By Dave Stevens.
The rich are getting richer whilst the rest of us are getting poorer, according to the latest official figures released at the end of January.
The Government’s Office for National Statistics revealed that real wages – taking rising prices into account – have been steadily falling month on month since the start of 2010. Every year since then, ordinary Britons have been getting 2.2% on average poorer every year.
This is the longest sustained fall since records began fifty years ago. It is still going on: these official figures showed Britons were 1.5% poorer in the last quarter or 2013 than they were a year before.
It’s not just the poorest who are getting poorer. An independent think-tank the Institute for Fiscal Studies chipped in with its own figures published the day before the ONS ones showing the average middle-income family is 6% poorer in real terms than they were when the crisis of the international globalised Capitalist system hit in 2008.
The ONS also highlighted the fact that this latest of many malfunctions of their economic system, the current recession, has been marked by a shift of employment from well-paid and socially productive jobs in the manufacturing sector to badly paid, unproductive and often largely pointless burger-flipping ones in the service sector. In turn, reflecting the continuing collapse of Britain’s once world-leading manufacturing sector, undercut by cheap Third World sweated labour in their “global free market”. Britain is heading to the point where our Gross Domestic Product consists largely of the equivalent of everyone taking in each other’s laundry and nobody producing anything. At which point our economy – outside the City of London at least – collapses completely.
This is where we have been going for a long time, as the British economy was steadily killed off by foreign imports and the crushing of what power workers had in the face of the international corporations exploiting them.
As the British economy was steadily “globalised” and British workers were ground down beneath the iron heel of Thatcher and her Tory,” New Labour” and now Lib Dem followers.
In the 1970’s, before globalisation and Thatcherism had struck, official ONS figures reveal that British people were getting richer, in real terms, taking inflation into account, by an average of 2.9% a year. By the 1990’s, with employees rendered powerless by Thatcher to resist increasing exploitation by increasingly international corporate employers, this growth in prosperity had halved to 1.5% a year. Between 2000 and 2008, as Blair and Brown betrayed all Labour ever stood for to carry on Thatcher’s pro-global-capitalist anti-British policies, this fell to just 1.2%. Then the international banks to whom our politicians had sold us all collapsed, it dropped below zero at last and we began getting steadily poorer.
The rich are getting richer
Or most of us did. For not everyone is becoming worse off. The rich are doing very nicely, thank you.
Income tax figures from HM Revenue and Customs reveal that the number of millionaires in Britain has almost doubled in the last two years. Their figures – based of course on what parts of their real income the rich and their highly-paid tax evasion advisers actually declare to the taxman – also show that more people are earning six-figure salaries. An additional 5,000 people now earn between £500,000 and £1m compared with two years ago; while a further 31,000 earned between £200,000 and £500,000 and 7,000 earned between £150,000 and £200,000.
There are now 73 billionaires officially resident in Britain, the highest number ever, and their wealth continues to increase. Many are not in fact British – they are members of a cosmopolitan elite of spivs, speculators and in some cases simply gangsters. None of the seven richest people in Britain are ethnically British. Most of them are “oligarchs”, who plundered Russia when the Soviet Union collapsed. They then fled the wrath of the Russian people, to which few of them ethnically belong, to set up in vast mansions in London and the Home Counties and buy once-British football clubs with which to amuse themselves. Some are wanted by the Russian police for serious criminal offences, but Tory, New Labour and LibDems are happy to safe-house the scum of the Earth within our shores as long as they have loads of lolly.
Below this layer of global gangsters are the rest of the rich, mostly City sharks, speculators and spivs who have never done an honest day’s work in their lives. Making money out of manipulating money, shuffling stocks and shares and otherwise parasitically exploiting the toil of honest workers. Again, the figures show whilst the rest of us get poorer, they are getting richer.
Contrary to what Cameron and Clegg – both millionaires themselves – say, we are NOT “all in this together”. Nor is Labour’s Ed Miliband going to get us out of it. Cameron, Clegg and Miliband are members of the rich ruling elite who have nothing whatsoever in common with ordinary British people, about whose lives they know nothing. Nor does UKIP’s Nigel Farage, another rich spiv who made his pile speculating on international metals markets (a very different world from that of a British metal worker, an iron miner or steelworker, back when we had them!) Their pompous platitudes about “hardworking families” – who have to work so hard to stay afloat as their Capitalist system makes them poorer every day – ring hollow from rich boys raised in pampered privilege who have never done a day’s hard work in their lives.
Only alternative
Global corporate Capitalism is their system, run by the global super-rich for the global super-rich on the back of the hard work of everyone else. They get richer as we get poorer. It’s time to stop this before things get any worse. Marxism has failed. Only Nationalism now offers an alternative to being ground ever deeper into the dirt beneath the Gucci heels of international plutocrats and their lackeys.
We should recover the wealth and the industries they have stolen and give them back to the British people from whom they stole them. We should free our economy from the burden of cheap foreign imported goods and cheap foreign imported labour, both of which take away our jobs and devalue the ones we have left. So we can give the wealth of Britain back to the people of Britain and the profit of the labours of those hardworking families back to those who did the hard work.
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We shouldn’t come across as a party that is opposed to the wealthy but we do want to see a society which is a bit more equal. This is actually in the best longterm interests of the very wealthy themselves as what we are witnessing at the moment, because of the economic crisis and the vast disparities in wealth, is that people have stopped spending money as they can’t afford to do it. A more equal society means that capitalism is more sustaniable as it is a system dependent upon a decent level of demand in the economy being present.
This is yet another way we can show we are different to the ultra-Tory and neo-liberal extremists (in an economic sense) of UKIP. UKIP need to be busted and we should be the party to achieve this.
We need to concentrate on showing the electorate that UKIP far from being a so-called ‘alternative’ to the Lib/Lab/CON party are in fact the worst economic mistakes of that political Establishment WRIT LARGE.
This excellent article gives a precise definition of the damage that is being done to the nation state by the Global Corporate Capitalist system. It emphasises how middle Britain as well as the white working class can free our economy from the .burden of cheap foreign imported goods and cheap foreign imported labour – to use Dave’s own words.
I can foresee that it may not be so welcome to those who might consider that the Briish Democrats should pursue a policy more akin to that of Ukip without Farage. I would ask such people to read the article again. To condemn the Global Capitalist system is not to reject the principles of private enterprise. Rather we are protecting it.
We should make it very clear that we SUPPORT free enterprise but we aren’t in favour of completely unhindered markets. The market economy does need to be regulated in the interests of the environment and the national interest.
What we are witnessing at the moment in both Britain and the USA is a ‘hollowing-out’ of the middle-classes and an increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of the super-rich. Now, you can have this to a certain extent but if it goes too far and the economic crisis since 2008 has indicated that it has done so is that you have capitalism starting to turn-in upon itself with disastrous consequences for the middle-classes and the working-classes and in the long-term for the super wealthy themselves.
I would suggest that global capitalism is a threat to private enterprise particularly insofar as the former tends to stifle the latter.
The film ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’, based on a real person, is an eye- opener about the type of person who makes lorry loads of money whilst adding nothing whatever to the greater good.
I don ‘t think it is too much of a caricature of reality.
I agree. Of course, the world of finance is essential to a decent economy but if you rely upon it too much like Britain and the USA have done then when a financial storm hits like it did with the world in late 2008 your country is going to be in greater financial difficulties than it would be otherwise. Banks play such a vitally important role in the economy that it is just plain irresponsible for a government to not regulate them enough. The last Labour government didn’t do this having followed in the footsteps of Margaret Thatcher and the Tories in 2008 even complained that Gordon Brown was regulating them too much!
Excessive neo-liberal economics has some major flaws!
I can’t argue with any of that. A very good article by Dave Stevens. We should spell out very clearly what Britain would look like if it were run along Nationalist lines. The financial institutions have become far, far too powerful and must be brought under strict control. We would encourage businesses that take the model of the John Lewis Partnership, where workers have an equal stake in the business and are fairly rewarded according to the success of the business. The model of share holders, top company executives and bankers lining their pockets on the back of the hard work of ever more poorly paid staff must become as historically unacceptable as the slavery of past centuries is to us today. The concept that this is the only way that capitalism can function must be challenged vociferously. Global trade is not unacceptable to Nationalists provided that it is in the interests of the Nations people, not just the ever greedy pockets of politicians and their corrupt Global business chums who buy their favour. Nationalist ideology is that the economy should exist to serve the people, the people should never simply exist to serve the economy.
There is still far too much of a ‘them and us’ attitude in British companies. In Germany, the workers have representatives on the board of companies and as a result both the management and workers pull together in the interests of the companies they work for and the nation as a whole.
Basically, the nationalist conception of the economy is that the economy should be the SERVANT of the nation and NOT its master. That isn’t the Tory viewpoint and it certainly isn’t the opinion of Tory commodities broker Nigel Farage’s UKIP party.
(Party Member) Well said Geoff. When push comes to shove people only vote on Economic Issues anyway, whatever they think about side issues. We need more Nationalist economic policy especially around budget time.
When pollsters ask people what issues they are thinking about and which ones will make them choose one political party over another at general election time, the economy is always within the top three issues and is normally number one. This is a hard political fact and one that nationalist parties haven’t acknowledged enough in the past which is one reason why we have consistently failed to make much of an impression on Britain’s politics.
This needs to change. Britain’s economy is fundamentally weak and is unbalanced due mainly to a neglect of our industrial base (in contrast to countries like Germany and Japan) and we nationalists need to show the people how nationalist economics can revive and rebalance the economy away from an over-reliance on finance and retail sectors.
Needless to say, this is something UKIP can’t comprehend due to them being globalist Tories (albeit anti-EU ones) and is the best way to counter them politically.
You sound quite a socialist Dave. Its strange that the MSM describe us as right wing.
The whole ‘Left/Right’ way of describing politics is inappropriate for our times. The REAL division in politics now is between globalists/internationalists on the one hand and on the other nationalists.
In an economic sense, we ARE slightly towards the Left in that we don’t favour a completely unhindered free market capitalism and have no problem with the government intervening in free enterprise where that is necessary to promote social cohesion and the national interest.
With regard to other policies, we are socially conservative ie we favour a referendum on capital punishment and want to see very strict immigration controls.
When the media say we are ‘far right’ they are wrong. In terms of economics, the REAL ‘far right’ party of British politics is UKIP with their addiction to globalist, neo-liberal (in an economic sense) economic policies which have already done so much damage to this country’s former industrial base and if they are continued will do so much more. UKIP’s economic approach would do nothing to rectify this country’s economic ills which are becoming increasingly serious.
A model of economic development wouldn’t be the quite literally bankrupt creed of economic globalism ie Thatcherism favoured by UKIP but could be more akin to Germany’s ‘social market’ economy or the ‘Asian Tiger’ of Japan.
Our industries have been exported in search of cheap labour, our unemployed and skilled workers find themselves undercut by immigrants prepared to work for peanuts, the only ones who benefit from this are the owners of capital and those who serve them.
Globalisation has been a disaster for this country, economically and socially. Once skilled men are now working stacking shelves In supermarkets, if they are lucky whilst a minority in the professional middle classes luxuriate in wealth.
Our banking sector is five times the size of that of the USA meaning that we are that much more susceptible to foreign financial disaster, as we discovered following the Lehman collapse.
We cannot feed ourselves and have to import even more food as the population rises thanks to immigration. Meantime, demand for foodstuffs from increasingly affluent places like China is driving up food prices,, etc etc…..
What a mess the politicians have made of this country.