Don't be fooled by Heidi Allan's "caring Conservative" schtick

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".

"We have got to change our tone and language" @heidiallen75 says the Tories have become too "inward looking" #marr pic.twitter.com/PRv1tVGSwM

— The Andrew Marr Show (@MarrShow) July 2, 2017

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.

OR

What ever happened to that Tory voter who cried on Question Time?

We all remember that time the Tory voter cried on Question Time because she felt betrayed by the Tories after they slashed her in-work benefits just months after winning the 2015 General Election with promises to "make work pay" and stand up for "hardworking people".

Some people were extremely harsh about Michelle Dorrell at the time. 

Nasty intellectual snobs on the left called her an idiot and said she got what she deserved for making a politically uneducated decision and regretting it (nice one! way to win people over guys).

The insults and contempt she got from the political right was very much worse, as she was attacked and abused by the Tory faithful using their age old tactic of attacking the person rather than responding to the actual point.

Well, Michelle Dorrell has learned from her mistake, and she's actually campaigning for Labour at the 2017 General Election (see video)

Michelle Dorrell is campaigning for Labour against Tories' 20,000 police cuts that have put UK at risk of terrorism pic.twitter.com/Gu9AOIB6Dd

— Scott Nelson (@SocialistVoice) May 28, 2017

Michelle's abandonment of the Tories in order to campaign against them demonstrates something fundamentally important about politics:

Politics is not like football: If your team is absolutely shit, you have no tribal allegiance to them, you have no obligation to keep supporting them. You can, and you should, change sides.

If your political team lets you down, then find another one that better represents your interests. and anyone who isn't feeling let down by the Tories really can't have been paying much attention can they?

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

OR

Ruth Davidson says you should vote against the Tories if you have a shred of human decency

When the Scottish parliament debated the despicable Tory rape clause the Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson advised the UK public to vote against the Tories if they find the rape clause abhorrent.

To get an idea of how abhorrent the Tory rape clause is, consider the fact that it even managed to unite the Scottish Labour Party and the SNP in opposition to it (getting Scottish Labour to agree with the SNP on anything is no mean feat). The Scottish Greens and the Lib-Dems also strongly opposed it.

During the debate the Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said "no woman anywhere should have to prove she's been raped in order to get tax credits for their child. I can't believe in 2017 that I'm having to stand up in the Scottish Parliament and make that argument".

The Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale called the rape clause "an absolutely sickening state of affairs" and quoted from an email from a rape victim in her condemnation of the policy.

The Lib-Dem MSP Alex Cole-Hamilton said that the policy of compelling women to provide evidence that they have been raped in order to obtain Tax Credits for their children "has no place in a civilised society".

The Green MSP Ross Greer said that "when you cut through the tank-riding, bagpipe-playing bravado, Ruth Davidson is just another cruel member of a cruel party".

The whole idea of limiting Tax Credits is abhorrent in itself, especially given the severe wage repression that UK workers have suffered since the Tories came to power in 2010. The majority families receiving tax credits these days are working families, not the unemployed.

The Tory welfare cuts that the abhorrent rape clause relates to will end up driving another 250,000 UK kids into poverty, and that's on top of the 400,000 extra kids growing up in poverty since 2010.

When the issue was voted on the only MSPs to vote against the motion to condemn the rape clause were the Tories. All of the other parties voted in favour. The motion to condemn the rape clause was passed by 91 votes to 31.

During her evasive defence of the rape clause policy (in which she evaded using the word rape) the Scottish Tory leader said that "if people across the UK do not support it, then there is an option on June the 8th to ask someone else to have a go".

In other words, if you find the rape clause abhorrent, you should vote against the Tories.

So take it from Ruth Davidson. If you have a shred of human decency, then make sure to vote against the Tories on June 8th no matter where you live.

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

OR

Why do pro-Brexit Tories suddenly care about David Cameron's lies?

David Cameron has never been particularly popular with the hard-right fringe of the Tory party, but despite giving them the EU referendum they demanded the pro-Brexit Tories seem keen to knife him in the back before the votes are even counted.

It's no surprise to see the anti-gay rights pro-banker Tory MP Andrew Bridgen rushing to attack David Cameron and calling for a vote of confidence. Slightly more surprising was the contribution of Nadine Dorries who put on an incredible display of synthetic outrage with claims that Cameron had "lied profoundly" over his claims that Turkey would not be joining the EU in the next three decades.

Of course David Cameron has no magic crystal ball to make such long-ranging future predictions, but in consideration of the fact that Turkey has been seeking EU membership for 29 years (since 1987) and has only successfully negotiated one out of the necessary 15 chapters needed to secure EU membership so far, Cameron's claim hardly seems like the most egregious of all of the lies he's ever told.

Nadine Dorries' synthetic outrage over David Cameron's over-egged claims about Turkish accession to the EU taking at least another three decades if it ever happens at all is remarkably hypocritical to behold given the way that she has held her tongue and refused to criticise David Cameron over numerous much more blatant and significant lies over the last six years.

VAT

Just before the 2010 General Election David Cameron repeatedly stated that the Tories had no plans to put up VAT to 20%. In June 2010, just two months after the General Election, David Cameron's pre-election lies were exposed when the Tories raised VAT to 20%.

Nadine Dorries (and the rest of the right-wing fringe of the Tory party) didn't bother complaining about this blatant lie, in fact she even voted in favour of David Cameron's dishonest VAT hike!

A massive pack of lies

In 2010 David Cameron made a massive fanfare of signing a pre-election Contract with the Electorate which contained 16 promises. He said at the time that "if we don't deliver our side of the bargain, kick us out in five years".

After a few years it became absolutely clear to the Tories that they were going to break pretty much every single promise that the "contract" contained, so instead of admitting it and asking to be kicked out of power the Tories simply deleted every single trace of the contract off their website and hoped that the public would simply forget about it before the 2015 General Election.

Nadine Dorries never spoke out about the Tory failure to live up to David Cameron's "Contract with the Electorate", nor their decision to sneakily delete every trace of it off their website.

The NHS

Before the 2010 General Election David Cameron famously promised "no more top-down reorganisations of the NHS". After the 2010 General Election David Cameron's government launched the biggest to-down reorganisation in the entire history of the NHS.

Nadine Dorries didn't speak out about the fact that David Cameron had lied about his intentions towards the NHS, in fact, she even voted in favour of Cameron's top-down reorganisation of the NHS!

Bankruptcy

One of David Cameron's favourite dishonest claims is that the UK was supposedly "bankrupted" during the New Labour administration, a lie he has told in parliament. Anyone who knows anything about economics knows that the claim that the UK economy has been declared bankrupt in the recent past is complete hogwash. Either the person claiming it is a complete economic illiterate who rote learns their facile political opinions from the pages of the right-wing press, or as in David Cameron's case, they're a despicable chancer who feels entitled to tell lies about the UK economy because he has such contempt for his audience that he thinks they're credulous enough to believe such absolute gubbins.

Nadine Dorries has never spoken out about David Cameron's habit of lying that the UK has been declared bankrupt.

Reducing the national debt

Another of David Cameron's favoured political lies is to claim that the Tories have been reducing the national debt, when they've actually failed to even halve the rate at which it is growing despite promising in 2010 that they would have eliminated the deficit completely by 2015 (the deficit was £76 billion in 2015-16).

David Cameron was rebuked by the UK Statistics Authority for telling this lie in a 2013 party political broadcast, but since the worst punishment they can give him for telling outright lies is the sending of a stern letter, Cameron decided to demonstrate his utter contempt for the UK Statistics Authority (and anyone who gives a damn about the truth) by repeating the exact same lie at the 2014 Tory part conference.

Nadine Dorries never once spoke out against David Cameron's habit of lying to the electorate about reducing the national debt when his government has actually created more new public debt than every Labour government in history combined.

Lying to evade questions
 

When Jeremy Corbyn asked David Cameron a question about the sweetheart 3% tax deal that had been cooked up with Google Cameron evaded the question completely by spouting an extraordinary stream of lies about the leader of the opposition as a desperate attempt to deflect attention away from the extremely lax treatment of multinational corporations that refuse to pay their fair share of tax.

Nadine Dorries never objected to the fact that David Cameron chose to evade the question about the sweetheart Google tax deal by spouting a load of lies about the leader of the opposition and she never raised the question of why Cameron was never held to account for telling such a stream of lies in the House of Commons by the Parliamentary Standards Committee.

Tax Credits

Before the 2015 General Election David Cameron and other leading Tories gave their word that the Tories wouldn't set about impoverishing the working poor by slashing Tax Credits. Just a few months after the 2015 General Election the Tories set about trying to slash Tax Credits for the working poor. They were only prevented from doing so after a major House of Lords rebellion.

Nadine Dorries never complained that David Cameron had lied to the electorate about Tax Credits, in fact she even voted in favour of the plan to slash in-work benefits for the working poor!

Conclusion 

Nadine Dorries has never complained about the way that David Cameron has contributed to the lamentable decline in the standard of political debate by lying over and over and over again. She never got upset about the extraordinary litany of lies and deceptions David Cameron has spewed on all manner of subjects, but now she's suddenly bothered!

The reason she's suddenly bothered now is pretty obvious. She didn't give a damn about Cameron's lies before because it suited her own personal self-interest to keep her mouth shut. Now that she's eyeing a ministerial position in a new post-Brexit government led by the extreme-right fringe of the Tory party she's keen to stick the knife in.

Nadine Dorries doesn't give a damn about honesty in public debate, like all of the members of the Tory party who have turned blind eyes to David Cameron's lies over they years, she's only really interested in serving her own personal self-interest.

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

OR

Tony Blair's attacks on Jeremy Corbyn

Tony Blair's latest attack on Jeremy Corbyn once again proves the validity of the "red Tory" accusations that are leveled at Tony Blair and the right-wing fringe of the Labour Party.

It's no surprise that Blair can't stop himself from publicly attacking Corbyn, because Corbyn was one of the most troublesome Labour MPs during Blair's years as Prime Minister. Corbyn opposed all kinds of right-wing Blairite policies like the reliance on rip-off PFI deals to load the cost of public infrastructure projects onto future generations and various other privatisation scams, as well as opposing Blair's invasion and occupation of Iraq (which created an appalling power vacuum that gave rise to a devastating wave of sectarian violence culminating in the rise of ISIS). Nobody would expect Blair to be delighted that the Labour Party is being led by one of his most defiant MPs. However, if Blair had any affinity for the Labour Party whatever, it would be far from unreasonable to expect him to accept the will of the Labour Party membership and avoid helping the Tories by launching one public attack after another against the current leader of the Labour Party.

The problem of course is that this kind of expectation relies on the assumption that a former leader of the Labour Party would actually give a damn about the Labour Party. Blair clearly doesn't. If it wasn't already completely clear that Blair simply used the Labour Party as a vehicle to fulfill his own personal ambitions, the string of vitriolic attacks against Jeremy Corbyn (and the Labour Party members who voted for him) are clear demonstrations that Blair has no affinity for the labour movement whatever. Now that the Labour Party has served its purpose to him, he's perfectly happy to help the Tories by constantly attacking the Labour leader instead of focusing on what the Tory government are up to.

In consideration of some of the fanatical and corrupt stuff that the current Tory government have been doing, it's utterly extraordinary that Tony Blair has decided to claim that the election of a Jeremy Corbyn led Labour government would be "a very dangerous experiment".

Here are just a few of the appalling things the Tories have been doing that Blair has been too busy attacking Jeremy Corbyn to bother speaking out against.

The austeirty con: It's extraordinary that so many people are gullible enough to fall for the Tory austerity narrative. Austerity has absolutely nothing to do with "living within our means" or "paying down the debt" (the debt grew by £76 billion in 2015-16 despite Osborne promising in 2010 that we'd actually be paying it back by now!). Tory austerity and debt fearmongering is the smokescreen behind which they have been distributing public assets to their private mates at an unprecedented rate and deliberately transferring wealth from the majority to the super-rich minority.

Blair never speaks out against austerity because he agrees with the objectives of privatising the state and the transference of wealth from the ordinary public to the super-wealthy minority. Ed Miliband screwed up the 2015 election because he listened to Blairites like Ed Balls' who advised him to run an austerity-lite campaign instead of attacking the Tory austerity con head on. Jeremy Corbyn absolutely stormed the Labour Party leadership contest because he was the only one of the four candidates who dared to point out that austerity is a con that needs to be actually opposed by the main opposition party.

Mass privatisation: George Osborne is currently distributing public assets to the private sector (often at massive losses to the taxpayer or completely for free) at a faster rate than any other Chancellor in history.

Tony Blair never speaks out against the unprecedented scale of Tory privatisation because he doesn't actually see any problem with it. In fact Blair's ministers actually assisted the Tories in kicking down the barriers to mass privatisation of pretty much the entire UK state by passing legislation to allow privatisation in the NHS and introducing privately operated (but publicly funded) academy schools.

Tax Credit Cuts: Despite their pre-election promises that they wouldn't be slashing Tax Credits (social security that provides support for the working poor whose bosses don't pay them enough to even live on), the Tories pretty much immediately set about trying to slash them.

Tony Blair didn't take the opportunity to criticise the Tories for breaking their election promises, or for impoverishing the working poor. Jeremy Corbyn did, and after a stinging House of Lords rebellion the Tories were forced to think of a different way of impoverishing the working poor in order to fund tax cuts for the rich.

Misreatement of the disabled: After the Tories voted to force through a £1,500 per year cut in the incomes of people who are too sick/disabled to work, George Osborne's 2016 budget included measures to further impoverish disabled people by slashing £4.4billion in Personal Independence Payments, whilst simultaneously handing a string of tax cuts to corporations and the super-rich.

Tony Blair didn't complain about this Tory policy of funding tax cuts for corporations and the super-rich by impoverishing disabled people. Jeremy Corbyn opposed it strongly and George Osborne was soon forced to drop his latest economic assault on disabled people after a large public backlash.

Privatisation of the English education system: Another feature of George Osborne's 2016 budget was the announcement of a Tory plan to force privatise every single school in England by 2022.

Tony Blair didn't bother speaking out against the forced privatisation of every single school in England, but Jeremy Corbyn did. Since the announcement in March 2016 the Tories have backtracked a little bit, saying that the best performing Local Authority schools will be exempt from forced privatisation, but thousands of other schools remain at risk of being given, for free, to corrupt and unaccountable private sector pseudo-charities like Perry Beeches.

Human rights:  The utter Tory contempt for human rights is absolutely clear. They've already managed to abolish the concept of open justice with their 2013 "Secret Courts" act and hastily rushed through legislation to allow the secret services to carry on with the mass trawling of public data that the Snowden leaks revealed that they had been doing unlawfully. Now they're intent on tearing up the right to free speech and the presumption of innocence. In order to destroy these long-established British rights, they're intent on tearing up the Human Rights Act and withdrawing the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights.

Since it was Blair's first government that introduced the Human Rights Act, one might have thought that he'd be a little more vocal in defending it. However he's been far too busy slinging muck at Jeremy Corbyn to bother much about speaking up in defence of our human rights that are under such threat from the Tories.

Tory Election fraud: The majority of the mainstream media has been extremely reluctant to cover the story, but the fact remains that the Tories stand accused of cheating their way to a majority in the 2015 General Election by breaking election rules in order to financially dope a large number of marginal constituencies. There are numerous ongoing police investigations into the Tory policy of misdeclaring electoral expenses in order to give themselves an unfair advantage.

Instead of using his influence to draw attention to the fact that the current government are under investigation for electoral fraud, Tony Blair decided that his time would be better spent attacking the current leader of the Labour Party!

Conclusion

In this article I've limited myself to just six subjects where Tony Blair could have actually helped the Labour Party by criticising the Tory government, instead of launching yet another bitter attack on Jeremy Corbyn. There are plenty of other things that Blair could criticise the Tories for too (immigration, divisions over the EU, fracking, foreign policy, attacks on labour rights, the Land Registry sell-off, the ridiculous energy price-fixing deal with France ...) but he continues to repeatedly focus his criticism on Jeremy Corbyn.

Blairites tend to get extremely irate if you accuse them of being "red Tories". But when their ideologue keeps persistently assisting the Tories by attacking Jeremy Corbyn, and has even openly admitted that he'd rather see the Tories in power than a Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn, their anger seems to totally unjustifiable. Those within the Labour Party who still worship at the altar of Blairism should admit to themselves that their leader is clearly much more closely aligned with the interests of a Tory Party that is being run by a fanatically right-wing bunch of zealots, than he is with the interests of the Labour Party.

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

OR

If anyone is playing petty "class war" politics, it's the Tories

One of the most familiar battle cries of the Tories and their cheerleaders in the right-wing corporate press is the claim that anyone who opposes Tory policies is guilty of "class warfare". I've already written an article about how so many Tories seem to be stuck in the class warfare battles of the 1970s so I won't go into that in so much detail. In this article I'm going to present some facts and analysis to support the argument that if anyone is guilty of conducting "class warfare" then it's clearly the Tories.

Social security cuts

Research conducted by Sheffield Hallam University has conclusively shown that the worst impact of Tory so-called "welfare reform" has been imposed on predominantly Labour voting areas like the north east, north west, south Wales and parts of Greater London.

Meanwhile the majority of the least affected areas happen to be in the Tory strongholds of the Home Counties and the rural north.

Council cuts

When we look at the severity of cuts to local council budgets a very similar pattern emerges. Predominantly Labour voting areas have borne the heaviest cuts in local government spending, while Tory councils have generally got off much more lightly.

Even though Tory councils have suffered nothing like the severity of budget cuts endured by places like Newcastle, that didn't stop David Cameron's own mother and aunt from lambasting the devastating effects of his ideological austerity agenda on local services, and neither did it stop Cameron himself from writing a bizarrely hypocritical letter to the leader of Oxfordshire County Council to complain about the service cuts they have been forced to make as a result of the Tory central government's obsession with ideological austerity.
Even though the bulk of local government austerity has been inflicted on poorer Labour voting areas, the Tory response to the furore over local government cuts by Tory councils and Tory MPs was to announce an extra £300 million in local government funding, 83% of which will go to Tory controlled councils.

The working poor vs wealthy pension savers

When George Osborne was planning to rob the working poor by slashing their working Tax Credits (despite numerous pre-election promises that the Tories would do no such thing) he ploughed on with it for ages in the face of massive public opposition, harsh criticism from opposition MPs, criticism from his fellow Tory MPs, and a large House of Lords rebellion.

Eventually George Osborne "U-turned" (by finding other ways of robbing the working poor), but he put up an epic fight to impoverish them.

When it came to proposed pension reforms that would have adversely impacted the rich, George Osborne dropped them before they'd even been officially announced! 

The contrast couldn't be more obvious.

Bedroom Tax and tax cuts for the rich

One of the clearest examples of Tory "class war" politics came in April 2013 when they introduced "Bedroom Tax" to penalise social housing tenants from poor backgrounds whether there was a smaller property available for them to move (less than 3% of cases) into or not (over 97% of cases).

In the very same week that they economically sanctioned hundreds of thousands of some of the poorest families in the UK, they handed an average £100,000 per year tax cut to Britain's 13,000 income millionaires!

Then they've got the absolute cheek to keep telling us that "we-re all in this together"!

Workers' rights vs bankers' bonuses

The UK already has some of the most restrictive anti-trade union laws in the developed world, yet the Tories are pushing ahead with a plan to make trade union democracy so unworkable that taking strike action will become almost impossible. Proposed legislation to turn an abstention into a stronger vote against strike action than an actual vote against strike action can surely only have been devised as a deliberately malicious effort to render effective trade unionism almost impossible.

This ongoing Tory attack on trade unionism is not the only example of Tories attacking workers' rights. Take their introduction of £1,200 fees in order to seek compensation for unfair dismissal, prolonged public sector pay freezes (which conveniently don't seem to apply to members of parliament who get one inflation busting pay raise after another) and the longest sustained decline in workers' wages since records began.

On the other hand the Tories have done nothing to reform the banks after the 2007-08 financial sector insolvency crisis. In fact financial sector workers (including bankers at failed, taxpayer bailed out banks) are taking home even larger bonuses than they were before the crash, and the Tories are actively assisting the inflation of another hopelessly unsustainable property speculation bubble with house price inflation schemes like "Help to Buy".

There's a legitimate debate to be had about whether the unions had too much power in the 1970s, or whether industrial decline in the UK was more a consequence of the incompetence of the over-privileged and hopelessly uncompetitive upper managerial classes and their utter failure to adopt modern managerial practices in order to compete with the Japanese, Germans and Americans.

Where there is no room for debate whatever is whether the 2007-08 economic meltdown was caused by ordinary workers and trade union activity, or by a massive spree of shockingly reckless financial sector gambling and outright fraud.

The fact that the Tories choose to focus their legislative efforts on attacking the trade unions and undermining workers' rights instead of trying to get the bloated, corruption riddled financial sector under control is an absolutely clear demonstration that these people are ideologically driven class warriors with no real concern for the long-term well being of the UK economy.

Conclusion

Whichever way we turn, we see the Tories favouring rich over the poor, employers over employees, the aristocracy over the "lower orders", Tory councils over Labour ones, the privileged over the ordinary, the greedy over the needy, the 1% over the 99%.

The fact that they behave like this shouldn't be any kind of shock at all to anyone who knows where the Tories get most of their financial donations, but what is shocking is the way that Tories and their supporters continue to dismiss opposition to their divisive inequality promoting policies as "class war" politics when they themselves are clearly engaging in class war; a crusade to enrich the already wealthy minority at the expense of everyone else.

 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.

MORE ARTICLES FROM
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 
         
Austerity is a con
           
The incompatibility of Christian ethics and modern Conservatism
                     
Why are so many Tories still fighting the ideological battles of the 1970s?
       
How gullible would you have to be to believe the Tory "hardworking people" propaganda?
                             
How the mainstream media frame the political debate
                
Why you should use your critical thinking skills 
(whatever the information source)
                      

The Tory ideological mission
                                
Margaret Thatcher's toxic neoliberal legacies
  

12 things you should know about the Tory Tax Credit cuts

Despite making numerous pre-election public assurances that they wouldn't be slashing Tax Credits, the Tories have been trying to push through £4.4 billion in Tax Credit cuts that will impoverish some 3 million working families.

In this article I'm going to run though twelve issues related to the Tories attempts to slash Tax Credits for the working poor like they promised that they wouldn't.

The pre-election lies

The fact that Tories like David Cameron and Michael Gove blatantly lied to the public about not having plans to slash Tax Credits to working families is an issue of fundamental importance.

It shouldn't matter whether you believe the cuts are necessary or not, you should surely be furious that the Conservatives lied their way into power, and that the bulk of the mainstream media are once again letting them get away with it.

What faith can the general public have in the political system when they can see such obvious examples of politicians lying their way into power, and suffering no consequences whatever for their appalling dishonesty?

"Hardworking people"
[Main article]

David Cameron and the Tories have been pushing the Orwellian "war is peace" style propaganda narrative that they are the party for "hardworking people", but this economic assault on millions of working families is yet another demonstration that they don't actually give a damn about ordinary working people.

It should be obvious to everyone that the Tories are not on the side of ordinary working people. Just follow the money - the vast majority of donations to the Tory party come from multi-millionaires, bankers, private health companies and the the inherited wealth aristocracy. Why on earth would the super-rich minority fund a political party in order for it to favour the interests of ordinary working people over their own? In what way would that make sense?

The Tories fake "living wage"

What is the usual response of habitual liars when they get caught out? Is it to admit they were wrong to lie and apologise, or is it to double-down with even more lies?

I guess it's little surprise to most people that David Cameron has chosen to double-down with even more lies to justify his economic attack on millions of working families. Neither is it surprising that he's so confident that the mainstream press will let him get away with it that he's even prepared to lie in parliament.

"what our proposals do are reform welfare and at the same time bring in a national living wage" David Cameron, 16th September 2015, PMQs [source]. 

Everyone knows that the Tories are trying to push through the Tax Credit cuts now, while their fake "living wage" is going to be slowly phased in over the course of the parliament, which means that Cameron's claim that the living wage is being introduced "at the same time" as the cuts is yet another lie.

One obvious factor to consider is that if the Tories did significantly increase the minimum wage right now, then the Tax Credits bill would fall dramatically as a consequence because fewer families would be suffering working poverty and relying on Tax Credits to top up their poverty wages. But the Tories have no intention of doing it that way because that would load the economic burden of reducing the Tax Credit bill onto their corporate backers, not onto the working poor.

Contempt

Just imagine the levels of contempt that the Tory party have for ordinary working people that they think they can tell blatant pre-election lies to us, try to con us into believing that they support "hardworking people" as they simultaneously impoverish millions of working families, and then try to fob us off with even more lies about how their fake "living wage" is going to mitigate the harm they are doing, when it's blatantly obvious that it won't because the cuts are being imposed long before the paltry increases in the minimum wage take effect.

In light of this cruel economic assault on the working poor, every single time we hear a Tory politician talking about "hardworking people"  from now on we should be thinking about how much utter contempt they must hold us in to expect us to mindlessly accept such obviously counter-factual propaganda.

The children

Independent studies have shown that millions of families are going to be made significantly worse off as a result of the Tory Tax Credit cuts, and that some 200,000 children (predominantly from working families) will be pushed below the poverty line next year as a result.

What the Tories are undeniably doing is imposing economic sanctions on hundreds of thousands of children for the "crime" of being born into working poor families.

The impoverishment of so many children highlights the absolute callousness of David Cameron saying that he's "delighted" that his MPs voted through George Osborne's economic assault on the working poor. 

The economic damage
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Impoverishing poor people in order to "save the economy" makes no sense from a macroeconomic perspective. It's a well established fact that poor people tend to spend a much higher proportion of their incomes on consumption than the very rich (who save a higher percentage of their incomes, and are much more likely to stash their cash in offshore tax-dodging setups).

You don't have to know the specific term for this phenomenon is called the Marginal Propensity to Consume to understand that taking thousands of pounds away from millions of families is certain to have a negative knock on effect on the amount of demand for goods and services in the wider economy.

It's absolutely clear that nobody who understands rudimentary macroeconomics could support impoverishing the working poor as a tactic for improving the economy, so there must be a different agenda. I'll get to what that agenda is later in the article.

Entrepreneurship

Ever since the rise of Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s the Tories have harped on endlessly about how much they love entrepreneurship, yet these Tax Credits cuts are blatantly an attack on the entrepreneurial working poor who are trying to establish their own small businesses in such tough economic times.

One of the big criticisms of the Tax Credits system is the way that it allows unscrupulous employers to boost their profits by paying poverty wages to their staff, safe in the knowledge that the taxpayer will step in and make up the shortfall. However, things aren't completely black and white. Tax Credits aren't just a subsidy to greedy employers, they're a form of subsidy for entrepreneurs who invest their efforts in trying to set up their own businesses.

This kind of subsidy for small independent businesses is a form of Infant Industry Protection, which takes the form of assistance for small businesses to help them compete against the economic advantage larger more established companies have due to things like economies of scale and brand awareness.

It's common knowledge that many successful businesses struggled to make significant profits in their first few years of operation (due to high capital investment costs, lack of product awareness and small initial customer bases). This means that helping small business owners out with Tax Credits is a way of promoting entrepreneurship, and slashing Tax Credits is a form of dissuading entrepreneurship.

Frontloading Austerity

Anyone who knows anything about economics knows that ideological austerity is bad for the economy. Just look at the graph to the right. It clearly shows that George Osborne's own pet thinktank the OBR have always accepted that ideological austerity is bad for economic growth.

Anyone who knows the economic basics knows that ideological austerity is bad for growth, the OBR know that ideological austerity is bad for growth, and the Tories know that ideological austerity is bad for growth. This is why the Tories frontloaded their harshest austerity measures at the beginning of the 2010-2015 parliament, and why they're frontloading even more damaging ideological austerity at the beginning of the 2015-2020 parliament.

The Tories are playing the age old game of hitting the "lower orders" with harsh economic sanctions at the beginning of the parliament, then easing back towards the end of it, in the hope that people will be so relieved to be able to breathe properly for a while, that they'll completely forget who has been standing on their necks the whole time and flock off to the polling stations to vote Tory.

Undermining social mobility

It's absolutely clear that reducing the spending power of the people who are most likely to spend their incomes on consumption is not a policy that is aimed at promoting economic growth, so the question has to be what is the real reason the Tories are so intent on impoverishing millions of working poor families?

In my view it's pretty obvious. The Tories hate social mobility and hate the idea of "the lower orders" working their way up from the bottom. They want to reserve the wealth for them and theirs and they certainly don't want a load of "uppity plebs" working their way out of poverty to challenge for the wealth the Tory class feel they have an unique entitlement to.

This Tory plan to impoverish millions of working poor families and stamp out entrepreneurship amongst the non-monied classes is not the only example of the Tories erecting deliberate social mobility barriers. Just look at the way they tripled tuition fees to ensure that students from poor and ordinary backgrounds are lumbered with huge (often completely unpayable) debts for the "crime" of aspiring to better themselves, while the children of the wealthy establishment progress through life without having to pay a 9% aspiration tax on their disposable income because their daddy paid their tuition fees upfront.

Constitutional issues

After the House of Lords crippled David Cameron's economic assault on the working poor we were treated to one of the most bizarrely hypocritical spectacles in the history of British politics, namely a load of Tory politicians whinging on about the unelected nature of the House of Lords!

Let's not forget that not only did the Tory party completely scupper the Lib-Dem plan to introduce a bit of democracy to the House of Lords during the last parliament, but also that David Cameron has already added a staggering 187 new unelected peers to the already bloated House of Lords, meaning he's been adding unelected peers at a faster rate than any Prime Minister in history, and the unelected House of Lords is now the second largest legislative assembly in the whole world after China's People's National Congress!

As much as the Tories are whinging on about how terrible it is that the House of Lords dared to vote to amend a Statutory Instrument, it's beyond obvious that the real constitutional issue here must be the fact that the Tories completely lied about having no plans to slash Tax Credits in order to cheat their way into power.

Are members of the public really going to get more upset that the House of Lords went against the obscure informal convention that they don't make amendments to Statutory Instruments, than they are about the fact that the Statutory Instrument in question is something that the government gave explicit pre-election public guarantees that they weren't going to do?

Seriously, which is most important constitutional issue? The House of Lords going against an obscure informal convention, or the government believing that they can get away with blatantly lying to the public?

What will the opposition do?

The Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has been doing a fairly good job so far by chipping away at David Cameron over the pre-election lies he told about not planning to slash Tax Credits, and the fact that these cuts are going to impoverish millions of the "hardworking families" that Cameron pretends to give a damn about. However I think more can be done.

The fundamental issue here is that the Conservatives lied to the electorate, and if the opposition parties were to work together they could force the Tories into supporting a totally untenable position.

The opposition parties could get their heads together to come up with proposals for some kind of "Integrity in Politics Charter" with the aim of preventing politicians from telling pre-election lies. If the Tories were to oppose it in parliament, they'd be seen to be defending the right they think they have to lie to the public.

I'm not going to say what should be in this integrity charter other than some means of making pre-election manifesto commitments and promises legally binding (barring certain predetermined exceptional circumstances). It's not my job to write proposed legislation, so I'm just throwing the idea out there because such a move from the combined opposition parties would have the potential to back the Tories into an impossible corner where they would be forced to repeatedly defend their presumed right to tell outright lies to the public.

If you think the opposition parties proposing some kind of integrity charter is a good idea, how about you write to your local political representatives to suggest the idea, or contact representatives of some of the opposition parties to suggest they get their heads together on the idea.

Trident

As a final point I'd like to put the scale of the cuts into perspective. While the Tories have been insisting that there is no alternative to slashing £4.4 billion in Tax Credit support to the working poor because of the economy, the estimated price tag for replacing the Trident nuclear programme has been quietly raised from £100 billion to £167 billion.

The idea that we need to thrust millions of working families deeper into poverty to save £4.4 billion is an affront to decency when the price tag for a bunch of ludicrous doomsday machines that nobody in their right mind would ever use has just been increased by £67 billion.

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