Here's a short list of some of the stuff that the British electorate rejected in the 2019 General Election:
- A 33% reduction in rail fares
- A National Education Service and an end to rip-off tuition fees
- The most ambitious environmental targets of all the major parties
- An end to the systematic government abuse of sick and disabled people
- £10 per hour minimum wage, and zero hours contracts banned
- Reversal of the 67% Tory cut to the local government budget
- Repayment of the pension money stolen from 1950s women
- The rollout of free super-fast broadband
So why did the British electorate reject all of this, in favour of an economy-tanking Tory administered Brexit shambles?
In my view there are two main reasons that British people decided that Corbyn was some kind of evil Santa offering impossible gifts: the bombardment of lies and the credibility gap.
The bombardment of lies
The research shows that 88% of the sponsored Conservative adverts injected into millions of people's Facebook feeds were demonstrable lies, mainly about the cost of Labour's policies and the absurd lie that everyone's tax bill would jump by £2,400, despite Labour's costed pledge not to increase Income Tax for anyone earning below £80,000.
Then on election day a fake "independent" Conservative front organisation launched a massive illegal propaganda campaign targeting polling stations in marginal constituencies across the country.
If you look at their illegally posted anti-Corbyn poster, you can see how much they were lying.
Apparently Evil Santa was threatening to "steal the children's inheritance", by, err, properly funding their education, freeing them from student debt, paying them £10 per hour, charging them 33% less for getting to work, building hundreds of thousands of affordable homes, and investing in high-tech, high-skill, high-pay industries.
Labour's policy was actually to maintain the inheritance tax threshold at £325,000, but scrap an additional property allowance, meaning the absolute maximum extra inheritance tax anyone would have had to have paid was £40,000, but only on inheritances of over £425,000.
Apparently this £40,000 paid only by the children of the property rich, was "stealing the children's future", but saving everyone who attends university from repaying rip-off inflation + 3% loans that most won't even pay off in their entire working lives, guaranteeing them all a decent wage whenever they leave school, and saving any of them who end up commuting to work fortunes on their rail tickets every year is unspeakably awful!
Then Evil Santa apparently wanted to "dictate their education", which is a total reversal of reality. The fact is that 75% of secondary schools in England have been privatised into the hands of unaccountable private operators, many of them major Tory party figures and donors, who get to control the curriculum, and dictate our children's education. Corbyn wanted to reverse this.
Point three is the terrorism smear-mongering which has dogged Evil Santa the entire time because he openly proposed talking to the Sinn Féin politicians before the Irish peace process and the Good Friday Agreement, at a time when Thatcher and her Tory government were secretly negotiating with the actual terrorists behind a wall of secrecy.
As Foreign Secretary Johnson sold weapons to the Saudi head-choppers, despite knowing that they were using them to commit war crimes, and despite knowing they were passing military hardware onto Al Qaida terrorist groups, but yeah, Corbyn is the terrorist-sympathiser and Johnson is the guy to protect us from terrorism!
The bit in the black box is also highly relevant. Corbyn is apparently the economic extremist for proposing public ownership of the railways, water supply, national grid, Royal Mail, and NHS.
Johnson and the Tories are the 'economic moderates' despite their demonstrable track record of outright defying the public will to privatise front line police services, swathes of the NHS, thousands of schools, prisons, the probation service, and conducting an enormous swindle to flog off the Royal Mail property portfolio at a tiny fraction of its true value.
It's impossible to deny that such a barrage of lies was an important factor in the election, especially the illegal postering campaign, ensuring the last thing that hundreds of thousands of people saw before they voted was a bombardment of lies.
The credibility gap
The Tories lied their way to victory, but Labour did themselves absolutely no favours at all with their election strategy.
I have no idea whose plan it was to launch a load of surprise policies like free broadband, the 33% rail fare reduction, and the repayment of the stolen WASPI money, but doing it as a sequence of surprise announcements was a terrible idea, because it made the party look incredibly irresponsible.
If you want to argue the case for increased public spending and more money in people's pockets, you need to lay the groundwork, you don't just dump it all on people as if it's a load of reckless pre-election bribes.
The majority of people in Britain simply have no idea at all about macroeconomics, because they've never been taught, and it's just not the kind of thing most people would choose to research for themselves.
If you want to switch from austerity extremism to investment economics, you need to develop a clear and simple economic case for doing so.
You need to come up with a few slogans along the lines of "invest now for a prosperous future", "you don't grow a business by cutting it, you invest, so why would you cut a country", or "more money in your pocket is more money in the economy", then you repeat it and repeat it and repeat it until everyone has heard it so many times they're bloody sick of it, but it's in their heads, so when you announce big public investments, or policies to put more money in people's pockets, they can link it to the slogans.
If you fail to do this, they link your pledges to ludicrous economic baby talk nonsense like "no such thing as magic money trees", or "how will they pay for it?", or "the money will run out" and then you're absolutely screwed.
The fact that millions upon millions of people still somehow think about the economy as if its a household budget, with a limited supply of money that can potentially "run out" is the origin of Labour's economic credibility gap, and their failure to establish any kind of simple counter-narrative absolutely did for them.
Announcing grand spending pledges as surprises just hammered nails into their own economic coffin, especially since they were as much surprises to their supporters and social media cheerleaders as they were to everyone else.
If "rail fares are too high in Britain" (which they are) and "for the sake of the environment and killer air pollution we need to encourage people onto public transport by making it cheaper than going by car" had been a significant talking point for the previous year, then a surprise 33% reduction in rail fares could have gone down really well, but again the architecture simply wasn't put in place to explain why, so it just came across as a reckless pre-election bribe.
Labour's absolute failure to clearly explain the macroeconomic case for investment and increased public disposable income was a lamentable failure in basic planning.
It's irrelevant if you've got the better economic policies if you don't give ordinary people the basic architecture to understand why they're good for the economy.
It's a quite astonishing Labour Party failure that the Tories are still widely considered the party of economic credibility after the slowest economic recovery in centuries, the worst period of wage stagnation since records began, the worst productivity crisis the UK has ever suffered, the soaring trade deficit, losing Britain's AAA credit ratings, failing to eliminate the deficit after an entire decade when they said they'd do it in 5 years, and dragging the nation to the brink of a chaotic economy-tanking, job-destroying Brexit meltdown.
It was bad enough that Ed Miliband failed to capitalise on Tory economic incompetence in 2015, which was only halfway through this economy strangling austerity chaos, but the Labour Party has subsequently failed to win the economic argument twice more under Corbyn, and it's pretty damned obvious that if they don't start communicating investment economics to the masses fairly soon, they're in for another defeat at the next election too.
It's now stunningly obvious that people will not elect a party they can't trust on the economy, even if the alternative is deliberately steering the economy towards an unprecedented self-inflicted crisis!
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Nobody likes to think of themselves as a traitor, but unfortunately many people are tricked into doing treasonous things.
I mean it's obvious isn't it? If someone wants people to act against the interests of their own community, region or nation they obviously need to trick them into doing it don't they?
Hardly anyone is going to commit treason willingly are they?
So in order to sell people treason, a grand deception needs to be constructed to make members of the public imagine that they're doing the right thing, when in reality they've been tricked into terribly betraying themselves and their own people.
Additionally the party that is attempting to get people to act against their own national interest is likely to focus heavily on attacking the reputation of anyone who opposes them. And what better strategy than to reverse reality and accuse their opponent of the very thing they themselves are guilty of?
The people selling you treason aren't going to come at you with a glossy prospectus with the word "treason" emblazoned on the cover. They're going to come at you wrapped in the flag, and constantly questioning the patriotism of anyone who stands in the way of their objective of tricking you into supporting their treasonous agenda.
This is the situation now. In Britain. In 2019.
The treason has been going on now for almost four decades and it's often wrapped up in slick sounding words and phrases like "globalisation", "privatisation", "free trade" and "foreign investment", but when you boil it down, it's blatant economic treason.
The groundwork for this economic treason was laid during the Tory privatisation mania of 1979-1997, when huge chunks of national infrastructure were sold off on the cheap, or simply given away for free, to the mega-rich.
The objective of course was to transfer ownership of the most prized parts of the UK economy to private individuals, who could then gorge themselves on the wealth they extracted from the British public.
In 1989 the water supply was privatised, in 1990 the National Grid was broken up and privatised, in 1994 the rail network was privatised, in 1995 Britain's nuclear energy infrastructure was privatised.
All of this stuff that was built up and maintained by the British taxpayer was hastily flogged off on the cheap, leaving the British public no longer stakeholders, but customers to be milked as hard as possible in order to maximise the private profits.
Many of the investors who ended up with chunks of public property were themselves treasonous individuals who used complex tax-dodging schemes to extract the wealth they were milking from the British public into offshore tax havens like Panama.
David Cameron's father was one of the people who made a pretty packet. Not directly from the infrastructure the Tory government were handing out, but by helping the private owners to siphon their profits overseas in order to avoid making a contribution to British society by paying their fair share of tax.
The rate of sell-offs declined significantly between 1997 and 2010 under the Blair-Brown government, but they did nothing to reverse the damage; they continued selling off bits and pieces like Air Traffic Control and the HMRC property portfolio; and they introduced PFI economic alchemy schemes to lumber the cost of current infrastructure spending onto future generations.
One important thing did happen during the Blair-Brown era that set the tone for what was to come. In 2008 the British nuclear power stations that were flogged off in 1995 were brought up by EdF, which is just a front for the French government.
It turned out that the private investors who gobbled up our nuclear industry in 1995 had so little loyalty to Britain that they literally handed the whole lot over to France when they realised it was more profitable to offload it to a foreign government than it would have been to keep running it themselves.
In 2010, when the Tories sneaked back into power (with the help of the Orange Book Liberal Democrats), the rate of sell-offs and giveaways skyrocketed again. They flogged off the Royal Mail at way below market value, they privatised the police forensic science service, they privatised literally thousands of the schools that our kids study at, they privatised the universities, and the Government Pipeline and Storage Systems (the underground aviation fuel distribution network that was created during WWII).
By this time huge chunks of former national industries were falling into the hands of foreign governments.
The Chinese and Qatari governments were particularly keen to get their hands on what used to be our nationally owned infrastructure. China bagged a huge stake in Thames Water in 2012, they teamed up with Qatar to win a major stake in the National Grid in 2016, and in 2017 the Tory Transport Minister Chris Grayling handed the Soutwestern rail franchise over to the Hong Kong government with barely a murmur of protest (apart from in a few left-wing blogs).
One of the most shocking things of all was the sell-off of the Government Pipeline and Storage Systems. This time the Tory government didn't sell it to private investors who then sold it on to foreign governments a few years down the line.
No. In this case the Tories cut out the middle-man and transferred ownership direct from the British public to the foreign governments of Oman and the United Arab Emirates who own significant chunks of the nominally Spanish company it was flogged off to.
When they flogged off our aviation fuel distribution network to the governments of Oman and the United Arab Emirates, the Tory party committed direct economic treason.
They decided that our aviation fuel network was better being run for the benefit of the governments of Oman and the UAE than being run by the British government, for the benefit of the British people, and the British economy.
And the most bizarre thing of all? They sold it off for just £82 million, then immediately signed a ten year lease to hire it back at the cost of £237 million!
Grean news for the governments of Oman and the United Arab Emirates, terrible news for the British public finances.
Boris Johnson keeps wrapping himself up in the Brexit banner and poses as if he's a patriot who loves Britain, but he was part of the government that handed our vital national infrastructure directly to foreign governments, and he's planning to carry on too.
In March 2017 then-Prime Minister Therese May grovelled before the Qataris to beg them to buy up even more of our infrastructure.
Qatar is a country that is so dodgy they've even been accused of supporting terrorism by Saudi Arabia (the global epicentre of Wahabi Islamist fanaticism), but Johnson's predecessor Theresa May actually begged them to come and buy even more of our national silver that the Tories are intent on flogging off.
You might think nothing can be done to stop this Tory treason because "aren't all political parties more-or-less the same?"
Well you'd be wrong to think that.
Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-establishment outsider who has managed to wrest the Labour Party out of establishment control, and he wants to break up this decades long Westminster obsession with globalisation and privatisation.
Corbyn is planning to repatriate some of the most vital public infrastructure.
Our rail franchises are now 74% operated by foreign governments. Jeremy Corbyn wants to renationalise them and run them for the benefit of the British people.
Corbyn also wants to take the national grid back from the Chinese and Qatari governments and run it for the British people.
And he wants to nationalise the water companies too, putting an end to Chinese government control over our water supplies.
The choice is a stark one. You can either believe the right-wing campaign of smears against Jeremy Corbyn and allow the Tories to con you into supporting their economically treasonous strategy of flogging our national infrastructure and services off to foreign governments ...
Or you can look past the barrage of propaganda from the economic traitors themselves, and their mainstream media bully boys who shill for the billionaire-owned newspapers, look at Jeremy Corbyn's actual policies, and understand that he's actually the patriotic one.
Jeremy Corbyn is the one who is saying that Britain is strong enough and wealthy enough to run our own infrastructure and services.
While the Tories are saying that we're so weak and broke that we have to continue flogging our national infrastructure off to China, Qatar, Oman, the UAE, or whoever else wants a slice, because in the warped Tory mind, foreign governments are so much more capable of running our infrastructure and services than our own country is!
Make no mistake about it. If you swallow the relentless Tory campaign of anti-Corbyn smears and vote the Tories into power again, you'll be committing an act of economic treason.
And what's worse is that you'll not be doing it because you've been duped into it, because you've read this article now, and you've had the grand deception pulled apart in front of your eyes.
If you vote Tory after reading this article, you'll be committing an act of economic treason in the full knowledge of what you're doing. Which is infinitely worse than doing it because you don't know any better than to be tricked by Boris Johnson's deceptive charade of fake patriotism.
If you vote Tory after reading this you'll be committing economic treason willingly and in full knowledge of what you're doing.
Don't vote Tory.
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The rule of this game is very simple. If you've been sent a link to this article, all you have to do is pick five of these fifty things from the Tory track record in government and explicitly defend them to the person who sent you the link.
Tearing up the British constitution
Page 48 of the Tory manifesto promises all kinds of radical hard-right constitutional changes, most notably their pledges to tear up our human rights, and to radically restrict the power of the courts to hold the government to account. They dress it up in right-wing propaganda speak, but it's obvious that their proposals are intended to prevent the courts from ever intervening again to stop unlawful legislation like Johnson's prorogation of parliament, and to stop judicial reviews from checking that government projects are actually lawful,
A vote for the Tories is a vote for weak courts and an all powerful government
Longest fall in value of wages since records began
Under Tory rule British workers have suffered the longest sustained decline in the real value of their wages since records began. The fall is so bad that it's the joint worst wage collapse in the developed world with Greece. The difference of course is that Greece did that to their workers because they were forced to by the Troika, the Tories did that to British workers because they wanted to.
A vote for Tories is a vote for lower wages
Spectacularly missed economic targets
In 2010 the Tories promised to eliminate the deficit by 2015. In 2019 they're still nowhere near eliminating it. Over 9 years to do what they promised to do in under 5, and more new public debt created in the process than every single Labour government in history combined? If that's "strong economic management", I'd hate to see what Tories would classify as chaotic, debt-soaring ineptitude.
A vote for Tories is a vote for more economic incompetence
The austerity con
The architecy of austerity extremism George Osborne's is gone, his mate David Cameron is gone, Theresa May is gone, but austerity isn't. Boris Johnson is still pushing austerity, whilst pretending that he isn't, because the evidence is now absolutely clear that austerity is a con job that only ever succeeded in transferring wealth from the majority to the super rich minority at the expense of the real economy.
A vote for Tories is a vote for the continuation of the Tory austerity con
Broken Robot politics
In 2017 Theresa May kept repeating the phrase "strong and stable leadership" like a broken robot until it became a standing joke, now Boris Johnson is doing the same thing with "Get Brexit Done", which is even more absurd, because Brexit will drag on for years and years if his lazy and incompetent rehash of Theresa May's shambles of a deal gets passed.
A vote for Tories is a vote for condescending wankers who won't stop repeating themselves
The productivity crisis
The UK has been suffering an extreme crisis in relative productivity. The UK lags 35% behind Germany and 30% behind the US. This means that the average UK worker has to work an hour to achieve the same economic output as a German can manage in 39 minutes. The problem is getting worse and worse, and it's easy to understand why. Unhappy and exploited workers don't work as hard as those who feel valued and well paid. Well educated workers are more effective workers than those who have suffered a poor education system. If the UK wants to resolve the productivity crisis it needs to improve wages and working conditions and invest in the education system. The Tories have been doing the polar opposite of that for nine devastating years.
A vote for Tories is a vote against resolving the productivity crisis
Systematic abuse of disabled people
The amount of appalling schemes and degrading assessment regimes disabled people have to go through under this Tory government is absolutely shocking. There's so much of it I've written a full article detailing over a dozen of the worst things.
A vote for Tories is a vote for the continued abuse of disabled people
Legal Aid cuts
Legal Aid was introduced in 1949 by Clement Attlee's Labour government. It serves to prevent the justice system just serving as a plaything of the rich. The point of it is to ensure equal justice and the right to a fair trial. Since 2010 the Tories have mercilessly slashed the Legal Aid budget creating a two-tier justice system where justice is available to those who can afford it, but out of the reach of the poorest and most vulnerable in society (especially in Legal Advice blackspots like the South West, the Midlands and the North). Legal experts are up in arms about these divisive and unfair cuts, but Johnson simply doesn't seem to care.
A vote for Tories is a vote for a two-tier justice system
Huge rise in child poverty
Since 2010 the number of children growing up in poverty has risen by 400,000. The latest research shows that if the Tories win then child poverty would soar to 34% by 2023-24, the highest rate in 60 years.
A vote for Tories is a vote for child poverty
Cowardice
Boris Johnson is a coward. He's evaded public scrutiny as much as possible during the election. He dodged the Climate Change debate, he dodged the Sky leaders interview, he dodged the Andrew Neil interview, he's dodged facing Piers Morgan on GMB, he's hidden himself away in Tory "safe spaces" where the public can't get near him, and he's even dodged husting in his local constituency. How anyone imagines a coward like that will be able to stand up to the US, the EU, Russia, and China on the world stage is anybody's guess.
A vote for Tories is a vote for a coward of a Prime Minister
Railway chaos
As a result of the shambolic Tory privatisation of the railways the UK has the most expensive, most over-crowded and least reliable rail service of any comparable developed European nation. What's more is that the profiteering private companies who operate the services take more in government subsidies than it cost to run the entire system under British Rail!
A vote for Tories is a vote for crap, over-priced and over-crowded rail services
Corporations paying less tax than their employees
Since 2010 the Tories have reduced the rate of corporation tax paid by the biggest multinationals from 28% to just 19%, where Johnson claims he's going to leave it. This is the lowest in the G7, and means that major corporations end up paying lower effective tax rates than many of their employees.
A vote for Tories is a vote for very low rates of corporation tax
Most unaffordable homes ever
After coming to power in 2010 the Conservatives oversaw the lowest levels of housebuilding since the 1920s. When Theresa May was Home Secretary she increased demand on the nation's housing stock by overseeing the biggest surges of net migration in UK history. This combination of weak supply, very high demand and collapsing wages has pushed house prices to their most unaffordable level ever.
A vote for Tories is a vote for unaffordable housing
NHS recruitment crisis
One of Theresa May's first acts as Prime Minister was to scrap NHS bursaries, which caused an astonishing 10,000 decline in applications for nursing courses. Add into the mix the fact that NHS staff from EU countries are quitting the NHS in record numbers and there's a massive NHS recruitment crisis on the cards. Boris Johnson's made up numbers and uncosted pledges are nowhere near enough to even make up the damage of the last 3 years, let alone the last 9.
A vote for Tories is a vote for a massive NHS staff shortage
Contempt for private sector tenants
In 2016 Tory MPs (1/3 of whom are landlords) voted down an opposition amendment to their housing bill that would have required landlords to ensure that rented accommodation is "fit for human habitation".
A vote for Tories is a vote for slumlords renting shit houses to people with nowhere else to turn
Biggest education funding cuts in decades
The Tories are planning the biggest education funding cuts in decades. Follow this link to find out how much they're planning to slash from the budget of your local school.
A vote for Tories is a vote for underfunded schools
The school privatisation agenda
An awful lot of people don't seem to have even noticed that the Tories have been privatising thousands of state owned schools, property and all, for free, into the hands of private sector pseudo-charities, many of which are owned by major Tory party donors (like Philip "Carpetright" Harris, Alan Lewis and John Nash). Read this article about the scandalous Perry Beeches academy chain to get an idea of the seriousness of this Tory vandalism of our education system.
A vote for Tories is a vote for unaccountable profiteers running the English education system
Rip-off tuition fees
With the assistance of their lying Lib-Dem sidekicks the Tories introduced £9,000 per year tuition fees for university students, meaning English students now face the highest fees in the world for study at public universities. The fees are so high that 2/3 of graduates will never be able to pay off their student debts, despite paying a 9% aspiration tax on their disposable incomes for their entire working lives.
A vote for Tories is a vote for lifetimes of unpayable student debt for millions of graduates
Huge rise in Food bank dependency
The Tories have seen a huge rise in food bank dependency since 2010. Over a million food parcels were handed out by the Trussell Trust last year, and they're just one of the food bank organisations. New research has shown that areas that have suffered the rollout of the Tories' hopelessly botched Universal Credit scheme have significantly higher rates of food bank dependency than areas where it hasn't been rolled out yet.
A vote for Tories is a vote for food poverty
Dictators and despots
Boris Johnson and the Tories love sucking up to dictators and despots like the vile misogynistic, homophobic, head-chopping, democracy-repressing, journalist dismembering, terrorism-spreading Islamist tyrants in Saudi Arabia, whilst implying Corbyn is the terrorism sympathiser!
A vote for Tories is a vote for closer relations with dictators and despots
The Hinkley Point C scandal
The Hinkley Point C deal is one of the most scandalous affairs in UK political history. The Tories have agreed to bribe the French and Chinese into building us a nuclear power station by promising to use taxpayers' cash to pay them double the market rate for electricity for 35 years, then cover the cleanup cost at the taxpayers' expense too. The reason we have to bribe foreign governments into building our nuclear infrastructure for us is that the Tories privatised the UK's nuclear expertise in the 1990s, and the private company was then allowed to be purchased by the French government.
A vote for Tories is a vote for the most expensive rip-off deal the UK has ever signed up to
Unqualified teachers
In 2010 the Tories changed the rules and scrapped the requirement that teachers actually be qualified to do the job. Since then the education system has been flooded with ever more unqualified teachers, rising to 22,500 by 2015. It's worth remembering that the education secretary who brought in the policy of flooding our schools with unqualified teachers was Michael Gove, you know, the guy who claimed that the UK has "had enough of experts" during the EU referendum campaign.
A vote for Tories is a vote for even more unqualified teachers in our schools
Unprecedented lying
Boris Johnson is such an egregious liar he makes David Cameron look trustworthy, and that guy couldn't even remember what football team he was pretending to support! Johnson's lies are so numerous it's impossible to keep track of all of them.A vote for Tories is a vote for the most dishonest Prime Minister this nation has ever had
PFI
One of the worst things about New Labour was their reliance upon rip-off PFI economic alchemy scams designed to bribe private companies into building public infrastructure. The Treasury Select Committee found that PFI is "an extremely inefficient method of funding [public infrastructure] projects" yet the Tories have carried on using them, and are currently looking for hedge funds to sign up to another £10 billion worth of PFI deals. Jeremy Corbyn has pledged to scrap PFI.
A vote for Tories is a vote for even more rip-off PFI economic alchemy schemes
Secret courts
In 2013 the Tories (in coalition with the so-called Liberal Democrats) introduced a new law to create secret courts in which a person can have their fate decided in a courtroom they are not allowed to enter, on charges they are not allowed to know, based on evidence they are not allowed to see. In secret courts even the person's lawyer is barred from entering the courtroom or seeing the evidence. These shocking secrecy rules don't just apply to criminal courts or terrorism related offences, they can be used in civil cases too!
A vote for Tories is a vote in favour of contempt for the concept of open justice
Privatisation
Since coming to power in 2010 the Tories have been privatising public assets at a faster rate than any government in UK history (even Thatcher). Many of their privatisation scams have been completely senseless and resulted in vast rip-offs for the British public; they sold Royal Mail off at over £1 billion below its real market value; they sold off the publicly owned banks at massive losses to the taxpayer; they've carved up and given away £billions worth of NHS services; they gave away thousands of publicly owned school properties, for free, to unaccountable private pseudo-charities; they've sold off the student loan books at a loss; and they sold off the UK government's stake in Eurostar for a tiny fraction of what it cost us to set it up.
A vote for Tories is a vote for more rip-off Tory privatisation scams
Foreign ownership of British rail franchises
One of the most ridiculous things about the Tory privatisation ideology is that the only country that is barred from bidding for UK rail franchises is ... err ... the UK! Vast swathes of our rail system are now operated by foreign governments like Germany, France, the Netherlands, Singapore and Hong Kong. These foreign governments then extract their taxpayer-subsidised profits back to their own countries to be used to improve their own rail systems. The Netherlands state rail operator Abellio now operates so many train services here that their UK network is two and a half times the size of the entire Netherlands state railway!
A vote for Tories is a vote for UK taxpayers and rail passengers subsidising foreign rail networks
Deceptive campaigning
This has been the most deceptive and manipulative election campaign ever, with all kinds of outrageous Tory scams. A fake Labour party manifesto, turning their Twitter account into a fake "fact-checking" service, endless fake Tory propaganda like fake "new hospitals" and fake "new nurses" to put in them, and of course the tides of fake 'independent' Facebook pages using sponsored ads to inject Tory propaganda into people's news feeds. The idea that any of this could be stopped by electing the party that's doing it is laughable.
A vote for Tories is a vote for ever more election fakery
Social care crisis
The Tories have slashed £4.6 billion from the social care budget at a time of rising demand due to the UK's ageing population demographics. This social care funding crisis has coincided with the biggest increase in the death rate since the 1960s, and is putting an immense amount of pressure on already overstretched NHS services and unpaid carers. Boris Johnson promised a solution to the social care crisis, then didn't even bother to include the issue in his manifesto.
A vote for Tories is a vote a social care system in crisis
Scrapped NHS waiting time targets
Over the winter of 2016-17 it became clear that the underfunded overstretched NHS was incapable of meeting the 4 hour waiting time target at A&E departments. Instead of reversing their cuts and stopping their programme of hospital closures, the Tories simply scrapped the waiting time target! If the target can't be delivered then don't change your policy, scrap the target - that's the Tory approach to problem-solving!
A vote for Tories is a vote for longer hospital waits
Defunding of local government
The Tories have slashed local government budgets so harshly that the leader of David Cameron's own Tory council famously wrote to him to plead for him to stop. What's most disgusting about this assault on local government budgets is that the most savage local government cuts have been focused on the poorest areas, while some leafy Tory councils actually got increases in their budgets.
A vote for Tories is a vote for even more ruination of local government services
Tax-dodgers winning government contracts
The Tories have brought giant outsourcing corporations in to do all kinds of government functions. Huge numbers of these corporate leeches are now having their contracts renewed automatically with no cost-benefit analysis and no competitive tendering process. The Labour Party have proposed a new law to ban outsourcing companies from receiving government contracts if they're based in tax havens. The Tories are quite happy to continue using taxpayers' cash to pay tax-dodging corporate outsourcing companies to do the work the government should be doing itself.
A vote for Tories is a vote for tax-dodging corporate outsourcing parasitism
Filibustering
Filibustering is an incredibly cynical strategy politicians use to block proposed legislation by talking and talking until the debate runs out of time. Some of the proposed laws that have been derailed by Tory MPs deliberately blabbering on for hours to run the clock down include first aid lessons for school children, free hospital parking for carers, cheaper off-patent drugs for the NHS, and a bill to prevent revenge evictions by landlords who have been asked to maintain their properties. Several of these bills had cross-party support, but were deliberately wrecked by a handful of hard-right Tories like Philip Davies, Andrew Rosindell, Sam Gyimah, Alistair Burt and Cristopher Chope.
A vote for Tories is a vote for Tory debate wrecking tactics
Fire service cuts
Between 2010 and 2015 the Tories slashed 30% off the fire service budget resulting in the loss of 10,000 firefighter jobs and the closure of 39 fire stations. Between 2015 and 2020 they intend to slash another 20%. 2017-18 saw the highest number of fire-related deaths since 2010-11.
A vote for Tories is a vote for more people dying in house fires
Prisons chaos
Violence, riots, widespread drug use, escapes, chronic understaffing and soaring suicide rates. The UK prison system is in chaos. One of the worst prisons of all is HMP Northumberland that was privatised by the Tories in 2014. It's supposed to be a training prison to give prisoners jobs skills so they're less likely to return to crime. At HMP Northumberland a private contractor Novus was giving prisoners pictures of Peppa Pig to colour in as their employability training, all at the taxpayers' expense of course.
A vote for Tories is a vote for absolute chaos in our prisons
Attacks on workers' rights
In 2013 the Tory led government introduced £1,200 fees in order for employees to seek unfair dismissal compensation from their employers. So now if your boss sacks you unfairly (for your age, sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy, political orientation, trade union activities, or refusal to suck his cock) you have to find over a grand in order to go to an employment tribunal. The Tory presumption of course being that your boss is a great guy and all of his employees are worthless scum, and the fewer people who take him to tribunal the better. This outrageous scam was ruled unlawful in 2017, however any political party that introduces such outrageous and unjust legislation obviously can't be trusted with workers' rights.
A vote for Tories is a vote for economic barriers to the justice system
Police cuts
Since 2010 the Tories have axed 21,000+ police jobs, and the impact of these police cuts can't be hidden off the violent crime statistics, which have been soaring for years. Johnson now promises to replace almost as many as they slashed, but loads of questions remain. With 600 fewer police stations closed down since 2010, where would they work. Why slash experienced officers and replace them with green recruits, and why has no attention been paid to the large UK population rise since 2010?
A vote for Tories is a vote for fewer police on our streets and more violent crime
Flood defence spending
Of all of the Tory cuts their decision to slash the flood defence spending budget is one of the most stupid. For each £1 spent on flood defence spending the nation saves £8 in avoided damage and disruption. Several of the areas that had their flood defence schemes cancelled in 2010-11 ended up suffering severe flooding. As a departing gift after resigning in disgrace David Cameron handed a DBE to Caroline Spelman who was the Tory politician who oversaw this ideologically driven lunacy!
A vote for Tories is a vote for more damaging floods
Adult education
Adult education colleges had their budgets slashed by 24% between 2010 and 2015. The vocational training budget was slashed even more, by 40%. Over a million adult learning places have disappeared since 2010. It's beyond obvious that re-educating adult workers is absolutely vital in the modern era where the concept of jobs for life has been all but eradicated. Any government intent on developing a modern high-tech economy would invest in adult education in order to provide workers with the skills retraining they need to move between jobs. The Tories have been doing the exact opposite.
A vote for Tories is a vote for an inflexible low-skill economy
Forced closure of NHS services
During the 2010 General Election the Tories promised to stop the forced closure of NHS services. In 2012 the Tory government attempted to force the closure of Lewisham Hospital in South London. In 2014 the Tories introduced new legislation to make it much easier for them to force the closure of NHS services and facilities. Since 2015 the Tories have been working on a secret plan to shut down dozens of A&E departments, maternity wards, walk in centres and mental health facilities up and down the country.
A vote for Tories is a vote for the forced closure of even more NHS services
Sweetheart tax deals
One of the sickest things about the Tory government is the way they allowed HMRC to draw up sweetheart tax deals with massive corporations like Google, Starbucks and Vodafone. Why should Google get to negotiate a 3% tax deal when ordinary working people have to pay what they actually owe?
A vote for Tories is a vote for more sweetheart tax deals with multinational corporations
Armed services cuts
Between 2010 and 2015 the Tories slashed over 33,000 jobs in the armed services. The army has been pared back to its smallest size since the Napoleonic War! Meanwhile the Tories have been blasting money like it's going out of fashion on aircraft carriers with no aircraft, paying 40 Admirals and 260 Captains when we've only got 19 warships, and the 205 billion renewal of Britain's privatised supply of weapons of mass destruction.
A vote for Tories is a vote for weaker and less capable defence
The Snoopers' Charter
Theresa May's Snoopers' Charter is the most extreme state surveillance law ever introduced in a developed nation. It allows over 20,000 government employees to trawl through the private communication data of innocent people (including loads of non-terrorism related organisations like the Food Standards Agency, the Health and Safety Executive and the Gambling Commission). It also allows the state to tell lies in court in order to secure convictions.
A vote for Tories is a vote for extreme surveillance and an end to the concept of privacy
In-Work benefit cuts
The majority of people receiving non-pension benefits in Tory Britain are the working poor, not the unemployed. When the Tories slash things like housing benefit and tax credits, what they're actually doing is further impoverishing the working poor. Incredibly they have repeatedly introduced new welfare cuts to make working families poorer whilst simultaneously spouting the Orwellian propaganda that they're "making work pay" as they do it!
A vote for Tories is a vote to further impoverish the working poor
The trade deficit
The UK is suffering a massive problem with trade deficits. This means the UK imports far more than it exports. The problem has been going on for a long time, but since 2010 the problem has been getting a lot worse, with the record being smashed over and again. In the month of the Brexit referendum the trade deficit in goods swelled to an astonishing £12.5 billion, the highest ever recorded. The UK's terrible balance of payments deficit is offset a bit by financial services export and vehicle exports, but a Tory hard Brexit would throw a massive spanner in the works, especially if they go for the "no deal" cliff edge that Johnson's Brexit bodge keeps alive.
A vote for the Tories is a vote for massive trade deficits
Contempt for human rights
Boris Johnson and his cabinet of ghouls have a burning contempt for your human rights.Their manifesto pledges to scrap our human rights and replace them with a set of Tory allowances, which would mean we join Belarus as the only European nation that doesn't adhere to the human rights legislation that was bestowed on Europe by the British Prime Ministers Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee.
A vote for Tories is a vote to scrap your own human rights
Mental health funding cuts
The Tories love talking up how much they care about mental health conditions, but their actual track record is disgraceful. Between 2010 and 2015 they slashed £600 million from mental health services. They're still slashing away now. In fact they even advised the corporate outsourcing companies carrying out their disability assessments to actively discriminate against disabled people.
A vote for Tories is a vote for mental health neglect
Taxpayer subsidised malice
One of the worst things about the Tory government is the fact that several of their malicious anti-welfare schemes actually cost more to administer in corporate outsourcing fees than they will ever save in reduced benefits payments. The Work Capacity Assessment regime for sick and disabled people and their draconian sanctions system are both examples of socially ruinous schemes that actually cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds to operate.
A vote for Tories is a vote for more money to be wasted on malicious Tory anti-welfare schemes
Rising inequality
While UK workers suffered the worst collapse in the value of their wages on record the tiny super rich minority literally doubled their wealth. There is an abundance of evidence showing that the more unequal a society is the less economically prosperous it is, and the unhappier the people are. Take from the poor to give to the rich, that's always been the Tory agenda. The worst thing is that these malicious reverse Robin Hoods even had the gall to tell us "we're all in this together" as they were deliberately rigging society even more in favour of the tiny super-rich minority than it already was!
A vote for Tories is a vote for an even more unequal Britain
Threat of no deal Brexit
Johnson keeps on banging on about "Get Brexit Done", but agreeing the Withdrawal Agreement is only step one. The next step is the wrangling over the future trade arrangement. Johnson reckons he can get this done within a year, which is laughable (most trade deals take around 7 years to negotiate). If Britain doesn't have a deal sorted by the end of 2020, Johnson is threatening to crash out with no deal, which would be an economic disaster for Britain.
A vote for Tories is a vote for the threat of an even bigger economic meltdown than the last one
A reminder of the rule
The rule of this game is very simple. If you've been sent a link to this article, all you have to do is pick five of these fifty things from the Tory track record in government and explicitly defend them to the person who sent you the link.
Explicit
Now I'm going to define what I mean when I use the word "explicitly" so that there is no confusion:
- If you mention Jeremy Corbyn, Labour, or any other political party or figure you're engaging in whataboutery deflection.
- If you fail to address the actual issue you claim to be defending, you're being misleading and evasive.
- If you attack certain sectors of society (the unemployed, the working poor, young people, migrants, left-wingers, trade unionists, Muslims ...) you're playing the classic Tory divide and conquer games that they use to keep the majority of people fighting amongst themselves rather than fighting back against their appalling misrule.
If you use any of these fallacious arguments you obviously fail the challenge.
Running away
If you refuse to engage with the challenge you obviously fail too, and demonstrate beyond doubt that you have the same cowardly run-away attitude to scrutiny as both Theresa May and Boris Johnson.
If you run away from the challenge then you'd just be showing the person who challenged you that you imagine that you can just make difficult subjects go away by evading them and refusing to engage in open and honest political discourse.
If you run away from the challenge then you'd actually be demonstrating exactly why politics in the UK is such a bloody mess.
You'd be showing that you're one of the people who wilfully ignore so much malice, incompetence and right-wing authoritarian scheming simply because you think it's all outweighed by whatever (probably imaginary) personal benefit you'll be getting from a Tory government, and that you're simply too much of a coward to even explain yourself.
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