Peering into the future part 2

Let's assume that the plans our leaders now have in mind are implemented. Let's tally up what that will mean for us in the near term, and ask what will we have at the end, to show for all the suffering, and will it have been worth it?

I'm not talking about possible future developements. Let's restrict ourselves, for now, to just what is already on the table and what we can resonably extrapolate from those certainties.

We know that we are going to have cuts in almost all areas of welfare and public service. I don't think it is being biased to be skeptical about assurances that 'front line services' will not be affected because all the cuts will come from 'efficiencies'. I think we all know the 'efficiencies' mantra, is just a pious utterance, akin to " God willing" or "Ahmen".

So, we are going to have worse education for our children ('Our' means working and middle class, excluding perhaps the upper middle class). Fewer more poorly paid teachers, larger class sizes, fewer facilities, fewer prospects for kids to believe in. We are going to have worse health provision. More service rationing, shorter consultations, soon to be higher charges on medicines, perhaps some charges akin to those already introduced in dentistry expanded into GP or hospital work. All on the cards in my opinion.

We are going to have worse transport. Public transport particularly will become more expensive as tickets go up to off-set lower government subsidies. Crowding will get worse.

We will have lower wages as settlements will be kept very low. The argument will be that inflation is low. This will be calculated by looking at costs of housing and electronics. It will cover over the fact that food and energy are going up fast. So you will be colder and will eat more cheaply.

We will have much less job security in our lower paying jobs. Businesses will demand 'flexibility'. Which means 'easier to make redundant'.

We already now know we will have to wait longer to get our penions and they will be lower when we finally get them (relative to rising costs). And it is likely that pensions will reduce further to an eventual vanishing point. These are state pensions of course.

But private pensions will do little better. We already know that most of the 90's, much vaunted company pension nirvana, was ideological clap trap. In my opinion privatisations were always less about efficiencies from private capital, private sector management, or profits to the exchequer from the sale. They were, I think, always about the MUCH larger, long-term savings to be made, by getting rid of state enterprises that had state funded pensions schemes, and tranferring everbody into private enterprises whose pension schemes were supposed to take care of buy the 'private sector' -the companies themselves. Of course it was a free-market fantasy now turned nightmare.

Most companies didn't or won't last long enough to keep a pension plan going. The companies collapse and with them go their pensions. If they haven't been plundered dry long before. Watch what happens to BA's pension scheme.

Personal pensions from pension companies are going to do little better. The stock market upon which they depend is down and is now certainly looking at a double dip, where the second dip will be worse than the first. The 'recovery' from this recession, is going to take a long time. Optimists talk of 5 years to get back to '07 levels. Optimism is one word for it. As growth estimates are revised down and down, in your mind, stretch out the length of recovery time year on year. Once we get beyond 7 years 10 years of subdued 'growth' with low wages and high unemployment throughout, what sort of state do you think your pension or those of your friends will be in?

While we are enjoying all this, we will also have the pleasure of higher taxes. Another pleasure will be to watch the Banks and Bankers doing rather well thank you. Not just financially well, but politically too.

So ask yourself, what are we going to have to show for it all, at the end of this hardship and privation? WIll we have suffered in order to have built a better country? Will we feel the self-respect of people who have done something great? Will we have built a nation where Democratic insitutions are strong and vital, where our political choices are real and effective? Will we feel the self-respect and dignity that any free born citizen and intelligent human being should feel?

Or will you slog through this endless privation, knowing all along, that you have settled for being a gutless and frightened vassal of the financial class? Will the democracy we might have built, have instead been pawned, leaving us with nothing more than a soiled ticket, for a future neither we nor even our children, will have the wherewithal to redeem?

Is that the future we are going to knowingly cringe towards?

If it is, then let us at least have the courage to confess it to ourselves, our friends and our children, that we are too frightened and cowed to fight for better.

If not, then it is way past time for us to reconsider who we really, fundamentally and constitutionally are, and what therefore we are really capable of doing. It is time to shrug off the self limiting stories of 'what people are like' that have made slaves of the post war generations who accepted them as gospel. Time to silence the snivelling, self interested, self loathing monkey who we have been assured we are.