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Anyone with eyes to see knows that living standards are falling and the future for future generations is growing bleaker. We all want to make Britain great; the question we need to ask is – great for whom?
We have arrived at a world where zero-hour contracts in dead-end service sector jobs have become the norm. Wages barely cover the cost of living and certainly don’t provide enough for decent housing. When we get sick, we can no longer count on sick pay or decent medical care. Social services no longer support us when times are tough.
Why do even two-income families struggle to make ends meet? Why is there an epidemic of mental illness amongst our youth? Why do the elderly have to choose between heating and eating? Why are poverty levels rising so fast? And why is our society so obscenely unequal?
After all, the ruling class – the owners of land, factories, workplaces, machinery, transport, raw materials, banks and capital – is getting richer. Corporate profits are increasing every year for the biggest shareholders, even though the economy as a whole is mired in crisis, small and medium businesses are going bust, the government is loaded with debt, and workers are told that further cuts to our living standards are necessary: that taxes must go up, and austerity must continue.
For well over a century, the owners of corporations and their City of London investors have been steadily moving industrial production abroad, where wages, land and raw materials are cheaper and profits are therefore higher. It is notable that a country once regarded as the ‘workshop of the world’ today makes hardly any of the goods it consumes. We have almost no heavy industry and grow only half our food, two essential bases of any self-sufficient modern economy.
Today, after decades of deepening global capitalist crisis, with profits harder to come by in productive industries (because the workers at home and abroad have been made too poor to buy the goods they produce), the financial elites have been finding other ways to invest their vast stores of capital. In Britain and all over the world they have been asset-stripping and privatising publicly-owned industries and utilities, cannibalising our services and infrastructure and crippling our chances of a decent tomorrow in the quest for a quick buck today.
Service provision has been greatly reduced, along with pay and conditions for the workers, while bills have skyrocketed. This is one of a thousand ways in which the system transfers wealth from the poor to the rich.
Voting can’t fix these problems
As a result of all this, people are losing faith in establishment politicians and media, and in the entire electoral circus. To try to stem this crisis of legitimacy and stop the workers organising for a socialist transformation of society, the ruling class is busy rebranding the right wing of the Tories as ‘Reform’ and the left wing of Labour as ‘Your Party’. The idea is to con us into believing that these parties are ‘disrupters’ whose leaders, if elected, would bring about radical change, rather than more of the same.
But the simple fact is that bourgeois politicians of every stripe (Tory, Labour, LibDem, Green, Reform, SNP, Plaid, etc) are employed to distract us with the charade of ‘representation’ and ‘democracy’ while the real decisions are taken by monopolists and financiers in offices and club rooms far from the public eye. Not one of them ever calls into question the machinery of exploitation and war that keeps the capitalists rich and the workers poor. Not one would help to nationalise and rebuild British industry or take Britain out of the criminal Nato alliance.
Whoever we vote for, the financiers remain in power. Capital continues to be moved out of the country, industries to be dismantled, services to be privatised, the flames of war to be fanned, the treasury to be looted by the banks and monopoly corporations. And British working people keep getting poorer.
Inequality widening in Newark
What is happening nationally and internationally is also reflected locally. In Newark-on-Trent, living costs are fast outstripping earnings. The average full-time salary is around £34,400, several thousand below the UK average, meaning one in three Newark children now lives in a low-income household (far above the already shameful 21 percent national level).
Housing pressures are intensifying the strain, with house prices rising more than 5% in the last year alone, and private rents by 7 percent, so that a typical family home now costs around £850 a month. These costs consume an unsustainable share of income, pushing workers into poverty, debt, overcrowding and homelessness.
This situation is underpinned by the long-term decline of Newark’s traditional industries, from manufacturing and engineering to the once-strong food-processing and distribution base. The closure of the British Sugar plant in 2001 ended nearly a century of major industrial employment in the town. As national and multinational firms consolidated operations to boost profits, production that once took place locally was centralised into regional hubs, stripping Newark of skilled, stable work that has been replaced by jobs that are typically lower-paid, casualised and agency based.
A story that is repeated all over Britain’s former industrial heartlands.
What is to be done?
It is time we stopped waiting for some divine intervention to save us and started to recognise our own economic and social power. We, the British working class, the majority, the ones who make everything and keep society running, have incredible collective strength.
Our first step towards liberation is understanding this simple fact!
We also need to be aware of just how comprehensive is the propaganda that makes us believe – against all our own experience – that we live in a democracy; that we have freedom; that things can and will get better within the existing system of capitalist relations. When we wake up and realise the con we have been subjected to, we must work together for a completely different type of society – one where people’s needs decide everything and the economy is organised rationally.
With a clear understanding of the world and solid organisation, the working class can overcome any obstacle. We do not have to accept the material and moral decadence of our times as inevitable. A better world is possible.
When the workers take over society as the ruling class and organise production in a planned economy, without the need to pay tribute to a layer of bloodsucking parasites, we will have the means to provide a truly decent life for ourselves and our children – a life lived in security and peace, with dignity and rising prosperity for all.
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