TWO extremely uncomfortable truths are being increasingly recognised under Tory governance: the existence of real and tangible slavery within the British economy and the return of what the teaching profession have labelled “Dickensian” conditions amongst our children.

Beginning with Thatcher, it has been the determination of the Tories to reduce the working people of this country to a state of modern slavery; to reduce them to a state of impoverished dependence that will allow employers and managers to impose whatever terms and conditions of employment they wish. Austerity is their principal weapon for the achievement of the increasing poverty and inequality that is quite deliberate and systematic public policy. Their determination to remove all employment rights from working people as a precursor to removing all of our human rights reveals the principal reason for their enthusiasm to leave the EU.

Modern forms of slavery are becoming normalised within our economic system as employers exploit the absence of meaningful employment protection; the result of a poisonous economic doctrine that dehumanises employees and treats them as commodities. Last month the National Crime Agency reported a 35 per cent annual rise in suspected victims of slavery in the UK.

We are also seeing reports from the teaching profession, who have decided to speak out over the return to Dickensian conditions amongst our nation’s children. They report how children are stuffing their pockets with food from school refectories and canteens because that is the only food they will get that day. Children are turning up at school on Mondays with dirty uniforms because they have no other clothes and have to wear their uniforms all weekend. Many children are missing school because they have no shoes, and one primary school headteacher recently opened his school during the severe snow to ensure his pupils got a hot meal that day.

Speaking at the National Education Union conference in Brighton, school leaders described how pupils arrive at school with “grey skin, poor teeth, hair and nails,” with many union members describing the situation facing their poorest pupils as “heartbreaking”. According to the Child Poverty Action Group there were four million children in the UK living in poverty in 2016, equivalent to nine in every classroom of 30.

This is the true character of our Tory elite and their supporters, those nice, moral, intelligent and well-bred personnel who went to private school, Eton and Oxbridge, so decent and civilised. The fruits of their governance demonstrate that they are indeed uncivilised, immoral and indecent, finding solace in a degenerate ideology that justifies a complete lack of human compassion and dignity and encourages their basest impulses and desires. We must never forget that we live in the seventh richest economy on earth and that such conditions flourish because of the cruelty of the Westminster Parliament. There is no depth to which a Tory will not sink to satisfy their greed and venality. In this Labour are little better.

There is poverty in Scotland, but most of the above scenarios are to be found outwith Scotland, which is a more civilised and decent society. And that is the clue: Scotland is more of a society than the rest of the UK, with a greater sense of community and social responsibility.

A dominant ideology of greed and aggressive individualism will produce greedy, aggressive individuals. The above trends are the result of the dominant free-market “there is no such thing as society” poison preached as gospel by the Blessed Margaret. This ideology must be challenged and defeated or things will only deteriorate. The final nails in the coffins of the working people of Britain will be Brexit, and is what the English voted for. We didn’t.

Peter Kerr
Kilmarnock