Use political crisis over Syria to drive out ConDems

The governing parties’ surprise defeat in last night’s vote on Syria is just as much a reflection of the immense distrust of the political class across the board as it is a general desire to prevent another in a long line of military adventures.

Even if the government announced that today was Friday, not everyone would be inclined to accept that, so deep is the scepticism after decades of being lied to on a variety of subjects from Iraq to the financial crisis.

A sketchy, half-baked dossier hurried out before the parliamentary debate, claiming that the Assad regime in Syria was more than likely behind the use of chemical weapons, was never going to win over doubters.

This was especially so after a number of senior military figures, including former head of the army General Dannatt, ridiculed the idea that missile attacks would deter future attacks while they could easily lead to an uncontrollable international conflict.

Prime minister Cameron assumed public opinion would rally behind a bellicose British response. Well, enough Tory MPs got the opposite message from their constituents and went on to wreck his government’s majority.

Cameron should have paid more attention to the right-wing Daily Telegraph. On Wednesday, an online poll was running at over 70% against military intervention in the shape of submarine-launched missiles. With the nationalist Ukip also declaring its opposition, it was clear that opposition to an attack was building across all classes.

That’s why Labour leader Ed Miliband retreated from total support for the government on Tuesday to producing an amendment that, as he put it in the Commons yesterday, offered a “sequential roadmap” that ended up with, er, the same military intervention that Cameron was proposing.  The only difference was that his plan would take a bit longer to arrive at the destination.

That was too much even for the usually loyal Jim Fitzpatrick to stomach. The Poplar and Limehouse MP told the Commons:  "In terms of the Opposition amendment - it's fair to say it's more honest and open and structured. But, from my reading, it essentially endorses the same principle - 'If we can address certain issues, if certain conditions are met, military action can happen'. I don't believe that it should under any circumstances."

Fitzpatrick then promptly resigned from the shadow cabinet before he was sacked. For alleged anti-war MP Diane Abbott, there were no problems for her in backing Labour’s pro-intervention amendment. However, at least another 30 Labour MPs were either absent or did not take part in the vote, including the anti-war MP Jeremy Corbyn.

The refusal to accept at face value what politicians say is one thing; hypocrisy when it comes to selecting enemies is another.  For example, thousands have been killed in Egypt by the army and police over recent weeks. Military rule is re-entrenched. Not a peep from Washington, from Cameron, from Miliband.

The Israeli government has a free hand to build settlements on Palestinian land and to occupy territories in defiance of the United Nations. Regimes like the Saudis can run feudal regimes complete with amputations and beheadings, yet Washington just can’t lend these states enough support.

Assad’s regime is truly a brutal one, but Washington has turned a blind eye to previous massacres, notably at Hama in 1982.  Even now, as it prefers to launch missiles without the UK’s participation, it prefers Assad to the jihadists and others who have hijacked the initial popular uprising against the government.

Yet, with or without the use of chemical weapons, or the sanction of the United Nations, we have to oppose military intervention on principle. The Syrians have the right to self-determine their own future.

Cameron’s credibility and authority is now on the line in a big way. Never before have Tory MPs felt so relaxed in defying their government in the lobbies. The weakness of the ConDem government is there for all to see following the Syria vote debacle.

The emerging political crisis could well drive on the development of movement to bring down the ConDems. That creates an opportunity to discuss what should follow because, as sure as night follows day, bringing Labour back would not constitute an alternative in any meaningful way.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

US shale gas bubble is ready to burst

"If we don't back this technology, we will miss a massive opportunity to help families with their bills and make our country more competitive." David Cameron. “Cuadrilla's never said it [shale] will bring down prices…We don't think it will bring down prices.” Cuadrilla spokesperson.

So what exactly are the economics of a shale gas boom? Let's look at what is happening in the US, where the fracking industry is much further down the road. An article by Nicole Foss in the "Automatic Earth" column of Business Insider says:

 "The shale gas bubble is a perfect example of the irrationality of markets, the power of perverse short-term incentives, the driving force of momentum-chasing, the dominance of perception over reality in determining prices, and the determination for a herd to stampede over a cliff all at once.

"The perception of a gas glut has driven prices so low that none of the participants are making money (at least not by producing gas) or creating value. We see a familiar story of excessive debt, and the hollowing out of productive companies dead set on pursuing a mirage."

Financial journalist Wolf Richter describes the economics of fracking as “horrid”. Drilling is, he says, “destroying capital at an astonishing  rate” and drillers are left with a mountain of debt just as production declines.

Arthur Berman, a petroleum geologist, says that in the Eagle Ford shale in Texas, gas output per well declines so fast that to keep production at the same level they must drill almost 1,000 new wells a year, each costing between $10-$12bn. "I add all these things up and it starts to approach the amount of money needed to bail out the banking industry. Where is that money going to come from?” he asks.

A bit of research into the official figures underlines the reality.  In 1990, there were 269,790 natural gas wells in the United States (on and offshore) producing 1,938,977 million cubic feet of gas, that is 7.18 million cubic feet per well.

By 2011 there were 514,637 wells producing 2,536,889 million cubic feet, that is 4.92 million cubic feet per well. If each thousand new wells drilled cost Berman's estimate of $10bn dollars, that means a total investment of around $245 billon.

The price of gas to US residential users was at its highest in 2008 at $20.77 per thousand cubic feet when the boom was already underway. The price at the end of 2012 was $12.62 dollars per thousand cubic feet. That is higher than before the start of the gas boom - in January 1981 it was $3.94 as the graph shows.

What we have is the anatomy of a classic bubble but the Obama administration is oblivious, rubbing its hands at the short-term gains in increased tax revenue, just as George Osborne is hoping to do.

And when the bubble bursts? They will be astounded when companies collapse and enforced mergers take place. Capitalist economists and governments never expect the collapse - they live in a fantasy land where, whatever happened in the past, the future is rosy.

And whilst "drilling is burning capital at an astonishing rate", we are told that it is impossible to raise the investment for renewable energy to replace fossil fuels.

The question is, are we going to allow the frackers/wreckers to destroy large areas of Britain, putting people's health and homes at risk, just to inflate a bubble with no long-term economic benefit, no long-term energy benefit, and a disastrous effect on climate?

Judging by the response at Balcombe and the creation of dozen of local anti-fracking groups, the answer is a resound “No”!

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Why we should oppose any attack on Syria

Desperate acts by unpopular regimes have the capacity to spiral out of control. And we’re not talking just talking about the Assad dictatorship in Syria but also the plans by the US and Britain to launch missile attacks on Damascus.

As they build their surveillance states at home, while driving down living conditions of the majority, president Obama and prime minister Cameron are gambling on a diversion which could well backfire.

Polls show the majority of Americans and British citizens opposed to military intervention in a brutal civil war. Iran and Russia are warning that attacks on Syria in response to alleged use of chemical weapons could further destabilise the region.

With Putin’s Russia and Iran heavily committed to backing the Assad regime, any action by the US backed by Britain, France and Germany will have unpredictable consequences. Madness indeed.

While there is talk of re-calling parliament to give military action a democratic veneer, the ConDem government has already indicated that it “has to reserve the right to act immediately”. To that end, the National Security Committee is meeting tomorrow.

The supposed reason is of course the “discovery” of chemical agents. While chemical weapons may well be used by the Syrian regime, how bombing Assad’s forces can really put an end to this is of course not stated. Just as in Iraq in 2001, UN weapons inspectors are still scrambling to investigate the nature and source of chemical weapons.

But US Secretary of State John Kerry claims that the evidence is “screaming at us” as he and the US military with the support of Cameron and Hague feverishly gather together their coalition of the willing.

Meanwhile, former Prime Minister Tony Blair has called on the West to “stop wringing its hands” and intervene against the Syrian government. “Peace envoy” (can there be a greater misnomer?) Blair has been hard at work touring super-yachts in the Mediterranean and private-jetting around St Tropez and Sardinia.

Blair – just like US secretary of state John Kerry - says that the new government in Egypt should be supported “in stabilising the country” by continuing to provide $1.3bn of US military aid. “Stabilising”? “Restoring democracy”? A strange word for the military regime’s murder of some 1,000 Muslim Brotherhood supporters.

Blair notoriously helped to launch the illegal UK-US attack on Iraq on the grounds that Saddam Hussein had secret “weapons of mass destruction”. That never-proven pretext turned out to be just that – a psychological operation to blur the issues and provide a “humanitarian” cover for a brutal war that caused hundreds of thousands civilian deaths.

Like the current pretext of chemical weapons, it was a blatant propaganda lie by the Blair, Bush and their allies to bring “democracy”, aka regime change through bombing and make Iraq “safe” for corporate exploitation. Never mind that more a decade later, Iraq has still not recovered from that war and is wracked by internal conflict.

It is well-known that the United States and Saudi Arabia have been supplying the anti-Assad forces in Syria with tanks and weaponry. But the imminent missile and drone attacks, backed up by military aircraft, will be crossing a major line.

So where is Her Majesty’s opposition on this vital question? Even less critical than the Conservatives’ own backbenchers, shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander says: "I'm not ruling out the possibility that Labour could support the government [even without a UN resolution, he made clear], but I'm certainly not prepared to write the government a blank cheque."

So that’s alright then. Just give Labour time and they will write that cheque.  

Obama-Cameron’s race to bomb Syria come what may has nothing to do with protecting the Syrian people, or even their distaste of chemical or weapons of mass destruction. After all, the US is the only country to have used atomic weapons on an undefended population and also defoliated large parts of Vietnam with chemicals, maiming hundreds of thousands of civilians in the process.

So arrange the following in any order you feel like: hypocrisy, double standards, neo-imperialism, military adventurism, warmongering, military-corporate complex. Then you’ll know why we should oppose attacks on Syria.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Salute Bradley Manning, victim of the secret state

The front pages are full of a statement by Bradley Manning that he will try now to live as a woman, reconciling what he explains has been a lifelong personal difficulty. They lasciviously reprint the picture that was introduced into his trial.

But if his lawyers thought that would win the sympathy of the court they were truly whistling in the dark. The US state was always planning to make an example of Manning, just as they would do with Edward Snowden if they could get their hands on the ex-NSA computer specialist.

Now Manning faces 35 years in a military prison, and daily challenges one fears are too horrible to imagine. This is a brutal world where a gentle person like him is condemned for decisions made "out of a concern for my country and the world that we live in", as he said in his statement to the court (which got one tenth the coverage of his more recent statement).

Manning joined up agreeing with the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq but when he was reading secret military reports on a daily basis he realised that, as he eloquently put it, "we have forgotten our humanity”. His statement added:

"Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability.
 "In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture. We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror.
 "Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues of democracy—the Trail of Tears [forced relocation of native Americans], the Dred Scott decision [1857 Supreme Court ruling that African Americans could not be US citizens], McCarthyism, the Japanese-American internment camps — to name a few. I am confident that many of our actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light."

He concludes: "If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society."

And his lawyer, Lt.Col David Coombs, did not mince his words either, saying that a country in which “you are faced with a death-penalty offence” for the simple act of disclosing information to a journalist “is not the America that I would hope that we live in.”

Manning joins an honourable list of US citizens prepared to risk everything to expose their country's secret state, which breaks every law –  American and international – in its pursuit of “national” – aka corporate – interests. 

- Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst who released "The Pentagon Papers" that showed that the US State Department knew the US could not win the war in Vietnam and carried on knowing there would be thousands more casualties.

- Philip Agee, former CIA agent who exposed the agency's active support of murderous regimes in South America, that sent oppositionists to torture and death.

-         Jesselyn Radack, Department of Justice official sacked and then hounded out of her next job because she told Newsweek the department lied about the interrogation of John Walker Lindh, a US citizen captured in Afghanistan.

And that is to name only a few - there is a list of whistleblowers going back to the 18th century here which shows that there are always women and men ready to risk their lives and freedom to expose illegal actions by so-called democratic states.

Manning may be ridiculed by those who have no human feeling, but we salute his courage and look forward to the day when the prison gates are opened and he is set free.

Penny Cole

Kafka's nightmare goes global

We are all potential “terrorists” now, at least in the eyes of the state. Why else would the police want to stop 61,000 people at entry points into Britain during the last year under the infamous schedule 7 of the anti-terror laws of 2000.

That’s the equivalent of the population of the town of Lowestoft or a full stadium when Arsenal play at home. This amounts to state intimidation on a scale that the notorious Stasi of East Germany or the KGB of the former Soviet Union would salute.

There’s no other explanation for the detention of David Miranda, a Brazilian citizen whose only “crime” was to be the partner of and assistant to Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who has helped publicise the material leaked by US whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Miranda says he was forced to hand over passwords and other information while at Heathrow or face arrest. All his electronic equipment was confiscated by the police, who got clearance from Downing Street for their action. And no doubt the ConDems told the American authorities, who have plans to put Snowden in jail.

Snowden’s “crime”? To reveal that the National Security Agency had created an unlawful, secret surveillance programme on a scale so immense that it put everyone under suspicion. And, naturally, the British end of the operation, GCHQ at Cheltenham, collaborated all the way.

To imply that revealing this is tantamount to an “act of terrorism”, as the US and British authorities do, is to create a world where the state can make anything a crime at the stroke of a pen. In Franz Kafka’s frightening novel The Trial, a man is arrested by an inaccessible authority and is never able to establish the nature of the charges.

Nearly 90 years after the book’s publication, Kafka’s nightmare has gone global.

Thus The Guardian was visited by no less an eminence than the cabinet secretary himself. Sir Jeremy Heywood was despatched by David Cameron and Nick Clegg to instruct the newspaper to hand over computer files containing Snowden’s leaked material.

Since when has the country’s most senior civil servant been a messenger boy for the secret state? After the newspaper refused, two spooks from GCHQ oversaw the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian’s basement.

Where’s the outcry? Who will protect our liberties? Labour? Parliament? You must be joking. Labour enacted the very legislation used to hold Miranda and the other 61,000. Blair’s governments created a surveillance state framework that the ConDems are busily using.

So not a peep from Ed Miliband about freedom of the press. As for parliament, its committee charged with intelligence oversight is, as libertarian Simon Jenkins puts it, “a charade, a patsy of the secrecy lobby”. The very same committee, you will recall, recently announced that GCHQ was not breaking the law in spying on our communications.

In any case, oversight is an over-used term. In the US, Congressional committees charged with checking on the NSA were repeatedly lied to or misled. They couldn’t get to the bottom of things even if they wanted to. That was one of the reasons that prompted Snowden to blow the whistle on the secret Prism programme.

The emergence of secret, unaccountable, security-surveillance states on both sides of the Atlantic over the last two decades is part of a wider process of change in the way we are ruled. Corporate-driven globalisation has resulted in a market-oriented state that in turn has lost legitimacy in the eyes of large numbers of people, particularly since the global crisis that began in 2007.

Like all states, the capitalist type needs constant justification for its raison d’être. An elusive external enemy that their policies helped create and which can never be defeated – aka global terrorism – answers the need.

And at the same time it creates the perfect cover for spying on dissent of any kind. The state’s claims to be protecting us are therefore useless as well as spurious. What we should ask is: who will protect us from the state?

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

US-UK security state strikes back

The outrageous detention of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald’s partner for nine hours at Heathrow airport yesterday gives a new meaning to the “special relationship” between Britain and the United States.

This was clearly a joint operation of overt intimidation by the burgeoning Anglo-US security state against the partner of a journalist who has helped expose the covert operations of GCHQ in Britain and the NSA in America.

David Miranda was held incommunicado for the maximum nine hours allowed under the Terrorism 2000 Act. His property – including his mobile phone – was taken from him and he was not allowed legal representation.

Under schedule seven of the Terrorism Act 2000, the police can detain people at British border points with or without probable cause. The detained person does not have the right to a lawyer and it is a criminal offence to refuse to answer questions, whether or not a lawyer is present.

Greenwald only knew of the arrest three hours into the interrogation when a “security official” – who only gave his number 203654 – called him at 5.30am on the east coast of the US.

His partner who is a Brazilian citizen was in transit from Berlin to Rio when seized. Neither Brazilian officials nor Guardian lawyers were allowed access to him.

It was a blatant act of revenge by the US and UK authorities to punish anyone associated with whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations about Prism, the mass snooping programme on US, British citizens and others around the world.

Miranda did not represent any terrorist threat, and the authorities knew that. His arrest was purely to punish his partner Greenwald for analysing the data released by Snowden, who remains in Russia on temporary asylum to escape arrest by the US authorities.

In enacting the Terrorism Act in 2000, New Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett flouted human rights and deeply enshrined principles, including the right to remain silent. When Blunkett was warned that it was a catch-all law, he notoriously poured scorn on human rights’ organisations.

In 2001 New Labour’s attorney general Lord Goldsmith, who approved the legal cover for the attack on Iraq, used the terror laws to detain asylum seekers for 10 days, despite judicial opposition.

In 2008, financial crime experts were shocked at the use of anti-terror laws to seize the assets of Icelandic banks, when Reykjavik-based Landsbanki Islands bank got into trouble.

In 2010, the Equality and Human Rights Commission expressed its concerns about the introduction of body scanners at ports of entry, again under the pretext of terrorism threats. It was alarmed about the infringement of the right to privacy and access and use of intimate body images,

The repeated use and abuse of the anti-terror laws by state forces has been so blatant that eminent experts such as David Anderson QC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, felt obliged to admonish the police.

In 2011 he cautioned the police over the arrest of six North African street cleaners, which had been prompted by a canteen joke. During the Olympics, in June 2012 Anderson stated that you were just as likely to die of a bee sting as of a terror attack.

Snowden’s revelations, like those of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, are doing serious damage to the Obama administration and, with the help of the compliant British authorities, they are seeking to intimidate, smear, frame and generally harass anyone involved.  

Greenwald has courageously said that he will not be cowed. He deserves total support. While anti-terror legislation remains on the statute books it will be used by the state in whatever way it sees fit. An argument if there ever was one that a new democratic constitution for the 21st century that enshrines basic rights is an urgent necessity.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Immigrant checkpoints are naked state racism

Today is Roma Holocaust Memorial Day, marking the start of the liquidation by the Nazis of the “Gipsy” camp at Auschwitz on August 2 1944. Today is also being marked by racist, illegal state targeting of immigrants on the streets of Britain.  The parallels are clearly not exact, but the sentiments are.

At a time when most people are struggling to pay their bills, when wages have been driven down by zero hours and other slave-like “contracts”, when the ConDems are fighting for votes against the nationalist Ukip, it comes as little surprise that the Home Office has unleashed its dogs.

They may not be wearing brown shirts, but the UK Border Agency officials might as well be. Setting up checkpoints at key locations around London, Durham, Manchester, Wales and Somerset, they have patently targeted non-white citizens for identity checks.

This is racial profiling with a vengeance.  Stopping people on this basis  to ask them for their identity is patently unlawful, as is the Home Office boasting that they have caught “offenders” before people detained have even been charged.

Rule of law? Forget it! We’re the state and, hey, who cares.

This is how it begins. Find scapegoats and make them the target for society’s problems. The fact that the state long ago failed to process properly immigration and asylum claims, leading to a backlog of hundreds of thousands of cases, is ignored.

Wind it up, Lynton Crosby, the notorious adviser to the prime minister would have said, bringing all his wretched experience of running similar campaigns in Australia. Wind it up, says home secretary Theresa May, who is shutting down the incompetent UK Border Agency to take it in-house.

So send out vans around London with billboards on top declaring, “Go home or face arrest”. In the days when sponsorship is everything, I am surprised that the Home Office has not asked the British National Party or English Defence League  to pay for the campaign. They would be only too delighted.

While comedians have led the protests, mockery won’t be enough. The silence of Labour and the trade unions is shameful. Chris Bryant, Labour’s immigration spokesman, has only queried whether May’s tactics are legal – but not the whole campaign itself.

Labour figures like David Goodhart, Demos director and former editor of the Blairite Prospect magazine, actually lend their explicit support. Goodhart wrote this week that  the billboards “are necessary precisely because so few do face arrest thanks to today’s legal obstacles. But there is nothing inhuman or racist about encouraging them to come out with their hands up.”

People were clearly angered by the UKBA checkpoints. Onlookers described their shock at the operations, with one member of the public saying it was akin to “Nazi Germany”.  Phil O’Shea told the Kilburn Times: “They appeared to be stopping and questioning every non-white person, many of whom were clearly ordinary Kensal Green residents going to work. When I queried what was going on, I was threatened with arrest for obstruction and was told to ‘crack on’.”

On the eve of last year’s Roma Holocaust Memorial day, United Nations Independent Expert on minority issues, Rita Izsák who is herself of Hungarian Roma origin, said not enough was being done to challenge “a rising tide of hostility and discrimination against Roma in Europe that shames societies.” She added:

“Genocide in Europe began by dehumanizing the other, blaming them for the problems of society, ridiculing their differences, excluding them and surrounding them within the walls of a ghetto, labelling them as evil, filthy and unworthy of the rights and opportunities afforded to others. Today in much of Europe, nearly 70 years after the Holocaust, many Roma experience all of the above on a daily basis.”  

We can add that many minorities in Britain justifiably feel the same way as the Roma, facing a hostile state and becoming a target for the mainstream parties who play on anti-immigration in search of a few grubby votes. We should totally reject this ugly state racism and, if you’re in London this evening, go along to Hyde Park to show your solidarity with the Roma.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Zero hours shows how capitalism works for the 1%

Job anyone? Yes? Good! Wait by the door with your cap in you hand and we’ll call you when we need you. If we call you we’ll pay you. Maybe. A bit. Not much though, times are hard. We’re all in it together.

Better than being on benefits, isn’t it. This way we’re not obliged to give you a cent, a penny, a dime. And we don’t have to worry about all that expensive red tape, bureaucracy. Things like sick pay, holiday pay.

Buckingham Palace, the National Trust, and the Tate Galleries use the same zero hours approach to employment as Mike Ashley billionaire owner of Sports Direct and Newcastle United.  

Some 90%  - 20,000 of the people employed by Sports Direct - are on these contracts. The remainder are in line for big bonuses, if they keep their noses clean and don’t upset the boss.

But if you DO upset the boss and get sacked there’s always the Employment Tribunal. Or at least there was. Now they’ve changed the rules so you have to pay a fat fee to even think about lodging an appeal. Good people in the Coalition.

The percentage of employers in the UK with more than 100 staff offering zero-hours contracts jumped from 11% to 23% between 2004 and 2011.  

They include most workers in the care industry, and a high proportion working for hotel, catering and leisure companies. No customers means no shifts, no hours and no pay.

Austerity programmes cutting spending in the public sector meant that NHS trusts began to issue zero-hours contracts to professional staff and make them fight it out for shifts.

Radiologists, psychiatrists and heart specialists found themselves in staff "banks" that trusts could draw on when demand peaked.

This trend is part of a universal, worldwide downward pressure on jobs and real incomes resulting from the 2007-8 crash.

You can see it behind the news that the number of jobless in the eurozone fell for the first time in more than two years in June, but the unemployment rate stayed at a record 12.1%. 

The total number of unemployed people in the wider EU fell by 32,000 to 26.42 million. But just like in the United States, part-time, and no-time jobs are increasing.

Even so, the youth unemployment rate is now at 58.7% in Greece and 56.1% in Spain.

The US Federal Reserve has just announced that it will continue adding to the $2 trillion dollars of credit it has pumped into the economy since the crash. Jobs are increasing by 200,000 a month as a result yet are failing to close the gap of 8.7 million lost as a result of the crash.

But, as Daniel Alpert, former merchant and investment banker, turned financial consultant points out, over 69% of the jobs created in April-June 2013 and over 57% of all the jobs created in the first half of 2013 were in the three lowest wage sub-sectors of the economy.

About half of the jobs created during the first half of 2013, and a large majority of the jobs created in April-June, appear to have been part-time jobs that offer employees as little as one hour of work per week, and up to 35 hours of work.

And the number of people saying they are working part time because they can’t find full time work crept back up to 8.2 million – double pre-recession levels.

Alpert now specialises in bankruptcy and restructuring – “thinking outside the box” to provide “novel and workable solutions to unique financial challenges”.

He’s got a new book out next month: The Age of Oversupply: Overcoming the Greatest Challenge to the Global Economy.

Just can’t wait to find out what new ideas he has for the huge numbers of people made surplus to requirements by the crisis of capitalist production.

 

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

 

They take the profits - we pay for the clean up

Somehow, the public always ends up with the bill for dirty energy operations, whilst the corporations take the profits and run. In 2010, it was estimated that dealing with the UK's nuclear waste would cost £49bn. Now that has more than doubled and some say it could rise to £100bn.

The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority is on the point of taking back in house the clean up of the UK's biggest nuclear headache at Sellafield though it has already paid a private company billions.

The US/UK/French consortium NMP has had £70bn so far but the work is way behind schedule and there have been criticisms of how they operate. Indeed they have been fined £700,000 by a court in Carlisle for sending low-level radioactive waste to an ordinary landfill site.

That didn't stop the NDA giving them £54m in performance bonuses in 2012 – now it seems even the authority has had enough.

Next year, the NDA will award contracts for cleaning up the old Magnox power stations and the agency is so nervous that it will not even give an estimate of the cost.

But the question is, why are WE paying for this? Didn't the new operators, when the companies were privatised, take on these responsibilities as well as the chance to make money? No, they did not.

Another example of corporations walking away is in Scotland, where KPMG acting as receiver for bankrupt coal companies Scottish Coal and Aardvark, won a court ruling saying any buyer will not have to fulfil obligations to control pollution and restore land at existing sites. So these will remain as scars on the landscape with no remedy in sight, other than by throw piles of public money at the problem.

Anne McCall, of wildlife charity RSPB, says: “It is unthinkable that private companies can cause such damage and then walk away when finances get tight. We simply cannot wipe the slate clean when such a terrible legacy has been left by Scottish Coal and Aardvark."

So what would the legacy be if fracking is allowed across the UK? Fracking pumps a mix of water, sand, and chemicals into fissures in shale rock made by controlled explosions. The water loosens the shale, the chemicals dissolve minerals and the sand props open fractures so that the gas or oil can be extracted.

Chemicals used include acids, detergents and deadly poisons. After the fuel is extracted, deposits of radioactive elements and huge concentrations of salt are left in the earth's surface as well as thousands of gallons of dirty water to disposed of.

The Con/Dem coalition are giving huge tax breaks to the fracking companies, and have changed planning laws so local communities have little chance of keeping them out.

And when the gas has been extracted and the companies have fracked off to the next project? Those communities will have to live with the long-term damage.

Of course, as far as Lord Howell is concerned that only matters if the damage is in nice, rural areas; it is OK if fracking takes plae in the former industrial areas of the north of England.

This is not just some old buffer speaking. Howell is a former energy secretary, up until three months ago an energy adviser to the government, and president of the BP/Shell sponsored British Institute of Energy Economics which promotes fossil fuels.

He is worried that if the middle classes in leafy areas in the south-east are affected, they might rise up and in a spirit of fair play, demand an end not only to their own local problem but to the whole fracking project across the country. Let's hope they do!

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Wanted: A Chartism for our times

As Labour prepares to terminate its historic relationship with the very trade unions that founded the party, the questions of democracy and representation assume an even greater importance.

Ending the special relationship that allows automatic transfer of funds from trade unionists to the party, firmly shuts the door on the age of parliamentary-based reformist policies and politics.

In Britain, for the last 100 years or so, that has taken the form of unions mobilising to return a Labour government that would carry out a reformist programme in parliament. In practical terms, of course, that hasn’t happened for a very long time.

That’s why there’s a harking back to the 1945 Labour government that introduced the welfare state and the National Health Service. More recently, the Blairite governments of 1997-2010 were 100% pro-business and indifferent to the demands of the trade unions.

The reasons for all this are not hard to fathom. Corporate-driven globalisation created a world economy dominated by transnational companies and financial institutions. Nation-state powers were consequently reduced to facilitating the market economy. Reformist politics was ejected into the far reaches of the galaxy.

Labour leader Ed Miliband has effectively acknowledged this change, abandoning traditional state intervention in favour of encouraging a kind of “responsible capitalism”. In his dreams!

The Agreement of the People for the 21st Century campaign brings the broken political system out into the open and focuses on the need for a constitutional transformation. Drawing its name from the inspirational struggle of the Levellers during the English Revolution, the Agreement seeks to re-enfranchise a powerless electorate.

In the first part of the 19th century, the Levellers’ fight for democracy was taken up by the Chartists which was the first independent workers’ movement. The Chartists had six demands that won the support of millions of people throughout Britain. It was the eventual winning of the vote and parliamentary reform that made Labour a possibility at all.

Representative democracy has arguably had its day, however. Labour doesn’t even claim to represent working people’s interests and democracy is noticeable by its absence at all levels of society but in particular in the workings of the state which holds the power.

So, taking our cue from the Levellers and the Chartists, we should draw up a contemporary set of demands. Our modern charter could say :

We  declare that the present state is a barrier to the real democratic control of society and has effectively disenfranchised the 99%. The right to vote, won in centuries of struggle, has been undermined. We propose the transformation of the present political system along democratic lines. We favour a transition from representation without power to a popular sovereignty through an Agreement of the People. Our demands are:

1. A people’s convention to develop a democratic constitution for the 21st century that transfers economic power away from the corporations and political power away from the state.
2. Building a new, nation-wide democratic tradition from the ground up through, for example, Peoples’ Assemblies.
3. Rights to justice, transparency and accountability; the rule of law; the right to self-determination within and without Britain and the promotion of equality and diversity globally.
4. Human and social rights, including to associate, demonstrate and strike independently of the state; the right of minority communities to equality in all areas of social life; the right to affordable housing; to free continuing education and training and to free health care at all levels.
5. The right to co-operative ownership in place of shareholder control; to democracy and self-management in all areas/activities of the workplace; to common land ownership in towns and rural areas.
6. the right to live in a sustainable environment shaped by ecological care and not profits; the right of nature, including human beings, to exist free from abuse and despoliation.

In the 19th century, the reformist wing of the Chartists prevailed over the revolutionary or “physical force” wing of the movement which wanted to overthrow capitalism altogether. The physical-force Chartists weren’t wrong – they were just ahead of their time.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Army rule in Egypt rejected by new movement

With the brutal murder of 74 – probably more - pro-Morsi supporters and persecution of thousands of Muslim Brotherhood members by the army leadership, the Egyptian revolution enters a dangerous and crucial phase.

The shootings on Friday night by Egypt’s military have been condemned by Human Rights Watch as targeted killings by snipers. Minister of Defence and coup leader general Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s call for support in dealing with “terrorism”, gave the army the green light to deal brutally with the Brotherhood.

Live rounds were fired directly into protesters’ heads and chests from buildings overlooking the Muslim Brotherhood’s sit-in in Rabaa al-Adawiya in eastern Cairo. Brotherhood supporters are demanding the release of detained former president Mohammed Morsi – elected after the fall of Mubarak - during a 30-day sit-in and are clearly prepared to die to achieve their objective.

But a new movement, the Third Square, has emerged in the city of Giza, which represents people-revolutionaries who support neither the military’s June 30 coup nor Morsi’s regime.

One of the protesters,  Ahmed Adel, said: "We are a group of young people whose views are not represented either in Tahrir Square or Rabaa al-Adawiya." He was critical of Egyptians being forced to choose between two camps "just because the Muslim Brotherhood failed" saying that he wants neither "religious fascism nor the army." 

Meanwhile, Fatma Ramadan, a member of the executive committee of the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions (EFITU), has denounced the EFITU's decision to support al-Sisi's call for pro-military demonstrations as well as the Muslim Brotherhood’s attack on Egyptian workers and trade unions, saying: 

“Did not the military forcibly end your strikes in Suez, Cairo, Fayyoum, and all over Egypt ? Did not the military arrest many of you and subject you to military trials just for practising your right to organize, strike, and protest peacefully? Have they not adamantly worked to criminalize this right through legislation banning all Egyptians from organising peaceful protests, strikes, and sit-ins? Do not be fooled into replacing a religious dictatorship with a military dictatorship.” 

The new status quo has been satirised by anti-Mubarak film-maker, Aalam Wassef. He has made a surreal music video in which he does his laundry in front of a banner saying “Resist”.  The pre-Mubarak world has been turned upside in two years, he says.

The former revolutionaries, Wassef’s song goes, are now members of the Couch Party, while the Brotherhood are now the “felool” – the remnants of the old regime, and the old regime – the army – is playing at being revolutionaries.

Many hailed the removal of the elected government of Morsi in June by Egypt’s powerful army leaders as a victory for the people. But Egypt’s army officers, as Jadaliyya website says, “are promoting a narrative in which they have (once again) intervened heroically to save the day and ‘protect the revolution’.”

Meanwhile, the demands for bread, freedom and social justice, which lay behind the revolutionary toppling of Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year autocracy in February 2011, remain unfulfilled.

The January 25 revolution – and indeed the Egyptian revolution itself – goes far deeper than the search for an elected government. As far as Jadaliyya is concerned, “it encompassed a host of demands for far-reaching institutional reforms and social and economic rights”.

The partisans of “bread, freedom, and social justice” represent a huge swathe of people-revolutionaries who back neither the Brotherhood nor the army. Egyptian writer Khaled Alkhamissi, author of the prophetic novels Noah’s Ark and Taxi, which foretold the fall of Mubarak, said last week:

 “We are living in a vibrant social era in Egypt. . . We are not in a process of transformation from A to B, as representative democracy is dying everywhere. We need to properly analyse the revolutionary process that has been going on for almost ten years ... and we need a manifesto of demands.”

The Third Square and Egypt’s revolutionaries face the challenge of moving beyond subversion and resistance.  The battle is on to grasp the nettle of state power. That means creating new democratic political and social institutions that can express the needs of Egypt’s workers, farmers, professional people and youth.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Capitalism's Arctic plan - get the oil, destroy the lives of millions

Citizens of every country will pay a massive, painful price for the melting of Arctic sea ice, even though capitalist corporations and governments view it as a potential profit bonanza.

A study in the journal Nature models the economic impact of the release of 50-gigatonnes of methane from melting permafrost and shows it would result in flooding, sea-level rise, agriculture damage and health impacts amounting to a cost of $60 trillion – roughly the size of the entire global economy last year.

And a parallel study confirms that this release of methane is already happening at an alarming rate. The melting of the Greenland ice sheet started a little later this year but is spreading fast and will probably match last year's record melt by September.

The result of this annual trend is that permafrost in the Arctic, in Siberia and Alaska is melting, releasing methane and speeding up global warming.

The methane could continue to be released gradually, albeit on a rising trend, or there could be a sudden pulse as tipping points are reached. This would push temperatures up so fast we could reach 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels by 2035.

Once you say that of course you are really saying "anytime" because emissions of all greenhouse gases continue to rise and no effort is being made to halt or slow them. A feedback effect could kick in at any moment.

A slowing of the rise in temperatures over the last few years provided a breathing space. 

But instead of using this to take urgent action to halt the growth in emissions, it was simply exploited by climate change deniers to say there is no global warming.

Now we know that much of the heat was being absorbed into the deep oceans and as they lose their capacity to soak up more, warming will take off again. Indeed, the overall upward trend has never halted, with all the hottest summers on record taking place during this disputed period.

Corporations and governments may be greedily eyeing the Arctic, but alongside the process already in train, this scenario would result in the worst possible conditions for agriculture. The worst effects would be in Africa, Asia and South America, but no country is immune as farmers from Europe and America can testify.

But the opposite of action to halt emissions is happening; Lloyds of London estimates more than $100bn will be invested in extraction and shipping in the Arctic in the next five years.

Writing these blogs, one begins to feel a bit like the Trojan prophetess Cassandra who was locked up as a madwoman by the fellow citizens for warning them the war with the Greeks could only end in disaster.

But so be it – the truth can always bear repeating, which is that without system change we cannot begin to start to slow and then reverse climate change. If the corporations are permitted to start operating in the Arctic, the consequences are unthinkable.

Solutions are tantalisingly within reach – from permaculture, perennial grains, recycling of waste products to support organic farming, to abandoning fossil fuels in favour of locally-planned renewable energy strategies, and, in the case of the Arctic, leaving the fossil fuels and minerals in the ground!

But capitalism cannot permit this approach. As Bolivian climate strategist Pablo Solon puts it: "In this race to the top, capital needs to colonize territories and natural resources, decrease the cost of human labour, develop new technologies and promote new financial, investment and trade rules that allow capital to have more and more profit."

As a result, capitalism has already, in Solon’s words, "reached and surpassed the limits of the Earth system". To redress the damage, and to have a future for humanity, we must move to a model where humans work in harmony with nature and that means that the absolute supremacy of growth and profit must be overthrown.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Sleeping giant threatens rule of China's corrupt elite

China is in the grip of a profound social, political and economic crisis. The evidence is there in corruption scandals, a fading economy and a rising tide of desperate resistance by ordinary people.

Several senior staff at GlaxoSmithKline's China operation are under arrest for bribery. They gave doctors and officials billions of yuan's worth of foreign travel, supplied prostitutes and handed over cash in return for boosting GSK products. More arrests are said to be imminent.

The trial has begun of former Communist Party (CPC) high flier Bo Xilai, accused of taking bribes, embezzling money and buying sex. He is the politician whose wife faces life imprisonment for allegedly murdering British businessman Nick Heywood. Similar charges were proved against former railways minister Liu Zhijun who was given a suspended death sentence.

The fact that it is these two officials on trial and not others, is only due to the fact that they are losers in continuous in-fighting in the CPC. The fact is that they are all at it.

Users of Weibo, the social network popular in China, are more and more taking their courage in their hands and publishing hundreds of accusations. Particularly disgusting are the stories of mass abuse of women. It seems the CPC has reintroduced the feudal crimes of concubinage and forced prostitution.

The impossibility of getting any redress through the courts or government is leading people to acts of total desperation. This month alone:

- an unemployed man set off an explosion on a bus in the south eastern city of Xiamen, killing himself and 47 others. Chen Shuizong left a suicide note expressing despair at being totally impoverished.

- in Dongxing, Guangxi, a villager stabbed to death two CPC officials trying to enforce the one child policy. Their crime is not entirely clear, but it is likely they were trying to force the man's wife to have an abortion.

- at Beijing airport, a man in a wheelchair injured himself by detonating an explosive device. It seems 34-year-old Ji Zhongxing, from the eastern province of Shandong, was protesting the authorities' refusal to investigate the beating he received from police in 2005, which left him partly paralysed

Driving this social and political upheaval is a deepening economic crisis. Growth continues to slow and exports fell 3.1% in June compared to the previous year, the highest monthly fall since the global crash. The price Chinese firms can get for their products on the global market fell for the 16th successive month.

The government is trying every way, from enforced retraction to Keynsian investment to fiscal measures, to shore up growth. Banks have been told to stop lending to businesses in sectors where there is oversupply, particularly industries making materials for construction. Local authorities have been instructed not to give land or planning permission to any new ventures in these sectors.

A collapse in tax revenue from falling consumer sales has added to the sense of crisis. The government has responded by lifting credit controls, to encourage people to borrow to buy consumer goods.

The government has pledged to keep unemployment below 5% and to improve its image. A commission is trying to convince people they are now "down-to-earth, honest and upright", and to regenerate support for nationalism and what they call, without irony, "the Chinese dream".

Hong Kong's relatively independent Oriental Daily News concludes that: "If the ruling authorities cannot reverse social injustice, narrow a rich-poor divide, eliminate bureaucratic officialdom and combat judicial malpractice to create a fair and equitable social environment where the weak have hope and where most people can live in equality and dignity, cases like the fatal stabbings on the streets of Beijing and the Xiamen bus explosion will not stop."

An increasingly confident working class is demanding and getting better wages and conditions. As a result, firms are moving out of China to even lower-wage countries. The CPC bureaucracy knows that they are facing a sleeping giant which when roused will shake the rule of the corrupt elite of oligarchs and local tyrants.

Penny Cole

Climate chaos is also the failure of political systems

While you enjoy the warm weather, consider this. “Atmospheric Rivers” will become more frequent and intense as global temperatures rise this century in response to increasing concentrations of  carbon dioxide in the  atmosphere

You might ask what these “rivers” are. They are described as narrow regions of intense moisture flows in the lower troposphere that deliver sustained and heavy rainfall to mid-latitude regions such as the UK. And, according to a new study, they are on the increase while winter flood events will become more frequent and more severe.

This is just one of the variety of consequences arising from the burning of coal, oil and gas which fuelled the industrial revolution of the 19^th century and the globalisation of capitalist production and consumption from the last period of the 20^th century.

Globalisation and war have seen the extraction, refinement and distribution of fossil fuels concentrated into the hands of a small handful of giant corporations. Their shareholders demand ever greater efforts to extract what remains of the resources buried deep beneath the surface by millions of years of planetary evolution.

They rub their hands with increasing glee as their lobbyists for continued economic growth stir dissent and confusion ensuring that no agreement on action to slow, let alone stop or reverse global warning is reached between the governments of the world. There’s every reason to expect no better outcome from the climate treaty talks scheduled for 2015 than all those that have taken place in the last 25 years.

Even if there were agreement, the International Energy Agency is warning that any action would come too late to give even a 50% chance of keeping the global temperature increase since the start of the industrial revolution below 2 degrees centigrade.

Why? Because competition between the remaining corporate contenders under intense pressure from their customers also competing on costs in the industrial sectors, drives investment in a continuing technological revolution. This provides previously unimagined access to “new” reserves.

Ultra-deepwater drillships, subsea oil and gas infrastructure and multi-well-pad drilling to machine-to-machine networking, floating LNG facilities, new dimensions in seismic imagery and supercomputing for analogue exploration make fracking – hydraulic fracking –  look positively old-fashioned.

Investment advisers Oil and Energy Insider – one node in a network of private intelligence networks looking like an offshoot of the CIA – big up the prospects, saying these technologies put the idea of peak oil to bed for the foreseeable future.

And the IEA is looking both ways. Originally set up in the wake of the 1972 oil crisis, its mission was to ensure continuity of oil supplies. Now it claims it works to ensure reliable, affordable and clean energy – but without compromising growth.

Academic Robert Manne says a rapid, global-wide, consciously engineered transition from a fossil fuel to a clean energy civilization would involve one of the largest transformations in the history of humankind. And he’s right.

But he’s pessimistic. The post-war international “system” of nations is entirely unfitted to the kind of broad-ranging international cooperation now required, he believes. “The domestic political systems of the nation states potentially of greatest importance in the struggle against global warming – that is the advanced Western democracies — tend to paralyse the possibility of necessary emergency action.”

To put it another way, the democratic system prevailing in the global capitalist system of nation states has failed. So that means building a new system, more suited to the task of taking human society into a new not-for-profit age, one in which care for the “oikos”, Mother Earth, our home, becomes the overriding priority.

One way would be to rapidly establish a global network of local people’s assemblies, using the worldwide communications networks as the foundation for wide discussion and participation as the precursor to the takeover and redirection of the resources currently in the hands of the 1%.

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

Miliband to apply coup de grace to Labour's history

What a day! There was wall-to-wall media coverage of just one of 370,000 babies born yesterday around the world and confirmation that Labour is pressing ahead with plans to break its current links with the organisations that created the party in 1900.

Are these events linked in any way? I think they are – in one important respect. They both contribute to what Antonio Gramsci referred to as the hegemony of the ruling class in terms of penetrating the rest of us with their outlook and ideology.

Hegemony is not a pretty word and also hard to pronounce (try it). It means domination or supremacy. Gramsci was a founder-member of the Italian Communist Party. Despite being an MP, he was seized by Mussolini’s fascist regime in 1926 and spent the next six years in jail.

Although he died a few years after his conditional release on health grounds, his Prison Notebooks were smuggled out of jail and later published. Gramsci wanted to understand why the masses in the major capitalist countries seemed to support the state political system. So he investigated how the ideas of the ruling class were the dominant, or hegemonic, ideas in society.

An essential, even “socially accepted function” of any state is, as Bob Jessop, professor of sociology at Lancaster University, explains is to “enforce collectively binding decisions on the members of a society in the name of their common interest or general will”.

So how are these “common interests” articulated? How are we persuaded, for example, that monarchy is good for every single person and that we should be happy that there is another addition to the royal family? This particular notion is achieved by way of social traditions, culture, ideas that we are born into, through the education system, the church and, of course, the media.

From the BBC to the “liberal” Guardian, there was only one story yesterday – the birth of one single baby. “Duchess in labour as the world awaits news”, said the BBC website. Yes, the whole world was standing by! The Guardian had rolling “live coverage” all day long.

A good day to bury bad news. So off the headlines went (in no particular order), the terrible situation in Syria, the end of the welfare state, outsourcing the NHS, surveillance state, tax cuts for fracking, global recession etc. Then later in the day, in stepped Ed Miliband, leader of the Labour Party with his own particular contribution to hegemony.

Whatever came later, the foundation of the Labour Party by the trade unions at the beginning of the 20^th century challenged the hegemony of ruling class ideas. It had been accepted until then that workers could only find representation through the Liberal Party.

The Tories bitterly opposed the scheme whereby trade unionists automatically had part of their subscriptions passed on to Labour to fund its campaigns and election work. So in 1927, the Baldwin government banned the practice. Instead, trade unionists had to opt into paying the levy. Labour opposed the move and pledged to repeal the law, which was in force for two decades.

Miliband is, as we know, proposing that Labour now follows what the Tories did in 1927. And yesterday it became known that his party is calling a special conference in March 2014 to get the rules changed. For good measure, the voting rights of the unions are to be further reduced.

This then is Miliband’s contribution to passing on the ideological domination of the ruling class. He doesn’t care that the party will lose millions as a result. Miliband is more interested in impressing middle-class, middle-England voters in the general election scheduled for 2015.

So Labour, having abandoned its famous socialist Clause 4 in 1995, is applying the coup de grâce to its history. Naturally, the Guardian, dresses this up as “reform” when it is nothing of the kind. More hegemonic deception!

You can point to numerous, every-day examples of this process. What is a more difficult task is to develop ideas and, above all, practices that challenge not just the grand illusions and deceptions but also the capitalist power structures that lie at the heart of the hegemony that Gramsci was referring to.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

George Obsorne - CEO of Britain PLC

“The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” So wrote Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848. And today George Osborne confirmed how true this observation remains.

The chancellor, or should that be the chief operating officer (CEO) of Britain PLC, announced that firms involving in fracking – the highly-dangerous, controversial, ecologically-damaging extraction of shale gas – will only have to pay a 30% top rate on production.

That compares to 62% on new North Sea oil operations, rising to 81% for established offshore fields. Leaving aside for a moment that Osborne’s father-in-law is head of a lobbying organisation for big oil and gas companies, the position is clear.

The government, any government, will use its authority to command the state to do what’s best for business – often to the detriment of a particular community or society at large.

Desperate to create new energy supplies as North Sea oil runs down, the government is hoping that a shale gas bonanza is the answer to their prayers. Hence the tax breaks announced today.

Every day there’s another example of this ever-closer alliance with business that is the hallmark of this particular period of globalised capitalism. Last night, the UK’s state-owned blood supply was sold to a US-based private equity firm.

The Department of Health sold an 80% stake in Plasma Resources UK to a Bain Capital. This company was founded by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, which paid £230m for a controlling interest.

This is consistent with the approach of all governments over the last 30 years. In 2004, New Labour prime minister Tony Blair said: “Our aim is to open up the system, to end the one-size-fits-all model of public service, which too often meant one supplier fits all, with little diversity, irrespective of how good new suppliers – from elsewhere in the public sector, and from the voluntary and private sectors – might be.”

In 2011, David Cameron remarked: “From now on, diversity is the default in our public services. What does that mean? It means that instead of having to justify why it makes sense to introduce competition, as we are now doing with schools and in the NHS, the state will have to justify why it makes sense to run a monopoly.”  

As a result, public services wholly provided for by the state are an increasing rarity. Today roughly £1 in every £3 that government spends on public services goes to contractors of one sort or another. That’s about £100 billion a year. That’s a bigger proportion than in any other country, the US included.

With the state lacking expertise in contract negotiating, let alone auditing what’s going on, the scene is set for creaming off the top, also known as scamming or gaming. Last week it was revealed that government contracts for tagging offenders held by G4S and Serco had been suspended.

The firms had been charging for tagging people who were either dead, in prison, or never tagged in the first place. Even this government had to act when the truth came out. This week, an extensive report by the Institute for Government into the outsourcing bonanza, gave chapter and verse on “gaming” by all sorts of agencies. The report noted:

“Such ‘gaming’ behaviours included excessive ‘parking’ of service users with complex needs and ‘creaming’ of users who are easier to support, and therefore more profitable to serve… Such gaming was most apparent in the Work Programme where the combination of low fees and specific design choices in the ‘payment by results’ system of reward acted to discourage investment in helping those who were less likely to get back into work swiftly.”

Choosing easier-to-pass qualifications is an education form of “gaming”, often used to maintain or attract fund. One head teacher told the researchers: “Schools that turn themselves around often do it… [by] exploiting tactics to improve exam results in the short term which are not about the experience that every child gets in every lesson.”

For Osborne and his corporate chums, however, it really is one big game which ends with directors and shareholders laughing all the way to the bank.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor