After nine years of deliberate Tory vandalism the UK education system is in absolute chaos, but Labour have a fantastic proposal to reverse this damage and make the British education system fit for purpose again.
Under Jeremy Corbyn Labour have developed some fantastic policies, such as publicly owned not-for-profit rail, national grid, water supply and Royal Mail, a National Investment Bank like Norway's Sovereign Wealth Fund, decentralisation of political and economic power, restoration of the NHS, investment economics instead of austerity fanaticism, and the long-overdue closure of the depraved Tory disability denial system.
But the shining jewel in Labour's policy proposals is the establishment of a National Education Service to provide quality education, for free, to all who require it.
It's a fantastic idea because access to a good education is a right, and an obvious benefit to all of society. And the Tories are horrifyingly wrong to have treated education as a commodity to be traded for profit by the rich.
The Tory damage
The damage the Tories have done to our education system over the last nine years will echo down the generations in the form of squandered opportunities, misallocated resources, wasted potential, and unpayable debts.
From the roots of the education to the branches Tory education policy has been a disaster. Here's just some of the detail.
- The Tory fixation with austerity dogma has had its most damaging effect on the education system in adult education, which has suffered an astounding 45% funding cut since 2010. It should be stark-staringly obvious that a well-funded and easily accessible adult education and retraining system should be a vital component in an ever increasingly volatile jobs market, but the Tories have cut it to shreds.
National Education Service
Labour's concept of an integrated National Education Service to provide quality education from cradle to grave is absolutely brilliant, and could revolutionise education in the same way that the introduction of the NHS in 1948 revolutionised our health system and improved our nation's health.
Stop the profiteering
The right-wing idea that education is a commodity to be traded by the rich is an affront to basic common sense.
The primary purpose of an education system should be to provide the best standard of education, not to extract quick profits out of the system.
It's just absurd short-term thinking to think about the education system as a primary source of profit (via profiteering academy chains, dodgy no-bid supply contracts, rip-off student debt repayments ...) rather than a crucial component of future economic prosperity.
The better educated we are as a nation, the more economic potential we have, and the more cash that gets siphoned away in bloated executive salaries and private profits, the less is left to actually spend on the principal task of providing a quality education.
The establishment of a National Education Service would squeeze out the profiteers and reorientate our schools, colleges, universities, and adult education facilities back towards what always should have remained the primary objective: providing the best possible education.
Workforce flexibility
Perhaps the most obvious area where the National Education Service would be an advantage would be the provision of adult education and retraining.
Instead of using draconian sanctions to hound people into finding work (that often simply doesn't exist), referrals to the National Education Service for retraining would clearly be an awful lot more effective.
Someone who loses their job in their 50s doesn't need hounding and abusing until they find work, what they probably need is a skills upgrade, from computer literacy to new skillsets entirely, and a National Education Service that provided these courses free of charge to anyone who needs them would be an obvious economic benefit to the nation in the long-term.
Education for all
One of the most commonplace right-wing whinges goes along the line of "why should I pay for other people's education opportunities when I didn't get a good education myself".
This unbelievably selfish but incredibly commonplace whinge would be eliminated by the introduction of a National Education Service providing access to free education for all.
If everyone is entitled to free education and training, then the only ones left whinging would be those who don't want to benefit. "why should I pay for other people's education opportunities when I don't want to be educated myself" doesn't have quite the same impact does it?
Policy-based debate
The proposal of a National Education Service is a fantastic policy, but few people know about it because the Tories and their cheerleaders in the mainstream media know that Labour and the left would win hands down when it comes to policy because the general public strongly support most of it (see image).
That's why politics is continually debased to such an extent with an endless barrage of trivial nonsense and outright smears.
Corbyn didn't bow properly. Corbyn didn't sing the national anthem. Corbyn doesn't dress in expensive Saville Row suits so he's unfit to be Prime Minister. Jeremy Corbyn's an IRA supporter (because he met members of Sinn Féin and the Ulster Unionists to appeal for a peaceful resolution to the conflict). Corbyn went to Morecambe. Corbyn is a Czech spy. Corbyn supporters are all Stalinists and Trotskyites. Let's focus on anti-Semitism in Labour all the time (when there are way more anti-Semites in the Tory ranks). Corbyn supported Hitler during WWII (even though he wasn't even born). Corbyn is a Russian stooge (even though the Tories are the ones raking in £millions from Russian oligarchs and Putin cronies). Corbyn muttered "stupid woman" (or was it "stupid people"? let's debate this for several days!)
The barrage of nonsense and smears is as endless as it is deliberate.
They'd much rather we expend our time and effort defending Corbyn, and Labour, and the left in general from this constant bombardment of gibberish, than spending it discussing and explaining Labour's policies.
And the concept of a cradle to grave National Education Service is one of the best Labour policies of all. Maybe let's talk about that for a while, rather than continually fixating on the latest faux outrage or manufactured smear?
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The Tories know that they're shockingly unpopular with the younger generations, and they're constantly preoccupied with how they're going to trick the under-45s into voting for them, including a Resolution Foundation event at the Tory party conference on winning back the under-45s that was mainly attended by over-45s.
Here are a few ideas for appealing to the under-45s
End austerity and wage repression: We've had a decade of this ruinous hard-right Tory economic nonsense now, which means that all workers up to the age of 28 have spent their entire careers in the Tory deadzone of real terms wage cuts, wrecked wage progression, outrageously exploitative employment practices, and scrapped workers rights. Any graduate under the age of 41 has now spent half of their working life in this Tory deadzone too. If the Tories really want to appeal to the under-45s, scrapping austerity dogma and wage repression would be an immediate first step.
Scrap "no deal" Brexit: If it was up to the under-45s there would never have been a Brexit in the first place, but they're being forced to bear the consequences because millions of retired people voted to trash the prospects and revoke the rights of the younger generations just because they believed Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Nigel Farage and the rubbish they read in the hard-right propaganda rags. The absolute least the Tories could do is follow Labour's lead and retract their threat of launching an economically ruinous "no deal" Brexit flounce because it's the under-45s who would have to deal with the extreme economic fallout of such a catastrophic move for decades.
Free education: One of the Tories' first moves when the Lib-Dems enabled them back into power in 2010 was to triple university fees to make England the most expensive place in the world to study at public university. As a result students are now leaving university with £50,000+ debts which grow at inflation plus 3%. This means that over 70% of graduates will never pay off their student debts despite paying a permanent 9% education tax on their disposable income for their entire working lives. Lumbering young people with such enormous and unpayable debts is clearly both unsustainable and a clear turnoff for anyone who has been lumbered with such debts.
Save the NHS and social care system: One of the strangest things about the state of modern British politics is that the older people are, and more likely they are to rely on NHS and social care services, the more likely they are to vote for the Tory party that is starving these services of investment and vandalising them with closures, ideologically driven reorganisations, and privatisation scams. Investment in the NHS and social care and the reversal of their privatisation agenda would certainly appeal to under-45s who see the NHS and social care system as vital components of living in a civilised society.
Scottish independence: As with Brexit, the outcome of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum would have been completely different had it been up to the under-45s. In fact if the vote had been restricted to people of working age the result would have been independence, but Gordon Brown's fear-mongering about pensioners losing their pensions in an independent Scotland was enough to ensure a huge turnout of elderly people to trample down the hopes and aspirations of their children and grandchildren. Support for another Scottish independence referendum would definitely appeal to the younger generations in Scotland.
Of course none of these are even remotely realistic propositions for the Tory party because they all conflict with the central Tory ideology of protecting the wealth and power of vested establishment interests, and erecting as many social mobility barriers as possible to prevent people from ordinary backgrounds from challenging the children of establishment elitists for the top jobs.
In fact the Tory party is such a weird echo chamber of extremism that when the Guardian journalist Dawn Foster asked some young Tories what policies would attract under-30s back to the Tory fold they replied "bring back public hanging" and proposed the recolonisation of Africa!
Then you just need to look at the disgusting antics of the young Tories at Plymouth University to see what calibre of young people the Tory party is attracting. "Fuck the NHS", pro-Trump, "Enoch [Powell] was right", drawn on Hitler moustaches, anti-Semitic slogans, white power hand gestures ...
Since Theresa may took over as Tory leader, the Tory party has gone through an intense period of Ukipification, pushing hard-right ultranationalism and welcoming UKIP-voters, politicians, and activists into the the Tory fold in droves.
The big problem (from a Tory perspective) with this Ukipification of the thier party is that socially regressive hard-right ultranationalism is utterly abhorrent political cyanide to the vast majority of under-45s, meaning that the few young people who are left supporting the Tories are either the politically clueless who just mindlessly vote the same way their parents do, or the absolutely rabid extreme-right fanatics who would surely be voting for actual neo-Nazi parties (like the ones the Tories aligned themselves with to support Viktor Orbán) if Britain had a modern proportional voting system like the rest of Europe.
So for now the Tory party strategy for attracting the youth vote appears to be appealing to the most rabid extreme-right, anti-Semitic, "fuck the NHS", socially regressive, "bring back public hanging", Enoch Powell-adoring, "recolonise Africa", white supremacist freaks, and screw the rest of them into the ground in order to feed the insatiable greed of the mega-rich!
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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.
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* = 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).
The rumour is that Nick Clegg is due to be handed a knighthood in the New Year's Honours.
Aside from the fact that the British honours system is an absolute affront to democracy, there's surely nobody less deserving of such a politically motivated award than Nick Clegg.
If we think back to 2010 we'll recall the fact that after decades of rebuilding and restructuring, the Liberals were a genuine third party, looking at securing well over 20% of the vote.
The Liberal Democrats were in fine form, with popular and engaging policies like their pledge to oppose any more tuition fee increases, and their determination to reform our outrageously outdated and unrepresentative political system.
In Vince Cable they had another apparent asset in someone who could talk about economics in an engaging and understandable manner. Before the General Election he cautioned against the fire-sale of public assets at below their true market value, and against austerity dogma with appeals for increased public investment in infrastructure projects.
By 2017 the Lib-Dem share of the vote has collapsed to just 7%, Nick Clegg is gone as party leader, and ousted from his Sheffield Hallam constituency too.
The reasons for this collapse in fortunes are obvious.
One of the main reasons is that Clegg and his Lib-Dem chums immediately betrayed everyone who voted Lib-Dem because they believe education is a right and a social benefit, rather than a privilege to be commodified and sold at the highest possible price.
By colluding with the Tories to increase tuition fees to £9,000 per year, with interest on the debts hiked to an absolute rip-off 3% above inflation, Clegg has lumbered hundreds of thousands of students with vast debts that over three quarters of them will never pay off, despite paying 9% of their disposable income in aspiration tax for their entire working lifetimes.
When it came to much-needed reform of the political system, Clegg betrayed that core Lib-Dem demographic too.
Instead of making fair votes one of his red lines in the coalition negotiations, he capitulated and agreed to nothing more than a referendum on a worst possible voting reform called Alternative Vote. A voting system Clegg himself once famously referred to as "a miserable little compromise".
The referendum was lost and reform of the House of Lords wasn't even attempted as Clegg actually sat by and watched David Cameron stuff the Lords with unelected cronies at a faster rate than any Prime Minister in British history!
Then there was Clegg's economics spokesperson Vince Cable, who went from warning against public asset fire-sales and ruinous austerity dogma, to serving in George Osborne's treasury, selling off the Royal Mail at way below it's true market value, and helping Osborne slash Britain's rate of infrastructure investment to the lowest level in the developed world.
What's worst of all is that the Lib-Dems are rabidly pro-European, and only the most blinkered of Lib-Dem fanatics could possibly try to deny the vital role Nick Clegg played in creating Brexit.
Firstly he enabled the Tories back into power and then backed their ruinous austerity fetishism and wage repression policies to the hilt, thus eroding the living standards of millions and creating the ideal situation for a massive public "fuck you" to the political establishment.
Then there's the way he normalised lying to the electorate with his absolutely brazen deceptions about opposing tuition fee increases. Watching Clegg completely get away with that extreme level of dishonesty surely emboldened the most shockingly dishonest Brexiteers like Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Priti Patel, and Iain Duncan Smith.
Then there was his refusal to press the Tories into electoral reform to make the voting system fairer and more representative. Had he made the introduction of a proportional voting system a red line in his coalition negotiations, David Cameron would never have been able to win a thumping majority with just 36.8% of the vote, and he would never have been able to gamble the entire future of the UK on a whim like he did.
Not only has Clegg wrecked his own party and rendered himself so politically toxic that his own constituency got rid of him, he's also played an instrumental role in bringing about the Lib-Dems own worst nightmare in Brexit.
Anyone with any grip on reality whatever would look at a man who wrecked his own party, lied to the electorate, wilfully imposed ruinous Tory austerity dogma and wage repression on millions of people, played an instrumental role in delivering his own worst nightmare in Brexit, and even got dumped by his own constituents, must surely conclude that he deserves a badge of shame rather than a reward.
However the Westminster establishment club are so shockingly out of touch with reality that they can look at an incompetent, profoundly dishonest, self-defeating, and massively discredited charlatan like Nick Clegg and think he deserves one of the highest honours the nation can bestow on a person!
Nick Clegg's reward for such abject failure actually tells us way more about the ridiculous bubble of delusion the Westminster establishment club exists in, than it tells us about the man himself.
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 MSP Annie Wells has come out with an extraordinary attack on millions of ordinary people that implies those earning below £33,000 per year are not ambitious hard-working or successful.
She posted her insulting Twitter rant in response to the Scottish government budget that included small income tax rises for people earning above £33,000 per year.
Her Tweet claimed that the progressive tax reforms implemented by the SNP government sent a message "don't be ambitious, don't be hard-working, don't be successful" to higher income Scots who have to pay a little bit more tax to fund public services, and things like free university education and free prescriptions. The clear implication of her rant being that people who earn less than £33,000 per year are not ambitious, not hard-working, and not successful.
This obnoxious elitist stance is yet another Tory assertion of the self-attribution fallacy: The warped idea that there is a form of natural economic justice at play ensuring that rich people become rich because they're superior, and poorer people remain poorer because of some inherent failing or moral deficiency (not because society is rigged against them and in favour of out-of-touch elitists like Annie Wells).
To put her toxic views into context the starting salary of a police officer in Scotland is £23, 493, a nurse starts on £22,128, and a firefighter begins on £22,017. All of these people earn at least £10,000 below Annie Wells' cutoff point.
Even if these public sector workers work hard over the years and climb the pay scale to eventually earn above £33,000, the SNP budget also includes decent pay raises for public sector workers, so they might have to pay a few extra pence a week in tax, but in return for much better pay than their counterparts in the rest of the UK. If they were lucky enough to benefit from Scotland's policy of free university education, they'd also save a fortune by not having to pay out chunks of their salary every month on aspiration tax either.
Annie Wells earns £60,000 per year as a member of the Scottish Parliament, which means she's raging that she's facing a 29p per week increase in income tax.
As many people have asserted, tax is the subscription fee we pay to live in a civilised society. Annie doesn't want to pay a tiny bit more because she's a high profile member of a political party that has spent seven long years actively repressing the wages of UK workers, and especially public sector workers like police, NHS staff and fire fighters.
It's vital to acknowledge that not all high earners are as selfish as Annie and her Tory chums. Several of people responded to her insulting Tweet by saying that they're perfectly happy to pay a few quid extra in tax to make Scotland a better and more progressive country (see image).
Annie is furious because she's bitterly opposed to the concept of a society where public sector workers wages rise in line with inflation. She's also firmly opposed to the idea of a society in which education is treated as social good that benefits all of society, rather than a commodity to be sold at the highest possible price so that people from ordinary backgrounds who aspire to better themselves end up in £50,000+ debt (like students in England do thanks to her Tory party colleagues' imposition of the highest public university tuition fees in the world).
Annie's contemptuous Tweet crying that a minority of Scottish people who are doing really quite well in life might have to pay an extra few pennies a week in order to make Scotland a slightly fairer and more civilised place just goes to prove how out-of-touch she is with the realities faced by millions of Scottish people who aren't doing as well as she is financially, and the fact that like most Tories, she only really gives a damn about serving the interests of the rich.
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 bald man in the BBC Question Time audience demanded answers from the Labour shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry, but he wasn't remotely interested in what she had to say, because he'd already diligently rote learned his political opinions from the right-wing media.
When he said "I'd like to hear an example of a country where Corbyn and McDonnell's ideas have worked" you might have imagined that he was interested in listening to the answer, but when Thornberry replied "most of central Europe" and when pressed to name specific countries she said "Germany" and "Sweden" he sneered derisively as if she was the delusional one.
Thornberry's response elicited cackling and sneering from the Tory tribailists in the BBC audience, but that just goes to show how these people have been led like sheep into believing that Jeremy Corbyn is some kind of terrifying left-wing extremist, rather than a centre-left democratic socialist who is proposing economic policies that are perfectly normal across Europe and the rest of the developed world.
Of course there is no country on Earth where a government has come to power and enacted absolutely everything in the Labour Party manifesto, but significant elements of Labour's economic policies are absolutely commonplace across the developed world.
One of Jeremy Corbyn's most prominent headline policies is the abolition of tuition fees (which should more accurately be described as Aspiration Taxes) and making university education free. University education is free (or very low cost) across most of Europe, including Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and let's not forget Scotland either. If Germany and Scotland can afford to offer free university education, why can't England?
Jeremy Corbyn wants to reverse the extreme Tory cuts to Corporation Tax that have been going on since 2010. He plans to increase the rate for major corporations to 26%, while setting a lower rate of 21% for small corporations. 26% would still be the lowest rate in the G7 advanced economies, which means Corbyn's tax policies are so far from being extreme-left that they're actually more pro-corporate than the USA, France, Germany, Japan, Italy and Canada!
One of Corbyn and McDonnell's most interesting ideas is the establishment of a National Investment Bank in order to fund future infrastructure projects. Other countries that have National Investment Banks/Sovereign Wealth Funds include Norway, Singapore, South Korea, Australia, and the Chinese economic powerhouse actually has several.
The Labour Party Manifesto pledged to renationalise the National Grid. Some might see this as radical leftist extremism, but they'd have to be utterly clueless to have been bamboozled into such a position by the right-wing dominated media, because the United States actually has a network of not-for-profit publicly accountable electricity distribution grids.
Perhaps if you're so rabidly right-wing that you think Texas is an extreme-left state awash with commies and Marxists you might believe that Corbyn's energy policies are extreme-left, or maybe you've got some semblance of a grip on political reality?
Corbyn and McDonnell also want to renationalise the railways. There are several countries in the developed world with national rail companies including France, Norway, Singapore, Hong Kong and Italy. The really interesting thing is that under the Tories' shambolic privatisation agenda these foreign state rail companies are actually running 74% of the franchises on the UK rail network, and the only country that is banned from bidding to run UK rail franchises is the UK itself.
Perhaps a more pertinent question when it comes to national rail networks wouldn't be where else do they have publicly owned railways, but where else have they managed to make such a godawful, inefficient, and ideologically-incoherent mess of their rail network?
Another Labour Manifesto pledge was to bring the Royal Mail back under public ownership. Other countries with national mail systems include Canada, Switzerland, Belgium, and Finland.
Then there's the policy of reversing the Tory strategy of carving up the NHS and distributing the pieces to profiteering corporations (including corporations run by major Tory party donors). You don't have to look very far for an example of a successful not-for-profit public health system. The NHS itself was doing brilliantly before the Tories set about vandalising it. The NHS was ranked as the most efficient health service in the world, and had the highest approval ratings ever, then the Tories imposed huge austerity cuts and imposed a massive top down reorganisation called the 2012 Health and Social Care Act. Since then waiting times have skyrocketed, huge numbers of A&E units, maternity wards and walk in centres have been axed (often against furious local opposition), NHS staff are overworked, underpaid and demoralised and huge numbers of people are dying as a consequence.
The truth is that we don't have to look abroad for evidence that Labour's policies work, we just have to look at the devastating ideological vandalism the Tories are inflicting on the NHS, and recognise that Labour have pledged to stop the vandalism and set about reversing the damage.
The problem of course is that vast numbers of people are so shockingly gullible that they simply believe what the mainstream media tell them about Jeremy Corbyn being some kind of terrifying leftist bogeyman with bonkers extreme-left policies. They're unwilling to even consider the fact that most of Corbyn's headline economic policies are commonplace across the developed world, and in fact it's radically right-wing Tory policies like handing control of state schools to private sector pseudo-charities, privatising police services, and vandalising the health system that are desperately unpopular, and pretty bloody rare in successful developed economies.
So the big question has to be how do we reach out to people who are so damned gullible that they uncritically rote learn the mainstream media propaganda about Jeremy Corbyn being an extreme-left bogeyman, and sneer derisively when anyone points out the fact that Corbyn's policies are absolutely commonplace across the developed world while the Tories are the ideological extremists?
How do we reach out to people who prefer to believe in mainstream media lies than in observable reality?
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
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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