Tory austerity dogma is punishing children who weren't even born when the bankers trashed the economy

Ten years ago the global financial sector collapsed into insolvency as a result of the reckless gambling of the bankers.

The UK establishment responded to this insolvency crisis by handing out the biggest state subsidies in history (some £1.5 trillion in bankers' bailouts) and turning on the cash taps to flood the financial sector with newly invented money (£435 billion in Quantitative Easing).

Of course someone had to pay for this vast rescue package, and when the Tories came to power in 2010 they decided to load the burden onto the backs of the poor and ordinary via wage repression policies and ideological austerity dogma, whilst actually lavishing vast handouts on the super-rich who created the crisis (tax cuts for corporations and the super-rich, distribution of public assets at bargain basement prices, huge bonuses at lossmaking taxpayer owned banks ...).

After seven torturous years of the Tories overseeing this vast upwards redistribution of wealth, and their economically ruinous strangling of investment in infrastructure and services (the foundations of future economic prosperity) the economy is in an absolutely desperate state.

UK workers have suffered the longest sustained decline in the value of their wages since records began; after the lowest level of house building since the early 1920s house prices are at their most unaffordable level ever; child poverty is soaring; in-work poverty is soaring; local councils all over the country are on the verge of bankruptcy; the NHS is in crisis; emergency services have been cut to the bone; and the UK economy is suffering its worst productivity crisis in centuries.

Despite this absolute horror show the Tories have no intention of changing direction. A shocking report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies predicts that the savage Tory cuts to the social security system are going to end up driving record numbers of children into poverty.

Unless the malicious austerity fetishism of the Tory party is reversed, the child poverty rate will be driven up to 37% by 2021-22. The worst affected areas will be the poorest areas of the country, but child poverty rates are still predicted to rise significantly, even in the wealthier areas like London and the South East.

It's important to note that by 2021-22 practically all of the 5.2 million British children who will be growing up in poverty will actually have been born after the financial sector meltdown hit in 2007-08.

Just imagine the hideous scale of callousness and depravity that makes Tory politicians believe that it's acceptable to continue enriching the bankers who crashed the economy with tax cuts and handouts, while they load the costs of the crash onto the shoulders of children who weren't even born when the Tories' banker mates tanked the economy.

Perhaps what's even more shocking than the callousness and depravity of the Tories is the mentality of the people who vote for them. 

In the grim amoral calculus these people perform in their heads when it comes to election time, they selfishly prioritise whatever (almost certainly imaginary) personal benefit they think they'd get from a continuation of Tory rule, over the fact that the Tories are consciously and deliberately driving millions of children into poverty in order to transfer even more wealth upwards to the tiny clique of bankers, corporate fat cats and billionaires who caused the economic crisis in the first place (and who bankroll the Tory party).

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