The Tories are a billionaire-backed zombie political party

Under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership the Labour Party has had a massive surge in membership to well over half a million people. The amount the party has raised in fees has increased from £6 million in 2014 to over £16 million last year (which accounted for almost a third of their overall income).

Meanwhile the Tories continue hiding their membership numbers. However the latest Tory party accounts reveal that the amount they received in membership fees has collapsed from 1.46 million in 2016 to just £835,000 in 2017 (below 2% of their income).

In fact the Tories made twice as much from legacies left to them by dead people as they did from membership fees from the living!

Tory membership costs £25 per head with discounts available for people under-23 and active members of the armed forces. 

Given that young people and active military personnel are surely a small minority of the party, the £835,000 figure suggests that Tory party membership is somewhere around 44,000, which is less than 1/12 of Labour's membership.

The discounts for young people and military personnel excuse is exactly what the Tory Chairman Brandon Lewis came up with to defend the party's minuscule takings in membership fees. 

But even if we adopt the ridiculous proposition that 1/3 of Tory members are under-23, 1/3 are active military personnel, and just one 1/3 are non-military adults over the age of 23, that still only works out at 55,670 members, which is less than half of what the Tories like to claim their membership as, and pretty much a quarter of the 200,000 members the Telegraph were bragging about in July 2018.

The comparatively tiny amount of cash the Tories make in membership fees is offset by the fact they raked in an astounding £34 million+ from their mega-rich backers (including massive wodges of cash from Russian oligarchs and Putin cronies).

Isn't it interesting that the mainstream media keep on pushing the trope that Labour's democratic socialist agenda is somehow a "cult" with very little public appeal, when in reality their return to democratic socialism under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership has attracted more new members than at any time in decades?

Meanwhile the comparatively tiny Tory party which only appeals to a minuscule "I'm alright Jack" segment of society with their hard-right austerity dogma, wage repression, and public service destruction policies, are never referred to as being an unpopular crackpot ideological cult with limited public appeal.

When it comes to policies the story is the same. The Labour public ownership platform (railways, NHS, education, National Grid, water supply, police, Royal Mail) is spectacularly popular with the public.

Meanwhile the Tory policy of privatising the police, schools, justice system, and NHS services is strongly opposed by almost everyone.

Yet somehow the media paint Corbyn and Labour as the unpopular cult with extremist policies, and the Tories as the popular sensible 'common sense' party with widespread public appeal!

Whichever way the mainstream media try to spin it, Labour is actually in a very healthy financial position thanks to their massive grassroots support, while the Tory party are a zombie political operation with hardly any grassroots support which is only being kept going by the legacies of dead people and a bunch of selfish mega-rich influence-buyers expecting their pound of flesh out of the British public in return for their donations.

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