‘So this is what we have come to?
Ann Archy. | 08.11.2010 08:34
Workfare will arrive in the U.K soon according to the Observer, an idea that even Thatcher rejected at the time. it is reporting that Duncan Smith is to launch a White Paper which will state unemployed people will have to do thirty hours of 'voluntary' work a week or lose benefits. This will include gardening, park maintainance, clearing paths, collecting rubbish etc, even sweeping streets. This is already happening in that Land of the Free, the US, where in N/Y a City Gardener can be made unemployed and in a few months be doing the same job for nothing!
Benefits reforms could include compulsory manual labour?
The dreams of the last century, that increased mechanisation and automation would lead to increased leisure time for the masses, relieved of the drudgery and sheer mindlessness of much unskilled work. Instead, compounded by the outsourcing of jobs and the influx of cheap immigrant workers, the best the 21st century can come up is forced labour at slave wage levels, extended working hours, and the age of retirement heading for 70.
So with the stroke of Ian Duncan Smith pen, we go from an economic strategy that deliberately creates mass unemployment to one that deliberately creates cheap labour. Brilliant. There’s an honour in this for you, Ian, rehabilitation, glory, a statue.
My God, my ancestors will be turning in their graves. The Tories are finally realising what they have long dreamed of – throughout the years of the post-war settlement, they moodily incubated a determination to reverse the social and economic gains fought for and won by people of unparalleled toughness and determination, people who took on the might of privilege and wealth and defeated it.
This is the New Tory moment; this when they come out from behind their cosmetic masks of reasonableness and fairness and social concern and display their true dark hearts before the world.
But I reserve my greatest contempt for those of us on the left; this is all happening on our watch. We betray those people I mentioned above, who vanquished the landowners and the factory and coal owners.
So what are WE up against? a couple of Bullingdon hooray-henries and a leadership reject with the political acumen of petrified bird droppings .
But the neoliberal apologists and careerist politicians that have infested the Labour Movement see only the votes of bigoted Middle Englanders and the ignorant Sun reading dross that posts here waiting to be harvested. The latter busy calling for their own enslavement, too ignorant or misinformed to notice the turkey staring back at them in the mirror of a Christmas Morning.
Now in the new Dark Age heralded in by Ian Duncan Smith, every morning will be Christmas Morning for the beneficiaries, the businesses who will exploit this measure to access free labour, the talk of charities being a transparent smoke screen to hide the fundamental dismantling of the human right for a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.
Make no mistake, this is just the beginning. Anyone who thinks that once the principle of unpaid labour has breached the social repugnance it generates that it will stop at a month’s work for ‘idlers’ is the kind of fool the Tories are relying on get this through.
These are the descendants of people who built vast fortunes and empires on the sweat and death of their factories and workhouses; they are past masters at dressing up inequality and evil in Protestant work ethics and biblical rhetoric denouncing the peril of idleness – except where it’s practised in its purest forms of course, by digital fortune shufflers and land owning parasites drawing their subsidies while they indulge Mediterranean waves with their oversized cock-yachts.
Shame, shame on us all. Tolstoy said everyone was innocent. I say everyone is guilty. Our children will never forgive us for allowing this to happen. The Tories talk of not saddling future generations with our debt; I think only of future generations facing the return of evils greater than any debt, that we had long thought banished from the lexicon of social intercourse and post war economics, all presented as some kind of economic panacea. Who is really ‘taking the piss’ here?
No doublethink, no prevarication, no quarter.
Either fight now or fuck off.’
The dreams of the last century, that increased mechanisation and automation would lead to increased leisure time for the masses, relieved of the drudgery and sheer mindlessness of much unskilled work. Instead, compounded by the outsourcing of jobs and the influx of cheap immigrant workers, the best the 21st century can come up is forced labour at slave wage levels, extended working hours, and the age of retirement heading for 70.
So with the stroke of Ian Duncan Smith pen, we go from an economic strategy that deliberately creates mass unemployment to one that deliberately creates cheap labour. Brilliant. There’s an honour in this for you, Ian, rehabilitation, glory, a statue.
My God, my ancestors will be turning in their graves. The Tories are finally realising what they have long dreamed of – throughout the years of the post-war settlement, they moodily incubated a determination to reverse the social and economic gains fought for and won by people of unparalleled toughness and determination, people who took on the might of privilege and wealth and defeated it.
This is the New Tory moment; this when they come out from behind their cosmetic masks of reasonableness and fairness and social concern and display their true dark hearts before the world.
But I reserve my greatest contempt for those of us on the left; this is all happening on our watch. We betray those people I mentioned above, who vanquished the landowners and the factory and coal owners.
So what are WE up against? a couple of Bullingdon hooray-henries and a leadership reject with the political acumen of petrified bird droppings .
But the neoliberal apologists and careerist politicians that have infested the Labour Movement see only the votes of bigoted Middle Englanders and the ignorant Sun reading dross that posts here waiting to be harvested. The latter busy calling for their own enslavement, too ignorant or misinformed to notice the turkey staring back at them in the mirror of a Christmas Morning.
Now in the new Dark Age heralded in by Ian Duncan Smith, every morning will be Christmas Morning for the beneficiaries, the businesses who will exploit this measure to access free labour, the talk of charities being a transparent smoke screen to hide the fundamental dismantling of the human right for a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.
Make no mistake, this is just the beginning. Anyone who thinks that once the principle of unpaid labour has breached the social repugnance it generates that it will stop at a month’s work for ‘idlers’ is the kind of fool the Tories are relying on get this through.
These are the descendants of people who built vast fortunes and empires on the sweat and death of their factories and workhouses; they are past masters at dressing up inequality and evil in Protestant work ethics and biblical rhetoric denouncing the peril of idleness – except where it’s practised in its purest forms of course, by digital fortune shufflers and land owning parasites drawing their subsidies while they indulge Mediterranean waves with their oversized cock-yachts.
Shame, shame on us all. Tolstoy said everyone was innocent. I say everyone is guilty. Our children will never forgive us for allowing this to happen. The Tories talk of not saddling future generations with our debt; I think only of future generations facing the return of evils greater than any debt, that we had long thought banished from the lexicon of social intercourse and post war economics, all presented as some kind of economic panacea. Who is really ‘taking the piss’ here?
No doublethink, no prevarication, no quarter.
Either fight now or fuck off.’
Ann Archy.
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