The ‘Choice’

In a bizarre tribute to Trainspotting – a 90s cult classic film that graphically depicted the lives of heroin addicts in Edinburgh – Chancellor George Osborne ended his Tory conference speech on Monday night (September 29) by riffing on the film’s iconic opening monologue.
Osborne galvanized the throngs of cheering conference-goers, “Choose jobs. Choose enterprise. Choose security. Choose prosperity, investment, fairness, freedom. Choose David Cameron, choose the Conservatives, choose the future!”

 
But let’s take a look beyond the pop-culture peppered sound bites to examine the real choices Osborne has presented the nation.

 
Jobs
Osborne loves to harp on about the coalition government’s job creation miracle. But as the TUC found last year, the vast majority of jobs created in the past few years have been low-wage ‘McJobs’.

 
Four out of five of the nearly 600,000 jobs created since 2010 have been in industries like retail and hospitality, whose wages average ÂŁ7.95 an hour, provide little opportunity for promotion and continue the vicious cycle of working poverty.
Enterprise
Osborne and his Tory cronies recently crowed about an enterprising nation of self-starting entrepreneurs. But as UniteLive reported in August, the UK’s quickly growing number of self-employed individuals masks a hidden economy of poverty wages and part-time work.
And the most pernicious reality of our so-called “self-employment nation”? The illegal and incredibly pervasive practice of money-hungry firms mis-classifying workers as self-employed to avoid paying taxes.
Security
The current government creates scapegoats to promote fear among its own citizens—all in the name of security. But the security that really matters – job security, the security of knowing that hard work will grant at least a basic standard of living, is still a mirage for most.
A survey found last year that British workers are feeling less secure and more pressured at work than at any time in the past 20 years.
Prosperity
Under the current government, prosperity is a choice only for those who are already prosperous. Runaway CEO pay has skyrocketed, just as wages for those on the lower end of the income distribution have irretrievably fallen.
Investment
The latest Tory-inspired, backdoor investment deal is the transatlantic trade and investment partnership (TTIP), an EU-US trade agreement that throws open the door to unbridled privatisation of the NHS, as UniteLive pointed out last month.
If TTIP – a deal that David Cameron lauded as having “great potential”—comes to pass, profit-hungry US health firms could end up running large sections of the NHS. And if the government tried to wrest public control of the NHS from private hands, under the terms of the deal, firms can sue the state in secret trials.
Fairness
A fair society is an equal society. But over the life of the present coalition government, income inequality in the country has skyrocketed. Osborne’s commitment to cutting benefits for those most in need while simultaneously proposing taxes which reward those who are already able to save will only further propagate an already deeply divided country of haves and have-nots.
Freedom
Like prosperity, freedom in Toryspeak translates into freedom for only some – those at the top. The passage of the Tory-backed “gagging bill” earlier this year is an unremittent assault on the freedom of speech and protest for average citizens and their representative institutions such as trade unions.
But, on the other side of the fence, in-house corporate lobbying is given free reign from public scrutiny.
The only “future” Osborne has given us is a future we’re already familiar with. And if the Tory conference is anything to go by—as the party reveals policies pushing more austerity cuts and an emboldened corporate class—our future will already be chosen for us.