R.I.P. Alistair Hulett

January 29, 2010 -- Alistair Hulett died at the Southern General Hospital in Glasgow on Thursday evening, January 28, 2010. Alistair's partner Fatima thanks all those who wrote in with messages of support in the past week since news of Alistair's illness became public. The response was overwhelming, and shows just how many people cared about Alistair and his music.

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Alistair, a truly great singer, songwriter, activist and socialist, will be greatly missed by us all.

Alistair Hulett was born in Glasgow and discovered traditional music in his early teens. In 1968 he and his family moved to New Zealand where he established a reputation on the folk circuit with his large repertoire of songs and his interpretation of the big narrative ballads.

In 1971, at the age of eighteen, Alistair moved over to Australia. For a couple of years he sang his way around Australia's festivals and clubs before "going bush" for several years. During this time he began to write his own songs and, following a two-year stint on the "hippy trail" in India, he returned to Australia in 1979 to find the punk movement in full swing. He joined in with the garage ethos in a band called The Furious Chrome Dolls.

In the early 1980s Alistair was again performing folk material around Sydney and was a founding member of a five-piece punk folk outfit called Roaring Jack, which specialised rocking Celtic reels and radical and revolutionary lyrics. Alistair was an active revolutionary socialist, with the International Socialist Organisation, and he and Roaring jack offered their talents for many benefits, rallies and demonstrations, in support of the antiwar movement and solidarity with workers in struggle.

For the next five years the Jacks made a startling impression on the Australian music scene. Their first album, StreetCeltabillity, was released in 1986 and reached No. 1 on the local indie charts. By the time the second album, The Cat AmongThe Pigeons was released in 1988 the band was headlining in major Australian rock venues, as well as opening for overseas acts including Billy Bragg, the Pogues, and The Men They Couldn't Hang. The The Cat Among The Pigeons was nominated for an Australian Music Industry Association (ARIA) award and was released in Europe by the German labelIntercord.

Alistair's solo work was always a part of the Jacks' live shows and offers to appear at festivals and clubs in his own right drew him further back into the folk orbit. By 1989 his songs were being extensively covered by several stalwarts of the Australian folk establishment. The demise of Roaring Jack coincided with this period and after the release of their third album, ThroughThe Smoke of Innocence, the band decided to call it a day despite another ARIA nomination.

Alistair's first solo CD, Dance of the Underclass, was recorded in 1991. Completely acoustic, with contributions from other members of Roaring Jack, the album was instantly hailed as a folk classic and proved to be the turning point in Alistair's return to the folk fold. His position as one of the most influential musicians on the Australian scene was now beyond dispute. In the UK his song, "He Fades Away", was picked up by Roy Bailey and by June Tabor and later by Andy Irvine. All three performers recorded uniquely different but thoroughly compelling interpretations of the song.

Rather than follow with more of the same Alistair recorded his solo CD with a return to the punk fuelled energy of the days with Roaring Jack. In the Backstreets of Paradise was a collection of songs originally intended as the next Jacks' release and rather than let the songs go to waste Alistair formed an acoustic outfit called The Hooligans to complete the cycle. The album caught some of Alistair's new found admirers among the purists unawares but during the next two years The Hooligans won them over with blistering live performances at every major folk festival in Australia. In the meantime Alistair continued his solo gigs with an ever growing reliance on the traditional songs that have always formed the backbone of his writing.

In 1995 Alistair compiled a collection of songs that owed little to punk and everything to the folk revival that inspired him in the sixties. Saturday Johnny and Jimmy The Rat was originally intended as a solo affair in homage to the likes of Ewan MacColl, Jeannie Robertson and Davie Stewart, as well as an acknowledgment of the time when the folk movement was a vital political and musical force.

At the time Dave Swarbrick was living in Australia and Alistair toyed with the idea of inviting Swarb to join him in the studio. Nothing more would have come of the notion had it not been for a phone call from a friend saying that Swarb wouldn't mind working with the bloke who had written "The Swaggies Have All Waltzed Matilda Away". Thus was forged a musical partnership that has won acclaim from audiences and critics alike.

Following a hugely successful Australian tour the duo returned to the UK. A triumphant perormance at Sidmouth in 1996 was broadcast by the BBC and was followed by a live in studio session a few weeks later. Since then Alistair and Dave have toured extensively in the UK, returned to Australia for another successful tour and recorded their second album together. The Cold Grey Light of Dawn was enthusiastically received and gathered some impressive reviews

Alistair, having returned to live in Scotland, continued to work solo and with Swarb. He wrote and performed three workshop presentations. "From Blackheath To Trafalgar Square" looked at "insurrection and resistance in the Disunited Kingdom" from the Peasants' Revolt to the poll tax riots. "The Fire Last Time" was a study of the protest song movement of the 1960s and "Red Clydeside" examined the working class unrest on the Clyde between 1915 and 1920.

Alistair, based once again in Glasgow, toured Australia in a double bill with US singer/songwriter David Rovics in December 2008-January 2009, playing benefits for Australia's leading radical newspaper, Green Left Weekly. Two more solo albums, In Sleepy Scotland and more recently Riches And Rags, confirmed Alistair Hulett’s position as one of the most consistent songwriters, musicians and interpreters of the tradition in Scotland. Folk On Tap called him "One of the defining voices of Scottish music" and a reviewer in the influential music magazine fROOTS wrote: "Hulett is at once an intense singer, radiating conviction, and a genuinely imaginative lyricist."

In partnership with 1960s veteran Scots folksinger Jimmy Ross, Alistair Hulett presented word and song presentations with powerpoint visual images at various events and festivals around the UK. Alistair and Jimmy shared a common political perspective, with both being deeply involved in socialist politics, and this bond was evident in the scripts they prepared together for these presentations. The three they have performed so far are titled Which Side Are You On? The Life And Times Of Pete Seeger, Ewan MacColl And The Politics Of The British Folk Revival and Ireland – A History Of Struggle In Song.

Most recently, Alistair Hulett joined with several Yorkshire based musicians to form a five-piece, semi-electric band calledThe Malkies. This was Hulett’s first return to working with a full-time band since Roaring Jack called it a day in 1992. Their debut album was Suited And Booted (2008).

Alistair toured Australia for the last time in late 2009, and again made his talents available to the socialist cause.

Sources: http://www.folkicons.co.uk/alisbio.htm, http://www.alistairhulett.com/biography.htm, http://www.roaringjack.com/

Reviews of Alistair Hulett in Green Left Weekly:
Revolutionary music from 'Sleepy Scotland'
Album puts Hulett among the best

Please leave your comments at the article at LINKS.

Also:

• Vale - Alistair Hulett
• Alistair Hulett – friend and comrade
• Alistair Hulett: `A truly great singer, songwriter, activist and socialist'
• Vale Alistair Hulett, 1952-2010, musician, writer, activist, socialist, Comrade and friend by John/Togs Tognolini
• Alistair Hulett has died
• RIP: Alistair Hulett (Roaring Jack)

Newspaper taken over by its staff

From BBC News - Scotland, October 29, 2009

West Highland Free Press was set up in 1972

Staff at the award-winning West Highland Free Press have taken the publication over from five shareholders who had owned it.

The weekly was founded in 1972 as a left-wing newspaper to campaign for the Gaelic language and against absentee landlords.

Among its founding shareholders was Brian Wilson, a former Labour government minister.

The newspaper will now be managed by a trust centred around the staff.

Mr Wilson said the Free Press was in good shape.

The paper's Gaelic slogan on its masthead - An Tir, an Canan 'sna Daoine - translates as the land, the language, the people and was borrowed from the Highland Land League.

In the late 19th Century the league campaigned on behalf of crofters.

Media consultant and former editor of the Herald, Charles McGhee, said the Free Press has always been different from other local papers which were struggling to keep readers and raise revenue from advertising.

He said: "There is generally a depression across the whole industry.

"There are one or two bright spots and one of these is the West Highland Free Press. Its circulation over the last six months is only down by about 2%, which in a declining market is a good performance."

Mr McGhee added: "Part of the reason for that is that the West Highland Free press is one of the few newspapers in Scotland that is still independently owned, it's still very much rooted in its community and services that community really well."

"Make Greed History"

Scottish Socialist Party EU Election Broadcast

The Credit Crunch: A Prelude to Capitalism’s Second Great Depression?

From the latest Frontline - an independent Marxist review from Scotland.

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With the collapse of banks and entire countries facing bankruptcy Raphie de Santos looks at just how bad the prospects are for capitalism.

There is no doubt about it. Capitalism is teetering on the edge of its second great depression. While a recession is defined as two successive quarters of negative growth in an economy – set by economists as all the goods and services that are produced domestically or the gross domestic product (GDP) - there is no formal definition for a depression. Here we will define a depression as a prolonged recession lasting more than two years of successive quarters of negative growth and resulting in a 10% shrinkage in GDP. How did capitalism get to the edge of the precipice? In this article we try answer that question.

First, we will shows that at the root of this crisis for the world’s economy and global finance lay a series of economic and financial policies that were used to deal with capitalism’s last great economic slump: the 1974/1975 recession. We will identify what lay behind this crisis and what policies were put forward by capitalism to solve it. We will show that these policies were later extended, modified and added to by mainly the governments’ of Clinton, Bush, Blair and Brown to pull capitalism out of a speculative bubble. We will show that the world’s central banks implemented monetary policies without understanding the complexity of the financial system and products that they had helped create and the impact of their policy changes on them

Next we will try to explain the dynamics of the current crisis. How it has interacted with the real economy and the global financial system and has created a beast that is eating up the capital of global finance. These losses are so great that the whole global financial system is frozen and is on the verge of bankruptcy.

Following this, we will look at the strategies that governments have come up with to fight the crisis. Many governments and commentators are reviving the memory of Keynesian economics with their crisis fighting policies. We will show how these policies did not work, contrary to popular myth, in the first place, what actually solved the first great depression and how Keynesian solutions are even more unlikely to succeed this time round given the dynamics of this financial crisis.

We will then examine the Marxist theories of economic crisis and see if they can explain the current crisis or if some new theory or modification of an existing theory is required to do so.

Next we will chart how capitalism is likely to evolve from this crisis and what solutions it will try to inflict on the working class and poor of the world to save itself. We will ask if there may be a further rise in fascism as a means to this end.

Finally we look at how the effects of the crisis will make the workers and poor of the world will fight back against capitalism’s offensive and how socialists could organise to help transform this great crisis of capitalism into an opportunity to create a new society based on cooperation, that is democratically run and sets out to meet the needs of people and not the needs of capital.

At The Root of This Crisis
At the root of this crisis lies:

• a bubble in housing prices;
• a liberal lending regime to everyone from the poorest in the rich north to whole countries;
• the deregulation of the financial system;
• the breaking down of the demarcation lines in finance and banking;
• the creation of new complex financial instruments that can multiply the exposure to the assets they are based on;
• independent carefree interest rate policies.

These factors evolved from solutions to the 1974/75 economic slump. This slump marked the first synchronised economic recession since the end of the second world war. The recession came about as profit rates started to decline due to more and more human labour (mental and manual) was replaced by automation. In addition there was an over accumulation of capitalist profits that could not be profitability invested. This led to a massive over production of goods and services which could not be sold.

Capitalism tried to solve the problem of declining profits by weakening the organisations of the working class, increasing productivity and moving its production base to South East Asia where the rate of exploitation was greater. The problem of the over accumulation of capital was to create new avenues for it. Some of this was done through the privatisation of state industries and housing. The deregulation of financial markets and institution allowed some of this excess capital to be invested in financial speculation. Finally, to solve the crisis of producing too many goods capitalism created an easy market for credit on the back of private home ownership and the deregulation of financial markets and institutions.

The governments of Clinton, Bush, Blair and Brown further extended these neo-liberal policies. Their central bankers made a major error at the turn of the millennium when they cut their central bank lending rates dramatically – US rates fell to 1% and UK rates fell to 3.5%,. They did this as the so called dot com bubble burst and the US economy went into recession. This created a major housing bubble and because of the liberal deregulated financial markets and institutions, a wave of credit related products were created on the back of these very low interest rates which helped feed back into the housing bubble.

The Dynamics of the Crisis
Having created a giant housing and credit bubble and a raft of products and strategies that sought to take advantage of the very low interest rate environment central bankers on both sides of the Atlantic then unknowingly burst it rapidly. Worried about growing inflation , the by product of so much credit and increased demand from China, and the housing bubble, central bankers started to raise interest rates in 2006/2007. They had no idea of the vast network of products that were linked to the US house market or the depth of poor peoples’ borrowings – the so called sub-prime market. Up to 20% of US lending is sub-prime and an incredible 60% of US mortgages are in some form of derivative security. These were repackaged around the world and sold to all sorts of banks, financial institutions and pension’s funds. The US central bankers did not realise how sensitive the sub-prime lenders were to rises in interest rates. These lenders soon started to default on payments and this helped, as well as the increase in interest rates, to bringing about a fall in house prices. Products based on these sub-prime mortgages fell in value and financial institutions who bought them started to have financial problems and suffered huge losses – Bear Sterns being a good example. Those other institutions that had borrowed short-term in the money markets and lent this money long term – Northern Rock and HBOS are good examples of this – ran into trouble as the cost of short-term borrowing rose. Nobody would lend to them either as they feared they may go bankrupt as a result of this failed business model.

The dynamic of a falling housing market has continued and now has gone beyond sub-prime loans to prime and even super-prime loans as these borrowers face the same problems as the very poorest borrowers did. The US housing market was worth over $12 trillion at its peak and 60% of this as we mentioned has been repacked as some form of derivative and sold round the world. Other types of loans such as credit cards and car loans have been repackaged this way and in other countries as well as the US most notably the UK. These are the toxic assets that have been talked about and they are becoming even more toxic.

The banks were first afraid to lend to other banks and financial institutions because these borrowers may be potential defaulters and go bankrupt. Now the lending banks are suffering such losses on these repackaged loans and something called credit default swaps (CDS) that they need their money to cover day to day losses and quarterly write downs of mortgage and loan based products.

This has caused a complete freezing of the credit markets to everyone form the individual right through to small businesses to large corporations and governments and countries. This drying up of credit has pushed the world into an economic recession as consumer demand dries up and capitalism is unable to function because it cannot service its day to day running without credit. Of course the recession feeds into lower house prices and this feeds into more bank losses and more tightening of credit and a deeper recession and so on.

On a recession companies go bankrupt and here is a further problem for the banks. They have sold insurance against companies going bankrupt called CDSs. The value of this insurance has risen in value and hit the daily cash reserves of the banks and now as companies start to go bankrupt then the banks have to make a full payout to those who have bough the insurance on the bankrupt company. Recent examples have been Lehmans and an Icelandic bank. Up to $60 trillion of CDS insurance has been sold and the losses to the global banking system could be in the region of $10 trillion if we have a long severe recession as seems likely. This of course further freezes up credit which deepens and prolongs the recession which leads to more bankruptcies which feeds into more bank losses and so on! It is literally a spiralling dynamic that will be very difficult to stop.

The interacting dynamic of recession, falling house prices and corporate bankruptcies is taking us to the edge of a great depression. It is a dynamic that governments don’t fully understand and will be sucked into with disastrous consequences.

Solutions to The Crisis
Governments and central banks, particularly outside the US, have been kept on the hop in trying to deal with the crisis. They have moved from one fire to another mainly throwing money at the banking and financial system as they tried to stop financial institutions going bankrupt or the hemorrhaging of their capital and cash.

Governments have literally thrown trillions of tax payers dollars putting these fires out – it was revealed that the US Federal Reserve (FED) have spent over $US2 trillion over the last few months under existing legislation onto top of the $US700 billion recently announced rescue plan.

Because of the dynamic of the financial system losses the FED have abandoned buying the toxic mortgage backed securities as they had spent so much on keeping financial companies from going under. They understand that they will need more money in the near future as the recession deepens and the financial system losses spiral further out of control. There in lies the seeds of another problem. Just as governments want to spend money on capital projects and giving tax cuts to try and boost demand they will have very little money left to do this as they spend so much money on the bailouts.

These bailout which lead to a huge borrowing requirements which will be difficult to meet because nobody wants to hold the assets of a weak economy as that country’s currency will also be weak. Recently the German government failed to sell all its issue of government bonds and Germany is perceived to have the best quality of state debt. Too much debt financing by governments issuing bonds will also lead to high long-term interest rates which will push up short term interest rates as well. There is the possibility that governments could go bankrupt themselves and have to be bailed out by the International Monetary Fund – global capitalism’s central bank. Of course lending of the scale needed to bring the world out of recession also fuels inflation.

The other Keynesian policies of cutting interest rates and giving tax rebates can limit the depth, length and onset of a recession but not avoid one. This is what happened this time round in the US and their policies delayed the recession starting by three months. The rest of the world was slow to follow such policies and using tax rebates and cutting interest rates will now lead to individuals hoarding money for those unexpected bills or as insurance against losing their income in the future or the future tax increases to pay for it all in the first place!.

All these policies do not deal with the two fundamental requirements for a recovery in the global economy: capitalists to invest in fresh new projects and individuals to increase their spending, leading to a need to increase the production of goods and services.

In the 1930s it was massive arms expenditure, which in itself is inflationary, and a second world war which destroyed huge amounts of capital, that created the conditions for the recovery of capitalism after 1945.

Marxists Theories of the Crisis
These broadly fall in to two camps. One camp thinks that too much profit is being produced and accumulated and this means finding fresh avenues of investment. However too many goods and services are produced and these end up being unsold leading to a crisis of an over-production of goods. The other camp believes that as workers are more and more exploited by increases in productivity that their real wages decrease and as a consequence their demand for goods and services falls. Capitalism has to do this because their rate of profit is declining as more and more of the human labour in the production process – physical and mental – is being replaced by automation. This tends to happen as capitalism’s boom cycle approaches its peak.

Accompanied by every boom particularly as the peak is being approached is speculation in credit and credit based investments. This has happened with every cycle. In this crisis governments and central banks laid the basis for a massive bubble in credit and speculation which was able to be leveraged several times by the use of complex financial instruments called derivatives. As the name suggests they are not actual physical assets but are derived from the performance of a physical assets or in some cases economic measures which only have a mathematical reality – such as inflation or interest rates.

Capitalism needed new avenues to put it’s over accumulating capital and financial speculation was one of them. It also kept demand up as a real wages fell by giving everyone from the poorest in society to the affluent middle classes unlimited access to credit.

Ultimately, it was the drying up of credit which led to a huge decrease in demand that is fuelling this slump and recession. As Marx emphasised on several occasions in Capital ‘the ultimate reason for all real crises always remain the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses, as opposed to the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as though the absolute consuming power of society constituted their limit’.

But it is the complete paralysis of the financial system with its exposure to recession multiplied several times by the use of derivatives that could take the world into its second great depression. This financial crisis is unprecedented either in scope, depth and complexity in capitalism’s history.

A New State Capitalism
There is a debate emerging between the left and right wings of capitalism. The right want to let private companies go the wall and have some bank bailouts but under bankers control to keep the financial system afloat. This right wing view is represented by the Republican administration in the US and the German Christian democratic government in Germany and Cameron’s Tories. The left view is a move to state control of the financial system, tighter financial regulations and the taking over of troubled major private enterprises such as General Motors in the US. This wing of capitalism is represented by the Democratic Party in the US and Brown government in the UK. Salmond’s SNP is somewhere between theses two camps.

China is likely to emerge as a stronger capitalist power as although its economy is slowing rapidly and it may go into a light recession it has less exposure to credit or to house bubble related assets. It is keen to attract international investors and private equity firms and corporate financiers may pile their money into China. They see it as the best bet of a recovery amongst the capitalist economies after they have suffered heavy losses, and the banks that lent them the money, on their projects in the mature economies of the north.

We are unlikely to see an emergence of fascism as a capitalist tool as happened in the 1930s when it was used to break a highly organised and politically conscious working class. This has already happened with the big defeats of the working class in the northern hemisphere in the early 1980s. Capitalism too has moved its production base to Asia and other emerging countries where it has much higher rates of exploitation and a more compliant work force.

There will be many struggles world wide against capitalisms onslaught to restore profitability and save itself. Many of the struggles against factory closures, redundancies and increased productivity will be led by the emerging working class in Asia. In the rich north there will be resistance as well and the opportunity will arise to build a new combative working class rank and file current as the ineffectiveness of the unions and their leaders becomes evident to the broad mass of the population.

Socialists have the opportunity to help build such an alternative current in and outside the workers movement as well as engage in the defence of public services which will come under attack as governments’ finances become stretched with the bank and industry bailouts.

We can help generalise these struggles and question the legitimacy of capitalism, its solutions of common ownership under capitalist control. We can counter pose our vision of a society under common ownership and under common control for the common good. A rationally planned society which is democratically decided upon and meets the needs of people and not the needs of profit and can end world hunger and stop the destruction of our fragile planet.

These are exciting times indeed.

Raphie de Santos is a member of the SSP and a supporter of the Fourth International. He was the former head of Equity Derivatives Research and Strategy at Goldman Sachs International and an adviser on financial markets and derivatives to the Bank of England, London Stock Exchange, The London International Financial Futures and Options Markets and the Italian Ministry of Finance. He now works as an analyst in fund management.

Frontline. An independent Marxist review from Scotland.

Colin Fox: Too poor to stay warm

by the Scottish Socialist Party's Colin Fox, first published in the Morning Star

Scottish government figures released this month showed 569,000 Scots households living in fuel poverty. The number has doubled since 2002.

Fuel poverty campaigners have reacted angrily to the news and attacked the failure of repeated government "initiatives."
They point to the fact that hese latest figures are for the year 2006-7 and do not take account of the gas and electricity price rises of the last 12 months.

In 2002, 13 per cent of Scots households endured fuel poverty, which is defined as those spending 10 per cent of their income on keeping warm. By 2007, this had leapt to 24.6 per cent.
Households now paying more than 20 per cent of their income on gas and electricity, a category that housing charity Shelter defines as people living in "extreme fuel poverty," now number 163,000.

Across Britain, the picture is much the same. Energy Watch estimates that 5.5 million households in Britain are living in fuel poverty.
With average combined gas and electricity bills now more than £1,300, it concludes: "There are millions of families who do not have that kind of money."

The question is, will the power companies try to disconnect those families unable to pay such sums this winter?

These are the circumstances behind the Scottish Socialist Party's decision to organise a day of action across Scotland on Saturday to draw attention to this intolerable situation. We will be campaigning on the streets of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and elsewhere to channel the widespread anger that exists towards the big six power companies and force a reduction in these exorbitant bills.

Public anger has been bubbling up for months.
Campaigning on Edinburgh's Princes Street each Saturday afternoon, I have seen it for myself. People are livid at what they see as energy companies "profiteering" and acting as an illegal industry cartel.

"Son, my gas and electric bill has never been so high," well-known local pensioner activist Phyllis Herriot told me. And this was a remark made in reference to her summer bill.
Margaret Holmes is another senior citizen who is angry. "These gas and electric firms are at it. My power card doesn't last half as long as it used tae."

And all the energy companies now admit that their power cards and pre-payment meter charges mean that the highest rates are levied against those in the lowest income groups.
So, the poor are penalised while the better off on their direct debits receive significant discounts. The government admits that more than 1,000 meters are now being installed every day in households across Britain.

The North Edinburgh Fuel Poverty group has also been campaigning for many months. It believes that people are extremely fearful that they will not have the money to pay these exorbitant bills when they arrive.

All the power companies were quick to put up their bills this summer citing the cost of oil and gas at $145 per barrel as the reason. They have shown no comparable speed in reducing their charges now that oil is trading at below $40 a barrel. No wonder the charge of profiteering and acting as an illegal cartel has stuck.

This seething sense of inequity and frustration provides the left with a significant opportunity to mobilise opposition. We have a golden chance to increase our influence acting together on a shared programme.

The SSP campaign is based on the following key demands:

* A £250 winter fuel allowance for all pensioners, unemployed and low-paid, paid for by a windfall tax on the power utilities
* The return of our gas and electricity industries to public ownership as this is the only way that we can guarantee everyone in the country will receive the energy that they need
* Tariffs on prepayment meters should be the reduced to become the cheapest and not the highest rates available
* A programme of investment in fuel efficiency and insulation to bring all homes up to the National Home Energy rating in five years
* An end to our dependence on burning fossil fuels by developing renewable forms of electricity generation

The North Edinburgh Fuel Poverty group has organised a forum in the city which will meet in January to focus on the anger and organise the broadest possible coalition around our shared and coherent programme. The Scottish Socialist Party has been invited to join as equal partners, as have MPs, MSPs and other interested parties.
Let this message ring out across Britain.

The left combined together 20 years ago to stop sheriff officers throwing people out on the street because they didn't have the money to pay the hated poll tax. We can combine again now, notwithstanding our divisions, to stop these hated multinational power companies disconnecting those who don't have the money to pay these exorbitant fuel charges.

In the process, we can show people that only the left will stand up to the profiteering of multinational corporations which seek to plunge millions into the misery of fuel poverty.