Even after seven years of ruinous austerity dogma David Cameron is still peddling the lie that slashing the incomes and public services of the majority to fund handouts to the mega-rich minority is a sensible and decent way of running a country.
At a leadership* conference in South Korea David Cameron had the absolute cheek to accuse people who want to see an end to the deliberate Tory policy of wage repression against our brave and dedicated emergency service workers of being "selfish", and to pretend that his ruinous austerity agenda wasn't a hopeless failure, but actually "sound finances".
Here's what he said:
"The opponents of so called austerity couch their arguments in a way that make them sound generous and compassionate. They seek to paint the supporters of sound finances as selfish, or uncaring. The exact reverse is true. Giving up on sound finances isn’t being generous, it’s being selfish: spending money today that you may need tomorrow."Selfishness
Tory austerity only ever existed for the poor and ordinary. David Cameron and his wealthy chums dressed up the myth of national belt-tightening as a necessity and claimed that we're all in this together. But while there was never enough money for public services, sensible levels of infrastructure investment, or decent pay for public sector workers, there was always somehow plenty enough for the Tories to lavish ever more handouts on corporations and the mega-rich.
Only in the Orwellian world of hard-right propaganda is it possible to argue that impoverishing the masses in order to enrich the mega-rich is decent, and wanting to stop this deliberate policy of salary erosion for nurses, teachers, police officers and fire fighters is "selfish".
Sound finances
The Tory myth of economic competence is one of the most extraordinary political deception of all time, yet somehow people keep on believing it.
Just consider their record over the last seven years. They promised to eradicate the deficit by May 2015 but failed spectacularly, and now they say it won't be gone until the mid-2020s; they promised to retain Britain's AAA credit rating, then promptly lost it; they've engaged in all kinds of ludicrous false economics like slashing flood defence spending and snatching people's disability vehicles only to hand them £65,000+ to take taxis to work for the next three years; and in the process they've created more new public debt than every single Labour government in history combined!
The reason they've made such a mess is that David Cameron's hard-right conception of "sound finances" is economically illiterate from even the most rudimentary macroeconomic perspective.
Slashing the incomes of the poor and ordinary, and lumbering the younger generations with vast student debts seriously erodes people's disposable incomes.
People with less disposable income spend less in the economy (causing a reduction in aggregate demand), and they're very much less likely to invest in economically productive activity (setting up small businesses, building an extension on their home ...) and they're more likely to rack up large personal debts in order to keep their heads above water.
Redistributing the savings from repressed wages and lowered investment in university funding to the mega-rich doesn't create anything like as much economic activity as has been destroyed because the mega-rich are very much more likely to save any additional income than spend it, or even just siphon it straight out of the economy into offshore tax havens.
The idea that enriching the already super-wealthy at the expense of the majority is in any way an example of "sound finances" is yet another one of these pervasive Orwellian myths that the right-wing billionaire propaganda barons and their depraved minions love to spread.
Tomorrow
Yet another pervasive hard-right reality-reversal is that austerity dogma is good for the future, when it absolutely isn't.
As a result of Tory austerity dogma the UK spends less on infrastructure investment than any other major economy (just 1.7% of GDP) meaning that we're being badly left behind in the global modernisation race.
The Tories have also slashed the universities budget, gutted the adult education system, hollowed out support for innovative new businesses, and are now implementing the harshest cuts to our schools in decades.
Only the most gullible of people would fall for the lie that borrowing to invest when interest rates on government debt are at all-time record lows is a reckless betrayal of future generations, whilst simultaneously supporting massive ideologically driven Tory assaults on our future economic potential through under-funding of our education systems (resulting in a low-skill, low-wage workforce) and a deliberate strategy of under-investment in infrastructure (resulting in businesses abandoning Britain because of its outdated and crumbing infrastructure and services).
"The exact reverse is true"
Anyone who has been paying attention over the last seven years will have spotted at least some of the Orwellian reality reversal tactics used by the Tory party to defend their depraved policies, but in this short comment about Tory wage repression David Cameron goes one step further than normal.
He doesn't just reverse reality by claiming that it's "selfish" to not support the Tory policy of redistributing ever more wealth from the majority of us to the mega-rich minority, but he also accuses the people who are in touch with reality (that the repression of nurses' and fire fighters' wages needs to be stopped) of being the ones who are guilty of reversing reality!
Cameron is clearly and undeniably accusing others of using the very same reality-reversing propaganda tactics that he spent his six years as Prime Minister relying upon.
Accusing other people of what you yourself are guilty of is abusive psychological projection.
It's a strategy used by sociopaths.
Conclusion
It's extraordinary that there are still millions who haven't woken up to the fact that the Tories and their collaborators in the mainstream media use all kinds of reality-reversing propaganda to justify their "take from the majority to give to the minority" economic agenda, and even more extraordinary that there are people out there who will take David Cameron's words at face value and actually believe that he's a straight-talking and honest guy, while those who disagree with his socially and economically ruinous austerity dogma are the ones who are guilty of reversing reality!
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* = Who on earth would listen to leadership advice from a man who ran away when his own gamble beckfired?
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