There are times when it is right for people to be angry and to express warranted anger in collective action. Even as Parisians take to the streets of Paris to protest Macron’s attempts to further penalise them, the citizens of Britain remain within their home, quiescent if not emotionally or terminally acquiescent. In this unapologetically angry blog I note a handful of empirically supported observations about what I have called our ‘fractured society’ in 21st century Britain. I then ask why we are not taking the fight direct to the worst government we have seen in my lifetime, and arguably for a good deal longer.
The current state of play – dating back to the disaster that was Thatcher to its post-2010 accelerating awfulness – might be summarized as follows:
- Significant and increasing wealth inequality, with no attempt to reign in the greed of the super-rich by a wealth tax, tackling abuse through non-dom status or the use of tax havens.
- Openly encouraging super-rich and rich donors to buy policies from government that favour capital accumulation over meeting population needs.
- The discovery of ‘magic money trees’ to rescue private banks in 2008-9 while denying their existence when it came to helping people struggling to get by.
- Executive abuse of parliament to circumvent scrutiny or accountability, with the passive connivance of the inept ‘Speaker of the House of Commons’.
- Undemocratic musical chairs leading to a succession of inadequate Tory Prime Ministers, culminating of late in a serial liar and narcissistic chancer (Johnson), a vacuous poser (Truss) and a multimillionaire banker determined to ‘look after his own’ (Sunak).
- A disastrous mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, aided and abetted by tame Chief Scientific and Medical Officers, and providing cover for a stealthy and corrupt handing of contracts that committed public monies to unqualified private providers, party donors and ‘friends’.
- Full support for the continuing charity status of our leading ‘public schools’, and more than satisfied with the public school/Oxbridge (especially Eton/Oxford) pass to political leadership.
- Cutting back on welfare support via the introduction of Universal Credit.
- In the wake of the biting of the ‘cost of living crisis’ triggered by ‘Trusseconomics’, failing to control energy prices (the only country in western Europe to do so), effectively allowing privatised companies to levels of rampant profiteering reflected in obscene CEO salaries and dividends to shareholders.
- Looking the other way as privatised monopoly service-providers rip customers off (eg transport).
- Favouring business cuts to labour forces, even at the price of public safety, backed up by sanctions against people made unemployed if they don’t pursue any rubbish part-time, zero hours jobs in or outside the areas in which they live.
- Legislating to reduce trade union rights, despite incontrovertible evidence that strong trade unions are associated with more equal societies.
- Legislating to threaten and punish any citizens daring to protest against the removal of their rights or campaigning against government policies purchased by rich donors and lobbyists.
- A corrupted and corrupt police force, readily available to repress the people on behalf of a corrupted and corrupt government.
- Putting profiteering over the futures of the people they purport to serve and the environment we and future generations share (oil and fossil fuels).
- Failing to build ‘affordable housing’, in the context of the present cost of living crisis condemning more and more to substandard and hazardous accommodation and even homelessness.
- Voting down Bills to ensure that all housing is ‘fit for human habitation’ and to put an end to ‘no fault evictions’ (many Tory and some Labour MPs are landlords).
- Running down the NHS by means of a deliberate policy of underfunding to create sufficient public dissatisfaction with the health service to allow the government to send for the for-profit cavalry (several Tory and Labour MPs already have shares in private healthcare companies).
- The lack of any effective political opposition from a Labour Party led by a lying and unprincipled opportunist and offering nothing other than ‘more of the same’ with the odd tweak or two, a Labour Party in fact now committed to serving its own big donors, courting business, and explicitly disassociating itself from public sector strikers, nationalising industries, people struggling on benefits and Palestinian rights.
I could of course go on, but surely this is enough to be going on with. When opposition-less government becomes little more than a brazen opportunity for already well-fed snouts to create and scamper towards yet more troughs, and to campaign and legislate against those who would challenge their privilege, then public anger should explode onto the streets.
Laws can and often are immoral and therefore ‘should’ be exposed and publicly attacked. After all, who made these laws? Overwhelmingly, advantaged capital and property owners dedicated to preserving their privileges, or at best disinclined to act against their own interests.
Rentier capitalism, I have often argued in previous blogs, has accentuated material and social inequality in Britain to the point of fracturing our society. The apprentice left opposition is fragmented. How easily Corbyn was seen off, undermined by the Parliamentary Labour Party let alone the Tory establishment. And how readily our political culture has been permeated by often nonsensical forms of ‘identity politics’, whereby objective class position has become obscured by putative ‘choices’ about ‘who we are’.
We are living in an era of full-on class struggle.
‘Hope is the fuel of progress’, Tony Benn used to insist. My route to hope is in the prospects of a crisis of state legitimacy, which seems to have been hovering close ever since the financial crash of 2008/9. We cannot be far off. What it will take, I have suggested, is an unpredictable event, which could take any number of different forms but which would ‘capture sufficient public attention to tip people onto our streets’.