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
Re-investment in the NHS
Free dental checkups
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
OK, here is some source material on the infographic, so you can know for sure that I'm not just making it up. Source one: Railways Here's the original source: New chief's challenge to get Railtrack back on track - Financial Times Here's my article explaining more about what this means: Tory rail privatisation and the £50 billion black hole of debt. It's also worth considering that despite this hidden debt-hiding subsidy, the private franchises also receive more in subsidies per year than the annual cost of running the entire British Rail network, tracks and all, before privatisation in 1994! Source two: Broadband Ironically the CEBR report into the economic benefit of super-fast broadband was commissioned by the private company that's done such a lamentable job of rolling it out so far (BT Broadband). The UK has below 10% access, while advanced economies like South Korea and Japan are up to 98% and 97% already. Source: British Broadband Source three: Royal Mail Here's the Daily Mail article explaining this extraordinary Royal Mail property portfolio under-valuation: Royal Mail 565% mark up on land sales Here's my article: The Royal Mail property privatisation scam is really paying off (at the public expense) Source four: Water companies You can read the damning University of Grenwich report into water privatisation here: Privatised water: a system in need of repair
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
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
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 robotuntil 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 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
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
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
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 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 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
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 bitby 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
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.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
