Barely two years with our new, illegal, right-wing government, it is already clear that Britain could not be in a more catastrophic position. This April has dealt a mortal blow to David Cameron’s ministry, which is saying something when compared with a truly staggering 24 months of failure and incompetence. Today it was announced that Britain is officially back in recession, the info coming mere hours after Secretary of State for Culture Jeremy Hunt’s ‘special advisor’ Adam Smith quit his post over Hunt’s alleged shady dealings with News International concerning its bid to take over broadcaster BSkyB last year. Add this to the fact that (‘official’)unemployment in Britain has increased almost every month since the General Election in May 2010, the entire government took about a decade to cancel their holidays and do something about the violence last August, and that, despite the prolonged rainy weather, virtually all of England remains in drought, and one wonders just how long the coalition government can stand these mounting controversies.
Not since Thatcher’s first government of ’79-’83 has Britain’s economy been in such chronic languish, but back then Thatcher had plans to completely explode market regulation and foster the cult of money, instantly pleasing an electorate easily distracted by the superficial emptiness of owning cars, houses and electronics. Cameron has tried to rekindle this culture of greed, but it remains clear that not only are people far worse off financially than in the early ’80s, but it was this very neo-liberal orgy of borrowing and spending, by both the financial world and by the public, that brought about this global crisis in the first place. The people may be stupid and ignorant but they won’t be tempted to repeat such serious mistakes again.
Even John Major’s tenure as PM from 1990 -1997 had the best part of a decade to reduce the Conservative Party to a clan of sleazy, corrupt aristocrats more concerned with paying for prostitutes and making the EU the new ideological boogeyman than doing something about the worsening situation of unemployment and the rapid decline of British manufacturing and industry. That too is echoed by today’s report, saying that manufacturing is one of the key areas of decline responsible for the new recession. Major’s government also had their own foreign wargames, bombing the life out of the bloody wars in the Balkans, but that’s nothing compared to William Hague’s roistering adventuring in Libya, which cost the lives of 40,000 people, assassinated a sovereign head of state, reduced a country to ruin, recreated the sectarian infighting that blights Iraq, and soaked up over £600million of public money (and not forgetting his Ahmadinejad-style rhetoric over the Malvinas). The Ministry of Defence also lost its first minister last year, after Liam Fox was forced to resign because of the slight issue of having a ‘friend’ tag along when meeting some of the world’s leaders/business partners.
But not even Thatcher’s most reactionary policies could have forced the working class out onto the streets during 2011 for three of the biggest industrial strikes since the 1920s. In March, June and November hundreds of thousands of people vented their fury at a government maniacally bent on ‘solving’ the nations monetary problems by stealing even greater amounts from a destitute public. More action is planned on May 10th this year, with another, bigger strike to follow in June. Whereas Thatcher had one definite challenge to her rampaging in 1984, Cameron will have many more on top of the huge damages inflicted last year. He tried to force the unions to commit to a more drastic stand-off at the beginning of April over the pitiful pay of fuel-tanker drivers, but they wisely avoided taking the bait and escalating an issue that would have made it easy for the corporate media to turn in the government’s favour. As a result, such politicking backfired spectularly on the coalition as a worried, uninformed populace scrambled to petrol stations to stock up on fuel, hoarding that was encouraged by Francis Maude, a grotty little demon from the Major government, and which ended up causing an accident that gave a woman severe burns to 40% of her body.
Just as few weeks earlier, George Osborne unveiled one of the most regressive Budgets in this country’s history, particularly thieving of pensioners to the tune of £3billion, giving his corporate sponsors more generous tax cuts than France, Japan or the US, and effectively partitioning the NHS, free and fair since 1948, amongst markets and privateers. There were also some rotten hidden measures such as cutting child welfare allowances, and forcing homeowners with extra rooms to accommodate lodgers (without being given information about them or, indeed, choice if they happen to have criminal records) lest their housing tax credits get stopped. But at least he was kind enough to set aside even more money for the gargantuan white elephant that is the London Olympics, as well as join the near-universal chorus from MPs and the childish media in praising Elizabeth Windsor for spending the last 60 years shaking hands with various equally over-dressed men, who is now getting a publicly-funded Kim Il-Sung festival of worship in June (and for all American tourists, I doubt you think ‘Elizabeth Tower’ has quite the same attraction as ‘Big Ben’.) Education Secretary Michael Gove was also happy at new laws letting state schools ‘choose’ to become ‘academies’, opening them up to private investment and failure, including from junk food companies despite there being an obesity epidemic amongst children and new warnings that diabetes is set to jump to affect an extraordinary 6 million people.
Voters are talking with regards to the Con-Dem’s tiny majority in Parliament. Several by-elections in recent months have re-seated some Labour candidates, London Mayor Boris Johnson is set to be booted out on his public-school ass in May, while Labour’s centre-right leadership was given a healthy shock as virulently left-wing firebrand George Galloway won a seat in a constituency Labour had held since 1974. And with a socialist all but winning the presidency of France in two week’s time, no doubt the forces of progressivism and sanity will be given vital support from across the Channel.
Since our government has no fixed term of office (unlike most civilised nations), Cameron can push back his termination of office to 2015, but how he could ever rescue the possibility of re-election seems non-existent. (I say ‘re-election’ for sake of argument; the reality is no one voted for this Frankenstein’s monster of a government.) Thatcher recouped her unpopularity by slaughtering some Argentinians on a windy rock in the middle of the Atlantic, John Major won in 1992 because he wasn’t a loudmouth who ran his election campaign like he was running for US president rather than incresing interest in his party, and Blair kept it going because he gave the people a few policies that helped their hard lives whilst helping orchestrate the calamity of September 2008. In a Third World country social unrest would have overthrown the government. In Europe it would’ve caused it to be replaced with a capitalist dictatorship, or to collapse completely under its own bullshit. In America, you guys get the bizarre privilige of voting for a president who has worked his hair grey to give back some money to the working class, and are treated to a fabulous comedy-melodrama from a party so far to the right even the European fascist parties are starting to play it safe. But here in Britain, where we are ruled without a written constitution and governed by an appointed committe of octogenarian ‘lords’, a former television PR manager and simple under-educated morons, we don’t have anything we can rely on, except ourselves, and it’s going to take a lot more corporate Budgets and mass strikes to wake us up to the unpleasant reality of a country narrowly heading into total chaos.
