There is an opinion poll out today showing Labour leading the Tories whose support is collapsing. Why vote Labour Light when you can vote for the real thing? Or if you are a Thatcherite, as I am, how can you bring yourself to vote for a Tory party that would disgust and repel every bone in the body of the blessed Margaret. The Tory party of the serial liar Boris is corrupt with party donors paying for his home furnishings and picking up soft sinecures and lucrative PPE contracts but, as bad, it has abandoned so much of what Thatcher believed in, including basic common sense. My day job is exposing fraud. How can I vote for such obvious frauds? The article below first appeared in my free weekly Tomograph newsletter which you can sign up to receive HERE.
In the morning, as Joshua and I have breakfast ahead of the walk to his new school, The Mrs will – now and again make an appearance to switch on Radio 4’s Today programme. And, thus I found myself listening to a Tory minister defending the indefensible. I could not help but shout a number of times, not obscenities for children were present, but damning judgements on this particular worm. Gradually it dawned on me that the worm in question was Sajid Javid.
Mr Javid was asked if he still had a portrait of the blessed Lady Thatcher on his wall and he said that he did. What, he was asked would she make of the decision to impose tax rises which will take the UK burden of taxation to an all time high? Sajid waffled. Of course the real answer is that the blessed Maggie would have been horrified not just at the tax hikes but at almost every aspect of the corrupt and rotten Johnson regime.
We might start with the National Insurance tax hikes which, no one disputes, will hit the young and asset poor as well as low earners. Unlike the toff Johnson and most of the cabinet (though, to be fair, not Javid) Mrs Thatcher did not come from a privileged background. She grew up in rooms above her father’s corner store. While Johnson talks of “levelling up” to help the ghastly oiks in the North who voted Tory last time, his tax policies clearly show his words are meaningless. He does not care about the working classes. When he does try to help the Northern oiks it is with promises of more handouts paid for – as we see now – with higher taxes.
Thatch realised folks did not want handouts. She offered folks opportunity. The opportunity to keep more of what they earned, to buy their council house so joining the middle classes on the property ladder, and to earn more for working hard as your wage might be set on merit not as part of a Union led collective bargaining process. Thatcher trusted the working poor to spend more of the money they earned, Boris et al do not and so want to do the spending for people that they secretly despise.
Thatch was prepared to concede when she was wrong, when the facts change. We may be told that “You turn if you want to the Lady is not for Turning” but the Lady did turn when needed, when her perception of the facts demanded a changed, as I discussed recently HERE in her approach to the global warming hoax. Faced with a black hole in Government finances and given how the last 18 months have made so many folks realise the sheer pointlessness of business travel, I am in no doubt that Maggie would have scrapped the white elephant that is HS2 at once.
Maggie’s greatest triumph was, arguably, facing down the Unions notably during the Miner’s Strike. These days industrial unions are so far past their sell by date as to be a near irrelevancy. Were Maggie in charge today she would be tackling the vast armies of managers, pen pushers and diversity, equality & inclusion managers as well as grossly overpaid, grredy and often idle WFH GPs who are bleeding the NHS dry. Instead of chucking more cash at such folk as Boris has done, Maggie would face them down. I am sure that she would view the armies of managers who swarm across the public sector often with no customer service delivery input at all and look at how Boris et al are buying them off and despair.
It goes without saying that Maggie would not be signing up to the carbon neutral targets of the current regime which, as I discussed HERE this week, will cost working people their jobs and screw the poor via higher energy prices in a massively regressive way.
There are so many other big issues where today’s Tories show themselves heirs not to Maggie but to Blair and worse. Sajid Javid may have a portrait of Maggie in his study but like the rest of the chancers in charge that is just a pretence, a sop to the core conservative base. But as each day goes by more and more folks see through this nonsense and despair at what a truly unconservative, and also very obviously corrupt, Government we find ourselves saddled with.