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Politics

See all MNHQ comments on this thread

An open letter to everyone who voted Conservative

557 replies

blacksunday · 10/05/2015 07:19

To everyone who voted conservative yesterday,

I hope you’re happy. Actually that’s a lie, I really don’t. But before you sit smugly down and give yourself a big pat on the back I’d like to ask you a few questions.

Do you think you haven’t benefitted from the system you are currently trying to break down? As a child, did you ever go to hospital? Have you had an education? Did you ever use a library? Have you ever been on a bus? If so, you have benefited from a system which subsidises facilities with taxes. And now you have, you are willing to take it away from everyone after you. Correct me if I’m wrong but that doesn’t seem very fair. You cannot have socialism and a support system when you need it but then be unwilling to support it for other people.

Now if you are someone who has used the private sector more than public services then I also want to know a few things. If you went to private school, or used private medical care as a child, did you pay for it yourself? Now I’m not asking if your parents paid for it, but you personally. I’m guessing the answer is no. So can you genuinely say you worked hard to get these privileges? No baby earns the right to an education. No child works hard to be born into a particular family who can afford healthcare. So why do you think one person is more deserving than another? If you value working hard and getting on how can you see this as fair? Do you really want to live in a world where children are deemed more worthy of education and healthcare based on what family they come from?

If you are someone who uses a lot of private, who are you? Are you one of the 1% who are currently getting richer? If so, are you ok with the fact that your benefit is someone else’s misery, someone’s poverty, someone’s lack of care? Are you ok with the fact that while you got a pay rise 900,000 people had to go to food banks because they literally didn’t have enough money to feed themselves to survive? Do you really believe that you work harder than these people?

If you aren’t one of these few people benefitting from this system then why have you voted for it? Conservatives use rhetoric of working hard and fairness but this is simply not the reality. If you start life without a lot, to get out of that is hard. “Success” stories are pinned up to show that if you work hard you get somewhere. But they are stories because they are anomalies. To come from a background of little education or money and to get a career you want is not the common way, and you can’t do it without a benefit system. We do not live in a system where if you work hard you get somewhere, the system the conservatives are creating means that if you start off well off you stay that way. Because someone who goes to a private school with tiny class sizes and one on one help does not have to work as hard as someone at an underachieving state school with over worked underpaid staff and huge classes. They just don’t.

Now if you are either one of these types of people you have to question whether you really do believe in what you have voted for. Because in voting conservative you are saying you are happy with the last 5 years. You are endorsing food banks. You are endorsing cutting care for the elderly and the mentally ill. You are endorsing a party where over half the MPs voted against gay marriage. You are saying yes to the NHS being privatised. You are saying you are happy with people being put off education based not on ability or passion but by money. You are saying yes to victimising the poor and disabled and scapegoating people based on where they come from. You are saying that you are ok with the incredible inequality in our country today and you are saying you want more of it.

I do not wish poverty on anyone. It is a cruel and harsh life. But what I do wish for you is that you at least experience it. If not first hand, that you witness the harsh trapping reality that is poverty. The gruelling cycle that doesn’t allow a parent to feed their children. That doesn’t allow for parents to feed themselves. And that you see that this is people who are working. People with jobs. And if they aren’t I hope you see that a life on benefits is not the picnic people make it out to be. Nobody wants to be on benefits. Maybe if you see this you will see what you have voted for.

And if you are ok with all of this then you make me sick. I can’t put it any other way. I am so ashamed to come from a country where this is apparently what the majority think. That the majority of people are too selfish to accept any form of tax rise to support those in our society who need help makes me so incredibly sad. Truly you should be ashamed of yourself that you can so heartlessly put yourself first and not see the consequences. I hope that in the next 5 years you fully appreciate what you did yesterday. I hope you know what you have supported and I hope one day you feel guilty. Because I am scared of what the next 5 years will bring and you should be too.

OP posts:
claig · 16/05/2015 13:56

It is salient points by a historian and top Daily Mail journalist, not the writing on the Edstone.

claig · 16/05/2015 13:55

I haven't dumped the whole lot. I have read the whole lot and quoted the best bits to save anyone else the time if they can't read the whole thing. If you want to skip it, then that's OK. I hardly think that reading a Daily Mail article is like "wading through treacle", it's not the Labour manifesto.

CultureSucksDownWords · 16/05/2015 13:52

You could try summarising and using the most relevant quotes, rather than a text dump of the whole lot. I think most people wouldn't read such a long post or just skim it if they do. It's like wading through treacle.

claig · 16/05/2015 13:49

Because most people don't bother clicking on outside articles and don't have time to read entire thousand word articles and since I think that lots of journalists make very good points that shine a light on issues, I try to include the best points they make directly within posts in order to prompt discussion on these points.

LumpySpacedPrincess · 16/05/2015 13:48

So disabled people who are scared are "contemptuous"....? Riiiight.

CultureSucksDownWords · 16/05/2015 13:40

You know people can actually follow a link and read the content from source? Why the need to copy and paste vast tracts into your posts?

claig · 16/05/2015 13:27

A good article in the Daily Mail on this topic. I am glad the author mentioms the joke that is so often invited onto the metropolitan BBC, Canon Giles Fraser. He also mentions the quintessential BBC and Guardian luvvie Charlie Brooker. I am surprised that Labour's party political broadcasts didn't feature those two right-on luvvies.

"The incredible sulk: All week, the Left have been frothing with fury that their fellow Britons could be so wicked and stupid as to vote in the Tories. Nothing better shows their contempt for ordinary people...
...
the reaction in some quarters to the General Election result strikes me as not merely disproportionate, but deluded — if not deranged.

Take, for example, the Anglican canon Giles Fraser, darling of the metropolitan chattering classes.

Four years ago, he resigned as chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral in protest at plans to remove forcibly the anti-capitalist protesters who had set up a ‘shanty town’ camp outside, saying he could not support the possibility of ‘violence in the name of the Church’.

‘Right now I feel ashamed to be English,’ began his column for The Guardian last weekend. ‘Ashamed to belong to a country that has clearly identified itself as insular, self-absorbed and apparently caring so little for the most vulnerable people among us.’
...
‘I’ve instinctively hated the Tories since birth,’ comedian Charlie Brooker once wrote in (you guessed it) The Guardian.

‘If there was an election tomorrow, and the only two choices were the Nazis or the Tories, I’d vote Tory with an extremely heavy heart.’

It would be easy to dismiss this as exaggerated posturing for melodramatic effect. But the fact is that in some areas of our national life — especially the universities and parts of the media — such views are regarded as mainstream.

One anecdote tells a wider story. A friend who teaches at Cambridge once told me he is afraid to admit to his colleagues that he reads The Times, lest they dismiss him as a brainwashed lackey of Rupert Murdoch. Instead, he pretends to read The Guardian, even though he can’t abide it.

This is not so much an issue of conscious bias as it is a case of what the American writer William H. Whyte once called ‘groupthink’: an intellectual conformity which is all the more insidious because it is so unconscious.
...
For there is, of course, another Britain. This is the country that the vast majority of people inhabit — a country very far removed from the gloomy Orwellian dystopia portrayed by Mr Miliband and his admirers, or by those BBC journalists who love to paint our country in the worst possible light.

This is the Britain of the silent majority — a decent, tolerant but quietly conservative bunch, horrified by the antics of the anarchists, scornful of the entreaties of demagogues such as Russell Brand, and much more interested in bread-and-butter issues than in the smug sixth-form pretensions of the former Labour leader and his Oxbridge chums.

What Left-wing intellectuals can never get into their heads is that most people are simply not very interested in party politics. They have much better things to worry about.

Yet it was a mark of Mr Miliband’s utter detachment from social and political reality that he and his allies were sucked into the echo chamber of Twitter, which is inevitably dominated by students, Westminster journalists and jumped-up B-list celebrities who think they’re as clever as the lines that are written for them.

[[For there is, of course, another Britain. This is the country that the vast majority of people inhabit — a country very far removed from the gloomy Orwellian dystopia portrayed by Mr Miliband and his admirers, or by those BBC journalists who love to paint our country in the worst possible light.

This is the Britain of the silent majority — a decent, tolerant but quietly conservative bunch, horrified by the antics of the anarchists, scornful of the entreaties of demagogues such as Russell Brand, and much more interested in bread-and-butter issues than in the smug sixth-form pretensions of the former Labour leader and his Oxbridge chums.

What Left-wing intellectuals can never get into their heads is that most people are simply not very interested in party politics. They have much better things to worry about.

Yet it was a mark of Mr Miliband’s utter detachment from social and political reality that he and his allies were sucked into the echo chamber of Twitter, which is inevitably dominated by students, Westminster journalists and jumped-up B-list celebrities who think they’re as clever as the lines that are written for them.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3083976/The-incredible-sulk-week-Left-frothing-fury-fellow-Britons-wicked-stupid-vote-Tories-better-shows-contempt-ordinary-people.html

We are run by a bien pensant group of teenage think tank twitterati from Oxbridge and London who think ordinary people are Tory scum for voting for common sense and an end to their politically correct groupthink preaching. The BBC and their W1A thinking are right behind them. But this time, the voters told them where to get off.

claig · 16/05/2015 12:22

Then I would be rich by now and would have had a sex change.

LumpySpacedPrincess · 16/05/2015 12:20

claig gets a special bonus everytime he types teenage advisors or Oxbridge.

claig · 16/05/2015 12:18

However, Isitmebut being a "politician", is somewhat plausible.

Out of touch, politically correct, deluded, in thrall to teenage theories and prone to talking twaddle.

claig · 16/05/2015 12:13

To even suggest that I or anyone else might be a "politician" is an egregious insult that I would not wish on my worst enemy, but the suggestion that I may be a Daily Mail journalist is flattery that I am not worthy of.

I agree with Lynton Croby when it comes to our metropolitan Oxbridge commentariat and our teenage Oxbridge political class. I am proud to be no part of that lot.

"Lynton Crosby: 'the so-called experts have lost touch with ordinary people'
...
The problem with political commentary and punditry in this country is that it’s conducted by a bunch of people most of whom live inside the M25 who could never live on the £26,000 that is the average annual earnings of people in this country. Most went to Oxbridge, talk only to themselves and last time they met a punter was when they picked up their dry cleaning.
...
And what about Mr Miliband as a candidate?

“He really was a sort of first year politics graduate who thought he had the answers to the world’s problems - who’d done a year of the course and it was just that other people hadn’t been as smart as him in the past to implement the policies that he believed in.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/general-election-2015/11608589/Lynton-Crosby-the-so-called-experts-have-lost-touch-with-ordinary-people.html

claig · 16/05/2015 11:57

And as for writing for the Daily Mail, it would be the highest honour possible (and would go along with a deservedly high salary no doubt) but I know my place, only the best write for the Daily Mail.

claig · 16/05/2015 11:54

Please don't compare me to Isitmebut, I am known for speaking common sense.

I am not a politician or the country would not be in the mess that it is. I wouldn't put up with that metropolitan muddle. The first thing I'd do is sack all the teenage advisers from Oxbridge and restore some common sense.

TwartFaceBeetj · 16/05/2015 11:32

Grin aww my phone won't let me use it Sad Grin

LumpySpacedPrincess · 16/05/2015 11:28

I reckon Isitmebut and claig are actually the same person.

You never see them is the same room together.

Da Da Daaaaa!!!!

Linguini · 16/05/2015 10:18

Twartface- Isitmebut is definitely a politician IRL ! Or he works at the Daily Fail. Or both.
Claig might b one too. They can't say though or they'd get trolled off the site.
Id miss all of isitme's Daily Fail articles if that were to happen.

TwartFaceBeetj · 16/05/2015 06:53

FFS you didn't read the links did you? and are just carrying on with your blah blah blah labour are evil conservatives are the savior of our souls.

I even pointed out on the SECOND one to not BE misled by the Title

Isitmebut · 16/05/2015 01:27

TwartFaceBeetj ... re the fact "the Tories have piled on more debt than Labour" as some pathetic excuse for Labour overspending - I've explained this about 50 times on the boards here, so lets hope the 51st is a charm - as I'll use the 'Jack and Jill" approach to annual Budget Deficits and National Debt.

If you had a credit card with a £1,000 balance on it in April, and put on £157 in May, as each month it accumulates, at the end of the month the balance would be £1,157 plus interest.

As in 2010 Labour passed over to the coalition £1 trillion of National Debt and an annual government Budget Deficit (overspend) of £157 billion, f the annual overspend was not cut in any way through 2010 - as we entered 2011, the National Debt would be £1.157 trillion plus interest, and whatever the UK budget deficit/overspend in 2011 as accumulates, will be then added to that £1.157 trillion National Debt figure.

Got it so far?

So unless anyone believes that the Conservative coalition should have cut the £157 billion annual overspend that Labour passed them on Day One, which would have been REAL AUSTERITY - of course the Conservatives piled on more debt in 5-years than Labour as that is what Labour left them - when the Conservatives in 1997 left a £400 billion National Debt and the (then) annual overspend, due to balance in 2001, which it did.

Labour with the new extra tax receipts of a financial bubble, and so government spending went from over £400 bil in 1997 to over £600 billion in 2007/8, instead of paying off national debt, decided from 2001/2 to BORROW around £30-40 billion a year extra - so come 2010 the unbalanced economy they build, once the tax receipts fell away and running a £30 bil plus budget deficit/overspend UK economy = a £2010 £157 bil a year figure.

As the economic crash began in 2008, it would have been clear to the UK Treasury/government, that they had to cut spending drastically or raise taxes drastically, probably both.

Instead Labour cut nothing and raised taxes i.e. National Insurance and Fuel Duty a bit, and if the independent OBR had been formed back then - they would have been demanding cuts/taxes figures and screaming incompetence from the top of Whitehall.

And this is why every Labour leader/MP hopeful saying "Labour did not overspend during their last administration" - will be just as economically incompetent as their predecessors.

caroldecker · 15/05/2015 18:28

here is an EU document on the approach to the ISDS in the TTIP and contains the quote below:

These much needed clarifications will make sure that companies cannot be compensated just because their profits have been reduced through the effects of regulations enacted for a public policy objective

TwartFaceBeetj · 15/05/2015 17:01

Here is a good report, and explains how the two sides can seemingly be talking about the same thing and both claiming to be right www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25944653

And if you bothered to read all that, then here is another link, try and work out which one deficit they are talking about,

blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2013/11/the-tories-have-piled-on-more-debt-than-labour/

Don't be mislead by that title ^^ it's actually very pro tory and very scathing of labour

TwartFaceBeetj · 15/05/2015 16:37

In the interests of political balance on biased statistics and research. Here is a list of the top think tanks and who their interests lie with.
So anything coming from them (all of them)

I would personally take with a pinch of salt and if bothered would look deeper into the subject.

This list maybe a little out of date because it was published in 2008.....

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/1576447/The-top-twelve-think-tanks-in-Britain.html

Isitmebut · 15/05/2015 16:33

No, and after all the points/quangos/job descriptions I raised, your only concern was too pooh pooh them as much of the source the taxpayers alliance, formed as so much of this 'stuff' was hidden by Labour as annual government spending went up by 57%, and no one knows where the money went - back at ya.

If there was no detail, I would be deflecting, if there was detail and no counter figures, someone else is.

Osborne formed the Office for Budget Responsibility as the national books under the Brown/Balls watch could no longer be relied upon e.g. ooops, where did that £157 bil a year deficit, COME from, there is a trend here.

TwartFaceBeetj · 15/05/2015 16:16

Are you actually a politician in RL?

As you are very good at missing points and deflecting.

Isitmebut · 15/05/2015 15:43

TwartFaceBeetj .... I love it on these boards as talk about 'shy Tories' as when I compare the records of the two main parties I get not in Labour corner denials, including from the OP.

So you don't like the TPA, got it, please provide your own qualified figures if you can find them, as it took around 5-years for The Times citing various disclosure acts to find out the full details of Brown's 1997/8 gold sales.

So OK none of these government quangos or local authority non jobs exist, there was not over 1 million new public sector employees hired from 1997, there was not a big spike up in this employment in 2008, the unfunded public sector pension fund liability is not £1.1 trillion on top of our £1.5 tril of national debt - and Labour did not waste countless £billions.

Despite the facts.

TwartFaceBeetj · 15/05/2015 15:13

Isitme

You seem to be talking to me as if I am fighting labours corner.

I am pointing out, how you are conducting yourself on here with 'shock' soundbitesquotes and relying on biased research, statistics and reporting.

As I said previously, would you take stats, and research done by a labour / leftwing think tank, on face value?
Then why would you take from conservative one?

History

The TPA was founded in 2004 by "a group of "libertarian" Conservatives, frustrated by what they saw as the party's decision to ditch its traditional tax cutting message."[5] At the time the Conservative Party felt the need to match the Labour Party's spending plans, and the TPA aimed to represent, in the words of founder and Chief Executive Matthew Elliott, those "who want to have lower taxes and lower spending".[5] The attraction for donors, many associated with the Conservatives, is the ability of the TPA "to "fly kites" for policy ideas that may go on to be adopted as Conservative policy.

The TPA's campaigning approach focussed on the media, relying in part on the reduction in journalists' investigation budgets. It aims to shape public opinion through the media by packaging its research "into brief, media-friendly research papers, complete with an eye-catching headline figure to give reporters a ready-made "top line"."[5] Its research is often based on "using the government's own data and Freedom of Information requests to winkle out examples of public sector waste"

The TPA's income from donations rose from around £68,000 in 2005 to around £1m in 2009

Taken from Wikipedia incase you didn't like the original link I use previously.

P.S The Mirror is one paper I do not read.
I do read The Telegraph, The Times, The independent, The I, The Guardian, and Shock The Daily Fail