This morning's Guardian is a treasure trove of good quotes. Take this form John Harris:
As we move into the succession of zombie jamborees that is conference season, one other thought occurs. Humankind long ago invented things that could at least retilt the balance between capital and labour, and ease some of modern life's most inhuman aspects. We called them trade unions. Most Tories would rather they did not exist: now, even people in the Labour party want to push them even further to the margins. If they do, they will be adding to the problem, when the increasingly poor, huddled masses they represent could really do with some solutions. To turn Osborne on his head, recovery alone is not the issue: rescue is what people need.
I'm proud to work to find solutions with union colleagues for precisely that reason. And I hope to do so for some considerable time to come.
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George Osborne aka “Malice in Wongaland” has no interest at all in helping ordinary people, they are not his “constituency”, they are to become the new serfs in the neo feudal Britain project. Instead it is best to get them fighting among themselves hence for example, the stigmatizing of benefit claimants, as they are submerged by a debt tsunami. They must after all be exposed to the full force of the “free market”.
Meanwhile, large dollops of socialism are handed out to the wealthy…
There are plenty of ways to retilt the balance as well as unions:
1) Stabilise house prices by LVT.
2) Split the bankins up into small units that help keep wealth in communities.
3) Utterly stop the finance ‘gambling’ industry with its hedge fund activities (interest rate swaps etc.) that benefit the 0.01 percent.
If this doesn’t happen soon then we are walking into a social upheaval – and it will be the irresponsibility of politicians that will have created it.
As a TU member, I will yet again be joining the TUC organised march and rally at the upcoming Tory party conference to protest at the madness and vindictiveness of the ConDem (austerity) policies. I do wonder, however, whether we should instead be protesting at the Labour party conference. After all, the Tories are just doing what we expect them to do when in power: look after the wealthy and the corporate world. So what impact does a union protest have at the Tory party conference? On the other hand, Labour have utterly abandoned, in the most cowardly and shameful way, the people they should be looking after and who need them most as the cuts hit home: ordinary working people and the most vulnerable in our society; and instead, they continue to peddle a semi-skimmed version of austerity that is ultimately designed to protect the system that brought about the crisis in the first place.
You make a good point
I shall be doing my best on the inside and at the fringes to make this point. I’m sure I will not be alone. I can’t think of any active Labour Party member who is not angry about the ‘professional’ branch, although there are plenty of ‘loyalists’ who keep their mouths shut in silent approval, because they’ve fallen for the line that if we/they say anything radical the media will mock them. Well, that would be the case if they just mouthed radical sound-bites with no real substance to back them up. And, of course, that is the problem.