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"The Conservatives have been in office for over twelve years, steering the nation through the fallout of the financial crisis"

The Tories spent the last 12 years ensuring that their donors and mates in the City got away with causing the biggest financial crisis for 80 years. They not only allowed the spivs to keep all their profits and bonuses but spent years trying to claim that the national debt had doubled due to Labour's spending on the run-down schools and hospitals which 18 years of Thatcherism left, rather than the cost of bailing out RBS and Lloyds and the subsequent recession. They were particularly vicious in blaming people in receipt of benefits and instituted such vindictive measures as the Bedroom tax. I'm not even a Left winger but it was blatant class warfare for all to see.

"Conservatism is not a comprehensive philosophy of reality, but “certain beliefs about the activity of governing and the instruments of government”" "conservatives recognise order as a vitally important good in itself"

Except of course when it comes to regulating the activities of their friends in the City. The party of "law and order" was curiously slow to prosecute the innumerable frauds which came to light in the years after the crash: LIBOR, HSBC money laundering, mis-selling, endemic tax evasion... It was naked favouritism to people who were effectively financial gangsters. The party of "sound money" then allowed the Bank of England to print up £885 billion in QE which was handed straight to the hedge fund boys. £885 BILLION. And these people then have the nerve to claim anyone opposing this heist is "envious"!

How to get people off benefits? Well don't close down the country's industry and leave millions of people to rot for 40 years, that would be a start. Don't be the party who loves nothing more than to use unemployment as a weapon, which will always make it easier to sack people at the same time as making it harder to go to an employment tribunal. Don't fix unemployment at 7 to 8% for 40 years and ensure it stays that way via mass immigration. Don't relentlessly suppress wages at the same time as driving up house prices while refusing to allow proper collective wage bargaining across the entire economy.

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