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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
Comments
Except that they know enough about how society works to divide it up and play the bits off against each other, and were politically astute enough to get elected.
"We are not daft!
We don’t believe you.
But we still support a system that selects and trains people like them and then we elect them. See also previous paragraph.
And I also tire of blaming the previous government for the deficit (I don't tire of blaming the previous government for two wars, complicity in torture, the erosion of civil liberties and nigh-on fraudulent PFI)
But this reads as an inaccurate, ill-thought out rant that blames the junior partner in a coalition government for all perceived ills whether the natural consequence of a recession (unemployment), states of affairs that have persisted for decades (the north south divide) or ills simply invented (eg. no public service has been "sold off" to a multi national that avoids paying UK tax).
Swap the words "EU" and "Brussels" for "Lib Dem" and "government" and it reads just like the rant of some UKIPer who latched onto the idea of Europe as a convenient scapegoat.
As well as tiring it is logically wrong.
The deficit is the shortfall between current spending and current taxation. The outstanding debt is substantially inherited. As the Office of Budget Responsibility and plenty of others have reminded Clegg et all.
(e.g. see Guardian
"How Nick Clegg got it Wrong on Debt"
)
Labour inherited from the Tories a debt of 42% of GDP. At the start of the global banking crises the debt had fallen to 35% - near 22% reduction, acc to this source:
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/ramesh-patel/growth-cameron-austerity_b_2007552.html
also this:
http://www.newstatesman.com/economy/2011/08/interest-rates-debt-government
One government inherits the tax and expenditure structures of the last and they cannot be radically changed in the short to medium term. The tax and expenditure structures inherited from the last government were set to suit “good times”. Now times are not good the expenditure goes up, the tax receipts go down and we have a deficit. In large part Labour policies caused the deficit. It’s a little silly blaming them though as no one was aware of the coming recession , no one objected at the time and we can be confident that everyone would have done much the same. It’s also pointless. We’re in a hole: the key point is how to get out, not who dug it.
One part of the deficit Labour can be blamed for is PFI. PFI hides government debt. Instead paying outright for new/rebuilt hospitals and schools, which would require borrowing the capital, the government pre-agree to rent the hospital/school . But they didn’t just agree to rent the hospitals/schools they also tied the public into 20-25 year contracts for the supply of nearly everything to the buildings. See all those pubs closing down? It’s not because pubs per se are unprofitable but the freeholders tie the tenants in for everything: beer, wine, soft drinks. And they set the prices of all those ancillary things to make themselves as much profit as possible. The same with PFI: if you want to see a policy that directly profits mutli-nationals at the direct expense of public services then look no further.
I take the point about the difficulty of changing spending due to certain prior commitments and it is certainly not illogical to blame their predecessors for making such commitments. I suppose perhaps if these commitments are so large and onerous then it may even be mathematically impossible not to run a deficit. Is this actually the case?
Mind you, if they legalised, controlled and taxed drugs the deficit would be gone practically overnight. None of them the balls to do that though.
Bankers! Booo!
Cuts! Booo!
Unemployment! Booo!
Tiresome and childish. Characterising all MPs as pantomime villains who can't wait to ruin the lives of their country, or who are bumbling idiots, presumably backed by a bumbling civil service.
It's cheap and easy to just complain about everything that the government (boooo!) does. I'd like to see the author pick any one of his buzzwords, formulate an argument of exactly how the government have ruined everything, and provide a viable alternative course, preferably with an evidence based justification. It would certainly be more helpful.