Tories out of touch with misery caused by their policies

Sir, – The right-wing unionist parties in Northern Ireland in alliance with the Brexiteer extremists in the Tory Party are trying to unpick and break the Northern Ireland Protocol.

Not only was this deal agreed by Boris Johnson, it was voted through Parliament by the European Research Group (ERG). Now Liz Truss has announced the UK will abrogate the international treaty.

This pandering to the unionists will have catastrophic consequences for the UK economy. It will instigate a trade war with the EU, one which the UK can’t win. The Brexitsupporting heartlands have been conned by Johnson’s grubby xenophobia, empire nostalgia and threats of war. Prices and supply chains which are already under severe strain will be further weakened. It will bring the UK economy further to the brink of collapse.

The Tories have lied about inflation. They pretend that it’s caused by government spending programmes in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic. They then use this as a means to justify austerity.

The reality is that the majority (60%) of inflation is caused by corporations increasing their prices to make more profit.

This is then covered up by the right-wing media as they too are corporations who rely on ever-increasing profits for their survival. The UK is being further hit by the supply chain crisis as it relies on imports more than other countries.

This is as a result of deliberate job off-shoring in the 1980s by the Tories. They allowed highly-skilled manufacturing occupations to be sent to China and India all to smash the power of organised labour. The so-called Thatcher “revolution”.

The energy price rises additionally are as a result of Thatcher’s giveaway of the utilities in the 1980s.

Had these still been in public ownership, the public and not the wealthy fat cats would currently be profiting from the high energy price. In 2017 the UK’s biggest gas storage facility was closed. This was after the Tory government refused to subsidise the cost of refurbishment.

This is the madness of the “free-market” which would not have happened had they been in public ownership.

The Tories along with the Bank of England are following the diktats of finance capital. They want wages to be forcibly decreased by a rise in interest rates.

This will result in recession.

Finance capital views such measures as a “first strike” against workers demanding better wages and conditions .

The Tories are so out of touch with the misery and poverty their policies are causing.

One Tory MP said people on low incomes should buy shops’ own brand of food, another said foodbanks were there because people didn’t know how to cook and claimed he could make meals for 30p each and a government minister suggested those on low wages should simply get a betterpaying job.

This Union flag is a bloodstained relic of colonialism and the word Britain really is just a fig leaf for England. Labour and the union have nothing to offer Scots except unionist Toryism.