From The Liberty Wall – National Liberal Trade Unionists – Syria: Money For War But Not Public Services!
Syria: Ordinary working families will not gain anything from any future conflict
“ONE THING that can be absolutely guaranteed is that ordinary British, American or Syrian working families will not gain a thing from any future conflict. They will be the losers. The only winners – as usual – will be big business and the banks.”
That’s the view of Glen Nicklasson, Chairman of the National Liberal Trade Unionists who was speaking after another week of claims and counter-claims about the situation in Syria. Without getting too bogged down in the details of the apparent chemical attack on Syrian civilians – as terrible as it was – he noted that it still hadn’t been proven beyond a doubt who had launched the attack.
He also questioned the motives of those who seem to be absolutely aching to teach Syria’s President Bashar Hafez al-Assad a military lesson. He said:
“It’s ironic that ‘liberals’ like US President Barack Obama, US Secretary of State John Kerry, UK Prime Minister David Cameron, UK Foreign Secretary William Hague and Lord Ashdown are acting like ‘hawks’. The ‘evidence’ that they’ve presented so far is sketchy to say the very least. They seem to me to be overly anxious to flex their military might. Why?
Compare this to the actions of ex-KGB man and President of Russia, Vladimir Putin. He’s an absolute ‘dove’ compared to the others. Indeed, it looks like his intervention has – for the moment – prevented the US and UK from launching a military strike on Syria.”
Devon-based Mr. Nicklasson continued by exposing the hypocrisy of David Cameron. He noted that Cameron was one of the main driving forces behind the Con-Dem Government’s Austerity Agenda:
“Mr. Cameron is responsible for slashing thousands of public sector jobs. Workers in the civil service or health and education sectors – effectively the backbone of Britain – have lost their jobs.
The private sector has also slashed jobs by the shed load. How many here have been thrown on the scrap heap?
Attacks on the elderly, single parents and the disabled – driven by economics – continue on what appears to be a daily basis. Indeed, look at the misery caused by the Bedroom Tax.
Mr. Cameron ‘justifies’ all this by saying that there’s ‘no money.’
I find this situation very odd. Apparently he hasn’t got the money to keep people in jobs and pay them decent wages – yet he can suddenly find the money to wage war on Syria! How is that?”
Even laying aside the question of money – indeed, how much would Cameron’s proposed military strike on Syria have cost? – Mr. Nicklasson noted that waging war is hardly in the interest of ordinary working families.
“In any conflict, Syrian civilians will inevitably become ‘collateral damage.’ And in the event of the US (and eventually even Britain) putting ‘boots on the ground’ the people who’ll usually get hurt are soldiers from ordinary working-class backgrounds. Many of these youngsters will have joined up for a classic reason – to escape grinding poverty and unemployment at home.
And once the dust has settled, who’ll be pocketing hundreds of thousands in ‘reconstruction projects’? The NLTU isn’t a betting organization. But if we were, we’d feel that it’d be pretty safe to wager that big business and the banks will be the real winners here.”
http://nationalliberal.org/liberty-wall-3/national-liberal-trade-unionist
http://nationalliberal.org/from-the-liberty-wall-%e2%80%93-national-liberal-trades-unionists
http://nationalliberal.org/magna-carta-comment-%e2%80%93-nltu
Date: September 16, 2013
Categories: Liberty Wall