Mr Cameron and his Cabinet of millionaires are hoping to make this Monday's May Day bank holiday one of the last.
Plans are afoot to abandon the holiday on the first Monday in May, and replace it with a holiday on St George's Day April 23, or the anniversary of the bloody Battle of Trafalgar on October 21.
Veteran Labour MP Dennis Skinner urged the labour movement to band together "to ensure that we keep the May Day flags flying as they do across the world."
Mr Skinner warned: "In sharp contrast to the pomp and circumstance and organised happiness around the royal wedding, the Tory establishment is now turning its attention to ruining the workers' traditional May Day celebrations.
"True to type, Cameron wants to create more unhappiness for working class people who are struggling to keep a job.
"He wants to stop them from enjoying the May Day bank holiday and from celebrating International Workers' Day along with people across Europe and around the world."
Rail union RMT general secretary Bob Crow said: "The most important events this weekend are the annual May Day celebrations - not the bread and circuses that were rammed down people's throats."
Declared Mr Crow: "Forget all the diversions. The trade union and socialist focus is on marking International Workers' Day at a time when the working class is under unprecedented attack."
He warned that the Tories were not only attacking the workers, but were also gearing up for an assault on May Day itself.
"Send out the message to the Con-Dems and the bosses loud and clear - la lucha continua!" urged Mr Crow.
Left Labour MP Kelvin Hopkins, who spent today tramping the streets of Luton delivering election leaflets, accused the government of blatant right-wing tactics in seeking to ditch the May Day holiday.
Unite union general secretary Len McCluskey said: "The Tory attack on the May Day holiday is to be abhorred and it's another reminder that this government has scant regard for the working people of this country."
May Day was an accepted holiday in many countries to commemorate workers' struggles, said Mr McCluskey, who suggested an extra bank holiday in October during the "long stretch" between August and Christmas.
General union GMB general secretary Paul Kenny had a blunt message for the government of millionaires: "Keep your hands off our May Day. Keep your hands off workers' day."
Mr Kenny added: "May Day is an important celebration of the achievements of humanity. We have got to fight to save the bank holiday."
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
UK: Save our libraries!
The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams criticised library closures during his Easter Sermon, delivered at the weekend.
Speaking on the wider topic of happiness—which is to be the subject of the first "happiness index", conducted by the Office for National Statistics—the Archbishop reflected on a recent stop-off at a local library on a "rather devastated" Manchester council estate. Williams said his visit had "revealed a lively group of teenagers who were regular users, welcomed by staff, glad of a place to do homework, gossip and feel secure."
The Archbishop continued: "Space, opportunity, the time to discover a larger world to live in—where are the clearly articulated priorities in public discussion that would spotlight all this, so as to make us think twice before dismantling what's already there and disappointing more hopes for the future?"
He concluded: "Talk about the happiness of the nation isn't going to mean much unless we listen to some of these simple aspirations—aspirations, essentially, for places, provisions or situations which help you lay aside anxiety and discover dimensions of yourself otherwise hidden or buried."
more
Speaking on the wider topic of happiness—which is to be the subject of the first "happiness index", conducted by the Office for National Statistics—the Archbishop reflected on a recent stop-off at a local library on a "rather devastated" Manchester council estate. Williams said his visit had "revealed a lively group of teenagers who were regular users, welcomed by staff, glad of a place to do homework, gossip and feel secure."
The Archbishop continued: "Space, opportunity, the time to discover a larger world to live in—where are the clearly articulated priorities in public discussion that would spotlight all this, so as to make us think twice before dismantling what's already there and disappointing more hopes for the future?"
He concluded: "Talk about the happiness of the nation isn't going to mean much unless we listen to some of these simple aspirations—aspirations, essentially, for places, provisions or situations which help you lay aside anxiety and discover dimensions of yourself otherwise hidden or buried."
more
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Economy: Tough budgets won't work
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| IMF Gross Funding Needs April 2011 |
Austerity measures in Greece, Portugal and Ireland have had devastating effects on those economies. In each case they reduced growth, pushed up unemployment and ultimately increased the debt burden on the afflicted economy leading to a loss of market confidence.
Ireland adopted austerity measures in 2008 and was eventually forced into seeking a bailout last year. In the past year, since tougher measures were adopted, Greek growth has collapsed, unemployment has soared and the interest rate on government bonds is consequently much higher.
Tough austerity is a self-defeating strategy. It will push up unemployment and make the lives of the least well off more precarious. If there are to be cuts start at the top and encourage those who shout loudest for them them lead the way.
Friday, April 22, 2011
Spending Cuts: false economy
Special Keynesian message for Gillard, Swan and would be Budgeteers
Cuts Are Not The Cure from Unionfilms
Fukushima: beyond our imagination
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists April 2011
If there is one weakness of the probabilistic risk assessment method that has been emphatically demonstrated at Fukushima, it is the difficulty of modeling common-cause or common-mode failures. From most reports it seems clear that a single event, the tsunami, resulted in a number of failures that set the stage for the accidents. These failures included the loss of offsite electrical power to the reactor complex, the loss of oil tanks and replacement fuel for diesel generators, the flooding of the electrical switchyard, and perhaps damage to the inlets that brought in cooling water from the ocean. As a result, even though there were multiple ways of removing heat from the core, all of them failed.
Fukushima also demonstrated one of the perverse impacts of using multiple systems to ensure greater levels of safety: Redundancy can sometimes make things worse. At Fukushima, as with most reactors around the world, zirconium cladding surrounded and protected the fuel. But when the cooling systems stopped working, the zirconium cladding overheated. Hot zirconium interacted with water or steam, producing hydrogen gas. When this hydrogen came into contact with air in the containment building, it caused an explosion that reportedly damaged the suppression pool beneath the reactor, another protective system. In other words, in complex systems such as nuclear reactors, redundancy may have unexpected and negative consequences for safety.
The lesson from the Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island accidents is simply that nuclear power comes with the inevitability of catastrophic accidents. While these may not be frequent in an absolute sense, there are good reasons to believe that they will be far more frequent than quantitative tools such as probabilistic risk assessments predict. Any discussion about the future of nuclear power ought to start with that realization.
Alexander Cockburn New Left Review
In political terms, nuclear power has always been a war on the people, starting with the Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, going on to the Marshall Islanders, ranchers and kindred inhabitants of test sites across the West, Native Americans, poor Latinos and African Americans (the usual involuntary neighbours of waste dumps), people in the path of ‘accidents’ or deliberate secret experiments, and most recently Fukushima. Not the executives of the Tokyo Electric Power Company. They are in Tokyo or heading further south. It is ‘worker heroes’—who know perfectly well they are doomed. It is the Board of tepco that should be sent to the front lines.
Look at the false predictions, the blunders. Remember the elemental truth that Nature bats last, and that folly and greed are ineluctable parts of the human condition. Why try to pretend that we live in a world where there are no force 8–9 earthquakes, tsunamis, dud machinery, forgetful workers, corner-cutting plant owners, immensely powerful corporations, permissive regulatory agencies, politicians and presidents trolling for campaign dollars?
- Severe accidents at nuclear reactors have occurred much more frequently than what risk-assessment models predicted.
- The probabilistic risk assessment method does a poor job of anticipating accidents in which a single event, such as a tsunami, causes failures in multiple safety systems.
- Catastrophic nuclear accidents are inevitable, because designers and risk modelers cannot envision all possible ways in which complex systems can fail.
If there is one weakness of the probabilistic risk assessment method that has been emphatically demonstrated at Fukushima, it is the difficulty of modeling common-cause or common-mode failures. From most reports it seems clear that a single event, the tsunami, resulted in a number of failures that set the stage for the accidents. These failures included the loss of offsite electrical power to the reactor complex, the loss of oil tanks and replacement fuel for diesel generators, the flooding of the electrical switchyard, and perhaps damage to the inlets that brought in cooling water from the ocean. As a result, even though there were multiple ways of removing heat from the core, all of them failed.
Fukushima also demonstrated one of the perverse impacts of using multiple systems to ensure greater levels of safety: Redundancy can sometimes make things worse. At Fukushima, as with most reactors around the world, zirconium cladding surrounded and protected the fuel. But when the cooling systems stopped working, the zirconium cladding overheated. Hot zirconium interacted with water or steam, producing hydrogen gas. When this hydrogen came into contact with air in the containment building, it caused an explosion that reportedly damaged the suppression pool beneath the reactor, another protective system. In other words, in complex systems such as nuclear reactors, redundancy may have unexpected and negative consequences for safety.
The lesson from the Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island accidents is simply that nuclear power comes with the inevitability of catastrophic accidents. While these may not be frequent in an absolute sense, there are good reasons to believe that they will be far more frequent than quantitative tools such as probabilistic risk assessments predict. Any discussion about the future of nuclear power ought to start with that realization.
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In political terms, nuclear power has always been a war on the people, starting with the Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, going on to the Marshall Islanders, ranchers and kindred inhabitants of test sites across the West, Native Americans, poor Latinos and African Americans (the usual involuntary neighbours of waste dumps), people in the path of ‘accidents’ or deliberate secret experiments, and most recently Fukushima. Not the executives of the Tokyo Electric Power Company. They are in Tokyo or heading further south. It is ‘worker heroes’—who know perfectly well they are doomed. It is the Board of tepco that should be sent to the front lines.
Look at the false predictions, the blunders. Remember the elemental truth that Nature bats last, and that folly and greed are ineluctable parts of the human condition. Why try to pretend that we live in a world where there are no force 8–9 earthquakes, tsunamis, dud machinery, forgetful workers, corner-cutting plant owners, immensely powerful corporations, permissive regulatory agencies, politicians and presidents trolling for campaign dollars?
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