Why our mental health matters

For me who has had a number of down times and felt very low at points due to various factors I do know how important it is to look out for our mental health. Often one of the most misunderstood forms of our health our mental well being is often over looked for someone just being a bit down or just needs to cheer up. As a society we simply do not understand mental health and this is no more so than for us living under the constant pressures and worries of life under capitalism. For me and many others mental health is an anti capitalist issue which must be firstly understood and secondly tackled as best we can on a day to day basis. Our small worries which can turn into bigger more long term problems must be understood and we must always try and reach out to those who are most in need. Not by preaching to them at what they need but offering our solidarity and support in any way we can if necessary. Sometimes just letting others know you are there if they need anyone to talk to can be a great comfort. I know many disabled people like myself who struggle day to day with what life has given them and the society which perpetuates disability and how they find it a constant challenge to “fit in” to a “normal” lifestyle whatever that means. I have had two blocks of councilling myself since loosing my eyesight 10 years ago now with that always be an issue for me which I return to a lot in my thinking other material conditions and daily situations also frustrate me and this can can come out in a multitude of ways. Learning to deal with your frustration and to channel it in to a positive direction for change is what I have tried to do. This is where my politics comes in. For me who has always identified myself with fighting injustice and unfairness I’ve taken a critical look at the society we live in. How society affects us on an emotional level and hew we can go about supporting each other in that transition to changing the world into a better place for all. A brilliant article found on www.libcom.org a few years back detailed a lot of where we are at in the current times the limits to our campaigns and where we could possibly improve in areas. When it comes to mental health and activism. “The ‘anti-capitalist movement’ we have been a part of in the UK (we offer this definition very broadly and with caution!) constantly strives to create its own infrastructure, whether this is motivated by apocalyptic visions of the future or autonomy from capitalist social relations (or both) everyone’s at it. Squats, housing co-ops and social centres. We build our networks to consist of people who can do accounting, plumbing, squat defending and cooking. We like doing things together and creating our own spaces, and we know how to do it. But for the past too many years we’ve arrived in fields around the UK and Europe, put up some tents, made the running water happen, fought the cops and then… invited a group of ‘action medics’ to set up a tent where we’ll later go to them with our splinters. On the one hand we strive for autonomy and on the other we treat some of our individual and social needs as services to be provided by others. The effect of this is not only that we hand over responsibility and control of our physical and mental health to others, but that we fail to engage with health as a political issue. For example, in another time and place, some people are starting a transition town group in their local area. In transition town collectives working groups for all the vital aspects of life are set up. This time we remember that health needs addressing. At our first transition town meeting, we attended the health brainstorm. We listened to people discuss the morally deplorable manner with which the NHS disposes of its waste, and casually (probably under-)estimate the amount of plastic that the NHS uses so irresponsibly, “How can we go about persuading them to return to sterilising metal equipment?” Beside providing another example of our obsession with carbon emissions at the expense of social issues, we again failed to identify health as political. We always seem to forget about health. We talk about authoritarian immigration laws, ID cards infringing on our civil liberties, incarceration of political prisoners (etc. etc.) but a quick look at the health section of Indymedia shows a fine example of the lack of debate there is in our movements around healthcare. There are hardly any posts under the health section of the web page and the ones that are there are mostly concerned with animal rights and incinerators. Why don’t we talk about how capitalism creates mental and physical health problems on both a global and individual level? Or health inequality? Or arbitrary diagnostic criteria that attempt to pathologise the personal burdens we carry from living in such a demanding society? Mental health and anti-capitalism When attempts are made to tackle issues surrounding mental health we seem more than happy to tolerate a conspiratorial understanding of society and power that we deplore elsewhere (psychiatrists controlling the masses etc. etc.). The authors believe it makes more sense to understand mental health discourses and practices as largely economically contingent, rather than as the result of some reactionary ideology peddled by a brain washing elite. Mental health practitioners are bound by the same economic limitations and requirements as everyone else, drugs are always the first port of call because they’re cheap, and, as we all know, medical science and research is dominated by pharmaceutical companies because the research just couldn’t happen without their money (significantly the majority of randomised clinical trials undertaken to evaluate the efficacy of drugs versus other forms of therapy are sponsored by the very same companies who manufacture the drugs). But the problem runs deeper than this, historically the industrial revolution facilitated new attitude to ‘madness’ and health, the transformation of nature through manufacture opened the way for ideas about the transformation of people, through transformative therapies and rehabilitation. We saw a move away from the view that madness was an incurable affliction and a move toward therapies intended to ‘cure’ what were now understood as mental illnesses with the view of rehabilitating people back into cooperative and productive members of society. Capitalism requires us to be productive and thus mental health practices and discourses are oriented towards this necessity. Attempts at reforming mental health services without addressing capitalism inevitably fail. Moves to community care were seen as a great success for the democratic mental health movement in Italy where psychiatric institutions were abolished and all psychiatric and mental health services were outsourced into the community. The eighties and nineties saw a similar move in the UK. Victorian asylums were closed and psychiatric and psychological services were moved into the community. Whereas there is no doubt that psychiatric services are now ‘better’ than they were in the sixties, the failure to challenge the entirety of the system within which mental health services are situated led to what has been described as the mere outsourcing of psychiatric services into peoples homes. The asylums may have gone but the institution hadn’t and couldn’t change. On a more grass roots level we also limit our potential for change when we revert to DIY life-stylism rather than radically critiquing the health service and the economic system and social processes that produce it. Anarcha-feminists are generally better at politicising health, it was feminists who focused the idea of autonomous health by starting to check their own breasts for lumps. But they also fall into a trap of lifestylism often talking about how to deal with ’so called’ PMT or how to make your own sanitary towels (we hope never to sit through one of these again) rather than how political and economic forces negatively affect people’s everyday experience of healthcare. Why do we never have a radical position on why most health resources are used treating the results of excessive food, alcohol and drug consumption? It’s not enough to encourage healthy, green, organic and active lifestyles or tell people to stop watching telly and get an allotment. In practice this is what doctors try to do everyday in order to lower peoples’ cholesterol and blood pressure, but after years of experience, they know they will always revert to drugs. Similarly it’s one thing to tell someone with high blood pressure to do a bit more exercise and quite another to tell someone suicidal who probably has inadequate housing and may be unemployed to radically change their lifestyle. That just doesn’t cut it for the majority of people. Instead let’s talk about society and what makes it that way. Consumer and individual choices alone do not carry the antagonistic element that would have the potential to realise change in our society. Whilst this reduction of social problems to the individual diverts attention it also places undue pressure on people who already live in a highly pressurised and externally managed environment. Many attempts at linking Marxist theory and mental health have identified alienation as having psychological or individual origins, but alienation originates from social organisation. Capitalism and the State require us to be active and productive citizens, to embrace our ‘rights’ and responsibilities and to participate equally in liberal democracy. We are dispossessed by society and labelled mad or unfit not then, because we are seen as being ‘possessed’ (as was once the case), but because we are no longer useful. Our focus therefore has to be on this form of social organisation that requires us to participate in limited and pre-determined ways. This leads us to one other concern, and that is the anti-medical, anti-corporate or anti-progressive streak that dominates some areas of mental health activism. A progressive socially critical position recognises that capitalism manifests in the ways we relate to each other in our everyday activities and not just in the big corporate monster or your local super-market. Rather than throwing the baby out with the bath water we feel that certain technological and social advances, whether that’s drug treatments, medical science or professionalised health services, should be embraced as the product of human creativity and innovation with a valuable and necessary role in society rather than purely as the product of an exploitative capitalist economy. For example rather than shouting down anti-depressants, we should talk about why capitalist economics make antidepressants the best and most ‘effective’ treatment for every person experiencing depression? Instead of criticising health and social care workers, we should recognise the time pressures on their work, the necessary corporate funding that keeps training courses, institutions and research centres afloat and the knock on effect this has on how health services are delivered. Finally, we feel it’s worth saying here that we are not denying the truly debilitating impact of some emotional and psychological experiences on people’s lives. By saying that mental health has a social and economic dimension we do not intend to belittle the experience of the individual, rather we are asking that our understanding of and activism on health issues has an antagonistic element and a social orientation. Continuing the conversation Like we said earlier we’re not pushing for another single issue campaign, rather we’re asking that when we are confronted with issues regarding mental and physical health we see them as political and as part of our struggle as anti-capitalists. Alternative approaches to a range of psychological ‘illnesses’ and experiences exist all over the country, the Hearing Voices Network works with people on an individual and collective level toward finding new ways of understanding and living with experiences of voice hearing. Mad pride and ‘bed pushes’ through city centres are examples of attempts to highlight the injustices experienced in the mental health system and to offer a voice for the ‘dispossessed’ to shout back. But rather than focusing too much on solutions and protest we want to continue exploring how ‘madness’ and health are embedded in social and political processes. We believe that the movement towards a truly democratic ‘mental health’ must be an anti-capitalist movement.” With thanks and extracts from the full version you can read over at https://libcom.org/library/possessed-or-dispossessed-jane-stratton-lauren-wroe Jane Stratton is involved in the No Borders network, an action medics collective, and studies Medicine. Lauren Wroe is co-editor of Shift magazine, researches in critical social psychology and is involved in the No Borders network.

Companies hoarding labour, feature of capitalist crisis?

At present in Britain it is said many companies are hoarding labour power in the hope that the recovery and new growth is just around the corner. This I’m afraid is more wishful thinking than any pre planned economic thought. The fact if they did lay off large numbers of skilled workers they’d have to re train and re employ lots if the recovery did come they fear. Of course we know as Marxists that no such recovery can be seen on the horizon anytime soon. Capitalism can get out of this crisis we often say this is a fundamental crisis of capitalism and the capitalists know no way of getting out of it on the basis of capitalism well I’m afraid they do but it is not something we talk up at all it would be at the crushing of the working class to living standards not even worth thinking of they’d be so low. We are told constantly that employment figures are improving and more are being employed then ever before this flies in the face of the reality on the ground for many whom dead in the labour market day in day out. But there has been a hoarding of labour in this crisis and it is unusual and tricky to explain as you would think big recession biggest crisis in capitalism since the 30’s why are we not seeing mass unemployment way above the 3 million mark as yet ? One explanation for why employment figures are rising as productivity falls is the phenomenon called "labour hoarding", where employers do not adjust the amount of employees they pay, despite fluctuations in economic conditions. Four years ago if you had asked me what would be the level of unemployment under the current economic conditions, I'd have said I'd expect it to be be at least 3 million people. Jonathan Portes Ian Brinkley says such a practice is not a long-term explanation for the recent official figures: "Logically, this phenomenon of "labour hoarding" can only go on for a short time but this has gone on from about 2008 and it's now 2012. So the idea of four years of blaming this on labour hoarding is starting to lose credibility." "The one thing I can think of which could explain this is that we may be underestimating GDP, but it would have to be a significant revision to show that the UK economy has been growing rather than contracting in the first half of this year". Jonathan Portes, director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, agrees. He told Channel 4 News there are also other factors: "The pace of the fiscal squeeze has slowed somewhat, and it might be that GDP is revised upwards. "Also we've seen employees prepared to accept shorter hours, there've been pay cuts and many people have moved into self-employment. These changes might not be terribly pleasant for individuals but it's better than having an extra half-million people on the dole.” As the capitalists point too. Of course they do not mind mass unemployment as it can help them drive down wages to increase competitiveness in the market. The problems that capitalism faces are all too stark for many today no way out of the nightmare of austerity for many leads to a demoralisation in the working class which we see today with a sense we cant win. This must be challenge at all opportunities. With the huge problems facing capitalism it is often a mystery as to why unemployment isnt higherin Britain than it is for examplein other parts of Europe. This is partly due to government measures bolstering 'zombie' companies. But it is also due to 'labour hoarding', in the false hope that this is a temporary crisis, while cutting workers' pay and conditions. There has been an increase in part-time casual work and people abandoning the jobs search and registering as self-employed. We must fightt o organise te unorgaised and unemployed unions must reach out to those not in work and try to draw them into the labour movemnt as we can affect rael change this way by a collective voice in colelctive actio. What is clear is that the problems of capitalism are not going away anytime soon despite labourHoarding mass unemployment could always be round the corner we must be ready for when mass struggle breaks out. Post April as we enter the new financial year we may start to see bigger redundancies as big busienss starts to see no end in sight of the crisis and begins to panic with still large numbersof labour cots on its books holding back profits. We must point this out and fight back where we can. Only socialist system change can be the answer to our woes. We don’t need a plan B for growth we need a plan S for socialism!

Miliband a safe pair of hands for the market?

Today Ed Miliband will address the CBI in a keynote speech in an attempt to prove to the markets that he if he was to become our next prime minister will be a safe pair of hands for capitalism. Milibands whose strategy that has ranged from responsible capitalism whatever that is surely it doesn’t exist to appearing at the Durham Miners Gala and getting booed at the TUC demonstration just gone. He is an odd character to say the least a person who hasn’t won over many so far as far as I can tell. He may end up becoming PM by default as the Tories look to be heading for a disaster at the next election if they don’t get defeated beforehand which we are all hoping. But Miliband who used his conference speech this year to The main theme of the speech - 'One Nation' - was the rehashing of an old idea, and an old Tory idea at that. In fact it was first raised by Tory leader Benjamin Disraeli 140 years ago. Miliband considers him a One Nation politician and he made sure we knew, using the phrase 46 times in his speech! He was forced to reflect the worries of ordinary people, the millions of us who can't find work or are struggling to make ends meet. He correctly said that the system doesn't work for them. But the idea of 'One Nation' cannot square the opposing interests of workers trying to improve their pay and bosses who are trying to cut it. We live under capitalism, a system where society is divided up in to classes. Rarely is this more obvious than now when the super-rich are continuing to rake it in while working class people are expected to pay for their crisis. With four out of five ministers in this government being millionaires it is clear who they represent. Bosses are getting cuts to their tax and to health and safety regulations, we're getting cuts to our pay, jobs and services. Unfortunately, what little concrete proposals there were in Miliband's speech made clear that fundamentally Labour will continue with the same agenda. In many local councils Labour councillors are already implementing huge cuts. They are another party of big business. The 'One Nation' rhetoric is simply a way of making their true intent, as the claim "we're all in it together" or the idea of the 'Big Society' were for Cameron. Ed Miliband was elected Labour leader two years ago, largely by the votes of trade unionists. Many hoped that he would lead a return to 'Old Labour'. This hasn't happened. Now members of Labour-affiliated unions should be asking why their money is still going to a party that doesn't represent them. We desperately need a party that will stand up for working-class and middle-class people. The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC), supported by the RMT transport union and a number of leading trade unionists in other unions is an important step towards such a party. Miliband has his work cut out to convince many he is a worthwhile leader of the country but if he does happen to we can be assured who’s interests he will serve. He may pay lip service to the plight of ordinary people any politician can do that but do they really understand? I don’t think they can do. It’s clear we need our own party. A party of the mass of working class people to counter the arguments of the market and to offer a true alternative to this rotten capitalist system

Don’t tell me there is no money left

As we are told everyday there I no money left so we must cut cut and cut some more by Tory and labour MP’s alike. Even labours too far too fast line would still ensure huge cuts to the public sector The PCS union has the right idea in smashing the myths about the cuts and the recession.

From 1918 to 1961 the UK national debt was over 100% of GDP. During that period the government introduced the welfare state, the NHS, state pensions, comprehensive education, built millions of council houses, and nationalized a range of industries. The public sector grew and there was economic growth.
Today, the coalition government wants to turn back the clock. It is set on dismantling the NHS and comprehensive education, and it is attacking the welfare state. It is not doing this because the country is on the verge of economic collapse, it is doing it because it is ideologically opposed to public services and the welfare state, and committed to handing over more of our public assets to big business.
Cutting public sector jobs will increase unemployment. This would mean increased costs for government in benefit payments and lost tax revenue. If people’s incomes are taken away or cut through pay freezes they will spend less. Fewer consumers spending means cuts in the private sector, and lower VAT revenues.
Internal analysis by HM Treasury proves this to be the case. Leaked documents estimated that over the next six years700,000 public sector jobs would be cut, and many more private sector jobs would also be lost – based on the current government’s policies.
Job cuts are therefore counterproductive. Mass job cuts would worsen the economic situation by reducing demand in the economy, and providing less tax revenue.
The government claims it can make cuts of between 25% and 40%, and still “protect frontline public services”. This is impossible – not just because ‘frontline services’ are being cut, but because services rely on ‘back office’ support staff. For example, cutting support staff like NHS cleaners has meant an increase in healthcare acquired infections, costing the NHS £1 billion. All public services require tax revenues to fund them, yet HM Revenue & Customs has cut 25,000 staff in recent years, which has led to uncollected tax at record levels and a growing tax gap.
The impact is likely to be highly divisive too. There is evidence of this already in the UK. In areas where public sector workers have already been laid off, retail sales have fallen faster than the UK average. In nations and regions where public sector workers make up a high proportion of the workforce, major public sector cuts could destroy local economies. Any attack on the public sector will also disproportionately affect women, as 68% of the public sector workforce is female. The public sector also has a much better record of employing disabled workers too.
The global race to cut labour costs is central to the economic collapse we have seen around the world. Squeezed consumers are defaulting on mortgages and personal debts, and are less able to spend in the economy. In the UK, the value of wages has declined from nearly 65% of GDP in the mid-1970s to 55% today. Over the same period, the rate of corporate profit has increased from 13% to 21%. It is no coincidence that in this period trade union rights were severely restricted, large swathes of the economy privatized, markets deregulated and corporation tax slashed.
There is an urgent need to rebalance the economy in the interests of people over big business.

Investing in public services is the solution to the deficit crisis. Instead of cutting jobs, we should be creating them. Jobs are not created by bullying people on benefits into jobs that don’t exist. Instead there are several areas where public sector jobs urgently need to be created.
It has been estimated that over a million ‘climate jobs’ could be created if the government was serious about tackling both climate change and unemployment – these would include areas like housing, renewable energy and public transport investment including high speed rail, bus networks and electric car manufacture.
Today there are 1.8 million families (representing over 5 million people) on council house waiting lists. There is an urgent need to build affordable housing for these people, which would also help reduce housing benefit payments.

Addressing the ‘tax gap’ is a vital part of tackling the deficit. Figures produced for PCS by the Tax Justice Network show that £25 billion is lost annually in tax avoidance and a further £70 billion in tax evasion by large companies and wealthy individuals.
An additional £26 billion is going uncollected. Therefore PCS estimates the total annual tax gap at over £120 billion (more than three-quarters of the annual deficit!). It is not just PCS calculating this; leaked Treasury documents in 2006 estimated the tax gap at between £97 and £150 billion.
If we compare the PCS estimate of the tax gap with the DWP estimate of benefit fraud, we can see that benefit fraud is less than 1% of the total lost in the tax gap
Employing more staff at HM Revenue & Customs would enable more tax to be collected, more investigations to take place and evasion reduced. Compliance officers in HMRC bring in over £658,000 in revenue per employee.
Even If the modest Robin Hood tax which we feel would only trim the finger nails of capitalism but would be a good step forward of course – a 0.05% tax on global financial transactions – was applied to UK financial institutions it would raise an estimated £20–30bn per year. This alone would reduce the annual deficit by between 12.5% and 20%.

Alongside this it is estimated big banks and business currently sit on a figure around 750 billion This is a huge contradiction of capitalism and hits the nail on the head for me that this sys
Pounds on idol money just sitting on it as they do not see a profitable outlet at this tem if it can’t improve things for people it has become a bankrupt system and is no longer a system we can afford. A system where the wealth is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands is not a healthy system and you may even go as far as to say it’s corrupt. I wouldn’t disagree. I think capitalism has reached saturation point and few potential avenues for profit are open for it at present in Europe and the UK certainly at this present stage.
This is part of the reason why privatising the NHS is such a popular idea with big business as this could be rich picking for capitalists who can make a big profit at our expense on health care. It is already rumoured Richard Branson of Virgin is eyeing up bids for parts of our health care.
We as socialists do not accept a single cut is needed. If you do you are wrong and have been fooled into thinking some cuts are necessary. As this piece shows and other evidence is out there that does not need to be any cuts at all. Labour councils do not need to pass on the cuts they could refuse but they don’t as they like the Tories agree the need for cuts unfortunately. We disagree.

SO alongside the PCS and the RMT we are firmly against all cuts no cuts are necessary as the previous facts and figures which can be categorically backed up and verified. So where we stand against all cuts is not as nuts or as loony left as people tell me it is a logical position to take. We did not cause this crisis so why should we be made to pay for it?

There is clearly wealth and money out there and I haven’t even begun to mention Trident and the scraping of that and how much extra money that’d bring in to the public purse.
Of course these are reformist measures but even on a reformist platform you can argue there does not need to be any cuts at all. Why isn’t labour saying all this? Well for a start it agrees that ordinary working people should pay for this crisis just like the Tories and the liberals. They are bankrupt in terms of ideas and their silly line of too far and too fast is no comfort to ordinary people suffering heavily under this crisis.

It is clear to me that this will only get worse unless some big changes happen. With an economy based for people’s needs over profits of a few these can happen. But unfortunately this will not happen under the main 3 political parties who all serve their capitalist masters now.

It’s time to fight for a change. A change in society a society that is run in the interest of the majority of people. A socialist society.

With extracts taken from the PCS union
http://www.pcs.org.uk/en/campaigns/campaign-resources/there-is-an-alternative-the-case-against-cuts-in-public-spending.cfm

The growing polarisation in Britain today

We are currently seeing a growing polarisation of opinion, wealth, opportunity and pay i'm afraid to say. It really does feel like we are being taken back in time to a earlier time in history.

I was borin in the late 80's did not experience Thatcher and her horrors but am quickly becoming acustom in what it must have been like today in 2011. As we see our living standards stagnate or fall in many cases there is a growing feeling that the poor aare getting poorer and the rich are getting richer. This is being helped through by yet another tory government headed by a cabinet of millionaires .


The government's measures amount to the biggest single attack on the living standards of the British working class for 80 years.

The Independent, basing itself upon the figures of the Institute of Fiscal Studies, claims they are the deepest cuts since the 1970s.

But this is not true. In 1976, to receive an IMF loan of £2.3 billion, the then Labour government cut £2.5 billion from public expenditure, equivalent to no more than £20 billion today.

Osborne wants to impose an £81 billion slash and burn programme over four years. Indicating his determination to push through his brutal measures Osborne has let it be known that there is no 'plan B' to fall back on if his proposals are not accepted.

This is bravado on his and the government's part. But the British ruling class has a tried and tested policy of bending with the wind. Whenever they have confronted a determined mass movement which is prepared to go to the end of the struggle against them they have often retreated.

Sometimes, they throw overboard the 'general' whose plans have been thwarted. This was the fate of Margaret Thatcher in the mighty poll-tax battle which she lost and as a result was subsequently ejected from office.

Such an outcome in this battle is not to be excluded. This is a government of liars, who have no mandate - the Liberal Democrats are doing exactly the opposite of what they promised before the general election - and deserves to be driven from office.

But on the other hand this is only possible on the basis of determined policies matched by bold leadership.

We cannot rely on a labour party traditionally known as defenders of the poor. New labour have transformed themselves into apologists of the city and big business
We cannot rely on Labour to oppose the cuts and austerity to the poor and workers.
Moreover, Alistair Darling, previously New Labour's chancellor, has admitted that the cuts that would have been inflicted if New Labour had been re-elected would have been more severe than Margaret Thatcher's when she was in power.

From the outset, this government has pursued a policy of 'shock and awe'. There are many who naively believe that these are always 'somebody else's cuts', in a situation like this.


A recent survey of top 100 FTSE chief executives has shown that in the last year these bosses have received, on average, 50% pay rises. Top company boss Martin Sorrell had the brass neck to complain that his £1 million basic salary was "very low"!

This at a time when many workers have had to endure pay freezes especially in the public sector. In some cases, such as Southampton City and Hampshire county council, workers face pay cuts. Most of these workers are already some of the lowest paid. In the private sector as well, those who have received any pay rises have seen them more than wiped out by price inflation.

It's a disgrace that the parasites at the top can award themselves such huge rises while at the same time calling for further cuts in public spending, leading to more job losses and attacks on workers' terms and conditions.

The fat cats have tried to defend themselves by claiming that their salaries and bonuses are set by independent pay review boards. But the bosses sit on each others' review boards where they recommend huge pay increases for each other!

They have even claimed that their massive pay rises are down to 'performance', yet the system they head is in crisis. If their pay is linked to performance they should be paying us for the mess they've created!

Cameron and Clegg have expressed 'concern' over pay inequalities but working class people won't be fooled by this. The Con-Dems are determined to make the poorest people in society pay for the bankers' greed and the failures of capitalism.

The growing polarisation in society really is starting to grow now. With peoples opinions eitehr falling in the have's or have nots. There is a growing feeling that we are not all in this together as the tories would have us believe . The poor will not take this laying down and will fight back.
I was listening to a programme on BBC 5 live last night and a debate in a church in Birmingham with Edwina Currie claiming taht she doesnt beleive we have real povety in Britain today she thinks its all down to peoples choices and lazy attitudes to not work. Well if there were the jobs there in the first place Edwina maybe we could all find jobs. But jobs that pay a decent living wage should be our aim not just jobs for jobs sake.