One has to give it to the Tories, what they lack in even basic humanity and concern they make up for in sheer gall. For Shapps, the brash hard-nosed in-your-face Tory chairman, to declare that the Tories are now the Workers’ party is so preposterous and silly that one marvels they have the nerve to raise such an absurd canard which could well boomerang back on them.
What it shows is that they believe they can get away with anything however ridiculous, given the lickspittle Tory tabloid pack and the lack of a sufficiently aggressive kick-back by Labour. Yet if this isn’t laughed out of court before it gets any airing, it may only serve to highlight just how far Toryism is now the party of the fraction of the top 1%.
Just how nonsensical is the Workers’ party facade is exposed by the blatant facts of the last 4 years – wages down 6% on average and still falling, while Britain’s richest 1,000 have walked away, according to Murdoch’s Sunday Times, with a cool increase in wealth of £190bn. The financialisation of the economy, pushed relentlessly by Osborne (and one has to say by Blair and Brown before him), has led to investment banks, private equity houses, hedge funds and wealth management companies monopolising 95% of the gains since 2010, with three-quarters of the increase in income concentration amongst the top 1% going to the finance industry, virtually all in astronomic bonuses. Call that the Workers’ party – and they virtually all vote Tory – and you would have your head bitten off in the Dog and Duck in Oldham.
Did the Tories lift a finger when it was announced yesterday that HSBC bankers were being handed ‘allowances’ worth £32,000 a week on top of their £1.2m salaries, or were these sterling Tory workers setting an example for other members in the Workers’ party to follow – the 4 million workers paid less that the Living Wage (which the bankers wouldn’t even deign to bother to know how much that is), let alone the 2.4 million ‘workers’ prevented from working by Osborne’s prolonged austerity policies condemning them to the employment scrap heap?
If the Tories cared a jot about real workers, they would significantly raise the minimum wage floor, end wildly excessive greed at the top, increase the coverage of collective bargaining, and above all make the restoration of full employment the central objective of economic policy. So is the Workers’ party going to go down that route? You must be joking.
OK it’s a joke we all know it’s a joke, but whether or not the Tories are a working class party or workers party is well ridiculous, but is it any more ridiculous as thinking Miliband is any different then the last right wing labour party as being for the working class.
Today we have two parties or three if you want to call the Liberals a party they seem to be the coalition specialist these days.
The issue to day when you see Miliband attacking the last vestiges or working class in the labour party the Unions it make you wonder, and it’s not surprising really that the working class no longer see Unions as a good bet to join or the labour party.
The country is changing to day we have three political parties all of them right wing all of the Conservative Progress types, and Miliband who talks about hard working people is laughable the bloke never had a job he may have worked hard in University but he’s never done a job.
The banking bonus well it’s gone down since the day of New labour, after all Brown had the chance to end the bonus culture as part of the deal and bail out he did nothing maybe he was hoping to get a job as a banker god knows what he was thinking.
Today both parties talk about hard working not the working class, they talk about the sick the disabled and the poor as being a sub culture of this country.
The fact is today who do I vote for to get a working class party who looks at the whole not the elite, nobody obviously to day the labour party is a Tory conservative party who now has Lawyers accountant and Bankers all of them would easily slip into a Tory party for god Sake look at Balls.
The question is not whether or not the Tories are a workers party it whether or not labour are.
Shapps is out of his tiny mind…