I’ve been thinking about the at times intense and even violent imagery I use when I talk about this country, and what has been happening to my friends and neighbours. I am vitriolic, I admit, and people I respect have voiced the worry that my harsh and cruel words are opening the gate to, and actively fanning the flames that could lead to political violence.
Here’s the thing – it’s already happening. What is it to deliberately take the food from the mouth of a child but abuse? All across the country there are children arriving at school unfed and malnourished; this is child abuse on the scale of entire populations.
The BMJ recently published a study estimating that austerity had been responsible for around 120,000 deaths in the UK, most of them due to lack of frontline staff in social care, and damage to the health service thanks to austerity and plundering contractors. These people didn’t just die without being killed; your grandma choking her life out unattended on a hospital trolley was murdered, as if Jeremy Hunt had his hands around her neck.
A few hundred people burning to death in a towerblock, people starving after being sanctioned when their bus was late to the jobcenter, the squaddies shivering to death in the streets up and down the county – I don’t know how much more clearly I can say it, this is political violence! The only reason that the gears of society have kept turning is that the worst parts of austerity affect maybe 5-10% of us; the rest of us have to work harder and our money buys less, but we’ve not had our necks on the block. The Tories have targeted with sadistic precision the folks with the least power and the quietest voices, but during the next financial crisis we will all be fair game and you should know it.
The reason for all this suffering and death is that we’re living in a decaying society, fronted by the venal, punishment-obsessed ideology pushed by the Conservatives. The unbelievably wealthy people who sponsor and direct these monsters want it all. They. Want. It. All. They want the rest of us to be beaten down into a subservient and broken mass-man who beg for the privilege of working for them, and they want all the brown people in the global south to just stay in their dustbowl and mine astatine for the new nucleonic iphone battery until they starve, with massive walls bedecked with guns and overflown by drones to keep them in their place.
The thing is, it won’t pan out that way. People don’t quietly die, they get violent. Environmental terrorism is right around the corner, and beyond that I’ve spoken before about how precarious our personal finances are in this country and how we’re one major recession away from collapse. When there is chaos and mass suffering, moderation goes out the window; look at the Russian revolution in 1917, which started with the beautiful ideals of liberation and socialism and turned into the red terror and Stalinism. Moderates and politeness cannot survive a crisis. You should be grateful for my vicious words; they are a grim but clear intonation of what lies beyond the dark horizon.