Is food bank gloating the sickest Tory publicity stunt yet?

Since the Tories came to power in 2010 rates of poverty in the United Kingdom have soared, and ever more people have found themselves in such dire economic circumstances that they've had to resort to charitable food handouts from an ever expanding network of food banks.

The Tories always bluster on about how "work is the best route out of poverty" but what they don't ever admit is that under their extreme economic mismanagement the number of UK workers living in poverty has been increasing way faster than the new jobs Tory ministers keep bragging about.

The upshot of this deliberate Tory policy of turning the UK into a low-wage economy is that four million British workers are living in poverty, and ever increasing numbers of working people are becoming reliant upon food bank charity in order to feed themselves and their families.

You would have thought that the dire consequences of this ideologically driven Tory assault on the economic well-being of UK workers would be a source of shame for them, but you'd be making the mistake of imagining that members of this grotesque elitism club are capable of feelings like guilt, remorse, or shame.

In fact the Tories are so shameless that they actually decided to launch a coordinated publicity stunt to gloat about the wave of food poverty they've inflicted.

It's difficult to imagine the thinking processes of the Tory wonks who came up with a coordinated effort to send Tory MP out to their local food banks for publicity pictures to upload onto Twitter.

Perhaps they thought that pictures of Tory MPs at food banks would cast them in a sympathetic light as if they actually care about people in poverty?

Aside from the fact that numerous Tories were so inept at pretending they cared about poor people that they all lazily copied the same copy n' paste Tweets, there was also the obvious public backlash to consider.

Soaring rates of poverty in the UK didn't just happen by chance. The huge rise in families in such poverty that they can't afford to feed themselves are the result of eight devastating years of Tory economic misrule. 

• Ideologically driven Tory assaults on the social security system (such as disability benefits cuts, "Bedroom Tax", the Universal credit fiasco, and the draconian sanctions regime) have played a crucial role in spreading extreme poverty, but there are other factors too.

• Tory wage repression polices have resulted in the longest sustained collapse in the real value of workers' wages since records began.

• Not only have the Tories overseen a historic collapse in the value of workers' wages, they've also attacked the social security system for low-paid workers. Arbitrary and ideologically driven cuts to Tax Credits, Housing Benefit, parental pay, and Child Benefit have dumped huge numbers of workers into destitution.

• The Tory decision to engineer a deliberate six week wait into applications for Universal Credit has also left huge numbers of families in destitution, because the last thing you need when you lose your job is six weeks without a penny as you wait for Universal Credit to kick in.

• The shocking rise in Zero Hours Contracts and fake self-employment jobs in the gig economy have created levels of job insecurity not seen since the 1930s.

• Tory austerity dogma has resulted in economic stagnation, shocking under-investment in infrastructure and public services the slowest post-crisis economic recovery in Centuries, and startling collapses in economic demand and productivity. All of which has made Britain a much poorer place than it could have been under a sensible investment-based economic recovery strategy.

In light of these factors is it any wonder that huge numbers of people saw the Tory food bank publicity campaign as the political equivalent of depraved trophy hunters posing beside the carcasses of the wild animals they've shot?

It just goes to show how wildly out of touch with reality most Tories must be that none of them even questioned the wisdom of a deliberate coordinated effort to associate themselves with the appalling wave of food poverty they've created.

The fact that their ruinous hard-right anti-welfare anti-worker, anti-investment policies have created such suffering and destitution is bad enough, but their total bone-headed willingness to even recognise what they've done makes them utterly unfit to rule ever again.

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