Carrion Feeders

Image - ©Reuters

 

 

I promise this will be the last post on this theme for a little while; but honestly, we do live in peculiar and none-too-pleasant times. However, our current circumstances are at least serving to emphasise pre-existing inequalities and to highlight what is fundamentally amiss with politics, governments and economies. The two key things facing us, Covid and Brexit, have thrown a bloody great spotlight on the divisions between the haves and the have-nots.

Those at the bottom of the heap financially are being disproportionately affected by further lockdowns, employees by redundancy and small businesses by loss of trade and much reduced business support packages. The inequalities are further being exacerbated by the bizarrely partisan interpretation and enforcement of the lockdown policy, hitting northern cities the hardest. To add insult to injury there have been different levels  of imposition of the rules between one city and the next despite both being on the same level of alert. The one thing that is absolutely certain is that those in the orbit of the establishment will not suffer one jot through all of this, already having hedged their bets and made their money safe for the duration of the crisis.

Many will also be seeking to profit from it all. With a no-deal Brexit being quietly expedited at breakneck speed under cover of Covid fatigue, half of the country is with good reason fretting about how the hell they're going to get through the pandemic with any kind of life or income intact. But just as carrion crows feed on road-kill and seeing a huge free lunch in the offing, '...the [hedge-funds and currency traders] will be trading off the collapse of the pound, says the former chairman of Goldman Sachs' Asset Management Sir Jim O'Neill.'(source: Business Insider, online). In an op-ed in the Guardian yesterday: 'Johnson is trying to gaslight communities into accepting that mass unemployment, rising under-employment and poverty alleviation is not the responsibility of the state.' In other words, 'nothing to do with me, guv.'

Small businesses going under are loss-making, whether by their own mismanagement, or as it is largely at present, by government decree due to pandemic restrictions; thus are not deserving of government assistance. Whereas big businesses making paper losses are seen as fiscally prudent in minimising their tax liabilities and get handed uncontested government contracts on a silver plate. In this twisted world, the phrase 'economies of scale' seems also to apply to morality and probity. Being economical with the truth and diminishing personal responsibility are it seems on a sliding scale, depending on your position within society.

If all this sounds like sour grapes on my part, it is; at least if you're one of those people who believe that this level of inward looking self-interest and downright chicanery has any place in governing a first world country in the twenty-first century. One would think by now some lessons might have been learnt from history. Unfortunately not, it would seem. We are still on track for the worst depression for a hundred years and the rats at the top will have long deserted this benighted vessel. Albatross, anyone?