The Tories are "gaslighting" us

In the Oscar winning 1944 thriller Gaslight a husband (played by Charles Boyer) tries to manipulate his wife (played by Ingrid Bergman) into believing that she is going insane in order to distract her from his ongoing criminal activities.

The Tory party are employing a "gaslighting" propaganda strategy aimed at misinforming, confusing and disorientating the public as much as possible so that they don't know what to believe, or who to turn to, as the Tories continue to run the country exclusively for the benefit of the super-rich elitists, private health companies, bankers and corporate fat cats who bankroll their party.

Here are 12 examples of completely backwards Tory propaganda that you'd have to be spectacularly divorced from reality to actually believe.

• Theresa May claiming that her leadership is "strong and stable" when she's U-turning so often and on so many issues it's impossible to know which way she'll be facing in the morning. Her whole snap election is absolute proof that she's a weak and directionless leader who promises the UK public and UK businesses the stability of a fixed-term parliament that lasts until 2020, and then threw the country into the turmoil of a snap election based on a total lie purely to serve her own personal self-interest.

• Tories claiming that their party is on the side of "hardworking people" when they oversaw the longest sustained collapse in the value of UK workers' wages in recorded history, a collapse so bad it's matched only by crisis-stricken Greece in the entire developed world.

• Tory ministers claiming that they're "making work pay" as they slash in-work subsistence benefits like tax credits and housing benefits and deliberately repress millions of workers' wages with their below inflation public sector pay freeze. The Tories have done such a woeful job of "making work pay" that NHS nurses are relying on food bank parcels to survive (Theresa May openly refused to admit that this is wrong).

• Tory politicians saying how their party is "the party of mental health" after their government slashed £600 million off the mental health budget, and continues slashing mental health funding, closing mental health services at five days notice, and even instructing their corporate welfare contractors to actively discriminate against people with mental health conditions.

• Tories pretending that their party is "tough on crime" even though they know that their party has overseen the biggest cut in police numbers in British history, and that it's the Labour opposition who are promising to put an extra 10,000 bobbies on the beat.

• Tories pretending to be the party of "economic competence" when they missed their headline target of eliminating the deficit by May 2015 by miles (they now admit they won't do it until after 2021 even if there isn't a "no deal" Brexit economic meltdown between now and then) and ended up creating more new debt in seven years than every single Labour government in history combined!

• Tories pretending that their welfare policies are designed to "help disabled people" when they actually consist of forcing disabled people to do demeaning, dehumanising and discriminatory Work Capacity Assessments that cost the taxpayer way more to administer than they will ever save in reduced disability benefits, and dodgy disability denial PIP assessments, 65% of which are overturned when they get to appeal. 

• Tories claiming that "we're all in this together" and saying that they will deliver "an economy that works for everyone" as they continue rigging the economy even more in favour of the super-rich; making sure giant multinational corporations pay less tax than their employees; making sure cleaners pay a higher percentage of their income in tax than corporate executives; overseeing the worst slump in ordinary workers wages ever as the super rich minority literally double their wealth; imposing a below-inflation 1% pay freeze on nurses and other public sector workers while they take an 11% pay hike for themselves ...

• Tories pretending that Labour is "a threat to national security" when they've cut the armed forces back to their smallest size since Napoleonic times, slashed police numbers more than any UK government in history, and annihilated the budgets of other emergency services like the fire brigade too.

• Theresa May claiming that "Jeremy Hunt has been an excellent health secretary" while the NHS is in absolute chaos; Tory cuts forcing the closure of dozens of hospitals and other facilities at a time of rising demand; a massive recruitment crisis; a deliberate ideologically driven war against the hard-working junior doctors; and a policy of simply scrapping the targets that are not being met!

• Tories talking about Jeremy Corbyn as if he's some kind of radical economic "extremist" for proposing an economically orthodox investment led recovery while the Tory party continue their radically right-wing and extremely destructive agenda of choking off any chance of an economic recovery by slashing investment in infrastructure and services and overseeing a massive transfer of wealth from the majority (who spend most of any extra income in the real economy) to the tiny super-rich elite (who stash extra income in tax-havens or spend it in the unregulated derivatives casino or inflating the unsustainable UK property bubble). 

• Tory ministers claiming that Theresa May's diplomatically inept threat to trigger a massive economic meltdown by marching the UK off a "no deal" Brexit cliff edge is "stability" and the opposition parties' unified objection to this astoundingly reckless threat is "chaos".

Of course there will be a proportion of the UK public who are so shockingly under-informed that they actually believe all of this blatantly contradictory tripe, and will dutifully flock to the polls to vote Tory because the right-wing billionaires who own the tabloid propaganda rags tell them to.

But for the rest of us, those of us with functional critical thinking skills, this huge tide of Orwellain "black is white" gibberish has another purpose. The objective of all of this backwards propaganda is to confuse and disorient us. It's to create the impression that nothing can be believed, that nobody can be trusted, that politics is fake.

The Tory propaganda drive doesn't just exist to push an agenda and to misinform the gullible, it exists to mentally exhaust those of us with functional critical thinking, and to completely annihilate the concept of political truth.

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