The toddler you’ll see in today’s news, lying across two chairs for five hours with suspected meningitis. The deaths in hospitals. The crisis in the NHS, schools, social care, no housing, homeless sleeping in frozen doorways, the epidemic of unemployment, anxiety, insecure or no employment, frozen pay, child poverty … and much more …. ARE DOWN TO ONE LIE! A DELIBERATE POLITICAL LIE BY THE TORIES.
The Tories are killing people and condemning tens of millions … for no good reason. They will go on doing that until their lie is exposed.
So, let’s expose it!
FACT …. everywhere else in the world dropped ‘austerity’ four years ago (with few exceptions). FACT. The Tories and the Lib Dems together imposed vicious ‘austerity’ cuts from 2010 to 2012. FACT. The US and every other advanced country ended ‘austerity’ cuts in 2012 because it was too damaging. FACT. The Tory/Lib Dems government slashed and burned with another three years of ‘austerity’ cuts (2012-2015). FACT. This Tory government since 2015 is still imposing savage austerity cuts.
‘AUSTERITY’ a definition. …. Austerity is ‘cold, bleak, unfeeling, mercilessness’. It is a conscious, deliberate political choice! Used first in the Depression of the 1930s after a banking crash, it was chosen again in 2010 after … err … a banking crash. When the greedy get too greedy the rest of us pay … as the protectors of the wealthy … the Tories, impose vicious ‘austerity’. That is not emotion it is fact.
Now, before these bloody foolish Tories sharpen their slurs … I am not a ‘trot’, not a ‘commie’ … what I am is a fiercely-independent writer whose ‘agenda’ is to hold those in power accountable for the power we hand to them in trust.
WHO PROFITS FROM AUSTERITY?.
The only people in Britain who have profited from the banking crash are the bankers (£375 Billion of quantitive easing/public money .. leading to their pay rises and even larger bonuses), and from ‘austerity’ are the wealthy (with zero-interest-rates, if you’ve got money you can borrow vast amounts more,at no cost, to profiteer and plunder in the property market … and so on).
WHO LOSES?
You can answer this your self. Just look around you. You, your family, children, doctors, nurses, teachers, your people, the elderly, everyone in between. What is important to grasp is this …. that such vicious ‘austerity’ does not choose between people. For the first time the ‘middle class’ are suffering alongside … the poor, the ‘working class’. The middle classes saddled with large mortgages and inflated expectations are suffering too .. from insecure contracts, frozen pay, collapsing services. Like ‘austerity’ ill-health is no respecter of ‘class’. The crisis in the NHS and other services hits EVERY ONE (other than the wealthy).
This point is vital. If you separate your self off from other people because of their house, their accent, where they live, you are doing the Tories divide-and-rule work for them.
Theresa May’s warm, weasel-words to the “just about managing” (JAM) is a plea to the middle-classes not to abandon the very same Tories who have dropped everybody in the … erm … jam!
When the middle-classes wake up to this fact, when the rest of us stop dividing out … and, together, confront the architects of division, despair, and ruin …. the Tories, then and only then will they be swept away!
HOW ARE THEY STILL GETTING AWAY WITH IT …. WHY NO OPPOSITION?
It is because the only possible opposition .. the Labour Party .. is being deliberately split. It is being split by the blairites … who are, therefore, the Tories best friends. Tony Blair is, was, always will be a free-market, global-capitalist, Tory. Many of the Blairites still in the Labour Party are the same. Others are too dull to know what I’m writing about here, and for the rest … well, they’re too ashamed to admit that they were duped and went along with the charlatan-actor Tory Blair.
An Example. Young, foolish, Owen Smith. The blairites chose him to speak for them in their failed leadership coup. They would have jumped in to his shadow cabinet if they’d won. Owen Smith, challenged by direct media questions, had no policies. None. When journalists persisted he said, over and over again, “I agree with Jeremy”.
The only policy statement he did say, very clearly, was a shocker. Right at the start of the Blairites campaign, Owen Smith said “AUSTERITY IS RIGHT” !
He, and they, had swallowed whole and without challenge Tory Blair’s ideas, and Owen Smith (too dull to see it) was trying to woo the middle- England, middle-classes who are suffering and hate ‘austerity’ like the rest of us. The blairites are still up to their dull tricks of dull splits. And why …. because they are too ashamed and weak to admit that, like obedient children, they were taken-in by Tory Blair.
They hate Corbyn because he was NOT duped. He is their worst nightmare, because just seeing him reminds them of their own folly and foolishness.
The only other ‘Party’ that could oppose the government are the Liberal Democrats. But they can’t can they. They gave the Tories power and were party to imposing the savage ‘austerity’. (It is time for those middle-class voters – who chose liberal because they thought too much of themselves to vote Tory – to wake up, toughen up and get real if they, too, want to live in a decent Britain).
‘AUSTERITY’ … THE REAL REASON!
Faced with growing hostility from everyone (other than the obscenely wealthy) why on earth are the Tories sticking slavishly to a policy of ‘austerity’ dropped by most of the rest of the world, And which will lead to their political defeat (when every one wakes up).
The reason is they are wedded, utterly, to the wealthy (who hate one penny being taken from them in taxes to be spent through government on services for the public).
The Tories can talk all they want about creating “a sharing society” … and about ‘conserving’ “what is best about Britain”, but it will no longer wash with the vast, vast, majority who can see Britain, its structures, and its values being systematically destroyed!
Here then (straight from the horses mouths) is the real reason why ‘austerity’ cuts are still being imposed ….. “The primary purpose of austerity is to shrink the size of Government spending” (DailyTelegraph, 2013) … “leaner not just now, but permanently” (David Cameron, Lord mayor’s Banquet speech, November 11th, 2013).
Put plainly …. less government, means lower taxes out of the wallets of the wealthy! Or … tax cuts for the rich = ‘austerity’ cuts for the rest of us!
‘Austerity’ is foolish, rotten, divisive, benefits only the very rich, and is wrong.
Any talk of one-nation-toryism” is the sort of facile soundbite politics Mr. Bliar was so proud of. Empty, meaningless, unachievable.
THE REAL SOLUTION …
I’ll finished where I started. The vast majority of advanced countries dropped ‘austerity’ by the end of 2012. They recognised that spending cuts were bad for growth (of the economy, jobs etc). In the United States (2013) just 2% of their economists argued for more austerity spending cuts. The vast majority of British economists oppose the idea that ‘austerity is good for growth’.
Investing public money (ie your money) creates higher output, more jobs, more spending, more money, more housing, better NHS, better schools … and with those things a country happier with itself, with its communities, services, and it’s shared values.
That is not ‘socialism’, it is copper-bottom fact.
‘Austerity’ is the preferred choice of the Tories. ‘Austerity’ is a brutal political choice by them. These people are not Conservatives. These people do not want to ‘conserve’ the traditions, values, decency, communities, society, standards, the people of Britain.
‘Austerity’ will continue to be imposed … in order to protect the wealthy.
It will until we ALL WAKE UP … AND STOP THEM!
Paul Starling (ex political editor of the Daily Mirror)
