Why do so many people who benefited from social mobility now want the ladder kicked down?

As a result of the changes introduced by Clement Attlee's post-war Labour government the 1960s and '70s saw the greatest levels of social mobility the United Kingdom has ever seen.

There was full employment so that pretty much anyone with the desire to work could find a job with at least half decent pay. There were plenty of houses, and even if you couldn't quite afford a house of your own there was an abundant supply of social housing too. If you were academically smart, then university education was free, and it even came with maintenance grants to cover your living costs. If you lost your job or fell ill then the welfare state provided decent social security payments to stave off absolute destitution. The legal aid system ensured that the poor and ordinary could have access to good legal representation so as to tip the scales of justice ever-so-slightly less in favour of the super-rich.

Of course this period was no utopia, and plenty of people still endured poor pay, dangerous working conditions, and discriminatory practices (especially when it came to stuff like sex, race, class and sexual orientation), but since 1979 many of the factors that allowed these all-time high levels of social mobility have been deliberately attacked and undermined by the Westminster political class.

• The supply of social housing has been catastrophically eroded since the 1980s, 40% of the sold-off homes falling into the hands of exploitative private landlords. 

• The lowest house building rates since the early 1920s has stoked house price inflation has made the prospect of home ownership an impossible fantasy to millions. 

• Since 2010 ordinary British workers have suffered the longest sustained decline in the real value of their wages since records began. 

• The current low unemployment figures that right-wingers love to brag about are a blatant fix which count anyone who does just 1 hour a week on a zero hours contract job as "employed". Additionally it counts anyone who has been thrown off benefits by zealous job centre staff as not being unemployed. Additionally people on unpaid workfare schemes are also classed as being employed!

• The welfare state has been persistently attacked so that unemployed people have to jump through countless hoops and even offer themselves up as unpaid slave labour at highly profitable multinational corporations in order to receive their meagre subsistence benefits. 

• Sick and disabled people have it even worse, having to go through demeaning, dehumanising and downright discriminatory Work Capacity Assessments administered by bureaucrats working for profitable outsourcing corporations. 

• Students are being lumbered with debts of £50,000+ before they even enter the workplace, and over 80% of graduates under this new regime will never be able to pay off their student debts, despite entire working lifetimes of repayments!

• Access to legal aid has been trashed so badly that hundreds of thousands of people are being left with no choice but to represent themselves in court, which not only shatters their chances of success, but also wastes vast amounts of court time and public money because they simply don't understand the legal processes.

It's completely understandable that the privileged classes and their pals in the Westminster establishment club have worked so hard and for so long to reduce social mobility. After all the beneficiaries of social mobility become rivals to the children of the upper classes.

The less social mobility there is, the more unearned opportunities there are to be handed on a plate to the children of the establishment class.

It's clearly a huge advantage to the children of the establishment class that their peers are lumbered with a lifetime 9% aspiration tax on their disposable income for their university education, while they avoid it because their parents can just pay the fees upfront. 

It's beyond obvious that an unaccountable political elite would increasingly selfishly rig society to benefit their own class if they found that they suffered no adverse electoral consequences for doing it (as the New Labour mob found when they first introduced aspiration taxes on university students from poor and ordinary backgrounds).

The establishment elitists who rig society to benefit their own class are undeniably the bad guys, but the truly despicable people are those who actually reaped the benefits of social mobility in the 1960s and '70s, who now desperately want to kick the ladder down to prevent the younger generations from climbing up too.

The people who came from poor and ordinary backgrounds and enjoyed the benefits of stuff like social housing and/or affordable house prices, full employment and decent wages, a decent social safety net, legal aid, and free university education, but who now vote in favour of denying these same opportunities to all future generations.

Perhaps some of these people have deluded themselves into believing that they achieved it all themselves, and the decent wages, affordable housing, social safety net, legal protections, and access to free university education had nothing whatever to do with it. That's called the self-attribution fallacy, and huge numbers of wealthy people love to imagine that they did it all by themselves.

On the other hand there are plenty who know perfectly well that they benefited from social mobility, but who want to kick the ladder down on younger generations for purely self-interested reasons. For example people who benefited from affordable housing in the past know that building more social and affordable housing now would slow down the inflating value of their own property portfolios, and reduce the profits from their buy-to-let slumlord empires.

Of course it was hard to avoid voting in favour of attacks on social mobility when Tony Blair and his ilk were running the Labour Party because both of the main parties were at it.

But now that Labour has a leader who is determined to reverse the trend and begin promoting social mobility again through policies like free education, house building, welfare reform, decent wages, regulation of the private rental market, and a crackdown on exploitative employment practices, there's really no excuse for voting for more Tory class war inspired attacks on social mobility unless you actively oppose social mobility.

The wealthy and privileged establishment class who have enforced four decades of neoliberalism, rigging British society in favour of themselves and their own are vile self-serving elitists, but the people who actually benefited from social mobility who actually vote in favour of the Tory war against social mobility are the truly despicable ones.

They're the kind of people who climb the ladder out of the flooding basement, then deliberately kick it down and let others from their own class drown, rather than risk sharing the benefits of not drowning with others.

They don't lose anything by letting other people escape, but it makes them feel important and special to look down on other people drowning, and feel superior.

Even those who have deluded themselves that social mobility is irrelevant and that they achieved everything in life themselves are guilty of class treachery. 

Perhaps they're too deluded to realise that voting in favour of the Tory war against social mobility is an utterly malicious thing to do? But since when was stupidity a defence?

Does the criminal get to avoid jail because he claims to be too stupid to have realised that robbing the Post Office was a crime?

Of course not.

So why on earth should Tory voters who came from poor and ordinary backgrounds get to claim that they're too narrow-minded to understand that it's unspeakably malicious for them to kick the ladder down to prevent younger generations benefiting from the social mobility they themselves enjoyed in the past?

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

OR

Windrush Brits are far from the only people to have suffered callous Tory abuse

The treatment of Windrush Brits by this horror show of a Tory government is an absolute outrage, but it's vital to remember that this dreadful scandal is just one example amongst many in a pattern of callous Tory abuse against pretty much anyone who is not a member of the wealthy establishment class that the Tory party exists to serve.

Windrush Brits

The Windrush scandal has come about because Theresa May introduced some vile UKIP-pandering anti-immigrant legislation in 2014. Nobody in parliament could have been under the impression that this was anything but an extreme-right attack on British values given that May openly bragged that the legislation could be used to create a guilty until proven innocent "deport now and hear appeals later" environment.

Since 2014 the Tories have been using this legislation to dehumanise and discriminate against Windrush Brits without the paperwork to prove their nationality. 

This systematic Tory discrimination has resulted in people being denied employment, denied accommodation, denied social security, denied pensions, denied NHS treatment, denied their freedom in immigration detention centres, and denied the right to return to Britain.

Other commonwealth Brits

Windrush Brits are far from the only Commonwealth British citizens to have been dehumanised and discriminated against in Theresa May's vile UKIP-pandering legislation. People from all manner of Commonwealth countries who arrived in Britain before 1973 have been denied their citizen's rights under Theresa May and Amber Rudd's "Hostile Environment". Examples already include arrivals from Kenya, Uganda, Cyprus, New Zealand, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and Canada.

The EU 3 million

Theresa May has been absolutely insistent that the lives of the three million EU citizens living in the UK should be used as disposable bargaining chips in the Brexit negotiations. 

In the weeks after the Brexit vote David Cameron wanted to make a unilateral offer to secure these people's rights, but Theresa May vetoed it.

Labour, the Lib-Dems, the SNP, Plaid Cymru, and the Green Party all agree that providing peace of mind to the EU 3 million should be an absolute priority, but Theresa May still insists on forcing them to live under the shadow of uncertainty, despite having had almost two years since the Brexit votes to give them a cast iron guarantee that they won't be deported or denied their rights. 

Sick and disabled people

One of the most shocking things about the Tories is their relentless systematic abuse of sick and disabled people.

One of the worst aspects of this systematic abuse are the dehumanising and discriminatory assessment regimes that are carried out by profiteering corporations like Atos, Capita and Maximus. Not only do these assessment procedures have spectacularly unreliable outcomes (almost three fifths of WCA cases that go to appeal are overturned), they also cost far more in corporate administration fees than they will ever save in reduced disability benefits payments.

The fact that the hated disability assessment regime costs far more to run than it will ever be able to save is conclusive proof that the Tories aren't even treating people maliciously for financial reasons, they're doing it because they enjoy it, and believe the taxpayer should subsidise their malicious treatment of some of the most vulnerable people in society.

The jobless

Another one of the malicious Tory policies that costs way more to administer than it will ever save in reduced benefits payments is their draconian sanctions regime against the unemployed.

Not only does the sanctions regime cost far more to run than it saves in reduced benefits payments, the evidence is absolutely clear that condemning people to absolute destitution (often for utterly trivial offences) actually reduces their ability to find work.

People with mental health problems

In 2014 the Court of Appeal ruled that the Tory Work Capacity Assessment regime is unlawful because of the way it discriminates against people with mental health conditions. The Tories just carried on regardless.

In 2017 the Tories were caught telling their army of corporate disability assessors to actively discriminate against people with mental health conditions.

And despite continually banging on about the importance of helping people with mental health conditions, the Tories are still ruthlessly cutting away at NHS mental health budgets.

Children

Over 400,000 more children are growing up in poverty than when the Tories came to power in 2010. The Tory government have also introduced the most extreme school spending cuts in decades.

Any country in which rates of child poverty are rising, and education budgets are being slashed is a country that has given up on its own future.

Workers

Despite all of their shtick about "making work pay" and "work is the best route out of poverty" the Tories have overseen the longest sustained collapse in workers' wages since records began, and they've also continually slashed in-work benefits for the working poor.

The Tories have also overseen an explosion in exploitative low-pay, low-security work like Zero Hours contracts and the fake self-employment gig economy.

Then there's the fact that in 2013 they introduced unlawful legislation to price low-income workers out of employment tribunals so that bad bosses could get away with treating their workers like dirt.

With an appalling track record like this anyone who works for a living and votes Tory is undeniably voting against their own economic best interests.

Brits with non-EU spouses

One of the most sickening things Theresa May did at the Home Office was to introduce a highly discriminatory arbitrary minimum income threshold for British citizens to bring non-EU spouses into the country.

These rules strongly discriminate against the low-paid, because women are far less likely to earn the arbitrary minimum income threshold than men, and people in poorer regions of the UK (north east, Northern Ireland, Cornwall) are much less likely to earn enough to meet the threshold than people in wealthy areas like London and the Home Counties.

At the exact same time as she was introducing these rules to split up relationships, or force British people to live in exile, she was also handing out British residency and British passports to super rich Russian oligarchs, corrupt Chinese officials, the families of African dictators, and Middle East oil barons who wanted to buy their way in.

Women

86% of the economic burden of toxic hard-right Tory austerity dogma has been loaded onto the shoulders of women.

That Theresa May persists with this brazenly sexist economic dogma is a clear demonstration that you don't have to be a man to be a misogynist.

The elderly

Given that the elderly are far more likely to vote Tory than working age people, you might have thought that they'd be somewhat protected from the worst Tory malice, but you'd be wrong.

The victims of the Tories' £4.6 billion cuts to the social care budget are predominantly elderly people. The victims of the Tory devastation of the NHS service are predominantly elderly people. And if that wasn't enough, in 2017 they decided to announce a policy of taxing people with dementia (and other serious debilitating diseases) so that they lose their houses, and lose their ability to leave even modest inheritances to their children and grandchildren.

Conclusion

It turns out that it's not just Windrush Brits who have suffered under this vile Tory government, it's almost all of us.

Pretty much the only people who are immune from this Tory malice is the mega-rich. Not only have they been spared the malicious treatment borne by the rest of us, they've also been showered in handouts, tax cuts, tax breaks, and quantitative easing cash to help them literally double their wealth since the global financial sector insolvency crisis hit in 2007-08!

If you're not one of the mega-rich elitists the Tory party exists to serve, yet you still vote for them, you're not just voting against the interests of the majority of British people, you're also voting against your own interests too (unless of course you imagine that you'll never be poor, never be sick or disabled, never be elderly, never have children, never be female, and never actually have to actually work for a living).

 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

Theresa May is letting Ben Bradley keep his job

As the rest of us were celebrating the New Year, the Tories decided to quietly sneak out an announcement that they'd appointed the vile hard-right polemicist Toby Young to their new (and supposedly impartial) universities watchdog.

Within a matter of hours it became clear that the Tories had failed to do even the slightest due diligence on the guy they were handing a job to. Not only did Toby Young have a disgusting back catalogue of misogynistic, homophobic, and downright disgusting Tweets, he'd also been attending secretive pro-eugenics conferences full of white supremacists and paedophilia apologists, and writing articles attempting to rehabilitate the concept of eugenics.

Eventually, after a nine day shit-storm over his repulsive comments and views, Toby Young resigned, and any sensible and/or vaguely competent political party would have looked into how they managed to appoint someone with such an appalling track record, but not the Tories.

On the very same day that Toby Young resigned over his back catalogue of despicable articles and Tweets, Theresa May appointed the recently elected Tory MP Ben Bradley as Vice Chair for Youth.

Apparently his job would be to get more young people to engage with the Conservative party.

Had they bothered to check Bradley's Internet history before appointing him, they would have come across a truly disgusting blog post calling for the sterilisation of unemployed people, as if unemployment is some kind of genetic disease, rather than a necessary condition in capitalist economies. 

I mean just think about it, how else are the exploitative capitalist class going to extract as much profit from the labour force as possible if there isn't a permanent pool of unemployed workers ready to replace any worker who agitates too loudly for pay raises or better working conditions?

One of the most shocking things about his elitist views on unemployment is that Bradley is the first ever Tory MP in the former mining town of Mansfield.

If anyone should know that unemployment can be thrust upon people, families, and even entire communities through no fault of their own, then surely it's people in a former mining town that was socially and economically decimated by the closure of the mines (as well as the textiles industry and the Mansfield brewery)?

But no, they've actually gone and elected this elitist Tory prig as their MP.

How someone with such vile elitist views about the sterilisation of the poor ever made it through the selection process to become a Tory parliamentary candidate is bizarre enough, but his appointment to Theresa May's government as a kind of youth engagement officer, well it just defies belief doesn't it?

Bradley and his right-wing backers have attempted to defend his comments by making out they happened ages ago, but 2012 wasn't that long ago, and his comments were made in defence of Iain Duncan Smith's welfare cuts, as if sterilisation of the unemployed is somehow a natural extension of Tory party welfare policy.

We all know that if Labour (or any other political party) had appointed someone with such vile views to an official position, the Tories, the right-wing dominated print media, and the Guido Fawkes smear-mongering operation would be in all out attack mode over it. But because this guy is a Tory, they're churning out excuses, and pretending that the Tory mask hasn't slipped.

Theresa May has decided that someone who has so recently expressed such vile elitist views is an appropriate person to try to engage young people with right-wing politics.

But the truth is obvious for everyone to see. Not only did the Tory party welcome Bradley with open arms and promote him to an official position within the party, and either they did no due diligence on his background at any state, or they did do due diligence and concluded that sterilise the poor blog posts are well aligned with the Tory party ethos.

The Tory mask has well and truly slipped, and Theresa May's decision to let Bradley keep his job could well backfire. Perhaps he has more extreme pro-eugenics views lurking around in his past, and even if not, any youth Bradley tries to get hooked on right-wing politics can be easily warded off with warnings "don't listen to him, he's the sterilise the poor guy".

 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OR

Why do so many people who benefited from social mobility now want the ladder kicked down?

As a result of the changes introduced by Clement Attlee's post-war Labour government the 1960s and '70s saw the greatest levels of social mobility the United Kingdom has ever seen.

There was full employment so that pretty much anyone with the desire to work could find a job with at least half decent pay. There were plenty of houses, and even if you couldn't quite afford a house of your own there was an abundant supply of social housing too. If you were academically smart, then university education was free, and it even came with maintenance grants to cover your living costs. If you lost your job or fell ill then the welfare state provided half-decent social security payments to stave off absolute destitution. The legal aid system ensured that the poor and ordinary could have access to decent legal representation so as to tip the scales of justice ever-so-slightly less in favour of the super-rich.

Of course this period was no utopia, and plenty of people still endured poor pay, dangerous working conditions, and discriminatory practices (especially when it came to stuff like sex, race, class and sexual orientation), but since 1979 many of the things that allowed these high levels of social mobility to happen have been deliberately attacked and undermined by the Westminster political class.

• The supply of social housing has been catastrophically eroded since the 1980s, 40% of the sold-off homes falling into the hands of exploitative private landlords. 

• The lowest house building rates since the early 1920s has stoked house price inflation has made the prospect of home ownership an impassible fantasy to millions. 

• Since 2010 ordinary British workers have suffered the longest sustained decline in the real value of their wages since records began. 

• The current low unemployment figures that right-wingers love to brag about so much are a blatant fix which counts anyone who does just 1 hour a week in a zero hours contract job as employed. Additionally it counts anyone who has been thrown off benefits by zealous job centre staff trying to comply with the sanctions league tables as not being unemployed. Additionally people on unpaid workfare schemes are classed as being employed!

• The welfare state has been persistently attacked so that unemployed people have to jump through countless hoops and even offer themselves up as unpaid slave labour at highly profitable multinational corporations in order to receive their meagre subsistence benefits. 

• Sick and disabled people have it even worse, having to go through demeaning, dehumanising and downright discriminatory Work Capacity Assessments administered by bureaucrats working for profitable outsourcing corporations. 

• Students are being lumbered with debts of £50,000+ before they even enter the workplace. 

• Access to legal aid has been trashed so badly that hundreds of thousands of people are being left with no choice but to represent themselves in court, which not only shatters their chances of success, but also wastes vast amounts of time because they simply don't understand the legal processes.

It's completely understandable that the privileged classes and their pals in the Westminster establishment club have worked so hard and for so long to reduce social mobility. After all the beneficiaries of social mobility become rivals to the children of the upper classes. The less social mobility there is, the more unearned opportunities that get handed on a plate to the children of the establishment class.

It's clearly a huge advantage to the children of the establishment class that their peers are lumbered with a lifetime 9% aspiration tax on their disposable income for their university education, while they avoid it because their parents could pay the fees upfront. 

It's beyond obvious that an unaccountable political elite would increasingly selfishly rig society to benefit their own class if they found that they suffered no adverse electoral consequences for doing it (as the New Labour mob found when they first introduced aspiration tax for university students from poor and ordinary backgrounds).

The establishment elitists who rig society to benefit their own class are undeniably the bad guys, but the truly despicable people are those who actually reaped the benefits of social mobility in the 1960s and '70s, who now desperately want to slam the door shut on the younger generations now.

The people who came from poor and ordinary backgrounds and enjoyed the benefits of stuff like social housing and/or affordable house prices, full employment and decent wages, a decent social safety net, legal aid, and free university education, but who now vote in favour of denying these same opportunities to younger generations.

Perhaps some of these people genuinely believe that they achieved it all themselves, and the decent wages, affordable housing, social safety net, legal protections, and access to free university education had nothing to do with it. That's called the self-attribution fallacy, and huge numbers of wealthy people love to imagine that they did it all by themselves.

On the other hand there are plenty who know perfectly well that they benefited from social mobility, but who want to slam the door shut on younger generations for purely self-interested reasons. For example people who benefited from affordable housing in the past know that building more social and affordable housing now would slow down the inflating value of their property portfolios, and reduce the profits from their buy-to-let slumlord empires.

Of course it was hard to avoid voting in favour of attacks on social mobility when Tony Blair and his ilk were running the Labour Party. But now that Labour has a leader who is determined to reverse the trend and begin promoting social mobility again through policies like free education, house building, welfare reform, decent wages, regulation of the private rental market, and a crackdown on exploitative employment practices, there's really no excuse for voting for more Tory class war inspired attacks on social mobility unless you actively oppose social mobility.

The wealthy and privileged establishment club who have spent the best part of four decades rigging British society in favour of themselves and their own are vile self-serving elitists, but the people who actually benefited from social mobility who vote in favour of the Tory war against social mobility are the truly despicable ones.

They're the kind of people who climb the ladder out of the flooding basement, then deliberately kick it down and let others from their own class drown, rather than risk sharing the benefits of not drowning with others.

Even those who have deluded themselves that social mobility is irrelevant and that they achieved everything in life themselves are guilty of class treachery. 

Perhaps they're too deluded to realise that voting in favour of the Tory war against social mobility is an utterly malicious thing to do? But since when was stupidity a defence?

Does the criminal get to avoid jail because he claims to be too stupid to have realised that robbing the Post Office was a crime?

Of course not.

So why on earth should Tory voters who came from poor and ordinary backgrounds get to claim that they're too narrow-minded to understand that it's unspeakably malicious for them to kick the ladder down to prevent younger generations benefiting from the social mobility they themselves enjoyed in the past?

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

OR

Philip Hammond actually claimed "there are no unemployed people"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OR

61% of Brexiters would rather see the UK economy fail than give up Brexit

61% of Brexit supporters say that they consider significant economic damage to the UK economy to be "a price worth paying" for their beloved Brexit.

The YouGov poll on Brexit attitudes also revealed that amongst Brexiters over the age of 65 the proportion who are willing to see the British economy significantly damaged rises to 71%.

When asked whether they would see members of their own family thrown on the unemployment scrap heap as a price of Britain leaving the EU an astounding 50% of over-65s said yes!
 

This means that a clear majority of retirement age Leave supporters are Brexit Extremists who wish harm on the UK economy, meaning job losses for huge numbers of strangers. Half of them would also gladly see members of their own family lose their jobs and left at the mercy of the cruel, draconian and deeply discriminatory Tory benefits system!

Not only do these dreadful people want to strip the rest of us of our longstanding rights to live, work, travel and study in 31 other countries across Europe, they've also completely abandoned the pretence that Brexit was going to be great for the UK economy, and would actually like to see the UK economy slump into another recession, and hundreds of thousands of us lose our jobs. Just as long as they get their beloved Brexit.

Imagine what kind of person would be willing to see their own sons, daughters and grandchildren thrust into destitution in order to achieve some abstract political objective that they're unable to even explain the details of.

Just think about it. If government ministers are still bickering and squabbling over the details of Brexit, then how can some random pensioner possibly know enough about it to know it's worth condemning their younger family members and their dependent children into poverty to achieve it?

Just imagine being comfortably retired and wishing unemployment on your own family members in order to achieve some abstract political objective. 

Is it any wonder that younger generations consider the baby boomers to be the most selfish generation of all when so many of them would condemn their own family members to poverty for such intangible benefits to themselves?

These shocking poll results prove how difficult it is to change people's minds once they've been conned into believing in something.

Millions of Brexiters were sold the lie that Brexit would make us all better off to the tune of £350 million a week, and through wonderful quickfire trade deals with non-EU countries. They were told to dismiss any negative warnings as "project fear" propaganda and that Britain has had "enough of experts".

Now that the reality is starting to bite (the weak pound, soaring inflation, the worst GDP growth in the EU, the Brexit wage slump, recruitment crises in the NHS and agriculture, financial sector relocations back to the safety of the Single Market, the chaotic Tory approach to the Brexit negotiations ...) these people would rather pretend that they knew all along that they were voting to make us all poorer (including making their own relatives redundant) than to admit that they were gullible enough to fall for the Brexit con.

Aside from exposing the shockingly callous attitudes of millions of Brexit voters to the hardship and suffering of other people, including their own family members, these results prove that Mark Twain was absolutely right when he said that it's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.

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