Just when you thought you had seen the pits of this year’s Christmas ad spree Labour release a re-hashed version of Do They Know Its Christmas and take the spoils at the final hurdle.
Bravo them. Just when I thought I’d had my fill of abject humiliation for this year our shadow cabinet decide to turn up the cringe one more time. And what a howler it is.
To the tune of the Band Aid classic, it goes:
Christmas is hard….. On the national mi-ni-mum wage.
At Christmas time…. we give but some employers take.
And we know that they have plenty….. But they give out less and less.
Stand up against their greed this Christmas time.
I won’t subject you to more, but needlessness to say this video will soon be confined to the vaults of humiliation alongside the likes of the Ed Stone for eternity.
But as cringe-worthy as it may be, the underlying message is an undeniably important one. This Christmas, as established and fledgling businesses count their annual takings, millions of British people will struggle to put food on the table because in-work poverty is increasing at rates we have seldom seen before.
Amazon workers are camping outside the depots they work in, workers across the country are walking out on strike because of basic employment demands and millions of people are now working on flexible contracts and on terms that craftily work-around worker’s rights that we have fought for years to instil.
For all those disrupted by the staff striking on Southern, or BA, or Asda, take a moment to consider that these firms earned multi-millions of pounds in profit last year, often more. And did you know that according to a recent Unite survey, half of Mixed Fleet British Airways staff have taken on second jobs to make ends meet and 84% reported experiencing stress and depression since joining BA because of their financial circumstances?
As our honourable members from the Labour Party remind us, it’s time for us to resent the damage being caused by big business, not people.