Reblogged from Beastrabban\'s Weblog:
A friend once described the Coalition’s policies to me as ‘Socialism for the
rich’. He’s quite right, of course. Under Socialism, the resources of the state
are used to improve conditions for the poorest members of society. Since
Thatcher, however, this situation has been completely reversed. The power of the
state has been used instead to enrich the wealthiest and most powerful, while
further grinding down and impoverishing the poorest. You can see that in the way
immense tax breaks have been granted to the extremely rich, while companies have
been given lucrative government contracts and subsidies for providing essential,
including the management of state-owned organisations and parts of the civil
service. These include the railways, parts of the NHS, the police service, and
the welfare infrastructure, now being mismanaged by Serco, G4S and ATOS. The
poor, on the other hand, have seen their state support, in the form of welfare
benefits, cut and the services they use privatised and placed in the hands of
the private sector.
It seems the Coalition have a strategy of finding a Socialist policy, and
then inverting it to use against the very people it was designed to help. The
bedroom tax is an example of this.
Something similar was to the fictitious ‘bedroom’ subsidy was in fact
proposed in Germany in the 1920s by the USDP – the Unabhangige
Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or the Independent German Social
Democrats. They were a Left-wing, but Non-Communist, Socialist party that had
split from the Social Democrats over their alliance with the bourgeois parties
and use of the paramilitary Freikorps units to put down the Council Revolution
that had spread through Germany and Central Europe in 1919. One of the policies
adopted by the USDP was that legislation should be passed, forcing homeowners to
take in the homeless. This use of state power over the homes of private
individuals may now appear shocking to a British public, raised on the Thatcher
ideal of popular home-ownership. On the continent, however, most people live in
rented accommodation. At the time, houses were split into multiple occupancy,
with different families occupying different rooms within the same house. The
poorest could be crammed into single rooms, such as the mother of one of the
child victims in Fritz Lang’s cinematic classic, M. Twenty years ago
one of the journalists in the colour section of the German newspaper, the
Frankfurter Allgemeine, went back to visit Silesia. This was one of the two
‘arms’ of Germany to the north and south of Poland, which had been granted to
the new country after World War II, and its German population expelled. The
journalist had been one of those 1 1/2 million people, who had been forced to
move to the new German borders further west. On his visit to his former home, he
managed to find his old neighbourhood and its building, reminiscing about the
various families that had shared the house in which he had lived as a boy. The
legislation proposed by the USPD would therefore have been used against
landlords as an attempt to solve the housing crisis that afflicted many
countries, including Britain, after the World War I.
Mike over at Vox Political and a number of other, great Left-wing
blogs have pointed out that the so-called subsidy the Coalition claims was
granted to council tenants with a spare bedroom is entirely fictitious. It never
existed. The claimed rationale for ending it, is that it would either force
tenants with an extra, unused room to take in a lodger, or else free up council
properties to be used by those, who really need such extra rooms to house their
members. In fact it’s simply another ruse to slash welfare spending, and at the
same time penalise those in council housing. In fabricating their pretext for
doing so, the Tories have clearly taken the same idea as that proposed by the
USPD, and then turned it backwards so that it affects and penalises not the
prosperous rich, but the poorest and most in need of state housing. It is
another example of the Coalition’s ‘Socialism for the Rich’.
I wondered if we should not, in fact, return to the spirit of the USPD’s
original legislation. Cameron and the Old Etonian aristos and members of the
haute bourgeoisie, who adorn his cabinet and Tory Central Office are,
after all, public servants. They are paid salaries and expenses by the state.
They are also very wealthy individuals, whose homes no doubt match their
inflated incomes. This also applies to the heads of the companies contracted to
run what little remains of the state infrastructure. These state should
similarly have the right to force them to open up their mansions to the poor and
destitute. David Cameron this week made a speech declaring that working-class
children should raise their aspirations. Well, what better example can Cameron
set for the new, aspiring, socially mobile working class he envisions, than for
he and his colleagues to give a place at their firesides to the homeless and Job
Seekers. The radical journalist Cobden believed that one of the causes of the
unrest and dissatisfaction rife in early 19th century Britain was due to the
breakdown of the hospitality farmers traditionally gave their workers. In
traditional agricultural society, these ate and lived with the farmer himself,
and so master and servants shared bonds of familiarity and loyalty. By the time
Cobden was writing, this had broken down, and Cobden believed that their
banishment from their master’s house and table was a major cause of class
discontent. Surely, as someone determined to restore the great traditions of
British society, Cameron should be the first to return to this great custom, and
offer his own home as residence to Britain’s new poor as a good, paternalistic
master in this century?
