Why are so many Remainers voting for the Lib-Dem austerity-enablers?

So apparently the UK political scene is so banjaxed that we're actually trusting Lib-Dems again, and it's not even four years since their disastrous coalition with the Tories came to an end!

Maybe Remainers flocking to support the pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, social safety net-trashing Lib-Dems would make some kind of sense if the Lib-Dems had shown any kind of remorse for what they wilfully helped the Tories to do to the United Kingdom. But no. There's no remorse at all. 

• There's no remorse over the economically illiterate austerity agenda that led to the slowest post-crisis economic recovery in centuries, and which still hasn't eliminated the deficit despite the fact they said it would have done before May 2015 (over four years ago).

• There's no remorse over the deliberate wage repression policies that led to the worst sustained decline in UK workers' wages on record, and set up an entire decade of lost wage growth.

• There's no remorse over the privatisation of the Royal Mail property portfolio at an absurdly tiny fraction of its real value. In fact the remorse is so non-existent that they even elected the man who ripped the public off to the tune of £hundreds of millions as their current leader!

• There's no remorse about the soaring rates of child poverty, and in-work poverty, nor over the fact that the vast majority of austerity cuts were loaded onto the shoulders of women, especially single mothers.

• There's no remorse over helping Theresa May slash the police force by 21,000 and close literally hundreds of police stations, which has contributed to the violent crime epidemic we're suffering today.

• There's no remorse about their decision to oversee the lowest rate of house building since the 1920s, while using financial trickery to re-inflate the housing bubble and drive housing costs back up and beyond the unsustainable levels before the 2008 bankers' insolvency crisis.

• There's no remorse over the brutal Tory sanctions regime, nor the despicable disability denial system that has resulted in literally thousands of people dying within weeks of being declared "fit for work" and thrown off their disability benefits.

• There's no remorse over Lib-Dem votes in favour of deeply illiberal policies like secret courts, the gagging law, bedroom tax, dripa, Theresa May's Hostile Environment, and the catastrophic strategy of turning Libya into a lawless terrorism breeding ground like Blair and Bush did to Iraq.

• And worst of all there's no remorse about the way the far-right blamed the collapsing living standards these disgusting policies causes on immigrants and the EU in order to promote Brexit, and the Lib-Dems just bit their tongues, because any effort to explain that the real causes of the living standards collapse (austerity, wage repression, infrastructure under-investment, public service cuts, vandalism of the social safety net) would have illustrated their own complicity. So they just stayed silent and let the far-right win.

And now just look at the delight on the faces of Danny Alexander, Nick Clegg, and George Osborne in the photo above.

These three men impoverished literally millions of their fellow countrymen, and deliberately trashed the future economic potential of the UK in order to fund a disgusting sequence of tax cuts and handouts to corporations and the mega-rich.

They raked in lavish six figure salaries while they were doing it, and now all three have quit politics to rake in even more extravagant salaries from private sector employers.

They don't give a shit about all the people they trampled into destitution, nor the fact that their ruinous economic policies created the dramatic collapse in living standards that led directly to Brexit.

But somehow, even when there are plenty of explicitly anti-austerity options for Remainers to choose from (Green Party, SNP, Plaid Cymru) Remainers are flocking to support the austerity-enabling Lib-Dems.

Assuming that people aren't completely gullible idiots with goldfish-memories, the only possible conclusion is that an awful lot of Remainers are the comfortably well off who never suffered the truly dire consequences of austerity dogma, wage repression, welfare cuts, and public service destruction.

They want to reward the party that enabled all of this malice in the first half of this decade because they were comfortably well-to-do during that period, and quite content at the time because the impoverishment was happening to other people below them on the social ladder.

They want to go back to the way things were before because they were perfectly comfortable when the destitution was being forced on "the lower orders" in order to fund tax cuts and handouts for corporations and the mega rich.

And they certainly don't want to consider that the vile poverty-spreading policies the Lib-Dems enabled were one of the main causal factors in the Brexit chaos in the first place.

They're like lung cancer sufferers dramatically increasing the amount of cigarettes they smoke in the hope that it'll somehow cure the disease they've given themselves.

By supporting a party that enabled so much ideological malice against the poor, working classes, disabled people, local communities, they're actually intent on making themselves look exactly like the aloof metropolitan elitists that the Leave camp always love to portray Remainers as.

Every time they turn up in comments sections to proudly brag that they're voting Lib-Dem because they "don't care about anything else except stopping Brexit", they're displaying their outright contempt for the people who actually suffered under the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition.

If these people can afford to not care about austerity dogma, wage repression, public service cuts, vandalism of the social safety net, etc, then they can hardly complain when left behind communities say that Remainers don't give a shit about them and their problems can they?

And what makes it so much worse is that they're so mindlessly optimistic that the Lib-Dems won't just completely shaft them again.

How exactly does electing a load of pro-austerity pro-privatisation neoliberals into the European Parliament do anything to stop Brexit when the only place it can actually be stopped is Westminster?

Voting for the austerity-enablers who helped create the Brexit backlash in the first place is nonsense, especially since boosting the number of austerity-enforcing neoliberals in the European Parliament does nothing practical to actually stop Brexit whatever.

But then the Brexit Party Faragists are ridiculous nonsense on the other side of the Brexit spectrum, so I guess maybe the thinking of these Lib-Dem supporters is as simple as "if Brexit supporters are going to vote for a polarised right-wing nonsense party, then so will we"!

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Alan Sugar knows nothing about the British rail system, and even less about communism

Labour are moving ahead in most of the polls and suddenly the political right are shrieking frightened and incoherent abuse all over the Internet again.

Alan Sugar's furious accusation that Jeremy Corbyn is a "communist idiot" because of Labour's policy of renationalising the UK rail network is a case in point.

The first thing to note is that a significant majority of British people actually want the railways renationalised.

If it's "communism" to want vital infrastructure and public services like the rail network to be run on a not-for-profit basis for the benefit of the British people and the British economy, then a clear majority of Brits are a bunch of communist idiots by Alan Sugar's warped definition.

That's the problem with furiously screeching "communism" at popular and sensible centre-left democratic socialist policies like public ownership of the railways. The more that venal right-wing propagandists like Alan Sugar do it, the more they actually make communism look like a good idea!

Then there's Sugar's absurd claim that private ownership of rail franchises has improved the railways, when in reality Britain has an increasingly expensive and overcrowded rail network, with very low levels of investment, and many services outside London still operating clapped out old trains that were built before privatisation in 1994!

And what's worse is that this expensive, over-crowded, under-invested farce of a system comes at the cost of far higher public subsidies than it used to cost to run the entirety of British Rail before privatisation!

The British pubic pay twice as much to support the railways today as we did when it was a not-for-profit public service, all just to allow the likes of Richard Branson to siphon £300 million out of the system in private profits.

It's quite incredible to try to credit the people guilty of ripping vast profits out of the system for any marginal improvements in the system, when any taxpayer-funded improvements over the last 25 years have happened despite the private profiteers, not because of them.

Then there's the problem that if Alan Sugar believes it's "communist" to have publicly owned railways, then Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Japan, Switzerland, Canada, Italy, Belgium, Singapore, Ireland, and even Northern Ireland must all be communist states!

Who knew that "communism" was actually so commonplace?

Then there's the fact that 74% of the UK rail network are actually operated by the state rail companies of other countries like the Netherlands, France, Germany, Singapore, Hong Kong, and China.

If supporting public ownership of the railways makes someone a "communist", then supporting the current UK franchising model (which allows foreign state-ownership but bars the UK from bidding to run its own railways) obviously makes the likes of Alan Sugar a supporter of foreign communism!

As a self-appointed cheerleader for the current rail franchising model Alan Sugar believes that UK should be the only state on earth that is barred from running UK rail services, while the state rail companies of ... errr ... "communist" countries like Germany, France, the Netherlands and Singapore should be allowed to run British rail franchises!

See what a pickle people get themselves into when they wantonly lob accusations of "communism" around without even bothering to acquaint themselves with the absolutely basic facts first?

Once we see the screeching abuse of people like Alan Sugar in the context of some actual facts about the UK rail system it's beyond obvious that he's got an incredible amount of brass neck to be calling anyone else an "idiot", and that he resorts to such venal abuse and hyperbolic accusations because he simply hasn't got the intellect or knowledge to contest the argument with stuff like facts and evidence.

But instead of getting upset at this kind of vitriolic abuse, the majority of us who want decent not-for-profit public services that are run for the benefit of the British people and the British economy should be delighted that the only arguments that supporters of the private profiteers can muster are vitriol, abuse, fact-aversion, hyperbole, and glaring logical incoherence.

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How the Tories used "divide and conquer" tactics to trash all of our wages

Since the Tories were enabled back into power in 2010 workers in the United Kingdom have suffered an unprecedented attack on the value of their wages.

The wage collapse

George Osborne's imposition of hard-right austerity dogma and wage repression resulted in the longest sustained fall in the real value of workers' wages since records began.

In fact the only country in the entire developed world to have suffered a post-crisis collapse in wages as bad as Britain's was crisis-stricken Greece, and they were forced into imposing austerity dogma and wage repression by the Troika, the Tories imposed the same toxic hard-right economic snake oil on Britain simply because they wanted to.

The dreadful outcome of these fanatically right-wing economic policies put UK workers in a uniquely bad position. The UK is the only developed nation in the world where the economy has been growing, but the share of the wealth going to workers has been in decline, which leaves the obvious question of where all that extra wealth has been going if not to working people.

Another obvious question that arises is how on earth the Tories have managed to get away with such a prolonged ideological attack on the wages of hard-working people without triggering a furious backlash.

Propaganda

One of the obvious reasons the Tories have got away with this sustained ideological assault on ordinary working people is the fact that the complicit mainstream media barely ever covers the issue.

The facts that British workers have suffered the worst wage collapse since records began should be the narrative that underpins pretty much every newspaper article about politics or the economy, but somehow the ideologically driven Tory "war on wages" is a story that only ever pops up intermittently, with much greater prominence given to absolute drivel like Diane Abbott's bouts of innumeracy, fake stories about Jeremy Corbyn breaking a student debt promise he never made, and endless hate-mongering attacks against any public figure who dares argue for anything but the most extreme-right anti-democratic interpretation of Brexit.

Not only have the mainstream media been complicit with the Tory "war on wages" by omission, they've also desperately failed to ridicule the ridiculous Orwellian propaganda narrative from the Tories that they're the party for "hardworking people".

The Tories have orchestrated the worst collapse in workers' wages on record, repeatedly slashed in-work social security (Tax Credits, sick pay, the child welfare system, maternity & paternity pay, Employment Support Allowance ...), attacked workers' rights (like the right of low-income workers to take bad bosses to Employment Tribunals without paying £1,200 in unlawful Tory tribunal fees), and created a system where a shocking 55% of all families living in poverty are working families.

It's absolutely extraordinary that the mainstream media have allowed an anti-worker party like this to dress themselves up as friends of "hardworking people" without repeatedly calling them out on their completely backwards "black is white" propaganda.

Divide and conquer

One of the classic right-wing political tactics is to drive divisions within sectors of society in order to get them hating each other, rather than fighting back against the government that is actually to blame for most of their problems.

The division the Tories have created in order to drive down all of our wages is between public sector and private sector workers.

The right-wing press have been particularly helpful to the Tories in helping spread this social division with their continual attacks on public sector employees, especially teachers and NHS staff.

The idea is to stoke jealousy amongst private sector employees about the supposedly brilliant wages and fantastic pensions enjoyed by public sector workers in order to justify imposing real terms pay cuts on public sector workers year after year, whilst simultaneously increasing their workloads too.

The economy is interconnected

Dim-witted private sector employees buy into the crude envy politics of the right-wing press and actually end up supporting the public sector pay freeze. They support it because they're actually gullible enough believe the ridiculous narrative that public sector wage repression is about equalising conditions between the public and private sector, rather than a political means of driving down the wages of all of us.

The reason they're too stupid to understand is that they've been conditioned into thinking about the economy in super-simplistic "us and them" terms, rather than seeing the economy as a spectacularly complex mass of interconnections.

Just think about it. If nurses, paramedics and other NHS staff are hit by huge real terms pay cuts for seven consecutive years, what kind of effect would this have on the local economy? 

Would the private sector employees of a hospital's now-struggling local coffee shops and sandwich bars be better off, or worse off, as increasingly over-worked medical staff bring packed lunches instead of eating out?

Would local businesses like restaurants, cinemas, gyms, and takeaways fare better or worse as their public sector clientele are forced to cut back dramatically on luxury expenditure?

If public sector wages in your town are collapsing and people are quitting public sector jobs in droves to seek private sector employment, is this increased competition for private sector jobs going to have an upwards or downwards influence on wages in the private sector?

Anyone who can't see that an intense campaign of wage repression against one sector of society is going to have a knock-on effect on their own wages too is obviously so riddled with envy that they've abandoned even the most basic critical thinking skills in favour of outright jealousy and hate.

Tory inertia

Remember how the Tory party actually cheered themselves when they won their vote to continue repressing the wages of the firefighters, police officers and NHS staff who were the heroues of the Grenfell fire and the terrorist attacks in London and Manchester?

Those cheers were an illustration of the ideological hatred that Tories have towards public sector workers (despite being particularly well-paid public sector workers themselves!). 

To actually cheer themselves for their continued attacks on public sector pay just goes to show how much the Tory party have bought into their own vile divisive propaganda.

A significant proportion of the Tory party are now so enamoured with their own anti-public sector propaganda that there is no way that the party can change direction without triggering yet another internal party civil war on top of the battles that are already raging over Europe and Theresa May's pathetic leadership.

These people actually believe that it makes economic sense to attack workers' wages which depresses economic demand, and create a repetition of the household debt boom that preceded the 2007-08 financial sector meltdown.

They also see public sector workers like nurses, firefighters and teachers as the new "enemy within" who need to be attacked and crushed like the miners were in the 1980s.

The Tories are now in a hopeless bind because they're incapable of seeing beyond their own propaganda. 

They've spent seven years making excuses for socially and economically ruinous austerity dogma, and they've spend seven years deliberately repressing all of our wages.

Just look at the epic struggle Jeremy Corbyn has had trying to tear the Labour Party right away from their fixation with hard-right austerity dogma and attacks on the in-work benefit system, and Labour are traditionally the workers' party (hence the name)!

If Corbyn's had such a difficult job of steering Labour away from hard-right austerity dogma and wage repression policies, just imagine how difficult it would be for a new Tory leader to convince their MPs and party members that they need to reverse austerity and stop wage repression because they've been guilty of driving the UK economy in totally the wrong direction for seven disastrous years.

As long as this Tory government continues to defy the national interest by clinging onto power, there's going to be nothing but the most superficial PR-driven changes of direction.

As long as they cling to power their wage repression policies which affect all of us will continue to increase rates of in-work poverty, cripple economic demand, and re-inflate the dangerous household debt bubble.

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David Cameron's latest Orwellian propaganda trope is unbelievable

Even after seven years of ruinous austerity dogma David Cameron is still peddling the lie that slashing the incomes and public services of the majority to fund handouts to the mega-rich minority is a sensible and decent way of running a country.

At a leadership* conference in South Korea David Cameron had the absolute cheek to accuse people who want to see an end to the deliberate Tory policy of wage repression against our brave and dedicated emergency service workers of being "selfish", and to pretend that his ruinous austerity agenda wasn't a hopeless failure, but actually "sound finances".

Here's what he said:

"The opponents of so called austerity couch their arguments in a way that make them sound generous and compassionate. They seek to paint the supporters of sound finances as selfish, or uncaring. The exact reverse is true. Giving up on sound finances isn’t being generous, it’s being selfish: spending money today that you may need tomorrow."

Selfishness

Tory austerity only ever existed for the poor and ordinary. David Cameron and his wealthy chums dressed up the myth of national belt-tightening as a necessity and claimed that we're all in this together. But while there was never enough money for public services, sensible levels of infrastructure investment, or decent pay for public sector workers, there was always somehow plenty enough for the Tories to lavish ever more handouts on corporations and the mega-rich.

Only in the Orwellian world of hard-right propaganda is it possible to argue that impoverishing the masses in order to enrich the mega-rich is decent, and wanting to stop this deliberate policy of salary erosion for nurses, teachers, police officers and fire fighters is "selfish".

Sound finances

The Tory myth of economic competence is one of the most extraordinary political deception of all time, yet somehow people keep on believing it.

Just consider their record over the last seven years. They promised to eradicate the deficit by May 2015 but failed spectacularly, and now they say it won't be gone until the mid-2020s; they promised to retain Britain's AAA credit rating, then promptly lost it; they've engaged in all kinds of ludicrous false economics like slashing flood defence spending and snatching people's disability vehicles only to hand them £65,000+ to take taxis to work for the next three years; and in the process they've created more new public debt than every single Labour government in history combined!

The reason they've made such a mess is that David Cameron's hard-right conception of "sound finances" is economically illiterate from even the most rudimentary macroeconomic perspective.

Slashing the incomes of the poor and ordinary, and lumbering the younger generations with vast student debts seriously erodes people's disposable incomes.

People with less disposable income spend less in the economy (causing a reduction in aggregate demand), and they're very much less likely to invest in economically productive activity (setting up small businesses, building an extension on their home ...) and they're more likely to rack up large personal debts in order to keep their heads above water.

Redistributing the savings from repressed wages and lowered investment in university funding to the mega-rich doesn't create anything like as much economic activity as has been destroyed because the mega-rich are very much more likely to save any additional income than spend it, or even just siphon it straight out of the economy into offshore tax havens.

The idea that enriching the already super-wealthy at the expense of the majority is in any way an example of "sound finances" is yet another one of these pervasive Orwellian myths that the right-wing billionaire propaganda barons and their depraved minions love to spread.

Tomorrow

Yet another pervasive hard-right reality-reversal is that austerity dogma is good for the future, when it absolutely isn't.

As a result of Tory austerity dogma the UK spends less on infrastructure investment than any other major economy (just 1.7% of GDP) meaning that we're being badly left behind in the global modernisation race.

The Tories have also slashed the universities budget, gutted the adult education system, hollowed out support for innovative new businesses, and are now implementing the harshest cuts to our schools in decades.

Only the most gullible of people would fall for the lie that borrowing to invest when interest rates on government debt are at all-time record lows is a reckless betrayal of future generations, whilst simultaneously supporting massive ideologically driven Tory assaults on our future economic potential through under-funding of our education systems (resulting in a low-skill, low-wage workforce) and a deliberate strategy of under-investment in infrastructure (resulting in businesses abandoning Britain because of its outdated and crumbing infrastructure and services).

"The exact reverse is true"

Anyone who has been paying attention over the last seven years will have spotted at least some of the Orwellian reality reversal tactics used by the Tory party to defend their depraved policies, but in this short comment about Tory wage repression David Cameron goes one step further than normal.

He doesn't just reverse reality by claiming that it's "selfish" to not support the Tory policy of redistributing ever more wealth from the majority of us to the mega-rich minority, but he also accuses the people who are in touch with reality (that the repression of nurses' and fire fighters' wages needs to be stopped) of being the ones who are guilty of reversing reality!

Cameron is clearly and undeniably accusing others of using the very same reality-reversing propaganda tactics that he spent his six years as Prime Minister relying upon.

Accusing other people of what you yourself are guilty of is abusive psychological projection.

It's a strategy used by sociopaths.

Conclusion

It's extraordinary that there are still millions who haven't woken up to the fact that the Tories and their collaborators in the mainstream media use all kinds of reality-reversing propaganda to justify their "take from the majority to give to the minority" economic agenda, and even more extraordinary that there are people out there who will take David Cameron's words at face value and actually believe that he's a straight-talking and honest guy, while those who disagree with his socially and economically ruinous austerity dogma are the ones who are guilty of reversing reality!

 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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* = Who on earth would listen to leadership advice from a man who ran away when his own gamble beckfired?

Just look at the deluded drivel Tories are coming up with to appeal to the under-40s

The Tory party, and their supporters in the mainstream media establishment are horrifically out of touch with what is going on with ordinary people in ordinary communities across the UK, but one factor they simply cannot ignore is the demographic time bomb they're sitting on.

The working age population of the UK voted in favour of Labour's transformative manifesto, but the Tories were saved from defeat by a massive turnout of hard-right pensioners who want even more Tory wage repression imposed on UK workers because they're retired and it just doesn't bother them.

Even hopelessly out-of-touch Tories can see that this pensioner-reliance is totally unsustainable in the long-term, but the solutions they're offering are absolutely absurd, and none more so than the ludicrous nonsense proposed by the former Tory MP John Wheeler.

In a blog post entitled "The Conservatives need fresh thinking and new policies to help the young" Wheeler correctly identifies that the Tories have become absolutely toxic amongst the under-40s, but his unbelievably patronising attitude and his absurd solution to this Tory problem are so ridiculously out of touch with reality it's laughable.

Here's what he wrote:

Where the Party has failed is with so many under the age of 40. In the next election, the campaign must engage with this generation; one that does not read the print media, or much bother with the television news, but seems to believe anything on Facebook or twitter. That is where the argument about the non existent forest of money trees must be won.  

 Before then, it will be essential to address the widespread concerns that many have as to student debt, unaffordable housing, and a low wage economy. Lots can be done by the Treasury. Parents and grandparents with property and assets are sometimes in a position to make gifts of cash but this is limited to £3,000 a year. Why not make this £20,000?

The idea that the under-40s "believe anything on Facebook or Twitter" is such patronising drivel it's unreal.

It's beyond obvious that social media users don't just "believe anything" they see, because otherwise we'd all have been suckered in by the unprecedented Tory efforts to buy social media popularity by spamming their dishonest dark ads all over our social media platforms for the entire 2017 General Election campaign wouldn't we?

Wheeler then moves on from dismissing all under-40s as a bunch of hopelessly gullible fuckwits to promoting the idea that we can all be won over with a campaign of economically illiterate baby talk about magic money trees, as if it's Labour's costed manifesto that plucked cash out of nowhere rather than Theresa May's £1 billion bung for the DUP to buy the Westminster votes of their 10 MPs.

Wheeler's assumption that we're all just a bunch of hopelessly gullible idiots who can be easily mislead with a load of demeaning economic idiot fodder about magic money trees isn't even the worst of it, just look at his proposed solution.

There are loads of policies that the Tories could steal off Labour to court the under-40 vote.

They could scrap tuition fees and write off student debts; they could invest in technical colleges and skills training; they could ban exploitative Zero Hours Contracts; they could properly regulate the rental market; they could scrap the punitive ban on young people claiming in-work social security like Housing Benefit; they could scrap their exploitative "workfare" scams; they could increase the minimum wage for young people; they could bring back the university grants and NHS bursaries that Theresa May scrapped; they could invest in social housing; they could begin supporting the progressive and green values favoured by the younger generations ...

But no. Wheeler's proposed solution is to offer a huge tax handout to the super-wealthy so that they can evade Inheritance Tax by siphoning £20,000 per year to their kids tax free!
What kind of bizarre bubble of wealth and privilege does John Wheeler live in where regular under-40s all have a wealthy relative who is rich enough (and actually willing to) shower them in cash to the tune of £20k a year?

The idea that regular under-40s have parents or grandparents wealthy enough to bankroll us to the tune of £20,000 per year is absolutely laughable.

What's more it's a fucking insult. Even if we did have parents wealthy enough to bankroll our lifestyles like that, we don't want a system of hereditary handouts, we just want the same kinds of opportunities that previous generations had: Stuff like half-decent houses that we can actually afford to buy or rent, stable employment with wages that aren't continually eroded away by inflation, and the right to debt-free education so that we can contribute more to society by developing our skills ... You know: The stuff that Wheeler's generation completely took for granted when they were under-40.

Another of Wheeler's proposed policies is a tax-free £20,000 per year ISA for the young!

The idea that we all have a spare £20,000 per year kicking around to stuff into tax-free ISAs is another demonstration of how shockingly out of touch these Tory elitists are.

The starting salary of nurses, police officers, teachers and fire fighters is around £20,000 per year and that's before they pay Income Tax and National Insurance contributions!

Public sector workers haven't had a real pay rise in seven years thanks to the Tory campaign of wage repression, and now these deluded Tory buffoons think they can buy back their votes by saying we'll let your mummy and daddy give you £20,000 per year so you can stick it all in a tax free ISA!

If calling us thick, patronising us with sub-juvenile economic idiot fodder, and proposing a scheme to allow the super-rich to evade Inheritance Tax by gradually siphoning their wealth to their kids in £20,000 per year lumps to stick into tax free ISAs is the Tory blueprint for winning back support amongst regular under-40s, then these shockingly out-of-touch buffoons are clearly even more doomed than the polling data suggests.

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The Tories just cheered themselves for slashing the wages of our brave emergency service workers

On June 28th 2017 the Tory party benches at the House of Commons celebrated after the Tory MPs teamed up with their newly-bribed DUP enablers to defeat an opposition move to end the public sector pay freeze.

Over the last few weeks the Tories repeatedly praised the emergency services: After the Manchester Arena bombing; after the London Bridge attack; and after the inferno at Grenfell tower.

And it's only days since the Tories found £1.5 billion in public money to end austerity in Northern Ireland as a bribe to ensure DUP support for continued austerity in England, Wales, and Scotland.

But when it came to putting their money where their mouth is and stopping the real terms cuts to emergency service workers' pay, the Tories are suddenly skinflint bastards again.

Anyone who knows a bit of rudimentary macroeconomics will understand how counterproductive it is to repress the wages of ordinary people with below inflation pay rises, whilst simultaneously distributing tens of billions in handouts to corporations and the mega-rich.

The reason that the Tory policy of crushing the wages of ordinary people in order to fund handouts for the tiny mega-rich minority is such a bad move is that ordinary people tend to spend the majority of any extra earnings in the economy, which creates economic demand, while the mega-rich are much more likely to either save any extra-income, or even extract it out of the UK economy altogether via dodgy offshore tax-dodger investments, which actually reduces demand (see my article on the Marginal Propensity to Consume).

It also hardly takes an economics genius to understand that repression of public sector wages for seven years has a downwards effect on private sector pay too, which is one of the main reasons that the UK has been suffering the joint worst wage slump in the developed world.

Continuing this economically destructive agenda of crushing the wages of our police, fire fighters, NHS staff and service personnel is no reason to cheer, but that's exactly what Tory MPs did when the result of the vote was announced.

MPs vote to reject Labour's amendment to the Queen's speech calling for public sector pay cap to be lifted, by 323 votes to 309 pic.twitter.com/AXkNseH99p

— Sky News (@SkyNews) June 28, 2017

The Tories have spent the last seven years repressing the incomes of our fantastic emergency service workers and hampering their abilities to to their jobs with savage budget cuts and facility closures, and when given the opportunity to stop this dreadful agenda, the Tories decided to give them another kicking, then cheer themselves for doing it.

It's absolutely sickening that 13.6 million people voted for this malicious, two-faced, and economically destructive Tory mob to continue wrecking our public services and imposing brutal real terms cuts on the wages of people who run towards danger to help others, rather than obeying the natural instinct to run away from it.

It's impossible to understand how Tory voters don't feel a deep sense of shame at seeing the Tories they voted into office continue their seven year long campaign of wage repression against the very same people they've repeatedly praised as heroes over the last few weeks.

It's only days since the Tories found £1.5 billion in public money to bribe the DUP into supporting their malicious government, so we now have absolute proof that the Tories can find the money to end austerity measures if they want to.

But ending austerity in Northern Ireland was a price they were willing to pay for their own political self-interest, and ending austerity for emergency service workers is a price they're unwilling to pay because they see no personal benefit in it for themselves.

Either Tory voters must be feeling a profound sense of shame and regret at enabling this disgusting self-serving Tory hypocrisy, or they don't because they actually agree with the ideologically driven Tory agenda of crushing the wages of our brave emergency service workers while they lavish ever more lucrative handouts on corporations and the mega-rich.

Let's hope that this latest display of outrageous Tory malice is enough to make a lot of people regret their decision to vote Tory, and swear not to make the same mistake 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.

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