The UK, fifth largest economy in the world, it is awash with wealth, it carries on the back of its people the imperial edifice of a pomp swamp of monarchy and all the aristocratic parasites associated with such a menagerie. Wealth flows freely, but only in certain quarters.
Since the 2008 "crash" the UK, like lots of capitalist countries, embarked on a policy of "austerity". This was the acceptable euphemism for the scheme to allow the rich financial Mafia to regain their massive gambling loses, by plundering the public purse. Eleven years on and we are told, "austerity is over" but where do we stand?
Well has "austerity" worked? You bet it has, with UK's billionaires having seen their net worth rise by 112% from £258billion to £547 billion since 2009. The previous 12 months saw the biggest jump in the UK super rich in six years, the City of London now boasts 80 billionaires up from 72 last year, more than any other city in the world.
Well while this "austerity" plan has worked for the super rich, how do we at the other end of this master plan fare?
Well it is not quite the same story, we the people got clobbered. We have suffered an ever decreasing standard of living, child poverty is increasing, workers in poverty has been increasing. What has been plunder from our social services has fed the super rich as they prance around the world in their private jets and super yachts.
Joseph Rowntree Foundation research reveals that in the UK child poverty has been rising since 2011/12. with 4.1 million children in the UK living in poverty, a rise of 500,000 in the last five years. 4 million of those in work are living in poverty, a rise of more than half a million over five years. In work poverty has been rising faster than employment, driven almost entirely by increasing poverty among working parents. Two sides of the capitalist coin.
These appalling figures among the ordinary people of this country are not just statistics, they are lives. Lives stunted in health and well-being, the potential of our children destroyed, an increase in stress among families, the breaking up of families, people pushed to homelessness, hard working people put under strain to the detriment of their emotional and physical health. All this, not as an unavoidable set of circumstances, but by the deliberate policies of the chosen few who play the corrupt game to the advantage of their rich cronies. It is called capitalism, and any attempt at trying to turn this exploitative, profit driven system into something with a shred of humanity is doomed to failure, it is not in the nature of the beast. It has to be totally dismantled and replaced with a system of justice, fairness, co-operation and sustainability that sees to the needs of all our people, in a word, anarchism.
