The NHS is a massive national asset that we must invest in

Today I am hearing the usual crap about pay rises for NHS staff, and this from a government which has increased the pay of top NHS managers by 11% in the past few years. I also had to put up with Peter Allen on BBC Radio 5Live launching a tirade of Tory propaganda against the leader of the Midwives union - " How can we pay for these pay rises - increase taxes?" Well yes, if necessary increase taxes if it means a better NHS! - but make sure those tax rises are paid for not by genuinely hardworking people - like public sector workers such as nurses - but the tax-dodging rich and the bankers who have had their snouts firmly in the trough for the past 30 years and more.

If it hadn't been for the economic mismanagement of this Tory-led government and near on five years of austerity our economy would now be in much better shape to deal with the economic difficulties we face, and we'd have a stronger NHS. This coalition government is  entirely responsible for the mess we are in.

The NHS was created at a time of austerity, now we are much wealthier - is it unaffordable? NO!

Most importantly, we must reject the government's neoliberal political agenda with its mania about 'balancing the budget' and 'tax cuts' which is beamed out every minute as propaganda by the BBC and corporate media. The 'story' they tell us about the economy is a false and misleading one. The NHS is a perfect example of this. Far from being a drain on resources that we 'can't afford' the NHS is a massive national asset which creates wealth for the UK. How? By maintaining the health and well-being of more than 60 million people, not to mention the money it puts into our economy by creating useful employment and ensuring that we are a more productive nation. Where would we be without it? We'd all be an awful lot poorer. The truth is we can't not afford the NHS.

We need to change the terms of political and economic debate in this country and reject the false world view which we are being told we must believe. Until we do that we will continue to be subjected to a regime of 'economic necessity' which is calculated to make us all poorer whist a tiny and undeserving minority benefits at our expense.

What we can all learn from Bob Crow

I was really shocked when I heard that Bob Crow had died this morning. He was only 52 years old and his sudden death will be a real blow to members of the RMT and trade unionists and workers everywhere. In his twelve years as leader of the union he increased its membership by 20,000, no mean feat in difficult times. He also did his best to ensure that his members were properly rewarded for their work and wasn't afraid to use industrial action to achieve better terms and conditions for them. That, of course, is how it should be and that is why he earned so much respect, even from his political enemies.

Bob Crow - a fighter for social justice who will be missed

The oft forgotten reality is that the wealth in our economy is created by workers. The trains and the infrastructure Bob Crow's members used in their daily work were built by workers, and the vital task of transporting millions is daily carried out by workers. What would happen without any of this? Capitalists, who are credited with creating wealth, are really the expropriators of the wealth that workers create. Since when has a shareholder or banker ever done any useful or essential work?

There will be more Bob Crows in the future and some of them will have been directly inspired by his example of shrewd tactics and tireless struggle for social justice. What can we learn from Bob Crow? The value of workers and the necessity of struggle by workers to achieve a better world for all. Every poorly paid worker can learn to join a union and to fight for a better standard of living. When Bob Crow was elected he was invited to Newsnight for an interview. He didn't go because he was celebrating with his mates in the pub. Tonight I will be raising a glass to the memory of Bob Crow and all the good things he achieved. RIP Bob.

What is democracy and how can we make it work for us?

Everybody knows what democracy is don't they? Citizens of a state, who are eligible, get to vote every 4 to 5 years for representatives to an elected chamber, which is the seat of government. Wikipedia defines democracy as:

"Democracy is a form of government in which all eligible citizens participate equally—either directly or indirectly through elected representatives—in the proposal, development, and creation of laws."

Then there is a whole lot of other stuff about the mechanisms of democracy such as voting systems and the structure of elected chambers which turns out to be pretty important because if that doesn't work, democracy doesn't work either.

In the West we have a system which has come to be known as 'liberal democracy' which many of us like to think is the best available. We know that because our leaders, including David Cameron and Barack Obama, are always lecturing the rest of the world that they should be using our 'democratic' system. But its clear that something is very wrong with Western liberal democracy, both here, in Europe, and in the USA. Fewer and fewer people want to vote and there is widespread disillusionment with the system. In 1950 83.9% of registered voters voted in the UK and in 2001 the number was 59.4%. Since then there has been an increase in the turnout but less than two thirds of registered voters voted in 2010, and the overall trend is downward. I believe that the disillusionment stems from the fact that democracy seems to work much better for some i.e. bankers, than others i.e. the rest of us.

So maybe its time we should go back to thinking about what democracy really is and how it could work better for all of us. That is why I recently read David Graeber's book The Democracy Project. Graeber starts by talking about Occupy Wall Street but the meat of his book is about democracy and decision making. It provides plenty of food for thought and is well worth reading. It also contains a few eye-openers for people who haven't studied the origins and development of democracy. And I like Graeber's ideas about consensus, something which is commonly poo-poohed by people who like adversarial democracy and seem to prefer there to be 'winners' and 'losers'. Consensus, far from being the shoddy compromise that some would have us believe, can be very powerful because its positive and inclusive.

If we go back to the origins of democracy in ancient Greece it was a very different setup to the one we are used to, one that we now call direct democracy. There were no representatives, and all citizens participated in decision making. Of course not everyone was a citizen, and women and slaves did not get to vote. In contrast, representative democracy is a relatively modern concept, and one which was intended, when the American Republic was founded, to prevent direct democracy from happening. You see the founding fathers of the USA feared direct democracy, which they saw as mob rule, and were determined that decision making was going to remain in the hands of men they could trust - themselves, and people like them. According to Graeber they agreed with the 'Puritan preacher John Winthrop who wrote':

"a democracy is, among most civil nations, accounted the meanest and worst of all forms of government."

So it follows that nowhere does the American constitution mention that the USA is a democracy. In fact the word 'democracy' had negative connotations for a long time and only became a popular term in the 19th century when politicians in the USA began to identify themselves as 'democrats'.  

Direct democracy in action in Switzerland

Given the current state of democracy in the West, in which a political class, divorced from the rest of society, has allied with corporate power to dominate our democratic institutions and control law making, its not difficult to see our current democratic system as anything other than government for the 1%. 

If we want to take back that democracy for the 99%, perhaps electing representatives is not the answer. We definitely need to empower citizens and undertake root and branch reform of our democratic institutions, starting from the lowest level of local government. So maybe we can learn something from the ancient Greeks by cutting out the 'middle man' and establishing what the American founding fathers feared most -  a form of direct democracy that allows all citizens a voice in decision making. Think it can't be done? Well it happens in Switzerland which has a form of direct democracy, and if it can happen there it can happen in the UK and other parts of the West. Democracy is much too important to be left in it's current state, in the hands of the political class and corporate lobbyists and it's something we should be having a national debate about. We need bring about real democratic change to make democracy work for us.