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10 years ago
Well today is Monday the 4th of July and as our American friends over the pond begin their Independence Day celebrations, I would briefly like to bring matters a little closer to home to the fore and look back in time to what happened here in England just four days earlier.
By the time you read this it’s likely we will have just experienced one of the largest public service strikes for decades. And even my father, a self declared entrepreneur who prided himself in never being involved in a strike of any kind would have been fully behind this one.
I mean how in God’s name, does the government expect those at the bottom of the pay scales to make sacrifices to do nothing more than help subsidise those at the very top?
The only public sector workers whose pensions are not today threatened are the MPs. How does that work? Closer to home we have services under fire, jobs threatened and pay rates cut while a chief executive still earns in excess of £200k a year. Where’s the equality of sacrifice in any of that?
The speculators and bankers, whose colossal greed created this whole financial meltdown catastrophe in the first place are still continuing to pay themselves outrageous sums while everyone else it seems, must work much longer for far less while on ever reducing pensions.
Sir Fred Goodwin for example, the man at the helm when the Royal Bank of Scotland recorded a £24 billion loss, the largest in UK corporate history, now struggles by on a reported pension of £350k per annum still in his fifties while the bank still paid out £950 million in bonuses during 2010 despite further losses of £1.1 billion. How do you begin to justify that to the taxpaying public then?
The simple answer is you cannot. Not to teachers, nurses, postal workers, town hall staff, carers, refuse collectors or to any of the small entrepreneurs losing their homes and sanity in this latest of financial tsunamis.
Ministerial promises made during the last election to protect public banking from speculative gambling are seen to be negated; control of grotesque bank houses hastily forgotten, and regulatory control of energy prices too easily ditched. It seems the agenda still firmly on the cards is more job losses, more public service cuts and massive pension reforms to include a longer working lifespan for the average Joe.
It appears that after Tony Blair and his ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’, the most insulting lies of our time ever told are now: “There is no other alternative” (to screwing the lower paid) and: “We’re all in this together,” (except for MPs, council executives, bankers, speculators, energy companies etc).
And if the government don’t have either the courage or the appetite to reign in corporate greed, share the pain equally among the rich and powerful and insist that MPs face the same impositions as the public, then they deserve to reap the full effects of this current whirlwind they have to a fair degree helped to create for themselves.
And I’m sure my father, a man of the utmost integrity, would have been one of the first to step up and join the picket lines to resolve this most blatent of public injustices.
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