@Iwouldratherbesailing
What the tories have done wrong often refers to:
Using public money to line the pockets of their friends and associates.
Austerity and the benefit policies resulting in increased need for food banks, worsening child poverty, heavily impacting mental health and causing suicides- policies such as:
- Bedroom tax, as you say, this involves reducing housing benefit if you’re in a home deemed too big- but didn’t account for situations such as where autistic children needed their own bedroom, or disabled people needed extra space etc and in any event is hugely problematic because there isn’t affordable housing of the “right” size to move to so people just struggle and get into arrears. In Scotland the Scottish government will cover the bedroom tax.
- 2 child policy for CTC- all very well to limit your family size but besides the disgusting rape clause there are many cases where families can afford 3 or 4 children but job loss etc means they then need help and now they are likely to struggle and could end up in poverty. Similarly contraceptive failures, domestic abuse situations, relationship breakdown etc etc and the net result doesn’t seem to be that less children are born but rather that more children end up in poverty. Bear in mind many of those who end up needing CTC are in work.
- Universal Credit - the 6 week wait caused huge issues like needing to use exploitative payday loans, food banks, or get into other debt because what do you do for 6 weeks with no income if you aren’t lucky enough to have savings and you need to eat, feed your children and heat your home. Again many people claiming are in work and if you are paid fortnightly you’ll get less over all than someone paid monthly because of how it’s worked out. Mistakes are difficult if not impossible to fix. More children in poverty.
- Zero hours contracts- one of the reasons so many working people need benefit top ups, very hard to get benefits on time though if your hours change all the time.
- benefit cap- you can only get so many benefits in total, so a single mother of three after a relationship breakdown might find she’s over the limit and they take it from her housing benefit so she ends up in arrears potentially threatened with homelessness.
I have seen all these situations personally, CABx are constantly trying to help people to budget in the benefit minefield but with their services getting cut too there’s a huge gap where people fall through. We are supposed to be a country with a safety net. There is report after report on how the U.K. is failing in this and how women and children are disproportionately affected. These are due to Tory policies. See report for example of United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights www.ohchr.org/documents/issues/poverty/eom_gb_16nov2018.pdf
“The Government has remained determinedly in a state of denial. Even while devolved authorities in Scotland and Northern Ireland are frantically trying to devise ways to ‘mitigate’, or in other words counteract, at least the worst features of the Government’s benefits policy, Ministers insisted to me that all is well and running according to plan.”
The Tory government have taken no steps to resolve all of the issues raised in this report.
Of course there are many other issues with the tories including their support for fox hunting, they voted that animals can’t feel pain, they have sold off parts of and reduced funding to the NHS www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/04/tories-protect-nhs-coronavirus-slogan , they have handled the COVID crisis in an appalling and confusing manner, they have dropped funding into schools by 8% a year, expanded grammar schools which are largely hard to access for those from deprived backgrounds, set up academies, created a hostile environment, dealt badly with women’s pensions and so much more, before you even get into problems with the individuals within the party.
The Scottish government is by no means perfect but compared to the Tory government they are progressive and seem on the whole genuinely interested in improving the lives of the population even if they have not always had success. We have no tuition fees here, free prescriptions, free school meals to p3, free bus travel for under 22s, baby box etc and whatever you think of those things, people benefit from them.
So I am not surprised that so many people voted for the SNP and I think independence will always be a desire whilst the tories are in power down south.