THE UK RAIL RIP-OFF: PART 3 – NEGATIVE REDISTRIBUTION RIDES THE RAILS

A Northern Rail Class 156 Sprinter, calls at Castleton Moor on the Esk Valley Railway with a Whitby to Middlesbrough service. This line was saved quite arbitrarily from the Beeching cuts of the 1960s, and yet for 20 years since privatisation has seen only a couple of trains per day in each direction. Unforgivably, none of these services are suitable for commuting to either of the line's termini. This railway awaits an imaginative and innovative operator who will maximise its undoubted potential at the heart of the North Yorkshire Moors National Park.

In last week's post Privatisation Profiteers Ride the Rails (at your expense), ANDY FLEMING examined the Tories'

half baked, inefficient, horrendously expensive and disastrous privatisation experiment with our railways. 

In the last post in this series he examines why Britain's rail network now the most fragmented and expensive in Western Europe to both passenger and tax payer alike, has become a cash cow to train operating companies who reap the profits, while you and I pay the losses.

Following the botched privatisation of British Rail in 1994, hopes were high that a change to a New Labour government in 1997 would see re-nationalisation of this strategic national asset in a country crying out for an affordable, reliable, safe and fully integrated environmentally-friendly public transport system.

But of course we didn’t see any such change. The key was in the word ‘New’. What we received was just a continuation of Major’s full-baked policies in railways and elsewhere, just different cronies enacting them. Sure there was the odd left winger full of bluster who was ready to drop all of their principals, in order to give the impression that there may be a little socialisation of the economy but of course it was a mirage. As would become clear following Tony Blair and George Bush’s illegal Iraq War of 2003, the petroleum industry was still pulling the strings despite the environmental rhetoric and run-ins with hard working truck drivers.

This phoney environmentalism was however a deceitful and duplicitous way of launching a full scale assault on the motorist with crippling petrol taxes, while simultaneously John Prescott was announcing an investment in railways so grand that the Victorians would have been jealous. It was of course all lies. Most of the £30 billion funding for the network announced in early 1999 wasn’t new money at all, just recycled promises from the last days of Major’s corrupt and sleazy administration. New Labour were of course masters of lies, dishonesty and deceit (these grotesque human traits were of course spun as ‘spin’ to the gullible).

It was brought home to me one night when BBC Look North carried a visit by Tony Blair to a primary school in Ferryhill, part of his Sedgefield constituency. One little girl asked the Prime Minister a fantastic question that deserved a fully honest answer.

“Please can you re-open Ferryhill station as there are a lot of people here who can’t afford cars”, she said.

His answer would be the reason why I wouldn’t vote Labour ever again,

“I’d love to be in a position to do it, but it would be just far too expensive”.

It was clear where this charlatan’s loyalties lay and they certainly weren’t with his constituents’ needs in a civilised society for even a basic public transport system. And he certainly couldn’t care less about the environment.

THE RISING PRICE OF DECEPTION

It's Sunday. But it's financial. So it's Friday Financial with JULIAN SAYER.

Why and how inflation and falling wages hasn't bothered the wealthy.

This week I want to look at inflation and the cost of living crisis. There was a lot of fanfare last week with the announcement that wage increases have finally passed the rate of inflation. The full details of the announcement can be found here;

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-27047966

On the surface it sounds great, the bedrock of a recovery is in place and good times are just around the corner. But, if you look into what has happened over the last forty years and the consequences over the coming years, then a different picture emerges.

These figures include all the high ranking salaried jobs mainly in the banking and financial sector that we the tax payer so happily saved back in 2008. These salaries have and are rising faster than any other. These million pounds salaries and their huge bonuses will adversely affect this data, boosting the percentage higher and disproportionately. Our Government does little to cap them as it encourages the City to make more and more money. Just look at the figures involved, who else gets million pounds salaries and two hundred per cent bonuses?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-27154184

Wages for the average person have stagnated and inflation has eroded the spending power that this reduced income can buy. For example average earnings adjusted for inflation have dropped 7.2 per cent since 2010 – leaving millions more than £2,000 a year worse off. This is where the economy has been hurt.

THE UK RAIL RIP-OFF: PART 2 – PRIVATISATION PROFITEERS RIDE THE RAILS (AT YOUR EXPENSE)

Rail privatisation was implemented in a way that made no economic sense whatsoever, but satisfied the Tory dogma of state equals bad; private equals good.

In last week’s UK Rail Rip-Off:Coming off the Rails,

ANDY FLEMING looked at how our once great national railway system that was the envy of the world, was butchered by politicians obsessed with imposing free market disciplines on a strategic national monopoly. In this post he takes a look at the Tories' half baked, inefficient, horrendously expensive and disastrous privatisation experiment with our railways.

You can always detect a political zealot. They are just like religious zealots and fundamentalists. The very last thing any of them can be bothered to do is learn any facts about the particular area they rant about. And I don't mind, I'm all for freedom of speech, just so long as they don't wreck our industries and economy or blow up aeroplanes. But that's just what's been happening to the British economy over the last four or five decades.

It has of course been an agenda dominated by right wing libertarian politics that has espoused an age old doctrine first propounded by Adam Smith and his "hidden hand" in his tome The Wealth of Nations. Like a hydra that keeps having its tentacles amputated, its philosophies of deregulation, "rolling back the state", and the wholesale privatisation of strategic state natural monopolistic industries just keep growing back.

The same old tired policies practiced right up to 1945 keep getting trotted out in every new generation of right wing politicians. They regard them as panaceas to every conceivable societal ill. It took an 'Old Labour' government led by Clement Attlee to civilise Britain, to legislate against children being sent up chimneys or down mines or becoming illiterate adults. Centuries of Adam Smith's free markets had failed to provide even a meagre standard of living for the majority of the population. The whole ideology was and still is just an excuse for individual greed masquerading as a political and economic ideology.

In just a few a few short years following VE day thanks to collective state intervention, Britain gained a socialised health care and education system, a Welfare State, socialised housing and the nationalisation of decrepit and rundown yet vital and strategic monopolistic industries including steel, coal and the railways. Such is the nature of global capitalism however, that even in the fifties a civilised society meant a society in which wage, safety and environmental protection costs were higher. Corporations and international capital always on the lookout for a workforce and a nation to exploit started to relocate their sweat shops run with slave labour to places such as Hong Kong and Japan.

It wasn’t long before the worsening balance of payments and trade deficits were being blamed on workforce laziness, unionisation, wages, infact everything under the sun as long as that didn’t include archaic British management practices or an early sixties Macmillan government led by a bunch of politicians like Profumo who epitomised the word sleaze.

Nationalised industries bore brunt of much of the blame and especially Britain’s railways. Nationalised in 1948 out of desperation resulting from decades of private company neglect, the “Big Four” railway companies (London Midland Scottish, Great Western Railway, London and North Eastern Railway and Southern Railways) became united and nationalised as British Railways.

It's April,1964 and even before Beeching swung his infamous axe, secondary but still important routes were being axed. Here is 34085 '501 Squadron' having to take a new route following the closure of the Somerset and Dorset Joint Railway near Sway.

At the time, the railways were faced with special problems. Before the Second World War both goods and passenger traffic was being lost due to the private motor car and lorry, both of which offered flexibility, no intermodal changes during a journey, and freedom in days long before traffic congestion. Prestigious expresses and high speed steam trains with romantic names were instigated such as the Coronation Scot, the Pines Express and the Flying Scotsman were instigated to lure passengers back thanks to their luxurious accommodation and futuristic looking motive power.

By 1945, after six long years of war and starved of funds, Britain’s railways were literally falling to bits. There had been a handful of things that ensured Britain had not been invaded by Nazi Germany, and most people will be able to name the well-known ones: the RAF in the Battle of Britain, the USA’s hand being forced at Pearl Harbour, and the carnage inflicted on the Soviet forces and people in defending Stalingrad. Well also add our railways and railwaymen. Because without them the mass movement of goods and people for D-Day, the evacuation or for the war effort generally would not have been possible.

POWER TO THE PEOPLE

Polly Toynbee joins protesters inside the Conduit Street branch of Starbucks (Image courtesy of The Observer)

byHARRY BLACKWOOD

We've already got it. we just need to use it properly

WITH the World Cup due to start in Brazil shortly, it's very appropriate that coffee has been in the news recently.

Firstly we had the news that Cafe Nero had been following the long practiced tradition of multi-national coffee chains and had been avoiding tax. Next up we had Starbucks - the company that led the way in tax dodging - announcing that it was moving its European headquarters to the UK. They cheerfully added that this would mean they would be paying more tax.

Well, that's jolly good of them. See, in the past they've not been able to see the benefits of coughing up tax. Oddly enough they've been unable to see that things like hospitals and schools and other nice stuff is paid for from tax receipts. So, it's nice that they've at last seen the error of their ways and will now be tipping vast sums of money into treasury coffers.

So why the change in attitude from Starbucks? Have they suddenly developed a guilt complex or taken on a new philanthropic approach? Have they hell. Since the outcry a couple of years ago over their tax avoidance, they've been losing customers. This is nothing other than soft soap PR. Rest assured they'll still be doing their utmost to deprive the Treasury of as much as they can.

Walk down any High Street and you'll still see idiots paying through the nose for Starbucks coffee despite all the publicity and boycotts in 2012. Quite frankly I despair. Our town centres are awash with coffee shops - both multiples and independents - so why the hell would anyone choose to give Starbucks their hard earned cash? In fact why would anyone choose to NOT use an independent?

THE BRITISH BROADCASTING CONSPIRACY

It's April 14, 1976, and Metro Radio's James Whale presents the station's late night phone-in programme, Night Owls. Metro Radio was one of the first nineteen commercial radio stations to gain an IBA licence following the demise of the North Sea pirate station in the late sixties. It's on air date was July 15, 1974.

ANDY FLEMING analyses how over the past thirty years freedom of speech, innovation, personality, choice and

imagination have been sacrificed within Commercial Radio, in favour of maximising company shareholder value and franchise revenue streams for the government. And politicians are once again the culprits! Our airwaves have been sold to the highest bidder without a thought for local public service or quality content.

Do you have a long memory? Do you remember how after her General Election victory in May, 1979, Margaret Thatcher 'transformed' the economic landscape of Britain with her 'resolute approach'? It was a defining moment in the social, political and economic history of our country. Because until that date all previous governments whether Conservative or Labour subscribed to the so-called social democratic consensus. In other words the British economy would not be comprehensively exposed to the vagaries of the free market, and neither at the same time would it be a full blown command economy as per the Eastern Bloc with all the limitations in terms of individual freedom such collectivisation would entail. Capitalism was to be the economic system rather than socialism, but the worst excesses of the free market would be excluded by a collectively provided welfare state.

So the UK was dragged into the modern world with a National Health Service, a free education system for all, benefits for the elderly, disabled and those unfortunate enough to be unemployed, a properly integrated public transport system and of course, 'homes for those returning heroes' from fighting Nazi Germany. Britain was going to be a more pleasant, fairer society where opportunities were going to be accessible to everyone without the exploitation and poverty of the inter war years. The Gold Standard was dropped and this new social democratic consensus was to be underpinned with Keynesian economics. The government would regulate capitalism by stimulating the economy in a recession with capital projects and would restrict the money supply when the economy overheated in one capitalism's cyclical booms. That was the theory at least, and until the late sixties and an ever increasing balance of payments deficit the mixed economy model seemed to be a practical compromise.

Regulation seemed to work, whether it was in employment, unemployment, housing, transport, and telecommunications or as especially applicable here, the media. However with the devaluation of sterling crisis in 1967 and then a major world oil price shock in October 1973 as a direct result of an Arab-Israeli war western economies had been hit by an economic tsunami. And it was one from which Keynesianism was not to recover sparking as it did political and industrial strife including three day weeks and Winters of Discontent. With another oil shock in 1979 as a result of the Iranian revolution, the last government of the old social democratic order and the last true Labour government led by Jim Callaghan was swept away by a new Conservative Party in government led by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Her government was totally different to those of the preceding four decades, espousing as it did, a return to 'monetarism' to reduce inflation (restricting the money supply) as propounded by her economic guru Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek before him.

Thatcher's policies were socially brutal and divisive. Whole state industries were to be privatised and closed if not profitable irrespective of the country's strategic needs, or if the result led to mass unemployment. Inflation was to be reduced at all costs as was taxation; but just income tax and mainly the rates for top earners. VAT was doubled, and from the outset there was a re-distribution of wealth from the poor to the rich. Benefits were slashed in an effort to cut state spending and regulations across business, including in the media were cut to maximise profits. State 'red tape' to protect the consumer was apparently strangling private enterprise. Infact, Thatcher's whole philosophy could be summed up succinctly as state equals bad; private equals good. Period. But what would the effect of these gargantuan economic changes be on the media, and radio in particular?

PENSIONED OFF!

There may be trouble ahead... retirement pensions will increasingly become unaffordable in the coming years, whether it's the state retirement pension or company and private pension schemes

It's Friday. It's financial. It's Friday Financial with JULIAN SAYER.

It's official. The UK state pension is worst in Europe.

It's been a busy two weeks looking after my six year old during the Easter holidays, but that's the conundrum of modern life. One of my pet hates is the lack of time modern life gives you; investing your most precious commodity (time) into the teaching of your greatest asset (your children.) So I am afraid this week's blog will be a short piece.

How a society looks after it's young, old and most disadvantaged says everything about it. This Government's continued attack on the most disadvantaged continues relentlessly. The poor, unemployed, handicapped, young and old are all suffering with reduced income, while the rich and multinationals continue to flout the tax laws stashing trillions of pounds in off shore tax heavens. This week I want to take a look at what's happening in the pensions industry, how it's affecting the pensioners now and how it will affect you when you retire in the future.

Having worked in the industry for twenty odd years, one thing I know for sure, is that this Government will continue to reduce the amount of pension you are going to receive in the future. Everything points towards it, an ageing population, reduced tax revenues, low employment levels, and longer life expectancy. In the UK we were once the envy of the world with our well run state and private pension schemes, and those lucky enough to have worked in the "golden generation" have reaped the rewards and are enjoying the benefits of these schemes. Sadly, just like our other world renowned institutions like the NHS and Railways, our pension system will be run down and hived off for the profit of the few, and to the detriment of the many.

BBC OFF THEIR TROLLEYS

The irony of Tesco profits being hit because workers don't earn enough.

ByHARRY BLACKWOOD

HAVING worked for the BBC for a short time, I can tell you categorically that most BBC journalists don't know their arse from their elbow.

Such is the narrow gene pool that the BBC selects its journos from (think Oxbridge and public school) that it's no surprise that they get the wrong end of the stick when it comes to even the most basic news judgement.

This week there was a classic example of what I'm talking about when Tesco announced its yearly results. The High Street behemoth posted profits of £3.3 billion. Worth pointing out at this juncture that a billion is a thousand million. So, a bunch of glorified corner shops pulled in 3,300 piles of dosh with a million quid in each. Nice work of you can get it.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-27046105

But the BBC wasn't interested in this massive amount of profit because some highly paid executive had already decided that 'the story' was a six per cent drop in profits. Except it wasn't. If you strip out new store openings, the like for like fall was only 1.4%. Not too shabby in times of austerity, inflation and queues outside food banks.