Everything That The Tories Have Been Doing Was for The Bad of The Country

Boris Johnson has been promising prosperity, as has every post-2010 Conservative government. But none of them has shown any success. Each of these regimes has had an explanation or at least an excuse, as to why, despite all their efforts, they have not achieved their alleged goal. Boris Johnson’s leadership is particularly generously endowed with rocket league plausible excuses as to why it is performing so badly. There is the war in Ukraine, which is affecting food prices, but also hitting the price of oil, which means that nearly everything becomes more expensive. In addition, there are still residual effects of the pandemic, which may still be causing staff shortages.

Conservative politicians make use of these explanations at every opportunity. But the economy was struggling well before any of these disasters hit. There was a problem with the workers not being educated to a satisfactory level, which was a part cause of the skills shortages seen in teaching, medicine and engineering. There was also the collapse in purchasing power brought about by the many job cuts, pay freezes and welfare benefit cuts. Whenever pay falls behind prices, often, but not always because of inflation, purchasing power drops. When these cuts take place on a large scale, driven by government policy, it hits the economy, and may lead to job losses, as manufacturers and retailers cut staff to match the new, lower levels of sales.

And then there are all the carefully negotiated pitfalls and self-inflicted injuries that are the natural progeny of Brexit. There was the shallow but mostly absent explanation of what Brexit meant, culminating in its apogee with the slogan, “Brexit means Brexit.”

There were the European workers who found the process of getting temporary visas for summer jobs unbearably complicated. There were the European nursing staff who are made to feel unwelcome by the “hostile environment” that the Tories had created. Plus the farmers, fishermen, exporters who because of the paperwork and excessive form filling, just had to give up some aspects of their work. In an interview, a Marks & Spencer executive said that they had to stop their exports to France, because of the paperwork, which was not merely excessive, but outright stupid. Some of the export paperwork, the executive said, had to be written in Latin, a requirement which surely could only have been put in by ‘educated in the classics’ Boris. Indeed, the only credible purpose for such a clause would be to make exporting more difficult.

Then there was the dedicated effort that Boris and his co-conspirator David Frost made to drive a wedge between Britain and Europe. There were occasional reports in the press that the EU negotiators found it very difficult to deal with the British team. At one point, Boris Johnson suggested that the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish republic was of no more importance than the border between the London boroughs of Camden and Westminster. (Jonathan Freedland. The Guardian. Wednesday February 28 2018.)

It is understandable if a government makes a few mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes. It is still believable even if they make a lot of mistakes. But if they only make mistakes and nothing ever goes right, we have a good reason to be suspicious. And if they do the wrong thing because they have ignored the advice of their own scientific experts, one should be very, very suspicious. And if the majority of what they do turns out to be a disaster, while their promises fade into distant memory, and what they do achieve is in their interest rather than ours, we have a very good reason to question what they are saying.

Indeed, it has been a constant pattern with the post-2010 Conservative governments. A multitude of promises have been made, from prosperity to a high-tech economy, to the abolition of burning injustices, to levelling up, to a global Britain. None of those have come to fruition. The policies that have come into effect, however, have led to a cut in the police force of 20,000 officers, a cut in education funding, hundreds of libraries closed, benefits claimants close to starvation, 3.6 million UK children living in poverty, and for 2 million families, it’s not a choice between eating and heating. Often, they go without either.

Since 2010, Britain has had governments that made life worse for the ordinary person, cut welfare benefits, downgraded public services, or allowed them to deteriorate simply by not increasing their funding. Over the same period it fought ferociously so that wealthy people could take home more of their income after tax. It also struggled to make sure that corporations could enter into contracts with the state without having to worry about the quality of work they offered.

And the Tories had not been doing what the country needed, or what people wanted, so one has to ask, whose agenda were the Tories following? David Cameron’s? Theresa May’s? Boris’s? Or that of big business? Because the big corporations and their executives were the main beneficiaries of post-2010 Conservative governments. It is time that we put the responsibility for the deterioration in Britain squarely where it belongs - Big businesses and the party that supports them.