Same old, same old
APROPOS recent letters (April 2 & 3) about freshening up the leadership of the Conservative Party perhaps it is worth looking back at its performance in 14 years of governance at Westminster. Has life improved or deteriorated for the majority of UK citizens? If you think it has improved you need your head examined.
The current government will be kicked out at the next General Election and leave the incoming administration with a record peacetime national debt. The economy is in ruins following a disastrous and completely unnecessary Brexit, privatisation has left England floating in a sea of human excrement, its railway system is collapsingg and the NHS has been deliberately starved of resources to facilitate it also being privatised.
The recent inflation rate in the price of food has been horrific. In 2020, the average price of a loaf of bread was £1.03 – today it is £1.40. Charity foodbanks are now established as a fundamental part of the support for workers as well as the unemployed, life expectancy is dropping and our children are becoming smaller and fatter. Westminster’s admission of the unaccountable disappearance of tens of billions of our hardearned taxes is simply unacceptable, but no heads will roll.
It’s not that there isn’t enough money to redress these problems, it’s just that a skewed taxation system means it is accumulating in the pockets of the relative few perched at the top of the social pyramid. We old codgers who worked all our lives and paid into the state pension fund now find Westminster wants to treat it as a benefit rather than a right. There is talk of means-testing, ergo reducing the state pension for some, a pension which currently expects old fogeys to survive on a stipend equivalent to half the current minimum wage, it itself being substantially lower than what is calculated to be the minimum living wage.
So, will putting lipstick on a pig stop it being a pig? No, not even when the lipstick is in the form of Sir Keir Starmer and his party of centrists who are virtually indistinguishable from the other blue pigs with their noses in the trough.
David J Crawford,
Glasgow.