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Thursday, 16 November 2017

What do Britain and Greece have in common?


The mainstream media rarely draw attention to the ongoing collapse in the value of UK workers wages.

They rarely bother to explain that the real terms value of workers' wages are lower than they were 10 years ago, and that this decline is set to continue into the 2020s.

They rarely bother to explain that the percentage of people living in poverty despite being in working families has been soaring.


And they steadfastly ignore the fact that the only country in the developed world that has suffered a comparably severe collapse 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. Wealthy Tory MPs and their cheerleaders in the right-wing press may be financially insulated from the dire consequences of their austerity wealth transfer con but ordinary working people certainly aren't.

Judged by the collapse in the value of our wages, 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, and fake self-employment scams in the gig economy. 

We all know people who haven't had a proper pay raise in years. 

We all know people who have had their in-work benefits slashed by this cruel Tory government. 

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'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 mega-rich minority literally doubled their wealth.

One of the most appalling things about this situation is that the Greek government oversaw the collapse in 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 British workers 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 UK workers' 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 such 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 have been re-elected as the largest political party twice (despite being led into the most recent election 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 British workers failing to fight back against this sustained Tory assault on the value of their wages, millions of them are still actually queuing up to vote for the party that did it to them!



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