"We meet after the global wake-up call of Tuesdays US presidential election...
Whether in the US or the UK people feel left behind. Marginalised by an economic system that makes them work harder for less, while hoovering up ever greater rewards for a small elite.
People are right to be angry with our failed economic system, falling living standards and rising inequality.
Young people today find it ever harder to get a home of their own. Harder to find good secure jobs. Landed in lifelong debt simply for trying to get an education. Older people see their children and grandchildren struggling. Their libraries and community services cut. Their friends’ social care worsen. They’ve seen politicians privatise what once belonged to everybody and paid the higher bills and higher fares as a result.
And if we don’t step forward and offer real solutions that meet the needs of our time then into the vacuum step the merchants of hate and blame. They see the problem, but instead of offering solutions to make people’s lives better, they offer someone to blame. Nigel Farage blames immigrants yet offers not a single practical proposal to put a penny more into the NHS. He actually wants to privatise our NHS, a service that now relies on hard-working migrants to keep going. The Tories bandied around terms like ‘scrounger’ and ‘skiver’, whipping up division against the unemployed and people with disabilities. And in the US we’ve had the shocking spectacle of Donald Trump’s election campaign, which found an unending list of people to blame: women, black people,
Mexicans, Muslims, military veterans. Everyone except the billionaire class of tax dodgers to which he himself belongs.
However, we should remember that Donald Trump tapped into real problems: stagnating or falling wages, underfunded public services, insecure work and housing, years of being left behind and neglected, frustration that your children’s prospects look bleaker and anger at a political elite that doesn’t listen. But instead of offering real solutions, or the resources to make them work, he offered only someone to blame. Everyone, that is, apart from those actually responsible for a broken economy and a failed political system.
The Tories do the same. They have opened the door to UKIP and fanned the flames of fear.
Theresa May, as Home Secretary, fed the idea that immigration was the real problem; made promises she knew they couldn’t deliver about slashing numbers and whipped up hate with ‘Go Home’ vans. No wonder she didn’t even temper her welcome to Donald Trump. She has used the same strategy herself; if delivered with more refinement.
We have no idea how Donald Trump proposes, as he has said, to “make America great again”, and Theresa May’s Tories offer slogans, but not solutions, for most people in Britain. We won’t tackle the damage done by elite globalisation just by leaving the EU. We won’t ‘take back control’ unless we take on the corporate vested interests that control our energy, our transport and have infiltrated our public services.
One thing is for sure, neither billionaire Donald Trump nor the billionaire-backed Tories have any interest in giving people back control or reining in the predatory excess of a globalized free-for-all.
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