Ever since Gecko’s “Greed is Good” speech on Wall Street in the 1980s, we in the developed West have taken for granted that companies that make profits regardless of the consequences are the best way forward for our global economy. Since Thatcherism it has been accepted that there is no job for life and that high unemployment figures are here to stay. Until the election of this UK coalition, I was prepared to accept that some workable compromise was possible between the collective needs of the economy and the personal needs of the individual. But this depends entirely on the ethical responsibility of the government in question. The fact is the Tories are back and the Tories spending cuts are back. The nightmare of the economic devastation of the eighties threatens to return. There is no such thing as an ethical free market.
It is time for smart people with affected consciences to start speaking up and encourage action to stop the return to Thatcherite-style hatchet work of people’s livelihoods. It has become increasingly apparent in recent weeks, as experts digest the numbers in question, that basic needs and supplies that affect the most vulnerable members of our society will be threatened by the proposed cuts and everything under the pretext of getting the economy back on track. This is pure sophistication. How can the government “urge” workers out of unemployment by denying them benefits when there is no work to go to?
There is also a growing tendency among cabinet ministers to cite the Brown government as responsible for the economic debacle they inherited, when all have long accepted that the main cause was the subprime disaster that emanated from the United States. United with the key operators are companies like Goldman Sachs. Don’t let the government alter the link between what happened then and what is happening now. They are planning a realignment of society that abandons the poor, neglects the elderly, and exploits the less able. The battle lines are being drawn between left and right once again. Blair’s proposed Third Way is being abandoned. It is time for the left to come together and be counted.
Unless the left is able to reassert itself with some visionary action like demands for full employment, power to unions, respect for the weak and disabled, and help for the elderly, we will see a future further divided between the haves and the haves. have nothing