Notice I'm talking about the party machine, not Tories per se. I can honestly say I've never yet met a Tory politician or voter who didn't strike me as a smug chancer convinced s/he got where they are today by their own efforts, and owed nothing to anyone. In fact, most of them seem to think the rest of us should be grateful to them.
This is my MP. Paul Masterton. He's a Tory. He's 31. That's all I know about him. I'm not sure if he's ever had a proper job where he had to get up early, travel to work in the dark for an organisation that didn't give a rat's arse about its employees, earned less than he deserved and looked forward to working till he was 70 before heading off for a poverty-stricken retirement. But he's a party man is Paul. So far, he hasn't put a foot wrong in the Commons, obeyed the Whips, voted the right way. There's a rumour going round he didn't realise during the general election that the town of Barrhead was part of 'his' constituency, but I'm sure that can't be true.
It doesn't matter anyway. Paul's not in charge. Everything the Tory Party does is carefully planned by people working behind the scenes: they come up with the policies, their PR department works out how to get the public to accept their policies, and people like Paul are just their public face, voting fodder who do what they are tellt.
The Tory machine is truly amazing. I've watched them in action for almost 50 years. I can see how they and their cronies in the press and on TV and radio manipulate the news. What I still haven't figured out is how the hell does the machine persuade the voters to instantly forget everything that has happened in recent UK history?
You don't believe me? Let's take the banking crash of 2008. The bankers got permission from the Tories way back in the 1980s to do whatever the hell they wanted just as long as they made money. Industry in the UK was finished and Britain was to become a service economy, making money out of - well - money. It was so successful that, when the Labour Party came to power, they just went along with it. Then banking crashed. The UK government bailed out the biggest bank. The rest went to the wall. I'm sure you remember seeing well-groomed 30-somethings leaving their nice shiny London offices with boxes containing their few worldly goods. I used to wonder how these Masters of the Universe managed to run the whole world out of a small cardboard box. But that's another story for another day...
The UK was left with a huge debt. There was nothing for it but to get the working population to pay for the greed of the banking world. For years, the Tory Party had been complaining that public sector workers were overpaid. Here was an opportunity to sort that out. Public sector workers weren't, in fact, overpaid. They just hadn't at that point been affected by the prevailing climate in the private sector, where money had - against all the laws of economics, not to mention gravity - started to flow upwards. The big bosses in the private sector got whacking great payrises, expenses and bonuses, usually on the backs of their employees.
Soon, public sector workers found out what this meant: government couldn't control what people earned in the private sector, but they sure as hell could in the public sector. Austerity was in. There were to be no more payrises, except for bribes - sorry, performance related pay, bonuses and expenses - for the bosses who were now being paid silly money, just like their counterparts in the private sector. And the word was spread by the Tory machine that public sector pensions (which employees paid for) were too generous, so they had to change too. People like me, who had been badly paid in the public sector over a long period of years, had always regarded our pensions as a way of making up for a lifetime of crap wages. Not any more. This despite the fact that the public pension fund I paid into all those years has made money in every one of the last 15 years bar one - 2008 - and had enough reserves to cover that glitch.
Then attention switched to people who were unemployed or disabled or sick. They were living a life of luxury, the Tory machine told us. They stopped getting social security (which a lot of them had paid into for years when they were working) and became 'welfare dependents.' Hard to imagine how much luxury £65 a week job-seeker's allowance can buy you. People like me who had paid national insurance and income tax from the age of 15 to 60, and had been net contributors to the economy all our days, we too were on 'welfare', because that's what our pensions are now called.
When it became clear that, even after 'sanctioning' the poor and disabled, the economy of the UK still wasn't in great shape, the Tory machine looked for other people to blame. That would be EU 'migrants.' Suddenly, they were coming over here, taking our jobs (not true), claiming welfare (not true) and sending our money (also not true - it was their money - which they had earned) back to places like Poland. But again, the British public fell for it. We were told we had to leave the EU, which was bleeding us dry. Even regions of the UK that had done well out of EU subsidies were won over by the Tory Party machine. In fact, the machine was so good, large numbers of Brits looked around and saw the devastation government neglect had caused in their towns and cities for the last 40 years, came to believe it was all the fault of the EU, and voted to leave.
And through all this, public sector workers worked on. Well, some of them did: local councils were so short of cash they made a lot of people redundant. So we have fewer police officers, fewer nurses, fewer paramedics, fewer teachers. That's the people we're talking about here: they form the backbone of our communities. They support the old, the young, the sick, the disabled. And it's estimated about 20% of them are living below the poverty line. Not the people they support - their situation is worse. The workers.
And mark my words, if the current Tory machine decides to remove the cap on public sector wages and pay police officers, prison officers and nurses more, there won't be any extra cash. No, wage increases will be paid for by cutting staff: more riots in prisons, fewer cops on the beat, more nurses worked into the ground.
But now it seems the voters are not falling for that old 'blame the greedy workers' trick any more, so the Tory Party machine has turned to another target: it's all Theresa May's fault. She's a useless prime minister. Led the UK into a totally pointless general election which she then proceeded to lose. If the Tory Party's backers can just get the public to blame her, all will be well.
Frankly, if UK voters fall for that story, hell whack it intae them.
Meanwhile, anybody want to check the UK's national debt? Here it is:
http://www.nationaldebtclock.co.uk/
Totally agreed. But - "AND?" Erm agreed the above, however try living in the Colony called Scotland.
ReplyDeleteThat's also another rant for another day, Calum. I have to consider my blood pressure when I start on a rant about what it's like to be part of this shambles that calls itself the UK. Just watching the fiasco at FM Questions at Holyrood today, not to mention missives from Brexit Central (otherwise known as the BBC) is enough to have me shouting at the telly. Feel free to make a start though and I'll join in the chorus.
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