guardian | Most of the world's people are decent, honest and kind. Most of those
who dominate us are inveterate bastards. This is the conclusion I've
reached after many years of journalism. Writing on Black Monday, as the British government's full-spectrum attack on the lives of the poor commences, the thought keeps returning to me.
"With
a most inhuman cruelty, they who have put out the people's eyes
reproach them of their blindness." This government, whose mismanagement
of the economy has forced so many into the arms of the state, blames the
sick, the unemployed, the underpaid for a crisis caused by the feral
elite – and punishes them accordingly. Most of those affected by the bedroom tax, introduced today, are disabled. Thousands will be driven from their homes, and many more pushed towards destitution. Relief for the poor from council tax will be clipped;
legal aid for civil cases cut off. Yet at the end of this week those
making more than £150,000 a year will have their income tax cut.
Two
days later, benefit payments for the poorest will be cut in real
terms. A week after that, thousands of families who live in towns and
boroughs where property prices are high will be forced out of their
homes by the total benefits cap. What we are witnessing is raw economic
warfare by the rich against the poor.
So the age-old question
comes knocking: why does the decent majority allow itself to be governed
by a brutal, antisocial minority? Part of the reason is that the
minority controls the story. As John Harris explained in the Guardian,
large numbers (including many who depend on it) have been persuaded
that most recipients of social security are feckless, profligate
fraudsters. Despite everything that has happened over the last two
years, Rupert Murdoch, Lord Rothermere and the other media barons still
seem to be running the country. Their relentless propaganda, using
exceptional and shocking cases to characterise an entire social class,
remains highly effective. Divide and rule is as potent as it has ever
been.
But I've come to believe that there's also something deeper
at work: that most of the world's people live with the legacy of
slavery. Even in a nominal democracy like the United Kingdom, most
people were more or less in bondage until little more than a century
ago: on near-starvation wages, fired at will, threatened with extreme
punishment if they dissented, forbidden to vote. They lived in great and
justified fear of authority, and the fear has persisted, passed down
across the five or six generations that separate us and reinforced now
by renewed insecurity, snowballing inequality, partisan policing.
Any
movement that seeks to challenge the power of the elite needs to ask
itself what it takes to shake people out of this state. And the answer
seems inescapable – hope. Those who govern on behalf of billionaires are
threatened only when confronted by the power of a transformative idea.
