There should be an outpouring of anger within the Labour Party and trade union movement at next month's TUC and Labour Party conference and within our wider society at the headlines in our papers this week.
It was revealed today that city bonuses have hit a record £14 billion, an increase of 30%. Most will go to a small number of City speculators, with one group of hedge fund managers receiving £200 million to £250 million each. To ensure that the super rich can maximise their incomes Gordon Brown cut corporation tax in his last budget and still refuses to tackle tax avoidance by the so-called non domiciles.
Under Brown's tax regime the Tax Justice Campaign estimates that every year between £90 billion and £150 billion is not collected as a result of tax avoidance and new figures published today report that nearly one third of companies are not paying any corporation tax at all.
Is it any wonder that under the financial management of our economy by Gordon Brown inequality has increased and social mobility has ground to a halt?
Whilst in London the financial speculators are able to pursue a life style of obscene conspicuous spending, working class young men and women continue to lose their lives and shed their blood in a Vietnam style retreat on the roads of Iraq simply to save the faces of the politicians and generals who placed them in this danger.
I was asked the other day why I was so angry at the political situation when we were experiencing such a Brown bounce in the polls. Angry, yes, I am angry. Angry at every death in Iraq and Afghanistan. Angry at the super rich getting richer when we still have 100,000 of our families homeless, when 3 million of our children and 2 million of our pensioners still live in poverty and furious that the Government denies treatment costing £2.50 a day to Alzheimers sufferers when we learn that city bonuses have meant that there is a 5 year waiting list for Rolls Royces and the super rich are experiencing the trauma of not being able to recruit sufficient crew for their yachts.
It is about time more of us got angry.
9 Comments:
Yes John, Obscene amounts of money and far more than a person could spend in a lifetime.
The fact they accept these sort of sums when they so clearly have a choice tell us that these persons do not deserve to be part of our wider society.
The government sit idly by failing large sections of our society such as the Altzhiemers sufferers as you have pointed out and do not seem to give a damn. All we get is more of the same spin spin and more spin.
Despite your comments about Iraq and what Brown has said today I would wager the pull out has started albeit on a small scale and clearly not fast enough to please the majority of the people in this country and significantly those in our armed forces.
Iraq has been a failure and the slow but sure pull out has been designed to disguise this abject failure.
Our pull back from Basra in the last few days and handing over control to extremests only shows what a sad waste of life (both Iraqi and British) this whole escapade has been.
I have now doubt that in time History will record that both Bush and Blair acted out of self and unknown (except to them) interests and that they will be labelled war criminals.
On another point John, I followed with interest your comments re the Climate Camp and the small demonstration by yourself, some local councillors and the good people of Hayes and Harlington against the third runway proposals at Heathrow.
I viewed some pictures taken on the day on hillingdon.com by a participant and was horrified to see how the police had responded to your demonstration with officers in full riot gear, batons and horses.
It reminded me of 20+ years ago when our mining communities were destroyed by Thatchers policy and the Coal Board. At that time the police overstepped thier remit and were used as a private army to enforce the Govt Policy.
I trust you will ask questions of the Home Office and the relevent chief constable on how they intend to police future demonstrations as we can be sure there will be many and that the Government will be keen to procede with airport expansion.
Gordon Brown is a disgrace to the Labour movement. It's about time that people who praise his handling of the economy stop to look, and realise that his 'economic success' is built on a contempt for the needs of the worst off in our society, the constant sale of public services, and the appeasement of the rich and super-rich. Maybe some of the 'left-wing' MPs who nominated him for the leadership should also stop and examine their consciences.
What is clear, and has been for the past 10 years, is that Brown has made his choice to represent the wealthy and the powerful in society at the expense of the poor and needy. It is an either/or decision. He can either represent those that need help, or those that have everything they could possibly dream of, and more. Brown has chosen to represent the latter.
John, to the best of your knowledge, will there be a motion submitted at Labour Party Conference demanding immediate change to the present situation? Also, as a new member who joint because of your campaign, what can we as party members do to fight Brown on this? This is a disgusting abuse of power, and a betrayal of the very Labour values Brown is so conscious to always state he holds so dear, and it cannot be allowed to continue.
Incidentally, has anyone here read George Lansbury's book 'My England'? I'm reading it at the moment, and it's shocking that the description he gives of British society in 1934 (when he wrote it) is so applicable today. I don't think George lansbury would have thought that after 10 years of Labour government, society would be so similar to the broken capitalist society of the 1930s which he describes so well.
Exactly right! The fact that all the 'perks' gravitate to the super right is nothing short of a disgrace. You're also right that people should get angry, very angry indeed! People just don't realise the power they actually have if they all mobilise as one - a lot of people are sympathetic but never do anything as people just live their everyday lives - it's these people we need to motivate.
As for Iraq and Afghanistan, well, i remember Tony Benn saying 'we have to choose do we build or do we destroy' and 'if we can find money to kill people we can find money to help people'...we could have helped more people by transporting the thousands of members of the armed forces and the hardware such as helicopters to the recent floods in India or the hurricane in the Carribbean (if they were wanted) if we really wanted to be a force for good in the world.
As for the 'Brown bounce' and people who say that members of the Labour Party should be happy that Labour are ahead in the polls - regardless of policy - well, they are shameful - it's not win at all costs, it's win with policies that will help the majority of people and create a fairer and more equal society. They people who advocate that view are the ones who would jump on the bandwagon when things look good, but would be quick to switch to a 'winning side' in the future.
JC
Correct. The people in charge at the moment are nothing but controlling bullies.
A lot of my fellow young people are angry, I hope Brown faces opposition as a result of this.
Keep fighting!
as I'm sure I've said before on this blog the New Labourites who run the party and government today don't like people being angry whether over the damage being done to for example NHS patients i.e. most people in the country due to their awful policies or on a more mundane level people who (politely) show frustration when their adminstration or conference procedures are found to be quite simply wrong and thus many people don't get to express their democratic rights or contribute to important policy debates etc. You feel you need to be sickly sweet with them all the time and never to express any form of disagreement the latter which goes against everything the Labour party has ever stood for as if you can't disagree within the party where can you???
A seminal moment for me with New Labour came back in 97 when I had only just started being active and was helping out with the Uxbridge by-election. You may remember that a non-local candidate favoured by New Labour in this early and crucial by-election just a few months after their historic landslide was foisted on the local party which was at that time my CLP against their wishes and the local candidate brushed aside. They went on to LOSE the election; (the Tory opposition was stiff as the incumbent MP had died and their was a strong local successor ready to step into his shoes which he, now John Randall MP, duly did after Labour's failure). I remember sitting with some party officials during the campaign and expressing my view that the local candidate would perhaps have been better as even as a relative newcomer to the area (though I had studied elections many a time when I was a student of politics) I could see that he would have been but having to lapse into dutiful silence as I could sense that to even mention this alternative view was total heresy yet I judged that it should be ok coming from someone who was relatively newly moved in to work in the surrounding area so I could claim not to understand everything about the local area if they wanted to dispute it (though I would have stuck to my guns if challenged of course!) but what got me was that they wouldn't even discuss it. I smelt a rat then as I thought at least amongst party activists only with no members of the public presnt you could risk deviating from the official line but the control freakery was such under the heady days of New Labour spin that I had obviously been too ambitious. To return to the topic of being angry we need to get across that we are " not satisfied" with New Labour's running of our country and that things could and should be much better than they are. The absence of (controlled!) anger is in fact a dangerous thing policy wise; it's so obvious that the Brownites are running on comlacency and the stiff upper lip tendency of not wanting to make a fuss we have in this country - while our hospitals, Post Offices and trains etc etc crumble, people are treated abysmally and our troops continue to die for pointless oil wars while (as The Mirror reports today in a truly shocking and upsetting double page spread) third world workers are making cut price clothes for our shops and being paid less than 5p a day for it. If that's what it takes to achieve growth they can keep it quite frankly.
We don't want to use the tired old "things can only get better" mantras but the fact is that things should not have to be as bad as they are and we should be offended that they are under this adminstartion where for example the gap between rich and poor is now as great as just after the second world war if I have got the statistic right and increasing rather than decreasing.
We can do better than this and we should be angry (without causing a riot or anything as that would detract from the issue!)that this has and is being allowed to happen right here right now as they say.
But there are things we can do about it such as supporting this campaign of course but also I remember being inspired by one of the episodes of the great civil rights tv series "Eyes on the prize" where during the days if segregation a black vicar got his black congragation to buy thier vegetables etc from each other rather than from white people to force white people to stop segregation by applying economic pressure while they continued to keep up the politcal pressure. That's why I'll always buy organic, fairtrade and ethical where I can and you can see how the big supermarkets etc have bowed to this sort of pressurte and are starting to go this way though there's a long way to go till they stop the sweatshops etc as well although there are many smaller ethical companies. I notice on an organic item I had to buy from ASDA (hate it as it's Wal-Mart and totally unethical - but I couldn't get to another supermarket that day so I did an organic shop there) said it was "food with a conscience" good but what about the other cheaply produced pesticide polluting and worker exploiting food they still sell?? We have such a long way to go to make the wider public embrace socialist policy once again but we can't give up now just as I can't go back to buying cheap, unethically produced food once I found out about it and how we've all been seduced by the cheap food policy that came with industrial farming. Before that the average family cost of food was about a third of their income along with a third for housing and a third for everything else. Now people only expect to pay ten per cent of their income for food and of course they are paying so much for housing so you can see how our priorties have changed in the wrong direction - it was recently reported that current state pension levels are not enough to buy proper healthy food with which for the fourth richest country in the world is just shaming. That fact makes me angry and so it should do and it's why the conservative and New Labour's neo-con policy of reducing everything to the lowest common denominator, the cheapest bidder will never work. Shame on them. There was also the recent report on the terreible state of hospital kitchens no doubt since they've all been contracted out to exploitative and profit greedy catering firms as has been much reported and this of course disproportionately affects old people too and many are alos sadly abused within privatised care homes which is another nationalo scandal that there are several campaigns against. There are of course many other examples I could give but I'll stop for tonight as I'm sure you can all think of many more! (And before spontaneously combusting with anger!!..) - no seriously anger is healthy if appropriately channelled and complacency or refusal to act is of course usually the deadliest enemy of all.
I will watch the troop withdrawal situation from Basra with interest (I've just heard as I've been camping and had little news for a few days). We only have 5000 odd troops left in Iraq now so have converged from the American surge though it will be interesting to see how the Brownites spin it. BBC News 24 just suggested that we are leaving the Iraqis to a local force infiltrated with many insurgents etc and suggested that the security situaion will ne so bad that we should perhaps have stayed alongside the Americans to finish the job. I wonder if that is the official line they are being fed?? - they often do reprt very conservatively.
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