Next Left has a shocking report on how the Tory-led Coalition is dividing the country: single parents and families with children lose out to couples without children.
The Shock Doctrine approach to re-engineering British society has been well documented. The consequences of such an approach will be analogous to the aftermath of Iraq. We will expect enterprise and innovation to flower in both a virtual and offline desert of people left entirely to their own devices. I am not surprised that the government’s version of Enterprise Zones should aim utterly to attract existing businesses and organisations to locate new offices and plants.
It’s far more difficult to set up infrastructures to train up new entrepreneurs in the recognisably viable desire to create an enterprise economy than it is to drag in with bribes and sweeteners corporate money machines which already operate. It would however be far better for the British economy long-term to create – from scratch – a pool of clever and informed individuals capable of regenerating the SME sector. This would benefit current unemployment levels and bring new ideas and new minds into the economic cycle.
The SME sector should be our way forward to developing future corporate behemoths. Rather than focussing all our efforts on enriching the already deep pockets of organisations which already choose to shrug off thousands of workers on behalf of the interests of their shareholders – even when they run profitable operations and generate billions of pounds in profits – we should, I think, construct Enterprise Zones tailored to the needs of the new entrepreneurs, and those we might manage to convince of the virtues of taking such a path.
We need more entrepreneurs. But we need incubating environments to help them develop and grow – and attain that virtuous status. These Enterprise Zones, as currently posited, incubate only those who already know how to run businesses. Hanging on to the coattails of the considerably wealthy – as this government is clearly doing – is justifiable only in the sense that any politics worth its salt needs to attend to the needs of all its subjects. In some strangely sad and unambitious way, however, this government has chosen to renege on that responsibility and attend only to the needs of that wealthiest part of the population which brought them to power in the first place. Pork-barrel politics of the most overt and unhappy kind.
As the corporations benefited so obviously from the Iraq conflict, so Cameron wants the same to take place in the UK.
So today’s march is exactly what we need. Just as during the Iraq conflict people needed to express their opposition to a piece of social re-engineering of the most naive kind – bomb a country to bits and then expect democracy to flower out of the ashes – so during this UK conflict people need to show the government that it has not done enough to convince them it has a constructive exit strategy from the all-out war it has chosen to declare on most of the country’s subjects.
Yes. It’s the job of ambitious politicians to attempt to change nation states. That’s true. But, equally, it’s the job of subjects and citizens to say “enough is enough” – or, at least, when events prove, for them if not their wealthy landlords, that this just might be the case.
All power to those who are marching today.
We do not approve of the Shock-Doctrined Iraq-ification of the UK.
This is Cameron’s Iraq then – and we can learn from previous experiences.
