A large news agency reports that, ‘Shares of the largest military and defence corporations of NATO member states and major EU contractors surged on Monday as arms makers stand to benefit from Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Stocks of major US defence contractors jumped amid the conflict with Lockheed Martin, the maker of HIMARS rocket launchers, and Northrop Grumman Corp adding 8.3% and 10.6%, respectively. RTX formerly known as Raytheon Technologies Corp gained almost 4% “amid expectations of increased defence spending”, according to Victoria Scholar, the head of investment at stockbroker Interactive Investor.

In the EU, among leading defence stock gainers were shares of the Swedish aircraft manufacturer Saab, which surged in price by more than 8%. As of Monday afternoon, shares of the German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall were up 5.7%, the British weapons maker BAE Systems gained 4.2%, while stock of Italy’s military helicopter producer Leonardo was up 5.7%.

The latest escalation began early on Saturday, when armed Palestinian groups launched a surprise attack on multiple locations along the Gaza border, with Israel launching a counteroffensive in response.

Israeli officials have estimated that over 700 people have been killed in the Hamas assault, over 2,200 have been wounded and 100 have been kidnapped, including citizens of European countries and the US. Following Israel’s retaliatory air strikes, over 400 people have been killed and some 2,200 wounded in Gaza, according to Palestinian officials.’

The following talks have been added to the audio section of the website:

‘European Developments’ – by Andy Davies, 11th August 2023

‘Poverty’s No Joke: Eva Torf Judd and Working Class Memory’ – by Darren O’Neil, 18th August 18 2023. (Unfortunately the discussion was not recorded)

‘Human Nature’ – by Adam Buick, 25th August 2023

‘Labour Theory of Value: Some Misconceptions’ – by Adam Buick, 8th September 2023

‘What right-wing social media does to you’ – Mike Foster, 22nd September 2023

‘Ideas about human nature’ – Howard Moss, 29th September 2023

The origins of Hamas have their roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, led in Gaza by Sheikh Yassin. Not only was he allowed to openly spread his Islamist message while Israel was conducting assassinations of members of the PLO, but Yassin was also permitted to form Mujama al-Islamiya as an official charity that would eventually evolve into Hamas (on.wsj.com/3wDFzfV).

Is Roland Hill, originator of the Penny Post, turning over in his grave at the new increase in Royal Mail postal rates where a first class stamp now costs £1.25.

Prior to an increase in April first class stamps were £0.95 each. The price increase in 2023 is, up to now, thirty four per cent. Outraged of Tunbridge Wells has no doubt written an incensed letter to The Times or The Telegraph, or their five followers on Twitter, demanding to know whether there has been a corresponding increase in the level of service. It’s all, no doubt, the fault of those bolshie workers wanting and nothing to do with wanting increased dividends from the shares!

‘Postal rates sky-rocketed on 30 April as a prelude to the privatisation of Royal Mail, but how will the workers there be affected?

The AGM of the postal workers trade union, the Communication Workers Union (CWU), in south-west London on 25 March was a very clear example of the reformist nature of much trade unionism, the limits on its power and the differences (or lack of)  between state capitalism and private capitalism in an operation like the Royal Mail. We should also not be surprised by the cosy relationship between Royal Mail’s Chief Executive Moya Greene and the Union Deputy General Secretary Dave Ward that showed at the meeting



The Postal Workers Union has a history of Labour right-wing leadership which has been useful to the capitalist class who need ‘respectable’ labour leaders to maintain industrial peace and to help them push through their ‘reforms’. This was not contradicted by the 1971 national strike by Postal Workers who went “on the cobbles” for 47 days! In 2009, in London, Postal Workers went on strike for 20 days over a 4-month period and the CWU took Royal Mail to the High Court because they were about to hire 30,000 casual workers to break the strike. At the eleventh hour Royal Mail and CWU came to an ‘agreement’. The union sold out the workers which is an old story in working-class trade union struggles with the capitalist class. The CWU is a major financial contributor to the Labour Party, the same Party who wanted to privatise the mail a few years ago. (It was Thatcher’s government that first mooted the selling off of the Royal Mail to private capitalists.)  It is all rather ironic considering that the Labour Party originated as a trade union pressure group. The Labour Party is just an alternative party to administer the capitalist system and exploit the working class.



The 2012 Postal Services Act is now in force and the Royal Mail pension deficit of £8.4 billion has been transferred to the state: i.e. the Government will take on the liabilities. The deficit was caused by previous Royal Mail management taking a “pensions holiday” when capitalism was booming in the 1990s and 2000s but it all came unstuck with collapse of western financial capitalism in 2008.



Moya Greene has been Chief Executive of Royal Mail since 2010 and is a hatchet-woman for the capitalist class. Her CV is not salutary reading for a postal worker. Greene was in charge of the ‘privatisation’ of the Canadian National Railway, the ‘de-regulation’ of the Canadian airline industry, and at Canada Post she trebled profits although revenues dropped, and injuries to Postal Workers went up 15 percent, days lost to strikes went up to 36, and workers’ grievances against their state capitalist bosses at Canada Post went up 60 percent under her regime. She is at Royal Mail to prepare the company for privatisation.



At the CWU AGM Greene said that we should welcome privatisation as it would mean “access to capital from an investor who wants the company to be successful,” and she stressed “We need capital”. She criticised the (state capitalist) system which currently operates Royal Mail with its “wrong-headed regulatory framework”, which restricts the amount of profits the Royal Mail can make. More profits will be made if the Royal Mail is owned by a private capitalist company. She offered financial carrots to the workforce by promising “a share in the success of the company” or “a stake in the year-on-year success of the company”, which is all that the CWU are asking for. The CWU campaign of ‘Keep the Post Public’ now has a lower profile as Dave Ward made no reference to it at the AGM.



Whether Royal Mail is a nationalised industry operated in the state capitalist manner or is run as private capitalist company ultimately makes no difference to the postal workers. They are being exploited by the state on behalf of capitalism or else by a private capitalist.’

SC

From Socialist Standard May2012

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2019/10/what-about-workers-2012.html

 Here’s the result announced just after midnight;

LAMBETH Vauxhall

SWAINE-JAMESON, Tom Simon (Labour Party) 595

ALDERECHI, Fareed (Liberal Democrats) 395

BOND, Jacqueline Rose (The Green Party) 256

ROTHERHAM, Lee Stuart (Conservative Party Candidate) 160

LAMBERT, Daniel Peter (The Socialist Party (GB)) 9

Vauxhall (Lambeth) council by-election result:

LAB: 42.0% (-11.1)

LDEM: 27.9% (+16.8)

GRN: 18.1% (-2.1)

CON: 11.3% (-4.3)

SPGB: 0.6% (+0.6)

Votes cast: 1,415

It is reported that, ‘Shares in the UK’s Metro Bank were briefly suspended from trading twice after the stock plunged nearly 30% over reports of urgent fundraising efforts to shore up the bank’s balance sheet.

Metro Bank shares have now fallen more than 60% since September 12, when it revealed that UK regulators had failed to approve a plan that would allow Metro to run its mortgage business at a lower cost.

The London Stock Exchange confirmed to CNBC that the brief suspensions were triggered by its circuit breaker mechanisms because of Metro Bank’s stock crash.

The bank, which was reportedly attempting to raise £600 million ($727 million) in debt and equity, said in a statement on Thursday that it is currently considering “how best to enhance its capital resources.” 

The options include asking investors to help refinance $424 million worth of debt before it falls due in 2025, as well as raising hundreds of millions of pounds through the sale of debt, shares, or assets.

“No decision has been made on whether to proceed with any of these options,” Metro Bank stated.

Rating agency Fitch placed Metro on negative watch citing increased risks to its business model, capital position, and funding.

Founded by US billionaire Vernon Hill in 2010, Metro Bank became the UK’s first new high-street bank in more than a century. In 2019, it was hit by a misreporting scandal that led to the exit of its chair and chief executive.’

‘The Magic Money Myth. A Guide to Banking’. The Socialist Party. 30 pages.

Since the Crash of 2008, blamed rightly or wrongly on the banks, there has been a renewed interest in how the banking system works, and not just among regulators. At the Occupy Camps that sprung up in 2011 this was a major topic of discussion as those there looked for an alternative to capitalism, at least in its present form. Leaflets circulated reviving money theories of yesteryear and criticising ‘fractional reserve banking’. The Green Party too discussed the matter and committed itself on paper to the theory that banks can create money out of thin air. Money theories and denunciations of ‘banksters’ are all over the internet and get a hearing from those trying to understand why the present economic system doesn’t work in the interest of the majority.

Some of these theories are just plain wrong, factually mistaken about what banks do and can do. All assume that banking or monetary reform can improve the position of the majority class of wage and salary workers. But it can’t as these problems arise from the capitalist system of minority ownership of the means of life and production for the market and profit rather than to meet people’s needs. Monetary reform is a red herring sending in the wrong direction people who are looking for a way out of capitalism. If implemented it would not solve the problems that the majority face as it leaves their cause unchanged.

In this pamphlet we set out, as part of explaining how the capitalist economic system works, to expose factual errors about what banking is and how banks work. There is nothing especially bad about banks compared with other profit-seeking capitalist enterprises. They are merely in a different line of business. Banks are not the cause of the problems that the majority class face. It’s capitalism and its production for profit. The way-out is not to reform banks or the monetary system but to abolish capitalism and replace it with a socialist society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. There would then be production directly to meet people’s needs and distribution in accordance with the principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs,” and banks and money would be redundant.

From Socialist Standard April 2019

Price £3 including postage. Send cheque, made out to “The Socialist Party of Great Britain”, to 52 Clapham High St, London SW4 7UN. Or order and pay online at: https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/product-category/pamphlets/

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2019/04/pamphlet-review-magic-money-myth-guide.html

LANGUAGE AND SOCIETY (ZOOM)

‘Tory Party grandee and former Brexit negotiator Lord Frost has suggested that the state pension age in the UK be raised to 75 in a bid to reduce public spending. The pension age has already risen twice in the last five years.’

“Lord Frost yesterday (2nd October) suggested that the state pension age should be raised to 75 to shrink public spending and the state.

The Tory grandee, who was former PM Boris Johnson’s Brexit negotiator, made the remarks at a party conference fringe meeting on the Future of Conservatism.

Urging ministers to make cuts to public spending and taxes and go for growth, he acknowledged that this would require making changes to the state pension.

He said: ‘I do think that the honest truth is that the pension age is going to have to go up quite a long way to solve this problem [of reducing public expenditure].

‘That seems to me the best way of getting out of it in the medium term.’

Asked whether it should go up to 70 years old, he said: ’75, it’s quite a lot higher.’

He added: ‘People are much healthier than they used to be and I think it does need to go up. The big blocks of spending are health, pension and benefits. If you don’t tackle those you’re not really tackling anything.

‘I do think you need to do something also like freezing – or coming close to freezing – the public sector health budget and finding a sort of socially just and accepted way that future spending needs to go to the private sector in some way otherwise it’s just going to absorb sort of half of the budget before too long.’

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12586719/Lord-Frost-suggests-state-pension-age-raised-75-shrink-public-spending.html?ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490&ito=1490

‘Britain has had a Conservative government since 2010, and despite some initial cutbacks by the normally spendthrift party, the government’s outlay has ballooned in recent years. Its annual spending on services – which includes healthcare, welfare benefits, and pensions – soared to £784 billion ($953 billion) in 2022-23, from £713.1 billion ($866 billion) the previous year, according to government statistics.

Meanwhile, the UK’s national debt has risen from 75% of the country’s GDP in 2010 to 100.5% earlier this year.

Between 1948 and 2010, Britons could expect to draw a state pension at 60 for women and 65 for men. This was equalized to 65 for both sexes in 2018, and increased to 66 in 2020. A further increase to 67 is planned by 2028, and to 68 by 2046, although these dates are currently being reviewed and could be brought forward.

At present, there are 28 people aged over 65 for every 100 people of working age in the UK. However, this is to hit predicted to hit 36 per 100 by 2050.’

Empty Vessels

Parliament’s suspended, it’s conference time

For the law givers, the makers of rules,

Sailors all in the sinking ship of fools

Foundering on the rocks of Capital’s crimes.

However they go about bailing out,

It makes no difference as to which crew

Is at the helm, nor, it seems, does the hue

Of the flag they serve under. Without doubt,

Whichever course they navigate, it’ll prove

To be in the wrong direction. No choice,

For those press ganged aboard don’t have a voice

Unless they mutiny, seek to remove

Those they’re expected to understand

Are possessors of both the sea and land.

D. A.