Save the over 75 TV licence

As you doubtless know, the government has passed the funding of TV licences for people aged over 75 to the BBC. It is iniquitous that what is in essence a form of universal benefit should be dumped on our national broadcaster. The reason is obvious: if the BBC decides it cannot afford to administer the concession, as seems likely, it will be blamed rather than the government that decided that a national concession introduced by one of its predecessors should now be paid for by a media corporation.

This is ministerial cowardice of the first order: deliberately ducking responsibility for one's own official actions.

The NPC is organising a demo in London on 7 March - details on the right.

They have also produced a petition (below).

• Right-click on the petition.
• On the menu that appears, click on 'Save image as...'
• Click 'save' to download to your computer
• You can then print it in the normal way.

Government pensions grab impoverishes miners

Then: fighting the government for their jobs.

Now:  fighting the government for their pensions.

This is a scandal that has largely slipped by unnoticed: the massive profits our government has made over decades by creaming huge sums of money from British miners' pension schemes.

Ministers took £617 million from the miners’ pension fund in 2018 to top up Treasury coffers, bringing the total removed to more than £4.4 billion in 24 years. The scandal has left retired pit workers receiving disgracefully low payouts averaging £84 a week, with at least 6,000 having had their pensions cut. Successive governments have mined the rich seam of funds since 1994. The Tories have pocketed two payments of £51 million in the last two years alone and have never put a penny back. Energy Minister Claire Perry recently revealed that the government will purloin another £427 million over the next three years.

Six months ago, Labour MP Dennis Skinner raised the matter in parliament at Prime Minister's Questions: "Is the minister aware that already his government have taken more than three and a half billion pounds out of the miners' pension? They're like Philip Green and Maxwell put together. Stop stealing the miners' pension."

Gloria De Piero, Labour MP for Ashfield, wrote in The Mirror last September: "It seems like daylight robbery to many. While many MPS [Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme] pensioners struggle to get by, the Government is profiting to the tune of billions of pounds from the investments of miners’ pension contributions. This is quite simply, grossly unfair, and it really is time the government did the decent thing and started talks to renegotiate the surplus sharing arrangement."

Considered alongside the WASPI scandal, it is clear that the government regards the pensions of ordinary people as a resource to be plundered at will without any concern for either the injustice of depriving people what they have worked for all their lives or the indignity of needless poverty in retirement.

Details of how the rip-off came about can be found at WalesOnLine, and an on-line petition has been set up to demand that this injustice be stopped. You can sign it here.

Oppose privatisation of Food Standards inspections

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) now want to stop independent meat inspections by Meat Hygiene Inspectors and Official Vets and leave the slaughter houses to carry out their own inspections for hygiene and safety. For an organisation such as FSA to contemplate such a dangerous strategy in terms of public health is unbelievable.

The FSA was set up in 2000 after Mad Cow Disease to control bad practices within the food industry and claims to "put the consumer first". Whilst we appreciate they have excelled with regards to diet and nutrition, the same cannot be said for food-borne illnesses, mainly caused by contaminated meat.

New proposals mean that the meat industry will be able to regulate itself rather than have independent inspections - more details here. If our Meat Inspectors are not there to give us independent health and safety and hygiene advice in slaughter houses, we should be asking the question 'if the Food Standards Agency is really fit for its purpose?'

Please sign this petition to keep the Meat Hygiene Inspectors and inspections independent and send a clear message to the FSA to stop listening to the meat industry and pandering to their cost saving ideas at the expense of public health.

Perfetti Van Melle attacking unions in Bangladesh

You may be familiar with Mentos, Chupa Chups or Alpenliebe, but you may not know the company behind these popular brands. Perfetti Van Melle (PVM), based in the Netherlands, is the third largest global confectionery company. PVM workers in Bangladesh recently attempted to form a union. The company's response was brutal and swift: workers are being visited in their homes and threatened with the loss of their jobs if they don't sign a statement saying they were forced to join (a common tactic used by South Asian employers). Elected union leaders have had their work rescheduled to make it impossible to meet with and represent their members.

The workers are determined to defend their union and their rights. Please support them by clicking here to sign an on-line petition to PVM.

International solidarity - support fired farm labourers

Two migrant farm labourers on a tobacco farm in North Carolina owned by grower Randy Blalock were abused, denied work and then summarily fired after describing substandard living conditions to an inspector from the state Department of Labor. 

IUF UITA IUL affiliate, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), is supporting the workers in their conflict with the grower and is seeking to recover thousands of dollars in stolen wages.

These two workers' story reflects the experiences of many other tobacco farmworkers who have no freedom of association and no union protection. And because there is no transparency in the tobacco supply chain, it is impossible to determine which company buys the product from Blalock; FLOC believes it is either Reynolds America Inc. or Alliance One.

Click here to send a message to the grower, his anti-union lawyer and the tobacco companies, telling them to stop these abuses, pay the workers their stolen wages and guarantee freedom of association.

STOP the new plans to dismantle our NHS

This post gives important information about these plans, info that the government is not keen to publicise. If you oppose them please sign this petition - here.

The Naylor Review, published in March 2017, laid out a new NHS Estates strategy to get rid of "surplus" NHS property. It is a con trick designed to turn public property into private wealth. Not content to just 'sell' the land and buildings, which might mean they go to Co-operatives or other socally aware groups or developers, Project Phoenix proposes a 'fire sale' via Public Private Partnerships.

Six regional Public Private Partnerships will be created to sell off “ surplus” NHS assets. Tenders for the partnerships are expected to be published in the Official Journal of the European Union this summer and the Public Private Partnerships will probably go live later in 2017. "Surplus" NHS land and buildings could be sold to developers wanting to build homes, or to the private sector to be improved and then leased to local health services.The profit from sales will probably be shared between the NHS and the private partners.

Channelling public money into Public Private Partnerships comes at a big cost. It means the state doesn't have to finance and pay capital costs upfront - but we know from the disastrous Private Finance Initiative history that these projects end up costing much much more than publicly financed projects, because of ruinous interest and facilities management costs. We also know that they compromise safety and usability standards during the construction stage, because profit is put ahead of everything else.

Government decided to cut public spending, but Hospital Trusts need money to implement the STP changes. A report to NHS England’s 15.12.16 board meeting said:

"Capital is very tight over the next few years; STPs' requests exceed what is available."

The report also said NHS England and NHS Improvement would review all STP capital requests and that funding would be available for:

"strategic schemes that are essential for unlocking local improvements and efficiencies".

A BMA report confirmed that 36 of the 44 Sustainability and Transformation Plans between them required £9.5bn of capital funding but there is nothing like that money available. The 44 STP footprints between them need to 'save' £22 billion by 2020. Less than a quarter of local politicians believe that major NHS plans to reshape local health and care services will succeed, So why, we ask are they not challenging the proposals through the Joint Scrutiny Committees?

Please help us stop the STPs. Share the petition with friends or family or share on Facebook or twitter. The petition's website address is: https://you.38degrees.org.uk/p/stopNHSattacks.

For more information about the land sale, click here.