Ever feel like you've been conned?

When the Lib-Dems enabled the Tories back into power in 2010, the Coalition government immediately launched their hard-right austerity agenda.

the two main themes the Tories used to push this right-wing ideological nonsense were fear-mongering over the size of the budget deficit, and the idea that we all have to make sacrifices together.

They promised that if we made the cutbacks then the entire budget deficit would have been eliminated by the end of the 2010-15 parliament.

Ever since they realised that they were not going to fulfil this promise they've been continually shifting the goalposts. As the 2015 General Election approached they even recast their failure to do as promised as a wonderful success story with the unbelievably brazen "we've cut the deficit by a third" narrative!

In 2017/18 the budget deficit was still an incredible £40.7 billion, and the Tories are now projecting that the deficit won't be gone until 2031! A staggering 21 years to achieve what they bragged they would do in less than 5!

When it comes to being "all in this together" it's even worse. Since 2010 UK workers have suffered a devastating collapse in the real value of their wages. It's so bad that the UK is on a par with crisis stricken Greece for wage deterioration!

To make matters even worse the Tories imposed massive real terms cuts to a whole range of in-work benefits like Tax Credits, sick pay, parental pay, Council Tax Relief, and Child Benefit, meaning that not only were people's wages collapsing, the top-up benefits to help low paid workers get by were being stripped away too.

Meanwhile the Tories continually lavished tax cuts and handouts on corporations and the mega-rich.

Since the Tories came to power in 2010 the upwards redistribution of wealth has been so severe that British workers have suffered a wage collapse as bad as the Greeks, while the mega-rich minority have actually doubled their wealth!

Of course austerity was never going to work if it involved cutting back the wages of millions of workers in order to fund a massive increase in the decadence of the gilded class.

If the government is spending less on infrastructure projects, and the public have less to spend because the value of their wages is collapsing - of course there's going to be a collapse in economic demand and a shortfall in tax receipts.

If the national economy is being held in an ideological choke hold in order to fund a massive upwards redistribution of wealth to the mega-rich, of course both the public and the government are going to end up borrowing more and more and more in desperate efforts to stay alive.

It's appalling that so many people ever fell for this economically illiterate austerity narrative in the first place.

Of course the Tories are to blame for their greed and their economic illiteracy, but we also have to look at why so many people are susceptible to believing Tory economic fairy tales.

The first thing to note is that virtually none of the 93% of us who went to state school received even a basic education in economics. Had the public had even the slightest smattering of economic history, then we'd have known that "let's cut our way to growth" has never worked, and that the proven way of kickstarting a post-crisis economy is through targeted investment in infrastructure and services that generate good returns on investment (think of the New Deal in the US, or the post-WWII investments of the Attlee government).

Then there's the mainstream media, who steadfastly refused to hold the Tories to account for their economic incompetence. When they tried to rebrand their failure as a success with their lamentable "cut the deficit by a third" narrative, they should have been absolutely torn to shreds. Every time they've shifted the goalposts they should have been torn to shreds.

Thanks to endemic levels of elitism in British society mainstream journalism is still heavily dominated by those who did go to private fee-paying schools, so they should have known that austerity dogma was economically-illiterate ahistorical rubbish from the beginning, but they refused to call it out.

Then there's the so-called 'centrists' who were complicit in the Tory austerity con. The Lib-Dems actively participated in the austerity con between 2010 and 2015, and the Labour right-wingers who controlled Labour's economic policy during the Miliband leadership actually decided to pathetically imitate Tory austerity dogma, rather than vehemently opposing it. Their aim was to nick a few thousand 'soft Tory' votes in marginal constituencies, but they failed to factor in the fact that a dollop of Tory-lite austerity gruel was always likely to drive away multiple traditional Labour voters for every 'soft Tory' it attracted.

Then there's Brexit, which could never have happened without the massive wave of public anger caused by devaluing wages, destruction of the social security net, and collapsing public services. Had there been any real political opposition to Tory austerity dogma, people could have focused their anger at the Tories, but instead the extreme-right gleefully filled the political void by blaming immigrants and the EU for the consequences of hard-righ Tory austerity fanaticism.

So thanks to failures in the education system, the mainstream media, and the austerity enabling political 'centrists' the Tories have managed to get away with this outright con for eight devastating years, resulting in the slowest post-crisis economic recovery on record, and the looming threat of another even worse crisis in the shape of a ruinous Tory "no deal" Brexit.

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The scrounging royals have been stashing their cash in tax havens

The royal family have been caught out using secretive offshore tax havens to hide at least £10 million while they simultaneously expect the British taxpayer to bankroll their lavish lifestyles, to refurbish their central London palace (because they're pleading poverty), and to throw in a free luxury yacht for the Queen too.

The royal family expect to live their lavish lifestyles on the backs of ordinary taxpayers, but then they spit in our faces by stashing their cash in secretive offshore tax havens.

Just imagine the forelock-tugging subservience of the people scrabbling to perform mental gymnastics to make excuses for this outrageous behaviour. 

Just imagine the kind of subservience that allows these people no real interest in stuff like fairness, decency, or integrity because all logical and moral considerations are overruled by deference to people they consider to be their rightful lords and masters.

The whole concept of monarchy is a ridiculous anachronism. It's an embarrassment to all of the countries that insist on persisting with unelected heads of state that are determined by birth, not by merit. 

Not only does this archaic system of hereditary patronage still persist in the UK, but the idle beneficiaries of it are so comfortable and complacent in their positions that they feel entitled to stash their unearned wealth in tax havens while pleading poverty so that ordinary taxpayers have to pay the cost of renovating the central London palace they've neglected to maintain properly for decades.

One of the worst things about royalist forelock-tuggers is that so many of them have allowed themselves to be trained by the mainstream media to spit outrage, bile, and hatred upon command at "scroungers" like a pack of salivating Pavlov's dogs. But when it comes to the biggest, dodgiest and most high profile pack of scroungers of all, they react with delight at the very thought of their own subservience to them.

How is it that people can fail to draw a connection between the tax-dodging of the super-rich establishment class, and the fact that our public services are at breaking point and in-work poverty and child poverty are soaring out of control?

How is it that people can think it fair that the hard-working exploited poor should not get any help whatever from the state to provide for a third child, but erupt in joy that William and Kate are expecting a third child who is destined to live its entire life suckling on the taxpayers' teat?

How is it that the thought of a guy claiming unemployment benefits and working cash in hand on the side provokes such ire, but the thought of a family of scroungers living lives of absolute luxury at the public expense and stashing their cash in secretive offshore tax havens has them in raptures of delight?

I guess it's just a matter of approach. 

If the tax-dodging scrounger is just some working class chap who tries to hide what he's up to, then the forelock-tugger Daily Mail-reader types would gladly spew hatred at him upon demand.

However if this hypothetical scrounger took a more brazen approach and flaunted his ill-gotten gains by riding around the streets in a gold carriage wearing a diamond encrusted hat, perhaps they'd love him for it? Perhaps they'd queue for hours for the chance to catch a glimpse of him and save up their hard-earned cash to buy mugs, plates and all kinds of awful tat with his face printed on it? And perhaps they'd gladly have their taxes used to refurbish one of his mansions and buy him a brand new luxury yacht, even though they know perfectly well that he's living large at the public expense and diddling the taxman as he does it?

Who knows how these people think? How they maintain such unshakeable faith in an antiquated system of patronage bestowed on an idle bunch of scroungers who spit in our faces by hiding their cash in tax havens while they simultaneously plead poverty and expect ordinary taxpayers to pay for their yachts and castles?

I guess the answer is that some people just like to be subservient. They like to be abused and taken advantage of by people they consider to be their superiors. Like Stockholm syndrome, but with flags, and castles, and parades, and pageantry, and golden carriages.

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Why isn't Theresa May's negligence a bigger news story?

If there's one thing we're learning from Brexit it's that Theresa May is a shockingly negligent chancer who absolutely refuses to learn even the most basic lesson from the mistakes of her predecessor.

The only reason that Theresa May is Prime Minister at all is that David Cameron decided to gamble the entire future of the UK economy in order to win a little bit of party political advantage at the 2015 General Election, and then lost the referendum.

Theresa May is well aware that David Cameron was so filled with hubris and certain of his success that he didn't even bother to make a government contingency plan for what to do in case the public voted in favour of Brexit.

We know that Theresa May is well aware of David Cameron's negligence because she spent her first six months as Prime Minister mouthing empty platitudes like "Brexit means Brexit" while her cabinet desperately scrabbled around trying to come up with the plan for post-Brexit Britain that her predecessor carelessly neglected to develop just in case his EU referendum gamble backfired.

After six months of spouting meaningless platitudes Theresa May finally announced that her long awaited Brexit negotiating strategy would be the diplomatic equivalent of a toddler tantrum. Either the EU give her the quickfire pro-corporate deal she wants, or she will strop away from the negotiations with absolutely nothing!

Theresa May's "no deal is better than a bad deal" rhetoric is bad enough in its own right because such ludicrous threats are a total embarrassment of a diplomatic negotiating stance, but it's clearly a recklessly complacent propaganda narrative in light of the incredible admission from her own Brexit Secretary David Davis that the government has done absolutely no economic impact assessment into how bad a "no deal" cliff edge Brexit would be.

Theresa May has made the absolute centrepiece of her so-called "negotiating strategy" the threat of doing something that she hasn't even bothered to investigate the consequences of!

It's clearly impossible to draw up any kind of contingency plan if you can't even be bothered to do an impact assessment to estimate how bad the economic damage would be or which would be the worst hit regions of the country and sectors of the economy. If you can't even be arsed to look at where the damage will occur how on earth is it possible to develop any kind of coherent plan to mitigate the worst of the destruction?

The astounding thing is that Theresa May saw her predecessor resign in disgrace after gambling with the nation's future without even bothering to make a contingency plan in case his gamble backfired, yet she's doing precisely the same thing. She's gambling that the threat of a "no deal" cliff edge Brexit will be good for her own party political interests, but she's negligently refusing to draw up a contingency plan in case the EU negotiators decide to call her ridiculous bluff instead of caving in and giving her what she wants.

Regular Another Angry Voice readers will know that Hillary Benn is hardly a hero of mine, but it's impossible to disagree with his conclusion as Chairman of the Commons Brexit committee that "If the government is going to make this assertion that no deal would be better than a bad deal, then I think everyone would expect the government to have done some assessment".

It shouldn't matter whether you are pro-Brexit or anti-Brexit; anyone with any kind of sense at all should be absolutely aghast at Theresa May's shocking complacency and negligence.

Even if you don't think Brexit is a bad idea in theory, surely you can't possibly look at the incompetently negligent way Theresa May is handling it and conclude that things are going to work out fine and dandy for those amongst us who don't have the riches to insulate themselves from the economic chaos?

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British workers are suffering the worst deal in the developed world

In July 2016 it was revealed that British workers have suffered the joint biggest post-crisis collapse in the real value of the wages anywhere in the developed world. The only other country in the OECD to have experienced a such a severe decline in workers' wages is crisis-stricken Greece.

Image credit: Financial Times

New data from the OECD puts this astonishing collapse in the value of UK workers' wages into an ever harsher perspective. Aside from suffering the joint worst wage collapse in the developed world, the UK is the only developed economy in which wages fell while the economy was actually growing.

UK workers have been given an uniquely bad deal. There's no other developed nation where workers' wages were systematically eroded while the economy was actually expanding.

A low-skill low-pay economy

One of the most significant causes of the unprecedented decline in UK workers' wages is the replacement of "real" full-time jobs with part-time, zero hours and gig economy contracts. Since 2010 only around a third of new jobs have been full-time paid positions, with the rest being part-time or self-employment.

The UK economy has been shifting from being a high-skill high-pay economy, to a low-skill low-pay one. Between 2007 and 2015 the number of managerial positions in the UK economy fell by 24%, while the number of low-skilled jobs increased by a similar amount.

Tory austerity

One of main causes in the UK's unprecedented wage collapse has been the socially and economically ruinous Tory austerity agenda.

Ideologically driven cuts in government spending have resulted in the abolition of hundreds of thousands of decent well-paid jobs, while the public sector pay freeze has inflicted below inflation pay increases on millions of workers.

People who have been indoctrinated by the right-wing press into jealously hating public sector workers might be inclined to celebrate the Tory assault on public sector jobs and wages, but only if they're grotesquely ignorant of the knock on effects in the private sector.

If tens of thousands of high-skill public sector jobs are needlessly abolished, it doesn't take a genius to understand that the competition for high-skilled private sector jobs is going to be significantly increased, meaning fewer job opportunities for well-paid private sector positions. Neither does it take an economic visionary to understand that deliberately repressing wages in the public sector gives unscrupulous private sector employers the ideal excuse to impose wage repression schemes of their own.

Wealth redistribution

People have argued for a long time that Tory austerity is nothing more than a deliberate wealth redistribution con, where inequality promoting policies are dressed up in "there is no alternate" propaganda which is subjected to almost no serious scrutiny in the politically biased mainstream media.

Austerity wasn't ruthlessly forced on the UK by the European Union and the IMF like it was in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, it was purely a matter of choice from a Tory government who saw the fallout from the global financial sector insolvency crisis as the ideal opportunity to push their hard-right economic agenda (tax cuts for the rich, welfare cuts for the poor, more privatisation scams, destruction of public services ...).

The fact that UK workers have suffered a uniquely bad deal is yet more proof that, from their own perspective, the Tory wealth redistribution scam called austerity has been a roaring success.

The UK wealth pie has got bigger over the last eight years, but the slice that workers end up with is somehow significantly smaller than the slice they were getting when the pie was smaller before the economic crisis.

There's no doubt whatever where all of the extra wealth has been going. While UK workers have suffered the worst sustained decline in the value of their wages in recorded history the super-rich minority have literally doubled their wealth.

The rate of in-work poverty has soared to a record high. 3.8 million working people now live in poverty. 66% of children living in poverty live in working households, and the super-rich elitists that the Tory party exists to serve are laughing all the way to the bank.

Where is the fightback?

One of the most common explanatory narratives about Donald Trump's election win was that it was driven by the anger of "left behind" US workers. While there is some sense behind this explanation (the wealth of the US middle class has been under erosion for the last four decades) the evidence shows that like France and Germany, the US is one of the majority of countries where both the economy and wages have grown since the financial sector meltdown.

The UK is in the unique position of being the only developed nation where the country got richer, but the workers got poorer.

If the US situation (both the country and the workers getting richer) was supposedly the reason for the political earthquake of Trumpism, where on earth is the UK fightback?* 

To put the meek and passive reaction of British workers into perspective, just imagine the reaction of the French if they were being shafted in the same way. Who thinks there wouldn't be huge strikes, mass protests and riots in the streets if French workers were being treated half as badly as British workers are currently accepting?

Conclusion

I often like to conclude my articles with some glimmer of hope, or some positive action that can be taken to fight back against the injustice, but when it comes to the way UK workers have been so badly shafted, and their pathetically meek acceptance of the uniquely poor deal they've been subjected to, well, there's only one explanation. There's something catastrophically wrong with the British psyche.

Not only have British workers failed to fight back against this uniquely bad deal, the political party that has been orchestrating this massive upwards redistribution of wealth is riding so high in the polls that they appear almost untouchable.

Theresa May has an astounding 49% approval rating. A huge number of British people are clearly a bunch of pathetically subservient forelock-tuggers who adore the savage aristocratic class who ruthlessly exploit them and administer one merciless beating after another.

If the British won't fight back when they're demonstrably suffering the worst deal in the entire developed world, what hope is there?

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* Don't even dare say "Brexit is the fightback" because handing even more power to the Tories who have been shafting British workers so ruthlessly is obviously totally the opposite of a fightback.

When are British workers going to start blaming the Tories?

In 1896 Peter Kropotkin wrote that "the worker feels vaguely that our present technical power could give abundance to all, but he also perceives how the capitalistic system and the State hinder the conquest of this well-being in every way". Given the huge technological advances in the last 120 years his idea of abundance for all stands truer than ever, especially in an advanced and wealthy society like the UK.

The reality is starkly different. Workers in the United Kingdom have suffered the joint biggest collapse in the value of their wages of any country in the developed world. Since 2008 only workers in crisis stricken Greece have seen such huge declines in their real terms incomes.

Things have got so bad that a record high of 3.8 million workers are living in poverty, plus another 2.6 million children in working households who are living in poverty. In Tory Britain having a job is no safeguard from poverty, and having parents who work is no safeguard from poverty for children.

While the burden of Tory austerity has been loaded onto vulnerable people and ordinary working families, the bankers who actually caused the global financial sector meltdown continue to get vast bonuses and the tiny super-rich minority have literally doubled their wealth. 

It should be crystal clear to every worker that Tory economic policy is actively pushing things backwards. Technological abundance should mean that fewer and fewer workers should be living in poverty, but under Tory rule the huge advances of the 20th Century are being rapidly snatched back from the majority of people and redistributed to the super-rich minority (the people who completely bankroll the Tory party).

The really sad thing is that the modern British worker doesn't even seem to understand the basic fact that the Tory party exists in order to promote the interests of the super-rich at the expense of everyone else.

Millions of British workers actually went out and voted for for the Tories in 2015, then millions more voted for Brexit in 2016 thinking that their rebellion would somehow make their circumstances better by giving the political establishment a kicking.

Now the reality is becoming clear. Brexit has handed even more power to the Tory party, who simply switched their leader and then continued exactly the same policy of extracting wealth from the majority of people in order to redistribute it to the super-rich minority.

Brexit has simply given fanatically right-wing Tories like Michael Gove the green light to ask British businesses to draw up lists of the employment and consumer protection rules they would like to see scrapped so they can make more profits for themselves at the expense of their workers and their customers.

Brexit was a snake oil revolution that looks set to lead to a Tory bonfire of employment rights and even more rapid declines in standards of living for British workers than they achieved between 2010 and 2015.

If Brexit is going to come with a huge price tag, then it's absolutely guaranteed that a Tory government will extract that cost of it from ordinary people in order to protect the the interests of the super-rich*. 

Even if Brexit causes the already appalling declines in workers' wages to accelerate, it seems likely that the Tories will maintain their grip on power. They only needed 24% of the electorate to vote for them in 2015 in order to achieve a majority government.

As a result of George Osborne's austerity con British workers suffered the longest sustained fall in the real value of their wages in history during the last parliament, yet the Tories not only won, but actually increased their grip on power.

Now it's become clear that British workers are getting the absolute worst deal in the developed world alongside Greek workers, but if things continue to follow the same pattern the Tories will win the next General Election with a landslide victory!

The only way to break this pattern is for sufficient British workers to wake up to the fact that the cause of their problems isn't immigrants, or unemployed people, or the EU, or whichever scapegoats the mainstream press are pushing ... The cause of their problems is the Tory economic policy of extracting wealth from the majority in order to redistribute it to the super-rich minority.

 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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* = In fact one of the first (and only) Brexit policies the Tories have announced is their determination to continue the vast handouts showered on the wealthy landowner class by the EU.

George Osborne's toxic austerity agenda

For years I've been banging on about how Tory austerity is a highly destructive, economically illiterate and historically unjustifiable con job. At times it felt like me, and the few other people talking economic sense were shouting in the wilderness because all of our efforts were completely undermined by the Blairite faction of the Labour Party constantly agreeing with the insane Tory economic fairy story that it's possible to cut our way to growth and prosperity.

Ed Miliband made a catastrophic mistake in appointing the inept Blairite Ed Balls as his shadow chancellor.  Balls' economic policy wasn't to present a clear and coherent alternative to ideologically driven Tory austerity, it was to try to agree them into submission. Anyone with any political sense at all could see the 2015 General Election disaster unfolding. Austerity-lite was clearly one of the weakest and least inspiring campaign strategies ever devised. The idea of millions of traditional Labour voters getting enthused about a watered down version of Tory economic madness was as unrealistic as expecting Tory voters to switch to ersatz austerity when they could have the real thing by voting Tory.

Since his election as Labour Party leader in 2015 Jeremy Corbyn has been a breath of fresh air. Instead of making the fundamental political error of agreeing with your political opponents' dodgy premise and trying to weakly imitate their policies, Corbyn has taken the revolutionary stance of actually opposing the Tory ideological agenda.

At last there is someone challenging Tory austerity, yet the Blairite faction of the Labour Party are desperate to assist the Tories again by constantly attacking their own party leader rather than concentrating on criticism of the catastrophically failed Tory austerity agenda.

The failure of austerity

If the success of Tory austerity is measured in sensible economic terms it's clearly been a complete failure. In 2010 George Osborne promised that austerity would eliminate the deficit by 2015 but didn't even manage to halve it. In 2015 Osborne promised that austerity would eliminate the deficit by 2020. In 2016 the Tories are admitting that elimination of the deficit by 2020 is going to be impossible.

The Tories are openly admitting that it's going to take way more than 10 years for austerity to achieve what they initially promised that it would do in five!

Aside from the abject failure to eliminate the budget deficit, austerity has produced all manner of appalling social and economic results.

• The longest sustained decline in UK workers' wages since records began

• The slowest post-crisis recovery in UK history

• A 10.4% decline in real wages

• An exponential rise in the number of people relying on food banks

• One record breaking trade deficit after another

• An appalling slump in UK worker productivity

• 800,000+ UK workers on exploitative Zero Hours Contracts

• Re-inflation of the house price bubble and a huge decline in home ownership

How much of an out-of-touch fantasy land would people have to occupy in order to make out that this record is such a "success" that George Osborne deserves to join the likes of Stephen Hawking, David Attenborough, James Lovelock and Ian McKellen in the exclusive list of Companions of Honour?

A bit of economic history

In 1945 the post-war UK economy was in ruins and the national debt stood at an incredible 250% of GDP. That year Clement Attlee's Labour government were elected and set in motion the most ambitious programme of government spending in British history. They established the NHS and the beloved principle that health care should be free at the point of need, they built hundreds of thousands of new houses per year, they rebuilt the UK's war shattered infrastructure, they massively improved pensions and the welfare state, they introduced Legal Aid so that ordinary people could access the legal system and they nationalised several core industries and services so that they could be run for the good of the country rather than the profit of a tiny minority.

These reforms resulted in the longest period of economic stability, sustained debt reduction and increased prosperity (across all sectors of society) in British history. By the time Margaret Thatcher and her band of ideological fanatics tore up the post war consensus in 1979 the national debt had fallen from 250% of GDP to just 43%.

The post-war period is a shining example of the fact that strategic investment is the way to reduce debts and increase prosperity, and the post financial crisis Tory austerity agenda is proof that "let's cut our way to growth" is a load of toxic economically illiterate nonsense.

The real Tory agenda

It's impossible that Tory politicians have failed to notice that George Osborne's austerity agenda failed on pretty much every economic indicator going. It's also highly unlikely that they don't know about the way the UK invested it's way to growth and prosperity in the post-war period. Yet they still stubbornly refuse to admit that austerity is a load of ideologically driven claptrap that has done immeasurable harm to the UK economy.

The reason they refuse to admit that George Osborne's austerity agenda has been a disaster is that for a select few it hasn't been a disaster at all. 

While all other public sector workers have been subjected to below inflation 1% pay freezes for years on end and the working poor have experienced savage cuts to their in-work benefits the Tories and the rest of the Westminster establishment club got an 11% pay rise. And while ordinary workers were suffering the longest sustained decline in real wages since records began, the tiny super-rich minority literally doubled their wealth.

The Tories don't see austerity as a failure because they, and the multi-millionaire donors who bankroll the Tory party have done very nicely out of it indeed (at the expense of everyone else).

Conclusion

The Tory austerity agenda was never really about tackling the government debt or stimulating economic growth. Had that been the case they would surely have followed the successful post-war example and tried to invest our way to growth and prosperity. The real agenda was to feed the public a load of economic fairy stories in order to justify policies that resulted in a massive upwards redistribution of wealth.

It's an incredible feat of propaganda that the Tories managed to delude millions of people into believing that austerity was about fixing the debt, rather than transferring wealth from poor and ordinary people to their super-rich backers, but it worked.

Disappointingly there are still an awful lot of people out there who still stubbornly refuse to admit that they've been conned despite the absolute mountain of evidence that David Cameron, George Osborne and their chums in the right-wing press pulled off one of the greatest con jobs ever on the British electorate.

 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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The Tory war on British workers' wages and labour rights

The Tories have been carrying out one of the most radically right-wing economic experiments ever tested at the national level. The Tory policy of wage repression is designed to turn the UK into a low-skill, low-wage low-job security economy where bosses earn fortunes and employees are treated like disposable pawns.

While most of the rest of Europe have experienced some wage growth since 2007, including crisis devastated economies like Spain (+2.8%) Ireland (+1.6%) and Italy (+0.9%), UK workers have seen a catastrophic decline in earning power only matched by workers in the economic catastrophe zone that is Greece (-10.4%).

Ordinary British workers have seen the deliberate decimation of their wages since the Lib-Dems enabled the Tories back into power in 2010. Meanwhile the super wealthy minority have literally doubled their wealth since the economic crisis. 

Aside from overseeing the longest sustained decline in wages in economic history, a reduction in earning power only matched by the crisis stricken Greek economy, a huge upwards redistribution of wealth, and the slowest economic recovery on record, the Tories have also been savagely attacking working rights too.

The Tories have attacked the right to compensation for unfair dismissal by introducing huge tribunal fees, they've tried to bribe workers into giving away their employment rights, they've been ruthlessly attacking the trade unions to make trade union democracy completely unworkable, they've slashed in-work benefits for the working poor, and they've overseen a massive increase in exploitative Zero Hours contracts as used by Sports Direct.

The fact that the British public have become a hopelessly docile bunch is evidenced by the almost complete lack of reaction to these attacks on workers' rights and wages designed to produce a deliberate upwards redistribution of wealth. In fact the party that set the destruction of workers' rights and wages as one of their deliberate policy priorities are soaring ahead in the polls!

Just look at the furious way the French have reacted to attacks on their employment rights, and consider that they've enjoyed a 10% increase in their earning power since the pre-crisis period. In Britain we've had a 10% decrease in our earning power and most people have sat back compliantly as the Tories have repeatedly snatched our employment rights away.

The situation is likely to get even worse now because the new Prime Minister Theresa May has appointed a fanatical right-winger called George Freeman as her policy director. In the past Freeman has championed policies like slashing the minimum wage in poor areas, reducing corporation tax to 10% (half the basic rate of income tax paid by their workers!), and the scrapping of workers' rights to basic protections like holiday pay, maternity/paternity pay, sick pay and the right to claim unfair dismissal.

The sad thing is that the mainstream media have allowed this radical and unprecedented Tory assault on wages and labour rights to go almost completely unreported. Instead they try to refocus people's anger away from the political villains and the super-rich establishment they serve, and onto scapegoats like immigrants, the unemployed and disabled people.

Additionally the mainstream press are conducting an intensive propaganda war against Jeremy Corbyn because he dares to stand up for ordinary workers against this Tory anti-worker agenda, whilst simultaneously lauding Theresa May for her transparently misleading rhetoric about how the Tories are going to help ordinary working people instead of the privileged few.

A look at Theresa May's voting record reveals that she voted time and again in favour of attacks on wages, in-work benefits and workers rights, yet she thinks the British public are such a gullible bunch of halfwits that they'll believe the ridiculous story that the Tories are now interested in serving the interests of the workers rather than the interests of the millionaire bosses who actually fund the Tory party.

Unfortunately, according to the polls she is right. The British public really are that gullible. Millions of working people actually support the party that has been systematically destroying their earning power and employment rights for the last six years.

 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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