A New Dawn

 

I sense a turned tide toward re-empowerment, reclamation and re-formation. Re-formation. Society seems slowly to be re-forming despite the weight and decay of the last four and-a-bit decades of oppression by the Masters of the Universe™: the suits, bean-counters and the false prophets of neoliberal macroeconomics, that pseudoscientific snake oil and its odious salesmen.  This, for the first time since Thatcher commenced dismantling pretty much all the social and moral achievements of the post-war era, by blindly following a rule-book cobbled together by the nascent MOTU™ [apologies to the electronic musical instrument manufacturer that shares the same acronym] in the mid-seventies.

From 1979 onwards, there has been a concerted, cynical and venal dismantling of the civil, political and social rights of the working classes, underpinned by revisionist and increasingly Draconian anti-union laws which have attempted to drive us back into the nineteenth century. To be honest, this has actually been pretty successful to date; but the collective worm, at last, seems to be turning. Collective being the operative word.

People are waking up to the fact that our current Winter of Discontent™is more likely not to be made glorious summer by any particular son of York, but by the collective actions of a newly revivified and uncowed workforce who are once again reclaiming their history to themselves and deciding, en masse, to exhibit that history and their entitlement to action. Action to pursue life, liberty and happiness itself, in the face of the unearned privilege, wealth and power that currently disbars them from those common rights. Any less affirmative action would simply be capitulation to the tacit lie under whose shadow we have lived for far, far too long.

We are the wealth creators. We are society. We are the people. The government needs to face that reality, square on, and start governing for and on behalf of the people who pay their salaries at their collective behest.