The Biggest Drop In Living Standards On Record - Stop Voting For Tory Governments

 

After twelve long years of Conservative rule we find ourselves facing the biggest drop in living standards on record following Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn Statement. 

The Office for Budget Responsibility says that household incomes are going to plummet by 7% over the next few years and unemployment will rise by more than HALF A MILLION.

Never again can we let the Conservatives declare themselves to be the party of economic responsibility, or the party of growth, growth, growth. They’ve had twelve years and we’re falling faster than we can fly.

Hunt - damn typo - is the fourth Tory Chancellor in just four months and the Chancellor that has delivered the highest tax burden since WW2. 

The Tories got their excuses in early, of course. They are blaming “global factors”, the pandemic, and the old favourite, Putin’s war in Ukraine. 

Here’s the thing, the Tories must not be allowed to wash their hands of the last twelve years, and while the commentariat will pass them the anti-bacterial hand wash, we the people cannot sit back and allow them to pin their own massive failures on anyone or anything but themselves. 

The Autumn Statement - delivered three weeks late due to the last Chancellor and Prime Minister crashing the economy - offered nothing beyond continued misery for the squeezed middle. 

Now my concern isn’t for Mr and Mrs Montgomery-Smythe worrying about how they will scrape up £10,000 a term to send Tarquin to private school, but low paid workers who are struggling to send their children to school with a basic packed lunch. 

Of course, Jeremy Hunt had the option to remove the charitable status enjoyed by private schools such as Eton College raising an extra £1.7 billion a year, but Hunt is hardly likely to bite the hand that feeds the Tory party.

It didn’t take long for the Tory commentators to complain about the 10.1% increase in benefit payments, but I say to them, how much extra is 10.1% of pretty much sweet fuck all? 

Do we really think benefit claimants and pensioners are the big winners of the Autumn Statement? If you do, I can only congratulate you on falling for the divisive rhetoric of the Daily Mail. 

Sure, some pensioners don’t need the 10.1% increase to their pensions, but one in five pensioners - more than 2 million people – are living in relative poverty in the UK, an increase of more than 200,000 in the past year alone, according to a comprehensive review of national data. 

Of course, the Tories could’ve saved a fortune and means-tested the financial assistance - or they could direct the cost of living payments from pensioners that don’t need the support to low income households who are having to hold down more jobs than an MP simply to keep their heads above water. 

But the government knows they need votes, and they know they can usually rely on the votes of the over-65’s - Ipsos MORI estimated that the Conservatives had a 47-point lead amongst voters aged 65 and above at the 2019 general election. 

As with every other Tory fiscal event, there is a huge amount of devil in the details and an overwhelming silence on the realities of the hardship facing millions of British people today. 

Let’s start with free school meals. 

Some 800,000 children living in poverty do not qualify for free school meals. The government remained silent on this national disgrace, but hidden away in the Autumn Statement small print is a huge tax cut on bank profits with the surcharge being cut from 8% to 5%. 

Just a few years back we had a fantastic plan to provide free school meals for every primary school child, costing around £1 billion a year - yes, that’s a hell of a lot of money, but it could be paid for 3-times over by ending the non-dom tax dodging loophole.

How about your NHS? Did you hear the Tory cheers when Jeremy Hunt announced an ‘extra’ £3.3 billion a year for the health service? 

You might’ve noticed inflation is currently at 10.1% and with the NHS already facing a £7 billion funding shortfall in its budget this year the ‘extra’ £3.3 billion of NHS funding announced by Hunt doesn’t even cover half of that.

We are also seeing a growing demand in service, waiting lists are at record highs, and a trip to A&E can take nearly as long as it took for the disgraced liar, Boris Johnson, to admit he did indeed party with his friends at Downing Street while you couldn’t attend a loved ones funeral. 

Johnson - a weasel of a man that should undoubtedly be put on trial in a court of law alongside the camel-penis-eating-weirdo in the celebrity jungle - was last seen bunking off from Parliament so he could pocket £276,000 for a single speech to the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers, in Colorado Springs, US. 

The Tories think less than nothing of the constituents that they have been elected to serve. Johnson and Hancock - the architects of the Covid disaster - couldn’t be any more obvious with their disdain for us.

Whether they are earning £400,000 for a stint in the jungle or jetting off to the US to deliver a single speech for more than a quarter of a million pounds, it is YOU that is still paying their wages to do their job as an MP. 

I digress. 

The Autumn Statement also promised a return to austerity. This is by no means a fiscal necessity but simply a failed political ideology. 

The government is insisting the tax hikes and spending cuts amounting to £55 billion didn’t mean a return to austerity. 

Just how fucking stupid do they think you are? 

Enacting some £30 billion worth of spending cuts represents a return to austerity. I don’t need to be an economist to work that out, and for Hunt to insist otherwise is dishonest and utterly delusional.

Paul Johnson from the Institute of Fiscal Studies was pretty honest about the position we find ourselves in:

"The truth is we just got a lot poorer”. 

"We are in for a long, hard, unpleasant journey; a journey that has been made more arduous than it might have been by a series of economic own-goals”. 

After twelve long years of Tory rule I am of the belief they have scored so many own-goals they now find themselves in a place of no return. 

How much further damage the Conservatives will cause in the next two years is anyone's guess, and Starmer’s Tory 2nd XI are barely distinguishable from the first team. 

And for the few brave souls that have managed to get to the end of this rant and still find themselves ready to vote Conservative at the next election, I have just one question: 

What the hell is wrong with you? 

Until next time, 

Rachael

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