ALAN GREENSPAN is regarded as the high priest of capitalism and is often credited with single-handedly averting recessions in the United States and steering the economy over there into calmer waters. He has had the ear of every US President since 1969 and, in 1987, was appointed chairman of the US Federal Reserve by Ronald Reagan. This 531-page book is, effectively, his memoirs with his assessment of the world economy including the rise of Russia, China, India and the other Asian economic tigers.

It is part autobiography, offering insights into how Greenspan interacted with policymakers and presidents. He says Gerald Ford was a decent man who knew and understood the economics he needed to know. Reagan was sometimes “oblivious of facts” but is still praised for the “clarity of his conservatism”. Bill Clinton was focused on long-term economic growth and, interestingly, there is no praise for the incumbent, George W Bush.

Greenspan was a key player in the expansion of Reaganomics and the rolling back of the state. Markets made some richer but the US also ended up with the widest income and wealth inequalities on the planet. He praises Thatcherite economic policies and offers his evaluation of former Prime Minister Tony Blair and the present Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Referring to a meeting in 1994 he says: “It appeared to me that Brown was the senior person. Blair stayed in the background while Brown did most of the talking about New Labour. Gone were the socialist tenets of postwar Labour leaders… Brown espoused globalization and free markets and did not seem to be interested in  reversing much of what Thatcher had changed in Britain. The fact that he and Blair had arrived on the doorstep of a renowned defender of capitalism (namely, me) solidified my impressions.” Ah, well, most of us had worked that one out!

The second half of the book focuses on emerging economies, globalisation, budgetary deficits, education, income inequalities, economic and energy crises and issues about regulation. Though he does not say much about the crisis in subprime mortgages and consequent credit crunch, the seeds of our current troubles were, of course, sown during Greenspan’s stewardship of the Federal Reserve. Low interest rates was his preferred tool for regulating the economy. After 9/11, US interest rates stood at 1.75 per cent and declined further to 1 per cent in June 2003, a negative rate of interest in real terms. Greenspan’s cheap money fuelled the borrowing binge. In a light touch environment, companies devised exciting new ways of repackaging and selling on loans and mortgages. Growth in corporate profits was mistaken for real economic renaissance, but the risks of collapse of course increased. Greenspan was always quick to reject calls for tougher regulation of the finance industry.

So this free market guru played a significant part in the current crisis of capitalism in the US. He should have seen the dark clouds gathering as his light regulation approach encouraged an unprecedented speculative frenzy. In the early 1990s, such ideological leanings produced the Savings & Loan debacle, resulting in losses of billions of dollars. In 1998, he had to bail out Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), a hedge fund nominally based in the Cayman Islands and managed by – would you believe it? – Nobel Prize winners in economics. But Greenspan, the self declared “defender of capitalism” would not budge from his ideological crusade for the free market.

This book is entertaining and informative, although Greenspan shies away from a proper examination of his own policies. Nevertheless, the high priest of capitalism is doing very nicely, thank you. His reputed $8.5 million advance for writing this book and six figure sums for providing public lectures provide him with some home comforts. Meanwhile, the world economy has taken a turn for the worse and the rest of us are having to suffer for his manifest mistakes. The age of turbulence is well and truly with us.

Prem Sikka

Now and again, in moments of calm as well as crisis, it can be quite productive to pause and ask yourself precisely why it is you hold the opinions that you do. This applies to politics as much as anything else, and it’s a useful corrective to the ever-present danger of getting set in your ways. The pretentious or the desperate refer to this process as “renewal” or frame it within the context of a “relaunch”, a word which always conjures up in my mind the idea of trying to relaunch the Titanic. Anyway, recently I’ve been filling the odd empty moment, when otherwise I’d be drawing or cooking or staring out of a train window, wondering what exactly it is that colours my politics.

If you’ve managed to read this far, don’t be alarmed. I’m not about to burden you with a harrowing description of my own road to Damascus, that moment which seems to have ambushed a bunch of former lefties when they hit middle age and sent them lurching rightwards. Unlike all those Cohens and Hitchenses and Aaronovitches, no political blood vessel has burst behind my eyes and made me suddenly recognise the perfidy, hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of my former comrades.

Because I tend to see almost all human interaction as an endless series of contingencies and compromises, I was well aware of all that already, quite irrespective of the wise words I was told decades ago by an old school teacher of mine, about sticking to your principles. Who is better, he asked me, the SS officer who sticks to his principles and continues murdering Jews, or the SS officer who abandons them and stops?

That said, my half-hearted self-examination led me to conclude that I have principles, which I might even call convictions, and these in turn colour my politics.

What I think is that my principles lack the high-mindedness our political leaders would like us to embrace so we won’t, by association, stink up their own notions of the sanctity (and sanctimoniousness) of their statesmanship. It’s like tribalism, which is always denounced by desiccated political commentators because of its inherent irrationality. This also ignores the fact that tribalism provides the bedrock for almost all politics, and that the tribe is a far better, more dynamic and mutually-supportive template for society than, say, the family, which in its turn has always been talked up by both church and state because it’s the largest social unit they can ever hope to control.

But returning to my own base political motives, I’ve long recognised what I’m for is mostly defined by what I’m against. In other words, I’ll never vote Tory because, quite simply, I can’t stand the bastards; the same goes for “new” Labour. But it’s only recently that I’ve finally worked out what it is that I really, really don’t like when I see it in other people, and react against to the extent that it defines what I think. And it’s complacency.

By that, I don’t simply mean the self-destructive state of mind that besets governments too long in office, and makes them think they can get away with anything. True, a tragic kind of complacency infected Gordon Brown’s administration from the start, because it thought it could trade forever on our gratitude that he wasn’t Tony Blair and the hopelessness of a terminally-complacent Conservative Party. That’s what led idiots like Douglas Alexander to brief non-stop about an autumn election, merely as a short-term tactic to wrong-foot Cameron’s Tories, who instead finally sloughed off 15 years of complacency and got their act together. It also inspired Brown to invite Thatcher into Downing Street, a squalid exercise in redundant triangulation and, again, the shortest of short-term tactics to discomfort Cameron, with no apparent thought given to the offence it would cause among both her victims and everyone else whose sympathies, instinctively and humanly, lie with those victims and not with disconnected politicians playing stupid games.

And that’s what I truly dislike about complacency: its blithe indifference to the lives of others. It doesn’t matter whether its dressed up as principle, be it the Money Supply or Humanitarian Interventionism: the complacency lies in the underpinning assumption that destroyed communities and dead Iraqis don’t matter. This goes across the board, from the Tories’ hardwired complacency that the comfort of the few matters more than the discomfort of the many, or “new” Labour’s complacency that its natural supporters no longer mattered a jot compared to the promise of power. Or, for that matter, the truly complacent assumption that, even though you have no detectable policies, you have the right to power simply because you went to Eton. Compared to all that, however tribalist, negative and irrational their source, I think a politics based on the idea that other people matter is actually rather noble.

SHOCKING statistics reveal that, over the past 20 years, as many as 10 million girls in India have been killed by their parents – either before or immediately after birth. Further gruesome data on gender ratios reveals that, for every 927 girls under the age of six, there are 1,000 boys. This is the most imbalanced in the world and that disparity is getting greater.

In India, the birth of a boy is a cause for celebration. With a son comes status and wealth. Sadly, girls are associated with subservience and expense. That monetary drain is felt most by poor families. That is most families, with the prospect of dowry payments proving the final nail in the coffin of what might anyway have been a very short life for young girls

In an attempt to stop female foeticide and infanticide, Renuka Chowdhury, India’s minister for women and child development, has introduced a “cradles plan” for unwanted girls. She has said: “We will have cradles strategically placed all over the place, so that people who don’t want their babies can leave them there. They will be collected and put into homes. There are plenty of existing homes and we will be adding some more.”

Many of these homes are under the auspices of Mother Teresa of Calcutta (Kolkata) and her Missionaries of Charity. The aim of this organisation is to work for the “poorest of the poor”, with a primary task being to care for orphans and abandoned children.

Its first refuge to be opened was the Nirmala Shishu Bhavan children’s home in 1955. At the time of Mother Teresa’s death in 1997, the charity had 610 missions in 123 countries.

In India’s southernmost state of Kerala, the government has chosen August 26, the day in 1910 when Mother Teresa was born, to be celebrated as “Orphan Day”, thus enabling those orphans who have never known their own birthday, to have a reason to celebrate.

With a female literacy rate of 87.6 per cent, as compared to the Indian average of 54 per cent, it might be expected that gender equality within the state would compare more favourably with the West. Sadly, this is not so. Kerala is a society where patriarchal values are so deeply-rooted that gender-related prejudices clash with any educational attempts to improve human rights for women.

For those who will not be adopted or have the chance to return home, there is still the opportunity for rehabilitation in the form of marriage, with partners often found for them by the authorities. There is encouragement at government level for prospective grooms to consider girls regardless of caste and destitution, with all expenditure, including dress and jewellery, being met by the sponsors of institutions looking after the girls.

Much of the basic funding comes from the Keralan state government, which acknowledges the importance that qualitative education can play in challenging the poor status of women. There are opportunities for education up to college level, both in vocational and non-vocational training, with much emphasis on dance, drama and music. Despite being born into poverty, many of these youngsters are the possessors of great talent. But failing either education or marriage as the way to a better life, there are some who are destined to be in care forever.

When I was in India recently, I travelled 25 kilometres south of Trivandrum in Kerala to an area renowned for its miles of silver sands and luxurious resorts. My contact was Pushpa Johnson, a dear friend I have made on previous visits to the country. In 1984, she responded to a “calling” from God to work with Mother Teresa in Calcutta, where she remained until 1989, having been summoned by her family to return to Kerala in order to marry.

By day, Pushpa works for reasons of necessity within the fabricated confines of a luxurious holiday resort in order to feed her family. In the evenings, she is often to be found working for reasons of choice in a Mother Teresa Missionary building for sick and destitute women. Only five kilometres separates these places, but they are worlds apart.

I met Pushpa at the gates of the sombre stone convent which is home to 70 abandoned women. She led me to a dark dormitory where those who were able to shuffled slowly forward to collect their evening meal. Others simply sat and stared. The traumas they have suffered have deprived them of the power of speech. Most of these women have been abandoned by their families and rescued from the streets. The suffering they endure makes no allowances for age. Many harbour disease and there are also those afflicted with mental health disorders. The suicide rate among women in Kerala is reported to be twice the national average. This is surprising in a state reputed where healthcare and literacy are supposedly so advanced. But the clash of progress with deeply-rooted cultural barriers is where part of the problem lies.

I met Mariamma, who first came to the convent 30 years ago. Then she was a young girl from a very poor farming family. She came to help in the kitchen and has remained ever since.

A small group of women gathered around me, some standing with arms outstretched, as if begging – probably all the life they’ve ever known. Others reached out to touch me. Pushpa then requested with some urgency that I go to wash myself. I felt ashamedly uneasy. Was it the realisation that I was exposed to the risk of disease, or more disturbingly, that I myself am guilty of possessing an element of the cruel denial which determines the destiny of these abandoned women in the first place?

There was relief at least in knowing that could be released from this darkness in which I ended my day. But for those women I left behind, there is little chance of such liberation.

These orphanages are keen to raise awareness of their cause and welcome visitors: Nirmala Shisu Bhavan, Missionaries of Charity, University Road, Trivandrum – 695034, Kerala, Southern India, telephone: 0091 471 2307434; Sri Chitra Home for Destitute & Infirm, Pazhavangadi, Trivandrum – 695023, Kerala, Southern India, telephone 0091 471 2472185 www.srichitrahome.com info@srichitrahome.com.

IT WAS a scene familiar from 1,000 televised election counts. Only the familiar, rotund figure of the late Vincent Hanna was missing. But this was the first time I had been personally involved.

We gathered for the results of the Craven District Council elections in the faintly baroque surroundings of Skipton Town Hall, crammed with trestle tables and middle-aged ladies laboriously licking their fingers and checking voting slips. The big black box for my village – naturally, on this day of days, number 13 – came up last.

I was surprised at the volume of paper that tumbled out. It seemed like the whole village, pop approximately 1,500, had voted. Appearances are deceptive. The turnout was 37.7 per cent, which was respectable and certainly not as low as some of the “urban” shows in Skipton, but lower than the high 40s elsewhere. In Grassington, Wharfedale, it topped 52 per cent, with no Boris Johnson in sight, although David Cameron’s man did get in.

My Tory rival, Ady Green (who drives around in a soft-top Mercedes with the number plate A1 DY), and I were allowed to sit at the counting table. He dressed down in open-neck and short sleeves. I thought it only right to wear the bright red knitted tie given to me by the recently-deceased former Labour Weekly man, John Rawlings, of Littondale. Some appearances should not be deceptive.

A council official, clearly enjoying his day of power, ordered us to keep our hands off the table. Did he think I had a secret stash of fake ballot papers in my coat pocket? This is Skipton, not Sligo. And where do you put your hands? In your pockets? Suspicious. On your knees? Looks a bit like prayer. And don’t talk to the Labour agent, party chair Duncan Hall, because it might put the ladies off their count. Indeed, it once did. My joke that Robert Mugabe had taken Barden Fell fell flat.

Just as I was thinking I would have been better off staying at home – the journey is an excruciating two-bus affair, taking well over an hour to do seven miles – the ballot papers were gathered up, wrapped in elastic bands and carted over to the returning officer. He switched on his mike (superfluous in the echoing confines of t’great hall) and announced the results as if this was the by-election that broke the Government. Still, every “I, the returning officer” has to have his day.

The outcome was mostly predictable. None of our five candidates – the largest number this century – won, but no one was utterly humiliated. Ted Saunders, the Giggleswick bookseller, picked up 178 in Settle and Ribblebanks, beating the bloody Tory into third place. Bob Holland, a former city councillor when he lived in Coventry, managed 177 in Aire Valley with Lothersdale.

Duncan Hall came a decent third in Skipton South, with 163 votes. I must say he took with great forbearance the embarrassing fact that one of his politics students, Sophie Gott, standing for the Tories, came in ahead of him with 222 votes. I imagine he will have to bear some ribbing in class over that. Christine Rose pulled in 113 votes in Skipton East. Unfortunately, this probably helped put in a Conservative, who gained the seat from the Liberal Democrats. But that’s politics. You can’t stand – or not stand – on the basis of what it might do for the Tories. You have to stand for what you believe in.

And how did I do? The Tory got in, by 470 votes to my 206. Nothing to be too ashamed of – at 30 per cent of the votes cast, rather better than Labour’s national average. It was the highest vote of all five of us, although, as was quickly pointed out, I had no Lib Dem to contend with. Not many of them, up ’ere. At least we flew the flag, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that more than 200 Cowineeaders (as the folk of Cowling are traditionally known) would support a Labour candidate at perhaps the lowest ebb in popularity of Gordon Brown’s Government. Maybe there are still grounds for hope.

So there you are. My first foray into local politics – and quite possibly my last. The bureaucracy surrounding this business is absurd. The guide to candidates is almost as thick as a Budget red book and the rigmarole allowing you to use Labour’s red rose is pointlessly officious. Filling out the nomination forms is worse than composing a raft of emails to people you don’t know: every dot and comma counts. Get one wrong and the whole shebang bounces back.

I don’t believe that democracy needs to be quite so complicated, especially at local level. There may be dangers from postal voting, but not half as subversive as the idiot red tape governing local democracy.

On May 1st, 2008 the Labour Government was given a stark and serious ultimatum – change or cease to exist.

The numbers by now are familiar: a Labour loss of 331 councillors, a Tory gain of 256, a 12-council gain for the Tories, a nine-council loss for Labour, the Cameron Conservatives now holding over three times as many councils as Brown’s Labour.

Without doubt the big news stories have been the resurgence of the Conservative Party and the worst results for Labour in over 40 years. Across the country, in places where the Tories should not be winning, they have made progress. There are also now 893 “other” councillors sitting in town halls across England and Wales. This sweeping term can encompass everyone from the BNP to local socialists, a particular breed being the “Independent”.

Looking to areas like Barnsley and Wakefield in the North, as well as in Wales,  Independents have made inroads in areas where people still cannot bring themselves to vote overwhelmingly for the Tories – in this, there is hope that Labour can still lure back its core voters but, for this hope to become anything more, there has to be change.

In this last week the term “change” has been the overarching theme. Change in direction, change in policy, change in style – some going as far as to say change in leadership but such broad solutions that read well in the media won’t fix the problem.

As my Compass colleagues have pointed out in the last few days – there must be change. The lapse of the Brown Government into a new form of Blairism did not satisfy the cries for change that echoed around the country. The change must be real: it must be change that people can see at work in their own communities.

To bring back our voters and appeal to other sections of the electorate that we might not traditionally call “ours”, we need to get back to why we all sought a Labour government in the first place. We need to narrow the gap between rich and poor, and address inequality where it exists.

There are practical policies that will instantly signal to our supporters we are serious. A progressive tax system is a start – a system that helps those on the lowest incomes while making sure those on the higher rungs pay their share, and a living wage to make sure those who go to work can support their families. If we need to fund these measures, we should be looking to the energy companies with their billions in profits per quarter, yet still squeezing people into fuel poverty. Or perhaps at the £76 billion of wasted money that will be channelled into renewing the Trident submarine system.

There is no option but to fix the tax credit system. It’s not headline-grabbing or an uncomplicated story, but there are people caught up in it who do need help. Our ignoring them has caused resentment and disillusionment – and rightfully so. Overpayments have left thousands in debt with no discernible way out – tax credits are not targeted at those who have a few thousand pounds tucked away for a rainy day.

We have to give people somewhere to live. The lack of affordable housing for rent is the work of the Tory Government which introduced “right to buy” without replenishing housing stock. But we can’t continue to blame the Tories for the lack of housing when we’ve had over a decade to sort it out. Every MP I know receives plenty of letters and phone calls each week from people desperate to move up the housing waiting list. There are some good proposals and promises of house-building programmes, but promises won’t convince people – they will believe it and the Labour Government when those houses are built in their neighbourhoods.

The government has to stop placing young people who want to carry on in education in thousands of pounds of debt. I get letters from parents and students alike who are worried about how much it costs to go to university. “Middle England” is concerned about the debt at the end of the line and working class young people are considering whether that debt is worth it in the first place. There has to be equality of opportunity, and this will not happen when how much money your family has is a consideration in any way at all.

Finally, the Government needs to bring public sector workers back into the tent. Rows over pay and constant reform and privatisation have seen the drift elsewhere of our formerly staunch supporters. Striking teachers won’t be inclined to stay with us on election day; neither are police officers who want a fair deal when it comes to their pay.

All in all, it’s not good, but all is not yet lost. If Gordon Brown is serious about listening to what people want – and not only listening, but acting – then we can move to a Labour fourth term. But a continuation of “new” Labour policies that put us in this position in the first place will not be tolerated by the electorate. And the party at all levels from branch right through to the NEC, the PLP and the Cabinet must insist that our leadership acts – our future depends on it.

This article is posted for debate at www.compassonline.org.uk

Chances are that if it had been a general election on 1 May, David Cameron would be Prime Minister,. with a working majority.

The Conservatives’ share of the vote was 44 per cent, their best level since 1992. Labour slipped to third place on just 24 per cent, worse than at any of the elections under Tony Blair’s leadership. (The party was steady on a 26 per cent share in 2004, 2006 and 2007.) Even allowing for the way that local elections always flatter the Conservatives because they benefit from the lower turnout, the LibDems always doing better in local elections than general elections, and even taking into account the advantage Labour currently derives from the vagaries of first-past-the-post, a lead of this scale would translate to a Tory General Election victory with plenty of room to spare.

As bleak a view for Labour is given by the roll-call of councils won and lost. Labour controls 9 fewer councils than it did before the elections, and made a net loss of more than 300 seats, which seems to have exceeded the leadership’s worst nightmares; the Tories gained around 250 councillors and 12 councils. The Conservative gains speak of advances in the marginal-rich urban North (Bury) and in some of Labour’s remaining footholds in the South (Southampton). Labour’s losses show a party in deep trouble - even in its own heartlands (Blaenau Gwent, Torfaen, Caerphilly, Merthyr Tydfil, Hartlepool).

The Liberal Democrats’ picture is more mixed. True, they pushed Labour into third place, but they made few net gains and their 25 per cent share is lower than the 27 per cent they were achieving at mid-term in the last Parliament. If at the next election the Tories rather than Lib Dems reap the benefit of Labour’s unpopularity, they risk being squeezed, especially in “naturally” Tory areas. But this is a very early stage in Nick Clegg’s leadership, and the jury is still out.

Boris Johnson’s defeat of Ken Livingstone in London made headlines round the world. Certainly London is the sole local election capable of gaining even national attention in its own right.

Johnson’s record as Mayor in the two years we must now assume remain until the next general election may have a significant impact on its result. He will be the highest profile Tory in office anywhere in Britain. His similarity of age and background to David Cameron make it inevitable that any success or failure will rub off on the public image of his leader. Johnson represents the Conservatives’ greatest opportunity to establish their credentials for governing, though at the same time, their greatest risk should he prove not up the job.

The importance to Johnson’s victory of the high turnout in Tory areas, with a bigger swing since 2004 than nationally, points towards the resurrection of an effective Conservative campaigning machine. The Tories, led by Lynton Crosby’s firm hand, got their vote out so effectively that Johnson had as many first preference votes in 2008 as his predecessor Steven Norris had mustered in the previous two elections combined. Labour, which now has barely half as many council seats as when Tony Blair became Prime Minister, is suffering from weakness at the grass roots which will count against the party at the general election.

Labour can no longer rely on voters doubting Tory credibility; it must put forward a positive case for re-election. In April’s Ipsos MORI Political Monitor poll, Gordon Brown recorded a lower personal satisfaction rating (23 per cent) than his government (26 per cent),  which has never previously happened, even to Margaret Thatcher. He still has two years, but he must turn things round, fast.

Roger Mortimore is Director of Political Analysis, Ipsos MORI

Labour chiefs have until the end of this month to plug a £4 million hole in the party’s finances and avert the possibility of a formal declaration of bankruptcy.

The financial crisis in the wake of the party’s drubbing at the local and London polls comes as Gordon Brown faces another humiliation with a possible defeat by the Tories in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election.

Auditors are due to sign off the party’s accounts soon after the end of May, but there are fears that they will refuse to do so and instead declare the party insolvent.

Arrangements have been made to account for most of the party’s £21 million debt, through negotiations with the Co-op Bank and rescheduling deals done with the donors of the controversial loans which led to the “cash-for-honours” affair.

But officers have identified a gap in the balance sheet of around £4 million which must be closed in order to satisfy the auditors, either by cash in the bank or certifiable promissory notes.

The size of Labour’s financial problems, and the possibility of incurring personal liability, are reported to be the reasons for City financier David Pitt-Watson refusing to take up the post of general secretary.

The announcement was held back until after the May 1 elections, though party chair Dianne Hayter led officers and national executive members to believe that Mr Pitt-Watson’s commencement was merely delayed because of difficulties in extracting himself from his present post.

It cost the party £50,000 in consultancy and advertising fees for the general secretary’s job-that-never-was. New adverts are to be restricted to the internet to save money.

Mr Brown had been determined to find a City figure with the experience and connections to help get the party swiftly out of its financial difficulties. Unable to persuade his first choice, London businessman Paul Myners, to take the role of general secretary – a post which has overall legal responsibility for finances – he then “went ballistic” when confronted with Mr Pitt-Watson’s decision several weeks ago.

Informal discussions have been taking place on the possibility of turning the Labour Party into a private limited company to protect officers and national executive members from individual liability if the party is declared insolvent.

As well as the short-term difficulties, there are long-term worries about financing the party in the run-up to the next election, when it can expect big donations for the campaign.

One Labour head office worker who has seen the books said: “Whether we sort out the immediate problem or not, we are still going to have to rely on millions of donations. The money is just not coming in.”

UNITE workers at the Grangemouth oil refinery in Scotland – who staged a dramatic 48-hour strike last month – are quietly confident that the walkout has achieved its aims. A peace deal appears to be on the cards after Jim Ratcliffe, the reclusive billionaire at the centre of the crisis, shelved his controversial plan to axe the workers’ pension scheme.

Sources say Mr Ratcliffe, 55, who is nicknamed Dr No because of his previous reputation for refusing to accede to union demands, has agreed to withdraw a letter to the plant’s 1,200 employees which triggered the dispute. The letter announced that, from August, new employees would not enjoy the same pension rights as existing employees.

A union source told Tribune: “It seems that Dr No has finally said ‘Yes’, so we have shelved our plans for further strikes. Our members have shown absolute solidarity on this one and, if he tries to bring it back in by the back door, then we will take industrial action again.”

It is a remarkable victory, not just for Unite which worked extremely hard on behalf of its members at Grangemouth, but for the whole trade union movement. In the last ten years many companies – especially those taken over by asset-stripping private equity firms – have closed their final salary pension schemes and, sometimes, plundered cash from the reserves, too. Union leaders hope victory at Grangemouth will help turn back the tide of those firms who want to put the squeeze on their workers.

The strike – which disrupted fuel supplies and halted much of the UK’s North Sea oil production – was the first at a refinery for 73 years. A ballot showed 97 per cent in favour of industrial action to stop the private chemical company Ineos closing its final salary pension scheme to newcomers and introducing financial penalties for early retirement.

Unite said: “Members at the Grangemouth refinery were forced by their employer to take strike action to defend their pension scheme. They deeply regret any inconvenience their action caused to the people of Scotland, but Ineos left them with no choice.

“The company wanted to close its pension scheme to new employees and reduce the value of the pension for current staff. Their pension scheme has always been an important part of their wages and the changes Ineos wanted to make would have had a serious effect on them and their families in future years.

“Ineos is a hugely profitable company – £300 million in profit last year – and their pension scheme is well funded and affordable. If their pension isn’t safe, then no pension is safe.”

An Ineos spokesman said: “Both sides are hoping for a positive resolution.”