People liberate themselves

Ernesto Che Guevara
"I am not a liberator.  Liberators do
not exist.  The people liberate
themselves."

The sell-off to Serco, Virgin and other corporate vultures of the NHS in England has taken us back to a time when capitalism was only too ready and willing to make money out of the pain and misery of those people who thought twice, three and more times before calling on the services of a GP.  History will recall the coalition government's wrecking of the NHS as a shameful footnote to the time when bankers, instead of jumping out of tall buildings as they did in the Wall Street Crash, begged government for a hand-out.

The more recent slaughtering of the Equality & Human Rights Commission [EHRC] in terms of budget, staff and functions, has left people who encounter discrimination feeling as if the only option left for them will be to jump out of tall buildings.

Alongside this, George Ian Duncan Smith, Secretary of State for Work & Pensions, who shows his contempt for disabled people by taking a shit in a toilet designated for disabled people and leaving it floating there, unflushed, presides over such a dismemberment of the state support 'benefits' system that Sweeney Todd himself would have been embarrassed at the gratuitous scale of Duncan-Smith's cutting and slicing.

Emiliano Zapata
'it is better to die upon
your feet than to live
on your knees' 

There are people and organisations who continue still to petition and lobby government to change this or that of the worst excesses they are imposing on the non-Eton educated people in the name of an economic recovery that stubbornly refuses to arrive.  Perhaps they do so as they cannot bear to contemplate the awful alternative reality - that just like George Ian Duncan Smith, the rest of the Cabinet does not give a shit, and certainly won't flush.  Even the most recent reversal of government policy - reducing the tax take on hot sausage rolls - is a risible concession which history will conjure up as the government's 'let them eat sausage rolls' defining moment.

Our choices are stark.  We can endure another 3 years of the coalition's voodoo economics which is deepening the recession, or we can, collectively, decide that the government really does have to start flushing its own shit, and the first turd to be flushed has to be the coalition deal itself. We need to accept that no political leader can do this for us.  It needs to be an expression of our collective will which makes it happen.  As Ernesto Che Guevara rightly said, 'the people liberate themselves'.  

Dolores Ibarruri

Just as relevant now to the fearsome challenges and choices we face are other echoes from our history.    In the early part of the 20th century, a popular revolution against the Diaz dictatorship in Mexico was led by Emiliano Zapata.  He is credited with the inspirational phrase 'it is better to die upon your feet than to live on your knees'.  La Pasionaria, Dolores Ibarruri, used it in her remarkable personal contribution to the republican side in the Spanish Civil War.  The words spoke to many people then.  They took action, got off their knees, and took control of their destiny.  The call remains powerfully relevant today, more than 100 years on from Zapata.