Bernadette McAliskey: Workers not served by Orwellian Budget language

Am I the only person who hears Maggie Thatcher’s voice every time Rachel Reeves speaks? Do they come from the same street?

Ms. Reeves also dresses in the modern equivalent of the style of Mrs. Thatcher – a deliberately understated powerdressing approach much loved by those higher-earning people who also derive significant profit from investing their money in the labour of Working Class people, and who predominated in the 1970s resurgence of Feminism among white women in Europe and the USA.

These observations could be no more than a flashback to the trauma of the real Maggie Thatcher’s reign as Prime Minister, but Ms. Reeves has all the bearing of a woman whose priority is being the first woman to be Prime Minister of a Labour government in the not-too-distant future.

Nothing other than the two-dimensional persona of Kier Starmer allows the stiff-backed woodenness of her Budget performance to appear as relative enthusiasm for her job, as she delivered a Budget that most economists agree will make little contribution to the elusive growth of the British economy on which salvation seems to depend.

Despite the hype, this budget is all smoke, mirrors and full of hot air.

The contribution to the NIO purse is neither transformative nor sufficient.

There cannot be much comfort for people here in the realisation that the public purse in the United Kingdom is worse than empty.

It seems there was also a big black hole in the purse, through which – if we believe the Labour Party – nearly £23billion more than anybody knew just disappeared without those in charge noticing or owning up to, until Ms. Reeves inspected the books.

Did nobody think to utter the much loved cry of gangster movies: “Cawda Powice”?

The truth of the matter might be that the Chancellor exaggerated the position more than a little, but the Tories are well able to defend themselves if that is the case.

The havoc they did cause was bad enough before Keir Starmer and his colleagues deliberately chose to destroy their own party’s chances of defeating them in 2019, rather than see Jeremy Corbyn lead the party to the government benches.

Ms Reeves and co. share responsibility for the consequences of preferring Boris The Terrible at any cost to ordinary people – the Working Class.

It would appear that the United Kingdom Labour Party defines the Working Class in much the same way as Fine Gael does in the Republic – those whose income is derived exclusively or primarily through waged labour, or as the former FG Taoiseach put it, “Those who get up in the morning and go to work”.

It says a multitude. The consequence of reducing workers to an economic commodity, nothing more than a means of the production of gross domestic product, is to reduce ordinary people to the status of workhorses from a bygone era, when the mantra was “A horse that don’t work, don’t eat!”

Readers familiar with George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ will recall the fate of loyal old Boxer.

When he could work no more, he was repaid by the equivalent of Starmer’s Labour Government with a trip to the glue factory.

If you haven’t read this short novel about a farm, pick it up in your local library.

You will enjoy it and realise how much you already know about how society works.

It is frightening to discover that when it boils down to the bare bones of the thing – to continue for a moment with an Orwellian outlook – Squealer and Napoleon are now running the farm, and the dogs cannot be far behind.

Among those who do not currently earn their income by working for someone who pays them to do so, well, among these are tradesmen and women who are self-employed.

Many of these men and women work alone or, at best, will take on an apprentice on minimum wage who will also probably be attending the local tech/further education college one day a week.

Think now of the local plumber, electrician, painter, dressmaker, washing-machine mender, computer fixer, child-minder, hairdresser, home baker, community class tutor, the language interpreter, researcher, the counsellor supporting the bereaved, and those with mental health issues.

Think also of the victims of individual, organisational and systemic abuse, and violence.

Are these individual ‘sole traders’ who trade their skills in the market on their own terms not working people and Working Class?

Are farm families on approximately 200,000 small and smaller farms across the United Kingdom not working people, and Working Class?

Is the Chancellor proposing to steal from the petit bourgeoisie and the peasantry to appease the obscenely rich and powerful property- and land-owning minority?

Scarier still are the consequences of the commodification of the class for those unable to ‘earn’ their income, temporarily or permanently.

The absence of anything in the Budget to address the ‘black hole’ in the finances for Social Care, or addressing poverty, testifies to the class and societal bankruptcy of the budget and those who devised it.

Are full-time parents; people with living with physical, neurological, and emotional conditions that prevent them from ‘earning’ and who are not independently wealthy, not Working Class people?

Do we stop being Working Class people because we are ill or retired? Does this Labour government think of people living with disability as lesser citizens – the modern equivalent of the White Man’s Colonial burden?

Are people primarily dependent on their entitlement to State support to be policed on the basis they are likely to be conning the State that there is not a day’s work, maybe two, in them that would justify their right to exist?

My mother often used a phrase to describe the state of affairs that expected someone to survive without the support they needed because it was going to take quite some time to put the planned support in place: “Live, horse, and you’ll get grass.”

Ms. Reeves clearly expects the Working Class to live without grass for another five years in return for what, exactly

Expect a winter or two of discontent.