Today's main front page headline on the Times is "Chancellor Alistair Darling on brink of second bailout for banks" (http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_and_finance/article5434660.ece) and most of the rest of the serious press concentrate on this story - so it's not just those Murdoch scum making it up. I'm looking forward to seeing Tommy Sheridan appearing on Celebrity Big Brother after suing those scum for £200,000 for defamation and winning! They lodged an appeal but the big business strategists were so petrified at the prospects of Sheridan versus Murdoch again that the police spent at least £1 million on a perjury investigation, that has never before been conducted about a civil trial! George Galloway was great - splitting the Muslim fundamentalists backing Respect who hate popular culture from the Muslim youth who see no problem with mixing with black, white, Chinese, Christian, Jewish, Mormon, Buddhist youth whatever - and even having sex outside marriage if they so wish! This led to the failure of Respect to take over Tower Hamlets council and the split in Respect with the SWP prats in Left Alternative in a real mess! The current issue of the Weekly Worker (see www.cpgb.org.uk) has a brilliant article on the split in the central committee of the SWP and open warfare from their previously acquiescent rank-and-file who had previously gone along with every twist and turn of those Stalinist-cum-Trotskyist misleaders of the working class!

 

Tommy Sheridan is of course far more serious as an ex-politician than Galloway. He did after-all lead the Scottish Anti-Poll Tax Federation and went to jail for defiance of a court order banning him from attending a Glasgow demo - during which he stood in the general election for Scottish Militant Labour and came second with 6287 votes, followed by winning a council seat while still in jail! Mass non-payment (not the riot unlike those SWP liers say which threatened to derail the movement hence it being started by the police) of 18 million in arrears or having not paid a penny at the movement's height defeated the poll tax. Even John Major admitted he had to abolish it because it was, in his word, "uncollectable".

 

All this talk of more government borrowing brings the question - where are they going to get the money from? Basically, they sell government bonds, and those bonds are insured in case they never get the money back. I posted a message a while ago pointing out that insurance on those bonds went up from 0.1% in May last year to 0.9% at the time of the pre-budget report. The conclusion I drew then was sooner or later insurance costs would go up so much that nobody would lend to UK plc. Talk of this new bank bailout may well be pie-in-the-sky! More fundamentally, I have now realised that offering insurance at a mere 0.1% on something as unstable as UK plc would appear with the benefit of hindsight pure madness! In fact, my analysis, much of which is also covered in a letter that also appears in the current (Christmas/New Year) issue of the Weekly Worker, headlined "Their solution" (because it does suggest one way capitalists could get out of this mess and thereby avoid a socialist revolution), shows that UK plc is bound to go bankrupt. In fact, Hyman Minsky predicted that the stock markets would inevitably completely collapse sooner or later decades ago, and it has become clear that the UK is the weakest government economically of any in the West. The £118 billion proposed budgest deficit next year illustrates this (under the Tories it'd be £97 billion). The question is not if UK plc goes under, but when - and what sort of revolution takes place (ethcial capitalist, socialist or anarchist). Go to http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/750/letters.html.