Turning back time to the bad old days of exploitation

The following blog was submitted to Your Thurrock on 17th February but has not been posted yet.  As it is a topical piece I have decided to post it here so it is at least 'out there'.  The Your Thurrock version has an addendum about some of the stuff I've been doing since January.

It’s funny how one can go to sleep in the relatively enlightened world of 2012 only to wake up eight hours or so later in a world two to three hundred years in the past.  At this point I can imagine you are thinking to yourself that I have finally succumbed to a psychotic break and am no longer in touch with reality.  Recent developments at the Department for Work and Pensions have, however, proved that this country, after years of having apologised for our part in the African slave trade, has turned the clock back a couple of hundred years or so to renew that awful trade.  The victims of this renewed trade are not picked out by the colour of their skin, however, but by the very nature of their physical or mental affliction.  The slaves of this brave new world are those who are the most exploitable because of their vulnerability – financially, emotionally and physically.  The new slave class are the individuals who currently form the underclass of today’s society – the claimants of sickness related benefits who will soon be forced into unpaid work placements with absolutely no limit to the duration of their enslavement.  This is outright discrimination as non-disabled claimants of Job Seeker’s Allowance have a rigidly defined limit to the duration of any unpaid work placements they are forced to take.  There seems to be little regard to the nature of one’s affliction when burdening an individual with a forced labour placement that may actually do more harm to the individual than the supposed good it was meant to achieve.

One burning question that is crying out to be asked is – is this forced labour programme actually legal?  Article 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights that the UK signed up to states that "No one shall be required to perform forced or compulsory labour".  How then can the DWP’s proposals be legal when it flies in the face of human rights legislation that the UK, as members of the European Union, must adhere to?

The other question on my mind is – what’s next, Mr Cameron?  Are we going to see the clock turned back even further and find ourselves in a Roman-style empire, a renewed British Empire with a newly crowned Emperor Cameron at its head with Tory lackeys and Liberal Democrat quislings at his side?  Will our new British Empire adopt a new national sport in which members of the underclass are thrown into the arena with hungry man-eating animals?  It would certainly be an extra way of reducing their numbers.  Is this vision of the future a fantasy or a prophecy?

I have, in the past, claimed that the ConDem Government is trying to cleanse our society of the underclass, those on whom the ConDems blame the ills of society, those seen as leeches on the Treasury’s teats because of their vulnerability.  It seems as though I was right and, to its shame, the public will probably sit back and applaud as the underclass is systematically exploited and devoured by the machinery of that exploitation.  The weakest and most vulnerable will fall to write a new chapter in the history of the United Kingdom and it will be written in their blood.

The Conservatives must be in a state of delirium as they finally drop all pretence and display their true colours, masturbating over their soon-to-be-realised dream of a society devoid of the proles who spoil their ivory tower world with their very existence.

The darkest part of the whole affair is that all of it will be met with overwhelming public approval, thanks in no small part to the demonisation of the underclass, the scapegoats blamed for all the UK’s ills.  The same incremental step approach that has seen fuel prices soar, taxation rise and living standards fall for the poorest and most needy, as untold numbers are forced into fuel poverty and the increase in VAT hits those hardest, without much in the way of public opposition, will finally lead to the most violent schism between rich and poor in history.

It seems that we have learnt nothing from history and are thus doomed to repeat it until someone has the moral strength and courage to say “enough is enough”.

Until next time…