Thangam Debbonaire's bizarre fallacy-laden and deeply disingenuous 'Landlords above Workers' diatribe

One of the huge problems in modern political discourse is political inertia.

Even though it's obvious that a mistake has been made, people, and especially politicians, are incredibly reluctant to admit their errors. So they just keep on doubling down on shocking errors of judgement and catastrophically ill-considered policies, rather than taking the ego hit and just admitting that they were wrong.

Labour's new shadow housing minister Thangam Debbonaire has provided an absolute masterclass in this kind of political inertia with an absolutely laughable, disingenuous, fallacy-laden, post-hoc, bad faith, straw man jumble of gibberish to defend her widely derided policy proposal of 'Landlords above Workers'.

In this article I'm going to offer a point by point examination of the muddled thinking and fallacious reasoning underpinning her attempted justification.

Here's the original article detailing Debbonaire's lamentable speech if you want to read it in its entirety first: ‘Cancel the rent’ policy would be “un-Labour”, says Debbonaire

Assuming the coronavirus shutdown lasts for six months, a two year rent arrears repayment schedule would require a 25% increase in payments on top of already extortionate rents, for the entire two year period.

What kind of Labour Party proposes people pay up to 125% rent for two years during the worst economic downturn in centuries?

Just when the economy needs extra economic demand the most, to boost production and keep people in work, Debbonaire wants to introduce a policy to erode away the disposable income of millions of private tenants, and stymie economic demand in the process, purely in order to ensure landlords are practically the only economic demographic in post-Covid Britain not to lose a penny from this crisis!
When she announced it people rightly called this 'Landlords above Workers' policy out as the absolute drivel it is, but she's now doubling down and using some ridiculously duplicitous and fallacious reasoning to defend it.

The other four points on the plan range from good, to OK. Eviction bans are good. Universal Credit is an unsalvageable mess, but an increase in payments in the absence of a complete replacement is a fair enough proposal. Increasing Local Housing Allowance makes sense, but it's hard to account for where the money comes from if the devastating Tory austerity cuts to local government funding aren't reversed.

The big problem people are having is with her 'Landlords over Workers' policy proposal to extract workers' disposable incomes for years after the crisis is over, purely to ensure that landlords are completely insulated from any of the economic consequences.

It's the criticisms of this particular policy that her speech is supposedly aimed at addressing.

To describe this proposal as just "controversial" is somewhat of an understatement.

Within weeks of her appointment she's created such a mess that she's united two of the three main Labour factions (socialist left, and soft left) against her, and landed an open letter with 4,000+ signatures on her new leader's desk!

Fantastic work eh?

At the time of her appointment I asked whether she was up to the task of handling what would obviously be one of the most important briefs in the post-crisis economy, but I had no inkling she'd be spectacularly proving my concerns justified within a matter of mere weeks.

In the early days of its history the Labour Party led the 1915 rent strike. Their major electoral breakthrough came in 1922 on the back of years of campaigning on housing policy. Over the following decades the Labour Party has imposed rent restrictions, championed tenants' rights, cleared slums, and built millions of affordable social housing units.

The idea that it's "surprisingly un-Labour" to defend tenants from impoverishment and exploitation is an extraordinarily ahistorical claim.

It's somewhat of a straw-man position to claim that everyone opposing her 'Landlords over Workers' policy is demanding an across-the-board cancellation of all rents for everyone, and with no compensation whatever for landlords.

Some of her many critics may adopt this more radical position, the majority certainly wouldn't, and the actual "Cancel the Rent" letter proposes no such thing, so it's an incredibly cheap shot to attack the much more radical stance because she thinks it's the easiest to deride, rather than the actual contents of the letter that she's apparently railing against.

But even if we ignore the bad faith, is the fact that some people might get what they don't really need a reasonable argument in favour of literally millions of people suffering a severe economic punishment that they absolutely don't deserve?

Why is a few wealthier people potentially getting what they don't need such a shocking concern that it justifies dumping millions into rent arrears, destitution, and the penury of onerous repayments necessitated by crisis they absolutely didn't cause?

Ah yes! What could be more representative of the kinds of desperate situation ordinary people are facing than ... erm ... an MP on a six figure salary renting a flat in London that's entirely paid for at the public expense anyway?

I'm sure this personal anecdote will really chime with the millions of people thrown into economic turmoil by this crisis, who have been left desperately trying to figure out how to pay the rent, the rip-off utility bills, the food, and all the other expenses.

They turn to Labour for a sign of hope and a promise of support, and the Labour Party housing minister is blethering on about a purely hypothetical scenario involving her grace and favour flat in London in order to elicit sympathy for her landlord!

Then there's that bad faith deceptiveness again. The "Cancel the Rent" letter actually asks that rents and utility bills are cancelled 'at the tenant's request' if they're suffering a coronavirus 'drop in income'.

In order for her rent to be cancelled under such a scheme, she'd have to fraudulently make a claim, knowing that her income hasn't actually dropped, and that the cost of her rent is immaterial to her anyway, paid as it is from public funds!

Alack! Alas! why will nobody think of the sanctity of contracts? is the kind of drivel you'd expect from the opaquely funded hard-right think tank wonks who are on perpetual rotation on the BBC politics circuit, not a Labour Party shadow minister!

The idea that the sanctity of contracts over-rules the public good isn't just 'un-Labour', it's positively Tory.

Just think about the assertion that "even if it's a rubbish contract, with a rubbish landlord who is charging far too much, it's still legally binding" and consider how awful that must sound to potential Labour voters.

And the bit about "no such thing as cancelling contracts" is just legally illiterate gibberish (which is sure to impress her new boss Keir Starmer QC!).

From the Tory government's retroactive redrawing of student loan conditions, through their cancelled contracts for Chris Grayling's imaginary ferries, to their emergency renationalisation of the railways just a few weeks ago, there are countless precedents for governments amending or tearing up contracts.

Once again, a "general waiver" is simply not what the "Cancel the Rent" letter is actually calling for.

"You have to think about who you are going to target" - if only the authors of the "Cancel the Rent" letter had thought of that eh?

And as for compensation, there are several potential solutions. The most obvious is to just give landlords a mortgage holiday for the duration of the rent cancellation.

For landlords who own properties outright, they should surely be declaring their rental income to the tax man anyway, so it would be fairly simple to create some kind of compensation scheme similar to the measures for self-employed people, so that losses up to a certain limit are covered.

It's quite frankly bizarre that she's so sympathetic to the idea of landlords suing their impoverished tenants, and suing the government, in the midst of an unprecedented economic crisis, rather than incandescent with rage at the very idea of it.

Once again, it's shockingly disingenuous to claim that the "Cancel the Rent" letter is talking about an across the board rent cancellation, however it is fascinating to learn that wealth extraction out of the legitimately productive economy via landlordism has soared to the incredible sum of £7.2 billion per month!

Here it is in black and white. Don't expect anything even remotely radical from a Labour government to deal with the UK's ridiculously dire housing crisis.

Their housing minister is profoundly reluctant to help struggling tenants even in the midst of an unprecedented economic meltdown, and she's busy salting the policy garden and deliberately lowering expectations of what any future Labour government would offer in terms of housing policy.

Well yes, in an ideal world we'd like to ensure everyone has enough money upfront to pay the rent, but we're not in an ideal world, the government is not ensuring this, and the proposal people are criticising Debbonaire for involves extracting tenants' disposable income, over the course of years, to cover their coronavirus rent arrears.

It's beyond obvious that these arrears simply wouldn't accrue at all in this ideal-world scenario she's just conjured out of nowhere, so the policy she's attempting to defend with this ludicrously disingenuous diatribe wouldn't even be necessary!

Once again, more disingenuous drivel. The proposal she's railing against isn't an across the board rent cancellation, and nobody has suggested leaving social housing landlords high and dry with no compensation.

But even if they had suggested this, the houses don't simply disappear if the housing association goes bust. Take the homes back into public ownership, turn them back into the Council Houses most of them were built as in the beginning, and pop, her imaginary problem is solved!

"It's the private rented sector where we've got a problem" - the first accurate thing she's said in this entire diatribe isn't it? 

God-damn it! We're back to this again!

If the proposals to "deal with it upfront" are competently administered, then there is simply no need for the two year arrears extraction programme at all - You know, the issue that huge numbers of people got upset at her about in the first place! The bloody reason she's giving this speech at all!

Well "evil" is a bit strong, but there's basically no way you can argue that landlordism isn't "exploitative" unless you position yourself significantly to the right of figures like Winston Churchill and Adam Smith, who both railed against the exploitative practice of landlordism.

And if you're so far to the political right that Churchill and Smith are reduced to mere distant specks over your left shoulder, what the absolute hell are you doing as a Labour Party housing minister?

OK, for the sake of argument let's say there's absolutely no scheme to compensate landlords, and the most recklessly over-extended ones (who didn't even keep a few months worth of rent in reserve in case of emergencies) end up deservedly going bust.

The house doesn't just disappear does it? It ends up with the reckless bank that recklessly lent the money to the reckless buy-to-let speculator in the first place.

The government could just step in, compensate the reckless bank for a proportion of their losses, and transfer the property to the local council or a local housing association (which, by the way, should be the policy whenever a private landlord goes bust, shouldn't it?).

She's catastrophising about "even greedier landlords" rather than proposing a humane solution to the traumatic busted landlord situation that significant numbers of people face each year, through no fault of their own (coronavirus crisis or no coronavirus crisis).

This "it could be worse" rather than "here's a proposal to make it better" stance just goes to illustrate how dreadfully unfit this woman is for her position.

This is just a very crude reworking of the "just think of poor old Granny" Tory argument against Mansion Tax isn't it?

Forget about the primary problem of millions of exploitative buy-to-let landlords greedily hoarding all the affordable housing in their local areas so that they can then get the poor saps they just priced out of the housing market to pay off their speculative property loans for them, let's humanise landlordism by invoking the much rarer and less problematic scenario of poor Terry and Jean who rent out frail old Marjorie's house to supplement their meagre salaries.

Instead of dishonestly pretending that "Cancel the Rent" is a proposal to just expropriate this house on behalf of the tenants, with no compensation, why not go the whole hog and pretend the nasty lefties want to shove poor old Terry and Jean and Marjorie into a pit and burn them alive?

Wouldn't that be even easier to argue against?

The oddness of this Tory-style 'pity the poor old landlords who are just scraping by' tactic makes it seem as if her speech was just written for her by some die-hard Tory from the Landlords Association. I wonder who did actually write it, and where they got this weird Tory-style persuasion tactic from.

Once again (and thankfully for the last time) the proposal in the letter she has been railing against is not a "general waiver", and it's staggeringly disingenuous of her to have pretended that it was for her entire speech.

The ideal-world scenario she invokes is lovely, but it simply doesn't explain the need for a punishing two year arrears extraction programme (which is what this speech was supposedly intended to defend).

And even though a "general waiver" clearly isn't the policy proposal in the letter she was railing against, it's still alarming for her to keep screeching "regressive" at the concept just because some wealthier people might benefit from the hypothetical scenario she's invented.

The reason it's alarming is that anyone who thinks like this would surely be howling "regressive" at the creation of a "free at the point of need" NHS if it were proposed today, on the absolutely appalling basis that richer people should never be allowed to benefit from public policy.

There's absolutely no way Labour adopts anything like the policies this country needs if Debbonaire's shockingly disingenuous, anti-universalism, sanctity of contracts, screw the economy, save the landlords diatribe is representative of the rest of the shadow cabinet.

Conclusion

It's not like workers chose not to work, they were compelled not to work by the government, so it's about as blatantly 'un-Labour' as you can get for Debbonaire to propose a policy of forcing people into penury in order to ensure that landlords are amongst the only economic demographics who end up not suffering any Covid-19 losses at all.

Yet she derides her critics with ludicrously fallacious and downright disingenuous arguments, and then accuses them of being the ones who don't understand Labour values!

It's enough to make you wonder what on earth is this woman doing in the Labour Party, let alone on their front bench.

Her rant is one of the most profoundly disingenuous diatribes I've ever waded through, and it's deeply concerning that it's not one of the usual suspects like a Tory liar, or a Brextremist, or an far-right hatemonger, or one of those viral lie copy n' paste social media propaganda campaigns ... it's a speech by a Labour Party shadow minister!

She was either too lazy to even read the "Cancel the Rent" letter from 4,000+ of her Labour Party colleagues and just formed this entire attempted rebuttal based on the title alone, or she did read it and decided to create a ridiculous straw-man interpretation because she figured it would be easier to attack that (incredibly ineptly as it turned out) than addressing what people actually said.

Either explanation is utterly contemptuous towards her fellow party members, and towards anyone who believes in basic competence or good faith political discourse.

She's clearly rendered herself unfit for the important responsibilities she's been tasked with, but it would simply be too embarrassingly soon for Starmer to sack her (rather understandable political inertia on his part), so we're stuck with her for the foreseeable future.

If Starmer was going to be decisive and nip this absolute nonsense in the bud, I'd suggest replacing her with Richard Burgon, but showing her the door within weeks of her appointment is obviously going to be far too much of an embarrassment for the party, so it definitely won't happen any time soon.

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OR

Is it too much to ask that Labour sides with tenants and workers, not the idle and exploitative landlord class?

The UK economy has been thrown into the worst crisis since 1709, following hot on the heels of the 2008 financial sector insolvency meltdown, and the decade of wanton economy-stagnating Tory austerity ruination that followed it.

Under these circumstances it's the responsibility of the opposition to come up with bold progressive solutions to aid the economic recovery and to protect the most vulnerable and exploited people in society for being lumbered with the costs.

But instead, Labour's new shadow housing minister Thangam Debbonaire has come up with a truly awful proposal.

Instead of demanding radical action to cancel rent arrears and clamp down on the exploitative private rental market, Labour have actually proposed a policy of forcing private renters to pay back their coronavirus rent arrears over two years.

If the coronavirus crisis lasts for six months, a two year repayment schedule would mean an additional 25% on top of private rents that are already inflated to absolutely ludicrous levels, during a period of mass unemployment to boot!

One of the very few potential benefits of an economic crisis for ordinary people is the prospect of deflation in housing costs, but Labour insist on siding with the landlords to ensure that they get their rent arrears by lumbering the full cost onto their tenants.

Let's not forget that people haven't just stopped going to work because they wanted to, they were forced to by the government. A government that then implemented an absolute bodge-job of workers' support measures full of holes and arbitrary cut-offs, purely because of their ideological opposition to implementing emergency Basic Income measures.

Thus millions of the most vulnerable workers have been left without income for a significant period, through no fault of their own, but instead of siding with them, Labour is insisting that they must pay the entire cost of their rent arrears themselves. And to top it off they're pretending that this policy of prioritising landlords' profits above ordinary people's living standards constitutes "help"!

Even if we ignore the plight of individuals who face being loaded down with housing debts that they simply can't afford to pay, there's quite clearly a macroeconomic cost to making the poor pay for the crisis in this way.

In order to find an extra 25% in rent over a two year period, huge numbers of people would have to pay off these debts by spending all of what would have been their disposable income (which is what people have left after essentials like rent, utility bills, childcare, and food).

This means no trips to bars, restaurants, theatres, pool halls, cinemas ... no days out, no saving towards setting up their own businesses, because the exploitative landlord class must have their extra monthly pint of blood to ensure that the coronavirus crisis costs them absolutely nothing.

The workers must pay so that the idle retain their privileges is an economic policy that will lead to reduced demand in the economy, a slower recovery, and fewer jobs.

In the depths of an economic downturn the last thing needed by people who run real businesses (those who do real economic activity rather than just rentier parasitism) is even fewer customers, because their potential customers are spending their entire disposable income servicing debts to the idle rentier class, rather than spending it on real economic activity.

Instead of facing the issue head on and saying that it's completely unfair to force people to repay debts that were accrued through no fault of their own, that it's awful for social welfare to enforce these debts, and extremely bad for the economy too - Labour has somehow decided to revert to the worst kind of 'centrist' slop, positioning themselves a couple of millimetres to the left of whatever horror show they expected the Tories would come up with.

Labour don't want to instantly evict tenants (hooray), but they want to financially cripple them for years, purely for the benefit of private landlords, and they're trying to dress this pathetically weak sauce up as some kind of wonderful favour they're doing too!

If the government says you mustn't work, the idea of loading the full cost of this enforced layoff onto low-income workers and private tenants is absolutely abhorrent.

If the government is going to force people not to work, it has a moral responsibility to ensure that they're not driven into debt, especially when the servicing of these debts will obviously have negative macroeconomic consequences for the post-crisis recovery.

This policy is so incredibly bad it transcends the usual left-right conflict between what's best for society and what's best for capitalism, because it elevates landlordism above both!

Screw what's fair, and screw what's best for the capitalist economy too, because our primary objective is ensuring the idle landlord class get their pint of blood!

What an extraordinary position for Labour to be taking.

And who is this policy meant to appeal to other than private landlords? Would it be enough to convince any private landlords switch allegiance from Tory to Labour? And how many dozens of natural Labour voters will it end up chasing away per "soft Tory" it attracts?

I don't want to blame Keir Starmer for this, but he can't have not foreseen how important the shadow housing brief was going to be, because the coronavirus crisis was well underway when he made these appointments, and yet he still handed it to Thangam Debbonaire anyway.

Just when we needed radical principled proposals from the opposition, we're back to the kind of flaccid, directionless, and shockingly unappealing weak sauce politics that marred the Miliband era, and handed the 2015 General Election to the Tory austerity wreckers.

If Labour can't even bring itself to stand up for ordinary workers who were ordered not to work by the government, because they're too busy prioritising the financial interests of the landlord class, then what the hell is the point of Labour at all?

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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 British people deserve better than Chuka's Lib-Dem whitewash propaganda

Turncoat Chuka Umunna has been spreading some extraordinary Lib-Dem propaganda on social media aimed at whitewashing their utterly disgusting legacy in government.

Alongside his despicably misleading comments about how British people deserve better than the disgraceful mess the Lib-Dems helped their Tory chums deliver, he included an extraordinary propaganda video rammed just as full of whitewash and false promises as any Brexiteer production.

I'm including annotated screenshots from this video alongside my commentary.

Environment

When the Lib-Dems were in government with the Tories they slashed solar subsidies, attacked onshore wind, and delivered a massive tax cut for fracking companies. aimed at creating fake economic viability for this environmentally ruinous practice.

In fact the attacks on solar subsidies and onshore wind were hand delivered by the Lib-Dem MP Danny Alexander in 2013!

They spent five years actively helping David Cameron to "get rid of all the green crap", yet now they've got the absolute cheek to demand better on climate change, and pretend that they're "fighting to protect our environment"!

 NHS

After the Lib-Dems enabled the Tories into power one of the first measures they introduced together was a programme of £20 billion worth of cuts to NHS services.

In 2012 the Lib-Dems voted through the £3 billion Health and Social Care Act, which should more accurately be known as the "NHS Privatisation-By-Stealth Act".

In 2014 the Lib-Dems helped the Tories to pass new legislation to make it easier for the government to shut down local NHS services against the will of local people.

Between 2010 and 2015 waiting lists soared, NHS staff shortages soared, literally hundreds of NHS facilities were scrapped or downgraded, and NHS patient satisfaction scores plummeted, yet now they've got the absolute cheek to demand better, and pretend that they're "fighting to save our NHS"!

Schools

Between 2010 and 2015 the Liberal Democrats helped the Tories inflict massive and unprecedented cuts to school funding.

Aside from the cuts they also helped the Tories vandalise the English education system by privatising over half of secondary schools (now 75%) and almost a quarter of primary schools.

Transferring ownership of so many schools into the hands of unaccountable private profiteers has been an absolute disaster.

These unscrupulous profiteers haven't just been paying themselves ridiculously bloated executive salaries out of our kids' education budgets and signing off huge no-bid supply contracts with their mates and family members, they've also been flogging off as much land and as many sports fields as possible in order to line their own pockets.

All of this before we even get to the devastating cuts in adult education funding, and the £9,000 per year tuition fees on extraordinary rip-off inflation+3% repayment terms they've lumbered on students.

Between 2010 and 2015 the Lib-Dems helped their Tory chums to vandalise the education system from top to bottom, yet now they've got the cheek to demand better, and pretend that they're "fighting to invest in our schools"!

 Housing

Between 2010 and 2015 the Lib-Dems and their Tory chums delivered the lowest peacetime house building rate since the 1920s.

Aside from the shockingly low levels of house building at a time of soaring demand, they also helped George Osborne introduce various house price inflation scams like Help To Buy.

2010-15 was a time of shocking inaction on the private rental market too, with exploitative landlords left free to rent disgusting homes to desperate people for extraordinary rip-off rents, with thousands of people hit with revenge evictions for daring to ask for basic repairs.

It was only after the departure of the Lib-Dems in 2015 that George Osborne and the Tories did anything whatever to clamp down on buy-to-let profiteering and revenge evictions!

Between 2010 and 2015 the Lib-Dems and their Tory chums catastrophically mismanaged the housing market, yet now they've got the absolute cheek to demand better and pretend that they're "fighting to end the housing crisis"!

Crime

Chuka Umunna added in one more thing in his comment that wasn't mentioned in the video, but once again it's utterly cynical stuff from a member of a political party that did so much to hep the Tories cause this violent crime epidemic.

Between 2010 and 2015 the Lib-Dems voted through every single Tory cut to the police budget, and wilfully inflicted the austerity fanaticism that resulted in the destruction of hundreds of youth centres and outreach programmes up and down the country.

Yet Chuka Umunna has got the absolute cheek to demand better and pretend that he's the wonderful hero sent to save us from the consequences of his own party's actions.

Brexit

It should be obvious to everyone that Brexit only happened because the Lib-Dems spent the preceding five years helping the Tories to ideologically vandalise our nation with austerity fanaticism, wage repression, public service cuts, infrastructure under-investment, and wanton vandalism of the social safety net.

What's even worse than actively laying the groundwork for the Brexit backlash is the way they just sat there and said nothing as the Brexiteers blamed the consequences of their austerity fanaticism on immigrants and the EU.

All they needed to do to undermine this insidious trope was to point out that the living standards collapse was caused by domestic UK government policy, not by immigrants and the EU, but to do that they would have had to implicate themselves, so they selfishly kept their mouths shut and let Britain go to the dogs.

And now they've got the absolute brass neck to try and cash in on the crisis that they helped the Tories to create by pretending to be the magnificent heroes sent to save the day.

And as we can see from this article, it's a technique they're using over and over again.

• They helped the Tories trash numerous environmental measures, now they're posing as the heroes who will save the environment!

• They helped the Tories vandalise the NHS and education system, now they're pretending to be the heroes come to save us!

• They helped the Tories spectacularly mismanage the housing market, now they want us to believe that they're the heroes who will fix it for us!

• They helped the Tories slash the police force to ribbons and shut down hundreds of youth centres, now they expect everyone to be gullible enough to believe that they're the knife crime-fighting superheroes.

• They helped the Tories lay the groundwork for Brexit, now they're presenting themselves as the heroes come to save us from Brexit!

Just imagine the extraordinary levels of delusional self-righteousness of Lib-Dem supporters who credulously lap up this Orwellian whitewash, whilst simultaneously sneering at Leave voters for their fecklessness and gullibility!

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