The Roast Beef of Old England: The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Should Go and Hide Themselves

The English ’Sunday Times’ has deigned to reveal to us in ’the most authoritative guide to wealth ever published,’ the financial high jinks that our ’top’ people are up to, by listing the 200 richest people in England and showing what clever things they did to earn their money and how hard they worked. After all, they imply, if you proletarians could only pull your fingers out, you could all be billionaires as well.

But providing any information about the rich is a double edged sword, so what morsels are there for us jealous, ungrateful proletarians in this bulky treatise on wealth? For a start off, the wealth of the 200 wealthiest thieves in Great Britain totals £38 Billion pounds – equivalent to 8% of ’Britain’s’ Gross National Product.’ Who isn’t reminded of the similar figures that helped many of us choose the revolutionary road of Marxism? We should recall that the fundamental texts of Marxism teach us that these figures are representative of all the most industrialised and capitalized countries in the world and don’t merely Indicate a backwaters sultanate.

What else do we find out? Well, the richest person in the country is that dear old lady who shakes hands such a lot i.e. the queen; who, nice as she may seem, has signed death warrants in liberal quantities for opponents of ’British’ interests in the colonies.

The overall impression is that the cosy relationship that the landowning classes established with the bourgeoisie is alive and well today. More than 50 of the ’top’ 200 are landowners. In fact, outside London alone, this ’select’ bunch owns 7% of the entire United Kingdom. But a few, not many, are not ’old money’. So there is a sprinkling of the celebrated ’self-made men’ (and women) of the American myth, recast into the ’frightfully British’ mold of, ’VIRGIN’, and ’THE BODY-SHOP’. The myth of the genius, the fortunate, the clever, and the swashbuckling buccaneer is obviously alive and well.

The other side to the coin of this wealth is poverty, which all the government ’budgeting’ to ’put the countries accounts in order’ and ’balance the books’ does precious little to disguise. Depicted broadly, we can say that this ’boom’ has been produced at vast expense to the working class brought about mainly through three measures. 1) privatisation 2) attacking the social wage, and 3) direct attacks on wages.

As far as privatisation goes, the government is well on its way to privatising everything. Gas, British Airways, council houses, shipping, dockyards and communications have all gone under the hammer, and it comes as no surprise to find that fingers have been in the till – legally of course by the system of patronage – thus we find as director of British Telecom – the recently privatised telecommunications network – none other than Mr. Norman Tebbit, a former cabinet minister. Mind you, when ideas were being put around about the possibility of privatising the sanitary services, a name slightly closer to the seat of power was mentioned in the paper of NUPE in fact, the managing director of one of the firms that put up a tender was none other than – yes, you’ve guessed – Dennis Thatcher. In fact, doesn’t this amiable drunk, who’s been taken under the wing of the satirists, have business interests in the Falkland Islands? Of course not, it must be a vicious rumour.

Next the government intends to privatise electricity, prisons, and the security services! One of the security firms proposed for the latter auspicious role has already had a shadow of suspicion cast over it by the mysterious death of a nuclear disarmament activist. After all, the government doesn’t want to be tainted by burglaries and murders does it?

Most controversial at present though is probably the bungling attempts to privatise water (accompanied by flashy advertising campaigns,) universities, schools, and hospitals. The government needs a softly, softly approach here, so they are commencing the attack on these services by allowing schools and hospitals to ’opt out’ of local government control, the word ’freedom’ is being bandied about like nobody’s business. Apparently, these services must be privatised so the patient and the parent has the ’freedom’ to shop around for a better service. Meanwhile private medicine is being advertised. The big firm in the private health field is BUPA, who astonishingly claim on their T.V. adverts that all the profits are ’ploughed back in for a better service’. Who do they think they are kidding! People are supposed to think that one social service is exchanged for another we suppose.

These last mentioned privatisations of course constitute a goodly portion of the social wage, but a huge scandal in England at the moment is the attack on young people. Unemployment benefit has been axed for those of them who don’t take up a place on a government training scheme, and thousands of them are without any home or money, literally starving on the streets, becoming drug addicts and having to sell their bodies to the loathsome pimps that hover around the stations and doss houses. The aim is to make parents support their unemployed children, despite the fact that most proletarian families only live just within the margin of poverty at the best of times. Such is the brutalisation within which live working class families in one of the richest countries in the entire world representing the future for those not already reduced to this level. In response to all this the government has had to step down a tiny bit, admitting that there may be very real reasons for leaving home. In recognition of this fact, some teenagers are now awarded a pittance if they can producing damaging information about their home life to the ’soft cops’ of the social services, by producing details of a frustrated father showing sexual attention or beating them up with all the attendant humiliations.

As far as hospitals go, what a miserable picture London presents today. Exactly as in Italy, thousands of mental patients have been kicked out onto the streets after a long winded debate in the media about the advantages of ’care in the community’. Some care! Some community!

As to wage cuts, the working classes hardly needs more facts and statistics to prove the truth of this miserable reality. Suffice to say that every day new factories are closed down accompanied by new-fangled ways of drawing up the unemployment statistics that clumsily disguise the obvious ’figure fiddling’ that everyone knows is going on.

So to many the boom doesn’t appear much of a reality, is it to anyone? Yes for some the boom is undoubtedly a reality, in fact, in the last five years the number of millionaires in England has risen from 5,000 to 20,000. Perhaps the world economy will one day be dominated by building magnates specialising in heated swimming pools!

And another thing: we all know that these rich people live in big houses. How do they pay those bills? Well, that won’t be a problem, the poor old rich don’t have to worry about that because the bourgeois government, which always holds their interests dear, has stepped into the breach with a brand new scheme. This is the new Poll tax which has already been ’introduced’ into Scotland – where the government likes to try out its new schemes – and will come into effect in England and Wales in April. This new ’peach’ of bourgeois thinking will mean that people pay rates on the number of people living in a property instead of it being related to size etc.. This neatly sidesteps the thorny question of whether the working classes has ever had ’equal’ service from the social services anyway. For instance, word has It that the police don’t even bother to investigate a burglary unless ten thousand pounds worth is stolen. No prizes then for guessing who gets hit most by burglaries. Most people just get given a form and that’s it!

But how did this new item of right wing ’thinking’ regarding the new poll-tax arise? Mr. Douglas Masson of the right-wing Adam Smith Institute explains in ’the Guardian’ of March 31,1989. ’A few of us were discussing alternatives to the rates and we realised that everything else in local government was based on a flat-rate charge; swimming baths, housing rents, for instance, so why not a flat-rate poll-tax as well? It seemed so logical we were surprised no one had thought of it before’.

Pregnant now with the inspiration, which had so thoughtfully tiptoed into the inner sanctum of the Rufflets Hotel, Mr. Masson gave birth some weeks later to a 47 page report which was hastily put up for adoption and welcomed with open arms by the government. Having mulled over the implications of his startling offspring, it remained only for Mr. Masson to finally condense his wisdom into the following pithy statement ’the rich and the poor pay the same to tax for their cars, or for a TV license, there seems no reason why they should not pay the same for other council services such as refuse collection, police, fire or the provision and maintenance of roads’.

Certainly the English bourgeoisie doesn’t need such penetrating minds to affirm the right that gives it the force to crush the proletariat. Its behaviour is so brutal as to have one believe that a real working class doesn’t exist anymore on these sceptred isles. But workers there are, and they are making their presence felt. It is crucial however that they free themselves from that band of social traitors called the Labour Party, and the official unions which handed them over, bound hand and foot, to the class enemy at the time of the miners’ strike.

The governmental methods have been, and are still are, an example for the bosses and bourgeoisie of the entire world on how to put the brakes on the working class; but they are also a lesson, maybe clearer today than in other western countries, for the proletariat not to trust those who are flag-wavers of the national economy – nothing than the economy of the rich and of the exploited.