Writing's a fight and this boy needs a battle
I agree with Paul Mason, “Brexit is a failed project”. Labour should “back a second referendum, and vote to remain”.
You can imagine the right-wing press’ response. Labour does a massive u-turn. Labour betrays the people. But the truth is, Labour has to step into the vacuum, and lead the country out of the mess caused by the Tories.
I agree with Polly Toynbee’s assessment in The Guardian, and I find her conclusions deeply troubling.
Brexit is fast becoming (perhaps it has always been) a synonym for crisis capitalism. Anything that does not service the needs of the few will be ripped to shreds for profit. What is left is for the crows, and crows that will go hungry.
It is my opinion, this country will end up being a tax haven. Consequently anything funded by tax revenues will go. How long before we have favelas on Brixton Hill, a shanty towns in Hyde Park, or people dead because they can’t afford medicines?
What strikes me about this story by Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian is how long it’s taken for people to realise what being done to them. How much suffering did Michelle Dorrell have to endured before she woke up? The sad fact is, the Tories were pushing ahead with the same policies when she “voted for them last time”.
How many others, like Michelle Dorrell, have voted and will continue to vote against their own interests? The blessing and the curse of her realisation is that she had to go through so much hardship before realising.
The Conservative Party are doing what neoliberal government’s have been doing for decades, concentrating “wealth, power and opportunity in ever-fewer hands”.
If this country is a horse, a massive “Boxer” of a horse, instead of rewarding his efforts with food, water, and care, the Tories have strung him up, cut his throat, and are watching while he empties of blood. The next step for Boxer is the glue factory. They want to wring every last penny from him.
I hope Michelle Dorrell is right, that the “Tories are screwed for a generation”. She punctuates her assertion with a moment of self doubt, a question, “aren’t they?” She knows her “kids will grow up knowing they’ve been screwed over by that lot”. What she doesn’t know is if “that lot” will be allowed to keep “laying waste to its own voters”.
I broadly agree with Owen Jones’s piece in The Guardian, a centrist split could be a gift to hard-right strategists.
Both Labour and Conservative are mistakenly committed to honouring the result of the referendum. We keep being told we’re defiantly, absolutely, positively, leaving the European Union. The only difference is the way we exit.
The Labour leadership seems broadly in favour a soft exit. Maintain the benefits of the European Union, mainly frictionless trade and workers rights, without being a member.
Government Conservatives, under the Chequers plan want the same thing, maybe? It’s definitely softer than hard-right Conservatives. They want to drive us off a cliff-edge.
Within that context, the appeal of centrists would be their pro-remain stance. Presumably it would attract MP’s from both parties, and damage both extremes equally. Their remain stance would appeal to the growing number of voters, slowly beginning to realise, leaving the European Union is going to have some very damaging consequences.
For me, one of the most dangerous parts of the centrist stance is their enthusiasm for neoliberalism. It wants to return us to the pre-election, pre-crash, status quo, and there lies its weakness. True, crashing out of the European Union would be a mistake. The cost of living will climb, and climb, and climb, with no deal. So the centrist can argue, with conviction, remaining part of the European Union is the lesser of two evils.
The hard-right Conservative version of exit, promises crisis capitalism that would make all but the wealthiest poorer. Which makes the Labour leadership’s stance either incredibly astute or incredibly reckless.
Centrist are hoping threats of a split will drag the Labour leadership towards them. It won’t, because what I’ve realised, exiting the European Union isn’t just about leaving, it’s also about exiting neoliberalism.
For Labour exiting offers a chance to draw a line under the neoliberal project. I could be wrong, I probably am, but the psychological break with the European Union is a chance to move us towards a country run for the many not the few.
That’s the astute part. The reckless part is letting the hard-right crash us out. They will then ramp up the hostile nationalism, and allow the profiteers to thrive.
This article in The Guardian asserts that “Knife and gun crime has surged in England and Wales, but the causes and solutions are unclear”. I don’t think the causes are unclear. The blame rests firmly at the feet of the Conservative Party and their policy of austerity.
Austerity has meant local authority budgets have been slashed, cutting support for all kinds of social programmes, there to help “at risk” kids stay out of trouble. Even something as simple as a youth club can provide early interventions, offering support to young people, and stop them getting involved in crime.
Those who think the causes are unclear should look at the work of Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner in their 2005 book Freakonomics. They argue access to abortions in the USA in the 1970’s reduced the crime rates in the 1990’s.
Crime rates in the 1990s came down because there were fewer unwanted pregnancies in the seventies and eighties. Women who felt they were not ready to care for a child, were able to terminate the pregnancy.
Apply that same logic to the rise in instances of gun and knife crime in the UK. The Home Office blames “changes in the nature of drug sales and use, highlighting crack cocaine, social media and music glamorising violence as among the issues fuelling the problem”.
I’m going to say that drug sales, social media, and music, are not the cause of the problem but a consequence. Austerity is the cause.
Ten years ago austerity started to remove support for youth programmes.
We now have a rise in gun and knife crime.
Is it really that hard to see the link?
I’d be interested to see where this goes, especially considering the Treasury Committee are launching a new inquiry into economic crime.
The Canary ran a story about the funding for Theresa May’s election campaign.
This prompted me to look on the Electoral Commission website, where you can search donations made to all the political parties.
Here’s a list of donations made to all the political parties in the last month.
What strikes me is how much The Conservative Party has been given. It’s far more than any other political party, double contributions to The Labour Party. It’s no surprise that Labour gets much of its funding from the unions. Neither is it a surprise the wealthiest few donate millions to The Conservative Party.
In the interests of the many, I donated to the Labour party.
I’m voting Labour and I urge everyone to do the same. As far as I can tell it’s not in the interest of most people to vote otherwise.
The Tory manifesto is a statement of poorly thought out ideas informed by a dogmatic ideology that puts profits before people, private interest before the public good.
Austerity is an ideologic strategy designed to make the poor pay off the debts of rich. The Labour manifesto, by contrast, feels optimistic. It aspires to the positive in us all, the sense of community, the desire to do good by the many, not just the few.
I have survived successive neoliberal governments both Labour and Conservative that have done nothing but keep me poor and in debt. The system is rigged to keep us all in our place. I know it has ever been thus, but it’s time for a change, a radical change. I am sick of these paternalistic parasites controlling us with lies.
This election, more than any other, has shown me how the mainstream media colludes with the vested interests, to drip feed a narrative of pessimistic division. Those people over there are to blame for your problems. Meanwhile I am free to go ahead bleed society dry like a spider feeding on an insect.
None of this is new. The difference this time, for the first time in my life, there is an actual alternative to the way things have been done since Thatcher. My fear is that most people will be blinded by the lies and vote against their own interests. My hope is that people with see through these lies, vote to do some good and vote Labour.
I, like many, was horrified by the recent election result which brought another Conservative government to power. The day after the election someone asked me if I was disappointed. National Health Service gone. Affordable housing gone. Welfare gone. As far as I can tell austerity is an excuse to dismantle the welfare state, and I can’t believe people voted for the worst version of it. Too right I was disappointed.
The person who asked the question replied to my predictions with the ever-so slightly patronising “we’ll see”. This from someone who has never really had it tough. I don’t mean “can’t decide which holiday to go on” tough. I mean “can’t feed your kids” tough. How do I know they’ve never had it tough? I once overheard them, in a conversation about how hard it is to find somewhere to live in London, say “I just pick up the phone, tell them how much I earn, and they give me what I want”.
That’s not unusual, it presumes because others haven’t achieved financial success they’re weak or lazy. This attitude is all too common. It’s a soulless attitude that takes no account of personal circumstances, or the hardships most people go though just to survive. In short, it’s an egocentric view of the world, at the core of a model of rampant self-interest, this nation was infected with since Thatcher.
For me it’s an attitude implicit in the ever-so slightly patronising coverage of Jeremy Corbyn. I, like most people, had never heard of Jeremy Corbyn before the recent Labour leadership campaign, but I keep finding things that make me say “this guy is interesting”. He seems to be offering a genuine, straight talking, alternative to rampant self-interest at the core of the current social and political landscape, an attitude that puts the values and interests of the very few at the top of this vast pyramid scheme we call capitalism.
This is just a small example of what I mean when I say “the ever-so slightly patronising coverage of Jeremy Corbyn”.
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