Videos from LEAP conference 'Capitalism Isn't Working'

Here's the first selection of videos from the morning plenary session of the LEAP Conference 'Capitalism Isn't Working' which took place on Saturday 25th April at Birkbeck College, London.

There's the opening address from LEAP Chair John McDonnell MP, followed by excerpts from the opening plenary 'Who Pays for the Crisis?' with panellists Penny Cole, Rahila Gupta, Richard Wilkinson, and Matt Wrack.

LEAP Conference - reports

The LEAP Conference 2009 'Capitalism Isn't Working' took place last Saturday, at Birkbeck College, London.

Rather than write a full report of the conference, here's some links to others' reports:

• Report on the speech by John McDonnell MP and the opening plenary session 'Who Pays for the Crisis?' from Monday's Morning Star.
• Full report of the LEAP conference from the Harpymarx blog
• Report on the 'Resisting the Recession & Defending Jobs workshop from Monday's Morning Star.
• Review of the lunchtime fringe session with Professor Richard Wilkinson from the Tax Justice blog.

If you attended the conference, and have any feedback on any part of the conference, please email leap@l-r-c.org.uk. Any feedback will be confidential and used to help us improve future events.

As well as the some more photos, we'll also have video from the conference online soon - hopefully over the weekend!

LEAP Conference 2009 - this Saturday, 25th April

The LEAP Conference 'Capitalism Isn't Working' takes place this Saturday, 25th April at Birkbeck College, Malet Street, London (map here, nearest tube: Russell Square).

A full agenda is available to download. The day begins with an opening address by LEAP Chair John McDonnell MP, author of Another World is Possible, and also Chair of the LRC and Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs.

From there we move into the morning plenary - a panel discussion Who Pays for the Crisis? with panellists including:

• Penny Cole (co-author of Running a Temperature - an action plan for the eco-crisis)
• Rahila Gupta from Southall Black Sisters (author of Enslaved - The New British Slavery)
• Professor Richard Wilkinson (co-author of The Spirit Level)
• Matt Wrack (General Secretary of the FBU).

After a break for lunch, in which there is a free fringe with Richard Wilkinson, about his pioneering research on inequality for The Spirit Level - why more equal societies almost always do better, we break into four sub-plenary workshops:

1. Resisting the Recession & Defending Jobs will be facilitated by Professor Gregor Gall and Jerry Jones (author of Halting the Decline of Britain's Manufacturing Industry) and will look at the industrial agenda during the recession. Download the LEAP Factsheet for this session.


2. Where's our bailout? will be facilitated by Andrew Fisher (LEAP Co-ordinator) and Colin Hampton (National Unemployed Centres Combine). Download the LEAP Factsheet for this session.


3. What to do with the City? will be facilitated by John Christensen (Tax Justice Network), and Gerry Gold (co-author of A House of Cards - From Fantasy Finance to Global Crash). Download the LEAP Factsheet for this session.


4. Neoliberalism Isn't Working - fighting the ideological battle, facilitated by Paul Feldman (co-author of A House of Cards - From Fantasy Finance to Global Crash) and social psychologist Rosamund Stock. Download the Factsheet for this session.

Then it's the final plenary session - a panel discussion on The Economy We Want & How to Get There, with panelists including:

• Bob Crow (RMT General Secretary)
• John Hilary (War on Want)
• John McDonnell MP (LEAP Chair)
• Graham Turner (author of The Credit Crunch)

Then we start fighting for it, maybe via the pub first . . . hope to see everyone there on Saturday.

p.s. I recommend two very good articles in Friday's Morning Star - one's my own: 'Devil in the Detail' and the other by Gregor Gall 'How to fart and chew gum', both analyses of this week's Budget.

Capitalism Isn't Working - Building the New Common Sense

Building the New Common Sense – Social Ownership for the 21st Century is the pamphlet published by LEAP last September. Thanks to many LEAP supporters we have sold enough copies to break even. Unlike the capitalist banks, we break even, haven't relied on dodgy loans or Government bailouts and are reinvesting the (very) small surplus in our forthcoming conference.

In the preface to Building the New Common Sense, I wrote:

"This pamphlet is the start of a debate and of a campaign to put the question of ownership back on the industrial and political agenda. As the UK faces recession and as job losses and business failures continue to rise, this question could not be more timely."

In the concluding contribution to the pamphlet, John McDonnell MP, LEAP Chair, wrote:

"Now is the time . . . to reinvigorate a debate about a new role for social ownership in the 21st century. This pamphlet is designed to stimulate a debate among trade unionists and all those who want a stake in their community. From this debate, we need to take forward a campaign for a worker controlled economy, accountable to our communities, into our union branches and conferences, into our workplaces, and through the TUC, and eventually even Parliament."

Since then workers have occupied workplaces at Waterford Crystal and currently at Visteon. We are hoping to have a worker from the Visteon occupation at the LEAP conference 'Capitalism Isn't Working' which takes place next Saturday, 25th April. The conference will also include a workshop entitled 'Resisting the Recession: the industrial agenda' led by Professor Gregor Gall and Jerry Jones (both contributors to Building the New Common Sense).

If you are interested in continuing the debate and building a campaign for workers' control and in solidarity with those workers taking action, I hope you will attend and participate in the conference.

US turns to socialism?

OK, apologies for the sensationalist title, but a recent US poll shows a marked increase in US citizens questioning the capitalist system. Only 53% favour capitalism over socialism.

Young Americans (under 30) are the most socialistic. The pollsters say they are "essentially evenly divided", 37% prefer capitalism, 33% socialism, and 30% are undecided.

It is perhaps unsurprising that people are questioning the capitalist system at a time when its caused the biggest crisis for a generation (and possibly much longer). However, the point is to offer a coherent alternative.

Like in the US, the mainstream political parties are all embedded with neoliberal capitalism - and because of that the mainstream media rarely reports anything that counters that world viewpoint.

It is therefore necessary for those of us who don't want capitalism to articulate a coherent vision for a socialist society. That cannot be wrenched from ancient Marxist tomes, but has to be developed in the contemporary context. That is what LEAP has been seeking to do the last few years - and what our conference on Saturday 25th April will continue.

What would a similar poll in the UK reveal?

Sat 18 Apr update: And now there's even pictorial evidence of the shift to the left in the US - Obama and Chavez warmly embrace. Roll on to the United Socialist States of the Americas!

So Where's Our Bailout?

Andrew Fisher, Coordinator of the Left Economics Advisory Panel (LEAP) (This article first appeared in the Morning Star)

As Gordon Brown can verify, it is a fool’s game to forecast the economy. However, when in 2006 Brown as Chancellor was predicting growth as far ahead as 2011 – and an end to boom and bust – LEAP was highlighting the levels of personal debt in the UK (nearly 50% greater than in the US) and warning they were unsustainable.

Now we are in a recession that looks set to eclipse that of the early nineties and probably even that of the early-mid eighties. Unemployment has breached two million, with a consensus forming that by the end of this year it will reach three million. This same consensus expects the UK economy to contract by 4-5% in the same time period.

In response the Government has awarded lavish handouts to the banking sector without any conditionality around jobs or pay (let alone public control). It is clear that New Labour in recession operates as it did in boom time – in the interests of big business.

The effects of a recession on working people always lag behind the economic data of GDP growth. When the UK economy was notionally recovering by the mid-eighties, unemployment was reaching its peak. This highlights how we measure recession is skewed towards the dominant interests.

There are several contrasts that need to be made with that period – and, if we are to comprehend how harshly this recession will ravage working class communities, we need these contrasts to be understood. The last thirty years of neoliberal economic policy have stripped away many of the protections that still existed in the eighties.

In the workplace, trade union density has nearly halved from 55% when Thatcher came to power to just 28% today; the proportion of workers covered by collective bargaining has suffered even more gravely, down from 85% to less than 40% today. As New Labour has refused to restore trade union rights, UK workers are now the easiest to sack in western Europe. The legions of non-unionised workers who retain their jobs will also be hit with pay cuts as employers seek to insulate their profits.

Just last year Gordon Brown boasted to the CBI that we have "the most flexible labour market in Europe". So when transnational corporations are judging where to cut jobs, it is in their interests to choose UK workers who are less likely to be unionised, and where they have the lowest legal commitments to fulfil.

When these workers join the army of surplus labour in the dole queues – itself helping to further suppress wages, they will find a benefits system less generous than under Thatcher. If unemployment benefit had increased in line with earnings from 1980 it would be worth nearly £110 per week. Instead today's unemployed are expected to survive on just £60.50, or £47.95 if they are reckless enough to be under 25.

They will also be faced with an unemployment service that has shed 30,000 staff in the last five years and is insufficiently staffed to cope with the rising demand – and subject to increased conditionality, now including workfare for the long-term unemployed. While the Tebbit-era rhetoric may have been more stark, the practicalities of maintaining a claim under the New Labour regime are far harsher – and for barely half the level of benefit.

As increasing numbers find themselves jobless, or their pay frozen, they will struggle to pay housing costs. In 1980, over a third of people lived in the secure tenancies of council housing. Today it's just 10%. The rest are faced with paying a mortgage and if they fail to make the payments and are repossessed –as nearly 50,000 were last year – they will join nearly two million others on the sick joke that is council house waiting lists. For private tenants of buy-to-let landlords, tenancies are insecure as many landlords struggle to maintain their mortgages. There is little good news for first time buyers. House prices, which more than doubled between 1999 and 2007, have dropped only 15%. The chronic housing shortage is keeping prices high.

Thanks to Thatcher's break of the earnings link (maintained by Major, Blair and Brown), today's pensioners face a basic state pension worth just 14% of average male earnings. In 1979 it was worth 23%. Many of those who took out private pensions have seen its value decimated by the crashing stock market, while final salary occupational schemes are increasingly the preserve of only directors and MPs – the culprits of the destruction of UK pension security. Further cuts in occupational pensions will come as employers seek to maintain profitability.

The neoliberal dogma of the past thirty years has decimated the public services on which the poorest rely. As the poorest and most vulnerable workers face lengthy periods of unemployment the true legacy of New Labour is revealed.

The 2009 Budget will be New Labour's first during a recession. The usual environmental gimmicks and corporate tax break leaks have been touted, but for the rest its austerity, rumours of a public sector pay freeze and no increase in the minimum wage. Under the slogan Their Crisis Not Ours, the LRC and others will be protesting in Whitehall on Budget Day to demand 'Where's our bailout?'

Like the MacDonald government of 1931 and Callaghan in 1978-9, this Labour Government is choosing to attack working class communities to pay for a recession not of its making.

The LEAP conference on Saturday 25th April 'Capitalism Isn't Working' is an opportunity to share information and mobilise resistance against the policies that make the poorest pay.

Equality - why it matters

There's a review of 'The Spirit Level' - the new book by Professor Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in today's Morning Star.

As the review states, "The authors, who are both epidemiologists, produce a wealth of graphs based on official statistics to show that the more unequal countries are, the worse are their health and social problems.

"This is done by comparing the records of the richest 23 countries in the world on levels of trust, mental illness, life expectancy, infant mortality, obesity, children's educational performances, teenage births, homicides, imprisonment rates and social mobility.

"Britain, the US and Portugal are the most unequal countries with the worst health and social problems, while Japan and the Scandinavian countries, especially Sweden, are the most equal with the least problems."

Professor Wilkinson will be a panellist in the morning plenary session 'Who Pays?' of the LEAP Conference 'Capitalism Isn't Working' and hosting a lunchtime fringe presenting research from the book.

Research by LEAP, The Real Story of UK Inequality, published in October last year shows how inequality has continued to grow under New Labour.

Richard Wilkinson to speak at 'Capitalism Isn't Working'

We are pleased to announce that Professor Richard Wilkinson will be speaking at the LEAP Conference 'Capitalism Isn't Working' on 25th April 2009.

Richard will be taking part in the morning plenary session 'Who Pays?' and then holding a free lunchtime meeting on his new book The Spirit Level - why more equal societies almost always do better (pictured left). The Guardian recently featured the findings of the work - which you can download here.

For years, Professor Wilkinson has done pioneering research work on the effect that inequality has on societies - and contributed to the March 2007 LEAP Red Papers '10 Years On: Whatever happened to equality?' (free download, Wilkinson's paper is on p.6).

You can register online for the LEAP conference. Full agenda details will be published soon.

LEAP Conference 2009 - Saturday 25th April

LEAP will be hosting its second conference 'Capitalism Isn't Working' at Birkbeck College, Malet Street, London on Saturday 25th April 2009 - just three days after the Budget.

Speakers and contributors include: John Christensen (Tax Justice Network), Penny Cole, Bob Crow (RMT), Andrew Fisher, Paul Feldman, Professor Gregor Gall, Gerry Gold, Rahila Gupta (Southall Black Sisters), Colin Hampton (UWC), John Hilary (War on Want), Jerry Jones, John McDonnell MP, Cllr Gordon Nardell, Rosamund Stock, Graham Turner, Professor Richard Wilkinson, Matt Wrack (FBU).

Download the full conference agenda.

It's a one-day conference from 10:30am to 4:30pm looking at how we fight the recession and build the economy we want!

Register online for the conference. We've frozen last year's conference prices: it's £10 waged and £5 unwaged.

We'll be posting articles here in the run-up to the conference to start the debates off. In between participative plenary sessions, there'll be four sub-plenaries:

• Resisting the recession & Defending Jobs: the industrial agenda
  


• Where's our bailout? Benefits, pensions, poverty & housing
  


• What to do with the City and Global Finance: socialising the sector
  


• Neoliberalism Isn't Working: fighting the ideological battle

Come along and join in, but please register in advance to be sure of your place. You can also pre-register by sending a cheque payable to ‘Another World is Possible’ to LEAP, PO Box 2378, London, E5 9QU.