Sun 26 Jul 2020, 09:11 AM | Posted by editor
LETTER from Tom Smith, Newport West Labour member
The Tories in parliament have voted for trade talks with the USA to be in secret and the facts not known for five years. It will rip to bits the food standards in this country and drive farmers out of business. They have also voted down any amendments that block NHS privatisation and amendments specifically calling for support for living standards.
Any US/UK trade agreement will give American multinationals the right to sue any British governments that adopts policies that supposedly injure the profits of those organisations.
Then we have a looming no deal Brexit that will further throttle domestic manufacturing and provoke big firms into cutting wages and sacking workers.
Yet the Tories are desperately seeking to get workers back to work and face the consequences of a second wave of the pandemic. The government is preparing to send the unemployed into elderly homes to carry out supposedly ‘unskilled’ work. Then thousands are threatened with homelessness because they cannot pay rent.
The Tories accepts Russian bribes of millions to their party whilst London remains the money-laundering capital of the world. Ministers have lied about how the government handled the pandemic and ignored the advice of experts.
Now it is seeking to gerrymander electoral boundaries to ensure a Tory majority in the next election, even while it seeks to debar thousands from voting because those voters cannot afford a passport or do not possess a driving licence.
In short, I sometimes think it is attempting to build a dictatorship, because workers in Britain are relatively passive. The trade union leaders are offering no answers and the Labour Party leadership has little to offer as it moves to the right. The only hope is to build a serious tendency and hope we can win a substantial number of young activists.
