There are still spaces available for Summer School, so bookings are still open. For more information about the event, chick here.

‘Rising food prices will soon overtake energy costs as the main force fuelling inflation in the UK, an independent think tank warned in a report on Friday. Food makes up a far larger share of the typical household’s consumption than energy, says the Resolution Foundation, whose aim is to improve living standards for those on low to middle incomes. As grocery prices will remain at a high level while energy costs decline, this summer “food costs will have overtaken energy bills in the scale of the shock they are administering to family finances,” the think tank predicted. Grocery bills have jumped by almost 20% during the past year, official figures for March showed, with the overall consumer price index standing at 10.1%. Energy prices peaked at record levels last year but have since declined significantly.’

‘The cost of living crisis is often thought of as a cost of energy crisis. That is an understandable, but increasingly inadequate, view. In particular, it understates the growing role of food prices (up by 25 per cent over the past year and a half) in the squeeze on living standards that households – especially low- and middle-income households – are living through.

While energy prices have risen faster, food makes up a far larger share of the typical household’s consumption (13 versus 5 per cent in 2019-20). This, combined with food prices continuing to rise even as energy bills fall back, means that by this summer the average increase in food costs since 2019-20 (£1,000) will be larger than that for energy bills (around £900). And this is not just true at the average: this will also be the case for a majority of households (56 per cent or 16 million). The food price shock is about to overtake the energy price shock as the biggest threat to family finances.

This spotlight examines the contribution of food prices to today’s high inflation and the pressure on households’ living standards, before considering how families and government have responded to date.

Inflation is on the way down. Having plateaued close to 40-year highs since the Autumn, sharp falls are anticipated from next week: a near 2 percentage point reduction from March’s 10.1 per cent is expected in April, as Figure 1 shows. This marks the end of the peak energy costs part of this crisis, albeit without energy bills remotely returning to pre-crisis norms. This first significant fall is driven by April 2022’s large increase in the energy price cap dropping out of the annual inflation calculation. But next week will also see confirmation that energy prices will actually fall from July – the energy price cap is expected to be reduced from £2,500 to £2,063) – reflecting the retreat of wholesale energy prices, and contribute to inflation falling back further through 2023.’

https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/publications/food-for-thought/

 Shu Xiang, 21, started looking for a job in February and still has had no luck. A financial management major at a college in Chengdu, China, Ms. Shu said she had received five responses to about 100 applications. Graduation is in a few weeks.

“I’m not so confident about finding a job,” she said. The only thing that makes her feel less anxious, she said, is knowing she’s not alone — most of her classmates were facing similar problems.

Ms. Shu is one of nearly 12 million Chinese expected to enter the job pool next month at a difficult time. The government reported this week that 20.4 percent of people ages 16 to 24 looking for a job were out of work in April. That is the highest level since China started announcing the statistic in 2018.

High youth unemployment has been a dark stain on China’s economy for several years, exacerbated by strict pandemic health restrictions limited travel, decimated small businesses and damaged consumer confidence. The government, facing rare public discontent as young professionals in major cities across China protested the “zero Covid” rules, abruptly announced in December that it would start easing the policies. But the youth jobless rate has remained high, even as the overall rate has ticked down two months in a row.

The Chinese government has introduced a set of policies meant to stimulate youth employment, including subsidies for small and midsize businesses that hire college graduates. State-owned enterprises have been directed to make more jobs available for those just starting out…’

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/business/china-youth-unemployment.html

 ‘Britons don’t have an automatic right to low food prices, former Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe has claimed, adding that people should simply go without certain items if they are struggling financially.

Discussing the UK’s cost-of-living crisis on the BBC’s Politics Live show, the former Tory member suggested that anyone claiming unemployment benefits should be made to fill labour shortages by picking fruit.

Widdecombe also advised people who cannot afford to pay for some food items to simply stop buying them. 

“Well then you don’t do the cheese sandwich. None of it’s new. We’ve been through this before,” she said. “The problem is we’ve been decades now without inflation, we’ve come to regard it as some kind of given right.”

The cost of living has risen sharply in the UK over the past two years, with annual inflation standing at 10.1% in March, driven largely by soaring food prices. Although the inflation rate dipped from 10.4% in February, it fell less than expected and is still well above the Bank of England’s target of 2%.’

‘The cost of British food staples such as cheese, white bread and porridge oats have soared – with one brand of cheddar increasing by 80 per cent in one year.

Overall inflation on food and drink at supermarkets continued to rise in March to 17.2 per cent, up from 16.5 per cent the month before, Which? found.

The price of cheddar cheese, which accounts for roughly half of all cheese sales in the UK, increased by an average 28.3 per cent across eight major supermarkets – Aldi, Asda, Lidl, Morrisons, Ocado, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Waitrose – compared to a year ago.’

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/which-supermarket-cheese-price-uk-b2322366.html

Party Meeting tomorrow evening Friday 19th May at 19 30 (18 30ut) on Zoom

Socialist Stanza No. 10

Three Good Friends

Three good friends met amongst the stalls

Gathered round the market cross,

Where commerce and competition

Determine profit and loss.

The first said, ‘Here people can choose

From this copious display.

Whatever they want they can have,

Just so long as they can pay.’

‘While it’s not so,’ the second replied,

‘For those too poor, that glitch

Could be cured by taxes that don’t

Impinge too much on the rich.’

The third friend had a better thought,

A simpler way to proceed,

‘Get rid of cash, prices and stalls,

Then let folk take what they need.’

D. A.

 There was no other way to deal with these men, but to break them to pieces … if you do not break them, they will break you.” – Oliver Cromwell

On 17 May 1649, three soldiers were executed on Oliver Cromwell’s orders in Burford churchyard, Oxfordshire. They belonged to a movement popularly known as the Levellers, with beliefs in civil rights and religious tolerance.



The name “Levellers,” like most party names (e.g., “Lollards,” “Anabaptists,” “Quakers,” “Whigs” and “Tories”) was originally a nickname applied in scorn and derision. The Levellers were those who demanded, so early as 1647, that the “whole body of the People” should make the people’s laws. During the Civil War, the Levellers fought on Parliament’s side, they had at first seen Cromwell as a liberator, but now saw him as a dictator. They were prepared to fight against him for their ideals and he was determined to crush them. Over 300 of them were captured by Cromwell’s troops and locked up in Burford church. Three were led out into the churchyard to be shot as ringleaders.



The Levellers were the most energetic and uncompromising faction in the English Revolution, with a short life taking shape in 1646 to be crushed by Cromwell’s dictatorship in 1649. The English Revolution was the revolution of the rising capitalist class against the monopolies and other restraints on free competition of the feudal-monarchic state in which many sections of the country gentry were capitalist, rearing sheep on land from which the peasants had been driven. Thus in 1640 they were able to combine with the merchants and lead the yeoman farmers and the artisans and apprentices of the town. 



The Levellers started as a propaganda group and transformed themselves into a party as their influence extended and the revolutionary movement mounted. The Levellers linked themselves with the rank-and-file of Cromwell’s New Model Army. They supported elections of soldier’s delegates and the agitation of the soldier’s committees which took up their grievances and favored a popular militia, democratically controlled. Most of the Agitators in the revolutionary army either belonged to the Levellers or were inspired by their ideas. Both the Cromwellians and the Levellers moved forward to a Republic. The Cromwellians wanted a regime in which sovereignty was concentrated in the hands of the large property owners. The Levellers demanded a democratic republic based upon the power of the people and responsive to their demands.



Their religious, political and economic ideas expressed the interests and outlook of the artisans, apprentices, shopkeepers and similar lower middle-class and working-class elements in the cities and the yeomen in the country districts. The”far left” was occupied by the dispossessed peasants who formed the agrarian communist sect of the Diggers who recognised that political democracy was impossible without economic democracy. However, the Diggers’ condemnation of private property in land ran counter to the aspirations of the peasant majority. By contrast, the Levellers were opposed to “making all things common,” defended the rights of private property, and called for free trade. The Levellers called for sweeping democratization of both Church and State. Among the religious reforms were full freedom of religious belief, separation of Church and State, the suppression of tithes; among the political reforms were a constitutional republic, annual election of a Parliament responsible to the people alone, general manhood suffrage; among the legal reforms, the right to a trial by jury, no star-chamber hearings, no capital punishment or imprisonment for debt; among the civil rights, freedom of the press and no license on printing. In their day such doctrines were audacious and revolutionary.



The mass petition was the principal means they used to inform and arouse the people. These petitions containing the demands of the people were widely circulated for signatures, submitted to Parliament, and backed up by meetings and demonstrations. In March 1647 a great petition was presented to the Commons. It called for the abolition of tithes, for the abolition of the Merchants Adventurers Co., for relief to imprisoned debtors and assistance to the poor, for limitations on fees of all judges, magistrates, lawyers and government officials. It demanded the abolition of the veto power of the King and the House of Lords. The Commons ordered the petition to be burnt. Lilburne who had hitherto been a fervent admirer and supporter of Cromwell broke with him for his subservience to Parliament, denounced the Parliament as a tyrant and oppressor and called for a new constitution and new elections. Lilburne, himself at one time a soldier, now turned to the army’s the rank and file. A popularly elected soldier’s Council argued about the Army’s political programme on level terms with the Generals.



Both the Cromwellians and the Levellers supported a republic but the Cromwellians wanted a regime in which power was concentrated in the hands of the large property owners. The Levellers demanded a democratic republic based upon the power of the people and responsive to their demands.



The Levellers were the first to encourage women to participate in political activity. In one of the petitions offered in their name the women asserted that they had “an equal interest with the men of the nation in its liberties and securities.” They did not go so far, however, as to demand female suffrage.



Although only active for only a few years on the stage of history, the Levellers left a durable imprint on the development of democratic thought demonstrating how a revolutionary group which itself never attains the heights of power can nevertheless profoundly affect the course of a great revolution and fertilize progressive tendencies for centuries thereafter. 



Marx and Engels knew that the Levelers were before their time and said so often, but they wrote also: 

“We find the first appearance of a really functioning Communist party in the bourgeois revolution at the moment when the constitutional monarchy is removed. The most consistent republicans, in England the Levelers, in France, Babeuf, Buonarroti, etc. are the first who proclaimed these ‘social questions.’” – The Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality.

 MAY 2023 EVENTS

 As the cost of living continues to spiral, a new report shows more than half of gig economy workers in the UK are paid below the minimum wage.

The first-of-its-kind study, led by the University of Bristol, found 52% of gig workers doing jobs ranging from data entry to food delivery were earning below the minimum wage. On average respondents were earning £8.97 per hour – around 15% below the current UK minimum wage, which rose to £10.42 this month.

More than three-quarters (76%) of survey respondents also experienced work-related insecurity and anxiety.

Lead author Dr Alex Wood, Senior Lecturer in Human Resource Management and Future of Work at the University of Bristol Business School, said: “The findings highlight that working in the UK gig economy often entails low pay, anxiety, and stress. As food, fuel and housing costs keep rising, this group of workers are especially vulnerable and need to be more adequately remunerated and better protected.”

Equally concerning, more than a quarter (28%) felt they were risking their health or safety in doing gig work and a quarter (25%) experienced pain on the job.

When asked what would improve their situation, basic rights such as minimum wage rates, holiday and sick pay, and protection against unfair dismissal were most wanted.

Unions and platform councils (similar to works councils that exist in some European countries) to represent their needs and help influence how gig economy platforms operate and affect their working conditions also featured on their wish list. More than three-quarters of respondents believed the introduction of such bodies would bring immediate 

Dr Wood said: “A major factor contributing to low pay rates is that this work involves spending significant amounts of time waiting or looking for work while logged on to a platform. Not only is the work low paid, but it is also extremely insecure and risky.

“The self-employed who are dependent on platforms to make a living are urgently in need of labour protections to shield them against the huge power asymmetries that exist in the sector. This clearly warrants the expansion of the current ‘worker’ status to protect them.”

The study involved 510 UK gig economy workers who were surveyed last year. There was representation from across the sector, with around half being remote freelancers using platforms such as Upwork and Fiverr to pick up jobs ranging from data entry to website design. The other half comprised local drivers providing food delivery and taxi services via platforms including Deliveroo and Uber.

More than just side hustles to earn extra cash, respondents spent on average 28 hours a week undertaking gig work, comprising 60% of their total earnings.

Respondents overwhelmingly considered their work to be best described as self-employment and thought an extension of labour rights to include the self-employed would significantly improve their working lives.

This was the first research to investigate what forms of voice gig workers want. The findings suggest strong support for European style co-determination whereby worker representatives are consulted on and approve changes that impact working conditions and employment. Works councils that exist in countries like Germany could therefore provide a model for platform councils and assemblies in the gig economy to facilitate workers having a say over the decisions which affect their ability to make a living.

Brendan Burchell, Professor in Social Sciences at the University of Cambridge and co-author of the report, added: “Respondents strongly felt the creation of co-determination mechanisms would allow workers, and their representatives, to influence platform provider decisions which could instantly improve their working lives.

“These policies include elected bodies of worker representatives approving all major platform changes that impact jobs and working conditions. Our findings emphasise the potential for trade union growth in this sector, with majorities being willing to join and even organise such bodies.”

https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2023/may/gig-economy-worker-research.html?ref=upstract.com

A gig economy is a labor market that relies heavily on temporary and part-time positions filled by independent contractors and freelancers rather than full-time permanent employees.

Gig workers gain flexibility and independence but little or no job security. Many employers save money by avoiding paying benefits such as health coverage and paid vacation time. Others pay for some benefits to gig workers but outsource the benefits programs and other management tasks to external agencies.

The term is borrowed from the music world, where performers book “gigs” that are single or short-term engagements at various venues.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/gig-economy.asp

1 in 6 adults in the UK currently work a gig job at least once a week. For most, 71.5%, gig work makes up less than half of their income. The UK gig economy workforce is now estimated at 7.25 million. https://standout-cv.com/gig-economy-statistics

In a move that will inundate the letter pages of The Times from ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells, (apologies to any Socialists living there) that newspaper is reported as saying, citing sources,  that’ UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace will press ahead with plans to reduce the size of the British Army despite the consequences of the Ukraine conflict and increased military spending by the government.

Infantry are out, more artillery is in.

A government source (?) said,  “We have too much infantry – a legacy of the counter-insurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We need more artillery. The jury is out on whether you need main battle tanks.” 

In 2021, the Defence Ministry announced plans to decrease the number of troops from 82,000 to just over 70,000, while cutting the number of tanks from 227 to 148. However, due to the ongoing conflict between Moscow and Kiev, the idea of downsizing has made many UK MPs and military commanders uneasy, with Patrick Sanders, the head of the army, calling it “perverse” in the context of a major conflict in Europe.

The matter is expected to be addressed in a defence command paper scheduled for release in June.

Another army source told The Times that “the main lesson from Ukraine is you need mass,” adding that “the truth is we don’t have enough infantry and we don’t have enough artillery.”

Sounds like the higher echelons of the British military are concerned for their jobs.

‘In March, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said the defence budget would swell by £5 billion ($6.2 billion) over the next two years, with additional funds meant to both replenish stocks of arms sent to Ukraine and modernise the nuclear arsenal.

This comes amid warnings that the UK would not be up to the task if it had to fight with a near-peer adversary. Wallace himself said in January that the army is “hollowed out and underfunded.” In February, retired General Richard Barrons said in an op-ed for The Sun that the UK could run out of ammo within hours in case of a major conflict. He added that the British military cannot currently be regarded as a ‘top tier’ NATO force.

Amid the Ukraine conflict, numerous Western countries, including Germany, France, and Poland, have boosted their military budgets, with total military expenditure in Europe seeing the steepest year-on-year increase in at least 30 years, according to the Stockholm International Peace Institute.’

it’s not known how many cruise missiles were given to Ukraine but in 1996 the UK ordered between 700 and 1000 of them at £790,000 a throw.

Spokespersons for British capitalism were not available for comment as to whether this was a good thing or not; anything which cuts into the profits, achieved through exploitation of the workers, is a bad thing, but at the same time British capitalist interests have to be defended.

The military is mainly sourced from the working class. The majority of the armed forces personnel interests therefore lie with the rest of the working class and the abolition of capitalism.

The working class in those  countries whose capitalism’s executive committee is committing to spending more and more on weapons of destruction need also to be saying NO to capitalism. Enough is enough. The answer is not more guns, missiles, or nuclear weapons. It’s Socialism. The clock is ticking.