Here's a letter from a friend of mine to his local Lib Dem MP.
I am sharing it with his permission. It illustrates the depth of feeling across much of the country about what is going on and how the Lib Dems have facilitated it.
How could you let this happen?
· Millions of people now long term unemployed.
· Millions more in poorly paid part-time jobs.
· Local and national public services broken up, people who relied on them left abandoned.
· Public services sold-off to make profits for shareholders of multi national companies who don’t pay UK tax.
· Education standards deemed unsatisfactory by Ofsted in expensively sponsored Academies and Free schools
· Education ministers prioritising, power, profit and politics before pupil performance.
· Deteriorating health and welfare of millions of children.
· Parents unable to afford healthy food or to buy fuel to heat their homes.
· The poor and vulnerable scapegoated, all benefit claimants demonized as work-shy, scrounger.
· The average citizen is only three pay cheques away from destitution.
· As many people living in poverty who have work than those who are out of work.
· A generation of school and college leavers unable to find employment, their career aspirations ruined.
· Thirty percent of children born into poverty will stay there all their lives.
· Talented well-qualified people without paid employment resulting in devastating personal traumas and deeply damaging losses for British Industry.
· Near decimation of the cultural, emotional and physical infrastructure of society through swingeing cuts to the Arts, youth provision and the highways.
· An unprecedented level of personal insecurity, anxiety and civil unrest.
· People on housing benefit being forced to move house or pay more rent for their empty bedrooms even when there are no smaller properties available.
· Millions wasted by careless, cavalier ministers incapable of (for example):
> managing the new rail franchise bidding process.
> legislating fair changes to the Child Benefit system,
> ensuring healthy school and community sporting facilities available following the Olympics
The UK’s economic and social crisis has become worse during the last 3 years; the future is considerably bleaker than when the Coalition took office. It is worse and bleaker because of your government’s arrogance, ignorance and incompetence.
Your austerity policies were designed less to get the country working again, more to discipline the powerless, to discredit and dismantle public services. to ensure the wealthy stay in-charge and to divert public attention from greedy, bonus-addicted bankers.
Your government has been responsible for encouraging unprecedented divisive splits in British society:
The wealthy against the poor
High achievers against the less able
Able bodied against the disabled
Young people against adults
Middle classes against pensioners
Straight against gay
Private sector against public sector
British citizens against foreigners
Lawmakers against the police
South against North
The Coalition didn’t invent the divisions but it has cynically and deliberately widened the gaps. Sadly both history and common sense tell us that ‘divide and misrule’ of this magnitude is a reliable recipe for the breakdown of law and order.
Your government’s handling of a very serious social and economic crisis has been potentially disastrous. It is hard to see how a once prosperous, tolerant country should have been destroyed by an inept bunch of aspiring grandees and selfish multi millionaires.
It's one thing to be ruled by a group of people who have no understanding, sympathy or empathy with ordinary working people it is a far worse situation when this powerful remnant of a faded aristocracy is incapable of governing, don’t know how to do it, and are economically, socially and politically illiterate.
One doesn’t have to be a financial genius to see that your brutal austerity package is seriously flawed. Academics, school children and ordinary people in the community who read and understand history alerted you 3 years ago. If you put people put out of work the country will receive less tax revenue this results in increased claims on social security benefits. People without work are more prone to illness and stress. This increases pressure on the NHS. The result is an economic spiral into deeper recession which will be mirrored by a spiral into social unrest and anarchy.
Your Government’s response to the recession is deeply offensive.
1. Blame the last government, loudly and often
2. Cut benefits to the less well off and disabled
3. Label everyone who doesn’t have a job as a lazy scrounger.
4. Sell-off the NHS
5. Proclaim that all child poverty in UK is the result of parental drug addiction
It has cruelly mis-represented the county’s problems as the fault of the opposition, the powerless, the disabled and the unemployed.
We are not daft! We don’t believe you. Can you not see how these silly policies and pronouncements insult our intelligence?
However the biggest disappointment of this crisis is that people like you - honourable, once well respected, politicians and public servants - have been seduced into supporting and facilitating the policies of an undemocratic right wing cabal.
Why did you let this happen and what are going to do to avoid the inevitable slide into anarchy?
Yours sincerely
No comments:
Post a Comment