Roosevelt was right; it seems that what we have to fear is fear itself

Despite Cameron and Osborne's best attempts to convince us that we are in recovery, and that we are all getting better off and heading back to the sunny uplands of endless growth, its clear that the crisis hasn't been worked through yet and we still have major problems. Lets consider unemployment; the figures are falling and have been for some time but its obvious that they are being massaged. 'Jobseekers' are being sanctioned for the feeblest of reasons, and no reason at all - like failing to attend a meeting you weren't invited to. There has also been a massive rise in the numbers of 'self employed' people and there are now 1.4 million people on zero hours contracts. Self employment is a convenient way of getting people off the books but it is also a sign that the economy is failing to provide proper jobs for people. So, despite a fall in unemployment to 2.24 million its clear that the real figure is way higher and if you consider underemployment, which has been estimated to be as high as 6 million people, you can see an economy that is failing.

Of course its not just unemployment that concerns people, there are also severe problems with falling living standards, poor housing, growing personal debt and shrinking pensions. This is the result of 30 years of neoliberalism, or Thatcherism as it is better known in the UK. The bright shiny future we were all promised in the 1980s just turned out to be a bonanza for casino capitalism and the super rich. And the super rich are really just a kleptocracy who have made massive gains by asset stripping the public sector and stealing our pensions, making the rest of us poorer in the process. 

Those who caused the great crash of 2008 have escaped without any sanction, banks have been bailed out, and lots of ordinary people have suddenly found themselves much worse off. Children have found they have less prospects than their parents. Not surprisingly governments and politicians have become unpopular and there is real anger about these changes. So who to blame? Well anyone it seems apart from 'ourselves' - in the sense that 'we' voted repeatedly for people who screwed 'us' because 'we' are politically naive - and the people, the capitalist corporations and their tame politicians, who are really to blame for the mess we are in. 

And there we have it. Lots of angry people, fearful for the future, feeling they have been left behind in a time of austerity, and wanting change. And how do you control those people and deflect them from the real culprits and the real solutions to their problems? You play on the their fears and you offer them simplistic solutions which feed their prejudices. You divide them to rule them, and you use the well worn but effective tactic of scapegoating. "Blame the immigrants, they are taking your jobs. Blame the unemployed, they are benefit scroungers soaking up your hard earned taxes". 

Franklin D. Roosevelt; well aware of the dangers of fear

Which brings us to UKIP which is the vehicle that people are using to vent their anger in the UK because they have been screwed. UKIP, the anti-establishment blokish party of common sense. Except that UKIP is neither anti-establishment nor does it speak any sense. What it does do very effectively is feed on people's fear and and discontent and its clear that if we ever had a UKIP government the very people who voted for it would be screwed even harder by the capitalist class. All of which shows us that Roosevelt was right, what we have to fear is fear itself because it is fear which can be exploited by political demagogues like Nigel Farage for their own ends and fear which blinds people to the truth and makes them act against their own best interests. Make people insecure and it is much easier to control them.

So what is the answer? Hope has to be the antidote to fear and we have to expose the real establishment nature of UKIP, and its policies, such as privatisation of the NHS. We have to promote positive alternatives which will result in the restoration of security for all the people through Social Security and a publicly run public sector. The only political Party which offers this hope is the Green Party. So vote Green in 2014.

The benefits cap is an attack on the victims of austerity

You have to hand it to the political right. They are the real masters of the politics of divide and rule. Recently they have been busy dividing public sector workers and private sector workers over pay and pensions. Now they are dividing those in work against the unemployed over the benefits cap. Cleverly, they have come up with, as they always do, a simple ruse to get the support of those in work, for their attack on the victims of austerity - the so-called benefit scroungers. This is typically simplistic right-wing distortion of the truth and is very effective.

In case you want to jump to any conclusions about my views - I think that people should find work if they can. But the whole issue of work is far more complicated than the media would have you believe.The problem for people in the UK is that they live in a capitalist economic system which creates unemployment, which increases in time of inevitable periodic crises, thus preventing the unemployed  from getting meaningful work. There are three important issues which those who support a benefits cap don't want to discuss, they are;

1. If benefits exceed the average wage, that clearly means the average wage is too low. Low pay has been a chronic problem in the UK for many years. The introduction of a minimum wage under the Labour government helped to redress this problem, but the minimum wage is still not a living wage. If workers were realistically rewarded for the work they do this wouldn't be a problem.

2. Unemployment; the real issue which underlies this whole debate about benefit caps is the unemployment caused by the Coalition's austerity programme. The capitalist economic system has always produced unemployment. It was Marx who identified this problem as the 'reserve army of labour'. We need a government which has the guts and gumption to create jobs, rather than destroying them through austerity. In the Green Party, we explained how this could be done in our manifesto with a call for a Green New Deal to create one million jobs.

3. Housing benefits payments at £20 billion wouldn't be so great if we had enough social housing with controlled rents instead of reliance on the rip-off private sector. Over the past 30 years successive governments have failed to provide social housing on anywhere near the scale needed. The UK has a chronic shortage of homes with many of the poor living in substandard housing because of the market ideology pursued by New Labour and the Tories. Promises to build new homes simply haven't been met.

New Labour and the Tories have sought to hide their neoliberal economic failures by blaming the victims, and dividing the nation, through bashing the unemployed, and now, a benefit cap. What we need is real economic and social change to create a society where jobs are the priority, and hard working families receive the real benefits of the wealth they create. The only political party in the UK which has a costed and coherent programme to bring about that change within the context of the growing threat of climate change is the Green Party. Come and join us in making that change happen.

We need to end the dependency culture of the 1%

You'll often hear the 'free' market fundamentalists on the reactionary right of politics complaining about the 'entitlement culture' and the 'dependency culture'. What they mean is that people, usually unemployed, believe that they are entitled to benefits, or handouts from taxpayers, and that they become dependent on them. The result is that these people either never feel the need to work for a living, or have become almost incapable of finding work. The approach of our reactionary coalition government is well summed up in this article from The Sun, which crows about the government's plans to:

"smash the dependency culture that condemns millions to a life on the dole"

But its not the dependency culture that condemns people in the UK to a life on the dole, its the failed ideology of neoliberalism and the economic policies of privatisation and deregulation which have destroyed jobs in the UK over the past 30 years. So what do the reactionary right do? Blame the victims of course! Since the failures of 'free' market capitalism can never be admitted, it is essential that the blame is dumped onto individuals like the 'benefit scroungers', who have been made scapegoats for the UK's economic problems.

A depression era dole queue

Papers like the Daily Mail and The Sun promote the denigration and hatred of the benefit recipients as a distraction from the real cause of our country's problems - neoliberalism and Thatcherism. The aim is not just to shift the blame, but also to move the UK from a system of decent social security provision to a grossly inadequate system of welfare 'handouts'. This not only allows savings for greater tax cuts for the rich, but also helps to grind the underclass even further into poverty, creating a pit into which people fear to fall, thus making them more likely to work for less.

But its not the so-called 'benefit scroungers' that we need to be angry about. Its the really big cheats in our society, the tax dodgers, who should be causing us concern. There really is a serious problem with entitlement and dependency cultures throughout the world. Its the dependency of the 1% on ever increasing wealth to the detriment of the rest of us, and its the culture of entitlement which the 1% have which makes them think they should own everything on the planet, and not have to pay taxes. If we are going to have a fair and socially just society we need to end the entitlement culture and dependency culture of the 1%.