In these days of evil, we are so much better than this.

The Tories treat us worse than animals, why are we debating their policies at all? Is it because we are now so used to being beaten and treated like shit and are so abject we can’t even see the depths of debasement we have been driven to?

I have of late been been feeling so low it has been a tremendous battle to continue to engage politically, requiring ever greater effort and I have struggled to understand why. I am no stranger to politics, nor to expressing robust views on the impact of policies and corruption on our lives and well being.

Two recent stories will serve to highlight the problem. The first is not unique, in fact tales of this kind have become entirely too frequent. In the words of Tom Pride of Pride’s Purge – “Denise Bates is dying of terminal cancer.

“She is on morphine to help manage the pain, she has a palliative care nurse, is receiving palliative chemotherapy and is in a wheelchair.

“But she has been found fit to work.

“As a result she has been stripped of her disability benefits for 10 weeks, and has only £6 a week left for food.” [1]

The second story is about government policy. On the 10th May 2019 Amber Rudd announced that she was abandoning the ‘rarely used’ 3 year sanctions, and, in future, the longest length of a sanction will be 6 months. [2]

Any ordinary person who is even half connected to their basic humanity will grasp how hideous both these interconnected stories are. They are the imposition of the unthinkable, that no sane human being would ever even consider imposing on another, Tory policies depriving people of the means of survival giving rise to hundreds of thousands of people dying prematurely.

It was made very clear to me when I attempted to report Iain Duncan Smith and (Lord) David Freud to the police for manslaughter and human rights violations that what the Tories were doing was legal and lawful, because they had passed laws to make it so, and my only recourse to justice was to bring a civil case to contest the law and there was nothing the police could do.

In other words, depriving people of the means of survival is lawful and the degradation of our humanity as Tory policy is firmly fixed in law. Every argument that follows that is an acknowledgement of institutionalised cruelty and slavery by government dictat. We have passed unconscionable by and entered into merely a discussion of our debasement as human beings.

Personally, I have had to learn to live with the outrage that courses through me every time I see some new evidence of the most despicable cruelty. I am 68 and have never experienced anything like this in all my years until now and I do not know how to pass ‘Go’ on the Monopoly board of Tory bestial cruelty, in the knowledge that for them it is just a game. They will never know the struggles of ordinary people, elevated, as they are, by privilege so great they have no care or concern for the lives and well being of those they are actually paid to serve, yet abandon even to death.

The danger of entering this hell hole is that every day makes our eventual emergence a fight to recover our worth which has been steadily, wilfully and brutally eroded. I am acutely aware of the erosion of my mental and physical existence and my sense of identity in a man-made hell on Earth.

I do not know how many times in my life I have said, ‘poverty is violence’ and in particular, over the last ten years of Tory extremism.

The lessons that we in Britain are having to learn from around the world is that we must never give up in the war that is being waged against us. Government extremism is nothing new, not even in Britain, but we have been lulled into a false sense of security by a system, designed by Labour, that was predicated on care: health care for all, free at the point of delivery, a system of social security designed to support those who, driven by circumstances, are in economic need and human rights legislation covering work, life and liberty, all of which is being destroyed on a daily basis, with malice aforethought.

I am 68 and have lived through good times and bad, which includes a life long battle with acute mental ill health for which I have spent time in a psychiatric institution, which, for the record, was amazing and got be back on the road again when I had lost all hope of life.

But I have never witnessed or lived with anything like this until 2010 when the Tories abandoned reason and instigated a war on the poor for no reason what so ever other than an ideological one. They did it because they wanted to, even down to robbing us of life and why? For greed. Literally robbing the poor to further increase the wealth of the rich [3]. The transfer of wealth from the so called 99% to the so called 1% has seen the people and public owned assets stripped and given to the super rich. The following is from 2018 and the only change since has been for the worst.

“The picture of rising inequality across modern Britain revealed by the commission’s report shows the financial health of nation is divided along the lines of income, geography, gender, ethnicity and age. It ranks the UK as the fifth most unequal country in Europe.

“More than a fifth of the population live on incomes below the poverty line after housing costs are taken into account, even though most of these households are in work. Nearly one in three children live in poverty and the use of food banks is rising.

“There is a sixfold difference between the income of the top 20% of households and those of the bottom 20%. Wealth inequality is much worse, with 44% of the UK’s wealth owned by just 10% of the population, five times the total wealth held by the poorest half.”

The Tories have engaged in an unrestrained national robbery for the last ten years across every area of life to fill the coffers of the already super wealthy, driving 4 million children into poverty and depriving them of even a morsel of food.

What I must never lose sight of, although it is becoming increasingly difficult, hence writing this, is that we are better than this. As life becomes ever more brutal, as well as the risk to life itself, it is also a psychological battle that we must win and find the ways and the means for each of us to survive mentally.

I have always struggled with coping socially, there is even a name for it, ‘social phobia’. I experience a titanic struggle to cope with society in general on a daily basis and yet, within the scope of my life, I know many people who are simply incredible. People who are everything anyone could ask for in their humanity, their unstinting kindness and their care and consideration for others. As much as they too are struggling under the brutality of the Tories, their humanity shines ever stronger, undimmed by the imposition of cruelty, inhumanity and the greed of the few against the many.

People who I love, people with whom I have shed tears and shared the struggle, people who are just so human that they give me strength even when they have no idea they are doing it. People who are extraordinarily ordinary, unpretentious, self-effacing and, above all, kind. Yes, I am talking about you. The people who are most likely to read this simply because I wrote it because you know me, understand me and where I am coming from, and who I love immeasurably.

If there is any hope for this world, it will never come from above, yet it already exists in our hearts and minds. It may express itself in anger and indignation in these dark days, but that anger and indignation has a bedrock of kindness. It is righteous anger and indignation against inhumanity, just as it damned well ought to be, because the one thing thing we will not and cannot sacrifice is our humanity and our care and consideration for each other, even whilst, all too often, finding self kindness a struggle under the cruel weight of being despised by a bestial government and their policies of attrition and cruelty, which, it must be noted, they revel in.

We may have to turn the other cheek to take the next cruel and unavoidable blow, but they will never, ever, not by any foul means at their disposal, steal our humanity.

That is something that burns inside me as an unquenchable fire, it is written in my innermost being, to live a humane life, a word derived from humanity, because to live any other way would mean sacrificing our humanity and our humanity is something we hold as sacrosanct and which is never ever open to debate. It is the rock on which our lives are built. It is love, peace, justice, care, consideration, tolerance, patience, kindness and understanding, and it is strong!

It is what dreams are made of, a better world for all, for life, for this tenacious gift we’ve been granted by nature, something beautiful beyond words.

This is what life has taught me, and I thank life and you for that.

Thank you so much.

KOG. 05 October 2019.

[1] https://tompride.wordpress.com/2019/07/20/tory-britain-woman-dying-of-cancer-found-fit-for-work-benefits-stripped-left-with-6-a-week-for-food/

[2] https://fearandloathingingreatbritain.wordpress.com/2019/05/12/amber-rudd-announces-max-period-of-government-enforced-starvation-of-only-6-months/

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2018/sep/05/qa-how-unequal-is-britain-and-are-the-poor-getting-poorer