Tory Contempt for Electorate
Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats
are probably the most hated party for many a long year. Currently at
a popularity rating of a 20 year low, they must be pleased to see the
Conservatives coming to their rescue, with a series of announcements
and partial truths trotted out by the Conservatives.
The Conservatives have never liked the working class, and have always
looked down on them with contempt. This has been highlighted recently
by three high profile Tory members including David Cameron.
The first, Lord Young
the millionaire former adviser to the Thatcher government, now enterprise
adviser [a post he has held for less than a month] to David Cameron,
said at a Daily
Telegraph lunch “For the vast
majority of people in the country today they have never had it so good
ever since this recession – this so-called recession – started.”
He also said “anybody, most people
with a mortgage who were paying a lot of money each month, suddenly
started paying very little each month. That could make three, four,
five, six hundred pounds a month difference, free of tax.”
He also said the 100,000 public-sector jobs a year as being within "the
margin of error" in the context of the 30 million-strong job market
as a whole. Although some of the companies RFT have been monitoring
since the recession started, are still making redundancies, and say
there are more to come. Lord Young apologised for his remarks, and was
admonished by the P.M. before handing in his resignation.
Former MP Howard Flight, now a Peer, told Channel 4 News that although
Lord Young had appeared callous about
people who might lose their jobs “there was a
lot of what he said that was perfectly valid comment – his comments
about interest rates”, for example.
Claire Francis editor of moneysupermarket.com
calculates that someone who had a Base Rate Tracker mortgage of 0.5
per cent above the Bank of England rate, would have to have a £250,000
mortgage to save £600 a month. Although lord Young said it was
tax free saving, he doesn’t realise that to save £600, they
will have already paid tax at the highest
rate.
The second was David Cameron:
on Michael Glove’s plan to axe the £162m budget
for the Schools Sports Partnership which met with outrage from teachers
and Olympians alike.
David Cameron waded in with a bunch of half truths, “What
we’ve experienced over the last decade was a lot of money being
put into school sport but without seeing a lot of progress.”
Saying that we didn’t see “a lot of progress”
under Labour’s strategy, which had resulted in “wrapping
teachers and schools in red tape”
Cameron justified the £162m budget being axed by saying: “Let
me give one figure, the number of schools offering rugby,
hockey, netball and gymnastics actually fell under the previous government.”
Schools
Sports Survey stated that between 1% and 5% fewer schools were offering
these sports in 2009/10 than they were in 2003/04 when the survey started.
The
Schools Sports Survey site has now
been closed, [for maintenance.]
According to Channel 4’s Fact
Check, what Cameron didn’t say was that, Over the
same period the number of schools offering rugby league (as opposed
to rugby union), football, dance, athletics, cricket, tennis, fitness
classes, basketball, orienteering, cycling, golf, badminton, table tennis,
volleyball, canoeing, archery, martial arts, mountaineering, judo, rowing,
sailing, karate, boxing, lacrosse, squash, bowls, equestrian sports,
triathlon, skateboarding, and angling have all
gone up. The number of schools offering swimming has stayed the
same.
In total, the average number of sports offered by a school has risen
from 14 to 19, according to the Youth Sports Trust. David
Cameron is not going to resign over misleading parliament.
The third was Lord
Flight’s interview with the Evening
Standard, on 25th November 2010 when he said “We’re
going to have a system where the middle classes are discouraged from
breeding because it’s jolly expensive, but for those on benefit
there is every incentive.” To clarify he was talking
about the changes
to child benefit. The word ‘Breeding
is usually used in the context of Breeding animals’;
most people prefer to say ‘having
children’ rather than labelling their
children as animals. The current Tory party are using the Thatcher
advisers, the fact that Lord Flight’s remarks have been link by
the Labour party to Sir Keith Joseph, who in 1974 claimed that the rise
of “poor, unmarried mothers “threatened…our
human stock”, would suggest the Tory party are
still 37 years behind the times. Sir Keith Joseph is credited with being
the founding father of Thatcherism,
With Conservatives openly referring to the general public with insulting
remarks, and the way the PM acts in parliament, you can understand why
they want to change the rules for absolving parliament to their advantage.
The Conservatives, when they bought the LibDems, made them agree not
to vote against the University increased tuition fees, they can abstain,
but unless Conservatives with a conscience abstain or vote against,
the bill will pass.
Since the Conservative and Liberal manifestos were published, there
has been no progress on the bill allowing the public to vote their MP
out of the House of Commons.
All of the students facing massive hikes
in their University fees will be eligible to vote at the next election.
I wonder how many will vote Conservative or Liberal
Democrat? How many people who are classed as ‘Breeding’
will vote for Conservatives or Liberal democrats? Will the Coalition
last [Blog post ‘News in Brief’ 25/05/2010] as long as the
2 year prediction? Questions every body will want to answer.
Ron
Gold RFT
Express
