A letter a day to number 10. No 945
Sunday 14 December 2014.
Dear Mr Cameron,
We are facing system failure and sadly that’s down to a failure of imagination and a failure to progress. For example, you and the Unions have something in common, work, you may differ over how you see it but you both agree in the basic premise of work. The world and technology has moved on, it is no longer conscionable for markets to exploit labour for profit and nor it is desirable or necessary to insist that the only way for people to have a living is through labour.
One of the greatest inventions in the history of the world is the washing machine, whilst it is a labour saving device, what it really does is free us to do other and better things. To invent the washing machine just to have more time for more drudgery is an astonishing failure of imagination. To suggest that the washing machine could give us more leisure time is another failure of imagination because even leisure is work, it just happens to be work that we each value higher than work; as more self fulfilling. However, that isn’t what washing machines have paved the way to, and the potential for the liberation that washing machines made room for has been completely, and deliberately, missed.
Your government drive for, and insistence upon, full employment is just a last gasp attempt to hang on to a model of labour as a means of control that is as unnecessary as it is small minded and vindictive. The Work Capability Assessments that Iain Duncan Smith has steam rollered into the lives of disabled people and stealing the Independent Living Fund are down to nothing more than vindictive bloody mindedness. There is plenty of wealth in the world, the problem of wealth is, and always has been, sharing it. What we are seeing today is the vast amount of effort being expended to protect the naked greed of the few against the just interests of the many. Wealth polarisation gives the obvious lie to any trickle down effect, wealth has always flowed upwards and it is now at such obscene extremes that the only way it can be maintained is punitively.
Disabled people, along with many others, are dying. They are being hounded to death because they can’t work and the most despicable part of that is that it is entirely unnecessary that they should. There aren’t enough meaningful jobs to go round, its forced labour for forced labours sake with no rhyme or reason to it other than the continued polarisation of wealth through naked greed. Austerity is the manufactured scarcity of the means of survival by those who control wealth and still want more of it. Food banks exist not because there is a shortage of food, there isn’t, but because people are being prevented from having access to food by the unending and unbending greed of the ‘owners’ of vast wealth gained through exploitation.
Lastly, TTIP is the ultimate global resource grab by the greedy few the world has ever seen, it shouldn’t just be resisted, anyone seeking, promoting or supporting it should be behind bars! Note: It takes some restraint not to demand heads on spikes.
http://dpac.uk.net/2014/05/join-the-campaign-to-save-the-independent-living-fund/
http://www.inclusionlondon.co.uk/save-the-independent-living-fund
Fear and Loathing in Great Britain 