Voting Tory is an endorsement of their systematic abuse of sick and disabled people

If you watched BBC Question Time on Thursday November 9th 2017 you will have seen a Tory plant in the audience bridling with faux outrage at the accusation that the Tory government is responsible for the mistreatment of disabled people.  Here's a clip of the encounter.

The absolute state of this: A Tory plant in the BBC Question Time audience outright denying the Tories horrific mistreatment of sick and disabled people. pic.twitter.com/0NFQntHuot

— Tom (AAV) (@Angry_Voice) November 10, 2017

The audience member in question is the Tory councillor for Horley Central in Surrey, although he used to be a Ukipper until he saw the political tide turning and opportunistically jumped ship to join the Tories.

The Ukipper-turned-Tory (blue-kip) councillor furiously condemned Aditya Chakrabortty as "the Donald Trump of the left" for daring to highlight the Tory track record of mistreating disabled people.

Given that the Tory plant in the audience was basically trying to deny the appalling Tory track record of mistreating sick and disabled people as "inflammatory rubbish", it's obvious that he's actually the one using reality-denying Trump-style rhetoric to render uncomfortable truths as "fake news". But by now we should all be well aware that accusing your opponents of what you're guilty of yourself has always been one of the classic right-wing propaganda tactics.

Here's a list of issues that the Blue-kip plant in the BBC audience was trying to publicly deny.

• The Tory government's own figures admit that thousands of disabled people have died within six weeks of being declared "fit for work" and stripped of their disability benefits by the Work Capacity Assessment (WCA) regime. The Tory government desperately tried to hide these figures by refusing to comply with Freedom of Information requests.

• The WCA regime was declared unlawful for the way it discriminates against people with mental health conditions, but the Tory government carried on regardless.

• Appeals against botched WCA rulings have been costing £50 million a year. The Tory government have ensured that this cost is paid for by the taxpayer, not the profiteering corporations that made the botched assessments in the first place.

• The WCA disability denial regime costs way more in corporate outsourcing contracts to administer than it will ever save in reduced disability benefit payments, meaning the Tories are forcing the taxpayer to subsidise their systematic abuse of disabled people.

• An incredible 420,000 disabled people were hit by the Tory "Bedroom Tax", many of them for "spare" rooms used for medical equipment, or for carers to sleep in. The financial stress caused Stephanie Bottrill to commit suicide leaving a note blaming David Cameron and the Tory government.

• Tens of thousands of disabled people were forced onto the Tories' shambolic Work Programme, but the outsourcing companies running this scheme knew they could never make a profit from helping "difficult to place" clients, so disabled people were just "parked" while the corporate parasites focused on cashing in on easy to place clients. Just 8% of disabled people to be put through the Work Programme end up finding jobs!

• A United Nations investigation into the treatment of disabled people in the UK found that the UK government was committing "grave and systematic violations" of disabled people's rights.

• In March 2016 309 Tory MPs voted to cut the Employment and Support Allowance by £1,500 per year. Not a single politician from any other party voted in favour of these cuts. As a result of this brazen economic assault on disabled people, several Tory MPs were sacked as patrons of disability charities.

• The Tory party claimed to be scrapping the Disability Living Allowance (DLA) and replacing it with Personal Independence Payments (PIP) in order to make sure the money went to the right people, but in April 2017 they slashed PIP payments by 33% using the perverse excuse that this would incentivise them to find work (despite there being no evidence whatever to back up this claim).

• Disabled people undergoing PIP assessments have routinely been asked "why haven't you killed yourself yet?" by their assessors.

• An incredible 65% of PIP decisions that go to appeal are overturned, yet the profiteering outsourcing corporations making these botched assessments (Atos and Capita) just had their contracts extended by two years by a no-bid process!

• The Tory party constantly claim that the purpose of their disability cuts is trying to get disabled people into work, but they deliberately laid off 1,500 disabled people by shutting down Remploy factories, many of whom are still out of work years later.

• Despite constantly going on about the importance of helping people with mental illnesses, the Tories have been doing precisely to opposite; slashing funding for mental health services and actively instructing it's corporate army of disability assessors to discriminate against people with mental health conditions.

• Since 2010 the Tories have had seven different disability ministers in seven years, with most of them using the position as nothing more than a stepping stone to higher positions in government, rather than doing anything to actually help disabled people. The latest Tory disability minister Sarah Newton has a shocking track record of voting against the interests of disabled people. 

• The Tory government are confiscating an astounding 900 adapted motability vehicles from disabled people per week. In one case they confiscated the motability vehicle to save £6,000 and then agreed to pay £65,000 in taxi fares so that the disabled person could continue going to work!

The mainstream media has given this disgusting Tory track record only a tiny fraction of the attention it deserves, so people can be forgiven for not knowing all of it. However, you would have to have spent the last seven years living in a lead box to not be aware of any of this stuff.

The fact is that when it comes to election time, Conservative voters are aware that the most vulnerable people in society suffer under Tory rule, but in the grim amoral calculus they perform in their minds, the suffering, destitution and actual deaths of disabled people are somehow a price worth paying for whatever (probably imaginary) benefit they think they'd be getting by electing a Tory government.

Of course the majority of the blame is shouldered by the Tory politicians who voted in favour of these horrifying policies, and cynically used the role of Disability Minister as a temporary stepping stone to other things instead of trying to actually help disabled people, but Tory voters are not exempt from blame because by endorsing the Tory party, they're complicit in allowing this disgraceful systematic abuse of disabled people to continue.

It doesn't matter how much blustering faux outrage and denials of reality people like Chris Stevens utter, the fact is simple: People who vote Tory are guilty of voting in favour of more suffering for sick and disabled people.

 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.

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The Labour Party manifesto is fantastic for disabled people

After seven years of systematic Tory abuse of disabled people Labour have come out very strongly on the side of disabled people and their families.

Here's my breakdown of the main Labour Party policies relating to disabilities in the 2017 Labour Manifesto:

• Labour will make it a priority to repeal the numerous Tory cuts in social security support for people with disabilities. They will do this through a new Social Security Bill that will be passed within the first year of the new parliament.

• Labour will end the pointless and needlessly expensive continuous reassessments of disabled people with permanent disabilities such as paralysis or permanent degenerative diseases. The Tories try to claim that permanent degenerative diseases get better, but Labour accept that they don't.

• Labour will scrap the discriminatory and degrading Work Capacity Assessment (WCA) regime that costs more to administer than it actually saves in reduced payments in social security support for disabled people.

• Labour will end the privatisation of disability assessments so that disabled people never again have to face the indignity degradation of having to prove their disability to some corporate bureaucrat with targets to throw as many disabled people off their benefits as possible.

• Labour will scrap the Personal Independence Payment (PIP) assessment regime too. An astounding 65% of appeals that go to tribunal are upheld. The PIP assessment regime is blatantly unfit for purpose and Labour will scrap it.

• Labour will replace the WCA and PIP assessment regimes with a system where personal advisers help to provide every disabled person who feels capable of work to develop a tailored personal plan. A holistic approach to social security planning sounds like a real challenge to implement, but surely it can't possibly be as bad as the current dehumanising and discriminatory regime that disabled people are forced into?

• Labour will reverse the £30 per week cut that the Tories recently imposed on disabled people who receive Employment and Support Allowance (ESA).

• The Tory government has been slammed by the United Nations for "grave violations of disabled people's rights" [Source - UN report PDF] . Labour will incorporate the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities into UK law.

• Labour will scrap the "Bedroom Tax" that has cruelly hit over 400,000 families with disabled members with punitive charges for "spare" rooms that are often used to store medical equipment, or for carers to sleep in.

• Labour will scrap the Tory sanctions regime that has consigned hundreds of thousands of disabled people to absolute destitution. The sanctions regime is particularly harsh on people with mental disabilities because they're often the easiest to trick into making sanctionable mistakes, and they're also often the least capable of appealing when they've been unfairly sanctioned too.

• Labour will increase the Carer's Allowance by £11 per week to bring it into line with the rate of unemployment benefit. This will benefit Britain's unpaid carers to the tune of  £572 per year. It's not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, but if you care for someone who is sick or disabled then it's a clear gesture to show that you are appreciated by society.

• Labour will reverse the Tories' assault on the Bereavement Allowance, so that if you die of your illness or disability your surviving family will get the long-term of support families have had since the 1950s, not the new cheaper "here's a lump sum and be off with you" approach of the Tories.

• Last but definitely not least: Labour have announced that they're adopting the social model of disability. This would mark a profound step-change in the way the UK government deals with disability issues, from the draconian Tory approach of bullying, humiliating and intimidating disabled people, to restructuring society in order to remove social barriers and allow disabled people to live up to their potential.

The Labour Party manifesto is a fantastic demonstration that they have been listening to the concerns of disabled people and their families, and that they've put together a set of policies to make people's lives better.

How to vote

In light of these policies that have been designed to end the systematic Tory abuse of disabled people, you should vote Labour if:

• You are disabled.

• You have a disabled family member.

• You know anyone who is disabled and give a shit about them.

• You have the self-awareness to realise that you may one day become seriously ill or disabled.

• You have a shred of basic human empathy.

If you can read an article like this and still conclude that the Tories deserve to get your vote then you should be ashamed of yourself, but then shamelessness is one of the main elements of the self-serving "I'm alright Jack" attitude isn't it? 

So you'll probably just perform some ridiculous mental gymnastics to conclude that voting to continue completely shafting disabled people is the right and decent thing for you to do won't you?

What we can do

• Make sure you are registered to vote so that you can vote in favour of this fantastic Labour manifesto for disabled people.

• Encourage others to register to vote too.

• Spread awareness by sharing this article. Please also consider sharing this one too in order to spread awareness of how bad things have been for disabled people under Tory rule.

 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.

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Look at this ridiculous bar chart from the Scottish Tories

Just look at the state of this bar chart from the Scottish Tories. Just imagine how thick you must imagine your target audience to be in order to try to pull off such a brazen misrepresentation.

The bar chart features on a remarkably pathetic Tory party leaflet that only mentions their own party 6 times and details precisely no policies from the Tory Westminster government whatever (the General Election is about picking MPs to sit in Westminster isn't it?).

Conversely this absurd piece of propaganda mentions the Scottish National Party and their leader Nicola Sturgeon an incredible 19 times.

What is more is that the Scottish Tories actually accuse the SNP of being "obsessed" with the idea of an independence referendum in a leaflet that is 100% dedicated to the subject of opposing an independence referendum and mentions it 7 times!

With no irony at all the leaflet demands that the SNP concentrate on stuff like better "public services" and "safer streets" without mentioning any of their own Westminster government's policies on these issues such as ... err ... cutting public services to the bone all over the UK and ... errr ... destroying 17,000 frontline police jobs between 2010-2015!

Maybe Ruth Davidson would be more honest if she stuck to defending the policies being imposed on Scotland against their will by the Westminster Tories like the hated "Bedroom Tax", the impoverishment of hundreds of thousands of children (not just in Scotland, all over the UK), Theresa May's reckless hard-Brexit posturing, and the absolutely sickening Tory rape clause?

The idiocy of the leaflet is exacerbated by the fact that the Scottish Tories are clearly trying to turn Theresa May's opportunistic self-serving snap election into an unofficial referendum on Scottish independence!

Instead of attempting to persuade unionists that it's their duty to fight for the union that they support in a second independence referendum, they're basically admitting that they know that they've lost before the date has even been set, and that their only chance of stopping it is to try to obstruct the democratic will of the Scottish Parliament (a hubristic "do as you're told" tactic that can only end in eventual defeat).

Imagine how thick you'd have to be in order to swallow this self-contradictory and brazenly misleading drivel from the Scottish Tories, especially in light of the appalling track record the Tories have in Scotland.

From using Scotland as a testing ground for their hated Poll Tax experiment to relegating Scottish constituencies to second class status in Westminster so they can't vote on English laws, but retaining the right of English Tory MPs to vote on Scottish laws like the Scotland Act (from which every amendment by Scottish MPs was removed by English Tory MPs), the Tories have done more to turn the Scottish electorate away from Westminster rule than the SNP ever have.

It beggars belief that Scottish unionists are so blinded by their hatred of the concept of Scottish independence that they're willing to actually embrace the toxic Tories who are actually the ones to have done more to promote the cause of Scottish independence through their misrule over Scotland than the SNP ever did, but it certainly seems to be the case if the polling figures in the woefully misleading Tory bar chart are anything to go by.

 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.

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The systematic Tory abuse of disabled people

Don't pretend you don't know. You'd have to have been living in a lead box for the last seven years to not know about at least a few of the disgusting ways in which the Tories have been systematically abusing disabled people.

Here is a far from exhaustive list of examples of the systematic abuse of disabled people that has been going on since 2010.

• The government's own figures admit that thousands of disabled people have died within six weeks of being declared "fit for work" and stripped of their disability benefits by the Work Capacity Assessment (WCA) regime.

• The WCA regime was declared unlawful for the way it discriminates against people with mental health conditions, but the Tory government carried on regardless.

• Appeals against botched WCA rulings have been costing £50 million a year. This cost is paid for by the taxpayer, not the profiteering corporations that made the botched assessments in the first place.

• The WCA disability denial regime costs way more in corporate outsourcing contracts to administer than it will ever save in reduced disability benefit payments, meaning the Tories are forcing the taxpayer to subsidise their systematic abuse of disabled people.

• An incredible 420,000 disabled people were hit by the Tory "Bedroom Tax", many of them for "spare" rooms used for medical equipment, or for carers to sleep in. The financial stress caused Stephanie Bottrill to commit suicide leaving a note blaming David Cameron and the Tory government.

• Tens of thousands of disabled people were forced onto the Tories' shambolic Work Programme, but the outsourcing companies running this scheme knew they could never make a profit from helping "difficult to place" clients, so disabled people were just "parked" while the corporate parasites focused on cashing in on easy to place clients. Just 8% of disabled people to be put through the Work Programme end up finding jobs!

• A United Nations investigation into the treatment of disabled people in the UK found that the UK government was committing "grave and systematic violations" of disabled people's rights.

• In March 2016 309 Tory MPs voted to cut the Employment and Support Allowance by £1,500 per year. Not a single politician from any other party voted in favour of these cuts. As a result of this brazen economic assault on disabled people, several Tory MPs were sacked as patrons of disability charities.

• The Tory party claimed to be scrapping the Disability Living Allowance (DLA) and replacing it with Personal Independence Payments (PIP) in order to make sure the money went to the right people, but in April 2017 they slashed PIP payments by 33% using the perverse excuse that this would incentivise them to find work (despite there being no evidence whatever to back up this claim).

• Disabled people undergoing PIP assessments have routinely been asked "why haven't you killed yourself yet?" by their assessors.

• An incredible 65% of PIP decisions that go to appeal are overturned, yet the profiteering outsourcing corporations making these botched assessments (Atos and Capita) just had their contracts extended by two years by a no-bid process!

• The Tory party constantly claim that the purpose of their disability cuts is trying to get disabled people into work, but they deliberately laid off 1,500 disabled people by shutting down Remploy factories, many of whom are still out of work years later.

• Despite constantly going on about the importance of helping people with mental illnesses, the Tories have been doing precisely to opposite; slashing funding for mental health services and actively instructing it's corporate army of disability assessors to discriminate against people with mental health conditions.

• The Tory government are confiscating an astounding 900 adapted motability vehicles from disabled people per week. In one case they confiscated the motability vehicle to save £6,000 and then agreed to pay £65,000 in taxi fares so that the disabled person could continue going to work!

As I said at the beginning, this is a far from exhaustive list of examples of the systematic Tory abuse of disabled people.

Are you honestly going to endorse this?

If you vote Tory on June 8th, you'll be endorsing the continuation of this disgusting Tory agenda of abusing and impoverishing disabled people.

If you know anyone who has a disability and you actively endorse the continuation of this systematic abuse of disabled people, you know perfectly well what kind of person that makes you.

If you have a rudimentary level of basic human foresight, you must understand that one day it might be you, or a member of your family, or a cherished friend who develops a disability or seriously debilitating illness. Which means that by endorsing the continuation of this systematic Tory abuse of disabled people, you're stupidly inviting it on yourself and the people close to you.

Please share

Please share this article as widely as you can to help people understand how appallingly the Tories have been treating disabled people. It's especially important to share it with people who don't have social media or even Internet access. Show them on your phone, or even print it off and hand them a physical copy.

 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.

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Meanwhile in Britain ...

Donald Trump winning the US election shouldn't really have come as a surprise to British people given that we're still dealing with the huge act of economic self-harm the British public inflicted on themselves earlier in 2016.

Even though it shouldn't have come as much of a surprise, Trump's shock victory has still dominated the mainstream press and social media alike since it happened.

Meanwhile several things have been going on in Tory Britain that have slipped quietly under the news radar during US election week.

• 1. The homelessness charity Shelter reported that 120,000 children will spend this Christmas homeless, and that the new lower Tory benefit cap will end up impoverishing an estimated 319,000 children. If it wasn't obvious before, it's crystal clear now that Tory austerity policies end up economically punishing children for the "crime" of being born into poor families.

• 2. The Tory assault on children's rights suffered a setback in the House of Lords where peers voted against the Tory plan to allow local governments to opt out of child protection measures. This Tory effort to build a "bonfire of children's rights" is clearly designed to make the privatisation of child protection services more appealing to corporate outsourcing giants like G4S, Capita and Serco. This vote in the Lords is more of a setback than a defeat though because Tory ministers can always simply reinstate the clause to scrap child safety standards when the child and social work bill returns to the House of Commons.

• 3. The latest figures from the Trussell Trust food bank showed that the increase in food bank dependency in the UK is still continuing. The charity handed out a record number of food parcels in 2015-16 and their evidence shows that two of the three leading causes of food poverty were benefit delays and Tory welfare cuts, accounting for over 40% of referrals between them.

• 4. A long-awaited report from the United Nations absolutely hammered the Tory government for their savage mistreatment of disabled people. Not only did the report find that Tory welfare cuts have disproportionately impacted disabled people and hindered their rights to live independently and be included in their communities, the report also found that disabled people in Britain have suffered a barrage of right-wing anti-disability propaganda that has routinely portrayed disabled people as "dependent or making a living out of benefits, committing fraud as benefit claimants, being lazy or putting a burden on taxpayers".

• 5. Theresa May's government suffered a humiliating setback in the Supreme Court where the High Court ruling that Tory "Bedroom Tax" discriminates against disabled adults and children was upheld.

• 6. The Brexiter argument that the collapse in the value of the pound has been a great thing for exports took a massive blow when it was revealed that the UK trade deficit has widened significantly to £12.7 billion. Not only did the vast gap between imports and exports grow dramatically, the volume of UK exports actually fell by £200 million. The Brexiter argument that a collapsing currency is great for the economy is utterly daft because the UK continues to import vastly more than it exports, but when the economic evidence shows that the collapse in currency value has coincided with a significant decline in exports, even the argument that it's good for the export sector begins to look incredibly weak. Even though the economic evidence shows that this Brexiter delight at the collapse in the value of the pound is misguided, we can look forward to Theresa May and the Tories continuing to spread the ludicrous myth that a weak currency is good for our (import dominated) economy.

• 7. The Bank of England responded to Theresa May's ignorant blame-casting rhetoric at the Tory party conference by releasing a report on the relationship between inflation and interest rates that demonstrated that Theresa May simply doesn't know what she's talking about when it comes to monetary policy (which is no surprise given the economically illiterate myths about monetary policy spread by her predecessors Cameron and Osborne).

• 8. The Institute for Fiscal Studies identified a £25 billion black hole in the UK public finances.

• 9. The Crown Prosecution Service are considering a "corrupt practices" case against the Vote Leave mob (which included high profile Tory government ministers like Boris Johnson) for lying to the electorate over claims like the "Let's give the NHS the £350 million a week ..." lie and their false claims that "Turkey is joining the EU".  

• 10. Theresa May visited India in order to beg for some kind of trade agreement with them, but ended up getting her ear bent about her obstructive attitude towards Indian migration and the "detrimental" immigration policies she implemented during her time as Home Secretary. Additionally Theresa May didn't even bother to schedule a meeting with the Indian conglomerate Tata to discuss the ongoing crisis in the British steel industry while she was in India.

• 11. After returning from her failure of a trip to India Theresa May continued the Tory policy of sucking up pathetically to the Chinese communist government, even allowing herself to be lectured about the importance of "mutual trust" by the Chinese when one of the contractors they lined up to build the UK's rip-off nuclear infrastructure for us has been charged with nuclear espionage in the United States!

• 12. The hope that the Tories are finally going to bin their economically ruinous ideological austerity agenda in order to pursue a sane investment led recovery strategy took another blow with the announcement that the rail electrification project for the South West of England has been indefinitely suspended.

The US election and Trump's victory have overshadowed what's going on in British politics, but it's important not to forget that the US isn't the only country suffering a political farce at the moment.

Whatever the mainstream media try to tell you about Theresa May being a "safe pair of hands" it should be beyond obvious that she's a profoundly dishonest and incompetent politician with a savage right-wing authoritarian streak and anti-democratic tendencies.

The twelve separate stories I've highlighted just from US election week illustrate the shambles that is going on, but as long as the bulk of the Labour Party opposition and the mainstream media continue failing to hold Theresa May and the Tories to account millions of people will continue believing the nonsense that Theresa May is  a competent politician doing a good job!

 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.

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Stephen Crabb: The more we learn the worse it gets

The more we find out about Iain Duncan Smith's replacement as the head of the DWP Stephen Crabb, the worse it gets.

• Stephen Crabb's voting record shows that he's the very worst kind of Tory "yes man" who has never once rebelled against the Tory whip since they came to power in 2010, and the only time he has voted against the majority of his Tory peers was a 2011 effort to interfere in women's reproductive rights.

• The new head of the DWP is currently under pressure to resign as patron of the disability charity Mencap as a result of his vote to impoverish disabled people on ESA by £1,500 per year.

• The DWP are currently wasting £250,000 to battle seven families in the Supreme Court over "Bedroom Tax" (a woman with spina bifida, a victim of rape and domestic violence, a disabled widower, an RAF veteran and three families of severely disabled teenagers). One of these families are a couple who care for their severely disabled grandson in a three bedroom home that was specially converted for them by the council  in Stephen Crabb's constituency. He's never met them, let alone spoken up for them in parliament. Now he's heading the department that is wasting a vast amount of taxpayers' money trying reverse the high court decision to exempt them from paying "Bedroom Tax".

• Another disturbing thing that has come to light about Stephen Crabb is the very close links he has to a bunch of homophobic "gay cure" religious nutters.

Now it's become absolutely clear that Crabb had absolutely no idea whatever about the actual details of the £1,500 per year ESA cuts he mindlessly voted in favour of (along with 308 of his Tory colleagues) just a few weeks before being appointed as head of the DWP.

After voting to impoverish disabled people who have been declared too unfit to work by £1,500 per year, he made up some desperately spurious post hoc justification for having done so.

Stephen Crabb's spurious claims that when it comes to the £1,500 per year cuts he voted in favour of, people who have been found unfit to work are "wholly unaffected" prove beyond doubt that he didn't even understand the absolute basics of what he had voted in favour of.

Had the new head of the DWP bothered to do any research at all, or listened to any of the countless objections from disability charities, opposition MPs, the House of Lords or members of the public, he would have known that the intended victims of the £1,500 per year cuts that he explicitly endorsed with his parliamentary votes are sick and disabled people who have been found to be too unfit to work. It's clear that Crabb voted in favour of economically sanctioning people who have been declared too unwell to work for no reason other than the fact that he never ever rebels against his party.

When Iain Duncan Smith resigned I predicted that his replacement would be an ultra-loyal self-serving careerist, and Stephen Crabb fits that description perfectly. What I didn't suspect was that David Cameron and George Osborne would end up finding someone who knows so little about the welfare system (the department he now heads) that he was making desperately misleading comments about the harsh welfare cuts he was voting in favour of just a few days before he was appointed as head of the DWP.

Still, if the Prime Minister is a guy whose only real world job before becoming a professional Tory politician was begged for him by his mother-in-law, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer has only ever worked as a data entry clerk and a towel re-folder in the real world, it's hardly a surprise that they'd pick someone who is hopelessly unqualified for the role as their favoured "yes man" to head the DWP.

 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.

If anyone is playing petty "class war" politics, it's the Tories

One of the most familiar battle cries of the Tories and their cheerleaders in the right-wing corporate press is the claim that anyone who opposes Tory policies is guilty of "class warfare". I've already written an article about how so many Tories seem to be stuck in the class warfare battles of the 1970s so I won't go into that in so much detail. In this article I'm going to present some facts and analysis to support the argument that if anyone is guilty of conducting "class warfare" then it's clearly the Tories.

Social security cuts

Research conducted by Sheffield Hallam University has conclusively shown that the worst impact of Tory so-called "welfare reform" has been imposed on predominantly Labour voting areas like the north east, north west, south Wales and parts of Greater London.

Meanwhile the majority of the least affected areas happen to be in the Tory strongholds of the Home Counties and the rural north.

Council cuts

When we look at the severity of cuts to local council budgets a very similar pattern emerges. Predominantly Labour voting areas have borne the heaviest cuts in local government spending, while Tory councils have generally got off much more lightly.

Even though Tory councils have suffered nothing like the severity of budget cuts endured by places like Newcastle, that didn't stop David Cameron's own mother and aunt from lambasting the devastating effects of his ideological austerity agenda on local services, and neither did it stop Cameron himself from writing a bizarrely hypocritical letter to the leader of Oxfordshire County Council to complain about the service cuts they have been forced to make as a result of the Tory central government's obsession with ideological austerity.
Even though the bulk of local government austerity has been inflicted on poorer Labour voting areas, the Tory response to the furore over local government cuts by Tory councils and Tory MPs was to announce an extra £300 million in local government funding, 83% of which will go to Tory controlled councils.

The working poor vs wealthy pension savers

When George Osborne was planning to rob the working poor by slashing their working Tax Credits (despite numerous pre-election promises that the Tories would do no such thing) he ploughed on with it for ages in the face of massive public opposition, harsh criticism from opposition MPs, criticism from his fellow Tory MPs, and a large House of Lords rebellion.

Eventually George Osborne "U-turned" (by finding other ways of robbing the working poor), but he put up an epic fight to impoverish them.

When it came to proposed pension reforms that would have adversely impacted the rich, George Osborne dropped them before they'd even been officially announced! 

The contrast couldn't be more obvious.

Bedroom Tax and tax cuts for the rich

One of the clearest examples of Tory "class war" politics came in April 2013 when they introduced "Bedroom Tax" to penalise social housing tenants from poor backgrounds whether there was a smaller property available for them to move (less than 3% of cases) into or not (over 97% of cases).

In the very same week that they economically sanctioned hundreds of thousands of some of the poorest families in the UK, they handed an average £100,000 per year tax cut to Britain's 13,000 income millionaires!

Then they've got the absolute cheek to keep telling us that "we-re all in this together"!

Workers' rights vs bankers' bonuses

The UK already has some of the most restrictive anti-trade union laws in the developed world, yet the Tories are pushing ahead with a plan to make trade union democracy so unworkable that taking strike action will become almost impossible. Proposed legislation to turn an abstention into a stronger vote against strike action than an actual vote against strike action can surely only have been devised as a deliberately malicious effort to render effective trade unionism almost impossible.

This ongoing Tory attack on trade unionism is not the only example of Tories attacking workers' rights. Take their introduction of £1,200 fees in order to seek compensation for unfair dismissal, prolonged public sector pay freezes (which conveniently don't seem to apply to members of parliament who get one inflation busting pay raise after another) and the longest sustained decline in workers' wages since records began.

On the other hand the Tories have done nothing to reform the banks after the 2007-08 financial sector insolvency crisis. In fact financial sector workers (including bankers at failed, taxpayer bailed out banks) are taking home even larger bonuses than they were before the crash, and the Tories are actively assisting the inflation of another hopelessly unsustainable property speculation bubble with house price inflation schemes like "Help to Buy".

There's a legitimate debate to be had about whether the unions had too much power in the 1970s, or whether industrial decline in the UK was more a consequence of the incompetence of the over-privileged and hopelessly uncompetitive upper managerial classes and their utter failure to adopt modern managerial practices in order to compete with the Japanese, Germans and Americans.

Where there is no room for debate whatever is whether the 2007-08 economic meltdown was caused by ordinary workers and trade union activity, or by a massive spree of shockingly reckless financial sector gambling and outright fraud.

The fact that the Tories choose to focus their legislative efforts on attacking the trade unions and undermining workers' rights instead of trying to get the bloated, corruption riddled financial sector under control is an absolutely clear demonstration that these people are ideologically driven class warriors with no real concern for the long-term well being of the UK economy.

Conclusion

Whichever way we turn, we see the Tories favouring rich over the poor, employers over employees, the aristocracy over the "lower orders", Tory councils over Labour ones, the privileged over the ordinary, the greedy over the needy, the 1% over the 99%.

The fact that they behave like this shouldn't be any kind of shock at all to anyone who knows where the Tories get most of their financial donations, but what is shocking is the way that Tories and their supporters continue to dismiss opposition to their divisive inequality promoting policies as "class war" politics when they themselves are clearly engaging in class war; a crusade to enrich the already wealthy minority at the expense of everyone else.

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