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Marching for real change
Friday 19 October 2012 Printable Email
David Cameron entertained his backbenchers this week - it doesn't take much - by ridiculing Ed Miliband's decision to speak at today's A Future that Works protest in London.
Cameron chortled, as only privately educated beneficiaries of inherited, tax-dodged wealth can do, that the Labour leader was ingratiating himself with his trade union paymasters by attending "the most lucrative sponsored walk in history.
What a card and what a loss to the world of stand-up comics when Cameron renounced comedy for politics.
This braying ass and his back-bench sycophantic gigglers wouldn't understand in a month of Sundays why hundreds of thousands of people are taking to the streets of London, Glasgow and Belfast.
The short answer is in opposition to the Tory-Liberal Democrat government policies, but a more detailed response would cover a catalogue of crimes committed by this conservative coalition and its own corporate paymasters.
It won't just be trade unionists protesting, although they have reasons enough to do so.
Whether in the public or private sector, workers have seen job losses, pay restraint, attacks on pension schemes and plans to undermine trade union representation.
Council tenants and the homeless will also take to the streets because they see a government intent on fleecing working people to suit its friends, the property speculators, private landlords and banks.
There are 4.5 million people on council housing lists, but, instead of investing in a new generation of local authority homes, the government pushes further privatisation and housing benefit cuts to drive poor people out of better-off areas of our cities.
Ministers take refuge in their natural prejudice against claimants by increasingly equating them to scroungers on society.
Justifying their campaign to slash benefits they seek support from "hard-working families," juxtaposing their economic hardship in the current crisis with supposed featherbedding of the unemployed, as though most, or even many, don't work through choice.
It is classic Tory divide-and-rule tactics, as Liberal Democrat leaders would once have pointed out before their backsides became so cosily moulded to their ministerial easy chairs.
Marchers know that it wasn't claimants, public service workers, trade unionists, pensioners, single parents, asylum-seekers, the long-term unemployed, young people or any other convenient scapegoat that caused capitalism's crisis.
It was sparked by private banks that gambled on subprime mortgages, worthless financial packages and commodity speculation.
When the going was good, the rewards were excellent for company directors and shareholders, but, unlike other gamblers who stand their own losses, the banks insisted on being bailed out, refinanced and allowed to start again.
Britain's finance sector wasn't unlucky. It was corrupt and crooked. Instead of being bailed out, the banks should have been nationalised and the people running them should be in jail.
Barclays has just set aside a further £700 million to cover its "mis-selling" saga, making £2,000 million so far.
What other business could engage in fraud on this scale and still be allowed to operate?
Yet politicians of all stripes still bow down to the banks, euphemising them as "markets" or "investors," and tell workers to pull together and bear the pain of paying for the crisis.
That's not acceptable from the Tories and Liberal Democrats. Nor will it be from Miliband. He should be told that today.
Workers are not marching today against Tory austerity with no better aim than embracing austerity-lite from Labour. They want real change.
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