Theresa May's message to the youth of Britain: Never Vote Tory

Let's be honest. We're destroying this planet. Just look at the millions of tons of plastic in the oceans. Look at the way insects are dying off in unprecedented numbers. And look at the fact that every single one of the five hottest years on record have occurred in the last five years.

Mindless consumerism and profit-fixated capitalism are not just trashing the planet, they're trashing the futures of the younger generations, many of whom are understandably angry about it.

They're too young to be allowed to vote in elections, but they've found a way to express their political opinions through the School Strike for Climate protests that manifested all over the world today.

Anyone who understands the essential political truth that proper political engagement involves more than stuffing a bit of paper into a box every few years should be delighted that so many young people are learning to raise their political voices before they even get to voting age.

But Theresa May and the Tories are far from pleased. The idea of young activists demanding political action frightens the hell out of them because they're repulsed by anything that might get in the way of their project to transfer as much wealth and power as possible to the mega-rich elitist class who entirely bankroll their party.

Theresa May's unbelievably patronising comments about the School Strike for Climate protests included accusations that the kids were being "disruptive" and "wasting time".

The Daily Mail hack, relentless Tory cheerleader and wife of the Tory environment secretary Sarah Vine went even further with an extraordinary claim that 99.9% of the kids who went on the protest had no real concerns about the planet whatever, and saw it as nothing more than "an excellent opportunity to get out of doing any work".

So the subtext to the Tory stance is absolutely clear. Your concerns are irrelevant, your attempts to engage with politics are not just disruptive, but they're also completely insincere for 999 out of every 1,000 of you too!

Way to appeal to future voters Tory geniuses!

Politicians from other parties adopted an entirely different tone to demonstrate that they were listening carefully to the concerns of the younger generations. Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn said the young protesters were "right to feel let down by the generations before them", Caroline Lucas of the Greens described the widespread protests as "most hopeful thing that's happened in years", and Nicola Sturgeon of the SNP said the protests were "a cause for optimism in an often dark world".

The Tory party are already utterly toxic amongst the younger generations as a result of their introduction of rip-off university fees (aspiration taxes that over 3/4 of students will never pay off despite entire working lifetimes of paying a 9% education tax on their disposable income), massive cuts to school funding since 2010, the deliberate and sustained under-investment in the infrastructure and services that generate future economic prosperity, and last but not least their hard-right ultranationalist interpretation of the 2016 Brexit vote.

But this unbelievably patronising attitude to young people raising their political voices is the glitter on the Tory turd.

The Tory stance seems to be that "kids can't vote, so fuck 'em", but it'll obviously only be a few years before these kids at the protest today become adults, so the Tory attitude isn't just patronising and dismissive, but also incredibly short-sighted too

This Tory political shortsightedness when it comes to listening to future voters is decidedly ironic given that political shortsightedness about environmental issues was one of the core themes of the youth protest.

So yes, kids skipped a few lessons today to protest about what they believe in, but the patronising toxicity of Theresa May and the Tories' reactions to their protest provides a much bigger life lesson than anything they could have learned in school: 'Never Vote Tory'.

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