10 humiliating Tory cock ups from just the last week alone

1. The National Insurance U-turn

The mainstream media desperately tried to turn the absurd Tory U-turn on their proposed National Insurance hike into an attack on Jeremy Corbyn, but the truth of it is that the "Corbyn missed an open goal" narrative is a sideshow designed to deflect attention away from the abject incompetence of the Tory party leadership.

It's absolutely clear that Philip Hammond was far too busy writing jokes to put in his budget speech to bother briefing his fellow Tory MPs or the pro-Tory press that he was going to casually break the Tory manifest commitment not to raise National Insurance. The week of absolutely ridiculous Tory excuses being made against a backdrop of almost unanimous condemnation was followed by a hastily executed U-turn. It was a total shambles, and anyone guilty of trying to make the story about Jeremy Corbyn's Prime Minister's Questions performance is clearly attempting to deflect attention away from the abject incompetence of the actual government.

2. A record fine

The Tory party were handed a record £70,000 fine for their dodgy election expenses during the 2015 General Election campaign. Not only did they misdeclare over £100,000 in expenses as national rather than local expenses, they also totally failed to declare another £100,000+ at all. The £70,000 fine was less than one third of the value of the expenses they scammed, but the maximum allowable by law.

3. Criminal investigations

12 police forces have handed files to the Crown Prosecution Service over the 2015 Tory General Election fraud and Tory MPs are being interviewed under caution about their roles in the scandal. There is plenty of evidence that the Tory party broke the law by misdeclaring local campaign spending as national spending. 

It's becoming ever clearer that the Tories won the 2015 general Election with a coordinated breech of election spending rules designed to financially dope their way to victory in a load of marginal constituencies.  The only way the CPS can avoid accusations of a politically motivated whitewash will be to find some people to prosecute for the blatant criminality, which means they will have to decide whether to charge the MPs themselves, or their election agents. 

4. The NHS nursing crisis

Freedom of Information requests have revealed that the number of EU nurses quitting the NHS has risen to an all time high, while the number of new nurses arriving from the EU has slumped by 92%. Meanwhile there is a huge recruitment crisis going on as the number of British people applying to train as nurses has slumped by almost 10,000 as a result of Theresa May scrapping the NHS bursaries that helped trainee nurses qualify without assuming vast mountains of debt.

5. David Davis' admission

The Tory Brexit secretary David Davis made an absolutely extraordinary admission that very few people seem to have grasped the appalling significance of. As he was being grilled by the Brexit select committee Davis admitted that the Tory government have done absolutely no research into how bad a retaliatory hard Brexit would be for the UK economy and the British people. What makes this admission so extraordinary is that it shows that when Theresa May put on her tartan clown costume and made her do as we say or we'll blow up a 'hard Brexit' economic bomb threat to the EU, she hadn't even bothered to investigate how bad the economic damage will actually be if the EU call her bluff. 

6. Scotland

If there's one thing that's most likely to drive Scotland towards independence it's an English Tory Prime Minister expressing her determination to totally ignore Scottish democracy. The Scottish parliament will vote to hold an independence referendum to give the Scottish people the chance to escape the appalling consequences of a hard Tory Brexit that they voted so strongly against, and if Theresa May refuses to allow it because of her determination to drag Scotland out of the EU, and out of the Single Market against their will, she'll drive countless people into the welcoming arms of the Scottish independence campaign.

David Cameron will always be remembered as the man who gambled the entire future of the UK in return for a little bit of short-term party political gain and lost. This week it's looking more and more likely that Theresa May is going to go down in history as the woman who's bossy authoritarianism ensured the break-up of the United Kingdom.

7. Child Poverty

The government's own figures revealed that 100,000 more children are living in poverty than last year. Of the 4 million children in the UK who are growing up in poverty, two thirds come from working families. As even more ideologically driven Tory cuts to in-work benefits really begin to bite over the next three years the child poverty rate looks set to continue increasing, and the proportion of kids in poverty from working families looks set to increase too.

Only the most savagely indifferent of Tory apologists could possibly try to argue that any kids, let alone kids from working families deserve to grow up in poverty.

8. Zero Hours Contracts

Office for National Statistics figures revealed that the number of UK workers on exploitative Zero Hours Contracts rose to an all time record high of 905,000, an increase of 13%.

Last year New Zealand banned Zero Hours Contracts, but in Tory Britain ever more people are finding themselves stuck in exploitative and unstable Zero Hours jobs.

9. The Housing crisis

The Office for National Statistics have revealed that UK houses are the least affordable they have ever been. Since 1997 house prices have risen 259% while wages have risen only 68% in the same period. This means that the the average house now costs 7.6x average annual earnings as compared to 3.6x in 1997.

In the 1980s the Tories used to bang on and on about the importance of home ownership, but nowadays the percentage of people who own their own home is in freefall, house prices have become the most unaffordable they've ever been, house building remains in the worst slump since the 1920s, a massive horde of virtually unregulated buy-to-let slumlords are cashing in on the crisis by renting appalling properties at sky-high rents, and last year the Tories voted down a bill to ensure that rented houses are fit for human habitation!.

39% of Tory MPs are landlords.

10. Ireland just shamed the UK

In January 2017 Theresa May scuttled off to the United States to lick Donald Trump's boots and beg him for a hastily cobbled-together trade deal for Brexit Britain. Her "begging bowl" speech was an absolute abomination.

In March 207 the Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny used his visit to America to lecture Donald Trump about the benefits of immigration as a swipe against Trump's immoral and brazenly unconstitutional anti-refugee policies.

Don't think that I like Enda Kenny's economic policies. I don't. But his backbone is admirable. Theresa May shamed Britain with her pathetic grovelling at the feet of a narcissistic bully with no respect whatever for basic human decency or the rule of law. Enda Kenny did the Irish proud by standing up for immigrants.

If the right-wing Prime Minister of our little neighbour Ireland can stand up to Trump, why on earth did Theresa May have to shame the United Kingdom by licking his boots so cravenly?

Conclusion

The Tory government is an absolute shambles. They're slow-marching us towards a catastrophic nuclear Brexit and the break-up of the United Kingdom; they just did possibly the biggest budget U-turn in living memory; they're trashing the NHS; they're overseeing huge spikes in child poverty and people in unstable work; they're under criminal investigation for cheating their way into power; they're overseeing an extraordinary house price inflation crisis; and Theresa May just got put to shame by the bloody Prime Minister of Ireland.

Of course the mainstream media will try to deflect attention elsewhere. Of course they'll attack the opposition instead of the actual party in government. 

"Ooh Ooh Ooh look at that squirrel". 

Now forget everything you just read.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR