Prime Minister David Cameron says we must save the UK as it’s a “brilliant, buccaneering country” (1) – (2). That’s an interesting choice of words. Buccaneers were pirates. How appropriate from a Prime Minister whose party gets most of its funding from the banks and hedge funds who are the modern international, government approved, pirates, stealing billions from 99.9% of the world’s population (3) – (4).
The hedge funds and banks even buy up food and stockpile it to push the price up to make money on “futures trading”, starving the world’s poorest people for profits that go to already super-rich investors, stock market traders and senior managers (5). David Cameron and much of his party are not ashamed of this, but proud of it.
To them Elizabethan England with its state approved pirates, or “privateers” like Sir Francis Drake, is a wet dream they want to bring back – and through privatisation, lack of regulation and eroding the welfare state, they are succeeding.
Big banks, hedge funds, energy companies and supermarkets are the privateers of our day, buying the right to steal from millions and avoid taxes in offshore tax havens through donations to party funds. They’re worse than the privateers, because at least the privateers were stealing from other governments and rich merchants, while the modern privateers steal from the vast majority including the very poorest.
The Coalition government has blocked even modest EU attempts at increased regulation and restrictions on bankers’ bonuses. Chancellor George Osborne has gone to court to block EU caps on bankers’ bonuses. For Cameron and Osborne there must be no restrictions on buccaneering. Cap benefits for the poorest, but bankers have to be able to pay themselves whatever they like (6).
With the number of people reliant on food banks in the UK having increased from under 50,000 to around half a million in the first few years of their government, they are also heading us back towards Elizabethan era levels of poverty and inequality. Like Tony Blair, they are very relaxed about this, as they’re not the ones who have to go hungry or watch their kids go hungry (7) – (8).
And this is the kind of thing David Cameron thinks will make Scots want to stay part of the UK? Even many English people would like to escape that kind of organised kleptocracy. Buccaneering isn’t popular when the buccaneers are the super-rich, stealing from the majority and making the poorest go hungry.
The best thing Scots can do to end this is vote Yes and go independent, both to save our own people, and to provide an example of supposedly impossible alternatives working; an example that no UK government would be able to ignore.
(1) = www.guardian.com 07 Feb 2014 ‘David Cameron sets out 'emotional, patriotic' case to keep Scotland in UK’, http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/feb/07/david-cameron-scottish-independence-referendum-olympic-park
(2) = www.gov.uk 07 Feb 2014 ‘The importance of Scotland to the UK: David Cameron’s speech’, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/the-importance-of-scotland-to-the-uk-david-camerons-speech (see paragraph near end of speech which begins ‘And I passionately hope that my children’ – final sentence of paragraph reads ‘Our great United Kingdom: brave, brilliant, buccaneering, generous, tolerant, proud – this is our country.’)
(3) = BBC News 9 Feb 2011 ‘More than half of Conservative donors 'from the City'’,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12401049
(4) = Bureau of Investigative Journalism ‘Tory Party funding from City doubles under Cameron’, http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/02/08/city-financing-of-the-conservative-party-doubles-under-cameron/
(5) = Independent On Sunday 01 April 2012 ‘The real hunger games: How banks gamble on food prices – and the poor lose out’, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/the-real-hunger-games-how-banks-gamble-on-food-prices--and-the-poor-lose-out-7606263.html
(6) = Guardian 25 Sep 2013 ‘Osborne bats for bankers' bonuses citing risk to City from EU cap’, http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/sep/25/osborne-bankers-bonuses-eu-cap
(7) = BBC News 30 May 2013 ‘Food bank reliance in the UK triples, says Oxfam’,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22715451
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