Lock-’em-up Conservatives competing noisily to bash workers the hardest reveals a terrifying hostility to grafters, families, the retired or even most businesses.
Expecting men and women desperate to protect their plummeting living standards to grovel like Oliver Twist, politely begging for more, please sir, while cuffing them with the anger of a Victorian master is 21st-century bully politics.
Transport strikes might be nearer resolution if hectoring Grant Shapps spent five minutes meeting trade union leaders – Micks Lynch and Whelan and Manuel Cortes – instead of the Transport Secretary bellowing scandalous threats to shackle them in work gangs on the railway.
Contrast the kid glove treatment of energy companies by reactionary Liz Truss, the clear favourite to be PM, with her smearing of folk losing a day’s pay to battle for wage justice.
Breaking Britain under the Conservatives is a country heading backwards not forwards. Inequality is injurious as well as insulting, with wages dropping in value at a record rate for the many.
Yet the High Pay Centre discloses the pay of the few running the largest firms is 109 times the average – up 39% since Covid to £3.41million.
Michael Gove’s devastating blue-on-blue “holiday from reality” attack on Truss could apply to the entire out-of-touch Conservative Party, including himself. Labour poll leads of between eight and 15 points since backing a £1,971 energy cap freeze may prove a watershed.
Quietly spoken Justin Madders, Labour’s Shadow Employment Minister, pinpointed a loss of faith in the Tories with fewer believing them.
Any lingering benefit of the doubt sinks when Shapps, who publicly condemned P&O Ferries for sacking and replacing 800 crew with cheaper agency bodies, then legislates for other employers to do the same.
Hand-wringing by Tory Ministers is regularly followed by broken pledges, observed mild-mannered Madders. He’s absolutely right, of course.
Mistakenly thinking that battering strikers and strikes is a vote winner is another fatal Conservative mistake by a Dickensian party trapped in its past.
