In February 2011, New Internationalist editor David Ransom helmed an issue called ‘The Great Rebellion’ where he outlined a ‘con-trick of truly breathtaking proportions’, played out across the Majority World by unscrupulous financial institutions and abetted by the World Bank and the IMF. As much of the Majority World had wised up to the devastating practice, it was being turned on those countries that had devised it instead.
What was termed as ‘structural adjustment’ in the Majority World phase, was now being called ‘#austerity measures’ in the Minority World phase, though the con-trick was essentially the same: the citizens of countries were being made to pay for vast debts that they had no hand in creating, allowing the market to privatize national assets while imposing outrageous cuts and levies on the population. Ransom outlined the dangers ahead, of inevitable spiraling national #debt, the rising power of unaccountable, undemocratic, opaque #corporations and financial institutions and the crippling onslaught of brutal cuts.
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The resistance begins at the raw front lines of those impacted first and impacted the hardest. The #UK #grassroots direct action group Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC), run by #disabled people, has grown out of that immediate need to hit back against crushing austerity. Their story is a microcosm of the #neoliberal story, including its construction, its destructive effects and how to fight back. Without learning from #DPAC, and having active solidarity with them, the various pockets of resistance risk remaining fractured and ineffective. ...
The UK has become the first country in the world to use the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities to be investigated for ‘grave and systemic violations’ of disabled peoples’ rights and it is telling that the Tory government has since refused to make public the findings.
Andy Greene, member of the national steering committee for DPAC, tells me, ‘What you have is the people who are engaged most with the state, disabled people because of the nature of impairment, being the first in the firing line when these public services and the welfare state start to be dismantled in the name of austerity… and the fall out is that peoples’ lives shrink or people die.’
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Despite their being probably the most prolific grassroots group in the country in terms of direct action, even forcing their cause into the Houses of Parliament itself twice, the amount of physical support for DPAC reciprocated from people in the wider movement is negligible.
Until that changes and people stand in solidarity with DPAC, using direct action and civil disobedience, putting their bodies in front of their convictions, then the UK movement against #neoliberalism risks remaining fragmented, ineffective and easily dismissed or ignored by the right wing press and government.
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