Thursday 11 November 2021

Spot the Difference


In 2019 voters in the Don Valley constituency in South Yorkshire elected their first ever Tory MP, a private landlord by the name of Nick Fletcher.

It's absolutely astonishing that people in a poverty-stricken post-industrial part of South Yorkshire would wilfully elect a member of the Tory party as their MP, but political memories are clearly incredibly short, and it seems like people have already forgotten the horrific Tory de-industrialisation policies of the 1980s and 90s that annihilated local economies across the north of England.

They've forgotten the disastrous de-industrialisation policies; they've forgotten the demented Tory "leave it to market forces" fanaticism of just leaving entire towns to rot, so that younger generations had no choice but to leave for more affluent areas where they could actually find decent well-paid jobs; and they've forgotten the Tory austerity ruination that siphoned £billions out of local government budgets as they were simultaneously lavishing tax cuts and handouts on corporations and the mega-rich!

It's bad enough that people in a left-behind former coal mining area elected any Tory to represent them on the political stage, but it's especially galling that he's a property-hoarder who profiteers off parasites like him buying up all of the affordable housing, so that ordinary people are forced into paying off his mortgages, rather than buying houses of their own.

He's not just an economically unproductive exploiter representing a party that inflicted ruination on the area he represents, he's also ridiculously dishonest, to the extent of taking people for absolute mugs.

On December 21st 2020 he posted a Facebook selfie, taken in the town of Thorne.

On September 20th 2021 he posted the exact same selfie, with Christmas trees still visible in the background.

And on November 10th he posted the same selfie again claiming to have visited the town, and seen it "thriving again after a tough year".

Of course using the same photo over and again isn't even remotely on the same scale of dishonesty and corruption that Johnson's Tory party is absolutely mired in (dodgy PPE contracts, the Owen Paterson scandal, Geoffrey Cox skiving parliament to earn £hundreds per hour representing a tax haven; Tory donors apparently buying peerages at £3 million a pop; MPs accepting freebies from gambling companies then lobbying for them in parliament; David Cameron lobbying for Greensill to get £350 million in Covid loans just before they went bankrupt; Rishi Sunak's wife investing in a firm just weeks before her husband gave them a massive loan ...), but misleadingly posting the same photo multiple times is the kind of dishonest behaviour ordinary people would call their friends out for, isn't it?

It's similar to Tory liar Lucy Allan's bizarrely staged election pictures in 2017.

Of course her mendacious lie about not being invited to remembrance day events (when she actually had her constituency manager reject both invitations) is worse, as is the way she fabricated a death threat in order to smear a constituent who wrote to her in 2015 urging her to oppose David Cameron's war-mongering in Syria, but the fact these people resort to deception, when it would almost certainly be easier to just tell the truth is illustrative of their characters, isn't it?

It absolutely boggles the mind that people wilfully vote to put charlatans like this in parliament, especially when it's people in deprived former coal mining areas like the Don Valley.

 
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12 comments:

Vivien Markham said...

Strange how people always bring up the winter of discontent and three day working week when Labour was in power but conveniently forget austerity and the poverty it has caused in towns like Don Valley which elected a Tory MP at the last General Election for the first time ever. My view is that the Tories will be forgiven any misdeeds greed or corruption because Boris Johnson appeals to a lot of voters in the North of England because they can relate to him and most importantly he got Brexit done so can do no wrong in their eyes!

DanMcAuley said...

The 3 day week was under a Conservative government in 1973-74 under Edward Heath. Which means anyone bringing that up to discredit Labour is being even more dishonest!

Vivien Markham said...

The three day working week was indeed under Ted Heath's Tory government I stand corrected.

Unknown said...

Yes it's not the first time I've seen people saying the 3 day week was under labour. Was going to correct this until I saw you had. Notice she immediately acknowledged this was when Ted Heath was in power, which makes me wonder why she claimed it was under labour when she clearly knew it was in Ted hlHeath's time.

Anonymous said...

Well the three day working week and winter of discontent were a direct result of both Conservative and Labour party post war policies. So Nationalising:

-Health care (the NHS has never broken even since it's creation).
-Steel (racked up massive debt once other countries went to China).
-Coal (Actually had miners in wales using pickaxes into the sixties! as well as; massive debt because it wasn't breaking even. The Taxpayer literally propping up these industries as a form of pretending to work on welfare).
-Social Housing (Rent control. There's tons of data on the chronic housing shortages this leads too.)

I suspect the only obvious one would have been nationalising the rails and we know how that went as a backlash to the aforementioned socialist policies!

It's funny how people would rather shit sling against the left or the right rather then looking at the data on the horrendous effects the policies they champion have had on people's lives *Cough* Labour Manifesto 2019 *Cough*. Inflation starves and kills just as much as a bereft handicapped man who's had his benefits cut.

Mr. Magoo said...

"WHAT THE MARKET DOES

"‘No politician’, John Kerry told a virtual climate summit called by the US President, ‘no matter how demagogic or how potent and capable they are, is going to be able to change what that market is doing’ (i paper, 24 April).

"As Biden’s climate envoy he was expressing the view that investment in technologies to combat global over-warming had now become so profitable for capitalist enterprises that no government would be able to stop it happening. He may have been over-optimistic or premature but his reasoning was based on a more general assumption – that no government can change what the market is doing.

"Applied more generally, it is what socialists say. It’s even the basis of our case against trying to make capitalism work for the benefit of all instead of, as it does, as a system geared to making and accumulating profits. So it is rather strange that a long-standing reformist politician – Kerry was the Democratic Party candidate for President in 2004 – should be saying this.

"He could come back and say that he only meant it to apply to the particular case of investment in anti-climate-change technologies. But why would governments not be able to change what the market is doing in this case but would in others? Such as when market conditions mean building luxury flats rather than decent homes for those who need one; or not producing food for malnourished people who can’t pay for it; or cutting back on the production of needed useful things when there’s an economic depression?

"Capitalism is an economic system based on the ownership of productive resources by rich individuals, capitalist enterprises or states, where production is carried on for sale on a market with a view to profit. It is driven by the economic imperative not just to make profits but to accumulate them as more capital invested in production for profit. This imperative is enforced via the market.

"A capitalist enterprise won’t make a profit unless it can sell what it produces. To do this, it needs to keep its costs down. This involves keeping up with the latest methods of production, installing technologically more advanced plant and machinery. The market obliges capitalist enterprises to do this just to stay in the game. If they don’t, they will be out-competed by rival enterprises and eventually go out of business, either through bankruptcy or being taken over.

"This is the context within which governments have to operate and which constrains what they can do. The main constraint is that they don’t have resources of their own and have to get them, directly or indirectly, from the profit-making sector. They must take care not to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Or even discourage it. Just the opposite; they have to positively encourage it, by maintaining or creating favourable conditions for making profits.

"How much they can take from the profit sector depends on how that sector is doing, whether it is expanding, contracting or stagnant. They can’t stop the boom/slump cycle that is built into capitalism, so they can’t do much more than navigate by sight. They can’t control capitalism but are at the mercy of its vagaries.

"Kerry is right. No politician can successfully buck the market. As he said, they have to go with its flow."

(Source: Cooking the Books 1, Socialist Standard, June 2021 - https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2020s/2021/no-1402-june-2021/cooking-the-books-1-6/)

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