‘WORK WILL MAKE YOU FREE’

PART THREE - EUTHANASIA

‘Your papers, sir!’  Idsy endorses the dreadful ESA-50 form, which summons doctors to pronounce their cancer patients fit for work.

Raking up the ashes ... 

They said it could not happen here, but Coalition Britain is beginning to resemble Nazi Germany.  New-Labour and Coalition governments have persuaded their supporters to approve of ‘mercy killing’.  They have slyly instructed the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to cull sick, disabled, and elderly people.  The DWP obediently cuts those people’s benefits, but then it denies responsibility for their suffering and for their deaths.  Everybody ignores what is going on because the ‘quiet killing’ is going on out of sight and therefore out of mind.

The Nazis were slightly less insidious and slightly more veracious than their British counterparts.  They devised a three-part plan which would legally allow them to liquidate the weakest members of their society.  The first part of their programme would change people’s attitudes towards euthanasia.  The second part of their programme would create a bureaucratic infrastructure which would administer euthanasia.  The third part of their programme would actually execute euthanasia.  It became an open secret which they code-named ‘Aktion-T4’.

The Nazi Experience - Preparation

Germany was not the only country which experimented with euthanasia.  The proposition originated elsewhere.  Euthanasia Societies and corresponding pressure groups existed in the UK, Australia, the USA, and other ‘western’ countries.  Some of those countries practised prejudicial birth control methods like sterilization both before and after the war, but Nazi Germany was euthanasia’s leading advocate and its most systematic practitioner.

The Nazis revered Darwin’s theory of natural selection because it seemed to justify their own barbaric theories on eugenics, which is the science of selective breeding. They believed some people’s lives were not worth living and, for instances, they pointed at severely disabled people and chronically sick people.

The first part of the Nazi plan had to persuade the common Germanic people or Volk that a remote governmental agency had the right to decide whose lives were worthless.  That was a difficult task.  Although the Volk trusted their government, whose euthanasia policies reflected a widespread international trend, they cared about their own families and friends and they wanted to protect them.

The Nazis filmed invalids whose lives they estimated to be ‘unworthy of life’.  Their films were presented in cinemas as axiomatic public information and they were accompanied by insincere narratives which pretended to pity their subjects.

The Nazi tenet or ‘backdrop’ which hung behind that dissemination was the embodiment of the mythical Aryan Volk (common Nordic and Germanic people) in the form of Übermensch (supermen).  Nazi populists, who ironically included some of the intelligentsia, tried to persuade the ‘common people’ to countenance euthanasia by appealing to their selfishness and to their conceit.  The Nazis wanted euthanasia to become commonplace so they argued it made common sense and it was for the common good.  The racial purity of the Aryan Volk could be condensed and medical resources could be assigned preferably to them.

Doctors, nurses, and midwives willingly applied for jobs on the T4 Programme.  They were attracted by relatively high wages.  Some of them already sympathized with Nazi ideals.  Their co-operation made both infanticide and the forced sterilisation of the ‘unfit’ seem credible to the Volk, who began to tolerate the noxious principle.

The Nazi Experience - Administration

Hitler and other senior Nazis authorized the Aktion-T4 Euthanasia Programme in 1939.  It required the establishment of a dedicated office, which would operate in a similar stolid fashion to all of the other Nazi governmental departments.  The Reich Health Ministry set up the Realms Work Committee (RWC) which would be responsible for administering the programme.

The RWC headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4, Berlin, (T4) was a ‘clearinghouse’ which collected information on ‘malformed’ children from questionnaires which it sent to hospitals and to mental institutions.  Doctors and midwives had to report every new-born child that had mental or physical disabilities to the authorities.

The questionnaires were returned to the RWC and a panel of three medical experts reviewed the results.  They all had to agree, but they trusted their colleagues who worked in the hospitals and in the institutions, and they usually agreed to ‘euthanize’ their patients.  Death Warrants were issued for their patients, who were then transferred to special hospitals for ‘treatment’.  Borderline cases that received split-decisions were kept under observation until further attempts could be made to get unanimous decisions.

T4’s bureaucrats and medical experts worked securely within a closed system which contained ‘feedback loops’ and ‘safety nets’, and which fostered ‘plausible deniability’.  The system ensured none of its victims would escape their doom, and it protected its perpetrators who could act without compulsion.  It distributed the blame for murdering innocent people, so bureaucrats and medics could disavow responsibility; they could protest: ‘I just work here.  I didn’t invent the system.’

The T4 Programme was dissembled as a welfare programme.  The Nazis tried to create the impression that patients were being assessed fairly and that they were being given benefits of doubts and necessary second chances.  Families believed their sick and disabled relatives were being bussed away to sanitaria to be nursed, but the bus drivers were SS men dressed in white coats.  Families were not allowed to visit their children; they never again saw them, but they did receive letters of condolence and falsified death certificates.

The T4 Programme was designed to dispose of sick and disabled children, but the Volk and the Church strongly opposed it.  The Nazis officially cancelled it in 1941, but they secretly expanded it to include adults who had similar symptoms; they considered those people to lead “burdensome” lives and they labelled them “useless eaters”.  They stretched their dragnets farther afield and then they ‘kick started’ a new euthanasia programme.  It was given a new code name, "14 f 13", which was the title of its new questionnaire form.  It was less regulated than before and it was described as ‘wild’.

The Nazis started to assess the economic value of other types whom they considered to be ‘asocial’ or ‘wayward’ or ‘undesirable’.  Those types included political dissidents, homosexuals and several ethnic groups.  The Nazis considered them to be mentally or genetically defective and they considered them to be liabilities.  Those who could work were sent to slave labour camps, but those who were incapable of work were processed for euthanasia.

The Nazi Experience - Execution

The T4 Programme predated the Holocaust.  Both terrors overlapped and used similar extermination methods, but T4 was supposed to be concerned with euthanasia, and the Holocaust was supposed to be concerned with eugenics.

The Nazis experimented with rudimentary methods of ‘mercy killing’.  They crowded invalids into small, air-tight rooms and then they tried to pump in vehicle exhaust fumes through rubber hosepipes.  They decided that method was too slow and it killed too few people.

The Nazis then converted some hospitals and prisons into killing centres, which could process larger numbers of people.  Those centres had built-in gas chambers and crematoria.  The gas chambers were disguised as showers, which could be hermetically sealed; they were then filled with the gasses carbon monoxide or hydrocyanic acid which was branded Zyklon-B.

The ‘mercy killing’ routine was generally the same at every centre.  Invalids were drugged, stripped naked, re-dressed in paper shirts, and then they were led to the gas chambers.  Dead bodies were placed on conveyor belts which transported them to furnaces.  Their families were sent mixed-up ashes.

When the Volk and the Church complained about the euthanasia programme, the Nazis stopped gassing patients and they started poisoning and starving them.  The results were the same but the Nazis hoped their victims’ deaths would be ascribed to natural causes.

An estimated 250,000-350,000 Germans were put to death under the various Nazi euthanasia programmes.  Around 5,000 ‘malformed’ children were transferred to killing centres.

Special SS units murdered thousands of institutionalised patients in occupied Polish territories.  They shot them or they gassed them in mobile chambers.

The Nazis established Heredity Health Courts to sterilize other targeted categories.  An estimated 350,000 Germans were sterilised under that branch of the programme.

So-called ‘wild’ euthanasia continued until the war ended in 1945.  Some higher ranking doctors were charged with war crimes and they were put on trial at Nuremberg, but many lower ranking medics escaped punishment and lived happily ever after.

The British Experience - Preparation

European attitudes towards euthanasia are again changing.  A Swiss clinic now offers to kill chronically sick and terminally ill patients before they die naturally.  That kind of intervention goes on tacitly in hospitals all over the world, but well-meaning doctors usually seek consent from their patients or their relatives before they ‘pull the plug’.  That is a separate issue, but it spreads the viral idea that euthanasia is sometimes acceptable.

Although most decent British people feel disturbed by the thought of euthanasia, British politicians seem to feel relaxed about it.  They seem to think disabled people are ‘basket-cases’ that ought to be strangled at birth, and they seem to think chronically sick people ought to be put out of their misery, and they seem to hope older people will drop dead at work before they claim their pensions.

British politicians want to find a simple solution to their economic problem of welfare costs.  They reckon invalids are too expensive to keep.  Their answer is to attack invalids with a two-pronged strategy.  Invalids must be prevented from becoming fresh long-term incapacity or disability claimants, and stale long-term invalids must be re-assessed and ousted.  Their machination succeeds by using ‘beggar-thy-neighbour’ tactics to purchase the compliance and complicity of one group of people at the expense of another group.

The New-Labour government which won a Pyrrhic victory in the 1997 election tried to unite health care workers and common folk against invalids, who could not fight back.  It instructed its twisted spin-doctors to market its welfare reforms as tough love.  They wanted to persuade the common folk that they had to be cruel to be kind.

New-Labour spearheaded a full scale attack on invalids, while its Coalition rivals watched and grudgingly admired its shock-tactics.  New-Labour whimpered that invalids did not deserve welfare payments and it smeared all of them with the same putrid drivel.  Invalids were receiving ‘free’ money for doing nothing all day but lying on beds, sitting in wheelchairs, or hobbling on crutches.  New-Labour whined that they were ruining its ‘Cool Britannia’ make-over, and it warned them that it could not continue to support them.  It urged them with treacherous humility to find jobs.

New-Labour administered more moral corruption to assuage the pangs of guilt in the hearts and minds of General Practitioners, who had sworn Hippocratic oaths to do no harm to their patients.  Some GPs opposed welfare reform, but New-Labour tried to bribe them with ‘sweeteners’; the government doubled their pay and it halved their hours.  The quid pro quo required GPs to re-examine their attitudes towards vulnerable patients, who included the sick, the disabled, and the elderly.  Invalids, who would ask their doctors for certificates or ‘sick-notes’, would just as likely receive lectures on ‘over-burdened tax-payers’.

British governments utilize their puppet media to persuade common folk to countenance welfare reforms.  Their ‘psychological preparation’ gets channelled through sensational newspaper reports and startling television exposés about ‘benefit cheats’.  Such reports are factual but they are not objective; their subject matter is carefully selected and edited.  Readers and viewers who trust their authorities turn cynical about their welfare system; they become resentful of its claimants; they give most of them short-shrift.

The British Experience - Administration

New-Labour had been planning welfare reform since its election, but in 2008 it introduced the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) programme, which was designed to provide false evidence against sick or disabled welfare claimants.  It threatened to cut the numbers of people who were claiming benefit by one million.  New-Labour also planned to gradually increase the state pension age for both men and women to 68; it moaned Britain could not afford to pay their pensions.

Anyone who was claiming long term sickness benefits such as Incapacity Benefit, Severe Disablement Allowance, or Income Support paid on the grounds of illness or disability, came under governmental scrutiny, re-examination, and possibly surveillance.  New-Labour huddled those disparate benefits into a new ‘one size fits all’ benefit called Employment and Support Allowance (ESA). 

The WCA is not concerned with welfare.  It is a multi-stage Psychological ‘Warfare’ Programme, which is designed to sap the strength of its victims and reduce their will to live.  Look at this ‘carry on’.

The DWP sends ESA-50 questionnaire forms to existing invalids who must return them before a deadline.  A private firm, which is currently called ATOS Healthcare, then invites invalids to attend one of its centres, where they are subjected to mock medical assessments by its own Professionals.  DWP bureaucrats eventually inspect all the evidence, and then they make their decisions.  Their verdicts are bankable; an estimated 66% of all examinees are found ‘fit for work’.

The whole process is completely unethical; it would be farcical but it is deadly serious.  It indicates profound depravity, which has not been witnessed in Britain since the superstitious witch hunts and trials of the 16th-18^th centuries.  Politicians of those times wanted to find ‘scapegoats’ whom they could blame for famine, poverty and any other social problems.  They pointed at people who were different such as sick people, disabled people, and elderly people, and they accused them of witchcraft.  Many of those poor beggars were tortured, tried, burned, or hanged, but all of them were innocent.  Ignorant common folk trusted their authorities and they sucked-up every scrap of nonsense which was spat out by them.

ATOS is a big foreign company, and every year the DWP pays it £100 million to process ESA-50 questionnaires.  Much of that money gets ‘trousered’ by generously remunerated company executives.  The Chief Executive of ATOS gets £800,000.  ATOS is nearing the end of its contract with the DWP, but it will be replaced by another big foreign company, which will promise to accelerate the WCA programme.

ATOS ‘clearinghouses’ may be situated in regional DWP premises, and invalids have to go to them.  ATOS Healthcare Professionals, who do not bother to wear white coats, ask invalids questions about how their illnesses and disabilities affect how they do day to day things; they ask about their physical functions and they ask about their mental, cognitive and intellectual functions.  The Professionals then award points to invalids for each of their health problems.  Invalids must score 15 points to escape from ATOS's meddling and to survive the rest of their dreary lives on benefits.

When ATOS’s Healthcare Professionals return their completed reports to the DWP, Decision Makers glance at the points totals, and they give the invalids the ‘thumbs up’ or the ‘thumbs down’.

A ‘thumbs up’ decision places an invalid in either the Support Group or the ESA Work Related Activity Group (WRAG).

The Support Group does not require invalids ‘to participate in work related activity’, which means ‘get a job’, because it admits they are ‘unfit for work’, and it tosses £125 per week or £6,500 per year into their hats.  That is the equivalent of a part-time wage, but able-bodied workers might need two or three part-time jobs to avoid the breadline; many part-time workers rely on food-banks.

The WRAG is a ‘trapdoor’ benefit for invalids who are deemed ‘fit for work with support and preparation’, which means ‘invalids who might be malingering’.  It tosses £76 per week or £3,952 per year into their hats, but that is limited to just twelve months, and invalids may be reassessed by ATOS during that same year.  That ominously worded ‘with support and preparation’ phrase means those same downtrodden people will be kept in a continual state of limbo and oblivion; they will be given abject subsistence money, but they will be re-educated by sham-training-agencies, which will teach them life-skills.

A ‘thumbs down’ decision means an invalid is ‘fit for work’, and he or she will be ousted.  The DWP sends bundles of notes and Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) claim forms to them.  JSA amounts to the same miserable £76 per week, but invalids are likely to miss a month’s payments because of built-in administrative negligence which creates backlogs and delays.  JSA demands that invalids compete with fit and healthy people in the jobs market.

Neither the DWP nor ATOS has put much intellectual effort into the WCA programme.  The bureaucracy is rickety; the procedures are performed like amateur street theatre; the ESA-50 form looks like it has been designed by a student.  The following patronizing, impudent, and distasteful extracts are taken from the ESA-50 form, which casually interrogates GPs, hospital doctors, or clinical nurses.

‘The information you provide on this page is important as it will help the Department for Work and Pensions to make a rapid benefit decision for your patient.’

‘This page concerns patients who are having, waiting for or recovering from (post completion of treatment) chemotherapy or radiotherapy.’

‘In your opinion, is it likely that the impact of the treatment has or will have work-limiting side effects? Yes No’

‘In your opinion are these side effects likely to limit all work? Yes No’

‘In your opinion how long would you expect these side effects to last?’

Who was responsible for writing that?  GPs, hospital doctors, and clinical nurses who have one drop of decency in their veins ought to answer those questions in favour of their patients every time, regardless of what they really believe.  They  must not collaborate with the DWP and its hired assassins.

The British Experience - Execution

Seventy three people die every week in Britain after having their benefits stopped.  The DWP could not care less.  Its ‘secret’ euthanasia programme strives to ‘boot out’ invalids from the welfare system completely.  It destroys their benefits, their homes, and their protected workspaces.  Its message to them is: ‘Get a job or crawl away or die’.  It expects most of them will survive on reduced benefits and charity, but it knows thousands of them will die of ‘misadventure’, which means malnutrition or hypothermia or melancholia.

The DWP wants to transfer most invalids from ESA to JSA.  It can then impose stringent and impractical conditions on their receipt of benefit money.  Invalids who cannot meet those conditions get ‘sanctioned’.  The DWP prefers to use innocuous words like that because words like ‘punish’ and ‘axe’ are too frightening.  It is sardonic prose, which is intended to soften the blow, condition the observer, and deliver a subliminal message: ‘It’s alright to laugh at someone else’s misfortune.’  It is an example of life imitating reality TV.  One of Britain’s favourite TV programmes is called ‘You’ve Been Framed’; viewers are expected to laugh at films of other people who are having accidents.

In the ‘juvenile court’ of the DWP, the accused are believed to be guilty until they are proven innocent.  The accused may be invalids but the DWP treats them like ‘delinquent’ malingerers.  It cannot beat them or thrash them but it can try to make their lives unbearable.

A typical WCA appointment is an irksome experience.  ATOS ‘clearinghouses’ are usually located around the backs of regional DWP office blocks.  Wretched invalids have to shuffle, limp, and hop from pillar to post across puddles, pot-holed tarmac, and cracked concrete pavements until they find some shabby doors which are marked ATOS Healthcare.  They totter cautiously past bored security guards; they report hesitantly to nonchalant receptionists; they plod in to plain waiting rooms; they rest gratefully on wall-to-wall plastic chairs.

A typical ATOS waiting room can accommodate about one hundred people.  The invalids may be held upright by their companions or they may be propped up by their sticks or crutches.  They are not ‘unwashed’; they make an effort to look presentable.  Most of them display the regulatory ‘stiff upper lip’, and they wait attentively, but some of them weep and wheeze.  The atmosphere has a whiff of Zyklon-B about it.

ATOS tries to schedule its assessments to keep its ‘conveyor’ moving, but its own staff shortages often cause uncomfortable delays.  Refreshments and medical facilities are not provided but invalids are permitted to use the toilets.

The invalids are eventually called in to the examination rooms where they are tried and tested by ATOS's Healthcare Professionals.  All of their Professionals are docile ‘cardboard cut-outs’, who have been trained to go about their dirty business with fixed expressions of false geniality on their faces.  The invalids try to explain why they cannot work, and the Professionals pretend to listen intently.  Some invalids might leave a ‘clearinghouse’ feeling optimistic, but most assessments result in negative ‘fit for work’ verdicts.  Most invalids eventually realize they have been ‘taken for a ride’.

Over one million people were receiving Incapacity Benefit; two thirds of those have been pronounced ‘fit for work’.  Invalids who fail to ‘actively seek work’ get punished and axed.  Loss of benefits causes invalids terrible anxiety, because they cannot buy food, and they cannot pay bills.  The postman delivers more demands, threats, and summonses every morning.

Bloated politicians tuck-in to their subsidized lunches and listen to choirs, instrumentalists, and quartets playing soothing music, while emaciated invalids scrape up their boiled rice and listen to sheriffs, bailiffs, and debt-collectors drilling-out their door locks.

British governments encourage their local authorities to join in the ‘feeding frenzy’ by unleashing ‘dog-eat-dog’ savagery.  Many town halls are allowed to lavish up to £50,000 pay rises on their council chiefs, along with other ‘back door’ gratuities, perks, and ‘comforts’ which include bonuses, expenses, allowances, cars and pension contributions.  About 61 per cent of councils in the UK pay their biggest earners more than the Prime Minister, who receives £142,500.  If local councillors and council bosses want to maintain their luxury lifestyles, they have to trim the benefits of unemployed people in general and of invalids in particular.

The Coalition government struck unemployed home owners by reducing its support for means-tested Council Tax benefit by 10%, and it struck unemployed social housing tenants with the Bedroom Tax.  Those people who were previously exempt from Council Tax suddenly had to pay an average bill of £247 a year.  Those people who lived in social housing, which is council or association owned housing, would lose 14% of their housing benefit if their property contained a spare room.

The Bedroom Tax is levied on people between the ages of 16 and 61.  Nearly two thirds of those affected are invalids.  Extra bedrooms for medical reasons are not allowed even if spare rooms have been specially adapted or are being kept ready for carers.  A severely disabled child might be allowed its own room if it would seriously disrupt the sleep of another child.

Over half a million vulnerable people have not been able to pay those extra taxes.  They have been summoned to court and they have been forced to pay costs, which may be over £100, on top of their original debts. 

If invalids do not pay their bills, their creditors bombard them with postal reminders, demands, or threats.  The usage of sham-debt-collection-agencies, which are usually gangs of thugs or organized criminals, to extort money or goods from invalids is comparable to brutal Nazi looting and plundering.

The Disabled Persons Employment Corporation was set up in 1945 to provide employment and support for disabled people.  It soon became known as Re-employ or Remploy.  It provided a protected workspace for disabled people which was operated and subsidised by the taxpayer.  British governments wanted to cripple it along with the rest of the welfare state; the Coalition withdrew its support for all 54 Remploy factories and it told them to stand on their own two feet; most of them collapsed.

Many invalids want jobs, but their mental or physical health conditions make work difficult or impossible, and neither firms nor sham-employment-agencies want to hire them.  Job application forms contain lengthy medical questionnaires which demand answers to intimate questions.  Most employers insolently threaten to contact applicants’ GPs.  Invalids who do not disclose their full medical conditions may be dismissed later; they are expected to tell all their business to untrustworthy rascals, rogues, and scoundrels who work at sham-agencies.

Personal information is supposed to be held secure under the Data Protection Act, but sham-employment-agencies share their data with each other over the telephone.  That allows them to screen applicants invisibly and without trace, and to blacklist or filter-out undesirables like trade unionists or invalids.

Aftermath ...

Britain’s ‘secret’ euthanasia programme seems to have been copied from the Nazi T4 blueprint.  Both regimes had wanted to dispose of ‘economically in-viable’ people, but the Nazis had invested in killing centres; British governments have let their victims die cheaply at home.

German people do seem to be morally superior to British people.  Ordinary German volk protested against Nazi euthanasia programmes, but ordinary British folk, who are led by the English, cheer-on their government’s persecution of invalids.  Thousands of sick, disabled, and elderly people have died unnecessarily in Britain.

German people can now breathe sighs of relief.  The British can no longer single-out Germans and accuse them of institutionalized murder, because the British are allowing their own governments to copy the Nazis.

Martin Niemöller was an anti-Nazi theologian who wrote a famous warning about indifference and apathy.  He wrote it for us who stand and watch while others suffer annihilation.

‘First they came for the communists and I did not speak out because I was not a communist.’

‘Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.’

‘Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.’

‘Finally, they came for me and there was no one left to speak out.’

The Green Response

1) The Green Party must register the names of those government ministers, bureaucrats, and medics who are responsible for the British secret euthanasia programme.  The GP must accuse them of crimes against humanity and manslaughter, and it must demand that they be tried for those crimes.
2) The GP must demand the repealing of all shameful welfare reforms, and it must demand the reversal of all changes to the benefit system that have taken place during the last twenty five years.
3) The GP must demand the restoration of all welfare rights to sick, disabled, and elderly people.  It must consult representative organizations to find out what sick, disabled, and elderly people need and what they want.
4) A huge chunk of housing benefit is paid directly to private landlords who charge excessive rents.  They are the real scroungers who are 'ripping off' the taxpayer, because they know the state will pick up the tab. Controlling rents, as in Germany, would be a more effective and humane way of reducing the bill.
5) The GP must provide a moral compass to guide those British folk who have been led astray by evil British governments.  It must rally all good-natured people who want to stop the culling of invalids. 

  

WINDUP

Green Swipe thought this idea was original, but others probably got here first.  We salute the pioneers and pathfinders at THE ANARCHIST WORKERS CO-OP and at ORGANIZED RAGE.  Everybody’s contribution to this vital humanitarian effort needs to be acknowledged, so please tell us about your resistance to the neo-Nazis, crypto-fascists, or other ‘kinky’ black-shirts who might be skulking in the corridors of Westminster.

We thank ‘The Life Resources Charitable Trust’ and ‘Disability Now’ for sharing their knowledge on the Internet.

For sheer anarchy go to:

Anarchist Workers Co-op - http://sabcat.com/

Organized Rage - http://www.organizedrage.com/

Don’t miss our next post –

‘The Seventh Enemy’ by Ronald Higgins

(What happened to him and did anybody take any notice?)

You may send your comments to greenswipe@gmail.com

‘peace man’ÿ☮[

‘WORK WILL MAKE YOU FREE’

PART TWO – SLAVE LABOUR

“I wish that you were here,” be Idsy’s thoughts on this postcard from the workhouse.

Iain Duncan Smith admires Britain’s traditional use of forced labour, which was customary both at home and abroad, and he wants to recreate similar working conditions.  He hopes his magnum opus, Universal Credit, will earn him the satisfaction, fulfilment, and  recognition which he himself withholds from millions of other people.

The history of slavery in Britain is checkered.  Various kinds of slavery or serfdom existed in Britain before and during the Roman occupation, and it existed during and after the Norman Conquest.  The four countries of the British Isles remained divided by geography, politics, and religion, but the slave-trade never respected any boundaries.  Wales joined England in 1536.  Scotland joined England and Wales to form The United Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707, though Mel Gibson had cried ‘freedom’ in 1305.  Ireland joined Great Britain in 1800, though English law had been introduced in the 13^th century following various Anglo-Norman intrusions.

Slavery in Britain was supposed to have ended in the 16^th century during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, but various forms of forced labour continued legally until the 19^th century.  Poor men were still pressed into the Royal Navy, and their wives and children were still used in the mines and the factories.  Destitute people could apply to the workhouses.  Those were the only welfare institutions, and their conditions were kept unattractive, abject and brutal.  Family members were separated and corporal punishment was used to discipline them.  Debtors were sent to prison.  They could ‘work off’ their debts by participating in profitable labour schemes, which were organised both inside and outside prisons by governors and private contractors.

Tory and Liberal governments, which ruled during the 19^th century, were eventually shamed into reforming the employment laws and the prison laws, but workhouses remained open for business until the middle of the 20^th century.

Britain contributed to the international slave trade between the 16^th and 19^th centuries.  It helped to transport forcibly millions of Africans to the Americas.  Its involvement in that oppression ended in 1838 after the slave trade as a line of business became less profitable.  The British colonies in North America had rebelled and they had declared independence in 1776.  The British colonies in the West Indies had become less manageable after slaves had rebelled successfully in the French colony of Haiti; they had declared independence from France in 1804.

Britain helped to deport thousands of European ‘settlers’ and convicts to North America and to penal colonies between the 16^th and 19^th centuries.  Many of those settlers were debt-slaves.  The State prosecuted people who could not pay their bills.  It convicted them of theft and it sold some of them, as though they were chattels, to merchants.  The merchants transported their chattels overseas and then sold them to unscrupulous business-folk, who posed as creditors.  Those creditors wanted cheap labour and they were eager to sign-up desperate settlers, who hoped for freedom and salvation.

The contracts were called Indentures and they usually lasted for several years; they bound debt-slaves to their new masters until their debts were cleared and their masters’ overheads were recovered.  Overheads accumulated and included original debts plus the costs of passage, plus the costs of housing, clothing, and feeding plus anything else that could be added.  It was obviously a racket and it was enforced by intimidation.  The settlers likely worked for nothing.

The official buying and selling of indenture contracts formalised the debt-slave-trade, and made it seem respectable.  The usage of various misnomers for ‘master’ and ‘debt-slave’ made the business seem impersonal; the traders were not ‘masters’ and they were not trafficking people; they were swapping indentures.

Debt-slaves were called Indentured Servants, who knew no difference between slavery and involuntary servitude; they were not owned by their creditors but they were obliged to work for them just the same.  Indentured Servants, who were also known as peons, were actually treated worse than owned-slaves.  Creditors did not take care of them; they wanted to exploit their ‘investments’ as much as possible before their relatively short contracts expired. 

In 1957 the International Labour Organisation adopted a resolution that condemned the use of forced labour throughout the world. The convention was ratified by 91 member nations.

Modern British history began in 1945.  The British working class enjoyed rising standards of living and full employment during the 1950s, but the ruling class were already plotting to return society to the status quo ante.  Other European countries and the rest of the world were automating their factories, but post-war British capitalists did not want to invest in Britain; buying ten spades for ten men was cheaper than buying one bulldozer.  Britain resorted to people trafficking.

Flooding the country with ‘blackleg’ labour from the British Commonwealth of Nations was the easiest way to divide the working class and to bypass the trade unions.  Cunning politicians and industry bosses fabricated the myth that immigrants would do the jobs that British natives would not want to do.  Employers would withdraw training opportunities, downgrade working conditions, and cut wages, and then offer the jobs to immigrants.  It was an awfully clever, capitalist stratagem; unemployment figures rose gradually to 8 million by the 1980s, and they were held at that level.

Consecutive Tory and Labour governments deliberately exacerbated the unemployment deluge by embroiling Britain in the European Union, which fostered creative-accounting and asset-stripping.  Much British property and many British utilities and companies were sold cheaply to foreigners, including the football clubs!  Politicians allowed bosses to decimate British industries; they called it ‘trouble-shooting’.  Bosses could export jobs and import workers to and from the continent.

Abstruse ‘positive discrimination’ laws, which segregated races, relegated British natives to second-class citizenship. Career jobs which offered higher pay and better conditions were reserved for foreign immigrants, but unskilled jobs which offered lower pay and worse conditions were handed to British natives.

Foreign competition battered Britain.  Farmland remained fallow.  Fishing fleets were wrecked.  Many docks, ship yards, and ports were abandoned.  Heavy industries like coal and steel were turned to dust and rust.  Textile mills were torn down.  Car manufacturing was crushed.  Britain became a nation of shopkeepers and shoplifters. 

Politicians encouraged industry bosses to create further unemployment by exporting British jobs to places like Eastern Europe and Asia.  Bosses closed hundreds more factories and they laid-off thousands more workers.  Bosses maximised their profits by opening ‘sweat-shops’ in developing third-world countries, whose workers endured virtually no rights, extremely low wages, and terribly unsafe working conditions.  Those bosses and some collaborative trade union leaders were awarded accolades and peerages; the British public was sold chintz.

British products were devalued, and their build quality deteriorated.  The once proudly boasted motto “Made in Britain” became the new epithet for “Made in Hong Kong”.  Job quality deteriorated while industries like injection moulding boomed.  Operatives were required to feed in lumps of plastic to ravenous machines which pumped out tawdry products.  Allegro music was broadcast over the factory Tannoys, and the speed of the machines was continually 'cranked up' to keep beat with the tempo.

That was the state of affairs in 2010 when the Tory-Liberal coalition formed the current British government.  The previous, conniving Labour government had mimicked American monetarist policies, which had bankrupted the exchequer; their tinkering prepared the economy for po-faced coalition politicians,who imposed ‘austerity measures’ on the working class.

Duncan Smith is just the latest ‘also-ran’ politician who has picked up the ‘slavery’ baton and has carried it one step farther toward the ‘genocidal’ finishing line.  He and his lackeys, who lurk in the DWP, are collaborating with firms to make the lives of ordinary people completely miserable.  Their policies, which seem to have been copied off children’s games, depend on chance, isolation, disorientation, and the law of diminishing returns.  Unfortunate job seekers who stray onto DWP territory, are lured deeper into a make-believe, ‘never-never’ land.  If they want benefits, they have to play daft games of ‘snakes-and-ladders’, ‘hide-and-seek’, ‘blind-man’s-buff’, and ‘musical chairs’.

Duncan Smith and his cronies think ‘carrying on’ like that is amusing and salutary.  Job seekers are expected to ‘actively participate’ and enjoy it, but they feel like they are being blindfolded, spun around, and hit on their heads.  Shame on the coalition government; it continues to fool and shame the voters again and again.

Some firms are replacing their personnel departments with sham-employment-agencies, which pretend to be independent of their parent companies.  They are able to circumvent existing agreements with trade unions, and they can rely on DWP support.  Job Centres aid-and-abet them by providing them with free office space, facilities, and advertising.

Sham-agencies pose as partners of the DWP.  They disguise themselves as quasi-governmental employment agencies that feign propriety to gain the approval and confidence of unwary job seekers.  They are, in fact, parasitic, money-grubbing, private businesses, whose seedy patronage is an affront to the trust and good-nature of honest people.

Sham-agencies contrive deceitful recruitment policies which create ‘two-tier’ and ‘three-tier’ inequality.  They employ their own ‘second-tier’, flexi-workers, who have to accept fewer rights and lower wages than their parent company’s ‘first-tier’ employees.  New starters are actually ‘third-tier’ employees, who rate fewer rights and earn less money; they have to serve probationary periods of time before they can be promoted to their ‘second-tier’ status.  Social differentiation is a feature of slavery.

Flexi-workers are treated like beasts-of-burden; they are expendable and their supply is inexhaustible.  Sham-agencies use any excuses to dismiss them; they sack those who take sick leave and they replace them with fresh probationers who are not sick.  Sham-agencies turn-over lots of workers so they can continue to pay ‘third-tier’ wages to most of them.

Probationers’ wages may vary from one week to another even though they continue to work the same hours.  Sham-agencies do not issue pay-slips, but they do deduct money from workers’ wages to recover the costs of things like uniforms.  Those uniforms are usually emblazoned with company brand-names and trade-marks, and wearers become walking sandwich-boards that advertise subjugation.

When people are converted into human resources that may be used as raw material or discarded like waste products, they become commodities.  That is a feature of slave-trading.

Look at this multi-agency racket that the DWP tries to pass off as an opportunity.  DWP officers hand out bogus job advertisements to job seekers, who think they are being directed towards jobs.  The job seekers meet sham-training-agency representatives, who enrol them onto sham-training courses.  They are told to attend venues, which are usually rented rooms in other towns.  Travelling expenses are not paid, but bread-and-water refreshments are ‘thrown-in’.  If job seekers complete their sham-courses, which may be scheduled to last four days, they are promised interviews but not jobs.

Some stalwarts are interviewed and they are offered probationary jobs, but others are rejected outrightly.  Those who succeed are handed glossy brochures which contain sham-agency terms and conditions of employment.  Those brochures are crammed with denials, disclaimers, ‘opt-outs’, repudiations, and reservations, which can be summarised as: ‘the employer has every right but the employee has no right’.

Sham-courses have titles like ‘Pre-Employment Training/Induction Programme’, and they contain sham-topics like Health & Safety, Manual Handling, First Aid Awareness, and Fire Safety.  Sham-lessons are pitched at elementary level but they are padded-out with banter and general knowledge quizzes.  Sham-courses deliver bits of useful information, but those bits could be printed cheaply in booklets. 

Sham-courses are schemed-up by associated sham-agencies, which purport to recruit and train unemployed people.  They are, in fact, just groups of assorted cads and bounders who act like brokers.  Sham-courses are accredited by local colleges of education, and they are funded generously by the government and by the EU.

Duncan Smith’s campaign against the lower classes continues unopposed.  The DWP has trapped the job seekers in a ‘pincer movement’ between its mean sanctions and sham-employment-agencies.  Job Centre bulletin-boards are peppered with dead-end job adverts which offer zero-hours contracts and minimum wages in exchange for temporary or part-time work.   Most adverts lead to supermarkets, warehouses, fast-food restaurants, and factory floors via the confidence trickery of sham-employment-agencies.

Dissidents get blacklisted.  They are put on the job-seekers’ treadmill: a life-time sentence which condemns them to pointless and unproductive job searching.  After years of rejections, some unemployed people turn to begging, others commit crime, while others commit suicide.

Duncan Smith wants unemployed people to work for their benefit money.  That will be a kind of involuntary servitude.  Sham-agencies are already devising profitable sham-work-experience and sham-community-service schemes.  He wants to privatise job centres.  Disreputable firms like slapstick, security outfit G4S, creepy, outsourcing syndicate SERCO, and murderous, health-consultants ATOS will compete to handle the lucrative trade in 'job seekers'.

The Green Party must remind British people about their post-war life in the 1950s when they had ‘never had it so good’. The GP must explain how British people can relive those good times by renationalizing essential industries and services.

The Green Party must explain why American social and economic theories do not apply to Britain; neither Multiculturalism nor Monetarism works in Britain.  It needs to tell people to trust their own eyes and ears and to ignore career politicians and puppet media.

The Green Party must argue in favour of reducing Britain’s population to 30 million.  Britain must stop all immigration and must start to repatriate all immigrants who settled in Britain since WWII and their descendents.  Fewer workers would force manufacturers to automate and to down-scale.  Full employment would be achieved and everyone’s job quality and job satisfaction would be improved.

Britainmust leave the European Economic Community, which is just a front for international big-business and people-trafficking, and it must set-up an alternative Green World Economic Community, which would exist everywhere for the benefit of ordinary people.

British manufacturers must be discouraged from moving their factories abroad. Bosses who close their factories in Britain and who open them abroad deserve to be publicly disgraced and shunned. They must not be allowed to discard skilled British workers and to exploit vulnerable foreign workers.

The Green party must must unite with the trade unions to fight for workers' rights.

The Green party must outlaw the abusage of people as collateral for debt or for 'credit'.

The DWP needs to manage Job Centres economically.  They need to be purged of parasitic sham-agencies: no more free accommodation for them!  Sham-agencies must be charged a commercial rate for their usage of public office space and facilities, and they must be charged for advertising their sham-jobs on government web-sites.

Public money must not be wasted on sham-training courses for the unemployed.  Government run Skill Centres need to be set-up in all towns and cities to provide real training in all kinds of trades for unemployed people.  Skill Centres performed very well in the past and they would perform very well in the future.

British people are being punished for daring to ask for more after they fought and won WWII.  They must reject all forms of slave-labour; it is not necessary and neither is mass unemployment.  If British governments want everyone to work, they could give a piece of farm land to every unemployed person.  People could grow their own food, and then they too could earn satisfaction, fulfilment, and recognition.

‘peace man’ÿ☮
You may send your comments to greenswipe@gmail.com

DON’T MISS PART THREE – ‘EUTHANASIA’

‘WORK WILL MAKE YOU FREE’

PART ONE - PROPAGANDA

How ‘Idsy’ would have looked in a smart Nazi uniform.  Would he have pleased Hitler? 

history repeats itself
Failed Tory Party leader, Iain Duncan Smith, struggled for years to launch his vengeance weapon: the Universal Credit scheme.  That was his final solution to the British Welfare question, but it seemed strangely similar to the Nazi ideological model which they inflicted on Europe.  The Nazis identified ‘subhuman’ people whom they wanted to eradicate.  Their pernicious methods included propaganda, slave labour, and euthanasia. 

if you repeat something often enough ...
Duncan Smith’s Ministry of Propaganda is the redundant and barmy Department for Work and Pensions.  It has regional offices which are staffed by thousands of ‘job’s worth’ bureaucrats who seem to reprocess continually the same data.  They are his ‘rear-guard’.  His ‘front line’ is occupied by the local Job Centres which are protected by security guards and are staffed by sadistic, junior clerical officers who plead the Nuremberg Defence: they are ‘only following orders’.

Duncan Smith, himself, comes forth to appear at national press conferences where he vilifies the unemployed and outlines his strategy to deal with them.  His psychology is visceral but effective.  It relies on frequent repetition to produce mass hypnosis, ‘brain-washing’, and hysteria.  He is likely to reiterate: ‘Unemployment is a lifestyle choice’, or ‘Life is meant to be hard’, or ‘The Government is encouraging unemployed people to find work’.  His pejorative slogans, which sound like autosuggestion, seem to blame the unemployed for the global economic mess.  He knows it is popular claptrap but he is sneering at the British public because he also knows the joke is on them.  The unemployed include the disabled, the sick, and the pensioners.  They are everyone’s friends, families, and relatives and everyone will get a chance to join them.

new technology old hat
Duncan-Smith is obsessed with uniformity that ensures narrow mindedness and blinkered vision.  He has restructured the DWP into a colossal data-processing network which resembles a fictional dystopia.  The civil service ‘pen-pushers’ have been replaced with Advisers who are really just Call-Centre Operatives and Data-Inputting Clerks.  They behave like cyborgs that wear head-sets and interact with computers and follow flowcharts.  Their own intuition has been replaced by artificial intelligence, and their glib patter may be interpreted as: ‘You are being assimilated; resistance is futile!’

The DWP’s computerised system is designed to ease decision making and eliminate human error, but the system is complicated and the Advisers are easily confused by inconvenient questions; it is just another example of ‘garbage in garbage out’.  News media recently reported how the DWP had wasted £40 million on IT systems that did not work.

The DWP expects unemployed people to have access to telephones and to the Internet.  That kind of technology is needed to process benefit claims and to search for jobs, but some people do not own telephones and personal computers.  The DWP directs them to public libraries and to public telephone boxes.

Claimants who cannot navigate a way through the DIRECTGOV website, which is still under construction, may try to navigate a way through its labyrinthine, telephone menus.  The calls are free but they might take up to forty five minutes.  At the end of their calls, DWP Advisers might decide to send bundles of paper forms and notes to the callers through the post, or they might direct the callers to collect forms from their local Job Centres, or they might do both.  A typical application-form runs to fifty two pages and is supplied in a booklet.  Callers might have to supply supporting documents and return all of it in a prepaid envelope.  The DWP has spent lots of money on automation but it is not yet a paperless office.

if you can’t beat them, join them
Frequent widespread confusion is caused when the DWP moves its regional offices from one location to another.  Processing backlogs and delays are inevitable.  When that happens, Advisers do not know who is in charge or what is going on, and they cannot contact anybody because the phone numbers and postal addresses are obsolete.  Many Advisers have become demoralised with their adverse management and they have ‘gone native’; they have accepted the ongoing chaos as an occupational hazard.

The Job Centre clerks are more zealous and malevolent.  Their real purpose is to withhold benefits.  They do that by preventing unemployed people from claiming benefits, and by stopping benefit payments to unemployed people who are already claiming them.  Unemployed people who are not claiming benefits do not get counted as unemployed.  That paradox is the Job Centre's hidden agenda.  Its pretext is Duncan Smith’s propaganda message: ‘The Government is encouraging unemployed people to find work’.

what’s in a name?
The DWP has spent millions of pounds on rebranding things.  Some of the old terminology, which reminded people of the Great Depression of the 1930s, has been ‘made-over’.  Labour Exchanges, the Unemployed, and the Dole have been given new names.  The Social Security offices have been shut permanently; the concept of Social Security no longer exists because ‘Life is meant to be hard’.  The Exchanges are now called ‘job centre plus’ offices, which are uniformly furnished and decorated in DWP livery and they have ‘inclusive’ posters hanging on their walls.  Unemployed people are now called Job Seekers.  The ‘Dole’ is now called Job Seekers Allowance.

None of that helps anyone to find a job, but it does help to alienate and ‘condition’ unemployed people.  It helps them to feel unfamiliar with Britain’s fantastic, ‘brave new world’; it lowers their self-esteem and confidence, and it helps them to feel depressed and socially inadequate.

When Job Seekers become Claimants, the DWP prefers to call them Customers.  Those words need to be defined and contrasted.  Claimants assert their rights to draw something out of the system.  Most of them have worked and have paid taxes into it, and they have lost their jobs through no faults of their own.  Customers purchase goods or services.

If we call Claimants, Customers, we are denying them their rights and we are forcing them to accept services which are not fit for purpose.  Most Claimants deserve welfare and have a right to it.  They did not pay taxes to employ spurious Advisers who do not listen but read prepared scripts and talk impertinent nonsense.  Claimants do not want that kind of service; it is inferior and it is a fraudulent swindle.  The ‘Customers’ are not buying it.

the three c’s
The DWP has spent more millions of pounds on short training courses for its staff.  Its fully trained Advisers are now supposed to be skilled in Customer Care, Communication, and Conflict Management.  That kind of ‘Investment in People’ looks good on paper, but it is actually a cynical misuse of money.  The aim of all that training is to manipulate society’s least sophisticated people.  They are the humble unemployed who have been identified as the ones most open to persuasion.

DWP Advisers receive the same kind of Customer Care training that car salesmen receive.  They try to identify the personality type of their customer and then match their spiel to that type.  The American business theory which underpins that procedure defines just four personality types for the whole of humanity.  Everyone ought to be alarmed about that ‘carry on’ because it means Advisers are practising amateur psychology; they are ‘analysing’ Claimants and then prescribing treatment that will ‘cure’ them of their unemployment.  What kind of quackery is that?  It sounds like unemployed people are being used as guinea-pigs in a pseudo social-science experiment.

DWP communication techniques are based on research carried out in the 1920s by the Soviet Union.  The Soviets ascertained the lower social groups such as workers, peasants, and soldiers tended to use more words than educated people to say the same thing.  They also ascertained educated people used more nouns and uneducated people used more verbs.  They concluded that good communicators ought to adjust their vocabulary, loudness, speed of delivery and accent to match their listeners’ levels of sophistication.  DWP Advisers presume therefore all Claimants are uneducated, and they speak accordingly to them.

Claimants feel like they are being interrogated by the Gestapo (Nazi German State Police).  Advisers face Claimants across desks and do not offer any encouragement, support, advice, or guidance.  They do not try to establish rapport with Claimants; they flatly contradict them, and they try to monopolise the conversation.  The posters ask Claimants to be courteous to Advisers, but the posters ought to read: ‘Please do not ask for credit as a punch in the face often offends.’

The DWP’s notion of Conflict Management is to use repeated threats and provocations.  Every Claimant can expect to be threatened with sanctions, which usually result in the loss of benefits, several times during the course of an interview.  Advisers will make remarks like: ‘I love my job,’ and ‘Job Seekers have had it too easy for too long’.  Those are deliberate tactics.  Every Claimant who ‘storms’ out of the building or is ‘frog-marched’ out represents a saving of at least £70 a week; that also represents one fewer person on the unemployment register; that also helps Advisers to reach their quotas and to claim their Performance Related Pay.

an offer you can’t refuse
Claimants who survive the interview are coerced into signing a job seeker’s contract which contains unreasonable terms and conditions.  They might be expected to apply for an ‘agreed’ number of ‘slave-labour’ jobs or for jobs that are too far from home.  Claimants are warned not to break their contracts because sanctions will result in loss of benefits.

Advisers attempt to justify their appalling behaviour by alleging they are being monitored by some kind of ‘big brother’ character.  That might be true but ‘big brother’ does not stop them from quitting their terrible jobs and from finding alternative, more respectable employment: 'There are millions of jobs out there.'

the green response
The Tories along with their Liberal and Labour stooges are waging class-war on the poor.  The Green Party must disassociate itself from all those Parties and it must challenge their propaganda.

Unemployment is not a life-style choice for most unemployed people.  They have worked in the past, and they want to work in the present, and they want to work in the future.

Life is not meant to be hard in a prosperous country like Britain.  Only someone who has led an easy life would say the opposite.  Is Britain short of money?  In 2012, Britain managed to celebrate one of the Queen’s anniversaries, stage the Olympic Games, and fight a war in Afghanistan.

The Government is not helping unemployed people to find work.  They want high levels of unemployment because that weakens the trades unions and it reduces wages, and it allows employers to exploit workers.

The unemployed are not to blame for the economic depression.  The Conservative, Labour, and Liberal Parties, and the Ruling Class (the 1%), whom those Parties represent, are to blame for it.

The Green Party must campaign to get rid of Duncan Smith’s complicated and shambolic Universal Credit system.  It needs to be replaced by a simplified system which is based on merit.  People ought to be entitled to one year’s unconditional, unemployment benefit for every year they have worked and paid contributions.  That would give people who want to work the time to find another job or a chance to retrain, and it would give people who do not want to work the incentive to change their ways.  It would also greatly reduce the perpetual and excessive bureaucracy which currently consumes a huge amount of the welfare budget.

The Green Party must campaign for a new, high-principled Job Centre ethos.  Class-ridden ideology which involves the routine punishment of weak and poor people must be replaced by genuine advice, and guidance, and encouragement, and support.  All the embellishments, which include branding and decoration, could stay but the expensive Security ‘goons’ would no longer be needed.

A trip to the Job Centre could be a positive experience.  Job Seekers could be made to feel welcome.  Advisers could greet them with a friendly smile, a firm handshake, and a cup of hot tea.  Such simple hospitality would be the antithesis of the elaborate hostility that penniless ‘Customers’ suffer under the Tory jackboot.

WINDUP

The answer to that question is, no.  Iain Duncan Smith would not have pleased Hitler.  Der Fuhrer would have had him shot for bungling incompetence.

You may send your comments to greenswipe@gmail.com

Don’t miss our next post:

‘work will set you free’ – slave labour

 ‘peace man’ÿ☮[