Private sector myths
Professor Mariana Mazzucato has made a fascinating study of the roles of the state and private enterprise in innovation. Her book challenges the false image that business is innovative while the state is full of inertia.
News/Views
Gallery board digs itself deeper into hole
27 February 2015
Staff are continuing to fight for jobs at the National Gallery, with a new director due to take up his/her position next week and expected to implement the outsourcing policies of the previous director.
Accounting for money in the Soviet Union
During Socialist transition some workers were in more mechanised workplaces than others, some less rationally organised or working with less up to date equipment etc. So the same product(s) produced from different locations could not at this time be directly exchanged with other products solely on the basis of the number of hours worked.
Bolshevik finance
How to run industry and finance without capitalism was one of the things the Bolsheviks learned how to do in the Soviet Union after the October Revolution – and we can learn something from studying how they did it.
Capitalist destruction
Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and No Logo, has written another challenging book. In this one, the Canadian author and journalist shows how capitalism is destroying our environment.
Libya - The authors of chaos
In an act of supreme irony, the US, France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Britain have said the forces of disruption “will not be allowed to condemn Libya to chaos and extremism”.
Minimum wage - A handful of prosecutions
The government has made great play of naming and shaming employers who fail to pay the minimum wage. Yet just 92 employers have been prosecuted over the past two years
Housing - empty investments
London has tens of thousands of “safe deposit boxes” positioned on its public streets – houses and flats bought for investment but untenanted.
1944: Britain and the battle for Athens
22 February 2015
Britain’s repressive role in the world remains for many a hidden history. One such episode occurred in Greece, after that country had been liberated from the Nazis…
SNP rule hits education
22 February 2015
For all the SNP’s talk of being a party that puts money into public services, statistics show that teacher numbers and college places have both fallen under its rule.
The NHS - for sale all over Europe
22 February 2015
THE NHS in England is now advertising across the private sector in the European Union to sell off the “back office” or administrative functions of GP practices.
Behind the scandal of tax avoidance
22 February 2015
Tax avoidance has been much in the news. That it happens is no surprise to workers – but the extent to which it is engrained in our economic system might be.