When I read the Labour manifesto, it was presented with bullet points and statements about what they will do to change the country. When I read the Tory manifesto, I saw a lot of big words, but no actual explanations about how they're going to change things for the better. More like a reassuring "Trust us, we'll fix it. How? Don't worry about that, just vote for us and have faith." I keep seeing Tory voters that are more intent on destroying the image of the Labour party than providing a strong discussion of their own policies. So in the name of reciprocity, let's take a good look at the Tories.
The Tory party committed electoral fraud in 2015. They've already paid the maximum fine the Electoral Commission could levy against them for election cheating, and 30 Tories are facing the prospect of criminal prosecution for financially doping their way to victory: https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/i-am-a/journalist/electoral-commission-media-centre/news-releases-donations/conservative-party-fined-70,000-following-investigation-into-election-campaign-expenses
Under Tory rule British workers have suffered the longest sustained decline in the real value of their wages since records began. The fall is so bad that it's the joint worst wage collapse in the developed world with Greece: http://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/the-tory-war-on-british-workers-wages.html
In 2010 the Tories promised to eliminate the deficit by 2015. In 2017 they're still nowhere near eliminating it, and they've openly admitted that they won't be doing it any time before 2021. Over 11 years to do what they promised to do in under 5, and more new public debt created in the process than every single Labour government in history combined: http://budgetresponsibility.org.uk/overview-of-the-november-2016-economic-and-fiscal-outlook/
After such spectacularly missed targets and George Osborne's departure from Westminster politics it's amazing that millions still believe in his austerity con, but Theresa May is still parroting the same kind of economically illiterate justifications for a blatantly unjustifiable economic agenda. The evidence is now absolutely clear that austerity only succeeded in transferring wealth from the majority to the super rich minority at the expense of the real economy: http://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/are-people-finally-waking-up-to-fact.html
Between 2010 and 2015 the Tories slashed £20 billion off the NHS budget. Their current spending plans involve a further £22 billion in funding cuts between 2015 and 2020. Slashing the NHS budget, closing dozens of hospitals and other NHS facilities; reducing services; and laying off tens of thousands of staff would be bad enough in it's own right, but at a time of rapidly increasing demand on NHS services it's a recipe for disaster: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2011/oct/17/nhs-cuts-impact-on-patients-revealed
One of Theresa May's first acts as Prime Minister was to scrap NHS bursaries, which caused an astonishing 10,000 decline in applications for nursing courses. Add into the mix the fact that NHS staff from EU countries are quitting the NHS in record numbers and there's a massive NHS recruitment crisis on the cards: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/mar/18/nhs-eu-nurses-quit-record-numbers
The amount of appalling schemes and degrading assessment regimes disabled people have to go through under this Tory government is absolutely shocking: http://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/the-systematic-tory-abuse-of-disabled.html
Since 2010 the number of children growing up in poverty has risen by 400,000. The latest Tory cuts to the child welfare system and in-work benefits are set to plunge another 250,000 kids into lives of poverty: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/theresa-accused-being-denial-over-10038973
Analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies has revealed that under Tory spending plans the worst hit demographic of all will be poor families with children. The trend is absolutely clear. The poorer you are, the harsher the cuts you will be facing, and if you have kids you'll be hit harder than those without: https://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/9164
Since 2010 the Tory government has overseen the lowest levels of housebuilding since the 1920s. When Theresa May was Home Secretary she increased demand on the nation's housing stock by overseeing the biggest surges of net migration in UK history. This combination of weak supply, very high demand and collapsing wages has pushed house prices to their most unaffordable level ever: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/04/17/uk-will-never-build-enough-homes-keep-prices/
In 2016 Tory MPs (1/3 of whom are landlords) voted down an opposition amendment to their housing bill that would have required landlords to ensure that rented accommodation is "fit for human habitation": https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/12/tories-reject-move-to-ensure-rented-homes-fit-for-human-habitation
As a result of the shambolic Tory privatisation of the railways the UK has the most expensive, most over-crowded and least reliable rail service of any comparable developed European nation. What's more is that the profiteering private companies who operate the services take more in government subsidies than it cost to run the entire system under British Rail: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/feb/06/uk-railway-judged-worse
The Tories are planning the biggest education funding cuts in decades: http://www.schoolcuts.org.uk/#!/
An awful lot of people don't seem to have even noticed that the Tories have been privatising thousands of state owned schools, property and all, for free, into the hands of private sector pseudo-charities, many of which are owned by major Tory party donors: http://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/michael-gove-ideological-vandalism.html
The Tories introduced £9,000 per year tuition fees for university students, meaning English students now face the highest fees in the world for study at public universities. The fees are so high that 2/3 of graduates will never be able to pay off their student debts: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/university-tuition-fees-increase-2020-government-new-legislation_uk_5902f9ebe4b0bb2d086c850c
The Tories have seen a huge rise in food bank dependency since 2010. Over a million food parcels were handed out by the Trussell Trust last year, and they're just one of the food bank organisations. New research has shown that areas that have suffered the rollout of the Tories' hopelessly botched Universal Credit scheme have significantly higher rates of food bank dependency than areas where it hasn't been rolled out yet: https://www.trusselltrust.org/news-and-blog/latest-stats/end-year-stats/
The Hinkley Point C deal is one of the most scandalous affairs in UK political history. The Tories have agreed to bribe the French and Chinese into building us a nuclear power station by promising to use taxpayers' cash to pay them double the market rate for electricity for 35 years, then cover the cleanup cost at the taxpayers' expense too. The reason we have to bribe foreign governments into building our nuclear infrastructure for us is that the Tories privatised the UK's nuclear expertise in the 1990s, and the private company was then allowed to be purchased by the French government: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/sep/15/hinkley-point-c-guide-uk-first-new-nuclear-plant-for-20-years
The Tories have slashed £4.6 billion from the social care budget at a time of rising demand due to the UK's ageing population demographics. This social care funding crisis has coincided with the biggest increase in the death rate since the 1960s, and is putting an immense amount of pressure on already overstretched NHS services and unpaid carers: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/social-care-scandal-tory-cuts-9836261
The Tories have slashed local government budgets so harshly that the leader of David Cameron's own Tory council famously wrote to him to plead for him to stop. What's most disgusting about this assault on local government budgets is that the most savage local government cuts have been focused on the poorest areas, while some leafy Tory councils actually got increases in their budgets: http://www4.shu.ac.uk/research/cresr/sites/shu.ac.uk/files/welfare-reform-2016_1.pdf
The Tories have brought giant outsourcing corporations in to do all kinds of government functions. Huge numbers of these corporate leeches are now having their contracts renewed automatically with no cost-benefit analysis and no competitive tendering process. The Labour Party have proposed a new law to ban outsourcing companies from receiving government contracts if they're based in tax havens. The Tories are quite happy to continue using taxpayers' cash to pay tax-dodging corporate outsourcing companies to do the work the government should be doing itself: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-26541375
Between 2010 and 2015 the Tories slashed 30% off the fire service budget resulting in the loss of 10,000 firefighter jobs and the closure of 39 fire stations. Between 2015 and 2020 they intend to slash another 20%: https://www.fbu.org.uk/news/2016/09/13/fire-service-crisis-10000-firefighter-jobs-axed
In 2015/16 the number of fire deaths increased by 17.4%: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/584351/fire-incident-response-times-1516-hosb0117.pdf
Between 2010 and 2015 the Tories axed 34,000 police jobs. Between 2015 and 2020 they intend to axe tens of thousands more. The police have managed to juke the statistics by non-recording vast numbers of reported crimes, but the impact of these police cuts can't be hidden off the violent crime statistics, which have increased by 96% between 2012 and 2016: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-39733225
One of the sickest things about the Tory government is the way they allowed HMRC to draw up sweetheart tax deals with massive corporations like Google, Starbucks and Vodafone. Why should Google get to negotiate a 3% tax deal when ordinary working people have to pay what they actually owe: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/04/google-uk-tax-deal-share-options-scheme
Theresa May's Snoopers' Charter is the most extreme state surveillance law ever introduced in a developed nation. It allows over 20,000 government employees to trawl through the private communication data of innocent people (including loads of non-terrorism related organisations like the Food Standards Agency, the Health and Safety Executive and the Gambling Commission): http://www.whoishostingthis.com/blog/2017/03/10/ipa-numbers/
Theresa May and the Tories love sucking up to dictators and despots like the Islamist tyrants in Saudi Arabia and the Turkish autocrat Recep Erdoğan. The disgraced Liam Fox was even in the Philippines to suck up to the brutal dictator Rodrigo Duterte and talk up our "shared values": https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-5076-Theresa-May-The-dictators-dream#.WTWk9OsrKUl
Theresa May has a burning contempt for your human rights. She has expressed her determination to tear up the European Convention on Human Rights on many occasions, and join Belarus as the only European nation that doesn't adhere to the human rights legislation that was bestowed on Europe by the British Prime Ministers Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee: http://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Convention_ENG.pdf
One of the worst things about the Tory government is the fact that several of their malicious anti-welfare schemes actually cost more to administer in corporate outsourcing fees than they will ever save in reduced benefits payments. The Work Capacity Assessment regime for sick and disabled people and their draconian sanctions system are both examples of socially ruinous schemes that actually cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds to operate: https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Benefit-sanctions-Summary.pdf
While UK workers suffered the worst collapse in the value of their wages on record the tiny super rich minority literally doubled their wealth. Take from the poor to give to the rich, that's always been the Tory agenda. The worst thing is that these malicious reverse Robin Hoods even had the gall to tell us "we're all in this together" as they were deliberately rigging society even more in favour of the tiny super-rich minority than it already was: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/apr/26/recession-rich-britains-wealthiest-double-net-worth-since-crisis
Perhaps the most worrying thing of all is the way Theresa May has made the threat of a "no deal" Brexit strop the centrepiece of her diplomatically inept Brexit negotiating strategy. If the EU 27 call her bluff and she ends up walking the UK over a "no deal" Brexit cliff edge the social and economic consequences will be catastrophic. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has estimated that the imposition of WTO tariffs, the flight of businesses, border checks and all the other chaos that would come with a "no deal" flounce would wipe between 6.3% and 9.5% off the national GDP. To put that in perspective the recession that followed the 2007-08 global financial sector insolvency crisis (you know, the one we're still trying to recover from) wiped 4.8% off GDP: http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/brexit02.pdf
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But wait... there's more! Let's keep going!! Piled on more debt in 4 years than Labour did in 13: https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2013/11/the-tories-have-piled-on-more-debt-than-labour/
A rise in wealth inequality on the horizon: https://www.ft.com/content/4642c8d6-eb95-11e6-ba01-119a44939bb6
Dismantling of disability benefits is a breach of human rights: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/un-report-disability-disabled-rights-violating-austerity-welfare-reform-esa-pip-a7404956.html
Number of homeless children hit an eight year high last year: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/nov/03/child-homelessness-christmas-eight-year-high-shelter-12000-children-temporary-accommodation
Child poverty expected to rise by 50% by 2020: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jun/28/number-uk-children-living-inpoverty-jumps-200000
Living standards fell for all but the richest: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/05/uk-living-standards-fell-for-all-but-the-richest-under-coalition-analysis
UK wages dropped 10% since 2007, the second-biggest hit in Europe: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/uk-wages-drop-10-tuc-greece-recession-financial-crisis-brexit-a7157681.html
As of 2011, British people work the 3rd longest out of everyone in Europe: https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/dec/08/europe-working-hours
16 million people have less than £100 in savings: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37504449
UK productivity growth is the weakest since WW2 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/apr/01/uk-productivity-growth-is-weakest-since-wwii-says-ons
GDP per capita is lower than it was before 2008: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/24/joseph-stiglitz-interview-uk-economy-lost-decade-zero-growth
Deficit was supposed to be eliminated by 2015, now the target is 2020: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/04/21/deficit-figures-an-embarrassment-for-george-osborne-as-he-misses/
For parents in full-time work the rate of poverty has risen to 8%, and the number of people in working-poor in absolute poverty grew by 2 million in the last decade: http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21701216-number-working-poor-growing-blame-high-house-prices-low-productivity-and-too-little
£1 billion inheritance tax cut pledged: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/feb/28/tory-1bn-inheritance-tax-cut-will-worsen-north-south-divide
Six million workers paid less than the living wage: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-34691404
Shelter: 1 in 5 adults suffer from mental health issues due to housing issues: https://twitter.com/Shelter/status/854782916739706881
In 2013 the Red Cross had to start a campaign for food aid in Britain for the first time since WW2: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-24487146
On average workers families are set to be £1300 worse off this year: https://fullfact.org/economy/average-working-families-and-budget/
By 2022 Conservatives will cut a combined £70 billion in corporation tax, capital gains tax, inheritance tax, and bank levies, yet they claim they need to make savings by not guaranteeing triple-lock pensions: http://press.labour.org.uk/post/158315410419/the-tories-70bn-tax-giveaways-to-the-super-rich
More than 500,000 primary school pupils are taught in classes between 31 and 35 pupils: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/jan/15/primary-schools-oversize-classes-claims-labour
More than 40,000 primary children in classes over 36: https://www.educationbusinessuk.net/news/21042017/jeremy-corbyn-criticises-tories-over-overcrowded-classrooms
More than half of primary school teachers surveyed in a NUT poll said that pupils showed signs of holiday hunger, 39% of teachers said it affected more than a quarter of their pupils, 12% said it affected more than half, and 80% reported that holiday hunger increased over 2 years: https://www.teachers.org.uk/news-events/conference-2017/nut-survey-holiday-hunger
10,000 jobs axed and record fire station closures, fire prevention exercises have reduced by a quarter over 5 years, 13% less time on public safety initiatives - 15% increase in fire-related deaths in 2015/16: http://www.writeyou.co.uk/dangerous_tory_cuts_to_our_fire_rescue_service_need_to_end
20 hospitals declared a black alert in January: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jan/11/nhs-crisis-20-hospitals-declare-black-alert-as-patient-safety-no-longer-assured
The Red Cross declared the NHS was in humanitarian crisis in January: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jan/06/nhs-faces-humanitarian-crisis-rising-demand-british-red-cross
Around 1000 NHS England patients waited more than 12 hours on a trolley this January, compared to just 17 in Jan 2011: http://news.sky.com/story/worst-month-on-record-for-ae-waiting-times-10795364
There's been a 504% increase of patients waiting over four hours since Jan 2011: http://news.sky.com/story/worst-month-on-record-for-ae-waiting-times-10795364
Over 4000 urgent operations were cancelled last year, up 27% in two years: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jan/27/record-number-urgent-operations-cancelled-hospitals-england-2016
Knee and hip operations are "rationed" for only those who can't sleep because of the pain: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/26/hip-operations-much-pain-cant-sleep-new-nhs-rationing-plans/
The rules on how much the NHS could pay agency staff is breached 50,000 times a week because of staff shortages: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-36341285
Applications for nursing degrees are down 23% on September 2016 applications because nursing bursaries have been scrapped: https://www.ucas.com/corporate/news-and-key-documents/news/applicants-uk-higher-education-down-5-uk-students-and-7-eu-students
Half of junior doctors chose not to progress to specialty training last year: http://careers.bmj.com/careers/advice/Half+of+foundation+trainees+now+choose+not+to+progress+straight+to+specialty+training
NHS staff suffering pay cuts: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/nhs-staff-pay-cut-one-per-cent-rise-health-workers-doctors-dentists-nurses-midwives-a7654251.html
Private contracting has doubled from £4 billion to £8 billion since 2010: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-37087304
Still, the Tories continue to cut £22 billion by 2020: http://m.huffpost.com/uk/entry/uk_58322fcae4b09025ba32a16b
Even though the £15 billion in corporation tax cuts the Tories are enacting would be enough to train 10,000 teachers, 10,000 police officers, and 12,000 nurses full time every year for a decade: http://press.labour.org.uk/post/155290716819/tory-cuts-to-corporation-tax-worth-15-billion
😡😡😡
But hey, at least May isn't an "IRA sympathiser" or a "loony"...!!
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