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.

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Why I've decided to join the Tory party

 
Did you check the date today?

Of course the title of this article is an April Fool's prank. I would never join the Tory party because their ideology is rotten to the core. In this article I'm going to give a list just some of reasons why I will never support the Tory party.

Reasons I will never join the Tory party

Inequality

The core objective of the Tory party is the upwards redistribution of wealth. They slash the subsistence social security of the poor and vulnerable and repress the wages of the majority of workers. Meanwhile they shower lavish subsidies and tax breaks on corporations, the asset rich and high earners. That is what they do. They have always been the party that serves the interests of the wealthy minority. That is what they have always done.

The reason that the Tories serve the interests of the wealthy minority (multinational corporations, the landed gentry, the asset rich and very high earners) is completely obvious. The Tory party receives the vast majority of their donations from corporations, the landed gentry, the asset rich and high earners.

Economic illiteracy

One of the most persistent pieces of folk mythology is that the Tories are economically competent. The indisputable fact that George Osborne has created more new public debt than every Labour government in history combined should give people some indication that the story of Tory economic competence is either badly out of date, or a complete fabrication from the beginning.

It doesn't take a genius in macroeconomics to understand that the Tory "let's cut our way to growth" austerity ideology is an economically destructive one, especially when combined with a policy of showering corporations and the extremely wealthy with lavish tax cuts.

Slashing investment in infrastructure, services, research and development and support for infant industries during a prolonged credit squeeze is obviously economic lunacy because it reduces economic capacity and stymies economic demand.

Continuing with the upwards redistribution of wealth is not good for the economy either because it's a well established fact that poor and ordinary people create demand by spending a large proportion of their income, while the super-rich are likely to save any extra income (or just stash it in tax havens for that matter).

Ideology above evidence

The Tory ideological austerity agenda is far from the only example of them putting ideology above evidence.

The Tory plan to force privatise every school in England is not backed up by evidence, in fact, a look at some of the financial scandals that have gone on at numerous academy chains constitutes evidence that forced privatisation of every school in England would simply increase the scope for ruthless profiteers to siphon cash out of taxpayer funded education budgets to line their own pockets.

Another example of Tories putting ideology above evidence is their obsession with "Workfare" forced unpaid labour schemes for the unemployed. The Tories were well aware of the evidence from Canada and the US that such schemes don't help people find paid work, and in many cases actually act as an impediment to people finding proper jobs, but they've ploughed ahead with numerous forced labour schemes to extract free labour from hundreds of thousands of individuals regardless. Still this utter contempt for the evidence is hardly surprising from the DWP during Iain Duncan Smith's tenure, after all, he explicitly stated that he felt perfectly justified in misrepresenting statistics as long as he believed that his crude misrepresentations were the truth.

Yet another example of the Tories putting ideology above evidence is their absurd Psychoactive Substances Act. In 2015 they were warned by the experts that it's so incoherently drafted that it would be unenforceable in reality, but in 2016 they went ahead and put it on the statute books regardless. In the month before the act was due to come into force it turned out that the Tories have indefinitely delayed it after legal experts have told them that it's unenforceable!

Orwellian propaganda

The Tories have such contempt for the general public (the "lower orders") that they believe that they can hoodwink us into voting for them by presenting a series of Orwellian propaganda narratives like "we're all in this together"  - as they cut social security for the poor and cut taxes for the super-rich minority.

Another example is their constant talking up of their "economic recovery" when the actual evidence shows that under Tory rule the UK has suffered the slowest post-crisis recovery on record; working people have suffered the longest sustained decline in real wages since records began; the UK is going through an appalling productivity crisis; the trade deficit and current account deficit keep hitting all time highs; and GDP per capita is still below the pre-crisis level. In order to achieve all of this failure, George Osborne has created more new public debt than every Labour government in history combined!

Perhaps the most brazen of all of the Orwellian Tory propaganda efforts was their utterly bizarre attempt to re-brand themselves as "the workers' party". Surely even political novices know that the Tories hate ordinary workers and trade unions with an undying ideological passion and take every opportunity they can to oppress trade unions and strip workers of their labour rights?

Outright lies

In my view much of the responsibility for the fact that high profile Tories feel that they can lie with impunity falls on Tony Blair's shoulders. Once he got away with deliberately distorting the intelligence in order to promote the catastrophic invasion and occupation of Iraq (that eventually resulted in the rise of ISIS), it was a green light to the Tories that they could lie to the public with impunity.

Here are just a few examples of brazen Tory lies:

• Before the 2010 General Election the Tories promised not to raise VAT. Two months after the 2010 General Election they raised VAT from 17.5% to 20%.

• Before the 2010 General Election David Cameron promised "no more top-down reorganisations of the NHS".  After the 2010 General Election the Tories launched the biggest and most controversial top-down reorganisation in the entire history of the NHS.

• The so-called "contract with the electorate" that David Cameron made such a big fanfare of signing before the 2010 General Election is so full of lies and broken promises that they decided to delete every trace of it off their website in the hope that everyone would simply forget about it.

• In 2013 David Cameron lied about "paying down the debt" in a party political broadcast and was rebuked for it by the UK Statistics Authority. During the Tory party conference in the autumn of 2014 he repeated the exact same lie, knowing that the UK Statistics authority have no power to sanction him for deliberately lying to the public, other than the sending of stern letters.

• Before the 2015 General Election David Cameron and several other leading Tories promised that they had no plans to slash Tax Credits. Within months of winning the 2015 General Election (with a mandate from just 24% of the eligible population) they set about trying to slash Tax Credits.

Lowering the standards of public debate

It's fair to say that every government has a share of language and logic manglers who have such a poor grip on logic and the English language that nobody in their right mind would allow them to teach in an infant school, let alone run a government department (the former New Labour Home Secretary Jacqui Smith springs immediately to mind), however this Tory government really is something else.

If you've ever had the misfortune of hearing the snide, wrong-headed, evasive, fallacious, misleading and downright dishonest crap spouted in interviews by the likes of Iain Duncan Smith, Priti Patel, Nick Gibb, Grant Shapps or Claire Perry you'll know exactly what I mean.

Alarmingly David Cameron is probably the worst of the whole lot. He simply won't ever give a straight answer to a question; he lies with impunity; he has no capacity for unscripted debate because his only talent seems to be mindlessly regurgitating the glib snidey remarks his script writers have prepared for him; and he runs away from unscripted debate like a coward. The man comes across as such an inveterate liar that you suspect that he'd lie in any situation, even if it was much easier for him to actually tell the truth.

It's absolutely shocking that such a high percentage of British people see such a dishonest and snidey spiv as being "statesmanlike", simply because he wears expensive suits, talks in a posh accent and carries a permanent air of smug self-entitlement.

I don't like Tories past or present, but I do think that articulate and intelligent Tories from previous eras like Benjamin Disraeli and Winston Churchill must be spinning in their graves at the fact their party is now being led by such a snide and intellectually stunted individual who continues dragging the standards of public debate down to ever more dispiriting lows.

Privatisation

In 2012 the Tories carved the NHS open for mass privatisation, ever since then massive chunks of NHS services have been handed out to private interests, many of them donors to the Tory party.

Since 2010 the Tories have been privatising thousands of publicly owned schools, for free, into the ownership of unaccountable private sector pseudo-charities, many of them owned and operated by Tory party donors.

In 2013 the Tories sold off a massive chunk of the Royal Mail at a bargain basement price. One of the biggest beneficiaries when the share price rocketed upwards from the artificially low starting point was a hedge fund that employed a guy who was best man at George Osborne's wedding!

After the previous private rail franchise bailed out of their contract to run the East Coast Mainline it was run as a not-for-profit public service for a while. Under public ownership it soon became the best performing and most popular franchise in the entire UK rail network. The Tories couldn't abide this crystal clear demonstration of the public sector massively outperforming the private sector so they re-privatised it even though the vast majority of people actually want the rail network renationalised.

The Tories have already sold off chunks of the part-nationalised banks at significant losses and now they're now planning to sell off the taxpayers' stake in RBS at an eye-watering £22 billion loss to the taxpayer.

Not content with steadily privatising over 5,000 publicly owned schools over the last six years the Tories have now announced plans to force privatise every single school in England by 2022.

During the last parliament the Tories were defeated when they attempted to privatise the Land Registry in order to create a cushy little monopoly for their private sector mates to rake in the cash. That appalling proposal has been snuck back onto the table. 

Right-wing authoritarianism

One of the most concerning things about the Tory party is their love of right-wing authoritarianism. They want to introduce new spying powers that would have made the Gestapo turn green with envy, launch economically insane deportation policies for working people, carry out a massive crackdown on the feeble vestiges of trade union power, abolish of the right to free speech, ban of intellectual opposition to the government, and continue to operate numerous forced labour schemes.

To top it all off, in 2015 David Cameron uttered a truly chilling sentiment (see image) that the government needs to actively interfere in the lives of law abiding citizens. This is the kind of deeply sinister thing you'd expect a villain in a Marvel Comic to say, not a British Prime Minister.

Incompetence

The Tory party is completely riddled with incompetence. From an economics spokesperson who stated that debt and the deficit are the same thing to an environment minister who thought she'd win brownie points from Osborne and Cameron by savagely slashing flood defence spending, only for several of the places that had their flood defence schemes cancelled to suffer £billions worth of flood damage in the following years.

Until Iain Duncan Smith quit the DWP, David Cameron's government operated on a tripod of abject incompetence, with IDS as one leg, and George Osborne and Theresa May as the others.

I could go on for paragraph after paragraph about the incompetence of these three individuals, but I'll just give one example for each for the sake of brevity.

• Iain Duncan Smith's reign of terror over the lives of sick and disabled people costs far more to administer than it will ever save by denying people disability benefits.

• In 2010 Theresa May promised to reduce net migration to below 100,000. Despite numerous draconian, economically illiterate and family destroying immigration policies, by 2015 she had managed to increase net migration to the highest level ever recorded!

• In 2010 George Osborne promised that his austerity agenda would have eliminated the budget deficit by 2015. In 2015 he promised that his austerity agenda will have eliminated the budget deficit by 2020. In 2016 his own pet thinktank, the OBR, stated that George Osborne has only got a 50-50 chance of achieving by 2020 what he promised to achieve by 2015!

Perhaps the worst thing of all is that even after six years of such incompetence, two of them are still in their jobs, and the other one was allowed to quit rather than get fired!

Conclusion

I will never join the Tory party, and it's always best to read the article before getting outraged about the title (especially when the date is April the 1st!).
  

 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 
         
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Regressive Taxation explained

Regressive Taxation is a term that refers to any kind of taxation that affects the poor more than the rich. Taxation schemes are described as regressive if the apply a larger burden (in terms of available resources) on the poor, than the rich.

Put simply, a regressive tax is one that takes a larger chunk out of a poor persons income, than it does out of a rich one's.

Regressive Taxes are extremely common in the UK, I'll run through a number of examples before looking at another factor that increases the regressivity of the UK tax system; taxation asymmetry.

VAT

VAT is usually the most commonly cited example of regressive taxation. Research has consistently proved that the poor pay a higher share of their income in VAT than the rich. This is due to the Marginal Propensity to Consume (poor people spend a higher proportion of their income, rich people save a higher proportion).

A study by the Office for National Statistics in 2008/09 found that the poorest 20% of the population spend 8.7% of their income on VAT, whilst the wealthiest 20% spend only 4.0% of their income on VAT. The evidence is absolutely clear that VAT is a regressive tax, however that doesn't stop right-wing VAT apologists lying about it. They often claim that VAT is not regressive because rich people spend more than poor people, therefore they pay more VAT, but this is a deliberately misleading argument. It doesn't matter that a wealthy individual actually pays more VAT in cash terms (because they buy expensive clothes and luxury items for example) because the VAT burden in relation to their overall income is still much lower than the relative VAT burden on a poor individual.

One of the key indicators that VAT is a regressive taxation is that it is highly favoured by the Conservative party. They have increased VAT on several occasions, including 1979, 1991 and most recently 2010, just a few weeks after categorically stating that they had no plans to raise VAT during the 2010 General Election campaign.

Fuel Tax
In western economies fuel tax is another regressive taxation because the working poor generally spend a higher percentage of their income on fuel than the rich. The individual that earns £1,000,000 a year is extremely unlikely to spend 50 times as much on fuel as the individual that earns £20,000 a year. Even if this hypothetical wealthy individual owns a fleet of luxury sports cars with large high fuel consumption engines, it is hard to imagine how they could spend so much time on this hobby that they spend 50 times as much on fuel as the £20,000 earner that commutes to work on a regular basis.

The reason I quantified the opening paragraph with "in western economies" is that in many poorer economies, where vehicle ownership is very rare amongst the poorest 20% (most African countries, parts of Latin America, large swathes of Asia), the regressive effect doesn't exist for them, since the poor majority rarely purchase gasoline or diesel. The regressivity still exists, but only between the wealthy minority and the remainder of the relatively small vehicle owning class.

National Insurance
National Insurance is another example of a regressive taxation. The reason that National Insurance is regressive is that earnings above the National Insurance Upper Earnings Limit (UEL) of £41,150 per year (as of 2013) are subject to just 2% NI contributions on salaries and benefits in kind, whilst people earning between the Primary Threshold of £7,755 and the UEL of £41,150 must pay 5.85% on salaries and 12% on benefits in kind.

This massive disparity between the proportion of income paid in NI contributions by the majority of workers, and the significantly smaller amount paid by extremely high earners makes National Insurance another example of regressive taxation.

Here are some examples:

Percentage of basic salary paid in National Insurance:
£20,000 per year      = 3.58%
£50,000 per year      = 4.25%
£100,000 per year    = 3.12%
£1,000,000 per year = 2.11%
£2,000,000 per year = 2.06%

As you can see from the examples, the upper middle class actually pay marginally more as a percentage of their income in National Insurance than the working poor, however, the higher the earnings above the £41,150 upper threshold, the smaller the relative burden of National Insurance becomes.

Council Tax
Council Tax is yet another example of a regressive taxation because of the absurd and arbitrary way that Council Tax Bands have been calculated.

The way the bands work in England is that a Band H property (valued at £320,001 or more in 1991) pays three times the council tax of a Band A property (worth £40,000 or less in 1991). Because the nominal value of the property is at least 8 times as high between Band H and Band A, a tax differential of 3:1 is actually very small.

Since the upper limit is a value of £320,001, this means that a multi-million pound mansion might pay the same, or only very marginally more than a large family home. When considered as a proportion of the property value a typical Band H charge of £2,536 on a mansion valued at £2.6 million represents a minuscule  0.1% of the property valuation, whilst a house valued at £162,500 paying a typical Band G charge of £2,113 is shelling out 1.3% of the property valuation. An individual inhabiting a house that was only valued at £10,000 in 1991 facing a typical Band A charge of £845 is left shelling out 8.45% of the valuation of their property.

To put these figures into perspective, it would take the country mansion dwelling family around 1,000 years of Band H Council Tax contributions to pay out the nominal property valuation of their dwelling. It would take the upper middle class professional with a large house in the leafy suburbs around 77 years of Band G contributions to pay off their nominal property value. And the poor occupier of the inner city slum dwelling would shell out the nominal valuation of their property in less than 12 years of Band A contributions.

Another factor to consider is that holiday homes and second homes are given a 50% council tax reduction, which means that someone with two Band H properties each nominally valued at over £1 million, would end up paying less in Council Tax for each of their two properties, than the owner of a Band G property with a nominal value of just over £160,000 pays for their single property.

Under the current Council Tax setup, it turns out that the more valuable the property, the lower the proportion of its value that must be paid in Council Tax, and the more properties an individual owns, the lower the burden of Council Tax becomes in relation to the value of the property portfolio.

Sin Taxes
Sin Taxes, which are sometimes called Pigovian Taxes (after Arthur Pigou, the English economist that developed the concept of economic externalities) are taxes which are applied on products like alcohol, cigarettes and coffee. Sin Taxes are amongst the most regressive forms of taxation because taxation on these "sinful products" does not account for ability to pay, meaning that the less well off pay a higher proportion of their income through these taxes.

According to research by The Tax Foundation in the US, the least wealthy 20% spend a 78% larger share of their income on alcohol taxes than people in the top 20%, and a staggering 583% larger share of their income on tobacco taxes.

In my view taxation on products with negative externalities (health costs, public disorder, domestic violence, pollution ...) should be taxed in order to cover the socio-economic costs, however, the way these taxes are currently applied results in the less well off bearing the greater proportional burden for their "sinful habits".

Bedroom Tax
[main article]
Before the pedants point out that "Bedroom Tax" isn't actually a tax in the strict sense of the word, it is still a government policy aimed at transferring the burden of austerity onto many of the poorest families and individuals in society. It is now absolutely clear that there is nowhere near enough smaller social housing available for everyone being hit by "Bedroom Tax" to relocate to, meaning that the vast majority are left with no choice but to cut their living standards in order to scrape together the money to pay "Bedroom Tax".

Taxation asymmetry
Aside from all of the regressive forms of taxation, there is another factor that plays a major role in widening the regressivity of the UK tax system. This factor is is lax tax enforcement, which causes taxation asymmetry.

To put it simply, it is much easier for the wealthy to reduce their tax burden through tax-dodging activities than it is for the ordinary person. The more permissive the tax system becomes in regards to tax-dodging, the lower the burden of taxation becomes on those wealthy enough to employ expensive tax lawyers to help them reduce their tax burden.

Taxation asymmetry means that wealthy bankers, celebrities and even Labour politicians can massively reduce their burden of taxation by using tax-loopholes or personal service companies, in order to avoid paying income tax and national insurance contributions on large chunks of their income. Some famous examples of wealthy people avoiding tax on their income include the Tory party donor George Robinson, the Topshop boss and Tory party "efficiency adviser Philip Green the so-called comedian Jimmy Carr and the former mayor of London Ken Livingstone.


The lax tax collection system in the UK allows many thousands of wealthy individuals to dodge paying their fair share of income tax, which is one of the very few UK taxes that isn't regressively applied. If the wealthy minority can just set up tax dodging schemes to avoid paying income tax on their fortunes, the progressive nature of the tax is invalidated, and a very unfair situation is created between the wealthy that do pay the expected amount of income tax on their earnings, and those that use tax-dodging schemes to avoid paying their share.

Taxation asymmetry is even more apparent in the business environment. The asymmetry between the tax burden on a Starbucks coffee shop franchise and a local independent shop without the means to divert profits offshore via convoluted transfer pricing schemes creates the situation where a Starbucks franchise pays virtually no corporation tax, whilst the local independent coffee shop is hit with the full tax load, means that the tax-dodging corporation has a massive unfair advantage.
  
Conclusion

The tax system in the UK is highly regressive and the policies of the Tory - Lib Dem coalition are making this situation worse. The Liberals hide their complicity in this behind the fig leaf of the rises in the lower threshold of income tax, but the small gains ordinary people have made from this have more than been wiped out by increases in other regressive forms of taxation and through the unprecidented scale of wage repression. For everything the Liberals have given with one hand, the Tories have taken away manyfold with the other.

It is hardly surprising that the dual strategy of making the taxation system even more regressive than it already was and the unprecidented scale of wage repression in the UK economy have coincided with the weakest period of economic recovery since records began. The creation of a consumerist economy majority populated by an over-taxed, under-paid and debt laden proletariat would be an utterly absurd venture from an economic perspective. However, given their policies of regressive taxation, wage repression and debt inflation it seems to be exactly what the Tory led government are working to achieve.

 

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