Welcome to the new political system in the United Kingdom, folks, initiated in 1997 when Tony Blair and his bunch of wet 'Noo-Labour' colleagues swept to power in one of the biggest landslide victories ever seen in the UK. I call them the 'ConservaLaboural Democrats'. This means that there is one single party with three wings - a left, a right, and an 'I'll go with whoever's in charge'.
In essence, you can't tell the difference between our three main political parties. The Conservatives, Labour and LibDems merged in 1997 when it was decided that a single policy of flushing the British way of life down the toilet for evermore would guarantee success for whichever party got into power in a General Election, who would then simply continue the policy of the previous Government, but wear different coloured ties.
Actually, the seeds of this merging were sown even earlier, when John Major took office back at the tail end of 1990, but it was Blair's first attempt at targeting the 'middle England' vote that sealed it. Since that time, the price of property began to go up and up and up and it was bound to burst one day.
It did. In 2008.
Someone in America realised that you can't loan people money for a property that they don't have a cat in Hell's chance of paying back. Oh, how I bet they wish they'd kept quiet. Stock markets tumbled the world over, and this was great because everybody could now say that the recession was a global one and it was always somebody else's fault.
And on that ticket, the British Conservative Party swept into power via a landslide hung parliament that demonstrated fully the British public's complete indifference to any of the political parties, because they were all essentially the same. That was in 2010. When David Cameron asked the Liberal Democrats to join them in a 'coalition', they couldn't believe their luck. They said, 'Oh, yes please, we quite fancy a spell in Government, it could be the only chance we ever get. Policies? What policies?'
If we thought Labour under Gordon Brown were bad, and they were, we were in for a rude shock. The Conservatives have showed us in three short years just was inept government really looks like. Their essential means of 'debt reduction' was to make some what they called 'very difficult decisions' because 'we're all in it together.' Both of these statements have been proved to be a lie.
First, those 'very difficult decisions.' What were they, exactly? Oh yes, to aim their sights at the poor, weak and vulnerable and fire everything that they had at them. Disabled, sick, elderly, unemployed and public sector workers were all shot at. Hundreds of thousands of public sector workers were made redundant in an effort to get them employed in the 'private sector,' except that didn't work, did it, because there were no jobs for them. Businesses couldn't afford to pay them because the banks weren't lending them the money to do so. Then, some bright spark in Ian Duncan Smith's Department for Work & Pensions had the genius idea of restructuring the benefits system, because if you rename the benefits then you've got an excuse to make everybody re-apply for it again. Go through all that humiliation that many sick and disabled feel again just to get a few quid off the Government because they've changed its name.
But that wasn't the best bit. No, the best bit was to tell all those already suffering that, if they didn't do what the government told them, they would lose that few quid each week (that they'd probably paid for themselves anyway through years of National Insurance and work health care plans) unless they worked for nothing at whatever jobs they were told to do. Thus, wheelchair-bound sufferers were told that, if they could move their arms a bit, there's no reason why they couldn't pack people's shopping at Morrisons. See? Get the poorest in society to give something back to those who are clearly superior to them because they are putting money into a large business' coffers.
Ian Duncan Smith has had the balls to suggest that disabled people doing such work are being paid by the taxpayer to do so. He does this without even blinking. They are not even getting a minimum wage, they are being forced into Soviet-style labour camps to receive the benefits they were getting in the first instance. Brilliant. Big business is laughing, because they get free employees thanks to the Conservatives. Yeah, that was a 'really difficult decision.'
Don't forget, middle-England and marginal seats are where the votes are to be had, so any political party will amend its policies to buy their votes. Hence, the Conservatives added a strong dose of The Politics of Envy into their 'difficult decisions.' They justified the above by telling voters that why should such-and-such on benefits have a flatscreen television and a car when Joe Bloggs works so hard and can't afford as nice a car as their neighbour has.
But the Politics of Envy will backfire on the Tories. After all, there are many millions of people wondering why it is they work so hard while millionaires in Government fiddle the rules so that they can claim mortgages from the taxpayer, and hundreds of thousands of pounds in expenses for things like food and paperclips. A nurse doesn't get her travel to and from work paid for by the taxpayer, why should an MP? A teacher can't travel first class to school, why should an MP?
MPs expenses amounted to a whopping £89 million in 2011-12! That's 26% more than the previous year, and totals £160 million in just two years. Every time an MP buys an iPad, you pay for it. Oh, and corporate tax-dodging has cost you, the taxpayer, £700 billion in the last decade. How's that for the politics of envy?
And that's before I even start on the amendments to the Health & Social Care Act 2012, which comes into full force on 1 April this year. Oh yes, folks, say goodbye to Strategic Health Authorities and Primary Care Trusts, they're all going and essentially any health service or department is up for sale to private enterprise who can see profit in it. I'm sure it's just coincidence that over 140 members of the House of Lords and even more of the House of Commons have interests in companies that would profit from the demolition of the NHS, including Baroness Bottomley, a director of BUPA!
Don't get me started on the Bedroom Tax, either. Look, middle-England, Joe's brother Fred Bloggs has a spare bedroom and he's on benefits! Cut his welfare! Of course, the DWP can justify this by saying that the taxpayer pays for his benefit, so they have the right to cut it if they can think of a reason. And yet the Queen, and other members of the Royal Family, live in palaces so large, with literally hundreds of spare bedrooms, swanning around claiming millions of pounds worth of state benefits each year, and we let them carry on. Thousands of corporate business men and women, bankers, lawyers, stock market gamblers, and companies like Google and Starbucks take billions of pounds from the mouths of starving middle-Englanders in unpaid taxes, but I don't see George Osborne and his cronies going after them. No, that would be a really 'difficult decision.' x
