COMMENT The enemy within
Anthony Seaton
A plug hole called London
There is a tapeworm living within the body of the United Kingdom. It fuels itself with our nourishment and saps our energy and powers of resistance. It is the almost perfect parasite, lying unnoticed injuring its host while it grows fat and reproduces. The meat containing its cysts, which we unknowingly ate, came originally from Switzerland and spread to Chicago and St Andrews. It is the neo-liberal consensus, the Establishment.
The concept that there is no such thing as society, only individuals out for their own and their families’ betterment, under attack by organised labour caricatured as the enemy within, seemed to be a deniable and passing phase of the 1980s, something that would be replaced by a more humane and less divisive government.
Two years ago my wife and I, shocked to learn of the need, volunteered a few hours a week helping in a food bank in Edinburgh. Started without salary by a young man and his wife from his small lock-up garage and staffed by a group of volunteers, this food bank, one of several in this prosperous city, now occupies a large warehouse and last year fed 6,000 people/families in crisis. It now dispenses a total of approximately a tonne of food each week.
Nobody can access this help more than twice a year and all have to apply with support from social services or doctors; all are desperate and a majority are in work, having lost benefits, been sanctioned or hit by impossible rises in rent and fuel bills. In the food bank, the human cost of welfare reforms is starkly apparent. Equally apparent is the generosity of so many people who are willing to purchase a little extra to donate food (and often throw in some extra presents around Christmas) and of the businesses and charities that have recognised this shaming national need.
We are now three nations: the poor getting poorer as housing, fuel and food bills have all increased while income remains static or declines; the generous middle who see what is happening and do what they can to help; and the secretive rich who shelter their cash in property, hedge funds and tax avoidance schemes and steadily filter wealth from the rest. If you want to know who they are, just look at the individuals, ‘think tanks’, clubs and corporations and ask yourself why they support political parties. Or look at the rows of complacent millionaires on the government benches. They truly represent the enemy within.
At a family wedding last month I was talking to a German engineer, interested in the concept of Scottish independence. I told him that much of the impetus for this had come from a sense of hopelessness engendered by government by and for the rich in Westminster, but that this feeling was shared by both sides in the independence argument and was widely held south of the border too, leading to the UKIP surge. Indeed, I said, we are better off here, with free prescriptions and tertiary education and a better NHS, than our friends and relatives in the rest of the UK. ‘No’ voters had mostly voted as a step towards changing the UK government at the next election and ‘Yes’ voters just wanted out whatever the risks.
‘In Germany’, he said, ‘we think of London as a tax haven for our wealthy’. Yes, London and its financial sector, euphemistically called ‘financial services’, is the plug hole through which flows the wealth of the rest of the UK and many other nations, only to be revealed (as mushrooms grow on sewage) by the outcrop of skyscrapers and grotesque acceleration in house prices there. It is there that the real wealth created by the nations’ makers and workers is transferred to the corporations, hedge funds, tax loopholes and into the bulging pockets of the super-rich.
I have for some years argued that we have been approaching a crisis point in capitalism. As food and energy poverty stalk the cities of one of the world’s richest countries, we have reached it. Those of us who remember the general election of 1945, now 70 years ago, know that if there is the will to change things we can do it. We must eliminate the need for food banks and vote for policies that will get more people into better paid work and paying tax.
Why put more out of work by cutting the public sector further when we can tax land, property and other unearned wealth and prevent tax avoidance and evasion? Why do we need to keep feeding the parasitic private sector railways, energy utilities and banks with taxpayer subsidies rather than taking them into public/worker ownership? Why do we tolerate the dominant ownership of our right-wing press by a few super-rich foreigners and tax exiles and allow them to press their case against that of ordinary working folk? Why can we not have a political party that is brave enough to reveal GDP and national debt for what they are, artificial economic constructs (eg try Googling ‘to whom do we owe the national debt?’), and direct their policies towards full gainful employment as the indicator of their success? Why are no political parties speaking out against the secretive negotiations to introduce the Transatlantic Trade and Industry Partnership (TTIP) that will allow rich US corporations to prevent any attempts to retain public services in public hands through a completely new and undemocratic legal mechanism?
There is a cure for tapeworm, but it does involve its complete elimination. Without such a cure, there is a risk that its host might eat some of its eggs himself and the cysts can then spread around the body and even affect the brain. Indeed, I wonder if this has not already happened. Our tapeworm, our enemy within, is the Establishment as characterised by Owen Jones in his recent book of that title. Please read it and when you have done so, join me in wondering not why we have got into this mess but what we can do to get out of it. The last time we had a radical re-think on where our country should go was 1945. Seventy years on, it is time for another…and I mean radical.
By Anthony Seaton | April 2015