John Williams, Cardiff East Socialist Party
750,000 people visited a food bank for the first time last year, an increase of 37%, according to the Trussell Trust, a UK food bank charity. It gave out nearly three million food parcels in 2022-23 and there’s no signs of this slowing down.
However, according to Bank of England economist Huw Pill, we need to “accept” being poorer… Obviously he’s fine with food bank usage going up, because many people can’t afford the basics as it is. This cost-of-living crisis is hitting the poorest hardest.
Millions – paramedics, carers, shop workers, pensioners, parents – are being plunged into poverty. But the millionaires and billionaires are doing just fine. They aren’t being told to get used to being poorer. The opposite in fact!
It’s estimated that the total cost the ‘taxpayer’ will have to pay for the King’s coronation is more than £250 million. But what about services like ‘meals on wheels’ for the elderly and vulnerable, which has been scrapped in various places of the UK, or money for underfunded schools, or a real pay rise for health workers?
Less than a third of 16 to 24-year-olds support the monarchy now, and it’s clear to see why. All the institutions of the capitalist establishment are losing credibility. The rotten profit system keeps making life worse.
Over the May Day weekend, teachers, nurses and civil servants took strike action, showing that we shouldn’t just accept getting poorer. Instead taking on the bosses and the governments of the UK, that want to make working-class people pay for their crisis. To hell with their mantra of ‘making difficult decisions’, and that includes Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer.
We shouldn’t accept being poorer, because we know there’s enough wealth and money in society. The problem is – who owns and controls it? Why can a select few, like the royal family, get the best healthcare while the rest of us face hours-long queues for A&E?
To put the control in the hands of working people, we need to fight for democratic nationalisation and for socialism. We need further coordinated strikes, and to channel energy into building a new mass workers’ party with a socialist programme that would fully fund the NHS, build council homes, provide inflation-busting wages and jobs for all, and end the rule of the monarchs and bosses (see pomp and ceremony food banks and strikes).
