Noam Chomsky at 80

The great man is 80 years old today. By way of a tribute, here's my article on Chomsky from the New Statesman's 'Great Thinkers of Our Time' Series.


The charge of both anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism is regularly made by propagandists of the new world order against those who do not happen to share their enthusiasm for biennial invasions of sovereign states and the spreading of neoliberalism by B-52 and cluster bomb.

What the likes of Michael Gove, Barbara Amiel and Melanie Phillips cannot explain away, however, is the inconvenient reality that some of the most outspoken opponents of their world-view are either American or Jewish, or very often both. The international anti-war movement owes much to the efforts of Gore Vidal, Ramsey Clark, Michael Parenti and Howard Zinn. But the greatest of their number is Noam Chomsky, who has spent more than four decades warning of the danger that US imperialism poses to the peace and security of the world.

Born in Philadelphia in 1928, the son of Russian immigrants who had strong pacifist leanings, Chomsky's early education was at a progressive school and at the city's Central High School. At the University of Pennsylvania, he studied mathematics and philosophy, as well as linguistics. Since completing his PhD in linguistics in 1955, he has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was appointed Institute Professor in 1976.

His contribution to linguistics is profound. His Syntactic Structures (1957) is considered to be one of the intellectual achievements of the 20th century. Chomsky pioneered the idea that each human child has an innate capacity to master the grammar and deep structure of language. His insight was based on the observation that children learn grammar at a rate far greater than can be explained by their extrapolating from examples given to them. They must therefore have an innate capacity not only to learn language but also to understand how it works. Because language acquisition is universal, all languages must share the same fundamental structure or "depth grammar".

Chomsky's revolutionary work on grammar and language deeply influenced not only linguistics, but also cognitive science in general. It has had a major impact on his political thinking as well. What Chomsky offers is, in the words of the author Collin Coyne, an "account of international power exchange from the linguist's perspective". For Chomsky, the word "democracy" has two quite distinct meanings. According to the dictionary, a system is democratic to the extent that its citizens have ways to participate in decisions about public affairs. In the ideological sense of democracy, a society is deemed democratic by the US only if its business is run in a way that is subordinate to the interests of US business. Anyone still in doubt as to why Guatemala in the 1950s, Nicaragua in the 1980s and Yugoslavia in the 1990s were denied the label "democratic" by the US state department, despite the holding of free elections in these countries, need no longer be puzzled.

Chomsky came to prominence as a social critic of US foreign policy during the Vietnam war. His first major political text, American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), was critical of a liberal intelligentsia that had supported the Vietnam conflict or, if it opposed it, did so not because it was wrong but because of the high level of US casualties. In the 1970s and 1980s, Chomsky was, together with John Pilger, one of the few to speak out on the "hidden" genocide in East Timor, where, over a 20-year period, Indonesian forces armed and supported by the US were responsible for the deaths of more than 200,000 people.

As a non-Marxist, libertarian socialist, Chomsky embraced the fall of the Berlin Wall. At the same time, he understood the dangers that would be created by the new power vacuum. His fear that with the demise of the Soviet Union, the US military-industrial complex would seek out new enemies to justify its existence has been borne out by subsequent events. That it has done so successfully owes much to what Chomsky calls an "unholy alliance" between the US state and the "corporate media".

In works such as Manufacturing Consent (co-written with Edward Herman in 1988) and Necessary Illusions (1989), Chomsky challenged the orthodoxy that a "free press" acts as a "watchdog" in a capitalist democracy. He argued instead that by "framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting discussion accordingly", the media help to preserve the status quo and the hegemony of global finance.

Chomsky's understanding of the mechanics of US imperialism and his ability at all times to see the "big picture" have led him to oppose recent US military interventions in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as President Bush's war on terrorism. As befits a true liberal, he has never compromised his belief in the freedom of speech, even to the extent that in 1980 he wrote the preface to a book by Robert Faurisson that doubted the truth of the Holocaust.

In 40 years of writing about politics, Chomsky's errors of judgement - he was wrong to think that the fall of communism in eastern Europe was a "triumph of the spirit" and that the west missed a "great opportunity" to be rid of Saddam Hussein in 1991 - have been remarkably few. For anyone wanting to find out more about the world we live in, for anyone who does not understand why the US ignored the genocide in East Timor but intervened so aggressively in a low-scale civil war in Kosovo, there is one simple answer: read Noam Chomsky.

He may be widely disliked by establishment commentators, but through exposing unpalatable truths about the way his country is run and by reminding us that US military spending protects not US citizens but the interests of the big US corporations, Chomsky has done his country and the world an invaluable service. This, together with his pioneering work in linguistics, makes him one of the great thinkers of this or any other time.

Noam Chomsky: Born 1928 in Philadelphia, US. Has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1955, where he is Institute Professor and professor of linguistics. Regarded as the father of modern linguistics, founder of the field of transformational-generative grammar, which relies heavily on logic and philosophy. A persistent, radical critic of American and capitalist hegemonic power, his pioneering linguistic works include Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammar (1966) and Knowledge of Language: its nature, origins and use (1986), while political books range from American Power and the New Mandarins (1969) to Terrorizing the Neighborhood: American foreign policy in the post-cold war era (1991)

Socialism's comeback

Here's my article from this week's New Statesman on the dramatic revival of socialism in Europe.

"If socialism signifies a political and economic system in which the government controls a large part of the economy and redistributes wealth to produce social equality, then I think it is safe to say the likelihood of its making a comeback any time in the next generation is close to zero," wrote Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History, in Time magazine in 2000.

He should take a trip around Europe today.

Make no mistake, socialism - pure, unadulterated socialism, an ideology that was taken for dead by liberal capitalists - is making a strong comeback. Across the continent, there is a definite trend in which long-established parties of the centre left that bought in to globalisation and neoliberalism are seeing their electoral dominance challenged by unequivocally socialist parties which have not.

The parties in question offer policies which mark a clean break from the Thatcherist agenda that many of Europe's centre-left parties have embraced over the past 20 years. They advocate renationalisation of privatised state enterprises and a halt to further liberalisation of the public sector. They call for new wealth taxes to be imposed and for a radical redistribution of wealth. They defend the welfare state and the rights of all citizens to a decent pension and free health care. They strongly oppose war - and any further expansion of Nato.

Most fundamentally of all, they challenge an economic system in which the interests of ordinary working people are subordinated to those of capital.

Nowhere is this new leftward trend more apparent than in Germany, home to the meteoric rise of Die Linke ("The Left"), a political grouping formed only 18 months ago - and co-led by the veteran socialist "Red" Oskar Lafontaine, a long-standing scourge of big business. The party, already the main opposition to the Christian Democrats in eastern Germany, has made significant inroads into the vote for the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in elections to western parliaments this year, gaining representation in Lower Saxony, Hamburg and Hesse. Die Linke's unapologetically socialist policies, which include the renation alisation of electricity and gas, the banning of hedge funds and the introduction of a maximum wage, chime with a population concerned at the dismantling of Germany's mixed economic model and the adoption of Anglo-Saxon capitalism - a shift that occurred while the SPD was in government.

An opinion poll last year showed that 45 per cent of west Germans (and 57 per cent of east Germans) consider socialism "a good idea"; in October, another poll showed that Germans overwhelmingly favour nationalisation of large segments of the economy. Two-thirds of all Germans say they agree with all or some of Die Linke's programme.

It's a similar story of left-wing revival in neighbouring Holland. There the Socialist Party of the Netherlands (SP), which almost trebled its parliamentary representation in the most recent general election (2006), and which made huge gains in last year's provincial elections, continues to make headway.

Led by a charismatic 41-year-old epidemiologist, Agnes Kant, the SP is on course to surpass the Dutch Labour Party, a member of the ruling conservative-led coalition, as the Netherlands' main left-of centre grouping.

The SP has gained popularity by being the only left-wing Dutch parliamentary party to campaign for a "No" vote during the 2005 referendum on the EU constitutional treaty and for its opposition to large-scale immigration, which it regards as being part of a neoliberal package that encourages flexible labour markets.

The party calls for a society where the values of "human dignity, equality and solidarity" are most prominent, and has been scathing in its attacks on what it describes as "the culture of greed", brought about by "a capitalism based on inflated bonuses and easy money". Like Die Linke, the SP campaigns on a staunchly anti-war platform - demanding an end to Holland's role as "the US's lapdog".

In Greece, the party on the up is the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA), the surprise package in last year's general election. As public opposition to the neoliberal econo mic policies of the ruling New Democracy government builds, SYRIZA's opinion-poll ratings have risen to almost 20 per cent - putting it within touching distance of PASOK, the historical left-of-centre opposition, which has lurched sharply to the right in recent years. SYRIZA is particularly popular with young voters: its support among those aged 35 and under stands at roughly 30 per cent in the polls, ahead of PASOK.

In Norway, socialists are already in power; the ruling "red-green" coalition consists of the Socialist Left Party, the Labour Party and the Centre Party. Since coming to power three years ago, the coalition - which has been labelled the most left-wing government in Europe, has halted the privatisation of state-owned companies and made further development of the welfare state, public health care and improving care for the elderly its priorities.

The success of such forces shows that there can be an electoral dividend for left-wing parties if voters see them responding to the crisis of modern capitalism by offering boldly socialist solutions. Their success also demonstrates the benefits to electoral support for socialist groupings as they put aside their differences to unite behind a commonly agreed programme.

For example, Die Linke consists of a number of internal caucuses - or forums - including the "Anti-Capitalist Left", "Communist Platform" and "Democratic Socialist Forum". SYRIZA is a coalition of more than ten Greek political groups. And the Dutch Socialist Party - which was originally called the Communist Party of the Netherlands, has successfully brought socialists and communists together to support its collectivist programme.

It is worth noting that those European parties of the centre left which have not fully embraced the neoliberal agenda are retaining their dominant position. In Spain, the governing Socialist Workers' Party has managed to maintain its broad left base and was re-elected for another four-year term in March, with Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero promising a "socialist economic policy" that would focus on the needs of workers and the poor.

There are exceptions to the European continent's shift towards socialism. Despite the recent election of leftist Martine Aubry as leader of the French Socialist Party, the French left has been torn apart by divisions, at the very moment when it could be exploiting the growing unpopularity of the Sarkozy administration.

And, in Britain, despite opinion being argu ably more to the left on economic issues than at any time since 1945, few are calling for a return to socialism.

The British left, despite promising initiatives such as September's Convention of the Left in Manchester, which gathered representatives from several socialist groups, still remains fragmented and divided. The left's espousal of unrestricted or loosely controlled immigration is also, arguably, a major vote loser among working-class voters who should provide its core support. No socialist group in Britain has as yet articulated a critique of mass immigration from an anti-capitalist and anti-racist viewpoint in the way the Socialist Party of the Netherlands has.

And even if a Die Linke-style coalition of progressive forces could be built and put on a formal footing in time for the next general election, Britain's first-past-the-post system provides a formidable obstacle to change.

Nevertheless, the prognosis for socialism in Britain and the rest of Europe is good. As the recession bites, and neoliberalism is discredited, the phenomenon of unequivocally socialist parties with clear, anti-capitalist, anti-globalist messages gaining ground, and even replacing "Third Way" parties in Europe, is likely to continue.

Even in Britain, where the electoral system grants huge advantage to the established parties, pressure on Labour to jettison its commitment to neoliberal policies and to adopt a more socialist agenda is sure to intensify.

Seumas Milne on why it's time to nationalise the banks

We know that Darling has made contingency plans for control over lending rates, as well as outright nationalisation. But at every stage of the crisis, ministers have shrunk from anything that might be seen to encroach on the independence of the private bankers whose reckless failure has been at the heart of the meltdown.

Even now, ministers insist on informal pressure and an arm's length relationship with the banks the government itself owns, and hope that modest adjustments to the bailout terms will do the trick. It isn't working. Darling is already speculating about the need for further eye-watering injections of capital. The logic in favour of bringing all the main banks into public ownership as the cheapest and most effective way of ending the squeeze and directing credit into the productive economy is becoming ever stronger as the crisis deepens. It may turn out to be the only way.

You can read the whole of Seumas' brilliant piece on what the British government needs to do next, here.

Syria: Enemy of our Enemy (1)

This essay of mine, calling for an end to the neocon-inspired US hostility towards Syria, appears in the anti-war magazine The American Conservative. It's a long article, so I'll be posting it in two parts, part two will follow shortly.

If you haven't visited Syria, then don't be put off by the negative propaganda surrounding the country, the people are incredibly kind and hospitable and Damascus is one of the most magical cities in the world.


It’s a Middle Eastern country where Christian celebrations are official state holidays and civil servants are allowed to take Sunday morning off to go to church, even though Sunday is a working day.

A place where women can smoke and wear make-up and are active in public life.

A country implacably opposed to Islamic fundamentalism and al Qa’ida, and whose security forces helped foil a terrorist attack on the US Embassy.

No, not Israel, Syria.

The list of the Bush’s administration’s foreign policy errors is long, but not least among them is the way in which it has treated Syria- in many ways a natural ally- as a pariah.

Despite having a secular government, led by a London- trained ophthalmologist who has a British born wife, Syria was added to the ‘Axis of Evil’ by US Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton in May 2002. In 2003, Washington passed the ‘Syria Accountability Act’ which imposed economic sanctions on Damascus. And according to President Bush, Syria poses “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy and economy" of the US.

Then to add injury- and death- to insult, in October American forces launched an attack from on Iraq on the Syrian village of Sukkiraya from Iraq. Eight people were killed. The US claimed to have been targeting the network of al-Qaida-linked foreign fighters moving through Syria to Iraq, but the Syrian government denounced the strike as ‘criminal and terrorist aggression‘.

How can we account for the US’s extraordinary hostility to a country that has never threatened it? The answer is the baleful influence of our old friends the neocons.

Nothing better illustrates the fundamental deceit that underpins neo-conservatism. If defeating radical Islam really was the name of the game as Podhoretz, Feith, Wolfowitz, and company insist, then the US would surely have been building bridges with Damascus, instead of treating it as an outcast.

For Syria‘s problem with Islamic militancy predates America’s.

Since the Ba’athist takeover in 1963, the Syrian regime has come under pressure from radical Islamists who dislike its socialistic, secularist policies, its empowerment of women and the dominance of the Alawites- a group previously considered the underclass in the country.

In 1973, there were violent demonstrations against planned changes in the constitution which proposed allowing non-Muslims to be head of state. Extremists assassinated prominent members of the regime and the Alawite sect.

Then in 1979 came the bloody massacre of 83 cadets at the military academy in Aleppo, followed by terrorist attacks in other Syrian cities. Three years later there, there was a violent Islamic uprising in the town of Hama, in which Ba’athists were attacked and murdered. The government‘s response was brutal: up to 30,000 people were killed when the army, under President Hafez al-Assad’s brother, attempted to restore order.

The threat that radical Islamists pose to the secular regime has receded since the early 1980s, but it has not gone away. The car bombing of a Shia shrine in Damascus in September, which killed 17 people, was the third such attack this year.

I first visited Syria in 1999, during the last year of the 29-year rule of Assad père. With its state-owned self-service cafeterias, socialistic style public buildings and East German-made trains, Syria reminded me more of the communist countries in eastern Europe I had visited in the 1980s, than a predominantly Islamic Middle Eastern state.

While the Syrians I met could not have been friendlier or more hospitable, there was no disguising the totalitarian nature of the regime. Pictures of Hafez al-Assad hung everywhere. An extraordinary amount of people were in military uniforms, including in the universities I visited- a ‘state of emergency’ has existed in Syria since the Ba’athists came to power.

If that all sounds pretty grim, there is, thankfully, another side to the story. The Ba’athists have undoubtedly bought stability to a country divided on religious and tribal lines- and considerable economic and social progress.

In my travels in Syria I did not see abject poverty of the sort that exists in most other countries in the region. The government's secularism means that most members of religious minorities, such as the Alawites, Druze, Christians and Isma‘ilis support the regime. “We support the government here because if it was toppled the Islamists would rule” a young female academic at the University of Latakia told me. The parallels with neighbouring Iraq- and the ethnic and religious strife which engulfed the country when the secular Ba’athist regime was toppled there-are all too obvious.

Jamaica brings back the hangman (1)

Last week Jamaica voted to end its 20-year moratorium on capital punishment. Here's my piece from The Daily Express on why the Caribbean island is ignoring the opinions of the EU and human rights groups, such as Amnesty International, to bring back hanging. It's quite a long article so I'll be posting it in two halves- part two to follow shortly.


With its idyllic scenery, golden sandy beaches and lush vegetation, Jamaica is unquestionably one of the most beautiful countries in the world.

But sadly, it is also one of the most violent. Last year there 1,400 murders on the Caribbean island, a staggering total for a country of just 2.8 million people. This year the number of killings has already passed 1,240. Jamaica has over 60 homicides a year for every 100,000 citizens, that's almost thirty times higher than Britain.

Faced with rising public concern, the Jamaican Parliament this week voted by 34 votes to 15 to end the 20-year moratorium on the death penalty. The measure was backed by Jamaica’s governing Labour party, which despite its name, is the country’s main conservative party, with Prime Minister Bruce Golding promising to resume executions.

“I wasn't for the death penalty, but since the Ananda Dean incident, I am for it," said Labour MP Karl Samuda in the debate during this week’s vote. He was referring to the abduction and murder of an 11 year schoolgirl in September- a crime which shocked a nation which thought it was beyond being shocked. Little Ananda had last been seeing getting on a bus to go to school- almost two weeks later her naked and headless body was found buried by the roadside in a wooden box.

Her murder was only one in a series of horrific crimes involving children to have taken place in Jamaica this year.

In September the dismembered body of 11-year-old Aakim Scott- who had gone missing from his home, was found in a rubbish bag. In May, gunmen shot two teen sisters dead in their Kingston home, on the eve of their father’s birthday. While earlier this month, 13 year-old Christopher Suckra, was found naked with his head bashed in after not returning home from school.

Violent crime has so blighted Jamaica that even long-standing opponents of capital punishment in Jamaica, such as its leading clergymen, have called for its reintroduction.

"There is need for some tough decisions and people will grumble and cry. But we'll have to make (those) decisions if we're going to have change in our land," said Bishop Ronald Blair, only a few days after a man attempted to behead a pastor with a machete, while he was preaching in the pulpit.

But Jamaica’s decision to bring back the ultimate deterrent looks set to put it on a collision course with western human rights groups- and the European Union, which may impose sanctions. Last month, Benita Ferroro-Waldner, the EU’s Commissioner for External Affairs, condemned the death penalty saying it “serves to aggravate a culture of violence and retribution”. She stressed that the EU- which prohibits the use of the death penalty in member states- was “determined to work towards the universal abolition of the death penalty through all available diplomatic channels”. The EU has openly sided with the anti-death penalty campaigners in Jamaica, giving a grant of 320,000 euros to a Jamaican human rights group opposed to the reinstatement of capital punishment.

Britain too, is not likely to be pleased with the decision taken by its former colony and current Commonwealth member. There are likely to be appeals by lawyers representing prisoners currently on ‘death row’ to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, a body which though it sits in England and consists of British judges is still Jamaica’s highest court. The 1993 ‘Pratt & Morgan’ ruling by the Committee mandated that the sentences of inmates on death row for more than five years be commuted to life imprisonment.

Meanwhile Amnesty International, the human rights group which campaigns for a worldwide moratorium on capital punishment, has called for Jamaica to reject the death penalty and claims that “a return to hanging will not solve the public security crisis”.

None of these arguments are however, likely to hold much sway with the Jamaican public who, if opinion polls are to be believed, strongly support the government’s move to resume capital punishment. In fact, there is resentment in the country that outsiders are seeking to influence Jamaica’s right to decide its own laws.

Jamaica’s problem with violent crime is a comparatively recent phenomenon. For most of the 20th century, the country was renowned for being a safe, law-abiding place- as late as 1965 the island’s homicide rate was only 3.7 per 100,000 people, nearly twenty times lower than today. Wealthy Britons such as the playwright Noel Coward and James Bond creator Ian Fleming, made the tranquil tropical island their home.

The rapid rise in violent crime in recent years has been described by Jamaican writer Kevin Chang as “maybe the greatest explosion of civil violence any nation without significant ethnic, tribal, linguistic, ideological or religious differences has ever experienced“.

In the 1970s the island began to be plagued with political violence- carried out by gangs linked to the countries two main parties. The violence reached a peak in the run up to the 1980 general election, in which around 800 people were killed.

Over the last decade, the level of non-political violent crime has soared. The numbers are truly mind-boggling. 1,100 people were murdered on the island in 2001- a 30% increase on the previous year and the highest rise ever in one year.
In 2004 the number of murders rose to 1,471, a year later it was up again to a new peak of almost 1,700.

The Best Ellery Queen episode ever......

....is being broadcast on BBC2 at 0.20 am tonight (ie Tuesday morning).

If you're in Britain or able to receive BBC2 don't miss it, you won't regret it, I can assure you.

The Adventure of Caesar's Last Sleep (not 'Caesar's Sheep' as it states on the BBC website!), is an ingenious locked room mystery involving the murder, in a New York hotel room, of a key informant in a mobster trial. Police guard the ante-room and the windows are locked. How was the informant murdered?

The solution will be a surprise to most viewers, but all the clues are there before your very eyes.

The best ever episode in the best ever mystery series. Enjoy!

PS Note to BBC2 chiefs:

Well done for re-showing Ellery Queen- for that alone I'm happy to pay my licence fee. But why on earth show these wonderful programmes at twenty past midnight on a Monday night?

Put them on in the evenings on BBC1 or BBC2 and you'd be amazed at the ratings you'd get.

Germany's Left Turn (and how democratic is Angela Merkel?)

This column of mine on the strong support for nationalisation in Germany and other issues involving public ownership, appears in today's Morning Star.

Germany's Left Turn

Germany is certainly a very interesting place to be at present. The unequivocally and unapologetically socialist Die Linke (The Left) party goes from strength to strength- gaining more new members than any other German political grouping. Sales of books by Karl Marx are up by 300%. And a new opinion poll shows that the overwhelming majority of Germans would not only like to see an end to any further privatisation- but the nationalisation of large segments of the economy.

In the survey, carried out by Forsa research group, 77% of Germans said that the state should take large equity stakes in German energy companies, while 64% said that financial institutions should be at least partly nationalised. Furthermore 60% of Germans said that the airline Lufthansa, Deutsche Post and the railway Deutsche Bahn should either come into, or stay under state ownership. And up to 45% of Germans thought nationalisation or partial nationalisation should extend to the telecommunications, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and farming sectors.

The poll shows the depth of opposition to neoliberalism in Europe’s largest economy, but encouraging as it is, important battles still lie ahead. The Financial Times reports that “regardless of the changing sentiment, Berlin continues to work on divesting its residual stakes in the former post and telecom monopolies and is planning to float Deutsche Bahn next year”.

The next few months will tell us just how committed to democracy the German government of Angela Merkel really is. Will it listen to the German people and halt privatisation- and embark on a programme of re-nationalisation? Or will it treat the views of the people with contempt and carry on privatising?

**************************************************************

As public support for nationalisation grows by the day, so the attacks on it in the media by Thatcherite ideologues intensify.

One such piece appeared recently in The Times. Lambasting British Rail, the writer opined: “Now that bankers and hedge fund managers are in the dock, it is easy to forget how nationalised industries ruined the economy. But with Gordon Brown out to convince the world that we need another state-led Keynesian spending splurge, we would do well to recall what happened last time the State took it upon itself to run industry".

What the writer didn’t mention in his anti-British Rail tirade was that the state owned railway received over four times less money from the British taxpayer than today's privatised railway companies do- yet it still provided a far superior level of service to passengers- and much lower ticket prices.

But of course, what are little things like facts when you’re peddling neoliberal propaganda?

*****************************************************

Thomas Cook- the world’s first travel agent -was born exactly 200 years ago this month (November). The company which the temperance campaigner from Derbyshire formed has a long and illustrious history- but what is almost forgotten today is that from 1948-72, it was owned by the British public. The company was nationalised as part of the British Transport Commission and stayed in public ownership until it was sold to a private consortium twenty-four years later. The idea of a state-owned travel agent would no doubt be condemned as ‘Stalinist‘ if mooted today- but the fact that the company stayed in state ownership under 13 years of Conservative Government from 1951-64 shows just how far the ideological pendulum has swung since then.

*****************************************************************

The former head of Coca-Cola once said he wouldn’t be satisfied until the ‘C’ on household taps stood for his company’s product and not ’Cold’. Well, if the neoliberal lunacy continues-we could soon be having the letters ‘M & S’ on our taps instead. Or even ‘T’ for Tesco. The Daily Mail reports that supermarkets could be given the right to supply water to Britain’s homes, after a government review had cleared the way for a shake-up in the sale of water, first to business and then to consumers. The proposal has received the backing from an industry review headed by Professor Martin Cave who enthused “Extending competition will deliver benefits for customers through lower prices, more choice, higher service levels and better use of water”.

Really? Haven’t we heard this one before? The very same claims were made when water was privatised in the first place- and twenty years on we’re still waiting to see any benefit to customers. There is a much simpler way to ‘deliver benefits for customers through lower prices’ and that is to restore water to full public ownership. When the industry was publicly owned, household water bills were so small no-one even bothered talking about them. Now they are a major item of household expense. Not surprising when you consider how many fat cats have their noses in the trough.

UPDATE: The Exile informs me that there's a typo in this post- I mistakenly typed in 'De' instead of 'Die' Linke.