Austerity Archives - Consistent Democrats

A Commentary by Kalliste

Storm Bert laid bare the cruel reality that Kid Starver’s government has ushered in. A massive increase in the money for the “civil list”, as we euphemistically call the annual royal handout to the spongers in the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha “firm”, was coupled with yet money for Ukraine, the most corrupt country in Europe;but none for the majority of people in the UK.

Exactly why the new “slimmed down” family should need an increase when the vast majority of the people, and specifically those on fixed pensions and benefits get nothing is not even mentioned in our lame-stream media. What benefit yet more money for Ukraine does for the people of Britain is even less obvious. Ukraine has been a US proxy for the past decade, locking up trade unionists, outlawing political parties, and committing human rights abuses by banning both the majority religion (the Ukrainian Orthodox church) and the Russian language (spoken by over a third of the population)

Chris Bryant lays claim to having solved the devastating flooding crisis for his constituents, not by doing his duty as their MP and a cabinet minister, and lobbying for a share of the government money set aside for flood victims but instead a “go fund me page” (started by someone else, to which he donated £100, yet asking others for thousands). We’ll wait to see if he claims that on “expenses”, as so many MPs have claimed their showy wreaths on Armistice Day.

Similarly the duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall charge our public services for parking while expecting us taxpayers to additionally stump up for the armed forces to put on courtesy flights and other transport for “security reasons”. There’s nothing quite like taking with both hands to build up a family fortune of £80 billion and then setting up a new charity to show the incompetent poor how to solve their financial problems. The latest scam to reassure the public that the royal family is still relevant has been unveiled, setting up a charity to address homelessness, a situation made infinitely worse by the 2012 legislation to criminalise squatting.

There are 350 000 homeless people in England and Wales, and over 650 000 empty and abandoned homes. We don’t need another charity to decide who are the “deserving poor” are, we need to stop criminalising need, and an end to the system of quangos that allow the ruling class to control our own natural generosity, guilt tripping us with endless appeals for yet more “funds” from the little we have, and force the government to comprehensively provide for the needs of the people who cannot provide for themselves.

It is as insulting as the previous ones to address “early years child development” and breakfast clubs as injuring when the 2 child benefit cap remains, treating almost every 3rd and successive child born since 2017 as unworthy of the support their older siblings receive. Over a million children grow up in poverty thanks to this iniquity, but successive governments prefer the band aid of charity to social justice and equality.

It should not be a crime to be poor. It should not be a crime to be born into a larger family. It should be a crime for the government to spend money on aggressive wars and regime change, tax breaks and self-aggrandisement, and ignore their responsibilities to provide services for our people. And when the government cannot or deliberately will not do its duty, the ministers who fail should be locked up for a period of time commensurate with the lives they have taken through their deliberate negligence or ideological malice.

In times of austerity the wealthy should shoulder the load, not the poor, and the royals should set the example they claim they are there to represent, and give up their civil list, their “income” from the duchies, and live on their own “savings”.

By Ian Donovan

*Dignity in Dying* lavishly funded advertising on the London tube

The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, introduced into Parliament by the Labour MP Kim Leadbetter, is widely touted as a humanitarian measure which will allegedly help those who are dying from painful terminal illnesses avoid the appalling suffering that frequently accompanies such deaths. Many regard it as a humanitarian measure, and it is being presented as a progressive reform. Those opposing it are being portrayed by supporters of the bill as religious fundamentalists. It has divided the establishment in Britain: former Tory Prime Ministers: May, Truss and Johnson oppose it, as does former Labour PM Gordon Brown. In the current Labour Party, Starmer supports it, but Wes Streeting opposes it.

A parliamentary grouping of Labour’s Anna Spicer, Lib-Dem Munira Wilson and Tory Ben Spicer, has put an amendment proposing that it should not be given a second reading until there is a law commission or royal commission into all scenarios and safeguards, which would torpedo the bill. The bill would make eligible adults with under six months to live, “mental capacity” and “a settled wish to die”. They would have to make two declarations, each approved by different doctors, seven days apart, and then a high court judge would question them, followed by a 14 day wait. The fatal drug would have to be self-administered; doctors would prepare the dose. There is an attempt to include other ‘safeguards’ in the bill, including making it illegal for anyone to “pressure, coerce or use dishonesty” to procure such a declaration or induce self-administering of such a dose, with a maximum prison sentence of 14 years.

There are elements within this that socialists should sympathise with. No one should be forced to suffer agonising death, which is all too common today, particularly as the National Health Service has come under vicious attack by neoliberal politicians. Particularly from some Tory and New Labour politicians who are making sonorous and hypocritical declarations about morality. Tories, Lib Dems and New Labour have all undermined the NHS through various forms of privatisation. The Tories in the last 14 years have done massive damage to the NHS, but New Labour provided them with the means to do so. Private Finance Initiatives, saddling hospitals with massive debt, and foundation trusts, providing the Tories with the means to stick the knife in even more, which they did with austerity attacks. On all these sides, protestations of humanitarian motivations do not ring true.

The principle of allowing all to end their lives in dignity is correct but under capitalism this is highly problematic. Today austerity attacks on the sick, the disabled, benefit claimants, etc. are endemic. This is why virtually the entire medical profession, and disabled organisations, oppose this. ‘Safeguards’ cannot overcome private property, both at a domestic level, where the interests of relatives, e.g. in inheritance, and the material cost of caring, pressure the sick to avoid being a “burden”. Leadbetter’s bill is backed by the Dignity in Dying campaign, which received £700,000 from the Bernard Lewis Trust, which has connections to offshore tax havens, funding Israeli settlements on the West Bank, and the so-called Campaign Against Anti-Semitism – a smear machine against the pro-Palestinian left. Hardly humanitarian causes! Dignity in Dying have the money to buy saturation advertising on the London tube, like at Westminster station foot tunnel where anyone walking through it is assailed by dozens of their electronic advertisements.

This would not be a humanitarian advance, but an accelerating neoliberal ethos of euthanasia, resembling Nazism. As shown in Canada and the Netherlands, where similar laws have been passed and euthanasia amounts to 5% of all deaths. Leadbetter estimates this bill would allow less than 1,000 assisted suicides per year. But the ‘safeguards’ in the bill can easily be amended by a future government. In Canada, Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) which passed in 2016, was extended beyond terminal cases in 2021. It is planned to extend it further in 2027 to include people suffering from a solely mental illness. With such extensions, likely at the hands of a future government and secondary legislation, it is entirely feasible that around 30,000 people a year could be subject to state-sponsored euthanasia in Britain in a few years’ time.

Socialists should oppose this bill tooth and nail. Even if it falls this time, they will try again. Far from promoting euthanasia, we should be insisting on a massive improvement in palliative care. The NHS should run hospices and similar institutions to allow all to end their lives without pain and suffering. We should not be supporting a law that clearly presages a cull of ‘costly’ people with health problems, funded lavishly by people who are up to their necks in the barbarism in Gaza. What’s ‘humanitarian’ about that?