Theresa May has some incredible brass neck to criticise past Labour governments for supposedly "rushing" their welfare reforms, and then claim that the Tories are bringing in Universal Credit "properly".
Not only is the Tory mishandling of Universal Credit trashing people's lives (in the places it has been rolled out payment delays are rife and food bank use, indebtedness, rent arrears and evictions are soaring), it's also massively over budget and already five years behind schedule!
When the Tories announced their flagship Universal Credit policy back in 2010 they claimed it would have been fully rolled out by 2017, meaning the process should already have been totally finished by now. Since then they've repeatedly moved the completion date back, so that it's now 2022!
They're running five years late, they've written off hundreds of millions in waste, and they're still rolling it out in a way that's wrecking people's lives. But what's even worse than the actual incompetence is their insistence that they're doing the job properly and that they actually deserve praise for not rushing!
The Tories really are masters at dressing up their cockups as success stories.
In 2010 they promised that their fanatically right-wing austerity agenda would have eliminated the deficit by 2015. When 2015 came around they hadn't even halved the deficit, but instead of admitting that they'd failed to even come close to meeting their own target and apologising, they dressed their failure up as a success by endlessly repeating "we've cut the deficit by a third" (or to put it another, less flattering way; we've missed our target by two thirds).
The complicity and collusion of the mainstream media allowed the Tories to completely get away with sprinkling a bit of glitter on their reeking economic turd and then presenting it to the public as if it were a delicious cake of success.
Now these Tory charlatans are actually trying to excuse the fact that their catastrophically mishandled implementation of Universal Credit is running 5 years late with an absurd well at least we didn't rush narrative.
No doubt the craven and subservient political pundits in the mainstream media will allow Theresa May to get away with re-framing this absolute farce as a good thing, because it's actually their job to do that.
The majority of mainstream media hacks are not in the business of holding the powerful to account or standing up for the vulnerable, they're in the business of rehashing government press releases as if it's their own work, generating low grade clickbait, endlessly recycling right-wing economic fairy stories, attacking anyone who poses the slightest threat to the pally Westminster-media status quo they reap the benefits of, and lazily churnalising trash from the Guido Fawkes blog into headlines.
The acquiescence of the mainstream press is glaringly obvious, otherwise how on earth could Theresa May take it for granted that nobody would call her out by making the absurdly easy point that not rushing is hardly something to boast about when your flagship welfare policy is running five years behind schedule.
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