SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon is right to attack the austerity policies pursued by successive Labour and Con-Dem governments at Westminster.

But in one sense she is wrong to argue that austerity has “failed.” True, it has failed the masses of people across Britain who have seen their living standards cut and their jobs or services shrivel or disappear.

It has also failed to meet most of its public finance deficit and national debt reduction targets.

On the other side of the coin, however, austerity has not failed to meet its central strategic objectives: to prepare our public services for yet more privatisation, to cheapen the cost of labour power to employers, to shift the tax burden even more onto the majority of people through increased indirect taxation, thereby to enrich the wealthy and big business still further.

A key element in this austerity and privatisation drive has been to shield the super-rich from proper scrutiny and paying their fair share of taxation.

It is important to understand the real motives and character of ruling-class strategy in order to identify the key elements of an alternative economic strategy which puts people before profits.

This would include halting and reversing all private finance initiatives (PFI) and similar schemes to privatise public-sector assets or services, something that the SNP government in Holyrood has — for all its fine words — failed to do.

A real alternative to austerity would mean reversing the Labour and Con-Dem cuts in corporation tax on big business profits, which the SNP would like to cut still further in Scotland.

A return to progressive taxation would also mean levying higher taxes on the 10 per cent of the population who own 44 per cent of all the declared personal wealth in Britain, ending the tax haven status of British territories overseas and enacting measures to redistribute that wealth to Scotland as well as across England and Wales.

Yet the aim of the SNP is to cut the Scottish people off from the wealth in south-east England and overseas that needs to be fully assessed, taxed and redistributed.

None of this invalidates the need for the Labour Party leadership to dump its vote-losing commitment to public-spending cuts and campaign instead for progressive taxation, public investment, public ownership of energy and banking and the introduction of a Trade Union Freedom Bill.

Then the election of a Labour government at Westminster would give SNP MPs no option but to support it. It would also demonstrate that working-class and labour movement unity within a federal Britain is the best way forward against a largely united capitalist class.

 
Imperialism starts packing

British and US diplomats are vacating their embassies in Yemen. Yet again, British imperialism has backed the wrong horse in the Middle East and now has to flee the stable being occupied by the Shi’ite minority Ansar Allah movement.

Prince Andrew fronted the sale of arms for internal repression to ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh until the latter’s downfall during the Arab Spring, since when Britain and other Nato powers have supported his successor President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi to the last.

There are encouraging signs that the once-strong Yemeni socialist movement is reviving, although the country’s democratic forces face the threat of renewed US and Saudi intervention on the one side and Sunni and Shi’ite religious sectarianism on the other.

In the meantime, Western embassy staffs in Afghanistan and Bahrain might be best advised to start packing their bags, too.