On your first point I don’t feel there is any help that I need, what I was talking about was the way the constant rhetoric about hard working families makes me feel excluded. My personal situation (and I’m sure millions of other peoples to) is not one that is ever described as a family yet you never hear politicians making big commitments to support co-habbiting young couples. despite the fact myself and my partner are both hard working we are always excluded simply because we have no children. But it’s not just my personal situation that this rhetoric excludes either, what about young people in general single or otherwise, or elderly people whose children have left are they to be excluded as well? This point was not about specific measures but about the exclusionary nature of this facile rhetoric.

On the other point I’ll start with a prediction by Keynes that by now people would work at maximum a 16 hour week and the additional free time could be spent doing charity, learning new skills, taking part in sport or cultural activities. He made this prediction because of the benefits of automation. If as a society we look at the work that is currently done that is genuinely essential for our society to carry on (ie. utilities, food production, manufacturing of useful goods, transportation) you will find that if we divided up that work amongst the population we would indeed (particularly if proper investment in automation is factored in) find that we would only need to work very short hours in comparison to now and would be more handsomely rewarded for our time as labour would have strong bargaining rights as the amount of labour to work would be high.

Instead what happened was the capitalists captured all the benefits of automation increasing profit margins but not labours share of the income. In order to maintain the status quo in such a situation where many people were losing their jobs but instead of sharing the work more equally with better compensation we simply developed a consumerist culture whereby people would be encouraged to value their worth by the things they own and huge industries which effectively are not essential came into being which employed people on low wages so they could keep earning enough for all the useless shit. Effectively it was decided that new jobs needed to be found rather than effectively share the work that remained more equally. This spawned many non-jobs (I’m sure you can think of plenty) that kept people employed on low wages so they could keep consuming but consumed more and more of the populations time.

Whether this happened by accident or on purpose I don’t know but the effect is the same. Hard work is only touted as a virtue because it keeps you consuming and quiet which is precisely what the establishment wants because it makes you easier to govern and manage and helps boost the all important GDP figures which ridiculously have become almost the sole factor by which our governments seem to measure their achievements regardless of whether this increasing statistic has any positive effect on society as a whole.

How we get out of this situation short of a complete collapse of capitalism (which I don’t advocate, imagine the human cost!) I don’t know. Perhaps a steady and managed move towards such a more equal society. Measures such as increasing the minimum wage above inflation every year would certainly make the move towards a high labour cost society in which people have more free time to actually live rather than be wage slaves.

What like fiddling Libor rates for instance or asking questions for big companies or how about getting it on expenses

absolutely……

Lords turning up to the House of Lords, signing in and then not attending debate but claiming their expenses. That doesn’t seem fair to me. People receiving more money than I would know what to do with because of the family that they were born into. None of them are rushing out to get their hands dirty cleaning toilets to make up for it. Are they deserving rich because they have families or something?

The other thing is that the deserving rich have multiple choices in what they do. Do nothing for months at a stretch then do a couple of high profile duties and be lauded for their work ethic and the boon that they are to the country.

This is the sixth or seventh largest economy in the world, the top 1% of families have doubled their wealth during this period of austerity but what have they done for this increase in wealth? Have they worked harder or were they just in a position to take advantage. Yet there are many reliant on foodbanks and, in turn, many of these are in work yet not paid enough to sustain themselves.

Many of these things do not seem fair to me. Letting people become destitute because they do not work (for whatever reason) or that work is not considered important enough to draw a living wage is not the mark of a civilised society.

Didn’t Brown start it with his ‘Hard-working British families’v

Dave, I do want to understand your position better; can you explain what help you need that you are not getting?
Nodbod, work is a transaction… one works, the other party pays. Is there a better way…otherwise some people are having to work for money whereas others get money without working and that doesn’t seem fair to me.

The left didn’t fail completely, Labour failed by trying to be Tory and our first past the post system gave the Tories power as a result, despite the fact they only got 24% of the electorate to vote for them! And that’s despite throwing so much money at the system it was painfully corrupt to watch for anyone who can see through the Torygraph/Sun/DailyMail bullshit lies. You quite clearly like swallowing that bs hook line and sinker though.

Cod he doesn’t give a shit.