A letter a day to number 10. No 1,321
Wednesday 20 January 2016.
Dear Mr Cameron,
Work, the great Tory magic mantra. It doesn’t matter how sick or disabled people are, Iain Duncan Smith insists that everyone can and must work. It doesn’t even matter whether we’re paid or not, as Smith put it, ‘work actually helps free people’, mimicking the Nazis, ‘Arbeit macht frei’. According to Smith it’s about delivering social justice, “Getting people into work is more than just earning a salary and certainly more than balancing the public purse. For culturally and socially, work is the spine that runs through a stable society. I want those who remain trapped and isolated on welfare to move from dependence to independence.” Really?
Whatever dignity might have existed in labour, you and your government and Smith in particular are stripping people of any vestige of dignity whilst presiding over the greatest transfer of wealth in history.
Oxfam reports that in 2010 the 388 richest people owned wealth equal to the poorest half of the world, that figure today has reduced to just 62 people and the report also finds that the richest 1% now own as much wealth as everyone else on the planet.
Work is the greatest con trick on Earth, and yet so successful is the propaganda many working people defend it to the hilt. Workers are merely human resources and companies no longer even try to wrap it up in any fancy way and in fact have reduced it to a mere acronym, HR and our entire education system is the supply chain to produce those useful human resources fit for work.
Work under capitalism is the ever increasing transfer of wealth upwards. The Walton family of Walmart fame is one of the worlds richest families, billionaires who pay poverty wages. Gina Rinehart, mining billionaire and one of the worlds richest women, infamously called for a lowering of the minimum wage (not even the living wage) in Australia. Fewer and fewer people in work can even hold their own, they are being driven backwards into poverty, many thousands now reliant on Food Banks to help them even eat.
You claim you are the party of equality but the reality is that you are grinding people literally into the ground and driving inequality through the roof. Work is the magic river of wealth that defies gravity, pouring upwards. There is, without question, vital work that must be done for the country to function and there will always be a work force, but for vast numbers of people work means poverty in a world of wealth that they help create. Iain Duncan Smith’s attacks on the poor and sick and disabled people to drive them into work is just naked brutality and your celebration of increasing numbers in work is just a con trick. Until there is economic justice there will never be justice on Earth. Wealth equality is a pipe dream, some disparity in wealth is always going to exist, but economic justice is something everyone should be fighting for and demanding. Until we have economic justice millions of people will remain in dismal wage slavery, barely making it one week to the next in the worlds greatest con trick.
IDS Calls For Another Major ESA Shakeup
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGY15gSc8OM&feature=youtu.be 4:19 “work actually helps free people.” – IDS
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/worlds-62-richest-wealthy-poorest-half-042929090.html
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/19/davos-super-rich-wealth-inequality
http://www.ibtimes.com.au/gina-rinehart-suggests-lowering-minimum-wage-60640-week-1300127
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/29/poverty-child-rising-welfare-cuts-tory-claims
http://www.trusselltrust.org/foodbank-figures-top-900000
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/26/david-cameron-conservatives-party-of-equality
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/iain-duncan-smith-claims-200000-strong-5932476
Fear and Loathing in Great Britain 