The barbaric Tory sanctions regime is still going on

The draconian Tory sanctions regime is callous, shockingly ineffective, economically unjustifiable, and deadly.

The stated purpose of the DWP Sanctions regime is to shock benefits claimants into putting more effort into looking for work by consigning them to periods of absolute destitution.

The Sanctions regime hit its peak between 2012 and 2015 during the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition, with up to 90,000 people per month hurled into absolute poverty, and never fewer than 30,000 people per month subjected to either Jobseekers or Universal Credit sanctions in the austerity coalition era.

The sanctioning rate has dropped off since the Lib-Dems left government, but there are still thousands of people per month receiving letters like the one above, and being forced to go through lengthy (and expensive to the taxpayer) appeals processes, or just give up fighting against a system that's designed to abuse them and live in extreme poverty for as long as it takes.

Callous

Excerpt from a 2014 Johnny Void article
about Jobcentres rewarding staff for 
high sanctions rates.

We know that during the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition Jobcentre staff were given mandatory targets to sanction a set percentage of claimants per week, in order to get the unemployment figures down (people subjected to sanctions aren't counted as officially unemployed).

It's beyond obvious that Jobcentre staff ended up targeting the mentally ill and severely uneducated by sanctioning every minor error, or deliberately giving them impossible tasks to comply with (like two appointments at the same time so they miss one and get sanctioned).

It's just so much easier to target the vulnerable than it is to expend significant amounts of time and energy on catching the tiny minority of die-hard benefits scroungers who know exactly which hoops to jump through to avoid losing their payments.

Perhaps most shockingly of all, the Liberal Democrats have openly bragged about how they helped the Tories make this sanctions regime even more draconian, in return for 5p charges on plastic bags.

Ineffective

We know from extensive research that sanctions are a massively counter-productive method of encouraging people into work.

Just think about it for yourself. If you had your income reduced to just £5.82 to last an entire month, how would you afford to print CVs, travel to job interviews, clean your clothes, eat properly so you can concentrate on making a good impression?

Multiple research papers have found that the victims of DWP sanctions ended up suffering extreme poverty, ill-health, mental distress, and resorting to survival crime like shoplifting.

Yet the Tories persist in using these sanctions (which disproportionately hit disabled people) under their warped belief that you motivate the poor to work harder by making them poorer, while you motivate the rich to work harder by giving them ever more lavish handouts and tax breaks!

Deadly

It's no exaggeration to say that sanctions are deadly. The most notorious example was the death of the ex-serviceman David Clapson who died of diabetic ketoacidosis in 2016 after being left penniless by sanctions and having his insulin supply spoiled because his electricity supply was cut off.

Although the most high-profile case because of the campaigning of his family members, David Clapson is far from the only example, with dozens of people having been driven to suicide after suffering sanctions.

Economically unjustifiable

Three years ago the National Audit Office found that the benefits sanctions regime costs more to administer than it will ever save in reduced benefits payments.

This means that the Tories have actually been using public funds to treat people in this despicable manner, and they've continued doing so despite knowing that it's a total waste of public money.

These Tory devils know perfectly well that sanctions don't work, yet expect the rest of us to actually subsidise their barbaric treatment of vulnerable and disabled people through our taxes because they apparently get some kind of kick out of it.

It would be bad enough if they were behaving like this in order to save a few million quid, but they're not saving anything, it's actually costing us fortunes to subsidise their system for treating vulnerable people in this disgusting way!

Conclusion

Even if you're the kind of person who doesn't care about all of the evidence that sanctions are unspeakably cruel and demonstrably ineffective, or that they're disproportionately used against vulnerable and disabled people, or even if you're completely indifferent about all of the suffering, misery, and death this barbaric regime has caused, surely you can't believe that it's a good or sensible use of public funds?

Surely you can't approve of the money you pay in taxes being used to subsidise a system designed to make vulnerable and disabled people suffer absolute destitution?

Surely you can think of better uses of your money than that, even if it's just being allowed to keep a bit more of it in your own pocket?

 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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The Brian Cox conundrum

If you're familiar with Twitter you'll know that every so often someone posts such an appalling take on there that you can't quite believe that they think like that. 

Often it's some kind of professional contrarian who whips up maximum publicity for themselves by saying the most extreme stuff possible, but then every now and again it's someone you actually admire.

I always assumed that because Professor Brian Cox is an intelligent and progressive guy, he'd be an ally of the most vulnerable people in society, but in a single Tweet he shattered that illusion to pieces.

Cox's Tweet was a reaction to John McDonnell saying that he's never seen human suffering like this in all the time he's been an MP, and that he can't forgive the Tories for what they've done to our communities, and to the most vulnerable people in society.

Here's what McDonnell actually said:

"I go back to my constituency and I've never seen human suffering like this in all the time I've been an MP and in the 40 years I've lived in my constituency."

John McDonnellpic.twitter.com/Y6l3AtnRpW

— The Pileus (@thepileus) November 21, 2018

Brian Cox's worst take Tweet implied that McDonnell's 'civil but not pally' attitude towards the Tories means that he desires a one-party state where all political debate is forbidden, and attempts to seek the moral high ground by directing sympathy towards the wealthy and privileged Tories that McDonnell doesn't feel like being chums with, instead of towards the vast numbers of ordinary people who have suffered absolute destitution and appalling circumstances as a result of Tory welfare extremism.

The devastating impact of Tory welfare extremism is all too familiar to those who have to pick up the pieces for the last eight years (charities, mental health workers, food bank volunteers, friends and families of the victims ...) and to those of us who are actually capable of basic human empathy too.

• The Tory party has a policy of systematically abusing disabled people by forcing them to go through dehumanising, discriminatory, and downright dishonest assessment processes. Their systematic mistreatment of disabled people has been vehemently condemned in a damning report by the United Nations, yet the Tories just ignored it and carried on regardless.

• The Tories have used hard-right austerity dogma to load the burden of the 2007-08 bankers' insolvency crisis onto the shoulders of poor and ordinary people, while continuing to shovel ever more tax breaks and handouts at the already mega-rich. 86% of Tory austerity dogma has been enforced on poor and ordinary women, while wealthy males (like Brian) have generally continued to do very nicely indeed. The United Nations have condemned Tory austerity dogma saying that it inflicts "unnecessary misery" and that if you got "a group of misogynistic men in a room" they probably couldn't devise a more effective way of hitting women!

• The roll-out of Tory Universal Credit has been an absolute disaster, causing massive increases in in-work poverty and food bank dependency in the areas it's been imposed on. It's such a flawed and damaging welfare reform it's impossible to explain how bad it is in just a bullet point, so here's a full article.

• One of the most malicious Tory policies of all is their strategy of using benefits sanctions to subject vulnerable people to absolute destitution for the most trivial of offences like being five minutes late for a Jobcentre appointment or selling remembrance poppies for a few hours a week. For years they lied that there were no targets to sanction certain numbers of people, but then the targets and league tables were leaked to the press. People have died because of Tory benefits sanctions, the most notorious example being the ex-serviceman David Clapson who died of diabetic ketoacidosis next to a pile of CVs after a benefit sanction left him unable to pay for food or electricity, meaning his insulin supply perished in his unpowered fridge.

So how is it that Brian Cox seems to have more sympathy with the wealthy and privileged Tories who have imposed these barbarous policies than with their victims?

How is he more upset that John McDonnell doesn't want to be pally with people whose welfare extremism is routinely condemned by the United Nations, than with the ideologically-driven architects of all of this suffering?
 

How is it that Cox creates the absurd argument that refusing to be buddies with people who wilfully inflict such suffering is akin to wanting a one-party dictatorship?

Brian Cox doesn't strike me as the kind of person who lacks basic human empathy, so presumably the reason he is more reviled by John McDonnell calmly criticising Tory welfare extremism than by the devastating real life consequences of this Tory extremism is that he's simply unaware. 

He just doesn't know anybody in the social classes who have suffered the appalling consequences of the systematic Tory abuse of disabled people, their devastating Universal Credit farce, their misogynistic austerity agenda, or their draconian sanctions regime.
Perhaps he's just so insulated from the devastating real-life consequences of Tory welfare extremism so he actually sees no reason to be angry?

Presumably everything is absolutely fine in the social circles he moves in, so he's got nothing better to do than post glib platitudes onto Twitter for Tories and the appalling "centrist dad" neoliberals to lap up.

Aside from the ivory-towered disregard for the people suffering at the wrong end of Tory disability abuse, Universal Credit, Sanctions, and austerity dogma, there's a far more important issue.

When Cox claims that refusing to be pally with ideological extremists shows that you believe in a one-party state he's wandering ineptly across the paradox of tolerance.

The basis of Cox's argument is utterly flawed. It's super-simplistic black and white thinking to say that just because you vehemently oppose the policies of a political opponent to the extent of not being pally with them, that you desire a one-party state.

Of course political debate is essential, but when it comes to stuff like Nazism, white-supremacy or the Tory policy of psychologically torturing disabled people, there's no grounds for friendly debate. This kind of extremism just needs to be opposed as vehemently and consistently as possible.

You don't convince Nazis to stop being Nazis with a friendly chat over canapés, and you don't stop the Tories from systematically abusing disabled people by being chums with them in the bars and diners of the Houses of Parliament either.   

I mean how far is Cox willing to go in his desire to see us befriend our political opponents?

Apparently misogynistic austerity dogma, the deadly sanctions regime, and the abuse of disabled people are just talking points amongst political buddies rather than outrages, so what about even more extreme political ideas like those who would just love the chance to begin rounding up people they disagree with into concentration camps? Do we have an obligation to be friendly with them too?

In political reality the only way to stop political extremism is unyielding resistance.

If I refuse to be pals with neo-Nazi thugs, does that mean I oppose democracy and desire a one-party state? 

Of course not.  

If I refuse to be chums with white supremacists who believe they're genetically superior to others because of the amount of melanin in their skin, does that mean I oppose democracy and desire a one-party state? 

Of course not.

And if actively supporting the systematic Tory abuse of disabled people is friendship red-line I won't cross, does that make me desire a one-party dictatorship? 

No. It makes me someone who finds it extremely difficult to turn a blind eye to the unspeakably suffering of others so that I can be buddies with one of the people who is wilfully making them suffer like that.

The idea that we should maintain friendly relationships with our political opponents, no matter how vile and damaging their policies is not just naive, it's incredibly dangerous.

Cox finishes off his Tweet that "certainty suggests hubris, doubt suggests wisdom", but this isn't even correct in his scientific field, let alone in politics.

Yes it's a great idea to keep an open mind where there's genuine debate, but when it comes to people like flat-earthers, climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers, and other psuedo-scientific kooks it's an appalling mistake to openly debate them as if their nonsense is as equally valid as your meticulous research.

The same goes for politics. There are few things better than a good civilised debate between friends with different views, but if someone is a neo-Nazi, or a White Power extremist, or someone who actively supports the systematic abuse of disabled people, you need to be firm with them that their politics are completely and utterly unacceptable, rather than creating the impression that the virtues of ethnic genocide, white supremacism, or the systematic persecution of disabled people are somehow open topics that are up for debate.

When it comes to life-wrecking political extremism there's no grounds for neutrality. Anything other than resistance is collusion, and it's simply grotesque if your ridiculous centrist delusions lead you to actively maintain friendships with the perpetrators without regard for the victims, just because you're afraid of actually picking a god-damned side.

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The depraved coalition deals the Lib-Dems cooked up with the Tories behind closed doors

Polly Mackenzie was never a Lib-Dem MP, but as one of Nick Clegg's core advisers she played a crucial role during the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition period. She's just admitted the kinds of depraved horse trading that went on between the Lib-Dems and the Tories at the time in a Twitter mini-thread.
 

She starts off with an unobjectionable and actually rather astute observation about how the Tories seem to announce a new green measure or plastics ban every time they want to move the news away from their latest scandal, but she followed the Tweet up with some more observations that shine a light on the grotesque horse trading the Lib-Dems did with the Tories.

She claims that the clampdown on plastics was actually a Lib-Dem idea, and that they finally secured the limited introduction of 5p charges on plastic bags in return for their support for a toughening of the draconian Tory benefit sanctions regime.

Here are a few facts about the benefits sanctions regime:

• Benefits sanctions condemn individuals and their families to periods of absolute destitution for up to two years by stopping their social security payments.

• Benefits sanctions have been applied for the most grotesquely inappropriate of "offences" such as having a heart attack during a work capacity assessment, a veteran selling poppies a few hours a week, being five minutes late to an interview, missing an appointment because their child was stillborn, missing an appointment because they had a stroke (see a list of grotesque examples with sources in this article)...

• Benefits sanctions have been shown not to work. It's obvious that removing a person's ability to eat properly, clean their clothes, print documents, travel to interviews reduces rather than increases their ability to find work, but the Tories insisted the opposite. That condemning people to absolute destitution is a way of helping people.

• The Tories repeatedly and vehemently denied that there were benefits sanctions targets and league tables, and that they had created a culture of sanctioning as many people as possible. In 2013 the sanctions targets and league tables were leaked to the press.

• A huge proportion of people caught up in sanctions destitution have been those with mental illnesses and learning disabilities. It's obvious why. If Jobcentre staff were under pressure to sanction a set number of people per week, it's much easier to trick a few mentally ill people into committing sanctionable offences than it is to spend huge amounts of time and effort catching out the tiny minority of hardened benefits scroungers who probably know the rules of the system better than the Jobcentre staff themselves.

• Doctors from Britain's leading mental health organisations have demanded that the government stop their sanctions regime because "it fails to get people back into work and damages their mental health".

• Benefits sanctions have killed. The ex-serviceman David Clapson died after suffering benefits sanctions. He was left with no money to buy food, and no money to pay for electricity. He was found dead from diabetic ketoacidosis with no food in his stomach, a supply of ruined insulin in his powerless fridge, and a pile of CVs by his dead body.

• Probably the most shocking thing of all is that the draconian sanctions system costs more to administer than it ever saves in reduced benefits payments, meaning that the Tories (and Lib-Dems) actually used taxpayers' cash to subsidise their malicious treatment of some of the most vulnerable people in society.

So in return for the limited introduction of 5p plastic bag charges the Lib-Dems green lighted even more savage Tory abuse of some of the most vulnerable people in society.

There's nothing wrong with caring about the environment, in fact it's highly commendable, but if you're willing to kick thousands of extremely vulnerable people under a bus in order to make a minor step forward in combating excess plastic waste, then you've got your priorities disgustingly wrong.

So the next time you hear someone trotting out the tired old Lib-Dem platitude about how they were a "moderating influence" on the Tories, remind them of the way they decided to give Iain Duncan Smith even more power to brutalise the most vulnerable people in society in return for nothing more than 5p plastic bag charges (that would have eventually been introduced anyway due to EU legislation).

 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 message to Britain: "don't get old, don't get sick, don't lose your job"

The 2015 General Election was an absolute disaster to any non-Scottish person with even remotely progressive social values. The Scots could celebrate their remarkable wipe-out of the neoliberalism-fixated Westminster establishment parties, but elsewhere there was little to celebrate after Ed Miliband squandered his golden opportunity to win a landslide victory by opposing ruinous Tory austerity dogma, because he chose to offer a disgustingly unpalatable and uninspiring prescription of austerity-lite snake oil instead.

One of the few highlights of the 2015 election was the people of Wirral West seeing sense and ditching their atrocious MP Esther McVey.

The ruthlessly self-serving McVey had spent the previous three years acting as Iain Duncan Smith's merciless henchwoman at the DWP, and the people of Wirral West were rightly sickened and appalled at her callous attitudes towards the poor, the sick, the disabled, and the unemployed, so lost her seat, and her role in government.

McVey used to brag about how rising dependency of food banks is a good thing, and she also had a central role in promoting the draconian Tory sanctions regime.

The mainstream media rarely address the issue of the benefits sanction regime that McVey had such an important role in expanding, but even fleeting analysis reflects extremely badly on the Tory party, so it's no surprise it gets so little coverage.

The first thing to note about McVey's beloved sanctions regime is that despite a barrage of lies and denials (including from McVey herself), the Tories operated a system of benefits sanctions targets and league tables designed to incentivise Jobcentre staff into sanctioning quotas of people per month. The purpose being to drive down the unemployment figures by throwing people off benefits for the most trivial of infractions (people out of work and not claiming benefits are not classed as unemployed!).

The next thing to note is that the most likely people to get caught up in the Tory benefits sanctions regime are the most vulnerable. Just think about it for a moment. If you were a hard-pressed Jobcentre employee with a target of sanctioning let's say two people a week, would it be easier to go after the minority of hardened benefits scroungers who probably know the benefits rules better than you do yourself, or to trick a few people with mental health issues or learning disabilities into committing sanctionable mistakes?

Just take the case of the former soldier David Clapson who was sanctioned and left penniless. He died at home from diabetic ketoacidosis after his electricity was cut off leaving his supply of insulin to spoil in the fridge. When opposition MPs questioned McVey over the dangers of sanctioning vulnerable people like David Clapson, she responded by accusing them of "inflaming" the issue. 

Just imagine the scheming callousness of a woman whose own policies have resulted in a man's death, who refuses to accept any responsibility, but instead tries to play politics by posing as the victim herself.

Another important thing to note is that Esther McVey repeatedly talked out of her posterior claiming that the sanctions regime exist to "help" the unemployed. 

The reality is the exact opposite. Numerous studies have shown that leaving people penniless hinders their ability to find work. Just think about it. If you can't afford to eat properly, clean your clothes, get a haircut, public transport fares, your phone/Internet bill, the cost of printing CVs ... would you really be more likely to find a job? All the research says no you wouldn't. Esther McVey says yes you would.

Then there's the absolute kicker. It turns out that deliberately thrusting hundreds of thousands of people per year into absolute destitution actually costs the taxpayer more money than it saves in reduced benefits payments!

This means that Esther McVey's draconian system of condemning hundreds of thousands of people per year to absolute poverty actually costs the taxpayer vast sums of money, making it a grotesque example of taxpayer subsidised Tory malice.

After she was rejected by the people of Wirral West the Tories handed McVey a ticket back into Westminster by parachuting her into the super-safe Tory seat of Tatton at the 2017 General Election. Now, within the space of a year, Theresa May has actually appointed this callous and scheming woman as the head of the DWP.

Make no mistake, this appointment is a clear statement of intent from Theresa May. She's not going to reverse course and stop squandering taxpayers' cash on the kinds of wasteful,  socially destructive, and downright malicious Tory impoverishment schemes favoured by Iain Duncan Smith.

In fact she's decided to double-down on this kind of disgusting hard-right malice by appointing the cruellest and most uncaring of Iain Duncan Smith's minions to carry on his work of punishing and abusing the poor and vulnerable.

You couldn't really get a stronger indication of Theresa May's absolute contempt for the welfare of the poorest and most vulnerable people in society than the appointment of Esther McVey as the head of the DWP.

So be warned. This is Theresa May's unmistakable message to the people of Britain: "don't get old, don't get sick, and don't lose your job".

 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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Philip Hammond actually claimed "there are no unemployed people"

Just imagine the mainstream media reaction if the shadow chancellor John McDonnell​ or anyone else from Labour had made a claim as ridiculous as there supposedly being no unemployed people in Britain. 

But that's exactly what the Tory Chancellor Philip Hammond did on the Andrew Marr Show.

Waiting for the same kind of festival of hate over this ludicrous Tory gaffe as Diane Abbott was given over her police numbers jumble during the election ... pic.twitter.com/OfnwE9UtHe

— Tom (AAV) (@Angry_Voice) November 19, 2017

We all remember the festival of hate that was aimed at Diane Abbott after she got her numbers horribly jumbled up during the general election, but at least she never made a claim as ludicrous as there being no unemployment at all.

Anyone who pays the remotest attention to politics must be well aware of the tricks and scams the Tories use to rig the unemployment figures like unemployed people forced to do unpaid "workfare" work being classed as employed, people working just a few hours a week on Zero Hours Contracts but still on benefits being classed as employed, people hit with draconian benefits sanctions not being classed as unemployed, economically inactive people not being classed as unemployed ...

We also know that the increase in the employment rate since 2010 has been matched by the longest sustained decline in UK workers' wages since records began. It's hardly ridiculous to suppose that the Tory policy of ruthlessly driving down workers' wages and working conditions has resulted in in a boom of low-paid, low-skill jobs as growing numbers of employers use exploitative employment practices like Zero Hours Contracts and fake self-employment in the gig economy in order to rinse as much profit as possible out of the UK workforce.

But we know that Hammond's ridiculous gaffe about there being no unemployed people will get nothing like the mainstream media attention Diane Abbott's mind fart got. And we also know that the mainstream media will continue championing the Tories' rigged unemployment figures without providing the caveat that they've only been achieved through horrific anti-welfare policies like sanctions, "workfare" and erecting as many obstacles as possible for people trying to claim unemployment benefits so that people (especially the mentally ill and under-educated) don't claim what they're actually entitled to.

 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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The 'centrist' bubble of delusion is absolutely extraordinary

I've just seen a bunch of smug centrists on Twitter lauding the 2010-2015 Coalition government as some kind of great success story because it wasn't as bad as the current shambles (the turd in the hand is better than a turd in the gob defence) and describing their litany of failures as "niggles".

Well here are just some of the catastrophic failings that these intolerably smug centrist types and the small core of die-hard Lib-Dems are trying to shrug off as just minor niggles.

Niggle 1: After the Lib-Dems decided to abandon the their core student demographic to win a tiny taste of second hand Tory power, students these days are being lumbered with £50,000+ in debts which 77% of them will never pay off despite entire lifetimes of paying a 9% aspiration tax on their disposable income. 

Niggle 2: Between 2010 and 2015 literally thousands of disabled people died within six weeks of being declared "fit for work" in Tory disability denial factories. Instead of doing something to combat this disgraceful situation, the coalition government tried to just hide the evidence of this death toll from public scrutiny.  Imagine the kind of person who considers a government desperately trying to hide the death toll from their systematic abuse of disabled people to be just a "niggle".

Niggle 3: The Coalition government introduced many unlawful pieces of legislation. Two of the most horrifying were Iain Duncan Smith's workfare schemes designed to unlawfully force jobless people into working for no wages at giant highly-profitable corporations, and a Coalition government scam to dissuade employees who have been mistreated at work from seeking compensation by unlawfully charging them £1,200 in fees to access the employment tribunal system. 

Niggle 4: As Home Secretary for the Coalition government Theresa May promised to reduce net migration to below 100,000. In reality they oversaw the biggest immigration surge in history peaking at 336,000 in 2015. Somehow, despite actually increasing net migration to its highest level ever, Theresa May remains popular with the bigot demographic because they adored her divisive anti-immigrant rhetoric and her "Go Home" vans so much that they allowed themselves to forget about her actual track record. 

Niggle 5: The Coalition government introduced the Justice and Security Act, which legislated Secret Courts into existence. This one flew under the radar because the mainstream press basically ignored it, but what they did was to undermine centuries of British legal tradition with new rules so that people can have their fates decided in courtrooms they're not allowed to enter, on charges they're not allowed to know, based on evidence that they're not allowed to see. 

Niggle 6: Thanks to their deliberate policy of repressing wages, the Coalition government oversaw the longest sustained collapse in the value of workers' wages since records began. I guess some people are so comfortably well off that they can consider the worst ever devaluation in UK workers' wages to be just a "niggle", but for people living on or near the breadline already after the bankers trashed the economy, it was catastrophic. 

Niggle 7: The Coalition government oversaw the lowest level of new house building since the early 1920s. Two things make this very much worse. House building is one of the proven ways of stimulating struggling economies, so cutting house building during an economic crisis is pure idiocy. The other of course is that a strategy of cutting house building whilst allowing the biggest immigration surge in history is guaranteed to stoke house price inflation, which is exactly what happened, with house prices soaring to their most unaffordable levels ever as a result. 

Niggle 8: The Coalition obsession with hard-right austerity dogma meant that they set about cutting all kinds of beneficial forms of public spending in their blind ideological quest to make short-term savings. Of course you can save some money by cutting wasteful spending, but ideologically driven cuts to stuff like flood defence spending is complete lunacy, because for every £1 invested today, flood defences save £8 in avoided damage and disruption further down the line. To make matters even worse David Cameron rewarded the woman who introduced the government policy of 'save £1 now at a cost of £8 later' with a DBE for political and public service! 

Niggle 9: The Lib-Dems binned most of their main principles in order to leap into bed with the Tories. Arguably the worst betrayal of all was the way they completely sold out the parliamentary reform movement by agreeing to a referendum on AV, rather than demanding a modern form of Proportional Representation as a condition of joining the government (with a referendum on the precise form the new voting system would take). Another betrayal was their failure to secure reform of the House of Lords. In fact the Lib-Dems watched on gormlessly as David Cameron stuffed the Lords with new unelected peers at a faster rate than any Prime Minister in history, swelling it to become the second largest legislative chamber on earth (after the Chinese parliament). The reason parliament is still such a mess today is that the Lib-Dems threw away their golden opportunity to enforce reforms in order to swan around in chauffeur driven ministerial cars for a few years.

Niggle 10: The Lib-Dems helped the Tories carve open the NHS for mass privatisation of services whan they backed the 2012 Health and Social Care Act.  The current chaos in the NHS is a direct consequence of the Coalition government's health policies.

Niggle 11: The Lib-Dems helped Michael Gove to vandalise the state education system by giving away thousands of publicly owned schools, for free, to unaccountable private sector pseudo-charities. Several of these private academy chains have gone bust leaving schools in crisis, or collapsed in orgies of fraud, others continue on gouging huge six figure executive salaries out of taxpayer funded education budgets to this day. 

Niggle 12: The Coalition government engaged in a massive fire sale of UK national infrastructure. Some of the worst deals included selling off the Royal Mail at way below its real market value (netting huge instant profits for a bunch of city spivs including one of George Osborne's best mates), selling off chunks of the nationalised banks at huge losses to the taxpayer, and flogging Britain's stake in Eurostar for an unbelievably tiny fraction of what it cost the country to build it. 

Niggle 13: Between 2010 and 2015 the global tide really began to change away from ideological puritanism and towards rational drugs policy. As Home Secretary Theresa May insisted on swimming in the opposite direction, criminalising the very mild stimulant Khat, pressurising the United Nations into not adopting rational drugs policy, and introducing a total farce of a law intended to ban possession of all non-approved substances, including drugs that haven't even been invented yet. May copied the legislation from Ireland, where handing the 'legal high' market to criminals resulted in the biggest surge in the usage of these drugs anywhere in Europe. Since Theresa May introduced the same legislation here, guess what? A huge upsurge in usage and the horrifying Spice epidemic! 

Niggle 14: Huge cuts to the police and emergency services mean that the per capita level of policing in the UK has fallen back to 1970s levels, huge numbers of crimes are going un-investigated, and the number of deaths in house fires has soared due to the closure of dozens of fire stations. But to self-declared centrist types dying in a house fire, or having the police fail to even investigate after your house was burgled are obviously just "niggles".

Niggle 15: Coalition government ministers continually used the "striver vs skiver" false dichotomy to defend their cuts to the social security system, but the bulk of the cuts actually affected the working poor. They slashed tax credits, and imposed real terms cuts on loads of other in-work benefits like housing benefit, child benefit, parental pay, statutory sick pay, and benefits paid to help disabled people to stay in work. 

Niggle 16: The Coalition oversaw an absolute boom in exploitative employment practices like Zero Hours Contracts, the gig economy, and employers forcing their employees to take on fake self-employed status in order to pay them below the minimum wage. It's no wonder that in-work poverty has soared so dramatically with the boom in exploitative employment practices combined with the Coalition government's systematic attacks in in-work benefits.

Niggle 17: The Coalition government oversaw an exponential growth in food poverty, with hundreds of thousands more people each year turning to food banks like the Trussell Trust in order to feed themselves and their kids. 

 Niggle 18: The Coalition government signed up to one of the worst rip-off deals in history by agreeing to bribe the French and Chinese into building us a new nuclear reactor at Hinkley Point C. Not only will this power station end up being the most expensive object on earth by the time it's completed, Coalition ministers agreed to pay double the market rate for the electricity it produces for 35 years.

Niggle 19: The Coalition government oversaw the worst UK productivity crisis since the early 19th Century, which is hardly surprising at all considering the boom in exploitative McJobs, and millions of workers subjected to increased workloads for decreased pay. 

Niggle 20: The Coalition government had a very illiberal attitude towards criticism and dissent considering one of the component parties was the so-called Liberal Democrats. One of the ugliest pieces of legislation they passed was "the Gagging Law" designed to prevent organisations like charities, community groups, trade unions, and think tanks from criticising government policies. 

Niggle 21: One of the most savage Coalition policies of all was their draconian benefits sanctions regime. 5 minutes late to sign on, suffer a heart attack during a meeting, miss an interview because you're in hospital to comfort your wife after your child was stillborn ... Fuck you! No money for months. Not only have people been sanctioned for the harshest of reasons, but it soon became clear that jobcentre staff were being actively pushed to comply with sanctions targets. Just think about it. If you're instructed to condemn 4 people per week to absolute destitution, is it easier to quickly trick a few people with mental health problems or learning difficulties into making a sanctionable mistake, or to spend hours and hours trying to catch out the minority of hardcore benefits scroungers who know the rules better than you know them yourself? Vulnerable people died because of this horrific punishment system.

Niggle 22: The Coalition government decided to hand a huge tax break to fracking companies by slashing their corporation tax rate in half. They did this because they knew fracking wasn't financially viable without such a vast tax break. Numerous senior Coalition ministers had clear financial interests in the fracking industry when this decision was taken. 

Niggle 23: The Coalition government promised that by 2015 their hard-right austerity programme would have completely eliminated the budget deficit. When it came to 2015 and it was obvious that they'd failed, they simply rebranded their failure as a success by endlessly repeating "we've cut the deficit by a third" as if missing their target by 66% is super-brilliant. Now we're in 2017 and the deficit still hasn't gone, and the Tories are predicting they won't be able to eliminate it until 2025. Over 15 years to do what you said you would do in under 5. Good work guys! 

Niggle 24: The Coalition government's obsession with hard-right austerity dogma dramatically prolonged the recovery from the 2007-08 bankers' crisis because "let's cut our way to growth" is an idiotic policy at the best of times, but it's economically suicidal when the private sector is hoarding assets rather than spending, and when the cost of government borrowing has been reduced to an all time historic low with central bank interest rates set at only marginally above 0%. 

I've stopped at 24 niggles because it's a nice round number, but there are so many more niggles I could have written about (the VAT hike, Bedroom tax, DRIPA, Internet snooping, the Libya disaster, Corporation tax cuts, soaring child poverty, railway chaos, legal aid cuts, flooding our schools with unqualified teachers, the social care crisis, tax-dodging, the prisons meltdown, ruination of the adult education system, armed services cuts and aircraft carriers with no aircraft, the massive trade deficit, selling arms to tyrannical regimes on their own blacklist of repressive states, mental health funding cuts ...)

The worst thing is that the combination of all of these factors (especially the erosion of wages and working conditions, the massive increase in in-work poverty, house price inflation, spectacularly missed immigration targets, public service deterioration, and the needlessly prolonged recovery period) created the surge in public anger that manifested in the "fuck this" Brexit vote.

So Liberal Democrats and the so-called centrists can try to delude themselves that the Coalition was a great success story with just a few niggles if they like, but it just goes to show what an out-of-touch bunch they are.

The reality is that hard-right Brexiteers like Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove deliberately rebranded the niggles (or  "shocking failures" as normal people call them) of the 2010-15 Coalition government as failures of the EU, in order to con the British public into voting for Brexit.

Of course the 2010-15 government looks less bad now than it was at the time, because in comparison to this post-referendum chaos and incompetence, every single government in living memory looks a lot less bad than it actually was. But this kind of comparison is delusional, because it was the niggles/catastrophic failings of the 2010-15 coalition government that led directly to the situation we're in now.

It's utterly ridiculous to whitewash the failings of the 2010-15 government because they weren't quite as bad as the government is now, because the state of the current government is a direct consequence of the ruinous failings that these bloody awful centrists and Lib-Dem apologists are now trying to whitewash away as just niggles. 

Anyone with any sense can see that the pathetic state of the current government is the biggest Coalition failure of all, not a reason to create a revisionist story about how bloody great they were in hindsight.

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