The Tory brand

Shock revelation. Tory is a cunt. In other news, the Pope remains Catholic and yes, bears prefer trees as their toilet decoration.

Surely this actually reinforces their brand? No one actually buys the "compassionate conservative" thing that David Cameron is pretending to? Did we not notice that Bush ran as one of those and immediately swung hard to the right as soon as he was in office? I'll say one thing for the rightards here: at least Tony Abbott doesn't pretend not to be an arsehole. He wears it with pride.

I love reading about conservatives who promote the "big society" as though they weren't pretending to believe in equity because most of us are poor and wouldn't vote for them if they admitted to being nakedly in pursuit of the agenda of the rich. Of course there is no such thing as society. They destroyed it. The idea that you can gut the welfare state and expect citizens to fill the gap is ludicrous because for 30 years they've also been selling us the idea that the goal of our lives is to fuck everyone else and make bank. Which has led us to the soulless, bereft, misshapen thing that passes for society today.

We are idiots because we allow ourselves to be conned by the messaging, and never look at what we are actually being sold. A key policy goal of the right (and in fact Labour, ironically) has been to destroy the power of unions to bargain collectively and to push people into "workplace agreements".

The thing is, when your boss offers you a workplace agreement, the deal is "take it or leave it". There's nothing you can do if you don't like it but look for another job. And good luck with that! When a union bargains for us, the deal is not "take it or leave it" because if we leave it, they are fucked. Now it's "please take it because I recognise you can fuck me".

Bosses, on the whole, are not kind people. They are people who have been trained to think of you as a cost that needs cutting if possible. They want to milk you as hard as they can for as little reward as they think you'll accept. Selling this as a virtue, and calling it an "agreement", when the choice is agree or starve because the right also took the floor out from unemployment support, was a great work of politics.

Did you know that your real wages have fallen? I'm pretty sure that's true for everyone reading this blog, because I'm pretty sure no one who reads it is particularly wealthy (my apologies to you if you are in fact wealthy and can I interest you in staking a moderately successful poker player?). Naturally, you may have changed jobs and now do something more lucrative than you did ten years ago, but otherwise, your real wages will have fallen. Yet the economy has grown (despite the recent problems) in real terms.

Why didn't we share? If this is a society, why didn't we all get a share in it? Answers on a postcard.

They conned you. They distracted you with immigration (who cares who lives in your street? You don't talk to your neighbours anyway). They distracted you with terror. They distracted you with wall-to-wall bullshit on the TV, newsertainment, celebrity culture, mobile phones that can film your life and make your tea and football, which they also destroyed, so that now we have a ridiculous parody of the contest of hometown allegiances that used to thrill us.

They conned you. Yet the Liberals here, the Tories there, the Republicans in the States all have hopes of a return to power in the next decade, and the parties they replace are not the parties of the working man they affect to be, but grim managerialists who differ only in nuance from the rightards, not in any way that will likely make a difference in your life.

posted by Dr Zen @ 1:41 pm