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

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

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

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

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

Austerity

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

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

Conclusion: "More of the same"

Privatisation profiteering

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

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

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

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

Conclusion: "More of the same"

Wittering on about "growth"

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

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

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

Conclusion: "More of the same"

Child impoverishment

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion: "More of the same"

Welfare scapegoating

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

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

Conclusion: "More of the same"

The panacea of deregulation

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion: "More of the same"

Brexit

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

But what does this even mean?

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

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

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

Conclusion: "More of the same"

More of the same

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

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

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The Tory "work until you die" dystopia

When I was younger I spent several years working in construction and roofing. I'm not even 40 and I'm glad I'm out of the industry now. As a young man it was fine, but the toll that this kind of hard physical labour takes on your body gets bigger and bigger with age.

Today I'm imagining what it would be like to be still working as a roofer at the age of 74, because that's what Iain Duncan Smith and the Tories are plotting for the working classes.

Iain Duncan Smith and his vile hard-right CSJ think tank are planning to hike the retirement age to 75 to create a work until you die dystopia for millions of British workers, especially manual workers with physically demanding jobs.

The UK government does remarkably little research into the life expectancies of specific professions, but from what little evidence is available, they know that hiking the pension age to 75 will mean that manual and low-income workers will end up contributing entire lifetimes of National Insurance payments, in return for little or no pension at all at the end of it.

The average age of death for males in routine and semi-routine trades are 76.6 and 77.9 years, meaning just a few paltry years of pension before death, if you're lucky enough to live to average age.

And that's before you factor in that forcing people to continue working in demanding physical labour jobs until their mid-70s is obviously going to significantly increase the death rate from factors like heart attacks and accidents.

The Westminster establishment class has already proven its willingness to steal people's state pension pots already with their attack on 1950s women, in some instances confiscating six years of pension payments whilst forcing them to continue paying six years extra National Insurance as an insult on top of the initial theft.

The theft from WASPI women adds up to £40-50,000 per woman, but hardly anyone even blinked an eye when this happened, because they weren't directly affected by this pension theft.

But now that the Tories realise they can get way with brazenly stealing people's pensions, they're coming for the entire pensions of following generations, hoping to work us to death before we even get to state pension age.

And the economic reasoning behind this Tory pension theft is just as economically-illiterate as the rest of their nonsense like "let's cut our way to growth" austerity blibber-blabber. 

They treat pension payments as if they're essentially "waste", but in reality they're economically beneficial.

When pensioners receive their state pensions they don't just burn the cash in their back yards, they spend it into the economy, which creates economic demand. It doesn't just disappear, it goes straight back into circulation.

And most pensioners in their mid-sixties to mid-seventies don't just sit there idly doing nothing, they look after the grandchildren, they act as carers for spouses and other elderly relatives, they contribute to their communities, spend money on the hobbies and activities they were too busy to do when they were working ...

If the Tories insist on working this generation to death intead, then the social good that they currently provide will have to be provided in different ways.

This means young families paying rip-off child care fees because granny is too busy cleaning hotel rooms or whatever at the age of 74, and too shattered from this living nightmare to ever help out in her spare time.

This means that if one partner becomes seriously ill or disabled, the state will have to pick up the tab for a full-time carer for one pensioner so that the other can go out to work!

This means elderly people will never get the final decade or so before stuff like extreme frailty and dementia set in to contribute to their communities, explore their hobbies and interests, and enjoy their retirement, unless of course they're wealthy, with a bumper private pension to live off ...

And that's the real Tory agenda.

The idea of ordinary people enjoying a few years of retirement before they die fills Tories with absolute fury.

In their minds a happy retirement is a valuable commodity to be bought by the rich, not a right to be enjoyed by the majority of people.

So they're determined to work the rest of us to death, even if it doesn't even make any kind of economic sense, because to them, the money we've all paid in National Insurance doesn't belong to us, it belongs to them, to lavish on corporate fat cats, and bankers, and the mega-rich in tax cuts and handouts, so they can make even more cash to stuff into their gold-plated pensions, so they can retire early to idle lives of luxury, while the rest of us break our backs until we die to pay for them.

The Tories believe that our pensions belong to them and their kind, and they're going to work us to death to make damned well sure of it.

 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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Theresa May's hypocritical outrage over BBC pay disparity

Theresa May has waded into the row over pay at the BBC to spew a load of faux outrage about gender inequality, but in doing so she's simply confirmed that she's only bothered about gender inequality when it affects the wealthiest people in society.

Of course BBC pay is ridiculous, not only for the fact that there's a huge gulf between the pay of the BBC's top earners, but also because a number of incredibly untalented people are earning absolute fortunes at the public expense.

Of course people have every right to complain about gender inequality amongst the BBC's highest paid employees, but they're clearly opening themselves up to accusations of hypocrisy if they've got a personal track record of discriminating against women.

Theresa May and the Conservative party have spent seven punishing years enforcing ruinous austerity dogma, 86% of the burden of which falls onto female shoulders.

It's an absolute disgrace to see Theresa May take a short break from her seven year campaign of loading the overwhelming burden of austerity dogma onto the shoulders of ordinary women, suddenly crying rivers over the fact that the likes of Claudia Winkelman and Clare Balding's six figure salaries are less than some of their male colleagues.

Boo hoo hoo, privately educated establishment-insider Claudia Winkelman has to subsist on a salary of less than half an million quid for whatever it is that she does that's so important, and meanwhile millions of ordinary women have suffered wage repression, tax credit cuts, child welfare cuts, closed maternity wards, Sure Start centres and domestic abuse refuges.

Fuck them though. Somebody has to pay for the mess the bankers made in 2008, and Theresa May isn't going to make the rich pay their share is she? After all the Tories would go bankrupt without all their donations from the City of London, the private health lobby and the landed gentry.

Then there's the WASPI women that Theresa May's Tory party are intent on robbing blind.

Nobody is arguing that the pension age shouldn't be equalised so that men and women retire at the same age, but forcing the change through so quickly that one group of 1950s -born women have to work six years longer than they were told they had to is manifestly unfair. Not only are six years of pension payments being nicked from these women, they're also being made to shell out an extra six years of National Insurance contributions too for their significantly reduced state pensions.

Still, the story is the same from Theresa May. She's crying rivers for Claudia Winkelman and Clare Balding because their bulging pay packets aren't big enough, but not for our wives, mothers, grans, aunties, neighbours, and work colleagues that her government is busy totally shafting.

Theresa may apologists might try to argue that she's somehow exempt from blame for these appalling policies because she didn't devise them, and that she's only implementing them because she's too weak and directionless to change direction away from these legacies from David Cameron's rotten leadership.

Of course they'd be right that she's far too weak and directionless to change direction (she's had a year to bin austerity dogma and do something/anything to help the WASPI women) but they'd be absolutely wrong to claim that she's just some passive bystander.

Not only did she repeatedly vote in favour of austerity dogma (even after it became very clear indeed that austerity was hurting poor and ordinary women a lot more than poor and ordinary men) she also devised one of the most sexist and discriminatory bits of legislation of the entire Cameron era while she was at the Home Office.

In 2012 Theresa May introduced a set of arbitrary income rules for British citizens wanting to bring their non-EU spouse to the UK. The rules are discriminatory in two main ways.

The first way the arbitrary rules discriminate is against people who live in poorer regions of the UK. The result is that 58% of people in London earn enough to sponsor a foreign spouse and two children, but just 36% in the North East 34% in Yorkshire and Humberside and 30% in Northern Ireland earn enough.

Arbitrary rules that discriminate against northerners, Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish people by taking no account of the cost of living are bad enough, but when it comes to gender disparity the situation is even worse.

72% of males have a salary high enough to sponsor a non-EU partner under Theresa May's arbitrary rules, but just 43% of females earn enough, which means that Theresa May's draconian spouse visa rules women are far more likely to be forced into exile from the UK for the "crime" of falling in love with a non-EU citizen than men.

The fact that Theresa May has deliberately forced tens of thousands of couples to make the choice between living separate lives or living in exile from the UK is sick enough in its own right, but when it's more than twice as likely to affect women as men too, it just makes her rivers of tears for Claudia Winkelman and Clare Balding shockingly hypocritical.

Theresa May doesn't give a damn about ordinary women because her government has been actively and deliberately attacking them. But not only does she discriminate against them, she despises them too, and imagines that they're such gullible halfwits that they'll completely ignore her political track record and imagine her as some kind of feminist because she hasn't got a penis, and because she's making a fuss that Claudia Winkelman isn't paid enough by the BBC!

 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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It's vitally important to talk to our elderly relatives

Elderly people are way more likely to vote Tory than any other demographic (the reasons for this are complex and I've addressed them in another article here).

Obviously not all elderly people are Tory voters, but almost two thirds of the ones who turn out to vote are, which means that being old is actually more of an indicator of Tory sympathies than being stinking rich! 

Talking to our Gran/Gandpa/elderly relatives and asking them to think again about supporting the Tories might be absolutely key in stopping Theresa May and her bully boys from getting a parliamentary majority.

A quick quiz

Here's one potential line of questioning you could use to make them think about what they are actually voting for. Tell them that it's a quiz and ask them these questions (read them off your phone or print this article out if needs be) and get them to provide a specific yes/no answer to each of them.

1. Would you vote for Jeremy Corbyn if he had put together a shambolic uncosted manifesto that didn't explain where the money was coming from to pay for over 50 of his policies? 

2. Would you vote for Jeremy Corbyn if he was planning to scrap the winter fuel allowance for millions of pensioners, but refused to say where the means testing limit would be set, so loads of them would only find out if they lose their winter fuel allowance after the election is over? 

3. Would you vote for Jeremy Corbyn if he was fighting to help the Chinese government maintain control over the British rail network, British water supplies, and the British national grid? 

4. Would you vote for Jeremy Corbyn if he kept running away and hiding instead of debating his political opponents? 

5. Would you vote for Jeremy Corbyn if he was planning to take food out of infant school children's mouths in order to give his rich friends a big tax break? 

6. Would you vote for Jeremy Corbyn if he said he was going to put an extra £8 billion into the NHS, but when the experts looked into it they found that there wasn't a single extra penny above what thay already said they would spend? 

7. Would you vote for Jeremy Corbyn if he said that he would trigger a nuclear war by using nuclear missiles as a first-strike to attack other countries with? 

8. Would you vote for Jeremy Corbyn if he was planning to scrap the Triple Lock on pensions because it's "unaffordable" but somehow he's got a spare £70 billion to hand to corporations and the mega-rich? 

9. Would you vote for Jeremy Corbyn if his manifesto included a policy of providing school breakfasts at 6.8 pence per child, per day? (ancillary question on how much breakfast they think they could make themselves for less than 7p)

10. Would you vote for Jeremy Corbyn if his manifesto promised to scrap the Leveson Report into press corruption so that the newspapers could just carry on as if they had never hacked into the phone of a murdered teenager (Milly Dowler) and made her parents imagine that she was still alive? (ancillary question on why they think the press is so heavily biased in the Tories favour)

11. Would you vote for Jeremy Corbyn if he refused to rule out cutting even more police jobs, even after Manchester? 

12. Would you vote for Jeremy Corbyn if he proposed a policy of asset stripping elderly people who get frail and need social care, but he wouldn't come clean about how much he was going to take from them until after the election?

Once they've (hopefully) answered "no" to pretty much all of these questions, you can tell them that all of these things are what Theresa May is doing, and every single one of these things is opposed by Jeremy Corbyn.

If they doubt that it can be true then here are articles providing proof (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12)

See what their reaction is when you tell them that all of that stuff is Theresa May.

If they say that they still want to vote Tory even when they know that, ask them why they would not vote for Jeremy Corbyn when they thought it was him doing those things, but they're going to vote for Theresa May when they know that she's definitely doing those things.*

Another approach

An alternative approach to making them question how bad Theresa May and the Tories are is to fill them with enthusiasm for Jeremy Corbyn.

• Tell them how Britain is spending less on infrastructure and innovation than any other developed nation and how Jeremy Corbyn wants to invest in better infrastructure for future generations.

• Tell them that you're really enthusiastic about Jeremy Corbyn's National Education Service because you think absolutely everyone should have the right to free education, no matter what their age or background, and that the more educated people there are in Britain, the richer the country will be for all of us.

• Tell them that they deserve to be looked after in their old age and that Jeremy Corbyn won't scrap the Triple Lock, snatch their winter fuel allowance, or asset strip their house if they get frail and need social care.

• Tell them that Jeremy Corbyn is a clever man who understands the value of arts, music and the creative industries, and how these things don't just enrich our cultural lives, but also bring loads of money into the UK economy too.

• Tell them that you really like the Labour Brexit minister Keir Starmer QC, and you think he's really clever and would do a miles better job of handling the Brexit negotiations than David Davis (he doesn't seem to have a clue what he's doing does he?)

• Tell them that Jeremy Corbyn wants to look after sick and disabled people by investing in the NHS and scrapping the horrible demeaning assessments that Tories make the disabled people do.

• Tell them that Jeremy Corbyn wants to repatriate our rail services, water companies and national grid back off the Chinese government and run them for the benefit of the British people instead.

• Tell them that Jeremy Corbyn is really popular with the young people (68% Labour to 16% Tory) because they love his economic policy of investing for the future, rather than cutting, and cutting, and cutting until there's nothing left like the Tories. 

Show them stuff on your phone

A very high percentage of elderly people have no access to social media. Maybe showing them some video clips and infographics might help them see things from a different perspective?

Here are the videos I've posted to Facebook during the election: AAV Videos

Here are my most recent infographics: AAV Infographics

Offer them a lift

Perhaps one of the most important things you can do is offer them a lift to the polling station and talk to them about your enthusiasm for Labour's manifesto as you take them there?

Conclusion

I'm not sure any of these approaches will work because people often gut stuck in their ways, especially when they're old, but one thing I'm pretty sure of is that they'd be delighted that you stopped by to pay them a visit or called them on the phone, even if the conversation is mainly about politics.

Even if you fail to convince them to stop being Tory enablers, they're still your elderly relatives and they most likely love you a lot and really appreciate your company.

 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

* = If they respond with rote-learned right-wing tropes about the IRA or nuclear weapons, here are the antidote articles if you can get them to look at them (IRA / Nukes), maybe print them off beforehand and leave them at their house? Maybe print off this one about Dementia Tax and this one about media bias too?

27 reasons why the Tories are hiding behind Brexit

A look at the Tory Twitter accounts reveals that: 11 of Theresa May's last 11 Tweets are about Brexit and 28 of the official Conservative account's last 30 Tweets are about Brexit.

 The Tories think that they can turn the General Election into a single issue campaign and stop people talking about anything else, so we need to defy them by talking about these things:

► The Tory "manifesto of misery": Not only is the Tory manifesto absolutely full of horrific policies, it's also an almost completely uncosted mess.

► Scrapped free infant school meals: A policy of literally snatching food out of kid's mouths.

► Dementia Tax: A depraved plan to asset strip frail elderly people in order to fund even more tax giveaways for corporations and the super-rich.

► The systematic abuse of disabled people: The Labour manifesto pledges to shut down the corporate disability denial factories, the Tories will keep them open (even though they cost the taxpayer more to run than they will ever save in reduced disability-related social welfare!).

► Theresa May's cowardice: Hiding in Tory safe spaces, evading public debates, refusing to answer questions, chickening out of appearing on Woman's Hour! - Theresa May's cowardly aversion public scrutiny paints a picture of a woman who will be utterly incapable of handling the Brexit negotiations.

► Scrapped pledge not to raise Income Tax: Why do you think the Tories have scrapped this pledge from their 2015 manifesto?

► Scrapped pledge not to raise National Insurance: Why do you think the Tories have scrapped this pledge from their 2015 manifesto?

► Theresa May's plot to bring back fox hunting: 84% of the public oppose the barbaric practice of ripping apart live foxes with packs of dogs, Theresa May wants to bring it back.

► School breakfasts at 6.8 pence per child: One of the only costings in the shambolic Tory manifesto is a pledge to provide school breakfasts at just 6.8 pence per child, per day!

► Theresa May recycling her failed immigration pledge for a 3rd time: In 2010 Theresa May promised to reduce migration to below 100,000 (she increased it to the all time record high of 336,000). In 2015 Theresa May promised to reduce migration to below 100,000 (she totally failed again). In 2017 Theresa May is promising to reduce migration to below 100,000. Who on earth would believe her empty anti-immigration rhetoric 3rd time around?

► UK economic growth rate lowest in the G7: The UK growth rate has slumped to just 0.2%. That's the joint worst in the G7 with Italy.

► Tax-dodging billionaires bankrolling the Tory party: The Tory party are raising £millions in donations from the billionaire class who want to keep society rigged in their favour. Several of these billionaire Tory backers are proven tax-dodgers.

► The Tories' disgraceful campaign of Dark Ads: The Tories are blasting £millions on plastering anti-Labour attack ads all over the Internet, and they're refusing to provide examples of what they've been sending out to the electoral authorities.

► The UK productivity crisis: Under the Tory government the UK has suffered an appalling productivity crisis. We're getting left miles behind our rivals like Germany, Japan, France and the USA, and the problem is getting worse, not better.

► The Chinese takeover: Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party have pledged to repatriate vital British infrastructure (rail, water supplies, national grid) and run them for the benefit of the British people. Theresa May wants to keep these things under the control of the Chinese government. 

► Binning the Leveson Report:  The Tory manifesto pledges to scrap the Leveson Report into press corruption as if Murdoch's hacks hacking the phone of a dead teenage girl never happened.

► Scrapped Triple Lock on pensions: Labour are pledging to keep the Triple Lock so that the UK's woeful state pension keeps rising by at least 2.5% per year. In 2015 the Tories pledged to keep the Triple Lock until 2020, but now they're planning to scrap it.

► The UK wage slump: Since 2010 UK workers have suffered the worst wage slump since records began. The purchasing power of UK wages has collapsed worse than any other developed nation apart from crisis-stricken Greece.

► More police cuts: Since 2010 The Tories have reduced per capita policing to 1970s levels. Now both Theresa May and the Home Secretary Amber Rudd have flat out refused to rule out even more police cuts. Labour would reverse the worst of the Tory cuts to the public safety budget by putting 10,000 extra bobbies on the beat.

► Scrapped pledge to ban the ivory trade: In 2015 the Tories pledged to ban the ivory trade. In 2017 they removed that pledge from their manifesto.

► The Naylor Report: Theresa May says she backs the findings of the Naylor Report, which promotes the policy of using taxpayers' cash to bribe NHS trusts into selling off their land on the cheap to property developers. If they don't take the bribes and keep their land they get hit with economic sanctions.

► Winter Fuel Allowance secrecy: Theresa May is outright refusing to explain where the means testing limit would be applied, meaning nobody knows how many million pensioners would lose their Winter Fuel Allowance.

► The biggest education funding cuts in generations: The Tory manifesto reveals that they're going to slash £9 billion from the education budget. This will be the biggest education funding cut in generations, meaning severe cutbacks for almost every classroom in the country.

► Theresa May's cowardly silence on Donald Trump trying to trash the Paris Climate deal: This is shameful and unacceptable. The governments of the world agreed a plan of action, Donald Trump is trying to wreck it, and Theresa May is standing by and saying nothing while the rest of the world (and significant swathes of the United States) unite in condemnation.

► The NHS recruitment crisis: Theresa May has triggered a massive NHS recruitment crisis by scrapping the NHS bursary. She's driven 10,000 trainee nurses away in just one year.

► Arming Saudi Arabia: Theresa May selling arms to Saudi Arabia when she knows they're using British weapons to commit war crimes in Yemen, and she knows that Saudi Arabia is one of the biggest financial backers of ISIS.

► More austerity: The Tory manifesto openly admits that austerity has failed because the deficit will not be eliminated until mid-2020s, but they're continuing with their socially and economically ruinous "let's cut our way to growth" austerity dogma regardless. They're sticking with it because it was never actually intended to deal with the public debt problem, it's actually just a con to provide cover for wealth redistribution policies that have literally doubled the wealth of the super-rich minority while the rest of us suffer the cuts and wage repression.

Conclusion

The Tories are desperately trying to totally focus the election on Brexit because they know that their track record in government is an absolute disgrace, and because they don't have any positive policies to campaign on.

They're trying to turn it into a single issue election because they think that the British public can be fooled into ignoring everything else, so we mustn't let them.

Make sure you talk to other people about any of these subjects over the next week, and make sure that they know the Tories are trying to bury their unjustifiable track record in government and their pathetically shambolic manifesto of misery under a tide of Brexit rhetoric.

 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

Bridging the generational divide

The results of the latest ICM poll paint an extraordinary picture of a shocking inter-generational divide.

Just look at the graph in the header image and consider the fact that Labour are outperforming the Tories by almost 5:1 amongst the younger generation, who see Jeremy Corbyn's transformational investment based manifesto as a beacon of hope for a future with decent opportunities after seven bleak and ruinous years of Tory asset stripping.

Unbelievably, despite the Tories' despicable Dementia Tax policy of imposing a huge stealth inheritance tax on anyone who hasn't hidden their assets in shady offshore shell companies, the over-65s are going to come out in force for the party that plans to strip them of their winter fuel allowance, scrap the triple lock on their pensions, and asset strip them if they end up suffering from age-related degenerative diseases.

It's alarming that so many millions of pensioners are not only intent on voting to allow the Tories to trash the aspirations of their grandchildren by gutting education funding, keeping exploitative zero hours contracts, enforcing the highest fees at public universities anywhere in the world, chronically under-investing in infrastructure and innovation, and gutting public services in order to fund their tax cuts for corporations and the super rich, they're also intent on voting against their own interests too.

For goodness sake why?

Obviously not all pensioners are intent on voting for a dystopian future where the aspirations of the young are crushed and the assets of the old are asset stripped in order to fund tax cuts for very wealthiest in society, but a huge majority are.

The reasons why are not clear cut and identical for all elderly Tory voters, but here are two of the big ones.

Echo chambers

The first big reason is that the older generations are very much more likely to be stuck in a mainstream media echo chamber, where their only sources of political news are the television, a single (incredibly biased) newspaper or their favourite radio station.

Independent media simply has no way to reach the large percentage of pensioners who don't even have access to the Internet, let alone social media networks like Twitter and Facebook.

Mainstream journalists often talk derisively about social media echo chambers, and the problem of selection bias on social media is undoubtedly a real one ... but anyone who thinks that people who use social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are suffering a worse echo chamber problem than those who only ever rely on mainstream media for their news has got the situation so ridiculously backwards it's beyond parody.

Mental decline

There's no polite or politically correct way to put this so I'm just going to come out and say it (with evidence to back it up of course): The older people get on average, the more gullible they are, the crapper their mathematical abilities, the more they're likely to over-estimate their own expertise, and the more attracted to right-wing authoritarian leaders they become.

The Online Privacy Foundation carried out some very interesting analysis into the political psychology of the 2016 EU referendum vote. You can view the results here.

One of the most remarkable results was that Brexit voters are very much more attracted to right-wing authoritarianism than Remain voters, but also that older generations are very much more attracted to the right-wing tyrant style of leadership than the younger generations (here's another study into older people and right-wing authoritarianism)

Theresa May is undoubtedly the most right-wing authoritarian Prime Minister the UK has ever had. 

Yes Margaret Thatcher crushed whole communities in pursuit of her hard-right ideological agenda, but she never openly fantasised about trashing the European Convention on Human Rights and scrapping our human rights!

Another thing that the research revealed is that the older people get the worse their critical thinking skills and mathematical abilities become, meaning they're very much less able to see through shockingly misleading political propaganda, blatant smear jobs, misleading push polls and the like.

People like to think it's the young who are gullible and naive, but the research shows that the wisdom of old age is a total myth. Once you start getting older, you start becoming ever more susceptible to believing in ridiculous economic fairy stories and mathematical jiggery-pokery.

One other thing that the research shows is that older people are very much more likely to suffer from the Dunning-Kruger Effect. This is the problem that people with a very limited understanding of a subject are liable to significantly overestimate their level of expertise, while actual experts are liable to underestimate their level of expertise (the more you know, the more you realise you don't know too).

The older people get, the more likely it is that they end up as a blowhard know-it-all on all subjects, even subjects they actually know next to nothing about.

Obviously not all old people suffer this kind of mental decline (the best ways to avoid this kind of mental decline are mental and physical exercise, a good diet, and avoiding brain cell wrecking substances like alcohol as much as possible) but on average most people do end with declining cognitive abilities.

Most older people end up losing their ability to critique the things they're told, seriously over-estimating their own expertise, and craving harsh dictatorial right-wing governance.
 

What we can do

The only way we can try to stop the older generations from wrecking the aspirations of their children and grandchildren is to talk to them.

We have to try to bridge the generational divide by getting them to rekindle the skeptical abilities they had in their youth.

We have to try to make them understand that the majority of the mainstream media, and especially the right-wing dominated newspapers are trying to con them into voting for the Tories.

Conscientiousness

Older people tend to suffer significant mental decline, but one hugely important thing that really stands in older people's favour is that they are very much more likely to be conscientious. 

They're far more likely to care about other people, behave selflessly, and put other people's needs above their own.

Appealing to older people's-interest is a reasonable strategy. Telling them that the Tories are going to rip them off by scrapping their winter fuel payments, abandoning the triple lock, and asset stripping them if they get ill and need social care might work.

However the cynical Tories know that they're more likely to be conscientious, so they've dressed these ideologically driven economic assaults against pensioners up as necessary sacrifices for the greater good. 

The Tories are so depraved that they know older people can be tricked into accepting massive personal impoverishment by telling them it's for the greater good, rather than a way of funding yet another round of lavish tax breaks for corporations and the super-rich (as it actually is).

If you're going to try to appeal to an older person's self interest, it's absolutely vital that you make sure they understand that the Tories are lying through their teeth: That the cuts aren't for the greater good at all, but actually a way of funding even more giveaways for the millionaires and billionaires.

Probably a much better way of appealing to older people is to talk about the significant differences the Labour manifesto makes for the younger generations, their own grandchildren.

Talk about how the Tories are going to scrap free school meals and slash education funding so the kids of today have worse opportunities than previous generations of children.

Talk about student debts. Explain that tuition fees in the UK are the highest in the whole world, and that nearly all the good jobs need a degree these days. Tell them that an incredible 70% of today's students will never be able to actually pay off their student debts despite paying a 9% tax for their entire working lives.

Talk about exploitative zero hours contracts and how they represent a modern incarnation the unstable employment days of the 1930s where dockers and steelworkers waking up at the crack of dawn to queue at the gates in the desperate hope of being called to work, and having to go home with absolutely nothing if their name wasn't picked.

Help them understand that the Tories aren't just taking wealth from the older generations, they're robbing wealth and opportunities from the younger generations too, just to stuff the already bulging the pockets of the super-rich elitists who totally bankroll the Tory party.

Give them a copy of the Labour Manifesto to read, and ask them to consider it for themselves. Tell them that you really like it, and that they should disregard what the Tories and the mainstream media say about it and judge it for themselves.

Good luck

The only way the Tories can be stopped from getting a whopping great majority, with which they can rob all generations in order to line the pockets of their super-rich mates, is if we all talk to our parents and grandparents and plead with them to disbelieve the Tory lies, think of themselves, and above all think of their grandchildren's futures.

Good luck.

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