As a result of the changes introduced by Clement Attlee's post-war Labour government the 1960s and '70s saw the greatest levels of social mobility the United Kingdom has ever seen.
There was full employment so that pretty much anyone with the desire to work could find a job with at least half decent pay. There were plenty of houses, and even if you couldn't quite afford a house of your own there was an abundant supply of social housing too. If you were academically smart, then university education was free, and it even came with maintenance grants to cover your living costs. If you lost your job or fell ill then the welfare state provided decent social security payments to stave off absolute destitution. The legal aid system ensured that the poor and ordinary could have access to good legal representation so as to tip the scales of justice ever-so-slightly less in favour of the super-rich.
Of course this period was no utopia, and plenty of people still endured poor pay, dangerous working conditions, and discriminatory practices (especially when it came to stuff like sex, race, class and sexual orientation), but since 1979 many of the factors that allowed these all-time high levels of social mobility have been deliberately attacked and undermined by the Westminster political class.
- The current low unemployment figures that right-wingers love to brag about are a blatant fix which count anyone who does just 1 hour a week on a zero hours contract job as "employed". Additionally it counts anyone who has been thrown off benefits by zealous job centre staff as not being unemployed. Additionally people on unpaid workfare schemes are also classed as being employed!
- Access to legal aid has been trashed so badly that hundreds of thousands of people are being left with no choice but to represent themselves in court, which not only shatters their chances of success, but also wastes vast amounts of court time and public money because they simply don't understand the legal processes.
It's completely understandable that the privileged classes and their pals in the Westminster establishment club have worked so hard and for so long to reduce social mobility. After all the beneficiaries of social mobility become rivals to the children of the upper classes.
The less social mobility there is, the more unearned opportunities there are to be handed on a plate to the children of the establishment class.
It's clearly a huge advantage to the children of the establishment class that their peers are lumbered with a lifetime 9% aspiration tax on their disposable income for their university education, while they avoid it because their parents can just pay the fees upfront.
It's beyond obvious that an unaccountable political elite would increasingly selfishly rig society to benefit their own class if they found that they suffered no adverse electoral consequences for doing it (as the New Labour mob found when they first introduced aspiration taxes on university students from poor and ordinary backgrounds).
The establishment elitists who rig society to benefit their own class are undeniably the bad guys, but the truly despicable people are those who actually reaped the benefits of social mobility in the 1960s and '70s, who now desperately want to kick the ladder down to prevent the younger generations from climbing up too.
The people who came from poor and ordinary backgrounds and enjoyed the benefits of stuff like social housing and/or affordable house prices, full employment and decent wages, a decent social safety net, legal aid, and free university education, but who now vote in favour of denying these same opportunities to all future generations.
Perhaps some of these people have deluded themselves into believing that they achieved it all themselves, and the decent wages, affordable housing, social safety net, legal protections, and access to free university education had nothing whatever to do with it. That's called the self-attribution fallacy, and huge numbers of wealthy people love to imagine that they did it all by themselves.
On the other hand there are plenty who know perfectly well that they benefited from social mobility, but who want to kick the ladder down on younger generations for purely self-interested reasons. For example people who benefited from affordable housing in the past know that building more social and affordable housing now would slow down the inflating value of their own property portfolios, and reduce the profits from their buy-to-let slumlord empires.
Of course it was hard to avoid voting in favour of attacks on social mobility when Tony Blair and his ilk were running the Labour Party because both of the main parties were at it.
But now that Labour has a leader who is determined to reverse the trend and begin promoting social mobility again through policies like free education, house building, welfare reform, decent wages, regulation of the private rental market, and a crackdown on exploitative employment practices, there's really no excuse for voting for more Tory class war inspired attacks on social mobility unless you actively oppose social mobility.
The wealthy and privileged establishment class who have enforced four decades of neoliberalism, rigging British society in favour of themselves and their own are vile self-serving elitists, but the people who actually benefited from social mobility who actually vote in favour of the Tory war against social mobility are the truly despicable ones.
They're the kind of people who climb the ladder out of the flooding basement, then deliberately kick it down and let others from their own class drown, rather than risk sharing the benefits of not drowning with others.
They don't lose anything by letting other people escape, but it makes them feel important and special to look down on other people drowning, and feel superior.
Even those who have deluded themselves that social mobility is irrelevant and that they achieved everything in life themselves are guilty of class treachery.
Perhaps they're too deluded to realise that voting in favour of the Tory war against social mobility is an utterly malicious thing to do? But since when was stupidity a defence?
Does the criminal get to avoid jail because he claims to be too stupid to have realised that robbing the Post Office was a crime?
Of course not.
So why on earth should Tory voters who came from poor and ordinary backgrounds get to claim that they're too narrow-minded to understand that it's unspeakably malicious for them to kick the ladder down to prevent younger generations benefiting from the social mobility they themselves enjoyed in the past?
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.
In case you missed it, the unelected Peer Alan Sugar has been having a massively undignified meltdown on Twitter that must surely be making people wonder how on earth such an angry, arrogant, bile-spewing anti-socialist ever ended up making his home in the Labour Party in the first place.
Sugar's meltdown began when he posted an absolutely vile photoshopped image of Jeremy Corbyn alongside Adolf Hitler. After a sustained barrage of criticism over this crude undignified smear-job he eventually deleted the tweet, but he didn't stop there. His next piece of anti-Labour propaganda was a widely ridiculed "poem" about how much he hates Jeremy Corbyn.
Sugar's pathetic "poem" prompted John Prescott to retort with a satirical Tweet proposing a Sugar Tax of £10,000 every time Alan Sugar posts a stupid Tweet or says something ridiculous.
This is where Alan went into full-meltdown mode, posting a bizarre series of abusive tweets in reply to Prescott and numerous other people who criticised his behaviour.
Sugar's vile Twitter rampage included repeatedly using insults like "stupid idiot", "loser", "tosser", and "non-achiever", resorting to misogyny by telling a woman to get a face lift, bitterly attacking the Labour left, and sneering repetition of the grotesque right-wing fantasy of natural economic justice.
This extraordinary temper tantrum of abuse and right-wing vitriol raises the questions of what an angry right-winger like this was ever doing in the Labour Party in the first place, and how the New Labour mob ever considered elevating such a person into the unelected House of Lords.
Sugar's Twitter rant demonstrated that he has masses of contempt for those who want to make Britain a slightly fairer place so that more people have the chance to rise out of poverty to have successful and productive lives.
It's absolutely clear from the bile that he spat at anyone who dared criticise him that Sugar also has a very right-wing arrogance, believing that his wealth somehow makes him better than other people.
He's spectacularly short-tempered and abusive with people he considers to be below him because they're not as loaded as he is.
One person politely pointed out that instead of actually turning up to debate and vote in the House of Lords where the New Labour mob put him, Sugar has barely lifted a finger to influence the political system. His laziness is so extreme that he's only bothered to vote in a pathetic 1.4% of Lords votes since 2015.
Sugar's response to this was an incoherently furious anti-Corbyn rant, attacking "red lefties", declaring himself politically infallible ("all I say is correct"), and refusing to engage with the actual question of his lamentable House of Lords attendance at all.
The really sad thing is that Sugar rose up from working class roots himself to become rich and famous, but he's now intent on kicking the ladder down to impede the life chances of others from his kind of background.
Alan Sugar's Twitter rants don't just expose the fact that he's a bitter and angry person who resorts to abuse and insults when challenged by people he considers to be beneath him, he's also demonstrating the awful ladder-kicking attitude of so many (but obviously not all) in the baby-boomer generation.
There's nothing more repulsive than seeing people who made it good during the greatest period of social mobility the UK has ever seen deliberately turning against their own class and actually endorsing the Tory party and their policies of erecting huge social mobility barriers, slashing education funding, overseeing an explosion of precarious low-paid jobs and the longest sustained decline in the value of UK workers' wages since records began, slashing in-work benefits, and condemning hundreds of thousands of kids to lives growing up in dire poverty.
But that's exactly what Sugar did when he endorsed Theresa May at the 2017 General Election.
If someone is prepared to abandon the Labour Party and then explicitly endorse the most right-wing, social mobility wrecking, infrastructure under-funding, poverty increasing, hope destroying government in living memory, it's absolutely clear that they never really had any interest in the traditional values and objectives of the Labour Party at all.
If the Labour Party moved so far from their democratic socialist roots that they were attracting right-wing self-servers like Alan Sugar during the New Labour era, it's no wonder at all that they ended up driving away traditional Labour voters resulting in a 4.2 million collapse in the Labour vote between 1997 and the final New Labour flop in 2015 (13.5 million down to 9.3 million).
After Jeremy Corbyn steered Labour back towards the centre-left territory they traditionally occupied, and the likes of Alan Sugar returned to their natural Tory home, the Labour vote has bounced back up by 3.6 million to 12.9 million at the 2017 General Election (the biggest increase in the Labour vote since Clement Attlee's radical transformative government won the 1945 post-war election).
So Alan Sugar can sing from the Tory song-sheet and spew his arrogant Twitter abuse as much as he likes. Labour has gone back to representing the people rather than mega-rich donors, and there's nothing he can do about it except lob impotent insults at people he detests for the fact they won't bow and scrape before him just because he's loaded and an unelected Lord put there for life by a political party he now despises.
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.
Theresa May and the Tory party have some incredible brass neck to announce that they're going to conduct a year long review into education funding because of the shocking levels of student debt that graduates are building up as a result of the Tory/Lib-Dem policy of imposing the highest tuition fees in the world for study at public universities, and applying rip-off inflation plus 3% interest on the resulting debts.
It's absolutely extraordinary that Theresa May is now pretending to be concerned about these extreme debt levels when she voted in favour of this impoverishment strategy along with the rest of her Tory chums.
We know that they voted in favour of this policy because they see the huge debts and the 9% aspiration tax that graduates must pay on their disposable incomes as a highly effective means of limiting social mobility and ensuring that the economy is rigged even more in favour of those with parents rich enough to pay the tuition fees up front*.
We also know that Theresa May didn't give the slightest damn about the issue of student debt when she became Prime Minister in 2016 because one of her very first acts was to scrap the maintenance grants that helped students from low-income backgrounds.
This Tory "review" has obviously been inspired by sheer panic at the popularity of Jeremy Corbyn's proposal to scrap tuition fees and institute a National Education Service to provide free education to anyone who needs it, no matter what their age, income or background.
It's taken the Tories eight years to realise it, but lumbering the majority of graduates with vast unpayable debts with ridiculous interest rates is a sure-fire way of creating a generation of people who hate your political party with an absolute passion.
But instead of admitting that their tuition fees hike was a deeply unfair policy of erecting social mobility barriers in order to benefit the children of the establishment, and that Jeremy Corbyn is absolutely right that education should be considered a social good that benefits everyone in society, rather than a commodity to be flogged at the highest possible price, they've decided to make a big fuss about kicking the issue down the road for another year in the hope that it makes it look like they actually care.
Had Jeremy Corbyn won the 2017 General Election these outrageous rip-off tuition fees would have been abolished already, yet all Theresa May is offering is "we'll look into it and get back to you in a year".
Theresa May must imagine that students are pretty damned thick to buy this ridiculous song and dance the Tories are making about how much they care about the devastating impact of their own damned policies. And she must imagine that they're absolute bloody half-wits if they're going to accept Tory "we'll look into it and get back to you in a year" guff as preferable to a Labour commitment to immediately scrap rip-off tuition fees.
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.
* = Finding an extra £9,000 per year for your kid to go to university is an impossible dream for most ordinary families, but £9k is an absolute snip compared to the £39,000 per year fees at Eton (David Cameron's school) £37,740 at Westminster (Nick Clegg's school).
This week the political establishment and the right-wing propaganda rags have been celebrating 100 years since the 1918 Representation of the People Act which gave some women the right to vote in General Elections for the first time.
There are several extraordinary things about this celebration.
The first is that the 1918 Representation of the People Act wasn't an equalisation of voting rights at all, it was a deeply sexist and classist compromise designed to enfranchise a small number of property-owning women from the privileged classes, whilst maintaining the disenfranchisement of millions of ordinary woman.
Yes it was a small step in the right direction, but the way it was done is indicative of the sexist and elitist attitudes that still abound today in British society, and especially in Westminster and the right-wing propaganda rags like the Express, Daily Mail, and S*n.
The next thing to note is that this compromise legislation was only achieved through the sustained political activism of the Suffragettes (a word initially coined by the Daily Mail as a term of abuse).
Make no mistake about it, the political elite and right-wing media who are lauding the achievement of the suffragettes today are exactly the people who would have bitterly despised and disparaged them at the time.
The suffragettes protested noisily and often, they regularly associated with trade unions and left-wing political movements, they interrupted political speeches, they defied the law, they criticised the elitist political establishment, and many of them even resorted to destruction of property and acts of violence in the name of their cause.
As a result they were continually criticised in the press, harassed, arrested, and even fed through tubes that were brutally forced up their noses when they went on hunger strike.
- Now look at the new Tory drive to criminalise political protest.
- Look at the contempt with which the political elite and the right-wing press sneer at modern day activist movements.
- Look at the unbridled hatred of trade unions and the political left that pervades the ruling Tory party and the right-wing press.
- Look at the barely disguised contempt with which most politicians consider the views of the general public, and the contempt with which right-wing press hacks expect us to believe their campaigns of lies and smears against social progressives and the political left.
- Look at the contempt with which the Tories deliberately filibustered the debate on votes at sixteen for no other reason that they know that young people won't vote Tory because the Tories have nothing to offer the young except more debt, lower wages, worse services, and more expensive housing and education than any previous generation.
- Look at the way the Tories and the right-wing press smear the centre-left democratic socialist Jeremy Corbyn as some kind of terrifying extreme-leftist when he's never said anything remotely as militant as Syvia Pankhurst's declaration that she was going to "fight capitalism even if it kills me".
The absolute brass neck of the establishment elitists is extraordinary. They laud the social progressives of the past at the very same time as they despise and disparage the social progressives of the present.
The lesson from 1918 is clear. Society does not advance because powerful elites benevolently choose to improve things on our behalf. It advances because ordinary people stand up and fight for their rights.
And even when pople eventually overcome the combined resistance of the political elitists and the mercenary hacks who do the bidding of the right-wing press barons, the establishment elitists only give away compromises instead of the full freedoms that are demanded.
Every generation must keep up the fight for social justice because when the elitists who rule over and dictate what we see in the media us are not completely indifferent to our suffering, they actively make things worse by erecting new barriers to social mobility, new methods of persecuting the poor, the sick, the young, and the disabled, new curtailments on workers' rights, and new laws designed to silence those who would use facts and evidence to protest against them.
Any generation that gives up on the fight for social justice simultaneously betrays the brave activists who went before them by allowing their achievements to be undone, and betrays the generations who come after them by ensuring that they have to work twice as hard just to make up the ground that was lost during the period of widespread public apathy.
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.
As a result of the changes introduced by Clement Attlee's post-war Labour government the 1960s and '70s saw the greatest levels of social mobility the United Kingdom has ever seen.
There was full employment so that pretty much anyone with the desire to work could find a job with at least half decent pay. There were plenty of houses, and even if you couldn't quite afford a house of your own there was an abundant supply of social housing too. If you were academically smart, then university education was free, and it even came with maintenance grants to cover your living costs. If you lost your job or fell ill then the welfare state provided half-decent social security payments to stave off absolute destitution. The legal aid system ensured that the poor and ordinary could have access to decent legal representation so as to tip the scales of justice ever-so-slightly less in favour of the super-rich.
Of course this period was no utopia, and plenty of people still endured poor pay, dangerous working conditions, and discriminatory practices (especially when it came to stuff like sex, race, class and sexual orientation), but since 1979 many of the things that allowed these high levels of social mobility to happen have been deliberately attacked and undermined by the Westminster political class.
- The current low unemployment figures that right-wingers love to brag about so much are a blatant fix which counts anyone who does just 1 hour a week in a zero hours contract job as employed. Additionally it counts anyone who has been thrown off benefits by zealous job centre staff trying to comply with the sanctions league tables as not being unemployed. Additionally people on unpaid workfare schemes are classed as being employed!
- Access to legal aid has been trashed so badly that hundreds of thousands of people are being left with no choice but to represent themselves in court, which not only shatters their chances of success, but also wastes vast amounts of time because they simply don't understand the legal processes.
It's completely understandable that the privileged classes and their pals in the Westminster establishment club have worked so hard and for so long to reduce social mobility. After all the beneficiaries of social mobility become rivals to the children of the upper classes. The less social mobility there is, the more unearned opportunities that get handed on a plate to the children of the establishment class.
It's clearly a huge advantage to the children of the establishment class that their peers are lumbered with a lifetime 9% aspiration tax on their disposable income for their university education, while they avoid it because their parents could pay the fees upfront.
It's beyond obvious that an unaccountable political elite would increasingly selfishly rig society to benefit their own class if they found that they suffered no adverse electoral consequences for doing it (as the New Labour mob found when they first introduced aspiration tax for university students from poor and ordinary backgrounds).
The establishment elitists who rig society to benefit their own class are undeniably the bad guys, but the truly despicable people are those who actually reaped the benefits of social mobility in the 1960s and '70s, who now desperately want to slam the door shut on the younger generations now.
The people who came from poor and ordinary backgrounds and enjoyed the benefits of stuff like social housing and/or affordable house prices, full employment and decent wages, a decent social safety net, legal aid, and free university education, but who now vote in favour of denying these same opportunities to younger generations.
Perhaps some of these people genuinely believe that they achieved it all themselves, and the decent wages, affordable housing, social safety net, legal protections, and access to free university education had nothing to do with it. That's called the self-attribution fallacy, and huge numbers of wealthy people love to imagine that they did it all by themselves.
On the other hand there are plenty who know perfectly well that they benefited from social mobility, but who want to slam the door shut on younger generations for purely self-interested reasons. For example people who benefited from affordable housing in the past know that building more social and affordable housing now would slow down the inflating value of their property portfolios, and reduce the profits from their buy-to-let slumlord empires.
Of course it was hard to avoid voting in favour of attacks on social mobility when Tony Blair and his ilk were running the Labour Party. But now that Labour has a leader who is determined to reverse the trend and begin promoting social mobility again through policies like free education, house building, welfare reform, decent wages, regulation of the private rental market, and a crackdown on exploitative employment practices, there's really no excuse for voting for more Tory class war inspired attacks on social mobility unless you actively oppose social mobility.
The wealthy and privileged establishment club who have spent the best part of four decades rigging British society in favour of themselves and their own are vile self-serving elitists, but the people who actually benefited from social mobility who vote in favour of the Tory war against social mobility are the truly despicable ones.
They're the kind of people who climb the ladder out of the flooding basement, then deliberately kick it down and let others from their own class drown, rather than risk sharing the benefits of not drowning with others.
Even those who have deluded themselves that social mobility is irrelevant and that they achieved everything in life themselves are guilty of class treachery.
Perhaps they're too deluded to realise that voting in favour of the Tory war against social mobility is an utterly malicious thing to do? But since when was stupidity a defence?
Does the criminal get to avoid jail because he claims to be too stupid to have realised that robbing the Post Office was a crime?
Of course not.
So why on earth should Tory voters who came from poor and ordinary backgrounds get to claim that they're too narrow-minded to understand that it's unspeakably malicious for them to kick the ladder down to prevent younger generations benefiting from the social mobility they themselves enjoyed in the past?
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.
The Tories are in civil war over tuition fees. Theresa May's loyal ally Damian Green obviously doesn't actually give a damn about student debt, but he is smart enough to recognise the demographic time bomb the Tories are sitting on, which has inspired him to say that the Tories need to think again about the electoral consequences of lumbering English students with the highest public university tuition fees in the entire world.
Michael Gove represents the regressive hard-right faction of the Tory party and he thinks that forcing such huge debts onto students that 70% of graduates will never pay them off despite an opportunity destroying 9% aspiration tax on their disposable income for their entire working lives.
We can all see Damian Green's grubby opportunism for what it is. He voted in favour of creating a huge barrier to social mobility with the highest university fees in the world, but at least he has the strategic cunning to realise that economically assaulting the younger generations for daring to try and get professional qualifications is a recipe for future electoral doom.
Michael Gove doesn't even have that level of brains. All he's driven by is a vindictive desire to divide society into an absurdly selfish bunch of narrow-minded materialist individuals with no social consciousness whatever, because the essence of bonkers hard-right economic dogma is that the economy only functions efficiently if we all abandon social conscience, solidarity, empathy, charity and philanthropy in order to ruthlessly maximise our own personal self-interest at all times.
When he appeared on the Andrew Marr show Michael Gove's best effort to defend lumbering the majority of university students with unpayable mountains of debt was the absurd claim that "if you don't benefit from a uni education you shouldn't pay for those who do".
Gove is famous for his ability to make ludicrous arguments (that all schools should be above average, that we shouldn't listen to experts, that the First World War was not "a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite", that the peace process in Northern Ireland was akin to condoning paedophilia...) but this appeal to blinkered selfishness is so absurd (especially coming from a Tory freeloader like Michael Gove) it's absolutely extraordinary.
The wonderful thing about Gove's latest divisive anti-intellectual statement is that it's so easy to hack.
- "I don't benefit from the Tory party using £1 billion of public money to bribe the DUP into propping up their failing government, so why should I pay for those who do?"
- "I don't benefit from the tax breaks given to private schools where elitists send their kids, so why should I pay for those who do?"
- "I don't benefit from the £130 elephant lamps that Michael Gove claimed on parliamentary expenses, so why should I pay for those who do?"
- "I don't benefit from lavish Tory handouts to the mega-rich, so why should I pay for those who do?"
The idea that there are no social or indirect economic benefits whatever to having an educated population is such a backwards hard-right delusion it's ridiculous.
We all benefit from having university educated doctors and surgeons in our hospitals. We all benefit from having university educated engineers and architects design and build our buildings and public infrastructure projects. We all benefit from having university educated teachers in our schools.
The social and indirect economic benefits of having an educated population are so numerous and so obvious it's extraordinary that anyone would seek to deny their existence.
If you ever went to school; ever use roads, rail, airports, or public buildings; ever enjoy the arts or use technology; have ever used the NHS; have ever needed a lawyer, solicitor or accountant; then you've benefited from somebody else's university education.
The fact that some (but by no means all) people who got a university education ended up getting highly paid jobs is hardly an injustice. If they worked hard and got highly paid jobs they should be paying back into society by paying the higher rate of income tax on their earnings.
If they're not paying the higher rate then the injustice is the fact that successive right-wing and centre-right governments have refused to clamp down on tax-dodging, not that some people got good jobs after graduating from university.
The idea that the benefits of a university education accrue only to the individual who received it is such arrant narrow-minded nonsense it's clearly designed to appeal only to the intensely thick, which is exactly the kind of dangerous anti-intellectual nonsense that Michael Gove so loves to peddle.
This attempt to create a sense of jealously and burning injustice amongst people who are too thick to recognise the social and wider indirect economic benefits of having a well educated and highly skilled population is yet another attempt by the political establishment to create an Orwellian reality reversal.
The real injustice is that kids from poor and ordinary backgrounds are being lumbered with vast unpayable debts, while the kids of the elitist establishment class have their fees paid up front by their parents and never have to pay the loans, and the ridiculous interest payments on the loans, via the 9% aspiration tax on their disposable income.
The children of the super-rich elitists already have life massively stacked in their favour, but the elitists in Westminster (including a lot of right-wing Blairite Labour MPs) see educated working class people as a horrible threat to their own establishment class, and consider lumbering them with unpayable debts just for getting an education to be a necessary measure to reduce the social mobility of the "lower orders" that they hate and fear so much.
The norm in developed European nations is either free university education, or affordable fees. People in countries like Germany, Denmark, France, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland, Norway, and Scotland are capable of seeing the wider benefits of having an educated population, but somehow the English have been convinced that education is not a right, and not a benefit to all of society, but actually a commodity that only benefits the individual, and which should be paid for through the imposition of literally unpayable debts.
What a narrow-minded and vindictive country England must have become to have allowed the establishment elitists to erect such huge barriers to social mobility, and to then justify it by appealing to the basest and most selfish instincts of the classes who are actually having their kids lumbered with the unpayable debts.
If countries like Germany and Scotland can afford to give all students from all backgrounds the opportunity to get a good education, what the hell is so wrong with England that Michael Gove thinks he can get away with promoting such blinkered selfishness with his absurd society-denying myth that the only beneficiaries of an educated population are those who received the education?
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.
The Tory MP Heidi Allan loves to pose as a caring Conservative, but when it comes to the crunch she always folds and votes in favour of even more ideologically driven Tory malice.
Heidi Allan loves to present herself as a Tory rebel with a social conscience, but she's nothing of the sort. She's been playing this dishonest game ever since she was elected to parliament in 2015.
In her maiden speech in October 2015 she criticised the Tory policy of cutting tax credits for the working poor before she dutifully voted in favour of it in order to avoid being sacked from her junior position in the Department of Work and Pensions.
Her June 2017 speech against the Tory policy of public sector wage repression was exactly the same thing. When the opposition parties gave Tory MPs the opportunity to end the seven year long economic assault on our public sector workers (including the fire fighters they'd just been praising for running into the fire at Grenfell tower) Heidi Allan spoke against the Tory wage repression policy, but then when it came to the crunch she voted to keep the pay cap.
In my view these displays of faux rebellious outrage followed by a dutiful vote in favour of the motion are even worse than a Tory who is delusional enough to actually believe that continuing to crush the incomes of the working poor and repress the wages of our nurses, soldiers, fire fighters and police are the right thing to do.
If she spoke out against these things then she knows that they're wrong, which means that she knew that she was doing something absolutely inexcusable when she actually voted in favour of continuing Tory wage repression.
I doubt that she was one of the Tories who actually cheered themselves for what they did because she clearly knew that her vote was inexcusable, but she did it nonetheless out of pure self-interest.
On the weekend after the Tories cheered themselves for continuing to trash the pay of our brave emergency service workers Heidi appeared on the Andrew Marr show and said something unbelievable.
She said that the Tory party needs to "change our tone and our language".
This bizarre prescription is based on the delusion that it isn't seven years of savage hard-right Tory policies (socially and economically ruinous austerity, the unprecedented Tory campaign of wage repression, the ongoing systematic abuse of disabled people, privatisation mania, and the erection of one new barrier to social mobility after another) that is the problem, but the fact that these horrific policies haven't been presented misleadingly enough.
Heidi loves to posture as a rebel Tory who actually cares about ordinary people, but what she did on the Marr show was simply regurgitate the new Tory party line that there is nothing wrong with Tory policy, but that the presentation needs some work.
It's been revealed that the Tories are planning to massively increase their social media propaganda unit in preparation for the next general election, and they're obviously going to try to find ways of prettifying austerity, wage repression, abuse of disabled people, privatisation mania and social mobility blocking.
Heidi Allan isn't pushing for the Tory party to change political direction on any of these issues (otherwise she would have voted in favour of the opposition amendment to end wage repression), she simply wants more gloss to slop over the divisive upwards wealth redistribution policies that are at the absolute heart of the modern Conservative ideology.
thee Tories are intent on continuing with their unpopular hard-right policies, and they're going to try to win over the public with a massive Orwellian propaganda campaign to rebrand the same old failing Tory policies as a wonderful new kind of caring conservatism.
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.
