David Cameron’s Empty Rhetoric

by redosiris

Earlier this week David Cameron claimed that Britain needed a pay rise and he asked the business community if they could facilitate such a move. If only he was in some kind of, oh I don’t know, position of power where he could legislate for this kind of change.

The best way to ensure decent pay, terms and conditions for workers is to have representation by robust trade unions, so the continual, ideological attacks upon those institutions demonstrates David Cameron’s real attitude towards working people.

This government has made it easier to fire people while making it more and more difficult to maintain a decent work/life balance. There has been an exceptional rise in the use of zero hours contracts – the type of contract which deems the worker to have less rights than those of workers with set hours. Workers have to wait two years before getting protection from unfair dismissal and fees of up to £1,200 are in place to get to a tribunal for unfair dismissal; because the one thing sacked workers have is cash on the hip yes? This has led to a decrease of 79% in overall claims – great news for Britain’s worst, racist, misogynist, disablist and homophobic bosses who can now sack a member of staff according to their own prejudices without any worries about the implications.

In addition plans are afoot the make striking harder to achieve. Trade unions already have to take over 250 separate steps before strike action can be legal and the UK is renowned across Europe as having the most restrictive trade union legislation already, without the suggested changes relating to turn outs and notice periods etc. This is nothing more than an attempt to further reduce the democratic method of opposing bad working practices and denigrate the bargaining abilities of workers and their representatives.

At the same time as this, executive bodies like the Gangmaster’s Licensing Authority and the Health and Safety Executive have had their budgets and staff cut to the extent where they are no longer able to carry out their jobs properly. This has led to an increase in workplace near misses and accidents and a series of incidents where people are earning less than the minimum wage; usually young or migrant workers.

After his little speech David Cameron hosted the Tories annual Black and White fundraising event to a crowd of party donors worth an estimated £22bn – we don’t know if he told these people to give their staff pay rises because the event was behind closed doors, no one really knows what happened in there – ah, open government and funding transparency! They expected to raise £3m from the event ahead of the election, which they clearly think I something for sale rather than a democratic process.

UK firms are currently hording £284bn in cash reserves and while we gave the bankers billions and billions of pounds of public money, bank lending is still down year on year for everything other than house buying – another bubble waiting to burst, and when it does the ordinary workers will once again be expected to pick up the tab for the failure of capital.

Meanwhile the staggering hypocrisy of his statement is overwhelming. As he has presided over a system that has implemented pay cuts and pay freezes all across the public sector, and in all areas of welfare spending he has the audacity to tell other company directors how to disperse their profits. One can’t help wondering that his words may have a semblance of authority if he practiced what he preached.

The cynical among us realise that this wasn’t a call for increased wages at all. We are now in an official election countdown and every word he utters is with a view to getting re-elected. He has no intention of giving workers a pay rise, whether they are directly under his control in the public sector or indirectly through encouragement and legislation. This was nothing more than a statement which he knew would be picked up in the media and played out as “Cameron calls for worker’s pay rise” hoping that the people are too stupid to realise it’s all a charade. I think the people are brighter than he gives them credit for. They will see through this ruse and hopefully boot him and his bought and paid for cronies out of the government benches on May 7th this year. The Tories will never deliver pay rises for working people.