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Kitty S. Jones has it spot on.
It’s not enough to defeat Tory ideology. We also have to defeat the “drum beat”. We have to defeat the propaganda machine that brainwashes people with their slogans and catchphrases. You’ve heard those slogans -“less government”, “personal responsibility”, “hard-working families”, “making work pay” and lots of flag waving. These are shorthand for an entire world-view. But ever such a shabby, ruthless and paltry one.
A clue is in the name: The word “Tory” derives from the Middle Irish word tóraidhe, which means outlaw, robber or brigand, from the Irish word tóir, meaning “pursuit”, since outlaws were “pursued men”. It was originally used to refer to an Irish outlaw and later applied to Confederates or Royalists in arms. The term was thus originally a term of abuse. The Tories live by plunder. They steal your taxes, your public services, your state provision and your labour, in order to raise more money for the rich.
It’s a world of corporate feudalism, and I heard some smart person from the States once sum up the Tories neatly with the phrase “cheap-labour conservatism”. How very apt. It fits so well. Basically, the larger the labour supply, the cheaper it is. The more desperately you need a job, the less you tend to demand for your wages, and the more power those big business Tory buddies have over you. This is what the Tories actually mean by “making work pay” – it’s either rationed out peanuts or starvation.
The Tories engineer this socio-economic situation every time they are in office. Think back to Thatcher, she did it, Major did it – it’s a manufactured recession and a large reserve army of cheap labour every time. Always the same with the Tories. Because it suits their “business friendly” agenda.
Conservatives don’t like social spending or welfare – our safety net. That’s because when you’re unemployed and desperate, companies can pay you whatever they feel like – which is inevitably next to nothing. You see, the Tories want you in a position to work for next to nothing or starve, so their business buddies can focus on feeding their profits, which is their only priority. Cheap-labour conservatives don’t like the minimum wage or other improvements in wages and working conditions. These policies undo all of their efforts to keep you desperate. They don’t like European Union labour laws and directives either, for the same reason.
Cheap-labour conservatives don’t like unions. Because when we unite and organise, wages go up. Working conditions improve. That’s why workers unionise. Seems workers don’t like being desperate. But businesses don’t like to pay out money. They like to hoard it.
Cheap-labour conservatives constantly bray about “morality”, “virtue”, “respect for authority”, “hard work” and other such vaguely defined values. This is only so that they can blame you for being desperate due to your own “immorality”, lack of “values” and “poor choices”.
Cheap-labour conservatives encourage racism, misogyny, homophobia and other forms of bigotry. That’s because bigotry among wage earners distracts them, and keeps them from recognising their common interests as wage earners. Divide and rule.
An ugly truth is that cheap-labour conservatives don’t like working people. They don’t like working class opportunities and prosperity, and the reason for this is very simple. Lords have a harder time kicking us around when we aren’t desperate.
Once we understand this about the cheap-labour conservatives, the real motivation for their policies makes perfect sense. Cheap-labour conservatives, the neo-feudalist fools, believe in social hierarchy and privilege, so the only prosperity they want to permit is limited to them. They want to see absolutely nothing that benefits us whatsoever. And even better if we fight amongst ourselves for scraps. Divide and rule.
The Tory mantra “making work pay” is an argument for raising wages, not cutting benefits, talk about the rationally illiterate…. But then cheap-labour conservatives hope that those affected will take comfort in the fact that if your wages are not enough to meet the cost of living, at least those without a job are much worse off.
The Tory “race to the bottom” is plain, and after four years of austerity, Osborne is forced to concede that the new welfare cuts leave £9bn of the deficit reductions promised by the Chancellor unaccounted for. The cuts are purely ideological. Tories: dangerous with the economy, dangerous for society.
“Less government” is another defining right-wing slogan. It’s also all about cheap labour. Included within the slogan is the whole conservative set of assumptions about the nature of the “free market” and government’s role in that market. “Less government” permitted the Conservatives’ cunning transformation of a crisis caused by banks into a crisis of public spending. It was a huge triumph of Tory dogma over the facts. And of course, our public services are being sold off to private companies.
And anyone would think, to hear the Tories talk, that the “free market” isn’t rigged to benefit the wealthy. The bedroom tax, welfare cuts, public service cuts, cutting inheritance tax and handing tax breaks to the wealthy are, after all, examples of state interventions, and not “market forces”, which the Tories always use as a front to suck the life out of communities, and to keep people desperate.
The whole “public sector/private sector” distinction is an invention of the cheap-labour conservatives. They say that the “private sector” exists outside and independently of the “public sector”. The public sector, according to cheap-labour ideology, can only “interfere” with the “private sector”, and that such “interference” is “inefficient”, “costly” and “unprincipled”.
Using this ideology, the cheap-labour ideologue paints him/her self as a defender of “freedom” against “big government tyranny”. In fact, the whole idea that the “private sector” is independent of the public sector is totally bogus, because “the market” is created by public laws, public institutions and public infrastructure. But the cheap-labour conservatives aren’t really interested in “freedom”. What they want is the privatised tyranny of industrial serfdom, the main characteristic of which is – you guessed it – cheap labour.
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ARE THERE NOT ENOUGH POLITICAL THREADS?
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