this article is originally published in the Big Issue in Scotland www.bigissuescotland.com

Tommy Sheridan - A Socialist Solution

After years of privatising the profits, it seems the former stalwarts of free-market capitalism now want to socialise the debts. The banking and financial sector executives and their parasitic reflections in the money markets have been gorging themselves on obscene salaries and bonus payments for years.

Their over-indulgence and complete lack of social responsibility was only matched by the complicity of Tory and New Labour governments alike who facilitated ever greater deregulation of the sector, and ensured low taxation and protection from proper controls in return for multi-million pound donations and invitations to yacht parties and holiday freebies.

The City traders and finance executives actually pay less tax than the near-minimum wage cleaners who sweep and polish the swanky office blocks.

It is a scandal and crime that tax evasion among the rich and their corporations denies the ordinary taxpayer around £85bn a year that could be devoted to increasing state pensions, better resourced public services and realistic levels of minimum wage and social security benefits. The very same situation exists in America.

A new report from the non-profit policy research foundation Cato Institute puts a $92bn dollar a year figure on the subsidy to big business in the form of tax relief and direct handouts, while the Institute of Policy Studies reports that the tax and accounting loopholes there amount to a £20bn subsidy for bumper executive pay packets every year. In other words, the idea of state subsidy for the rich is nothing new.

The ordinary nurse, cleaner, checkout assistant, council worker, train driver, and people throughout the working population, have been subsidising the rich and their rigged free market system for decades. The size of the subsidy and the colossal nature of the rewards to the rich are often hidden and officially denied, but the whole horrible edifice of their rigged system based on greed and waste is now teetering on the brink of collapse.

In fact, if the States across the world did not intervene with ordinary workers' hard-earned cash - the system would have collapsed already. Capitalism, contrary to its slick PR campaign parroted in the minority-owned media, is a subsidy junkie. The only difference now is the size of the fix required.

Banks, insurance companies and big corporations are going to the wall. Real workers, the creators of all the wealth, should not be made to suffer. I like the idea of publicly-owned banks. I've argued for it all my adult life.

But let's not just take over the sick and ailing ones. The whole sector should be socialised and run on the basis of maximum security and assistance to citizens, not maximum profits for the few.

The major parts of the economy should also be socialised. Instead of electricity, gas, transport, oil and big manufacturing being run and based on private profit, they should be directed to serving social need.

It's called socialism and its day is coming because it makes sense in the midst of rigged free-market greed, madness and anarchy.

Tommy Sheridan, socialist Solidarity party leader and law student, will be writing regularly for The Big Issue in Scotland