The parallels in tone with the Thatcher era were clear
In front of around 8,000 people at Manchester Cathedral on Monday night, at the People’s Post rally called by the CWU, I described our current government as an extremist government, one that wants to strangle democracy and push on with privatisation of public services and assets even when the model has clearly failed.
I was thinking then of the plan to stop democratically elected councils implementing bans on products and companies they believe to be destructive to the interests of their residents, if the ban goes against the policies of the national government.
That could have a devastating effect on the increasingly powerful drive to get local authorities and their pension funds to divest from fossil fuels – handy for the government’s many friends in the dinosaur fossil fuel industries.
Added to the extremist anti-democratic tone of this government, there’s the plan to abolish the Human Rights Act, the cuts to legal aid and the plan to prevent local communities resisting the forced academisation of schools.
I was thinking too of Michael Gove – the man who’s made our schools such hell that half of teachers are thinking of leaving the profession – who now wants to privatise more of our prisons, even though evidence clearly shows that privatised prisons are less humane and effective at rehabilitation, and more expensive, than those still in public hands.
And I was thinking of the sell-off of Royal Mail – the ‘privatisation of the Queen’s head’ that even Margaret Thatcher could not countenance.
At Tory Party conference, the parallels in tone with the Thatcher era were clear.
On Sunday 60,000 people, in an act of defiant, peaceful, celebratory, determined protest, expressed their opposition to austerity, to privatisation, to the failure to take policy to tackle climate change seriously. We were many, compared to the few at Tory Party conference.
Yet here was Theresa May expressing a hard line on immigration policy that even Nigel Farage might find hard to outdo. Refugees, victims of torture and state abuse should be allowed, reluctantly, to stay, but only until conditions in their country are judged to have improved, after which they should be shipped back – making Britain not a secure, stable home for those in desperate need, but a temporary, unstable, fearful perching place.
And her ‘tough new plan for asylum’ would limit the numbers given asylum – and deny it to those lucky enough to reach Britain’s shores – in clear breach of our obligations under the UN Convention on Refugees.
The strength of her anti-immigration message even outraged the Institute of Directors and the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). The former described her stance as ‘rhetoric’ and accused her of putting internal party politics ahead of the national interest.
And there was Iain Duncan Smith displaying a detachment from the facts that even Karl Rove might envy. He doesn’t want disabled and ill people to be ‘victims to be sustained on government handouts‘.
Instead he’s made them victims of penury and fear through the work capability assessment, the ending of the Independent Living Allowance, the 20 per cent cut in help with the introduction of the Personal Independence Payment and the axe of benefit sanctions hanging over them.
Similarly Rovian was Boris Johnson saying we need shared confidence in our political institutions. This from a man who’s part of a government backed by just 24 per cent of eligible voters.
And I’m sure someone somewhere said something about climate change. There are a lot of fringes at Tory Party conference, and campaigners no doubt were plugging away, doing their best, but in the main messages from the conference it was nowhere to be found.
You might remember before the last election that David Cameron, together with Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg, made a solemn pledge to take serious steps to cut our carbon emissions. Now Al Gore is just one of the many people pointing out that the government is headed in entirely the wrong direction on that.
With its planned cuts to solar feed-in tariffs, its ideological opposition to onshore wind, its abandonment of standards to ensure new homes are warm, comfortable and affordable to heat, the government has whipped the rug out from under tens of thousands of small businesses, and alienated its natural ally, the CBI.
There’s an extremist anti-renewables stance here, combined with a solicitous concern for the welfare of the oil and gas industries who are just about the only people – well perhaps add in the anti-immigration zealots – who will feel better about the Tories after yesterday’s events at their conference.
This is a government heading to the extremes of Thatcherism, just as the country heads in the opposite direction. A government detached from reality, detached from compassion, and detached from the evidence on climate change.
We really cannot afford, the most vulnerable in our society cannot bear, the planet cannot take, four more years of this government.
Natalie Bennett is the leader of the Green Party. Follow her on Twitter
39 Responses to “Comment: The Tories have now gone further than Thatcher – to the extremes of British politics”
Nick
this government has gone much further to the right mrs thatcher destroyed communities this government has allowed the sick and disabled to die through welfare reform which is far worse
Dark_Heart_of_Toryland
Whatever else our voting is, it is not ‘democratic’. That a government can be elected to untrammelled power by just 25% of the electorate does not suggest a properly functioning democracy.
And point remains, why should unions be held to a higher standard of democratic accountability than the government? Again, if simple first-past-the-post is good enough for general elections, why is not good enough for unions? The current government has caused far more disruption to millions of lives than the unions; why should be held to a lower standard of account?
And why are the pay demands of train drivers, who perform a vital and necessary public service, so much more in need of control that those of the utterly grotesquely overpaid financial sector? Why does the government so cravenly submit to the brazen blackmail of the financial sector, which is so dependent on state benefits?
And incidentally, how does the football analogy work? After all, footballers are hardly vital workers in the same way that train drivers are.
Charlatans
Most PLCs generally are in a market economy where you can nearly always find someone else to competitively supply you, except in a minority of cases.
blarg1987
However if say 10% of people turn out to vote on PLC’s they can end up closing down industries and cripple parts of the national economy etc.
neuralwarp
Excellent!
But I thought the govt had the mandate of 24% of *registered* voters, and only 20% of *eligible* voters?