Metaphors don’t come more satirical than this. The weather refuses to let Spring arrive, with the coldest Easter in living memory. The Chancellor chose April 1st, aka April’s Fool day, to effect the most draconian cuts to benefits and services yet, and news from the rest of Europe anticipates more of the same: austerity followed by more crisis followed by more austerity (for the poor, that is, with record tax cuts and tax free deposits in tax havens for the very rich).

A bedroom tax is today introduced to force people on benefits into smaller houses, to make room for larger families. The idea would not be so bad if there were smaller flats to go to. In reality it is a way to tax the poor and/or make them homeless.

A substantial reduction of Local Services as Council Tax goes to local authorities, already experiencing a severe reduction in their funding. Care for the elderly, the infirm and the young are already suffering together with library closures and reductions of school budgets to give preference to ideologically suspect Academies.

The loss of Legal Aid for the low end of middle income families leaves their potential rights unprotected.

The National Health Service, Britain’s highest achievement and one of the best value-for-money systems in the world enters its final stage in the drive towards privatisation started by Margaret Thatcher in the 70s and 80s.

Tax cuts for high earners: the 50 pence bracket disappears, a present to the City and Financial high flyers that fund the Conservative Party.

Various changes (cuts) in the benefits system to overhaul the way people with disabilities and the long term unemployed manage to survive. When they try to challenge the inevitable mistakes this chaotic system is about to introduce, they will find that Legal Aid funded services no longer exist.

There is no justification for these cuts; it has already been shown that austerity shrinks the economy (“double dip recession”, hurray for slightly humorous metaphors!) which leads to more recession with more unemployment and an increase in the benefits budget. But here we have ideology. The State must shrink, everything must be privatised, competition and individualism must rule interpersonal and economic relationships and if poor people have a much shorter life expectancy, well, that’s a kind of euthanasia many feel OK about.

So where is our Easter miracle, death and resurrection? Well, actually, the FSA (Financial Services Authority) has died and is reborn as the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), part of the Bank of England, which will look after financial services firms whilst the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) will be the City’s behavioural watchdog. The much announced future total separation of retail and investment banking to prevent the casino-induced economic disasters of the last few years is nowhere to be seen, resisted as it is by the Financial Sector.

In the midst of these cuts Britain is still spending a fortune and planning to go ahead with the replacement of Trident, its nuclear weapon system. Something is not quite right here.

Economic Violence kills

Violence: “an unjust or unwarranted exertion of force or power, as against rights or laws” (On-line Dictionary). Since violence begets more violence we can only see the actions of this new stage as a provocation.

In “The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better” Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argue that there are “pernicious effects that inequality has on societies: eroding trust, increasing anxiety and illness, (and) encouraging excessive consumption”. It claims that for each of eleven different health and social problems: physical health, mental health, drug abuse, education, imprisonment, obesity, social mobility, trust and community life, violence, teenage pregnancies, and child well-being, outcomes are significantly worse in more unequal rich countries.

A new system is being born with alternative economic forms combining Commoning, Cooperatives, Peer to Peer lending, local Credit Unions, Co-management, workers participation in profits, crowdfunding and applying humanist principles to small and medium industries. Its invisibility in the mass Media speaks loudly of the commitment of such media with the big corporations that manipulate political power today.

One of the responses we can give to the British Chancellor is to spread information about new initiatives and participate in the wider discussion about what the new system will look like when they finally realise this one can no longer be fixed.