A letter a day to number 10. No 1,090
Tuesday 19 May 2015.
Dear Mr Cameron,
I will never understand how those who have every advantage in life and enjoy lives of plenty can choose, choose mind you, to hound and attack the poor and deprive them of the little they have and reduce them to abject penury and despair. I don’t care how you wrap it up or spin it, your austerity pogrom unforgivably targets the poor and most vulnerable people in the UK.
There is something missing in the Tory mindset in particular and in a great many people generally. It is a lack of understanding or appreciation of human kindness and generosity of thought and action. In some, meanness is actually something they enjoy, taking pleasure from hurting others or putting them down.
Holding public office without any understanding, appreciation or concern for humanity is, quite simply, to be unfit to hold office, after all a land filled with buildings and infrastructure but no people requires no government. So parliament exists to serve the nation – ‘A large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular state or territory.’
A government that harms the people is despotic, a government that targets and causes harm to the poorest, weakest and most vulnerable people is bestial.
An act of kindness is about doing something for another without consideration of reward or payment, it is an act of generosity without strings. An act of genuine kindness doesn’t expect or require thanks, if there is an expectation of thanks that is not an act of kindness because it expects to be rewarded, if only with thanks. Even if we act expecting a vicarious reward, like heaven, that is not kindness, it’s a moral deal we’re striking with god for a reward.
Why am I spelling this out? Because a family, community or nation without kindness is a harsh, bitter and toxic place to live, it is to live in an environment in which people will not flourish in any meaningful way, it is essentially repressive and regressive.
Jacob Rees-Mogg accused anti-austerity protesters as ‘tainted by lack of acceptance of democracy’, thus demonstrating only that, like the rest of you, he doesn’t get it. We live in a country awash with money, one of the richest in the world and also one of the most unequal. Not only does money not grow on trees, 93% of it is made out nothing, not even thin air, by the banks, as debt, which people pay back out of the their labour. For the banks, money is a free good, created out of nothing, yet endlessly enriching them including charging interest on something they never produced or had in the first place. But there’s not enough for the poor, the sick and the vulnerable and they are dying because of austerity. Rees-Mogg said people’s votes supported continued austerity, so they voted for people to continue dying, more poverty, more homeless, more food banks, more despair. That is what people are protesting about, because they want to live in a better country. You may have won seats in parliament, but the majority of people did not vote for you and they are exercising their democratic right to protest against a brutal government without a trace of kindness in it.
Fear and Loathing in Great Britain 