Saturday 25 August 2018

Working class support for the Tory Brexit farce is collapsing


It doesn't take a lot of knowledge of political history to understand that the people who suffer the most from political cockups are always those with the least: The poor, the low-paid, the sick and disabled, the jobless, and the vulnerable.

Neither does it take a political super-nerd to understand that when the Tories are in power this effect is multiplied, given that the absolute core of the Tory political ideology is the upwards redistribution of wealth to the millionaires and billionaires who bankroll the entire Tory operation.

When there's an economic crisis going on, it's obvious that the deliberate upwards redistribution of wealth massively exacerbates the social and economic problems.

Take the Tory austerity dogma that was imposed in the wake of the bankers' insolvency crisis. Extremely wealthy bankers crashed the UK economy with their utterly reckless gambling on complex financial products they didn't even understand ... Yet Tory austerity dogma saw pretty much the entire burden of this crisis loaded onto the shoulders of poor and ordinary people (wage repression, in-work benefits cuts, local government cuts, social care cuts, NHS and emergency services cuts, trashed workers' rights ...) while corporations and the super rich were lavished with handouts (top rate Income Tax cut, Corporation Tax slashed, masses of corporate outsourcing handouts, public services and infrastructure sold off at way below their real market values, Quantitative Easing shoring up the assets of the super rich).

The results of this have been devastating. The NHS and social care cuts have come with a death toll of an estimated 120,000 avoidable deaths, the police cuts have resulted in soaring rates of violent crime, local government cuts mean we're all paying more Council Tax in return for significantly fewer council services, food bank dependency is soaring, child poverty is soaring, in-work poverty is soaring, NHS queues have grown exponentially, ordinary British workers are still getting the worst deal in the developed world ... and to top it all off, the Tories haven't even got remotely close to eliminating the deficit, despite their promises that austerity dogma would have wiped it away before May 2015!

And now, despite not having recovered from the last crisis, we're facing another even bigger one. The looming spectre of a Tory administered Brexit.

Every day that passes makes it look more likely that Theresa May's shambolic Chequers proposals are going to collapse, resulting in the disastrous "no deal" flounce out of the EU that she's been threatening since the beginning.


The Tories' own regional impact assessments show that a "no deal" Brexit would trigger a devastating recession, far worse than the 2007-08 bankers' crisis.

And it doesn't take a genius to figure out who Tories would load the cost of their own "no deal" Brexit crisis onto:

The poor, the low-paid, the sick and disabled, the jobless, and the vulnerable. As usual.

The only people who will ever get a 'Brexit dividend' out of a Tory Brexit will be the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg, John Redwood, Steve Baker, and the mega-rich investment class who will cash in on it by betting against Britain, then flooding their cash back in during the crisis to pick up £billions worth of distressed British assets on the cheap.

The mega-rich will make a Brexit killing while the poor and ordinary pay the price. That's exactly what happened with austerity dogma, and you'd have to be shockingly naive to imagine a different outcome under a Tory Brexit.


Perhaps this is why the latest polling figures indicate that working class people are turning against the idea of Brexit.

Perhaps they can see the Tory Brexit farce approaching.

They can see it's their jobs, and the public services they rely on that are on the line.

And as the prospect of a Brexit recession draws closer and closer, they're ever more aware that the only possible winners under a Tory administered Brexit will be the mega-rich speculator class the Tories are bankrolled by.


It certainly takes a level of intellectual bravery to admit that you have been fooled by a political con.

But thanks to Jeremy Corbyn actually opposing it (rather than pathetically imitating it like Ed Miliband and Ed Balls did) ever more people are waking up to the fact that Tory austerity dogma was never really about reducing the deficit, and was instead just a hard-right wealth transfer con.

And hopefully enough people will figure out that a Tory administered Brexit is likely to be even more devastating than austerity dogma was when it comes to the wellbeing of poor and ordinary people.


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