So it’s out with 2014: a year which Madge the Queen chose to describe as a year of “reconciliation” in her Christmas speech to the nation. Perhaps there’s been a bit of reconciling in Sandringham this year – but there’s been little evidence of it anywhere else, as Madge should know.
Over 2,000 people who worked for City Link had the worst Christmas present of all: they were told their company was in administration. Before the New Year, the liquidators had turned down a rescue package and confirmed there will be over 2,000 redundancies (funded, incidentally, by the taxpayer). The City Link staff join thousands of others who have lost their jobs since the financial crisis which began in 2008.
Many more than 2,000 people are struggling to one extent or another with reduced welfare benefits – out of work benefits, in work benefits, housing benefits (the bedroom tax) and council tax benefits. Old people struggle to live off their savings, which are no longer bringing them any appreciable interest; young people are struggling to pay back huge debts they incurred as students so that they can take on the massive debt necessary to buy a house.
The Government is beginning to realise that a countryful of people without a disposable income is a country without a domestic market for goods and services – and it desperately trying to shovel through positive economic statistics till the General Election in May, while also warning that there are more Tough Times ahead.
Her Madge made a big deal in her speech about the “spontaneous” truce in the trenches 100 years ago, when soldiers from opposing armies left the trenches to play football. What she didn’t say was that in many places officers had to step in and order the troops back to war after “grassroots truces” which lasted days, not just 90 minutes. The football matches were not twee games held to mark the Christian spirit of Christmas: they were ordinary people saying they preferred to play football than to kill and be killed. This was no truce. It was mutiny.
Another regular and seasonal football match took place on Christmas Eve, but didn’t get a mention in the Christmas broadcast. This was the traditional match between workers from the Queen’s Sandringham estate and local villagers. Apparently Prince Harry and the Duchess of Cambridge’s brother played for the Sandringham team – what sports they are! And at the end, just like the soldiers returned to their trenches, so the royal party returned to taxpayer-funded plenty and the villagers returned to paying their taxes and living off what’s left.
So as we enter 2015, let’s remember that spirit of mutiny. There’s an awful lot wrong with the world, but the biggest scandal is that the poorest people are being forced to pay the price for problems not of our own making. We need to play football again: not with those who are sending us into the 21st century trenches, but with those others we find in the trenches with us or in neighbouring trenches. We need to speak up, to expose the lies, to stop tolerating the oppression, to end the exploitation. There is so much we can change if we step forward and work together – before and after May’s General Election.
There’s so much wrong in the world, let this be a year when we misquote the phrase often attributed to Joe Hill: “don’t mourn – mutiny!”