Conservatism in a nutshell

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This article is repeated in full with the kind permission of the author, Kitty S. Jones (Twitter ID: @suejone02063672).

It’s not enough to defeat Tory ideology. We also have to defeat the “drum beat”. We have to defeat the propaganda machine that brainwashes people with their slogans and catchphrases. You’ve heard those slogans -“less government”, “personal responsibility”, “hard-working families”, “making work pay” and lots of flag waving. These are shorthand for an entire world-view. But ever such a shabby, ruthless and paltry one.

A clue is in the name: The word “Tory” derives from the Middle Irish word tóraidhe, which means outlaw, robber or brigand, from the Irish word tóir, meaning “pursuit”, since outlaws were “pursued men”. It was originally used to refer to an Irish outlaw and later applied to Confederates or Royalists in arms. The term was thus originally a term of abuse. The Tories live by plunder. They steal your taxes, your public services, your state provision and your labour, in order to raise more money for the rich.

It’s a world of corporate feudalism, and I heard some smart person from the States once sum up the Tories neatly with the phrase “cheap-labour conservatism”. How very apt. It fits so well. Basically, the larger the labour supply, the cheaper it is. The more desperately you need a job, the less you tend to demand for your wages, and the more power those big business Tory buddies have over you. This is what the Tories actually mean by “making work pay” – it’s either rationed out peanuts or starvation.

The Tories engineer this socio-economic situation every time they are in office. Think back to Thatcher, she did it, Major did it – it’s a manufactured recession and a large reserve army of cheap labour every time. Always the same with the Tories. Because it suits their “business friendly” agenda.

Conservatives don’t like social spending or welfare – our safety net. That’s because when you’re unemployed and desperate, companies can pay you whatever they feel like – which is inevitably next to nothing. You see, the Tories want you in a position to work for next to nothing or starve, so their business buddies can focus on feeding their profits, which is their only priority. Cheap-labour conservatives don’t like the minimum wage or other improvements in wages and working conditions. These policies undo all of their efforts to keep you desperate. They don’t like European Union labour laws and directives either, for the same reason.

Cheap-labour conservatives don’t like unions. Because when we unite and organise, wages go up. Working conditions improve. That’s why workers unionise. Seems workers don’t like being desperate. But businesses don’t like to pay out money. They like to hoard it.

Cheap-labour conservatives constantly bray about “morality”, “virtue”, “respect for authority”, “hard work” and other such vaguely defined values. This is only so that they can blame you for being desperate due to your own “immorality”, lack of “values” and “poor choices”.

Cheap-labour conservatives encourage racism, misogyny, homophobia and other forms of bigotry. That’s because bigotry among wage earners distracts them, and keeps them from recognising their common interests as wage earners. Divide and rule.

An ugly truth is that cheap-labour conservatives don’t like working people. They don’t like working class opportunities and prosperity, and the reason for this is very simple. Lords have a harder time kicking us around when we aren’t desperate.

Once we understand this about the cheap-labour conservatives, the real motivation for their policies makes perfect sense. Cheap-labour conservatives, the neo-feudalist fools, believe in social hierarchy and privilege, so the only prosperity they want to permit is limited to them. They want to see absolutely nothing that benefits us whatsoever. And even better if we fight amongst ourselves for scraps. Divide and rule.

The Tory mantra “making work pay” is an argument for raising wages, not cutting benefits, talk about the rationally illiterate…. But then cheap-labour conservatives hope that those affected will take comfort in the fact that if your wages are not enough to meet the cost of living, at least those without a job are much worse off.

The Tory “race to the bottom” is plain, and after four years of austerity, Osborne is forced to concede that the new welfare cuts leave £9bn of the deficit reductions promised by the Chancellor unaccounted for. The cuts are purely ideological. Tories: dangerous with the economy, dangerous for society.

“Less government” is another defining right-wing slogan. It’s also all about cheap labour. Included within the slogan is the whole conservative set of assumptions about the nature of the “free market” and government’s role in that market. “Less government” permitted the Conservatives’ cunning transformation of a crisis caused by banks into a crisis of public spending. It was a huge triumph of Tory dogma over the facts. And of course, our public services are being sold off to private companies.

And anyone would think, to hear the Tories talk, that the “free market” isn’t rigged to benefit the wealthy. The bedroom tax, welfare cuts, public service cuts, cutting inheritance tax and handing tax breaks to the wealthy are, after all, examples of state interventions, and not “market forces”, which the Tories always use as a front to suck the life out of communities, and to keep people desperate.

The whole “public sector/private sector” distinction is an invention of the cheap-labour conservatives. They say that the “private sector” exists outside and independently of the “public sector”. The public sector, according to cheap-labour ideology, can only “interfere” with the “private sector”, and that such “interference” is “inefficient”, “costly” and “unprincipled”.

Using this ideology, the cheap-labour ideologue paints him/her self as a defender of “freedom” against “big government tyranny”. In fact, the whole idea that the “private sector” is independent of the public sector is totally bogus, because “the market” is created by public laws, public institutions and public infrastructure. But the cheap-labour conservatives aren’t really interested in “freedom”. What they want is the privatised tyranny of industrial serfdom, the main characteristic of which is – you guessed it – cheap labour.

http://kittysjones.wordpress.com/2014/09/26/conservatism-in-a-nutshell/

Not forgetting the B(W)ankers that put the UK in the mess the rest of us are having to pay for and Davy boy will make sure we pay every penny if the UK are stupid enough to let them back into power in May, the UK will not know what has hit it because the next tranch of cuts from the Tories will be double of what they have been over the last 5 years.

Can we assume that those working class people who support Conservatism would be happy to sign this?  


https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CGJ4VH0WwAA8fOg.jpg

On behalf of others, no doubt

You can have fun playing with language:

Definition of CONSERVATOR

1
a : one that preserves from injury or violation : protector

b : one that is responsible for the care, restoration, and repair of archival or museum articles

2

: a person, official, or institution designated to take over and protect the interests of an incompetent

3

: an official charged with the protection of something affecting public welfare and interests

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conservator

Cecil Parkinson proved that Thatcherism had nothing to do with family values

From an article by Suzanne Moore:-

Cecil Parkinson was one of Thatcher’s favourites. He became trade and industry secretary, and Thatcher wanted to promote him to foreign secretary. He was smooth on TV, if you like that sort of thing. He calmly explained what the Tories were doing: for example, going to war over some islands that most people had never heard of – the Falklands.

The dash was interrupted when his secret 12-year affair with his pregnant secretary became public knowledge. He had once promised to marry her, but changed his mind. Sara Keays decided to keep the baby. Financial arrangements were made for the child, Flora, who had multiple disabilities, including epilepsy, and who at the age of four underwent brain surgery for a tumour.

In 1992, Parkinson was elevated to the Lords. He then also secured an extraordinary court injunction that meant Flora could not be discussed in public. Her name could not even appear in the programme of her school play. She never received a birthday card from her extremely wealthy father and he never saw her. When the injunction ceased on her 18th birthday, Flora said publicly: “I would like to see him. If he loved me he would want to see me and be in my everyday life …” Keays was subject to a campaign to discredit her.

Thatcherism is often misread as being about a set of fixed family values. Actually, it was pretty amoral; it was entirely about privatisation. You could do what you like if you could pay for it, as Parkinson did. The ultimate privatisation is one where the rich are not subject to the same judgments as the poor. Pay as you go.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/27/cecil-proved-that-thatcherism-had-nothing-to-do-with-family-values

So there is no difference between the Thatchers gov't & this Tory gov't one law for them and another for us PLEBS.

Cecil Parkinson, along with inter alia Jonathan Aitken and Jeffrey Archer broke the First Law of Toryism, which is THOU SHALL NOT GET FOUND OUT.

God bless 'em!

I exclude Alan Coulson, who was just a Minder imposed on Number 10 by the Dirty Digger.

The only reason that Tory scandals in this Tory gov't are not coming out to the public OW, is because Tory HQ control most of the media & press.

IVAN I have known that the Tories are the working mans enemy since I was 5 years old thanks to my grandfather, with 18 years of Thatcher and nearly 6 years of Davy boy they have made it as plain as the nose on a face.

Redflag wrote:IVAN I have known that the Tories are the working mans enemy since I was 5 years old thanks to my grandfather, with 18 years of Thatcher and nearly 6 years of Davy boy they have made it as plain as the nose on a face.

Not just the enemy of the working MAN, Redflag but currently of working women in particular. A 62-year-old born in 1953 would have first been told that she would have to wait until 2017 for the pension she would always have expected by 2014, but recent announcements from Gideon Osborne in fact mean that her pension will not now start to be paid until 2019.

I have been watching that debatein the HOC, that is one generation of women that will not be voting Tory in May OW well I hope not, as I have said before there is only one answer that will solve all our problems with the Tories REVOLUTION French Style.

I always thought that 'tory' was short for toerag.

You're not wrong there, Andy:

Irish  tóraighe
outlaw, bandit, derivative of tóir chase, pursuit

You get rid of one Tory toerag and there's always another to take his or her place....

Stephen Crabb claimed his 'main home' was a room in another MP’s flat, after buying a new house for his family at taxpayers’ expense

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5318954/Stephen-Crabb-nominates-fellow-MPs-flat-as-main-home-MPs-expenses.html

And this the man they say is 'in touch with people' because he was brought up on benefits by a single mother. Guess it decided him to grab all he could and damn everyone else.

Crabb has the same philosophy and political dogma that Dave and Gideon share.
He was selected because he is a toadying yes man who will not upset the apple cart.

Crab apple, Andy? O U R A 1 !

I am thick skinned, dont get the pip easily and always get to the core of the debate

Panama Papers: Cameron’s admission is a sudden insight into what the Tories stand for

From an article by John Harris:-

Every so often, the presentational masks acquired down the years by British conservatism slip. If only for a moment, the supposed convictions Tory politicians bang on about are reduced to mere window dressing, and what cynical old lefties tend to talk about as the venal pursuit of class interests suddenly looks like a matter of unanswerable fact.

Cameron would like us to think of his politics as a hybrid of the two strands of conservatism that preceded him: the belief in hard work and self-reliance embodied by Thatcher, and the patrician, socially concerned Toryism which still has a place in some Conservatives’ hearts. The result has been what the Tories have been selling us for the last 10 years: a utopia of home ownership and endless graft, where so long as you avoid being on “welfare”, the joys of social mobility can be yours, and we are – of course – all in this together.

On a bad day, this can still look like the politics of spivvery and cruelty, and despite the fact that Tory links with financial sharp practice are as old as time, the right kind of story can still hurt them too. We now know Cameron wrote to Herman Van Rompuy in 2013, warning him against transparency moves on offshore trusts, and its neat fit with the Cameron family’s complicated finances. Only weeks before, Cameron had given a speech to the Tory conference assuring anyone listening that “this party is on the side of working people”. But in the letter to Van Rompuy, he suggested that offshore vehicles used for what high-end financial advisers call “inheritance planning” might best be left alone.

For the whole article:-
http://www.theguardian.com/news/commentisfree/2016/apr/07/cameron-admission-what-tories-stand-for

"A private matter"

http://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/business/this-is-a-very-british-scandal-%e2%80%93-so-what-if-anything-will-osborne-do-about-it/ar-BBrl5rz?li=BBoPMmp&ocid=U219DHP

Yes, it's another opportunity this evening to throw things at the telly during Dominic Sandbrook's selective view of the 1980s on BBC2.  

In this final part he will refer to the Poll Tax.  Perhaps he will suggest that the strongest opposition came from a letter in The Times from Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells.  (9.00 pm unless you prefer the beach volleyball showing on all other available BBC platforms).