This article in The Socialist is by Sarah Welch, West Sussex Socialist Party
The link is here
In 2019-20, the former chief executive of the Tory council in West Sussex received a £265,000 exit package. Financial statements for 2020-21 reveal three more large payouts.
The executive director for adults and health received £110,473. The former director for communities received £88,358. And another received £34,000.
In total, 43 exit deals cost the council £1.1m in 2020-21. The cost for 2019-20 was roughly the same for almost double the number of exit packages at 81.
There have been large payouts to recruitment agencies. Hamptons Resourcing received £173,400 and McLean Partnership received £249,423.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Millions of pounds of taxpayers' money just wasted.
We are waiting to hear what cuts are being made to our service, adult social care. We think it will be over £2 million. The council constantly tells us that it has no money, and has "difficult decisions to make".
In 2018, I was part of a campaign group fighting to keep my son's centre open. We attended one of the council committee meetings. When they adjourned for lunch and we walked through the dining area, we saw their five-star buffet, including waiter service and wine.
Our local paper, Chichester Observer, has pointed out that the only other West Sussex residents in receipt of free food are some school children dependent on their parents' benefit levels. They only receive £15 supermarket vouchers a week in school holidays.
The council's gluttony is an insult to the people who have just had their Universal Credit cut, and all those that have been forced to use food banks. It's yet another example of the greed and mismanagement at the top.
We need an end to cuts, and democratic workers' control to run the services that we all need.
The Tories should not be called ‘dodgy’ by Zarah Sultana.
I withdraw the word ‘dodgy’, how about ‘suspect’/‘crooked’/‘shifty’/‘dicey’ or ‘knavish’? Just call them ‘Tories.’
"Dulce et Decorum Est pro Patria Mori" was a phrase they taught public
school boys. "It is sweet and fitting to die for your country." or
better yet get your servants to go off and die on your behalf
obviously.
DULCE ET DECORUM EST
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . .
.
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Wilfred Owen
8 October 1917 - March, 1918
--
http://derekmcmillan.com/
"Last week, Unite's policy conference in Liverpool took a major step to
challenging pro-austerity councils and budgets. A motion proposed by the
union's local authority section leadership included:
"Conference is therefore extremely concerned, disappointed and our
members are angry that Labour Councils continue to make cuts and
privatise our services. We also note the negative role played by Labour
councillors on the boards of organisations which tender for services.
Conference agrees that Unite must now adopt a policy calling on Labour
Councils to set legal, balanced no cuts needs based budgets."
Unite throws down the gauntlet. And TUSC, which has led the way in
calling for no cuts, needs-based budgets, is now preparing the widest
challenge of anti-austerity candidates for May 2022.
Those local elections, scheduled to take place on Thursday, May 5th
2022, are for all 32 unitary councils in Scotland and the 22 single-tier
authorities in Wales. In England, there are scheduled elections for all
32 London borough councils, 34 Metropolitan district councils, and 82
district councils.
Also on the same day, there will be Mayoral elections in Watford and the
London boroughs of Hackney, Lewisham, Newham and Tower Hamlets. The
South Yorkshire Metro-Mayor position established in 2018 is also up for
election in May 2022.
The local elections in Scotland, Wales, London and Birmingham – and
Harrogate, Huntingdonshire, Newcastle-under-Lyme and South
Cambridgeshire – are ‘all-up’ contests, with every councillor up for
election, usually in multi-seat wards. Most other elections will be for
one-third of the councillors in single-seat contests but some may be
‘all-up’ elections following ward boundary changes or council
reorganisation.
Of the 202 councils holding elections next May, 88 are currently
Labour-led, with Labour holding an overall majority or are the largest
party in a coalition administration.
There are still ongoing boundary reviews and council re-organisations to
be factored in, but a current estimate is that May 2022 will see 6,751 councillors elected in 3,949 wards, a bigger electoral test in terms of local council seats to be contested than in 2021.
TUSC agents, and potential TUSC agents, are invited to this
important briefing meeting on Wednesday which will deal with some of the
practical organisational tasks needed for the People's Budget campaigns
and the preparation for the 2022 elections.
More information on People's Budgets and full listings of the 2022 elections are available at:
https://www.tusc.org.uk/txt/450.pdf (Preparing a People's Budget)
https://www.tusc.org.uk/txt/451.pdf (Campaign Pack)
https://www.tusc.org.uk/txt/448.pdf (Directory of Elections)."
Today I found a number of my books being sold second hand on eBay.
The link is here
Three bookshops are now selling my books on eBay and then there is "Socialist Books" who sell online but not through eBay.
Sir David Amess was assassinated today. The motives of the killer are not yet known.
However, assassination will only gather sympathy for right-wing Tories. Individual terrorism (if that is what this is) is politically naive. The police can use it as an excuse for repression.
Famously the Narodniks achieved their highest ambition by assassinating the Tsar. The result? Another Tsar and a wave of vicious reaction ensued.
Marxists oppose individual terrorism. Trotsky pointed this out over 100 years ago. The link is here
Sizewell C is expensive, costing £20+ billion, which could be invested in renewables such as offshore wind or hydrogen storage. The government said it was necessary to rob the poor of £20 off Universal Credit but there are billions to be thrown away on nuclear death traps.
This is not the time to be wasting money on a dangerous project.
Some people in Worthing object to the windfarm because in their minds it is an eyesore. At least it does not have the potential to blow us to kingdom come.
The ground around Chernobyl is still poisoned 35 years after the nuclear catastrophe. Is that what we want?
"We are here to start a nuclear war. Don't waste our time with one bloody death." is the attitude of the officers on HMS Vigil towards the hapless detective DCI Silva in the opening episodes of this BBC series.
The contempt of the military officers towards the police and towards the people of Scotland and civilians in general is made clear.
On paper the nuclear subs are there to defend the public. In practice the sinking of a trawler is just a nuisance to be hushed up and who cares if the rank and file die?
The people of Scotland resent the fact that the Westminster government has pinned a nuclear target on their backs. Any government and any terrorist group who wants to attack the Trident subs will endanger Scottish lives. Perhaps that is just the way the Tories like it.
This is the background to a story which has all the hallmarks of "Line of Duty" and it is every bit as gripping.
The idea of a murder mystery set on a submarine is the ultimate "locked room" mystery and this is an excellent detective story.
Vigil is well worth a watch.
Now that Richie Rishi is talking about making pensioners pay for the pandemic, it is worth recalling the real wealth distribution in society.
The 2020 Credit Suisse Global Wealth report makes for interesting reading.
Released at the end of October last year, it revealed that the top one percent of households globally own 43 percent of all personal wealth, while the bottom 50 percent own only one percent.
Successive governments have done nothing to alter this state of affairs.
You can learn a lot about the Russian revolution and its genesis from this book and it is easy to read.
The translation is by Max Eastman and it is a work of literature in its own right.
This book gives a chilling insight into the mind of a murderer. It also deals with the issue of internet trolls – so called because they dwell in the darkness of anonymity. Val McDermid more straightforwardly refers to them as “bawbags”.
Trolls rapidly move from insults or comments within the normal range of free speech to horrific threats couched in the vilest possible terms.
In this work of fiction the police are able to combat this new crime. In real life it will take them a while to catch up.
It is written in a unique style and the audio version, which is narrated by Saul Reichlin is also excellent.
"The struggle for socialism is necessarily international.
Right back in the period of the Paris Commune, the movement in Paris found an echo around the world and scared the pants off the capitalist class.
It is from the Paris Commune that the First International emerged. It was superceded by the Second International which developed in a period of growth of capitalism.
As a result the leaders of the International began to believe that capitalism could be reformed. As a result the largest of the Social Democratic Parties, in Germany capitulated to their own ruling class, effectively voting for the first world war.
The third international was a recognition that the Russian revolution needed to develop internationally. Again the German Social democrats betrayed the movement of the workers in Germany and stopped the Russian revolution spreading.
This facilitated the development of Stalinism in the USSR and led to the development of Trotsky's fourth international.
This work is continued by the Committee for a Workers' International."
(Nick Chaffrey at the Southern and South Eastern Regional Conference of the Socialist Party)
My
friend Google thinks that "essays on works of art or literature" should
be included in the category of non-fiction books. So this is the list
of my seven non-fiction books
Classroom Teacher Manual
Death Agony of Capitalism
Letters to Lara
Socialist Reviews
The Concept of Evil
The Role of the Hero
Xavier's Cook Book
Brevity now has a page on Facebook
"Brevity" is our best-selling audiobook. Actually, it is our only audiobook but its success has been a pleasant surprise. People may not have CD players in the home but many cars and many laptops have CD players.
Not many writers have a printing press in the shed but producing an audiobook only takes a computer, a decent mike and a program such as "Audacity" which is free and open-source.
There are professional readers available for hire but I chose to read myself because I am very cheap 
We visited the Goring Folly.
I can recommend this to anybody.
The folly itself is the fanciest garden shed in history, a very small medieval castle. The garden is home to a large number of dogs. They are made from everyday materials, nails, knitting needles etc and they do not bite.
This book is a factual account of crimes committed in Croydon. It stretches back to the century before last. Two things seem strange to modern readers. People run out of the house and find a policeman almost immediately. People call the doctor and the doctor comes round to the house. Not these days!
In some cases, the murderer's identity will never be known but there are some suspects for the reader to consider.
In some cases the murderer is caught red handed and confesses to the crime on the spot so there is no need for a detective to exercise the little grey cells.
One interest for me was the number of locations in Croydon which I recognised but had no idea they had been crime scenes. The other books in the series, which cover 17 locations, would be of interest to locals for the same reason.
One crime will be familiar to many people. It has been the subject of a number of books and a TV series. The Craig and Bentley case is treated fairly and even-handedly in the final story in this book.
Overall, this is a very interesting read but it is about real life so it does not have the neat resolution you would get from a fictional detective story.
“Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Those sound like rights worth having. “The right to die” is the only right we will end up with unless we fight back.
Do we want to live in a country where elderly, sick or disabled people
are made to feel worthless and then offered the ‘right to die’?
Imagine this.
Someone goes into hospital with a serious illness. They declare that they would rather be dead. To accelerate the process, they stop eating.
Would you give them the “right to die”?
A month later the same person is sitting opposite me, eating, drinking and ridiculing the government. They have re-engaged with life.
Would you reconsider their “right to die”?
A disabled teacher once made this plea to a conference I attended, “The media are only interested in those who want to kill disabled people because that is a good story. They are not interested in those of us stubborn enough to want to live.”
The case for “mercy killing” or “assisted suicide” is that it should not be treated the same as cold-blooded killing for gain. It never is. Juries and judges have every right to deal sympathetically with such cases if they are genuine.
If someone faces a choice of a painful death or an end to that pain, it would make sense for society to invest in palliative care rather than leaving them no choice but mercy killing. As it is, hospices which care for the terminally ill are generally charities without serious state funding.
What is anathema is a change in the law, which is being sought by campaigners, which would make the lives of people with illnesses and disabilities worth less than those with healthy bodies. Being healthy can be a very temporary state by the way.
According to Age UK, “Do Not Resuscitate” agreements have been forced on vulnerable adults during the pandemic. Give the government the power of life and death over the disabled and sooner or later they will use it “in the public good” or “to save public money”.
We cannot be confident that the opposition would oppose them either.
It is not beyond our capability to create a society which people would not want to escape from but rather enjoy “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
The euthanasia machine, on display at the Science Museum, would allow all those old, sick and disabled people to quietly exercise their "right to die" so their place can be taken by (temporarily) healthy people.
It comes to something when former Tory MP John Bercow looks a great improvement on the leader of the Labour Party.
He has denounced Boris Johnson as "reactionary, populist, nationalistic and sometimes even xenophobic". The Labour leader has trodden a difficult path supporting a reactionary populist nationalistic and perhaps xenophobic prime minister. When Boris started hiding behind the union jack, I am sorry to say that Starmer followed suit.
The Labour leader seems to be too busy trying to look statesmanlike to do the job of an opposition leader and judiciously oppose the government policies over
* Fire and rehire
* The blatantly racist attack on EU nationals working in the UK.
* Serial incompetence in handling of the pandemic.
* failure to do anything about social care
* hypocritically clapping the NHS while offering an insulting pay deal to NHS staff.
* (I could go on!)
I took three main thoughts away with me from this book.
1) For Hegel the prime thing was the Idea, with a capital I, of the state. For Marx the prime thing was the material conditions from which the state arose.
2) Marx saw the class nature of the state. He believed that the working class could change society for good.
3) Religion is ' the heart of a heartless world' and for workers it was a means of escape from intolerable conditions. Here the famous phrase the opium of the people' comes in. The aim of Socialists is to create a society from which people do not wish to escape.
Incidentally, Hemingway said that cannabis was the opium of the people. It too is a means of escape.
I am pleased mass-murderer Ratko Mladic, who butchered 5,000 people in Srebrenica, has been sent to jail. Such a pity the USA and its allies are exempt from any punishment. Blair, Mandelson and Alistair Campbell walk free and are fawned on by the BBC.
The civilian death toll of the Iraq war has been estimated at a minimum of 110,000 and is probably much higher.
The Wikipedia link is here.
The fake story of "weapons of mass destruction" was used to convince members of the Parliamentary Labour Party to vote for war.
Blairites still crow about Blair's election victory but 110,000 deaths was not in his manifesto.
June Challenge
A children’s classic
July Challenge
A debut novel
August Challenge
A book based on real people or events
September Challenge
A banned book
October Challenge
A book recommended by a friend or librarian
November Challenge
A prize-winning book
December Challenge:
A book published this century
WILDCARD
Substitute any month of the challenge with any book from your to-read list!
I was saddened to see how working class voters in Brighton were reduced to voting for a middle class protest party. The policies of the Greens seem 100 times better than Keir Starmer's apology for a Labour leadership.
However there is now a working class alternative. Socialists have always been allies of the trade union movement. The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition is beginning the long march towards a party of the working class.
Will it be in my lifetime? Does that matter? The main thing is that TUSC are doing the right thing and however long it takes, capitalism is an immoral system and it is doomed.
I use Amazon.Mea Culpa. Mea Culpa. Mea Maxima Culpa.
I do, however, object to their continual attempts to trick me into paying a shedload of money to use Amazon Prime. And they do this to everybody.
Subsequently, I have received nuisance phone calls demanding money for Amazon Prime. Amazon is not responsible for this.
If they could stop trying to make people use bloody Prime it would be a start. Then start treating their employees with respect and stop attacking the unions. Just a few things!
Only kidding.
Starmer is saying Labour should go further right faster. He is just echoing Mandelson. Why on earth should anyone vote for Ersatz Tories when the real Tories are available?
North of the Border, Boris is in trouble. The probable majority in Holyrood will be for independence. Like a victorian Imperialist, Boris is asserting his divine right to rule Scotland whether those Scottish types want him to or not.
His arrogance will be his downfall.
One voter interviewed by the BBC voiced a common view. He voted Tory because he believed Boris Johnson's boast that the vaccine rollout was due to him (and of course to the twin gods of greed and capitalism).
The rollout of the vaccine was a victory for
the NHS. For any politician to claim credit will only increase
vaccine skepticism.
Tories voted against the founding of the NHS and trade-union-sponsored MPs voted solidly in favour.
The long march for a new workers' party continues!
Anyone who thinks voting Conservative is in their interests might ponder this little cartoon.
The BBC could not resist repeating the result of the Hartlepool election all morning. They also broadcast ad nauseum the statement of the candidate, Jill Mortimer, that this was "a vote for change."
It is a bit disingenuous to call this a vote for change. The Tories have been in Government for over a decade. It is a vote for more of the same - corruption and incompetence.
The Labour Right will use the result as a pretext to move the party closer to Tory policies.
Why should anyone vote for a Labour Party with Tory policies when they can have the resl Tories instead?
Nobody could confuse TUSC with the Tories ☺The long uphill battle for a working class party continues.
A
bit fanciful to picture Trotsky as St George but it must be galling to
the English Nationalists that St George was, in fact, Turkish and probably
had a Palestinian mother He is chiefly famous for something he could not possibly have done and he never visited England.
Happy St George's Day everybody!
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Derek-McMillan/e/B009FUXHWY
There are two things wrong with this sign.
It should either say "24-hour" or "at all times". To say both is otiose.
The other is a legal problem which has several answers.
Can random members of the public put up "NO PARKING" signs?
One argument is that if some are allowed then all are allowed so nobody can park anywhere except outside their own house.
Another is that nobody has a legal right to the parking space outside their own home unless the council has designated it as a reserved parking area.
The third, favoured by the makers of signs, is that anyone can put up a "NO PARKING" sign but nobody has to pay the slightest attention to it.
