Recent figures show workers in Britain have suffered an average six per cent cut in the real value of their wages.
Since 2009 the cost of austerity has seen ordinary people lose out in every area, as the rising cost of utilities and commodities compounds the misery of falling purchasing power.
The net effect is a wholesale transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich – carried out under the propaganda of a national collective sacrifice.
But we’re not all in it together. When the bosses throw 2.5 million onto the dole, and the government forces the unemployed back to work unpaid for their millionaire mates, the real nature of the system is cruelly exposed.
Since coming to power, the Con-Dem coalition has cut corporation tax three times – but raised VAT which is grossly unfair, since this tax eats up a greater proportion of the incomes of those on lower wages.
Now the majority of those receiving some form of welfare assistance are actually people in work struggling to get by on poverty wages.
In one of the richest countries in the world tens of thousands of people are relying on food banks. Rents are out of control, sparking a rise in homelessness. Every winter the energy cartels carry out a massive legal extortion leaving the poor freezing, broke or both.
The punitive measures imposed by Britain’s rich elites, which have driven 3.5 million children into poverty, are the inevitable consequences of the boss’s attempts to restore profitability.
While desperation and the savage competition this creates will certainly drive down wages, and so boost profits in the short term, it’s the economic equivalent of a sticking plaster. To substantially boost the rate of profit requires more drastic measures the replacement of huge masses of plant and machinery, indeed of whole sectors of capital – the longer term positive effect for capital as a whole of letting sectors of it go to the wall.
