by Nate Bear
Part 3 - Cruel Britannia
The UK is moving ahead with large welfare cuts for disabled people, including those with cancer. On TV the other day, the UK’s health secretary Wes Streeting said that people with cancer should be in work, not at home resting. Alongside this, the government has said that to cut youth employment it will push young people to join the army. This, of course, is in the context of a massive expenditure on military weapons in the face of the Russian bogeyman.
What’s happening in the UK under a nominally centre-left Labour government is a good reminder that there is never a lesser evil if your leaders are neoliberals. Balancing the books on the backs of the poorest and most vulnerable in society is the north star of all neoliberals, whether they call themselves centrists, left wing or right wing. Cruelty is the policy and the point.
Yet the last few years have also been a good reminder that everything is a choice. Covid showed us that clearly, as I have written about many times before. The money, in reality, is there for whatever governments want to spend it on. The government is not like a household. It can sell bonds to raise money to finance whatever it likes. It’s just that they don’t want to do that for us, unless, as during covid, they’re forced to.
When it is suggested a government spends more on the public good, as Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders said they’d do, all we hear is whining and bleating about how this will ‘spook’ the markets and ‘undermine investor confidence.' Under neoliberalism, the poor, sick and needy are just the necessary blood sacrifice for capital.
Freeing ourselves from the death grip of neoliberal ideology remains the central political task of our lifetimes.
***
Source, links:
Comments
Post a Comment