The Cost Of Britain's "Success"

The Tories like to talk in terms of "success", "competition" and "hard working families" but do not like to discuss the costs of their policies. So how "successful" is Britain? It is the fourth most unequal developed country in the world. Pay has fallen three times faster in Britain than in all but three of EU countries - Greece, Portugal and Spain. Briton's work the third longest hours in the EU for the second lowest wages in the OECD. We have the third highest housing costs, the highest train fares and the second highest levels of fuel poverty. We have the highest level of child mortality in the industrialised world and the worst levels of child poverty while our pensioners are the fourth poorest. The gap between the richest and poorest in Britain is twice as high as any other EU country and yet we manage to retain the title as the least productive industrialised nation in Europe. We can now understand what the Tories are talking about. "Success" is measured only in terms of how rich they and their corporate pals are getting. "Competition" is actually nothing more than a cover for lowering wages and shovelling as much money from us to them as possible. "Hard working families" are, it must be admitted, very hard working but, then again, they have no choice in the matter. The Tories are wedded to the idea that inequality is natural and necessary if we are to remain "competitive". The reality is that inequality is not natural, as all our EU partners demonstrate on a daily basis, and, far from being necessary, is in fact a dead hand that slows our growth and undermines our economic performance. The Tories are wrong and they know it but persist in their insane economic policies because it benefits them and their rich backers and only them and their rich backers.

Tory Threat Level Raised To "Severe".

The threat from the Tories in Britain has been raised to "severe" as it becomes increasingly likely that they will lose the next election and will attempt to fill their offshore bank balances at our expense. The National Debt is now larger than at any time in our history while George Osborne has now borrowed more than every Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer combined. Analysts have speculated that this may be the result of lower tax returns than expected which has come as a complete surprise despite the record level of tax cuts and evasion loopholes provided for wealthy corporations and individuals. "We just can't understand it," a Treasury spokesman told our reporter. "Despite lowering the tax bill for millionaires we have failed to collect more money as predicted by our economic models. Since it is a well known fact that taxing rich people actually produces less revenue then lowering their tax liability should have returned more revenue. It stands to reason doesn't it? We can only speculate that poor people must have been hiding their income from benefits in offshore bank accounts while the working poor must have found a way to avoid PAYE. No other explanation fits the facts. Fortunately none of this threatens the economic recovery since that is based almost entirely on the London property market and, even if it does, we still have most of the NHS available to flog off to our rich pals in an emergency." Warnings have now been issued by security experts that the threat to the British way of life from militant Tories is now at an all-time high. "These people are desperate and utterly ruthless terrorists," one adviser told our reporter. "They subscribe to an evil ideology and think nothing of stealing food from starving children or stealing money from helpless pensioners. The only thing that remains safe is property prices in London and that is about the only thing that stands between ordinary people in Britain and what the Tories like to call "market forces" - an evil perversion of economic theory first promulgated by the Ayotollah Margaret Thatcher."

Baroness Warsi Resigns Over A Matter Of "Principle".

There can be little doubt that the civilian death toll in Gaza is appalling. But the truth is that the civilian death toll is always appalling wherever there is a war. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians have died in the wake of western interventions in these two countries over the last decade. The lesson to be learned from all this death and destruction is that no national leader should even contemplate a war unless he or she is willing to shoulder the responsibility for horrendous casualties. Both Israel and Hamas have been more than willing to do so, both sides so filled with hatred for each other that casualties, whether amongst their own or amongst the enemy, seem to mean very little. Today Baroness Warsi has resigned over a matter of principle, asserting that she can no longer be a member of a government that has refused to condemn Israel in forthright terms. So where was she when her government were happily selling Israel munitions and military equipment? The money from such sales was welcomed by both her and her government when it helped to underpin George Osborne's otherwise largely fictional "recovery." And where was her sense of moral outrage when her government was whaling into the unemployed, sick and disabled in this country? Why is her government's lack of policy over Gaza so more important than their completely heartless policy towards its own people? Baroness Warsi would like us all to believe that she is caught up in a moral maze but, like all Tories, she simply lacks a moral compass.

Ken Clarke Pours Cold Water on Osborne's "Economic Recovery"

Ken Clarke, free at last to express his real opinions, has lambasted Osborne's so-called "economic recovery". Speaking to the "Guardian" he described the recent slight economic improvement as nothing more than "a bit of cyclical upswing" while Britain's economy is "fragile, vulnerable to shocks, and still lacks the strong productive base necessary to compete long-term in global markets". "It's not firmly enough rooted on a proper balance between manufacturing and a wide range of services and financial services," he says. "I mean, we have this mystery of why we can't get productivity to start rising again." Describing Osborne's policy as merely reviving the "ludicrous cycle of house price booms," he has, in effect, trashed the Tory party's entire economic policy. Not that there is much to trash since their policy consists entirely of erecting a solid wall of economic privilege between themselves and the rest of the country and then pulling up the drawbridge. Ken Clarke, it must be said, is the last of a dying breed within his party - a "one nation Tory" who believes that a government should govern in the interests of the whole country and not in their own selfish interests. As such Ken Clarke is a bit of a dinosaur as the "modernising" Tories seek to turn the clock back to the 18th century and grab what they can while they can. Pity he didn't say all this when he was in a position to make some sort of difference.

Nick Clegg's Amazing Epiphany.

Nick Clegg has had an epiphany. After supporting a minority Tory administration for over four years he has finally admitted that the Tory party is full of "head-bangers" and that the bedroom tax is both unjustified and horribly unfair. Which rather begs the question as to why he supported it in the first place? The basis of his objections now seem to lie in the fact that the policy hasn't "worked". Worked in what sense? The tax has punished the poor for being poor, forced many into further debt and led to many losing their homes. So what did Clegg expect the policy to do exactly? Did he really believe that people would be able to move into smaller properties even though he knew that these did not exist? Apparently, since Danny Alexander said today that the Lib Dems "have always said that we'd be guided by the evidence and now we have it." Is he really telling us that he now has "evidence" that non-existent properties are actually non-existent? Did the Lib Dems really have help to inflict untold misery on thousands of people simply to gather evidence of what everyone else already knew? Are they so unutterably stupid that they need evidence of the bloody obvious? If so they are hardly worth voting for, if not then they are too hypocritical to vote for. Either way Nick Clegg's belated epiphany cannot be equated with St.Paul's epiphany on the road to Damascus. Rather Nick Clegg is on the road to his own personal Cavalry and, with the rest of his treacherous party, will suffer a well deserved crucifixion in May 2015.

Yet Another Bad Hand For Britain.

Cameron has reshuffled his cabinet and what is the result? Gove, after a disastrous four years in education, has been moved from pouting at and bullying teachers to pouting at and bullying Tory backbenchers. While David Cameron described his petulant colleague as "a heavy-hitter" his real motive seems to lie in ditching an electoral liability who has managed to drive teachers into industrial action, entire schools into the hands of right-wing dingbats and religious fundamentalists and parents to the point of despair. To redress the Tory image of a bunch of Etonian toffs completely out of touch with the rest of the country, Cameron has beefed up the number of females around the cabinet table - replacing several insane male right-wing ideologues with an equal number of insane female right-wing ideologues. Esther McVey has been promoted from bad-mouthing poor people on behalf of Iain Duncan Smith in parliament to bad-mouthing poor people in the cabinet where IDS needs all the support he can get after his total failure to starve the poor into submission. Indeed Cameron's failure to move IDS somewhere where he can't inflict any more harm on vulnerable people or cost the country even more money is the real story of the cabinet reshuffle and tells us everything we need to know about the course of any future Tory government after 2015. Vicious and incompetent at the same time, IDS is what modern Toryism is all about. Forget the idea that Cameron's cabinet is now more Euro-sceptic - that's simply window dressing to recapture the swivel-eyed loons who have deserted to UKIP - what this reshuffle really tells us is that, after 2015, we can only expect more of the same. More poverty, more austerity, more social division and more disdain of ordinary people from a party who see themselves as somehow superior instead of the greedy scroungers they actually are.

Abuse: Establishment Cover Up Or Establishment Cover Up?

We are used to politicians legally dodging their tax liabilities and "accidentally" claiming too much on their expenses. We've even become used to politicians perverting the course of justice and then returning to government after being "re-habilitated." The disproportionate number of MP's and Lords with criminal records is no longer shocking, though it should be. Nor are we any longer amazed when a so-called celebrity is shown to have feet of clay and to have been hiding from us all a darker side. But what is about to crash into the headlines, the widespread abuse of power by politicians in the 1980's, threatens to rock our democracy to its very foundations. Should we be so shocked however? It is clear from the cases involving Jimmy Saville, Rolf Harris, the miner's strikes and Hillsborough that there was something very wrong about the 1980's. Perhaps Lord Tebbitt summed it all up for us when he revealed on TV that a cover up was not unlikely and that, at that time, such things were routine. It was a different time with different attitudes he blithely informed us as if that makes it all OK. The truth is that, apart from the attitudes of the political elite, it wasn't different in the 1980's. I was a young man then and, if sexual freedom was taken for granted, rape, sexual abuse and child molestation were not. It was a matter of knowing right from wrong. Sex, even then, was a mutually consensual activity and children under 18 were strictly off limits. What is being revealed by all of this is that the abuse of power in the 1980's was not only widespread but was considered normal. The 1980's were not what many of us believed they were and now stand revealed as a house of cards erected upon rotten foundations. Worse yet we now find that the establishment cover up continued well after the 1980's and even up to the present day. Today the Labour MP Simon Danczuk has revealed in the Mail Online that he has been pressurised by a Tory Minister to keep quiet about child abuse by politicians, while documents are now known to have conveniently disappeared. Meanwhile Michael Gove is desperately trying to tell us that this was all in the past and we should now concentrate on the future instead of raking over old coals. The Tory party is heavily implicated in all this, although it should be noted that they don't stand completely alone. But one thing is now becoming crystal clear at that is that Tory hegemony of power between 1979 and 1997 was a period in which the abuse of power lay at the very heart of government and, like now, formed a cornerstone of Tory philosophy.

How The Tories Tackle The Housing Crisis.

The Tories have recently been addressing the problem of the housing crisis, cruising the TV studios telling us all about their concerns and presenting statistics that seem to indicate that they are doing something about it. Having ignored the problem for four years they were galvanised into action after very public warnings from the EU and the Bank of England that the recent re-inflation of the property market is a grave danger to the British economy. The problem for George Osborne is that the property boom constitutes the major element in his otherwise non-existent economic recovery. Building houses threatens this recovery for the rich only that Osborne has engineered and the growing inequality between rich and poor that he champions. Not to worry though because, behind the scenes, he, the Tory Party and their wealthy backers, are still cashing in for all they are worth in the property market. Mike Weatherly, Tory MP for Hove, has been busy promoting anti-squatting laws on behalf of wealthy property tycoons who are responsible for a staggering 710,000 empty houses in Britain and who have paid him thousands of pounds in personal "donations". Meanwhile Richard Benyon, pictured above, Tory MP for Newbury, has been investing in social housing estates in London and then raising rents in an effort to get rid of the working-class families that presently live there and replace them with wealthier tenants. The eventual goal, a spokesman for the consortium that has bought the New Era Estate in Hoxton said, is to "raise rents to the going market value." In case you're wondering the "going market value" in East London is it is £2,000 per month. Few, if any, of the present tenants could possibly afford such a rent hike and it seems unavoidable that they will soon be evicted and replaced by tenants more the Mr.Benyon's taste. This then is the Tory housing policy. Hundreds of thousands of empty houses put to one side as an "investment", unaffordable rents for ordinary working people, increasing homelessness and a rich rentier class sucking the lifeblood out of our economy.

Where Are All The Working Class Tories?

After his outstanding triumphs with regard to Andy Coulson and Jean-Claude Juncker, David Cameron has decided that he now has to reach out to the peasantry. What is needed, he reasoned, is to show that the Tories are not just a bunch of toffs but are also firmly grounded in the working class. What is needed is for working class Tory MP's to step forward and show the peasants that they too can be Tories if they're not careful. Just for good measure the initiative was to be launched by the ex-gnome manufacturer John Major, son of a working class circus performer. It was a good plan - simple, effective and graphic. Unfortunately, after an exhaustive search in the House of Commons, the Tories could only produce 14 out of 305 MP's who can be described even loosely as "working class". "I can't understand it given our huge following in the North of England where we keep our working class," a Tory spokesman told our reporter. "The electorate just don't seem to understand that many of our MP's did not come from independently wealthy backgrounds, even if they are now all as rich as Croesus. Many of them are engaged in trade and, though I for one wouldn't allow them into my home through the front door - that's what the tradesman entrance is for - I am proud that they are members of the Tory party. I think what we need is a recruitment drive amongst the peasantry. Inducements could be offered such as giving them a nice pair of used army boots to replace their worn out clogs or permission to attack useless cripples, the unemployed and foreigners in the street. We need to reach out to the hard-working people of this country and persuade them that working even harder for a whole lot less is their patriotic duty. Then we can get out of the EU, cut my tax bill and go on to win the World Cup in 2018."

Cameron Isolates Europe.

David Cameron is celebrating his victory over Europe tonight as his party congratulate themselves on isolating the rest of the continent with the exception of Hungary. "We have made a principled stand against European federalism," a Tory spokesman told our reporter. "If it wasn't for those bloody Hungarians our victory over Johnnie Foreigner would have been complete. Trust some dago southern European country to steal our thunder and spoil our Dunkirk moment." As was clear from the beginning, Jean-Claude Juncker will now become President of the European Commission while Cameron's refusal to recognise this and negotiate a deal means that he has managed to get absolutely nothing in return for Britain. While Cameron has been reduced to making dark threats about the "waifer-thin support for the EU in Britain" the EU has totally ignored his amateurish attempts to sway the vote and is quite happy to watch him flounce off yet again muttering about dignity, principle and the nobility of defeat. The truth is that Cameron is a hopeless negotiator while his claim that he can "reform" the EU in order to fend off a referendum looks less and less likely. His only hope now is that he will lose the next general election and then be able to accuse a Labour government of betraying Britain's interests. His worst nightmare is that he'll win and then have to face his own back benchers baying for his blood when he comes up with yet another paper thin excuse for not giving them the referendum they want. His problem then will be trying to reconcile the loony right of his party with the fat cats who bankroll the Tories and support a federalist Europe if it forces down wages and offers fewer barriers to the free movement of their money from one offshore bank account to another. This is the fault-line in the Tory party as they struggle with their hatred of foreigners and their desire to avoid paying tax on their profits. If only they could come up with a perfect blend of their greed and stupidity, a way of maximising profits, reducing their tax bill and keeping the riff-raff out all would be well. Shame.