In the next week we will no doubt have inflicted upon us the ‘official Christmas photographs’ of Rishi Sunak and his family. It is a ritual, dripping with hypocrisy, that is repeated by Tory MPs up and down the country.
But behind this glittery, plastic, façade, there lie the morals of the cess-pit. Tory morality rests not on ‘good will’ and generosity, the supposed hallmarks of this season, but greed, theft of public assets, racism, contempt towards the most disadvantaged in society, and callous disregard of the many victims of their politics.
It is worth dwelling a little this week on the real morality of the Tory Party. Such as:
- Lady Mone, elevated to a peerage by David Cameron, used the pandemic “VIP lane” to lobby for contracts for her company, PPE Medpro, even before it was set up and registered at Companies House. Got contracts for over £200m, mostly for PPE that turned out to be useless, in the process enriching her family. For three years she denied having any connection to the company, then finally, this week, she admits lying through her teeth all that time, but adds, “I can’t see what we’ve done wrong”.
- The man put in as Home Secretary by the ‘party of the family’, James Cleverly, more than doubles the earnings threshold for foreign nationals – to well over national average earnings – for them to have a right to live in the UK. This means that British citizens who have foreign born partners and may have lived here for years may either have to split up or move overseas to continue living together. (See feature in the Guardian, here).
- The Tories’ continue their grandstanding (no-one – not even them – see it as a serious policy) on deporting desperate asylum seekers who cross the Channel on small boats to Rwanda, a corrupt and undemocratic country. But to do this requires an act of parliament to deem Rwanda to be ‘safe’, irrespective of the real facts on the ground.
- A new measure is to be introduced into parliament as part of a criminal justice bill, to give police powers in England and Wales to prosecute homelessness people who might contribute to the “nuisance” of rough sleeping. Prosecutions, therefore, for being poor. There are no plans to prosecute successive Tory ministers who have increased the “nuisance” of rough sleeping by three-quarters since 2010.
- According to the Office for National Statistics, wealth is so unequal in the UK that in 2020, the richest 10% of households held 43% of all wealth. The poorest half of the population, on the other hand, owned only 9% of the wealth.
- Three million people used food banks in the UK in 2022/23. In the first year of the Tory government, in 2010/11, the Trussell Trust, which runs around two thirds of food banks, only gave out 61,468 food parcels (one fiftieth of one per cent of the latest figure).
These are only some aspects of Tory policies that impact on life in the UK. They do not even take into account international issues. Like the fact that it has taken seven weeks of brutal bombing and around 25,000 Palestinian deaths, mostly of women, children and non-combatants, before the Tory Government shifts, ever so slightly, its staunchly pro-Israeli policy.
We need to bear all of these things in mind, when we are being fed the usual seasonal ‘pap’ on TV and in the media this week. ‘Morality’ is not a characteristic that stands above, or separate to, politics. Our morality, the morality of the labour movement is of a completely different order to that of the rich, greedy, and powerful elite who control our lives, at least for the moment.
