Word on the street
A sympathiser in Birmingham:
“I had a read of the paper, and I think you guys are nailing the real issues we are facing today. It’s just a shame these views are not more widespread. At the moment, it feels like truth holds no value at all, and people are quite happy to blindly believe what those with the loudest voices tell them (which certainly aren’t on the left). How do you even combat that?”
A worker in Wembley (London):
“I’ve had to have two jobs after my husband died. I live downstairs because I can’t afford to heat my whole house. We pay tax and get nothing back. All politicians are bastards, there isn’t a good one among them! When they speak, the devil speaks!”
Feast during famine
Roman Merker, Birmingham
I have a friend who works in a huge IT company in Austria. After the recent tariff announcements, they had an emergency meeting with their CEO.
He was quick to the point saying that tariffs will hurt their company enormously (their stocks are down) and the future looks bleak for the company.
Their clients are already cancelling services and changing their minds on buying software from the company. However, the CEO is promising that the company will stand its ground and ensure that it is the most competitive on the market but what is good for the CEO, is not good for a worker.
Redundancies are already in the pipeline. The managers and the CEO, of course, are not planning to cut their own salaries or perks.
Tariffs, ‘cost of living’, all are well-worn excuses for the bosses’ cost cutting. Exploitation will intensify; misery will increase. Those fed-up with such excuses should join us in overthrowing the bosses’ system.
Stacked against us
ST, Birmingham
The warehouse I work in has only recently been occupied by my company. But what was meant to be an upgrade has turned into a nightmare of mismanagement leading to abandonment and return to the old warehouse.
Now I have no idea if I’ll still be employed for the six months I’m contracted for and neither do they.
But how did this happen? One of the frustrated operations team who’d been running warehouses for 13 years shared their insight into a litany of errors.
- Management rushed to move before the new warehouse offices had even been built, forcing them to occupy valuable floor space with portacabins.
- Worse, instead of putting someone with real warehouse experience in charge, they handed control to an office worker with none – appointed by a managing director who barely steps foot outside the office himself!
But management were far too busy dreaming up how to spend the £250,000 in annual savings to notice the disaster unfolding before them until it was too late.
The new warehouse ended up never operating at even half the capacity of the old one. Instead of fixing the problems, management irresponsibly tried to throw more workers at it – mass hiring providing false job security to people they’re now kicking to the curb.
Now, as the company flees in embarrassment, agency workers are left scrambling for new jobs while the bosses claw back their losses from a debacle that could have been avoided if the people who actually operate the warehouse had been the ones making the decisions.
Make capitalism extinct!
Hugh Nankervis, Oxford
Time magazine opened recently with the image of a beautiful white wolf.
Only this is not a wild wolf; rather, it’s a genetically modified “dire wolf” designed to have the appearance of the predator that went extinct at the end of the Ice Age and is featured in Game of Thrones.
This creature, along with two others, was created by Colossal, a company specialising in “de-extinction”, talking about bringing back mammoths, dodos and the Tasmanian tiger.
Alongside general moral questions, there remains a ‘mammoth’ in the room; where does the science go from here? Scientists have already criticised Colossal for its focus on “bringing back” extinct creatures, which removes emphasis from conservation work. Don’t worry about the pandas, we’ll bring them back!
Moreover, the technology is hardly revolutionary; CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing has existed for years and is widely used in medicine. So why exactly were these dire wolves made?
In short, the business model of these companies – as is the case with many industries – is speculation; rather than produce useful things, they encourage investment with a “wow” factor. It works to a point; the Colossal CEO has a net worth of over $10 billion!
Ultimately however, this bubble has to burst if no useful products come out; 23andMe, the company offering services to sequence user genomes for gene variants associated with disease, is currently filing for bankruptcy protection and has never turned a profit, despite being valued at $6 billion at its peak.
Both these technologies offer huge potential to improve our quality of life; the huge dataset 23andMe possesses could be used to accurately predict who is likely to fall sick and the best treatment for them, while CRISPR-Cas9 is already used to produce more efficient crops to feed a hungry world.
However, we have no say over how these technologies are employed if they are used in “dog” and pony shows to produce profits!
Dent in the walls and my wallet
Maxfield Long, Leeds
At the beginning of last month, I travelled halfway up the country and moved into an accommodation in Leeds. In only a month, the landlords have already put it on the market!
These parasite-lords operate with total impunity, the rent for this new tenancy is being raised by £60 and what can I do except take the attack on my living standards or move out? Neither of which are particularly appealing options.
This rent increase is pretty bold of them anyhow, they would not even provide us with a microwave! Dents remain in the walls, cracks in the ceiling – nothing new to anyone who rents I’m sure!
While we break our backs and burn ourselves out, they sit on our hard earned gold like a tyrannical dragon, arbitrarily dictating who can afford the luxury of meeting their most basic needs in this economy.
I dread to think what will happen as the world economy sinks deeper into the abyss, there has never been a better time to kick the parasites out and take control over our own lives.
Here today, gone tomorrow
Photographer, South London
Last week, Gideon Saar the Israeli foreign minister paid a secretive visit to the UK, meeting fellow war criminal David Lammy and other British ministers as part of Britain’s continued imperialist project in Gaza.
The visit received no real media attention, the BBC initially reporting that Saar was still in Israel, but on Thursday two activist groups put out an arrest warrant for Saar, in response Lammy assured his genocidal partner they would be disregarded and Saar decided to continue his stay until the Sunday.
Thinking there would be a press detaché, I went to Heathrow airport as a photojournalism student to try and catch a photo of the war criminal as evidence of Starmer’s complicity.
Saar was meant to fly on the 15:15 El Al flight. Instead of a standard press shoot the British state made its intentions crystal clear.
The gate was teeming with armed police and squads of sniffer dogs, the atmosphere very quickly became tense and several people were swiftly detained for questioning, having photographed the arrests I was also questioned by armed police, asked if I was considering protesting and told that if I was to return within the next 24 hours I would be placed under arrest.
Needless to say the British state had no intention of supporting their much touted freedom of speech. Lammy, Starmer and co. can attempt to hide their crimes but events will continue to expose their rotten façade.
