Recently, at a grand dinner, a feisty British-Asian woman in a black suit bounded up and said: “I always wanted to meet you, such a celebrity.” Then she told me sharply that I should be less critical of the Tories: “I mean they’re good for us – people like us. Why can’t you see that?”
By “people like us”, I guess she means those many super-aspirational brown people who believe taxation is state larceny and the needy are all shirkers and welfare cheats. My reply was curt: “I’m not like you or any others who vote Tory. They’ve ruined the UK. And people like you still can’t see that.” Then off I flounced, almost tripping over my fancy frock.
The polls show the Tory party in (hopefully) irreversible decline, yet such loyalists are still hanging in there, trapped in blind faith, persuaded that only the Conservatives can be trusted to run Great Britain.
This woman – a financial consultant – will be much comforted by the murmurings about the Autumn Statement. It is rumoured that Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt will cut taxes for the well off – again.
Adam Corlett, principal economist at the Resolution Foundation, warns that pre-election ruses such as a reduction in inheritance tax, paid for by fewer than 4 per cent of the wealthiest estates, “would effectively be funded by higher taxes on the incomes of 36 million people”.
In Milton Keynes on Saturday, Hunt said: “There’s no easy way to reduce the tax burden. What we need to do is take difficult decisions to reform the welfare state.” Apparently the Chancellor wants to cut £2bn from the benefits budget, knowing that more people are finding it impossibly hard to pay rents and bills. Spoil the rich, punish the poor.
The truth is that they never take the “difficult decision” to deny their millionaire pals millions of pounds in contracts. Taking from the poor, in contrast, causes them few real difficulties.
It’s been 13 years, six months and 15 days since David Cameron – then projecting youthful modernity – won the election but failed to get a clear majority. Gordon Brown, a politician who genuinely believed in equality and justice, was presented as a loser, an outmoded cast off.
That charmer, Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, got his party to form a Tory-Lib Dem coalition government.
By 2015, according to the Child Poverty Action Group, deep cuts in family support had resulted in the biggest increase in child poverty in a generation. The Tories won the 2015, 2017 and 2019 elections, the last with “Red Wall” voters lured by Boris Johnson’s affability and his unreliable promises. That wrong turning has led us to a place of irrecoverable social and economic disintegration. We were last there back in Victorian times.
In 1845, the Tory PM, Benjamin Disraeli, wrote a novel titled Sybil; or The Two Nations. In it, when the aristocrat Charles Egremont declares that Britain is the “greatest nation that ever existed”, Walter Gerard, a working-class radical, retorts: “Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.” This is us today.
In the past week, Care Quality Commission inspectors have found that more than half our hospitals in England are substandard. And the Public Accounts Committee has expressed concern over deteriorating and unsafe schools, attended by more than 700,000 pupils. And Paul Johnson, director of the Institute of Fiscal Studies, has warned that the UK has the “meanest welfare system in Europe” for people who are unemployed, and that further cuts in benefits will leave countless citizens unable to cope.
Tomorrow, the same day as the Autumn Statement, a Centre for Ageing Better report will reveal that in England’s most deprived areas – particularly in the North – life expectancy for men and women is now between eight and 10 years lower than in the least deprived areas. Remember the trumpeted “levelling up agenda”? They didn’t mean any of it. Voters who trusted them are roundly junked.
And now look! Cameron’s back; Austerity Mark II waits in the wings. It’s continuation Tories: arrogant, entitled and disconnected from most of us. That’s why they failed so spectacularly when Covid came along. And why, today, in Britain nothing works. Their tax plans are unholy election bribes.
Don’t be conned again. Vote them out. Britain can be better than this.
Why does nothing work in Britain today? Let me explain
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1
21.11.2023
Recently, at a grand dinner, a feisty British-Asian woman in a black suit bounded up and said: “I always wanted to meet you, such a celebrity.” Then she told me sharply that I should be less critical of the Tories: “I mean they’re good for us – people like us. Why can’t you see that?”
By “people like us”, I guess she means those many super-aspirational brown people who believe taxation is state larceny and the needy are all shirkers and welfare cheats. My reply was curt: “I’m not like you or any others who vote Tory. They’ve ruined the UK. And people like you still can’t see that.” Then off I flounced, almost tripping over my fancy frock.
The polls show the Tory party in (hopefully) irreversible decline, yet such loyalists are still hanging in there, trapped in blind faith, persuaded that only the Conservatives can be trusted to run Great Britain.
This woman – a financial consultant – will be much comforted by the murmurings about the Autumn Statement. It is rumoured that Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt will cut taxes for the well off – again.
Adam Corlett, principal economist at the Resolution........
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