Sunday 5 May 2019

Who is gullible enough to believe the party of millionaires is the natural party of the working classes?



The Tory MP Esther McVey has put her name to a ludicrous article in the Daily Express claiming that the Tories are "the natural party of the working classes".

The crux of the argument is that the Tories are the natural home of northern working class Brexit voters, and that the disastrous Tory local election results somehow prove that they should just get on with delivering Brexit!

It's total nonsense from start to finish. The Tories aren't the party of the working classes; Brexit wasn't delivered by northern working class voters (the most likely demographics to vote for it were actually wealthy retired Tories in the Home Counties and the Shires); and the idea that local election results that delivered the worst Tory results since 1995 and huge gains for the Brexit-sceptic Lib-Dems and Greens are proof that the public are baying for Brexit to be delivered is absurdly nonsensical, even by the extraordinary propaganda standards that have been set by Brextremists and Remain ultras over the last few years.


Of course there are a few idiots out there who would be convinced by this incoherent propaganda, but anyone with the vaguest grip on reality knows that the claim that the Tories are the natural party of the working classes is complete nonsense.

The Tories are bankrolled by a tiny clique of mega-rich donors, corporate fat cats, bankers, property speculators, landed gentry, private health companies, and Russian oligarchs.

Labour are funded by hundreds of thousands of small donations for ordinary people and workers through their trade unions, and have numerous policies aimed at supporting and improving the lives and communities of the working classes.

Even if you're too obtuse to follow the money to see whose interests are being represented by whom, there's the grotesque anti-worker Tory track record in government.

• Thatcher declaring ideological war on UK manufacturing and mining in the 1980s in order to wreck the trade unions by deliberately crippling the industries they represented.

• The privatisation of masses of public services, from the water supply and public transport, to the outsourcing of local services like grass cutting, meaning the replacement of vast numbers of stable long-term decently paid public sector jobs with insecure, low-pay private sector exploitation.

• The toxic "leave it to the markets" neoliberal mentality that resulted in millions of people across the UK ending up trapped in left behind high-unemployment communities, with desperately neglected public services and infrastructure.

• The lost decade of wage growth since the bankers' insolvency crisis as a result of deliberate Tory wage repression policies and the explosion of insecure, exploitative, low-pay Zero Hours type jobs since 2010.

• The imposition of unlawful Tory tribunal fees designed to protect bad bosses from being taken to court by their employees by deliberalely and unlawfully pricing poor workers out of the justice system.

• The ideological vandalism of public services and the social safety net, resulting in a violent crime epidemic, huge health service waiting lists for those who are not rich enough to afford private medical insurance, and an unprecedented rise in in-work poverty (70% of kids growing up in poverty are living in working households).

So maybe the extremely hard-of-thinking might be convinced by the nonsensical Tory propaganda that the billionaire-bankrolled party of corporate greed and inherited privilege is actually the party of ordinary workers, but convincing the gullible isn't the main point of reality-reversing propaganda like this.

The main point is a propaganda technique called "gaslighting".

Gaslighting involves psychological manipulation in order to make people question their own sanity.

Esther McVey and the Tories aren't pushing this absurd reality-reversal because they actually believe it, or because they expect many of us to believe it.

They're pushing it because they want to pollute political discourse with such a torrent of ludicrously incoherent nonsense that ordinary people end up dazed and confused, struggling to pick out the occasional nuggets of political truth from a disorientating torrent of deceptions, distortions, logical fallacies, propaganda tropes, and lies.


They're not actually trying to convince anyone besides the hopelessly gullible that "black is white", they're simply hoping that they can convince enough of us to give up on politics altogether in order to ride a wave of political apathy to success.

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8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I cant imagine a party who favour massively raising the minimum wage as favouring "the working class". Y'know, given how its fucked over hundreds of thousands of small businesses and low wage earners. Like theres a ton of data on it. Like artificially raising wages without matching the amount of money a business earns is so mathematically stupid only a socialist or someone of equivalent intelligence would think it a good idea. Thoughts anyone?

The Nerd Nest said...

That's been covered in a previous AAV article from a few years back, but long story short: raising the minimum wage makes more money available to the lowest-paid, who are also those with the highest marginal propensity to consume.

This leads to increased incomes for businesses of all sizes, large and small, as the amount of money spent on goods increases (incidentally pushing up GDP as well, which helps the nation control debt levels).

When the minimum wage was introduced in the 1990s, a lot of people made the same prediction as you: that there would be mass bankruptcies, businesses would fail, and unemployment would skyrocket. None of these things actually happened then, and they wouldn't happen as a result of an increase in the minimum wage now.

The only ones who might lose out are major shareholders, who could see their (essentially unearned) shareholder incomes reduce as a larger proportion of their business profit gets spent on worker remuneration, leaving less for the shareholders themselves (and many people would think that as the workers, not the shareholders, are the ones who actually make the company profitable in the first place, this is perfectly fair).

Anonymous said...

I'm afraid you've provided absolutely no evidence that capital is specifically raised for small businesses,when minimum wage is raised.
Please provide valid citation or honestly you, like Thomas are simply blowing hot air (at the expense if low skilled workers of course).

Anonymous said...

FYI Seattle got hit incredibly hard by job losses according to this study explored by the New York times: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/20/upshot/minimum-wage-and-job-loss-one-alarming-seattle-study-is-not-the-last-word.html

Anonymous said...

https://globalnews.ca/news/3944598/60000-jobs-lost-minimum-wage-increase/

Obviously not a small business, however they have a decidedly left wing government in power atm (hence my use of the NY times given frequent accusations of right wing bias in these pages, lol). But again: an artificial increase in the employee wages saw absolutely no increase in available hours or indeed revenue as you claimed (again you've not even explained how that would work?)

Anonymous said...

I actually found this website with multiple examples of small businesses explaining their job losses and loss of profits in states that raised the minimum wage artificially and a great deal of them effectively explained that an incremental increase, let alone a sudden one off say, three dollars simply did not add up too additional revenue:
https://www.minimumwage.com/2019/02/real-stories-of-small-biz-owners-harmed-by-wage-hikes/

Realistically if you were to raise the current UK minimum wage by one pound an hour youd effectively have to raise roughly two thousand pounds a year for that one employer. I believe labour want an incremental increase too ten pounds an hour. So thars around the six thousand mark within... three years as an example?

How, given the evidence that artificially increasing wages has cost so many hundreds of thousands of jobs in Canada and the U.S as I've evidenced... do you justify what appears to be a mythological increase in capital for small businesses when its clearly not happened for so many?

Cheers.

Mr. Magoo said...

Another good example of gaslighting is that whenever I hear the word "anti-semitism" I now think of the Labour party. It's obvious that criticism of Israel isn't anti-semitism, but very repetitive propaganda makes us question our own sanity.

Anonymous said...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XgjUnl4Bluk