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May 13, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
44:33
The Conservative Party is Your Enemy
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In the wake of the Conservative victory in the British general elections in 2015, there have been rallies in London by people demanding that the Tories vacate the position they've just been elected to.
The Conservatives formed a majority government after the election, which means that they are no longer hamstrung by the Liberal Democrats vetoing any of their proposals.
So naturally, everyone is wondering, well, what does five more years of the Tories mean for Britain?
Now, I believe that the best indicator of future behaviour is past behaviour.
So why don't we take a look at the Conservative government's actions for the past five years to see if we can get an indication of what the next five years might bring.
And before we go on, I just want to stress that I am in no way advocating for any other parties in this video.
The Conservative Party has always been the primary advocate in Britain of privatisation.
That is, the selling off of publicly owned assets to private businesses for profit.
This has been a steady march under the Tories.
In 1989, the only privatised sectors of the NHS were the mental health services.
As you can see, this has grown dramatically, and continues to do so.
In fact, the Tories have presided over the biggest privatisation in NHS history, supposedly of £780 million, but actually more in the region of £1.2 billion, according to leaked documents.
This is going to either directly or indirectly affect just shy of 4 million patients.
And this is the privatisation of cancer and end-of-life services.
And there seems to be simply no limit to what about the NHS they will privatise.
The UK Plasma Supplier was a company owned by the NHS and has been sold to a private equity firm called Bain Capital, owned by presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
This caused veteran politician Lord Owen to remark, it's hard to conceive of a worse outcome for a sale of this particularly sensitive national health asset than a private equity company with none of the safeguards in terms of governance of a publicly quoted company and being answerable to shareholders.
Indeed, this rather ghoulish aside is just the beginning.
Private companies are now running entire hospitals across Britain.
And where things aren't being privatised, they are being cut back, such as a quarter of all NHS walk-in centres, or funding and staff cuts for cancer care networks, which had also been cut by a quarter, and teams looking after heart and stroke care said their funding had been cut by 12%.
Needless to say, this is causing a crisis due to rising demand and budget cuts.
Despite overall budget increases to the NHS, the system is not growing to meet demand, and we will deal with the issue of demand on the NHS later.
For now, we will just note that the NHS in England has warned that the inexorably rising demand for care will leave a £30 billion black hole in its budget by 2020-2021 without unprecedented improvements in productivity.
Unsurprisingly, this has affected the quality of service from the NHS, with a sharp rise in the reported number of patients suffering never events, events that should never happen.
These are, of course, abject failures of service that in 2012 were up by 84%.
Never events are a more useful way of assessing the NHS because death rates are a consequence of high-risk procedures, whereas never events are preventable and should never happen.
This is all rather self-justifying.
Unsurprisingly, austerity cuts to the NHS are leading to a backlog of patients, which leads to further justification of privatisation.
Needless to say, all of this has the public rather worried about the state of their precious NHS, and so they should be.
Satisfaction with the way the health services run fell from 70% in 2010 to 58% in 2011.
But you know what?
It's just the NHS.
It's hardly something really important.
Like the trains.
Even as far back as 1993, again under the Conservative government, this was predicted to be a bad idea.
They thought back then that it was going to cause higher fares and higher state subsidies and reduced services.
And in 2015, that is exactly what we're dealing with, with the British railway system.
Since privatisation, the British now pay the most expensive train fares in Europe, with UK commuters spending twice as much of their salary on train fares as most other European commuters.
And this is in contrast to promises made in 1993 by the Conservative Party that we would have affordable and even lower fares.
I see no reason why fares should increase faster under the new system than they do under the present nationalised industry structure.
Then Transport Secretary John McGregor told the House of Commons in February 1993.
In many cases, they will be more flexible and will be reduced.
A man who clearly has been shown not to know his ass from his elbow when it comes to calculating human greed.
For example, a single train from London to Manchester has gone up by 208%, which is more than three times the rate of inflation.
Almost universally have the price of tickets gone up way in excess of the rate of inflation.
And unsurprisingly, they are still rising.
And before you think, well, this is still probably more efficient than if they had remained nationalised, one need only look at the example of East Coast Rail.
The East Coast Rail depended less on public subsidies than any of the 15 privately run rail franchises, and it has actually been a lucrative cash cow, bringing in around a billion pounds to the exchequer since 2009.
Profits that were doubtless plowed back into the privately owned rail companies as subsidies, as nearly £3 billion was splashed out on these companies between 2007 and 2011.
And needless to say, we are hardly being provided with a superior service for all of the extra money that is being handed out to private companies.
Let's next talk about the privatisation of the Royal Mail.
It's the same old rhetoric.
The government and Royal Mail management say the company needs access to private capital in order to grow and compete.
And this privatisation has been planned for many years, with legislation enacted in 2011 to pave the way for the sale.
But the thing is, the Royal Mail was turning a profit.
The Royal Mail made almost half a billion pounds for the Exchequer last year.
Why would you privatise a public company that was doing so well?
You even have conservative think tanks like the Bow Group warning that privatisation will probably see an increase in the price of stamps, as well as the closure of rural post offices.
And the thing is, the Tories didn't even make a good amount of money out of the Royal Mail.
Goldman Sachs think the Royal Mail was worth almost twice as much as what the taxpayer made from it.
The Tories sold it off on the cheap.
And after privatisation, what a surprise.
An immediate stamp price hike.
If there was a winner in the privatisation of the Royal Mail, it was not the taxpayer.
But there is literally nothing that the Conservatives will not privatise.
They are even following the American model and privatising Britain's prisons.
From April 2012, no fewer than 14 out of the 139 prisons in England and Wales will be managed by private companies for profit.
The rationale from this comes from the think tanks who say private firms will be better at running the prisons.
It just makes sense.
Despite the examples of the trains, the NHS and the Royal Mail.
But that isn't even really my problem with this.
It's not that it wastes money and it's bound to waste money.
It's that people are profiting from the incarceration of human beings.
I find for-profit systems to be deeply immoral.
Like with America, it creates a system that incentivizes the authorities to put people in jail.
We should be trying to avoid putting people in jail.
Putting people in jail is not a good thing.
Making it profitable is right up there, if not further, with making profit from human blood.
It's fucking ghoulish.
There can really be no doubt that the Conservatives are definitely the party of business, but they're not the party of the workers.
It's no secret that the Conservative Party is not the party of the working man.
But the things the Conservative Party has done in the last five years, I really do think can adequately be described with the term class warfare.
For example, workers have had their redundancy notices halved to just 45 days from the three months that they had previously had.
This is coming at a period of financial insecurity for the average worker anyway, as the average pay rise is barely a quarter of the inflation rate.
While the economy overall may be seeing a small increase, the average family is suffering from a cost of living crisis.
Basically, there is a fall in real wages.
The gap between what you're being paid and the price of what you can afford is wider than ever with no end in sight.
And the people at the bottom are getting squeezed a lot harder than the people at the top.
Take for example the NHS.
Nurses are way behind the managers in their pay rises.
Managers' wages went up by 13% in the last four years, compared to 9% for the average worker.
And that's even if they're lucky enough to still have a job, because thousands of nurses have been cut in the Tory cutbacks to the NHS.
It's the same with GPs, the fire service and the police.
And the redundancy payouts are costing billions.
This is all in the public sector, but don't go thinking that it's all hunky-dory in the private sector.
You may well be one of the hundreds of thousands of people who are on a zero-hour contract.
Zero-hour contracts are bad news for workers.
They allow employers to hire staff with no guarantee of work.
They mean employees work only when they are needed by employers, often at short notice, with sick pay often not included.
They are also paid by the hour and this represents the main employment for almost 700,000 people between October and December in 2014.
Employers use zero-hour contracts because they can avoid paying fixed overheads and it gives them flexibility of their workforce.
But this comes at the expense of employee rights, whether this is intentional or not.
And the number of people on zero-hour contracts may be vastly underestimated.
Polls suggest that up to a million British workers are on such contracts.
Zero-hour contracts are regularly criticised by unions and other non-governmental organisations as they are insecure for the employees, and employers seem to be taking full advantage of that fact.
The backlash against zero-hour contracts has grown so great that the Conservatives have been forced to promise to outlaw the use of exclusive zero-hour contracts.
Whether they do this or not, well, we'll see.
Of course, the Conservative reaction to this is to say, well, it's not that these things are bad for workers, despite the fact that they are, it's that they are being sold to the public incorrectly and have a PR problem.
The work and pension secretary Ian Duncan Smith, a man whose name you're probably going to hear quite a lot later on in this video, has said that these are scare stories.
But frankly, I am in the same camp as Ed Miliband when he says that it's not right that employees get a text message late the night before to tell them whether they have any work in the morning.
These contracts are indeed exploitative, but I suppose under a Conservative government, you should be thankful that you have any job at all.
Because if you find yourself unemployed under a Tory government, you are in trouble.
Either the poorest in society or the hardworking people courted by the Tories face being targeted under the party's commitment to £12 billion in cuts.
John Hills from the London School of Economics says that he thinks the benefit cuts will come from lone parents and disabled people, which will create pressure on food banks and hardship on a scale that would hardly be imagined.
Alternatively, you could take it from hardworking families who rely on housing benefits and tax credits.
In a time of economic downturns and austerity, there are obviously a lot of people who are unemployed.
And these people are unemployed for reasons not of their own making.
The rate of unemployment fell to 1.35 million, but this figure isn't accurate, but we will go into that a little later on.
The overwhelming majority of the unemployed are young people.
Almost a million out of the 1.35 million people unemployed are younger than 24.
The real figure for the unemployed is around 2 million.
And to go around these 2 million people, there are only 700,000 jobs.
Yes, this is an improvement, but it doesn't change the fact that there are almost three times the number of unemployed people looking for work than there are jobs available for them to fill.
Of course, the Conservatives are not shy about lying.
Blatantly lying about the number of unemployed.
What's been happening is quite simple.
They've been using the benefit claimant counts rather than the official unemployment statistics.
Simply put, the number of people on JobSeeker's allowance is not the same as the number of people who are unemployed.
The number of people on JobSeeker's allowance can be directly manipulated by the government.
They've not only redefined the term unemployment to mean registered benefit claimants, but they have also been cutting benefit entitlements, which then they report as being people who are no longer unemployed.
And if you happen to be on a training scheme or a work program, you are excluded from the figures as well.
It's a good thing that the Conservatives brought back Ian Duncan Smith to oversee the £12 billion of welfare cuts because he appears to be a man utterly without remorse.
The Conservatives plan to close 15 Remploy Factories, which was a company owned by the government to employ disabled people to help them to work.
900 disabled workers have lost their jobs.
To go with the thousand previous redundancies that closing re-employed factories has caused.
Which is really bad luck as the benefit cuts are hitting disabled people hardest.
A coalition of 90 organisations and charities focused on helping disabled people found that around 85% of disabled people say that losing their disability allowance will drive them into isolation.
95% fear it will damage their health.
78% say their health has got worse as a result of the stress this has caused.
87% of disabled people say their everyday living costs are significantly higher because of their condition.
And 90% of welfare rights advisors say too many disabled people are slipping through the net and are left without adequate support by the benefit system.
Not that the man presiding over all of this gives a shit, he's too busy getting his portrait painted at the taxpayers expense.
I am not joking.
So basically, if you're unemployed, you can look forward to having your benefits cap lowered.
You can look forward to seeing housing benefits scrapped for people under 21.
You can look forward to seeing the bedroom tax increased.
We'll get to that in a minute.
Just before we cover how civil servants have been leaking that there are extremely controversial cuts to benefits coming up.
Aside from targeting young mothers and the disabled, they plan on restricting the carers' allowance fund and cutting the access to work fund for disabled people.
Since it came up, we may as well discuss the bedroom tax.
The bedroom tax is the most miserly thing since the window tax of the 18th century.
Long story short, the amount of money you will receive in housing benefits will be reduced for each spare bedroom you have.
Basically, you can lose up to 25% of your housing benefit for the spare bedrooms in your house.
The chances are these people are renting and therefore these spare bedrooms can't be sublet, so these spare bedrooms aren't making them any money.
Which means that people who are poor are just receiving less money from the state.
In what is an apparent bid to force poor people into smaller houses.
You probably won't be surprised to hear that the end result of this is that tens of thousands of people are now facing eviction.
And this scheme is just going to be increased since the Tories' victory in the election, with up to a million more people to be affected by it.
So when David Cameron announces that we are on the brink of something special, I can only question what the fuck is going on in his mind.
The next thing on the list of no surprises is that food banks are on the rise because the poor people are starving.
Food banks are charities where people donate cans of food or packets of pasta or whatever to these food banks that the poor people who can't afford to eat can go there and get free food from.
In 21st century Britain.
Under the Tories there has been a shocking rise in the number of users of food banks.
Almost a million people claimed food from these food banks, up almost 350,000 people from the year before.
And the Tories had the fucking gall to say that there was no evidence of a link between welfare reforms and the use of food banks.
Fuck you.
83% of the food banks reported that benefit sanctions, or the benefits payments are temporarily stopped, had resulted in more people being referred for emergency food.
For fuck's sake, Conservatives, it's obvious that that is the reason that people need charity.
But that's the point.
The food bank is on the rise.
It's not going anywhere.
There are more and more food banks being established around the country because people need them.
There are over 400 of them now.
And unsurprisingly, these food banks are being taken advantage of by unscrupulous people who may or may not be members of the Tory party.
For some reason, David Cameron doesn't want to talk about food banks, which is a surprise because they are a prime example of the big society that he vaunted so much when he first came to power.
Maybe it's because the explosion of food banks can only be explained by the explosion of poverty.
But don't worry, if you're unemployed and you don't really know what to do with yourself, the Conservatives are going to put you to work for free.
People between 18 and 21 who have not had a job for six months will be barred from claiming benefits unless they agree to start an apprenticeship or complete community work.
Because when you're a young person with little experience entering a job market in which there are three times as many people as there are jobs, what you need is to be penalised by the government.
They will be paid no more or less than any other benefit claimant, meaning that they would be earning the equivalent wage of £1.91 per hour.
But this isn't so bad.
It's only 18 to 21 year old people, and it is presumably to get them onto a course or something that will give them some kind of experience, help them make some sort of contacts in the real world.
The real travesty was Workfare.
What's Workfare?
Well, Workfare is the name given to government schemes where unemployed and disabled people have to work in return for their benefits.
It's like they're trying to bring back slavery or something.
The mandatory work activity is a mandatory and sanctioned scheme for people claiming JSA, 18 or over.
Claimants must work unpaid for up to 30 hours a week over a four week period or face losing their benefits.
But the work experience schemes are even worse.
Where claimants 16 to 24 are put on two to eight week work placements, usually in the private sector.
While protests have led to claimants on the work experience schemes no longer being sanctioned directly, they've been reported to being referred to the mandatory work activity if they do not, quote, volunteer for work experience.
The thing is, they say that these are for 16 to 24 year old people, but they're not.
They apply to a wide variety of people of all ages.
And I'm sure that you can already see the inherent problems with a system like this.
A system that forces unemployed people to work for free at private companies.
That's right, the end result of this system has already happened.
A man who was let go from his paid position at a company has been ordered to go back to that company to work for free on benefits.
And if he doesn't, he gets his benefits sanctioned.
This has actually happened in your country under the Conservatives.
Fucking think about that.
It turns out that Workfare did not help very many people at all find work.
With only 25% of people who completed Workfare getting a paid job at the end of it.
But, you know, loads and loads of corporations receiving plenty of free labour, courtesy of the government, and those poor unemployed bastards.
And if you aren't a private company who wants free labour, well, you will be bullied and intimidated into accepting them.
Needless to say, there was quite a lot of backlash against Workfare as well, primarily because it so resembled slave labour.
Some companies even started paying these people as if they were employees.
You're hearing that right.
Companies whose sole purpose is to make a profit decided to make less profits because the ethical concerns of forcing British citizens to work for them for free grew too great.
Poor old Ian Duncan Smith's appeal to the Supreme Court though was overturned as they ruled that the work programmes were legally flawed.
The court stopped short for ruling that regulations constituted forced or compulsory labour, but they did say that the 2011 regulations creating the programme were invalid as they did not contain a sufficiently detailed prescribed description of the schemes.
I assume they did this to save the embarrassment of the Conservatives being the first government in Britain to endorse slavery since 1807.
So after being declared essentially illegal, Workfare was retired and replaced with a variety of back-to-work schemes, all of which cost billions of pounds and were, quote, worse than doing nothing.
Which really makes it seem as if the Conservative Party is malevolent.
It's not just incompetent, like the Labour Party, it seems that the Conservative Party is actively trying to make things worse.
And it is on that note that we come to ATOS.
ATOS was a French company that the Tories contracted with an eye to examining and presumably reducing the number of people on disability allowance.
And it didn't take long before a spike of deaths were reported to the Department for Work and Pensions.
I'm just going to let these headlines flash by because I don't really think I have anything to add to them that isn't immediately obvious from reading them.
I mean, what kind of people were working at ATOS?
Well, the sorts of people who'd refer to those collecting sickness and disability benefits as parasites and down and outs.
Unsurprisingly, ATOS, given their mandate and practices, attracted some rather nefarious characters.
And it's not like the bosses didn't know that half of people ruled fit to work ended up destitute.
And why am I not surprised to see Ian Duncan Smith's face attached to another article about this?
Doctors from within ATOS came forward as whistleblowers to say, look, what is happening in this company is wrong.
Which led to GPs unanimously calling for these assessments to be scrapped because they were killing people.
And it sickens me to say that that isn't an exaggeration.
I'm sure it won't surprise you to learn that ATOS did everything they could to shut down public criticism of their company.
For example, Paul Smith, who runs the ATOS Register of Shame website, received legal action against himself from ATOS where they unironically claimed that he was libeling them.
In the end, instead of admitting that the Department of Work and Pensions was in the wrong, Ian Duncan Smith, they just simply said, look, we'll just pay them.
Just pay people their benefits.
We won't do the checks.
Just let's just sweep this under the rug.
In the end, even ATOS could see the writing on the wall and made a substantial financial settlement to the Department of Work and Pensions in exchange for an early termination of their contract.
Presumably before they were all dragged out of their offices and hanged in the fucking streets.
This is a picture of the Conservative Party when they were in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats.
The numbers circled in blue and yellow signify those members who are personally millionaires.
Most of the cabinet of 2010 were millionaires, and I've got no doubt that most of the 2015 cabinet will be millionaires as well.
Let's take a quick look at the list and see if we recognize any familiar faces.
Well, obviously we've got David Cameron and George Osborne, the Secretary of State William Haig and the Attorney General Dominic Grieve.
Hell even Nick Clegg is a millionaire.
No wonder he fit in so well with the Conservative Party.
The Minister for Women's Equality Theresa May, she's definitely more than equal, isn't she?
And what a surprise.
The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, our old friend, Ian Duncan Smith.
You know, I don't know about anyone else, but it strikes me as eminently sensible to put a sociopathic millionaire in charge of the welfare states of the United Kingdom.
Now, he just strikes me as a man who knows what it's like to be down on his luck.
I know he lives in a million pound mansion, but I really want to press home the point that I think Ian Duncan Smith is definitely the best choice to manage the welfare system.
I mean, we have a man in Ian Duncan Smith who fully understands what it is to be poor.
So when Smith is tasked with making work pay and reforming welfare, we know that he is fully aware of the challenges that poor people face and he's not creating unrealistic expectations for what people should be able to do on the very limited welfare budget that they will be given.
I mean he must be able to.
He did say that he could live on £53 a week, which was the same amount as one benefit claimant said he survives on after rent and bills.
And so naturally Smith who earns £135,000 a year completely understood what it was like to live on £53 a week and said yes of course I can do that, of course.
I guess Ian Duncan Smith didn't realize that the public would take his statements seriously and almost half a million people signed a petition to make Ian Duncan Smith prove that he can live on £53 a week.
Ian declared this to be a stunt, a stunt designed to make him prove his assertions and he was absolutely not going to live on £53 a week to prove that he could live on £53 a week.
His word is good enough.
Seriously though, everyone could tell that Smith absolutely understood that reducing his income by 97% was not a tenable prospect and for the people living on £53 a week, life is very, very difficult.
But this is the point I'm trying to make.
It's not that there's anything wrong with being rich.
It's really not.
And being millionaires really isn't being all that rich anyway.
The problem is really that the people who have lots of money are dictating how life should be for the people who don't have lots of money and they have no idea what it is like to have very little money.
And that's giving them the benefit of the doubt.
It could be that they are just vile and selfish people who look out for their own interests.
Despite being the elected representatives of the people of Britain to run their government for the best interests of the people of Britain, they seem to have no compunction in giving themselves tax cuts.
I wish I was joking.
Due to a change of the top rate of tax, which almost all of the Conservative Party fall into, people earning a million pounds a year will have a tax reduction of £42,000 while they are scrimping and saving and squeezing the poorest people in society.
It's like something out of a fucking Dickens novel.
These tax cuts for millionaires are removing £3 billion from the exchequer every year.
And they are being recouped from the poorest people in society.
And then you have jackasses like Ian Duncan Smith flippantly saying, yeah, sure, I could live on £53 a week.
Anyone can.
Well, how would you fucking know?
His claim that he knows what it's like to be down and out and unemployed and poor really rings rather hollow when you consider that in 1982 he married the daughter of a baron.
So what's going up under the millionaire Tory government?
It's getting rather depressing hearing about all these cuts and how everything's just going down and badly.
Let's get some good news for a moment.
Good news if you're a banker, your bonus is up by 64%.
Suicide rates are up so that's less peasants around to clutter up the place.
The number of children per classroom is up.
And energy bills are up so maybe we'll scythe off some of those pesky old people in the winter.
Council tax is up but only for poor people.
And the housing benefit bill is up but that's not as bad as it sounds because it's going into the pockets of Tory donors.
Homelessness is up but don't worry your local MP isn't going to lose any sleep over it.
Court summons are up but again that's fine it's just for the plebs.
And child poverty is up with 3.5 million children in the UK living in poverty.
VAT's up which undoubtedly hits the poor harder than the rich but you know what?
Fuck them.
And tuition fees are also up which is why Nick the Turncoat Clegg's party got so badly tanked in the election.
Okay well how about immigration?
I mean the Tories did say that they were going to cap immigration and that that would be brought under control and it would be reduced.
And that's not just from outside of the EU either.
They were planning to do it from within the EU.
Well shit.
A pledge that fails spectacularly as figures show net migration almost three times as high as Tories promised.
Well you know I'm sure that's got nothing to do with the budgetary strains that the NHS is finding itself under.
So though this government has had to make some difficult decisions, we are making progress.
We're paying down Britain's debts, insisting on excellence in our schools, sorting out the welfare system, tackling out-of-control immigration, doing what's right for Britain in the long term.
And over the next year, no matter how tough it gets, that is what we'll continue to do.
So we hear an awful lot about the Conservatives, quote, paying down Britain's debts.
But how true is this?
It is, of course, the opposite of truth.
It is an anti-truth.
It is something that is not only not correct, but the opposite of this thing is correct.
I mean, I think there might be a word for it.
I'm not quite sure, maybe, oh yeah, it's bullshit.
Everyone thought that the debt increase under Labour was catastrophic, but that is nothing compared to the mismanagement of George Osborne.
When Labour left office, the debt was 811 billion.
That seems like a ridiculous amount.
But under the Tories, it seems like a fucking fairy tale.
Because it's gone up by 80% to £1,451 billion.
To say we're paying down Britain's debts is such a brazen and bold-faced lie that the UK statistics authorities came out in public and rebuked Cameron for saying it.
Unsurprisingly, Cameron's political opponents went on to make a formal complaint.
But you might be thinking, well, hang on, didn't they mean the deficit?
And they might well have meant that.
But their claims about reducing the deficit aren't true either.
Current borrowing is down 6.4% while net borrowing, overall borrowing, has fallen by 18.3%.
So I suppose we should congratulate them on doing something.
Just in case anyone wasn't aware, the debt is the total amount of money the government owes and the deficit is the difference between the government's incomes and the government's expenditures, which affects the rate at which the debt grows or shrinks.
Basically what the Tories have achieved so far is to reduce the speed at which the debt grows.
Which would be wonderful if they hadn't increased the deficit so dramatically when they had entered office.
We are now finally back at the levels the Labour Party left us at.
And they had a ridiculously high deficit.
And before you go thinking, yeah, well, but for the next five years, these projections look pretty good.
Well, big deal.
It's not like the Tories have ever actually stuck to any of their targets in the past, so there's no reason to think they're going to stick to them in the future.
And you might be thinking, well, surely the little fat vampire running the economy is well aware of what's going on and he knows how to fix it.
Well, I wouldn't put money on it given that George Osborne has a bachelor's degree in history and intended to pursue a career as a journalist.
I can only imagine that it was a vast amount of cronyism that led to this man being in charge of the economy of a first world nation.
So I suppose the question becomes, who is bankrolling these idiots?
Who is paying for these people to demonstrably degrade the country?
Well, someone is.
Someone outside of the public finance is doing it as well.
The Conservative Party received the most donations outside of public funding.
Well, it's not going to come as any surprise to you that it was billionaire hedge fund managers.
What a fucking shock.
And did they directly benefit?
Of course they did.
In 2013, the stamp duty reserve tax was abolished, which has been described by Labour as a £145 million hedge fund tax cut.
And this is a tax loophole that the Conservatives are not even eager to close.
I'm not surprised about that, to be honest.
Essentially, what we're seeing is the super rich paying the rich to shit on the poor so the middle classes won't realize how screwed they are getting.
Make no mistake, Tory party donors are making money hand over fist because of Tory party policies.
And this is not like a small thing either.
Almost half of the wealthiest hedge fund managers in the country have donated to the Conservative Party.
They do this at the Tory Leaders Group Donor Club, a chance for like-minded people to talk for the low price of £50,000.
Tory party donors attend a lot of these group events, so there is simply no doubt that they must be getting their money's worth.
So now that Call Me Dave and the gang are back in power, what can we look forward to over the next five years?
I mean, in addition to the privatisation, the cuts, the food banks, the poverty, the increase in immigration, the poor getting poorer, the rich getting richer, and the country sliding further into debt.
Aside from all of that, what can we expect?
Well, assaults on your basic freedoms.
You may remember when the Conservative Party arbitrarily banned a long list of seemingly innocuous sex acts from UK porn.
Well, they are attacking freedom of the press already, so we can expect to see more of that.
I imagine they'll continue to try and reduce freedom of information requests so you can't find out what they're doing.
And they are doubtless going to keep pushing their snoopers charter so they will know exactly what you are doing.
But I think what worries me the most is this.
David Cameron to unveil new limits on extremists' activities in Queen's speech.
The Prime Minister will announce counter-terrorism bill, including plans to restrict harmful actions of those seeking to radicalise young people.
And that sounds good on the surface, doesn't it?
But then so did the Patriot Act.
These measures would give the police powers to apply to the High Court for an order to limit the, quote, harmful activities of an extremist individual.
The definition of harmful is to include a risk of public disorder, a risk of harassment, alarm or distress creating a threat to the functioning of democracy.
All of these terms are very, very open to interpretation.
Which is why the Liberal Democrats vetoed them when they were proposed in Parliament last March on the grounds of freedom of speech.
These are a bad thing.
They're probably trying to prevent dissent.
But not prevent dissent by being a good and effective party.
Prevent dissent by act of law.
They are directly going after your right to strike, your right to privacy and your right to independent thought.
David Cameron wants to target people who believe in certain values.
I'm not sure I want David Cameron determining what values are appropriate and what values aren't.
To be honest, I can't believe so many people voted for the Conservatives.
I really can't.
I can't believe with everything that they've done in the last five years, anyone would even consider it.
Even if you're a Conservative person, these are not your people.
If you are not a millionaire, the Conservative Party is not going to help you.
The Conservatives are the party of the rich, and if you're not rich, they are not your party.
They have made deep cuts to this country's services under the guise of reducing the deficit.
But at the same time, they're reducing taxes on the wealthiest people in the country, which offsets any cuts that they're making.
And they fill the pockets of their billionaire donors as they do it.
I don't know how anyone, anyone could have the balls to say that this is not class warfare, because that is exactly what this is.
I'm going to leave you with Cassette Boy's amazing David Cameron rap.
And I'd really like you to pay attention to the lyrics, because they are incredibly accurate.
It's a work of art.
Thank you.
Thank you.
We've been recording the music video and it goes like this.
I'm hardcore and I know the score and I am disgusted by the poor and my chums matter more because we are the law and I've made sure we're ready for class war taking money from the man who works long hours giving power to the tycoon in the glass towers.
That is why I can look you in the eye and say this is the party of the mother buffers.
We don't care about the mother-supplers because this is the party of the mother fuckers and no, I don't think that's a dirty word.
So let the beat drop.
I come here with flows right from the top.
Everybody knows if you work in a shop, we won't help you.
And you know what?
People rising from the bottom to the top has got to stop.
We have the bravery to bring back slavery.
Working in a supermarket is just the start of it.
My friends, there is no job at the end of it.
You will be working for your benefits forever.
Let me get this off my chest.
Saying, yes, we are selling the NHS and we'll give you less.
And that is just for starters.
Even after privatising sticking plasters, it is a social disaster that makes our hearts beat faster.
Now, I am your master.
The last thing this country needs is us, the conservatives, worse than the alternative.
We don't care if you're driven to despair.
Don't you dare say it's not fair.
I'm not saying it's not funny.
It is for me.
I've got loads of money.
This is the party of the mother fuckers.
The country is run.
For me and my mothers, this is the party of the mother fuckers.
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