“Enough is enough. People in the UK are dying because of the Cost of Living Crisis” by Salma Yaqoob at the Peoples Assembly rally in Birmingham

Enough is Enough Speech at Peoples Assembly rally outside Conservative Party Conference, Sunday October 2nd 2022

This week the Tories gave the richest in our society – those earning over £150,000 – £45 billion in tax cuts. And the Bank of England was forced to spend £65 billion to avert a pensions wipe-out. That’s £110 billion pounds. Let that sink in.

That’s enough money to pay our nurses, carers, posties, and railway workers a decent wage. Far more actually than what they are asking for in the strike action they are being forced to undertake. After having been told they had to endure pay restraint year after year for the last 10 years, whilst those at the top have seen pay and profits increase astronomically. There is no austerity or ‘cost of living crisis’ for them – only opportunity and obscene profiteering. 

The British public, renowned for its patience, its queues, its aversion to causing a fuss has had enough. Workers are saying we refuse to be poor any more. This weekend we have seen huge rallies from Plymouth to Glasgow with workers from different sectors and diverse communities coming together. This isn’t militancy. It’s about need. For the first time in a generation the anger, frustration and despair experienced as individualised anxiety is being channelled collectively through solidarity. And that’s why it is important that we have come out together today. 

Because this government would have us believe that the simple refusal to remain poor is unreasonable, greedy – and an impossible demand to meet. That ordinary workers’ pay should continue to be ‘restrained’ even though that has created a situation such that right here in Birmingham, second city of one of the richest countries in the world and host to the Tory Party Conference, half the population lives in poverty. That includes 130,000 children, the majority of whom live in a household with a working parent, but whose wages are not enough to meet basic needs. Low pay is the issue here. I work in the NHS and I find it heart-breaking that some of my own colleagues rely on foodbanks to feed their families despite working long shifts caring for others. 

We are seeing people in our poorest areas dying 10 years earlier than those living in the most well-off areas. Addressing inequality is not the politics of envy, it is literally a matter of life and death. That’s why there has been an unprecedented call by NHS leaders for the government to change course as more lives will be lost. Babies and children will develop lung conditions in cold, damp homes and need hospitalisation and young people will suffer completely avoidable and costly life-long physical and mental health issues.

Listen carefully, and you will hear that the lectures on pay restraint are only for the working class. The government cheerfully supports the huge increases in pay for those at the top, including now the removal of caps on bankers’ bonuses. 

The government and their elite sponsors know full well that paying people a decent wage is not impossible. They just want to keep workers in their place. They want to keep us in a dreamless sleep. To stop us dreaming of better they sedate us with lullabies of ‘we are all in this together’ and scare us with the mantra of ‘there is no alternative’.

This week’s £110 billion intervention benefiting the rich has exposed that as lie. It has shown that money is there to pay fair wages and pay properly for public services if they want, and they can do it quickly too. It has exposed the truth that it is a political CHOICE to allow devastating inequalities in this country to grow. It is a political CHOICE to prioritise the wants of the most rich and powerful over the needs of everyone else. The government has been brazen, the curtain has certainly been pulled aside. And even those who want to be soothed by the lullabies are being jolted awake.

The government could have kept energy bills affordable in the short term with a windfall tax. It chose not to. Profits have never been greater. According to the Treasury’s own leaked estimates UK gas producers and electricity generators are set to make EXCESS profits of £170 billion over the next 2 years. The majority of people in this country support a windfall tax and so self-evident is this solution that the energy companies themselves indicated they would not object. The worst their shareholders would face is slightly less profits. It wouldn’t make a dent on their lifestyles. They certainly would not face going hungry or losing their home or becoming sick because they can’t afford to heat their home. But that’s what this government is knowingly condemning millions of ordinary people to. 

They justify supporting the rich by saying their extra wealth will trickle down. But 40 years of this extremist economic orthodoxy has seen only contempt, not wealth, trickle down from the top. Those losing out are not just the poorest, the most vulnerable, and the just about managing, but even people who had not had to think about basic costs of living before. People running small businesses are seeing their livelihoods crash as they can’t keep up with inflation and energy costs.

There will be tens of thousands of ‘excess deaths’ this winter. A sanitised way of talking about the horrific fact that mainly vulnerable old, disabled and sick people, including babies will die because families cannot afford to keep their homes warm, or afford enough healthy food. 

The Tories say they don’t believe in state intervention and redistribution of wealth. Except they do – just in ways that ensure large transfers of wealth from the poor, working and middle classes to the most rich. 

And to add insult to injury, they are claiming they are helping us out with the energy price cap. When basically it is a massive state handout – estimated to be up to £200 billion – to the companies who have benefited most from the energy crisis. A debt that we and our children will have to pay back, not that we were asked. 

It’s interesting to see how the ‘divide and rule’ tactic they have successfully deployed to rule over populations in imperial conquests abroad, whilst exploiting them, is cunningly deployed right here at home. 

The ruling elites want us to be a society that is suspicious and mistrustful of its own people. The Tories are masters of this, but I don’t forget that Labour governments are not been immune from this – waging illegal wars abroad, ushering in privatisation of the NHS and building a surveillance state when in power. That’s why with talk of an early General Election with polls indicating a Tory implosion – really what else do they have to do to lose? – we have to keep mobilising to not allow complacency and poor ambition within the Labour leadership which has spent more effort fighting its own members than the Tories of late.

But we are here because we believe in a different vision of society. A society that is caring, that is kind. Where those who are most vulnerable, most in need of help, are not seen as lazy, or scrounging, or robbing the rest of us for whatever they can get. Where we do not turn our backs on those facing hard times and where we are not afraid to admit that, if not now then we all at some point, need help.

The elites are good at keeping us paralysed in fear and hopelessness. But many of us have dared to dream. We know we deserve better, believe we can do better and we are going to do better.

And we are not asking we are demanding, and that’s what they fear. They fear us standing up and knowing our own power. I haven’t come here to protest the Tory Party Conference. I’ve come here to be with you in solidarity. They fear us waking up and standing together. 

They say ‘winter is coming’. I say we have already been living in winter for the last 10 years. But the spring is now coming. I see the green shoots of resistance in the huge rallies up and down this country – from Plymouth to Bristol, to Birmingham, Bradford, Newcastle and Glasgow people are saying enough is enough. And we know words are not enough. We need peaceful civil disobedience. I support the call to refuse to pay for extra high energy bills while energy companies are enjoying massive profits- once a million people have signed up to refuse paying theirs. Because in unity there is strength. The poll tax protests brought down Thatcher’s government when people then said enough is enough and refused in huge numbers to pay. 

Our movements to support climate justice, demand a dignified wage, secure housing, enough food for everyone and stand against racist division are coming together.

The whispers of dissent are becoming a roar, and the streams of frustration are becoming torrents of anger.  

We are leaving no one behind. We only say we’ve crossed the finish line when the last of us does. Because no one is alone. And there is such a thing as society. Enough is Enough.