Theresa May's tears of self-pity

With tears in her eyes Theresa May announced that she will be resigning on June 7th.

Some people will feel pity for her, and believe the mainstream media hagiographies about how "she did her best", but the fact that she cried tears of self-pity as she resigned simply serve to illustrate her selfishness and callousness.

She cried no tears for the Windrush Brits she unlawfully discriminated against and even forced into exile overseas.

She cried no tears for the victims of the Grenfell fire when she rocked up to the scene and refused to even meet the survivors.

She cried no tears for the four million British kids growing up in dire poverty, and even sought to scrap their free school meals and replace them with a 7p per child breakfast.

She cried no tears for the millions of sick and disabled people that her government has systematically abused to the point of literally thousands of people being treated like idle scroungers and told that they're "fit for work" just weeks before their deaths.

She cried no tears for the millions of people who suffered the devastating consequences of Tory austerity fanaticism, and even lied through her teeth that "austerity is over" while continuing it.

She cried no tears for the Yemeni children blown to pieces by the tyrannical Saudi war criminals, in fact she kept on signing more and more arms contracts with them despite knowing that they're using British weapons to commit their war crimes.

Yet she cried tears for herself as she finally let go of her grip on political power.

No tears for the Windrush Brits she deported

No tears for the Grenfell fire victims

No tears for the disabled people her government has systematically abused

No tears for the 4million kids growing up in dire poverty

Tears of self-pity when she resignspic.twitter.com/4HQI78ZkiI

— Another Angry Voice (@Angry_Voice) May 24, 2019

Many people will argue that she was the worst Prime Minister ever, but in a way she was actually the perfect Tory Prime Minister. A perfect distillation of the utterly selfish, greed is a virtue, rob the poor to give to the rich, 'no such thing as society' Tory philosophy.

The only person she's ever felt sorry for is herself, so don't be fooled into taking pity on her.

If you want to feel sorry for anyone, take a moment to remember the millions of victims of her policies.

And if you don't want to do that, then have some pity on yourself and your fellow Brits, because whichever Brextremist the tiny clique of Tory party members pick out as our next Prime Minister is surely going to be even worse than she was.

 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

Who is gullible enough to believe the party of millionaires is the natural party of the working classes?

The Tory MP Esther McVey has put her name to a ludicrous article in the Daily Express claiming that the Tories are "the natural party of the working classes".

The crux of the argument is that the Tories are the natural home of northern working class Brexit voters, and that the disastrous Tory local election results somehow prove that they should just get on with delivering Brexit!

It's total nonsense from start to finish. The Tories aren't the party of the working classes; Brexit wasn't delivered by northern working class voters (the most likely demographics to vote for it were actually wealthy retired Tories in the Home Counties and the Shires); and the idea that local election results that delivered the worst Tory results since 1995 and huge gains for the Brexit-sceptic Lib-Dems and Greens are proof that the public are baying for Brexit to be delivered is absurdly nonsensical, even by the extraordinary propaganda standards that have been set by Brextremists and Remain ultras over the last few years.

Of course there are a few idiots out there who would be convinced by this incoherent propaganda, but anyone with the vaguest grip on reality knows that the claim that the Tories are the natural party of the working classes is complete nonsense.

The Tories are bankrolled by a tiny clique of mega-rich donors, corporate fat cats, bankers, property speculators, landed gentry, private health companies, and Russian oligarchs.

Labour are funded by hundreds of thousands of small donations for ordinary people and workers through their trade unions, and have numerous policies aimed at supporting and improving the lives and communities of the working classes.

Even if you're too obtuse to follow the money to see whose interests are being represented by whom, there's the grotesque anti-worker Tory track record in government.

• Thatcher declaring ideological war on UK manufacturing and mining in the 1980s in order to wreck the trade unions by deliberately crippling the industries they represented.

• The privatisation of masses of public services, from the water supply and public transport, to the outsourcing of local services like grass cutting, meaning the replacement of vast numbers of stable long-term decently paid public sector jobs with insecure, low-pay private sector exploitation.

• The toxic "leave it to the markets" neoliberal mentality that resulted in millions of people across the UK ending up trapped in left behind high-unemployment communities, with desperately neglected public services and infrastructure.

• The lost decade of wage growth since the bankers' insolvency crisis as a result of deliberate Tory wage repression policies and the explosion of insecure, exploitative, low-pay Zero Hours type jobs since 2010.

• The imposition of unlawful Tory tribunal fees designed to protect bad bosses from being taken to court by their employees by deliberalely and unlawfully pricing poor workers out of the justice system.

• The ideological vandalism of public services and the social safety net, resulting in a violent crime epidemic, huge health service waiting lists for those who are not rich enough to afford private medical insurance, and an unprecedented rise in in-work poverty (70% of kids growing up in poverty are living in working households).

So maybe the extremely hard-of-thinking might be convinced by the nonsensical Tory propaganda that the billionaire-bankrolled party of corporate greed and inherited privilege is actually the party of ordinary workers, but convincing the gullible isn't the main point of reality-reversing propaganda like this.

The main point is a propaganda technique called "gaslighting".

Gaslighting involves psychological manipulation in order to make people question their own sanity.

Esther McVey and the Tories aren't pushing this absurd reality-reversal because they actually believe it, or because they expect many of us to believe it.

They're pushing it because they want to pollute political discourse with such a torrent of ludicrously incoherent nonsense that ordinary people end up dazed and confused, struggling to pick out the occasional nuggets of political truth from a disorientating torrent of deceptions, distortions, logical fallacies, propaganda tropes, and lies.

They're not actually trying to convince anyone besides the hopelessly gullible that "black is white", they're simply hoping that they can convince enough of us to give up on politics altogether in order to ride a wave of political apathy to success.

 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

Don't let anyone trick you into feeling sorry for Theresa May

As Theresa May's catastrophically inept handling of her own party's Brexit mess has degenerated further and further into chaos, there's an ongoing campaign to elicit sympathy for her.

There's obviously not much sympathy to be found on left-wing sites like mine, but scroll through the comments on mainstream media outlets or the Tory blogosphere and you'll see a concerted effort to paint Theresa May as some kind of poor, innocent, defenceless victim of circumstances that are beyond her control.

Here are just a few of the most glaring reasons why this outrageous "poor Theresa" narrative is disgustingly warped, and why any feelings of sympathy towards her are catastrophically misplaced.

Perspective

If you're having these feelings just try to have a think about just some of the many victims of Theresa May's politics to restore your sense of political perspective to normality.

If you think Theresa May's having a hard time just consider:

• The families of Black British people who have been deported overseas thanks to Theresa May's grotesque "deport now, hear appeals later" Hostile Environment policy. Several of these black British citizens actually died abroad.

• NHS staff who are under enormous pressure thanks to 8 devastating years of Tory cuts and their deliberate ideologically-driven vandalism of the NHS. Winter is always the hardest and most stressful time for health workers, and this year's winter NHS crisis is likely to be the worst ever thanks to Theresa May and her Tory mates. Why not talk to someone who works in the NHS about how bad things have got if you've started to get feelings of misplaced sympathy towards Theresa May?

• Since the Tories came to power in 2010 they've overseen the worst collapse in the value of UK workers' wages in history. The percentage of workers suffering in-work poverty has absolutely skyrocketed. Just try to imagine what it's like actually having a job, but earning so little you can't even cover the basic costs of living (rent, utility bills, transport, food). This is a fate that Theresa May and her Tory mates are wilfully inflicting on millions of people so don't feel sorry for her.

• Remember when Theresa May turned up to prowl around the site of the Grenfell Tower fire, aloofly ignoring and avoiding the survivors and the devastated families of the victims? And remember how her government 'rewarded' the emergency service workers who dealt with the tragedy just a few days later by whooping and cheering as they won their parliamentary vote to continue with their malicious real terms cuts in public sector workers' pay?

• Theresa May and her fellow Tories have been condemned by the United Nations for their systematic abuse of disabled people, yet they just carry on with their despicable policies of cutting disabled people's meagre subsistence benefits, confiscating their mobility vehicles, and forcing them through degrading, dehumanising, and discriminatory assessment regimes. If you're tempted to feel a bit sorry for Theresa May, just try to appropriately direct your empathy by considering what it's like to be disabled in Tory Britain.

• Not only have teachers suffered huge real-terms pay cuts over the last 8 years, many are stuck working in incredibly dodgy private sector academy chains where the bosses pay themselves inflated six figure salaries by 'topslicing' the public funds that are supposed to pay for our children's education. Then there's the appalling scandal of teachers using their own money to provide food and clothes for the ever growing numbers of kids who are turning up to school dressed in rags and malnourished as a consequence of Tory austerity dogma.

• If you think Theresa May is having a tough time, just think about the victims of the crime wave she deliberately unleashed. Ask anyone who works in front line policing or youth services how Theresa May's ideologically-driven agenda of cutting the police force by 21,000+ and the Tory policy of gutting investment in youth outreach programmes have impacted areas like gang violence and violent crime. Or just look at the crime statistics. Violent crime is soaring out of control meaning thousands more muggings, thousands more stabbings, thousands more sexual assaults and rapes. Does your pity for Theresa May really outweigh the thousands of victims of violent crimes that simply wouldn't have happened without her extraordinary police-cutting agenda?
  
  Outside of Britain just try to imagine the suffering of innocent civilians in Yemen. Theresa May knows that the Saudi Arabian tyrants are committing war crimes there, and using the despicable tactic of spreading famine and disease as weapons of war too (resulting in the biggest humanitarian disaster on earth). But she keeps sucking up to them and selling them £billions more in British weapons to commit their war crimes with.

Insulation

Consideration of the tsunami of stress, poverty, and suffering Theresa May and her Tory mates have unleashed over the last 8 years provides a bit of valuable perspective for those who feel inclined to feel sorry for Theresa May, but there's another vital factor too.

Theresa May is an incredibly wealthy woman who is married to a multi-millionaire investor (who works for a fund with huge investments in arms manufacturers who profit from supplying weapons to the Saudi war criminals).

She's so rich that she could just walk away tomorrow and live the rest of her life stress-free in idle and extravagant luxury without having to lift a finger (completely unlike the circumstances of most ordinary workers, victims of her vile Hostile Environment policy, disabled people, emergency service workers, or the starving refugees fleeing the consequences of British foreign policy in places like Yemen).

Brexit

Then there's the fact that Theresa May has brought most of her problems on herself:

• She had a parliamentary majority to push her Brexit plans through, but threw it away last year in an unprecedented display of political hubris.

• She had the opportunity to run Brexit in the national interest from the beginning, but she chose to run it as a closed Tory shop exclusively for the benefit of her own political party, and now she's upset that all the people she excluded from the process are dissatisfied at the shambles she's cobbled together!

• She had the opportunity to develop a sensible Brexit negotiating strategy, but she resorted to toddler tantrum threats to trash the UK economy with a "no deal" flounce right from the beginning.

• She had the option of devising a coherent set of negotiating objectives before she set the Article 50 clock ticking, but she chose not to because she couldn't resist the allue of the glowing 'hooray for triggering Article 50' headlines in the right-wing propaganda rags.

• She had the opportunity to run Brexit in an open and accountable manner, but she hid the impact assessments, she hid the legal advice, she's hiding her post-Brexit immigration plan, and she's hiding the true cost of the "no deal" catastrophe she's threatening the nation with if she doesn't get her own way.

• She had the opportunity to abide by the parliamentary rules and conventions, but she has continually sought to sideline and ignore parliament culminating in the extraordinary decision to defy parliament and postpone the meaningful vote on Brexit for no reason other than she knew she was going to lose it.

• Theresa May could accept that nobody wants her shambolic last-minute farce of a deal, she could take the threat of "no deal" ruination off the table, she could walk away right now, or she could call a general election. But all she's interested in is desperately clinging to political power for as long as possible, no matter how much her selfishness and vanity damages the British national interest.

Conclusion

If you ever feel yourself beginning to slide towards having a bit of sympathy for Theresa May, just don't.

Theresa May isn't a character in some silly soap opera. She's an incredibly powerful woman with a horrifying track record of trashing the lives of people she perceives to be below her in the social pecking order.

When she imposes austerity dogma, inflicts social security cuts on the most vulnerable people in society, licences arms sales to war criminals, deports black British citizens to their deaths overseas,  vandalises our public services, triggers a devastating crime wave, and imposes wage repression policies - she knows that her status amongst the gilded establishment class protects her from all of the suffering she's inflicting.

And when it comes to Brexit, that's undeniably a mess of her own making. Yes David Cameron ran away when his gamble with the nation's future backfired and left the mess to his successor, but the primary reason the process has been even more chaotic than most Brexit critics could even have imagined back in the summer of 2016 is Theresa May's appalling combination of selfishness, hubris, control-freakery, strategic ineptitude, incompetence, and utter contempt for the concept of democratic accountability.

She's the one who made this farcical mess for herself, and she's certainly not going to have to pay any real price for it either when it all comes crashing down.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

The absolute brass neck on her

There's not much to admire about Theresa May, but aside from the cowardice, the dishonesty, the autocratic tendencies, the incompetence, the callous disregard for the suffering of people she considers to be below her in the social pecking order, and the selfish instinct to keep defying the national interest by shamelessly clinging onto power for as long as she possibly can, she does have an absolutely extraordinary brass neck.

When Jeremy Corbyn confronted her at Prime Ministers' Questions about her unbelievably cowardly decision to postpone the parliamentary Brexit vote purely because she knew she was going to lose it, her retort was to spew rhetoric about how Labour in government would "cause chaos".

This feeble reversion to her "strong and stable" Tories against "weak and chaotic" Labour trope would have been ridiculous enough any time since she wilfully threw away her parliamentary majority in her vanity election last year (rendering herself an ideological hostage of the DUP sectarians in the process), but an accusation like this in this unbelievably chaotic week of all weeks is just dripping with absurdity.

It's just 9 days since Theresa May's government became the first in all of history to be held in contempt of parliament for their defiance of a democratic vote to stop hiding the legal advice they received on her lamentable Brexit deal.

On the same day as making parliamentary history as the most contemptuous UK government of all time, she lost a further two votes in parliament, bringing her total to 16 defeats since she took over in 2016. To put that in perspective the grand total of parliamentary defeats racked up by her three predecessors combined over the space of 19 years is 16 (Blair 3, Brown 4, Cameron 9).

And then just two days ago she totally humiliated Britain on the world stage and showed utter contempt for parliamentary democracy by pulling the meaningful vote on Brexit just so she could keep shamelessly clinging onto power.

And then on the very morning of her accusation that Labour would "create chaos" if they were in power, her own damned MPs turned on her by registering enough letters of dissent to provoke an internal vote of confidence to decide whether to keep her or replace her with a Brextremist fanatic to make things even worse than they've already made them!

Then there's the background details. The fact that it was the Tory party who created this entire mess in the beginning by calling a Brexit referendum just to nick a few thousand ukipper votes.

It was the Tories who annihilated the public services and the living standards of millions through their ideological fixation with ruinous austerity dogma, and their deliberate policy of repressing British workers' wages under the crackpot economically illiterate delusion that the poorer the workers, the richer the bosses.It's the Tories who have twice been condemned by the United Nations for their despicable treatment of disabled people and the poor.

Then it was Tories like Boris Johnson, Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Give, and Priti Patel who aligned with the extreme-right Faragists to blame the devastating consequences of their own malicious economic policies on immigrants and the EU in order to divide Britain and push the Brexit vote marginally over the line.

The maliciousness and incompetence of the UK government is unprecedented. The rot began under David Cameron's dreadful tenure, but it's degenerated dramatically since Theresa May took over, to the point that her Brexit deal only survived it's inevitable death through an unprecedented act of government cowardice, a government which itself is on the brink of collapse (whether they decide to keep her or not).

And then she has the absolute brass neck to stand there in front of the nation and fear-monger that the opposition would "cause chaos"!

 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

Theresa May just laughed in the face of the millions of workers her party has spent the last 8 years impoverishing

If you want to get to grips with the shocking levels of mainstream media bias in the UK just consider the reaction to Prime Minister's Questions on December 5th 2018.

Instead of criticising Theresa May for the absolutely shambolic state of her government, or the cynical and evasive scripted non-answers she responded with, or the usual cacophony of braying, jeering, and howling from the 300-odd millionaire elitists on the Tory benches, or the way she openly and contemptuously laughed in the face of the millions of workers her party has spent the last 8 years impoverishing, the BBC politics team and swathes of the mainstream media tried to create the absurd narrative that Theresa May somehow won the debate because Jeremy Corbyn asked the wrong questions!

The crux of their ridiculous narrative was that Jeremy Corbyn used his six questions to absolutely nail the Tory track record on poverty, collapsing wages, Universal Credit, and their grotesque publicity stunt the previous weekend of taking publicity photos in food banks (as if they're actually proud of their record of massively increasing poverty to the extent that huge numbers of people now rely on charitable food handouts to survive).

According the the bitter mainstream media hacks, Corbyn should have concentrated on Brexit minutae and the historic three defeats in a single day Theresa May's government had just suffered.

The absurdity of this warped anti-Corbyn narrative was beyond obvious.

It was always going to be the case that other MPs from all sides of the house (including Theresa May's own Tory backbenchers) would bring up Brexit, Theresa May's shambolic last-minute fudge of a deal, and the government's parliamentary defeats. Here's the SNP's Ian Blackford doing just that.

"Is it time that the Prime Minister took responsibility for concealing the facts on her Brexit deal from members in this House and the public?"

The SNP's Ian Blackford accuses Theresa May of "misleading" MPs. She denies this and the Speaker tells him off for using this word. pic.twitter.com/PJOtkbi5KN

— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) December 5, 2018

Another element of the ridiculousness is that the three parliamentary defeats Theresa May suffered came as a direct consequence of Jeremy Corbyn and his Labour Party colleagues voting against the government.

These defeats didn't just materialise out of nowhere like the mainstream media hacks want to present it, the happened because Jeremy Corbyn worked with other opposition MPs and a small bunch of Tory rebels to inflict them.

Yet another element of the ridiculousness is that there are 5 days of parliamentary debate scheduled on Theresa May's Brexit shambles before the crunch vote on December 11th. PMQs was one of the very few political opportunities to talk about any other issue for the entire week, and the hacks all supposedly wanted Corbyn to waste it away on even more Brexit bickering!

By choosing not to gloat about Monday's parliamentary defeats and focus on poverty and collapsing living standards Corbyn opened a second front of attack, and a really important one too.

If Theresa May's Brexit deal is going to be stopped, triggering either a General Election or another EU referendum, it's now absolutely vital to make the crucial point that stagnant wages, soaring poverty, collapsing public services, crumbing infrastructure have nothing to do with immigration and the EU and everything to do with 8 ruinous years of Tory austerity dogma, wage repression, and under-investment.

If you're one of the millions of UK workers to have suffered a decade long real-terms decline in your wages, here's Theresa May and her millionaire Tory chums openly laughing at your plight!

They make us poorer then they actually laugh at what they've done. Disgusting. pic.twitter.com/n1M9e4f5J9

— Another Angry Voice (@Angry_Voice) December 6, 2018

Then there's the fact that Corbyn's questions on poverty created an extraordinary clip that was so wildly inappropriate that it should have been widely broadcast and seen/heard by almost everyone. When Corbyn challenged Theresa May on Britain's "lost decade" of wage growth, she openly laughed about the collapsing living standards her party have inflicted.

• As a result of deliberate wage repression policies and ideologically driven cuts to in-work benefits millions of UK workers are far worse off in real terms than they were 10 years ago. 

• Tory Universal Credit has created massive spikes in poverty and unfairness everywhere it's been rolled out. And the curse of UC is spreading to places like Liverpool and North Kensington (where Grenfell Tower happened) just before Christmas.

• From 2010 onward Tories imposed the longest real-terms collapse in workers' wages since records began.

• Rates of in-work poverty are absolutely soaring, with 2/3 of children growing up in poverty actually living in working households.

• A damning United Nations report has slammed the Tories for replacing traditional British concern and compassion for vulnerable and suffering people with a "punitive, mean-spirited and callous approach".

• Exploitative and low-paid jobs like Zero Hours Contracts and fake self-employment in the gig economy have spread like wildfire since 2010.

• The UK is still absolutely rock bottom of G20 wage growth league table.

And when Jeremy Corbyn challenged Theresa May on this absolutely outrageous track record, she actually sat there and laughed.

Instead of furiously attacking Jeremy Corbyn for asking vital questions about the poverty that is ruining the lives of millions, maybe mainstream media hacks could just have asked one single question about whether it was appropriate for Theresa May to sit there and laugh at the appalling wave of poverty the Tories have created?

But no. Holding Theresa May to account simply isn't part of their remit.

Even when her government is in chaos and she's openly laughing at the millions of people her party have deliberately impoverished, mainstream media hacks deliberately switch targets and aim their fury at Jeremy Corbyn for clinically highlighting a Tory track record of failure that extends way beyond recklessly gambling away the nation's future to nick a few thousand UKIP votes, then wasting two years cobbling together an absolute shambles of a Brexit plan.

For them it was an unforgivable mistake for Corbyn to have cornered Theresa May on poverty, and to even create the shocking situation where she openly and publicly laughed at the millions of workers her party have impoverished (a clip they would have shared with the nation if they had any intention of actually doing their jobs rather than cobbling together ludicrously tendentious anti-Corbyn outrage pieces).

What they apparently wanted to hear sequence of questions about the convoluted intricacies of Brexit with very limited appeal to people who live outside the Westminster bubble.

Think about it. If you're one of the millions who are struggling to put food on the table or heat your home, and can't even imagine how you're going to give your kids any kind of enjoyable Christmas, the last thing you want to hear is politicians quibbling about backstops, Brexit legal advice, a thing called a "Grieve amendment", etc.

The reason mainstream media hacks are presenting this as a terrible blunder from Corbyn is that he didn't say exactly what they wanted to hear. They're all living the high life on six figure salaries so why on earth would they ever give a shit about the tsunami of poverty and suffering the Tories have unleashed on millions of ordinary people, let alone when their blinkered Brexit obsession is reaching its absolute peak?

In fact they don't give a shit to such an extent that they still remain oblivious to the fact that it was this Tory policy of deliberately inflicting poverty and suffering on millions that generated the wave of public anger that actually lifted the Brexit vote just marginally above the 50% threshold.

This week they don't want to hear anything at all about anything that actually impacts the lives of millions, they want limited-appeal context-free Brexit bickering and nothing else, and they're going to scweam and scweam unless they get what they want.

 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

Is food bank gloating the sickest Tory publicity stunt yet?

Since the Tories came to power in 2010 rates of poverty in the United Kingdom have soared, and ever more people have found themselves in such dire economic circumstances that they've had to resort to charitable food handouts from an ever expanding network of food banks.

The Tories always bluster on about how "work is the best route out of poverty" but what they don't ever admit is that under their extreme economic mismanagement the number of UK workers living in poverty has been increasing way faster than the new jobs Tory ministers keep bragging about.

The upshot of this deliberate Tory policy of turning the UK into a low-wage economy is that four million British workers are living in poverty, and ever increasing numbers of working people are becoming reliant upon food bank charity in order to feed themselves and their families.

You would have thought that the dire consequences of this ideologically driven Tory assault on the economic well-being of UK workers would be a source of shame for them, but you'd be making the mistake of imagining that members of this grotesque elitism club are capable of feelings like guilt, remorse, or shame.

In fact the Tories are so shameless that they actually decided to launch a coordinated publicity stunt to gloat about the wave of food poverty they've inflicted.

It's difficult to imagine the thinking processes of the Tory wonks who came up with a coordinated effort to send Tory MP out to their local food banks for publicity pictures to upload onto Twitter.

Perhaps they thought that pictures of Tory MPs at food banks would cast them in a sympathetic light as if they actually care about people in poverty?

Aside from the fact that numerous Tories were so inept at pretending they cared about poor people that they all lazily copied the same copy n' paste Tweets, there was also the obvious public backlash to consider.

Soaring rates of poverty in the UK didn't just happen by chance. The huge rise in families in such poverty that they can't afford to feed themselves are the result of eight devastating years of Tory economic misrule. 

• Ideologically driven Tory assaults on the social security system (such as disability benefits cuts, "Bedroom Tax", the Universal credit fiasco, and the draconian sanctions regime) have played a crucial role in spreading extreme poverty, but there are other factors too.

• Tory wage repression polices have resulted in the longest sustained collapse in the real value of workers' wages since records began.

• Not only have the Tories overseen a historic collapse in the value of workers' wages, they've also attacked the social security system for low-paid workers. Arbitrary and ideologically driven cuts to Tax Credits, Housing Benefit, parental pay, and Child Benefit have dumped huge numbers of workers into destitution.

• The Tory decision to engineer a deliberate six week wait into applications for Universal Credit has also left huge numbers of families in destitution, because the last thing you need when you lose your job is six weeks without a penny as you wait for Universal Credit to kick in.

• The shocking rise in Zero Hours Contracts and fake self-employment jobs in the gig economy have created levels of job insecurity not seen since the 1930s.

• Tory austerity dogma has resulted in economic stagnation, shocking under-investment in infrastructure and public services the slowest post-crisis economic recovery in Centuries, and startling collapses in economic demand and productivity. All of which has made Britain a much poorer place than it could have been under a sensible investment-based economic recovery strategy.

In light of these factors is it any wonder that huge numbers of people saw the Tory food bank publicity campaign as the political equivalent of depraved trophy hunters posing beside the carcasses of the wild animals they've shot?

It just goes to show how wildly out of touch with reality most Tories must be that none of them even questioned the wisdom of a deliberate coordinated effort to associate themselves with the appalling wave of food poverty they've created.

The fact that their ruinous hard-right anti-welfare anti-worker, anti-investment policies have created such suffering and destitution is bad enough, but their total bone-headed willingness to even recognise what they've done makes them utterly unfit to rule ever again.

 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

Here's the reason "centrism is really struggling to make headway"

In a speech to the Lib-Dem conference Gina Miller lamented the fact that "centrism is really struggling to make headway" before going on to call people to the left and right "fascists" with "cold hard ideologies".

The obvious problem with centrism is that the term itself is a complete misnomer that implies that hovering aimlessly around near the centre has some special moral virtue no matter how far off into the political extremes the prevailing political orthodoxy might go.

Thus during the post-war decades the political centre was the mixed economy of public ownership of vital infrastructure, services and industries combined with a strong welfare state and regulated capitalism (a position occupied by Labour, the Liberals, and the Tories), and the privatise everything, "greed is good" deregulate the financial sector right-wingers were fringe lunatics.

Fast forward to 1979 and the hard-right fringe were propelled into power and their mass privatisation, welfare-wrecking, deregulation mania has continued unabated for four decades with truly appalling consequences.

Just look at the behaviour of the self-declared centrists between 2010 and 2016 and you can see the disastrous consequences of this morally weak and utterly wrong-headed determination to occupy the centre ground between raving ideological extremism of the Tories and the Blairism that went before it:

• Despite warning that an ideological cuts agenda would wreck the recovery before the 2010, the Lib-Dems leapt into coalition with the Tories to actively help them wield George Osborne's economically illiterate and unspeakably ruinous austerity wrecking ball.

• The Lib-Dems enabled countless attacks on ordinary people, from the unprecedented campaign of wage repression, though their savage cuts to in-work benefits, to the unspeakably cruel impoverishment and mistreatment of hundreds of thousands of disabled people.

• Meanwhile the Lib-Dems voted through all kinds of unpopular hard-right Tory reforms like selling off the Royal Mail at a fraction of its true value, lumbering students with astronomical debts, carving the NHS open for the benefit of private profiteers, slashing corporation tax to by far the lowest rate in the G7, and literally giving away thousands of state schools to unaccountable private pseudo-charities (many run by Tory party donors!).

• To get an idea of how lost the Lib-Dem centrists became, consider the fact that they agreed to allow Iain Duncan Smith to condemn thousands more to absolute destitution by toughening his draconian sanctions regime in return for the limited roll-out of the 5p plastic bag charge! Of course plastic pollution in the environment is a bad thing, but deliberately and knowingly throwing thousands of real, often extremely vulnerable people under Iain Duncan Smith's bus to combat it is just grotesque.

• In 2014 Theresa May introduced her extremist "hostile environment" legislation and bragged about how the Tory government could "deport now, hear appeals later". Dozens of black British citizens were deported under these rules. Several died in exile. Thousands more were denied employment, housing, access to public services, access to banking services, even medical treatment. The majority of 'centrists' either voted in favour of this disgusting legislation, with only a tiny minority of MPs opposing it on principle (or because their "cold hard ideologies" wouldn't allow them to enable it as Gina Miller would no doubt describe it).

• Then the Labour centrists threw away the 2015 general election with their ridiculous decision to pathetically imitate ruinous Tory austerity dogma rather than oppose it head on.

• After their election defeat Labour centrists like Chris Leslie actually tried to argue that losing the election by copying Tory extremism rather than opposing it meant Labour should shift even further to the right! Thankfully the Labour membership strongly disagreed and voted for a candidate who would actually oppose ruinous Tory austerity dogma instead of meekly copying it.

• During the Labour leadership election the Labour centrists decided to abstain on a massive programme of Tory welfare cuts designed to further impoverish the poor, especially the working poor. Jeremy Corbyn was the only Labour leadership candidate to vote against it.

Centrist collusion with Tory austerity dogma had appalling consequences: The longest period of sustained wage devaluation on record, public services put under massive strain or shut down entirely, in-work benefits slashed, soaring food bank dependency, exploitative employment practices like Zero Hours Contracts and fake self-employment spreading like wildfire ...

Then it came to the Brexit vote and suddenly the complacent centrists were trapped in a pit of their own digging. The far-right Brextremists opportunistically blamed immigrants and the EU for the wage collapse, the failing public services, the in-work poverty, the suffering ... But the centrists couldn't fight back with the truth that these things were the result of austerity, because they were all complicit with austerity.

The only way the centrists have countered the far-right anti-immigrant anti-EU lies would have been to admit that 'centrism' itself was a fraud!

Amazingly centrists still occupy this bubble of delusion that it's somehow morally superior to triangulate with hard-right Tory austerity dogma than to oppose it. That all the 'centrist' MPs abstaining on Theresa May's vile "hostile environment" policy was acceptable and palatable xenophobia, but the xenophobic Brextremist lies were somehow so much worse than a policy they couldn't even be bothered to oppose that eventually led to British citizens dying in exile abroad!

The problem is that centrists promised us that their watered down version of neoliberalism would bring prosperity, but what it's actually delivered is Tory austerity dogma, collapsing wages, failing public services, exploitative employment practices, ridiculous privatisation scams, grotesque "hostile environment" policies, soaring in-work poverty, and eventually the centrist's own worst nightmare; Brexit.

But rather than admit their culpability in creating this dreadful situation, they're intent on moral high-horsing and abusing everyone to the left, and everyone to the right of them as "fascists"!

And it's exactly this kind of self-aggrandising and aloof sneering that's going to keep them in the political wilderness, because like it or not, the idea of aimlessly drifting around in the totally artificial territory of the 'centre ground' is finished.

The choice now is between the hard-right neoliberals who want to keep us on the same course we've been on for four decades (more privatisation, more undermining of workers rights, more public service cutbacks, more under-investment in infrastructure spending and research and development, more welfare cuts for the poor, more tax cuts and lavish handouts for the mega-rich) or those on the left who want to change direction and make Britain more of a high-tech, high-skill society with a decent welfare system like Norway, Finland, Germany, or Denmark.

Of course it's necessary to take an ideological position to step away from the complacency and aimlessness of the political 'centre', but there's nothing "cold" or "hard" about opposing the political orthodoxy of welfare cuts on the most vulnerable people in society (the sick, the disabled, the working poor, the jobless, the children, the elderly and infirm ...) in order to lavish corporations and the mega-rich with ever more tax cuts and handouts.

Quite the contrary, it takes a "cold hard" heart to go along with such barbarity solely because you want to maintain the illusion that by doing so you're somehow a 'moderate' occupying the 'centre ground'!

When centrism actively helps the Tories grind the most vulnerable people in society into absolute destitution for five years in order to feed the greed of the mega-rich, and then centrists accuse others who object to this horrific agenda of "fascism" and having "cold hard ideologies" then you really can't expect anyone other than your ever-diminishing echo chamber of delusional 'centrists' to applaud your unbelievably hypocritical message.

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