Madness

My alarm clock goes straight into some news station, not sure which though, maybe BBC? This is a very distressing way to start your day and I might have to stop it and just use the alarm function instead of radio.
The other day I woke up to the “news” that the Tory back benchers wanted to reduce taxes further. Seriously!

Lower taxes means less money left for public spending, which lead to more cuts in public services. More people will be redundant and less people can afford to buy things and the economy will slow down as a result.
Obviously, the back benchers are only thinking about the amount of money they themselves can pile up by paying less tax, a selfish greed in other words.
When politicians talk about doing something for the economy, you need to ask yourself; whose economy are they talking about, yours or theirs?

Another pie brain of politician then suggested that we reduce the NI. But if the Government are making cuts in spending in order to pay off the national debt then surely a reduction in NI (Government income) will take away any “savings” made by the cuts in spending? Basically the bloody woman just wanted more money in her pocket.

Let us all get some reality check here. Economics has a tendency to regard the world in terms of competition over limited resources and therefore companies need to constantly increase their profit, regardless of the consequences for others. We can see an example of this thinking in the bankers’ greedy and selfish behaviour that led us all into the economical crisis we now find ourselves in.

However, if you look at the world as a place of abundance and where co-operation and compassion becomes the determent for your actions then there will be more for all and all will increase their welfare and standard of living.
Sadly, this is made impossible because of the actions of the selfish, greedy and racist* elite that build their fortunes by exploiting others.
For example, we could read in the papers about the £18bn hidden away in overseas tax heavens by the rich. The Government’s response is to come up with a proposal to make it even easier for the rich to do this! Talk about madness!!!!

I read in Metro the other day about a think tank (who ever that is) that ¼ of all children in Britain will live in poverty by 2020.
And a research into cost of rents by the charity Shelter shows that “ordinary working families face unaffordable private rents in 55% of local authorities in England**. That means that the rent cost more than 1/3 of the total family income.
I find the above facts more disturbing when I read the Sunday Times rich list of 2011 and that Duke of Westminster’s fortune increased with £250 million during the last twelve months and his fortune comes from properties!

I say like Martin Luther King, Jr., “He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it”.

This selfish madness by the rich has to stop!
  

* Racism here meaning using biological explanations for their own superior position compare to poor peoples’ inferiority in abilities and therefore lower social/economical position.

** Shelter website

Biological determinism

After Cameron’s and others rants about how to clamp down on the rioters with a firm hand, we can now start to see the facts coming through from the court papers and there are no surprises there.

Despite that Cameron and his friends tried to make us think that the rioters were only ‘mindless criminals’ and not actually rioters, the facts show a different story. Two thirds of the charged came from the poorest areas of the capital and the average distance between the alleged looting and the suspects home was 2.9km*.

The demand from the top on harsh punishment trickles down the society pyramid and the New Scotland Yard Chief Bernard Hogan-Howe (a favourite candidate with the Conservatives) say that he will make criminals fear the police. This is worrying tendencies. Is it not better if the police force starts to behave in a fair and just manner instead so that people will respect them? Hard core policing is never successful because crime stem from unmet needs and appears when huge portions of society is excluded. Fear does not change that.

But sadly, instead of equality it is very clear that the Government make a difference between people and people when two former Conservative peers only had to serve a quarter of their sentence for fiddling their expenses. Why does not Mr Cameron demand the highest punishment for these rich looters as well as for the poor street looters?

I think it is time for the Government and the parliament as a whole to pay attention to the dangers of excluding people from society with their talk about deserving and undeserving people. We are all humans, none of us is more or less!

We need a loud opposition that speak out about what their politics of austerity actually means. I like to quote Daniel Dorling here to make my point clear, ‘if poor people in affluent nations believed that all human beings were alike, then it would not be possible under affluent conditions to justify the exclusion of so many from so many social norms. The majority would find it abhorrent that a large minority should be allowed to live in poverty if they saw that minority as the same sort of people as themselves**.’

The Government is driving a politics based on ideas of elitism and according to this viewpoint some people are seen as inferior. This view is based on a biological determinism that is horribly close to the eugenics of the early twentieth century.

I surely hope we will not end up with concentration camps for the race of the undeserving poor.

Vote the Conservatives out of Government!

*According to Evening Standard: 5 Sept 2001, p6.

**Daniel Dorking, p.103