I watched a programme recently about what people considered was the nation's favourite Beatles record. The winner was All You Need Is Love. I was a fan of the Beatles, not a massive fan but I liked them and more importantly I admired them. I admired their passion, their energy and their role as pioneers. However, from my perspective, All You Need Is Love was one of their weaker recordings. I have always thought that Help, Hello Goodbye and Paperback Writer were far more innovative and exciting. I always thought Lady Madonna was a quite brilliant record, and I remember She Loves You which I thought was historical as it ushered in a new era of popular culture and changed music in a similar way to Rock Around The Clock and Elvis. But I suppose that in the end it is all a matter of taste.
However, on one important matter I will take issue with the Beatles and argue that all you need is love is quite wrong. Of course the Beatles did not mean that to be taken literally and my argument is not with them, but with those in our society that do tend to take such things literally and use them as a scapegoat to mask far greater problems. Only someone who is financially comfortable would actually try and argue that all you need is love. For people in poverty love will rarely substitute for a life filled with the stress of day-to-day striving to make ends meet. Life without money is both mind-warping and ugly and will destroy a relationship faster than almost any other factor as it poses stress, tensions, ill-health and arguments and challenges love to the maximum. Poverty destroys individuals, couples, families and communities. It challenges all traditional values. Poverty, and particularly food poverty, has serious consequences for a person's health, both physical and mental. For people reading this from outside the UK I wonder if you are aware that in the UK, the sixth wealthiest nation on the planet, over 13million people live below the poverty line, that in 2014-15 foodbanks fed over 1,100,000 people, 400,000 of whom were children. This is all the direct result of an addiction to free market economics. The US have long been accustomed to their people relying on foodbanks, but Americans are quite indifferent to their neighbour's suffering believing that it is all their own fault. If the Good Samaritan had been an American he would have been denounced for being a commie bastard and that neoliberal poison has now deeply infected the British as well. However, in Britain and the US all that is absolutely unnecessary and there is neither excuse nor reason for this state of affairs, it is a choice.
I am not arguing that people in the UK or the US have rights that other people in the rest of the world do not have, what I am arguing is that in these countries there is absolutely no need imaginable for anyone to go hungry other than the fact that the elite in both Britain and America genuinely believe that anyone who is starving deserves all they get. I continually listen to David Cameron, Tony Blair, George Bush and the rest of their ilk telling me that they are Christians and they wonder why people like me detest religion. If any of these people are Christian then I am the Pope. In the Britain I grew up in no-one suffered from malnutrition except in exceptional circumstances. Today it is becoming quite normal, and is the direct result of quite deliberate policies of a Tory government. Britain is continually being told that we must tighten our belts, there is no extra money available for the NHS, for social security, for education and the police and fire services. This month has seen a ballot with a 98% majority of doctors voting in favour of industrial action, but the government is desperately trying to win a vote in Parliament sanctioning another war. There is no shortage of money for that, for bombs for nuclear weapons etc. The Tories are working on the policy of allowing their own people to die of hunger and poverty, of illness because they won't properly fund the health services, in order to fund killing people in other countries. As the movie said, Death Becomes Them. This is modern neoliberal Christian Britain, and it is what the British voted for because they were well warned by this government what it would do if elected. It would make you sick with shame, but free marketeers and Christians have no shame, they are continually bolstered by their own self-righteousness. This is moral and ethical bankruptcy on a national scale. You have been warned.
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
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