Why you'd have to be an idiot to oppose wage rises when the cost of living is soaring

Wes Streeting is Labour's Shadow Secretary for Child Poverty. Today he's been on the television to agree with the radically right-wing Adam Smith institute that rising wages would be a bad thing because they would cause a "wage price spiral".

Just a Labour Party shadow minister agreeing with a radically right-wing think tank that rising wages would be awful.

Starmer's Labour is an absolute shamblespic.twitter.com/puiw9wg0St

— Another Angry Voice (@Angry_Voice) October 7, 2021

There are very many reasons that this is a profoundly stupid position for a Labour Party minister to take.

Labour is supposed to be the party of the workers (the clue is in the name), so spouting radically right-wing rhetoric against wage rises is a completely extraordinary thing for a Labour minister to be doing.

Streeting was obviously attracted to the Adam Smith propaganda because it used the term "economically illiterate" to chastise Boris Johnson's Tory conference speech.

But for years people on the left have been using the phrase "economically illiterate" to describe economy-strangling idiocy of 'lets cut our way to prosperity' austerity ruination, but Wes never really had a problem with austerity (he abstained on George Osborne's brutal austerity cut in 2015), but suddenly he's enamoured with the phrase, because a radically right wing think tank pinched it to attack wage rises!

Anyone with any sense knows that Johnson's rhetoric about rising wages is pure bluster. He's been in a party that's overseen the worst decade of wage stagnation in economic history. But it's unbelievable strategic ineptitude for an opposition MP to adopt the position that Johnson's blustering that wage growth is good, so I'll say it's bad.

The supposed justification for opposing wage growth is that it would cause inflation, but this is utterly backwards. The inflation is already happening, largely because of Brexit, so keeping wages repressed at this moment would actually create wage deflation (real terms income cuts).

Imagine being such an economically clueless dweeb that you put the effect before cause like this, and end up calling for wage devaluation, just as the prices of energy, food, and housing are spiralling out of control.

'Derp, the opaquely funded and radically right wing pressure group say Boris Johnson is wrong to say wage rises are good, so I'll argue that wage rises are bad!' - this actually appears to be the way Streeting thinks!

I know thinking is a wildly over-generous description of whatever's going on in Streeting's head, but the thinking seems to be that Corbyn and the Labour left would have supported wage rises for ordinary workers while prices are soaring out of control, so it's the duty of Labour's much-vaunted "new management" to oppose them!

A few months ago the junior Labour minister Alex Sobel criticised capitalism over climate change, and Starmer reacted with indignant fury, forcing him to issue a grovelling apology for offending capitalists!

Today another Labour minister is parroting ultra right-wing rhetoric in order to attack the interests of UK workers, and Starmer says nothing!

In the raging battle between workers and the capitalists who exploit them, Starmer's clearly on the side of the capitalists, even though he's supposed to be the leader of the party of the workers!

Starmer's surrounded himself with such idiots that Johnson doesn't even have to do anything to outflank Labour to the left, and appeal to British workers.

All the Bodger has to do is issue absolute platitudes like 'wage rises are good' (even if he doesn't actually believe it himself) and then watch on passively as the strategically incompetent divs in Starmer's top team rush out to argue that 'wage rises are bad actually', and that what British workers really need is another punishing dose of wage stagnation, supposedly in order to prevent the inflation that's already happened!

This short clip perfectly illustrates the problem with liberal capitalist 'centrism'. These people don't actually stand for anything at all.

They've got no convictions; no firmly held beliefs; no understanding of political or economic history; no empathy for other people; no point that they wouldn't argue with equal vehemence for or against, depending on the circumstances; no reason behind anything they do besides self-advancement and political point scoring.

If Johnson had said 'wage rises are bad', the likes of Wes Streeting, Neil Coyle, David Lammy, and Jess Phillips, would have argued that 'wage rises are good actually'.

David Lammy was on the telly the other day using his oratory skills to attack the idea of transitioning towards a £15 per hour minimum wage, but everyone watching surely knew perfectly well that had he been ordered to argue in favour of the policy, he'd have summoned up the exact same faux passion to say what a fabulous idea it is.

These people believe in nothing.

If their party leader tells them to abstain on Theresa May's unlawfully racist "Hostile Environment", or George Osborne's brutal austerity cuts, or Priti Patel's despicable legislation to allow undercover cops to rape women with impunity, then that's exactly what the Labour right-wingers will do, because they don't believe in anything.

That's why they hated Corbyn so much, and worked tirelessly to sabotage Labour from within between 2015 and 2019, and keep the Tories in power.

They hate people with actual principles with a burning rage, and use the word "ideological" as a slur, as if it's some kind of sickening aberration to actually believe in anything, and have a principle that can't be bought.

They knew that having a principled person lead the Labour Party meant their career advancement options were curtailed, so they burned the Labour house down from within to get rid of him.

They put their own narrow self-interest above the unspeakable agonies of millions of others who were suffering under Tory austerity, Tory wage repression, Tory public service cuts, Tory disability persecution, Tory welfare vandalism ... and now they've succeeded in getting rid of Corbyn, we're stuck with a truly horrific Tory government, and an opposition composed almost exclusively of these dreadful people.

So this is why we're witnessing the strategic stupidity of a Labour minister attacking the interests of workers.

He doesn't know anything; or believe in anything; or care about the history and traditions of the labour movement; or have any strategic plan for winning power and making the nation a better place.

He was simply bewitched by a load of radically right wing nonsense, and then mindlessly regurgitated it for the cameras, without even giving a moment's thought to what he was actually saying.

 

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

OR

£15 per hour is overwhelmingly popular, so how could it be made to work?

In the middle of his first Labour Party Conference Keir Starmer engineered the resignation of his Employment Minister Andy McDonald by instructing him to argue against moving towards a £15 pounds per hour minimum wage, and decent rates of Statutory Sick Pay for UK workers.

 

People were quick to find pictures of Starmer himself protesting for £15 per hour for McDonalds workers in 2019, meaning he had to perform the most absurd mental contortions to pretend that he meant only McDonalds workers deserve £15 per hour, not care workers, nursery staff, hospital porters, delivery drivers, or anyone else!

By instinctively favouring the interests of capital over the interests of British workers, Starmer made an absolute fool of himself, and it's only been worsened by a Survation poll showing that moving towards £15 per hour is an overwhelmingly popular policy, with 65% of people saying they strongly or moderately support it, and only 14% saying they strongly or moderately oppose it.

It's an astonishingly popular stance that has majority support across supporters of all political parties, and all age demographics (the least enthusiastic are the 65+, but they're still 59% in favour!).

Starmer's vehemently insisting that in order to be "electable" Labour has to fiercely oppose a policy that's overwhelmingly popular with the public! 

He's sent out ministers like the moral contortionist David Lammy to argue against public opinion with a series of misleading claims, but let's say Labour did want to actually appeal to the public, how could they actually make £15 per hour work as a policy?

Here are a few considerations:

Increased tax revenues

If UK workers' wages are dramatically increased, that obviously means the government will benefit from significantly increased Income Tax and National Insurance revenues, which would be enough to offset a significant proportion of the increased public sector pay bill.

Increased demand

If millions of UK workers are lifted out of destitution over the next few years, then people will actually have a bit of money to spend on nice things, rather than desperately scrimping and saving to get by. This means higher economic demand, which means more economically productive activity, which means more jobs, and more business opportunities for entrepreneurs.

Savings and investment

Lifting millions of people out of poverty would create new opportunities for people to save and invest. Financial experts have been repeatedly raising concerns that current generations of workers simply aren't saving enough for retirement, but a big pay raise for UK workers would help to reverse this trend.

Any government approaching the policy sensibly would do it in combination with innovative savings and investment policies, such as giving people the option to save a proportion of their wage directly from their pay packet, for example, via a National Savings and Investment Bank.

Massive social security savings

If all workers began making decent wages, that were actually enough to live on, the social security savings would be absolutely enormous. Government spending on Universal Credit/Working Tax Credits could be virtually eliminated over the course of a few years.

Housing benefit savings

In recent years the UK government has been spending £20 billion+ per year on housing subsidies like Housing Benefit, which mainly goes to subsidise the unearned profits of private landlords.

If a £15 per hour minimum wage was introduced, along with rent caps to prevent greedy landlords extracting it all for themselves through hiked rents, then this £17.9 billion housing subsidy expenditure could be dramatically reduced.

Small businesses

One of the most commonly raised objections to the policy of increasing minimum wage involves plaintive cries of "how will small businesses cope?", but this attitude betrays a belligerent resistance to finding ways to make the policy work.

If a government really wanted to make £15 per hour work, they could offer all kinds of business support schemes.

As long as the small business demonstrates that they're tax-compliant (UK registered, no offshore holding companies, transfer pricing scams, or other tax-dodges) they could be made eligible for business support to cover a decent proportion of their workers' wages. 

Small businesses would get the support until they become profitable enough to pay their own way, while massively profitable tax-dodging behemoths like Amazon simply wouldn't be eligible, meaning they'd have to pay wage rises out of their own profits, not out of the taxpayers' pocket.

The beauty of supporting workers' wages this way is that it changes the dynamic completely. Instead of supporting low-paying businesses by using public funds to top up the paltry below-subsistence wages they pay their workers, the businesses themselves would have to apply for the support, and demonstrate that they actually need it, and that they comply with basic norms and conventions like paying their fair share of tax. 

Incentivising difficult jobs

There are two main reasons for the massive labour shortages that are causing empty shelves, petrol panic, rotting food in the fields, turkey shortages, and a proposed mass cull of pigs.

One is Brexit restrictions driving away workers from the continent, and the other is widespread poverty-pay across numerous UK employment sectors. 

Why would anyone do back breaking or emotionally laborious work like picking cabbages or caring for vulnerable and incontinent elderly people, for wages that are impossible to even live on?

And since we decided as a nation that we don't want to exploit Eastern Europeans into doing it anymore, the only sensible solution is to incentivise British people into doing it by paying them decent wages isn't it?

Conclusion

 

Unfortunately it's highly unlikely Keir Starmer is going to change position now.

Starmer made a huge show of trash-talking Labour's 2017 manifesto in his interminable bore-fest of a conference speech, to make out that policies aimed at materially improving people's lives and communities are unaffordable, unrealistic, irresponsible, and unwanted.

He's determined to return Labour to the spectacularly failed 2015 strategy of trying to appeal to Tory voters by offering them a watered-down version of Toryism, rather than trying to offer them anything that's recognisably better.

And to do this Tory-lite act, he's going to adopt the absurd strategy of telling the public that they're wrong, rather than trying to figure out a workable way of giving them what they overwhelmingly want.

The arguments are all there for someone to make the case that the public are right, and that Britain does deserve a pay rise.

However it seems vanishingly unlikely that Keir Starmer, or any of the right-wing dolts he's surrounded himself, with will ever snap out of their arrogant delusions that they know best. 

They're simply too far gone up their own fundaments to embrace the idea that people might actually like the hope that things could become better, a bit more than they like another unappealing serving of austere, ersatz Tory gruel from a Labour Party that really should be doing better.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

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 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

The sheer Tory entitlement

It doesn't matter how badly you fail in life, if you're born into the gilded British establishment class then you'll be given once chance after another to completely screw even more things up.

Just look at the state of George Osborne. Only the most brainwashed of Tory tribalists could even try to argue that his six year tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer was anything but a disaster for the British economy.

• He pushed an economically illiterate austerity agenda from the very beginning, insisting that all the evidence from economic history showing that targeted infrastructure investment and the creation of skilled jobs are the drivers of economy recovery was wrong, and that wanton across the board austerity cuts, the proliferation of exploitative low-paid McJobs, and a endless tax cuts and handouts for corporations and the mega-rich were the only way out of the banker's insolvency crisis!

• He missed every economic target he set himself, most notably the promise that austerity fanaticism would have completely eliminated the budget deficit by early 2015. It's well over four years past his deadline, he's been gone for three years, and it's still nowhere near eradicated.

• All of these missed targets meant that he ended up creating more new debt than every single Labour government in history combined.

• Osbornomics resulted in the slowest post-crisis economic recovery in modern British history, going back at least two Centuries to when economic records were extremely crude.

• Osborne also delivered the worst collapse in the value of UK workers' wages since records began, meaning we're still earning less in real terms than we were a decade ago.

• Despite staking his reputation on Britain keeping its AAA Credit Rating, he lost it for the first time since the 1970s!

• After only a few years of austerity stagnation even devoutly neoliberal economic organisations like the OECD and the IMF were warning against the ideological fanaticism of austerity cuts, but Osborne soldiered on regardless.

• And to top it all off the collapse in living standards caused by Tory austerity fanaticism, wage repression, pubic service cuts, infrastructure under-investment, and welfare vandalism caused a Brexit backlash that was sufficient to push Leave marginally over the winning line and dump the UK into the three years of interminable chaos we've suffered since.

After losing his job as Chancellor and quitting as an MP Osborne took up a number of jobs. Several of them look just like the kind of highly-paid corporate directorship bribes you'd expect him to receive after carving up so many public assets to give away to city spivs, and slashing Corporation Tax to by far the lowest rate in the G7. But becoming Editor of the London Evening Standard was quite a surprise given his absolute lack of experience in the newspaper trade.

Within a couple of years in the Evening Standard job Osborne has reduced a slightly profitable news outlet into an extraordinary money-burning pit, losing a staggering £23 million in the last two years.

But now Christine Lagarde is potentially moving on as head of the IMF for a position in the EU, George Osborne and his cheerleaders are promoting him as her replacement!

The absolute entitlement of it is staggering. His incompetence as Chancellor will go down in economic history as a lesson in exactly what not to do after a crisis, his tenure at the Evening Standard is an absolute joke, and here he is pushing himself forward for one of the top economics jobs on the planet!

presumably the rest of the world will piss themselves laughing at the idea of the most incompetent British finance minister in living memory fancying himself for such a job, but that hasn't stopped the Tory press from championing the idea as if they actually see him as some kind of magnificent economic genius, rather than a living embodiment of Britain's dangerous subservience to over-entitled and under-qualified Tory toffs.

What a country we live in where poor and ordinary people experience one barrier after another to progression no matter how capable they are (sexism, racism, classism, regionalism, homophobia, lack of old school connections ...) while those born into the gilded establishment class can stumble from one unbelievably catastrophic cock-up to another, and remain perfectly confident that there's always another high profile and lavishly remunerated position for them to waltz into.

 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

12 questions to ask local Tories who turn up on your doorstep pretending to be your friend

As the May 2nd local elections approach many of us will have the uncomfortable experience of Tory canvassers knocking on our doors to pretend to be our friends. 
In this article I'm going to provide 12 questions you can use to blast them off their feet.

1. How much have your party cut the local government budget since 2010?

They will try to bluster and blunder their way around this question because they know the answer is not good for them at all. The Institute for government say that they've cut support for communities and local government by 67% since 2010. 

These ideologically driven Tory cuts are the reason your Council Tax bill is going up, while your local services are worse than they've ever been before.

2. Do you think that there is a link between rising violent crime and the 20,000+ police jobs you Tories have scrapped?

There is obviously a link between the Tories slashing 20,000+ police jobs and the soaring rates of violent crime, but the Tories will try to deny it because to admit it would be extremely damaging.

So instead of admitting the truth they assume that the general public are so thick that we'd actually reject our own common sense understanding of cause and effect, and mindlessly believe the Tory fairy story that slashing the police force back to 1970s levels of per capita policing has had absolutely no effect whatever on rates of serious crime!

3. In 2010 you lot said you'd eliminate the deficit by 2015 but you failed, what is your projection now?

When the Lib-Dems enabled the Tories back into power in 2010 they endlessly promised that their hard-right austerity project would eliminate the budget deficit by 2015. They obviously missed that target by miles because it's mid-2018 and the deficit is still there.

Again the Tory canvasser at your doorstep is likely to try to bluff and bluster their way out of answering the question, because they either don't know, or they know that the answer is awful. Maybe allow them bluster away for a while before you burst their bubble by informing them that the latest projection is 2031, and asking them if they think it's acceptable to take 21 years to achieve what they promised to do in less than 5.

4. Are you aware that the Tory party has a problem with bigotry?

The Tory canvasser on your doorstep will almost certainly try to deflect onto Labour and the charges of anti-Semitism, but you can nip this kind of evasion in the bud by pointing out that YouGov surveys have found that rates of anti-Semitism are way higher in the Tory party than in the Labour Party, and asking why they're so keen to deflect away from the problem of anti-Semitism in their own ranks by criticising a party that has lower levels of anti-Semitism than their own.

Then you can ask them subsidiary questions about things like Theresa May's vile UKIP-pandering anti-immigrant legislation that has been used to dehumanise and discriminate against the Windrush Generation, Jacob Rees-Mogg promoting the German far-right on Twitter, the fact the Tories put up an extreme-right white-supremacist as a local election candidate in Watford, or the fact that they simply wait for the public fuss to die down and then let their racists and bigots slide back into the party later on.

5. Why did your party defeat Amendment 58?

The Tory probably won't even know what you're talking about because the mainstream media barely touched this incredibly important parliamentary vote, so you'll have to explain it to them.

When the Tories put their EU Withdrawal Bill before parliament in January 2018 the opposition parties all supported a Labour Party amendment to stop the government from using Brexit as a Trojan horse to scrap our workers' rights, environmental laws, food standards, consumer protections, and equality legislation.

The Tories (including CUK squatter hero Anna Soubry) and their sectarian DUP mates voted the amendment down, presumably because they wanted to reserve the right to trash our workers' rights, environmental laws, food standards, consumer protections, and equality legislation.

This absolute Tory refusal to build parliamentary consensus on Brexit in order to run the whole thing as a closed Tory shop is the main reason that Brexit has turned into such a humiliating deadline-missing farce under Theresa May's rule.

6. Which was the first local council to go insolvent?

The answer is that Tory run Northamptonshire was the first council to declare de facto insolvency in February 2018. This is incredible because the Tories have loaded all of their worst local government funding cuts onto non-Tory councils in northern England for the last nine years.

So despite having a massive artificial financial advantage over Labour run councils that have suffered much deeper austerity cuts, the Tories in Northamptonshire did such a woeful job that they were the first to break under the pressure.

7. How much are you Tories going to slash from the budget of my local school?

Since 2010 the Tories have implemented an unprecedented 8% per pupil funding cut to the schools budget, and they've also transferred ownership of literally thousands of schools to private profiteers who use bloated executive salaries and financial trickery to siphon as much cash as possible out of the education system into their own pockets.

Use this school cuts calculator to find out how much they're planning to slash from the budget of your local school (or the school your kids/grandchildren attend), make a note of it, then ask the question.

They won't know the answer so expect more bluff, bluster and misdirection tactics from them. Let them bluster away as much as they like, then tell them the figure and ask them whether they think it's acceptable that they're making children pay the cost of the 2007-08 bankers' crisis.

8. Are you proud of what you've done to our wages?

Ask the Tory canvasser if they're aware that since 2010 British workers have suffered the longest sustained collapse in the value of their wages since records began, and ask them if they're proud of having imposed this record breaking level of wage repression.

9. Why has housing become so unaffordable since 2010?

Ask the Tory canvasser whether they are aware that UK housing is more unaffordable than it's ever been before.

Then ask them whether they think that home ownership souring out of the reach of millions of ordinary people has anything to do with their wage repression policies, and the fact that between 2010 and 2017 the Tories oversaw the lowest levels of house building since the early 1920s.

10. How many more children are growing up in poverty since you lot came to power in 2010?

The answer is 400,000.

11. Why do you expect me to pay compensation for the consequences of your horrible policies?

The Tory government have announced a compensation scheme for the Windrush Brits who have been denied housing, employment, social security, pensions, and NHS treatment, and been made to live in fear of imprisonment and deportation as a result of Theresa May's brutal and unlawful "Hostile Environment" legislation.

What she hasn't been clear about is that the Windrush scandal came about because of her own vile UKIP-pandering anti-immigrant legislation in 2014.

So what she's actually saying by promising compensation is that she's going to completely evade responsibility for her own actions by not resigning, then compound matters by using public money to pay off the victims of her own malicious legislation.

See if you can get the Tory canvasser to admit that it's wrong for Theresa May to make the general public to pay the cost of her own horrible mistake, while she suffers no negative consequences at all.

12. Which political party has imposed the biggest armed forces cuts since the end of the Cold War?

The answer is the Tory party who have dramatically slashed the size of the armed forces since 2010.

They've reduced the army by over 20,000, the RAF by 8,500, and the navy by 5,500. 

General advice

Don't be afraid to print this article off and leave it by your front door so you can use it as a guide (I absolutely don't give a damn about copyright issues). These Tory canvassers will be speaking from a script, so it's totally fair for you to refer to notes too.

Feel free to compile other questions you can stump them with too. If there's some local issue or controversy you can hit them with use that, or take a scroll through this list of 50 disgraceful Tory controversies to find other issues that you're particularly concerned with and make note of them.

Remember that the information in this article doesn't specifically have to be presented in the form of questions, it can also be used to rebut several of the set talking points the Tory canvasser will try to raise.

Also remember that the longer you can keep the Tory canvasser engaged in discussion, the less time they'll have to try to convince other less well-informed people into voting Tory through their bombardment of lies and deceptions. It's actually much better for you to keep them occupied by asking them questions like these and watching their absurd displays of mental gymnastics, than just angrily telling them to get off your doorstep.

 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

The Tories are bragging about their economic failures again!

Back in 2010 when the Liberal Democrats enabled the Tories back into power the Tories repeatedly promised that their hard-right austerity policies would eliminate the government budget deficit by 2015.

Scroll forward to 2015 and despite all of the austerity, and wage repression, and public service cuts, and slashed local government funding, and unprecedented reductions in infrastructure spending, and destruction of the social security safety net, the Tories were still running a massive budget deficit, entirely unlike their 2010 promise they wouldn't be.

How did they deal with the fact that they had failed so badly to deliver what they'd promised? Well they deleted their 2010 promises off the Internet, and set about reframing their failure as a success with an incredibly brass-necked "we've cut the deficit by a third" narrative (we've failed our own measure of sucess by 2/3 so vote for us!)

Had Labour not allowed idiots like Chris Leslie and Ed Balls to dictate their economic stance they could have countered this nonsense, but instead they were too busy chasing away millions of natural Labour voters with their vapid and strategically inept austerity-lite agenda.

Labour completely dropped the ball thanks to the vapid "centrists", but obviously nobody in the mainstream media even bothered to call the Tories out on this extraordinary "Failure is Success" Orwellian bullshit either.

Scroll forward another four years to the present and the Tories still haven't eliminated the deficit like they said they were going to by 2015, and they're still dressing their abject economic failure up as some kind of brilliant validation of their crazed approach to economics, and they're even bragging about it on Twitter!

The lesson from all of this is obvious. That hard-right policies like austerity, wage repression, public service cuts, and deliberate under-investment in infrastructure spending are an absolutely rubbish approach to reducing government borrowing, in fact they're so bad that they've resulted in the slowest post-crisis recovery in Centuries, and left UK workers earning less in real terms than they were an entire decade ago!

But then we're left with the question of why reducing government borrowing was turned into such a desperate priority that it over-ruled all other measures of success, from collapsing workers' wages to deteriorating public services, from record low infrastructure investment to slashed education spending, from soaring violent crime rates to rising inequality levels, from exponential increases in food bank dependency to unsustainable rises in private debt.

The answer of course is that government borrowing should never have been presented as such an overarching priority that debt-fixation resulted in the trashing of workers' wages, vandalism of public services, destruction of the social safety net, and the ripping off of future generations through deliberate under-investment in things that generate future-prosperity like education, affordable housing, and infrastructure projects.

The reason austerity "failed" is that it never really had anything to do with reducing the deficit. Debt fear-mongering was always just a smokescreen to hide their true agenda behind.

Collapsing workers' wages, under-funding of local government and public services, increased privatisation mania, and vandalism of the social security safety net weren't unfortunate by-products of this Tory agenda, they were the actual objective.

The whole thing was a giant wealth transfer fraud of monumental proportions designed to load the debts of the bankers' insolvency crisis onto the general public while transferring as much wealth as possible from the poor and ordinary to the mega-rich establishment elitists.

Amazingly some people still haven't clocked that the whole thing was a con, even when the Tories are so blatantly dressing their glaring failure to do as they promised, even after 9 years, as some kind of wonderful economic success story!

 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

Don't let anyone trick you into feeling sorry for Theresa May

As Theresa May's catastrophically inept handling of her own party's Brexit mess has degenerated further and further into chaos, there's an ongoing campaign to elicit sympathy for her.

There's obviously not much sympathy to be found on left-wing sites like mine, but scroll through the comments on mainstream media outlets or the Tory blogosphere and you'll see a concerted effort to paint Theresa May as some kind of poor, innocent, defenceless victim of circumstances that are beyond her control.

Here are just a few of the most glaring reasons why this outrageous "poor Theresa" narrative is disgustingly warped, and why any feelings of sympathy towards her are catastrophically misplaced.

Perspective

If you're having these feelings just try to have a think about just some of the many victims of Theresa May's politics to restore your sense of political perspective to normality.

If you think Theresa May's having a hard time just consider:

• The families of Black British people who have been deported overseas thanks to Theresa May's grotesque "deport now, hear appeals later" Hostile Environment policy. Several of these black British citizens actually died abroad.

• NHS staff who are under enormous pressure thanks to 8 devastating years of Tory cuts and their deliberate ideologically-driven vandalism of the NHS. Winter is always the hardest and most stressful time for health workers, and this year's winter NHS crisis is likely to be the worst ever thanks to Theresa May and her Tory mates. Why not talk to someone who works in the NHS about how bad things have got if you've started to get feelings of misplaced sympathy towards Theresa May?

• Since the Tories came to power in 2010 they've overseen the worst collapse in the value of UK workers' wages in history. The percentage of workers suffering in-work poverty has absolutely skyrocketed. Just try to imagine what it's like actually having a job, but earning so little you can't even cover the basic costs of living (rent, utility bills, transport, food). This is a fate that Theresa May and her Tory mates are wilfully inflicting on millions of people so don't feel sorry for her.

• Remember when Theresa May turned up to prowl around the site of the Grenfell Tower fire, aloofly ignoring and avoiding the survivors and the devastated families of the victims? And remember how her government 'rewarded' the emergency service workers who dealt with the tragedy just a few days later by whooping and cheering as they won their parliamentary vote to continue with their malicious real terms cuts in public sector workers' pay?

• Theresa May and her fellow Tories have been condemned by the United Nations for their systematic abuse of disabled people, yet they just carry on with their despicable policies of cutting disabled people's meagre subsistence benefits, confiscating their mobility vehicles, and forcing them through degrading, dehumanising, and discriminatory assessment regimes. If you're tempted to feel a bit sorry for Theresa May, just try to appropriately direct your empathy by considering what it's like to be disabled in Tory Britain.

• Not only have teachers suffered huge real-terms pay cuts over the last 8 years, many are stuck working in incredibly dodgy private sector academy chains where the bosses pay themselves inflated six figure salaries by 'topslicing' the public funds that are supposed to pay for our children's education. Then there's the appalling scandal of teachers using their own money to provide food and clothes for the ever growing numbers of kids who are turning up to school dressed in rags and malnourished as a consequence of Tory austerity dogma.

• If you think Theresa May is having a tough time, just think about the victims of the crime wave she deliberately unleashed. Ask anyone who works in front line policing or youth services how Theresa May's ideologically-driven agenda of cutting the police force by 21,000+ and the Tory policy of gutting investment in youth outreach programmes have impacted areas like gang violence and violent crime. Or just look at the crime statistics. Violent crime is soaring out of control meaning thousands more muggings, thousands more stabbings, thousands more sexual assaults and rapes. Does your pity for Theresa May really outweigh the thousands of victims of violent crimes that simply wouldn't have happened without her extraordinary police-cutting agenda?
  
  Outside of Britain just try to imagine the suffering of innocent civilians in Yemen. Theresa May knows that the Saudi Arabian tyrants are committing war crimes there, and using the despicable tactic of spreading famine and disease as weapons of war too (resulting in the biggest humanitarian disaster on earth). But she keeps sucking up to them and selling them £billions more in British weapons to commit their war crimes with.

Insulation

Consideration of the tsunami of stress, poverty, and suffering Theresa May and her Tory mates have unleashed over the last 8 years provides a bit of valuable perspective for those who feel inclined to feel sorry for Theresa May, but there's another vital factor too.

Theresa May is an incredibly wealthy woman who is married to a multi-millionaire investor (who works for a fund with huge investments in arms manufacturers who profit from supplying weapons to the Saudi war criminals).

She's so rich that she could just walk away tomorrow and live the rest of her life stress-free in idle and extravagant luxury without having to lift a finger (completely unlike the circumstances of most ordinary workers, victims of her vile Hostile Environment policy, disabled people, emergency service workers, or the starving refugees fleeing the consequences of British foreign policy in places like Yemen).

Brexit

Then there's the fact that Theresa May has brought most of her problems on herself:

• She had a parliamentary majority to push her Brexit plans through, but threw it away last year in an unprecedented display of political hubris.

• She had the opportunity to run Brexit in the national interest from the beginning, but she chose to run it as a closed Tory shop exclusively for the benefit of her own political party, and now she's upset that all the people she excluded from the process are dissatisfied at the shambles she's cobbled together!

• She had the opportunity to develop a sensible Brexit negotiating strategy, but she resorted to toddler tantrum threats to trash the UK economy with a "no deal" flounce right from the beginning.

• She had the option of devising a coherent set of negotiating objectives before she set the Article 50 clock ticking, but she chose not to because she couldn't resist the allue of the glowing 'hooray for triggering Article 50' headlines in the right-wing propaganda rags.

• She had the opportunity to run Brexit in an open and accountable manner, but she hid the impact assessments, she hid the legal advice, she's hiding her post-Brexit immigration plan, and she's hiding the true cost of the "no deal" catastrophe she's threatening the nation with if she doesn't get her own way.

• She had the opportunity to abide by the parliamentary rules and conventions, but she has continually sought to sideline and ignore parliament culminating in the extraordinary decision to defy parliament and postpone the meaningful vote on Brexit for no reason other than she knew she was going to lose it.

• Theresa May could accept that nobody wants her shambolic last-minute farce of a deal, she could take the threat of "no deal" ruination off the table, she could walk away right now, or she could call a general election. But all she's interested in is desperately clinging to political power for as long as possible, no matter how much her selfishness and vanity damages the British national interest.

Conclusion

If you ever feel yourself beginning to slide towards having a bit of sympathy for Theresa May, just don't.

Theresa May isn't a character in some silly soap opera. She's an incredibly powerful woman with a horrifying track record of trashing the lives of people she perceives to be below her in the social pecking order.

When she imposes austerity dogma, inflicts social security cuts on the most vulnerable people in society, licences arms sales to war criminals, deports black British citizens to their deaths overseas,  vandalises our public services, triggers a devastating crime wave, and imposes wage repression policies - she knows that her status amongst the gilded establishment class protects her from all of the suffering she's inflicting.

And when it comes to Brexit, that's undeniably a mess of her own making. Yes David Cameron ran away when his gamble with the nation's future backfired and left the mess to his successor, but the primary reason the process has been even more chaotic than most Brexit critics could even have imagined back in the summer of 2016 is Theresa May's appalling combination of selfishness, hubris, control-freakery, strategic ineptitude, incompetence, and utter contempt for the concept of democratic accountability.

She's the one who made this farcical mess for herself, and she's certainly not going to have to pay any real price for it either when it all comes crashing down.

 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