Wednesday 27 April 2016

Catalonia - Past determines the future





Catalonia will stick to its timetable for independence from Spain despite the national political stalemate and the Madrid government’s refusal to negotiate, the region’s foreign policy chief said on Wednesday.

Raul Romeva said that independence for Catalonia was now inevitable, with or without Madrid’s blessing.

“The turning point has already been crossed, it is going to happen. When is the question,” he said in an interview at the Catalan delegation in London. “We are not going to be waiting forever.”
Spain has been in political limbo since an inconclusive election last December in which no party gained a majority.

The issue of whether to grant Catalonia a binding referendum on independence was one stumbling block as parties tried to form a coalition. Their failure to do so means that Spaniards will now go to the polls again on June 26.

“We cannot be prisoners of this,” Romeva said.

Romeva was ordered to drop his title of Catalan foreign minister by Spain’s constitutional court in February on the grounds that only the state could have a formal foreign policy, an indication of the depth of sensibilities.

The central government and a majority of Spaniards have long opposed independence for the wealthy, industrialised northeastern region, which is home to 7.5 million, or about a sixth of Spain’s population.

Acting premier Mariano Rajoy, in a meeting last week with Catalan President Carles Puigdemont, again refused to contemplate a referendum.

Romeva said a new dynamic had come into play since a pro-independence regional government won power in a Catalan vote last year, claiming it had a democratic mandate to go ahead.

Critics dismiss this view however because the pro-secession camp, while winning a majority of seats, fell short of winning a majority of votes in the election.

NO ONE PICKING UP PHONE

An 18-month timetable from last September still held despite the national stalemate. During that time, the regional government would create basic laws, a tax system and a state structure, he said.
Asked what would happen if Madrid refused to budge, he said: “We have put a deadline on this. If here is no response, then we will have to move ahead.”

There would be no unilateral declaration of independence, he said, but most likely another vote.
“That’s not the scenario we want, to do it without negotiation, but to negotiate we need the other side to be negotiating. But so far nobody is picking up the phone.”

“Some people in Spain believe that doing nothing, that is already the solution for them. But doing nothing has costs. Trust is being broken, there is a risk in economical terms.”

Catalonia was anxious to resolve the issue in a legal way, he said and the Scottish referendum in 2014 was a model. Scots voted to stay inside the United Kingdom, but had it gone the other way, London would have allowed secession.

Asked how an independent Catalonia would handle issues that the Scottish independence movement had faced, such as which currency to use and whether it could remain in the European Union, Romeva said these would not be problems.

Wednesday 20 April 2016

Kevin Cahill :The great property swindle: why do so few people in Britain own so much of our land?


Yr Aflonyddwch Mawr has learnt much from the research of Kevin Cahill and especially his book Who Owns Britain published in 2002.

We only wish other socialists and nationalists had paid attention to his studies - if they had they would not have such a skewed view of agricultural subsidies and the current European Economic Union.

The Crachach in Wales are telling us how we benefit  from EU agricultural subsidies - what they hide is precisely what Kevin Cahill reveals its is landowners who benefit from these subsidies and many of them in Wales are not even Welsh like the Beauforts etc.

Caveat emptor Buyer beware of the Lies about how the "average" person benefits from European Union Agricultural subsidies.


The myth spun about Britain is that land is scarce. It is not – landowners are paid to keep it off the market.

By Kevin Cahill

Modern British history, excluding world wars and the loss of empire, is a record of two countervailing changes, one partly understood, one not understood at all.

The partly understood change is the urbanisation of society to the point where 90 per cent of us in the United Kingdom live in urban areas.

Hidden inside that trans­formation is the shift from a society in which, less than a century and a half ago, all land was owned by 4.5 per cent of the population and the rest owned nothing at all.

Now, 70 per cent of the population has a stake in land, and collectively owns most of the 5 per cent of the UK that is urban.

But this is a mere three million out of 60 million acres.

Through this transformation, the heirs to the disenfranchised of the Victorian era have inverted the relationship between the landed and the landless.

This has happened even while huge changes have occurred in the 42 million acres of rural countryside.

These account for 70 per cent of the home islands and are the agricultural plot.

From being virtually the sole payers of such tax as was levied in 1873 (at fourpence in the 240p pound), the owners of Britain's agricultural plot are now the beneficiaries of an annual subsidy that may run as high as £23,000 each, totalling between £3.5bn and £5bn a year.

Urban dwellers, on the other hand, pay about £35bn in land-related taxes. Rural landowners receive a handout of roughly £83 per acre, while urban dwellers pay about £18,000 for each acre they hold, an average of £1,800 per dwelling, the average dwelling standing on one-tenth of an acre.

Britain urgently needs land reform, but there is a problem. The "tenants" of between 30 and 50 per cent of the Home Island land mass are unknown. I use the word tenant deliberately.

Here's why. In a written response to a question by Andrew George MP in February 2009, Bridget Prentice, a parliamentary undersecretary at the Ministry of Justice, replied, "The Crown is the ultimate owner of all land in England and Wales (including the Isles of Scilly): all other owners hold an estate in land.

Although there is some land that the Crown has never granted away, most land is held of the Crown as freehold or leasehold."

Prentice omitted to add that, as the preamble to the Land Registration Act 2002 put it, "the concepts of leasehold and freehold derive from medieval forms of tenure and are not ownership".

What this means is that, in relation to land in the UK, we are all tenants on the basis of the feudal superiority of the Crown, a superiority created in 1066 and founded on legal norms that were created to uphold that same feudal superiority.

This expensive medieval legal miasma in relation to land might not matter, if the confusion did not directly impinge on the size of our homes and even more directly on the price of land, which can be as much as 80 per cent of the cost of a new home.

Both the size and the cost of houses are predicated on the idea that land is scarce in the UK, but this is a myth propagated by those with an interest in selling plentiful land expensively.

The home islands together with Northern Ireland are 60 million acres in extent.

It is estimated that there are 62 million people living on those acres, giving every man, woman and child a little under an acre apiece.

An acre is a little over half the size of a standard Football Association pitch, which is why that measurement is used here. Almost everyone in the country knows what a football pitch looks like.

Very few people know how to visualise a hectare.

So, who wants the acre on the top of Ben Nevis? You don't have to go to a Scottish mountain to find plenty of land, however. England, one of the most urbanised countries in the world, has abundant spare acres.

This is because less than 6 per cent of the entire island of Britain - and 10 per cent of England - is urban.

Put another way, for every acre that is bricks and mortar, home or business premises, nine acres are not. This is not counter-intuitive.

Most people understand it as they get out of urban areas, big or small, and journey by train or car through some of the greenest and most pleasant land on earth.

What runs counter to what you see is the propaganda, unremitting and relentless, from the environmental and countryside lobbies, telling you that the UK is a small and crowded island and that within 30 years the last blade of grass in England will be concreted over.

At the current rate of urbanisation, which is about 14,400 acres a year, England won't finally fall to "concretisation" for 2,014 years.

Behind the scare stories is a very simple financial fact: an acre of rural land worth £5,000 becomes an acre of development land worth between £500,000 and £1m once planning permission is obtained.

Moreover, most land granted planning consent is registered offshore and is thus tax-free, or virtually so.

If the true availability of land in the UK were known, the conversion factor would not be quite so generous. The true availability of land starts with who tenants or holds it freehold.

What we need in this country is a debate about land, informed by facts. The obvious place to look for the facts is the three land registries of England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Here we encounter two extraordinary but related anomalies:

we have land registries that do not record the ownership of land at all and a second Domesday book that did record the ownership of all land in the UK but vanished.

These facts are not unrelated.

First, the land registries. Most people think that this is where the ownership of all land in the UK is recorded. They are wrong.

Formally created by the Land Registration Act 1925, the current three land registries only partly succeed where a series of earlier attempts failed, beginning in 1875.

Before that, there were deed registries in most counties in the United Kingdom.

The effort to create a land registry happened at roughly the same time as the publication in 1873 of the Return of Owners of Land, the so-called second or new Domesday Book, a coincidence that almost certainly led to the failure of the push for a registry.

The second Domesday of 1873 exposed the inequity of land ownership in Victorian Britain - that all land in the UK was then "owned" by just 4.5 per cent of the population, while 95.5 per cent of the population owned nothing, not even a blade of grass.

Domestic home ownership was in its infancy at the end of the 19th century; most of the land was the property of a very small network of aristocratic families, most of which had dual links to the House of Commons and the Lords. Those who owned everything also had political control of everything.

The second Domesday recorded the ownership - yes, the word used was ownership - of at least 98 per cent of all land in the four countries of the then United Kingdom: England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.

The details of each owner's holding, name and address, together with the valuation of any land of more than one acre, were recorded and printed in four volumes running to 2,300 pages and containing 321,000 names and addresses.

The details of the owners of less than an acre were recorded but not printed. And it was all completed in four years. The current Land Registry for England and Wales is at least 35 per cent short of that achievement after 86 years of trying, and in the age of computers.

The failure to record the ownership of land in the UK arises not from failures by the staff running the registries, but from the way they were constructed by lawyers on behalf of landowners. The land registries were designed to conceal ownership, not reveal it.

Shocked by the detailed revelation of the actual acreage that they held, the great landowners did two things. First, they refused to register their land with the new land registry in 1875.

Second, they had one of their own, the Hon George C Brodrick, Old Etonian warden of Merton College and second son of Queen Victoria's chaplain, the landowning 7th Viscount Midleton, damn the Returns in his 1881 work, English Land and English Landlords. No academic work relating to the Returns appeared subsequently until 2001.

By the early 1920s, the pace of urban home ownership in London and throughout the UK necessitated an expansion of land registry activity. This resulted in a series of land registration and land regulation acts that reaffirmed the Crown's feudal superiority by creating two forms of lease - for a term of years, or freehold of indefinite duration. The structure passed into law in 1925; nothing significant has changed since.

With rare exceptions, ownership dictates how land is used. Those who now "hold" the bulk of the acreage of the UK are extremely hard to identify, almost entirely because of the defects in the land registries. But they are for the most part the descendants - the so-called cousinhood - of the great landowners of 1873.

Among them are the current Duke of Buccleuch, with his 240,000 acres, the Duke of Northumberland, with 131,000 acres, the Duke of Westminster, with 129,000 acres, and the Prince of Wales, with 141,000 acres.

With ownership information missing, planning of any kind, whether national or local, is extremely difficult. And finding out who is getting the money is almost impossible.

In 2002, Michael Wills, then parliamentary secretary in the lord chancellor's department with responsibility for the Land Registry, wrote to the Liberal Democrat MP Adrian Sanders setting out the limitations of its remit:

1. The Land Registry does not record ownership of land.
2. It records two forms of tenancies: leaseholds for a term of years and freehold tenancies of indeterminate duration.
3. It creates titles without recording the acreage of each title.
4. Its records are not kept in a manner which would enable the registry to establish with any certainty what land was owned by a particular organisation or individual.
5. The titles to only about 65 per cent of the acreage of England and Wales are recorded; in Scotland and Northern Ireland it is 85 per cent and 50 per cent respectively.

What the land registries do is record the freehold titles of the domestic dwellings of the UK, and they do that in an exemplary way. This is to damn with faint praise, however, given that domestic dwellings cover three million acres in the UK at most. Those may be the most valuable parts, but they still constitute only 5 per cent of the country's land mass.

The 60 million acres of the UK are broadly comprised of 42 million acres of "agricultural" land, 12 million acres of what is called natural waste (mountains, bog, moor and so on) and six million acres of the urban plot (houses, shops, businesses). When it comes to our homes and the taxes we pay, only two of the three sectors are significant. These are the taxed land where most of our homes and businesses are, and agricultural land, which is untaxed and subsidised.

Many businesses are subsidised by the taxpayer, for various reasons - to retain jobs, to improve technology, to keep businesses in the market. But the agricultural subsidy is strange. Pared down to its essentials, it is a permanent and unaudited gift from the taxpayer to the owners of rural land.

Introduced in America in the 1920s, in Britain after the Second World War and in the European Union in the 1970s, subsidies were intended to keep the agricultural sector viable and food supplies secure.

In practice, the agriculture subsidy appears instead to have become a permanent prop to an unprofitable business as well as a free handout to the rich.

If the business of farming is profitable, why does it need the subvention?

It is most abused internationally by the United States, whose farm subsidy regime distorts trade throughout the world, making it impossible for many farmers in the developing world to enter international markets, much less trade in them.

But the EU, and its member states, mirror every bad American practice.

In the UK, the average "farmer" receives between £18,260 and £23,000 every year from the taxpayer for an average farm of 220-plus acres, whether or not he or she grows or herds anything.

There are no current subsidy figures specifically for England and Wales, according to Jack Thurston, a London-based expert on the subsidy regime.

"The UK government has refused to supply them," he says.

However, according to Andy Wightman, author of The Poor Had No Lawyers: Who Owns Scotland (And How They Got It), quoting figures from the Scottish government: "During the ten years from 2000 to 2009, the top 50 recipients of agricultural subsidy received £168m - an average of over £3.3m per farmer.

Among the top 50 are some of Scotland's wealthiest landowners, including the Earl of Moray, Leon Litchfield, the Earl of Seafield, Lord Inchcape, the Earl of Southesk, the Duke of Buccleuch, the Earl of Rosebery and the Duke of Roxburghe."

The crucial point is that the subsidy ultimately winds up with landowners, giving them greater flexibility in relation to the release of land for building homes.

Wightman cites the case of Frank A Smart & Son Ltd, a company that owns 39 farms in Speyside. In 2009 it received over £1.2m in single farm subsidy, the largest payment in Scotland.

The same company sold 18 building plots and six building properties on one of its farms, bought for £300,000 in 1991, for £1.3m. It made a profit of over £3.1m in 2008, and in March 2009 sold 24 plots of land with planning consent for more than £2.9m.

This pattern is repeated throughout the UK.

A subsidy originally intended to help poor farmers winds up padding the profits of rich landowners while keeping poor farmers in the developing countries out of the market altogether.

Is this the worst case ever of unintended consequences?

Together, homes and businesses in the UK pay as much as £57bn annually in de facto land taxes, such as business rates (£22bn) and council tax (£35bn a year, including stamp duty and charges). The subsidy of up to £5bn that the UK agricultural sector receives comes from British taxpayers, not some remote bureaucracy in Brussels.

In the UK, 90 per cent of the population lives on the three million acres of the urban plot. They work in the remaining three million acres of industrial and business land and live in an estimated 27.1 million homes, 18.9 million of which are privately owned and 8.2 million of which are publicly or privately rented. So 90 per cent of the population has made a deliberate choice and has paid for it, usually at double the cost of the home over the term of the mortgage needed to secure it.

The annual cost of that choice in terms of tax paid by the 70 per cent of us who are private owners, in addition to mortgage interest, averages out at £1,851 per home. Those in rented accommodation pay no mortgage but do pay some rates. People living in rented accommodation end up without an asset, whereas private home­owners at least acquire an asset. It comes at a very high cost, however, one that is subject to severe fluctuations in value.

The estimated gain on a UK house over the past 20 years, inclusive of tax and mortgage, is less than 4 per cent per annum. Over the long term - and most people change homes perhaps only once or twice in a lifetime - homes turn out to be a very modest investment.

The financial crisis demonstrated the raw capacity of capitalism to destroy or place entire economies at risk as well as to expel hundreds of thousands of people from their home through repossession.

The world financial system had to be rescued by emergency state spending and the imposition of taxes on entire populations and countries. A properly functioning system should not require subsidy on that scale to save it. Free-market capitalism failed because it suffers from huge design flaws. It is inherently unstable and lopsided. And nothing in the UK demonstrates this quite like the housing market.

Most land in the UK held monopolistically by large landowners or estates follows the rules of what the American social economist Mancur Olson called "hidden coalitions". How these work in the UK and their impact on the housing market is very simply explained.

First, no one knows just how much land is available for development or from whom it is available. The result is that UK homes are both the smallest in Europe and the most expensive, with the land or site costing a vast proportion of the value of the dwelling.

From the perspective of the 31 million people, or half the UK population, who pay direct taxes, what we are doing is in effect paying an inefficient business - the 325,000 "farmer" holders, or 0.5 per cent of the population - to keep hold of building land, further falsifying an already rigged market.

The finer figures are worse. Only two-thirds of UK farms are owned; the other one-third is rented, mostly from the owners of the other two-thirds. In effect, the agriculture subsidy goes to the 0.36 per cent of the population that owns 70 per cent of the country.

If the 65,000 "farms" of under two acres are subtracted as economically meaningless, what you have is 50 per cent of the population, the taxpayers, paying 0.28 per cent of the population to hold the bulk of the country's landed assets and to make those plentiful assets scarce. The result is that the cost of a building site is two or three times what it should be for 70 per cent of the population. This is Britain's great property swindle.

When home ownership became endemic, two things happened. First, the banks, highly monopolistic institutions with a profound lack of understanding of money, as they recently demonstrated, commoditised and monetised the most basic human need for shelter: our homes. But then those of us who managed to buy a home and hold on to it finally had a stake in the capitalist system. This was economically novel. It had never happened before.

The Domesday Book of 1873 records the beginning of private home ownership in the UK - in effect, the beginning of popular participation in the capitalist market system. No economist, not even Karl Marx, who was still alive when the second Domesday was published, foresaw the transformation that this would bring about. Marx thought that capitalism would always be confined to a minority, and that the majority would be a rent-paying proletariat. A superficial look at the second Domesday would have confirmed this. That is how it was then, but it's not how it is now. The transformation is fundamental to both capitalism and democracy.

Private home ownership destroys the notion of rent as a significant element of the overall economic equation. The estate agent Savills recently demonstrated what this means. The national debt, which we are supposed to lie awake at night worrying about, is roughly £1trn.

The total value of the privately owned national housing stock is over £3trn. The ratio of debt to equity in the housing stock is about 1:4. In other words, for every £1 of mortgage debt, there is £3 of free asset value.

Back in 1870s, for a UK population then of 28 million, there were just over 3.84 million dwellings, of which 703,000 were privately owned. Between 1873 and 2010, the population multiplied by 2.2, but the number of houses jumped more than sevenfold. The number of privately owned houses increased to 18.6 million, a 26-fold increase, as the majority of the population moved from landless to landed, from a waged proletariat to an asset-owning democracy.

Today the great popular asset pile is threatened by tax addicts on one side, acting for inefficient government, and defective bank-dominated capitalism on the other.

The banks, knowing the real situation about the land supply market, that it is rigged and opaque, recently felt safe enough to inflate a house-price bubble that showed reckless disregard for housing's primary purpose - to provide enduring shelter for people.

That problem could have been contained eventually by normal domestic fiscal adjustments, no matter how brutal. What no one allowed for was that the banks, the masters of money, would blow a second, and even more destructive, asset bubble in their own basic commodity, money.

The banks created fictional assets and ran a bubble market in these, using other people's money. They incinerated about half the global stock of money, other people's money. When the banks' internal bubble burst, it left no assets, just worthless paper.

The property bubble at least left some habitable assets behind. No matter how financially damaged, something could be rescued from the crash in house prices.

The only rescue available for the banks was for money to be printed and for a lien to be taken on the entire nation's taxes for the next ten to 15 years. We owe the banks nothing except our debts.

What we urgently need is a clear, simple and logical land registry in each of the four nations of the Union, with all land ownership recorded and the names of the owners indexed, as at the present Scottish land registry, and with the acreage stated.

In parallel with that change, we need formally to extinguish the Crown's expensive, legally meaningless and complex feudal claim to all land in the UK, a claim that was informally challenged by parliament in 1873 by using "owners" in the title of the Return of Owners of Land. 

Finally, and even more urgently, we need to simplify both land law and the appalling and wholly unnecessary language in which it is dressed up by fee-farming lawyers.

If these three things can be achieved, it will lead to a simplification of documentation and a lowering of lawyers' fees for land transactions.

Yet those three steps, useful though they might be, will not take us to the heart of the matter, which is the urban acreage of the UK and the houses we live in, which stand on it.

To become environmentally efficient and more habitable, and with ever larger numbers of people working from home, houses need to be larger and, wherever possible, to have a garden. To achieve this transformation, we need to know the facts about land and its use, not the fiction spun by those trying to sell plentiful acres as if they were a scarce commodity.

SOURCE: http://www.newstatesman.com/life-and-society/2011/03/million-acres-land-ownership

Wednesday 13 April 2016

European Court of Justice and the Viking and Laval Rulings




Enrico Tortolano says the case for Leave is stronger than it has ever been.


There is also the vital issue of EU case law. It is impossible to ignore this, not least because past ECJ rulings have inevitably become interwoven with British legislation and legal decisions. Britain’s courts have incorporated European Court of Justice (ECJ) decisions into their own jurisprudence and to attempt to unravel this will present a variety of problems. The ECJ Viking and Laval rulings illustrate how employers’ rights trump workers’ rights in the EU.

In December 2007 the ECJ judged in the Viking case that the International Transport Workers’ Federation and the Finnish Seafarers’ Union were in breach of Article 43 of the Treaty that gave businesses the right to freedom of establishment in any country of the EU.

The Laval case followed, it ruled that employers were not required to observe more than minimum terms and conditions in ‘posting’ workers from one member country of the EU to work in another where more beneficial collective agreements had been previously agreed between the trade unions and the employers.

In the Ruffert 2008 judgement, the ECJ ruled that contractors were not obliged to observe collective agreements unless it could be proven that they were ‘universally applicable’. It claimed that under Article 49 of the EU Treaty, higher rates of pay would mean ‘an additional economic burden that may prohibit, impede or render less attractive the provision of their services in the host member state’.

These cases make clear that the rights of workers enshrined in both the Community Charter of the Fundamental Social Rights and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, are entirely subordinate to the economic freedom and interests of employers and multi-national companies. There is an urgent need to build solidarity amongst the workers of Europe.

The virulent attacks on the workers in Greece and Portugal by an unaccountable Troika of technocrats has shown the EU to be the antithesis of democracy: decision-making is centralised and decisions are in the hands of an unaccountable technocratic elite.

Even the former unelected head of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, outlined in 2007: “… Its (EU) core is undemocratic and distant, a threat to all those living in its shadow”.

SOURCE: http://tuaeu.co.uk/?page_id=846

THANKS TO IRISH COMRADES FOR PRODUCING  PAMPHLET BELOW ON EUROPEAN UNION AND WORKERS RIGHTS BELOW - PLEASE CIRCULATE

http://www.people.ie/trade/lux.pdf


SEE ALSO : http://greatunrest2012.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/the-european-union-eu-is-not-member-of.html

Sunday 10 April 2016

Tata Steel Wales - Seize the Time to Occupy the Steel Works and Start the Process of Setting up a Welsh Steel Co-operative run by the workers



Tata Steel Wales - Seize the Time to Occupy the Steel Works and Start the Process of Setting up a Welsh Steel Co-operative run by the workers says Yr Aflonyddwch Mawr

John Boyd writes:

Steel plant workers in Port Talbot are being persuaded by Laurence Platt to occupy the plant to keep the furnaces, and blast furnaces from going out.

They should ensure order books don't go to steel plants within the EU.

What has to be made clear we had a steel industry until it came under the control of the European Coal and Steel Community with quotas and a EU Commissioner who was a steel baron.

The ECSC was the first EU treaty and has been folded into the Lisbon Treaty by which we are ruled.

We all need to support these workers and to obtain a massive vote to leave the EU to end the interference by the EU, control capital, our borders and carry out laws and policies in the interest of workers, jobs and rational development of Britain outside the EU.

Yr Aflonyddwch Mawr says that waiting for a top down solution will be fatal to Steel making in Wales.

Welsh Workers taking things into their own hands first by an occupation as a prelude to setting up Welsh Steel Co-operative is a route while having its risks is less risky than doing nothing and waiting for the industry in Wales to die before our eyes.

SEE ALSO: 

http://greatunrest2012.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/the-tory-attempted-murder-of-welsh.html






http://greatunrest2012.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/indias-tata-steel-said-saturday-that.html

Nota Bene




Study : Steelworkers Co-operatives in USA.

http://newint.org/columns/essays/2010/09/01/modragon-co-op-united-steelworkers-union/




Also the phenomenon of fabricas recuperadas ("recovered factories") is not new

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_self-management

Saturday 9 April 2016

The European Union (EU) is not a member of the Council of Europe and, accordingly, it is not bound by the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights.




The Neo Liberal European Court of Justice

Yr Aflonyddwch Mawr have found confusion among some people about the European Court of Human Rights established in 1959 which was established by the Council of Europe and the European Court of Justice established in 1952 to serve the emerging European Union then in its European Coal and Steel Community incarnation.

In particular we find some of the judgements of the European Court of Human Rights favourable to ordinary people but the European Court of Justice in the Viking and Laval Cases  in particular showed its anti working class prejudice like the other institutions of the Neo Liberal European Union from European Commission to European Central Bank



The European Union (EU) is not a member of the Council of Europe and, accordingly, it is not bound by the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights hence some occasional good judgements from European Court of Human Rights

SEE ALSO: http://greatunrest2012.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/sos-save-our-sovereignty-campaign-vote.html

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/ampp3d/six-things-you-should-know-4370967

India's Tata Steel said Saturday that Britain's Serious Fraud Office is investigating a lapse in procedures at its steel-making site in Yorkshire, as the group seeks to sell its UK operations.


Yr Aflonyddwch Mawr says the more light shone on Tata Steel the better - fraud in UK is now being exposed but we have exposed much worse here 

Tata Steel Welsh assets  should be put in the hands of a Welsh Workers Steel Co-operative and belong to the Welsh people - 200 years of building an Iron and  Steel Industry in Wales should not disappear because our Industry passed temporarily into the hands of a Indian Comprador Capitalists who have much Indian blood on their hands.

India's Tata Steel said Saturday that Britain's Serious Fraud Office is investigating a lapse in procedures at its steel-making site in Yorkshire, as the group seeks to sell its UK operations.

In a filing to the Bombay Stock Exchange, Tata confirmed media reports of an SFO probe, saying it notified fraud investigators after discovering the problems in 2015.

"...During an internal audit conducted by the company, certain inappropriate testing and certification procedures at the South Yorkshire-based Speciality Steels business were identified," Tata said in the filing, signed by company secretary Parvatheesam Kanchinadham.

Tata did not specify the issues, but the UK's Daily Telegraph said police were probing allegations staff may have falsified certificates detailing the composition of its steel before sale.

Tata said that after discovering the problems it immediately stopped the improper practices, alerted more than 600 direct and indirect customers and notified bodies including the SFO, which has opened a criminal investigation.

"Since this initial notification Tata Steel has been cooperating fully with the Serious Fraud Office on their investigation," Tata said in the filing.

Tata will start the process of selling its British steel assets by Monday, the UK government's Business Secretary Sajid Javid said earlier this week after holding talks in Mumbai.

Javid has said his government will make every effort to secure a serious buyer for Tata's Port Talbot plant in Wales and other assets, with up to 15,000 jobs put at risk by the sale plans

Source AFP

SEE ALSO:

http://greatunrest2012.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/what-people-in-wales-should-know-about.html

Sunday 3 April 2016

EU Membership Means No Re-Nationalisation



Public ownership of gas and electricity is destined to become a cherished aim of the Labour Party. For years under privatisation, the swindling of the consumer has gone hand-in-hand with outrageous profit-taking by the corporate giants, to the loss of the public purse.

Far from helping customers through keen competition, the main effect of energy privatisation has been – like austerity – a redistribution of wealth from the have-nots to the well-to-do.

What a pity, therefore, that Labour cannot renationalise it!

Britain is a member of the European Union (EU)  and as such bound by the EU Treaties.

Indeed, every British court is duty-bound to enforce every EU law in preference to any conflicting British statute. Under Article 106, the EU prohibits public monopolies exercising exclusive rights where this violates EU competition rules.

The EU’s Court of Justice has interpreted Article 106 as giving private companies the right to argue before the national courts that services should continue to be open to private-sector competition.

Nationalised services are prima facie suspect and must be analysed by the judiciary for their “necessity”.

Thus the EU has given companies a legal right to run to court to scupper programmes of public ownership.

The fact that EU law has this effect may seem astonishing. Many on the Left seem unaware of it.

Those fond of the EU tend to go into denial over it.

Despite Greece, there is a tendency to displace the EU’s neoliberalism onto the nascent Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership: “EU good, TTIP bad”, so the chorus goes.

Yet the consensus that EU law really does preclude renationalisation is pretty overwhelming.

 Legal scholars regard the jurisprudence surrounding Article 106 as

“revolutionary”, since it reverses “the decades-old presumption…that Member States are free in principle to determine their preferred system of property ownership”. 

Even Polly Toynbee endlessly reiterated that EU competition law would make NHS privatisation irreversible, though curiously this didn’t dampen her pro-EU ardour in the long term.

Furthermore there is scant prospect of Article 106 ever being repealed.

To do so would require the common accord of all the governments of the EU Member States.

You’d only need a single neoliberal government to veto such a Treaty change.

For good measure, from the 1990s onwards there was a surge of EU liberalisation directives opening up gas, electricity, transport, telecommunications etc to private sector involvement.

Fat chance of a Labour Britain getting these repealed either: to do so would require a “qualified majority” of Member States.

Labour therefore faces a choice: dump the EU or dump renationalisation. Whatever choice it makes, the fact that EU membership outlaws renationalisation needs to be fully understood throughout the Party and labour movement.

Danny Nicol is Professor of Public Law at the University of Westminster and author of The Constitutional Protection of Capitalism

SOURCE:
http://www.leftfutures.org/2015/09/eu-membership-means-no-renationalisation/

Study :

The European Super State Project

http://greatunrest2012.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/the-nature-of-european-union-and-its.html



Why the Crachach Love the European Union

http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/the-european-union-green-nazi-tycoon.html

Public Banking for Wales

http://greatunrest2012.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/european-union-membership-not-helpful.html

Trade Union Rights

http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/letter-from-norwegian-workers-to.html?spref=fb

Euromania

http://greatunrest2012.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/euromania-uncovering-eu-by-peter-vlemmix.html

The World of Imperialism

http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/vi-lenin-on-slogan-for-united-states-of.html

http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/usa-lenins-imperialism-brian-becker-and.html




Saturday 2 April 2016

What People in Wales should know about Tata Steel but you never hear on the BBC or the Corporate Media


Tata Steel and Salwa Judum 

 Only days after the Chhattisgarh government signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Tata Steel, a vigilante militia was established (known as the Salwa Judum). 

Organised by the state government and funded by Tata Steel the Salwa Judum initiated a ground clearance operation to eradicate the local forest peoples so Tata could set up its steel plant. 

The Salwa Judum burned, raped and murdered its way through 600 local villages forcing 50 000 people into police camps and displacing a further 350 000. 

To keep these displaced persons in check, the government then deployed 200 000 paramilitary troops to the region to make sure that it remained a stable climate for investment and economic growth.

To find our more about how to 
STOP THE WAR ON THE PEOPLE OF INDIA  VISIT ;
https://www.facebook.com/Stop-Indias-War-on-the-People-167572753339209/?fref=ts



Port Talbot: bail it out, by David Powell of New Economics Foundation



Yr Aflonyddwch Mawr welcomes this article by David Powell of the New Economics Foundation even if we are skeptical about the top down strategy proposed our views are contained in the article The Tory attempted murder of the Welsh Steel Industry.

The UK steel industry is again at crisis point with Indian company Tata set to sell its British steel businesses. Attention is focused on its iconic plant at Port Talbot in Wales where 5,500 people are employed – although it’s grim news too for the other plants across the country.

Steel workers are already reeling from huge job losses over the last few months. In October last year the liquidation of Thai company SSI’s UK arm led to the mothballing of its Redcar plant, taking with it 2,200 jobs.

Tata has already axed 1,000 members of its workforce earlier this year.

At the time of writing, the government was considering – or at least not ruling out – stepping in to bail out the Port Talbot plant. This is the minimum that it should do.

The big question is economic


Is the continuation of the plant viable and profitable? And how long would any bail out last until we know? UK steel has become unprofitable thanks to a glut of Chinese steel on the market, which has hugely depressed prices.

Currently, the main solution that has been proposed is for higher tariffs to be imposed on steel imports to the EU – as they have been in the US.

Until this is addressed, any new owner – whether private, cooperative or nationalised – risks perpetual buffeting by global forces. But the UK has been criticised for actually resisting attempts by the EU to crank up tariffs.

But whatever happens, the UK’s steel workers need the government to be as proactive in helping the steel industry as it was in bailing out the banks in 2008.

So how could a bail-out help?


Importantly, a bail-out would create much needed time to find a solution that works for the steel industry and our economy. And it would create time to find a new private owner – Tata’s plants in Scunthorpe and Lanarkshire are already reportedly attracting interest from new suitors.

More excitingly, it’s possible that a very different way of running the plant can be found – like a new cooperative model of ownership, as NEF set out in our 2013 report with the TUC outlining an industrial strategy for Wales.

But a bail-out also offers a chance to reorient how a troubled sector fundamentally works. Following the financial crisis in 2008, the nationalisation of RBS presented an important (but missed) opportunity to set the bank on a new path, and reform our broken banking sector. We proposed that breaking RBS up into local savings banks would help diversify our banking system and demonstrate that the finance sector could, and should, work in the public interest.

We need a proper plan for UK industry


The root causes of the UK steel crisis go back decades, during which successive government’s attention has focused on one sector: finance.  While the interests of the City have been prioritised and the freedom it demanded granted, the government has been forced to step-in to mop-up the crisis that resulted. And the dominance of finance has hurt other sectors, like steel – for example, the strong pound it has led to has hurt exports.

While the Chancellor was busy trying (and failing) to take the UK to court for capping bankers’ bonuses, areas like Port Talbot have been left to stand or fall on the decisions taken dispassionately in boardrooms on the other side of the world.

We need proper, sectoral and regional industrial strategies. This challenge is very real in areas beyond the steel sector – for example the need to wean high-carbon areas like Aberdeen from fossil fuel jobs to a sustainable, employment-rich future.

Vulnerable industries desperately need leadership and a hands-on approach from government – particularly if they need to transition fast to ultra-efficient processes or futureproof green energy industries.

The government has to help Port Talbot – now. But bailing out a proud and nationally important industry isn’t really a plan: it’s what you do when you’ve actively decided not to have a plan, until it’s virtually too late.

SEE ALSO : 

http://greatunrest2012.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/the-tory-attempted-murder-of-welsh.html