Is there any alternative to the jaundiced Tory attitudes?

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Depressing, isn't it? All the miserable gits can come up with is oppression of the poor and fear of the disadvantaged. Never mind, here's something that can make us all feel better about the human race - even if it does have to include Cameron and Company .........

http://www.buzzfeed.com/expresident/pictures-that-will-restore-your-faith-in-humanity

House of Commons vote, 28 June 2017

Labour attempted to push through an amendment to the Queen's Speech calling on ministers to recruit more police officers and firefighters and to end the 1% limit on annual pay rises for public sector workers.

But their efforts were defeated in the House of Commons, with 323 MPs opposing the amendment versus 309 in favour. The result gave the Government a majority of 14.

Government benches cheered the result. They appeared not to have noticed that the Labour amendment manoeuvred the Tories and their supporters into voting against a pay-rise for the very public-sector workers upon whom they have been heaping so much praise for their valiant performance.

I'm not sure Tories really understand irony - let's hope this vote is remembered widely when we finally do get our new General Election

I hesitate to intrude upon private grief, but a lot of Tories must be wishing they had a fast-forward-button to press, that would get them past this week's party conference.

A lame-duck leader presides over a Britain with a dwindling GDP, falling Pound, falling London house-prices; rough-sleepers of Thatcherian proportions, crumbling Universal Credit operation and apparent mistrust from The Palace (not the Crystal one).

We are governed by Peter Pans who refuse to look after the next generation

From an article by Laurie Penny:-

We are led by an array of wizened children. The policies being pursued by the centre-right and the dregs of the neoliberal left are stubborn, selfish and infantile. How else are we supposed to think about the blind insistence that the same ideology that collapsed the world economy ten years ago will work just as well this time with a side-order of flailing, screeching nationalism? Our political leaders today have all the entitlement and lack of foresight of little kids with none of the instinctive sweetness and wonder.

The Tories have a young-people problem – the problem being that young people hate them and don’t want to vote for them. This is a problem that successive Tory leaders have been childishly kicking down the road until they could no longer avoid the spectre of “natural wastage”, which is a terrible way to talk about the fact that the loyal voters you bet the farm on are going to keep dying no matter how hard you ring-fence their pensions. Now, apparently, the Tories want to attract the young. The trouble is that they think this can be done with a swift rebrand and some slick lines. They’re skulking about like worn-out pick-up artists in a club at closing time, desperately trying to find someone under the age of 30 whom they haven’t already screwed. Well, perhaps they should have thought of that before they tripled tuition fees, tore up the welfare state and set the damn planet on fire.

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2017/10/we-are-governed-peter-pans-who-refuse-look-after-next-generation

Once again, it's "The System" which is failing us. MPs cannot see beyond their own five-year validity, so nobody is making long-term plans for growth or making adequate provision for e.g. care for the elderly, infrastructure or social levelling.

It’s true: Conservative governments really do kill people

From an article by Zoe Williams:-

Just as it’s verboten to call someone a liar in Parliament, so there is a curious and ancient disapproval around pointing out that a state has been the direct cause of any deaths, whether of its own citizens or abroad. It is taken as hysterical overstatement (something that should only be levelled at an authoritarian regime, which takes its people out and shoots them) and pitiful naivety (a wilful misunderstanding of the business of government, to trace its policies crudely back to the lives of those who are affected by them).

In 2015 there were 30,000 “excess deaths” in England and Wales, the greatest rise in mortality for 50 years, according to a study published this year, which concluded that “the evidence points to a major failure of the health system, possibly exacerbated by failings in social care”. Last year, the suicide rate within prisons in England and Wales reached an all-time high: 119 deaths, or one every three days. The background is a 40% drop in the number of prison officers.

Since “hysterical” and “naive” are two of the deadliest charges in political discourse, one always checks oneself before going full-pelt: we know that 90 people a month die after being declared fit for work, but can we really lay those deaths at the government’s feet? Plainly, they might have died anyway. All we can say about the Conservatives is that they instituted a disability assessment system that makes bad decisions, repeatedly, and causes untold trauma and desperation to people who are on the brink of death.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/13/conservative-governments-kill-people-health-disability-benefits-prisons

On the same theme.....  

Conservatives accused of “economic murder” in landmark study which links 120k deaths to austerity

The study, published in 'BMJ Open', identified that mortality rates in the UK had declined steadily from 2001 to 2010, but this reversed sharply with the death rate growing again after austerity came in. On this trajectory that could rise to nearly 200,000 excess deaths by the end of 2020.

https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/conservatives-accused-economic-murder-landmark-study-links-120k-deaths-austerity/16/11/

Hammond's 'no unemployed' gaffe fuels belief that Tories don't care

From an article by Alan Travis:-

Philip Hammond’s gaffe that “there are no unemployed” is damaging, despite his best efforts to explain it away, because it feeds into two widely held beliefs: that the Tories don’t care about the unemployed and that the chancellor may be good at the figures but has no wider political vision.

Hammond left the clear impression that the 1.4 million people on Britain’s official unemployment figures not only do not count, but they do not exist. He fed into decades of political dogma that the Tories simply do not care about the unemployed. His remark carried an echo of Norman Lamont’s notorious phrase at the height of the 1991 recession that “rising unemployment and the recession have been a price well worth paying to get inflation down”. But the impression also goes back to Margaret Thatcher’s own gaffe during the 1987 general election campaign when she described those who criticised her for creating an extra 1 million unemployed as “drooling and drivelling that they care”, and Norman Tebbit’s 1981 appeal to the unemployed “to get on their bikes and look for work”.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/nov/19/philip-hammond-no-unemployed-gaffe-fuels-beliefs-tories

"Unemployment" delivers a pliable workforce to Tory-donating bosses. Such a familiar habit they don't even notice when they're creating it.

totally not surprised