Socialist measures to fight capitalist crisis

Coventry Socialist Party councillors Dave Nellist and Rob Windsor are putting the following motion to Coventry City Council, calling for wider nationalisation to combat the developing recession, and an end to Private Finance Initiative schemes.The motion will be debated by the council on Tuesday 28 October.

"This Council: Believes the partial nationalisation of several leading banks will neither prevent the developing economic recession nor give the government sufficient power to reconstruct the banking system, ensuring bank workers' and other workers' jobs (particularly in manufacturing industry) can be saved, and mortgage holders threatened with repossession can keep their homes;

Condemns the payment in the financial year which ended April 2008 of Ł16 billion in bonuses to city bankers responsible for this failed and flawed financial system;

Notes that the 40% fall in the stock market in the last 12 months has condemned huge numbers of people coming up to retirement to sharply reduced living standards and believes that the pensions industry should be nationalised and that similar guarantees to those the government has provided to savers with deposits in British banks should be provided to those about to retire;