Saturday, 2 October 2021

Organise.

          I sometimes wonder if the general public in the UK are fully aware of the tsunami that is thundering towards them. There is the energy price increase which will kill hundreds of elderly and infirm, their is the cut to universal credit, which will plunge thousands more into poverty, then there is the increase in National Insurance payments that will cut the wages of the poorest the hardest. On top of that, those in need of special care are being hit by a care system that is in dire crisis. All this while the bank accounts of millionaires and billionaires grow ever fatter and fatter. Of course it is not all being taken lying down, Stagecoach bus drivers are taking strike action over pay, care workers who have struggled to do their job under the most adverse conditions, under staffed and under paid, have decided to march to the Tory Party conference in Manchester to vent their anger.

    Before the national insurance and energy price hikes and before the slash at the universal credit, in the year 2019/20 11.7 million people, 18% of the population in the UK were in the "relative low income" category.

        Some facts and figures on Poverty in this country, one of the richest countries in the world:

The facts and figures show the reality of child poverty in the UK.

  • There were 4.3 million children living in poverty in the UK in 2019-20.1 That's 31 per cent of children, or nine in a classroom of 30.2
  • 49 per cent of children living in lone-parent families are in poverty.3 Lone parents face a higher risk of poverty due to the lack of an additional earner, low rates of maintenance payments, gender inequality in employment and pay, and childcare costs. 
  • Children from black and minority ethnic groups are more likely to be in poverty: 46 per cent are now in poverty, compared with 26 per cent of children in White British families.4
  • Work does not provide a guaranteed route out of poverty in the UK. 75 per cent of children growing up in poverty live in a household where at least one person works.5
  • Children in large families are at a far greater risk of living in poverty – 47 per cent of children living in families with 3 or more children live in poverty.6 
 
         These figures are all before the present tsunami of energy price increase, and cuts, not to mention the pandemic, hits the public at large. No working class family will escape these hammer blows to their standard of living, what can we do about it? We can take a leaf out of the Stagecoach bus drivers and organise strike action, we can organise in solidarity with the care workers and take our righteous anger on to the streets. We can organise in our communities and work places to take control and shape society the way we want it, a society that sees to the needs of all our people. We don't need the millionaire/billionaire parasites and their bedfellows, prancing political ballerinas, that army of pampered privileged parasites that hold the reins of power over our lives, all to their own advantage. We don't need them, they need us, dump them, we can make a better world without them.
 
 WE THE LABOURING MASSES.

We the people have, every brick laid,
have fed the world with sweat and spade,
every instrument played in every band
created by the skill of the craftsman's hand.
We made every truck and every load,
our toil our effort every winding road,
every ship that ever sailed the sea,
our power our imagination made it be.
Cities and towns large and small,
our labouring hands fashioned them all,
every home, every spire,
luxury mansion or humble byre.
No matter what dreams the mind might spawn
without labour's hand, never see the light of dawn,
without labour's strength and labour's skill,
we would be foraging beasts in a jungle still.
Visit ann arky's home at https://spiritofrevolt.info  

No comments:

Post a Comment