How to impoverish disabled people, a lesson from Tory Britain.

Just imagine what it must be like to be a disabled person opening a letter that threatens to cut off your disability benefits if you fail to attend an interview five days ago.

Luckily the individual who received this letter has a good support network who are helping them to fight against this deliberate trap, but there are huge numbers of disabled people out there without strong support networks to help them fight against this kind of injustice.

People with mental health conditions and learning disabilities are particularly vulnerable to this kind of benefits denial trickery.

Whether people have mental health conditions or not, this kind of thing exacerbates their illnesses by loading masses of stress, anxiety, and depression on top of whatever they were already suffering with.

The last thing you need when you have a heart condition or terminal cancer is a prolonged bureaucratic fight to obtain the social security payments you're entitled to.

And just look at who the letter had been sent by. It's not from the DWP, it's from the private profit-seeking outsourcing company Capita who have been contracted to carry out the Tories' dirty work.

Chaos, inefficiency, and vast cost-overruns have been commonplace wherever the Tories have brought in profiteering outsourcing firms to do their dirty work in the welfare system. The WCA assessment regime has ended up costing more to administer than it ever saved in reduced benefits payments, unlawful Tory workfare schemes ended up subsidising private profit-making companies at the Taxpayers' expense, and the corporate-administered Work Programme ended up producing results that were worse than literally doing nothing at all!

The PIP assessment regime is no different. Costs have overrun so dramatically that instead of the £2 billion saving the Tories predicted in 2013, but figures from the OBR (page 113) reveal that by May 2018 it was already costing £4.2 billion more than they projected!

This disgraceful PIP letter is just one isolated example of the kind situations disabled people are suffering in Britain on a daily basis, but there's no denying that this kind of abuse is widespread and systematic.

When the United Nations investigated the treatment of sick and disabled people, they concluded that the Tories are inflicting "grave and systematic" human rights violations against disabled people.

Even if people were somehow unaware of the damning United Nations report, there are news stories virtually every day highlighting the disgusting consequences of these botched and malicious Tory welfare reforms. Stuff like tens of thousands of people dying within weeks of being declared fit for work, people with terminal illnesses being treated like scroungers, denied benefits, and told to 'get a job', people winning their benefits appeals after they died, people committing suicide because of all the stress and anxiety of having their disability benefits cut ...

There's absolutely no pretending that the Tory government aren't administering the systematic abuse of sick and disabled people, and there's no pretending that the millions of people who vote Tory simply consider this systematic abuse a "price worth paying" in return for whatever (probably imaginary) personal benefit they think they're getting from keeping this malicious and incompetent party in power.

Unfortunately we live in a nation of selfish "I'm alright Jack" bastards who actively endorse the Tory party and the system they've built which results in private profit-seeking companies running the show and sending con-trick letters like this.

Tory voters endorse this abusive system because they naively imagine that things like sickness, disability, or simple misfortune could never happen to them or their families, and they're absolutely chilled as long as this systematic abuse is targeted at other people.

 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

Meet the "more of the same" party

The Independent Group of 11 MPs who are squatting in parliament, refusing to call by-elections, and pinning their political hopes on begging Theresa May for an opportunity to prop up her pro-austerity government have announced the positions they've given themselves, and you couldn't have picked more inappropriate roles for several of them if you'd actively tried.

Heidi Allen - Welfare, social care, pensions, and business

Source: Heidi Allen on They Work For You

Heidi Allen is one of the three ex-Tories to join the parliamentary squatter group, and by putting her in charge of welfare and social care this lot are sending a very clear message to their financial backers that they're intent on continuing the savage welfare policies that Allen repeatedly voted in favour of during her time on the Tory benches.

Any "centrists" hoping this new group might adopt a more humane approach than the Tories to issues like disability, social security, and social care will surely be sorely disappointed to see this position handed to a Tory with a proven track record of voting in favour of savage welfare cuts and crippling reduced local government funding in order to fund lavish tax cuts on corporations and the super-rich.

Greedy businessmen hoping for more unearned handouts on the other hand, they'll be punching the air with delight that this new group is intent on continuing the same old "something for nothing" Tory agenda, and actively begging Theresa May to let them prop up her shambles of a government.

Mike Gapes - Foreign affairs and defence

It's difficult to think of a less suitable individual to take responsibility for foreign affairs than the unapologetic warmonger Mike Gapes.

This is a man who voted in favour of the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, and then repeatedly voted against investigations into the ensuing catastrophe.

The Iraq war caused hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, triggered a refugee crisis of millions, and created a lawless power vacuum that eventually gave birth to ISIS.

Mike Gapes refuses to accept any moral responsibility whatever for any of this, and remains 100% unapologetic.

Gapes is also a big fan of the tyrannical, homophobic, misogynists, head-chopping, journalist-dismembering, terrorism-spreading Saudi war criminals, and was one of 13 MPs to receive a share of over £100,000 of gifts and freebies lavished on British politicians by the Saudi regime in 2018.

Gapes knows that the Saudis use British weapons to commit war crimes in Yemen because he was a member of the foreign affairs select committee that admitted that this was the case, but he simply doesn't care.

By appointing Gapes to their foreign affairs and defence brief the group are sending a very clear signal to arms manufacturers and the military-industrial complex that they're setting up as a pro-war, pro-imperialist party that is willing to turn a blind eye to the sickening war crimes of disgustingly tyrannical regimes like Saudi Arabia in order to flog them £billions more in weapons.

Chris Leslie - Treasury and trade

One of Ed Miliband's biggest mistakes as Labour leader was to allow a bunch of hard-right austerity fetishists rule the shadow treasury which resulted in Labour's ridiculously unappealing "austerity-lite" agenda that ruined their chances at the 2015 general election.

The 'thinking' behind this ludicrous policy was that Labour could pinch a few thousand soft-Tory votes in marginal constituencies by imitating ruinous Tory austerity rather than actively opposing it. What they clearly failed to factor into this mind-bogglingly stupid plan was the fact that an explicitly pro-austerity agenda would end up driving away vast numbers of natural Labour voters for every "soft-Tory" they managed to entice.

Hence Labour's share of the vote collapsing from 35% in 2010 to just 29% in 2015, despite the Tories overseeing unprecedented collapses in workers' wages and living standards, trashing Britain's AAA credit rating, and spectacularly missing all of their economic targets!

Had Labour actually opposed devastating Tory austerity dogma in 2015, Labour would probably have beaten the Tories, Ed Miliband would have become Prime Minister, austerity would be over, Jeremy Corbyn would still be an obscure Labour backbencher, and there's be no such thing as Brexit!

Chris Leslie was one of the ludicrous hard-right wonks in the shadow treasury who helped to lay the groundwork for Brexit by outright refusing to oppose the Tory austerity madness that was trashing wages, living standards, and public services, and he's still a pro-austerity fanatic now, even years after right-leaning international bodies like the IMF and OECD have rejected austerity dogma as an economically damaging ideology.

Appointing a hard-right economic illiterate like Chris Leslie to their economics brief is a very clear signal to the mega-rich beneficiaries of Tory austerity dogma that this group intends to continue the Tory agenda of using austerity as a means of transferring ever more wealth from to poor and ordinary to corporations and the mega-rich.

Angela Smith - Transport, Local government, housing, energy, environment, rural affairs

Angela Smith is such a talentless incompetent that she managed to completely screw up the biggest day of her entire political career by referring to British Asians as "funny tinge" on live TV on the Independent Group launch day.

Afterwards she excused this racist gaffe by repeatedly claiming that she was "very tired" which is actually significantly more offensive than the original gaffe because it implies that racist attitudes are somehow so natural and inherent that they accidentally slip out when people are tired, drunk, or stressed.

The idea that we're all inherently racists and it only depends how tired, drunk, or stressed we get before we start spouting bigoted racist slurs is absolutely extraordinary, but not quite as extraordinary as this group putting a pro-privatisation ideologue and lobbyist for private water companies in charge of their transport, energy, water, and housing policies.

With a hard-right pro-privatisation ideologue running this huge brief, it's absolutely clear that this group are committed to defying the public will by cementing private profiteering ownership of the railways, national grid, water companies, and other public services.

Putting Smith in charge of this brief is a clear signal to the private profiteers who are gouging vast profits out of our housing, public services, and utilities that this group is absolutely committed to delivering "more of the same". 

Anna Soubry - Brexit and justice

Of all of the squatter MPs Anna Soubry is perhaps the most distasteful because of her outright and glaring displays of hypocrisy.

When she's not praising the devastating 2010-15 austerity policies that laid the groundwork for Brexit by collapsing UK living standards as "marvellous" Soubry often talks a good talk, but when it comes to the actions her parliamentary voting record stands as absolute proof that she repeatedly does precisely the opposite.

Take her continual grandstanding on Brexit to pose as some kind of noble Brexit-critic which is completely contradicted by her actions. She poses as a Brexit-sceptic, but in parliament she's repeatedly voted in favour of Theresa May's hard-right interpretation of Brexit.

Soubry's Brexit collusion including votes in favour of May's shambolic Withdrawal Bill in January 2018, votes against opposition amendments to protect workers' rights, environmental laws, equality rules, consumer protections and food standards, and even a vote of confidence in Theresa May after she humiliated Britain by postponing the scheduled "meaningful vote" for no reason other than the fact she knew she was going to lose it.

It's not just talking about opposing Brexit while repeatedly voting in favour of it either. When it comes to police cuts and violent crime she's also proven herself a despicable hypocrite too.

In response to Theresa May's ludicrous assertion that her policy of getting rid of 21,000 police and slashing police budgets has no relation with soaring rates of violent crime, Soubry stated that "of course there's a link between policing numbers and crime".

This Tweet is an admission that she knew that slashing police budgets would end up increasing rates of serious and violent crime all along, but she repeatedly voted in favour of Theresa May's ideologically driven assault on the police service regardless of the dire and deadly consequences she knew would happen. 

She blatantly put loyalty to the Tory party above the lives of violent crime victims, but now she's abandoned that party loyalty as worthless to join the parliamentary squatters, demonstrating that the victims of the violent crime wave she helped Theresa May to create are actually less than worthless in her estimations!

And she's got the absolute brass neck to start carping from the sidelines about the appalling consequences of the austerity fanaticism that she repeatedly and knowingly voted in favour of as if she's now some kind of heroic saviour!

Putting one of the most brazen hypocrites in the whole of parliament in charge of their Brexit brief is a signal to their financial backers that the group are actually extremely flexible on their Brexit position. If the secretive millionaires who are bankrolling this group want them to go all out for a referendum then that's what they'll do, but if the bankrollers decide that a hard-right Tory Brexit is actually in their interests, that's obviously what Soubry and the squatters will eventually vote in favour of.

Change Politics!

The parliamentary squatters' "change politics" slogan is every bit as Orwellian anything the Tory government have come up with over the years ("all in this together" - while transferring as much wealth as possible from the majority to the mega-rich minority, "making work pay" while overseeing the longest sustained collapse in workers wages in recorded history and slashing in-work benefits, "strong and stable" as their campaign slogan during the most shambolic and needless election in modern British history ...).

They repeatedly claim that they want to "change politics" but their actions demonstrate that on all manner of crucial issues from ruinous austerity dogma to war-mongering imperialism, and from privatisation mania to welfare policy, these are people who desperately want to keep things exactly the same.

 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

How has Britain has become so normalised to Tory lawlessness and contempt for democracy?

To get a measure of how utterly normalised we've become to Tory lawlessness, just consider the fact that they became the first government in UK history to be held in contempt of parliament for deliberately refusing to comply with a parliamentary vote to release the legal advice they received on Brexit, and it's already been forgotten about within days.

This is always the case. Tory lawlessness and contempt for democracy always gets swept under the carpet and forgotten about.

• Remember when Theresa May and the Tories were defeated in the Supreme Court over their efforts to completely sideline parliament in order to make democratic opposition to Theresa May's hard-right Brexit scheming impossible? 

• Remember how the Tories' propaganda merchants in the right-wing rags triggered a tsunami of death threats and abuse against the judges who ruled that parliament is sovereign and Theresa May can't just make up Brexit as she goes along with no democratic scrutiny?

• Remember when the Tories introduced unlawful tribunal fees designed to protect bad bosses by pricing mistreated workers out of the justice system?

• Remember when the courts found that the draconian Tory Work Capacity Assessment regime for disabled people was unlawfully discriminating against those with mental health conditions, yet they carried on regardless?

• Remember when the Tories' ideologically driven benefit cap was declared unlawful by the courts for impoverishing single-parent families and causing misery "for no good reason"? 

• Remember when their policy of using the unemployed as a source of free labour for their corporate mates (Workfare) were repeatedly defeated in the courts?

• Remember when the Tories absolutely gutted Legal Aid in order to price poor and ordinary people out of the justice system and make it almost impossible for the victims of their malicious and unjust welfare policies to seek justice in the courts?

• Remember when unlawful Tory efforts to shut down Lewisham hospital were defeated in the courts? (so they simply rewrote the rules to make it much easier for them to shut down NHS facilities against the will of the local community).

• Remember when the Tories wasted £500,000 of public money in under a year challenging criticism of their track record on air pollution, resulting in a hat-trick of court defeats?

• And then there's all the blatantly fraudulent campaign spending the Tories did during the 2015 General Election (that they only got away with because the Electoral Commission are such a toothless and incompetent electoral regulator).

This is a government riddled with contempt for parliamentary democracy and contempt towards the rule of law, yet they're barely ever held to account for it by the mainstream media. And on the rare occasions that the public do actually hear about these extraordinary scandals, the tendency is to shrug it all off as if lawlessness, corruption and contempt for democracy are normal and unavoidable, rather than outrageous and unacceptable.

 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

How bad is the Tory Universal Credit disaster?

There are so many problems with the Tory government's botched Universal Credit policy it's impossible to list them all, but here are just a few:

• There's a demonstrable link between Universal Credit being imposed on an area and rising rates of poverty and food bank dependency. The Trussell Trust has reported that Food Bank usage has soared 52% in Universal Credit areas, while the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have highlighted the way that Universal Credit has tipped struggling families into absolute destitution (the 42 day wait from initial claim to first payment being one of the worst aspects).

• Despite the 42 day wait a shocking one in six of the unfortunate people who have been subjected to the Tory Universal Credit experiment were still not even paid in time. Imagine if the business you were involved in had a 1/6 failure rate. There'd be hell to pay.

• There's the fact that Universal Credit discriminates heavily against the self-employed (especially seasonal workers and self-employed people with fluctuating monthly earnings), This means extreme income losses for self-employed people who are transferred to Universal Credit. That's some 5 million self-employed people in the UK at risk of impoverishment if this flawed Tory scheme is ever rolled out nationally.

• Another flaw in Universal Credit means that some people would actually be financially penalised for working extra hours. Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that some people would actually end up with less disposable income if they changed from working 3 days a week to 5. What kind of incompetent government economically punishes people for working longer hours?

• The way Universal Credit is paid out per household creates a very strong risk of domestic violence perpetrators taking control of the entire family budget. One victim told a committee of MPs that her husband would "wake up one morning with £1,500 in his account and piss off with it, leaving us with nothing for weeks". Shockingly the Tories have continued pushing ahead with the scheme despite these warnings, doing nothing but issuing an Orwellian statement that they take tackling domestic violence "incredibly seriously" as they simultaneously turn a deliberate blind eye to the devastating consequences of their own policy.

• Universal Credit is so badly flawed that it economically penalises parents for getting new jobs, forcing them hundreds of pounds into debt because the system won't take account of their childcare costs. Just imagine the combination of incompetence and outright malice that drives Tory ministers to continue rolling out a scheme that penalises people for finding work.

• A National Audit Office report into the early stages of Universal Credit found that £34 million had already been wasted on botched IT systems. In 2014 the amount wasted on botched Universal Credit IT systems was upped to £500 million+ by the Public Accounts Committee.

• A leaked 2013 report described the absolute chaos in the Universal Credit team. One respondent said that there was "a near complete absence of anything that looks like strategic leadership in the programme", and another said "I have never worked somewhere where decision making was so apparently poor at senior levels. This programme should be a case study for how not to engage with your people to get the most out of them".

• David Cameron had such a lax attitude to incompetence amongst his ministers that he simply ignored the hundreds of millions in scrapped IT projects and the reported administrative chaos at the DWP, allowing Iain Duncan Smith to continue as the minister responsible for the chaos until he resigned over Brexit in 2016.

• There's the fact that it's ridiculously delayed. The entire country was supposed to have been converted to Universal Credit by October 2017, but instead just 815,000 people in a few unfortunate areas had been subjected to it by March 2018.

• In 2017 Labour Party and other opposition MPs voted for a "pause" in the roll-out of Universal Credit to deal with some of the most glaring flaws. The vote was won by 299 votes to 0 after the government deliberately abstained on the vote, but the Tories have carried on with the roll-out regardless.

• In 2017 the Tories quietly shelved plans to roll out the full version of Universal Credit in the areas of several senior Tory MPs (Iain Duncan Smith, David Gauke, Damian Green, and Theresa May), including two of the DWP ministers who were responsible for devising and implementing the scheme in the first place. Cancelling the roll-out of Universal Credit in their own constituencies as they force it on Labour and SNP areas is a very clear implicit admission that they know Universal Credit is utterly flawed and devastatingly unpopular.

• In July 2018 the Tory DWP minister Esther McVey outright lied to parliament about the botched roll-out of Universal Credit, claiming that a damning National Audit Office report didn't take account of changes to the system when it actually did. Theresa may refused to sack her despite this egregious breach of parliamentary standards.

• There's the fact that the Tories repeatedly lied and misled to pretend that Universal Credit isn't making people worse off, before Esther McVey finally admitted the truth that people would be worse off under the scheme she's imposing just one day after Theresa May had lied to the public that nobody would lose out.

• The former Tory Prime Minister John Major attacked the scheme, saying that Univeral Credit has the potential to be as disastrous for the current Tory government as Poll Tax was for Margaret Thatcher!

• Fury amongst the Tory MPs has been further exacerbated by a Residential Landlords Association report showing a massive increase in landlords with Universal Credit tenants in rent arrears. A rise from 27% in 2016 to 61% in 2018. The immense suffering of the working poor under this botched scheme was never likely to factor into Tory MP's concerns, but ever growing numbers of wealthy Tory-voting landlords losing cash to the scheme is much more likely to grab their attention.

Despite all of these problems the Tory government continue pushing on regardless. They don't care that the scheme is pushing people into poverty and Food Bank dependency; they don't care that it's an absolute gift to controlling domestic violence perpetrators; they don't care that it penalises self-employed people and entrepreneurs; they don't care that they've wasted over £500 million of public cash on this botched scheme; they don't care that it actually creates various disincentives to work; they don't care that it's years behind target; they don't care that parliament voted for them to stop and iron out some of the worst faults; and they don't care that Theresa May outright lied to the nation when she said people wouldn't be worse off just one day before the minister in charge of it admitted that they would be.

The only real hope that the Tories will stop pushing this malicious and incompetent farce is if they start getting stick from the wealthy Tory-voting landlord class who find that Universal Credit is impoverishing their tenants so much that they can't afford to pay the rent.

If the Tories won't listen to the interests of the rich, then who will they listen to?

The other option of course is a Labour government. Whether they'd "pause" the Universal Credit roll-out in order to try and fix all of the Tory flaws, or scrap it altogether is a question that will be answered by the next Labour manifesto.

Whatever the case, anyone who votes Tory in light of this absolute farce is complicit in the waste, the inefficiency, the dishonesty, the poverty, and the suffering.

 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

Here's the reason "centrism is really struggling to make headway"

In a speech to the Lib-Dem conference Gina Miller lamented the fact that "centrism is really struggling to make headway" before going on to call people to the left and right "fascists" with "cold hard ideologies".

The obvious problem with centrism is that the term itself is a complete misnomer that implies that hovering aimlessly around near the centre has some special moral virtue no matter how far off into the political extremes the prevailing political orthodoxy might go.

Thus during the post-war decades the political centre was the mixed economy of public ownership of vital infrastructure, services and industries combined with a strong welfare state and regulated capitalism (a position occupied by Labour, the Liberals, and the Tories), and the privatise everything, "greed is good" deregulate the financial sector right-wingers were fringe lunatics.

Fast forward to 1979 and the hard-right fringe were propelled into power and their mass privatisation, welfare-wrecking, deregulation mania has continued unabated for four decades with truly appalling consequences.

Just look at the behaviour of the self-declared centrists between 2010 and 2016 and you can see the disastrous consequences of this morally weak and utterly wrong-headed determination to occupy the centre ground between raving ideological extremism of the Tories and the Blairism that went before it:

• Despite warning that an ideological cuts agenda would wreck the recovery before the 2010, the Lib-Dems leapt into coalition with the Tories to actively help them wield George Osborne's economically illiterate and unspeakably ruinous austerity wrecking ball.

• The Lib-Dems enabled countless attacks on ordinary people, from the unprecedented campaign of wage repression, though their savage cuts to in-work benefits, to the unspeakably cruel impoverishment and mistreatment of hundreds of thousands of disabled people.

• Meanwhile the Lib-Dems voted through all kinds of unpopular hard-right Tory reforms like selling off the Royal Mail at a fraction of its true value, lumbering students with astronomical debts, carving the NHS open for the benefit of private profiteers, slashing corporation tax to by far the lowest rate in the G7, and literally giving away thousands of state schools to unaccountable private pseudo-charities (many run by Tory party donors!).

• To get an idea of how lost the Lib-Dem centrists became, consider the fact that they agreed to allow Iain Duncan Smith to condemn thousands more to absolute destitution by toughening his draconian sanctions regime in return for the limited roll-out of the 5p plastic bag charge! Of course plastic pollution in the environment is a bad thing, but deliberately and knowingly throwing thousands of real, often extremely vulnerable people under Iain Duncan Smith's bus to combat it is just grotesque.

• In 2014 Theresa May introduced her extremist "hostile environment" legislation and bragged about how the Tory government could "deport now, hear appeals later". Dozens of black British citizens were deported under these rules. Several died in exile. Thousands more were denied employment, housing, access to public services, access to banking services, even medical treatment. The majority of 'centrists' either voted in favour of this disgusting legislation, with only a tiny minority of MPs opposing it on principle (or because their "cold hard ideologies" wouldn't allow them to enable it as Gina Miller would no doubt describe it).

• Then the Labour centrists threw away the 2015 general election with their ridiculous decision to pathetically imitate ruinous Tory austerity dogma rather than oppose it head on.

• After their election defeat Labour centrists like Chris Leslie actually tried to argue that losing the election by copying Tory extremism rather than opposing it meant Labour should shift even further to the right! Thankfully the Labour membership strongly disagreed and voted for a candidate who would actually oppose ruinous Tory austerity dogma instead of meekly copying it.

• During the Labour leadership election the Labour centrists decided to abstain on a massive programme of Tory welfare cuts designed to further impoverish the poor, especially the working poor. Jeremy Corbyn was the only Labour leadership candidate to vote against it.

Centrist collusion with Tory austerity dogma had appalling consequences: The longest period of sustained wage devaluation on record, public services put under massive strain or shut down entirely, in-work benefits slashed, soaring food bank dependency, exploitative employment practices like Zero Hours Contracts and fake self-employment spreading like wildfire ...

Then it came to the Brexit vote and suddenly the complacent centrists were trapped in a pit of their own digging. The far-right Brextremists opportunistically blamed immigrants and the EU for the wage collapse, the failing public services, the in-work poverty, the suffering ... But the centrists couldn't fight back with the truth that these things were the result of austerity, because they were all complicit with austerity.

The only way the centrists have countered the far-right anti-immigrant anti-EU lies would have been to admit that 'centrism' itself was a fraud!

Amazingly centrists still occupy this bubble of delusion that it's somehow morally superior to triangulate with hard-right Tory austerity dogma than to oppose it. That all the 'centrist' MPs abstaining on Theresa May's vile "hostile environment" policy was acceptable and palatable xenophobia, but the xenophobic Brextremist lies were somehow so much worse than a policy they couldn't even be bothered to oppose that eventually led to British citizens dying in exile abroad!

The problem is that centrists promised us that their watered down version of neoliberalism would bring prosperity, but what it's actually delivered is Tory austerity dogma, collapsing wages, failing public services, exploitative employment practices, ridiculous privatisation scams, grotesque "hostile environment" policies, soaring in-work poverty, and eventually the centrist's own worst nightmare; Brexit.

But rather than admit their culpability in creating this dreadful situation, they're intent on moral high-horsing and abusing everyone to the left, and everyone to the right of them as "fascists"!

And it's exactly this kind of self-aggrandising and aloof sneering that's going to keep them in the political wilderness, because like it or not, the idea of aimlessly drifting around in the totally artificial territory of the 'centre ground' is finished.

The choice now is between the hard-right neoliberals who want to keep us on the same course we've been on for four decades (more privatisation, more undermining of workers rights, more public service cutbacks, more under-investment in infrastructure spending and research and development, more welfare cuts for the poor, more tax cuts and lavish handouts for the mega-rich) or those on the left who want to change direction and make Britain more of a high-tech, high-skill society with a decent welfare system like Norway, Finland, Germany, or Denmark.

Of course it's necessary to take an ideological position to step away from the complacency and aimlessness of the political 'centre', but there's nothing "cold" or "hard" about opposing the political orthodoxy of welfare cuts on the most vulnerable people in society (the sick, the disabled, the working poor, the jobless, the children, the elderly and infirm ...) in order to lavish corporations and the mega-rich with ever more tax cuts and handouts.

Quite the contrary, it takes a "cold hard" heart to go along with such barbarity solely because you want to maintain the illusion that by doing so you're somehow a 'moderate' occupying the 'centre ground'!

When centrism actively helps the Tories grind the most vulnerable people in society into absolute destitution for five years in order to feed the greed of the mega-rich, and then centrists accuse others who object to this horrific agenda of "fascism" and having "cold hard ideologies" then you really can't expect anyone other than your ever-diminishing echo chamber of delusional 'centrists' to applaud your unbelievably hypocritical message.

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

OR

Theresa May has complacently betrayed the Tory core vote

The Tory Dementia Tax is surely one of the nastiest and most ill-conceived pieces of legislation to ever appear in a General Election manifesto.

It just goes to show how arrogant and out of touch the Tory party are that they thought they could get away with announcing such a malicious scheme to asset strip elderly people for the "crime" of developing dementia or serious physical disabilities in their old age after lifetimes of paying National Insurance and Council Tax to cover the cost of things like the NHS and social care.

Setting the bar at £100,000 when the average property price in the UK is £215,000 is clearly a way of harvesting the wealth of middle income families.

The poor won't have to pay it because they won't own their own homes. The very wealthy won't have to pay it because they can pay for private care in their old age. So it's just the middle who get asset stripped. The people who worked hard and saved to buy their own properties are the low-hanging fruit the Tories have identified. They're the target this time.

Dementia Tax is clearly an inheritance tax specifically to extract the wealth of middle income families as they get ill in their old age, so that the Tories can continue lavishing tax breaks on the super-rich and their corporate chums (like the £70 billion that the ongoing Tory corporation tax cuts are going to cost by 2020).

Dementia Tax is a clear and demonstrable attack on the Tory party's own core support.

Theresa May has been so busy trying to turn the Conservatives into a UKIP-on-steroids party in order to attract the UKIP vote and the extreme-right demographic that she's totally neglected the Tory core support, and utterly betrayed them with this callous asset stripping scheme.

Now that Theresa May has expressed her intention to asset strip any home owner who has the misfortune to get ill in their old age, where do these people turn?

Well Anna from Putney has made up her mind. She told LBC that Dementia Tax is pure evil, and declared "I shall go and vote for Jeremy Corbyn then"!

Theresa May's been so busy turning the Tories into UKIP-on-steroids she's casually betrayed and enraged the Tory core vote! #DementiaTax pic.twitter.com/h0Isc9mAJV

— Another Angry Voice (@Angry_Voice) May 18, 2017

I guess Theresa May and the Tories had become so complacent about their support amongst the older generations that they decided that they could do pretty much whatever they liked to them with total impunity:

• Scrap the triple lock on pensions

• Scrap the winter fuel payments

• Scrap the guarantee not to raise VAT (consumption taxes hit income poor pensioners particularly hard) 

• Even announce their Dementia Tax with great fanfare as if letting pensioners continue to live in their house as the asset value is stripped away is some kind of great act of Tory kindness!

The mainstream media demonisation campaign has been particularly effective in making the older generations hate Jeremy Corbyn, but the Labour Manifesto pledges to keep the triple lock, keep the universal benefits for pensioners, to not raise VAT and to properly fund social care, rather than asset stripping elderly people to make them pay it themselves.

Any older person with any sense at all should be thinking about voting to remove the Tories from power, not sending the Theresa May a clear message that she can do whatever she wants to the older generations from now on and assume that the Tories will always win "the grey vote".

What we can do

Make sure that you are registered to vote so you can vote against the Tories and encourage others to register too.

Spread awareness: Talk to the older generations and let them know about the Tory plans to introduce Dementia Tax and to scrap the Triple lock. Show them the clip and let them know that other people are switching away from the Tories,

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