Once again the Tories are hiding their own culpability behind vapid 'culture war' nonsense

Boris Johnson's Tory government have opened up a new front in their nauseating culture war, by trying to blame the term "white privilege" for catastrophic failings in the educations system, that leave working class kids (white and non-white alike) at huge disadvantages in comparison to kids from wealthier backgrounds.

I'm going to give a non-exhaustive list of other factors that are infinitely more damaging to the prospects of working class kids than this term, but first I'll briefly explain what "white privilege" actually means.

The term certainly doesn't mean that all white people are wealthy and privileged, only a fool or someone who is trying to fool you would try to argue that.

It means that in a still-racist society there are advantages to being white.

White people are obviously less likely to suffer institutional racism like being harassed by the police or denied painkillers when seriously ill; we're less likely to have our CVs immediately thrown in the bin for having non-white sounding names; and we don't have to face disgusting examples of inter-personal racism like the majority of non-white people have experienced in their lifetimes.

This obviously doesn't mean that life is a bed of roses for all white people, because there are all kinds of other forms of discrimination such as classism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of anti-queer bigotry, ageism, persecution of the disabled, persecution of the neurodiverse ...

Only those with malicious intentions would even try to portray recognising that whiteness is an advantage in a racist society as some kind of attack on poor white people, which brings us to the Tory government, and their woeful efforts to hide their own catastrophic failings behind yet more culture war bollocks.

So here are eleven things that are infinitely more damaging to the prospects of working class kids than the existence of the term "white privilege".

1. Education cuts

Ever since the Lib-Dems enabled them back into power in 2010, the Tories have been inflicting brutal cuts on England's education budget, with the worst cuts of all concentrated in the poorest areas of the country. This means that working class kids have borne the brunt of this deliberate Tory strategy of under-funding the education system, and trashing the nation's future economic potential.

How dare they pretend to give a damn about the prospects of working class kids, when their own longstanding policy is to systematically underfund the schools these working class kids attend?

2. Tuition fees

When the Tories and Lib-Dems colluded to triple university tuition fees, and bring in rip-off new repayment terms (inflation +3%) they ensured that kids from poor and ordinary backgrounds would need to drive themselves tens of thousands of pounds into debt just to get their degrees, and that the vast majority of post-2012 graduates (83%) would never be able to pay these debts off despite making entire working lifetimes of repayments.

Is it even possible to think of a better way of putting working class kids off academic attainment, than telling them they'll have to suffer an entire lifetime of unpayable debt if they aspire to go to university?

3. Youth service cuts

Anyone who claims to give the slightest damn about kids in deprived working class communities should be championing youth services aimed at honing kids' talents, giving them social skills, and keeping them away from crime and drugs.

The Tory government has been relentlessly slashing youth services budgets to the bone (70% cut in less than a decade).

4. Sure Start

If you want to give kids the best possible opportunities in life, it's crucial to begin the positive impact as soon as possible, which is why, despite their many other faults, the 1997-2010 Labour government did a great job in setting up Sure Start.

Despite the overwhelming evidence that Sure Start is extremely beneficial to kids' prospects, the Tories have slashed it to pieces since 2010, resulting in 500+ closures, and once again, the worst cuts have been reserved for the most disadvantaged areas.

5. Free School meals

Anyone who claims to care about the prospects of working class kids wouldn't hesitate for a second over providing free school meals during a global pandemic, because there's mountains of evidence that well-fed kids concentrate better and get better grades, while starving hungry and malnourished kids often fail to live up to their academic potential.

But we've all seen how the Tory government repeatedly voted against providing free school meals during the coronavirus pandemic, and had to be shamed into action by the footballer Marcus Rashford, on more than one occasion.

6. Social security cuts

Since 2010 the Tory government has implemented round after round of savage social security cuts. It hardly takes a genius to understand that policies like slashing working tax credits and cutting entitlement to child tax credits and child benefit would end up having profoundly negative consequences for children in the poorest families.

But there's just something in the Tory mentality that gives them a perverse sense of pleasure at the idea of punishing the poor for their poverty, and ensuring that their kids grow up even poorer too.

7. Adult education cuts

Since 2010 the Tories have relentlessly attacked adult education spending, even though any sane government would be investing in adult education in order to ensure that the economy has a skilled and flexible workforce, and so that workers have the means and ability to retrain should they lose their jobs.

The Tories clearly don't want a modern, flexible, highly-skilled workforce, they want to minimise retraining opportunities, and ensure working class people who lose their jobs end up languishing in exploitative low-pay gig economy jobs, working for capitalist mega-corporations, because their retraining options are so severely limited.

And to make things even worse, despite all of his cheery rhetoric about investment and upskilling, Johnson's government is pressing ahead with yet another round of cuts to adult education spending.

8. Wage repression

After the Tories came to power in 2010 they imposed the longest sustained period of wage repression since records began. 

There's basically no better strategy to erode the prospects of working class kids, than to spend the best part of a decade systematically eroding the real value of their parents' wages, and ensuring that when these kids do eventually enter the workforce, they'll be earning less in real terms than those who were entering the workforce a decade previously!

9. School privatisation

Since 2010 the Tories have been overseeing an extraordinary programme of school privatisation in England, to such an extent that 75% of English secondary schools are now controlled by private profiteering pseudo-charities called "Academy Chains" (many of them owned and operated by major Tory party donors).

These profiteers aren't allowed to leech profits out of the education system in shareholder dividends because of their so-called charitable status, but there are loads of other ways of soaking cash out of our kids' education budgets into private pockets, not least vastly inflated six figure salaries for profiteering academy chain directors and their cronies, and endless tides of massive untendered supply contracts handed out to their friends and family.

If you think that the existence of the term "white privilege" has more to do with working class academic under-achievement than this widespread looting of education budgets by Tory party donors and assorted other spivs and profiteers, there's something seriously wrong with the way you're looking at the world.

10. Soaring child poverty

Several of the aforementioned issues, like social security cuts and Tory wage repression have combined to drive half a million more kids into poverty over the last five years, with a shocking 75% of all the kids in poverty, now living in a household where at least one adult works.

It's utterly obscene for the Tories to pretend that they give a damn about working class kids, when their own policies have resulted in hundreds of thousands more kids growing up in dire poverty, and literally millions of kids learning the very early life lesson that 'work doesn't pay', because they see their parents struggling in destitution, despite having jobs.

11. Classism

Britain has one of the most rigid and persistent class hierarchies in the world. The wealthy privately-educated 7% minority are vastly over-represented in politics, corporate media, the judiciary, corporate boardrooms, and the top-paying public service jobs.

Two of our last three Prime Ministers went to the exact same elitist private school, which charges vastly more than the average annual salary in yearly fees.

People still use ludicrous anachronistic terms like lord, baroness, and sir in all seriousness, and we've still got unelected hereditary peers in the House of Lords for pity's sake.

The evidence shows that people from working class backgrounds, with regional accents, are routinely paid thousands of pounds per year less than the posh, for doing exactly the same work.

And the current Prime Minister is a hateful elitist, who used incredibly derogatory language to attack working class children as "ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive, and illegitimate" in a disgusting tirade in which he also derided working class men as "drunk, criminal, aimless, feckless, and hopeless".

Is it any wonder at all that society is geared to fail working class kids, when we insist on picking sneering elitists like Johnson to run the show?

Conclusion

If you look at their actual track record in government, it's obvious that the Tories have been conducting class warfare against the working class. 

They've slashed education budgets, handed control of schools to a bunch of sleazy profiteers, gutted youth services, ruined sure start, smashed the adult education system to pieces, and imposed rip-off unpayable student debts.

Beyond their outright vandalism of the social ladder, to make it so much harder for working class kids to escape poverty, they've also been actively making the poverty worse with their twin agenda of wage repression and social security cuts.

And these Tory vermin think that they can just hide this dreadful and downright malicious track record behind a smokescreen of vapid and divisive culture war bollocks about the term "white privilege".

The reason they think they can get away with pushing this absolute gibberish is that they're confident that the majority of the lower orders (as they see us) have been leaving the education system with such under-developed critical thinking skills, that we won't even notice that we're being duped into blaming "woke teachers" or whatever, rather than the powerful elitists who actually run the country, and are obviously to blame.

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OR

Why do so many people who benefited from social mobility now want the ladder kicked down?

As a result of the changes introduced by Clement Attlee's post-war Labour government the 1960s and '70s saw the greatest levels of social mobility the United Kingdom has ever seen.

There was full employment so that pretty much anyone with the desire to work could find a job with at least half decent pay. There were plenty of houses, and even if you couldn't quite afford a house of your own there was an abundant supply of social housing too. If you were academically smart, then university education was free, and it even came with maintenance grants to cover your living costs. If you lost your job or fell ill then the welfare state provided decent social security payments to stave off absolute destitution. The legal aid system ensured that the poor and ordinary could have access to good legal representation so as to tip the scales of justice ever-so-slightly less in favour of the super-rich.

Of course this period was no utopia, and plenty of people still endured poor pay, dangerous working conditions, and discriminatory practices (especially when it came to stuff like sex, race, class and sexual orientation), but since 1979 many of the factors that allowed these all-time high levels of social mobility have been deliberately attacked and undermined by the Westminster political class.

• The supply of social housing has been catastrophically eroded since the 1980s, 40% of the sold-off homes falling into the hands of exploitative private landlords. 

• The lowest house building rates since the early 1920s has stoked house price inflation has made the prospect of home ownership an impossible fantasy to millions. 

• Since 2010 ordinary British workers have suffered the longest sustained decline in the real value of their wages since records began. 

• The current low unemployment figures that right-wingers love to brag about are a blatant fix which count anyone who does just 1 hour a week on a zero hours contract job as "employed". Additionally it counts anyone who has been thrown off benefits by zealous job centre staff as not being unemployed. Additionally people on unpaid workfare schemes are also classed as being employed!

• The welfare state has been persistently attacked so that unemployed people have to jump through countless hoops and even offer themselves up as unpaid slave labour at highly profitable multinational corporations in order to receive their meagre subsistence benefits. 

• Sick and disabled people have it even worse, having to go through demeaning, dehumanising and downright discriminatory Work Capacity Assessments administered by bureaucrats working for profitable outsourcing corporations. 

• Students are being lumbered with debts of £50,000+ before they even enter the workplace, and over 80% of graduates under this new regime will never be able to pay off their student debts, despite entire working lifetimes of repayments!

• Access to legal aid has been trashed so badly that hundreds of thousands of people are being left with no choice but to represent themselves in court, which not only shatters their chances of success, but also wastes vast amounts of court time and public money because they simply don't understand the legal processes.

It's completely understandable that the privileged classes and their pals in the Westminster establishment club have worked so hard and for so long to reduce social mobility. After all the beneficiaries of social mobility become rivals to the children of the upper classes.

The less social mobility there is, the more unearned opportunities there are to be handed on a plate to the children of the establishment class.

It's clearly a huge advantage to the children of the establishment class that their peers are lumbered with a lifetime 9% aspiration tax on their disposable income for their university education, while they avoid it because their parents can just pay the fees upfront. 

It's beyond obvious that an unaccountable political elite would increasingly selfishly rig society to benefit their own class if they found that they suffered no adverse electoral consequences for doing it (as the New Labour mob found when they first introduced aspiration taxes on university students from poor and ordinary backgrounds).

The establishment elitists who rig society to benefit their own class are undeniably the bad guys, but the truly despicable people are those who actually reaped the benefits of social mobility in the 1960s and '70s, who now desperately want to kick the ladder down to prevent the younger generations from climbing up too.

The people who came from poor and ordinary backgrounds and enjoyed the benefits of stuff like social housing and/or affordable house prices, full employment and decent wages, a decent social safety net, legal aid, and free university education, but who now vote in favour of denying these same opportunities to all future generations.

Perhaps some of these people have deluded themselves into believing that they achieved it all themselves, and the decent wages, affordable housing, social safety net, legal protections, and access to free university education had nothing whatever to do with it. That's called the self-attribution fallacy, and huge numbers of wealthy people love to imagine that they did it all by themselves.

On the other hand there are plenty who know perfectly well that they benefited from social mobility, but who want to kick the ladder down on younger generations for purely self-interested reasons. For example people who benefited from affordable housing in the past know that building more social and affordable housing now would slow down the inflating value of their own property portfolios, and reduce the profits from their buy-to-let slumlord empires.

Of course it was hard to avoid voting in favour of attacks on social mobility when Tony Blair and his ilk were running the Labour Party because both of the main parties were at it.

But now that Labour has a leader who is determined to reverse the trend and begin promoting social mobility again through policies like free education, house building, welfare reform, decent wages, regulation of the private rental market, and a crackdown on exploitative employment practices, there's really no excuse for voting for more Tory class war inspired attacks on social mobility unless you actively oppose social mobility.

The wealthy and privileged establishment class who have enforced four decades of neoliberalism, rigging British society in favour of themselves and their own are vile self-serving elitists, but the people who actually benefited from social mobility who actually vote in favour of the Tory war against social mobility are the truly despicable ones.

They're the kind of people who climb the ladder out of the flooding basement, then deliberately kick it down and let others from their own class drown, rather than risk sharing the benefits of not drowning with others.

They don't lose anything by letting other people escape, but it makes them feel important and special to look down on other people drowning, and feel superior.

Even those who have deluded themselves that social mobility is irrelevant and that they achieved everything in life themselves are guilty of class treachery. 

Perhaps they're too deluded to realise that voting in favour of the Tory war against social mobility is an utterly malicious thing to do? But since when was stupidity a defence?

Does the criminal get to avoid jail because he claims to be too stupid to have realised that robbing the Post Office was a crime?

Of course not.

So why on earth should Tory voters who came from poor and ordinary backgrounds get to claim that they're too narrow-minded to understand that it's unspeakably malicious for them to kick the ladder down to prevent younger generations benefiting from the social mobility they themselves enjoyed in the past?

 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.

OR

The barbaric Tory sanctions regime is still going on

The draconian Tory sanctions regime is callous, shockingly ineffective, economically unjustifiable, and deadly.

The stated purpose of the DWP Sanctions regime is to shock benefits claimants into putting more effort into looking for work by consigning them to periods of absolute destitution.

The Sanctions regime hit its peak between 2012 and 2015 during the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition, with up to 90,000 people per month hurled into absolute poverty, and never fewer than 30,000 people per month subjected to either Jobseekers or Universal Credit sanctions in the austerity coalition era.

The sanctioning rate has dropped off since the Lib-Dems left government, but there are still thousands of people per month receiving letters like the one above, and being forced to go through lengthy (and expensive to the taxpayer) appeals processes, or just give up fighting against a system that's designed to abuse them and live in extreme poverty for as long as it takes.

Callous

Excerpt from a 2014 Johnny Void article
about Jobcentres rewarding staff for 
high sanctions rates.

We know that during the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition Jobcentre staff were given mandatory targets to sanction a set percentage of claimants per week, in order to get the unemployment figures down (people subjected to sanctions aren't counted as officially unemployed).

It's beyond obvious that Jobcentre staff ended up targeting the mentally ill and severely uneducated by sanctioning every minor error, or deliberately giving them impossible tasks to comply with (like two appointments at the same time so they miss one and get sanctioned).

It's just so much easier to target the vulnerable than it is to expend significant amounts of time and energy on catching the tiny minority of die-hard benefits scroungers who know exactly which hoops to jump through to avoid losing their payments.

Perhaps most shockingly of all, the Liberal Democrats have openly bragged about how they helped the Tories make this sanctions regime even more draconian, in return for 5p charges on plastic bags.

Ineffective

We know from extensive research that sanctions are a massively counter-productive method of encouraging people into work.

Just think about it for yourself. If you had your income reduced to just £5.82 to last an entire month, how would you afford to print CVs, travel to job interviews, clean your clothes, eat properly so you can concentrate on making a good impression?

Multiple research papers have found that the victims of DWP sanctions ended up suffering extreme poverty, ill-health, mental distress, and resorting to survival crime like shoplifting.

Yet the Tories persist in using these sanctions (which disproportionately hit disabled people) under their warped belief that you motivate the poor to work harder by making them poorer, while you motivate the rich to work harder by giving them ever more lavish handouts and tax breaks!

Deadly

It's no exaggeration to say that sanctions are deadly. The most notorious example was the death of the ex-serviceman David Clapson who died of diabetic ketoacidosis in 2016 after being left penniless by sanctions and having his insulin supply spoiled because his electricity supply was cut off.

Although the most high-profile case because of the campaigning of his family members, David Clapson is far from the only example, with dozens of people having been driven to suicide after suffering sanctions.

Economically unjustifiable

Three years ago the National Audit Office found that the benefits sanctions regime costs more to administer than it will ever save in reduced benefits payments.

This means that the Tories have actually been using public funds to treat people in this despicable manner, and they've continued doing so despite knowing that it's a total waste of public money.

These Tory devils know perfectly well that sanctions don't work, yet expect the rest of us to actually subsidise their barbaric treatment of vulnerable and disabled people through our taxes because they apparently get some kind of kick out of it.

It would be bad enough if they were behaving like this in order to save a few million quid, but they're not saving anything, it's actually costing us fortunes to subsidise their system for treating vulnerable people in this disgusting way!

Conclusion

Even if you're the kind of person who doesn't care about all of the evidence that sanctions are unspeakably cruel and demonstrably ineffective, or that they're disproportionately used against vulnerable and disabled people, or even if you're completely indifferent about all of the suffering, misery, and death this barbaric regime has caused, surely you can't believe that it's a good or sensible use of public funds?

Surely you can't approve of the money you pay in taxes being used to subsidise a system designed to make vulnerable and disabled people suffer absolute destitution?

Surely you can think of better uses of your money than that, even if it's just being allowed to keep a bit more of it in your own pocket?

 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.

OR

How to impoverish disabled people, a lesson from Tory Britain.

Just imagine what it must be like to be a disabled person opening a letter that threatens to cut off your disability benefits if you fail to attend an interview five days ago.

Luckily the individual who received this letter has a good support network who are helping them to fight against this deliberate trap, but there are huge numbers of disabled people out there without strong support networks to help them fight against this kind of injustice.

People with mental health conditions and learning disabilities are particularly vulnerable to this kind of benefits denial trickery.

Whether people have mental health conditions or not, this kind of thing exacerbates their illnesses by loading masses of stress, anxiety, and depression on top of whatever they were already suffering with.

The last thing you need when you have a heart condition or terminal cancer is a prolonged bureaucratic fight to obtain the social security payments you're entitled to.

And just look at who the letter had been sent by. It's not from the DWP, it's from the private profit-seeking outsourcing company Capita who have been contracted to carry out the Tories' dirty work.

Chaos, inefficiency, and vast cost-overruns have been commonplace wherever the Tories have brought in profiteering outsourcing firms to do their dirty work in the welfare system. The WCA assessment regime has ended up costing more to administer than it ever saved in reduced benefits payments, unlawful Tory workfare schemes ended up subsidising private profit-making companies at the Taxpayers' expense, and the corporate-administered Work Programme ended up producing results that were worse than literally doing nothing at all!

The PIP assessment regime is no different. Costs have overrun so dramatically that instead of the £2 billion saving the Tories predicted in 2013, but figures from the OBR (page 113) reveal that by May 2018 it was already costing £4.2 billion more than they projected!

This disgraceful PIP letter is just one isolated example of the kind situations disabled people are suffering in Britain on a daily basis, but there's no denying that this kind of abuse is widespread and systematic.

When the United Nations investigated the treatment of sick and disabled people, they concluded that the Tories are inflicting "grave and systematic" human rights violations against disabled people.

Even if people were somehow unaware of the damning United Nations report, there are news stories virtually every day highlighting the disgusting consequences of these botched and malicious Tory welfare reforms. Stuff like tens of thousands of people dying within weeks of being declared fit for work, people with terminal illnesses being treated like scroungers, denied benefits, and told to 'get a job', people winning their benefits appeals after they died, people committing suicide because of all the stress and anxiety of having their disability benefits cut ...

There's absolutely no pretending that the Tory government aren't administering the systematic abuse of sick and disabled people, and there's no pretending that the millions of people who vote Tory simply consider this systematic abuse a "price worth paying" in return for whatever (probably imaginary) personal benefit they think they're getting from keeping this malicious and incompetent party in power.

Unfortunately we live in a nation of selfish "I'm alright Jack" bastards who actively endorse the Tory party and the system they've built which results in private profit-seeking companies running the show and sending con-trick letters like this.

Tory voters endorse this abusive system because they naively imagine that things like sickness, disability, or simple misfortune could never happen to them or their families, and they're absolutely chilled as long as this systematic abuse is targeted at other 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.

OR

Why do so many people who benefited from social mobility now want the ladder kicked down?

As a result of the changes introduced by Clement Attlee's post-war Labour government the 1960s and '70s saw the greatest levels of social mobility the United Kingdom has ever seen.

There was full employment so that pretty much anyone with the desire to work could find a job with at least half decent pay. There were plenty of houses, and even if you couldn't quite afford a house of your own there was an abundant supply of social housing too. If you were academically smart, then university education was free, and it even came with maintenance grants to cover your living costs. If you lost your job or fell ill then the welfare state provided half-decent social security payments to stave off absolute destitution. The legal aid system ensured that the poor and ordinary could have access to decent legal representation so as to tip the scales of justice ever-so-slightly less in favour of the super-rich.

Of course this period was no utopia, and plenty of people still endured poor pay, dangerous working conditions, and discriminatory practices (especially when it came to stuff like sex, race, class and sexual orientation), but since 1979 many of the things that allowed these high levels of social mobility to happen have been deliberately attacked and undermined by the Westminster political class.

• The supply of social housing has been catastrophically eroded since the 1980s, 40% of the sold-off homes falling into the hands of exploitative private landlords. 

• The lowest house building rates since the early 1920s has stoked house price inflation has made the prospect of home ownership an impassible fantasy to millions. 

• Since 2010 ordinary British workers have suffered the longest sustained decline in the real value of their wages since records began. 

• The current low unemployment figures that right-wingers love to brag about so much are a blatant fix which counts anyone who does just 1 hour a week in a zero hours contract job as employed. Additionally it counts anyone who has been thrown off benefits by zealous job centre staff trying to comply with the sanctions league tables as not being unemployed. Additionally people on unpaid workfare schemes are classed as being employed!

• The welfare state has been persistently attacked so that unemployed people have to jump through countless hoops and even offer themselves up as unpaid slave labour at highly profitable multinational corporations in order to receive their meagre subsistence benefits. 

• Sick and disabled people have it even worse, having to go through demeaning, dehumanising and downright discriminatory Work Capacity Assessments administered by bureaucrats working for profitable outsourcing corporations. 

• Students are being lumbered with debts of £50,000+ before they even enter the workplace. 

• Access to legal aid has been trashed so badly that hundreds of thousands of people are being left with no choice but to represent themselves in court, which not only shatters their chances of success, but also wastes vast amounts of time because they simply don't understand the legal processes.

It's completely understandable that the privileged classes and their pals in the Westminster establishment club have worked so hard and for so long to reduce social mobility. After all the beneficiaries of social mobility become rivals to the children of the upper classes. The less social mobility there is, the more unearned opportunities that get handed on a plate to the children of the establishment class.

It's clearly a huge advantage to the children of the establishment class that their peers are lumbered with a lifetime 9% aspiration tax on their disposable income for their university education, while they avoid it because their parents could pay the fees upfront. 

It's beyond obvious that an unaccountable political elite would increasingly selfishly rig society to benefit their own class if they found that they suffered no adverse electoral consequences for doing it (as the New Labour mob found when they first introduced aspiration tax for university students from poor and ordinary backgrounds).

The establishment elitists who rig society to benefit their own class are undeniably the bad guys, but the truly despicable people are those who actually reaped the benefits of social mobility in the 1960s and '70s, who now desperately want to slam the door shut on the younger generations now.

The people who came from poor and ordinary backgrounds and enjoyed the benefits of stuff like social housing and/or affordable house prices, full employment and decent wages, a decent social safety net, legal aid, and free university education, but who now vote in favour of denying these same opportunities to younger generations.

Perhaps some of these people genuinely believe that they achieved it all themselves, and the decent wages, affordable housing, social safety net, legal protections, and access to free university education had nothing to do with it. That's called the self-attribution fallacy, and huge numbers of wealthy people love to imagine that they did it all by themselves.

On the other hand there are plenty who know perfectly well that they benefited from social mobility, but who want to slam the door shut on younger generations for purely self-interested reasons. For example people who benefited from affordable housing in the past know that building more social and affordable housing now would slow down the inflating value of their property portfolios, and reduce the profits from their buy-to-let slumlord empires.

Of course it was hard to avoid voting in favour of attacks on social mobility when Tony Blair and his ilk were running the Labour Party. But now that Labour has a leader who is determined to reverse the trend and begin promoting social mobility again through policies like free education, house building, welfare reform, decent wages, regulation of the private rental market, and a crackdown on exploitative employment practices, there's really no excuse for voting for more Tory class war inspired attacks on social mobility unless you actively oppose social mobility.

The wealthy and privileged establishment club who have spent the best part of four decades rigging British society in favour of themselves and their own are vile self-serving elitists, but the people who actually benefited from social mobility who vote in favour of the Tory war against social mobility are the truly despicable ones.

They're the kind of people who climb the ladder out of the flooding basement, then deliberately kick it down and let others from their own class drown, rather than risk sharing the benefits of not drowning with others.

Even those who have deluded themselves that social mobility is irrelevant and that they achieved everything in life themselves are guilty of class treachery. 

Perhaps they're too deluded to realise that voting in favour of the Tory war against social mobility is an utterly malicious thing to do? But since when was stupidity a defence?

Does the criminal get to avoid jail because he claims to be too stupid to have realised that robbing the Post Office was a crime?

Of course not.

So why on earth should Tory voters who came from poor and ordinary backgrounds get to claim that they're too narrow-minded to understand that it's unspeakably malicious for them to kick the ladder down to prevent younger generations benefiting from the social mobility they themselves enjoyed in the past?

 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.

OR

The Tories are dressing their failures up as success stories again

Theresa May has some incredible brass neck to criticise past Labour governments for supposedly "rushing" their welfare reforms, and then claim that the Tories are bringing in Universal Credit "properly". 

Not only is the Tory mishandling of Universal Credit trashing people's lives (in the places it has been rolled out payment delays are rife and food bank use, indebtedness, rent arrears and evictions are soaring), it's also massively over budget and already five years behind schedule!

When the Tories announced their flagship Universal Credit policy back in 2010 they claimed it would have been fully rolled out by 2017, meaning the process should already have been totally finished by now. Since then they've repeatedly moved the completion date back, so that it's now 2022!

They're running five years late, they've written off hundreds of millions in waste, and they're still rolling it out in a way that's wrecking people's lives. But what's even worse than the actual incompetence is their insistence that they're doing the job properly and that they actually deserve praise for not rushing!

The Tories really are masters at dressing up their cockups as success stories.

In 2010 they promised that their fanatically right-wing austerity agenda would have eliminated the deficit by 2015. When 2015 came around they hadn't even halved the deficit, but instead of admitting that they'd failed to even come close to meeting their own target and apologising, they dressed their failure up as a success by endlessly repeating "we've cut the deficit by a third" (or to put it another, less flattering way; we've missed our target by two thirds).

The complicity and collusion of the mainstream media allowed the Tories to completely get away with sprinkling a bit of glitter on their reeking economic turd and then presenting it to the public as if it were a delicious cake of success.

Now these Tory charlatans are actually trying to excuse the fact that their catastrophically mishandled implementation of Universal Credit is running 5 years late with an absurd well at least we didn't rush narrative.

No doubt the craven and subservient political pundits in the mainstream media will allow Theresa May to get away with re-framing this absolute farce as a good thing, because it's actually their job to do that.

The majority of mainstream media hacks are not in the business of holding the powerful to account or standing up for the vulnerable, they're in the business of rehashing government press releases as if it's their own work, generating low grade clickbait, endlessly recycling right-wing economic fairy stories, attacking anyone who poses the slightest threat to the pally Westminster-media status quo they reap the benefits of, and lazily churnalising trash from the Guido Fawkes blog into headlines.

The acquiescence of the mainstream press is glaringly obvious, otherwise how on earth could Theresa May take it for granted that nobody would call her out by making the absurdly easy point that not rushing is hardly something to boast about when your flagship welfare policy is running five years behind schedule.

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Don't imagine the Tories dropped their rip-off DWP charges out of the goodness of their hearts

The Tories have announced that they 're now planning to scrap their policy of charging 55p a minute for people to phone the Universal Credit hotline, and all of their other rip off DWP hotline charges.

Don't make any mistake. They're not scrapping their vindictive policy of wringing cash out of some of the poorest people in society out of the goodness of their hearts. They're doing it because they got caught, and in Jeremy Corbyn Labour have a leader who is prepared to ignore what the right-wing tabloids might say about him, and hold the Tories to account for their malice.

It's absolutely no coincidence that DWP helplines are being made free just one week after Corbyn roasted Theresa May about the rip-off charges in parliament. This Tory U-turn has only happened because Britain has an effective opposition that is holding the government to account and forcing them into one U-turn after another.

Corbyn's predecessor Ed Miliband wasn't actually such a bad guy, but unlike Corbyn he didn't have the courage of his convictions, and surrounded himself with economic right-wingers like Ed Balls and Chris Leslie.

Not only did Miliband squander the 2015 General Election by adopting Ed Balls' ridiculously uninspiring "austerity-lite" narrative when outright opposition to ruinous and failing Tory austerity dogma was required, he also allowed other Labour right-wingers to mimic the Tories in order to pander to the right-wing press.

One of the most notorious examples came when Miliband's shadow DWP minister Rachael Reeves vowed that Labour would be tougher on benefits claimants than the Tories (as if systematically abusing disabled people, using unemployed workers as sources of free labour to distribute to their corporate mates, slashing in-work benefits for the working poor, and their draconian sanctions regime weren't harsh enough already)!

Just imagine if the right-wing of the Labour Party had succeeded in their numerous plots and schemes to oust Jeremy Corbyn from the Labour leadership. 

Their desperation to appeal to the editors of the right-wing propaganda rags would have prevented them from ever being seen to side with social security claimants, so the pressure over these ludicrously unfair DWP hotline charges would never have been applied, Theresa May wouldn't have been forced into performing another screeching U-turn, and the Tories would have continued wringing money out of poor people forced to righ the DWP over stuff like the unacceptable delays in their Universal Credit payments.

The difference with Corbyn is that he doesn't give a damn if mercenary hacks at right-wing propaganda rags like the S*n, Daily Mail, Express and Telegraph are going to attack him for standing up for the millions of working and non-working people on social security. Corbyn can see that charging people 55p a minute to deal with DWP errors in the Universal Credit system is just wrong, so he stood up and said it was wrong, and as a result forced the Tories into changing direction.

Of course the right-wing tabloid hacks are going to hate him for it. Of course people who have been conditioned to despise all social security claimants (whether they're working, not working, or physically unable to work) will hate him for it. But when Ed Miliband's pro-austerity anti-welfare incarnation of the Labour Party fumbled the golden opportunity that was the 2015 General Election, they proved that Labour simply can't win elections by crudely aping the Tory party in the hope of appealing to the kind of people who are never going to support Labour anyway.

You don't hold the powerful to account by meekly imitating their policies in the hope that you get a go at being in power next. You hold them to account by identifying their malice, incompetence and greed then haranguing them over it until they're forced to change direction, then eventually after the public have seen the powerful forced into either defending the indefensible, or U-turning for the umpteenth time, they get sick and tired of it and vote for a government with some actual principles.

This latest screeching U-turn from Theresa May is proof that Jeremy Corbyn is doing an increasingly effective job of holding the Tories to account, and what Labour (and the other opposition parties) need to do now is to continue to actively oppose this absolute shambles of a Tory government, especially when their policies are unfair, incompetent, or downright vindictive. 

 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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