Wednesday 30 November 2016

Tory economic platitudes


David Cameron kept saying that austerity meant "paying down the debt", but in six years his government borrowed way more than every single Labour government in history combined and ended up nearly doubling the national debt.

George Osborne's favourite economic platitude was "all in this together". During his time as chancellor the super-rich minority doubled their wealth while ordinary workers suffered the longest sustained decline in real wages since records began (the only country in the developed world to suffer a comparably bad wage collapse is crisis ridden Greece).

Cameron and Osborne are gone, but Theresa May is keeping up the Tory policy of addressing the public in mind-numbingly stupid platitudes.

On the economy she says she believes in "living within our means" but her Chancellor Philip Hammond has admitted that the Tories will still be borrowing £billions in 2021, 11 years after George Osborne promised to eliminate the deficit within 5 years!

On Brexit Theresa May is even worse. People keep pressing her on what on earth the Tory economic strategy for Brexit is going to be, but she keeps falling back on the repetition of the tired tautological platitude "Brexit means Brexit".

The Tory figureheads at the top of the UK government have changed, but they're still talking in exactly the same kind of over-simplistic and staggeringly dishonest platitudes as their predecessors. The worst thing about this is that despite (or perhaps because of) all the idiot-fodder platitudes, the Tories are currently more popular than at any point since the Lib-Dems enabled them into power in 2010!

There are clearly millions of people out there who prefer to think in ridiculously over-simplified economic platitudes rather than doing just a little bit of thinking about the economic realities we're facing.

Unfortunately the Tories look guaranteed to hold onto power until the British people learn to stop believing in Tory economic fairy stories and actually start thinking about the economic issues for themselves.


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