When the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition took power in 2010 they had one major priority; to transfer as much wealth as possible from the poorest in society to the wealthiest. Naturally, it is no coincidence that members of the coalition government are also amongst those who are the wealthiest in society! Each day brings more evidence of that transfer of wealth. Starting with cutting benefits for the unemployed and disabled; assisted by the Tory media and their hunt for dole scroungers (in communities where 16 or 17 people are chasing every vacancy). This assault on the people is continued by major job losses in the public sector, with all the knock-on effect that will have within the private sector – particularly shops and other small business. But government cynicism is breathtaking. It deliberately creates mass unemployment whilst at the same time penalises people for being unemployed. War has been declared! And now the realisation is beginning to hit home; that life, which has been tough in the past, is about to get worse.

In actual fact, we are now seeing the latest development in a long process that has led to the brutalisation of our communities; a process which began under the last Tory regime with the destruction of our manufacturing and mining industries and caused the devastation of many local areas. This was followed by the decision to allow the flooding of our housing estates with ‘skunk’ marijuana and cheap alcohol, accompanied by the legal system reducing the punishments for those who carry out acts of violence within poorer communities.  Now, the new Justice Secretary Ken Clarke has signalled that, due to cost, very few people will be sent to prison (probably only benefit cheats or those who steal from banks), thus encouraging more crime at a time of reduced police numbers. We can now look forward to a time when our streets will be overrun by a feral youth that has no social or education facilities, no prospects for work, and reduced benefits if registering as unemployed. There will be no police around to stop them from committing crimes; no fire service nearby to extinguish the arson attacks on those who offer resistance, and the nearest hospital will be privatised and refuse to take patients from certain postcodes. In addition to rising crime, there is an attack on the social welfare system; no care services for the elderly and disabled, no meals on wheels, and no respite care for those who look after the vulnerable. There will also be an unprecedented assault on the disabled, with a eugenics-influenced medical company forcing millions of vulnerable people into abject poverty and, possibly, pushing many to suicide or an early death from poor health. Just like the Nazis, this ConDem government has decided that the poor and disabled, the working class youth and the unemployed, are untermensch – subhuman.  Welcome to Cameron’s Reich!    

However, things could now start to get interesting. For thirty years, and even through the dark years of Thatcher, governments have been able to avoid problems from the masses due to the fact that loss of work, and the prestige that went with having a job, was cushioned by housing benefit and invalidity payments. But now the government is seeking to end the benefits cushion without providing employment opportunities, and it is seeing their benefits reduced unfairly that will make people more politically aware than ever before, and risks provoking the sort of backlash that has not been seen since those days in 1981, when Toxteth and Brixton burned.  More to the point, the brutalisation of our youth has an interesting historical precedent. In ancient times the Spartans brutalised their youth as a deliberate policy, and turned them into the finest warriors in Europe (ask the Persians at Thermopylae!). So, the government should be aware that its policy of targeting working class communities could actually backfire, especially if our youth and unemployed are given suitable education and direction by community activists who step into the void left by the State. In other words, don’t step back in horror from the cuts, step up to the plate and make a difference; radicalise our communities!

Finally, let’s not forget that if the ConDems declare war on the people, history teaches us that the people are justified in responding accordingly. As English Radicals we take pride in a political heritage of fighting against tyranny and injustice, and a key moment in this heritage came on 30th January 1649, when King Charles I was executed in Whitehall after having been found guilty of ‘waging war on his people’. This day was a victory for the ordinary people of England who, through their service in the New Model Army, the ‘instrument of the people’, had brought an end to a tyrannical government. Perhaps somebody should remind Cameron and Clegg about what happened in January 1649!
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WHAT LIES BEHIND THE CON-DEM WINDOW DRESSING
We have all been shopping and bought an item where the description is absolutely wonderful and the packaging leads to all sorts of high expectations. Yet when we return home and take the item out of the box we become disappointed, it’s not as wonderful as we first thought and very often some of the pieces are missing.

In a way politics is a little bit like going shopping. Each of the main parties has a shop window which they dress beautifully, their policies neatly packaged and presented and their tidily dressed well spoken salesmen doing their utmost to seem sincere and understanding. But, like the item which you have bought in the shop, when you return home and remove the packaging what you really have is something you neither expected, nor wanted, and because some of the items are missing it simply doesn’t work.

The present Con-Dem coalition is doing a wonderful job of window dressing their shop window. With the ‘Under new management sign’ neatly placed on the door of Number Ten they have set about refurbishing the store and rebranding the same products with different packaging. Shortly following the new management sign came one saying ‘Under refurbishment – sorry for any inconvenience’, as the Con-Dems announced massive cutbacks in their emergency budget. Finally the store opened for real, and the Con-Dems announce a superb deal on immigration and benefits, all neatly packaged and served by their smiling sales personnel.

So let’s have a look at these special offers from the Con-Dem superstore of politics. To begin with let us look at immigration, or to give it its real titles Economic Migration and Asylum.

Realistically the Con-Dem policies will do little to prevent England suffering further intolerable levels of economic migration and will do very little to prevent our country from remaining  the number one destination for asylum seekers. It is very true; the new Con-Dem policies may do something to prevent people from outside the EU from settling in England, but what worries people most is economic migration from other EU states. Will these new policies prevent thousands of Turkish economic migrants from coming to England? NO! What will happen when Albania eventually joins the EU, will it prevent Albanians from coming to England as economic migrants? NO! Will these new policies prevent the pressure such economic migration shall bring to our schools, housing and hospital services? NO!  Therefore when you take the Con-Dem immigration policy out of the packaging it is not only disappointing, some of the items are missing and it doesn’t really work!

Now let us open the benefits package. The Con-Dem proposal is to have a purge on the benefit system and to cut the number of claimants. On face value this may seem a good idea, as many of our coastal resorts have a ‘Costa del Dole’ image and there are many people which our benefit system has made into ‘the professional unemployed’ or those who seek to work the system rather than ever finding real work again. However these people are a small minority, and as we have stated are a product of the present system. But on viewing the Con-Dem proposals, our real fears are that it will be the genuine and most vulnerable claimants that will suffer most from the purge on benefits.

Unforunately the worst thing about the whole Con-Dem package of policies is that it will create further unemployment, thus forcing more people on to benefits. Investment in our schools and industry will be reduced. There will be little encouragement for English industries, and therefore fewer opportunities will be created. The Con-Dem ideal is a capitalist one for foreign companies to buy out and asset strip English companies or to keep them going using cheaper economic migrant labour. Therefore we are back to square one.

So if we unwrap the Con-Dem immigration and benefits proposals we can see we have something none of us really want, something which has some necessary components missing and something that will definitely not work. As a result of these policies over the coming years we will still  see high levels of economic migration from other EU countries, an influx of cheap overseas labour, further strains on our housing, schools, hospitals and social services, and more people being driven into benefits with some even turning to crime as a last resort.

As English Radicals we view things from a common sense angle rather than one driven by a capitalist or socialist ideology. We need to deal with ALL forms of economic migration from both inside and outside the EU. We see the EU superstate as something which is far too expensive in the form of our financial contribution and the social costs we have to pay as part of uncontrollable economic migration membership incurs.  We see the current costly benefit system as completely inadequate. It needs replacing with one which offers support for those that are vulnerable or genuinely unemployed but provides a real incentive to return to work. Therefore we believe the present benefit system needs scrapping and replacing with a National Income Scheme, which would provide funding to house, clothe and feed people and allow them to keep this funding when they found employment, thus providing a real incentive for returning to work. Lastly we need investment in the people of England to create businesses and thus create jobs.

ERA provides an alternative range of policies for creating a new, radical and independent England. When you remove the packaging from English Radical policies you will find something that is not disappointing, that has all the components in place and that definitely works. Therefore isn’t it time to take the faulty goods of the main parties back to their plush superstores and start to shop somewhere else. ERA is open all hours for business.


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TRUE TO FORM 06/30/2010
 
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In grotesque but sadly predictable fashion, Ian Duncan-Smith, the millionaire ex-Guards officer, and Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (square peg, round hole), is threatening to stop housing benefit to unemployed people who refuse to uproot themselves in order to find non-existent work elsewhere. In other words, a rehash of the classic “Get on your bikes” Tory dogma from the 80’s. While this proposal will no doubt propel many Daily Mail readers to erotic spasms of ecstasy, the English Radicals are curious to know - which part of the UK has labour shortages at the moment?

Or perhaps he has visions of sending them somewhere even further afield, such as Romania, or Hungary? After all, we’re in the EU now…….

Mr Duncan Smith, here are some facts from the real world for you to think about. 

For every new job vacancy that appears, the number of applicants is in double, sometimes treble, figures. 

Government plans to raise retirement ages for those already employed, will make a bad situation worse by preventing younger people from entering work.

Many newer jobs are currently filled by workers from the EU, mostly young men and women from eastern Europe, prepared to live in overcrowded, cramped conditions, working for long hours and low pay? Back to Victorian values, hurrah! 

Finally - there simply aren't enough jobs to go around in our crowded island.

Ironically, Tory policies from the Thatcher era were responsible for the demise of industrial areas that now have massive levels of unemployment: the “Free Market”, the beloved doctrine of global capitalism-loving Tories everywhere, dictated that foreign made goods made in sweatshop conditions, thus undercutting English goods, should be allowed to flood our markets and kill our home industries, whether it be coal or cloth, shoes or steel. The only solution they can dream up to compete with foreign manufacturers, is for English workers to gradually accept third world pay and conditions - hence this latest Tory plan, to make us compete feverishly for imaginary jobs.

And what was New Labour’s answer to the Tory demolition of British and English industry? Borrow money to create public sector non-jobs for the educated middle classes, whilst at the same time using the benefits system to create junkie-like dependency in the working class areas worst affected by industrial collapse, to ensure both groups' future support at the ballot box. Labour were in power for 13 years, yet their poorest seats are even poorer now, incredibly, than when they first took power! The economic mess we are currently in, can be traced back to both party’s short term “fudge” tactics, each one leaving a mess for the other one to clean up, but finding when they return to power much of the original mess is still there, plus some dodgy new carpet stains from the recently evicted tenants. 

It is not the job of government to spend taxpayer’s money hiring people to shuffle paper, or to make unwanted widgets, in order to make unemployment figures look better. The job of government is to protect its home industries - and therefore jobs - from unfair foreign competition, by heavy taxation on cheap, slave made imports, levelling the playing field for our higher waged workers to compete. It is the job of government to encourage foreign manufacturers to build factories here, not by bribery in the form of grants, but by allowing them to be classed as English companies while based here, to sidestep the heavy taxes we would otherwise impose. England is a huge market for any company – if they want to sell here, they should have to “make” here.

Only when your government has done ITS job, Mr Duncan-Smith - when you have created the framework for English industry to flourish, stemmed the tide of potentially unlimited EU economic immigration and allowed the elderly to retire at a reasonable age, will you be morally entitled to ask the unemployed to “get on their bikes” and fill the new jobs as they appear. Until then, the English Radicals suggest you live up to your reputation as the “quiet man” of politics.

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Even before they’ve got their feet under the Cabinet table, the Conservative-LibDem Coalition government has drawn up plans to force the weakest in our society to pay for the mistakes of the wealthy. Cameron says that ‘we’ will all share the pain of the next few years of financial austerity, but with eighteen millionaires in the Cabinet I very much doubt that ‘we’ all will. The fact is that the capitalist system under which we live needs to keep its foot on the throat of the poor so that they are ‘industrious’ – in other words work for next-to-nothing – and targeting the unemployed and the older citizens, by forcing them to work longer before pension age, is part of the process.

Recent surveys have shown that, on average, there are five unemployed claimants chasing every job vacancy, in some areas this rises to fifteen, especially in the north of England, the very areas that will also be targeted for cuts in public service jobs. In fact, these public service jobs that the ConDems now seek to wipe out, were actually created in areas of high unemployment; areas that had once contained major manufacturing, or mining, jobs that were then wiped out by a previous Tory government. So for the present regime to target these jobs is not just cynical, it is criminal, because every loss of public service employment affects the vulnerable in society, whether as clients or as workers.

If we examine the background to these plans to target the poor a bit more then we can see the real cynicism of capitalism and its political frontmen. The ConDems have announced plans to do away with the default pension age, despite evidence that there are hundreds of thousands of men over fifty who are long-term unemployed and facing age discrimination wherever they look, and nearly a million under-25s who are unemployed and can’t get onto the job ladder to start with. The fact is that if they do away with the pension age then the unemployed sixty-five year olds will now get £64 Job Seekers Allowance, instead of £100 pension and a bus pass, along with a gateway to many other age-related benefits, thus saving money for the government (and putting it into the pockets of the bankers). Similarly, by forcing the unemployed to do menial work for their £64 weekly JSA, it can create an unemployed labour army to replace the thousands thrown out of work from public services. It can then add to this unemployed labour army (similar to what the Nazis set up in 1933 by the way!) by forcing the disabled to work and pushing young mothers out to work earlier (and then the Tory right will complain when all the little Jakes and Joshes start running riot on their estate through lack of parental supervision). The new mastermind of the government’s attack on the vulnerable is an expert on poverty, Frank Field MP, whose Birkenhead constituency has consistently been one of the poorest, not just in Britain, but in Western Europe. Of course, Frank’s Labour government actually increased the gap between rich and poor so, coupled with his thirty years of watching Birkenhead live below the breadline, he really is the man to help the ConDems create more poverty.

As English Radicals who know our history, we have witnessed this cynical attack on the weak before, ever since the onset of the industrialisation of our country, politicians and businesses have worked cap-in-hand to force the poor to be ‘flexible’; ensuring they make slave labour wages acceptable by deterring men and women from claiming benefits. The capitalist system needs competition for jobs to keep wages low, and this means either maintaining high unemployment, or encouraging mass immigration; with the former the system will then make claiming benefits difficult, with the latter it highlights ‘racism’ and ‘xenophobia’ to prevent opposition to its activity. Both high unemployment and mass immigration force poorer communities into more hardship, whilst the capitalist system benefits. But, as we are now seeing, Governments also force the poor to pay the cost when there is economic failure; so the banks get bailed out whilst the unemployed and pensioners suffer. Capitalism is evil and the politicians who cynically front it are criminals.

The English Radical Alliance is different to every other political party in that we wish to see the capitalist system replaced by one which protects English workers from exploitation and encourages more people to run their own businesses or own shares in the company they work for. We wish to see a system that breaks up the monopoly of the big banks and localises more of our financial services, so making them more accountable to people at the grassroots. This system, Distributism, is a much fairer and more tolerant than the evil system that we have now, and we call upon the unemployed and the elderly to join us now in a crusade to wipe out capitalism in our country, and the criminals who run it.

In the weeks and months ahead, ERA will be campaigning against the government’s attack on the vulnerable, and encouraging the unemployed to seek legal advice regarding their conditions in connection with the minimum wage and employment rights. If the unemployed are punished at a time when there are fifteen vacancies for every claimant AND the government itself is creating unemployment through public service cuts, then this may well need to be addressed in the courts; governments are not above the law. ERA stands firm besides the vulnerable in our society and will defend the right of every English man and woman to live in a dignified manner.


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