Tories’ Top Ten Crimes Against Britain

Good morning, pop pickers, and what a beautiful day to go to the polls. For those of us with shorter memories, I thought it might be fun to try to rank just those very worst crimes of the Conservative Party in government against Britain these last few years.

10. Johnson’s lies

Caught lying so often there was an entire website dedicated to listing his falsehoods, Johnson lied to the public about parties in Downing Street during lockdown, about hospital building, about in-work figures, about his personal relationships, about asylum numbers, about the Chinese communist party funding Labour, and even about wallpaper. Single-handedly took global opinions on British statesmanhood down several levels.

9. Undermining the judiciary and breaking the law

Johnson and his cabinet also went on a rampage against the world’s most respected, historied and independent judiciary after it threatened to curb his unlawful, authoritarian behaviour, ultimately leading to the right wing press labelling judges ‘Enemies of the People’ and an immigration law firm suffering a right-wing terrorist attack.

8. Ministerial behaviour

Never before have we seen so many ministers reinstated to senior cabinet roles having been sacked for breaches of the ministerial code. Bullying, unauthorised meetings with foreign powers, harassment of female journalists, failure to declare interests, inappropriate and undeclared relationships with lobbyists, the list goes on. Things got so bad under Johnson that the government’s own Ethics Adviser quit when he said his job had become impossible.

7. Waterways (literally) full of shiiiiiiit

Privatised water companies are allowed for years to offer executives banking-level salaries and bonuses and pay eye-watering dividends, all paid for by leveraging debt, whilst bills rocket, infrastructure is left to crumble, and shiiiiit is allowed to flow into the nation’s rivers and seas.

6. PPE

Fast-track contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds dished out to companies owned by spouses, friends and business associates of Tory MPs whose companies had never manufactured a single gown or pair of goggles. Unashamed daylight robbery from the taxpayer during the worst public health crisis in a century.

5. Liz Truss

The Resolution Foundation estimates that in her seven-week premiership £20bn was blown by Truss and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng on unfunded cuts to national insurance and stamp duty, with a further £10bn added by higher interest rates and government borrowing costs. Boom, lost forever. Wiped a fortune off people’s pensions and achieved the lowest ever rate for Sterling against the Dollar

4. Assaults on freedoms

Johnson’s PCSC Bill has given the UK police extraordinary powers, unique in the developed world, to curb peaceful protest. It is the only bill in the West which allows the outright banning of free citizens with no criminal record from even planning, let alone attending, any peaceful, legitimate protest under threat of incarceration. Add into the mix various other grubby acts like giving undercover agents of the state immunity from prosecution for any and all crimes (including murder) and the direction of travel under the Tories was very clear.

3. Letting “the bodies pile high"

From failing to lock down until two months after the first Sage meeting, to failing to protect care home residents, to Eat Out to Help Out, to Test and Trace, to back to work measures, to Johnson rocking up at Buck House with COVID, it was failure after failure ultimately costing we still don’t know how many lives.

2. Brexit

A referendum conceived by the Tories (solely for their own electoral benefit), a Leave campaign led by the Tories, and a Brexit deal negotiated by the Tories. 4% immediately wiped of the UK’s GDP, companies bankrupt, jobs lost, red tape increased, freedoms binned, immigration up, diplomatic relationships with the UK’s closest neighbours and allies in the bin. The successful engineering, start to finish, of the greatest act of national self-sabotage in modern history.

1. Austerity

The greatest single crime against a nation’s public in the history of modern democracy. A cynical, punitive and - best of all - wholly counterproductive philosophy of government which targeted society’s most vulnerable in slashing welfare payments, housing subsidies and social services, crippled public services, emasculated the civil service, and left infrastructure to rot.

The British public is left with a country unrecognisable from the one the Tories inherited in 2010, and where did this sacrifice leave us? Still with zero growth fourteen years down the road, a bereft industrial sector, and a national debt now higher than Ireland’s, comparable to Portugal and Spain’s, and heading in the opposite direction to all three. All against 100 years of empirical economic evidence and based on an error in an Excel spreadsheet.