Most people in the UK have a pretty dim view of politicians in general – and the past 40 or 50 years of outrageous political tw*ttery served up by our elected representatives proves this view is completely justified. But the vast majority of people also now concede that, in the past 8 years in particular, the Conservative Party have taken ‘bending the truth’ to new and particularly ridiculous levels, far beyond the level of we have seen before. And their latest claim that “austerity is over” has now become yet another shining example of why huge swathes of Brits no longer trust a single word that happens to fall out of any Tory politician’s mouth.
Since 2010, the Conservative Party have served up a thin and particularly bitter gruel of swingeing cuts to vital public services.
The Tories were elected back to government arguing that such austerity measures were necessary to ‘bring the public finances back in order’ following the financial crash in 2008.
And so, the public services that the vast majority of us all rely on – such as the NHS, schools, the police, firefighters etc – as well as essential funding to local councils that pay for things like roads, libraries and housing, have been drastically cut in order to save money.
But 8 years on, it is now clear that the Tories’ austerity policies have not worked. In this time, UK debt has almost doubled, and the Tories haven’t even managed to bring the public finances back into a surplus – meaning that their promise to handle the economy so that we are ‘living within our means‘, has been categorically broken.
Not only this, the NHS is on the brink of catastrophe; schools are in crisis and teachers are leaving in their droves through stress and exhaustion; crime is soaring due to the fact that 21,000 police officers have been made redundant, and councils across the country are going bankrupt because their budgets have been slashed in half.
Furthermore, poverty is soaring to near-Dickensian levels. Rough sleeping has risen by 169%. The number of children without homes has almost doubled.
And these effects are just the tip of the austerity iceburg.
So when Theresa May first announced that these devastating cuts would be coming to an end at the Tory Conference last month, the entire country was desperate to believe that, for once, she was telling the truth.
We hate to break it to you, but she was lying. Again.
Yet, despite the fact that the Tories look set to continue with their failed and provably horrific policies, the Chancellor Phillip Hammond used Monday’s budget to again reassert the myth that austerity was coming to an end – a repeated assertion that, understandably, came in for significant criticism and intense ridicule, not least because virtually everyone in the country could see that it was patently untrue.
But now, the BBC comedy show The Daily Mash has summed up the Tories’ ridiculous lies in an utterly amazing 48 second skit which absolutely annihilates their claim that austerity is coming to an end:
“Chancellor Phillip Hammond used Monday’s budget to announce that the austerity era had official ended.
But cuts to council funding, police numbers, and social housing will continue.
Schools, social services, and care for the elderly will also continue to be chronically underfunded.
Prisons will be overcrowded and the NHS will carry on struggling to manage without enough doctors, nurses or ambulances.
Libraries will either be closed altogether, or only open at specific points in the lunar cycle.
Homelessness will continue to be quite sad, but easily ignored, and Britain’s housing supply will still be controlled by evil b*stard property developers who think “affordable” means £250,000.
But thank f*ck austerity is over!”
You can watch the sketch below:
