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.
"...purchasing power parity poorest people
ReplyDeletein 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