WE ALL know the deal. It wasn’t made by us, but we uphold our end, nonetheless. Those who can, work and in exchange we all benefit from each other’s labour and are the better for it. For a time that seemed to bear fruit. Our grandparents lived longer than their grandparents, and our parents had more choice than their parents, yet the current bargain is leaving our potential rotting on the vine.

British life expectancy progress has reportedly stalled. But the retirement age continues to rise. Much of our lives will continue to be spent in labour.

Workers have suffered stagnant or falling wages since 2008, yet the cost of housing, food and energy have reached record highs leaving little, if anything, left at the end of the month.

Today, we’re working to live and living to work.

One in four adults in England will experience a mental health problem this year while 30 per cent of the UK population live with one or more such long-term conditions, robbing us of the freedom to enjoy what time we do have outside of work.

So, yes, we are working, but we are not feeling the benefit, and it’s no surprise that we are asking, in increasing numbers: what are we working for?

In fact, as Morning Star readers know, under the current economic system, we are largely working for private profit. Whether through the labour we exchange for currency or the currency we exchange for goods and services, at every opportunity profit is extracted and, through the global economic system, pools among an ever more concentrated elite.
But that is not what we’re told by those in power.

We’re told that either “you’re poorer because your neighbour is taking more than their fair share” or “you’re poorer because the people you elected to manage things previously did a bad job.”

These are red herrings which, though struggled to gain traction for a time, are now being heard by a much wider audience.

The latter is proving especially unconvincing from a Prime Minister who is seen as “untrustworthy” and a British government which swathes of the public think is handling many key issues badly. So, without a credible alternative, the former is taking root.

People do not simply give up, it’s not in our nature. And what we saw this weekend in London, and what we are seeing across the country outside asylum detention centres, is the result of people having been squeezed too tight for too long.

It’s not too late to counteract this sentiment, but to do so we must put forward a persuasive vision for change — and deliver it.

It’s not complicated. Every person alive requires the same fundamentals to survive: air, water, food and shelter. Fortunately, these necessities, or the resources required to create them, are all naturally occurring — given by the earth freely so long as we nurture its environment.

Yet as a species we have allowed the profit motive to dominate our environment, withdrawing these necessities ever further from our reach, until we are utterly dependent on this intermediary system choking our supply to these life-giving ingredients.

Doctors say UK air pollution is killing more than 500 people a week. According to the Trussell Trust more than 14.1 million people in the UK faced hunger in the past year. Serious water pollution incidents are up 60 per cent, according to the government’s Environment Agency, and homelessness is on the rise all around the UK, with one in every 200 households experiencing it.

And we are not alone in this. Globally, an estimated seven million are killed by air pollution each year, 300 hundred million are at risk of death from starvation, 1.8 billion are facing absolute water scarcity, and more than 1.8 billion people worldwide lack adequate housing.

Clearly, any vision of change must take an internationalist perspective and seek to tackle the system, which for too long has been allowed to put short-term profit before human life.

Without this systemic change no amount of admirable local changes will be enough. Yes, the British Labour government is recruiting GPs and teachers, bringing rail into public ownership, and ending zero-hours contracts — as a people’s government should. But it has also cut benefits, rejected a wealth tax and armed a genocide, delivering not for workers, but the bosses who pick their pockets. We need an urgent alternative.

A tax on wealth to show a statement of intent. A relentlessness drive to democratise our economy and close the inequality gap. And, most of all, a vision. Of hope, to rally, to reassure and to reunite our communities.

The alternative is the far right. We saw that this weekend.

The number of the discontented is swelling. And it will only grow.

We ignore them at our peril.