The Tories have been trying to disguise themselves as a pro-worker party for years, and with the help of their propagandists in the extreme right-press they're actually succeeding in convincing millions of working people that their billionaire bankrolled party is a friend of the workers!
The Tories latest effort to con working people into supporting them is a pledge that is worth less than the paper it was written on. Despite the efforts of the right-wing media to dress it up as a wonderful thing, it's actually an insult to the intelligence of anyone with the wit to have followed what's actually been going on for the last seven years.
The offer is an insult
The Tories have stripped £4.6 billion from the social care budget leaving care services in crisis, and unpaid carers and already over-stretched NHS hospitals having to pick up the pieces.
The Tory solution to this social care crisis they've created is to offer workers one year worth of unpaid leave from their jobs in order to care for their sick relatives themselves.
After overseeing the longest sustained decline in workers' wages since records began, which has left millions of families just one paycheck away from financial ruin, they're offering us the new workers' right to take a year of unpaid leave from our jobs to care for sick relatives!
This new workers' right is clearly not a workers' right at all because it's only feasible for the small minority of workers who can easily afford not to work. It's a new right for the wealthy minority to take time off the jobs they could afford not to do anyway.
Even if you're wealthy enough that you could afford to take an entire unpaid year off work, what happens if your sick relative fails to die of their illness within the year? Do you just go back to work or not? Assuming you decide not to go back to work, how does your sick relative end up feeling that they didn't die in time, causing you to lose your job?
Unenforcable
In 2013 the Tory government introduced a new set of employment tribunal fees that were designed to stop employees seeking justice by imposing upfront £1,200 fees. The result was a 79% decline in the number of employees taking their unscrupulous bosses to employment tribunals.
The Tory attitude is that unless you're the type of person who can stump up £1,200 when you've jest been sacked, you're a worthless nobody who doesn't deserve the right to seek justice if your boss sacked you for your age, your gender, your political views, your sexual orientation, your trade union activities, your pregnancy, or your refusal to give in to their crude sexual advances.
So if you go to your boss and ask him for up to a year of unpaid leave to care for a sick or dying relative, he can still sack you on the spot knowing that thanks to the Tories you'd have to cough up £1,200 in fees just to get your unfair dismissal case to tribunal.
So what's the point?
What's the point of offering a new workers' right that virtually nobody could afford to take advantage of, and which most employers could easily ignore thanks to the outrageous Tory tribunal fees they introduced in 2013?
The objective is obvious.
The objective is to give the right-wing media a "nothing policy" to hang their totally backwards propaganda narrative that the Tories are the new workers' party onto.
The right-wing propaganda rags are never going to write front page headlines explaining how the Tories have been attacking and undermining workers' rights since 2010; nor about how the Tories have overseen the most severe collapse in the value of workers' wages since records began; nor about how the collapse in wages and the Tory assault on in-work benefits has led to the situation where two thirds of children growing up in poverty these days come from working households.
All they're intent on doing is spreading the backwards propaganda that the Tories care about workers, even though they're completely bankrolled by billionaire bosses!
But it's actually working!
Recent polling data shows that the right-wing propaganda is actually working. That millions of working people are actually planning to vote for the billionaire-bankrolled Tories despite their proven track record of repressing wages, slashing in-work benefits, scrapping workers' rights, favouring multinational corporations with tax breaks and sweetheart tax deals, and favouring unscrupulous bosses by erecting huge financial barriers to the justice system to deter workers from seeking compensation.
The lesson is clear. Facts just don't matter any more.
If you control a big enough share of the media that your propaganda tropes get trumpeted on almost every newspaper front page, and your woeful track record in government never actually gets scrutinised, then it's possible to actually make working people believe that "black is white". It's possible to make working people believe that the party of wealth and privilege is on their side, rather than being the ones who have repressed their wages and trashed their workers' rights.
The Tories are proving that it is indeed possible to bamboozle and delude the turkeys so badly that they actually end up voting for Christmas!
Conclusion
The whole policy is a sick insult. It's a con that benefits virtually nobody and serves only to allow the right-wing propaganda rags to bullshit their readers into believing that the Tories now suddenly care about workers' rights.
You'd have to be utterly delusional to believe it. Theresa May was in the cabinet that pushed through the shocking tribunal fees that make this policy so unworkable for goodness sake!
Theresa May never cared about protecting workers' rights. All she's ever cared about is her own personal self-interest, and if she thinks that an absolute insult of a proposal is going to dupe a few more working people into voting for her, then that's exactly what she'll offer.
Shame on you if you actually fall for it.
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