An open letter to anyone who claims to be voting Tory for the sake of their grandchildren

Dear potential Tory voter,

I'm writing this letter about the unbelievable claim that you made about how you would be voting Tory at the General Election because you care so much about the future your grandchildren will be facing!

I'd just like to clarify a few things:

You're going to vote for a woman who U-turns so regularly it's impossible to know which way she'll be facing tomorrow?

Presumably you want your grandchildren to grow up in a world where their political leaders just make things up as they go along to suit their own self-interest.

You're going to vote for a woman whose political party has already condemned 400,000 British kids to growing up in poverty, and who just condemned another 250,000 more to poverty with the child welfare and in-work benefits cuts they introduced at the beginning of April?

Presumably you want your grandchildren and/or their peers to spend their childhood years living in poverty.

You're going to vote for a woman whose political party has overseen the longest sustained decline in real wages since records began, meaning average real wages are an incredible 10% lower now than they were in 2008? 

Presumably you don't want your grandchildren to have well paid jobs.

You're going to vote for a woman who licks the boots of Saudi Islamist war criminals and the brutal Turkish tyrant Recep Erdoğan? 

Presumably you want your grandchildren to grow up in a world where Islamist war criminals and repressive dictators have more sway with the British government than your grandkids do themselves.

You're going to vote for a woman who has cut real terms spending on education in order to fund tax cuts for her rich mates? 

Presumably you don't want your grandchildren to grow up to be smart and well educated.

You're going to vote for a woman who is pushing the NHS to the brink of destruction with her severe funding cuts, hospital closures, her health secretary's ideological war with the junior doctors and the recruitment crisis she's exacerbated by driving EU nurses out of the NHS whilst simultaneously deterring tens of thousands of potential future nurses by scrapping the NHS bursaries?

Presumably you don't want your grandchildren to have access to a functioning health service that is provided on the basis of need, rather than the ability to pay for it?

You're going to vote for a woman whose party introduced the highest public university fees in the world for students in England, ensuring that 2/3 of today's students will never pay off their student debts in their entire working lives, despite paying a whopping 9% aspiration tax on their disposable income for having dared to try to better themselves? 

Presumably you don't want your grandchildren to get a professional qualification of any kind, or a massive unpayable debt mountain if they do have such aspirations.

You're going to vote for a woman who is vowing to strip UK citizens of their right to live, work, study or retire in any one of 27 other European nations in order to appease the anti-immigrant fanaticism of the hard-right demographic?

Presumably you don't want your grandchildren to have the same rights to travel and work abroad as you did yourself.

You're going to vote for a woman whose party has created far more new public debt in just seven years than every single Labour government in history combined?

Presumably you want your grandchildren to grow up paying off the massive debts that the Tories are obviously going to continue racking up in order to fund even more tax cuts for the already extremely rich.

You're going to vote for a woman whose party has overseen the least affordable house prices in history and the lowest level of new housebuilding since the 1920s? 

Presumably you don't want your grandkids to ever own a house.

Just admit it. You're not really thinking about your grandchildren's interests at all are you? 

In the grim amoral calculus you performed when you decided to you want to vote Tory, you decided that trashing your grandchildren's future was worth it in return for whatever (likely imaginary) personal benefit you'd be getting from a Tory government.

You're thinking entirely about yourself and what you want, and just invoking your poor grandchildren to present a (transparently thin) veneer of basic human decency to your utterly selfish "I'm alright Jack" attitude.

I feel sorry for your grandchildren having such a self-serving grandparent. I really do.

Tom (Another Angry Voice)

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