Conservatism in a nutshell

It’s a world of corporate feudalism, and I heard some smart person
from the States once sum up the Tories neatly with the phrase
“cheap-labour conservatism”. How very apt. It fits so well.

Basically, the larger the labour supply, the cheaper it is. The more
desperately you need a job, the less you tend to demand for your wages,
and the more power those big business Tory buddies have over you. This
is what the Tories actually mean by “making work pay” – it’s either
rationed out peanuts or starvation.

The Tories engineer this socio-economic situation every time they are in office. Think back to Thatcher, she did it, Major did it – it’s a manufactured recession and a large reserve army of cheap labour every time. ALWAYS the same with the Tories. Because it suits their “business friendly”agenda.That’s another Tory slogan that means corporate greed, profit before people and Tory donations – see the Beecroft Report,
for example, written by a British “venture capitalist” that has donated
more than £500,000 to the Conservative Party. The overdogs write
policies to make sure. we remain the underdogs.

Beecroft is currently Chairman
of Dawn Capital. The release in May 2012, of the long awaited Beecroft
Report in the UK caused considerable controversy because it recommended
that the government should cut red tape in order to make the hiring and
firing of employees easier. The report claimed this would help to boost
the economy although no evidence for this was provided.  It helps boost
profits for venture capitalists, and the government-commissioned report
strips workers of their rights. As the TUC said at the time, the ideas
have taken the UK back towards Victorian era working conditions and
standards.

Conservatives don’t like social spending or welfare – our safety net .
That’s because when you’re unemployed and desperate, companies can pay
you whatever they feel like – which is inevitably next to nothing. You
see, the Tories want you in a position to work for next to nothing or
starve, so their business buddies can focus on feeding their profits,
which is their only priority . Cheap-labour conservatives don’t like the
minimum wage, or other improvements in wages and working conditions.These policies undo all of their efforts to keep you desperate. They don’t like European Union labour laws and directives either, for the same reason.

Cheap-labour conservatives don’t like unions. Because when we unite
and organise, wages go up. Working conditions improve. That’s why
workers unionise.

Seems workers don’t like being desperate. But businesses don’t like to pay out money. They like to hoard it.

Cheap-labour conservatives constantly bray about “morality”,
“virtue”, “respect for authority”, “hard work” and other such vaguely
defined values. This is only so that they can blame you for being
desperate due to your own “immorality”, lack of “values” and “poor
choices”. It’s also so that they can justify their “business friendly”
workfare schemes to further exploit the reserve army of labour, and keep
us desperate and in our place.

Cheap-labour conservatives encourage racism, misogyny, homophobia and
other forms of bigotry. That’s because bigotry among wage earners
distracts them, and keeps them from recognising their common interests
as wage earners. Divide and rule.

An ugly truth is that cheap-labour conservatives don’t like working
people. They don’t like working class opportunities and prosperity, and
the reason for this is very simple. Lords have a harder time kicking us
around when we aren’t desperate.

Once we understand this about the cheap-labour conservatives, the
real motivation for their policies makes perfect sense. Cheap-labour
conservatives, the neo-feudalist fools, believe in social hierarchy and
privilege, so the only prosperity they want to permit is limited to
them. They want to see absolutely nothing that benefits us whatsoever.
And even better if we fight amongst ourselves for scraps . Divide and
rule.

The Tory mantra “making work pay” is an argument for RAISING WAGES,
not cutting benefits, talk about the rationally illiterate’. But then
cheap-labour conservatives hope that those affected will take comfort in
the fact that if your wages are not enough to meet the cost of living,
at least those without a job are much worse off.

The Tory “race to the bottom” is plain, and after four years of
austerity, Osborne is forced to concede that the new welfare cuts leave
£9bn of the deficit reductions promised by the Chancellor unaccounted
for. The cuts are PURELY ideological. Tories: dangerous with the
economy, dangerous for society.

“Less Government” is another defining right-wing slogan. It’s also
all about cheap labour. Included within the slogan is the whole
conservative set of assumptions about the nature of the “free market”
and government’s role in that market. “Less government” permitted the
conservatives’ cunning transformation of a crisis caused by banks into a
crisis of public spending. It was a huge triumph of Tory dogma over the
facts. And of course, our public services are being  sold off to private companies.

And anyone would think, to hear the Tories talk, that the
“free-market” isn’t rigged to benefit the wealthy. The bedroom tax,
welfare cuts, public service cuts, cutting inheritance tax and handing
tax breaks to the wealthy are, after all, examples of state
interventions, and not “market forces”, which the Tories always use as a
front to suck the life out of communities, and to keep people
desperate.

The whole “public sector/private sector” distinction is an invention
of the cheap-labour conservatives. They say that the “private sector”
exists outside and independently of the “public sector”. The public
sector, according to cheap-labour ideology, can only “interfere” with
the “private sector”, and that such “interference” is “inefficient”,
“costly” and “unprincipled”.

Using this ideology, the cheap-labour ideologue paints him/her self
as a defender of “freedom” against “big government tyranny”. In fact,
the whole idea that the “private sector” is independent of the public
sector is totally bogus, because “the market” is created by public laws,
public institutions and public infrastructure.

But the cheap-labour conservative isn’t really interested in
“freedom”. What they want is the privatised tyranny of industrial
serfdom, the main characteristic of which is – you guessed it – cheap
labour.

Thanks to Robert Livingstone for all of his excellent pictures

This article first appeared at http://kittysjones.wordpress.com/2014/09/26/conservatism-in-a-nutshell/ and is republished here with kind permission from the author