To wonder why there has been no revolution?

[DoctorTwo]

Even the Torygraph is mystified. Why are we not kicking the shit out of the thieving wankers that make up our parliament? Or burning down corporate headquarters and lynching the bosses? These bastards are making us poorer and blaming us for it.

DaughterDilemma Another poster below my post put it quite well: the way jobs such as accounting are changing and becoming commoditised by technology, or moving overseas with globalisation.

The Economist did a good piece on it a few months back and concluded that many white-collar jobs will soon be for the chop thanks to advances incomputing, just as blue-collar ones lost out to factory automation and the like over the 20th century. The Economist, being very pro free market, concluded that in te long run this revolution would leave everyone better off just as previous revolutions in working patterns have done in the past. But also that this would be cold comfort in the short term to entire professions watching themselves become obsolete and their dreams of a comfortable lifestyle going down the pan.

IMO when Cameron talks about 'hard working people' and Miliband about the 'squeezed middle' this is the anxiety they are tapping into. Unfortunately there is not much that either of them can do about it, anymore than politicians could have stopped thousands of stevedores losing their jobs when containerisation took off in shipping freight loading/unloading could be handled by a staff of 20 machine operators rather than needing 200 labourers.

Posts, plural.

doctor from poverty.org

Except for those in the top and bottom tenths of the income distribution, households with below-average incomes have, on average, enjoyed bigger proportional increases over the last decade than households with above-average incomes.

which is a far cry from:
'99% of this country are in a better position than they were 10 years ago'

don't think it is - it is saying that peole are better off at most income levels

and you honestly think its ok that income inequality is growing?
Thats what the link you posted is all about...the fact that the rich are taking a larger and larger slice of the pie, are you not aware of the negative effects of increased inequality?

There is enough to go round, and less and less work is needed to keep things running, yet we still believe that everyone should work 40 hours a week ... The problem is that those at the top are hoarding everything so that the rest of us don't have enough.

Still catching up on today's posts, but have to offer Suzanne a round of joyous applause for these statements of blindingly obvious facts. The vast majority of responses here are rooted in mid-twentieth-century thinking. It was already clear in the 1970s that things would go this way (I did my dissertation on it) and those who held power, along with those who wanted to, started taking steps to secure their positions in what could become a grotesque Blade Runner style dystopia.

I am constantly horrified at the blindness and/or backwardness of my fellow citizens.

thanks Garlic :o

I think it's partly connected to the whole protestant work ethic thing, this idea that we must all be kept busy all the time, and people tend to be very fixed on the idea that money must be earned, rather than thinking that as human beings we all deserve a basic share of the fruits of human achievement.

(Getting a bit starry eyed and utopian there )

We don't need a revolution. We've had ours and successive developments from Magna Carta to women's suffrage have given us rights that people all over the world risk death, imprisonment & torture to achieve.

In particular, we have the right to vote.

If we all went out and voted the pollsters and the pundits wouldn't be able to predict the result, the politicians would get the fright of their lives and couldn't any longer tailor their 'message' to target voters because we would all then be target voters.

But first we have to make the effort to learn about what the parties stand for. They are not 'all the same', not by a long chalk.

The apathy people display about voting makes me foam at the mouth and yet they moan that they are not represented.

We have a system that would work just fine if we used it properly.

We have a choice who we vote for, not that it does much good, we also have a choice who we do business with.
If the party you would like to vote for doesn't have policies you want to vote for, tell them what you want them to do.

Move your money from the banks to the mutuals, shop in the local market, refuse to do business with any firm bought by private equity, or that doesn't pay corporation tax in the uk, and lobby for new laws. Join a trade union. Understand where your pension is invested. Make sure your kids grow up with enough political and economic education to be angry, and show them by example that you believe things can be changed.

We don't have to throw bricks to make a revolution, comrades.

People seem so apathetic. There's articles about how the cuts have affected people, how some people have taken their own lives. People say how sad it is or how angry they are for maybe a day or two, but do nothing. The right to vote, labour laws, the Human Rights Act etc were all years ago and the current Government is doing its best to overturn them, yet the British public do nothing. It's pretty clear that the gap between the richest and the poorest is widening. How many rich people do you know who have needed to use a foodbank? Is it the stiff upper lip which stops people from acting or are we in such a mess that we just don't care any more?

lady peole realise how well off they are in this country comared to others and realise the status quo is good

Carol there are millions out there who don't lead a good existence and there are plenty of other countries who look upon us as being poor and dysfunctional.

Existence is not what humans should be striving for. Most people in this country want to see poverty eliminated and working conditions made better for all, but those whose situation is good, like yours perhaps, don't care enough about the others to fight alongside them.

The status quo doesn't work for the people who rely upon food banks to feed their families or the people who have to choose between keeping warm and eating. Utility prices go up and up. People moan for a little while, say how outrageous this is but do nothing. The cost of living in the UK only goes up, it rarely goes down. My travel costs only ever go up, my water rates only ever go up, my gas bill only ever goes up... It sickens me that children go hungry whilst our MP's moan that their 50k plus expenses isn't enough! Yes, some are well off compared to others, but we're not a third world country with an overly corrupt government so there's no need for any child to go to school hungry or for any person to have to decide between buying food and keeping warm. We're in yet another 1980s era of strikes and poverty and what do people do? Have a quick grumble and do nothing.

The French had the right plan (not to chop the heads off the nobles though).

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMYNfQlf1H8

Carol this is the sixth or seventh richest country in the world. It is both stupid and vicious to compare our standard of living to impoverished nations and corrupt dictatorships.

In fact, adopting the latter comparison makes it easier for our leaders to create a corrupt dictatorship right here.

My point is that we are one of the richest nations because we don't have revolutions and the way things are work - if the way this country operates was so awful, we would be much worse of than others.

I agree! So why are we allowing our country to become so much less like 'the way we operate' and so much more like problematic countries?

"We struggle to get by on £300 per day says Fib Dem peer Olly Grender. That's tax free. Words fail me.

London mayor says £2800pcm is affordable rent.

The useless scamming arseholes running things just have no clue at all about the lives and realities of 'ordinary' people.

for me the point is not that we are better off than third world countries, it's that in the first world, we are second only to the USA in inequality, other European countries are more equitable than the UK.
Eg, here the top 1% take home 15% of the total income, in Switzerland the top 1% take home half that...around 7% of the total income.

A small elite group of people (top 1% afaik is a couple earning over £200k) are getting richer and richer at the expense of the rest of us.
This is unfair, they dont deserve to be so richly rewarded compared to the rest of us.

Perhaps there will be a backlash against the rich once the income discrepancy reaches a certain point?

Why are people so het up about income inequality?

Carol if you seriously don't regard income inequality as a problem then I don't see any point explaining it to you.

People in England and Wales are just SO apathetic.
Locally to me there has been a load of councillors making bad decisions and much, much talk of getting rid and voting in a whole new council at the next election.
But just as an experiment, I set up a Facebook group to see how many people would actually support a vote of no confidence to call an election.
Of the 2,500 members of a "The council are rubbish, let's moan about it" group, 11 people joined my "Let's do something about it" group.
The British people are happy to moan, but not happy to do anything to change it.

Yup, it's that, BluePop. Unless something affects them that is. We're all one illness or one accident away from being disabled, no one knows what's around the corner so apathy does no favours.

There is never going to be revolution as long as there is plentiful cheap food (cheap junk food) and entertainment (x factor, strictly, MN, bake-off, cinema, olympics).

Julius Caesar already knew that all you need to do to keep the plebs (us) happy is to give them food and games

Nobody is going to start a revolution if Domino's does a 2 for 1 and football/reality show is on the telly

I agree it's unlikely that us peasants will actually revolt but humans have a quite deeply rooted 'instinct' to react against unfairness.

There is probably a kind of tipping point beyond which public dislike of the haves by the have-nots will push those in power into making some adjustments to appease us, bread and circuses will only work up to a point.