Bad week for the Tories - Attack Jeremy Corbyn

In the wake of George Osborne's March 2016 Budget of Failure the Tory party endured the worst week they've had had since the Lib-Dems enabled them back into power in 2010.

A bad week for the Tories

Here are just a few things that went wrong for them:

• Before Osborne's budget of failure was even announced a poll revealed that Tory austerity is the least popular it's ever been.

• George Osborne had to admit that he'd failed to achieve two of the three economic golden rules he set for himself, and his own pet thinktank (the OBR) admitted that he only has a 50-50 chance of achieving the third.

• Labour immediately condemned the Tory budget as having "unfairness at its very core" because it planned to impoverish hundreds of thousands of disabled people whilst handing out lavish tax cuts to corporations, the asset rich and high earners.

• Iain Duncan Smith resigned from the government claiming that the disability cuts were indefensible. If the cuts are apparently enough to horrify a callous monster like Iain Duncan Smith, then it's clear that they must be absolutely brutal.

• The Tories had to U-turn on hugely unpopular their plan to impoverish disabled people within days of announcing it, leaving a £4.4 billion hole in their budget.

• David Cameron and George Osborne managed to dig out a dangerously inappropriate and unqualified replacement called Stephen Crabb. It was soon revealed that he had close links to a bunch of homophobic "gay cure" religious nutters and absolutely no idea about the impact of the welfare cuts he'd just voted in favour of.

• It was revealed that George Osborne had tried to hide a plan to rip off the taxpayer by £22 billion by selling the government stake in RBS for only about half of what was paid for it.

• The Home Secretary had one of her deportation schemes condemned by a tribunal as being built upon totally unscientific hearsay. She will now have to explain herself in front of a parliamentary inquiry.

• The Tory candidate for Mayor of London was forced to resign as patron of a disability charity after voting to impoverish people who are too unwell to work by £1,500 per year.

• The massive scale of public opposition to the Tory plan to force privatise every school in England became clear when two separate petitions against it passed 100,000 signatures within a week! [petition one] [petition 2]

• A poll revealed Labour had overtaken the Tories for the first time since Jeremy Corbyn was elected as Labour Party leader.

• Another poll revealed a 10% improvement in Jeremy Corbyn's approval ratings and a 10% decline in David Cameron's.

Attack Corbyn

Given this catalogue of failures, it might have been fair to assume that the mainstream press might actually begin to question David Cameron's leadership, but the mainstream media narrative was quickly set that Jeremy Corbyn was the real failure of the week for apparently not attacking the Tories effectively enough!

Pretty soon online discussion threads were filled with people spouting this feeble narrative as if the thoughts were their own, rather than some absolute drivel they'd rote learned from the right-wing press and mindlessly regurgitated as if it was their own opinion. However, if people actually listened to some of the responses from Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and Angela Eagle this week they'd have heard strong criticisms of the Tories that the likes of Ed Miliband and Ed Balls never managed to deliver.

Spurned Blairites

The biggest problem for Jeremy Corbyn remains the pathetic crowd of spurned Blairites who, even this week, have been feeding anti-Corbyn stories to the mainstream press. Even when the Tory party is visibly imploding, the spurned Blairites are far more interested in attacking Corbyn than they are in attacking the Tories!

Hypocritically, the main focus of their foolish self-destructive attacks on Jeremy Corbyn are that he's apparently "not good enough at attacking the Tories". Well, even if you don't think Jeremy Corbyn has done as well as he could have done - at least he was actually attacking the Tories, unlike the spurned Blairite crowd who are still clearly far more intent on tearing the Labour Party apart, even in the worst week this Tory government has ever endured, than actually criticising the Tories.

Conclusion

The UK has the most right-wing press in Europe, so it's no surprise whatever that they've once again jumped in to try to save their golden boy George Osborne from the absolute mauling he so clearly deserves with pathetically contrived attacks on Jeremy Corbyn.

What is more worrying is that even during the most catastrophic week the Tories have endured in years, there are still crowds of pathetic spurned Blairites willing to feed anti-Corbyn stories to the press rather than concentrate of attacking the Tories. With a party full of self-defeating backstabbers like that, it seems pretty unlikely that Jeremy Corbyn will ever be able to defeat the Tories, even if he continues to up his game.

Another worrying factor is the sheer number of mindless rote-learners out there who are ever so happy to soak up the latest feeble "blame Corbyn" narrative, and repeat it as if it's their own opinion. It just goes to show what a shocking level public discourse has declined to that people would not only allow themselves to be convinced that it was Jeremy Corbyn who had a bad week, not David Cameron, but also to go around trying to convince other people to believe in such transparent gibberish too.

 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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 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE    
                    
Tory MP sacked by disability charity
      
George Osborne's 2016 budget of failure
           
The Tory plan to force privatise every school in England
                     
How Iain Duncan Smith's reign of terror costs more to administer than it will ever save
       
George Osborne's £22 billion rip-off
                             
What does Osborne have to do to deserve the sack?
                
Austerity is a con
                      

Zac Goldsmith forced to resign as patron of disability charity

  

Stephen Crabb: The more we learn the worse it gets

The more we find out about Iain Duncan Smith's replacement as the head of the DWP Stephen Crabb, the worse it gets.

• Stephen Crabb's voting record shows that he's the very worst kind of Tory "yes man" who has never once rebelled against the Tory whip since they came to power in 2010, and the only time he has voted against the majority of his Tory peers was a 2011 effort to interfere in women's reproductive rights.

• The new head of the DWP is currently under pressure to resign as patron of the disability charity Mencap as a result of his vote to impoverish disabled people on ESA by £1,500 per year.

• The DWP are currently wasting £250,000 to battle seven families in the Supreme Court over "Bedroom Tax" (a woman with spina bifida, a victim of rape and domestic violence, a disabled widower, an RAF veteran and three families of severely disabled teenagers). One of these families are a couple who care for their severely disabled grandson in a three bedroom home that was specially converted for them by the council  in Stephen Crabb's constituency. He's never met them, let alone spoken up for them in parliament. Now he's heading the department that is wasting a vast amount of taxpayers' money trying reverse the high court decision to exempt them from paying "Bedroom Tax".

• Another disturbing thing that has come to light about Stephen Crabb is the very close links he has to a bunch of homophobic "gay cure" religious nutters.

Now it's become absolutely clear that Crabb had absolutely no idea whatever about the actual details of the £1,500 per year ESA cuts he mindlessly voted in favour of (along with 308 of his Tory colleagues) just a few weeks before being appointed as head of the DWP.

After voting to impoverish disabled people who have been declared too unfit to work by £1,500 per year, he made up some desperately spurious post hoc justification for having done so.

Stephen Crabb's spurious claims that when it comes to the £1,500 per year cuts he voted in favour of, people who have been found unfit to work are "wholly unaffected" prove beyond doubt that he didn't even understand the absolute basics of what he had voted in favour of.

Had the new head of the DWP bothered to do any research at all, or listened to any of the countless objections from disability charities, opposition MPs, the House of Lords or members of the public, he would have known that the intended victims of the £1,500 per year cuts that he explicitly endorsed with his parliamentary votes are sick and disabled people who have been found to be too unfit to work. It's clear that Crabb voted in favour of economically sanctioning people who have been declared too unwell to work for no reason other than the fact that he never ever rebels against his party.

When Iain Duncan Smith resigned I predicted that his replacement would be an ultra-loyal self-serving careerist, and Stephen Crabb fits that description perfectly. What I didn't suspect was that David Cameron and George Osborne would end up finding someone who knows so little about the welfare system (the department he now heads) that he was making desperately misleading comments about the harsh welfare cuts he was voting in favour of just a few days before he was appointed as head of the DWP.

Still, if the Prime Minister is a guy whose only real world job before becoming a professional Tory politician was begged for him by his mother-in-law, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer has only ever worked as a data entry clerk and a towel re-folder in the real world, it's hardly a surprise that they'd pick someone who is hopelessly unqualified for the role as their favoured "yes man" to head the DWP.

 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.

Are people finally waking up to the fact that ideological austerity is a con?

He might be the golden boy of the sociopathic right-wing press barons, but there's no disguising the fact that George Osborne's 2016 budget was a massive failure.

It seems an awful long time ago that George Osborne was booed by the crowd at the 2012 Paralympic Games. Since then he has continued his ideological austerity agenda, merrily slashing away at infrastructure, services and social support to the most vulnerable people in society whilst simultaneously showering corporations the asset rich and high earners with one tax break after another. Even winning a renewed mandate at the 2015 General Election (from 24% of the electorate) to continue doing it.

Austerity is a choice

Over the years many people have tried to point out that ideological austerity is a choice not a necessity, and furthermore, that it's incredibly harmful to the UK economy.

That austerity is a political policy not an economic necessity, and that austerity is harmful to the UK economy are hardly contentious positions to hold, yet the abject refusal of the vast majority of the mainstream press to scrutinise the underlying Tory assumption that austerity is necessary has created a mediascape where those who do speak out against austerity can sound like out-of-touch crackpots, rather than like people who actually understand a few basics in political theory, economic history, and macroeconomics.

George Osborne and the Tories love to play up the level of public borrowing as if it's catastrophically high (it isn't) and they love to pretend the solution to high public borrowing is to slash public spending (it isn't).

When the Tories were enabled into power by the Lib-Dems in May 2010 the level of UK public debt was well below 70% of GDP. To put this into perspective, the average level of public debt for the entire 20th Century was 81% of GDP, and public debt peaked out at a huge 238% of GDP after the chaos of the Second World War.

When Labour were elected after WWII, instead of cutting back public spending and cancelling as much infrastructure investment as they could, they set in motion the most ambitious programme of government spending in history. They founded the NHS, built hundreds of thousands of affordable houses, rebuilt the UK's war-shattered public infrastructure, introduced the welfare state and legal aid, massively improved pensions and nationalised most of the core industries so that they could be used for the public good, not for private profit.

And do you know what? The national debt fell dramatically as a percentage of GDP, and then continued to fall steadily until Margaret Thatcher and her bunch of right-wing fanatics tore up the post-war consensus in 1979.

Expert opinion

The majority of trained economists believe that austerity has harmed the UK economy and only 15% of them are prepared to say that they think it's a good idea, yet the Tories, and a hefty proportion of the public prefer to ignore the expert opinion in favour of the "let's cut our way to growth" austerity narrative.

It's likely that an awful lot of Tory MPs fully understand that austerity is a political strategy that has nothing to do with reducing the scale of public borrowing, and everything to do with ensuring the upwards transfer of wealth from the poor and ordinary to corporations and the extremely wealthy (where the Tory party source the vast majority of the donations), however I hesitate to believe that the majority of people who voted Conservative in 2015 understood that Tory fearmongering about the scale of public borrowing is just a cynical ruse to get people to support a political policy that favours the very rich at the expense of everyone else.

International opinion

International opinion is strongly against ideological austerity. In most countries that have been forced to endure ideological austerity the anti-austerity movement has led to a vibrant resurgence of left-wing and liberal political parties and rapid declines in popularity for the parties that imposed austerity. We could look at Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy or Canada for examples of powerful anti-austerity campaigns, yet the clearest example of all is actually right here in the UK. The SNP set out a very clear and coherent anti-austerity anti-Tory narrative before the 2015 General Election and ended up taking an incredible 56 of the 59 Westminster seats afforded to Scotland.

The English seem to be one of the only peoples to have been made to endure harsh ideological austerity, yet formed practically no resistance to it whatever (before Jeremy Corbyn burst out of nowhere to become Labour Party leader, the biggest opponents to ideological austerity in English politics were the Green Party).

Make do and mend

If the evidence shows that the scale of public borrowing isn't actually that high in a historical context, and that at a previous time when public debt was actually much higher, the government of the day reduced it significantly by investing in infrastructure, housing, jobs and welfare ... And if the majority of trained economists reject ideological austerity as the economically destructive political ideology that it is ... And if ideological austerity is deeply unpopular across the globe ... Why has the "let's cut our way to growth" narrative been so damned popular with the English?

Some might point to the fact that the UK media is the most right-wing biased in Europe; some might point to the fact that the main opposition party decided to commit electoral suicide in 2015 by agreeing with the ridiculous Tory proposition that there is no alternative to "let's cut our way to growth" austerity economics; some might blame our outdated and bizarrely unrepresentative electoral system that locks smaller parties out of the political system; but I have a theory that in England there's still some kind of cultural hangover from the austere "make do and mend" era of the 1940s and 1950s.

Maybe English people buy into the ludicrous, economically illiterate, anti-historical "let's cut our way to growth" narrative because they just like the story of everyone making little sacrifices for the greater good. Maybe they don't like austerity because they're "I'm alright Jack" types who want to see the poor and vulnerable hammered so that the rich can have even more for themselves, maybe they support ideological austerity because they actually believe in the socialistic ideal of everyone making a contribution for "the greater good", but that they just don't realise that under Tory rule "the greater good" we're all sacrificing for is nothing more than the enrichment of the establishment class.

Maybe the English yearn to hand in their pots and pans to be turned into tanks to beat the Nazis just like their forefathers did, but now there are no Nazis, only a massively over-hyped public debt and a bunch of conniving Tory politicians collecting up the sacrifices of the poor and ordinary to be consolidated into obscene payouts for the tiny super-wealthy minority who bankroll their party. 

Are people finally waking up

A February 2016 poll by BMG for the London Evening Standard reveals that public enthusiasm for ideological austerity is on the wane. The number of people who strongly support ideological austerity has dropped to just 7% of the population, while only 28% supported the proposition that austerity is good for the UK economy.

When the results are broken down by party it becomes clear that Tory supporters make up a significant proportion of the pro-austerity camp. 61% of Tories think austerity is good for the economy, compared to just 13% of Labour supporters*. Interestingly ideological austerity is actually more popular with Lib-Dem voters (32%) than it is with UKIP voters (25%). The poll didn't bother to break down the views of Green, SNP or Plaid Cymru supporters, but it would be fair to guess that the response would be pretty close to 0% support from them, given their very strong anti-austerity positions of their parties.

It's worth bearing in mind that this poll was conducted a month before George Osborne's disastrous "budget of failure" and given the political fallout from that it seems likely that public opinion will have shifted further away from austerity.

Conclusion

A hell of a lot of people used to buy into George Osborne's absurd "let's cut our way to growth" austerity narrative, but public opinion seems to be gradually shifting away from it. So the question is this: Were you one of the first people to recognise that ideological austerity is a socially and economically destructive con designed to transfer wealth from the majority of people to the super-rich minority, or are you determined to be one of the last?

 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.

* If ideological austerity is so unpopular with Labour supporters, what on earth could have made the pre-2015 Labour leadership think it was a good idea to run an austerity-lite election campaign? Surely it was obvious that for every soft-Tory vote they won with their ridiculous austerity-lite agenda, they'd end up driving away multiple previously loyal Labour voters?

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The pre-election "contract with the electorate" that the Tories want you to forget
                     
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George Osborne's £22 billion rip-off
  

George Osborne's £22 billion rip-off

It doesn't matter who has been in government, New Labour, the Coalition or the Tories by themselves, the Budget has always contained a few headline grabbing measures that the Chancellor talks up at the dispatch box and the mainstream media fixate their attention upon, whilst much less appealing things are buried in the detail of the budget report. In George Osborne's 2016 "budget of failure" there was one huge buried detail that looks set to cost the taxpayer an incredible £22 billion.

A lightly glittered turd

In the wake of Osborne's "budget of failure" there was a spate of news items focussing on the glitter of a sugary drinks tax and cuts to business rates for small companies, as well as analysis of the huge stinking turd of huge cuts in support for disabled people at the very same time as corporations, the asset rich and high earners are showered with tax cuts.

Goodbye "doctor death"

Iain Duncan Smith's resignation sent the press into overdrive, and understandably so. If George Osborne's brutal austerity cuts are apparently too much even for Iain "doctor death" Duncan Smith*, then even the mainstream media have to begin to entertain the idea that they're pretty damned awful, which is what some of us who don't rely on billionaire Tory sociopaths like Rupert Murdoch (S*n, Times, Sky), Jonathan Harmsworth (Daily Mail, Metro, London Evening Standard) and the Barclay brothers (Telegraph, Spectator) for our pay checks have been saying for quite some time.

George Osborne's £22 billion rip-off

While the majority of the post-budget news coverage is understandably focused on the civil war that has erupted within the Tory party, a few people have noticed that buried deep in the 2016 Budget report is the revelation that the Tories are expecting the taxpayer to take a £22 billion loss when they sell off the government stake in RBS to the private sector.

A £22 billion loss on a £45.5 billion investment is an incredibly poor deal, especially when put into perspective.

James Wright at the Canary claims that £22 billion would be enough to pay 103,000 nurses for ten years, the construction of nearly 150,000 affordable homes, 6,000 new average sized primary schools or 40 brand new state of the art hospitals.

Another way of putting this rip-off into perspective is that £22 billion is more than 62x the projected annual saving (£0.35 billion) the Tories used to justify their brutal policy of slashing the incomes of hundreds of thousands of disabled people by £1,500 per year.

But .. but ... what about Gordon Brown

Right-wing political commentators love to harp on about Gordon Brown's decision to sell off a chunk of the UK gold reserves at the bottom of the gold market as an example of Labour's economic incompetence, yet that blunder only cost the taxpayer an estimated £2 billion, which of course is still an awful lot of money to waste, but less than 10% of the £22 billion George Osborne is planning to rip off the taxpayer by.

If the right-wing blowhards who have produced endless outraged articles about "Brown's bottom" had any integrity whatever, they'd obviously now be far more outraged about George Osborne's plan to rip off the taxpayer by selling our stake in RBS for only marginally more than half of what we paid for it, but we all know that that's never going to happen.

What to do instead

It hardly seems like a coincidence that RBS made vast losses for the majority of time it's been largely owned by the taxpayer, and now that it's recovering towards financial viability the Tories are planning to sell it off at a massive loss to the taxpayer.

In my view the massive public stakes in major banks that were deemed necessary in order to fend off a total financial sector meltdown in 2008 should have been used to create a publicly owned not-for-profit national investment bank to target investment at economically useful activities like infrastructure improvements, housebuilding and support for innovative British industries struggling to raise capital during the credit squeeze.

Instead the publicly owned banks were allowed to return to the exact same reckless and even downright criminal behaviour that preceded the 2007-08 financial sector meltdown: The inflation of another vast unsustainable property bubble, asset stripping of British businesses and the payment of outrageous bonuses (despite the fact the bank was losing £billions every year).

The idea of a national investment bank is still not completely out of the question. but it will be all the more difficult to achieve if George Osborne gets away with selling the public stake in RBS at a £22 billion loss to the taxpayer.

What we can do to oppose this rip-off

Thanks to the 11 million people (24% of the electorate) who voted Tory in 2015 there's not actually a lot that can be done to stop George Osborne selling off our stake in RBS at a vast loss to the taxpayer. Enough people bought into the utterly ludicrous narrative that George Osborne is economically competent that he now gets to conduct the biggest fire-sale of public assets in British history, hammer the poor and ordinary with the burden of ideological austerity and shower corporations and the well-off with ever more lavish tax cuts.

If you do object to this rip-off, it is probably a good idea to write to your local MP to explain your objections. If they are an opposition MP you can ask them to oppose the sale as much as they can, and if they're a Tory, you could ask them to justify this rip-off plan and then post the reply you get in the comments section of this article so that we can see a. the crap excuses they come up with and b. whether they all just use the same utterly contemptuous copy n' paste reply as Tory MPs so often do.

 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.

* It seems unlikely there are many people credulous enough to take Iain Duncan Smith at his word, that he resigned over severe cuts for poor and vulnerable people at the same time as corporations, the asset rich and high earners get showered with tax cuts. The upwards redistribution of wealth is the core ideology of the Tory party, he can't possibly expect anyone to believe that he objects to that. A much more plausible theory is that his resignation is part of the ongoing Tory civil war between the pro- and anti-EU factions. A theory that seems a little less farfetched than IDS suddenly developing a conscience is the idea that it's an effort by Iain Duncan Smith to damage pro-EU Osborne and Cameron as much as possible in order to ingratiate himself with Boris Johnson in the hope of staying at the Tory top table a bit longer.

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Zac Goldsmith sacked as patron of disability charity
  

Zac Goldsmith sacked as patron of disability charity

The Tory government have a pretty appalling record of mistreating and economically sanctioning disabled people, but in March 2016 their economic assaults on disabled people caused huge public backlashes, several PR disasters and a spate of self-interest fuelled Tory infighting.

The £1,500 per year ESA cuts

In March 2016 the Tory party concluded a vicious assault on sick and disabled people by voting to slash social security payments to people in the ESA group by over £1,500 per year (despite the House of Lords rejecting the plan as many times as they could). Not only did the Tories vote to impoverish disabled people, they also voted to torpedo a proposed impact assessment into the actual effects of impoverishing disabled people.

The absurd Tory justification for slashing disability benefits is that it would somehow make disabled people more likely to look for and find work if they are made £30 per week poorer. This ridiculous assertion is not backed up by any reasonable evidence and is hotly contested by opposition MPs and various disability organisations. In fact, many opponents of the cuts claim that slashing people's subsistence incomes will make them less likely to find work, not more likely, because they will have less money to pay for stuff like travel costs, smart clean clothes, printing CVs, or just keeping themselves healthy enough to even look for work.

"No longer tenable"

The Tory candidate for mayor of London Zac Goldsmith was one of 309 Tories to vote in favour of impoverishing sick and disabled people. Not a single MP from any other political party voted in favour of the plan.

The obscure backbencher Kit Malthouse was the first Tory MP to be removed as patron of a disability charity as a result of his support for economic sanctions against sick and disabled people. In the article I wrote about Kit Malthouse's sacking I wondered whether fear of losing donations from Tory voters was preventing the charity Richmond AID from sacking Zac Goldsmith as their patron. Just a few days later Richmond AID did sack Zac in the most unequivocal terms.

Here's an explanation of the decision from Lucy Byrne of Richmond AID:

"We are shocked and disappointed to find that both our local MPs here in the borough of Richmond voted for this cut, one of whom is patron of our organisation ... Zac's decision is a complete conflict with our social model and ethos ... Having voted for this brutal cut we believe that Zac Goldsmiths' position as patron is no longer tenable." [source]

Having their candidate to become Mayor of London sacked as patron of a London based disability charity as a result of his explicit support for the ongoing Tory economic assault on disabled people is a pretty spectacular PR disaster for the Tories, but that's not their only problem.

Backbench rebellion

Just one week after 309 Tory MPs caused a furious public backlash by voting en masse to load the burden of their ideological austerity agenda onto sick and disabled people, George Osborne announced in his budget of failure a new plan to slash another branch of disability funding (PIP) whilst simultaneously showering corporations, the asset rich and high income workers with huge tax cuts.

The public perception that the Tories are a political party that actively hates sick and disabled people is solidifying so much that several backbench Tory MPs are in open revolt about George Osborne's plan to impoverish hundreds of thousands of disabled people who rely on Personal Independence Payments to lead active and fulfilling lives.

Tory self-interest

This backbench revolt is very interesting because it's absolutely clear that it hasn't been brought about by genuine concern for the welfare of disabled people, otherwise these backbench MPs wouldn't have completely ignored the deafening chorus of condemnation from disability organisations, opposition MPs, the House of Lords and the general public in order to vote through their cruel £1,500 cut just the week before. Neither would they have ignored other huge scandals like the discriminatory and false economy riddled WCA reign of terror, the shocking number of people to have died within weeks of being declared "fit for work", the neglect and abuse of disabled people in the Work Programme, or the closure of so many Remploy factories.

My theory is that this backbench revolt is a rather obvious exercise in pure self-interest.

Pretty much everyone who uses social media will have seen some of the flood of images naming and shaming the Tory MPs who voted to impoverish disabled people by £30 per week. It's actually pretty rare for backbench MPs to be publicly held to account in this manner for the way they choose to vote, so it's easy to see the self-interest kicking in when obscure backbench Tories see widely shared pictures of themselves with text explaining their decision to impoverish disabled people in juxtaposition with something like their huge public speaking fees, lucrative outside work, employment of their own family members at the taxpayers' expense, extravagant expenses claims or outright expenses fraud.

It's no wonder they're suddenly so jittery. They're simply not used to being publicly held to account for their actions.

Conclusion  
From the Tories' discriminatory and psychologically torturous WCA regime (that costs far more to administer than it saves in reduced social security payments) to Iain Duncan Smith's shockingly callous disrespect for dead disabled people, the utter Tory contempt for disabled people has been obvious for years to those of us who pay attention to things like disability rights. However their last two vicious economic assaults on sick and disabled people have really pushed the issue a lot closer to mainstream public awareness.

The public perception that the Tories actively hate disabled people is solidifying, and the backbench Tory revolt is clear evidence that several Tory MPs consider such a public perception to be harmful to their own personal self-interest. 

What can we do?

If you oppose this ideologically driven £1,500 per year Tory economic assault on sick and disabled people in the ESA group you could take a few moments to sign this petition.

If you oppose the ideologically driven Tory plan to impoverish hundreds of thousands of disabled people who receive PIP support whilst they simultaneously handed out lavish tax cuts to corporations, the asset rich and high income earners, you could take a few moments to sign this petition.

It doesn't matter which political party your local MP works for, you could take a few minutes to write to them to express your views (if you include your full name and postal address they have a statutory requirement to reply to your communications). If they are a Tory you can criticise their treatment of disabled people, and if they're an opposition MP you can ask that they do their best to hold the Tories to account for their appalling treatment of disabled 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.

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The Tory ideological mission