Rally round the flag. One Britain. Undivisible. The rhetoric from the Tories is one of right wing British Nationalism. In a world where Britain is portrayed in the right wing press such as the Daily Mail and the Daily Express as being at loggerheads with the EU and under threat from Muslim Extremism, and at risk of losing control of Scotland and Northern Ireland, it’s easy to simply wave the flag, demand unity in the face of adversity and to slyly coax people to put their differences aside, invoking the Dunkirk spirit and “Our Boys” imagery to do so.
As politics go, these are legitimate tactics.
But is it not up to us to see through the jingoism and rhetoric and to point out what is coming through the back door unseen?
The Tories are undoubtedly purveyors of avarice and enemies of the working people. Friends to big business, to shareholders and financiers, to arms dealers and privateers, the working people of Britain are nothing but fodder to be be fed to big business and discarded when no longer productive.
The sick, the disabled and those too old or infirm to work are a burden, to be managed at the lowest cost, in the most degrading and inhuman way possible. State assets are seen as short term generators of profit to prop up failing budgets; to be sold off to any bidder who’ll join in the crusade to strip workers of rights, and to reduce the ordinary working folk to commodities, minimum wage slave labour to generate profit for the shareholders.
Look around you and tell me you DON’T know people who have been shafted by them. How many of you see people unable to afford prescriptions and being forced to choose which of the drugs they need to keep them alive they can afford? How many of you see pensioners robbed of their dignity before being robbed of their savings and their homes to pay for “care” where they are treated like animals, fed on slops on a 36p a day budget, while the profits run into the fat cats pockets?
You see schools struggle with budget cuts, education suffer, libraries close, dirty streets strewn with litter that no one has the money to pick up, meanwhile private companies rob the public purse with inflated contracts where they spend other peoples money without a second thought, because they can always put the squeeze on them some more.
And all the time the bankers get greedier, the fat cats get fatter and the Daily Mail blames the immigrants and the unemployed and tells you to keep voting Tory.
I am bewildered how after all these years the working class of this country seem blind to how Thatcherism is alive and well and living in Westminster. I am bewildered how the working class of this country seem so willing to turn a blind eye to the rotten beating heart at the core of the Tory party. I am bewildered at how so many people are willing to ignore all that they have done, because they are waving the flag. The “I’m alright jack brigade” now hold sway.
Some of you are doing alright. Compared to some you have good wages and compared to some you have reasonable conditions. But they are under threat from a party that wants to rip every last one from you. When you vote Tory you sell out everyone in this country who is struggling, everyone who needs a hand from the system, everyone who hasn’t had the breaks that many of us have.
Above all, when you vote Tory the person you sell out most of all is yourself.