First things first if you don’t agree with the conclusions of the British Medical Journal research then prove them wrong and stop going to the f***in doctors. If this was another country we’d be united in slating them but because it’s domestic we play the party political game and the deaths and suffering continue.
I am sick to death with people putting up with this because they believe ‘Corbyn will make it worse’. How can someone who wants to end austerity and suffering make it worse? Anyway this is not about alternatives. This is about a cruel personality type having power. This is about suffering and despair.
Read this if you haven’t already. And this. And goodness knows how many more examples of how this rotten government is killing people for fun.
It has got to the point now that if this government is not kicked in to touch despair will turn in to something proactive and many decent people will join together and adopt more potent means of change. Millions are literally sick to death of the poison hemorrhaging from the arteries of the Tory party and their supporters. We want them and their venom gone one way or another. Hopefully a caring and empathetic set of values can replace them and that will be our salvation.
This is not new. The 19th century and the early 20th century was littered with Tory death traps for the vulnerable. Not one sincere attempt to improve the lives of the poor specifically can be identified. All advances came from other parties whether it be the Liberals or the Labour party. Don’t get me wrong they were not all of wholesome virtue, far from it, but in comparison they were saints. Pensions; Suffrage; Welfare State; Discrimination legislation… all introduced by Labour and Liberals but blocked by Tories. Only when the public will has become too strong have they admitted defeat.
Then came Thatcher and her ‘return to Victorian values’. Egged on by her multi millionaire/billionaire mates she sold off our belongings to them for a pittance and then set loose market forces that hit those lower down the hierarchy disproportionately. Her government created a hell for many based upon ideology and a distortion of economics and philosophy.
Take the repeated association with Adam Smith the man who gave us An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. How many who practice libertarian armchair philosophy have actually read it? More importantly how many have read The Theory of Moral Sentiments which preceded it? In it Smith states:
‘How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrows of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous or the humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility. The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it.’
Now when was the last time a Tory referred you to this? Never! Their message is a complete distortion of the work of Smith as is much of their wider rhetoric. They are not the virtuous or humane that Smith refers to so they ignore all the most essential narrative in his work. They know their supporters have never engaged in the philosophical foundations of their ideology just like the proponents of another malevolent force that consumed the mid 20th Century.
120000 dead as a direct result of their policies over last 7 years. Billions hidden off shore.
They have to be gone and sooner rather than later. Adam Smith too would agree with that.
Douglas James
