Social Murder n. Government economic policy designed to destroy lives
Social Defence n. Any action taken to protect against Social Murder
Social Murder
In ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’ communist revolutionary Friedrich Engels reported that “society in England daily and hourly commits what the working-men’s organs, with perfect correctness, characterise as Social Murder; it has placed the workers under conditions in which they can neither retain health nor live long; it undermines the vital force of these workers gradually, little by little, and so hurries them to the grave before their time. Society knows how injurious such conditions are to the health and the life of the workers, and yet does nothing to improve these conditions. It knows the consequences of its deeds; its act is, therefore, not mere manslaughter, but murder.”
His research was published in 1845. One hundred and seventy-eight years later (2023) Social Murder is a predominant strategy of the UK conservative government’s pursuit of its sole purpose: Concentration of wealth at the expense of everyone else.
Tories use Social Murder in Britain to
- Take money from the people and hand it to the wealthiest
- Denigrate and destroy public services to promote privateer extortion as a necessary change
- Instil fear to dissuade people from complaining, protesting or taking industrial action
- Inculcate an ideology of society as constant competition and survival of the fittest in order to eradicate government responsibility for welfare of the people
- Distraction: If people are focussed on daily survival then they do not investigate the causes of problems
Social Murder’s use increased rapidly since 2010 and the rate of increase multiplied since December 2019.
Deliberate destruction of National Health Service
- Understaffing due to failure to replace people who leave including thousands of medical staff from European Union countries who were forced to exit UK after Brexit
- Wage reductions via opposition to pay rises that match inflation
- Massive reduction of NHS beds in hospitals
- Divergence of funds to racketeers as part of Covid pandemic government contracts scandal
Consequences of the attacks on NHS are fatalities.
People are dying while waiting for emergency ambulances, particularly after heart-attacks and strokes, because of shortages of paramedic staff and because ambulances are queueing with patients on board outside hospitals for hours waiting for admittance and not able to attend other emergency calls.
People with treatable illnesses are dying because hospital appointments for assessment are delayed; the delays are sometimes measured in years. There is a lack of access to GPs leading to health issues not being diagnosed early enough for effective treatment.
In collusion with the government’s destruction of NHS is pressure on people to chose private healthcare. Recent Health Secretary Sajid Javid demonstrated typical Tory manipulation of language by describing the persuasion to go private as a “right to choose” for a patient.
“I want to enshrine [the right to choose] so that every patient of the NHS, once they’ve been diagnosed and they need a certain treatment, they are given options, they have a choice. It could be an independent provider in the independent sector.” – Sajid Javid, March 2022
He meant that immediately after people are told how serious an illness is they will be given the choice of “go private or die.”
The focus of many libertarian influencers – politicians, journalists, think-tankers, TV and radio screaming heads – is depiction of the NHS as failed without any criticism of government. All such activists have connections to privateer healthcare industry.
Universal Credit
Universal Credit (UC) was designed to cause debt, destitution, homelessness and death. Inadequate payments particularly for rent costs and deliberate underpayments mean claimants, including people working, do not receive enough money to live on. Vicious unjust sanctions – total removal of payment – are applied via trickery; their effects are devastating.
The existence and application tactics of UC make loss of unemployment extremely fear-inducing and so people in exploitative jobs are less likely to leave, to seek better pay and conditions or to complain. Their employers are delighted about that.
Disability and chronic illness
For people with a disability or a chronic or life-ending illness their lives worsened hugely as a consequence of destruction of health provision and removal of financial assistance via DWP actions. Ideological policy of DWP forces disabled people to “prove” disability via assessments, by unqualified people, that are designed to deny financial help.
Tory-supported extortion by fuel suppliers is a larger problem for some disabled people who might require more electricity for equipment to help them live and for heating.
Erasure of statute defence
There are organised, traditional and approved methods of defence against Social Murder all of which had to be fought for with organised resistance: Voting in elections; forming political parties; collective bargaining and strikes via trades’ unions; legal redress; protests; free speech (in person, in literature and online). All are being erased by the Tory government via a series of bills through parliament, with more to come in 2023, including
- Denial of right to vote via imposition of necessity of photo Voter ID. In particular, many younger people (among whom there is a low percentage of Tory supporters) will not be able to vote
- Refusal by Electoral Commission to allow some political parties to partake in elections including Black Lives Matter party and Northern Independence Party
- Continuing attacks on the right to strike or to take any industrial action
- Removal of legal aid
- Ban on protests accompanied by severe judicial decisions. It is illegal to talk (even in private) about protesting. Protestors (Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion, etc.) received custodial sentences for minor “offences” and some were remanded in custody indefinitely before trial. A journalist reporting on a Just Stop Oil protest was arrested. A jury acquittal of defendants (protesters who dumped a statue of a slave trader in a river in Bristol) was overturned by Home Secretary Suella Braverman in a non-jury appeal
- Corrupt libel jurisprudence that silences critics while enriching libel law industry
The examples above are a preamble to imposition of Retained EU Law Bill (REUL) in 2023 that dispenses with all EU laws from several decades. Tories are able to do this as a consequence of their hard Brexit. As UK was bound by EU law equivalent UK-only laws were not needed and, thus, do not exist.
REUL dispenses with protections for workers’ rights (hours of work, paid holidays), gender equality (maternity pay, equal pay) and anti-discrimination (protections for disabled people and denial of racial discrimination).
As a corollary to leaving EU Tories also want UK to leave European Court Of Human Rights.
Social Defence
If someone is trying to kill you, your friends and family or people in your community then you choose the methods of defence.
In the face of ever-increasing volume and viciousness of state Social Murder and in absence of statute means of protection Social Defence is an urgent necessity.
Tools, strategies, tactics and methodology of Social Defence are whatever is possible and whatever is needed. They can be planned or spontaneous, individual or collective, brazen or secret, reactive or pre-emptive.
Social Defence does not have to be honest. It is moral in its aims and motivations but each act need not conform to liberal sensibilities of morality. Planned defence is preferable but opportunism should be embraced. Anger will be a catalyst for action; it should not be subdued or controlled. Actioners are full-time, part-time, occasional or one-timers. Supporters are active and/or silent.
The only argument declared by faux socialists and faux radicals against Social Defence is their preference for using existing tools to hamper exploitation and Social Murder. Those tools – right to vote, right to strike, NHS, tenants’ rights, workers’ rights, access to justice, right to protest, free speech, welfare system, support for disabled people, affordable domestic fuel, affordable food – are gone or are about to disappear. Their erasure is deliberate; it is vital to the success of disaster capitalism.
Disaster capitalists adore destruction because they can step in and take ownership of everything and then exploit everyone. They create disaster. They require collapse of what are considered normal aspects of a functioning society, such as healthcare, homes and affordable food and fuel, and they create that collapse if it has not happened.
Their ownership of everything includes physical entities – land, property, businesses and public services – and includes administrative entities – justice, democracy, workers’ rights, human rights. They want complete control of the mechanics of the economy in order to continuously enrich themselves at everyone else’s expense and they need, as enabling tools, complete control of law and communication.
Brexit was created, designed and processed to assist disaster capitalism. The “failures” of Brexit are what was intended to happen.
Tories’ “investment zones” are charter territories wherein administration is handed to corporate control and democracy is absent. They are fascist states within states and are the ultimate operation of extremist libertarian capitalism.
Every crisis that is happening now in UK – cost of living crisis, fuel price crisis, NHS crisis – was engineered to happen and is a direct consequence of Tory decision-making including the decision to do nothing. Abandonment of EU laws (via REUL) and creation of “investment zones” will worsen the crises.
Our livelihoods are under attack. Our health is under attack. Our lives are under attack. Basic protections are gone. The right and means to challenge and change the perpetrators and their actions are gone.
There is no help from pretenders for government. Britain has an insipid parliamentary opposition that is heavily in hock to its donors from fuel, arms and financial industries. Labour Party’s role is to soak up complaints and regurgitate them as ineffectively as possible. It has purged itself of socialists and recruited careerist politicians whose choice of political party is arbitrary.
People need to reset their understanding of how UK works, what is happening, why it is happening and what is being sought by employers of the government. Consequently, people need to realise that Social Defence is not just an option, it is a necessity.
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