UK WORKERS have suffered privation and poverty ever since the 2008 financial crash, when the banks were bailed out by a Labour government at a cost of over £1 trillion.
While the bosses and the bankers were saved from the crash, the working class is still paying the bill with over a decade of austerity, and a privation which is still continuing, even deepening.
People sleeping on the streets is now the new normal, as are savage education and health cuts that have seen children going to school hungry, with their parents unable to pay for their meals, and schools struggling to provide dinners and breakfasts for hungry pupils.
Teachers now say that they have to bring in clothes and shoes for their more needy pupils, while their parents look to the ‘food banks’ to provide one meal a day for their offspring.
The crash of 2008 and Labour’s decision to rescue the banks brought the Tories back into power to bring in an orgy of deregulation which has produced horrors like the Grenfell fire, while tower blocks remain coated with inflammable materials up and down the country.
The Universal Credit policy has produced a country where the majority live in fear of cuts, flock to food banks and are in a position where they cannot feed their children.
Meanwhile, landlords are making a mint by charging commissions before renting their property and then evicting their tenants who have no security at all.
Britain now more than resembles a third world country, of oppressed people who, with the Brexit betrayal, have even had their right to vote and decide on policy taken off them by a bourgeoisie that is determined to stay in the EU no matter what.
It is this Britain, that is being driven backwards that has produced the knife crime epidemics.
We are being forcibly returned to the conditions of the early 20th century in which the imperialist Cecil Rhodes wrote in his diary that unless Britain turned to imperialism, and provided a better life through the robbery of the colonies, there would be a civil war in the UK.
Britain did carry out this policy, but the loss of empire has seen a return to 1900 conditions. However, just like then, super poverty at home was the terrain in which exploiters make their billions and become even richer, as the latest Sunday Times Rich List shows.
The list for this year, just published, shows that the billionaire Hinduja brothers have been named as the wealthiest people in the UK for a third time. Sri and Gopi Hinduja saw their fortune increase by £1.356bn in the last year to £22bn.
Others on the list include David and Simon Reuben (Property and internet) £18.7bn, Sir Jim Ratcliffe (Chemicals) £18.2bn, Sir Len Blavatnik (Investment, music and media) £14.4bn, Sir James Dyson and family (Household goods and technology) £12.6bn, Kirsten and Jorn Rausing (Inheritance and investment) £12.3bn, Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken (Inheritance, brewing and banking) £12bn, Alisher Usmanov (Mining and investment) £11.3bn, Roman Abramovich (Oil and industry) £11.2bn, Mikhail Fridman (Industry) £10.9bn.
The Times says that the list does not include the amount contained in people’s bank accounts, nor does it include the wealth of the monarch, and her dependents, including the Duchy of Lancaster.
The Duchy of Lancaster is a private estate owned by the Queen, as Duke of Lancaster. The rural estates consist of 18,484 hectares of land in England and Wales and comprise commercial, agricultural and residential properties, the majority of which are in Lancashire, Yorkshire, Cheshire, Staffordshire and Lincolnshire. Additionally, the Duchy has a significant commercial property portfolio largely in the Savoy precinct off the Strand in London, a portfolio of financial investments and a small urban residential portfolio.
The yawning and widening gulf between the rich and the working class is sharpening the class struggle. Its first political product is the Brexit revolution. That this political revolution will develop into a social revolution there is no doubt.
The News Line urges all of its readers to join the WRP and the Young Socialists to organise the British socialist revolution to expropriate the bosses and bankers and bring in socialism. This is the only way to secure a decent life for all!
