The Private Finance Initiative (PFI) was part of the Tories’ privatisation programme, originally opposed by the Labour Party but now embraced by them – because New Labour is now the main party of big business in Britain. Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) sound more “voter friendly” but they are much the same. Tony Blair has not only sucked up to George W Bush on the issue of Iraq but he puts forward similar economic policies too.
Private finance is enforced on governments in the European Union by the Maastricht criteria, which limit public spending. However, PFI is a big waste of taxpayers’ money in the long run, because companies always take a cut, can’t get as good interest rates as governments, and Withington Hospital will belong to them after 25 years! Brown pledged billions (of probably not new PFI money) for school rebuilding, to help big business. He is renowned for handling the economy well, and claims to have solved the problem of boom and bust (so painful for working class people under the Tories). However, he plans to spend £32 billion more than received this economic year even if his forecasts are correct (according to the Independent), so another recession must happen soon. Tory claims that they can cut £35 billion in public spending, while improving services and cutting tax, aren’t credible of course.
Compared to those figures, the £280 million extra that Blair has promised for school dinners (still a miserly 50p on ingredients for primary schools and 60p for secondary) is tiny, but the fact that the government were forced to shift at all was due to Channel 4 programme Jamie’s School Dinners. As Jamie Oliver pointed out, it is very uneconomic in the long term to feed school students junk food, due to the additional expenditure on the NHS and poor educational performance due to unruly behaviour, and uneconomic in the short term due to the massive health problems caused while they are young. Ending of minimum nutritional standards (to be finally reintroduced by Labour but not until September 2006), privatisation of the school meals service through compulsory competitive tendering and council spending cuts, under the Tories have led to the current problems. New Labour will not ban school vending machines. Contracts with junk food and drink companies and private caterers should be cancelled!
Bradley built
his career from campaigning against the threatened closure of Withington
Hospital by the Tories – then supported its closure by New Labour
Keith Bradley, the New Labour minister seeking re-election, built his career out of the “Save Withington Hospital” campaign, when the Tories threatened its closure. However, the Labour Party shifted rapidly to the right, and as it became obvious that they would support PFI and the closure of hospitals when in power, they closed that campaign down. Steve Wallis’ organisation, then called Militant Labour and later the Socialist Party, therefore set up the “Hands Off Withington Hospital” campaign, which kept the hospital open until it was finally reduced to a “community hospital” (glorified clinic) by New Labour. Bradley has not rebelled on any PFI or health-related bill. |
The Liberal Democrats are a big business party, like New Labour and the Tories, and have a mainly middle class base. They therefore call for the abolition of student fees, but say nothing at all about the grant that was abolished by the Tories to put off working class people going to university. We are in favour of scrapping all fees – particularly the top-up fees to be introduced by New Labour that will lead to working class students tending to go on the worse courses because they are cheaper. However, priority must be given to reintroducing a grant, so that working class students are no longer laden with many thousands of pounds of debt, or drop out due to poverty.
New Labour refuses to increase income tax levels, even on the very rich. They would have you believe that increasing income tax is unpopular, but it obviously isn’t if you only increase it for the richest in society. Instead, they have increased the levels of national insurance, which attacks low paid workers more than the better off, because there is a limit beyond which no further national insurance is paid. Due to the Tories’ attacks on the working class, granting token tax cuts to low paid workers and massive cuts for the rich, plus “stealth taxes” by both parties, the poorest 80% now pay a larger proportion of their income in tax than the richest 20%.
Senator John Kerry pledged to tax the rich and close all tax loopholes, when debating live with Bush. That is why the Republican Party had to defraud the US electorate and pretend that Bush won. Computers were used in the USA for voting, making fraud very easy. See www.socialiststeve.me.uk/us-electoral-fraud.htm for more details.
The rich should be forced to pay the level of tax that a government has decided they should pay, and tax loopholes should therefore be closed as soon as they are detected. This would put expensive accountants out of a job and threaten the capitalist system. In short, trying to implement this demand would lead to a socialist revolution!
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