Wednesday 11 April 2018

12 things you should know about the Tory "Dear Mr Fuckingjoking" letters


How can the Tories expect us to believe that they can run the country when they can't even send vile propaganda-ridden begging letters to pensioners without screwing it up by addressing them to "Youmustbe Fuckingjoking".

The blunder obviously came about because the Tories used "Youmustbe Fuckingjoking" as the default Addressee on their mailing list, then forgot to change it when they input the address.

The Tories have admitted that the offensive letter was sent out by their propaganda arm and apologised for the sweary piss-taking, but there's plenty of other concerning stuff within the content of the letter that the Tories did not bother to apologise for.


See the full letter here (credit: Laura McCormack)

Begging pensioners

Why are the Tories begging pensioners for cash when they're almost completely bankrolled by mega-rich donors, including the kinds of Russian oligarchs and Putin cronies who can afford to pay £160,000 for a game of tennis with Boris Johnson?

Instead of begging for £52 - £160 per year from pensioners, surely the Tories could just ask one of their hedge fund mates or Russian oligarchs for an extra half million or so and let the pensioners keep their cash.


A Britain fit for the future?

In the opening paragraph of the letter the Tories claim to be "building a Britain that is fit for the future" but the reality is that they're investing less in infrastructure development than any of our economic rivals, meaning we're getting left behind in the global economic race, and that they're actually retarding our future economic potential with their fixation with hard-right austerity dogma.


Brexit

The letter then goes on to brag about what a supposedly great Brexit deal the Tories are securing, but what they don't admit is that their own economic assessments (you know, the ones they spent months trying to hide) found that every form of Brexit will result in an economic downturn.

The Single Market and Customs Union version of Brexit would be the least damaging, but Theresa May already ruled that out under pressure from the right-wing Brextremist faction of her party, meaning the options were facing are two even more damaging versions of Brexit (hard right-wing Brexit & "no deal" chaos).


Stamp Duty

The next bit of Tory bragging is their Stamp Duty cut for first time buyers. They pretend that this is a great thing for first time buyers, but their own evidence said that it's not, and that it actually works as a significant unearned bonus for sellers, paid for at the taxpayers' expense.

Who would have thought that the Tories would try to dress up a taxpayer-funded handout for the rich as a benevolent gift for struggling first-time buyers?

Well, anyone who has been paying the slightest bit of attention for the last 8 years obviously.


The environment

The Tories then resort to bragging about how much they care about the environment, hoping that the recipient is unaware of their ghastly environmental record which includes handing massive tax breaks to fracking companies, ignoring massive local objections to grant fracking licences in beautiful rural locations like Ryedale, trashing the UK solar industry by slashing solar subsidies, and vehemently opposing European Parliament efforts to clamp down on plastic pollution, only to dress the policy up as their own idea when it came to implementation time!

Then there's the fact that they voted down Labour's amendment to their EU Withdrawal Bill that would have prevented them from using Brexit as an excuse to scrap EU derived environmental laws. If they have no intention of scrapping environmental laws, why on earth would they have voted down an amendment to stop them doing it?

Misleading rubbish


The letter then sets about fearmongering about Jeremy Corbyn and Momentum in order to frighten people out of voting Labour at the local elections. This is especially disingenuous given that the Tory party Twitter account has explicitly admitted that local elections are about local issues, not who rules the roost in Westminster.

Outright lies

One of the fearmongering claims about Labour is that they're promising to "take £350 billion from the pockets of hard-working taxpayers".

There's absolutely nothing in the Labour Manifesto "promising" to raise taxes by £350 billion, and in fact it actually pledges to avoid raising income tax for everyone except the top 5% of earners.

If the UK electoral authorities weren't a completely toothless joke these kinds of political lies would be clamped down on hard, but as we saw with the complete inaction on Tory dark ads during the 2017 General Election, the Tories are free to lie with total impunity.


Army of footsoldiers

The letter admits that the Tories see their only hope of beating Labour is by pumping huge amounts of cash into their political campaigns to recruit "an army of footsoldiers".

This plan sounds awfully similar to the plan cooked up by the Tory Chairman Brandon Lewis to hire a troll army of social media propagandists.


The letter openly admits that the Tories are forced to pay people to be activists while Labour's policies are popular enough to attract huge numbers of volunteers willing to do the work for free. Doesn't this tell us everything we need to know?

No credible policies

The letter then goes on to claim that Labour have "no credible policies for improving the lives of people in London".

Since 2010 the Tories have cut £600 million from the London police budget, resulting in the loss of 7,000+ police officers and PCOs. They also have plans to slash another £400 million from the London police budget by 2022.


Labour have a costed plan to reverse these cuts and put more police back on the streets of London in order to help deal with the shocking increase in violent crimes like stabbings, shootings, and acid attacks.

Defeat Socialism

The letter contains a quite extraordinary footnote that proves what a bunch of ideological fanatics the Tories really are. When they promise to "defeat socialism" there's no other way of reading this than a death sentence for the NHS, because it is indisputably one of the finest examples of socialist policy on the planet.

The concept of prioritising health care to those who need it most, rather than those with the largest wallets is an unmistakable example of socialism, so when the Tories openly state that they're on a mission to defeat socialism, make no mistake at all, they're admitting that they hate the NHS and want to see it destroyed.

The only way that sending a letter out to a bunch of pensioners that admits their ideological commitment to wrecking the NHS is if they're so damned arrogant that they assume that the pensioners won't put two and two together and actually realise what the real world implications of "defeat socialism" really are.


Theresa May's signature

Theresa May's signature appears on this letter, which means that she's personally approved this lamentable pack of lies, distortions and distractions, and that she approves of the ideological attack on the NHS that appears in the footnote.

Piss-taking Tories

The fact that the automatic addressee in the Tory mailing software has been set as "Youmustbe Fuckingjoking" strongly suggests that even the Tories responsible for sending out these letters have no faith in what they're doing, and no faith in the absolute bullshit they're being asked to peddle by Theresa May and her propaganda team.

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