The State We Are In

Cold, hungry, poor, jobless, homeless, bankrupt, and stuck. New Labour offers them all and insists on their take-up. The most vulnerable have got the lot, plus a poor education and slow, backward health care.

Electricity and gas bills are up by more than a quarter on last year. The cold hasn't really started yet but when it does it will be most of us wincing at the cost of keeping it at bay, some of us shivering at dropping the central heating thermostat, and the elderly dying from cold-related conditions. Nothing has been done to revitalise the power distribution system, which may not matter at the moment as nothing has been done to build greater generating capacity by whatever means; but as the old generating plants, particularly the nuclear power stations, close down one after the other from sheer old age, a more systemic source of cold that has nothing to do with Russian oil and gas control, creeps up on us all.

Fresh food is disappearing from the diets of the many not the few. Not just high-quality fresh food but any fresh food: fish, game, prime cuts of lamb and beef, even offals are replaced by minced everything and frozen nameless protein, and frozen tasteless greenery. Cheese? Processed and conveniently sliced to place on never-ending toast. Food bills are a form of taxation, not payment for desired goods but for standardised supplied goods. We haven't got the ration books yet but their return can be seen easily in the supply of a basket of basic groceries for 'hard-working families and pensioners' to assist during the global down-turn, on registration at the supermarket and presentation of ID. Poor food is better than no food, but food poverty and food inaccessibility will take its toll on health and well being.

Living without work has not been a life-style choice for many, more a life-style imposition for those living at the wrong time in the wrong place in a deindustrialising economy. But at least those who practice it are readier for its privations than the millions who will be thrown out of work in the coming months.
New Labour's new unemployed are about to be cast into the cauldron of inadequate public services their taxes have been ostensibly paying for (although in reality they have been mulcted to fund New Labour's client base of quango-employed jobsworths and infinite varieties of envoys and advisors). The standard of living of the new New Labour unemployed will fall like a stone. No car, no transport. No tutor, no grammar school. No money, no holidays, not even a day out. Above all, no credit. And innumerable wasted hours filling in forms, queueing, hanging onto call centre calls, and dropping into crisis if even the smallest detail on payments in or out goes wrong.

The small print on 'your home may be at risk' is now written in letters of fire for millions as new legislation that requires mere activation by a junior minister, not parliamentary discussion where it would surely be impeded, comes into force. Unsecured debts could be secured upon a debtor's house before, but now the forced sale to pay them has been yielded into the control of the creditor. The sound of credit cards swooshing through must be replaced by the sound of scissors. The time before help can be obtained with mortgage payments by New Labour's new unemployed has been reduced, but that is a sop in comparison with the threat from unsecured loans. The council accommodation offered will not be the council housing so carefully saved for and bought under other government, that is lost.

There must be a general election. These New Labour purblind, corrupt, incompetent, betraying, destroyers - destroyers of a once functioning and growing economy and society at considerable ease with itself in all its diversity, are like a cork in a bottle of fermenting rage. A general election is the civilised, democratic way.

Who could want the cork to blow?