So now we know for sure. David Cameron will not be happy until his race to the bottom turns the UK into a sweat shop economy with millions of low or even unpaid workers toiling in misery and living lives of near servitude.
At a conference festooned with banners to ram home the message that Cameron and his class expect us to work harder, the man who’s never done a real day’s work in his life set out his nightmarish vision for the future. And like all true despots he intends to start with the young, who will grow up never knowing what a society is like where people care about each other, share risks and try to support those who have fallen on hard times.
In a breath-taking lie, Cameron talked about how young people unable to find a job are choosing to sign on and rent a Housing Benefit funded flat. In reality most young people are desperate for work and Housing Benefits will only pay for a room in a shared house at the cheapest possible rent for those under 35. Job Seeker’s Allowance for people under 25 is set at the miserly rate of £56.80 a week. Only a gilded toff could imagine that anyone would choose to live in a tiny room rented from a slum landlord and try to survive on just a few pounds a day.
Yet even this will no longer be an option if Cameron gets his way, with his sham claim that young people should be earning or learning. But the only training available to most young people is workfare – unpaid work stacking shelves or mopping floors whilst grasping employers claim training grants from the Government. Young people in these roles are neither earning or learning, they are just working, hard, to prop up the profits of the rich. Profits that should be celebrated says David Cameron. But never shared.
Cameron wants to see a million young people working without wages for years on end or facing lives of homelessness and hunger. A million unpaid workers entering the workforce to drive down pay and working conditions for everyone. This is a blueprint to normalise unpaid work and remove any safety net at all for the young. And they will not stop with the young.
That’s young people incidentally who may be escaping abuse, who will have nowhere to run if Housing Benefits are removed. Young people living in over-crowded accommodation, or those whose parents are unable to afford to support them financially. Only care leavers are to be exempt according to The Guardian, and possibly single parents. And of course the rich, whose parent’s wealth can cushion them from the brutal society Cameron is intent on creating.
Five more years of austerity are promised no matter what happens to the economy the Tories told us this week. Austerity that is really just cheap political cover for the Tory Party’s long-standing agenda, the crushing of the Welfare State, the NHS and everything we have left that is decent in the UK.
This is a man who truly hates Britain, or at least hates all of those outside his own Etonian huddle. A man who considers himself a class above the plebs beneath who are only fit for a life of hard work and poverty pay. Who does not care at all if we become sick or disabled or are unable to find a job in an economy with two and a half million people out of work. Why would he care? He has always had a vast inheritance to draw on when his Champagne stocks are running low. And if you don’t have that then fuck you thinks this Prime Minister, it serves you right for not having rich parents.
Cameron’s land of opportunity is only for the rich. The rest of us are to be consigned to a cut throat competition, fucking each over in the scramble for the scraps that are thrown from the top table. Work hard and it could be you, sitting there with this Eton mess of a government stuffing venison down their over-privileged throats. But it won’t be. Not ever. Not whilst we continue to let these parasites ransack our lives.
