the left and the influx of migrant workers.

i dont blame anyone who lives off benefits, if their only option is to take a mundane job that pays minimum wage. there is nothing noble about waking at the crack of dawn, working in excess of 40 hours and to take home a wage that gives you no standard of living

+ the cost of transport of getting there and back each day , in winter - leaving the house in the dark and getting home when it is dark again , perhaps working outside in the cold rain and snow , and for an abusive boss or line manager as well ,, " Just Sign On , Son " I would say .

The problem is not wages. It is a problem of personal fulfillment. Society provides no fulfillment whatsoever to its labour force. It demands payment for education then, upon education, demands one serves burgers to tourists. One must ensure an economy that provides not only cash, but fulfillment to the labour force. Each one of us would work for any wage as long as we were happy in our job and felt as if we were contributing to both our own ambition and loves, and to society.

three weeks time i will be redundant. i have been in full employment since 1986. i am taking my money and going to south east asia for a few months, because the only alternative is to get on my hands and knees and beg for a job that will pay me about two hundred pounds a week. no thanks

i agree whole heartedly with your post completely.

Capitalism requires not you,but your labour. Your contribution to society is of as much relevence to capitalism as a bee is to a hive.

Sadly the same goes for socialism - the main difference being the basis on which you are rewarded. Would you rather be paid based on the demand for your labour or on what someone else thinks you need?

No economic theory is going to have much interest in that which it cannot model.

Doctor: That is exactly the pont of communism. Socialism is a weak, inferior and cowardly branch of politics, neither embracing nor refusing capitalism or communism, but balancing precariously on the fence.

"When, in the course of development, class distinctions have diappeared,and all production has been concentrated in the hands of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another..." ( Marx and Engels,The Communist Manifesto)

Mr Bounds, you should be careful what you say, as regards having "left wing leanings", the Police may have a dossier on you. I am sorry that you are losing your job, hopefully not joining the thousands of Construction Workers who have been unable to regain employment due apparently to this country's Secret Police keeping tags on what you do, say or what you might be thinking?

I must admit I missed this story in the mainstream News, and only briefly picked up on it today whilst watching Russia Today on Freeview.

"Blacklisted building workers hope for day in court after ruling?"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/mar/03/police-blacklist-link-construction-workers?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487

Daniel Boffey, policy editor
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 3 March 2012 21.57 GMT

"The police or security services supplied information to a blacklist funded by the country's major construction firms that has kept thousands of people out of work over the past three decades. The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has revealed that records that could only have come from the police or MI5 have been discovered in a vast database of files held on 3,200 victims who were deemed leftwing or troublesome. The files were collected by the Consulting Association, a clandestine organisation funded by major names in the construction industry.

Its database was seized nearly three years ago, but the extraordinary nature of the information held has only now emerged, following an employment tribunal for one of the victims, Dave Smith, a 46-year-old engineer who had a 36-page file against his name and was victimised repeatedly for highlighting safety hazards on sites, including the presence of asbestos."
=====================================================
"The Consulting Association, a shadowy organisation that compiled a list of 'troublemakers' - with the help of the security services - for Britain's biggest building companies was closed four years ago. Only now can its 3,200 victims go to court and hope to win"

One of the victims of this secret blacklist, compiled by the (Secret) Police and which stopped this man from gaining employment in the Construction Industry included pages detailing his private activities such as,

"We were at an anti-fascist demonstration at the Cenotaph and that somehow finds a way into the file. It is incredible. What has that got to do with my employment record? People were emailing me saying come along Monday and then I would get a phone call on the Sunday saying, 'That job has gone.' It was devastating. It smacks of a sort of police state, almost with the police colluding with the employers to blacklist the trade unionists. Some of the people on that blacklist are just ordinary health and safety reps. You just wonder how far this goes."

see full article @
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/mar/03/blacklisted-building-workers-court-hopes

Apparently this kind of blacklisting has been happening, surprisingly, NOT, since the days of Maggie Thatcher and continued by her poodle, Blair, and only just discovered I gather because of the current investigation into Police corruption via the Leveson Enquiry and other investigations into the media.

Excellent post, Molly - thank you for the useful information.

bet i'm on it!!

Hi R & R,
Me also!

It started well before Thatcher ...

http://www.1in12events.co.uk/archive/publications/library/spies/spies.htm

The Consulting Association is the Economic League continued under another name.

"Economic League (United Kingdom)" From Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_League_(UK)
"The Economic League was an organisation in the United Kingdom dedicated to opposing what they saw as subversion and action against free enterprise. The organisation was founded in 1919 by a group of industrialists and then MP William Reginald Hall under the name of National Propaganda. Its chief function was to promote the point of view of industrialists and businessmen. Predating McCarthyism, it worked closely with the British Empire Union. John Baker White worked as the league's Assistant Director, and then from 1926 to 1939 as Director.[1] They later worked with MI5 to blacklist workers who they suspected of association with certain left wing groups, ranging from the Communist Party of Great Britain to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.[citation needed] The League became more visible in the 1980s, as the press investigated its activities, and questions were asked in Parliament in a campaign against the League, led by Maria Fyfe. It was wound up in 1994, with two of its former directors forming the similar organisation CAPRiM shortly afterwards.[2] Another similar organisation was The Consulting Association which was raided by the Office of the Information Commissioner in February 2009."

"The league's running cost was funded by contributions from various companies. In the early 1980s numerous companies would check out employees with the League to ensure that employeess were not communist-trained with the intent of disruption."

Hi Tom C, I've recently had problems with a trojan on my PC from unknown sites, so didn't go to your link. Did however, look it up on Wiki, and you are totally correct. Why on earth should I believe it was something new. I mean Capitalists maintaining their power, through subversive means.

My main concern, and reason for posting the links, was that it was not easy to access, it took me some time to find a mainstream site that had reported on this outrageous and illegal blacklisting of working people because of their political beliefs. Now who is to say what a "troublemaker" is, I have been accused and harassed at work of being just that. What it often means is that you have simply pointed out to your boss that actually what they have instructed you to do, is possibly illegal, infringes your employment rights, or is quite often immoral or dangerous to your or others health, ? It means you are not a "yes man(woman)", but has nothing to do with your ability to do your job or do it very well. You are already using your abilities to make money for the company presumably, in some way. In many cases where I have drawn certain points out to a manager, it was in the best interests of the company, but perhaps not in the best interests of that particular manager? I have never been sacked for doing this, infact quite the reverse, the person involved in a dispute of some of the above has subsequently "been moved on", conincidentally soon after the problem arising, and the company stood by me and was grateful for making them aware of a problem, you know, "whistleblowing".

Companies need to trust their workers more, encourage "whistleblowing"
as sometimes in is in their economic benefit, to actually know what is happening in their companies, when corrupt, or potentially unsafe practices are carried out. Many Companies employ "troubleshooters", or any other term of undercover employees to find these problems before they come back to bite them on the @rse, causing perhaps fatal injury. Just look at News International?

The blacklist in the construction industry is not exclusively for the left, it includes people on the right who actively opposed the import of cheap labour to bolster the profits of multi-nationals and subject the indigenous workers to unemployment which the government pays for not them. I know; I'm on it. That's one of the reasons I don't work in UK anymore. I was lucky, having the quals and experience to do this-millions haven't.

Mornin' Molly.

"when opposing this global social engineering"

In what sense is closing borders and dividing people along ethnic lines not also "social engineering"?

Morning easytiger, so you went out into the world and got your own back then. I wouldn't say the imported cheap labour question is necessarily a right wing thing. It's just that the left think it is politically incorrect to question foreign labour undercutting the labour market here. I think the right and left and middle (perhaps), would like a decent living wage for all people in the country.

What galls me about the left is that they're usually well educated, middle-class civil servants in what used to be jobs for life. Try walking out the site gate with your cards on a friday and then watch cheap labour march in on a monday. This one world-no borders thing plays right into the multi-nationals' hands-the ability to shift blocks of cheap labour round the world without giving a fig about the living standards of the indigenous population. It's not just on the shop floor either. I did three different contracts on the Olympic Park and by the time I was on the final one in 2010 I was the only englishman on the job and that included engineers and managers.It's all done now, no way back, but from 2003 onwards you can bet your bottom dollar that if half the presenters and reporters on the BBC had turned into eastern europeans overnight a totally different attitude would have have prevailed.

That old quip 'TB didn't like the British working class so he imported his own' rings so true. If the likes of Thatcher had done this it would have been classed as a savage attack on the working class and there would have been mass demonstrations in the streets! I just don't get the left in UK at all.

Then ofcourse there is the old vs the young, (that's how I was undercut with redundancy). Makes sense to get rid of someone that has worked their way up to a decent wage, then suddenly, you're gone and some 21 year old whizz kid who'll work for peanuts because they don't have a mortgage, or there parents are rich, takes your re-titled job. This is going on now with internships. I am certainly not middle class, and had to fend for myself from aged 16. It's not just imported labour now that's undercutting jobs.

Many people seem to mix migrants, immigrants and asylum seekers and blame them for what is Globalised Capitalism. And what does this issue have to do with religion??? Are you worried about your work being stolen by immigrants or you are afraid your culture, whatever it is, being diluted by those bloody people who are so different? It is Globalised Capitalism that requires the movement of workers. The sooner you give up the little island mentality the sooner you can face the reality of the capitalism we all benefit from, i.e cheap food and cheap clothing. You cannot focus on the symptom without being able to understand the cause. You can blame your average Eastern European worker for this all you like, if that makes you feel better, but what will this change? Conversely all people who berate migrant workers are abjectly silent on the Brits who move abroad and use the local health service etc., are you all who complain about Eastern Europeans happy for Brits to be able to move to France, Spain, Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary etc. and use the benefit system there, expect the same treatment as here and drive up local property prices so local kids cannot get work or buy their first homes? If you close the borders and quit the EU you will pay a very high price: you will loose trade, all your citizens who are expats will loose their benefits as all the agreements to match standards will be annulled, and pay higher export price, is that what you really want? 70% of UK trade for the moment is coming from the EU if I remember well the figures. Be careful what you wish for!

Quite frankly most of the Brits I know who haved moved abroad are solvent and can take care of themselves. Most of them say they left Britain not because of migrant workers but because their cities had become full of immigrant layabouts demanding that the culture they supposedly fled be imposed on their new homelands. You don't have million Brits in catholic Madrid shouting for protestant schools do you?
Quite frankly I couldn't give a monkey's what expat Brits get up to (by the way I work abroad but retain residence in UK by paying UK tax and NI-costs me a lot of money to be a smug B), it's an irrelevant arguing point.
Quite frankly if you still believe all that propaganda that the EU and the BBC churn out I should try reading some other literature if I were you. Very soon there will be limited access to the internet because of the impending (I kid you not) powercuts caused by this completely non-sensical renewable energy policy dictated to us by EU.

[Deleted by the author on 29 Mar 2012 09:46:20 BDT]

Mrs A , what rubbish - for a start - global capitalism nearly brought the whole house down lately , with the EU resorting to build " Firewalls " around 1 small country - Greece , global capitalism being reversed as fast as possible here , even the USA and China were feeling the heat .
perhaps more firewalls are required around other countries , some bigger than Greece . Imagine the havoc if France or Spain were to take the place of Greece , more firewalls needed now , and higher walls than what has already been done . De globalisation is now needed asap to save the globe from any 1 country whose clap-trap finances hit the fan in the near future .

As for immigration , the joke is now over , local unemployment is rising all round the UK and local people can not find any meaningfull jobs now , perhaps we should tell the EU to get stuffed , we're leaving ( ireland really should asap ) , don't worry about trade , they do not want to lose our buying power .
We will still buy Mercs , BMW's , Audis , Renualts and Citroens from them , they will not want to harm that .
OK , so MRS Ashton loses her cushy well paid number , but time to give the EU back it's citizens and endless red-tape .

WHOOP!!!! WHOOP!!!!!!

i concur 100%