Cartoon – Cameron and Osborne Laughing at the People, Who Elected Them

This cartoon is simply a straight drawing of David Cameron and George Osborne, based on photographs of them from Private Eye. These showed them laughing like a malignant, old Etonian Nazi version of the Chuckle Brothers. Of course, the Tories enjoy a good laugh mocking the Labour party, or anybody else in parliament who dares to tell the truth about the mass poverty they’re inflicting for the profit of big business. Remember the way May laughed robotically shortly before the election, when Jeremy Corbyn dared to remind her of it?

But it’s also not hard to imagine that they are laughing, not simply as a way of trying to shrug off the entire accurate attacks on them and their vile policies, but also at the poor and the very people, who are suffering through their policies. Mike put up a picture a year or so ago of Cameron and Ian Duncan Smith, the minister in charge of culling the disabled, having a real belly laugh in parliament at a speech, in which the sufferings of one disabled woman due to their welfare reforms, were being read out and described.

If you want a graphic demonstration of the Tories’ real attitude to the poorm that was it.

The Tories are dismantling what’s left of the welfare state and privatising the NHS, all for the benefit of the rich and big business. They have seen their tax rates cut, while the tax burden has increasingly shifted to the poor and working class through the imposition of indirect taxes. This has been a direct consequence of nearly forty years of Thatcherism. Left-wing economists, politicians, and writers have said that it is the largest redistribution of wealth upwards for decades.

The result has been massive wealth for the few, while the 75 per cent of the population who aren’t rich have been thrust further into poverty. Over a hundred thousand people are forced to use food banks. Seven million people live in food insecure households, just about feeding themselves today, but unsure whether they’ll have enough tomorrow. Wages are stagnant and below the rate of the inflation. The disabled and unemployed are thrown off benefit at the whim of jobcentre clerks and decision makers. Many of those fortunate enough to have jobs are stuck in short-term, part-time or zero hours contracts. Insecure short-term work, which does not pay enough to support them or their families. The majority of people claiming benefits aren’t the unemployed, but people in work hit by this type of poverty.

And the Tories are hitting the working poor as well. If you’re low paid and need benefits, it’s your fault for not being able to get a better job, rather than due to structural faults in the economy and decades of Thatcherite employment policies. So they’re busy trying to find ways of sanctioning these poor souls as well.

This is all done in the name of creating a fluid jobs market, enabling employers to hire and fire workers at will, and not having to pay those workers they do retain if they don’t need them that day. This is supposed to create employment.

But the Tories aren’t interested in creating mass employment. 19th century free trade economists and their monetarist successors wanted to keep a certain proportion of the population – about 8 per cent – unemployed in order to use the threat of unemployment to keep the working class in line and wages low.

This has made the rich much richer. And some of the Tories were very frank about what it meant at the time. Private Eye, reviewing one of the ‘heritage’ books that came out during Thatcher’s period in office about the wonderful lives and stately homes of the aristocracy, quoted Hugh Massingberd’s comments about it in the Times. After decades of attack by Labour governments, who had imposed death duties on them to break up their wealth, the aristocracy were returning to their old power and status. It was, he declared, ‘a social restoration’.

The anonymous reviewer pointed out what this meant for the rest of us. The rich were winning back their old seats in society, and the rest of us were going to be sat on.

Meanwhile, the Tories have sought to maintain their grip on power through lie after lie. They claim that only they represent the real working class, defending hardworking people against idle scroungers like the unemployed and asylum seekers. The NHS is being privatised and cut to the bone, but they then claim with a straight face that in real terms, there’s more money being spent on it than ever before. They aren’t depriving people of benefits, only reforming it so that it goes to the people, who deserve. Yeah, it’s because these reforms are so accurate that we have so many people dying of starvation.

As for food banks, people are only using them because it’s free food. It’s another lie. You can only use them if you have a chit from the jobcentre to say you have no money and can’t feed yourself. But the truth is irrelevant to Tories mouthing this nonsense, like Edwina Currie.

And at the top you get the sneers and condescension from very rich Tories, who are doing very well, thank you very much. Johnny Void, Mike and the Angry Yorkshireman at Another Angry Voice carried a sample of some of these a few years ago. One Tory patrician declared that the homeless were ‘the people you step over coming out of the opera’. And Matthew Freud, who was briefly a member of Blair’s New Labour before jumping ship and joining the Tories, declared that the poor should be more flexible than the rich, as they had less to lose.

These people are out of touch, and are sneering at the victim of the poverty they have imposed.

After the elections in the early 1990s, which saw John Major enter downing street as the new Tory pm, Spitting Image ran a series of sketches. These showed the Tories turning up outside the homes of ordinary people and asking them if they vote for them. When they said ‘Yes’, Major and his cabinet chanted ‘Stupid, Stupid’ at them. This was because the British public had voted them back in, despite massive poverty due to cuts and a housing crisis that had created a rise in homelessness as people had their homes repossessed for not being able to repay their mortgages.

Just as the lack of affordable housing now means that the majority of working people will be unable to afford their own home, and rents are also high.

So behind the carefully crafted veneer of ‘one nation’, ‘compassionate’ Conservatism – which is in fact anything but – it’s not hard to see that the Tories are having a laugh at the British public, sneering at the ordinary people, who elect them sincerely believing that they mean to serve them.

They don’t serve us, and have nothing in common with us, despite all that bilge about how ‘we’re all in it together’. They serve only the rich, and despise and hate the working and lower middle classes.

But for a genuine politicians, who does have the interests of the poor at heart, vote Labour and get Corbyn into office when ‘strong and stable’ May’s administration finally collapses.

Tags: 'One Nation' Conservatives, Another Angry Voice, Aristocracy, Austerity, Benefit Cuts, Benefit Sanctions, Big Business, Cartoons, Conservatives, Cuts, David Cameron, Edwina Currie, Elections, Eton, Food Banks, Freet Trade, George Osborne, Homelessness, Housing, Hugh Massingberd, Ian Duncan Smith, Jeremy Corbyn, Jobcentres, Jobs Markets, John Major, Johnny Void, Lower Middle Class, Margaret Thatcher, Matthew Freud, Monetarism, New Labour, NHS, NHS Privatisation, Part-Time Work, Private Eye, Rents, Short Term Contracts, Spitting Image, Starvation, the Poor, the Rich, Theresa May, Vox Political, Welfare State, Working Class, Zero Hours Contracts