In modern Britain, today, right now, the basics of survival are being withdrawn from people whom British society deems unworthy.
Vulnerable people, often coping with an illness, a disability or both, are being tricked, bullied, punished and abused on an unprecedented scale.
A level of savage public scorn exists for the unemployed, the disabled, and the poor that has been deliberately manufactured by sections of the British media and political establishment.
We paid taxes so that social security would be there for us in hard times, but to be forced to rely on it in 2014, is to be labelled a shirker, a scrounger, a barrier to progress and a feckless drain on resources.
The evidence of the chill winds blowing through Britain are everywhere.
* DWP staff set mandatory targets to withdraw benefits from as many JSA claimants as possible
* 600,000 Job Seekers had benefits docked as a result
* Jobseekers to be forced to do six months of unpaid work or lose all benefits
The withdrawal of all social security payments simply leaves people destitute and hungry, but sanctions for absurd and callous ‘reasons’ are now commonplace all over the country – click here to view but a few examples.
Scroll through this enormous list of cuts to services and you notice that the effects of them will disproportionally affect people on lower incomes.
Then there are is the vicious benefit trap laid by the Department for Work and Pensions for people claiming benefits like Employment Support Allowance (ESA).
From October last year claimants have been unable to appeal against a ‘fit for work’ decision until requesting a ‘mandatory reconsideration’. This process takes months while people are effectively unable to claim any benefit. Some of the poorest in the country, suffering from cancer, MS and other life threatening conditions – are left relying on food banks and other charity just to be able to eat.
Some people have decided that in a nation that has deemed them unwanted and unworthy – that suicide is the only way out. Go and read for yourself but be prepared for some harrowing stories.
How did Britain become such a judgemental and heartless nation, that we must bully and deprive those who most need our help and are least able to fight back?
By what mechanisms has one of the richest nations in earth turned so aggressively on sections of its own citizenry?
It seems to me that the Conservative Party allied with vested financial interest – has successfully activated a latent fascism in British society.
To blame all of the ills of society on a minority group is as an old and very dangerous idea.
Once the basic scapegoating has been accepted by enough people, then the obligation to value everyone in that society disappears – only the righteous and the worthy need to treated as human beings, the rest are the enemy.
In all facist societies with an identified sub-class there is a need for a superhuman exemplar class that points the way to freedom from the unwashed ones.
In Britain today it is the wealthy and those with power and agency who are extolled as the morally superior “creators of wealth” – for them no tax break, protection or subsidy is too much, they are beyond scrutiny and the example to which we are all told to aspire.
Money has become its own virtue and to own lots of it is to be implicitly more virtuous than those that don’t.
The political system, the media and sections of populist opinion seem locked in a poisonous loop of self reinforcement.
With swathes of the populace demonised and smeared by the media, no politician dares to stand up to the prevailing mood. With no voice of contradiction from Westminster, no way for the powerless to find a voice and with the daily drip feed of media stories braying for ever more public condemnation of the powerless – the mood gets uglier and uglier – the clamour to impose sanctions, workfare schemes and service cuts ever more strident.
Britain needs to wake up fast and stop deluding itself – this is fascism pure and simple – and whenever fascism takes a grip on society people suffer and die.
How ironic that the nation that took such pride in confronting fascist Nazi Germany should now be sleepwalking into fascism itself.
Many voices of protest are being raised, but like all fascist states, the same paranoid and dangerous intolerance towards dissent is asserting itself rapidly.
New legislation has just been passed which will criminalise charities and NGO’s from highlighting the plight of the poor. The mayor of London wants water cannons to quell public dissent.
Legislation going through parliament right now would allow the government to:
(a) Criminalise almost every kind of public gathering
(b) Authorise the seizure of journalists notes in a closed secret court
Does this sound like a political establishment that is interested in democracy to you?
What kind of a nation are we becoming?
When charities are silenced, when student and activist groups are infiltrated and undermined, when the police kettle protestors and when protest itself is under threat – one MUST ask this question or sleepwalk into a dictatorial state that will be very difficult to challenge afterwards.
These are critical times for British people of good conscience.
History shows that the gentle slide into fascism can go unnoticed until its too late.
The time to speak out against the scapegoating and ongoing punishment of the poor, the elevation of the rich to a god-like status and the curtailment of democratic freedoms is NOW.
Don’t imagine that Britain is immune from plunging into the abyss – it really can happen here – and only the very secure can afford to be complacent.
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see also on Sodium Haze: Time to expose the REAL benefit scroungers and Inciting hatred against the poor and hungry – a new British bigotry.
The Reichstag Fire Decree on February 28, 1933, permitted the suspension of basic civil rights—rights that had been guaranteed by the democratic Weimar Constitution. The Third Reich became a police state in which Germans enjoyed no guaranteed basic rights and the SS, the elite guard of the Nazi state, wielded increasing authority through its control over the police. Political opponents, especially those in the Communist Party of Germany and the Social Democratic Party of Germany, along with Jews, were subject to intimidation, persecution, and discriminatory legislation.
Source:
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005204
I have begun to fear that we are now subjects of a corporate state which is what the facist state nearly became with slave workers and mass murder etc.
We are nearly there and most of that is down to the lies and de-regulation so beloved by the City of London and The Tory Party under Thatcher. Thats my opinion anyway.
I thank God that I am retired now and wish I had not raised four children to suffer the misery still to come.
Our present government have shamed this country by their malicious behavior but their donors have benefited greatly.
Peter Benson and Chris Bergin have got it right.
However, I would like to suggest that Ukip, especially if taken over by the extreme Right of the Tory party, with infiltration by such as the BNP, will indeed lead eventually to fascism – cf. the rise of Hitler as the Nazis appealed to the, often legitimate, fears of the German working class.
On the other hand, the Tories, while trying to nullify the impact of Ukip on the ‘ordinary’ citizen (i.e. the ignorant because ill-informed and duped by the Tory press), will increasingly try to outdo Ukip by introducing ever more Right wing policies. So, between the two, we will end up with full-blown fascism in the not-too-distant future if the Left do not get their act together by, say, infiltrating New Labour and ousting the neo Cons, i.e. the Tory Blairites, and setting about reclaiming a true socialist Labour movement from its ashes.