The method in the madness

George Osborne needed to plug a gaping hole in the balance sheet created by his discredited austerity policies and massive public-sector job cuts that are pummelling the spending power of the vast majority. He used the firesale of Britain's 4G spectrum to do it.

An estimated one-off windfall of £4.1 billion - with an official "reserve price" of £1.36bn - from flogging off high-speed mobile broadband frequencies handily papered over the deepening cracks of his abject fiscal failure.

In another glaring indication of the role of the docile sheep within the Establishment media not a peep is to be heard about the financial wisdom of the latest set of national silver being handed over for at least 20 years in return for a quick fix of spare corporate cash.

Among the seven wolves panting eagerly for this prime cut are Everything Everywhere, which reported pre-tax profits of £1.416bn last year, Hutchison 3G, whose Hong Kong parent made £4.44bn, notorious tax-dodger Vodafone, profits £11.187bn, Telefonica UK, whose Spanish parent racked up £8.19bn despite the ravages delivered on Spanish people, and our once publicly owned BT Group, profits £2.919bn.

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These firms exist well beyond the realms of suffering and privation heaped on ordinary people by their ideological chums in Westminster.

And their political representatives are now poised via toothless regulator Ofcom, whose "principal duty" is supposedly "to further the interests of citizens, and the interests of consumers where appropriate by promoting competition," to hand over another slice of our common wealth never to be returned.

At least not without the mother of all struggles.

This bargain giveaway of 4G frequencies in the air around us is the latest indication of the determination by our wealthy elite to grab from us every profitable communally owned resource in order to hire it back at a filthy profit.

It's up there with the theft of our water, energy and land in the long list of economic crimes carried out by the greedy few.

Even if the existence of phoney competition were tolerated there is no reason to privatise the airwaves around us.

They could be leased out, but retained by the state in the public interest.

But there's no valid reason why we shouldn't go further, and boot the profiteers out of the sector altogether.

This is our common wealth - and it is time to take it back.

Mean spirited

The capitalist classes must have watched Oliver Twist and thought it was a corporate training video.

While the Con-Dems are doing their best to return us to the era any way they can, vindictive bosses at low-paying retailer Argos have punished their workers for saying "Please, sir can we have some more?" by stripping them of two bottles of wine usually handed out as a Christmas bonus.

"Scrooge bosses" is a phrase banded about freely at this time of year, but in the Morning Star's book these Dickensian disgraces are prime contenders for the title of Scrooge of Scrooges.

Shame on them.