As unemployment hits 2.5 million, the Tories are blaming the unemployed on benefit for our economic woes, rather than the bankers at Goldman Sachs who have an average salary of £520,000 per year. The Tories are going back to their nastiest base instincts to try to pull off an election win.
The sad thing, of course, is that you could replace Cameron in that photo with James Purnell, Hazell Blears or Tessa Jowell without having to change the slogan.
The benefit system already is onerous and humiliating to those who want to work and feel, wrongly, ashamed to be unemployed. Many entitled and unemployed, normally hard working, people drop out of benefits, and into terrible trouble, because of the routine degradation heaped on them by the New Labour “New Deal” system, which Cameron seeks to reinforce.
Strangely the brass-necked benefit cheats, who do exist, are the ones who are not discouraged by the endless appointments, interrogations and form filling and continue to thrive on the counter-productive system.
But if anyone doubts the real nastiness of the Tories, or that the Lib Dems are seen as a real threat to the established order by the corporate media and their paymasters, should look at the absolutely vicious anti-Clegg headlines on the front pages of every single Tory newspaper today. I have not seen anything like this concerted a Tory media campaign since the Falklands War. The only parallel at election time was the vilification of Kinnock, but even that did not have every other front page vying with the Sun in extremity.
http://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2010/04/22/tabloids-cover-lib-dems-sensation/
The Mail’s Clegg Nazi front page headline wins first prize for tenedentiousness, The Telegraph “expenses scandal” is not about taxpayers’ money but private and declared donations (and has been saved up for nine months for this moment), the Financial Times warns the City won’t accept anything but a clear Tory win, the Sun is apoplectic at the idea that for once Murdoch may not be able to nominate his Prime Minister, and the Daily Express warns that Clegg will flood the country with black people.
The Tories are truly vicious when rattled. This has become a campaign about who democracy is for – the people or the press barons. Anybody who opposes corporate and City power and its ownership of democracy through the mass media, needs now to fall in line behind the Liberal Democrats to resist this.
UPDATE
I take my hat off to Iain Dale for his excellent article on the subject.
http://iaindale.blogspot.com/2010/04/these-shameful-attacks-on-clegg-will.html
I attack Iain from time to time because it is part of the blogosphere game; but I have always had a high opinion of him. He seems to have wandered into the wrong political party by mistake – if you look at the typical Tory commenter on the political betting first link above, Iain has nothing in common with these vicious people.