Congratulations To Democracy

Finally, something good to report. Ed Miliband has become the new leader of the Labour Party. It would have been disastrous if his big brother David had won the election as all three leaders of the main parties would have been virtually identical. But now we have a distinctly different leader in Ed; someone who is principled rather than consumed by spin. It's unfortunate that it took the trade unions to get him the job - if it had been left to party members or MPs they would have handed it to David, the Tony Blair wannabe - but at least the right result was achieved in the end. And even though Ed would never admit to this himself, I hope he throws New Labour in the dustbin and goes back to a time before Blair changed the whole concept of what the Labour Party was meant to stand for, i.e. the working class. Incidentally, the voting system used in this election was the Alternative Vote, so let's hope people take that into consideration next year when we get to decide in a referendum on our general electoral system; AV is much fairer than Proportional Representation. But that issue can be discussed another time; for now, well done Ed!

Negotiation And Manipulation

Difficult Issues

The postal strikes are continuing unabated with no end currently in sight. The sides are now even becoming petty as the Royal Mail accuses the Communication Workers' Union of talking "cobblers"! The ability to compromise is apparently impossible on both sides. But surely this is not the way to behave. As much as I loathe the way in which competition in capitalist business structures cause the workers to lose out to unsocial working hours, insulting wage increases and a domineering attitude from managers, strike action will never be the solution. If an organisation were to give in to the strikers' demands then a precedent would be set which would be extremely difficult to reverse: every time the workers had a grievance they would simply strike, get their demands granted and the business would quickly sink without trace for being uncompetitive causing everyone to lose their jobs. I also don't believe that the postal workers are gaining a great deal of sympathy with the general public as more and more post gets delayed in a backlog which will inevitably cause some of that post to go astray; it's certainly not a situation that I'm happy with! Surely a more intelligent line of attack would be to exploit the fact that Trade Unions are a major source of funding for the Labour Party. If the CWU made a pledge that all of its members were immediately switching their allegiance and their money to the Liberal Democrats, the government would go into a panic-stricken frenzy in order to solve the conflict. Just a suggestion, I really wouldn't expect anybody else to come up with anything that bright. However, I'm not trying to make these issues sound simple and I certainly don't support the fat-cat bigwigs and their typical coercive tactics, but in the current climate of people getting increasingly irritated at not receiving their post, it will only take one cheap and efficient competitor to close in on the domestic postal-service market for Royal Mail to vanish from people's minds like an old memory.












Patronising Politics

Gordon Brown has recently indulged in (or at least failed to damp down) profligate speculation on whether a General Election was going to be called. After seeing the Conservative Party do so well at their conference and the subsequent polls, the Prime Minister elected to restrain himself, lying to the general public by telling them that this was the decision he would have made anyway. But it gets even worse from the Labour spin doctors. During the Tory conference, Shadow Chancellor George Osborne had been forced to unveil a policy (due to the possible looming election!) of increasing the threshold of inheritance tax. Now that the election is not happening, Chancellor Alistair Darling has released his plan in his pre-Budget speech today to - surprise, surprise! - increase the threshold for inheritance tax, apparently something he had planned on doing all along. What a coincidence! Exactly how stupid are British people meant to be nowadays? This sort of political manipulation is abhorrent and is something I was hoping Labour would get away from now that Tony Blair had cleared off to Europe. Seemingly this is not to be, and for the time being politics will continue in its condescending lunacy.

Capitalism dominates again

So Gordon Brown's probably going to be the new British Prime Minister when the Labour sheep vote him in. He might even be marginally better than Tony Blair, by a margin of about 0.01%. I'd so love for old Labour to make a comeback and for Michael Meacher or John McDonnell to get in, bringing back a certain sense of socialism and redistribution of wealth. At least then my wanker boss wouldn't be able to pay me minimum fucking wage while he scrapes profits from the business to put into his own million pound trust fund. Gordon 'take a big breath' Brown is going to be almost identical to Blair in widening the gap between rich and poor, allowing personal religious fundamentalisms to interfere in national and world politics, burying socialism as far underground as is humanly possible so that kids nowadays have never even heard that there are alternative ideologies out there, and spinning every policy so that capitalism will once again reign supreme! Prime Minister Davros will look over his sheep and chuckle himself to sleep at night knowing that those who can make the most money - indiscriminately persecuting those without such ruthless ambition - will always hold the power of social and financial repression, while the hard working, honest-to-goodness decent people in the majority of the western world will struggle unsuccessfully to make morality the guiding issue of the moment rather than strengthening the economy. But will anybody else realise this? Not really, because although we live in the 21st century, the proletariat still deludes itself into thinking that they are in their rightful place of repressed workers and that there is nothing to be done. Then again, I don't really know what to do either, but at least I've got the brass balls big enough to have a diatribe about it to anyone who'll listen!
I hope you liked my rant, because there will no doubt be more to come in the near future; just wait till I get started on religion. If, however, you found this reading a little heavy, please feel free to go and watch another episode of Big Brother or Eastenders, or go and hang around with some chavs, you ignorant fuck!