fahrenheit451:117

You know that feeling of dread you get at the onset of what you know will be a migraine headache? The same sickening sense of foreboding is achieved by listening to what that humongously vapid and lacklustre straw man masquerading as the current leader of the British Labour Party has to say on the EU's " Freedom of Movement ". The impending sense of nausea he induces when evading the issue is all too palpable. It is also all too indicative of the 200 #LabourIn MPs' tawdry metropolitan PC ideology. For some reason, this antidemocratic, seditionist, parliamentary rabble and quite a large swathe of otherwise serious and rational people on the British " Left " think and behave and speak as if the ineluctable Laws of the Capitalist means of production,distribution and exchange , i.e. the totality of the Capitalist economic system has ceased to operate. Despite their voluble and disingenuous abusive harangues to the contrary, they e.g  most of Labour most of the time and most of the other " left " most of the time categorically deny the following.:- The basis of the laws of supply and demand are that the less you have of something,the higher the price of it inexorably is.The more you have of something the lower the price of that becomes.  Seriously,the operation of the capitalist system is really simple, that's why it works. 100 tons of potatoes might fetch a sum of say £1per ton; if only 1 ton of spuds became available, the price would rocket. An increase in the availability of labour in what is " a labour market " will overall lower the price of labour.A shoratge of labour would increase the price. Adam smith expounded on this Marx certainly knew that this is how our world operates. But not according to Corbyn or Slogans With Placards or any other amongst the dreck of failed PC multiculturalist neophytes who show off their faux-revolutionary,anticapitalist politics at Uni. Sad.  Unrestricted labour market competition is called freedom of movement. Utterly ghastly. Time for sovereign borders and tariff barriers and each nation State to its own.Time for autarky and higher wages. Time to smash the #EU to smithereens. And that Comrades is Revolutionary!

fahrenheit451:110

Ken Loach's current film , " I, Daniel Blake " has had a significant an impact as any film in the last 30 years. As someone who was wrongly sanctioned in 2015 by politically motivated scoundrels,thieves and liars ;a placement Charity, Interserve and DWP - I know what it feels like to get shat on from the great heights of a Stasified state apparatus. I won my Sanctions Appeal on October 1st 2015. I still maintain and refresh my dedicated facebook page ,#DansLaMerde which served as the fulcrum for a pretty effective social media campaign which I conducted from April 2015 when I was first denounced and recommended for punitive sanctions. Comments to a more recent report on the ineffectiveness and massive implementation expenses of the Benefits Sanctions Regime, argued that the very existence of foodbanks helps to encourage DWP staff to issue Sanctions against claimants. Two years ago  at thoughts.com ,kulturist no.446 on 8 December 2014, I addressed not too dissimilar concerns aired in Parliament.

The trouble with " moral outrage " is that you need to identify who in fact is generating it and what the supposed object of the " outrage " is.  People suffering  Hunger ; that's a good one to start with. In conditions more shocking than can be seen in Congolese refugee camps ; wow,that's another one. Let's complete the picture ; The Church of England and two of the three largest parties in parliament all agree on the aforementioned. Blimey, it's serious after all. The Daily ten plagues Mail asserts its usual place in the media ruck and maul of such issues with :-

" The all-party Commons group on hunger warned that some parents spend far too much money on cigarettes, alcohol, takeaways and other ‘non-essential items of expenditure’ because they lack basic budgeting skills.

Many more cannot cook even the simplest meals for their children – leaving them to go hungry.

The MPs call upon teachers to do more to report parents from chaotic households so they can receive help from ‘troubled families’ units.

However, they conclude: ‘We should not leave the duty resting with schools. Parents have duties, and these duties are not abated by the chaos resulting from their lifestyle.’

The report, Feeding Britain, is released today. Chaired by Labour MP Frank Field, the all-party group calls for:

• A new publicly funded body, also to be called Feeding Britain, to work towards a ‘hunger-free’ UK with the help of eight Cabinet ministers;
• Bigger food banks to distribute more free food, and advise how to claim benefits and make ends meet;
• A rise in the minimum wage, and the provision of free school meals to children even during school holidays;
• New measures to make it harder to withhold benefits, including ‘yellow cards’ instead of outright bans; and
• A request from the Government for food bank funding from Brussels.

As a Christian,revolutionary activist and campaigner I argue that it would be politically counter-productive and socially regressive to implement any single one of the five bullet points mentioned above.For in truth there is no food crisis ,there are no shortages.No-one is starving in Britain.Lost in their own little Narnia-worlds of soon-to-be-nice to one another again; heretics and traitors to the Reformation and heretics and traitors to the cause of Organised Labour are trying belatedly to save ,not the masses from further suffering,but rather the Ruling Elites from their own hubrisitc follies that have brought us all to the edge of something rather wonderful and exciting;not seen in this country or in Europe properly since the 1640's.
They act and posture naively , as if all of this has nothing at all to do with the inexorable logic of  the immutable historic Laws governing the accumulation and centralisation of Capital and the attendant and necessary socio-economic developments that accompany such remorseless economic Laws. The point of the global system of Usurer-Capitalism is the continuing,unabated and increasing exploitation and pauperisation of the mass of the proletariat and sub-proletariat as a natural consequence of the inherent and intrinsically dysfunctional division of wealth and appropriation thereof by the 1% Ruling Elites. Their sole purpose of all of this, is for their own self-gratification and self-aggrandisement ;the fulfilment of their immutable historic destiny of the 1% ; to utterly consume as much of  the planet's wealth irrespective of any implied social/humanitarian cost to the 99 % and the state of the planet itself. The point of exploitation is,as Orwell pointed out, exploitation.

 

fahrenheit451:095

Quite a lot of people, predominantly in academia and amongst the media Commentariat have been terribly upset recently by a thoroughly sound and common sense suggestion made by HMG's Home Secretary during the Tory party conference. Companies ought to publish data on the numbers of non-British workers in their employ.There was,headlined  in the relentless  24/7 media  environment a report of compulsion,which added a certain frisson to the original idea as floated. The egotistical rabble of Metropolitan domiciled,hard core eurozealots went into their customary righteous meltdown over a subject and an issue they have no real life,lived experience of nor even some remote understanding and empathy with. At present the previous non-announcement has been clarified; Companies won't have to make available any data on the composition of nationalities on their books. There, happy? well the antidemocratic,Seditionists of the eurozealot,anti-British, Remain campaign are not in business to seek contentment - all they want is to maintain unrestricted competition in the national labour market and to perpetuate falling wage levels and the marginalisation of British workers. Nominally UK based Job Agencies and their booming Zero Hours contracts goldrush can only become ever more rapaciously profitable if there is an endless supply of migrant labour as at present. There are of course, an infinite number of possibilities in any set of negotiations but usually the protagonists tend to stick to what they see as a handful of manageable options. How's this for one; which I originally emailed to my local/regional newspapers early in September :-

" A strong negotiating position would be that only citizens of EU member states prior to January 2004 ,might be eligible to apply for extended residency permits.This measure would provide a substantial corrective to the indiscriminate and unprecedented imbalances and disadvantages foisted on the UK  who in 1975 only previously consented to be part of a 6 member states group and nothing more."...

As any experienced competent negotiator knows, the process of negotiating tends to resemble a game of Poker.Bluff ,counter bluff and raising the stakes are intrinsic to the process itself. How skilled any side is, determines the likelihood of them getting most of what they want

A grasp of these rudimentary principles seem to be eluding our government as they near the time for invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty and so begin the  process of " Brexit "from the EU. Apart from the disillusioned euro-fanatics of the defeated Remain campaign, the consensus is that we want to maximise the advantages and benefits for the UK predicated on what are basic objectives - reasserting our sovereign control of our borders which entails ending the EU imposed diktat of free movement of labour. 

it does not bode well that,even before substantive talks begin, our future negotiating position is compromised by specious and ill formed public concessions to the defeatist agenda of the likes of LabourIn,most of whose 200 MPs are wildly out of step with their own constituents. Brexit need not be a long complicated process,nor does it have to be dragged out over the prescribed two years. It is axiomatic that in any given negotiation the side that is most determined wins. 

Rather than capitulate before  a card is dealt, let's declare a moratorium on  the moribund and no longer fit for purpose freedom of movement for labour. Given the 40+ years of economic and social depradations inflicted upon us by the EU, let's have a general reset on what are " guest workers " from the EU,whose rights have as of 23 June de facto been rescinded,A strong negotiating position would be that only citizens of EU member states prior to January 2004 ,might be eligible to apply for extended residency permits.This measure would provide a substantial corrective to the indiscriminate and unprecedented imbalances and disadvantages foisted on the UK  who in 1975 only previously consented to be part of a 6 member states group and nothing more.

Company lists could have been a pathway to a transparent and accountable system of managing what is,after all, the economic and social aftermath of a 40 year long tsunami.

fahrenheit451:088

GDP is the main measure of UK economic growth based on the value of goods and services produced during a given period.

My  " facts " are harder than your " facts ". That's about the infantile level of public political discourse in Britain regarding the actual state of the national economy. For years now the DWP ( Department of Workslavery & Penury ) has bleated on and on and on ad nauseam about the record numbers of people " in work ". Their latest stats put it at close to 32 million or something like that. Who cares? It really is Ministry of Truth stuff.  Great news citizens of Oceania, the chocolate ration has been increased! Wherein fact the hapless Winston Smith had just disposed of all written records showing that the chocolate ration had been in fact decreased only the previous year and  he had just consigned those records to the oblivion of the Memory Hole. And still the punitive-Sanctions imposing, human rights and human decency shredding DWP carry on announcing in triumphalist overtones ( ( weirdly reminiscent of the Argentine military junta of 1982 and its successes in the Falklands ) that more and more people are in work or have taken up self-employment. But in the end Capitalism has to maintain rationality and objectivity; if a business is doing badly and making losses or insufficient profits they do get found out and punished by the marketplace in the end. To be pedantic, companies do really need to sell whatever it is they are in business to sell. Governments and the political classes in general don't get this.Neither do the far from impartial,far from dispassionately objective civil service bureaucrats who manufacture propagandistic pigswill that wouldn't have passed for credible even in Maoist China. And so the declining and increasingly moribund western capitalist democracies are atrophying economically,socially and culturally.Insane, indiscriminate punitive social welfare regulations actually inflict quasi-legal punishment on citizens deemed not to be sufficiently actively,in the opinion of a bureaucrat,  "searching " for additional hours of work. There are no, ( how shall I phrase this bearing in mind pseudo-effete/genteel aspirational middle class sensitivities might be involved ?) fucking jobs,ok? geddit? Across the entirety of the , (the UK is still in there at the minute) 28 satrapies of the European Union,there are officially some 30 millions unemployed. The UK's apparent phenomenal jobs growth, which alas the more deluded Brexiteers are harping on about as being an indicator of some outworking of special economic thaumaturgy, is utter fantasy. Gross Domestic Product has barely recovered to its 2007 levels. There are now a million workers on zero hours contracts. Inner EU migration is still in full flow.Vast numbers from south of the Danube and east of the Oder are in effect continuing their colonisation of British society. The tyrannical European Union's great shibboleth of  " freedom of movement of labour " needs to be taken down. take that down, you take the entire EU down.

Footnote:-

On this day,September 15,1940,when that which was necessary for national survival was accomplished, the grandchildren  of those Heroes alas turned out unworthy of the inheritance and life which those Heroes had helped in securing.

fahrenheit451:057

In a fortnight's time Great Britain will be on the very cusp of a historic sea-change. A seemingly interminable EU Referendum campaign will be all but over. And yet one story has managed to upstage the whole EU-In/Out slanging match. Step forward Mike Ashley, the boss of Sports Direct. Ashley was called to give evidence before a Parliamentary Select Committee concerning issues over his Company, Sports Direct's treatment of workers, abuse of their employment and other Rights including illegal underpayment of wages. And boy did he get pilloried and rightly so. Pernicious, venal, boastful, unscrupulous, hectoring,  and mendacious to an astounding degree in full view of the Media and Public; all that Mr.Ashley was missing from his wardrobe to complete his self-authored caricature as a Victorian mill owner was the iconic top hat. Yet,what single characteristic of Mr.Ashley's management style and draconian behaviour toward his Company's employees differentiates him from every other similar CEO ? Quite simply none, at least none of any discernible significance. He simply is one capitalist bastard amongst a whole legion of capitalist bastards. Sports Direct business model with its use of,according to his own evidence, an 80% zero hours contract workforce and a workplace culture of fear,uncertainty and harassment is pretty much the universal benchmark across the logistics/warehousing sector as a whole. The only genuine surprise, from my own Activist's point-of-view, is just how much of a surprise, indeed startling and shocking revelation this has been portrayed as in the Media to the general Public. Kudos to the UNITE Union for spearheading a very long and arduous campaign against Ashley's High Street Empire. The Trades Union movement on the whole has alas, not effectively engaged with the spreading cancer of zero hours agency contracts,nor with the cold blooded business practices that all Agencies utilise with virtual impunity against the many millions of workers now wholly dependent on casualised precarious work. Ashley's antiquated, oppressive tyranny is a symptom and a pretty major one at that, but clearly what needs to be addressed and focused on is the cause of such heinous, inhumane, and demeaning conditions of employment being allowed to exist and take shape in the first place.