Despite the Landslide, Labour Have No Vision and Only Won the UK General Election Because the Tories Lost So Spectacularly
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So the good news is easy. After 14 years of cruelty, incompetence and corruption, the Tories were wiped out in yesterday’s General Election in the UK, suffering their worst ever result, and ending up with less MPs than at any other point in their 190-year existence.
Of the 650 seats contested, the 365 seats that the Tories had when Rishi Sunak unexpectedly called a General Election on May 22 were slashed to just 121 (a loss of over two-thirds), with their vote almost halved, from 13,966,454 in 2019 to just 6,814,469 yesterday.
High-profile Tory losses included Liz Truss, the disastrous 43-day Prime Minister, whose vote plunged from 35,507 in 2019 to 11,217 in South West Norfolk, the absurd and offensive pro-Brexit toff Jacob Rees-Mogg, and a number of ministers until six weeks ago including the vacuous Tory pin-up Penny Mordaunt, the empty Grant Shapps and Mark Harper, the far-right ideologues Liam Fox and Johnny Mercer, and the offensive Thérèse Coffey and Gillian Keegan.
Britain’s 9/11 and Cannibalistic Capitalism: The Grenfell Tower Fire, Seven Years On
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You might be thinking that’s an outrageous analogy. Apart from the visual similarities between burning towers, how can I compare an attack by a foreign entity on the tallest buildings in New York’s banking centre with an unfortunate accident that befell the inhabitants of a tower block of social housing in a historically deprived area of west London?
The reason I make the analogy is because the Grenfell Tower fire, on June 14, 2017, wasn’t an accident, as such; it was the inevitable result of a system of deliberate neglect, and the deliberate erosion of safety standards, for those living in high-rise housing, which came about because of the deliberate creation of what I believe we’re entitled to call cannibalistic capitalism; or, if you prefer, economic terrorism, knowingly inflicted on civilians by politicians and almost the entire building industry.
Terrorism is the deliberate targeting of civilians for political or ideological aims, and at Grenfell, seven years ago, 72 people died because, over the previous four decades, a system of providing safe and secure rented housing was eroded and largely erased, replaced with a new ideology that, under Margaret Thatcher, sought to eliminate the state provision of housing, selling it off via the notorious ‘Right to Buy’ policy, demonising those who still lived in social housing, portraying them as shirkers and scroungers and reclassifying them as inferior, or second-class citizens, cutting funding for maintenance and repairs, and transferring as much of the remaining social housing as possible to less accountable, or, seemingly, completely unaccountable public-private entities.
Endless Sewage and Massive Unjustifiable Profits: Renationalise the Water Industry Now!
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Two weeks ago, a revenue collector from Thames Water rang me to remind me that I was overdue paying the first two instalments of my £500+ annual bill, and I spontaneously went into a rant about how it is not a water company, but an extortion scheme for providing profits to its shareholders while failing to provide the service for which it ostensibly exists — to provide us with clean water and to manage sewage.
Last week I received an automated call demanding payment, and I’ve now paid it, because there’s no solidarity movement of other Thames Water customers, in vast numbers, also refusing to pay, and I have no choice of supplier. This is a privatised monopoly, as well as an extortion racket — although I note that anyone wanting to tackle it through concerted customer action might take heart from the fact that Southern Water customers, who are “refusing to pay their wastewater bills in protest at sewage spills by the firm”, are meeting with some success in their campaign, as the BBC reported just two weeks ago.
Like all the water companies, privatised by Margaret Thatcher in 1989, Thames Water makes vast profits while failing to do its job. In December, it announced six-monthly profits of almost £500m, and its CEO, Sarah Bentley, was paid a staggering £2m last year. Last month, responding to mounting criticism of the water companies’ profiteering, Bentley, along with the CEO of Yorkshire Water and the owner of South West Water, stated that they would be forgoing their bonuses this year, with Bentley explaining that it “just did not feel like the right thing to take performance-related pay this year.”
Who's still at Guantánamo?
