Universal Credit is a crime against the British people – and is there a Brexit connection?

by **Admin** Mon Aug 13, 2018 10:28 am

Universal Credit is a huge waste of money that victimises the poor for absolutely no reason at all… or does it?

The fact that areas where austerity measures like UC have been introduced correspond with those that back Brexit is highly disturbing.

https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2018/08/13/universal-credit-is-a-crime-against-the-british-people-and-is-there-a-brexit-connection/

by Brutus Wed Aug 15, 2018 4:03 am

In my opinion there is a much larger social trend that need to be considered to try and understand the connections between the backward conservatism of the brexiteers and the impoverishment of the precariat.

Fundamentally one should remember that power in any society is not a stable or monolithic structure.
Autocracies come and go and democracies are subject to more peaceful but not less radical changes due to the change in whom can provide coercive power.

It is often a messy and confuse affair but it does happen.

In our first industrial revolution, for instance, the ruling class did change from land owners (and mostly aristocrats of sort) to industrialists, sometimes with continuity sometimes with disruptions but it did.

In recent decades, technology has made the world more integrated and has produced a new wealth, one not based in any particular nation, that slowly but surely is replacing, or perhaps expressing it better, that is taking away the ability to exert power from established national elites.

Brexit is just an expression of this general "reactionary" trend that we see all around the world.

The faction of each national elites that identify most intimately with local state structures are simply becoming poorer.
It is not just a question of money but rather that money itself, in the global scheme of things, is becoming less valuable.
The real wealth is residing in the ability to make technology work.
So for example money can buy technicians that will keep the electrical grid working and the specialised contractors with the material needed to maintain and repair it, however it is the knowledge kept in their heads and tools that helps keep the value of money of the societies that consume the electrical power more than the other way around.
Just imagine what would do to the currency value in any nation state if for some reason, electricity could not be had.

Now power is usually lost because the people that exercise it cannot adapt to change. If one's wealth has been accumulated in generations by working the land, say, one is less proclive to abandon a comfortably sure way of life for a risky enterprise in a field of activity, let's imagine building an industrial plant or start large scale commerce, that is largely unknown.
A much normal reaction would be to try and stop those damaging changes.
So, continuing with the above abstract example, if one's land-produce is undercut by cheaper imports the normal reaction is one of using the available powers, in all the senses of the word, to stop the imports from reaching one's market, and so on.

Now there is a general rule of thumb in human civilisation, and as far as I know no one is actually sure why this happens, but people that trade and exchange is more successful in the long run than people that doesn't.
Societies that try to be self-sufficient are poorer and much more unhappy or creative than societies that try and involve as many of their neighbours as they can.
Counter-intuitive but true.

This is what I see in world today.
Powerful technologies and international conglomerates creating immense wealth and resources that erode the power and wealth creation of existing nation-based elites.

In this Country much of the industry is gone an our ruling classes are mostly "rentier classes" they derive their wealth from accumulation of inherited fortunes and their investments in other people wealth creation, for example shareholding or land property lease, they are in this respect saprophytic classes that take a bite from other people wealth creation.

This make them utterly dependent on the ability to force their property rights, hence the general trend in all post industrial countries, toward more restrictive legislation and the exaltation of social values that belittle individual rights when they oppose the stability of unchanging state structures.
This can clearly be seen, again as an example, in the "war on terror" which has not a rational justification.
Because this Country has a long conservative tradition and roughly one third of its population is convinced, mostly through owning properties, that they are part of the establishment, we have a particular pernicious spiral of proto-fascistic trends toward an autocratic model, one where everybody has its fixed place and where questioning the status quo becomes a crime, and were diminishing resources are more unequally distributed .

The unemployed or using the better definition of “the precariat”, which is in itself the product of the impoverishment and increased social inequality of the nation, is portrait as both an imaginary danger to those that own a piece of the land and a rabble to be manipulated.
Therefore the more and more derogative propaganda describing the society "loosers" as self-destructive and at the same time as the result of result of un-Britishness, of external demoralising influences.

Nothing new here, this process has been used over and over again and it is a tested way for a weakening elite to maintain itself in power for longer and it is also a sure recipe to lower the level of civilisation in any society.

I do not expect this decline in civilising values to stop any time soon, it will however be overcome by the emergence of new technologies that will, in the next decades, bring the world together.
But in the process extremes will be touched before a more balanced and humane world will emerge.

Universal Credit is a crime against the British people – and is there a Brexit connection?

Universal Credit is a crime against the British people – and is there a Brexit connection?

Re: Universal Credit is a crime against the British people – and is there a Brexit connection?