A letter a day to number 10. No 1,119
Tuesday 16 June 2015.
Dear Mr Cameron,
Looking back to the banking crisis, I think one of the most remarkable things about it was that it never occurred to the vast majority of ordinary people, including me, that it would become the goose that laid the golden egg. I don’t for one moment think it was naivete or ignorance on our part, it is simply that ordinary decent people simply don’t have a criminal mind set, and certainly not to pull off a heist on such a vast global scale.
I believed it really was a crisis and not a consequence of a vast crime, after all that’s what was screamed on every headline and every news broadcast. We weren’t given time to think, but then thinking probably wouldn’t have done us much good because the sheer scale of criminality and the minds that pursued it is simply beyond our ken. I am still staggered at the enormity of it just as I am staggered by what followed.
‘The banks are too big to fail’, we were told, so governments took all our hard earned money and bailed them out. No time for a referendum, not a moment to lose. Like a great big enormous food bank the national larder was plundered and given to the banks with hardly a whimper of protest. Remind me, did anyone thank us for our largesse, was there even one, single, word of gratitude, any where? Was there a general amnesty for the public on interest charges for loans and credit cards or a single penny off debt? No, what we now had to do was PAY OFF THE BANKS DEBT!
Enter the Tories and Osbornomics… Britain can no longer afford our public services, the nation must be asset stripped and handed over to private ownership – schools, fire stations and fire engines, coast guards, police, health care, care in the community, disability assessment, PFI, Royal Mail, prisons and probation, bank holdings, social housing, you name it, the biggest fire sale in our history, except for one small issue, we still pay for all of it at rip off prices; a monstrous transfer of public wealth into private hands.
Our generosity was rewarded with permanent austerity and the biggest axe fell on the poor, the unemployed, the sick and disabled. Britain was to be robbed of its universal social safety net (paid for by us) and thus ensued the heinous campaign of demonisation and vilification of the poor and most vulnerable people in Britain. The poor were made the whipping boy, dragging the country down and preventing recovery, accused of having a culture of entitlement by you (the irony!), and therefore stripped to the bone. Benefit denial, loss of legal aid, loss of employment rights, zero hours contracts, Workfare, bailiffs, loss of homes, even plans to scrap the human rights act and in Britain not one banker went to gaol. The richest people have enjoyed a bonanza, doubling their wealth, the crooked bankers are rolling in bonuses and business as usual and a government of cowboy millionaires live in luxury and you have the unmitigated gall to tell us we’re all in it together. Well , yes we are, the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor to wealthy private interests, bankers, hedge funds and corporations. Poor geese farting out golden eggs for criminals to fill their nests with whilst we count our dead.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jun/06/basel-iii-banking-volcker
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-the-papers-32822057
http://labourlist.org/2012/12/why-let-the-facts-get-in-the-way-of-demonising-the-poor/
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2012/jun/25/cameron-tories-slash-benefits
Fear and Loathing in Great Britain 