And with full government support.
Examples:
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
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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.
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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?