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Permanent underclass
is emerging in UK

Precarity

Trussell Trust

Unum Provident

Taking Margaret Thatcher's famous dictum - "There's no such things as society" - as his starting point, Paedar Kirby digs deeper in search of possible reasons as to why the concept of society has been so degraded.

He finds the problem goes back to Descartes:

... the dominant Western psychology of the self ...(is) ... based on a Cartesian mechanistic worldview, where the whole is separated into parts.

It is a short step to the belief that there is also a 'dualism' - a polarisation - between nature and human beings.

Our control of nature has allowed us to exploit it for our own benefit, to the point where the dangers facing life on earth from massive consumerism, resource depletion and pollution are unprecedented.

So it is not just our increasing technological ability to rob the earth of its resources that is at the heart of the crisis, but more our deep loss of connection to the Earth.

Our belief in a separate self has numbed our innate response to the danger ... it is hard to credit our pain for the world, if we believe we are essentially separate from it.

'We have a mechanistic sense of the natural world, not a sense of an inherent sacred quality'

A narrow definition of self ... which disconnects from nature, is not only at the heart of the environmental crisis but also leads to an increasing impoverishment of the psychological self ... (leading) to alienation, numbness, anxiety and depression.

The idea of the self-sufficient and supreme individual ... of Thatcher's denial of society, turns out therefore to be a dangerously truncated and atomised understanding of the human person.

The German word means "locational competition" and refers to what Zygmunt Bauman calls the "pedlar/beggar" role of government within neoliberalism:

Governments are reduced to the role of standortkonkurrenz to seduce free-floating capital to flow in and to cajole it to resist the temptation to flow out ... (it is the) ... pedlar/beggar role to which governments have been reduced in their struggle to keep their subjects alive and away from mischief ...

It is this which accounts for pressure to privatise public services, pressure on welfare spending, and the switch away from 'progressive' taxation on income, to 'regressive' taxation on spending.

The constant bleating by the rich in regard to the current 50 per cent tax bracket sums up both the rampant greed, and return to Victorian contrasts highlighted by the impact on the current recession on the most vulnerable:

Meal appeal targets 1m donations over Christmas

The One Million Meal Appeal, which will be launched on 26 November, gives customers the opportunity to add an extra store cupboard item ... which will then be delivered to local community projects by food poverty charity FareShare ...

Gdn  24 Nov 2011

50p tax band will cost Britain £1bn a year

The tax is pushing Britain’s wealth creators beyond a “psychological threshold”, the Centre for Economics and Business Research warned ...

Tel  23 Nov 2011    Whither Britain? Log

Communitarian Citizenship    Unsustainable Burdens

Cameron's war on employment rights

'Dignity & Compassion' in the NHS

Doubling in number of care home firms collapsing into administration

Executive pay consultants behind escalating boardroom salaries

Goldman Sachs conquers Europe

Judge to examine Goldman Sachs tax deal

Neets number of young people climbs to record 1.16m

Patients 'struggle to get emergency mental health care'

Scandal of elderly facing abuse and neglect in own homes

St Paul's still suffering huge losses because of protest camp

Tories accused of scuppering vulture funds bill

Trussell Trust

UK incomes fall 3.5% in real terms

Welfare: the 18th Brumaire of Iain Duncan Smith

Why has executive pay increased so drastically?

Young jobseekers told to work without pay or lose unemployment benefits

Prozac Nation: The Coalition and Mental Illness

Punishment or Rehab?

'Reserve Army'

Rough Sleepers

Social Cohesion

Southern Cross 'Care' Homes

Street Gangs

The Myth of Full Employment

The Work Programme

Youth Unemployment

Wasted Lives

Veterans' Care

Vulnerability & Violence

Welfare 'Reform'

Welfare_Workfare

Why we need a proper study of mankind