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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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