Rachel Reeves' "new approach" is just "more of the same"

In her latest economic speech Rachel Reeves claimed that "at the election people voted for a whole new approach". That’s possibly true, although a more realistic interpretation could be that Labour won by default because the Tories imploded, and millions stayed at home in despair at the lack of alternatives to the failing status quo.

Even if we accept Reeves’ interpretation of the election result at face value, it’s still deeply problematic.

If people "voted for a whole new approach" then where are the new ideas? Where are the policies designed to make life better for ordinary people? And why does Rachel Reeves’ economic rhetoric sound indistinguishable from the succession of Tory Chancellors who preceded her?

Let’s look at some of the Labour government core positions under Keir Starmer’s leadership.

Austerity

One of the first things Rachel Reeves did was to launch another economically debilitating round of austerity cutbacks, pinning blame on the previous government for her actions.

That’s pretty much identical to George Osborne’s strategy in 2010, of blaming Labour’s supposed economic mismanagement for his ruinous programme of austerity cuts.

Conclusion: "More of the same"

Privatisation profiteering

Starmer’s Labour outright refuses to countenance taking vital services and infrastructure away from parasitical privatisation profiteers to run them as not-for-profit public services.

In fact Starmer’s health secretary Wes Streeting is salivating at the mouth at the prospect of carving the NHS open for even more private profiteering, to the benefit of several private health figures who have donated hefty sums to Starmer’s front bench.

Even Labour’s renationalisation of the railways is a sham which keeps the trains and freight services under the control of greedy private profiteers.

Labour are on the side of the privatisation profiteers, just like the Tories before them.

Conclusion: "More of the same"

Wittering on about "growth"

Rachel Reeves keeps going on and on about creating "growth" but without setting out any kind of realistic framework to get the economy growing in real terms, and without defining any redistribution strategy to ensure that any additional growth isn’t simply hoovered up by greedy corporations, exploitative landlords, financial speculators, and the tax-dodger brigade, leaving the rest of us even deeper in the mire of inequality.

Without redistribution policies Reeves’ "growth agenda" amounts to the same old trickle down economic bunk that neoliberal political grifters have been spouting for decades.

’Just let the rich get richer, and eventually some of it will trickle down to plebs like you’ - It didn’t work in the 1980s, it didn’t work in the Tory austerity years, and it’s not going to work now.

Conclusion: "More of the same"

Child impoverishment

One of Keir Starmer’s first acts as Prime Minister was to purge seven Labour MPs from the parliamentary party for the crime of voting to scrap the Tories’ diabolical poverty-spreading Two Child Policy.

Recent research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation shows that child poverty is due to rise in England and Wales under Starmer’s leadership, due to Labour’s draconian welfare policies.

Meanwhile in Scotland, child poverty rates are set to fall as the SNP government works to mitigate the terrible consequences of Reeves’ poverty-spreading agenda.

If Labour were to follow the SNP example and scrap the Two Child policy, it’d raise 800,000 kids out of poverty, but they don’t want to do that because they’re too busy pandering to the rich.

Labour aren’t just sticking with Tory child-impoverishment policies, they’re wittering on about how growth is magically going to fix everything while a third of all British kids grown up in poverty.

Conclusion: "More of the same"

Welfare scapegoating

One of the most depraved things about the 2010-2024 Tory governments was the way they continually attacked the most vulnerable people in society. Not just whipping up public hate against the poor, the unemployed, and the disabled, but implementing cruel and draconian policies to drive the most vulnerable people in society deeper into destitution (Bedroom Tax, Two Child Policy, Benefit Sanctions, "Fit For Work" assessments …).

Rachel Reeves has been copying from the same Tory playbook by distracting from her own economic failings by whipping public resentment against disabled people, and pledging yet another round of austerity cuts to the disability welfare system.

Conclusion: "More of the same"

The panacea of deregulation

Reeves bangs on and on about deregulation, as if giving powerful corporations even more leeway to do whatever they like is magically going to result in prosperity for the rest of us.

Look at the Grenfell tragedy. Look at our rivers and coastal waters full of raw sewage. Look at the life-ruining Post Office Horizon scandal. Look at the outrageous P&O sackings. Look at the collapse of Carillion. Look at the orgy of corruption going on in Teesside.

Who on earth thinks that any of these things would be have been made better by even less regulation than there was?

And who can forget David Cameron endlessly fulminating against "red tape" and promising a "bonfire of regulations".

How is Reeves’ anti-regulation rhetoric any different from what came before?

Conclusion: "More of the same"

Brexit

Reeves only mentions Brexit once in her speech to say "we are pragmatic about the challenges that we have inherited from the last government’s failed Brexit deal".

But what does this even mean?

Keir Starmer whipped Labour MPs into backing Boris Johnson’s Brexit shambles, and he’s repeatedly insisted that the country is stuck with it now, and there’s nothing to be done to try and mitigate the damage.

How can anyone give a speech on "growth" without acknowledging the diabolical impact that Brexit has had on the British economy?

It doesn’t matter how many pensioners, children, and disabled people Reeves drives into destitution in her cruel and counter-productive austerity book-balancing exercises, when the Brexit sanctions we applied on ourselves are such a massive millstone on the UK economy.

Conclusion: "More of the same"

More of the same

In conclusion Reeves is pretending to offer the change that she says the British public wanted, but in reality whole swathes of her speech, and Labour’s policy agenda are indistinguishable from the rhetoric and policies of preceding Tory governments.

And when people are handed the cold gruel of "more of the same" when they’ve been promised that everything will change for the better, that’s the environment of disillusion that the extreme-right absolutely thrive in.

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Working class support for the Tory Brexit farce is collapsing

It doesn't take a lot of knowledge of political history to understand that the people who suffer the most from political cockups are always those with the least: The poor, the low-paid, the sick and disabled, the jobless, and the vulnerable.

Neither does it take a political super-nerd to understand that when the Tories are in power this effect is multiplied, given that the absolute core of the Tory political ideology is the upwards redistribution of wealth to the millionaires and billionaires who bankroll the entire Tory operation.

When there's an economic crisis going on, it's obvious that the deliberate upwards redistribution of wealth massively exacerbates the social and economic problems.

Take the Tory austerity dogma that was imposed in the wake of the bankers' insolvency crisis. Extremely wealthy bankers crashed the UK economy with their utterly reckless gambling on complex financial products they didn't even understand ... Yet Tory austerity dogma saw pretty much the entire burden of this crisis loaded onto the shoulders of poor and ordinary people (wage repression, in-work benefits cuts, local government cuts, social care cuts, NHS and emergency services cuts, trashed workers' rights ...) while corporations and the super rich were lavished with handouts (top rate Income Tax cut, Corporation Tax slashed, masses of corporate outsourcing handouts, public services and infrastructure sold off at way below their real market values, Quantitative Easing shoring up the assets of the super rich).

The results of this have been devastating. The NHS and social care cuts have come with a death toll of an estimated 120,000 avoidable deaths, the police cuts have resulted in soaring rates of violent crime, local government cuts mean we're all paying more Council Tax in return for significantly fewer council services, food bank dependency is soaring, child poverty is soaring, in-work poverty is soaring, NHS queues have grown exponentially, ordinary British workers are still getting the worst deal in the developed world ... and to top it all off, the Tories haven't even got remotely close to eliminating the deficit, despite their promises that austerity dogma would have wiped it away before May 2015!

And now, despite not having recovered from the last crisis, we're facing another even bigger one. The looming spectre of a Tory administered Brexit.

Every day that passes makes it look more likely that Theresa May's shambolic Chequers proposals are going to collapse, resulting in the disastrous "no deal" flounce out of the EU that she's been threatening since the beginning.

The Tories' own regional impact assessments show that a "no deal" Brexit would trigger a devastating recession, far worse than the 2007-08 bankers' crisis.

And it doesn't take a genius to figure out who Tories would load the cost of their own "no deal" Brexit crisis onto:

The poor, the low-paid, the sick and disabled, the jobless, and the vulnerable. As usual.

The only people who will ever get a 'Brexit dividend' out of a Tory Brexit will be the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg, John Redwood, Steve Baker, and the mega-rich investment class who will cash in on it by betting against Britain, then flooding their cash back in during the crisis to pick up £billions worth of distressed British assets on the cheap.

The mega-rich will make a Brexit killing while the poor and ordinary pay the price. That's exactly what happened with austerity dogma, and you'd have to be shockingly naive to imagine a different outcome under a Tory Brexit.

Perhaps this is why the latest polling figures indicate that working class people are turning against the idea of Brexit.

Perhaps they can see the Tory Brexit farce approaching.

They can see it's their jobs, and the public services they rely on that are on the line.

And as the prospect of a Brexit recession draws closer and closer, they're ever more aware that the only possible winners under a Tory administered Brexit will be the mega-rich speculator class the Tories are bankrolled by.

It certainly takes a level of intellectual bravery to admit that you have been fooled by a political con.

But thanks to Jeremy Corbyn actually opposing it (rather than pathetically imitating it like Ed Miliband and Ed Balls did) ever more people are waking up to the fact that Tory austerity dogma was never really about reducing the deficit, and was instead just a hard-right wealth transfer con.

And hopefully enough people will figure out that a Tory administered Brexit is likely to be even more devastating than austerity dogma was when it comes to the wellbeing of poor and ordinary 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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Windrush Brits are far from the only people to have suffered callous Tory abuse

The treatment of Windrush Brits by this horror show of a Tory government is an absolute outrage, but it's vital to remember that this dreadful scandal is just one example amongst many in a pattern of callous Tory abuse against pretty much anyone who is not a member of the wealthy establishment class that the Tory party exists to serve.

Windrush Brits

The Windrush scandal has come about because Theresa May introduced some vile UKIP-pandering anti-immigrant legislation in 2014. Nobody in parliament could have been under the impression that this was anything but an extreme-right attack on British values given that May openly bragged that the legislation could be used to create a guilty until proven innocent "deport now and hear appeals later" environment.

Since 2014 the Tories have been using this legislation to dehumanise and discriminate against Windrush Brits without the paperwork to prove their nationality. 

This systematic Tory discrimination has resulted in people being denied employment, denied accommodation, denied social security, denied pensions, denied NHS treatment, denied their freedom in immigration detention centres, and denied the right to return to Britain.

Other commonwealth Brits

Windrush Brits are far from the only Commonwealth British citizens to have been dehumanised and discriminated against in Theresa May's vile UKIP-pandering legislation. People from all manner of Commonwealth countries who arrived in Britain before 1973 have been denied their citizen's rights under Theresa May and Amber Rudd's "Hostile Environment". Examples already include arrivals from Kenya, Uganda, Cyprus, New Zealand, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and Canada.

The EU 3 million

Theresa May has been absolutely insistent that the lives of the three million EU citizens living in the UK should be used as disposable bargaining chips in the Brexit negotiations. 

In the weeks after the Brexit vote David Cameron wanted to make a unilateral offer to secure these people's rights, but Theresa May vetoed it.

Labour, the Lib-Dems, the SNP, Plaid Cymru, and the Green Party all agree that providing peace of mind to the EU 3 million should be an absolute priority, but Theresa May still insists on forcing them to live under the shadow of uncertainty, despite having had almost two years since the Brexit votes to give them a cast iron guarantee that they won't be deported or denied their rights. 

Sick and disabled people

One of the most shocking things about the Tories is their relentless systematic abuse of sick and disabled people.

One of the worst aspects of this systematic abuse are the dehumanising and discriminatory assessment regimes that are carried out by profiteering corporations like Atos, Capita and Maximus. Not only do these assessment procedures have spectacularly unreliable outcomes (almost three fifths of WCA cases that go to appeal are overturned), they also cost far more in corporate administration fees than they will ever save in reduced disability benefits payments.

The fact that the hated disability assessment regime costs far more to run than it will ever be able to save is conclusive proof that the Tories aren't even treating people maliciously for financial reasons, they're doing it because they enjoy it, and believe the taxpayer should subsidise their malicious treatment of some of the most vulnerable people in society.

The jobless

Another one of the malicious Tory policies that costs way more to administer than it will ever save in reduced benefits payments is their draconian sanctions regime against the unemployed.

Not only does the sanctions regime cost far more to run than it saves in reduced benefits payments, the evidence is absolutely clear that condemning people to absolute destitution (often for utterly trivial offences) actually reduces their ability to find work.

People with mental health problems

In 2014 the Court of Appeal ruled that the Tory Work Capacity Assessment regime is unlawful because of the way it discriminates against people with mental health conditions. The Tories just carried on regardless.

In 2017 the Tories were caught telling their army of corporate disability assessors to actively discriminate against people with mental health conditions.

And despite continually banging on about the importance of helping people with mental health conditions, the Tories are still ruthlessly cutting away at NHS mental health budgets.

Children

Over 400,000 more children are growing up in poverty than when the Tories came to power in 2010. The Tory government have also introduced the most extreme school spending cuts in decades.

Any country in which rates of child poverty are rising, and education budgets are being slashed is a country that has given up on its own future.

Workers

Despite all of their shtick about "making work pay" and "work is the best route out of poverty" the Tories have overseen the longest sustained collapse in workers' wages since records began, and they've also continually slashed in-work benefits for the working poor.

The Tories have also overseen an explosion in exploitative low-pay, low-security work like Zero Hours contracts and the fake self-employment gig economy.

Then there's the fact that in 2013 they introduced unlawful legislation to price low-income workers out of employment tribunals so that bad bosses could get away with treating their workers like dirt.

With an appalling track record like this anyone who works for a living and votes Tory is undeniably voting against their own economic best interests.

Brits with non-EU spouses

One of the most sickening things Theresa May did at the Home Office was to introduce a highly discriminatory arbitrary minimum income threshold for British citizens to bring non-EU spouses into the country.

These rules strongly discriminate against the low-paid, because women are far less likely to earn the arbitrary minimum income threshold than men, and people in poorer regions of the UK (north east, Northern Ireland, Cornwall) are much less likely to earn enough to meet the threshold than people in wealthy areas like London and the Home Counties.

At the exact same time as she was introducing these rules to split up relationships, or force British people to live in exile, she was also handing out British residency and British passports to super rich Russian oligarchs, corrupt Chinese officials, the families of African dictators, and Middle East oil barons who wanted to buy their way in.

Women

86% of the economic burden of toxic hard-right Tory austerity dogma has been loaded onto the shoulders of women.

That Theresa May persists with this brazenly sexist economic dogma is a clear demonstration that you don't have to be a man to be a misogynist.

The elderly

Given that the elderly are far more likely to vote Tory than working age people, you might have thought that they'd be somewhat protected from the worst Tory malice, but you'd be wrong.

The victims of the Tories' £4.6 billion cuts to the social care budget are predominantly elderly people. The victims of the Tory devastation of the NHS service are predominantly elderly people. And if that wasn't enough, in 2017 they decided to announce a policy of taxing people with dementia (and other serious debilitating diseases) so that they lose their houses, and lose their ability to leave even modest inheritances to their children and grandchildren.

Conclusion

It turns out that it's not just Windrush Brits who have suffered under this vile Tory government, it's almost all of us.

Pretty much the only people who are immune from this Tory malice is the mega-rich. Not only have they been spared the malicious treatment borne by the rest of us, they've also been showered in handouts, tax cuts, tax breaks, and quantitative easing cash to help them literally double their wealth since the global financial sector insolvency crisis hit in 2007-08!

If you're not one of the mega-rich elitists the Tory party exists to serve, yet you still vote for them, you're not just voting against the interests of the majority of British people, you're also voting against your own interests too (unless of course you imagine that you'll never be poor, never be sick or disabled, never be elderly, never have children, never be female, and never actually have to actually work for a living).

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Hours after legislating to starve children of the working poor Tories gorged themselves on a luxury banquet

On the evening of Wednesday February 7th 2018 Tory MPs enjoyed a lavish banquet at their Black and White fundraiser event for the assortment of amoral millionaires and billionaires who bankroll their despicable party.

Tables at the event sold for up to £15,000, Tory MPs auctioned themselves off in a sickening "cash for access raffle", and Theresa May delighted the crowd with her extremist rhetoric about how she's on a mission to "defeat socialism" (which obviously entails destruction of the socialist NHS).

Just hours before this grotesque display of opulence, the Tory party sneaked a piece of legislation through parliament designed to confiscate free school meals from the children of the working-poor.

Anyone who has been paying attention to the devastating consequences of Tory austerity dogma and their unprecedented campaign of wage repression will be familiar with the shocking rises in child poverty and in-work poverty since the Lib-Dems enabled the Tories back into power in 2010.

As a result of the longest sustained collapse in the real value of UK workers' wages things are now so bad that an astounding 67% of the children growing up in poverty actually live in working households.

The Tories have no sympathy whatever for the human catastrophe they've created, and they've decided to deny free school meals to children whose parents earn more than a paltry £7,400 per year.

Just imagine earning a paltry £617 and being told that you're too rich for your kids to be provided with a free school meal.

The Tories knew that such a move would cause uproar if they tried to pass a specific piece of legislation through parliament to bring in these changes, so they did it via a Statutory Instrument so as to avoid the hassle of parliamentary debates, votes, and press coverage.

Just imagine how mercilessly self-serving these Tory MPs are that they can legislate to starve the children of the working poor in the morning, then rush off to stuff themselves at a lavish black tie dinner in the evening, without even a thought for the anguish and suffering they're inflicting on these poor kids and their families.

Just imagine being a millionaire/billionaire who can afford to blast £15,000 on a single meal, deciding to donate to a political party that has just legislated to deny free school meals to the children of those who earn way less than £15,000 in an entire year.

 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 conspiracy-mongering and censorship frenzy of Tory MP David Morris

The Tory MP David Morris has claimed that contributors to a report by ITV into poverty in his local constituency of Morecambe in Lancashire were lying about extreme poverty as part of a plot by the left-wing Labour pressure group Momentum.

This is an incredible display of conspiracy-mongering because he's actually claiming that the doctors and teachers in the following clip are making up their concerns as part of a concerted left-wing political conspiracy.



If this Tory MP's evidence-free smears were actually true and the doctor was lying about having seen children with malnutrition-based illnesses just for political reasons, he would face being struck off the medical register.

And the teachers would also face serious disciplinary action and probably the sack too if the Tory MP's lazy smears about them making up lies for political reasons were true.

But David Morris is absolutely and totally free to make up politically motivated smears as a feeble effort to distract public attention away from child poverty in his constituency.

And that's the difference between Westminster politics and the rest of us right there in a nutshell.

If people in ordinary jobs get caught telling disgraceful politically motivated lies in our jobs, we'd face disciplinary action or the sack. But Tory MPs  like David Morris are absolutely free to fall back on brazen lies and ridiculous smears whenever they like, with no fear of punishment from their party, or from the (absolutely toothless joke of a) parliamentary standards authority.

It's clearly one set of rules for us 'lower order plebs' and another completely different and far more lax set of rules for out-of-touch Tory elitists like David Morris.

And to make matters worse Morris has now had an entire day to apologise for his evidence-free smear-mongering, but has instead doubled down on his claims and instigated a massive purge of his Facebook page to block people from questioning his statements, claiming that the negative public reaction to his original smears is another conspiracy by Momentum!

One of his Facebook posts shows 72 comments in the thread, but only one comment has survived the purge, while another post shows 65 comments in the thread with not a single one surviving his censorship frenzy.

This scandal has demonstrated a lot of things about David Morris. He indulges in paranoid conspiracy theories; he refuses to provide any evidence to back up his wild assertions; he has contempt for public sector workers like teachers and doctors; he ruthlessly censors all critical comments from his Facebook page; and worst of all is his complete disregard for the children growing up in shocking poverty in his own constituency.

All of these things show how utterly unfit David Morris is for public service, so let's hope the people of Morecambe and Lunesdale overturn his slim 1,339 majority at the next election and give him the sack that he so thoroughly deserves.

And let's also hope that the doctor and teachers he has smeared consider taking legal action against him for spreading defamatory comments that damage their professional reputations, and endanger their careers.

 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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Is Rebecca Pow really so out-of-touch that she thinks people are better off than ever?

When the Tory MP Rebecca Pow intervened in John McDonnell's parliamentary speech to make the ridiculous assertion that "people have more money than ever" McDonnell replied in a very polite manner.

He calmly pointed out the horrifying fact that there are 4 million kids growing up in poverty in the United Kingdom, and the majority of them actually come from working families.

@johnmcdonnellMP politely explains the shocking scale of in-work poverty to clueless Tory MP Rebecca Pow. pic.twitter.com/aBtvL42NBI

— Tom (AAV) (@Angry_Voice) November 23, 2017

That the working poor make up the majority of people living in poverty in austerity Britain should be common knowledge, but thanks to the complicity of the mainstream media, uncomfortable facts like this are barely mentioned outside of left-wing independent media sites and in the slew of damning reports on the sheer scale of the problem from the likes of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Child Poverty Action Group and the Resolution Foundation.

It doesn't matter how much we try to raise awareness of child poverty and in-work poverty, there's always some wealthy insulated Tory around to pretend that things are fantastic, and that we've actually "never had it so good".

The problem for Rebecca Pow is that the Tory budget is full of explicit admissions that Tory austerity dogma is failing Britain, and failing British workers.
 

Aside from the downgrades in the UK economic growth forecasts, deficit reduction, and productivity, there's also a damning admission that the (already record-breaking) squeeze on UK workers' wages is set to continue into the next decade.

This means that the real value of workers' wages is not going to return to 2007 levels until early 2025.

That's an astounding 17 year period of zero real terms wage growth.

That's a generation of workers who have had their earning potential cruelly and deliberately blighted for the most productive years of their careers as a result of ruinous Tory austerity dogma.

Instead of progressing up the pay scale like previous generations did, millions have been trapped in low-pay insecure work without a decent pay rise in years, meaning they're actually worse off now in real terms than they were a decade ago.

It doesn't matter how many jokes and jolly japes the Tory Chancellor Philip Hammond padded out his "banter budget" with, the economic prognosis for the UK is absolutely dire, especially for ordinary working people.

The really sad thing is that millions of working people are so immune to reality that they'll actually believe the likes of Rebecca Pow and the right-wing propaganda merchants when they tell them that the Tories are doing a fantastic job and that they've never had it so good.

They'll forget all about the fact they haven't had a real pay rise in years; their nephew being exploited in the fake self-employment gig economy while their boss hides all the profits in tax havens; their niece on a dead end zero hours contract bringing her daughter up in grinding poverty; their mother being denied the social care she paid for with a whole lifetime of National Insurance contributions; the ever-worsening chaos in their local hospital; their neighbour forced to go through humiliation after humiliation to obtain the disability benefits they deserve ... because they keep on reading what a spiffing job the Tories are doing of running the economy in the pages of the S*n/Daily Mail/Express/Telegraph.

People like this will never read about how Philip Hammond's "banter budget" extends the Tory wage squeeze to 17 years, the dire state of the UK productivity crisis, or the soaring rates of child poverty and in-work poverty, because the Tory party rely on the ignorance of the masses to get away with what they do, and the right-wing press dutifully foster ignorance by not giving these vitally important issues anything like the coverage they deserve.

Until ordinary working people stop reading the right-wing propaganda rags, and stop uncritically believing Tory politicians when they defy reality by claiming that people have more money than ever, it's difficult to see how things can actually get better.

 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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Tory austerity dogma is punishing children who weren't even born when the bankers trashed the economy

Ten years ago the global financial sector collapsed into insolvency as a result of the reckless gambling of the bankers.

The UK establishment responded to this insolvency crisis by handing out the biggest state subsidies in history (some £1.5 trillion in bankers' bailouts) and turning on the cash taps to flood the financial sector with newly invented money (£435 billion in Quantitative Easing).

Of course someone had to pay for this vast rescue package, and when the Tories came to power in 2010 they decided to load the burden onto the backs of the poor and ordinary via wage repression policies and ideological austerity dogma, whilst actually lavishing vast handouts on the super-rich who created the crisis (tax cuts for corporations and the super-rich, distribution of public assets at bargain basement prices, huge bonuses at lossmaking taxpayer owned banks ...).

After seven torturous years of the Tories overseeing this vast upwards redistribution of wealth, and their economically ruinous strangling of investment in infrastructure and services (the foundations of future economic prosperity) the economy is in an absolutely desperate state.

UK workers have suffered the longest sustained decline in the value of their wages since records began; after the lowest level of house building since the early 1920s house prices are at their most unaffordable level ever; child poverty is soaring; in-work poverty is soaring; local councils all over the country are on the verge of bankruptcy; the NHS is in crisis; emergency services have been cut to the bone; and the UK economy is suffering its worst productivity crisis in centuries.

Despite this absolute horror show the Tories have no intention of changing direction. A shocking report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies predicts that the savage Tory cuts to the social security system are going to end up driving record numbers of children into poverty.

Unless the malicious austerity fetishism of the Tory party is reversed, the child poverty rate will be driven up to 37% by 2021-22. The worst affected areas will be the poorest areas of the country, but child poverty rates are still predicted to rise significantly, even in the wealthier areas like London and the South East.

It's important to note that by 2021-22 practically all of the 5.2 million British children who will be growing up in poverty will actually have been born after the financial sector meltdown hit in 2007-08.

Just imagine the hideous scale of callousness and depravity that makes Tory politicians believe that it's acceptable to continue enriching the bankers who crashed the economy with tax cuts and handouts, while they load the costs of the crash onto the shoulders of children who weren't even born when the Tories' banker mates tanked the economy.

Perhaps what's even more shocking than the callousness and depravity of the Tories is the mentality of the people who vote for them. 

In the grim amoral calculus these people perform in their heads when it comes to election time, they selfishly prioritise whatever (almost certainly imaginary) personal benefit they think they'd get from a continuation of Tory rule, over the fact that the Tories are consciously and deliberately driving millions of children into poverty in order to transfer even more wealth upwards to the tiny clique of bankers, corporate fat cats and billionaires who caused the economic crisis in the first place (and who bankroll the Tory party).

 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 Tory challenge

The rule of this game is very simple. If you've been sent a link to this article, all you have to do is pick five of these fifty things from the Tory track record in government and explicitly defend them to the person who sent you the link. 

Longest fall in value of wages since records began
Under Tory rule British workers have suffered the longest sustained decline in the real value of their wages since records began. The fall is so bad that it's the joint worst wage collapse in the developed world with Greece. The difference of course is that Greece did that to their workers because they were forced to by the Troika, the Tories did that to British workers because they wanted to.

A vote for Tories is a vote for lower wages

Spectacularly missed economic targets
In 2010 the Tories promised to eliminate the deficit by 2015. In 2017 they're still nowhere near eliminating it, and they've openly admitted that they won't be doing it any time before 2021. Over 11 years to do what they promised to do in under 5, and more new public debt created in the process than every single Labour government in history combined? If that's "strong economic management", I'd hate to see what Tories would classify as chaotic, debt-soaring ineptitude.

A vote for Tories is a vote for more economic incompetence

The austerity con
After such spectacularly missed targets and George Osborne's departure from Westminster politics it's amazing that millions still believe in his austerity con, but Theresa May is still parroting the same kind of economically illiterate justifications for a blatantly unjustifiable economic agenda. The evidence is now absolutely clear that austerity only succeeded in transferring wealth from the majority to the super rich minority at the expense of the real economy.

A vote for Tories is a vote for the continuation of the Tory austerity con

NHS cuts
Between 2010 and 2015 the Tories slashed £20 billion off the NHS budget. Their current spending plans involve a further £22 billion in funding cuts between 2015 and 2020. Slashing the NHS budget, closing dozens of hospitals and other NHS facilities; reducing services; and laying off tens of thousands of staff would be bad enough in it's own right, but at a time of rapidly increasing demand on NHS services it's a recipe for disaster.

A vote for Tories is a vote for an underfunded NHS

The productivity crisis
The UK is suffering an extreme crisis in relative productivity. The UK lags 35% behind Germany and 30% behind the US. This means that the average UK worker has to work an hour to achieve the same economic output as a German can manage in 39 minutes. The problem is getting worse and worse, and it's easy to understand why. Unhappy and exploited workers don't work as hard as those who feel valued and well paid. Well educated workers are more effective workers than those who have suffered a poor education system. If the UK wants to resolve the productivity crisis it needs to improve wages and working conditions and invest in the education system. The Tories have been doing the polar opposite of that for seven years.

A vote for Tories is a vote against resolving the productivity crisis

Systematic abuse of disabled people
The amount of appalling schemes and degrading assessment regimes disabled people have to go through under this Tory government is absolutely shocking. There's so much of it I've written a full article detailing over a dozen of the worst things.

A vote for Tories is a vote for the continued abuse of disabled people

Huge rise in child poverty
Since 2010 the number of children growing up in poverty has risen by 400,000. The latest Tory cuts to the child welfare system and in-work benefits are set to plunge another 250,000 kids into lives of poverty.

A vote for Tories is a vote for child poverty

Railway chaos
As a result of the shambolic Tory privatisation of the railways the UK has the most expensive, most over-crowded and least reliable rail service of any comparable developed European nation. What's more is that the profiteering private companies who operate the services take more in government subsidies than it cost to run the entire system under British Rail!

A vote for Tories is a vote for crap, over-priced and over-crowded rail services

The harshest cuts of all on poor families with children
Analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies has revealed that under Tory spending plans the worst hit demographic of all will be poor families with children. The trend is absolutely clear. The poorer you are, the harsher the cuts you will be facing, and if you have kids you'll be hit harder than those without.

A vote for Tories is a vote to further impoverish the already poor (and their children)

Corporations paying less tax than their employees
Since 2010 the Tories have reduced the rate of corporation tax paid by the biggest multinationals from 28% to 20%. They plan to cut it even further to just 17% by 2020. This means that the UK has one of the lowest corporation tax rates in the developed world. The global average is 27% and the G7 average is 33.4%. Theresa May has threatened to reduce the corporation tax rate even further too. Labour would reverse the corporation tax cuts and bring the UK back into line with other advanced nations.

A vote for Tories is a vote for very low rates of corporation tax

Most unaffordable homes ever
Since 2010 the Tory government has overseen the lowest levels of housebuilding since the 1920s. When Theresa May was Home Secretary she increased demand on the nation's housing stock by overseeing the biggest surges of net migration in UK history. This combination of weak supply, very high demand and collapsing wages has pushed house prices to their most unaffordable level ever.

A vote for Tories is a vote for unaffordable housing

NHS recruitment crisis
One of Theresa May's first acts as Prime Minister was to scrap NHS bursaries, which caused an astonishing 10,000 decline in applications for nursing courses. Add into the mix the fact that NHS staff from EU countries are quitting the NHS in record numbers and there's a massive NHS recruitment crisis on the cards.

A vote for Tories is a vote for a massive NHS staff shortage

Contempt for private sector tenants
In 2016 Tory MPs (1/3 of whom are landlords) voted down an opposition amendment to their housing bill that would have required landlords to ensure that rented accommodation is "fit for human habitation".

A vote for Tories is a vote for slumlords renting shit houses to people with nowhere else to turn

Biggest education funding cuts in decades
The Tories are planning the biggest education funding cuts in decades. Follow this link to find out how much they're planning to slash from the budget of your local school.

A vote for Tories is a vote for underfunded schools

Legal Aid cuts
Legal Aid was introduced in 1949 by Clement Attlee's Labour government. It serves to prevent the justice system just serving as a plaything of the rich. The point of it is to ensure equal justice and the right to a fair trial. Since 2010 the Tories have mercilessly slashed the Legal Aid budget creating a two-tier justice system where justice is available to those who can afford it, but out of the reach of the poorest and most vulnerable in society (especially in Legal Advice blackspots like the South West, the Midlands and the North). Legal experts are up in arms about these divisive and unfair cuts, but Theresa May has steadfastly refused to conduct an inquiry.

A vote for Tories is a vote for a two-tier justice system

The school privatisation agenda
An awful lot of people don't seem to have even noticed that the Tories have been privatising thousands of state owned schools, property and all, for free, into the hands of private sector pseudo-charities, many of which are owned by major Tory party donors (like Philip "Carpetright" Harris, Alan Lewis and John Nash). Read this article about the scandalous Perry Beeches academy chain to get an idea of the seriousness of this Tory vandalism of our education system.

A vote for Tories is a vote for unaccountable profiteers running the English education system

Rip-off tuition fees
With the assistance of their lying Lib-Dem sidekicks the Tories introduced £9,000 per year tuition fees for university students, meaning English students now face the highest fees in the world for study at public universities. The fees are so high that 2/3 of graduates will never be able to pay off their student debts, despite paying a 9% aspiration tax on their disposable incomes for their entire working lives.

A vote for Tories is a vote for lifetimes of unpayable student debt for millions of graduates

Huge rise in Food bank dependency
The Tories have seen a huge rise in food bank dependency since 2010. Over a million food parcels were handed out by the Trussell Trust last year, and they're just one of the food bank organisations. New research has shown that areas that have suffered the rollout of the Tories' hopelessly botched Universal Credit scheme have significantly higher rates of food bank dependency than areas where it hasn't been rolled out yet.

A vote for Tories is a vote for food poverty
 
The Hinkley Point C scandal
The Hinkley Point C deal is one of the most scandalous affairs in UK political history. The Tories have agreed to bribe the French and Chinese into building us a nuclear power station by promising to use taxpayers' cash to pay them double the market rate for electricity for 35 years, then cover the cleanup cost at the taxpayers' expense too. The reason we have to bribe foreign governments into building our nuclear infrastructure for us is that the Tories privatised the UK's nuclear expertise in the 1990s, and the private company was then allowed to be purchased by the French government.

A vote for Tories is a vote for the most expensive rip-off deal the UK has ever signed up to

Unqualified teachers
In 2010 the Tories changed the rules and scrapped the requirement that teachers actually be qualified to do the job. Since then the education system has been flooded with ever more unqualified teachers, rising to 22,500 by 2015. It's worth remembering that the education secretary who brought in the policy of flooding our schools with unqualified teachers was Michael Gove, you know, the guy who claimed that the UK has "had enough of experts" during the EU referendum campaign.

A vote for Tories is a vote for even more unqualified teachers in our schools

Election fraud 
The Tory party committed electoral fraud in 2015. They've already paid the maximum fine the Electoral Commission could levy against them for election cheating, and 30 Tories afaced the prospect of criminal prosecution for financially doping their way to victory in a number of marginal constituencies, but were let off on a technicality.

A vote for Tories is a vote to empower electoral cheats

PFI
One of the worst things about New Labour was their reliance upon rip-off PFI economic alchemy scams designed to bribe private companies into building public infrastructure. The Treasury Select Committee found that PFI is "an extremely inefficient method of funding [public infrastructure] projects" yet the Tories have carried on using them, and are currently looking for hedge funds to sign up to another £10 billion worth of PFI deals. Jeremy Corbyn has pledged to scrap PFI.

A vote for Tories is a vote for even more rip-off PFI economic alchemy schemes

Secret courts
In 2013 the Tories (in coalition with the so-called Liberal Democrats) introduced a new law to create secret courts in which a person can have their fate decided in a courtroom they are not allowed to enter, on charges they are not allowed to know, based on evidence they are not allowed to see. In secret courts even the person's lawyer is barred from entering the courtroom or seeing the evidence. These shocking secrecy rules don't just apply to criminal courts or terrorism related offences, they can be used in civil cases too! Theresa May was the Home Office minister responsible for this attack on the concept of open justice.

A vote for Tories is a vote in favour of contempt for the concept of open justice

Privatisation
Since coming to power in 2010 the Tories have been privatising public assets at a faster rate than any government in UK history (even Thatcher). Many of their privatisation scams have been completely senseless and resulted in vast rip-offs for the British public; they sold Royal Mail off at over £1 billion below its real market value; they sold off the publicly owned banks at massive losses to the taxpayer; they've carved up and given away £billions worth of NHS services; they gave away thousands of publicly owned school properties, for free, to unaccountable private pseudo-charities; they've sold off the student loan books at a loss; and they sold off the UK government's stake in Eurostar for a tiny fraction of what it cost us to set it up.

A vote for Tories is a vote for more rip-off Tory privatisation scams

Foreign ownership of British rail franchises
One of the most ridiculous things about the Tory privatisation ideology is that the only country that is barred from bidding for UK rail franchises is ... err ... the UK! Vast swathes of our rail system are now operated by foreign governments like Germany, France, the Netherlands, Singapore and Hong Kong. These foreign governments then extract their taxpayer-subsidised profits back to their own countries to be used to improve their own rail systems. The Netherlands state rail operator Abellio now operates so many train services here that their UK network is two and a half times the size of the entire Netherlands state railway!

A vote for Tories is a vote for UK taxpayers and rail passengers subsidising foreign rail networks

Social care crisis
The Tories have slashed £4.6 billion from the social care budget at a time of rising demand due to the UK's ageing population demographics. This social care funding crisis has coincided with the biggest increase in the death rate since the 1960s, and is putting an immense amount of pressure on already overstretched NHS services and unpaid carers.

A vote for Tories is a vote a social care system in crisis

Scrapped NHS waiting time targets
Over the winter of 2016-17 it became clear that the underfunded overstretched NHS was incapable of meeting the 4 hour waiting time target at A&E departments. Instead of reversing their cuts and stopping their programme of hospital closures, the Tories simply scrapped the waiting time target! If the target can't be delivered then don't change your policy, scrap the target - that's the Tory approach to problem-solving!

A vote for Tories is a vote for longer hospital waits

Defunding of local government
The Tories have slashed local government budgets so harshly that the leader of David Cameron's own Tory council famously wrote to him to plead for him to stop. What's most disgusting about this assault on local government budgets is that the most savage local government cuts have been focused on the poorest areas, while some leafy Tory councils actually got increases in their budgets.

A vote for Tories is a vote for even more ruination of local government services

Tax-dodgers winning government contracts
The Tories have brought giant outsourcing corporations in to do all kinds of government functions. Huge numbers of these corporate leeches are now having their contracts renewed automatically with no cost-benefit analysis and no competitive tendering process. The Labour Party have proposed a new law to ban outsourcing companies from receiving government contracts if they're based in tax havens. The Tories are quite happy to continue using taxpayers' cash to pay tax-dodging corporate outsourcing companies to do the work the government should be doing itself.

A vote for Tories is a vote for tax-dodging corporate outsourcing parasitism

Filibustering
Filibustering is an incredibly cynical strategy politicians use to block proposed legislation by talking and talking until the debate runs out of time. Some of the proposed laws that have been derailed by Tory MPs deliberately blabbering on for hours to run the clock down include first aid lessons for school children, free hospital parking for carers, cheaper off-patent drugs for the NHS, and a bill to prevent revenge evictions by landlords who have been asked to maintain their properties. Several of these bills had cross-party support, but were deliberately wrecked by a handful of hard-right Tories like Philip Davies, Andrew Rosindell, Sam Gyimah, Alistair Burt and Cristopher Chope.

A vote for Tories is a vote for Tory debate wrecking tactics

Fire service cuts
Between 2010 and 2015 the Tories slashed 30% off the fire service budget resulting in the loss of 10,000 firefighter jobs and the closure of 39 fire stations. Between 2015 and 2020 they intend to slash another 20%. In 2015/16 the number of fire deaths increased by 17.4%.

A vote for Tories is a vote for more people dying in house fires
 
Prisons chaos
Violence, riots, widespread drug use, escapes, chronic understaffing and soaring suicide rates. The UK prison system is in chaos. One of the worst prisons of all is HMP Northumberland that was privatised by the Tories in 2014. It's supposed to be a training prison to give prisoners jobs skills so they're less likely to return to crime. At HMP Northumberland a private contractor Novus was giving prisoners pictures of Peppa Pig to colour in as their employability training, all at the taxpayers' expense of course.

A vote for Tories is a vote for absolute chaos in our prisons

Unfair dismissal fees
In 2013 the Tory led government introduced £1,200 fees in order for employees to seek unfair dismissal compensation from their employers. So now if your boss sacks you unfairly (for your age, sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy, political orientation, trade union activities, or refusal to suck his cock) you have to find over a grand in order to go to an employment tribunal. The Tory presumption of course being that your boss is a great guy and all of his employees are worthless scum, and the fewer people who take him to tribunal the better. The person who came up with these fees is a major Tory party donor called Adrian Beecroft who also runs the payday loan company Wonga (which would obviously benefit from a significant increase in the number of people being unfairly dismissed and priced out of seeking compensation). Jeremy Corbyn has vowed to remove this economic barrier to justice by scrapping employment tribunal fees.

A vote for Tories is a vote for economic barriers to the justice system

Police cuts
Between 2010 and 2015 the Tories axed 34,000 police jobs. Between 2015 and 2020 they intend to axe tens of thousands more. The police have managed to juke the statistics by non-recording vast numbers of reported crimes, but the impact of these police cuts can't be hidden off the violent crime statistics, which have increased by 96% between 2012 and 2016.

A vote for Tories is a vote for fewer police on our streets and more violent crime

Flood defence spending
Of all of the Tory cuts their decision to slash the flood defence spending budget is one of the most stupid. For each £1 spent on flood defence spending the nation saves £8 in avoided damage and disruption. Several of the areas that had their flood defence schemes cancelled in 2010-11 ended up suffering severe flooding. As a departing gift after resigning in disgrace David Cameron handed a DBE to Caroline Spelman who was the Tory politician who oversaw this ideologically driven lunacy!

A vote for Tories is a vote for more damaging floods

Adult education
Adult education colleges had their budgets slashed by 24% between 2010 and 2015. The vocational training budget was slashed even more, by 40%. Over a million adult learning places have disappeared since 2010. It's beyond obvious that re-educating adult workers is absolutely vital in the modern era where the concept of jobs for life has been all but eradicated. Any government intent on developing a modern high-tech economy would invest in adult education in order to provide workers with the skills retraining they need to move between jobs. The Tories have been doing the exact opposite.

A vote for Tories is a vote for an inflexible low-skill economy 

Forced closure of NHS services
During the 2010 General Election the Tories promised to stop the forced closure of NHS services. In 2012 the Tory government attempted to force the closure of Lewisham Hospital in South London. In 2014 the Tories introduced new legislation to make it much easier for them to force the closure of NHS services and facilities. Since 2015 the Tories have been working on a secret plan to shut down dozens of A&E departments, maternity wards, walk in centres and mental health facilities up and down the country.

A vote for Tories is a vote for the forced closure of even more NHS services

Sweetheart tax deals
One of the sickest things about the Tory government is the way they allowed HMRC to draw up sweetheart tax deals with massive corporations like Google, Starbucks and Vodafone. Why should Google get to negotiate a 3% tax deal when ordinary working people have to pay what they actually owe?

A vote for Tories is a vote for more sweetheart tax deals with multinational corporations

Armed services cuts
Between 2010 and 2015 the Tories slashed over 33,000 jobs in the armed services. The army has been pared back to its smallest size since the Napoleonic War! Meanwhile the Tories have been blasting money like it's going out of fashion on aircraft carriers with no aircraft, paying 40 Admirals and 260 Captains when we've only got 19 warships, and the 205 billion renewal of Britain's privatised supply of weapons of mass destruction.

A vote for Tories is a vote for weaker and less capable defence

Democracy under threat
The proposed Tory Great Repeal Bill is an astounding assault on the concept of democracy and accountability. If this bill passes it will give Tory government ministers the ability to rewrite tens of thousands of UK laws with no parliamentary scrutiny. If people supported Brexit because the EU is too undemocratic, it would take an astounding display of doublethink them to now be supporting Theresa May and the biggest anti-democratic assault on the UK in history that they're planning.

A vote for Tories is a vote against democracy

The Snoopers' Charter
Theresa May's Snoopers' Charter is the most extreme state surveillance law ever introduced in a developed nation. It allows over 20,000 government employees to trawl through the private communication data of innocent people (including loads of non-terrorism related organisations like the Food Standards Agency, the Health and Safety Executive and the Gambling Commission). It also allows the state to tell lies in court in order to secure convictions.

A vote for Tories is a vote for extreme surveillance and an end to the concept of privacy

Dictators and despots
Theresa May and the Tories love sucking up to dictators and despots like the Islamist tyrants in Saudi Arabia and the Turkish autocrat Recep Erdoğan. The disgraced Liam Fox was even in the Philippines to suck up to the brutal dictator Rodrigo Duterte and talk up our "shared values".

A vote for Tories is a vote for closer relations with dictators and despots

In-Work benefit cuts
The majority of people receiving non-pension benefits in Tory Britain are the working poor, not the unemployed. When the Tories slash things like housing benefit and tax credits, what they're actually doing is further impoverishing the working poor. Incredibly they have repeatedly introduced new welfare cuts to make working families poorer whilst simultaneously spouting the Orwellian propaganda that they're "making work pay" as they do it!

A vote for Tories is a vote to further impoverish the working poor

The trade deficit
The UK is suffering a massive problem with trade deficits. This means the UK imports far more than it exports. The problem has been going on for a long time, but since 2010 the problem has been getting a lot worse, with the record being smashed over and again. In the month of the Brexit referendum the trade deficit in goods swelled to an astonishing £12.5 billion, the highest ever recorded. The UK's terrible balance of payments deficit is offset a bit by financial services export and vehicle exports, but a Tory hard Brexit would throw a massive spanner in the works, especially if they go for the "no deal" cliff edge strop Theresa May has been threatening.

A vote for the Tories is a vote for massive trade deficits

Contempt for human rights
Theresa May has a burning contempt for your human rights. She has expressed her determination to tear up the European Convention on Human Rights on many occasions, and join Belarus as the only European nation that doesn't adhere to the human rights legislation that was bestowed on Europe by the British Prime Ministers Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee.

A vote for Tories is a vote to scrap your own human rights

Mental health funding cuts
The Tories love talking up how much they care about mental health conditions, but their actual track record is disgraceful. Between 2010 and 2015 they slashed £600 million from mental health services. They're still slashing away now. In fact they even advised the corporate outsourcing companies carrying out their disability assessments to actively discriminate against disabled people.

A vote for Tories is a vote for mental health neglect

Taxpayer subsidised malice
One of the worst things about the Tory government is the fact that several of their malicious anti-welfare schemes actually cost more to administer in corporate outsourcing fees than they will ever save in reduced benefits payments. The Work Capacity Assessment regime for sick and disabled people and their draconian sanctions system are both examples of socially ruinous schemes that actually cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds to operate.

A vote for Tories is a vote for more money to be wasted on malicious Tory anti-welfare schemes

Rising inequality
While UK workers suffered the worst collapse in the value of their wages on record the tiny super rich minority literally doubled their wealth. There is an abundance of evidence showing that the more unequal a society is the less economically prosperous it is, and the unhappier the people are. Take from the poor to give to the rich, that's always been the Tory agenda. The worst thing is that these malicious reverse Robin Hoods even had the gall to tell us "we're all in this together" as they were deliberately rigging society even more in favour of the tiny super-rich minority than it already was!

A vote for Tories is a vote for an even more unequal Britain

U-turn after U-turn
Theresa May keeps repeating the phrase "strong and stable leadership" like a broken robot but she's not strong or stable. She's too much of a coward to face Jeremy Corbyn or the other party leaders in the TV debates, she's conducting her election campaign in "safe spaces" full of handpicked Tory sycophants bussed in from miles away, and she U-turns so often it's impossible to know which way she'll be facing in the morning. She's U-turned on supporting Remain during the EU referendum, on the National Insurance hike, on "now is not the time", on not calling a snap election ...

A vote for Tories is a vote for the lady who is for turning


Threat of a "no deal" Brexit strop
perhaps the most worrying thing of all is the way Theresa May has made the threat of a "no deal" Brexit strop the centrepiece of her diplomatically inept Brexit negotiating strategy. If the EU 27 call her bluff and she ends up walking the UK over a "no deal" Brexit cliff edge the social and economic consequences will be catastrophic. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has estimated that the imposition of WTO tariffs, the flight of businesses, border checks and all the other chaos that would come with a "no deal" flounce would wipe between 6.3% and 9.5% off the national GDP. To put that in perspective the recession that followed the 2007-08 global financial sector insolvency crisis (you know, the one we're still trying to recover from) wiped 4.8% off GDP.

A vote for Tories is a vote for the threat of an even bigger economic meltdown than the last one

A reminder of the rule

The rule of this game is very simple. If you've been sent a link to this article, all you have to do is pick five of these fifty things from the Tory track record in government and explicitly defend them to the person who sent you the link.

Explicit

Now I'm going to define what I mean when I use the word "explicitly" so that there is no confusion:

• If you mention Jeremy Corbyn, Labour, or any other political party or figure you're engaging in whataboutery deflection. 

• If you go off on a tangent about "strong and stable leadership", "living within our means" or repeat the ridiculous myth of Tory economic competence you're just parroting propaganda slogans. 

• If you fail to address the actual issue you claim to be defending, you're being misleading and evasive. 

• If you attack certain sectors of society (the unemployed, the working poor, young people, migrants, left-wingers, trade unionists, Muslims ...) you're playing the classic Tory divide and conquer games that they use to keep the majority of people fighting amongst themselves rather than fighting back against their appalling misrule.

If you use any of these fallacious arguments you obviously fail the challenge. 

Running away

If you refuse to engage with the challenge you obviously fail too, and demonstrate beyond doubt that you have the same cowardly attitude to scrutiny as Theresa May. 

If you run away from the challenge then you'd just be showing the person who challenged you that you imagine that you can just make difficult subjects go away by evading them and refusing to engage in open and honest political discourse. 

If you run away from the challenge then you'd actually be demonstrating exactly why politics in the UK is such a bloody mess. 

You'd be showing that you're one of the people who wilfully ignore so much malice, incompetence and right-wing authoritarian scheming simply because you think it's all outweighed by whatever (probably imaginary) personal benefit you'll be getting from a Tory government.

It's bad enough having such a selfish "I'm alright Jack" attitude, but running away when challenged to defend it, well that would just be pathetic wouldn't it?

Register to vote

If you're horrified by this list of incompetence and malice, and had no idea how bad it was, you need to make sure that you are registered to vote so that you can vote against this disgraceful Tory government.

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