The Labour Party in Britain may have managed to quell the uprising within its ranks and to give the impression that they are now back on track. This is especially so since our Darling, the Chancellor came to the rescue with his exchequer magic wand, raising the personal tax allowance to mean that anyone earning up to £40,835 will gain an additional £120! His wand will also do the magic in funding this reduction by borrowing, so that money will not be taken out of the economy while it was slowing down.
What is not disclosed, but will need an even bigger magic wand, is who is going to pay for the borrowing – as nothing comes freely! Poor people and low income earners should watch their pockets, bank-accounts (if these still exists), the rising costs of putting food on the table and not be too fixated on Darling's magic wand. There is a trick somewhere and an intense hermeneutic of suspicion must be put in place.
My own hermeneutic of suspicion forces me to ask: if my salary is up to £40k a year why would I want to gain another £120 by encouraging the government to go into further debt, rather than spending that amount on better infrastructure, transport, health services and greater benefits for the less deprived etc . Indeed, I am all for a society that can offer relief to the “have-less and have-not” while seriously addressing systemic issues that encourage this divide.
Related to this systemic challenge is something more disturbing: and this is the feeling that what is displayed here is cheap politics that plays up to our greed, our wanting to have more and cheaper at that. Luther may want to refer to this habit as incurvatus in se – so bent up or wrapped up in the self that the common good of society flies through the window and “me” takes over.
Politicians are not daft. They know how to lampoon and pamper us and to soothe popular feelings in order to win back confidence which when translated in real language (read my lips) actually means: votes and staying in power. Lying, within the context of such an imagination becomes a deceptive art, even if it means awarding our greed and digging a deeper hole.
The reality, however, only just a day after Darling’s declaration, is the sobering reminder by the Bank of England governor that grabbed the headlines: UK inflation woe ‘set to worsen’. It is time for life in the polis to be characterised by politics with integrity and gumption; and citizenship that thinks beyond the self.
© copyright Jagessar May 15, 2008
