We're all familiar with the endlessly recycled right-wing propaganda trope about how Labour are supposedly "taking us back to the 1970s" aren't we?
We're also well aware that the right-wing narrative that the 1970s was unrelentingly crap is an absolute myth, and that despite the oil shocks and the periods of industrial unrest it was a time of affordable housing, full employment, decent wages, rapidly improving social conditions, great music, train fares that cost less than just doing the trip by car, free university education, and the highest levels of social mobility the UK has ever seen.
We also know that stuff like facts and evidence don't matter a jot to the people who mindlessly regurgitate right-wing propaganda tropes as if they're visionary political insights rather than something they've just mindlessly absorbed from the right-wing gutter press.
It barely takes a puff of critical thinking skills to tear this "back to the 70s" trope to shreds, yet the mindless political rote learners just can't do it.
Just look at the headline policies in the Labour manifesto and consider these facts:
- The rip-off private energy companies only formed after the privatisation of the National Grid in 1990 (long after the 1970s).
- The shambolic Tory privatisation of the railways happened in 1994 (long after the 1970s).
- The Royal Mail was only sold off at significantly below its true market value in 2013 (long after the 1970s).
- The NHS was run as a not-for-profit public service until the Tories carved it open for privatisation with their 2012 Health and Social Care Act (long after the 1970s)
- The proliferation of exploitative Zero Hours Contracts that Jeremy Corbyn wants to crack down on only happened over the last decade (long after the 1970s).
- House prices have soared out of the reach of millions of ordinary working people as a result of the Tories overseeing the lowest levels of house building since the 1920s and the worst collapse in the value of UK workers' wages since records began (long after the 1970s).
Labour want to reverse this mess, literally all of which has happened since 1990, and much of the worst of it has been going on since the Lib-Dems enabled the Tories back into power in 2010.
The problem is that stuff like facts and evidence just don't matter to the kind of people who rote learn and mindlessly regurgitate the propaganda they read in the extreme-right press.
They only care about the dopamine reward they get from successfully remembering that they've seen these simplistic extreme-right propaganda tropes before, and from faithfully repeating them like a small child who is ecstatic at having learned the first few letters of the alphabet or the two times table.
Worse even that their immunity to facts, and their aversion to critical thinking skills, is the downright hypocrisy of so many of these Blue-kip blowhards.
They're been trained by their masters in the extreme-right press to pour scorn on any policies designed to undo the damage that decades of hard-right economic madness has done to the UK economy, and to accuse their proponents of living in the past, or wanting to "drag the UK back to the 1970s" ... yet, we know that a huge proportion of the hard-right propaganda reading Blue-kip types are obsessed with bringing back archaic stuff like blue passports, Imperial weights and measures, hunting with dogs, and corporal punishment in schools!
We also know that they voted for a party that wants to bring back the divisive segregation of children into a minority that go to well-funded grammar schools, and the majority who get left to rot in the under-funded secondary moderns.
We also know that they voted for a political party that oversaw the lowest level of house building since the 1920s!
These right-wing blowhards accuse others of wanting to live in the past, whilst simultaneously hankering after the policies of the distant past themselves!
They crave a return to the times when passports were blue, innocent people were killed by the state for crimes they didn't commit, and children got whipped and beaten with sticks in schools for failing to learn how to divide stuff by 14 and 16 properly.
And in 2017 they flocked to the polling stations to vote for a political party that was plotting to restore the archaic and barbaric practice of ripping live foxes apart with packs of dogs.
The really sad thing is that they don't miss the actual good things about the past like the house prices that weren't way beyond the reach of ordinary working people, the decent wages, the train tickets that were cheaper than doing the trip by car, the affordable energy bills, the social mobility, the full employment, the decent workers' rights ...
No! The stuff that most Blue-kip blowhards seem to miss about the past is the teachers beating the crap out of the children they didn't like in schools, the ridiculously archaic and impractical weights and measures system, the barbaric blood sports, the segregation in the education system, and the bloody blue passports!
They only care about the dopamine reward they get from successfully remembering that they've seen these simplistic extreme-right propaganda tropes before, and from faithfully repeating them like a small child who is ecstatic at having learned the first few letters of the alphabet or the two times table.
Worse even that their immunity to facts, and their aversion to critical thinking skills, is the downright hypocrisy of so many of these Blue-kip blowhards.
They're been trained by their masters in the extreme-right press to pour scorn on any policies designed to undo the damage that decades of hard-right economic madness has done to the UK economy, and to accuse their proponents of living in the past, or wanting to "drag the UK back to the 1970s" ... yet, we know that a huge proportion of the hard-right propaganda reading Blue-kip types are obsessed with bringing back archaic stuff like blue passports, Imperial weights and measures, hunting with dogs, and corporal punishment in schools!
We also know that they voted for a party that wants to bring back the divisive segregation of children into a minority that go to well-funded grammar schools, and the majority who get left to rot in the under-funded secondary moderns.
We also know that they voted for a political party that oversaw the lowest level of house building since the 1920s!
These right-wing blowhards accuse others of wanting to live in the past, whilst simultaneously hankering after the policies of the distant past themselves!
They crave a return to the times when passports were blue, innocent people were killed by the state for crimes they didn't commit, and children got whipped and beaten with sticks in schools for failing to learn how to divide stuff by 14 and 16 properly.
And in 2017 they flocked to the polling stations to vote for a political party that was plotting to restore the archaic and barbaric practice of ripping live foxes apart with packs of dogs.
The really sad thing is that they don't miss the actual good things about the past like the house prices that weren't way beyond the reach of ordinary working people, the decent wages, the train tickets that were cheaper than doing the trip by car, the affordable energy bills, the social mobility, the full employment, the decent workers' rights ...
No! The stuff that most Blue-kip blowhards seem to miss about the past is the teachers beating the crap out of the children they didn't like in schools, the ridiculously archaic and impractical weights and measures system, the barbaric blood sports, the segregation in the education system, and the bloody blue passports!
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