From austerity to revolt

Friday, 29 April 2022

From austerity to revolt

Keir Starmer, the UK Labour leader, has recently said that, 'People don't want a revolution. They do want how I am going to pay my energy bill.' Sorry for your clunky speech Sir Starmer. Here is the clearer reality. A lot of people want to use energy, yes, and they are considering that they will need to do it by a revolution. 

Natural gas costs 20 times higher than the lowest point of the pandemic; a third more than January 2022. The government has lifted energy companies costs from 54% - using tax. But fuel bills are increasing another £700 per 6 months starting in October. Energy companies made £7 billion profits in the last 5 years. Time to open up a general wealth tax and the nationalisation of energy.

Apples are going up by 25%; Milk by 7%, Margarine 31%. Fertiliser is rising from £280 to £1000 per ton.  Guess what happens to crops. 

Meanwhile incomes are falling; so far by 2.2%; the steepest fall since records began. And that is today. 

Universal Credit is cut by £20. Meanwhile inflation is rising towards 8%. Households £1100 worse off and rising. Average annual spend on groceries is now more than £1300 per person. Those in the poverty line faced their food budget being wiped out. Additional 1.3 million people, including the additional half a million kids, are tipped into current poverty. We are now, this moment already, 60% below the median. 

And Britain is dropping alongside its neighbours? So the UK can feel bearable? The Food Foundation in 2017, compared with the EU, discovered that Britain has the highest proportions of children 'living in a severely food insecure household'. (And in 2020, 2500 kids were admitted to Hospital with malnutrition, twice as many as in the year before.)  

Billionaire Chancellor Sunak jollied with the press when they asked him what loaf he had in his family. His household has lots of loaves, he said.

Prime Minister Boris told the British people when he won the General Election in 2019 that the previous ten year austerity had been swept away. In fact a desperately worse austerity appears that it is here to stay in the UK, magnified this time by the whole general West's rapid decline. Traditional politics is beginning to shatter and has already broken down in the Western margins. Globalisation has lost its dynamic. Modern capitalism is depending on a decreasing US financial hordes and providing billionaire wealth rather than unacceptable, long term, would-be dodgy, investment. World wars are beginning and climate crises, despite heroic individual efforts, are going backward.

Looking at the overall West's picture, Sir Starmer's view of the world seems timid indeed. In reality this UK's Labour's Lord has already failed and is certain to hang-on to the more and more decrepit status quo than any change of a new society. He is much more frightened of any new revolution, much more than he worries that he won't replace Boris in the good old style.     

What would be a change; a new, developed, democratic, socialist revolution? 

In 2017 Labour leader Corbyn, following the largest Labour vote for decades, nearly won a radical program of reform which might have been a significant platform that could have prepared to win against the current crisis. Corbyn's failure over Brexit, by then focussed on its democratic demand and not led through racism, broke the potential social democratic left. Nevertheless, despite the most vicious attack on Corbyn, mostly led by Labour leaders, 10 million still voted for his program. If this huge population, (despite the 13 million that voted Boris) had been encouraged to have remained an active movement - with Corbyn's principles - then a real opening for a socialist change could well have taken the lead in society in today's increasingly desperate conditions. 

Alas, even Corbyn's social democracy is not socialist revolution. But the current conditions and the memory of the ideas of radical changes in the recent past can still play a part in a new turn towards genuine revolutionary conditions. 

How can that be?

The new thing across the West - and most apparent in the breaking up of the UK - is not only the shift of the anger at the wealthy self-serving, lying, 'democracy', it is the awkward day to day life that constantly irritates and causes annoying trouble. Everybody knows the big picture of increasing wealth and its connection with increasing poverty. Some imagine and hope that this will 'pass away.' But the unexpected things and the dangerous things constantly prick the failing government and the real problems in society. 

Passports don't work and planes don't fly. GPs are unavailable (and the UK is the lowest across all of the main European countries.) Potholes are opening and education is declining and closing. (Again, education is dropping compared with Europe in general.) The railways don't work and they cost a fortune when they do get going (like everything else.) You can't pay for your dog food. Your drive to work is more than half of your wages. You've decided not to go to Uni because you are going to pay for it, if necessary for the rest of your life. And yet the rich and the corporations still get richer and richer. Chucking out Boris is far and away not enough. Sir Starmer doesn't do much better. This is the beginning of the breakdown of a society - of many societies - still dominated by rulers who maintain relentless wealth.  

In these conditions new battles are already emerging. In the UK there are dozens and dozens of workplaces that are striking. Many of them are winning. (See News From the Frontline.) Nationalisation is becoming a deeply sensible response to private money grabbing - especially among the services, utilities and banks; and most significant is the new ideas and demands that are arising, aiming to 'sort out' the UK's ridiculous Parliament.

The 'mother of all Parliaments' is simply the most ridiculous 'democracy' in the world. The Lords who are solely chosen by Prime Ministers, and as is well known, they are the largest part of any Parliament in the world, except the Chinese Communist Party's annual conference. From time to time waves of corruption causes the notion that the Lords must go. Except they never do. The two main parties, Tory and Labour, are just as linked to these corruptions. Except, in the last few years, because Tory and Labour leaders are becoming more and more versions of the autocrats like Trump, Orban and Duda, the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish National Party and the Greens have begun to demand deep and wide changes. And, in the despair of Southern Ireland's ancient parties, a new democracy has erupted, which shows how ordinary people can decide the answers to key questions and the real democracy has begun.  

But there is a status quo in the UK and the West in general. It has worried about its regal, centuries, place.  There is no question that the current decaying politics will use every resource that they already hold to prevent the rise of a new root and branch for a new economy and a real democracy. The revolution will come out of the battles by ordinary people, who, as they push and then they battle for their rights, will start for the prospects of their future. The sooner the better it is vital to make that clear.

For that reason; the reason for the power needed for a real revolution, following France, a radical UK needs now to build a bloc. Melenchon recently led the left to a degree that it could lead the major part of French society in the direction of change, similar to the needs of the UK. The new French Popular Front is a proposal for a combined left; for wages and genuine social care; for the fight for ecology, for women, for people of colour and support for immigration; for a new socialist society. (It has nothing to do with the Popular Front of the 30s, which believed that fascism would be defeated if capitalism came in together. Fat chance!)  

Previous blogs in the past have theoretically suggested, after 10 million voted for Corbyn, that it would be possible to build such a step. The UK's servant, that bows to one of the worst Parliaments in the world, stopped dead the possibilities of a powerful left, and the millions were dumped. Now the results are so much more obvious. There is the possibility of a new leadership in society. Now it is not theoretical. 

Posted by Brian Heron at 17:22 

Labels: Chance for revolution?, Parliament is over?, What's next in politics?