How gullible would you have to be to believe the Tory "hardworking people" propaganda

David Cameron and the Tory propaganda machine have been trying ever so hard to establish their absurd Orwellian "war is peace" style propaganda narrative that they are on the side of hardworking people. 

Anyone who knows anything about politics knows that the Tories actively work against the interests of ordinary workers because they represent the interests of capital and inherited privilege. Just follow the money - the vast majority of Tory party funding clearly comes from millionaire businessmen, bankers, private health companies and the idle inherited wealth nobility, so why would they take the side of the workers when they're reliant on the bosses to bankroll their party?

It says a lot about the staggering levels of contempt the Tories must have for the general public that they think they can make people believe that they're on the side of the workers, while they're busy impoverishing millions of working families, attacking our labour rights and completely ignoring the plight of thousands of hardworking British steelworkers.

Tax Credit cuts
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The Tories are pushing ahead with their plan to slash Tax Credits for millions of working families, despite the fact they gave assurances before the 2015 General Election that they had no such plans. They attempt to justify it with lies about how increases in the minimum wage will offset the losses, but everyone knows the Tax Credit cuts are being imposed long before the paltry increases in the minimum wage go through, meaning an estimated 200,000 children being thrown into poverty.

It's also worth noting that millions of people who are self-employed will lose a big chunk of their Tax Credits, but will not benefit at all from increases in the minimum wage. Impoverishing people who are working hard to establish their own businesses (and their families) seems like odd behaviour for a party that is always harping on about entrepreneurship and standing up for hardworking people doesn't it?

November 2015 update: The House of Lords voted against Osborne's Tax Credit cuts then a backbench Tory rebellion threatened to derail the proposals completely so Osborne was forced to scrap the Tax Credit cuts, but he simply figured out other ways of loading the burden of ideological austerity onto the poor and ordinary [source]

Wage repression
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The mainstream media rarely ever mention the fact that the Tory ideological austerity agenda has coincided with the longest sustained decline in workers' wages since records began.

What makes this calamitous decline in wages all the worse is that the tiny super-rich minority have literally doubled their wealth since the global financial sector insolvency crisis.

If anyone can look at the workers of Britain suffering the longest decline in wages on record while the richest people in Britain literally doubled their wealth and then conclude that the Tory government is on the side of the workers, they must be so far removed from reality that they represent a clear and present danger to themselves and to their families.

Attacking the trade unions
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The UK already has some of the most severe anti-trade union laws in the developed world, yet the Tories are intent on introducing even harsher rules that seem to have been deliberately designed to make trade union activity almost impossible by rendering abstentions as stronger votes against strike action than explicit votes against the strike action!

One of the worst things about these new anti-trade union rules is the staggering hypocrisy of many of the Tory politicians who promote the idea that trade unions should be subject to minimum turnout rules. Tories like Boris Johnson (who was elected Mayor of London on a 38% turnout) promoting the idea that trade unions should achieve a 50% turnout for strikes to go ahead is a classic example of the Tory "one set of rules for people like us, and a completely different set of rules for the plebs" mentality.

Trade unions are democratic institutions that represent the interests of some 7 million working people in the UK. Anyone who believes that the Tories can simultaneously attack the trade unions and represent the interests of workers must have an incredibly level of immunity to cognitive dissonance. 

Trashing workers' rights
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Not a lot of people know that the Tories actually allow their wealthy party donors to write anti-worker legislation for them. I don't blame people for not knowing, after all, the mainstream media barely mentioned the scandalous Beecroft Report.

One of the foulest bits of anti-worker legislation the Tories have introduced is a new set of rules that compel the victim to pay £1,200 in fees in order to claim unfair dismissal against their employer. Thus if your boss sacks you (for your political views, your age, your ethnicity, your gender, your trade union activities, your pregnancy or your refusal to suck his cock) you'll have to find £1,200 in order to seek compensation, and if you can't find it, your boss will get away with it.

The UK steel industry
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David Cameron and the Tories have turned a blind eye to the plight of the British steel industry as it is crushed under a tsunami of artificially cheap Chinese steel. The Tory belief in hardline free-market dogma means they'll never intervene in order to save British industries and British jobs like the Italian government did to protect their steel industry.

In the last few weeks over 5,000 steel workers have lost their jobs, but Cameron and the Tories were far too busy prostrating themselves before the Chinese and signing staggeringly one-sided contracts with them (that look much more like terms of economic surrender than trade deals to be celebrated) to even care.

The Tory contempt for the plight of these steel workers is so extreme that the unelected Tory peer Michael Heseltine even said that the newly redundant steelworkers should be happy to have lost their jobs now because "if you are going to lose your job this is probably as good a time" as part of his ludicrous and deeply disrespectful spiel about how the British steel industry has to be left to die because of "market forces".

It should be obvious to anyone that the "market forces" argument against state intervention is a load of absolute drivel if the market that is forcing the destruction of our industry is the heavily state controlled Chinese steel market.

Conclusion

I think the clearest conclusion from all of this is that the Tories hold the general public in utter contempt if they think they can convince us that they're the party for hardworking people.

Not only are the Tories almost entirely funded by capital and inherited privilege, their appalling track record as outlined above is concrete proof that they actively oppose the interests of hardworking people. They just think that there are enough hopelessly gullible workers out there to lap up their Orwellian propaganda and head off to vote in favour of a party that holds them in such contempt and works ceaselessly against the interests of ordinary working people like them.

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