rights and creating markets for public services, you can see why many people find it hard to stomach voting New Labour.

As for inequality, City bankers have experienced near-unprecedented income growth over the past decade, with the highest-paid workers taking home nearly a third of the UK’s total wage bill, new research from the London School of Economics shows. The report reveals that the top 10 per cent of workers seeing their share of wages rise from 27 per cent to 30 per cent between 1998 and 2008. Big bonuses paid to bankers and traders accounted for most of those gains, with financial services professionals taking home an extra £12bn per year by the end of the decade.

The extreme electoral volatility shown in the polls does not herald, however, a new political dawn so much as the break-up of the old arrangements under the impact of globalisation and its offspring, the world economic and financial crisis.

The fact that Clegg himself represents constituents in Sheffield – once an engineering and steel-making town – speaks volumes for the decline of New Labour in what were once its heartlands. The city council is also Lib Dem controlled, as is Newcastle, York and other northern towns and cities.

If the Lib Dems do end up joining a coalition to keep New Labour in power it would mark the full turn of the circle and the completion of the Blairite project to unite both parties. Labour was formed in 1900 to end Liberal influence over the trade unions and win reforms from capitalism. A coalition would be a step along the road to a merger that would signal the formal and historic end of that venture.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

A government in freefall

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to lose one minister, Mr Brown, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose four in two days looks like carelessness. Actually, it looks like more like meltdown time for the New Labour government as it tears itself apart.

The leaked resignation plans of home secretary Jacqui Smith and the decision of two other ministers to leave the government yesterday in advance of a cabinet reshuffle, only reinforce the view that Gordon Brown is now prime minister of a government that is holed below the water line (thus the appearance of rats leaving a sinking ship). The resignation this morning of communities secretary Hazel Blears only adds to the nightmare on Downing Street.

And when even The Guardian, a newspaper known best as a New Labour supplicant, tells Brown that his time is up, you get the picture. The paper wants Labour MPs to “cut him [Brown] loose” now, while there’s still time, in its view, to rescue “progressive politics” in Britain from oblivion.

Several questions arise. Would replacing Brown make any difference to New Labour’s prospects? And, in any case, what is “progressive” about this government that is worth preserving?

There is considerable doubt about whether any other prime minister would make a difference because, in the end, it’s New Labour as a whole that’s despised, not just Brown. The reasons why the government has run into the sands are complex, but the turning point was undoubtedly the financial crash that began in 2007.

Almost everything New Labour did and does was based around introducing in a messianic way the alleged virtues of the market into areas of public life like education, housing and local services. After the kind of open market capitalism championed by Brown and Blair before him plunged into crisis, the government’s ideological underpinning went into tailspin too.

The bailing out of the banks is hailed as “decisive action” in some quarters, but it also showed the general population that a) the government had deceived them about the economy b) the bankers would not suffer in any circumstances c) ordinary people would pay the price in terms of unemployment and repossessions.

When the scandal of MPs expenses was added to this cocktail recently, the die was cast. Leading members of the government, not content with their six-figure salaries and massive pensions, as well as backbench MPs, were milking the system for all it was worth and Brown was unable to respond as the political crisis mounted.

And so what is so “progressive” about New Labour? The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan? A systematic destruction of human rights and civil liberties? Cutting welfare benefits? Promoting financial and corporate interests without hesitation? Allowing privatised rail companies to rip off the public? Presiding over growing inequality? Opening public service provision up to the private sector on a vast scale? Reducing Parliament’s status further to the point where there was hardly anything for MPs to do? Encouraging the economy to “grow” on the basis of massive consumer debts? The list is endless.

The disintegration of New Labour is neither a time for rejoicing nor an occasion for sorrow but for a sober assessment as to where we have arrived at politically and historically. Wherever you look, the old order is breaking apart and political instability at a time of economic and political crisis obviously brings dangers along with it. But they also present opportunities to develop and organise a movement that looks beyond the narrow focus of who may or may not win a general election towards a democratic reorganisation of society as a whole.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

Brown delivers the message

The leaders of the CWU postal workers’ union have waited and waited for the intervention of the government in their pay and jobs dispute with Royal Mail. Yesterday it finally arrived. But it was not what the CWU leadership wanted to hear. New Labour broke its silence – and came down firmly on the side of the employers. Prime Minister Brown and business secretary Hutton denounced the strikes as “unjustifiable”. Brown told postal workers to “get back to work” while Hutton said the union should accept what he described as a “perfectly fair and reasonable offer”.

The postal workers have so far stood steady and firm in their series of strikes for jobs, pay and pensions in the face of an arrogant employer. Yesterday, after the official two-day strike had ended, a management provocation was answered by unofficial walk-outs in Glasgow, Liverpool, London and other parts of the country. The postal workers are up for a fight and have forced their leaders into some fighting talk and a limited strike action.

But the main (and only) strategy of the leadership of their union, the CWU, has been try to get the government to intervene and enforce a “fair” settlement. This was always an entirely hopeless and forlorn perspective. Far from being some kind of arbitrator (as governments were sometimes up until 1980), this government has a different agenda entirely. Not only does the government stand four-square behind the belligerent Royal Mail management, but, behind the scenes, it is dictating and determining the policy and direction of the company. To what purpose? To make it fit to compete with UPS and the other private carriers of mail and parcels, and then to privatise it.

It has become the tried and tested method of governments, Tory and Labour, since the great Miners Strike of 1984-5 to lie about their real intentions and then to rely on the trade union leadership to “believe” those lies and to confine any action to the perspectives and agenda laid down by the government. Behind the statements of Royal Mail about “flexibility”, the “need to modernise” and so forth is the plan to break it up and sell it. They offer below-inflation pay rises and refuse to guarantee jobs in order to streamline and rationalise the business for privatisation.

This all stems from the very nature of New Labour as an outfit that no longer even pretends to protect the interest of workers or their unions, but rather gives total support to the corporations, the banks and the speculators. It is not just the postal service that is facing break-up and the threat of privatisation, leading inevitably to lower wages, pensions and unemployment, but all public services including health, education, local government, the BBC and the civil service. This is not a popular policy. At a rally earlier this week for the postal workers, Mark Serwotka , general secretary of the PCS said the New Labour governments had privatised “more of our work than the Major and Thatcher Governments combined”. He said his union was gearing up for a full-scale battle with the government.

The CWU is now in a fight to the finish with New Labour. This is a political struggle against a capitalist government. If the union leaders were blinded to this harsh reality before yesterday’s statements by Brown and Hutton, their members are certainly aware of it today. The CWU has to mobilise the entire membership in all-out action, asking for the support of other trade unionists in the privatisation firing line. And they should also recommend to the membership that the union should end its financial support and affiliation to New Labour.


Peter Arkell

Opposing the new EU treaty

The gathering storm over the new European Union treaty, focused on the growing demands for a referendum, raises deep issues about the nation-state and its place in the globalised market economy. At the heart of the proposed treaty is the further development of the EU as a regional bloc better able to compete in increasingly tough capitalist market conditions. This in any case is what the EU has been doing for some time, compelling member countries, for example, to open up industries and services to competition and ruling out hidden state subsidies. The British government, under both Tories and New Labour, has gone faster than the rest of EU in imposing what some call the neo-liberal agenda of free markets and a flexible labour force. Central to this is the continuing opt-out from the clauses which set out a minimum framework of social rights for employees. In fact, one of Blair’s last acts as prime minister was to ensure that this was carried over into the proposed new treaty and his successor is in full agreement with this approach.

So one strand of opposition to the new treaty comes from the trade unions, led by Bob Crow of the RMT rail workers and Paul Kenny, leader of the GMB. Crow says: “Whatever you call the EU Reform Treaty, it contains the same anti-democratic mix that was in the constitution supposedly killed off by French and Dutch votes in 2005. It is the back-door constitution which would still transform the EU into a state, and transfer power to an unelected EU government. For working people it would be a disaster, further institutionalising the mis-named economic ‘liberalisation’, forcing more privatisation of public services and abolishing vetoes over transport and a host of other areas.” Kenny says GMB “members are sick and tired of being treated as second class citizens in Europe. If these rights are good enough for French, German and Spanish workers then they should be good enough to apply to UK workers too”. Both unions have tabled resolutions against the treaty at next month’s TUC Congress.

Another strand of opposition comes from the Tory right-wing, led by the Daily Telegraph. This is a nationalist, anti-European trend that is based on days long gone when there was such a thing as “British capitalism” powerful enough to defend its own interests. The global point of view comes from the Financial Times, which yesterday declared: “Most generals avoid fighting the last war. The motley band calling for a referendum in Britain on the European Union’s constitutional treaty has failed to learn this.” The paper of global rather than national big business claimed that their ultimate goal was “either withdrawal or a do-nothing Union” and that neither “serves the national interest”.

The fact is that the British ruling elites have had to surrender large measure of political and economic sovereignty in the last 30 years, not just to the EU but to supra-national bodies like the World Trade Organisation. This is one of the main consequences of the corporate-driven globalisation process, which Gordon Brown in particular has embraced wholeheartedly and driven forward. The trade unions are right to oppose the new treaty and to join New Labour MPs demanding a referendum. But to distinguish themselves from Little Englanders, union leaders have to go further. Even a refomed British state – which itself is a highly unlikely prospect - would have little control over economic and financial processes that transcend borders and state bodies like central banks in their operation. In opposition to the corporate-dominated EU, unions have to adopt a perspective of a democratic alternative to the EU, based on shared common ownership of the region’s resources and new political structures that reflect the aspirations of the disenfranchised majority.

Paul Feldman, communications editor
A World to Win

The inequality indictment

If you wanted evidence to draw up an indictment of corporate power and the global market economy, you need look no further than the reports on inequality in Britain published today by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF). While you’re about it, there is plenty of material for a charge sheet against successive governments as well. In the dog-eat-dog globalised market economy, the story is a simple one: the rich have obviously got a lot richer and the average worker has got relatively poorer. Another group – they used to be called the “poor” but are now officially known as “socially excluded” – have grown in numbers. The JRF findings do not delve into socio-economic causes. But their conclusions speak for themselves because the period studied – 1968 to 2005 – coincides with the contemporary globalisation period. During these decades, successive Tory and New Labour governments have facilitated the accumulation of private wealth on a grand scale. The deregulation of capital and finance has enabled City traders, merchant bankers, industrial and financial capitalists to amass wealth on an unprecedented scale at the expense of ordinary working people.

The JRF research , which uses new ways of comparing poverty and wealth trends across Britain, reveals inequality to be at a 40-year high. Researchers discovered that households in already-wealthy areas have tended to become disproportionately wealthier and that many rich people live in areas segregated from the rest of society. At the same time, more households have become poor over the last 15 years. The widening gap between rich and poor has meant that “average” households (neither poor nor wealthy) have been decreasing in number. Danny Dorling, who led the research, said: “Most interesting and certainly unexpected when this work began is the geography of those households who are neither rich nor poor. Over time it has become clear that there is less and less room in the south for them; they have either moved elsewhere, or become poor.” A second report studies people’s attitudes to inequality. It found that over the last 20 years, a large and enduring majority of people have considered the gap between high and low incomes too large.

Britain over the last few decades has become a low-wage, long hours, exploitative, debt-ridden society as far as the majority is concerned. New Labour has speeded this process along, as did the Tories before them. In place of decent wages, there are tax credits so that the employers are not put under any pressure. In place of strong trade unions, there are organisations enfeebled by anti-union laws and weak leaders who are frightened by globalisation and corporate power. While most people reject gross inequalities, there is no one in parliament to represent their views. The state has abandoned its mediating role between class interests and in the period covered by the JRF research has become partisans of big business interests. Overturning inequality will require a comprehensive remaking of the state and a democratisation of ownership of economic and financial resources. That takes us way beyond the wretched New Labour outfit and what passes for democracy in Britain today.

Paul Feldman, communications editor

Post strike and globalisation

At the heart of the looming confrontation between Royal Mail management and New Labour on one side and the Communication Workers Union (CWU) on the other, is the nature of public services in a period of free-market globalisation. Although still state owned, the Royal Mail is an arms-length company that is actually run as a business concern by extremely overpaid executives. They insist that the business has to "modernise" to face up to more efficient, cheaper competitors in Britain and internationally. The CWU fears that up to 40,000 jobs are at risk. A one-day strike on June 29 is planned over pay and in an attempt to put pressure on Royal Mail to change its plans to make thousands redundant. Following a breakdown in talks yesterday, CWU admitted that management had refused to negotiate a settlement higher than 2.5% or change its plans. Dave Ward, the union's deputy general secretary, accused the Royal Mail of "deliberately misleading" the public by claiming that the union was demanding a 27% pay rise and opposing modernisation. Ward said: "What Royal Mail are doing is not modernisation. The truth is, they are intent on cutting services, cutting jobs and cutting pay. We have tried to reach an agreement but Royal Mail are refusing to negotiate."

If the CWU believes that a series of one-day strikes will force meaningful concessions from Royal Mail or the government they are sorely mistaken. Trade and industry secretary Alistair Darling condemned the planned strike, saying it would be "extremely damaging" for the Royal Mail and its customers. The stoppage will take place just two days after Gordon Brown becomes Prime Minister, and he is in total support of competition and "open markets" and will not yield to the CWU. The government is already shutting down thousands of post offices claiming that they are losing money, and ignoring their function as a vital public service. Ministers agree with Royal Mail chief executive Adam Crozier when he says: "We are losing business because we have failed to change and modernise - and as a result, our costs and therefore our prices are higher than those that rivals are charging in the intensely competitive business mail market, which makes up 90% of all postings." What’s at stake, therefore, is control of the Royal Mail. So long as it remains a profit-centred business competing with capitalist rivals, jobs will go and services will be cut. The CWU is therefore engaging in a political strike against a government which champions globalisation and which is standing behind bosses like Crozier, who is understood to have received a bonus of up to £370,000, taking his total package to more than £1 million. Isolated one-day strikes are inadequate and a poor response to a massive 77% majority for strike action. To widen support for their action, CWU leaders have to bring these issues out and put forward alternative, democratic, not-for-profit ways of running the Royal Mail. The CWU has to involve the rail unions and others in mounting a full-scale challenge to the government if it is to succeed.

Paul Feldman, communications editor

Government 'greenwash' won't wash

Set targets, then rely on the market economy, an expanded nuclear industry and personal sacrifices to make them work. This is what lies at the heart of the government’s Climate Change Bill. All the evidence says this won’t wash when it comes to carbon emissions. Only recently, New Labour’s own inquiry, the Stern report, described global warming as the biggest market failure of all time. Relying on an expanded carbon trading market, which may include tradable personal "footprints", will make no serious impact on climate chaos. New Labour came to power in 1997 pledging a 20% cut in emissions by 2010. Not only has this target been missed, emissions are actually higher and continuing to rise. This is the reality of a global market economy dominated by the operations of profit-seeking transnational corporations, which nothing must be allowed to disturb. While Friends of the Earth and other lobby groups were falling over themselves in a rush to praise New Labour, others were more cautious. Edward Hanna, senior lecturer in climate change at the University of Sheffield, was unimpressed, saying: "(It) doesn't go far enough fast enough to confidently combat the significant threats posed by human-induced global warming. I fear that as we are closing the stable door, the horse has already bolted." Even Christian Aid, said the final legislation would have to be "significantly stronger".

In fact, a recent report by Christian Aid points out UK-quoted transnational corporations are responsible for far more of the world's CO2 emissions than they would like us to think. Christian Aid tried to find out whether leading companies were reporting their CO2 emissions in relation to their direct and indirect activities. It is hardly surprising that only one-sixth of bothered to disclose their direct emissions to Christian Aid. These alone amounted to 285.83 million tonnes CO2 which were emitted both in the UK and across the rest of the world. Christian Aid estimated this figure would increase to 477.35 million tonnes when the emissions from those who did not respond were included. This is equal to more than half of the UK's national emissions. The fourth annual report of the Carbon Disclosure Project found less than a quarter of the top companies were able to provide data for even direct emissions to an acceptable standard. The situation is even worse in respect to smaller companies, where only 10% were able to provide data on direct emissions! As Christian Aid, points out there is massive under-reporting of carbon emissions even in relation to companies' operations under their direct control.

But as the report discovered, the UK's global footprint extends well beyond its borders, through companies' supply chains spreading out across the rest of the world. Over a third of the top 500 companies reported their emissions were taking place in developing countries. Christian Aid estimated the extent of indirect emissions to be 911.06million tonnes. This makes the combined total for direct and indirect emissions from FTSE100 companies 1,388 million tonnes, two-and-a half times the UK national total and more than 5% of global emissions. These emissions are making a significant contribution towards global warming and climate change, with millions of the world's poor paying a heavy price. It also exposes the myth that all it will take to solve global warming is a change or shift in individual consumer choices. It is clear that capitalism's driving force, unrestrained profit growth, is responsible for the climate crisis we are facing and the globalisation of capital has intensified the problem. No amount of corporate social responsibility reports, or the provision of "transparent" emissions data, will alter the fact that we need to replace these planet destroying transnational corporations with not-for-profit companies. Only then can we evolve truly sustainable operating practices based on needs, both for people and the planet, rather than profit. In that context, New Labour’s proposals are more state "greenwash" than substance. You'd be better off reading Running a Temperature, a real action guide to the eco-crisis, which A World to Win published recently.

Stuart Barlow, environment co-editor

Children the victims in Blair's Britain

There is a crisis at the heart of our society, admits the children’s commissioner for England, Aynsley Green. Not the sort of remark New Labour wanted to hear after a decade in power during which time Britain has become a more fractured, divided society. Green’s remarks come in the wake of a damning United Nations report into the wellbeing – or lack of it – of children growing up in the UK. The UK is bottom of the league of 21 economically-advanced countries according to a report by Unicef on the wellbeing of children and adolescents. It is even below the United States, which comes second to last. The Unicef team assessed the wellbeing of children in six areas: material wellbeing; health and safety; educational wellbeing, family and peer relationships, behaviours and risks; and young people's own perceptions of their wellbeing. The Netherlands came out top, followed by Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Spain. Nine countries, all of them in northern Europe, had reduced child poverty down below 10%, the report says. But it remains at 15% in the three southern European countries - Portugal, Spain and Italy - and in the UK, Ireland and the US. The UK takes bottom place "by a considerable distance" for the number of young people who smoke, abuse drink and drugs, engage in risky sex and become pregnant at too early an age. On education, the UK comes 17th out of 21. More than 30% of 15- to 19-year-olds are not in education or training and are not looking beyond low-skilled work.

Commissioner Green hopes the report will prompt an investigation into "the underlying causes of our failure to nurture happy and healthy children" and adds: "These children represent the future of our country and from the findings of this report they are in poor health, unable to maintain loving and successful relationships, feel unsafe and insecure, have low aspirations and put themselves at risk." These are fine sentiments but Green shouldn’t really have to look too long to identify the underlying reasons for the fact that the UK, along with the United States, are bottom of the Unicef league. These are the two countries where naked commercialism, corporate greed, inequalities and a money-is-everything approach are official policy. These crude features of corporate-driven globalisation have resulted in an emphasis on individualism and an ever-deeper alienation, not just among teenagers but throughout the population as a whole. For example, increasing sections of society are denied affordable housing because of a rampant housing market stoked by a government that stimulates home ownership on the basis that it is a route to wealth. Amongst the younger generation, white, black and Asian working-class kids especially are often excluded from many of the "opportunities" to get rich quick. Even with formal educational qualifications, they find that they live in a world of low-pay, unskilled work for the majority. Surrounded by commodities that they cannot buy, they will, however, be offered credit cards so that they can run up debts they will never be able to pay back. It’s not simply a question of teenagers being part of jobless households either. Researchers last year found that half the children in poverty have someone in their family doing paid work, which is another indicator of how wages are for many. Targeted by the Blairites, young people are increasingly likely to have an Asbo slapped on them or end up in youth custody, which is often a direct route to a life of crime. Britain’s class-divided society has produced a new generation that has few human and social rights. What an indictment of a decade of hard Labour.

Paul Feldman, communications editor