A letter a day to number 10. No 1,318
Sunday 17 January 2016.
Dear Mr Cameron,
Millions of people are being driven into a third world existence in Britain, which considers itself to be a first world nation. Poverty is not an accident, nor is it a natural force of nature, it is a deliberate act in the polarisation of wealth and resources driven by greed.
In 2014 millionaire Kevin O’Leary was delighted by an Oxfam report on global inequality, which found that the ‘wealth of the world’s 85 richest people is equal to the wealth of the poorest 3.5 billion’, calling it ‘fantastic news’. He went on to say, “this is a great thing because it inspires everybody, and gets them the motivation to look up to the 1 per cent and say, I want to become one of those people. I’m going to fight hard and get up to the top. This is fantastic news and of course I applaud it.”
The idea that the worlds poorest 3.5 billion people could fight their way, tooth and claw, to the top table to join the 85 richest people in the world is so absurd and asinine it’s breathtaking. Perhaps these days O’Leary might describe himself as a self made man, conveniently forgetting that his own mother loaned him $10,000 to set himself up in business (source: Wikipedia). Extreme poverty has no backers other than the rapacious greed of the few who preside over the polarisation of global wealth.
According to a YouGov poll, ‘nearly 80% of teachers have reported children coming to school hungry at least once a week, and 38% said this happened every day’. This in a country in which George Osborne can lower the bank levy, reneging on an election pledge that it would be permanent, under intense pressure from banks, although the Treasury denies any undue influence, and yet drive children into hunger through the ideological politics and policies of austerity for the many, ignoring, and indifferent to, the suffering of millions of people.
It is not hard to see the power of the wealthy in action, protecting their own interests. The banks managed to con us into bailing them out after crashing our economy with not a single prosecution for so doing and later the Bank of England gave them a free gift of £375 billion in Quantitative Easing. A mere 64.1 billion distributed to the people would have given every child, woman and man in the UK £1,000 each, a thought too ridiculous to be countenanced. Far from being used to benefit the nation, the £375 billion was fed into the financial markets simply to make even more money for criminals. The absurd notion of ‘trickle down’ doesn’t even wet the cheek of a single child going hungry today.
The idea that the UK is too poor to feed the nation’s children is actually a malicious assault on lives as they form whose only crime is in being born. Maintaining the violence of poverty is big business and a crime against humanity in which Osborne and the rest of you are fully complicit, although special mention must go to Ian Duncan Smith for the violence of his sanctions regime as a deliberate and brutal assault on the poor.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2016/01/15/a-third-of-teachers-admit_n_8987330.html
https://www.oxfam.org/en/research/working-few
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_O’Leary
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/breadline-britain-20million-now-living-5123323
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jan/15/george-osborne-bank-levy-cuts-john-mcdonnell
How to waste £445 billion? – The Failure of Quantitative Easing (VIDEO)
Fear and Loathing in Great Britain 