General Federation of Trade Unions
News Xtra
Is The Government Really Standing Up For Britain? BFAWU View
Posted on Friday, December 16, 2011
The UK’s jobless total reached a 17 year high in the three months leading up to October, hitting 2.64 million. It’s a national scandal and disgrace that a government claiming to be standing up for Britiain is treating it’s people with complete disregard. With the figures suggesting there are more than a million women and young people making up those figures, it only serves to demonstrate and highlight typical Tory values and their scant regard for families. Is it any wonder then, that a large number of women are deserting the Conservative Party as their demographic is simply unrepresented? Rather than address this, the Tories continue to push through policies that target women and young people unfairly.
In just 18 months, the Tories have managed to return UK unemployment levels to those not seen since the last Tory government. The cowardly Liberal Democrats and their doormat Pinickio Clegg, who helped facilitate the return of the ’nasty party’, promised that they would keep Cameron and co in check; but just like their commitment to students and ’guaranteed’ opposition to the cuts, the lure of highly paid officialdom has proved too powerful for them to keep to their fundamental values.
The Tories are now in full flow, wreaking havoc on working people and cutting health and safety, despite the highly paid professor asked to review this saying that workplace health and safety was balanced and that cuts were unnecessary. In addition to this, employees must now wait for two years before they have any job security rights, thus increasing their vulnerability and forcing them to accept everything the employer tells them to do with no comeback.
The undermining of the Agency Workers Directive has been driven by Tory HQ, as has the back door privatisation of the NHS. Look how minister Eric Pickles enjoyed himself, rubbing shoulders with other NHS privateer lobby groups at a recently held cocktail party. He proclaimed that he was so glad to be there, knowing that it signalled the true Tory intent to privatise our NHS without any mandate whatsoever from the electorate.
Working people now face a pensionless future, working to pay for a banking crisis of capitalism not of their making. They’ll have to work until they’re 67, yet the bankers continue to prosper, enjoying huge pensions and golden handshakes. The business leaders enjoy massive pay increases and bigger pension pots whilst telling us to castigate Public Sector workers for having a pension entitlement that is far from ’gold plated’.
The politicians and their supporters in the media spin lies, seeking to deliberately mislead and misinform the gullible on anything remotely looking like a workers benefit. They try to portray all workers as greedy whilst heralding bosses as saviours of the economy and heroes to the country. Despite out of control unemployment, economic gloom and the continued reluctance and failure to tackle the bankers, we are asked to delve deeper, pay more and get less. They want to force us to pay with our jobs and our cash and in return, we will have even more taken from us with the repatriation of certain ’powers’ from the EU. They then want to continue this relentless assault by removing holiday rights, making changes to your working week, removing tea breaks and of course the entitlement to both maternity and paternity leave. This is before they remove your rights to redundancy consultation and payments.
In conclusion, if you think what a good job Cameron did standing up for the UK, just remember that he did it to protect his own job and his chums in the city, whilst rallying his party and tightening his unsympathetic and vindictive grip on both working people and the most vulnerable in our society.
from www.bfawu.org.uk
« Back