Vote socialist on 1 May! SGUC leaflet for 24 April

Submitted by martin on 23 April, 2008 - 12:51 Author: SGUC
SGUC

The Socialist Green Unity Coalition - with 39 candidates standing under our umbrella in the local government elections on 1 May - gives our full support to the teachers and lecturers striking on 24 April.

We hope this strike will be the start of a strong campaign by the public sector unions which will beat back the New Labour government's plan to drive down real wages across the public sector for three years.

The current credit crisis shows the irrationality of the capitalist system, which puts economic decisions in the hands of a gang of speculators focused on short-term gain. It flags up the contradiction between production being based on social cooperation while the gain and the decision-making power are with speculators. It highlights the flagrant inequality which the system generates when in expansion, and the equally flagrant inequality of "rescue" moves in crisis (billions of taxpayers' credit to help out Northern Rock and J P Morgan, but nothing for people losing their houses, or Northern Rock workers losing their jobs).

The Socialist Green Unity Coalition candidates will stand with every group of workers fighting back. They will raise the banner of a socialist alternative. We want the financial sector, and all the major concentrations of productive wealth, taken into public ownership under democratic and workers' control.

This will make decisions on where investment goes both transparent and democratically accountable. It will enable social equality. It will vastly increase the resources going into socially constructive purposes – instead of into of fees, bonuses, and pay-offs for "vulture capitalists".

Even the Financial Times, under the byline of Martin Wolf, notes: “Across the globe there has been a sizeable shift in income from labour to capital. Newly ‘incentivised’ managers, free from inhibitions, feel entitled to earn vast multiples of their employees’ wages. Financial speculators earn billions of dollars, not over a lifetime but in a single year... Democratic politics, which gives power to the majority, is sure to react against the new concentrations of wealth and income”.

That, though the Financial Times doesn’t say so, is why the new wave of neo-liberal social democrats, Blair, Brown and the rest, have systematically restricted democracy. New Labour, most conclusively through its 2007 decision to ban trade unions and local Labour Parties even from putting political motions to annual Labour Party conference, has cut the working class off from political representation.

The Socialist Green Unity Coalition unites a number of different socialist groups, each with its own distinctive policy and perspectives, round a joint core policy statement, and a common determination to restore a workers' voice in politics and to make the basic ideas of socialism available as an alternative.

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