There is an ongoing debate in the UK just now about public sector pay. This has been either frozen in some sectors for the past seven years, or capped at one percent, but mostly a mixture of both. The result has been that all public sector workers have witnessed a significant drop in their incomes. Coupled with that has been the quite deliberate reduction in public sector workers as I noted in other posts. Thus, the effect is that we have less people working for significantly less pay. This has been brought to a head by the Grenfell Tower tragedy that has focused the nation's attention on the continuous pigsty policy of austerity. This policy has now been duly exposed for the inherent class warfare that the Kommirat has been telling you it is for many years, and it has got the Tories deeply worried. However, despite mounting pressure they are still publicly telling us they are committed to the austerity programme because in the Blessed Margaret's famous words, there is no alternative.
This however has nothing to do with sound economics, sound public finances, rational decision-making or any of the other shibboleths and class based excuses and justifications we are constantly bombarded with by the residents of the pigsty. It is ideological, pure and simple. Austerity is a smokescreen, an excuse to cover the transfer of wealth from the bottom upwards and to force working people to pay for the enrichment of the elite and for their criminality in causing the financial crash and its aftermath. As all of you must know, whilst working people and the poor all over the world are suffering an ever decreasing standard of living and actual poverty, the wealthy have never ceased increasing their wealth. However, free market political economy, thanks to never ceasing propaganda and the constant demonization of all those who oppose it or seek to offer alternatives, has established such a hegemony on national consciousness, there has never been a challenge or even a consideration of alternatives, except from oddballs and loonies like Doktor Kommirat, until now. Tragedies such as Grenfell Tower and recent terrorist atrocities, have exposed the results of austerity on our emergency services highlighting financial and personnel crises in all of them, leaving them increasingly unable to cope with genuine emergencies. Coupled with the results of political free market ideology that has exposed elected politicians and their respective civil service personnel at both national and local level as indifferent to and indeed hostile to, the plight of the poor and working class, a genuine backlash against the dominant order is growing in size and intensity. There is now an increasing clamour for an alternative.
It is frankly unintelligent to suggest that there is only one model of economic activity that will underpin a successful society. It is downright insanity to continue with a model that has demonstrably failed. There are absolutely no grounds for arguing that taxation cannot be varied to raise more revenue from the most wealthy in society, it has been done before, and it worked. It may not have worked in a way that you approve of, but it worked in a way that I approve of. Similarly there is no argument for maintaining artificially low taxation on business. It all comes back to my arguments on justice. No one who understands the consequences of equality will genuinely argue for it. What people desire is equity, for fairness, as opposed to everyone being treated the same. Marx's famous dictum 'from each according to their ability to each according to their needs' is clearly not a doctrine of equality, regardless of how much the right seek to propagandise it as such. It is a doctrine of equity. No-one person needs a billion pounds or dollars, no corporation needs profit margins in double figures. As Alfred Marshall wrote in 1890, we can afford to have a temporary lowering of living standards amongst the top half of the population in order that the bottom half be taken out of poverty and want. Marshall was the founder of modern neoclassical economics, professor of economics at Cambridge, he was most certainly no Marxist, although he would be labelled that by the uneducated cretins that Cambridge produces today. There are alternatives and we must embrace them. I will give you some if you want. You have been warned.
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
No comments:
Post a Comment