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This article of mine appears in today's First Post.

Neil Clark: If the Lib Dems force a coalition, every party could fragment- including Nick Clegg's.

Imagine a British political landscape without a Labour or Conservative Party. Where there are several political parties, all with a realistic chance of making it into government. Where single-party administrations are a thing of the past and multi-party coalitions are the norm.

Sounds far-fetched? It could happen much sooner than you think.

If the Liberal Democrats do hold the balance of power in next week's general election, as the opinion polls predict, then Britain's antiquated first-past-the-post electoral system will be kicked into touch.

But the adoption of proportional representation - the price the Lib Dems will demand for propping up a Tory or Labour government, whichever it turns out to be - won't only mean fairer elections in the future, it is also likely to lead to the radical transformation of our party system. And I mean radical.

While supporters of first-past-the-post denounce the idea of peacetime coalition government as being horribly 'un-British', in one sense we've had coalitions for years. Both the Labour and Conservative parties are coalitions, made up of people holding a wide range of opinions, who only stay together due to electoral convenience.

The Conservative Party includes socially liberal Europhiles such as Ken Clarke, and socially conservative EU-haters like Lord Tebbit. In today's Parliamentary Labour Party you can find the unequivocally anti-war socialist John McDonnell, and the darling of the right-wing media, Frank Field, a man who sits on the advisory board of the free market think-tank, Reform.

What keeps our two 'broad church' main parties together is the knowledge that under first-past-the-post any breakaway party has little chance of getting into government, even if, like the SDP in the early 1980s, it is led by well-known political figures and attracts plenty of positive media coverage.

But under PR all that will change. Political marriages of convenience will no longer be quite so convenient and, for some divorce will look a far more attractive option.

You can read the rest of the article here.

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A classic from today's Daily Telegraph.

Renationalised railways:

SIR – With the acquisition of Arriva (report, April 22) by Deutsche Bahn, which already owns or runs EWS (operator of the royal train), London Overground, Tyneside Metro, Wrexham & Shropshire and Chiltern Rail, it seems those that wish to see our trains returned to state ownership can start to celebrate.
I would personally have preferred it had the state in question been Britain, but perhaps we can at least look forward to improved efficiency on Arriva services.
John Vance
Kingsdown, Kent

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He was the best manager Hull City had ever had. He saved them from relegation to League One (the old Third Division) and then, incredibly, took them to the top flight of English football for the first time in their history- where even more incredibly they reached the top three in the first half of the season. This season, despite a tough run of fixtures at the turn of the year, Phil Brown’s Hull had still managed to beat Man City and hold Chelsea. But after a last gasp defeat at home to Arsenal in March, Brown was sacked. At the time, Hull were by no means relegation certainties. His successor, Iain Dowie, a man who has flopped at most clubs he’s been with, won just one game out of nine (against a Fulham team going through the motions) and on Saturday- after their third successive home defeat, Hull were relegated.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of a worse decision in English football this year than the sacking of Phil Brown and his replacement by Iain Dowie.

And guess what, Brown may return as Hull manager. It’s a bit late now, Mr Pearson.

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It was arguably the biggest war crime committed against a civilian media institution and its workers in history.

Exactly 11 years ago today, on 23rd April 1999, NATO bombed Serbian Television (RTS), murdering 16 innocent people. British Minister, Clare Short claimed RTS, a station that regularly broadcast repeats of Only Fools and Horses, but which committed the ‘crime’ of challenging NATO's propaganda during the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, was a ‘legitimate target’.

The bombing as well as being an appalling war crime, set a terrible precedent.

As Robert Fisk, wrote at the time, ‘Once you kill people because you don’t like what they say, you have changed the rules of war'

Not only have those who ordered and carried this blatant war crime got off scot-free, but the puppet government in Belgrade, which came to power after the illegal US-sponsored coup d‘etat against President Milosevic and the Serbian Socialist Party in October 2000, put the RTS director Dragoljub Milanovic on trial and sentenced him to ten years imprisonment. Milanovic, a political prisoner if ever there was one, remains in prison to this day. He was effectively the 17th victim of the bombing- with his imprisonment a warning to all others who might have the temerity to run a media outlet which dares to challenge the lies of the most powerful military alliance in the world.

Here are the names of the sixteen innocent civilians murdered by NATO on 23rd April 1999. You will see that eleven of those killed were under 35 years of age. May they all rest in peace, and let us hope that some day those responsible for their deaths will finally face justice.

Darko Stoimenovski (26), technician
Nebojsa Stojanovic (27), technician
Dragorad Dragojevic (27), security guard
Ksenija Bankovic (28), video mixer
Jelica Munitlak (28), make-up artist
Dejan Markovic (30), security guard
Aleksandar Deletic (31), cameraman
Dragan Tasic (31), technician
Slavisa Stevanovic (32), producer
Sinisa Medic (33), programme designer
Ivan Stukalo (34), foreign programming specialist
Milan Joksimovic (47), security officer
Branislav Jovanovic (50), programme operator
Slobodan Jontic (54), set director
Milovan Jankovic (59), mechanic
Tomislav Mitrovic (61), programme director.

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Britain’s neoliberal political elite oppose the British state owning railways and buses in Britain, but it seems they’re perfectly happy for the German state to own them!

Here’s my article from The First Post on this ludicrous state of affairs.

When the sell-off of Britain's state-owned companies started in the early 1980s we were told it would be much better for publicly-owned assets to be transferred to the private sector. State ownership was bad and inherently inefficient, private ownership was good. That was the Thatcherite mantra.

Thirty years on, however, large sections of our economy are back in state hands - only it's not the British state that's the owner, it's the governments of other European countries.

Today's £1.59bn takeover of the bus and rail firm Arriva, Britain's second largest transport provider, by Deutsche Bahn, which is 100 per cent owned by the German government, is just the latest in a series of deals in which publicly-owned European companies have taken over privatised British companies, or firms running services previously operated by the British state.

Even before today's transaction, Deutsche Bahn already owned Britain's largest rail freight company (which operates the Royal Train) and Chiltern Railways: in addition they have a 50 per cent stake in London Overground and the Wrexham, Shropshire and Marylebone Railway and, since April 1, have also run Tyne and Wear Metro.

It's not just the Germans who are operating British trains: the Netherlands' state-owned railway, NS, is a joint owner of Northern Rail and Merseyrail. France's state-owned railway SNCF, who missed out on Arriva, are keen to enter the UK transport market too.

As for British utilities, EDF Energy, a subsidiary of the French state-owned EDF, supplies 5.5m customers in the UK. Last year, EDF Energy also took control of the privatised British Energy, the UK's largest electricity generator and operator of Britain's nuclear power stations.

The German state running trains in Wales? The French Government providing your gas and electricity? Such a prospect would have seemed incredible in the mixed economy Britain of 40 years ago, but it's the reality of life in the 'everything is for sale' Britain of today.

You can read the rest of the article here.

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From The Daily Mail:

The gap between the richest and the poorest in London is wider than it has been since the days of slavery, a leading academic said today.

The City elite and the wealthy in the capital enjoy the greatest advantage over the poorest that has been known in 200 years, Professor Danny Dorling said.

And in the rest of the country the difference between the best and worst off is as big as it was in the slump years of the 1920s when mass unemployment led to poverty without a welfare state safety net.

In an interview yesterday, Professor Dorling, of Sheffield University, said the top 10 per cent of people living in London have on average wealth worth £933,563, while the poorest 10 per cent are on average worth £3,420 - some 273 times less.

He said: 'We are getting wealth inequalities now as far as we know that have not been seen since the days of a slave-owning elite.'

Professor Dorling added: 'Britain is at its most unequal for 80 years in terms of inequalities in income.'

Isn’t neoliberalism wonderful folks?

And what a shocking indictment of thirteen years of ‘New Labour’ government.

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Jacking up prices to make an even greater profit from people’s hardship is one of the most inhumane elements of modern neoliberalism. While the closure of Europe’s skies has been terrible news for stranded travellers, for some greedy companies, it‘s been a chance to make a quick buck.

Today’s Daily Express reports:

Stranded Britons last night told how they had been held to ransom as they battled to get home.

Travellers returning through English ports complained of being forced to pay exorbitant fees for car hire, hotels and train fares.

Teacher Steve Hancock, from Gloucester, said: “We have been ripped off by everyone.”

Mr Hancock, 51, and wife Karen, 49, were in southern Italy when their Flybe flight to Birmingham was cancelled last Thursday.

On Saturday, we tried to hire a car. Europcar said we could return a rental to Germany. But we had to pay 570 euros (£501) to drive their car back to Frankfurt. From there we got trains to Paris, Lille and Calais.

“We were charged 65 euros (£59)each as foot passengers.”

Eurostar is charging £223 for a single train ticket from Paris to London over the next two days, more than three times the £69 for a similar journey in two weeks’ time.

Don’t you just love ‘market-based’ pricing?

It doesn’t have to be like this. When asked to name his ‘Grand National Legend’ in this year’s Grand National race card, the jockey Mick Fitzgerald, didn’t name a horse or a fellow jockey- but ‘the people of Liverpool'.

‘I would love to nominate the people of Liverpool as legends for opening their doors to the world the year the National was put back to the Monday (because of a bomb scare) in 1997. I am confident it would not have been possible in any other city, for the people of Liverpool were amazing. They opened their doors to everybody- pauper, jockey, trainer, all were welcome- and it made restaging he race on Monday a possibility'.

By 1997, the people of Liverpool had already had to put up with 18 years of selfish neoliberalism- which they‘d never voted for. But by opening their doors to all- comers, and helping those stranded in the city, people like the wonderful ‘Auntie’ Edie Roche, showed that they rejected the tenets of a heartless creed that says that profits should always come before people.

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