Welcome to the modern world of work.

If I may return to the subject of trades unions, I trust you will have read in the papers how the sports retailer, Sports Directs' 20,000 employees are all on zero hour contracts. That is actually a misnomer because people on zero hour conditions don't have contracts and that is the significant point. If you have no contract of employment then you have no employment rights.

If you work in an environment where the employer can treat you exactly as he/she pleases then you are working in a form of slavery. It was exactly such conditions that trade unions were created to defend against. It is genuinely difficult to come to terms with the fact that in modern Britain, the country that created the trades union movement, the 5th richest country in the world, that fought the greatest war in history against regimes that were enslaving people, that took the lead in abolishing slavery, and that claims to be the mother of democracy, will accept its peoples being treated in this manner. Britain is becoming truly more barbarian by the day. This is the real legacy of Margaret Thatcher.

What are trade unions? Well, they are agencies of collective bargaining, that is what trade unions do. They bargain on behalf of a collective, their members, with another collective, the representatives of the employer. Collective bargaining is the process by which employers and workers representatives collectively regulate the conditions under which people work in their various types of employment. In the absence of a trade union the only other form of regulation is law, and that it what successive governments have been systematically dismantling since Thatcher first took office. Collective bargaining regulates the workplace. For example, trade unions gradually convinced employers to reduce the working day and the working week, introduce holidays, pensions, health and safety measures etc. over many years, and were able to demonstrate that such measures were to everyone's benefit. The only method at their disposal to bring pressure to bear on employers who refused to treat their workers fairly was the strike weapon, the ability to withdraw their labour. Without that ability workers are literally powerless and at an employers mercy, and that is exactly how both Labour and the Conservatives want them to be. They have successfully marginalised the unions and removed the legal protections on employment built up over a hundred and fifty years, and the bulk of the British people, who depend on such measures for their protection, sit and nod their heads in agreement with all the anti-union propaganda that spews out of the government and its loathsome supporters. You genuinely couldn't make it up.

Independence for Scotland is becoming a moral imperative as one of the only solutions to the carnage being inflicted on our country by a rapacious elite that cares for nothing other than their own enrichment. The British elite are genuinely repulsive. You have been warned.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Big Brother Britain

If you have been reading your newspapers you will be aware that the police in Royston, a town in Hertfordshire have, for the past three years, been monitoring every car number plate entering and leaving the town. It does this through seven automatic number plate recognition cameras installed around the town. You will also be aware that the government wants to use cameras on the motorways to enable them to track our cars wherever they go. The excuse for this is that they want to scrap the road tax and charge us for the miles we use on the motorways.In addition, we have the government authorising GCHQ to hoover up all our email and phone communications and that they are planning to be able to pinpoint our exact location 24 hours a day by using technology to locate us through our mobile phones. All this is being done on the excuse of tackling crime and terrorism. As a result, every human being who lives and breathes in the United Kingdom is now, officially, a potential criminal and terrorist. This is a level of surveillance only dreamed about by Hitler and Stalin.

At the same time we are reading how the police have been fully aware for years of the illegal use private investigators by large companies and corporations to hack into phones and computers to gain our personal data. This involves banks, insurance companies, law firms, financial services organisations and pharmaceutical companies. However, the police justify refusing to act on this information of outright criminality and has classified the material as secret on the grounds that they wish 'to safeguard individuals’ human rights and protect the financial viability of major organisations by tainting them with public association with criminality' So, big business is being protected by the police for exactly the same criminal behaviour that the staff of the News of the World have been prosecuted for. Remember, the police were guilty of protecting the News of the World until they were forced to act by public outrage at the hacking of Millie Dowler's phone. This is the police acting as an agent for one particular section of society and establishing two types of law. It is pure class discrimination, and anyone who tries to deny this is quite simply an idiot, a scoundrel, or both.

The surveillance of the British people and the collusion of the police and politicians with outright criminality have reached the level of a crisis in this country. Our government and the police are behaving in an openly hostile attitude to the bulk of the population in order to protect and support a gang of criminals and thieves. You must be fed up by now with me reminding you who and what politicians and the police are, and what their roles and functions are. There is no justification imaginable for this type of surveillance in society by people who are elected to office by people like you and me who pay taxes for the support and maintenance of both the political class and the police. Both Parliament and the police are treating us like enemies of the state.

Anyone familiar with sociology will recognise how sociology tells us that crime is a necessary factor in the process of meaningful social change and how a society that successfully eradicated crime would not be worth living in. It would be quite intolerable. Crime must be tackled and kept at manageable and controllable levels, but crime is simply the ruling elite's opinion of what is good and bad behaviour and they often get it wrong. Thus, all laws are subject to challenge, and if necessary disobedience. St Thomas Aquinas tells us that we are not bound by unjust laws and John Locke tells us that should any government become destructive to the public good we should remove and replace it. Witchcraft was once the biggest crime you could commit and is now a harmless pastime because it was recognised that the laws against witchcraft were both stupid and unjust. Thus, all the people who refused to obey the laws on witchcraft were quite right to do so. My point is that all this surveillance has nothing to do with crime and terrorism, it is an indication of the neoliberal's obsession with control and with their determination that they will not tolerate any challenge to their domination. Crime and terrorism is the excuse but is not the reason. Britain is becoming more and more authoritarian and exclusive and is now seriously beginning to resemble a police state, You have been warned.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Politicians are the ultimate public servants, elected into post by the public who then pay their salaries, expenses and support their lifestyle through their taxes. The Prime Minister lives free of charge in a fully taxpayer funded council house in Westminster, as does his Chancellor who lives next door. They of course reject the concept of council housing and deny it for everyone else. They are elected into office to protect and serve the public and to represent the will and the wishes of the British people. That is their sole reason for holding office. The police are in a similar position, public servants whose entire career and pensions are supplied through taxation. Politicians and the police are the ultimate public servants.

Yesterday, the Prime Minister was repeatedly asked in Parliament if he had a discussion with his public relations adviser of tobacco packaging and he simply and repeatedly refused to answer. All that was required for this question was a simple yes or no, but he did what all Westminster politicians do and rambled a load of garbage. The reason for this is, of course that he has had such discussions, but, if he denied it he may have been found out to have been lying to Parliament and would have had to resign, or if he admitted it he would have been in breach of the ministerial code and would have had to resign. Thus, the Prime Minister has been exposed as breaking the rules and regulations he has taken an oath to uphold. If you or I did this in a court we would go to prison.

Today we find that the police have refused to submit a list of people and companies that they know have been breaking the law by hacking people's phones. The police earlier refused to admit to lists of people they knew had been doing things such as hacking Millie Dowler's phone. They also refused to reveal the identities of people who had assumed the identities of dead children so that they could spy on British citizens who had done no wrong. They were, of course, up to their necks in the phone hacking scandal and were covering up criminality.

I could fill this blog for the next year with examples of public servants like MPs and the police who simply lie through their teeth to cover illegality and corruption on the grounds that they are not like the rest of us and are entitled to lie and indulge in criminal activity. Thus, thanks to the Westminster system of government we have an elite in this country who genuinely think that they are above the law, and that the law is for the little people, witness the activities of the police over Hillsborough and of Westminster who colluded in their disgraceful behaviour.

No politician, no police officer, or any other form of public servant has any right whatsoever to refuse to answer a legitimate question as to their activities in office. The political class in particular has no defence against accountability. There are of course matters of security that cannot be publicised, but we should be made fully aware of such circumstances so that we can be assured that such matters are legitimate. We must never simply have to take the word of people who have neither decency nor any form of moral authority and who take us to war and kill millions of people on a farrago of lies.

Yesterdays spectacle in Parliament is ample testimony to the complete corruption of our political system and the appalling character of all Westminster politicians. When you vote in the coming referendum, I trust you will consider the kind of people you are voting for if you decide to reject your opportunity for self-determination, and the kind of government you must obviously prefer. If you do reject it, then you will deserve all you get and will not be able to complain afterwards. You have been warned.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Big Bad Unions part 2

As I said in an earlier post, one of the greatest dangers to our society has been the marginalisation and the demonization of trades unions. To understand why will take more than one post and I trust you will bear with me as this will not appear the most interesting subject, but it is very important. Also, many of the points I make will have to be accepted at face value as they are important subjects in their own right and I will be happy to elaborate on any of them for anyone who wishes me to do so. However for the moment I ask you to take them on trust.

The first point is that the human being is essentially a social being. This means that the human is not an individual in the way our dominant neoliberal ideologues, such as Thatcher and her supporters, claim them to be. The isolated human individual of liberal economic theory is a fiction that does not, nor cannot, exist. Human beings can only individuate themselves in a collective and social sense, and cannot be understood outwith their development in an interdependent relationship with other people. As humans are interdependent and social by nature, they require order, both in their individual and social lives. The human being needs an ordered and regulated environment.

Trade unions were born out of the agricultural and industrial revolutions, where workers were thrust into unregulated working environments that had no precedents to guide them. The ability to harness the forces of nature allowed work to be carried on regardless of weather conditions and regardless of whether it was day or night. As a result, the traditional constraints on work were either removed or conquered and work now took place under new conditions where employers had a free hand on the conditions and circumstances that their workers had to perform under. In other words, work was unregulated, different groups of workers working for different employers, but making the same or similar products had different conditions of employment, different hours, working days, working weeks, wages etc. One group might work 18 hours a day, another 14, another 12 for example. One group might work 7 days a week, another 6 etc. Workers were hired and fired at will, had no rights, had no safeguards and no control over their own lives.

As a result, workers formed into combinations to rectify such conditions and to bring some form of order and regulation into their lives, as human beings cannot function in such conditions. They suffer from what sociology calls anomie. In other words, they sought to bring a measure of control, of meaning and direction into their lives. They sought order and regulation over their living and working conditions because that is what human nature demands. Therefore, the first point to note about trades unions are that they are regulatory organisations, and are a direct reflection of the human social nature. They emerged to satisfy a basic human need, and they continue to exist for that same purpose. In a modern economy where the mass of people work for employers for a money wage they are essential, they are not a luxury. Thus, what is a trade union? It is a regulatory organisation that establishes ordered and regulated working conditions and seeks to bring a measure of control over the working environment as it effects ordinary working people. I will elaborate on this later and hope I do not bore you.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat.

Europe and the Westminster Lie Machine

I trust that you are all aware of the furore that has followed the ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that imposing a whole life sentence on someone without the possibility of their sentence being reviewed with the possibility of parole was a breach of human rights law. I raise this because of the reaction of all three Westminster parties and their quasi fascist supporters in the right wing press. All of these people are lying through their front teeth to the British people and deliberately creating what sociologists call a moral panic.

Once again, Cameron and the Tory party are using a completely distorted interpretation of a ruling by the ECHR to raise the prospect of withdrawing Britain from the European Convention on Human Rights, a Convention that Britain helped draft, and was voted into British law by the Westminster Parliament. All of our noble Christian rulers are telling us that the ECHR has ruled that we cannot sentence people to whole life tariffs for exceptional crimes. This is simply not true. I repeat, what the Court ruled was that we cannot sentence to a whole life tariff without the possibility of a review of the sentence at some point. There is no suggestion that a review would have to change the tariff, it may come to the conclusion that the tariff was right and proper, all that the Court said was that without the possibility of review then such a sentence, whole life, with no possibility of even a review, was wrong. I would also remind you that Britain has a representative on the bench of the ECHR who was party to making that ruling.

Britain is a country that claims to be Christian, with a Prime Minister who claims to be Christian and who has publicly called for a return to Christian values. Should you decide that you are not going to execute people, then you must hold out the possibility of repentance and redemption. It is only a possibility, it may not and indeed need not, happen, but it must be on offer. Should you fail to do that, then you descend into the same moral and ethical universe inhabited by the people you have just condemned. You are in effect no better than them.

This of course is only an excuse for the neoliberal elite in the UK to abandon the entire concept of human rights. I have written of this before and is the subject of the book I have just written. The Westminster elite is determined to remove all of our human rights and reduce us to modern forms of slavery. At the moment over 300,000 people in the caring professions alone work under zero hours contracts. This means that they have no human rights as they apply to employment. They have no set hours, have no idea what their wages will be from one week to the next, have no pension entitlements, no overtime entitlements, no holiday entitlements etc. etc. They have no employment protection whatever. If that is not a subtle form of slavery then I implore someone to come on and tell me why it is not. This is the prospect that looms for the vast majority of workers in the near future. The Guardian reported yesterday that there are 85 graduates applying for every job available. This is why Scotland must abandon the Westminster system as a matter of urgency, it is matter of civilisation. You have been warned.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Big Bad Unions

If there is one thing Thatcher must be given credit for it is how she resoundingly won the battle of ideas in crucial parts of the national narrative. One of her greatest successes has been the climate of hatred towards anything associated with trades unions. The present row within the Labour Party is a reflection of that and now Labour is determined to join in the demonization and continuing marginalisation of the unions. Britain's hatred for unions reflects the visceral Tory hatred of working people and we now have a growing scenario within our national discourse that resembles how the Americans used to view their coloured slaves, you have the good house slaves who know their place and fully accept the unquestioned right of white people to enslave the subhuman blacks, and you have the dangerous blacks who have the audacity to think that they are full human beings with rights, and who must of course be put firmly in their place as they are a threat to civilisation and the future of the human race.

We now accept two kinds of worker is this country, good non-unionised workers who are happy to accept any job at any wage under any conditions and who are quite properly eternally grateful to their employer for the opportunity to serve them in whatever capacity, and bad unionised greedy left-wing bastards who claim that they have rights to minimum conditions of employment and what they arrogantly call a living wage. How dare these dangerous lunatics challenge our superb minister for Work and Pensions who is an intelligent and educated man and who is an expert on such matters and who has demonstrated beyond any doubt or question that anyone can live perfectly well on £53 per week. These people, who pay 80% of the Labour Party's funding and most of its membership are now actually claiming that they should have a say in choosing the people who will represent them in parliament. Who do these people think they are? Don't they know, what everyone else in Britain now seems to know, that the only people entitled to a say in any form of decision-making in the UK are middle-class university educated ex public school people, preferably male, and most certainly preferably white Anglo-Saxon. I mean that is what such people are born for, and workers are born, well, to work! What on earth is this country coming to? I personally blame this outlandish concept of democracy, where people from the lower orders are actually encouraged to think that they have rights. It will have to go!

Should the neoliberals in Westminster achieve their goal of completely de-unionising British society, and it looks very likely that they will succeed, then there will be no barriers left to the complete privatisation of the health service, education, welfare, and the entire public structure of British society, because the trades unions are the only serious barrier to that left. I shall post a blog on the role and functions of trades unions and how the British hatred of them is a truly dangerous threat to all of us. The need for an independent Scotland separated from the madness of the neoliberal Westminster parliament and its henchmen in the English gutter press is now reaching a critical stage. You have been warned.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Nelson Mandela

I do not believe in the concept of important people. I have never met anyone who is genuinely important, although I did once have the honour of meeting with, and shaking the hand of, Pele, the best football player ever, but I can think of no-one who could be described as indispensable. Some people occupy important positions and some do important tasks, but the importance normally lies in the positions and the tasks and not in the people performing them who can all be adequately replaced. But there are exceptions to every rule, people who genuinely make a difference and who do important things, and, in some way change the world, and in that category I would place Nelson Mandela. Mandela is a genuinely important person on many levels. He is also what I would describe as a great man. Indeed, when Mandela finally dies, there will be no more great men in this world, and I doubt if I will see another in my lifetime.

Part of Mandela's importance lies in how he symbolises so much that is wrong in our society, how we create monsters and judge by stereotypes and get it so wrong so often. Listening to our leaders, particularly Cameron, paying homage to Mandela in his last days, is genuinely nauseating given what they said about him and how they regarded him in the past when he was portrayed as a black Marxist terrorist who would bring about the death of civilised society.

Mandela typifies everything that these people are lacking. He has dignity, charisma, intelligence and the ability to rise above class and race. He is a genuine statesman. He signifies tolerance and forgiveness and the rare ability to unite people who, on the face of it have nothing in common, in a common cause. He is a healer. If I did not consider it an insult, I would be tempted to call him a genuine Christian as he represents what I am led to believe a Christian is supposed to represent. However, I consider him a better person than that. The world will be a poorer place with his passing.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Labour - What is the Point?

There was a time when there was a rationale for the Labour Party. It used to have principles, an identity, an image and a purpose. It also had a definable constituency and it stood for something. Perhaps most importantly, it represented people, working people, the poor, the disabled and the unemployed. Nowadays it displays open hatred and contempt for such people, represents no-one and goes to extraordinary lengths to disassociate itself from the people who gave it birth and who continue to support and finance it. Labour are the party who famously told us that they were quite relaxed about people becoming filthy rich. What they neglected to tell us was that they are also the party who are equally relaxed about people becoming filthy poor. In September 2010 in his first address to a Labour Party Conference since becoming leader of the party, Ed Miliband told the party that he would not support "waves of irresponsible strikes."  He went on to tell the conference that Labour had to win public support and avoid alienating people and adding to the book of "historic union failures". I paused when I read that and considered that the party he was addressing must now rank as the union movement’s greatest historic failure. He continued, "That is why I have no truck, and you should have no truck, with overblown rhetoric about waves of irresponsible strikes.” He went on "The public won't support them. I won't support them and you shouldn't support them either." I was left wondering what his attitude was to irresponsible managers, employers and government policies that have devastated millions of jobs, workers terms and conditions and laid waste to whole communities? I was also left waiting for a suggestion about what the union movement was supposed to do to remedy such conditions if they are not supposed to embark on ‘irresponsible’ industrial action?

Miliband then told the mindless mass that poses as a political party that it was vital that workers had a voice to speak for them, regaling the conference with anecdotes about the exploitation of dinner ladies and care workers who had to buy their own uniforms and who didn’t have a decent living wage and who only wanted someone to help them get basic standards of decency and fairness. At this point I had to stop and check that this was indeed the Ed Miliband who had just left office three months earlier as a member of a government that had been in office for thirteen years. I thought he must be blaming the Tories for this disgraceful state of affairs, but no, I was right, it was Labour that had presided over the situations he was complaining about. Yes, it was Labour who supervised the exploitation of the dinner ladies and denied the care workers of a decent living wage, and it was Labour who, in thirteen years of government failed to establish basic standards of decency and fairness, I wasn’t imagining it! What makes it worse is that there were trade union leaders sitting listening to this appalling drivel and applauding him. Am I alone in thinking that there is no-one left in the Labour Party with even a vestige of self-respect or shame?

So, what can we expect from a Labour government in the way of decency and fairness, of the prospect of a living wage for everyone? Well nothing actually, because Labour has just signed up to the whole of the government’s economic programme if they take office in 2015. We now have the spectacle of Labour announcing that they will adhere to the coalition’s spending plans, with Ed Balls telling the press that the Tories spending plans were acceptable for a period of three years after the next election. In addition, they will keep the benefit cuts in place, and they will keep the benefits cap. He also announced that he plans to attack the state pension. So, why on earth would you vote Labour; if these policies are so right and necessary, why not just vote for their authors? At least the Tories know why they think they need such policies, Labour are simply embracing them as they have not a clue what else to do. What this tells us about the Labour Party is that they now exist simply to gain power. They represent nothing but their own power hungry ambitions. They no longer stand for anything, are completely without principle, and will do whatever is necessary to get elected.  If we vote Labour, what is going to change? Labour has now become an irrelevance in our political system, they have no ideas, no vision, no programme. In Scotland we have the spectacle of the Labour leader denouncing the something for nothing society, which is of course, borrowed straight from the Tories hymnbook. This is Ms Lamont telling the poor, the sick, and the disabled that if they contribute nothing to the economy then they can expect nothing out of it. The only contribution that now matters to the Labour Party is economic, it is the measure of your worth to society, and if you cannot contribute because of physical or mental disadvantage then you are worthless, and can expect nothing in return. Balls and Miliband have also endorsed the government’s plan to force all foreign benefit claimants to take English lessons or lose their benefits, and support the proposal to delay jobseekers allowance for someone made unemployed. Welcome to the caring, sharing, all-inclusive Labour Party.

However, we are all better together the Westminster parties tell us. Oh really? So, be under no illusions, should you vote no in the coming Scottish Independence referendum, this is what you are going to get, three Tory parties all competing with each other to see who can kick the disadvantaged the hardest, and the most unprincipled of them all, by their own admission, are the Labour Party.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat