How will history look back on 2013? I think it might well be regarded as a turning point – “the year the British people said ‘no more’”.
Up and down the country, as I’ve travelled around as Green Party leader, I’ve founds groups and individuals saying “no more”.
They are saying “no more” to poverty wages – people working fulltime, yet unable to meet the cost of even the basic necessities.
They are saying “no more” to workfare – the unemployed being forced into such alleged “educational” roles as stacking for Poundland for not just low wages, but no wages at all.
They are saying “no more” to the 1 per cent collecting more and more of the wealth of our society, while the share for the rest, particularly the poorest, is squeezed more and more..
People are increasingly saying “no more” too to the demonisation of benefit recipients. They recognise that nearly all of us are only one medical incident, one traffic crash, away from disability, from depending on the support of the state. None of us can be sure that employment is certain, that we won’t find ourselves applying increasingly desperately for jobs where employers, faced with hundreds or thousands of applications, don’t even reply to all applicants.
As I spoke to open Green Party conference in Nottingham on Friday, and as I attended its sessions yesterday, I’m was wearing on my jacket a small yellow rectangle of ribbon – a symbol of support for the Occupation of the University of Sussex, which I visited this week.
We’ve seen the comprehensive failure of the outsourcing model – the dreadful litany of A4E, G4S, and the awful Atos – yet somehow the university administration thought they could sneak through a privatisation of services on campus.
But the students have said “no more”. And looking around the university, at the rectangle of yellow in windows in offices and accommodation, it was great to see the resistance spreading.
Another group saying “no more” to great effect is UK Uncut. Like lots of Green Party members, I really enjoyed its action last year against Starbucks, the fast growing but mysteriously totally unprofitable coffee chain that infests our high streets like a particularly pernicious weed.
But sadly, mysteriously, one group that isn’t saying “no more” is the Labour Party.
Well, maybe it isn’t so mysterious… They’re only offering more of the same that we had for 13 years under Blair and Brown.
We know that it was Labour who championed the “light touch” regulation of the financial industries that the Tories have only continued, which abandoned all interest in supporting manufacturing and farming and was content to allow the jobs, the cash, the people of Britain to concentrate more and more in the south east corner of the country.
We know that it was Labour that started the privatisation of the NHS, it was Labour that championed the undemocratic academy schools that have morphed into Michael Gove’s free schools, it was Labour that dotted the country with immensely expensive, but immensely profitable, PFI schemes that today’s babies will still be paying for when they are parents.
And we know that Labour is failing to challenge the government’s deeply divisive, deeply corrosive, deeply dishonest “strivers versus skivers” rhetoric.
We are living too in a Britain in which the mistakes, the great errors, of the past, have not been properly acknowledged, let alone dealt with, even though they are glaringly obvious.
We know the neoliberal model of a globalised economy in which we specialise in casino banking, arms sales to human-rights-abusing regimes and pharmaceuticals, while leaving it to the rest of the world to make our goods and grow our food, has hit the buffers: hit the buffers economically, and hit the buffers environmentally.
We know that we can’t keep living as though we’ve got three Planet Earths to exploit.
Yet the Labour Party is content to mutter empty platitudes about being “one nation”, keep its head down, not apologise for the mistakes of the past (including the Iraq War), and not offer any change in direction, just hope that the incompetence and economic failings of George Osborne’s clearly failing Plan A of austerity will deliver government back to them in 2015.
That’s not good enough, and it’s increasingly clear that the British people are saying “no more” to the shallow, sterile politics that sees Labour almost indistinguishable from Tory, each chasing a few tens of thousands of voters in a small percentage of marginal seats.
This article is adapted from the speech given by Natalie Bennett at the Green Party spring conference in Nottingham. The conference continues until Monday.
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