Monday 1 May 2017

What do Britain and Greece have in common?


The mainstream media are highly unlikely to make the collapse in the value of UK workers' wages an issue during this election campaign because that would be extremely counter-productive to their aim of ensuring a landslide victory for Theresa May.

As a result of the Tories overseeing the longest sustained decline in the real value of UK workers' wages in history between 2010 and 2014 it was revealed that the only country in the developed world that has suffered such a severe decline in the value of workers' wages is crisis-stricken Greece.

To hear Tories scaremongering that the UK could end up like Greece if the public don't re-elect the Tory party is utterly laughable. They may be well insulated from the dire consequences of their austerity wealth transfer con (MPs got a whopping great 11% pay rise) but ordinary working people certainly aren't.

Judged by the collapse in the value of our wages ordinary the UK has already ended up like Greece in the experience of ordinary working people.

We all know that prices have been rising way faster than wages. We've all seen people we know struggling on exploitative zero hours contracts. We all know people who have had their in-work benefits slashed by this cruel Tory government. We all know people who haven't had a proper pay raise in years. We all know people who are struggling to get by on various low paid part-time jobs because there aren't enough real jobs to go around. We all know there are huge numbers of people working fake "self-employed" jobs in the gig economy. We're all well aware of the scandal of NHS nurses relying on food bank parcels in order to survive.

We all know that the Tory economic recovery was only ever a recovery for the rich, while the rest of us have seen our share of the wealth actually eroded away.

The UK is the only country in the developed world where the economy has actually been growing, but the share of the wealth going to workers' has been in decline.

"Where has all of this extra wealth gone?" you may ask. The answer is obvious. While the majority were suffering the worst collapse in the value of our wages on record, the tiny super rich minority literally doubled their wealth.

One of the most appalling things is that the Greek government oversaw the trashing of the value of their workers' wages because they were forced to do it by the iron fist of the Troika. The Tories chose to do it to us because they wanted to.

The Tories actually want to turn the UK into a low-skill, low-tech, low-pay, low-welfare economy to compete with China and India on their way up as we meet them on our way down, and trashing the value of our wages is one of the ways they've been trying to achieve it.

Even worse than the fact that the Tories imposed this wage repression agenda just because they wanted to do it, not because they had to, is the fact that so many ordinary British workers absolutely refuse to fight back, and even allow themselves to be deluded into thinking that they actually have something to gain by voting for the billionaire bankrolled Tory party.

Just imagine if this was France. Just imagine if the French government had overseen a severe collapse in the value of workers' wages to match the wage collapse that British workers have endured. Just imagine the strikes, the mass protests, the riots in the streets, the relentless civil disobedience. Hell, they'd probably blockade Britain to make themselves heard!

Meanwhile in Britain the party that did this to our wages are actually leading in the polls (despite being led by a robotic charisma vacuum of a woman who is seemingly hell bent on delivering a socially and economically ruinous "no deal" Brexit strop to make the global banking crisis look like a walk in the park).

Not only are we failing to protest against this attack on the value of our wages, we're actually queuing up to vote for the party that did it to us!


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