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).

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If you vote Tory on June 8th ...

We all know the Tory rhetoric now. "No deal is better than a bad deal" they keep telling us, and the drones who rote learn their political opinions from the tabloid press have mindlessly regurgitated it millions of times between them to anyone unfortunate enough to have to listen to them or read their pitifully unoriginal blabberings online.

Some of us have tried to ask "how do you actually know that no deal is better than a bad deal?" But there is no sensible answer to be heard. Theresa May and the Tory government didn't even bother to do any impact economic assessment before making the threat of a "no deal" strop the centrepiece of the diplomatically inept negotiating strategy that it apparently took them half a bloody year to come up with!

The tabloid rote learner drones have no answer either, they just like the simplicity of the eight word sound bite because it has a nice rhyming cadence, it's easy to memorise, and it's easy to regurgitate without even thinking about the incredible complexity of what a chaotic "no deal" strop out of the EU would actually entail.

Challenge them about the finer details of it and they'll either evasively change the subject (as their hero Theresa May does whenever she's confronted with a question she doesn't want to answer) or resort to the abusive attack points they've also rote learned from the fanatically right-wing tabloids ("remoaner", "traitor", "liberal elitist", saboteur" etc).

Theresa May's government negligently refused to look into how bad a "no deal" flounce away from the negotiating table would actually be for the UK, but others have. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has estimated that if Theresa May follows through on her threat to strop away from the negotiating table with nothing, the damage to the UK economy would be between 6.3% and 9.5% of GDP.

To put this cliff edge Brexit recession into perspective a little, the effects of the 2007-08 global financial sector insolvency crisis caused a 4.3% slump in national GDP in 2009.

Given that various aspects of the UK economy have not even recovered since the financial crisis a decade ago (real wages are still a whopping 10% below their 2008 level), do you really think that the UK can withstand another recession that is likely to be even bigger than the crisis the bankers delivered with their reckless gambling?

One thing that we all definitely learned was that in a crisis situation the Tory party will always put the economic burden on the majority in order to protect the wealth and privilege of the super rich minority. As a result of Tory ideological austerity after the last economic meltdown UK workers suffered the longest decline in real wages in recorded history while the super rich minority actually doubled their wealth!

People who voted for Brexit because they thought things couldn't possibly get any worse than they already were for them may have a very nasty shock coming if Theresa May follows through on her threat to deliver a massive cliff edge Brexit recession because the EU won't give her what she wants.

Even if she somehow faces down the fanatical Eurosceptic hard-right of the Tory party and signs up to some kind of deal with the EU, it'll be a Tory deal, drawn up by Tory politicians, for the benefit of Tory political donors. There will be nothing but more austerity, more social welfare cuts and more wage repression for the ordinary people who naively gave her a mandate to do it.

Theresa May is comfortable making this kind of lose-lose gamble because she knows that it won't be her and her kind who suffer the ruination of a cliff edge Brexit. It'll be people like the working poor, disabled people, the young, the ill, students, the unemployed, workers in the manufacturing, services, health and agricultural sectors, and people who rely on local government services who will suffer. The wealthy elite will always be financially insulated from the most appalling consequences of their actions.

If you vote for the Tories on June 8th you'll be giving Theresa May a mandate to continue making Brexit up as she goes along to suit her self-serving and ever changing political whims. You'll be giving her a mandate to follow her extraordinarily reckless "no deal is better than a bad deal" rhetoric through to it's seemingly inevitable and economically ruinous conclusion.

This time it won't be faceless bankers to blame for the economic meltdown though, it will be you, and people like you. People who complacently allowed Theresa May to gamble so recklessly and ineptly with the entire UK economy, and believed her bizarre claim that giving her total free rein (rather than electing people to actually hold her to account) would somehow create "certainty and stability" rather than absolute chaos.

Don't say you weren't warned.

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13 years of lost wage growth

We already know that since the global financial sector meltdown UK workers have suffered a catastrophic 10%+ decline in real wages (matched only by Greece in the developed world). Now analysis of Philip Hammond's Autumn Statement by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has shown that UK workers look set for even more wage stagnation.

The boss of the IFS Paul Johnson described the latest figures as "dreadful" and pointed out that the woeful economic policies of the Tory government and the failure of David Cameron's Brexit gamble mean that real terms workers' wages will still be well below 2008 levels in 2021.

It's impossible to fully explain how much social and economic damage is going to be caused by this lost 13 years of wage growth.

It doesn't take a genius to understand the economics of demand. If people have money in their pockets they're more likely to spend it. If they suffer 13 years of wage stagnation thanks to Tory policies like ideological austerity, deliberate wage repression, the erosion of in-work benefits and attacks on workers' rights, then they're going to have less money to spend than they otherwise would, meaning less demand in the economy, and fewer stable well-paid jobs as a consequence.

The Tories have created a deliberate downward spiral in workers' wages and working conditions (unmatched anywhere in the Western world apart from crisis stricken Greece) and the economic fallout from Brexit is about to make this already appalling situation even worse.

13 years of lost wage growth, a £122bn Brexit
black hole, missed targets, broken promises ...
yet the Daily Mail present their readers with
this "Everything is Awesome" front page!

13 years of lost wage growth would be bad enough in its own right, but it's obviously even worse when you factor in things like soaring housing costs (continued unsustainable house price inflation and the ever inflating rents charged by the unregulated buy-to-let slumlord rentiers), constant above inflation hikes in public transport costs, post-Referendum inflation, and the increased cost of imports due to the collapse in the value of the Pound.

The astounding thing is that despite the six years of severe and sustained decline in their real terms wages that workers have already suffered under Tory rule, millions of ordinary working people continue to believe the propaganda in the right-wing press that the Tories are doing a great job of managing the economy!

People are apparently so susceptible to what the mainstream media tell them that they'll ignore the real evidence of their own lives, and the real evidence of the lives of the people around them, and choose to believe the ludicrous right-wing fairy stories about how awesome everything is.

The fact that we're undergoing the worst collapse in living standards since the Second World War makes me wonder when it was that British people actually lost their spines and became such a grovelling bunch of weaklings who are perfectly content to have a bunch of Tory toffs rob them blind for 13 long years with barely a whimper of complaint?

During the Second World War people accepted the sharp decline in living standards because they knew that their way of life was under existential threat from continental fascism. They put their all into defending our country, then after the war was won they demanded better for themselves, resulting in the foundation of the NHS, the construction of millions of decent affordable homes, the introduction of Legal Aid and the longest sustained improvement in living standards in British history.

What is it about the current generations that we meekly accept a similar decline in living standards to the Second World War when there is no existential threat like Nazi Germany to justify it?

When did the British public become such a weak and docile bunch that they'd accept being robbed blind for 13 years, while the Tories and the right-wing press tell us a pack of ridiculously unbelievable lies about how great everything is?

 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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£350 million per week is a lie

It doesn't matter how many times their "£350 million per week" claim is shown to be hopelessly misleading, the Brexiters carry on using this proven lie as one of the foundation stones of their anti-EU arguments.

£350 million a week is a lie

It's important to recognise that alongside the wealthier nations like Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Denmark, Austria Finland and France, the UK is one of the net contributors to the EU.

It's difficult to estimate the precise amount that the UK contributes because there are various different ways of doing it. However one thing is absolutely sure, if you make your calculation by using the gross figure for the UK contribution without factoring in any of the money that comes back (through regional investment programmes, landowner subsidies, research grants, education funding ...)  and not even including the Rebate that never even gets sent to Europe in the first place, then you're figure is going to be a massively exaggerated over-estimate.

It's absolutely impossible to claim that factoring in all costs and excluding all benefits is a fair way of calculating a net contribution to anything.
 Fact Check have rubbished the £350 million claim, various newspapers have rubbished the £350 million claim, the UK Statistics Authority have rubbished the £350 million claim, the House of Commons Select Committee have rubbished the £350 million claim, even the Institute for Fiscal Studies have said that it's "not sensible" to use the gross contribution figure without factoring in any of the money that the UK receives back.



Vote Leave just won't stop lying to us

It's appalling that Vote Leave continue to rely on this fundamentally misleading "£350 million per week" figure despite such a chorus of condemnation. They repeat it like a mantra, their Vote Leave; take control document is riddled with references to it, and they even painted it on the side of their Vote Leave battle bus, and they absolutely refuse to back down and admit the figure is a lie. In fact they're so belligerent that they even decided to start smearing the Institute for Fiscal Studies as "biased" rather than admit that including all costs and excluding all benefits is not a fair way to measure a net contribution to anything.

It's pretty difficult to explain why the likes of Boris Johnson, Priti Patel and Michael Gove continue using their misleading "£350 million per week" figure despite the fact that anyone who is paying proper attention is well aware that it's a lie.

The probable explanation is that they think they have more to lose by admitting that they were wrong than by continuing to peddle the lie.They imagine that it's better to have a consistent message that is based on a lie, than to make themselves look inconsistent by changing their message to remove the dishonesty.

They seem to think that it's better strategy to peddle a consistent lie rather than complicate things by admitting the truth.

What about the NHS bit?

It's already extremely difficult to believe that the UK contribution to the EU would be spent on funding the NHS, because Brexiters have been making all manner of claims about how the savings would be spent that add up to many times more than any possible savings. The fact that their headline figure in the first part of the sentence is a lie also casts doubt on the second part of the sentence.

Even if you overlook the fact that Brexiters have promised the EU contribution money many times over to all kinds of different causes, and the fact that the headline £350 million figure is a lie, you're still stuck with the question of whether you are naive enough to believe a bunch of radically right-wing Tories when they talk about spending more on the undeniably socialist NHS.

Back in 2003 Boris Johnson called for the NHS free at the point of need  principle to be scrapped, Michael Gove oversaw the privatisation of over 3,000 schools as Education Secretary, Chris Grayling has been busy carving up the justice system for privatisation...

These people represent the extreme right-wing fringe of a Tory party that has already spent the last six years carving the NHS into little pieces for distribution to their private sector chums.

Radically right-wing free market fundamentalists hate the NHS with a burning ideological passion, so any claims they make about wanting to protect the socialist NHS must be treated with extremely deep scepticism, especially if they are prefaced by an outright lie.

They're assuming you to be a complete idiot

The only way that Vote Leave's decision to continue repeating their dishonest "£350 million per week" mantra makes any sense at all is if they're assuming that the people they're trying to convince are complete idiots. 

There's no way that a "consistency trumps honesty" strategy could possibly work unless the target audience are unquestioning rote learner types who mindlessly absorb propganda narratives without subjecting them to any critical scrutiny whatever.

This "consistency trumps honesty" strategy makes Vote Leave even worse than the small child with chocolate all over their face who continues lying to the adults in the room that they definitely didn't steal any cake. The child is unaware of the overwhelming evidence that their statement is a lie. Vote Leave on the other hand are perfectly aware that it's offensively misleading to calculate a contribution by including all costs and excluding all benefits, but they keep repeating what they know to be a lie because they assume that their audience (you) are just a bunch of gullible idiots who will believe any old crap.

 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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