When the Tories were introducing their ideologically driven and hopelessly botched plan to privatise the UK rail network the Tory Transport Secretary John MacGregor claimed that passengers would benefit from reduced fares.
Anyone who understood the basics of monopolies (captive markets) knew that MacGregor's promises were fantastical nonsense. Once a monopoly service is handed to a private profit-seeking entity, prices are certain to rise because there's no price competition in a captive market.
Two decades after rail privatisation the average train fare has increased by 117% (24% adjusted for inflation). On some journeys fares have increased by well over 200%.
Aside from the direct hit to passengers' wallets, there's also the fact that the private rail operators are being showered with £billions in direct and indirect taxpayer subsidies.
Annual direct subsidies to the private rail franchises far exceed the total cost of running the entire UK rail network back when it was run as a not-for-profit public service!
Aside from the direct subsidies there is also the issue of the indirect subsidy that occurs because the publicly owned rail infrastructure company (Network Rail) allows the private rail franchises to use the tracks at significantly below the actual cost of maintaining them.
Hiring out the tracks at way below market value in order to secure the profitability of the private train operators has meant that Network Rail has built up a vast debt mountain of £41 billion.
This is about as clear an example as possible of the Tory ideology of privatising the profits and nationalising the debts as it's possible to see.
Aside from costing far more in direct and indirect subsidies, the privatised rail franchises do far less than British Rail with all of that extra money.
Before privatisation British Rail designed and developed new trains, including many that are still in service today generating huge profits for their private operators. Privatisation of the UK rail network put a swift end to Britain being a world-leader in train building.
Immediately after privatisation the private franchises were so intent on reaping as much profit as possible out of the old taxpayer-funded rolling stock that there wasn't a single new train order for 1,064 days, causing the absolute annihilation of the UK train building industry.
These days the UK buys most of its new trains from Germany, Japan, China and even Italy, which is an absolutely shameful state of affairs for the country that invented the railway and was a world leader in trainbuilding well into the 1980s.
The abject failure of rail privatisation is perhaps the most glaring example of all amongst a litany of other woeful Tory privatisation scams, yet the Tories will never undo their mistake because they're ideologically opposed to British infrastructure being owned by the British public and operated on their behalf.
In fact the Tories have such a strong ideological opposition to British infrastructure and services being owned by the British people that they would demonstrably prefer our rail infrastructure to be owned and operated by foreign states like Germany, France, Netherlands, Hong Kong and Singapore.
Just a few decades ago a government would be considered shockingly treasonous for promoting a policy of prohibiting the British from owning our own rail network so that it can be used as a cash cow by foreign states.
But these days, thanks to the Tory rail privatisation scam, it's not just a crackpot policy that would have been shouted down as anti-British lunacy in the past, it's the actual reality!
Tory rail privatisation has been an absolute failure for everyone apart from the profiteering rail franchises and train leasing companies. Passengers have suffered massive ticket price inflation and ever more over-crowded and unsafe conditions; the taxpayer continues to pay far more in subsidies than the total cost of running British Rail in the past; Network Rail is sitting on a £41 billion debt mountain; the UK train building industry has been annihilated; and railway staff have suffered over two decades of declining wages and worsening working conditions.
The two political parties that deserve credit for promoting the extremely popular policy of rail renationalisation are Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party and the Green Party (who supported rail renationalisation back when the New Labour mob were still pushing disgusting neoliberalism-lite gruel on the public under Miliband and Balls).
Let's hope that someone with some sense actually moves to sort out this festering Tory blight on our nation soon.
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An awful lot of thickos are sharing pictures of Jeremy Corbyn with Irish people in order to try and "prove" that he met the IRA.
The problem of course is that they're thick, so they don't understand the difference between Sinn Féin (a political party) and the IRA (a disbanded terrorist organisation).
One of the most commonly shared pictures is the one in the header image, which shows Jeremy Corbyn with Gerry Adams, who is the leader of Sinn Féin.
The picture was taken in 1995, after the Downing Street Declaration (an agreement between the UK and Ireland that the Northern Irish people had the right to self determination) which led to the first IRA ceasefire.
Corbyn had been pushing the IRA to abandon the bombings and sit down to negotiate since the 1980s. By 1995 the Conservative Prime Minister John Major had taken the first hugely important steps towards peace in Northern Ireland.
It was just a few years later that the Good Friday Agreement was signed (one of the truly great achievements during Tony Blair's leadership of the Labour Party) and the principle of power sharing was established.
It was far from easy, but the sight of Ian Paisley (a fierce loyalist) and Martin McGuinness (of Sinn Féin) talking to each other, and working together, and even becoming friends, was something that was impossible to imagine back at the height of the troubles.
The fact that these fierce ideological opponents managed to put their differences aside and work for the good of the people of Northern Ireland should be an inspiration to us all, but to some intensely bigoted right-wingers it's not an incredible success story at all.
The problem is that some people are intent on digging up the anti-Irish animosities of the past and ignorantly using them in attempted smears against Jeremy Corbyn.
It's as if they wish that peacemakers like Jeremy Corbyn had failed, and that people in Northern Ireland were still being killed and maimed, and that the IRA were still planting bombs in England, and the loyalist paramilitaries were still exacting gruesome revenge.
It's as if they're still fighting the war in their sick little minds, even long after the main combatants sat down and negotiated a peaceful settlement.
Patriotism? Don't make me laugh
Make no mistake, a lot of these smear-merchants are not patriots, they're anything but.
They hate Jeremy Corbyn's policy of bringing British infrastructure and services back under British control with a burning ideological passion.
These people adore the Tory determination to sell Britain off piece by piece, regardless of whether the pieces eventually end up under the control of the Chinese communists or the Islamist tyrants in Qatar.
They don't care if Communist China, the Islamist tyrants in Qatar, or whoever get a slice, as long as they have the chance to take a lucrative slice of British public infrastructure for themselves too so they can milk the British public for all they're worth.
They know Theresa May wants to keep things this way, so they'll smear, and smear, and smear.
These sick smear-merchants don't care about Britain or the British in the slightest.
They're just trying to smear Jeremy Corbyn by whipping up anti-Irish hatred of the past to serve their own sick selfish interests.
So if you see anyone (like the right-wing slob Paul Staines - AKA Guido Fawkes) smearing away in this bigoted manner:
Tell them that they're thick as fuck if they actually believe what they're sharing, and an economic traitor to boot for using anti-Irish smear tactics to help Theresa May keep our public infrastructure and services under Chinese control.
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One of the most commonly occurring personal attack points that right-wingers use against Jeremy Corbyn is that he openly talked to the IRA in the 1980s and '90s.
The problem with this right-wing narrative (like with so many other right-wing narratives) is that it's totally undermined by facts and reality.
These people know that Corbyn talked to the IRA because he did it openly, but at the very same time Corbyn was openly talking to the IRA the political establishment were conducting secret backdoor deals with them.
It's astoundingly hypocritical for right-wingers to slam Corbyn for having openly talked to the IRA when the political establishment they're defending were doing the same thing in but in secret for decades. But then hypocrisy (which stems from fact-aversion and immunity to cognitive dissonance) is an extremely common trait amongst right-wingers, and especially extreme right-wingers isn't it?
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Even though I've stated many times that I don't but into the party political tribalism thing, a lot of people tend to think of me as a Labour Party supporter. I guess that's understandable given the way I've often felt compelled to offer a counter-narrative to the savage propaganda war the mainstream media are conducting against Jeremy Corbyn. I can see Corbyn's problems easily enough, but beneath his poor speaking skills and his lack of charisma, he's a decent man with strong political convictions who has been unfairly maligned by the media.
On the other side of the political spectrum there's another guy I quite like. It's obvious that I have a lot fewer political ideals in common with Ken Clarke as I do with Jeremy Corbyn, because it's pretty damned unlikely that I would share much political territory with a guy who served in the governments of Margaret Thatcher, John Major and David Cameron.
On the other hand I like the way Ken Clarke has become pretty honest and outspoken in his old age.
During the shambolic post-referendum Tory leadership election he was recorded having a candid conversation with his fellow Thatcher cabinet minister Malcolm Rifkind in which he described Theresa May as "a bloody difficult woman" and blasted Michael Gove as being so fanatically right-wing that he even shocked the disgraced Liam Fox.
When it came to the Article 50 vote, Ken Clarke was the only Tory to ignore the party whip and vote against it. It's actually pretty extraordinary that he was the only one given that the majority of Tory MPs campaigned to stay in the EU. However all the rest of them were willing to follow Theresa May's lead and abandon their stated principles in order to vote in favour of this massive act of economic self-harm.
Ken Clarke's explanations over why he decided to rebel were full of more candid political insight.
Clarke on the Tory Brexit shambles
"I've never seen anything as mad or chaotic as this."
This is quite some admission from a guy who served under Margaret Thatcher (Monetarism, 20%+ interest rates, the Poll Tax fiasco), John Major (Rail privatisation, Black Wednesday) and David Cameron (the failed rush to war in Syria, six years of economically ruinous austerity).
"The government are going to extraordinary lengths to try to avoid being accountable to parliament ... It leads me to the unworthy suspicion that they don’t have a clear policy that they have agreed on, so they are trying to minimise its exposure."
It's pretty extraordinary that so little fuss has been made about Theresa May's effort to overrule parliamentary sovereignty and turn the UK into an autocracy where she alone gets to make and repeal laws. Thankfully this dictatorial power-grab was defeated by the courts, hence the hopelessly rushed and error-strewn Brexit white paper and the Article 50 vote.
Clarke on Remain voters
"It's quite obvious that some of the 16 million [Remain voters] were much bucked by the fact that somebody was still being as obdurate as I was and refusing to see why on earth they should all be abandoned. Actually, I think the 16 million were right."
It's pretty sad that the several million Tories who voted Remain are left with just one man to represent their views in parliament because the rest of the Tory MPs are determined to put pure political expediency above what they actually think is best for Britain.
Clarke on Theresa May
"I am trying to minimise giving you opportunities to attack Theresa ... [but] going to see President Trump and President Erdoğan as her first two highly publicised calls showed the limitations of 'the new global politics'."
I suppose that it's good that there's at least one person in the Tory party with a sense of distaste at Theresa May sucking up to a brutal dictator and a bigoted narcissist on the world stage.
Clarke on Donald Trump
"Well, they [the government] have got this slogan about a global Britain, so obviously they want to illustrate this by having good photo-opportunities with leading figures around the world. So I suppose they thought it was quite a political coup to finally land this first meeting with him. But it's a mixed blessing because we happen to have a rather unpleasant and highly unpredictable American president."
Clarke on the fantasy of a beneficial Tory-Trump trade deal
"It's possible that for some reason he [Trump] wants to have a trade deal with us while he's busy repudiating deals with everybody else but I don't ... think ... so."
Conclusion
The reason I quite like Ken Clarke is not because he was the only Tory with guts enough to stick by his principles and vote against triggering Article 50, I quite liked him before he did that.
Back in the 1980s and 90s Clarke was perfectly happy to go along with all kinds of right-wing Tory madness, and he's still a free market fanatic despite openly admitting the catastrophic failure to solve the problem of inequality.
The difference nowadays is that the political spectrum has now shifted so far to the right that a once centre-right Tory has ended up looking like a rebellious leftie these days, simply because he's pretty much stayed where he was while the rest of the Tory party has dashed off into bonkers extreme-right Ukipper territory.
Clarke is still a right-winger, and I fundamentally disagree with him on numerous issues (privatisation, austerity, corporate outsourcing, tax cuts for corporations and the super-rich, tax-dodging ...) but I have a certain measure of respect for him. The main reason I've got time for him these days is that as he's got old and a bit cantankerous, he's taken to quite often telling the truth and plainly expressing his views, which is pretty rare for most politicians, let alone a Tory one.
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Back in 2013 David Cameron's Tory party oversaw the sale of our NHS blood plasma supply unit to a vampire capitalist group called Bain Capital (which was founded by the 2012 Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney).
Fast-forward three years and Bain Capital have already handed David Cameron a lucrative speaking gig at one of their events just weeks after he quit politics after his Brexit gamble went so spectacularly wrong. Thanks to the extraordinarily lax rules covering financial rewards to former politicians it's not clear how much Cameron is going to be paid for his speaking gig, but given that that the former foreign secretary William Hague is expecting to make some £4 million per year on the speaking circuit at £50,000 - £100,000 per appearance, Cameron's speaking fees are unlikely to be less than six figures.
It's no wonder Cameron was so keen to abandon politics when there are such rich pickings to be had from the companies his government handed favours to during his time as Prime Minister.
Some other potential speaking gigs for David Cameron include:
Wonga: The revolving door between David Cameron's government and this appalling legal loan shark company has been well documented. Cameron's sack-at-will legislation (drawn up by the Wonga investor Adrian Beecroft) must have been a real boon to the company as desperate sacked workers turned to them for their rip-off 5,000%+ APR loans. Surely Beecroft and his boys at Wonga could return the favour by handing Cameron a few lucrative public speaking gigs?
Circle Health: This private operator of various NHS facilities across England was one of the major beneficiaries of Cameron's 2012 NHS privatisation by stealth bill. Circle (owned by numerous major Tory party donors) was responsible for the absolute debacle at Hinchingbrook hospital, yet they're still running other NHS facilities across the country. The least they could do for Cameron is stuff him a few hundred grand for all of the NHS services they've snapped up under his watch.
Landsdowne Partners: This hedge fund made a £36 million profit when Cameron's government sold off the Royal Mail at way below its true market value. Given their enormous profits surely they can shove a bit Cameron's way?
G4S and Serco: In 2013 these global outsourcing were caught defrauding the taxpayer out of £180 million by submitting false invoices for the electronic tagging of non-existent prisoners. Cameron's government promised to punish them by temporarily banning both companies from bidding for contracts, but secretly handed them £350 million worth of contracts when they were supposedly banned. Even worse than that, the Tories carried on paying these companies for electronic tagging services way into 2015, two years after they were caught defrauding the taxpayer. Surely these companies can find a few hundred grand apiece to stuff into Cameron's back pocket?
Caudrilla: The fortunes of Cuadrilla and other fracking companies received a massive boost when Cameron's government decided to halve the rate of corporation tax for fracking companies. The fracking boom and bust in the US is proof that fracking is only financially viable if energy prices remain high, so the champagne corks must have been popping at Cuadrilla headquarters when Cameron and Osborne signed the UK taxpayer up to an absolutely ludicrous deal with the French and Chinese states to pay them double the market rate for electricity from Hinkley Point C for an astonishing 35 year period. No doubt Cuadrilla and other fracking companies will feel a moral obligation to repay Cameron for the vast tax cut he handed them and his decision to ensure their financial viability by signing the UK taxpayer up to pay massively inflated energy prices for generations to come?
Virgin Group: Richard Branson's Virgin Group have been major beneficiaries of numerous Tory privatisation schemes. From heavily subsidised rail contracts to huge slices of NHS infrastructure Branson's business did extremely well at raking in taxpayers' cash during David Cameron's time in office. The least "beardie" could do is repay Cameron with a few six figure public speaking gigs?
Times have moved on since former Prime Ministers quietly stepped out of the limelight having achieved the pinnacle of public life. These days becoming Prime Minister or an important government minister is just a stepping stone in the process of becoming filthy rich.
After serving as Prime Minister John Major cashed in by hooking up with corporations like the Carlyle Group arms company, but Tony Blair really blazed the trail for David Cameron with his corporate consultancies with the likes of JP Morgan, his lucrative speaking gigs and his work as adviser to all kinds of brutal dictatorial regimes.
After shafting the British public with his failed Brexit gamble Cameron literally couldn't wait to get stuck into what was clearly always the endgame; making himself filthy rich gorging on corporate speaking fees and lucrative consultancy positions.
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.
Every Prime Minister leaves legacies. Margaret Thatcher left the Westminster establishment club utterly fixated on socially and economically ruinous hard-right neoliberal madness and the use of nasty divide and conquer propaganda, John Major left us the absolute shambles of rail privatisation, Tony Blair left the devastation of Iraq and the lawless sectarian chaos which eventually led to the rise of ISIS, Gordon Brown left us the enormous cost of bailing out the reckless bankers who had gambled themselves into insolvency, and David Cameron will always be remembered as the man who gambled the entire future of the UK in order to secure a bit of short-term political advantage at the 2015 General Election, and lost.
Cameron's failed EU gamble is clearly going to be the most significant defining legacy of his regime, but he leaves behind plenty of other toxic legacies too.
Cameron dragged the standard of political debate down from one appalling new nadir to the next; he brazenly misrepresented statistics; he evaded pretty much every parliamentary question with snidey pre-scripted put downs; he told countless outright lies to parliament and the public alike; and towards the end he even used parliamentary privilege to smear some random guy as an Islamist fanatic in an attempt to damage Sadiq Khan's London mayoral bid, when the only extremists he had actually been cavorting with was the Tooting branch of the Tory party!
Aside from losing his EU gamble and booting the standard of public debate into the gutter and then micturating on it for six revolting years, Cameron also left us the ideological vandalism of the English education system; the carve-up and mass privatisation of NHS services; a bigger increase in the national debt than every single Labour Prime Minister in history combined; an astonishing 205 unelected cronies stuffed into the House of Lords; the annihilation of local government services through ideological austerity; the longest sustained decline in wages since records began; an exponential rise in food bank dependency; 800,000 workers on exploitative Zero Hours contracts; financial sector reform booted into the long grass; the reinflation of the unsustainable house price inflation bubble; and huge numbers of deaths and suicides due to savage welfare reforms like "Bedroom Tax", sanctions targets and the WCA disability witch hunt.
It would take an amazing pair of blue-tinted spectacles to remain blind to all of the damaging legacies David Cameron has created, but one of his most significant blunders simply can't be ignored because he's left his successor Theresa May in an impossible bind over the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station.
The deal Cameron and Osborne struck to bribe the French and Chinese into building our energy infrastructure for us is absolutely woeful. In 2013 Cameron and Osborne agreed to a ridiculous price-fixing deal to pay double the market rate for electricity from the plant for 35 years, but the estimated cost of this rip-off deal has already quintupled in just three years to £30 billion!
The deal is so bad that even George Osborne's father-in-law (a former Tory energy minister) described the deal as "one of the worst deals ever for British households and British industry".
Not a single one of the nuclear reactors of this design has ever been successfully completed, and if it does go ahead it is already projected to become the most expensive object on earth (even before the inevitable cost overruns are taken into account).
Theresa May's only sensible option would be to scrap the deal, but that would be a foreign relations disaster. Not only would it anger the French at a time when we need to avoid infuriating our European neighbours as much as possible so that the Brexit deal isn't even worse than what we're already facing, it will also enrage the Chinese.
It really isn't a great idea to offer huge bribes to the Chinese to get them on board and then slap them in the face by scrapping the whole deal. Maybe that kind of behaviour is considered acceptable in Tory circles, but in China such behaviour is a grave insult because it leaves both parties in a face-losing situation.
Theresa May has been left in a situation where she's either going to have to gravely insult the Chinese and piss off the French at pretty much the worst juncture imaginable, or continue with Cameron's plan to lumber the British public with one of the worst rip-off deals in history.
For all of her faults (of which there are many) Theresa May is a belligerent sod, so there's still a small possibility that she'd choose to enrage the Chinese by scrapping Cameron's rip-off deal. However the much most likely course of action will to be lumber it on the taxpayer with full awareness that it's an abusively poor deal, but hit them with a propaganda war to redefine it as the best thing ever.
Whichever course of action Theresa May chooses, one of David Cameron's most appalling legacies is leaving this atrocious lose-lose situation for his successors to deal with.
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.
It was always astonishing that so many people still fall for the UKIP 'Trojan Horse' con, but the fact that UKIP have now created the Brexit chaos they wanted and their leader has cleared off as quickly as possible it's beyond explanation why so many people, especially working class people, still decide to support UKIP.
As has been pointed out many times before, UKIP is a Thatcherite political party. It is bankrolled by Tory party donors, it's stuffed full of failed, disgraced and defected Tory politicians and it pushes a "more Tory than the Tories" hard-right agenda.
For four decades the UK has been ruled over by a self-serving Westminster establishment with a fixation for hard-right neoliberal economic dogma. This fixation with hard-right economics has resulted in the deliberate destruction of British industries and the neglect of the communities they supported; an out of control self-serving financial sector elite who have pumped up vast house price and speculative asset bubbles at enormous detriment to the nation; the fire-sale/give-away of hundreds of £billions in public assets; rampant tax-dodging by corporations and the super-rich; and ever increasing levels of inequality.
Margaret Thatcher was the hard-right ideologue who started the process; John Major continued it (with stuff like his utterly botched privatisation of the railways); Tony Blair won the backing of the Murdoch propaganda empire by promising to continue the hard-right Thatcherite experiment; Gordon Brown squandered £1.5 trillion bailing out the reckless bankers with the biggest state subsidies in British history to save them from the bankruptcies they so richly deserved; then David Cameron spent six years pushing the same old hard-right economic dogma that caused the financial sector insolvency crisis as the cure to the crisis, simply by rebranding it as "austerity".
The purpose of UKIP is to soak up the discontent at the appalling consequences of the ideologically driven right-wing economic dogma favoured by the Westminster establishment club, and then channel it into a political party that serves to drag the political spectrum even further to the right.
The concept of a right-wing 'Trojan Horse' protest party designed to hoover up the anger at failed right-wing economic policies of the Westminster establishment and use it to drag the establishment political parties even further to the right is so cynical that it's obscene, but somehow people still keep falling for this faux protest party.
One of the main reasons people fall for it is that they are conditioned into believing in ludicrous right-wing tropes by an education system that teaches them to rote learn rather than apply critical thinking skills, and a mainstream media that constantly frames the political debate in terms of hard-right economics and immigrant-blaming being "common sense" and anything that actually questions the hard-right economic status quo of the Westminster establishment club as being "radical", "fanatical" or "dangerous".
When people are taught to mindlessly regurgitate what they're told from such a young age, it's no surprise that they end up rote learning the hard-right propaganda of the tabloid press and supporting fanatically right-wing political parties.
One of the most dispiriting things is the way UKIP have become so popular in the working class communities that have been completely ravaged by four decades of Thatcherite economic dogma. Given how hard-right economic ideology has trashed their communities, how could anyone from areas like the north east, the Welsh valleys or the former industrial towns in the Midlands end up throwing their support behind a bunch of hard-right Thatcherites like UKIP?
The only way it makes sense is if people have either failed to understand that the Westminster establishment has been dominated by hard-right Thatcherites for the last four decades (perhaps buying into the extraordinarily misleading extreme-right propaganda that people like Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron and Osborne were just a bunch of "lefties"), or they've failed to realise that UKIP is pushing an extreme version of the exact same policies that led to the social and economic ruination of their communities (perhaps buying into the simplistic propaganda narrative that immigrants, rather than the political establishment, are to blame for their problems).
Whatever the reason that people allowed themselves to be conned by the UKIP snake oil merchants, their main excuse for supporting UKIP is now gone. They can't continue to say, as so many of them used to, that they only support UKIP to get the UK out of Europe. After the vote for Brexit in June 2016 that reason is null and void.
If you're working class and you still find yourself supporting UKIP, now is the time to admit to yourself that your support goes beyond wanting to get the UK to quit the EU. It's time to admit that you actually support the hard-right economic policies that have ruined working class industries and communities up and down the country; distributed hundreds of £billions in public assets to private interests; repressed your wages; underfunded and undermined the services and welfare system you pay for through your taxes; turned a blind eye to the tax-dodging of corporations and the super-rich; and allowed the bankers to go on one reckless gambling spree after another resulting in an over-inflated housing market that has put home ownership beyond the means of millions of ordinary workers like you.
You need to admit to yourself that you support a "more of the same, but harder" party, and in doing so you're giving material support to the most right-wing elements of the Tory and Labour parties who think that the only way to win back the votes of people like you is to imitate UKIP by offering ever more right-wing policies.
You need to admit to yourself that by supporting UKIP, you're part of the problem, not part of the solution.
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.
John Major is now the only living person to have led a Tory majority government (1990-1997). When he was selected to lead the Tory party in 1990 he was seen as a steady hand to lead the party through the difficult recovery period after the internal coup d'etat that ended the reign of Margaret Thatcher.
Perhaps you are old enough to remember some of the "innovations" that the John Major regime introduced such as "Black Wednesday", the hopelessly botched sell-off of British Rail, the decision to give the UK nuclear industry away for an absolute pittance, the privatisation of the UK nuclear deterrent, cash for questions, the propaganda campaign against single mothers and the Cones Hotline.
John Major was not a good Prime Minister by any stretch of the imagination, but it is probably fair to say that he was the least bad Tory Prime Minister since Harold MacMillan who served between 1957 and 1963. I conducted a pair of polls on the AAV Facebook page which confirmed that John Major was neither popular (right wing people have an unhealthy fixation with Thatcher and the majority of left-wing people went for Clement Attlee) nor particularly unpopular (people were split quite evenly between Thatcher and David Cameron as the worst PM since WWII), meaning that he ranked as very average indeed, which is probably fitting for a man that earned himself the nickname "the grey man of politics".
Even though his government introduced a number of catastrophically bad policies, he is quite clearly leagues above all of his successors as leader of the Tory party. William Hague became the first leader of the Tory party since the 19th Century to not serve as Prime Minister of the UK. His successor Iain Duncan Smith was so bad that the party removed him before he could even lead the party into a general election and his replacement Michael Howard was just as unelectable. The lack of talent within the Tory party led to the appalling situation that a transparently dishonest former PR man who had only been a Tory MP for a few years landed the top job. David Cameron was so desperately unconvincing that he failed to get a majority despite the fact that he was standing against an extremely unpopular Prime Minister, during the worst economic crisis in generations, and with the support of the vast majority of the corporate controlled mainstream media. This fourth successive failure to win a parliamentary majority meant that the Tories were forced into sharing power with the Liberal Democrats.
At first John Major was a vocal supporter of the Coalition Government, but as the years have gone on he has clearly come to realise that the current Tory leadership are a bunch of over-privileged and out-of-touch rich boys, who are driving the country towards economic ruin. He kept quiet about it out of loyalty to the party, but in October 2013 he reached breaking point as he saw Ed Miliband running rings around David Cameron on the issue of energy bills. Here's what he said:
"I do not regard it as acceptable that they [energy companies]
have increased prices by this tremendous amount. Nor do I regard it as acceptable their explanation that they are investing
for the future ... [the UK] will probably have a very cold winter and it is not
acceptable that many people are going to have choose between keeping warm
and eating ... I suggest [George Osborne] imposes an emergency tax on the energy companies to claw back
the money that we will have to give to people to see the winter in any form
of warmth."
He didn't limit his criticism to the way David Cameron and George Osborne have refused to deal with the cost of energy crisis, he also laid into the Work and Pensions Secretary (and failed Tory party leader) Iain Duncan Smith, criticising his refusal to properly address any of the concerns of his critics and warning that "if he listens only to the bean-counters and to
cheerleaders concerned only with abuse of the system, then he will fail."
He also made a long overdue apology to the victims of the Hillsborough disaster for having steadfastly refused to conduct an inquiry during his time as Prime Minister.
The former Prime Minister also spoke of the "silent have-nots" and "lace curtain poverty".
"Low interest rates are unavoidable, essential for economic recovery,
but they crucify the prudent long term saver. For many elderly people now in retirement the financial crisis has destroyed
security of mind as well as the value of savings ... There are too many people falling behind through no fault of their
own ... They are not high fliers, not financially secure. They are the
dignified poor or near poor and to the shame of politicians - and I include
myself in this - there are still millions and millions of them."
I believe that these divergences from the position of the current Tory leadership are inspired by pragmatism and loyalty to the long-term interests of the Tory party. He can see that a bunch of out-of-touch and over-privileged millionaires dogmatically pursuing an ideological agenda to the detriment of countless millions of people (voters) is going to severely damage the long-term prospects of the party. By actively helping the rich to get richer (Millionaires tax cut, corporation tax cuts, below market value privatisations, dodgy outsourcing contracts to Tory party donors ...), whilst inflicting severe economic pain on millions of poor and ordinary people ( Wage repression, the VAT hike, "Bedroom Tax", Atos WCA regime, slashed in-work benefits ...) is terrible for the long-term prospects of the party he led for seven years.
Another telling point is the way that John Major described Ed Miliband's energy price freeze policy:
"Ed Miliband's heart was in the right place but his head has gone walkabout ...but he did touch on an issue that's very important. The
private sector is something the Conservative party support but when the
private sector goes wrong or behaves badly I think it is entirely right
to make changes and put it right."
Firstly, I have to say that the accusation of the "heart being in the right place, but the policy suggestion being nonsense" is even more applicable to John Major's one-off energy windfall tax idea. The reason being, it is a short-term fix for a long-term problem. If the profits of the energy companies are recouped this year to help the millions of people living in fuel poverty, this will only delay the pain, because next year prices will still be sky high, and in fact, it is likely that the energy companies will further hike their prices to recoup their "lost" profits from the windfall tax. John Major is essentially saying "we can't let them freeze and die (until next winter)".
Secondly, both Ed Miliband and John Major are motivated by legitimate concerns over fuel poverty, but their solutions are both inadequate. The real, obvious long-term solution is a large-scale renationalisation of the energy sector, but since that conflicts with the neoliberal economic orthodoxy, and the competition laws of the neoliberalism riddled European Union, nobody apart from the Green Party and a few unelectable fringe left-wing elements are even going to dare suggest it.
Thirdly, the assertion that "Ed Miliband's heart is in the right place" contrasts very sharply with the vile Lynton Crosby inspired bullshit that David Cameron spouts. John Major is from the old school where civilised debate and a measure of respect for your adversaries were essential elements of doing politics. David Cameron has a different view, he believes the British public love to see childish mud slinging, at-the-man attacks, abusive language, outright lies and fact-free rhetoric from their political leaders. Hence his decision to lie about Britian having been declared "bankrupt" one week and then make the absurdly hypocritcal accusation that Ed Miliband is a "conman" the next.
John Major is an old-school politician, with an old-school idea. He understands that a political agenda, administered by multi-millionaires, that drives countless millions of poor and ordinary people into greater poverty is likely to severely damage the Conservative party. He would prefer to see a more pragmatic and less ideologically zealous strategy; a form of "compassionate conservatism", where the Tories still overtly favour capitalist interests (as is their way), but will intervene when market forces push millions of people (voters) into greater poverty. It's still conservatism, but with a pragmatic pinch of social justice.
The other thing John Major is arguing for is a return to civilised and respectful debate and political balance. He clearly despises the playground politics of the current era, and hankers after the days when politicians called each other "honourable gentleman" rather than "conman".
The problem for the former Prime Minister is that neither of these objectives are remotely possible. With a clueless ideological zealot like George Osborne (who barely understands the neoclassical economic theories he ceaselessly promotes) in charge of both the Tory party policy and national economic policy, and a cabinet that is stuffed full of compensatory narcissists like Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Gove (people who have a siege mentality towards the slightest hint of criticism), the idea of "Conservatism with a pragmatic pinch of social justice" is an impossible pipe dream.
When it comes to grown-up and civilised politics, that also is never going to happen when the Prime Minister, and leader of the Tory party is taking strategic advice from a gutter dweller like Lynton Crosby.
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