I am staggered to learn that David Cameron is a Marxist. I know, I know: the man who introduced the Bedroom Tax, who slashed tax credits for the working poor, who cut taxes for the rich, who continued the privatisation of the NHS started by fellow Marxist Tony Blair and slashed frontline public sector services and jobs. And now he’s a Marxist. In fact, he said so himself.
The Tory government, after having dramatically bumped up the cost of rail fares in the last five years have just realised, as the election nears, that voters are being shafted by rail companies. And he is going to freeze rail fares for five years. Hooray! What a happy coincidence!
This surely can’t be the same David Cameron who said in 2013 when Ed Miliband proposed freezing rip off energy bills, “We have to address the causes of prices, rather than effectively come up with what is a con.”
“I know he wants to live in a Marxist universe,” continued the PM. “He needs a basic lesson in economics.”
Cuddly George Osborne then confirmed that Labour’s policy was straight from Das Kapital. We’re all Marxists now then, right? Well, not quite.
What we have to remember about Cameron is that he is not a strategist and neither is Osborne, who is more of a fixer, a tactician. For all the endless “long term economic plan” rhetoric, the truth is that the modern day Tories do not look beyond winning in May. The future if that happened would be two years of warfare over Europe and the consequent uncertainty that would bring and years of strife and chaos if the Tories took us out of the EU.
Hence the series of back-of-a-fag-packet announcements, all seemingly unfunded, by Tory HQ.
The latest one is to freeze rail tickets but that’s not really what is happening. They are pledging to freeze regulated tickets along with the Retail Price Index (RPI), so no freeze at all in cash terms, and they are not freezing unregulated fares at all. Profiteering rail companies will simply jack up the cost of unregulated fares because they are not regulated. Not hard to spot the con in Conservative, is it?
I’m getting very tired of the negative Tory campaign now, which appears to consist of abuse and outright lies about Miliband and announcements that are dripping with spin. In fact, the Telegraph and the Mail appear to have given up on journalism full stop, with woeful stories today about who Miliband was shagging before he met his wife – over 10 years ago. Never mind that one of the women lost her husband two months ago. According to Telegraph and Mail morality code, there is a story there that the leader of the opposition had a sexual relationship with no intention of procreation. Now hands up everyone, which one of you ever had a fling purely for pleasure and not with the sole intention of making a baby? We’re not all Catholics you know!
I’ll be glad when it’s all over, to be honest. I am sick of Tory spin, I am appalled by the miserable level of debate in the gutter press, which these days includes much of the top end of the market, I’m afraid. I do not want to read about whatever Ed Miliband did with his cock a decade ago because it’s his business, not mine.
Anyway, the real cocks are the editors and tax dodging owners of Britain’s sickly press. I wish them nothing but erectile disfunction.
