There are now just hours to go until the public will be taking to the polling stations and casting their votes for the general election. Tensions are running high and I swear to God if I hear Theresa May come out with a pathetic sound bite one more time I’m going to lose my shit and run through a field of wheat with a covfefe on my head.
The reason that these sound bites
are so frustrating is because they hold about as much irony as when she said that
the UK hasn’t done enough to tackle terrorism, when that has literally been her
job for seven years.
Coalition of Chaos
We have heard countless times,
members of the conservative party referring to a Coalition of Chaos, supposedly
headed up by Jeremy Corbyn. How unthinkable – parties with opposing views
joining together to run the country as an unelected Government! The fact is
that we have already seen a coalition of chaos. 2010 brought us the
Conservative/Lib Dem coalition, providing with us with David Cameron, our very
own unelected Prime minister (they seem to have a habit of doing this). During
their five years in power, the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition embarked crippling austerity, causing the start of unimaginable chaos to our
public services. The parties introduced the following austerity measures;
The bedroom tax; aimed at low
income/unemployed families - according to the TUC, this affected a total of 31%
of all working age families in the social rented sector. They also slashed Legal
Aid, the top rate of tax was cut from 50p to 45p, we saw Sure Start centres
from across the country being shut down (612 in just four years) [site
4children], the Sure Start Maternity grant was also abolished - costing low
income mothers £500 and hitting the poorest the hardest, education maintenance
allowance for 16-18 year olds was snatched from the hands of the poorest
students attending further education, the armed forces were cut - creating a
loss of thousands of soldiers, as well as the RAF losing hundreds of helicopters
and planes, Child Trust Funds were totally abolished, we have also seen huge
numbers of changes to benefits. Child benefit was frozen for a total of three
years, inciting a cumulative loss of £1,000 to families with two children, families
receiving working tax credits saw a rise in the number of hours they had to
work from 16 to 24…the list goes on, including cuts to GP surgeries, Remploy,
Youth Centres, local council funding, local parks, police, buses, education,
income support, youth employment and support allowance, prisons, public sector
pay, mental health.
Basically the coalition government
slashed everything they could get their paws on, if I were to list it all in
detail it would take up the full blog post, however you can find all the
information here.
Strong Economy
Two years on, now with a
Conservative government in power and we are still seeing violent austerity
across the country. We are being told that we must live within our means and
that these measures will create a ‘strong economy’ (you know, that thing they
have been promising us for seven years but we are yet to see).
Wrong.
The conservative government displays
public spending in the same way as managing a household income. When you are
tight on money you make savings through cutting out luxuries; you stop shopping
at Sainsbury’s and go to somewhere like Aldi, you decide not to take that
holiday that you’ve been planning, you cancel your gym membership – because who
are you kidding? You never go anyway.
Cutting back on luxuries works well
as a way to survive when you are low on money. The fact is that this logic is
not transferrable to government spending and austerity is not about cutting down
on luxuries – it is about cutting vital public services that help the majority
of people living in this country to thrive.
By cutting funding to education,
the poorest children are unable to gain the knowledge and skills that they so
desperately need for the future. By cutting spending on mental health services
we see individual’s health deteriorate, often resulting in a loss of
employment, then housing and sometimes a loss of their own lives. By cutting
benefits we see more people pushed into poverty and therefore further from the
jobs market, more reliant on our underfunded NHS, more reliant on our
underfunded social care services and more reliant on underfunded local authorities.
Do you see a pattern here yet? Circa
100,000
children fell into relative poverty in 2015-16, showing a year on year increase
of one percentage point. Not only that but people with disabilities have had to
withstand the worst of our government cuts, many of whom have literally had their human
rights violated as a result of austerity. Between 1st April 2016 and 31st
March 2017, The Trussell
Trust’s Foodbank Network provided 1,182,954 three day emergency food
supplies to people who literally could not afford to eat. Of this number,
436,938 went to children.
The Tories boast that they have
created record numbers of jobs, yet fail to mention the record rise of in work
poverty under their leadership; the Nuffield
Foundation found that the risk of poverty for adults living in working
households rose by more than a quarter (26.5%), from 12.4% to 15.7%, during the
ten year period 2004/5 to 2014/15.
The fact is that there is nothing
strong about one of the richest countries in the world having literally
hundreds of thousands of citizens who can’t afford to feed themselves.
Magic Money Tree, Magic Money Tree, Magic Money Tree
On the BBC Election Debate, the night
that our Prime Minister Theresa May went missing, we heard Amber Rudd squealing
about Labours ‘magic money tree’. Throughout the campaign we have seen this phrase
banded about – probably a tactic used to avoid the fact that the Labour
manifesto is fully costed and has the backing of 120
economists from across the globe, while the only figures that appear to be
in the Conservative manifesto (in the words of John MacDonnell) are the page
numbers.
“There is no magic money tree!” we
hear them scream, “We can’t just find this money from nowhere! We have to build
a strong economy to afford such luxuries as money that allows people with
disabilities to live independently and…you know…eat.”
Funny that, because it seems that
there is quite a large sum of money floating around.
In March, the conservatives managed
to implement their inheritance tax cut, meaning that couples who pass on homes
worth up to £750,000 pay no inheritance duty. Not only this, but by 2020 even
homes up to £1million will be exempt from the tax. According to figures from
the House of Commons library, this measure will cost the taxpayers £1billion
over the next three years, while only benefitting 26,000 of the country’s
richest households – and I can guarantee those are not the ‘just about managing’
that Theresa May loves to speak about.
We have also seen a huge
tax cut for high earners by pushing up the threshold for paying the 40p
rate of income tax, we have seen a reduction in corporation tax and cuts to
capital gains. They implemented the new ‘lifetime ISA’ which means that wealthy
parents are now able to open tax free savings accounts for their children,
deposit up to £4,000 a year and gain £1,000 of tax payer money as a bonus. On top
of this they have allowed people with spare rooms, houses or flats to get a tax
break on the first £1,000 a year they make renting them out online, not only
benefitting people with extra properties but encouraging them to let them out
on a short term basis rather than long term.
The fact is that austerity does not
work. The method has been widely discredited by economists. Back in 2012, the International
Monetary Fund’s (IMF) chief economist, Olivier
Blanchard, said that although his organisation never bought into the notion
that austerity would actually boost economic growth, the IMF now believes that
it massively understated the damage that spending cuts inflict on a weak
economy.
But why would our Conservative
government continue down the path of austerity if it is doing nothing but pushing
thousands of people into poverty and taking away any hopes for decent
employment? It’s not like they are too stupid to realise what is happening. They
aren’t doing it just because they hate poor people, people with disabilities,
mental health needs, single mothers and everyone else who is losing out. Nor is
this an accident. This is a very well planned out dismantling of our welfare
state and it is happening because it widens the gap between the rich and the
poor, it strips the pockets of the most vulnerable and in return, lines the
pockets of the most wealthy.
I was going to go into a more
detailed answer to this question but I think from today’s events and the
headlines printed across our right wing mainstream media, it is very clear. The
priority of the Conservative party is to enhance the interests of the ruling
classes. The majority of our main stream media which happens to be owned by billionaires
will continue to push austerian messages to keep this government in power,
meaning that they can keep getting those juicy tax breaks.
Austerity is not just about cutting
spending, it is also very much about privatisation of publically owned
services. Conservative values mean that they are ideologically opposed to
having a public sector. By privatising and selling off our public services, capitalism
prospers, shifting the priorities of these services from serving the public to
generating profits. Cue: zero hours contracts, low pay and restricted worker’s
rights.
Is it any surprise that in 2015,
the Conservatives signed their biggest private deal on our NHS - £780million to
be exact – to private firms, half
of which have ties to the party.
For the Many
Whatever the result tomorrow, we
can take a glimmer of hope from this election. Not only has Theresa May’s
car-crash of a campaign been highly entertaining to follow; starting by basing
all promotional materials around May herself, rather than the Conservatives as
a whole, presenting herself as a ‘strong and stable’ leader, followed by her
refusing TV debates, avoiding the general public at all costs and basically
imploding during questions given by TV audiences.
The real hope that we can take from
this campaign is the excessive support that Jeremy Corbyn has harnessed from
previously disillusioned voters. People from all walks of life coming out and
backing him. The most vulnerable in society finally finding a voice in
politics. The anti-austerity message that has finally been brought to the
table.
Even if we lose tomorrow, this
campaign has touched so many people and it won’t be forgotten by them. They
will continue to vote and they will continue to hold our government to account.
During Corbyn’s time as leader he has forced the Conservatives to make huge
U-turns on policies that would have had a detrimental effect to the poorest in
our country, with the backing of new voters, he or whoever takes his place, can
and must continue to do this.
Social mobility on this level has
never been easy and if Corbyn were to win it would be the most monumental
change in political history dating back to the war. We must take his campaign
as a victory and we must make a promise to ourselves and each other that we
will continue to fight, for the many, not the few.
