It is the
festive season and the ordinary people of the UK are facing an
“austerity” Christmas. The slashing and cutting of social
services, benefits, wages, pensions, on top of rising unemployment,
being implemented by our millionaire public school thugs, with their
mantra, “we can't afford them” sounds rather hollow when we look
at what is being squandered on death and destruction. The money
poured into Iraq and Afghanistan is well passed the £20 billion
mark. To put this figure in perspective we can take Ken Livingstone's
statement, "The true cost of our policy of international
adventures is now being shown - £20bn is 10 times the amount it
would cost to scrap student fees in England, for example.".
So would you rather have ten years of free education for your kids or
ten years of bombing, killing and destroying some foreign country?
When this figure was released, Lindsey German, convener of “Stop
the War Coalition” said, "People will be astonished that
the government had the cheek to call for public spending cuts when
such an obscene amount has been spent in Iraq and Afghanistan."
This figure of over £20 billion, believe it or not, does not include
the wages of the troops, (10,000 in Afghanistan at the moment) nor the cost of treating those injured in
these unacceptable brutalities. Bob Crow's statement also helps to
let us grasp the reality of this situation, “The money that's
been drained away on illegal war-mongering is only outstripped by the
cash ripped off in the bankers bail-out," This
figure still does not have Cameron's little ego trip, the Libyan
disaster, added, another vast expenditure on death and destruction. We still have to count in such things as the UK's illegal weapon of mass destruction "Trident".
Don't you know,the arms industry creates jobs??
When governments talk about can't
afford, it is a matter of choices. They have in their coffers a vast
pot of gold, they decide where to spend that gold. It so happens this
mob choose to spend unbelievable sums on bank bailouts, followed by
foreign policy adventures of death and destruction and nuclear weapons. They could choose
to spend it on improving social services, education, health and
welfare of the people and pensions. They choose not to. However they
still claim that this is a democracy, it is a strange democracy when
the wealth of a country is drained away in destructive and financial
policies that not one member of the public voted for, and then we the
public, are told we will have to suffer “austerity cuts” to all
the fabric of our society. At the same time all those who made those
decisions will in no way be implemented in the suffering from the
“austerity cuts” nor the death and destruction from their
foreign policy. In fact, they belong to the same club that they
helped to bail-out, the only group that will benefit from their
choices. If you think that is democracy, you are delusional, it's
called corporate fascism.
