Tuesday 6 November 2018

The End Of Austerity!!

 
        As usual our political ballerinas are prancing around with their opposing views. On the one side, the opposition spouts gloom and doom, while the group with their hands on the controls, waffle on about "austerity is over", and everything is wonderful and will only get better if you leave them in control. Then through the portal into the real world and we find the truth. The use of food banks in UK has risen by 13% this year, people are still being callously sanctioned for trivial and unjust reasons, and losing their benefits for varying periods from one week to one year, pushing them into deprivation and desperation. This winter it is forecast that their will be an increase in deaths from fuel poverty. Which translates into people sitting in their home during the UK winter with no or too little heating and in some cases dying a slow death.
      What kind of society takes the only means of survival away from poor and vulnerable individuals and families, by deliberate means of "sanctions". What is the outcome for a young family when their income is stopped, in a society where money is your means of survival? This is callous vicious vindictiveness based on an ideology that the poor must be intimidate to obey and be submissive, or at worst, a cull of the poor. 
      How can we claim to be a developed rich modern country when there is an ever increasing number of our people, to survive, are having to seek food from charities?
      While the UK spent. 2016/17, £35.3 billion on defence, the world's 5th largest defence budget, the same government is quite prepared to see an increasing number of its elderly people suffer strokes, heart attacks, pneumonia and death, simply because they don't have enough money to heat their homes.
     This is the real picture of the "end of austerity" a country that has seen, during the ten years of "austerity", the richest section of our community double its wealth, while the rest of us have seen our standard of living rapidly decrease, and we continue to slide down that slippery slope to ever greater deprivation. All of these factors can be reasonably named engineered poverty.
       This is the best that capitalism can deliver, is this the way we want to live, is this the world we wish for our children? The answer is not to look to the very wealth political ballerinas to come to our rescue, they wont. Their corporate buddies need us as a large pool of submissive cheap labour, it helps their profits. The answer as always, is in our own hands, to take control of our own lives, our communities and workplaces, and shape them to the needs of all our people. Don't expect the rich and powerful to come riding on a white charger to sort out your problems, that's up to us, and only the people can and will solve the problems of the ordinary people.  
Visit ann arky's home at radicalglasgow.me.uk

1 comment:

  1. "...purchasing power parity poorest people
    in the United Kingdom in the year 2000
    are poorer than any other nation in 2010
    some of the poorest 10% of the
    population have an income on the scale
    which the OECD create and I should
    explain this a little better to you the
    OECD study creates a scale and
    inequality scale in the year 2000 in the
    United Kingdom the poorest 10% of the
    population had an income which which
    gave them 60 points on the OECD scale
    the top 10% of the population of the
    United Kingdom in the year 2000 had an
    annual income at 845 points on the same
    scale 60 at the bottom 845 at the top
    Germany is the country in the study
    which comes closest to the United
    Kingdom at the bottom end of the scale
    poorest people in Germany are at around
    60 points in the scale as well but the
    richest 10% of the German population
    have a score at the other end of the
    scale lot of 845 but just above 300 and
    that's the closest of any country in the
    whole survey including the United States
    so that's in the year 2000 15 years
    later and uniquely in the survey poorest
    people in the United Kingdom are poorer
    than they were in the year 2000 and
    there is no other country in the survey
    at all where 15 years later
    people have fallen further back than
    they were 10 years earlier at the top of
    the scale in the United Kingdom the
    richest people have moved from 845
    points on the scale now to 1150 they
    have broken through the 1000 barrier in
    Germany the most well-off have got
    richer - they've now moved from just
    above 300 to just below 400 so the gap
    between the United Kingdom and any other
    country in Europe which starts with
    differences in equality in inequality
    which are absolutely striking at the
    start of the period that gap has grown
    even further in the 15-year period and
    that's what I mean I think by suggesting
    to you that while in the European
    mainstream the gap between the top and
    the bottom in any country is relatively
    narrow and even under the conditions of
    austerity grows to a modest extent the
    United Kingdom begins as the most
    unequal country in the European Union
    and that accelerates away accelerates
    away even faster during the austerity
    years and the figures as you will know
    I'm sure are not in any way one-off for
    the product of some strange
    methodological quirk earlier this year
    research for the Center for you for
    European reform the Centre for European
    reform told the same story at a regional
    level the United Kingdom has nine of the
    ten poorest regions in northern Europe
    there is one part of Belgium that is on
    that list all nine others are regions of
    the United Kingdom and within the United
    Kingdom the gap between the richest and
    poorest regions is wider than in any
    the European Union country and that gap
    the center concludes has widened and not
    narrowed during the age of austerity but
    simply it seems to me that by the end of
    the period the United Kingdom no longer
    looks like a European country the
    mechanisms of social solidarity which
    are the project of government action
    have been abandoned here to an extent
    unparalleled elsewhere with the gross
    disparities exposed in the figures I
    just set out and nor of course in our
    country is this dismal journey over..."

    https://youtu.be/A-CTUQiZm4Y

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