When the wealthy hold power, the poor and vulnerable are always seen as mere collateral damage, regardless of the issues. Protecting the interests of the top few in society usually seems far more important than being fair to the many. At certain points in history, this has meant lining up banks of untrained and under-resourced soldiers like a human shield, hoping that the corpses of poor citizens and migrants will be enough to trip up the opposition and prevent them from stealing all the shiny things. At the moment, this means starving them and making them homeless to make sure the wealthy are kept in the luxury to which they have long been accustomed.
I've said this so many times, and so have countless others, but it wasn't the poor who caused the economic crash: it was extremely well-paid City workers (and their non-working bosses). So why are they paying the price? Why have the top earners become wealthier since the crash? Why haven't tax payers got their money back from the banks? After all, the main reason for the cuts that the Tories, Labour, Lib Dems and UKIP agree are necessary is the debt caused by bailing out the banks with around ONE TRILLION POUNDS of taxpayers' money. And the deficit, which is apparently more important even than the debt, is the result of paying too much out and getting too little in return. Which is no wonder, given how much tax we pay to people who don't pay tax, just so their bosses can make bigger and bigger profits from their labour.
The main parties are made up almost entirely of career politicians who use a different language to the rest of the population. Unless you spend time learning how to decipher the language of politics, interpret the soundbites and work out how to read between the lines, you don't really know what they're talking about. And if you're more concerned about how you're going to pay your gas bill or put food on the table, it isn't a priority. So a lot of people who are being made to suffer the consequences of a crash they had no part in see nothing to vote for. And so the parties know that kicking those people won't make much difference to their polling. Meanwhile, those who do sit through Question Time* or listen to Radio 4* in the morning hear what is being said, work out what they prefer and vote accordingly.
*Although as they're both on the BBC, the central topics tend to miss issues which affect the poorest in favour of something about the EU or immigration, neither of which are particularly crucial to what our government does with our money.
So let's generalise by saying that the most vulnerable are less likely to vote than the well-off who mostly vote to keep themselves rich and that those in power are ok with homelessness and malnutrition rising. What about the rest of us? What about the people who aren't rich but aren't poor, who donate a little to charity now and then to make ourselves feel better? Too many of us don't vote either. And many will dip in and out of politics and pick up on some rhetoric and lies without getting a bigger, clearer picture and might vote in the party who will kick the poor the hardest.
Ed Milliband's 'squeezed middle' could do a lot of good by stepping up and protesting against the nasty policies paid and lobbied for by the rich instead of quietly muttering something about a politician's hair or hand gestures before switching channel and switching off their conscience.
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