HAT do the events in Indonesia, the G8 summit, Lite-on, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, and New Labour's welfare reforms have in common? The answer is that in their different ways all of them are an indictment of global free-marketeering.
This has been brought home to us by the fact that no sooner are they here than Lite-On are announcing that they are throwing 250 workers on the scrapheap. Previous to this, Hyundai, which appeared to promise so much, pulled the plug on Fife.
As the people of Scotland become victims of the unfettered global free market, we witness that erstwhile ''socialist'', Brian Wilson, MP, squirm as he attempts to defend the ''here today, gone tomorrow'' short-termism which was the trademark of Thatcherite inward-investment policies.
Events in Indonesia are an extreme manifestation (with recent lesser examples in South Korea and Taiwan) of the reaction when the bubble bursts on the so-called economic miracles of the Pacific Rim ''tiger'' economies. The nature of the global free market (as we in Scotland are finding out) dictates that Asia's problems today will be our problems tomorrow.
According to Gordon Brown, these countries cannot cope with the social impact of recession because they have not invested in their welfare states. The sheer hypocrisy of this comment is apparent as it is made by the Chancellor of a Government which is currently in the process of dismantling ours!
For example the Government's green paper on welfare reform contains an entire chapter devoted to fraud. Perpetuating the blame culture is part of the process of cutting public spending to release more money for ''buttering up'' the free-marketeers.
The emphasis on fraud being a major factor in the cost to the taxpayer of welfare benefits has a hollow ring to it when the Child Poverty Action Group (a charity which campaigns for benefit rights) issues a report, using the Government's own figures, which reveals that more money remains unclaimed by those entitled to it than is alleged to be defrauded from the system each year. But still the emphasis is on spending money trying to catch ''fraudsters'' as opposed to publicity campaigns and the revision of systems to make it easier to claim the benefit to which many are entitled.
The architect of this distortion is none other than Frank Field, MP, who during the 1970s was director of the Child Poverty Action Group.
As Blair, Clinton, et al, sat powerless at the G8 in Birmingham surveying the anarchy of the economic system they support, poverty and conflict have become the new, new world order. This is borne out by pondering the potentially cataclysmic effects of the MAI which will further neuter national governments' ability to regulate free-marketeers, through the removal of any legislation to prevent the wholesale exploitation of entire countries by multinationals.
What we need in the run-up to the new millennium is not more of the same but a development of a true international democratic socialism where the call is for ''need before greed''. We can begin by contributing to that development here in Scotland next May. The question is, who will be its torch-bearer? Certainly not New Labour.
David Logan,
27 Westcliff, Dumbarton. May 17.
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