 English Radicals are disgusted by the actions of the two sides in the BA dispute: Chief Executive, Willie Walsh, grins like a Cheshire cat as he contemplates the freehand he will get to sack and bully his workforce following the Unite union’s decision to go on strike; while for their part, Unite leaders are less interested in the future for their members than they are about dictating the future of the Labour party. Both sides in this dispute have clear goals: Walsh was brought in to BA to prune its workforce and turn it into a flying version of Netto. Whilst the Unite leaders want rid of the New Labour leadership and beating up the flying public on the eve of a General Election was the obvious weapon of choice. Sadly, it is the BA workforce, bullied by the management and by the union, and the general public who want to fly, who are the innocent victims of this Left versus Right industrial battle. Many people have commented on how this ‘Spring of Discontent’ is like some throwback to the 1980s and, in some ways, they are right. Like then there are industrial leaders who want to shed jobs in a time of recession, regardless of the poverty and hardship this will cause for their workforce. And also, like then, the workforce was part of a trade union that had political motivations as its primary goal, rather than the welfare of its members. Sadly, this is always going to be the case when our businesses are part of global corporations and our unions are run by extremists. The BA workers have a strong argument; BA’s problems are not caused by the workforce but by the decisions made over recent years by its management, yet it is the workforce who will pay the price by losing their jobs, or by working longer hours for less money (and won’t that be a comfort for you when you’re half way across the Atlantic?). But, and it is a big but, being right doesn’t get you anywhere if you are badly led and badly advised. The miners were right in the 1980s, but they were lions who let themselves be led by a donkey called Arthur Scargill, a man more interested in bringing down a government than in protecting his members jobs. And so it is with Unite, they are led by men who want to bring down Gordon Brown and the New Labour leadership, even if that means losing the General Election and, therefore, allowing into power a party that would decimate the public and private sector workforce in order to maximise the profits of its global capitalist backers. The sad fact is that the BA workforce should have given greater consideration to guerrilla action against BA management rather than taking on Walsh AND the public with a strike. They should also have examined the motives of their union leadership and not allowed themselves to be cannon fodder in the class warfare ambitions of a pair of Marxist losers like Derek Simpson and Tony Woodley. Crucially, the union leaders have failed to bring out the majority of their members and have left those on the picket line at the mercy of Willie Walsh’s axe. However, before the public blame the workforce for this strike, they should also examine the actions of Willie Walsh. He has deliberately set out to provoke a strike regardless of how this will affect the general public. He’s been clever. He knows that, with a General Election due, he will get the support of both major parties. Whilst, for their part, the travelling public will obviously support him (solidarity with a bullied workforce will be low on the priority list of a modern ‘me-first’ society). And so, after this strike, he will be unopposed when he sets out to decimate the workforce and trample on its working conditions. English Radicals believe that companies such as BA would be better-off being owned by their workforce rather than by global corporations who can hire hit men like Walsh to duff up the workforce and make the customers lives difficult. Furthermore, co-operative businesses would not require the presence of obnoxious Marxist-led unions, whose sole reason to exist is to bring chaos and disorder to our lives. The BA strike is a primary example of how Capitalism and Socialism cause hardship and disruption to our society, there has to be a better way of doing things. CLICK HERE TO RETURN TO HOME PAGE & WEBSITE MENU Add Comment PROFITS & PARTNERSHIPS 06/17/2010
 In the depths of the worst recession for decades (thanks, Gordon!), a retail company – one of the hardest hit sectors of all – recently announced its employees are set to share a £140 million bonus pot, equivalent to eight weeks pay each, and are set to announce strong full year results. What is the name of this remarkable company that has managed to make money in such difficult conditions, when other retailers are going under? The John Lewis Partnership. The unusual thing about this company? It is a workers co-operative. All 68,000 staff are motivated to work well and efficiently, knowing their performance and ideas will have a direct result on John Lewis profits, and with it their own bonus payments. This is what capitalism should be all about – workers owning the company they work for, making and sharing the profits, rather than handing them over to remote share-holders who may pull out at any time and destroy the livelihoods of many people, if they get the chance of slightly more profit elsewhere. Now, profit is a reasonable motive to invest money – without the profit motive, there is little point in starting a business in the first place. The problems arise when people who do not have a direct, intimate connection with the business are the ones who own it. The global capitalist elites would have us believe that their great wealth makes them the natural choice to own businesses – an “Officer” class, if you like - while we should be content playing the part of cannon fodder in the war that is commerce. It is high time the English people woke up and realised these “elites” and the “Free Market” (the option to close a factory in England and use slave labour in the Far East) will be the economic death of us. The only people who care about us, is us. The John Lewis model is surely the way forward in these difficult times: virtually any company would run more efficiently if the employees were the owners, actively implementing efficiencies and new ideas, unlike the present situation at shareholder owned businesses where the workforce merely turn up for work and perform like robots, doing only what they are told, and no more. There is no outlet for creativity in such an environment, which leads to frustration and apathy – not a good recipe for productivity, I think you'll agree. And imagine how different things would be at the Corus steelworks in Teeside, or the Cadbury plants around the country, if these enterprises were owned by the workers themselves, and could not be bought off like the original shareholders were? They would still be in business, making things, producing wealth for England, instead of wondering how long their redundancy pay will last. The English Radicals believe that global capitalism has failed England, we see in this country and elsewhere how production and wealth is shifting eastwards, leaving us without work and income: we also believe socialism is wrong, as State ownership of all property and means of production is a dictatorship, and ultimately doomed to collapse, even as it did in Russia. We ask people to consider Distributism, a system that promotes business ownership, not by the idle rich or the State, but by the workforce - as co-operatives. Staying with the rotating system of capitalism and socialism guarantees a bleak future either of poverty or slavery. Don't we and our children all deserve better than that? CLICK HERE TO RETURN TO HOME PAGE & WEBSITE MENU DAWNING OF A NEW ERA 06/17/2010
 What will happen after the forthcoming General Election? England will still be locked within the three party system, it will still be dictated to by the EU, it will still be economically steered by failed economic systems that entrap the people instead of allowing ordinary folk opportunity and fairness. To put it simply in five years time absolutely nothing will have changed!Therefore is it not time to think out of the box and look beyond the tribal ritual of the three main parties and beyond the corrupt and failed systems nearly all other political parties promote.When we look at the dreadful state our country is in, with its dire economic and social problems as well as the surrendering of our sovereignty to Europe, now, probably more than at any other time in our history, there is a need for the election of a radical but not extreme alternative to deal with our country’s woes. There is a desperate need to help build a party that fills this void on the political landscape, and offer the electorate a radical yet non-extremist alternative. The only party offering a true alternative is the English Radical Alliance (ERA).We are in favour of withdrawal from the EU but we are an insular thinking party as our critics may claim. If anything those that favour our membership of the EU are insular thinking in excluding much of the economic and trading opportunities beyond Europe. ERA would retain trading links and co-operation with Europe as well as recreating links with the commonwealth and other countries in the free world. But more importantly we would help rebuild the English economy, English industry and protect it from unfair foreign competition. Our vision of rebuilding English industry is not based on the capitalist principle of selling the workforce of England to mass multinational corporations. Our vision is based on the Distributist principle of helping to fund and teaching our people to create businesses, to encourage co-operatives and to secure jobs in England for the people of England. That means bringing to an end the open door policy of companies being allowed to relocate abroad and the influx of cheap foreign labour to our shores.ERA also seeks independence for England. Since devolution to the other home nations the UK has slowly began to disintegrate. Some of you may remember the famous Tory party posters of the 1979 general election stating ‘Labour isn’t working’ and showing a long line of unemployed people. We could easily display similar posters claiming ‘The UK isn’t working’ and show a long line of English taxpayers money going to fund the Scots Parliament and Welsh and Northern Irish Assemblies.Once again, though we seek an independent England, we are not an insular thinking party. We are not anti-Scottish, anti-Wesh, anti-Irish. Out of the remnants of the UK, four proud and independent home nations shall emerge and become part of a Council of the Isles. This will provide independence, trade and co-operation between the home nations, yet contain none of the financial unfairness and social inequalities of the present UK.Beyond the tribal ritual of the three main parties there are others, the Green Party, UKIP, Liberal Party, English Democrats and the BNP being the main players, plus a few socialist parties. Yet each of these parties either favours our continued membership of the EU and eventual demise into part of a European superstate, or supports the continuation of the UK with its financial unfairness and second class treatment of English citizens. Only ERA offers radical but not extreme policies, a new economic philosophy, the immediate withdrawal from the EU and the only solution to the unfairness of the present dis-United Kingdom. In the forthcoming General Election, because we are a young party we are concentrating our efforts on just one constituency – that being Liverpool Wavertree. However the time has come to build our radical party for the whole nation! CLICK HERE TO RETURN TO HOME PAGE & WEBSITE MENU  MAJOR PARTIES LINE UP TO MAKE CUTS Labour, Tories and Liberal Democrats, they’re all raring to get stuck into making cuts, each competing over the where and the how, but glossing over what these cuts mean and, more importantly, why they are needed. What do they really mean by cuts? They mean sacking tens of thousands of public service workers, and so adding to the public debts via social security payments and loss of tax revenue, and adding to everyone’s problems by reducing services in hospitals, schools, council services and government departments. But of course those in power, and their business friends won’t be affected by any of that, will they? More importantly they forget to mention the reason why these cuts have to be made. In the past twelve months the government has transferred a massive amount of taxpayers money to the banks, most of whom are based overseas and whose debts are also overseas. Many of those banks have rewarded the taxpayer by sacking thousands of their workers and forcing the public to pick up the bill in benefits payments, and increasing the interest rates on loans and mortgages. Since the present financial crisis hit us, over a million people have joined the unemployment lists, and now, thanks to the proposed cuts in public services, many more are now set to join them. But these cuts are not only immoral, they are also unnecessary. Instead of cutting funds to hospitals and schools why not cut our subsidies to the European Union? Instead of cuts to the emergency services why not cut our subsidies to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland? Instead of pumping more money into the banks why not use that money to create jobs (and taxpayers) in our dwindling manufacturing industries. For let us never forget the irony in all of this, that the people who claimed that subsidising peoples’ jobs was not on, are the same people who clambered to subsidise the bankers. It’s time they stopped conning the people of England into financing the millionaire lifestyles of Mandelson's and Cameron’s friends and, instead, defended the jobs and services of this country, before we become a Third World banana republic? CLICK HERE TO RETURN TO HOME PAGE & WEBSITE MENU  SNOW WAY TO RUN A COUNTRY On Tuesday 5th January many towns and cities in the country ground to a halt, people were stranded in the workplace because there were no buses; car journeys that normally took ten minutes, became rally events of three or four hours; schools and public buildings closed (for ‘elf and safety of course!), and supermarket shelves emptied of basic food supplies. By Wednesday many people were discovering ‘the community’ and, more particularly, they discovered that they had a butchers, grocers and newsagents just around the corner from where they lived. Shock, horror! And all this time we didn’t know, we thought life meant ASDA or Tesco or Waitrose (fill in as applicable..........). In some local areas the big bus companies immediately cancelled all services, leaving their ‘customers’ stranded at their places of work, or unable to get to hospital appointments (yet, interestingly, many of the smaller operators provided at least a skeleton service). And all because of a few inches of snow! But worse was to follow, by the weekend of the 9th/10th grit supplies were running low and central government had taken over from the phoney regional government in controlling its distribution to local authorities across the country. Imagine that, Gordon Brown controlling our grit, could things get much worse? Well, the Government Office for the North West, a Soviet-inspired, and unelected, EU body, was accused of diverting Merseyside’s grit supply to Manchester and therefore Liverpool council had to ‘borrow’ grit from Wirral council, so when the regional Soviet fouls things up obviously it’s time for the central Soviet to take over. What the present winter event has surely taught us is that there should, in future, be more emphasis on local networks and less on centralised planning. If local government had more control over raising its own funds then it would have more control over purchasing supplies of grit salt, and snowploughs, and where and when to deploy them, after all the local authority tends to know more about the vulnerability of specific areas and communities and can plan accordingly. And councils could then liaise with community groups and residents associations to protect the elderly and vulnerable, supplying them with shovels and supplies of salt as required. Similarly, if there were better incentives for people to use local shops (by taxing the superstores according to product lines and forcing them to charge for parking as part of carbon tax) then the sense of community spirit people have just discovered recently (no doubt there will be articles about this by the ‘professional middle class’ journalists in the Times!) would be engendered all year around. And with this sense of community would come more enthusiasm for joining with neighbours to clear side roads and pavements, supported by well-run community/residents associations freed from ‘elf and safety Gestapo. Transport should also come under local authority control so that services can be delivered to the workplace and local hospital, and ensure smooth running during these so-called winter events. The same with gas and energy supplies, once run by the local borough (and at a profit they ploughed into public transport), these too can be de-centralised to local authorities or combinations thereof. Where will the money come from for all of this, I can hear you all say? Well, look at the obscene profits now being made by energy companies. Look at the obscene subsidies we now pay to the bus and train companies (they pocket the profits, we pick up their debts, just like the banks). Why isn’t that money being ploughed into local services, instead of buying luxury homes in the Caribbean for their directors? But, and most important of all, we must get back to encouraging local food supplies, as we’ve already outlined elsewhere on this website, so that our local shops are kept supplied, without the need for haulage across the country, or worse, imports that make us vulnerable to the vagaries of prices and supplies. We hear all the major political parties witter on about the environment, and about localism, yet none are willing to put their money where their mouth is and really tackle the problems that we face by getting rid of their Soviet-style central planning and getting back to the traditional English way of doing things – locally. Let us turn things on their head and start at the local level for taxation, government, business, banking, services, and then link that to a local network of farming/fishing and food supplies, encouraging smallholdings and allotments in our towns. This is the radical idea whose time has come and from a radical English movement that is ready to challenge the major parties and offer the people an alternative way of life, not just an alternative party to vote for. CLICK HERE TO RETURN TO HOME PAGE & WEBSITE MENU   ROYAL MAIL NOT FOR SALE SAYS ERA The English Radical Alliance pledges its support for all those campaigning to prevent the privatisation of the Royal Mail postal service. The party believes current so called 'modernisation' proposals are in reality a means to privatising Royal Mail and would lead to poorer postal delivery services for households and businesses. Later deliveries and proposed additional charges for early morning deliveries would have a detrimental effect on the economy and small businesses inparticular. English Radical opinion is that this is sheer economic madness and is yet another government and EU inspired initiative that will only see large coprporate businesses benefit at the expense of small businesses, households and the postal workers themselves. ERA beleives the Royal Mail is a postal SERVICE, a service to the nation and not designed to make a profit. This is something that has been forgotten in this one size fits all, big is best corporate capitalist inspired world. Being a postal service, English Radicals are of the opinion that the best service possible should be provided. This would mean re-instating early morning and possibly second deliveries. Whilst it is agreed the Royal Mail is a national service, ERA would like to see a return to more locally managed service and would investigate ways of reopening local sorting officers adjacent to Post Offices to deal with second deliveries. Though this may be an expensive option it is felt by distributing the pay structure and positions from the present fat cat national management to local services and the delivery workforce this can be achieved. What cannot be accepted is our postal service becoming yet another statistic on the table of English companies being sold off to foreign investors and asset strippers. Sadly this is exactly what will happen if nothing is done about it! 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