David Cameron is a ruthless man – and the regressive neoliberalism that he and his party champions, has this morning, secured five more years to subvert and betray the fabric of British society.
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It is a disaster – but how many fully realise just how truly dreadful this news is?
Expect more punishment and hatred to be thrown at the unemployed and the disabled, more benefit sanctions, more food banks, more homeless people. The bedroom tax will continue to bring misery and stress to some of the most vulnerable people in our society.
Expect more zero hours contracts, job insecurity and desperate people driven into the arms of legal loan sharks like Wonga.
The housing market will be pumped up and the profiteering and bullying from estate agents and buy-to-let landlords will continue. A whole generation will be enslaved to high rents, insane debts and our housing provision will fall ever further below basic standards of human rights laid out by the U.N.
Expect a gleeful repeal of the Human Rights Act and more legislation to restrict protest.
The NHS will be underfunded, undermined and broken up as a prelude to full privatisation.
TTIP will be warmly embraced and future attempts to prevent the worst excesses of corporate power will be met with armies of corporate lawyers and multinational lawsuits.
The disgusting public subsidies afforded to the private owners of the railway companies will continue – they will profiteer while commuters suffer.
What remains of our public services will be under relentless attack – not a single public sector worker, nor the people who rely on them, will feel safe.
Some of the richest families in Britain will be purring with delight this morning – their wealth will increase and the gap between the 1% and the rest of us will increase.
Corporate and oligarch tax dodgers can breathe easy today – every stone will be left unturned in the search for the taxes they dodge illegally – expect more staff cuts at HMRC.
Bank bonuses will rocket upwards with no restraint on banks or their practices, CEO pay will leap on in an ever more insane disconnect from their workforces.
The dominance of the City Of London will continue and our economy will remain dangerously reliant on financial speculation and housing bubbles that serve no useful purpose in the real world.
But perhaps even more serious than the traditional fall out of a Conservative government are the things that never even got mentioned by the mainstream politicos and media portals during the election.
Our corrupt system of party political funding will remain unreformed – oligarchs and corporate ‘donations’ will set the agenda for the years ahead, those without money – frozen out.
Our hopelessly broken electoral system will remain intact and the Hobson’s choice afforded to the electorate via the two entrenched tribes will be unchanged.
Every possible measure to address climate change will be abandoned or left unexamined. As a species we are faced with a threat to our very existence and our response is to ignore it and head obliquely in all the wrong directions.
Instead of scaling down wasteful consumerism, switching to renewable energy and leaving the vast majority of fossil fuel reserves in the ground – we will ramp up fracking and try every neoliberal trick to assist the worst excesses of capitalism. We are being led into an ecological apocalypse that our children and grandchildren will pay for.
The mantras supporting infinite economic growth on a finite planet and empty yardsticks like GDP and the FTSE 100 will be worshipped without question. No rational debate about where this is taking us will be permitted.
Did anyone hear the debates about soil loss, the destruction of biodiversity, and the creeping retreat of social cohesion ? Neither did we.
Is any politician or pundit questioning the utter dominance of the corporate media and the propaganda which restricts meaningful debate? Of course not.
Let us not weep too many tears for career politcos like Rachel Reeves, Ed Balls and Ed Milliband.
A Labour government would have been a tiny step in the right direction – but Labour was captured by the neoliberal consensus long ago and while less spiteful, New Labour had ingested so many tory tropes that it is now hard to tell them apart.
Quite where we go from here I honestly don’t know. Perhaps there is no way now to prevent our so called ‘leaders’ from taking us into the abyss of social breakdown and environmental collapse.
It is important that people of integrity and courage speak out against and document the horrors that lie ahead.
This short article is by no means a comprehensive list of all the consequences that will flow from re-electing a cock-a-hoop tory party with its right wingers empowered as never before.
For the next five years all I can suggest is that if you care – share information – organise – speak out and never give up.
People of good character who will not be silenced, are now all that stands between our most vulnerable citizens and the neoliberal bully boys.
Spot on. The next five years will consolidate the obscenely wealthy in both corporate and political circles.
We, the rest, are sheep to be sheared for their continued economic transcendency, control, manipulation and exploitation.
But don’t expect any time soon that thick, compliant sheep will turn into enlightened goats and start butting against their barriers. The modern version of panem et circenses – consumerism, gadgets and piped entertainment – will easily deter any collective motivation to change for many years to come.
It’s a dour, sad, complacent, cowardly, obsequious and subservient country we live in when goats are regarded as a threat to the national security of sheep. You might ask, whose nation? The few in control of it. Whose security? Theirs.
Then again, it has to be said that the faux majority sheep of this county have put the tories back in power and well deserve the shearing to the bone it will entail. At what point will they wake up to their self-inflicted pain and do something to mitigate their abject condition? On the steps of the abattoir.
The enlightened live in dire, depressing times.