A letter to Tory reactionaries

Dear "blame welfare" ranter,

So you just dropped by to share your view that "it's all Labour's fault", that "welfare spending caused the crisis" or some minor variation on these themes.

If you're gullible enough to ignore the mountains of evidence to the contrary and allow yourself to believe the absurd narrative that the ongoing global financial crisis was caused by excessive welfare spending by the Labour party in the UK, rather than reckless over-leveraged gambling (on crap like sub-prime mortgage based derivatives, Irish bank bonds, Spanish property assets or Greek treasury bonds), Ponzi scheming and outright criminality in the neoliberalised global financial sector, then I pity you.

Neo-Labour were pretty awful, but you'd have to be extremely credulous to not only accept the absurd "it's all Labour's fault" narrative, but to actually parrot it out on public forums as if it were you're own remarkable insight into the causes of the ongoing crisis, rather than as an absurdly counter-factual narrative that's been passively absorbed into your stunted political worldview, via the process of cultural osmosis.

You probably believe the right-wing "scrounger narratives" and all of Iain Duncan Smith's made-up statistics too, don't you? I mean, why would you want to allow yourself to feel like a fucking dupe that's being shat on from above by a cabal of corrupt bankers, corporate fat-cats and self-serving politicians, when you can feel all smug and superior by blaming the unemployed (who are actually victims of the financial sector implosion) or the disabled, that you place below yourself in the social pecking order.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you are not just some kind of sadist that gets erotic kicks out of thinking about the real life consequences of the policies you support. I'll hope that you don't actually enjoy thinking about the hundreds of thousands of people reduced to such desperation that they would beg food from the ever growing number of foodbanks, or the suffering of the kids that have to go without basics because their parents are being financially persecuted by the Tories. I'll assume that you're actually a decent kind of person that is capable of basic human empathy, but that you're just so intellectually lazy that you've passively bought into all of this brazenly incoherent Tory anti-welfare propaganda, without actually considering the real world consequences.

Many of you are so dumb that you even support these welfare attacks, despite the fact that you are amongst the principal victims! You cheer when the Tories cap benefits increases to a significantly below inflation 1%, even though most of these cuts will be felt by working families. You don't care that in-work benefits like Working Tax Credits, Child Tax Credits, Income Support, Child Benefit, Statutory Sick Pay, Maternity & Paternity Pay and Housing Benefit will all be capped too. You're just so overjoyed that the Tories are imposing even more financial hardship on the "idle scrounger" bogeymen you've read all about in the pages of the Mail/Sun/Telegraph/Times/Express, that you don't even pause to think what the financial consequences will be for you, your wider family and your friends.

Perhaps you really are dumb enough to imagine that you'll somehow be better off if those below you in society are made to suffer? But are you really naive enough to believe that any money saved through the harsh welfare reforms that you applaud will find it's way into the pockets of hard working people, rather than just being distributed by the Tories to the already wealthy via more absurd privatisation and outsourcing scams or through another round of bankers' bailouts?

I would be utterly sickened by you lot, if yours was an overtly conscious decision to blame (and seek vengeance upon) the weak and needy, instead of the people that actually caused the crisis. But people like you tend to be so cognitively illiterate that you don't even realise that you are being played by the Tories and the right-wing press like the reactionary fools that you are.

Will you ever wake up and realise that the ones that are pointing at your unemployed or disabled neighbour as the cause of the current crisis, are also the ones that have continued making more, and more and more money, whilst people like you (and the people you blame) have borne the weight of austerity? I doubt it. Most of you seem happy enough in your bubbles of self-righteous "I'm alright Jack" self-interest. You seem happy enough to passively absorb the structurally incoherent anti-welfare propaganda, and to endlessly repeat it in lieu of actually having any political insights of your own. You seem happy enough as long as someone you define as being below you in the social pecking order is being made to suffer more than you are.

I hope you wake up and begin having political thoughts of your own. You don't have to become as left-wing or libertarian as I am by any stretch. You've just got to realise that just because the Tory party has inflicted brutal financial buggery on your unemployed/long-term disabled neighbour, doesn't mean you're going to enjoy giving the financial blowjob they're demanding from you.

Scant regards

Tom (Another Angry Voice) 

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