la-vie-est-politiques:

Edinburgh University announced that UK students from outside of Scotland would not benefit from Holyrood’s protection of Scottish fees.

Solidarity to all occupiers! 

One solution - Revolution!

(via dirty-rotten-scoundrel)

(via yoursocalledgovernment)

The votes have been counted, but it’s the bankers and big business who are ruling Britain.

Whoever you voted for, all the politicians are agreed that workers everywhere must now accept wage curbs, job losses and public service cuts in order to keep the rich happy.

The talks about a government coalition in Britain have seen arguments about everything—except the need to impose cuts.

As the BBC’s economics editor Robert Peston put it, “Investors want a stable government perceived to be tackling the record public sector deficit in a serious, substantial way.

“Only in those conditions will they continue to lend cheap money to the state.”

Giving in to this disgusting blackmail will only encourage more demands.

When politician after politician speaks about “the national interest”, they mean the interests of those who own and control industry and those who move trillions around the money markets.

While the bosses and their tame MPs want a coalition for cuts, we need a coalition of resistance.

Workers need to support each other and coordinate their strikes. Trade unionists, students, the unemployed and pensioners need to stand together.

We can’t let racism and anti-immigrant feeling divide us.

That means backing every fightback—especially high profile strikes like the ones at British Airways.

And it means organising networks of resistance and solidarity.

Fed by conditions of the British economy the 1976 anti-state anti police riots in South London set the stage of what was to come. The hated “Sus” law gave the police the power to stop and search anyone they wanted, a power they used to hassle young men and immigrants on the street often violently.

Following their fabulous “Tax Justice Goes Bananas” investigation last November into the tax practices of the world’s biggest banana companies, Britain’s Guardian newspaper has followed this up with another superb piece of work: an investigation into the tax tricks of Tesco, which the BBC has described as the UK’s first supermarket superpower.

The BBC asked: “how did this struggling store chain transform itself into a supermarket giant?” Their answers only told the obvious part of the story. The Guardian has given us the more interesting answer. Their headline story goes like this:

Tesco has created an elaborate corporate structure involving offshore tax havens which enables it to avoid paying what could be up to £1bn of tax on profits from the sale of its UK properties. The complex new structures uncovered by a six-month Guardian investigation include a string of Cayman Island companies, each named after a different colour, from aqua to violet. These are being used by the supermarket giant as it proceeds with its announced programme to sell and lease back £6bn worth of its UK stores.

A second story entitled “Every little bit helps” looks in more detail into Tesco’s tax gymnastics, setting up, for example, a “transparent tax vehicle” whose tax liabilities are incurred not by the partnership itself but by its 99.9% controlling partners - and those partners are two companies set up in the Cayman Islands. More contortions followed (read the story for the grisly details) and the net result was that “99.9% of the profits on the deals arose in the Cayman Island companies and are not liable to UK taxation.” An audio version is here.

The most worrying thing about tax avoidance is the corporate thinking it illustrates. Read this Guardian editorial on the issue, which explores these issues further.

There are many things we could say about this. The first is this: these issues drive a coach and horses through the prevailing debates on corporate responsibility. TJN’s position on corporate responsibility is this: corporate social responsibility should start with tax compliance. If corporations don’t pay their taxes, someone else has to pay them, and they gain an unfair advantage - in effect, a subsidy - that does nothing to enhance competitive markets. (Richard Murphy’s recent comment article explains more.) Vince Cable of the Liberal Democrat party, who always has interesting things to say, agrees:

Tesco’s behaviour makes a complete nonsense of any claims that it makes about corporate social responsibility. The Government must also answer why British dependent territories are being allowed to offer large-scale tax avoidance schemes at the expense of the Treasury. If Germany can crack down on Liechtenstein, why can’t Britain do the same with territories for which it is directly responsible?”

Tesco, in response, said it had a duty to organise its affairs in a “tax-efficient” manner. These are weasel words (read what Richard Murphy has to say about this euphemism for tax avoidance here.) John Christensen, director of the Tax Justice Network, said:

When Tesco directors talk about operating as “tax-efficiently” as possible they demonstrate a lack of corporate responsibility and a lack of commitment to the communities which sustain their profits. Aggressive tax planning through offshore structures also provides the big supermarket groups with a financial advantage that is not available to their smaller competitors, further tilting the playing field away from fair and competitive markets. The government needs to act decisively to counteract this regressive trend.

The directors of Tesco claim in their corporate responsibility statement that they use their size and success to be “a force for good” in the communities where they operate. Their aggressive tax planning shows their intentions to be the exact opposite.

John remembers the annual corporate responsibility conference at the Royal Institute for International Affairs in London in 2004. He had prepared himself by wading through the corporate responsibility statements of 150 companies worldwide, and found the word “tax” in only two - without relevant detail. So he stood up and asked: “Would the panelists tell the audience what position their Boards take on paying tax in the countries where they operate?” - followed by one of the most uncomfortable silences he can remember, pregnant with accusing glares. It is time for companies to mention the unmentionable word in their corporate responsiblity statements.

Various stories have been emerging recently about how little tax companies pay. Tesco is right to claim that it is not the only company playing these tax tricks: we have already noted how other British firms, as well as Dutch ones, get out of paying tax . (Perhaps we should call Tesco a “Transparent Tax Justice Vehicle” - highlighting how Tesco’s main purpose in this case is not so much as a direct target as a vehicle allowing the Guardian to tell a wider story about corporate tax abuse and the structures that encourage and facilitate it.)

In the United States, there has also been much discussion about how the retailing giant Wal-Mart has been using its own nefarious tax tricks to minimise its taxes. In Wal-Mart’s case, the issue was partly about whether what it was doing was legal: for one of its tax tricks, for example, a North Carolina judge ruled that it was not. The Guardian is not accusing Tesco of acting illegally. But the key point here is that this question of legality is not the point.

It is now time to change people’s mindsets so that they no longer think that what is legal is OK and what is illegal is beyond the pale. Both kinds of abuse are unacceptable. Tax havens are central to our concerns. And, as another Guardian story today points out, we are seeing the start of a major global backlash against these pernicious jurisdictions.

Racism, according to the New Labour communities secretary John Denham, is on the decline. The government’s progress in promoting racial equality in the last decade is, he argues, substantially responsible for this state of affairs. Denham’s claim is astonishing in light of a documented rise in the incidence of racism in the UK, the growth of support for the far right BNP, the emergence of violent street gangs under the rubric of the English Defence League (whom Denham himself has compared to Mosley’s British Union of Fascists), the reappearance of anti-immigrant politics in labour disputes such as at the Lindsey oil refinery, and the extraordinary increase in media-led hostility towards Muslims.

Anti-racists are not as sanguine as Denham. The Guardian journalist Gary Younge argues that the last decade has witnessed a sharp regression, as “the shift in emphasis from race to religion and from colour to creed and culture” has grafted “old views on to new scapegoats”.

Younge’s analysis is much more convincing than Denham’s, though the shift to creed and culture can be traced back further to the New Right’s agenda on race relations, a major inspiration in the career of Enoch Powell. As we shal see, racist ideologies have always had a concern with creed and culture.

Yet the acceleration of this shift, and the novelties of racism in contemporary Britain, need to be registered if anti-racists are to be effective. A number of important transformations are taking place in terms of the intellectual justifications for racism, and its targets. If creed and culture have come to the fore, so have ideas of nationality and citizenship that do not neatly correspond to older ideas of race concerned with biology and skin colour. The targets of anti-immigrant hostility are not necessarily black, and those engaged in racism towards Muslims are not automatically hostile to all black Britons. That fact alone confuses the discussions of racism and gives racists an important alibi. Many of those vilifying Muslims will earnestly explain that they hold no brief for racists, and that they only intend to defend human rights or “British values” from a culture that violates them. They will often add that Muslims aren’t a “race”, as if this resolved the controversy.

The “war on terror” is a proximate cause of much of this racism. However, the temptation to reduce the question of Islamophobia to a
sub-narrative of the “war on terror” is one that must be avoided. Racism towards Muslims pre-dates 9/11 and the ensuing warmongering, and is not necessarily tied to pro-war opinion. It has far more to do with domestic social processes than a singular focus on the “war on terror” would allow. In fact, if socialists are to resist the far right, they will have to come to terms with the way in which they articulate a right wing anti-war sentiment in seeming opposition to their traditionally imperialist ideology. This is related to a displacement within racist ideas in the post-colonial era in which aggressive global white supremacism was replaced by defensive white nationalism.

Nor does cultural chauvinism towards Muslims stop at the boundaries of Islam. Anindya Bhattacharyya has usefully characterised Islamophobia as the “cutting edge” of contemporary racism in that it carves out a path for older forms of racism to once again emerge in mainstream culture.

Segments of liberal opinion have adopted the New Right’s agenda on race relations, often swallowing wholesale the culturalist arguments on immigration and citizenship that were crafted in opposition to multiculturalism. The centre-left has also increasingly embraced the idea of a progressive nationalism. In a way that mirrors the New Right, they hold that social solidarity and cultural diversity are opposing aims.

Following the lead set by Gordon Brown, they have set out to develop a liberal account of “British values” that could underpin social solidarity. This has all too often led to a prosecutorial attitude to Muslims, the rationale being that “Britishness” includes respect for feminism, human rights and “Enlightenment values”, all of which are supposedly at odds with Islam, or at least with immoderate manifestations of it. Again liberal complicity in such cultural chauvinism is not as outlandish as it may appear.

As conventional forms of racism are revived on the basis of Islamophobic cultural essentialism, there has been a notable attempt to revive old racist terms of abuse. Strictly Come Dancing presenter Bruce Forsyth defended the use of the word “Paki” by contestant Anton Du Beke, averring that “at one time the Americans used to call us limeys, which doesn’t sound very nice, but we used to laugh about it. Everybody has a nickname.” Again, when Ron Atkinson referred to black Chelsea player Marcel Desailly as a “lazy thick nigger”, he was defended by sports commentator Jimmy Hill who said that such comments were just “fun”.

It is probably no coincidence that such terms, whose function is to normalise racist behaviour, should be so aggressively championed just as the recorded incidents of racist harassment and violence increase. The statistics are damning. In 2005 it was reported that racial incidents had more than quadrupled in England and Wales from 13,151 in 1996-7 to 52,694 in 2003-4. Of the latter figure, more than 35,000 were characterised as “serious” and included wounding, assault and harassment

For most people, the word poverty brings up images of impoverished countries in Africa and Asia, not many people however think about the UK and western countries as places where poverty exists.

In the UK poor families have £90 ($138) to live on for a week, this has to pay rent, bills, food, and tax. Very often these people get into problem through no fault of their.

In 2007/08, 13½ million people in the UK were living in households below this low-income threshold.  This is around a fifth (22%) of the population.

Over the last decade, the poorest tenth of the population have, on average, seen a fall in their real incomes after deducting housing costs.  This is in sharp contrast with the rest of the income distribution, which, on average, has seen substantial rises in their real incomes.  The richest tenth of the population have seen much bigger proportional rises in their incomes than any other group.

It actually hurts me to think that so many people are so close to becoming poor, its a fine line between poverty and living comfortably, no party in the UK is addressing this problem that we have and it sadens me greatly. Why is this a problem, this is the evil twin of capitalism.