The Tories have shown us that for them - its class war as usual

The greenest government ever; cuddling a Husky at the North Pole; and hug a hoodie? This is what we got from Cameron before the 2010 general election. Now, in government we can see what the Tories are really like, and we can see that nothing has changed - they are still very much the nasty party. At the Tory party conference this week, obviously rattled by both UKIP, and Milliband's pledge to freeze energy prices, David Cameron and the Tories retreated to their comfort zone, on the far right of politics. Cameron even had the audacity to claim that all people under 25 should either be in a job or education, and they should not get benefits, when it is his government which has failed young people, and failed to provide them with the jobs and education they desperately need.

Why? Because it's this government's fault that there are a million people under 25 who are unemployed, even taking into account the government's fiddled unemployment figures, which claim that people on 'workfare' are not on the dole. It's the gross failure of this government, in its mismanagement of the economy, which is the cause of hardship for many millions of Britain's people. This is a government which has imposed class war austerity on the poorest and most vulnerable in order to get it's chums in finance and banking off the hook for the greatest economic crisis since the depression. 

The perpetrators of the crisis and their supporters have no shame, no guilt and no remorse. As long as they continue to be 'all right Jack' everything is fine as far as they are concerned. This really must be the worst government in British history, given the times we are in. No government in my living memory has shown so much contempt for the people it governs, and such naked regard for the exploiters who make up its natural allies. No government has set out so brazenly to destroy the institutions which its people love and upon which they depend.

Make no mistake about it this is an ideologically extremist  government. The forced labour, the openly racist attacks on immigrants, the destruction of collective provision, the attacks on trade unions, the worship of corporations and warmongering - this is a form of twenty first century fascism, fascism-lite maybe but fascist nonetheless. What the people who govern us have demonstrated is that you don't need jackboots to be a fascist. In the twenty first century fascists wear suits not boots. If you think I'm over-egging this take a look at this post by Henry Giroux about the rise of a new fascism in the USA. Here is a quote:

"The American political, cultural, and economic landscape is inhabited by the renewed return of authoritarianism evident in the ideologies of religious and secular certainty that legitimate the reign of economic Darwinism, the unchecked power of capital, the culture of fear and the expanding national security state. The ghosts of fascism also are evident in what Charles Derber and Yale Magress call elements of "the Weimer Syndrome," which include a severe and seemingly unresolvable economic crisis, liberals and moderate parties too weak to address the intensifying political and economic crises, the rise of far-right populist groups such as the Tea Party and white militia, and the emergence of the Christian Right, with its racist, anti-intellectual and fundamentalist ideology."

The good news is that the Tories are making themselves unelectable

Have you been following the Eastleigh byelection? No, neither have I. Its hard to get exited about a straight fight between the Tories and their Coalition partners, the Lib Dems, even though it could have implications for the future of the current government. What eventually brought the contest to my attention was the antics of the Tory candidate Maria Hutchings. I live in the North of England but you can hear her knuckles scraping from up here.

Hutchings is a typical Tory candidate, someone who sounds and looks like she was buried in the 1950's and has just been dug up for the occasion. Like most Tories, fifty years and more of social progress has passed her by. She's anti-abortion, doesn't like gay marriage and thinks her son is too intelligent to go to a mere state school. She says that her son wants to be a surgeon, and if he succeeds, after the high-powered private education she has planned for him, he would be well advised to operate on his mother and remove the small particle of brain lodged in her skull.

I'm not a psephologist, and I don't look at opinion polls, but what I do know is that the Tories last won a general election in 1992. Cameron failed to win a majority in 2010, much to the ire of his backbenchers, but Cameron himself is far more popular than the Tory Party. Cameron didn't fail. What he did do was to give the Tories a chance of power by de-toxifying the brand of the nasty party sufficiently to enable them to win more seats than any other party. As I've said before, Cameron is a complete charlatan, a deeply reactionary Thatcherite toff, who manages somehow to con people that he is the bloke next door, rather than a fully paid-up member of the ruling class. 

But every cloud has a silver lining, and despite the fact that Cameron,  Osborne and co. are screwing our economy and waging class war against all but their own kind, what they are doing in the process is making the Tories even more unelectable than they were in 2010. They are in a very similar predicament to the Republicans in the USA. Making predictions in politics is a dangerous game but here we go; I predict that the Tories already have no chance of winning outright in 2015, and will not be the largest party; furthermore, they will never win another election in their own right unless they stop serving their own narrow class interests and wise-up to that fact that they are completely out of touch with the majority of the British people. The former being impossible of course. Nothing could be better for Britain than the demise of the Tory Party, a Party which has caused immense damage to this island and its people. 

David Cameron's illiterate class war 'economics'

Once again David Cameron's chums in the capitalist class have seen an opportunity to kick the workers of the UK whilst they are down. Workers who have been subjected to pay freezes and pension cuts to pay for a crisis that was not of their making are to have their employment rights trashed to benefit those  'free' market fundamentalists who helped to cause  the crisis.

David Cameron: economically illiterate class warrior

In time-honoured fashion whenever a UK government has a 'problem' to solve they turn to a 'businessman' for ideas. And those ideas, which are habitually presented as being from someone who is 'dynamic' and 'innovative', always personally benefit the individual who came up with them, and people like him, at the expense of other people, usually workers. In this case, step forward Adrian Beecroft, a venture capitalist and Conservative Party donor, who thinks that fair compensation for loss of earnings at an employment tribunal, and reasonable notice of redundancy are hampering 'growth'. Even people inside government recognise that Beecroft is talking nonsense. See this quote from Garry Gibbon's blog about Beecroft's 15 page report:

"Government aide: “crap – supported by only one person in No. 10,” (Steve Hilton, allegedly)".

And Beecroft  is one of the people behind the company Wonga which provides small short term 'payday' loans at 4214% and have been described by campaigners as "legal loan sharks".

The Daily Telegraph claims this is a war on red tape, but then I guess that the pundits at the Telegraph think that any legislation which makes our society fairer and gives ordinary people decent protection at the expense of their chums in business has got to be a bad thing. I have no doubt that David Cameron's, and the Telegraph's lust for worker-bashing will only be satisfied when most of us are reduced to the abject penury and wage-slavery that they and their 'free' market fundamentalist buddies appear to think ought to be the lot of all UK workers - their own children and families excepted of course.

This is pretty pernicious stuff in itself but what makes it worse is that it is economically illiterate also. These kind of so-called 'structural' changes won't make one iota of improvement to UK growth, in fact, by making people poorer they are likely to reduce it. It was James Tobin the economist who came up with the financial transaction tax known as the Robin Hood Tax who said; "structural labour market policies can make only marginal improvements". 

Just as 'growth' and 'cutting red tape' are the fraudulent excuses for David Cameron waging class war on UK workers, now the government have shifted their excuses for our failing economy onto the Eurozone crisis. Before it was Labour government overspending that was the cause. So, one lie replaces another. Finally, one bit of good news today is that the Guardian now seems to have caught up with reality. Its well worth reading this editorial, and I'm quoting one of the key passages:

"At the heart of this calamitous [government] strategy is a wholesale misdiagnosis of how the market economy functions and a complete failure to understand why the financial crisis took place, the profundity of its impact and its implications for policy. For a generation, business and finance, cheered on by US neoconservatives and free market fundamentalists, have argued that the less capitalism is governed, regulated and shaped by the state, the better it works. Markets do everything best – managing business and systemic risk, innovating, investing, organising executive reward – without the intervention of the supposed dead hand of the state and without any acknowledgement of wider social obligations.

The lesson of the financial crisis is that this is complete hokum that serves the political and personal interests of the very rich."[my italics]

Really pleased to see that the Guardian has at last picked up on my "free market fundamentalist" tag. Someone must have been reading my blog :)

Make no mistake about it, Cameron and Osborne are evil

Why would a left-wing blogger and a ecosocialist make such a statement? Socialists aren't really supposed to deal in such terminology. Whilst most people would accept that 'leaders' in the past such as Hitler, Stalin and Gaddafi were evil individuals, surely describing our Prime Minister and Chancellor in such terms is way over the top? In addition to this, many socialists are atheists who prefer to deal with the hard-headed facts of history, economics and politics, rather than deal with issues in terms of morality.

Firstly lets deal with definitions. According to my Mac 'evil' means:

• profoundly immoral and malevolent; and
• harmful or tending to harm

If we accept these definitions lets examine the case of Messrs Cameron and Osborne. There can be no doubt that they are the ruling minds of a government which claims that we 'are all in this together', and then proceeds to dump the staggering costs of unregulated failure by wealthy, greed driven bankers onto the poorest and most vulnerable people in our society, and are behaving in a profoundly immoral way. Not only has the country had to deal with savage cuts of £81 billion in Osborne's first budget, but now, in the autumn statement we have further savage cuts and job losses which will hit the poorest people in this country hardest, and all that to save the necks of bankers and financial capitalism.

Both David Cameron and George Osborne are 'well educated" millionaires who are supposed to have been brought up in the best way this country can manage. They have had every advantage and opportunity, yet what they are doing is deeply reprehensible and dishonest. Its dishonest because they claim to be acting in the 'national interest' when they are clearly acting in the narrow interests of their class and against the interests of the vast majority of British people. Osborne claimed that savage cuts were necessary about two years before the 2010 election. He was swiftly slapped down by Cameron. Did either of them mention these 'savage cuts' in the election campaign? No, they kept silent because it was clear that this would damage their election hopes. Of course, its not just Cameron and Osborne who are to blame for the governments actions. There are 20 millionaires in the cabinet, and many MPs in Parliament who are playing the role of Auschwitz camp guards to Cameron's Hitler. You don't have to kill people to be evil, although it seems that at least 10 people have been killed by the cuts so far, you just need to cause them deliberate harm. That is what this government is doing with its class war cuts, knowing full well the consequences.

Morality matters. Morality is something that people on the left are profoundly concerned about. Not in the way the political right are, which is all about imposing your prejudices and beliefs on others, but in championing fairness and behaviour which treats all people equally. We have made great strides on that front over the past thirty years or so, everywhere in society but in the economy. Its essential that we champion the return of decent behaviour to our rotten democracy, which has become so scarred by the appalling behavior of government ministers.