My feed
Premium

Please
or
to access all these features

AIBU?

to think that we are in a new Victorian era of exploitation by the rich of everyone else

167 replies

AgaPanthers · 18/03/2014 00:56

And with full government support.

Examples:

  • Poverty farming - £35k per year of your taxes going to the owner of this disgraceful hovel:
    www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-21066093.html

    Who benefits? Not the 7 or more people living in one of the shittiest, crime-ridden cesspits in Europe that is Slough, the owner of the house who boasts 'A Fantastic 14% Yield (Which bank will give you that for your money?) '

    14% yield on farming poor people. My bank (fully government bailed out to the tune of hundreds of billions of pounds of taxpayer cash) gives me 0.5% on my savings.

  • Indentured immigrant labour - business owners don't want to pay people a wage sufficient to have the basic living standards that campaigners fought from the early years of this century onwards to guarantee to every full-time worker. Minimum wage cannot possibly support a family in large areas of the country.

    So business owners campaign for unlimited immigration, because otherwise there aren't enough people desperate enough to take their sub-poverty line pay: www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/let-more-immigrants-into-uk-because-brits-wont-take-our-jobs-says-dominos-pizza-boss-8992388.html

    Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch's rag The Sun ran a large feature on how worthless and lazy British workers are, on Friday, because there aren't enough of them (in Murdoch's view) willing to work for sub-poverty line wages: twitter.com/StigAbell/status/444802994891423744

  • Low pay subsidies - business owners don't want to pay a sufficient wage, so the government subsidises them in this with tax credits, paid to workers who would otherwise be unwilling to work for poverty-level wages.

  • The great property scam - house prices are beyond all records in terms of income multiples, affordability in terms of wages vs. mortgage payments. This impoverishes everyone in society except for the oldest (who bought their homes for nothing years ago), and who, by no coincidence whatsoever, are most likely to vote, and wealthy landowners (who own more property than they need, and therefore can sell it off at inflated prices to serfs), as ever larger debt repayments are made to banks and to the largest landowners.

    Gidiot announced today that the taxpayer will underwrite house builders (big donors to his party) to sell off their shitty newbuild houses at ludicrous debt slave valuations until at least 2020: www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-26611163

    -

    Politicians of all parties support all aspects of this.

    We had a post-war 'consensus' between the two major parties. Those who were born with everything would pay higher taxes in order to give opportunity to those born with nothing.

    This consensus was smashed by Thatcher, who claimed to represent the little man, selling Sid a couple of hundred British Gas shares, and his council house, but also shutting down any industry that didn't turn a profit every year.

    The men of Merthyr Tydfil, once employed in their thousands by the town's coal and steel mills were put out to pasture in the 1980s, with vast numbers never working again, moved onto a diet of anti-depressants and incapacity benefits (news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/4217648.stm) by a government that did not care to acknowledge the true scale of unemployment, as it sought to 'restructure' the country from one where most people were paid decent wages for their labour to one based on financial services, where the productive worker is nothing more than a cost centre, to be screwed into the ground, outsourced to India or, more recently, replaced with low-paid foreign labour.

    It took Fettes-and-St-John's-Oxford-educated Blair to entrench this Thatcherite consensus permanently. He opened the doors to unlimited low-paid labour from Europe, and introduced the 'zero-hour contract'. He loaded up his 'portfolio' with dozens of 'investment properties', which his policies drove through the roof.

    He consorted with crooks, floating around the Mediterranean with rich men whose only moral compass was to be found steering their 150-foot yachts.

    He encouraged them to bring their capital, acquired under circumstances that are best not examined, to London, where it could be parked, subject only to the lightest of taxation, in buildings built by their spiritual predecessors, the pre-20th century land-owners, who acquired their wealth by Act of Parliament or royal whim, seizing it from those whose families had worked it for centuries.

    His successor, Gordon Brown, formalised these men's tax-free residency, the so-called 'non-dom' status, with the payment of a nominal fee, which made legal and permanent the avoidance of millions of pounds in taxes.

    Blair & his cronies were finally were replaced in 2010 by the new Conservative Party, remoulded in Blair's image and, to a man, from backgrounds of extraordinary privilege. Unlike their 20th century political aristocratic antecedents, the likes of Lord Douglas-Home, who might also come from aristocratic backgrounds, the sense that the Lord had some sort of paternal duty towards his men, had long since been abandoned, prey to the forces of 'greed is good' and globalisation.

    The new government set out to redouble its predecessor's efforts in support of exploitation, offering business unpaid labour in the shape of 'Workfare', an initiative originating from a man, who unlike 'Sunman' trying out minimum-wage labour while earning a £150k/year salary, had no financial need to perform a day's work in his entire life, a man who claimed that people ENJOYED paying 40% tax, because it made them feel wealthy. www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2581860/Osborne-People-paying-40p-tax-feel-joining-aspirational-classes-success-Tory-MPs-accuse-Chancellor-insulting-middle-earners.htm Never mind that such earnings are insufficient to buy a small flat in Del Boy's Peckham, and that paying 40% tax, in Osborne's world, is only for the suckers subject to PAYE, with the truly wealthy able to employ lawyers and accountants to keep their taxes down to fraction of that figure.

    AIBU to say that we have the most exploitative society in generations, and that it's only going to get worse?
OP posts:
Report
traininthedistance · 18/03/2014 01:26

YANBU!

Report
Elsiequadrille · 18/03/2014 01:50

Yanbu. at that property link.

Report
ChubbyKitty · 18/03/2014 03:07

The minimum wage link about that Batchelor guy is a little too close to home for me. His vile words make me so angry and I'm not even allowed to say it!

But yanbu.

ErghAngry

Report
BratinghamPalace · 18/03/2014 03:16

YANBU.

Report
JazzAnnNonMouse · 18/03/2014 04:21

Yanbu.
I wouldn't be surprised to see work houses next - rebranded of course

Report
MistressDeeCee · 18/03/2014 04:32

I think you're entirely right about exploitative society, OP.

& Im slightly un-nerved by my feeling that the result of govt's ordered chaos in absolutely shitting on working class people, is people bickering and scorning each other. Worrying about who has what, who is doing what, envying council house tenants..the list could go on and on..people sniping and turning on each other when its the govt causing all the havoc.

I too wouldn't be surprised to see workhouses. & I think govt would get away with it, too. Especially if benefits claimants were stuck in them. The relentless 'being poor is a crime/its your own faults' programmes on tv these days must be a lead up to something...

Report
whatsgoinon · 18/03/2014 04:34

Yanbu

Report
somedizzywhore1804 · 18/03/2014 05:11

YANBU. I agree re rebranded workhouses. It's a sorry state of affairs everywhere right now Hmm

Report
Southsearocks · 18/03/2014 06:37

I don't think it has ever been any different. People are just becoming more aware of the inequalities. But as a nation I feel we are useless at protesting.....

Report
wowfudge · 18/03/2014 06:43

So what do you suggest Aga?

Report
SamandCat · 18/03/2014 06:59

YANBU DH said the exact same thing about the 'new Victorian era' just this morning

Report
ihatethecold · 18/03/2014 07:03

Great op well put.
Yanbu!

Report
Badvoc · 18/03/2014 07:20

Yanbu
:( Angry

Report
DracuLaura · 18/03/2014 07:23

YANBU.

Report
JumpingJackSprat · 18/03/2014 07:27

Great op. Definitely nbu.

Report
Tanith · 18/03/2014 07:31

I read an article in either the Express or the Telegraph the other day that basically rubbished English nannies because "foreign" nannies were prepared to do anything their employers asked for a pittance.

Seems to be the theme at the moment :(

Report
Allofaflumble · 18/03/2014 07:33

What an amazing post! It is chilling the way things are going. The relentless propaganda about the lazy British and the bedroom tax which is really eviction by another name. Yanbu.

Report
insomniarules · 18/03/2014 07:33

YANBU
The problem, for me, is that there is no clear way to get out of this. Living in a democracy the answer should be to vote in a new and different government but I sure I'm not the only one disillusioned with the parties and their leaders.
I'm not sure but the way out of Victorian/Edwardian poverty last time was a bloody long war.

Report
Imnotmadeofeyes · 18/03/2014 07:34

Yanbu.

I have to admit that I am part of the problem though. I can hold my own in a discussion and point people in the direction of evidence that condradicts the propaganda of the mainstream press, but I'm not actually 'doing' anything about it.

The organisations that exist to fight these inequalities often lean too extremely to the left for me to fully get behind and support. There doesn't seem to be a middle ground and I'm not the type to mobilise my own movement.

The time is ripe for someone inspirational to take the reins and focus people, history has always managed to produce someone like this, although it makes me ashamed to acknowledge the most I'm doing is waiting and crossing my fingers that someone to follow will turn up.

Not easy to admit that you're for all intents a weakling.

Report
Allofaflumble · 18/03/2014 07:34

Yes and apparently nurses are less caring than foreign nurses!

Report
Imnotmadeofeyes · 18/03/2014 07:38

insomniarules, it's only recently, but I've recently come round to the idea of compulsory voting.

Principally because it has to have a 'none of the above' option that has a meaningful outcome. I think other countries that practice compulsory voting have to hold re elections forcing their political parties to review their manifestos to gain votes.

Report
TheCrackFox · 18/03/2014 07:43

YANBU

All the political parties are the same - preprared to do anything to please big business and couldn't actually give a stuff about the electorate.

Report

Don’t want to miss threads like this?

Weekly

Sign up to our weekly round up and get all the best threads sent straight to your inbox!

Log in to update your newsletter preferences.

You've subscribed!

PartialFancy · 18/03/2014 07:44

Yanbu.

Report
CelticPromise · 18/03/2014 07:48

Yanbu. I wish Labour would wake up and realise they don't have to timidly wobble about in the centre ground any more. People are angry. They want something different. Offer it ffs!

Report
DorisAllTheDay · 18/03/2014 08:12

YANBU. To the barricades, people. Excellent post - I'm just watching a report on Breakfast news about how people don't feel any better off although there appears to be an economic recovery on. Well, it's not surprising, is it? All that's happening is the gulf between rich and poor keeps widening. The housing scam that's been forced on this country is shameful - massive state subsidies via housing benefit for private landlords opening up the chasm between the haves and have-nots. And my blood boiled last week at the announcement of the derisory pay 'rise' (in reality another cut) for nurses and other NHS workers. I feel ashamed. Our forebears fought hard for us all to enjoy a better life, and we're letting it slip through our fingers because we don't seem able to galvanise ourselves to actually do anything to oppose these leeches.

Report
Please create an account

To comment on this thread you need to create a Mumsnet account.