The crisis facing Britain today is not austerity, austerity is the result of a much greater crisis which is ongoing. It is a crisis that was created by the wealthiest people and institutions in the country and the world. The ongoing crisis we face is the neoliberal agenda to destroy all public ownership and to put up everything for private profit. The global financial crash has been orchestrated to subjugate entire nations including Britain. The people and institutions that caused the financial crisis are exactly the same people and institutions that are now profiting from it. The banks that were at the heart of the sub-prime mortgage global crash have been rewarded with trillions of tax payer money and that hemorrhaging of the people’s money continues to this day.
The general populace, dubbed the 99%, had no part to play in the global financial meltdown; they had neither the means nor the power to put into effect such a crisis. It is certainly true that many people were persuaded to take on mortgages they had no hope of repaying in response to aggressive marketing with little or no understanding of the risks involved and the precariousness of their position. It was not in the interests of mortgage advisers, who were paid on commission, to offer information that might persuade people to act with caution, quite the reverse, they worked to direct people to the ‘deal’ that seemed to best suit them often talking down their clients own fears and caution. These high risk, toxic mortgages were packaged into lots and sold as AAA rated investment deals. They were worthless and the crisis came when no one would buy and those who had bought them discovered that all they had was empty air which had been exchanged for fortunes.
Lehman Brothers fell and the financial markets crashed, Lehman brothers staff later went on to receive bonus payouts from the banks administrators, PricewaterhouseCoopers, yet it was the general public who paid for the bank bailouts following the crash. Since then the message has been loud and clear, the austerity imposed on the public, the continuing and ongoing cost for bailing out the banks and the responsibility for recovery is the entirely down to the great general public who were and remain, in every way, its victims.
Austerity is being used by the government to destroy the welfare state, to target the worst cuts at the poorest and most vulnerable people in Britain, which includes such things as the vicious bedroom tax, and to sell off all publicly owned assets including the NHS. In so doing the government has embarked on a process of demonization and hate speech against the very people they are targeting, lying to the public, imposing cuts, sanctions and stripping away employment protections and ending legal aid and stifling funding for support agencies, like the CAB. They are generally unconcerned at the alarming increase in poverty, including child poverty, and the proliferation of food banks. As much as we have been taken by surprise and waking up has been hard, when a government goes rogue it is the people who must stop them through exposing them, protesting, non compliance and by any and all creative non-violent means.
https://articles.latimes.com/2012/apr/27/business/la-fi-compensation-20120427
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/francesca-martinez/hands-off-our-public-services_b_2951098.html
https://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2011/sep/06/welfare-post-riots-video
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/02/cameron-rebuked-uk-statistics-authority-over-debt-lies
