Open reply to Green taxes letter, Wakefield Express.

David Speight presents some good argument for scrapping green taxes.
l don’t own a car but see, like everyone else, the shoddy state of public transport - often overcrowded, too hot, bumpy ride and poor shelter when waiting all weathers. At 42 yrs old this presents little problem. Others not so - the elderly or those with kids in tow and shopping plus, love ‘em or hate ‘em, our blessed schoolkids. All cramped up in poorly designed buses and an inefficient network. Somehow we daily manage our way through this mayhem with muted protest. True, some are darn right disrespectful in their protests but can you really blame them? There are better ways to register complaint with our lot.

Doesn’t all the transport system need upgrading for public and private use? Many of us prefer the freedoms associated with our individual means of transport, car or otherwise. For instance in these days of DIY we couldn’t manage repeat trips to suppliers for our materials by bus. Plus of course the freedom to roam - on a whim and for pleasure.

Britain has masses of countryside and a wealth of offerings in other villages, towns and cities. Yet investment in roads is pitiful if not generally anti-motorist.
There’s a duality here in that our Townmasters seek to encourage visitors for revenue yet limit the mobilities of inhabitants (low wages, high house prices, taxes, fines and traffic schemes.) lnstead we are offered a sense of ‘place’. An identity chaperoned by selective nostalgia.

As for London’s transport system being up to the job then Mr Speight is very much mistaken. London has all the benefits and pitfalls as anywhere else but in concentrated form. Too much haphazard design and based on similar faulty logic of minimizing our footprint and sticking with an imaginary past.

It’s not just cars. All consumption is up for consideration - clothes, activities, food, socialising, holidays, energy; our daily lives and wastes.
We put so much effort into saving by products that are worthless that the whole exercise becomes one of going backwards. This stuff comes from the ground and could easily compress and go back there. Or what of machine processed separation or clean burn incineration as a power source? If there’s a case to be made for our rubbish being useful then surely it lies on the larger scale and not at the level of the individual householder.

Which ever way it is looked at retail is to feature heavily as everywhere ‘regenerates’. Yet we are set to be guilt tripped and green taxed by some pretty naive and disingenuous thinking. This from people who have often benefited the most from society’s abundance.

There is a good argument for redesign of homes as they are generally built today guided by a lack of forward thinking - nostalgia and environmentalism. There are some fantastic looking developments on the Leeds waterfront and Wakefield also making an offering. But too much crowded in. This may suit hard working, hard living city types all well and good but not so those with families or wishing peace and quiet or different lifestyle.

This overcrowding is happening everywhere. Wakefield, as well as anywhere else, is experiencing a building boom. More of a whimper given low build rates and the state of housing stock old and new.

Plots of land are being taken up and high rise and compacted dwellings abound. People are offered relatively huge sums of money to sell off their gardens for new housing. Tales abound in these parts of offers in the region of £50 - 70,000. Houses are expensive due to the cost of land, not materials or labour. High profits are generated by the demand for limited stock and our desire for a place of our own.

Good plots of land are hard to come by because of artificial restraints. Supposedly overcrowded Britain is just 10% built, 75% farming that is held back by environmentalist sentiment and 13% ‘other’.

So whilst we are constantly upgrading and patching up the old, living increasingly cheek by jowl in expensive and inefficient housing and getting taxed for the benefit of maintaining this we could actually be looking at pastures new - our out moded, subsidised and romanticised countryside.

Britain is in crying need of regeneration. Regeneration writ large and not this small scale, anal retentive stuff.

Great efficiencies and improvements in housing and living will only happen on the larger scale - at the level of town and country planning and a consideration of our place in that.
There are fantastic, easily built house types looming on the horizon and new materials and techniques that offer more. All held back by petty, contradictory convention and regulation.
These design types will make the best efficiency savings rather than small scale and expensive energy generation. Energy absorbent materials are constantly being developed and certainly have a part to play though still reliant upon the weather and thus requiring back up. Retrofitting is expensive and offers diminishing returns for intermittent power.

Why kid ourselves? A developing economy needs masses of cheap, reliable and clean energy.That can only mass generation and nuclear power. We need to ditch our aversion to the ‘big monster’ and embrace our capacity to improve all situations. l’m pretty sure that if something as inefficient as a windmill can be made elegant then something as useful as a nuclear power station can be made a thing of beauty.

This could well set the alarm bells ringing ringing with some who would believe that the country will become one big housing plot. Not really so. Better living standards seem to lead to a decrease in the size of families. This coupled with the marvelous news that we live longer (despite all our bad habits) is leading to the requirement for immigrant labour - and we all came from somewhere.

Regardless, Britain’s glory days of empire and assumed superiority are long over. We may still be an island but that is purely in geographical terms. Despite the protests of Greens and Little Englanders our destiny will always be reliant on interacting with the outside world. How can it be otherwise?

Despite maintaining something of a bargaining chip by looking both ways, the UK is part of Europe and rightly so. As well as the benefits of increased immigration to this country - new culture, outlook and determination to progress there is also opportunity abroad. Europe is a two way thing and many opportunities await the willing. Many take advantage of cheap travel and low costs abroad to set up there and why not?

Even our good friends at the BNP say (somewhere) that there should be no problem with migrant workers developing skills to take back home with them to rebuild their country. We can discern their reasons for saying so but perhaps something a bit more progressive than our green chums?
Our eastern european chums are taking full advantage of opportunities offered whilst the predominant outlook, particularly in the UK, is an entrenched one. People from developing cultures have little of the self loathing impressed upon us and are keen to develop.

We should be pleased that many choose to come to the UK out of choice. Perhaps they were attracted by our sense of tolerance and fairplay, or that Britain once stood for something to be proud of - the cradle of the industrial revolution, scientific endeavour and ingenuity. All sadly things that are out of fashion at present as the west looks backwards at its peril.

Open reply to Cllr. Roberts, Heckmondwike. (The Press (1)

l'm not overfamiliar with Cllr. Roberts stance on funding English teaching to, it's presumed he means, foreigners. But judging by your article in last week's Press he seems to want it both ways. How can you argue for the withdrawal of funding and then expect 'foreigners' to speak it as their main language? Would you argue the same for 'homegrown' kids that need their rudimentary understandings guided in the classroom? Perhaps funding and the runnings of education are further matters for discussion.

What is 'english' anyway? It does seem to be a form that can adopt others and continuously adapt itself. Spend some time checking the roots of words, their meanings and use and we find that they come from all over. This continues today and new words and expressions are always arising. Not sure whether this is the case with other languages though - l recall a welsh speaking couple sounding completely alien until hearing 'supermarket'. Likewise Croatia's Franjo Trudjman coming out with 'device for holding up trousers' when divorcing Serbo-Croat.

l take the point that English should be the main language when used in this country. This is even established in much of global trade and in diplomatic circles, having replaced French.
But what of when we 'Brits' go abroad? How many of us speak the lingo? Erm . . . ? not many. Even when some of us do make the attempt we find our efforts appreciated but generally our continental counterparts speak more than adequate english, french, spanish, etc. This seems to be even more so at the lower end of the jobs market. I wouldn't put myself high up the pecking order but have often been embarassed by those of lower 'status' who demonstrate command of many languages and myself struggling with the basics.

Bloody tourists, eh?

l'd counter Roberts' point about a reluctance on the part of others to learn and say it's more one of traditional resistance to the 'other' in this country. Compounded today by the multicultured approach to societal realtions accepting the 'other' as 'always other'.

Given Cllr. Roberts leanings it's presumed that his bottomline is 'they' should go home yet immigration to this country and the mobility of its occupants has always been a feature of its make up. lf any of us trace our family hisory then we find it's been a long and winding road to get to this point.
Despite geographically being an island Britain cannot be other than part of the bigger picture. We have a global economy with goods and people travelling far and wide. (The latter should be considered to be the most basic of freedoms.)

Regardless of Cllr Roberts' approach and the shilly-shallyings of mainstream politicos immigration and mobility will always make the world go around with benefits and challenges for all. lt seems that despite a wealth of cultural differences we find there are more things that bind us than not and assumptions made about people expected to conform to tradition don't actually fit the stereotype.

Maybe there are forms and nuances of expression that just don't translate via language so an understanding of other forms of expression enhances our own to the point that words or phrases become accepted, thesaurusised (made that one up) or adapted. Our understanding and language given some ad hoc je ne sais qois, so to speak.
Much can be learnt from the study of other language and culture. l profess to not having much understanding of other languages let alone script. Looking at eastern forms with odd symbols written fom right to left is incomprehensible to me but does suggest another side to learning. Perhaps the mere ability to read in this manner has an effect on comprehension and the ability to do both in many languages opens up far more than the seperation. Which ought to go without saying really.

Maybe in the future language will reflect an absorption and filtering of the lot into one common but enriched 'english' or other. Further than that though, our eastern contemporaries seem a lot less encumbered by the insularities of mainstream western thought and the world may come to speak in a modern eastern form. Somehow doubt that but Cllr Roberts may yet speak from the other side of his mouth.

(1)http://www.thepressnewspaper.co.uk/NewsDetails.asp?id=801

Public service Fightback!

Volunteers required . . .

The National Health Service is undergoing considerable change at present. Changes big on promise, all the right boxes ticked - but on the ground service becoming a nightmare and staff and patient care suffering.
We're sold stories of bright new shiny hospitals which are definitely needed but scratch beneath the surface and we're getting a lot of self-congratulatory hype from people whose vested interests lie elsewhere.

We face job cuts, closures and cutbacks - a diminished service replaced by one ran to quotas, an attendant bureaucracy of well paid consultancies, managers and sub managers, privatisation for the sake of it and practically a licence to print money.

In real terms these cuts are unnecessary. There is no real reason - or the reasons stated are various and incoherent. Part slap in the face and taste of things to come and part due to Labours fixation with targets.
Even in the Govts own cheesy cliche-speak of ‘best practice’ and ‘value for money’ this makes no sense as many of the services up for grabs are set to be more expensive. In fact many business analysts are baffled as to the Govts actions stating that the figures are nothing to be alarmed about. And they are a fraction of the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

These are the actions of an administration trying to look dynamic at our expense and reveal nothing but contempt for the public.
We are being sold short by a bunch of goons that get by on spin and hype but with no effective opposition to challenge them. People that get off on telling us we drink, smoke and enjoy ourselves too much and ram patronising and hypocritical sermons down our throats as to how we should live our lives. This is a parliament stuffed with lawyers and ‘fairplay’ rulemakers with no direction other than to see society stifled and stepping to their tune.

Whether we like it or not this period is one undergoing substantial change, much of it seemingly without direction. Changes are afoot in the economy, labour market and beyond and we can no longer afford a head-in-the-sand approach.
If we allow this period to fester with, at best, hopeful gestures and placing faith in foot-draggers and sellout merchants then they will wriggle out of it in one form or another, something else will replace it - immigration, criminality and general bad behaviour likely to the fore. Expect stories of unscrupulous care workers, scamming immigrants and general unfeeling, uncaring and self-interested behaviour. Basically, how crap we all are and that we need decisions making for us.

Too often this is where we fall down. We allow a mood to fester, individuals and groups picked off, others keep their heads down, regulations follow and we’re stuffed.

So what do we do?

Merely ask the bosses to be nice to us whilst we leave them to do their jobs? Their jobs being nothing more than to whip us into some indeterminate shape and in real terms our paymasters. ln very real terms they have little to do with actually running the health service.

Despite 'bending over backwards' to minimise the harm of cuts in the Health service it's fairly obvious that with the appointment of two new turnaround directors Mid-Yorkshire Health trust are determined to see through some nasty treatment. Therefore anything we do will have to be determined.
Health workers need to be able stick up for themselves day to day and to be comfortable that others will genuinely support them - us, the general public as users and fellow workers with an interest in our livelihoods. If we do this we prove that there is nothing to fear by making a stand.

lt’s suggested that staff adopt a policy of non compliance with unnecessary paperwork, refuse to comply with target driven initiatives that allow management to please their political masters (but do nothing for patient care) and break the 'vow of silence'. Professionalism is nothing to do with speaking out against a drop in service, in fact quite the opposite.
And no victimisation. Management and their friends will do everything they can to win this - everything from soft soaping to disciplinary action for petty reasons and more.

*
By now the current swathe of redundancy notices will have been handed out and staff worried about their livelihoods. Management have said they will do all they can to minimise redundancies yet haven’t ruled out the option as a continuing part of their plans. There shouldn’t be a single one. lf the principle of us losing jobs to save their necks is accepted then how long before one becomes 93, 450, 1100? And remaining staff carrying an increased workload.

*
Even at low levels of growth, the nation’s wealth is predicted to double over the next 40 years. Advances in medical science and practice mean more and better treatments are constantly being developed yet held back by red tape, underfunding and an aversion culture. Notwithstanding groundbreaking new technologies, today we face the rundown of essential services and health staff, effort and resources diverted into meeting quotas and targets. The results of this are well known - people are dying and losing out on basic healthcare whilst all the time we are told things are getting better.

The NHS has never been perfect and we should be clear that ‘nationalising’ it, ie. keeping it in public ownership, is a limited call. What is meant by public ownership? In truth we own precious little of it although our collective labours create it. Usually it means run by the state yet it is state policy to stitch up the NHS and private entrepreneurs are merely doing what they do best.
Further, in a globalised economy shouldn’t we be thinking of an international health service? To some extent it already is - staff, products and patients from all over the world.

*
To stand any chance of stopping the rot we need to make a determined stand and stick up for ourselves. For that we need to recognise the general nature of this battle.
No job cuts, no closures and no loss of services should be the most basic stand taken - for decent employment and a health service worthy of the name.

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This leaflet aims to help set up health worker support groups to discuss further actions and activities. Every inch forward will be a hard fought one as despite overwhelming anger and public sympathy there is little that people believe can be done under the present circumstances.
ln the past people have been motivated into action for various reasons - good and bad. Isn’t it time that we consider something worth fighting for today - before we get caught up in events?

Health workers need support now.

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Unison are coordinating other aspects - 01924 212335



(psf! *3)

*A case of the shovel calling the spade a nigger?

(letter handed to Wakefield anti-fascists)

Should we be bothered by 'fascists'?

Are we to believe that the BNP and their like are a problem? Sure they have a handful of Councillors and gain a reasonable enough vote in elections but what does this mean? lsn't it the case that they merely occupy the arse end of politics adding a twist to the outpourings and actions of mainstream politics? At the end of the day these are the people with the say-so. For instance when so-called respectable mainstream politicians go on about the level of immigration or asylum seekers and pander to ideas of being overcrowded and under resourced, yet in the eyes of many do little about it, then the BNP hit home by giving a populist twist to the argument.
Let's not forget that it is state authorities that make the decisions to inter and deport people or even invade foreign countries.

White supremacist ideas may not be that strident anymore but appear in soft-core form under the guise of multiculturalism at home and humanitarianism abroad - 'we are different' still being the message. Though perhaps inverted here whereby any and every other 'culture' is promoted and home grown tradition is sanitised - though not at the request of immigrant groups.
These ideas are evolving under the pressures of globalisation yet in island Britain there is a smug remnant of complacent superiority.

The BNP's popularity is something of a myth - many decent people have voted this way purely out of anger at what they see as ineffectual politicians and not out of any support for what they stand for. Pretty much the way that most voting goes ie. loose affiliations that are acted upon every four or so years with no genuine commitment to 'the cause'. The BNP at best are seen as something that will do what they say and seemingly a logical response to problems posed by elements of the mainstream.

Perhaps we confuse the BNP with fascists from times past when these labels meant something and people had an active involvement with their political parties. Not so today - people on the whole have little faith in active involvement with politics and go along with the loose belief that voting an outfit into power can change things.

In effect the BNP are a pisspot* outfit and we do ourselves no good by campaigning against them. Surely their are bigger and better ways to operate than picking this seemingly easy target? lf we go around telling people not to have any associations with them then we only make the case that there is something remotely coherent about them.

What is good about the BNP is that they give ground level expression to ordinary every day anger and propose means to deal with problems that people perceive - however crap that may be. Most of us in our daily lives come across sentiments that the BNP echo ie, their 'ideas' are commonplace. We should relish the challenge that these arguments present as it is often here that we can make headway and build a true expression of ground level politics.

Sadly if we concentrate our fire on 'fascists' then we let the real culprits escape and they carry on reinforcing the shaky ground that the BNP occupy. Worse, if we adopt the slogan that even mainstream politicians are better than 'fascist scum' then we dig a hole for ourselves too.
Shouldn't we be a bit more daring and find ways to channel that muted anger into meaningful expression?

The left should seriously be just that little bit braver. The BNP may occasionally fight a bit dirty but they are good at it - and after a significant section of the same audience as us. They may be reactionary in some circumstances but they are at least brave enough to stick their necks out. And they do set a standard, of sorts. Can we say the same about ourselves?

"We' well outnumber 'them' yet concentrate too much effort in being scared. Turn all this around and hit the audience instead of leapfrogging it by thinking they can be won over to our cause by 'celebrity' figures. If we don't understand our arguments or at least work to principle then how do we think others can be convinced by celebrity?

l'd actually go further - we should attempt to win this lot over. Why? As mentioned before their arguments are commonplace - amongst our workmates, friends and family. If we say don't speak to the BNP then we deny their arguments can be countered - unless Sting or someone says so. If we can't counter these arguments and promote something our closest can believe in it's probably because we're not too sure of our arguments. We'll only find out by putting them to the test.

Recruit from the BNP!?!

Quite serious. Whatever their faults they do seem to believe in something and put in good effort. The days that they seem to hanker for are long gone, arguments incoherent and a just a bit hypocritical. Misguided Nazis? Hmm

If that is to be met with apoplexy the the left should at least defend - to the hilt - the BNP's right to free speech, not seek official sanction to quieten them, side step or simply deny their arguments.