The Private Finance Initiative was always bonkers. The idea was that, instead of the government borrowing to build infrastructural projects, they would hand the job over to a private consortium to raise the money.This was always daft. The government was always the safest borrower in town. When did you last hear of a government going bust? Because its loans are completely safe, the government can borrow at a cheaper rate than anyone else.

Yesterday it was David Blunkett and his privately funded trip to South Africa, which he forgot to own up to. Today it is Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and her £116,000 expenses claim. According to the BBC: ‘Ms Smith reportedly claimed £116,000 in expenses for her home in Redditch, Worcestershire, after telling the Commons that her sister's home - where she stays while in London - was her main residence.’ The tax-free Additional Cost Allowance is worth up to £24,006 a year at present.

Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, was the man who didn’t let the buses go out during the snow in London on Monday 2nd February because he thought it was dangerous.

So how did he expect people to get in to work? Now he’s docking transport staff a day’s pay for not making it in. The managers who are making the threat are claiming that they were ‘working from home.’ So they get their money.

David Blunkett has been rapped over the knuckles by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. Apparently the former Minister ‘forgot’ to register a trip to South Africa paid for by a private training company.

Blunkett, as a former Minister in charge of the Department for Work and pensions, was a big fan of opening up the administration of the welfare service to the private sector. No wonder. Sheffield-based firm A4e is bidding for a whole raft of multi-million pound contracts under New Labour’s misnamed welfare reform programme. And they find Blunkett’s services well worth purchasing.

In these recessionary times the fear of a future with no income amongst redundant workers is persuading some to part with all their cash in return for future wealth and riches - only to find themselves bankrupt and maybe homeless.  This is a legal form of ripping you off, with the rise of the some of the worst kind of leeches to prey on the real victims of the economic downturn.  This cost me and by wife £50,000, and hundreds of other hard working people have lost tens of thousands of pounds to this form of legalised extortion.

Campaigners to keep Tyne and Wear Metro, Britain’s best-performing railway, in the public sector, have condemned the publication of a list of ‘approved bidders’ that brings the network’s operations a step closer to privatisation. Around 250 RMT members employed by the Tyne and Wear passenger transport executive Nexus are to be balloted for strike action over the threat to jobs and conditions posed by moves to privatise the network’s operations.

Public transport in London, that kept going throughout the blitz, pathetically came to a halt on Monday February 2nd because of a few inches of snow – or rather because of cost-cutting by private firms keener to make a fast buck than to provide a decent service to Londoners. The whole public transport system, rail and buses alike, is privately owned and run for profit. Staff did their best to keep the service going, but they weren’t helped by management cheese-paring. As far as they are concerned, workers are just a cost that needs cutting back.

Whose fault is it that nearly 30,000 workers have lost their jobs with the closure of all the Woolworths stores? Not the workers, that's for sure. We are due to see an avalanche of job losses after Christmas. Unemployment is nearly 2 million already, and due to hit 3 million in 12 months' time. None of these workers deserve to lose their jobs. They are the victims of a capitalist system that is just not working. How can we make things better? If we fight for work or full pay, the bosses would soon find them something to do.

In 1848 The Communist Manifesto opened with the line, "A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of communism. " The spectre of Marx haunts world capitalism still.The years of steadily rising living standards, of relatively full employment have gone, never to return. This year, and for years to come, workers look with trepidation at their future. Will they have a job? Will they still have a roof over their heads?

2008 makes for a sad story, and in 2009, the working class will begin really paying for it. Some of the worst to be affected will be young unskilled workers; cleaners, shop-workers and caterers, like myself. Minimum wage workers at the best of times, we have, during the period of boom (which apparently was the last 10 years, although no one told us) eked out an existence, hovering from one place to the next for as long as moral holds out. Most I have worked with were young, often migrants, demoralised but unorganised and so usually without contracts of employment and subject to very poor working conditions.