Don't be fooled by Heidi Allan's "caring Conservative" schtick

The Tory MP Heidi Allan loves to pose as a caring Conservative, but when it comes to the crunch she always folds and votes in favour of even more ideologically driven Tory malice.

Heidi Allan loves to present herself as a Tory rebel with a social conscience, but she's nothing of the sort. She's been playing this dishonest game ever since she was elected to parliament in 2015. 

In her maiden speech in October 2015 she criticised the Tory policy of cutting tax credits for the working poor before she dutifully voted in favour of it in order to avoid being sacked from her junior position in the Department of Work and Pensions.

Her June 2017 speech against the Tory policy of public sector wage repression was exactly the same thing. When the opposition parties gave Tory MPs the opportunity to end the seven year long economic assault on our public sector workers (including the fire fighters they'd just been praising for running into the fire at Grenfell tower) Heidi Allan spoke against the Tory wage repression policy, but then when it came to the crunch she voted to keep the pay cap.

In my view these displays of faux rebellious outrage followed by a dutiful vote in favour of the motion are even worse than a Tory who is delusional enough to actually believe that continuing to crush the incomes of the working poor and repress the wages of our nurses, soldiers, fire fighters and police are the right thing to do. 

If she spoke out against these things then she knows that they're wrong, which means that she knew that she was doing something absolutely inexcusable when she actually voted in favour of continuing Tory wage repression.

I doubt that she was one of the Tories who actually cheered themselves for what they did because she clearly knew that her vote was inexcusable, but she did it nonetheless out of pure self-interest.

On the weekend after the Tories cheered themselves for continuing to trash the pay of our brave emergency service workers Heidi appeared on the Andrew Marr show and said something unbelievable.

She said that the Tory party needs to "change our tone and our language".

"We have got to change our tone and language" @heidiallen75 says the Tories have become too "inward looking" #marr pic.twitter.com/PRv1tVGSwM

— The Andrew Marr Show (@MarrShow) July 2, 2017

This bizarre prescription is based on the delusion that it isn't seven years of savage hard-right Tory policies (socially and economically ruinous austerity, the unprecedented Tory campaign of wage repression, the ongoing systematic abuse of disabled people, privatisation mania, and the erection of one new barrier to social mobility after another) that is the problem, but the fact that these horrific policies haven't been presented misleadingly enough.

Heidi loves to posture as a rebel Tory who actually cares about ordinary people, but what she did on the Marr show was simply regurgitate the new Tory party line that there is nothing wrong with Tory policy, but that the presentation needs some work.

It's been revealed that the Tories are planning to massively increase their social media propaganda unit in preparation for the next general election, and they're obviously going to try to find ways of prettifying austerity, wage repression, abuse of disabled people, privatisation mania and social mobility blocking.

Heidi Allan isn't pushing for the Tory party to change political direction on any of these issues (otherwise she would have voted in favour of the opposition amendment to end wage repression), she simply wants more gloss to slop over the divisive upwards wealth redistribution policies that are at the absolute heart of the modern Conservative ideology.

thee Tories are intent on continuing with their unpopular hard-right policies, and they're going to try to win over the public with a massive Orwellian propaganda campaign to rebrand the same old failing Tory policies as a wonderful new kind of caring conservatism.

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