No Surprises

Tax credit abolition. China building our nuclear reactors. TTIP rampant. £2billion short fall on NHS budget. AstraZeneca Zero tax deal. More and more public spending cuts. If anyone is at all surprised by the events in the last week then you need to revise more.

George Osborne's main criteria is to get the deficit down, yet no right wing press has made much of the fact the budget deficit is higher now than it ever was under Labour; or that Gorgeous George has actually borrowed more money - not for the country, but to help line the pockets of his new chums. We get Corbyn and the asteroid in the news, while Tories literally dismantle everything that is admirable about this country and not even a sniff of it - anywhere 'creditable'.

When I suggested that a Tory government would penalise the poor and disenfranchised, many soft Tories I know accused me of the kind of scaremongering our right wing press gets away with on a daily basis. Some even suggested, when I said that tax credits would be the first thing to go that I really had no idea and I was working purely on an anti-Tory agenda. I accused many people of not caring for the country or the people and I was told, quite categorically that despite not having a job and being a victim of austerity cuts TWICE, I didn't know what I was talking about. I accused them of being 'alright Jacks' and was pretty much ostracised and told they were doing it for their kids - because, as we know, the Tories are the party that plan for the future of your kids. I mean look at the amount of schools, hospitals, nurseries and child-based community projects they fund or have built...

Champagne is back on the menu at the Tory conference; but more alarming than anything else are the steel fences around the venue and the armed guards, and snipers on roofs. At the labour Party conference a week before any Tony, Gordon or Mandleson could have strolled up to Jeremy Corbyn and shook his hand. The Tories are the party in power; they have a majority; they are telling us what a good job they're doing - so why are they barricading themselves away from their adoring general public - I mean 60,000 turned out yesterday to wish Dave and Gideon a good conference, did the PM pop out and say thanks?

The pinnacle of how far the general public has lost touch with politics was summed up, yet again, by someone I know who believes that everything on ITV is indicative of the country as a whole. I had had this argument many months ago when my brother suggested that you only had to watch Jeremy Kyle to realise why people should never vote Labour - as if anyone other than Margaret Thatcher can be blamed for the rise of the Chav class. It also is never noted that people who appear on Kyle's show represent less than 0.01% of benefit claimers in the country and according to a survey the majority of these people would vote UKIP or Conservative because they're 'aspirational' - yet, they're not. The problem is when you read facts about things and it doesn't come from a recognised news source, people who don't want to believe it, won't.

All over the news today is Cameron's promise for a 7-day-a-week NHS. This has been trumpeted all over the media, yet senior NHS doctors have been quick to point out that there isn't enough staff to cope with it at the moment and unless the government invests in new medical staff then this is a promise that people will struggle to see. The government are believed to have misplaced £2billion of NHS money - according to less right wing newspapers - perhaps that £2billion is what is going to be used to train the next generation of doctors and nurses?

Also, just to prove what a lefty I am - this 5p plastic bag charge will pretty much only affect the poor. Most affluent Tories who stuff plastic bags with their caviar and Wagu beef can afford to buy a bag for life or more likely pay the 5p charge over and over again - then the poor and disenfranchised will get the blame for all the landfill bin bags, because the media can and will do that and most of you will believe it...

This is England 2015.