I get annoyed when politicians and their sycophants in the media speak to me as if I have the intelligence of an eight year old child. And that is exactly what they are doing when they refer to the economic policies adopted by the Tories and their Lib Dem supporters as “austerity”.
In fact even an eight year old child can see through the efforts of their parents to make cauliflower more appealing by describing it as an aeroplane and ‘flying’ it towards their closed mouth with accompanying vroom vroom noises. The eight year old and I can both see it is not an aeroplane. It is a vegetable!
Calling it an aeroplane does not make it an aeroplane. It just makes you a patronising idiot who underestimates the intelligence of your audience.
Now, back to those other patronising idiots in the field of politics and the media.
When they talk to me about austerity I know exactly what they mean. They mean cuts in the living standards, working conditions and social care for working class people. Austerity means trying to push back the advances made over many years by the working class. Austerity does not mean we are all in this together and everybody is making sacrifices to get the country ‘back on its feet’. Getting the country ‘back on its feet’ is just a euphemism for restoring the profitability of major national and international corporations.
Hardly a week goes by without a further insight into the so-called austerity the top echelons of society are not experiencing. Only this week it was reported that the average remuneration of the executives of the 100 FTSE quoted companies had risen by 11% in the last year. 11%! Did Cameron rush to the Newsnight studios to declare his outrage at this selfish, self-serving elite who are charged with imposing ‘austerity’ on their workforces. Did he heck! While their employees get less than 1% on average last year, they line their own pockets (and the coffers of the Conservative party) and bemoan the selfishness of any group of ordinary working people who dare to question the austerity myth.
While Cameron keeps his mouth shut about the greedy executives, there is no shortage of government ministers willing to speak out against hundreds of thousands of working people prepared to sacrifice a day’s wages in these hard times to defend their pension schemes from George Osborne’s raid to fund his austerity programme.
So let’s lose the ‘austerity’ label. Whenever they say austerity they mean attacking the working class. It isn’t complicated, and most people understand what is going on. But the whole media world promulgates the ruling class’s terminology.
Why? Lazy journalism? Sycophantic cosying-up to the big knobs? Or the subtle corruption of independence and principled reporting that the Leveson enquiry is bringing to light?
I get annoyed when politicians and their sycophants in the media speak to me as if I have the intelligence of an eight year old child. And that is exactly what they are doing when they refer to the economic policies adopted by the Tories and their Lib Dem supporters as “austerity”.