C.J. Stone's Blog, page 28

A guileless tribute to lift the heart

I had the most beautiful letter through the post a while back.

It was addressed to “Mr Mailman” with a heart above the i where the dot is supposed to go, written in a neat, child-like hand.

On the back was a picture of a sleeping cat with a toy dinosaur behind it. The dinosaur had jagged shapes coming out of its mouth, like lightning.

I think the lighting was meant to represent the dinosaur’s roar.

The letter itself was written on the inside of the envelope.

At the top it said “stuff + cats = awesome”.

Here is the text of the letter, written, like the envelope, in a simple, unselfconscious, hand, with hearts where all the dots and apostrophes usually go.

It said: “Dear Mr Mailman, my mum says that you always deliver our mail. Even when it rains. Even in the snow.

“I don’t go out in the rain, but I love to play in the snow. I like both. The rain and the snow.

“Anyhow, you will always bring us our mail everyday. You bring me cards from my Grandma on my birthday, and Christmas and you bring us pictures from amerika from my other Nan, even when it will rain.

“My mum says you know my name, she says you know everybody’s name, and that you work hard for us everyday in the rain and in the sun and in the snow. That is amazing.

“Mr Mailman you are amazing. AMAZING!

“LOVE from Evie.R.Body xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx”

There were 16 kisses and the word “Amazing” appeared both times inside a hand drawn star. The word “everyday” was double underlined.

I can honestly say that was one of the best letters I’ve ever had.

Sometimes my job can be very hard. I often come home from work and just fall asleep, exhausted. That letter made it feel good to be a postman.

So I’d just like to say thank you to Evie.R.Body, whoever you might be. And just as you have written it from everybody, to me, so I think I will dedicate it to all the other postal workers in the world.

You are ALL AMAZING.

Evie.R.Body says so.

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

The Whitstable Gazette.
The editor welcomes letters on any topical subject, but reserves the right to edit them. Letters must include your name and address even when emailed and a daytime telephone number.
Send letters to:
The Editor, 5-8 Boorman Way, Estuary View Business Park, Whitstable, Kent CT5 3SE,
fax  01227 762415
email kentishgazette@thekmgroup.co.uk

Ignore the Tory PR, give Corbyn a chance

Unless you’ve been on Mars for the last week, you should know the result of the Labour Party leadership election by now.

Those of us on the left are naturally very happy. I’ve even rejoined the Labour Party. It feels like I’m coming home.

Winning the Labour Party election was the easy part, of course. The difficult bit will be winning over the public, who are already being subjected to a propaganda campaign of historic proportions.

David Cameron tweeted: “The Labour Party is now a threat to our national security, our economic security and your family’s security.” At the same time the entire Tory front bench were out in force and on-message repeating the same formulaic phrases.

Priti Patel, the Minister of State for Employment, was on LBC. She was invited to congratulate Jeremy Corbyn on his victory, but instead chose to echo the mantra about national security and hardworking families. In the space of less than four minutes she used the word “security” 11 times.

This is a Tory PR trick, of course: repeat the same slogans often enough and eventually, they hope, the words will lodge in your head and you’ll start to think they originate there.

Meanwhile a number of ex-Labour Ministers were writing scathing articles in the right-wing press. It makes you wonder why they were in the Labour Party in the first place, given that their natural allies appear to be Tory newspapers.

I know I’m writing for a mixed audience here in the Gazette, but let’s give Corbyn a little time shall we?

If there really is a threat to our national security, I personally trust him to tell us about it.

He will be privy to information that has been kept from the public for many years.

We may hope to find the real reasons why we have been taken to war so many times in the recent past.

And meanwhile his economic policies offer a genuine alternative to the politics of austerity which have dominated the debate since 2010.

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

The Whitstable Gazette.
The editor welcomes letters on any topical subject, but reserves the right to edit them. Letters must include your name and address even when emailed and a daytime telephone number.
Send letters to:
The Editor, 5-8 Boorman Way, Estuary View Business Park, Whitstable, Kent CT5 3SE,
fax  01227 762415
email kentishgazette@thekmgroup.co.uk

Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party purge and the retirement age for manual workers

Labour Party leadership elections 2015: the candidates

I was one of those people purged from the ballot before the election for the leadership of the Labour Party. This is despite the fact that I’m a life-long Labour supporter, have been a member of my Labour Club for over 30 years, and worked closely with the Labour Party candidate in our constituency in the run-up to the last election. I am a member of the Communications Workers Union, and therefore an affiliate member of the Party through my union. I’m an active trade unionist, having been a rep, and have paid the political levy through my union fees for something approaching 15 years.

I was purged, according to the letter I received, because they had “reason to believe” that I “do not support the aims and values of the Labour Party.”

I guess the question then has to be: who defines what the aims and values of the Labour Party actually are?

The Labour Party introduced the new rules, in part, to open up the membership to trade union affiliates, as a way of lessening the influence the trade union bosses had over the party through the block vote. I think that was a good decision, as – theoretically at least – it allowed ordinary trade union members like me a direct say in the running of the party. Until, that is, some of us decided to vote against the mainstream of the parliamentary party: at which point we were summarily removed from the voting list.

This smacks of vote rigging to me and I am currently looking at ways to get redress for what I believe is a blatant political decision. The only reason they can possibly have for rejecting me, is that I have been a vociferous and open supporter of Jeremy Corbyn on social media throughout the campaign.

There are lots of reasons why I wanted to vote for Corbyn. It’s not only that he voiced a clear and uncomplicated message to the party and the world beyond, or that he is a principled and courageous politician – a rare thing these days – it is also that his policies laid out a real alternative to the austerity agenda of both the main parties.

With my niece, Beatrix at a protest to save our delivery office from closure

I’m 62 years old, a postal worker. I walk anywhere from 10 to 13 miles every day, pulling a trolley full of letters and packets, and am generally so exhausted at the end of the day that I can barely stand. My days consist of work, eat, sleep, and very little else. I don’t have enough spare energy to have a social life. The idea that people doing my job will have to work on till they are 68 is a crime against humanity, no less.

This is the reason Jeremy Corbyn spoke to me directly when he talked of lowering the retirement age for manual workers in physically demanding jobs.

A number of my older co-workers have been forced into early retirement as increasing demands are placed upon us. More and more work is being done by an ever shrinking workforce. It’s a young person’s job these days. People are made to cut corners to keep up. They sling their bags over their shoulders and run. When the new working methods were brought in, and bikes were replaced by trolleys, we were told by the union that this was to take the weight off our shoulders. In fact it has put more weight on to our shoulders.

One of the means by which they force us to do more work is something we call “lapsing”.

It’s short for “collapsing”.

In the old days we all had a round each for which we were wholly responsible. There were light days, and there were heavy days. It’s an unpredictable job. On light days we went home early. On heavy days we worked over. But management weren’t happy with this. They wanted to get more work out of us on the light days. This is where lapsing comes in.

They take a round and they collapse it. They divide it into separate roads and they give all of us a number of extra bundles to take out. Sometimes this can amount to a whole bagful of mail and can take up to ¾ of an hour to deliver. They do this with two or three rounds, thus saving man-hours in the office. By lapsing two rounds in an average size office, 48 workers are effectively doing 50 people’s jobs.

They started doing this earlier this year on the lighter days, but as the year progressed they began imposing it every day. They started off collapsing two rounds, but have added a third in the last month, and, while it is true that they cannot force us to work overtime, once out on the round we cannot bring mail back. This means that we have to make our assessments on how much work we can do back in the office, which means a daily argument with the line managers whose job it is to impose discipline on the shop floor.

What is certain is that these new demands are being forced on us by militant shareholders, who want to see better returns on their investment. Shareholders put pressure on upper management, who put pressure on middle and lower management, who put pressure on us.

It’s a recipe for bullying, which is rife throughout the Royal Mail.

We once had pride in our jobs. We were an integral part of the life of the towns in which we worked. When I first started one of the older guys told me he had been on the same round for 25 years. When he retired his customers showered him with cards and gifts. He was like one of the family, a valued member of the community.

Not any more. By breaking up the rounds they break the link between the postal worker and his customers. We don’t have time to stop and chat any more. We just have to keep moving, moving, moving, till our legs ache and our shoulders are numb with the strain.

I overheard one of the managers responsible for organising the rounds talking to one of his minions. He was complaining about the workforce. “One of them has been invited to a wedding,” he was saying. “I don’t want my workers to get to know their customers so well that they go to their weddings. I just want them to get on with their work.”

And in that one last sentence he said almost everything there is to say about what is wrong with the world of work in the 21st century.

Tory with a wilted rose

You won’t be surprised to learn that I am supporting Jeremy Corbyn as the next leader of the Labour Party.

He’s not really a “hard-left extremist”, despite what the media tells you. He is an old fashioned Social Democrat, like the Labour government of 1945, which brought us the National Health Service, or like current governments in the Scandinavian countries, which have some of the highest standards of living in the world.

The only reason he can be portrayed as an extremist is that politics have moved so far to the right in the last thirty years that what is now considered the centre ground was once the exclusive preserve of the right wing of the Tory Party.

Thatcherism is the new orthodoxy.

So Tony Blair is on the rampage, telling us to reject what he calls “Alice in Wonderland politics”.

This from the man who told us that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction which could be deployed within 45 minutes.

Blair did a deal with the oil lobby and the Murdoch press, took us into an illegal war which killed more than a million Iraqis and set off the chain of events which led directly to ISIS. And he thinks we should listen to his sage advice?

Corbyn has said that Blair could stand trial for war crimes. Perhaps this might explain the ex-leader’s urgent need to intervene in the debate.

Tony Blair became mysteriously wealthy after leaving office, which illustrates something else about the hysteria surrounding Corbyn’s candidacy.

The word “Capitalism” literally means rule by those with Capital.

Rule by the very rich.

Corbyn’s policies are a bid to return us to the post-war mixed economy which saw unprecedented levels of wealth for the majority of people in this country, and a relative decline in the influence of the financial elites.

Thatcher’s policies were designed to reverse that trend.

Not satisfied with having lots of money, the Capitalists want ALL of the money.

Austerity is their means of achieving this.

A Labour Party committed to cuts in public expenditure is not really a Labour Party at all.

It is just another Tory Party, handing us a wilted rose.

Dear Mr Mailman

A letter came through the post this morning. I don’t know who it was from. It was addressed to “Mr Mailman”, with a heart in place of the dot above the i, and a picture of a sleeping cat, with a toy dinosaur on its back.

Here is the picture:

It looks like the cat is dreaming about being a dinosaur and letting out that wild electric roar like forked lightning to frighten away its enemies.

The envelope was green with circles and star shapes, and a big hand drawn star in the middle, which is where my address was written.

Here is the letter.

I think it is honestly the best letter I have ever received from anybody. It might be the best letter written to a postal worker by anyone anywhere. It was me who received it, but I think it is for all postal workers everywhere on the planet.

So remember this postal workers – or mail men and women, or posties, or whatever you call yourself in your part of the world: You are AMAZING. AMAZING!

Evie. R. Body says so.

Who’s really profiting from post office’s loss?

I was on the telly last week. It was in episode 3 of the BBC2 series, Signed, Sealed and Delivered: Inside the Post Office, about the occupation of our Crown Post Office on the day the building closed down for redevelopment. A copy exists on YouTube if you want to watch it.

I’m a bit-part player, that’s all. You see me carrying a bucket and then explaining what it will be used for.

The programme also features Hugh Lanning, James Flanagan, and Brian Hitcham; plus the talented Justin Mitchell, playing a moving rendition of the Last Post on his bugle, the lovely Cherry Walker with her hand made sign, and the irrepressible Julie Wassmer doing what she does so well, namely being clever and colourful in front of a camera.

Julie gets a lot of stick from some quarters for being so energetically involved in the protest scene. People call her a self-promoter, but I know from having worked with her, that she is just very adept at manipulating the media and bringing much needed attention to the cause.

In this case the cause is the downgrading of our Crown Post Office service to a franchise in a shop.

Roger Gale, the general manager of the Crown Network, has this to say: “The Post Office holds a place in people’s hearts…. but we have to modernise, we have to change, and we can no longer be a burden on the tax-payer.”

That gave only part of the story.

The real reason that the Post Office has become a “burden to the taxpayer” is that it has been forcibly separated from its historic partner, the very profitable Royal Mail, by that company’s recent sale to the private sector.

As always, it’s a case of privatisation of profit, socialisation of costs. The profit goes to wealthy investors, while the public bears the burden of loss.

Meanwhile, the government continues to support big business through subsidies to the private sector to the tune of £93 billion a year.

In other words, the government is perfectly happy to allow the taxpayer to subsidise loss making companies, as long as those companies don’t belong to the taxpayer.

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

The Whitstable Gazette.
The editor welcomes letters on any topical subject, but reserves the right to edit them. Letters must include your name and address even when emailed and a daytime telephone number.
Send letters to:
The Editor, 5-8 Boorman Way, Estuary View Business Park, Whitstable, Kent CT5 3SE,
fax:  01227 762415
email: kentishgazette@thekmgroup.co.uk

Jeremy Corbyn: Quantitative Easing for the people

State opening of Parliament: the speech is not her own

I’ve been wanting to write these words for a long time.

If democracy is rule by the majority, and monarchy is rule by an individual, then what is capitalism?

It is rule by those with capital, of course. Rule by the rich.

That’s such an obvious statement that I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone saying it before.

We all know that our monarchy is just for show. The Queen makes a dazzling display on the state opening of Parliament, wearing the crown and the royal robe, shimmering in all her jewellery under the TV spotlights, while summoning the commons to attend, as if she had any real power.

We enjoy the theatre of it while knowing that it is purely ceremonial. We listen to her words, aware they have been composed by someone else. We know her speech isn’t her own.

No one argues with this. It is the measure of our sophistication as consumers that we understand these ceremonial forms for what they are: symbolic gestures carried out in the grand theatre of Parliament.

So what of our democracy? Is this, too, an empty ceremonial form covering a deficit of real power?

Of course it is.

We all know this too, secretly, deep down. We know that we elect governments not to rule, but to administer. We know that governments themselves are ruled. That’s why we never believe the promises that they make.

Politicians even admit it, but in a subtle way. They are always telling us that we have to obey the market, that “Market Forces” dictate this, that, or the other policy, but without telling us – what they know, and we don’t – that “the market” is the mechanism by which the rich rule over us.

Governments throughout the world are mere administrators for the financial oligarchs who control the market.

Market rules

This has been the case for more than thirty years, since the Thatcher revolution overthrew the post-war consensus, and instituted a return to rule by market forces in this country, but now we know the Thatcherite experiment has failed.

What she told us was that by allowing the financial markets free rein while simultaneously subjecting Trade Unions to all the rigours of the Law (by regulating the one and deregulating the other) that the rich would grow very rich, and that their wealth would trickle down to the rest of us. She referred to the rich as wealth creators, and suggested that it was they who had generated the wealth.

She was lying to us, of course, but some of us believed her.

So we mopped up shares in the newly privatised industries and took out mortgages for our own council houses. We became a nation of speculators.

What happened next? The rich grew very rich, as promised, but they kept their wealth for themselves.

Surprise, surprise!

The only way it trickled down was by turning the young into their zero-hour contracted, minimum-wage servants, and allowing us the crumbs that had fallen from their table.

All the pride and the intelligence of the post-war generation was squandered – all that accumulated skill, which had taken centuries to develop – to be replaced by a generation of smiling automatons, enslaved by their own indebtedness.

But this was not always the case. Sometimes things can change.

Labour Party, for public ownership

Throughout the 20s and 30s the Labour Party was the parliamentary wing of a wider political movement. We called it “The Labour Movement” and we understood what that meant. It consisted of working people, the people who voted Labour, plus their financial backers in the Trade Unions. The Labour Party was wedded to the Trade Unions, just as the Conservative Party was (and still is) wedded to the Business Elites.

If the Labour Party does not represent the views of the Trade Unions and their members, then what is its purpose? We already have one Business party, why would we need another?

When the Labour Party won in 1945, it was as a representative of this wider movement, and it enacted policies which were approved of and were understood by the vast majority of people in the UK.

Our grandparents knew what they were voting for. We called it socialism then, and we can call it socialism again, right now.

What that government did – despite the extreme austerity to which the nation was subjected by the war – was to enact policies of economic stimulation. It did not cut the economy: it grew the economy. It created the NHS. It took into public ownership large swathes of British industry. It invested in infrastructure, in rail and road, in energy, in telecommunications, in the postal network. It built homes. It built schools. It replaced the devastated landscape of our major cities, bombed-out in the war, and built anew on the rubble of the past.

What followed was more than thirty years of prosperity for the British people. As Harold Macmillan said, we’d never had it so good.

Jeremy Corbyn: Quantitative Easing for the people

These are precisely the policies that Jeremy Corbyn is proposing now: Quantitative Easing for the people. Growth, not austerity. Work not slavery. Give the people a share of the wealth, everyone will spend, and that will make the economy grow.

Quantitative Easing is creating money. What successive governments have been doing since the crash of 2008 is creating money and then giving it to the banks, in the hope that they will lend it to the public.

It is our money. Giving it to the banks is giving it away. It is handing our money over to speculators. They will only spend it on what will enrich themselves. We already see speculative bubbles forming. Property prices are rising, not because property prices are an indication of what is happening in the wider economy, but because it is a way for the Business Elites to store and expand their wealth.

It was speculation of this sort that lead to the financial crash of 2008. Why would we imagine that it wouldn’t have the same effect this time round? Einstein said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. If individual insanity manifests itself through personal breakdown, so economic insanity manifests itself through the breakdown of the financial system. Expect another crash quite soon unless we change the policy.

This is all that Corbyn is proposing: the people’s money for the people, for economic stimulation, for investment, for infrastructure, for schools and hospitals, for all the things that we want and need, just as the Labour government of 1945 did.

He is talking about a National Education System: an NHS for our minds. A lifetime of learning instead of a lifetime of work.

He is talking about renationalising the rail: putting public subsidy, currently paid out to speculators, back into improving the service and reducing fares.

He is talking about renationalising the Big Six energy companies, and investing in green energy.

He is talking about participatory democracy, of us all becoming a movement again, of us taking back the Labour Party, which was our own creation, and making it work for us again, instead of for the Business Elites as it currently does.

So when the media tells you that Jeremy Corbyn is a hard-left extremist, remember this: he is only as much of an extremist as the Labour government of 1945.

A first-class education is a right, not a privilege

I was sad the hear of the closure of the Chaucer Technology School earlier this year as my son was a pupil there.

When Joe failed his Kent Test he was very depressed. We chose the Chaucer as the only school looking anything like a comprehensive in the area at the time. In order to get into the school he had to do another test; which he passed, with flying colours.

This cheered him up no end.

Joe went on to get three A levels and a First Class Honours degree. He now works in the photography industry as a freelance technician and is much in demand for his skills and his practical intelligence.

The Kent Test would have condemned him as a failure at the age of eleven. It was the Chaucer which gave him the confidence to discover where his real intelligence lay.

I’m puzzled at how the Chaucer ended up failing as a school. When my son went there, in the nineties, it was a first class institution.

My own schooling was undertaken at Sheldon Heath Comprehensive School in Birmingham. It was the first specially built comprehensive in the country and the largest.

That too, like the Chaucer, went through emergency measures recently. It closed and was re-opened as the King Edward IV Sheldon Heath Academy in 2010.

And yet the school that I went to was anything but a failure. It was a flagship school of the newly devised comprehensive system and served me and my contemporaries very well. A number of my friends went on to get degrees and to forge successful careers.

The only explanation I can think of is that successive governments have messed around so much with the education system, pulling it first one way, and then the other, that they have undermined the very foundations of education in this country.

The latest news is that the Chaucer is likely to re-open at some point in the future, but as a secondary, rather than a technology school, which sounds like an admission of failure to me.

A first class education is a right, not a privilege, and should be available to all.

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

The Whitstable Gazette.
The editor welcomes letters on any topical subject, but reserves the right to edit them. Letters must include your name and address even when emailed and a daytime telephone number.
Send letters to:
The Editor, 5-8 Boorman Way, Estuary View Business Park, Whitstable, Kent CT5 3SE,
fax  01227 762415
email kentishgazette@thekmgroup.co.uk

Biker Dads

Bikers at the Ace Cafe

Driving used to be a pleasure. Right now I’m inching forward in first gear, watching the tail lights of the car in front flicker on and off, tasting the traffic fumes like bitter porridge, steaming in this damp, heavy heat, seeing yet another red light up ahead, yet another set of road works, waiting, waiting – moving – waiting. Where’s the pleasure now?

From  The Independent 

Sunday 01 August 1999

Read more here.

Bring Back British Rail: Jeremy Corbyn the only choice.

Yesterday I went up to London with my family: my brother, my two sisters, and my niece, Beatrix. We caught the 10.24 from Whitstable. This is the earliest direct train to Victoria in off-peak hours.

There used to be two trains an hour going to Victoria. Now there is only one. It used to take an hour and 20 minutes. It now takes an hour and a half. Trains from Whitstable to London are slower and less frequent than they were in the 19th Century.

When we got to the station there was a long queue at the ticket machine outside the station. This is because the ticket office was closed. The notice on the window explained that the office was closed in order to allow staff to perform other duties on the station.

Take a minute to think about that.

Office staff are expected to perform other duties only ten minutes before the busiest train of the day is due to pull into the station.

This is obviously a cost-saving device by Southeastern Rail, the company that runs the train service in our area. There is now only one member of staff on duty, who has to do all the tasks that were once performed by a number of people. The consequence of this is that several passengers were unable to get a ticket in time and were forced to jump on the train without a ticket.

Once we were on the train it was difficult to find a seat as the train was packed.  There were only four carriages. My family and I had to sit in separate seats. We were lucky to find one at all. As the train moved further up the line, more and more seats were taken, meaning that, by Gillingham – about half way to London – large numbers of people were left standing.

Also the door from our carriage was faulty. It only allowed people through intermittently, which meant that people were unable to get to the toilet, or to move down the train to find a seat.

Such is the nature of our privatised rail service.

The usual justification for the privatisation of services is that it will offer us “choice”.

So where is the choice in the South East region where I live? There are no Virgin trains plying their way to London from Ramsgate and Dover offering us an alternative. There’s no Arriva, or Cross Country, or Chiltern or East Coast, or any of the other 27 or so train companies that divide the rail network up into a patchwork quilt of competing monopolies.

Thus “choice” is an illusion. There is no choice. Most of us, given the choice, would choose a publicly owned, publicly controlled national rail service, accountable to the public.

We would choose British Rail.

Of all the people standing for the leadership of the Labour Party, only Jeremy Corbyn is promising to re-nationalise the railways, something that over 70% of the electorate would agree with according to a recent poll.

Thus only Jeremy Corbyn is offering the electorate a real choice.

http://www.jeremyforlabour.com/