The UK: Show the Tories the door

An utter disservice to democracy

Before I went away, I had applied for a postal ballot knowing I would not be in the country when the UK General Election takes place. Sadly, our council in its lethargy and lack of alacrity must have thought all applications for a postal ballot were from those who out of some sort of incapacity could not make it to the polling station.

Despite the fact that my application went in the day after the election was announced and I posted the additional information they asked for a few days later, the postal ballots were not posted until the third week of June, by which time it was too late.

What I even found more annoying was, I was already on the voters’ register for 10 years at the same address. I unfailingly renew my registration every year, and I received a voter’s registration card which I used for the local elections in early May. Another card was mailed to me for this election if I were to choose to vote in person, but my postal ballot was nowhere to be found.

I can only wonder about the many Greater Manchester voters that have been so poorly served by the electoral services unit with regards to postal ballots.

On balance, 14 years of failure

If there is anything to consider about the last 14 years of the Conservatives in power, I reckon we are at a net negative if a balance sheet were set out about the benefits and the demerits of having that party preside over our dear country of many nations.

When I returned to the UK in late 2012, I was a European citizen who had spent over 12 years in the Netherlands with untrammelled rights of a European freely able to visit, live, and work in one of 28 countries, if I chose to. If I was gifted with any sense of prognostication, I could have naturalised as a Dutch citizen any time from 2005, but I never thought the UK would risk leaving the EU, we were too invested in the project.

I was wrong, as in the 5 Prime Ministers that the Tories have given us since 2010, each in their own way has gambled with livelihoods for personal and partisan expediency to the detriment of the fortunes of our country. There is no need to rehash the points, we are much worse off, where a parliament that is self-servingly incapable of the kind of collegiate thought to progress anything.

Having lost a sense of responsibility

The entrenchment of the entitlement to power has become so ingrained that the facts of the situation mean nothing if we can be scared into believing the populist simple solutions for practically difficult problems.

The Tories need some time in opposition to regain a sense of what the responsibility of governing and impacting positively on people’s lives beyond culture wars and pandering to the basest of our human instincts. The idea that a limited company masquerading as a party with the face of an indolent representative who has the gift of the gab and nothing else to offer, being our future is a fantasy begging for the unfortunate.

The best option for government today is the Labour Party, if only for the fact that they would appreciate the opportunity to govern and do much more to attend to the atrocities passing for policy that the Tories have enmeshed themselves in without the quality of scrutiny necessary among them and beyond to jettison the bizarre and refine the barely acceptable.

A possible future in our votes

The Labour Party offers a new direction that will address many of the issues of today, it is change-focused, future-looking, ready to grow and invest in our economy, seeking to divest power from central government, helping people back to work, addressing the immigration issue that has been lost by the Tories, and introducing the modern industrial strategy. Their manifesto reads like something to have expectations for rather than one that offers trepidation and fear.

The polls will suggest Sir Keir Starmer will be kissing the hand of the king on the 5^th of July 2024. I enjoyed some years of Labour-driven prosperity from 1997 to 2000 before I emigrated to the Netherlands, and this prosperous spell continued until the financial crash.

It is evident that after so long in power the Tories are bereft of new or useful ideas, they cannot even look on their record of the past 14 years which have given us some of the worst Prime Ministers to ever preside over His or Her Majesty’s Government.

I appreciate some are too tribal to vote for another party, but the future of our country is at stake, we cannot sacrifice this to sentiment when competence is required. I would rather have a boring competent and disciplined government than an entertaining relatable but totally incompetent politician run the show. It is not pot luck, lives are impacted beyond your door.

Coronavirus streets in Manchester & Leeds - XLV

Many a gory Tory here

One is glad to desert Manchester for a week as a brief walk around a section of the city around the Manchester Convention Centre gave much meaning to that situation beyond other extenuating circumstances, the police and cordons laid out to insulate the ruling party from its public and the vehemence of misgovernment.

The Tories are coming to Manchester for their annual convention and what an inconvenience it would be to all but the ones in the thrall of Boris Johnson whilst celebrating the apparent successes of Brexit which are patently invisible to most except those with impaired eyesight.

Leading to Leeds

Meanwhile, on a train to Leeds, the rain simply followed relentlessly on a journey that was as uneventful as to be recorded in sleep. Of all of us on my coach, only two of us donned face masks. We are all letting our guard down and this pandemic is hardly over. The UK retained the highest number of new cases worldwide and we are still ahead of our European neighbours in the number of deaths due to COVID-19. [WorldInfoMeters: Coronavirus]

I was last in Leeds just the week before I lost my baby sister, now coming to 5 years. The same hotel, some excuses that I overlooked until I went to the bar and was left feeling quite irked by the time I got to check-in my room.

Oh yes, it’s ladies’ slight

Later, when I went shopping for a few morning goods, the ladies were all more exposed yet bedecked like for a Cinderella summer ball except if I am unaware of some invisible thermal garments to help keep them from freezing in the cold and rain. Their slipper heels as unsteady as walking a rope bridge buffeted by winds strung over a ravine infested with hungry crocodiles in a river last rowed centuries ago.

Obviously, the reference to dress, apparel and appearance is oblique, one for which commentary should be reserved apart from thinking, surely more could be done. Anyway, the pandemic is the last thing on their minds much as hen nights seem to have chosen Leeds for revelry and unspeakable acts of wanton and reckless expression. It’s in the air, maybe no one is breathing it.

Tax Credits: The Toffs are making it tough

All buses gone

One morning when I was still living in Amsterdam, I walked up to the bus stop one morning to catch a bus to the train station one my way to work.

Until, that morning, we had 5 buses going from that bus stop in different directions going to the train station that no one had to wait more than 10 minutes for a bus to come by. However, no bus came, or the only other bus that did was not going to the station.

One cursory view of the bus timetables showed that all buses from that stop to the station had been cancelled. I was later to learn that the buses were cancelled because there was a new tram service going to the train station, only that the said tram service was another 6 months away from coming into service.

This was some sort of forward-planning made without considering the impact and consequence on our community for the 6 intervening months where we had to find alternative convoluted arrangements to get to the train station, we had to wake up earlier and leave home earlier to make our connections because of this.

The travesty of tax credits

This brings me to the issue of the day in UK politics, the review of Tax Credits as proposed by the Chancellor of Exchequer. That Tax Credits exist in and off themselves is a travesty and a failing of the democratic capitalist model we have in the UK.

Tax Credits are neither taxes nor credits but a socialist means of supplementing the incomes of workers who are paid such atrociously low salaries in the public and private sector that they can hardly subsist on their incomes. In a way, our capitalist framework does not pay fully for the employment and utility of labour and the slack is taken up by the public purse in the quest to lift the poorly paid above the poverty line.

There are probably macroeconomic policies that can be put in place to make capitalism pay up in full for the cost of labour and expertise, allowing for a middle-class kind of existence, but no government has had the guts to stand up to business and demand they do the morally and ethically right thing about wages. In most cases, these businesses that leach of us to exist for the primary profit motive will howl about changes that cost them more when they are not even meeting their basic costs.

The truth is, we’re worse off

What the new Conservative government plans to do is to reduce the level of income at which people will qualify for the full in-work benefits over which the payments reduce and to limit the benefits towards children to a maximum of two.

We are told that changes to the living wage, higher tax payment thresholds, more subsidised childcare access and other tax jiggery-pokery will compensate for the loss of Tax Credits. The fact is like the transport situation I described earlier, nothing could be further from the truth.

Independent analysts and institutions have already determined that all taken together, up to 3 million families will be worse off, losing an average of £1,000 a year whilst saving the government up to £4 billion in their ideological quest to plug the deficit brought on by the financial system gone riot and the government using public money to save private financial atrocities for which no significant member of the financial community has been held accountable for.

The toffs are making it tough

In all, it is the poor and the low-income earners that have taken the bigger brunt of the austerity measures put in place to compensate for the ‘crimes’ of the City and rich investors, the squeeze is still on the poor without respite.

This might well be the Conservative government’s Poll Tax moment, but I guess not much can be said for the concern or consideration of a well-heeled governing class who have trust funds to last generations that the cries of anguish of the masses will only be an irritation to be blocked out in the comfort of their gilded and soundproofed castles.

This is not the Great Britain many signed up for, but that is the way things are. My transport situation was resolved in 6 months, the lives of people dependent on Tax Credits will not get better in the long run and that is a shame.