Neo-liberalism turned the Welfare State into Bolton Abbey-a beautiful ruin.
Neo-liberalism turned the Welfare State into Bolton Abbey. It is a beautiful ruin from long ago that was looted by the entitled and left to rot by successive governments, including Labour.
The 1% stole the birth right to a life free of want from the generations that followed mine, and that can't continue for much longer without Britain returning to my past. If the 21st century is forcibly returned to my past, it will be more brutal and bloodier than it was for me- so many years ago. This time, there will be no mercy because the state now has the ability to control all facets of your life. It will be impossible to resist or mobilise as we did in the 1930s and 1940s. You must act now or live under the boot of the entitled forevermore.
Everything that we have today, when it comes to social benefits, originated from those six years when Labour held government after the war.
Without the 1945-1951 Labour government, Britain would have been a dark and fearful place during the end of the twentieth century. And yet many of our citizens are ignorant of history but made arrogant by the fake news of the right-wing who disparage the great accomplishments we made as a nation when we cleared the slums, gave free healthcare to all, built affordable homes and made higher education accessible to working-class kids.
When a million people in Britain need to use food banks, politics has failed, not only them but all of us. Politics has failed us when large swaths of society turn to the right wing for solutions in ideologies of hate that embrace intolerance as wisdom and demand their followers evict compassion for the vulnerable from their hearts.
All our politicians are at fault but some more than others.
Farage is a fraud, who can no more offer political salvation to the disenfranchised masses than a television evangelist can fast-track heaven to those with a hundred-pound donation to his dodgy ministry. And it is time the news media stop paying lip service to their busman holiday version of fascism.
Aspiration politics is a cruel deceit. Conservativism is no more than an elaborate pyramid scheme where they convince everyone to steal from the lowest to keep their place in the queue.
We are at a juncture in history that is as dangerous to this generation as the 1930s were to mine. There are serious threats of war emerging all across the globe, some caused by the folly of neo-liberalism and others just erupting because we forgot that tyranny if fed will metastasise in even the most healthy of societies.
It is your choice now to decide whether you let the jungles of greed, neoliberalism and corporations grow over and obscure the welfare state like vines and forest growth obscured the great Mayan civilizations a Millennium ago, or you can reclaim your birthright. My past won’t become your future if you hold firm to the belief that all people are born equal and deserve the right to a life free of want, ignorance and sickness.
You just read a small excerpt from Harry Leslie Smith's "Don't Let My Past Be Your Future." My dad completed that book 15 months before he died in November 2018. He understood what awaits us because he had lived our future, when he was a boy in Great Depression Britain.
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