Please Support “Britain Needs A Pay Rise,” the TUC March and Rally in London on Saturday, October 18

On Saturday, I’ll be joining — hopefully — tens of thousands of people (at least) for “Britain Needs a Payrise,” a march and rally in central London organised by the TUC (Trades Union Congress). Campaigners are meeting on the Embankment  at 11am and marching through the West End to Hyde Park, where there will be a rally (see the route map here). The Facebook page is here, where you can join the event, and you can also pledge your support on the website. There is also a Twitter page here.

As the TUC states, in its message about the protest, “Join us for a march and rally in London on 18 October 2014, to help call for an economic recovery that works for all Britons, not just those right at the top.”

The following are three very good reasons given by the TUC for joining the march and rally:

1. Poverty Pay

One in five people earn less than the living wage. For the first time more people in work are below the poverty line than those out of work.

The spread of zero-hours contracts, agency working and bogus self-employment is trapping many below the poverty line.

2. The Cost of Living Crisis

We are told that the economy is now recovering and that Britain’s costs of living crisis is over. But whose recovery is this? Ordinary people are £40 a week worse off in real-terms than they were five years ago.

And if bankers hadn’t crashed the economy and wages growth had stayed on track then workers on average would have £100 more in their pay packets every week.

3. Rising Inequality

Of course it’s not tough for everybody. In 1998 top chief executives earned 45 times the average wage — enough for anyone I’d say.

But now they earn 185 times as much. That means they have earned what most people earn over 12 months in just a day and a half.

One key driver of the economic crash was growing pay inequality. Long before our banks went bust people’s wages had stopped growing.

I’m extremely glad to see the TUC putting together a major protest, as it is exactly two years since the last major TUC-organised protest, “A Future That Works,” which I photographed (see here and here for my photo sets on Flickr). Prior to that, there was the “March for the Alternative,” in March 2011, which I wrote about from St. Thomas’s Hospital, in an article entitled, “On the Anti-Cuts Protest in London, 500,000 Say No to the Coalition Government’s Arrogant, Ideological Butchery of the British State.”

I must admit to being extremely disappointed that the unions have not organised massive anti-austerity protests every six months against the butchers of the Tory-led coalition government, who continue with their efforts to destroy almost every aspect of the British state, privatising almost everything that was not privatised by Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and to hand it all over to unaccountable profiteers — with the exception of their own jobs, and their lavish expenses, and, presumably, parts of the judiciary, the military and the intelligence services.

The unions are still the biggest bloc by far of UK workers — with around 6.5 million members — and I do think they should have more rigorously opposed the government, not just for their members, but for everyone in the UK except the rich and the super-rich, who are the only beneficiaries of Tory policies.

The timing of Saturday’s protest, however, could not be better. On Tuesday, Credit Suisse published its annual global wealth report, which noted that “Britain is the only country in the G7 group of leading economies where inequality has increased this century, as the Guardian explained, adding, “The amount of the country’s wealth controlled by the richest 10% increased to 54.1% this year, up from 51.5% in 2000.”

So over half the country’s wealth is in the hands of the top 10%, and yet one of the top 10%, the welfare minister Lord Freud, has just been caught out saying that some disabled people should be paid less than the minimum  wage — £2 an hour were his exact words — as if a) the minimum wage is optional (it isn’t), b) it’s possible to live on £80 for a 40-hour week (it obviously isn’t), and c) disabled people are demonstrably worth less than those without disabilities (they aren’t). If you haven’t already done so, please sign the 38 Degrees petition calling for Lord Freud to be sacked (but you’ll need a UK postcode).

The Credit Suisse wealth report also stated, as the Guardian described it:

The increase in inequality has coincided with a boom in the number of rich and super-rich people in Britain. There are now 44 dollar billionaires in Britain, compared with eight at the start of the century, while the number of people whose net worth is at least $50m (£31m) almost quadrupled to 4,660.

As the rich have got richer, low and middle-income households have been squeezed by falling real incomes caused by years of rising household bills and lack of wage increases.

The authors also “warned that rising inequality could indicate a recession was on the way, with the global wealth-to-income ratio hitting a peak,” as the Guardian put it, adding, “The ratio is now at a recent record high level of 6.5 (the average wealth is 6.5 x income), matched previously only during the Great Depression. This is a worrying signal given that abnormally high wealth-income ratios have always signalled recession in the past.”

Does that mean a crash is coming? It seems unlikely, because those in power have rigged the economy so that, with interest rates at almost zero, the only arena for investment is housing. But that is a bubble, a monstrous bubble in which prices in London and the south east have now exceeded the vertiginous heights they reached in 2007, and with more and more people being priced out of house ownership, paying more and more of their earnings in rent, or even being priced out of London altogether, it would be difficult not to conclude that some sort of crash is not only necessary, to stop the endlessly increasing inequality that is making life a misery for so many people, but also inevitable, the economic version of the tipping point that triggers an avalanche.

Saturday’s protest is an opportunity for people to show, in significant numbers, how dissatisfied they are with the raging inequalities of Tory Britain, and I hope that, if you’re in London or anywhere near you’ll be able to make it along.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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