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.
