Wednesday 10 October 2018

Theresa May's pyramid scheme of deception



Theresa May's announcement that she's going to scrap Tory austerity dogma is so utterly deceitful that it's a Tory con on top of a Tory con.

Austerity is a con

To anyone with a basic understanding of macroeconomics it was obvious that Tory austerity dogma was a con from the beginning, because when the private sector rapidly reduces lending because of an economic crisis, it's massively counter-productive for the government to deliberately exacerbate the problem by reducing economic demand through massive ideologically driven cutbacks to expenditure on infrastructure and services, and a deliberate campaign of wage repression against the general public.

After eight years of this ideologically driven hard-right madness the dire consequences are obvious: The target to eliminate the budget deficit by early 2015 has been spectacularly missed and rolled back to 2031 (21 years to do what they said they'd achieve in 5); British workers have suffered the longest sustained collapse in the value of their wages on record; public services are in chaos; the UK is being left behind in productivity growth; local councils are going bankrupt under the strain of the cuts; and the post-crisis recovery is by far the weakest in over a Century.

On the other hand the mega-rich minority have more than doubled their wealth; the biggest corporations have been lavished with extraordinary tax cuts; the bankers who trashed the economy in the first place are taking home bigger salaries and bonuses than ever; MPs wages have risen way above inflation; and the wealthy speculator class have benefited from one rip-off Tory privatisation give-away and outsourcing scam after another.

Tory austerity is not ending

Despite the fact that Tory austerity dogma has demonstrably failed to do what the Tories promised it would when they introduced it, they have no real intention of scrapping it, because it's been so damned good for their wealthy backers.

Just two days before Theresa May announced austerity was over, her Chancellor Philip Hammond gave a speech at the same Tory conference venue promising to continue the austerity cuts.

When Jeremy Corbyn called Theresa May out on her dishonest claim that austerity was ending, she spat fury and bile at him in order to avoid admitting that Tory austerity dogma is continuing when it comes to the NHS, policing, local government funding, public sector wages, and the continuation of catastrophically low levels of infrastructure investment under Tory misrule.

All the bile and bluster was intended to obscure the fact that Tory austerity dogma isn't ending at all, they're just seeking to rebrand this toxic economic fanaticism with new words.

All that will change is that Tories will use the friendlier-sounding term "fiscal responsibility" to hide the fact that they're continuing with their ruinous austerity cuts.

Dishonest to the core

You could kind of respect them a bit if the Tories somehow had the decency and integrity to admit that thay made a terrible and damaging economic mistake when they imposed ideologically-driven austerity fanaticism after the bankers' crisis, and if they promised to follow Jeremy Corbyn's lead with a genuine investment-based economic policy designed to to undo some of the worst of the damage they did, but that isn't what Theresa May has done at all.

What she's done is realised that the term "austerity" is a tainted brand, but she's got no intention of stopping it because the mega-rich beneficiaries of it who bankroll her party wouldn't let her stop enriching them at the expense of everyone else, even if she wanted to.

So her reaction to the fact that ever more people are waking up to the fact that Tory austerity dogma is a con is to attempt to con them all over again by simply pretending she's stopping it with a crude and shockingly dishonest rebranding exercise to continue imposing the exact same policies under a shiny new name.

It's simply a con on top of a con, and it just goes to show how gullible most Tory supporters must be that they gladly go along with this economically ruinous Tory pyramid scheme of deception.

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