Workers' Fight workplace bulletin editorials, 1st October 2007

Britain's total net personal wealth rocketed to over £6.3 trillion between 1996 and 2006 - according to the Halifax Bank. We are told this rapid rise is due to the big rise in house prices which accounts for £2.7 trillion of the total - after mortgage debts are subtracted. Savings, pensions and shares make up the rest.

Such a huge amount of money (one trillion is one thousand billion) is impossible for most of us to imagine. But £6 trillion divided up equally among the whole population would give every man, woman and child in this country a cool £100,000 each... which, on the other hand, is a lot easier to get a grip on!

The only problem is that it does not work that way! Capitalism is, of course, a class system, so nobody expects equal wealth distribution. But today's Britain happens to be one of the most unequal societies in the developed industrial world. Just 1% of the population owns as much as 21% of all the country's wealth - which is more than the state's annual budget for the whole population! By contrast, a measly 7% of all the wealth has to be shared between more than half of the population!

So let us go back to that £6 trillion. Because this illustrates that it is possible for everyone, to have plenty. But what do we get instead? A struggle to make ends meet for the many while the rich minority have never had it so good.

And as if to rub it in, this week, Brown's government announced a "rise" in the minimum wage. Of course this remains a 3-tier system, with younger people getting a lot less than the "adult" rate of £5.52 per hour - which represents less than £200 for a 40-hour week after tax - hardly a "living wage"!

With the party conference season in full swing, all the politicians are making plenty of promises which they claim will make Britain a fairer society. Yet not one of their parties is opposed to what causes social injustices - the class society. Because the construction of a society without classes would mean getting rid of the profit system - and only those who do not benefit from exploitation have an interest in such a change. But that just happens to be the vast majority of us, the exploited!

No-one knows exactly the state of play in Burma at the moment. But the mainstream media has done very little to help us understand what is going on there.

Initially TV reports hailed the hundreds of monks who seemed to be taking on the dictatorship on their own. The fact that the rebellion appeared to be inspired by pacifist religious men rather than by political objectives was music to the ears of our politicians, which is why they were so willing to support it.

But they were soon unable to hide what was really going on. Alongside the monks, thousands of youth hurled stones and whatever they could lay their hands on at the regime's stooges. Far from being "non violent", these demonstrations were the latest stage of months of an angry protest against the brutal increase of the cost of living.

Today, we are told that the Burmese military are stopping news and film footage from filtering out of the country. Maybe. But one can only wonder at such a claim. After all, journalists have always managed to smuggle reports, even out of the worst war-torn areas like Taleban-occupied Afghanistan. Could it be that the powers-that-be would rather we did not see what is going on in Burma?

What is beyond doubt, however, is the hypocrisy of the Browns, the Bushs and their like when they "threaten" the Burmese dictators.

Since the Burmese regime showed what it was about by killing 3,000 marchers, 19 years ago, the silence of the West has been deafening. The fact is, that every government defends the interests of one capitalist or another, for whom friendly relations with the Burmese butchers represent a good deal of profits. The US protected the gas investment of oil giant Unocal (now part of Chevron); while British ministers defended British arms exports and timber imports.

This is why the UN's noises about intervening against the Burmese are hot air. Fortunately, in a way, given what happens to the populations when the UN does intervene, as it did in Afghanistan, Haiti or elsewhere.

No, the Burmese demonstrators cannot count on Western governments, in fact they have every reason to beware of their greed. They can only count on their own collective strength and their determination to join ranks with the region's poor populations, in order to build a better future.