‘We Are All In This Together’
Posted on April 25, 2010
‘We are all in this together’ the leader of the Tory Party assures would-be supporters.
In the past year, during the worst crisis of capitalism since the Great Depression and concomitant surge in fascism of the interwar period, the ‘collective wealth of Britain’s 1,000 richest people rose 30%, the biggest annual increase in [Rich] list’s 22-year history’. How can this be? How can the personal wealth of a few have risen by more than £77bn to £333.5bn, while people are losing their jobs and their homes and even their will to live, when we are ‘all in this together’? The truth is that David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ election schtick is the same old Victorian-era bourgeois moralism in new drag. Do the right thing (and this a point which he makes repeatedly) and you will be ‘rewarded’. If you are poor and marginalised and left behind, it is because you have not done the right thing and you deserve the misery which is rightly yours. Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ is one and the same thing as Thatcher’s ‘No such thing as Society’, an ideological blueprint for renewed attacks on workers and the poor: ‘Vote for me — I’ll put your entire family out of work’. The rich get richer and the poor must get poorer to pay for it all — there must be cuts! is the Tory refrain.
Why should we be forced to pay for the crimes of our exploiters? We should refuse to pay. Let them clean up their own mess — they can foot the bill. We need look no further than Spain with over 20% unemployment (possibly rising to 30%) and Greece where wages have already been cut 30% and the EU and IMF will demand further cuts following Papandreou’s appeal for further financial aid for a glimpse of life in Cameron’s ‘Big Society’. Demonstrations of workers’ anger in Greece against the neo-liberal consensus which punishes them for the crimes of their bosses at least appear to bear some revolutionary or emancipatory potential. While millions of workers across Europe have taken to the streets since the beginning of the current recession to voice their outrage at the bosses, in the UK, 7000 people turned out to a ‘national’ demonstration in London, while ‘regional’ protests have had similarly pathetic support. Little wonder that the Tories think, should they be elected, that the success of their renewed attacks on low-income earners is going to be a lay-down misère.
The Tory Party exists to protect the interests of its rich friends and to ensure the concentration of the maximum possible wealth in the hands of a ‘lucky’ few (those fortunate enough to have been born into the ‘right’ social class, and to have attended the ‘right’ schools and to have the ‘right’ social and business connections). This is what the Tories mean by doing the right thing.
KEEP THE TORIES OUT
