A letter a day to number 10. No 1,148
Wednesday 15 July 2015.
Dear Mr Cameron,
If we, the great British taxpaying public, bailed out the banks, how come it’s us who are in debt and to whom? We are now paying £1 billion a week in interest on ‘the national debt’, which stands at an eye watering £1.36 trillion. If we were loaned the money which we are being crucified to pay back, then we didn’t bail anyone out, someone else did, the someone we are being bled dry to pay back, with interest. Why would we borrow to pay off the banks, with interest? Why did we become the middle man? Why didn’t the banks just borrow money from wherever you borrow it from and service their own bloody debt and the interest?
I appreciate that the debt is not the same thing as the deficit which is the difference between income (from tax receipts, profits from national assets [which George is so mad keen to sell off], and so on) and expenditure. George doesn’t want to borrow any more money to cover expenditure and wants to balance the books, which is why he said as he cut Tax Credits, “So those who oppose any savings to Tax Credits will have to explain how on earth they propose to eliminate the deficit, let alone run a surplus and pay down debt.” Making it clear that the responsibility for clearing the deficit and the debt is the exclusive responsibility of that Great British storehouse of wealth, the poor.
I confess I do not have George Osborne’s unique qualifications in economics; a history degree, a brief attempt at journalism or a week folding towels in Selfridges after customers had manhandled them. So my understanding of Osbornomics is limited at best, but this I am sure of, we have been, and continue to be, had, conned, tricked, robbed and vilified.
What I am trained and experienced in is people work, it’s what I have done for the majority of my adult life. The real wealth of the world is it’s treasure of natural resources and, so far as humanity is concerned, above all else, labour.
I can think of no finer example of the exploitation and abuse of working class people than the great liners and the teeming humanity required to build them. If a labourer who slaved away on pitiful wages to help produce the glories of the great liners wished to travel to America, it would be in steerage class, ‘offered only the most basic amenities, typically with limited toilet use, no privacy, and poor food, doled out, with less courtesy than one would find in a charity soup kitchen’. Labour is the bread basket of any nation, it is the life blood of survival and growth. When Osborne broke your promise of protecting Tax Credits, he wanted to know (and I paraphrase) if the poor don’t pay through the imposition of cuts, how on earth do we propose to eliminate the deficit? It may just be that because of the historic abuse of ordinary people and Osborne being a man raised in the blind world of excessive privilege, he is genuinely unable to imagine any other way. Rob and abuse the poor, because that’s the way you’ve always done it!
http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/uk_national_debt_chart.html
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/chancellor-george-osbornes-summer-budget-2015-speech
Fear and Loathing in Great Britain 