Richie Venton Ungagged Ep 2

Hello, it's Richie Fenton, the Scottish Socialist Party National Trade Union organiser. I know it's difficult to imagine that you could say this, but after 20 years of really reactionary right-wing, vicious and racist Tory government, anti-working class government, it's hard to make this claim, or I think it's accurate to claim, that the centre of gravity of mainstream politics has shifted even further to the right in the past week. And that's epitomised probably by two events north and south of the border. In the case of England, we've got the defection of Natalie Elphick from the Tory party to Starmer's Labour. Now this is a woman who is described by Jacob Rees-Mogg as more right-wing than Jacob Rees-Mogg. He made that claim himself. She's somebody that most Tories imagined was going to defect to Nigel Farage's Reform Party, and yet she's been welcomed with open arms by Keir Starmer as a new evangel for the Labour Party. This is the woman who denounced the unions when they were fighting back against the sacking of 800 seafarers on P&O ferries for what's been proven now to be replacement of them by slave labour workers on £4.87 an hour by a man, a chief executive, who's on half a million of an income last year. She denounced the unions for fighting back against that atrocity. She's a woman who has been even more viciously racist on the issue of stopping small boats trying to victimise the most vulnerable in society than the likes of Rishi Sunak. She's on the Suella Braverman wing of the Tory party at least and on the Nigel Farage wing of politics in reality, and yet she's been welcomed into the Labour Party, the same Labour Party that's removed membership from Diane Abbott as a Labour MP and has absolutely no intention of re-admitting her to the Labour Party. And then it's so bad that even people like Neil Kinnock, not known for his progressive attitude for allowing socialists to be in the Labour Party, thinks that it's gone too far. He's saying how Labour is a broad church but the church has walls. Of course the same Neil Kinnock didn't show the door of the walls to people like Robert Maxwell, the bouncing Czech linked with Israeli security services Mossad and with MI5 amongst other things. He was a Labour Party member at the time when Kinnock was expelling socialists like me. So when Kinnock finds it going too far it really does say something and I think what that indicates is that in reality the most extreme right parties in England are setting the political agenda in the form of reform ex-UCEP when it comes to the Labour Party as well as the Tories. The Tories are trying to double down on their most right-wing policies including on questions of immigration and also on action against legal immigration in order to try and stave off the threat of reform after last week's council elections. And here we have it, Labour admitting such a creature into their ranks. That's one indication of how far things have gone to the right. And then in the case of Scotland we have the formation of the new Scottish government after the divorce between the SNP and the Scottish Greens with John Swinney as First Minister and then as we predicted bringing Kate Forbes in as his deputy leader and quite significantly also in charge of the economy. Now Kate Forbes, I don't personalise politics, Kate Forbes is well known and quite rightly condemned for her 19th century opinions on the rights of women, on the rights of LGBT people and so on. Her opposition to the rights of minorities like the LGBT community, her opposition to the rights of women to abortion, all of those things are quite well publicised and rightly condemned as being against the spirit of equality in any modern society. What perhaps is not as widely advertised is her extreme conservatism when it comes to the economy, her economic outlook, her fundamental core opinions on what kind of Scotland that she would like. And I think given that she's been made not just Deputy First Minister but also in charge of the economy, it's necessary to dwell a minute on this aspect of her outlook, her ideology. Now Kate Forbes was a member of the growth commission that was established by the SNP in 2016. She was one of 14 members chaired by Andrew Wilson, former SNP MSP, then a lobbyist for corporate interests, now a director at Santander. And in that report which she has justified and defended right up until very recent years, one of the core proposals they made was that a post-independent Scotland should cap the debt of the government below 50% of GDP, which in turn would mean a slashing of public expenditure, slaughtering of public services, spending on jobs and services. And that 50% cap in terms of the debt compared to GDP would be the lowest cap of any country in the entire OECD nations, which is an indication of just how fundamentalist free marketeer the policies are. That's one aspect of what she believes in and it spells out the prospect of a full decade, a full 10 years of austerity in the aftermath of independence under that prospectus. But Kate Forbes is further and more recently advocated for economic opinions in a document called the National Strategy for Economic Transformation, which was published in March 2022. And to just talk out a couple of quite significant and core examples of what she said and wrote in that, and I'm not going to distort, I'm going to quote she said, amongst other things, we need to focus on how the public sector can reform to become more efficient. Now, this word reform is one of those weasel words used by all sorts of politicians on actually what they mean is dismantling, regression, counter reform, a dereliction of the public sector, in this case, at the advantage of the rich. So, for example, when Wes Threating of the Labour Party talks about reform of the NHS, he quite openly elaborates that what he means is dragging big companies in the private sector, including American big business, into the run of the National Health Service. So that seems to be something he has in common with the likes of Kate Forbes in regards to the public sector. She also made plain in this document of March 22 that Scotland needs to become a magnet for inward investment and global private capital. She also added during that document that it needed to attract mobile international finance. Now, what does that mean in plain language? It means there's a government that she wants, which would rattle the big and bold combined with bribery under the noses of the multinationals and tell them to invest in Scotland because they'll make fabulous profits at the expense of the Scottish people. And this idea of relying on inward investment from foreign multinationals is nothing new, frankly. It's been a theme of SNP policy over the years. What has become increasingly centrepiece when you've got people like Kate Forbes at the heart of that government. And really, I would reply by saying to that idea, try asking the workers who observe the carcasses of factories that multinationals establish in Scotland with the assistance of all sorts of inward investment grants, regional development grants, money and loans from the Scottish government of the past and so on. Try telling it to those people that saw the same multinationals taking the subsidies, taking the tax free holidays and whatever else was offered to them by way of bribery to invest in Scotland. And then when it suited them, they up sticks, shut down those factories and headed abroad to even cheaper pastures when it came to the cost of the workforce. Just to take two examples, Volvo in Ayrshire or Motorola in the Lothians, both of which actually just shut up shop and buggered off after receiving money from the government for establishing themselves in the likes of Scotland. Or try telling it to the workers in Grangemouth at the minute who are reliant on multinationals, whether it be the state capitalists of China or the multinational capitalist Jim Ratcliffe to invest in capital and develop their job prospects and so on. Instead of that, are facing a future of dread and fear for their jobs and all sorts of rumours about the number of thousands of jobs potentially disappearing. That is an indication that if you rely on inward investments by capitalist enterprises that there's no control over, then you're really dooming the prospects of the working class. It's not a route to a successful economy, an economy of well-being. Or to take the one other example, when ScotWind was sold off just two years ago by the Scottish government, the coalition actually of Scottish Greens and SNP to multinational capitalists, one of the things that was promised was the prospect of 25,000 new skilled jobs in the supply chains for those enterprises, those 17 absolutely giant wind farm projects that would be established offshore from Scotland. And instead of that, instead of having 14 manufacturing sites to supply the equipment for those offshore wind farms, there are exactly zero. In other words, the promises of job creation through that selling off of the facilities, the wind power, the natural resources of Scotland to multinationals has led to zero when it comes to the job creation compared to the 25,000 that was promised. So I think this idea of roughing the begging bowl with ample bribery in that bowl is not a route towards success for the working class of Scotland. In reality, in essence, as well as her right wing reactionary opinions on the rights of women, of LGBT people and so on, what we see is a woman, Kate Forbes, who in a nutshell is a wee free marketeer, somebody who believes that the market should let business get on with it was one of the phrases she used in the document I quoted earlier, let business get on with it and attract business to Scotland through tax incentives and elimination of regulatory burdens was another phrase that she used. In other words, it would be on the basis of downgrading the conditions of the working class. That's referring to her general ideas or general policies, which I think should fill anybody with dread of what might be in prospect from this new minority SNP government, which has also moved to the right, because when John Swinney uses the expression that this is a centre left or a left of centre government, really that's just cliches that have been trotted out by all types of politicians. Tony Blair used to use exactly the same expression, a left of centre government, and we know what he was like. He privatised more assets in Britain than Maggie Thatcher did when she was in government as the Tory Prime Minister. Or Keir Starmer talks about a left of centre government amongst many other cliches. It's meaningless. The fact is that the centre of politics, if you want to call it that, is overcrowded by politicians who have converged upon each other with very fundamentally the same ideologies of relying on the capitalist market to solve society's problems, and it doesn't. It's been proven not to do so. Covid was an experience that proved that if you rely on the capitalist market, you're on to plums, frankly. It cannot provide even for the lives and the livelihoods of ordinary people, and just one simple current example perhaps illustrates the things that are at stake. Right now we face the prospect that the very welcome and temporary concession of scrapping peak hour fares on the trains in ScotRail, that's going to come to an end at the end of June, and it would appear today that John Swinney, and I'm sure Kate Forbes would be quite instrumental in backing him up on this, or advising him to do this, John Swinney would appear to be not open to the idea of making that a permanent ban on peak fares. In other words, the threat is that workers in particular are being taxed for travelling to work during the peak hours, and frankly I think that is the mildest of mild measures. It doesn't go anywhere far enough because the Scottish Socialist Party have consistently for almost 25 years argued not for just scrapping peak hour fares, but also for scrapping fares full stop by making all travel and public transport free at the point of use. Now John Swinney comes out with the line, we need peak fares because things have to be paid for. Yes they do, but how about the radical notion of using the money that is handed over to privatised bus companies, £400 million this year alone, to subsidise them from the Scottish Government, from taxpayers' money. Why not use that as one of the many sources of money in order to introduce a system of free public transport? Of course that goes completely against the grain of relying on free markets to provide for society, and that to me is what's at stake at the heart of all this. It's not a question of personalities as such, although sometimes the role of individuals is critical to history, but when you look at the inclusion, the embracing of a right-wing Tory reactionary into the Labour Party by Starmer, or the introduction of Kate Forbes as Deputy First Minister and Minister for the Economy, and when you look at what's in common between them is the reliance on capitalist market economics, and that is what's produced mass poverty, mass unemployment, mass underemployment, inequality and of course the climate crisis, which will not be tackled if you try to charge people through the nose for travelling on public transport as an example. So what we need instead of that is a complete change of direction, a socialist direction to what Scotland is doing, which will not come from Kate Forbes or John Swinney, and certainly won't come from Labour either, given that they're embracing some of the worst of the Tory Party into the ranks. We need socialist change to tackle poverty, inequality and job insecurity, and also simultaneously to tackle the climate crisis, and in doing so of course stand up for equality for women, for minorities and an end to racism, homophobia and all those other obnoxious traits that are being whipped up by the mainstream parties.