"More of the same" is an extremist agenda

If any party went into an election explicitly proposing the neoliberal ruination that's already been done to the country, they'd be asking for an absolute kicking

Imagine a party went into an election with a manifesto pledging to do the following:

• Give away all of Britain’s nuclear power plants to the government of France.

• Allow private profiteers to siphon £70 billion+ out of England’s water infrastructure, whilst pumping billions of litres of raw sewage into our rivers and coastal waters.

• Drive a million kids into poverty with a cruel and arbitrary policy of denying child benefit and other social support to parents who have more than two children.

• Make the UK one of the lowest investment economies in the developed world by slavishly following an economically illiterate and counter-productive austerity agenda.

• Essentially stop building Council Housing, and allow buy-to-let slumlords to buy up millions of houses for their economically worthless exploitation schemes.

• Carve up the NHS and give away the most profitable pieces to private health profiteers.

• Shut down scores of police stations, defund youth centres and early intervention initiatives, dramatically increase poverty rates, vandalise the legal system, and then watch on as violent crime rates soar, and conviction rates plummet.

• Lumber students from ordinary backgrounds with vast university debts, on rip-off repayment terms that mean over 80% of graduates will never pay them off, despite paying 9% of their disposable income on repayments for their entire working lives.

• Impose economic sanctions on ourselves by setting up new trade barriers between the UK and our biggest trade partners.

• Spend over a decade deliberately driving down UK workers’ wages to create the longest period of wage stagnation in centuries, then attempt to blame workers for an inflation crisis that’s quite obviously been created through greedy capitalist profiteering and the Brexit sanctions we applied on ourselves.

• Flog off our strategically vital underground aviation fuel distribution network (GPSS) for a infinitesimal fraction of what it would have cost to build from scratch, then rent it back on a ten year lease for three times the price we just sold it for.

• Allow the state rail companies of various foreign governments to take over chunks of the UK rail network, then siphon £billions in profits back to their own countries to subsidise their own rail networks back home.

• Bribe the governments of France and China into building a new nuclear power station for us by promising them to pay double the market rate for the energy it produces for 35 years.

• Print £800 billion+ in brand new cash (Quantitative Easing), and then spend it in a way that they know benefits the very wealthy at the expense of everybody else.

• Deliberately under-invest in the creative industries, despite knowing that they’re worth more than £100 billion per year to the UK economy, and that the sector is one of the only ones left where Britain is still a genuine world leader.

• Systematically abuse and humiliate sick and disabled people by forcing them to repeatedly go through “fit for work” assessments that cost far more to administer than they save by booting people off disability benefits.

• Hand control of Britain’s nuclear weapons stockpile to a private consortium that’s 66% owned by US corporations.

• Allow a bunch of private spivs to take control of the majority of schools in England, then massively enrich themselves by siphoning huge chunks of the education budget into their own pockets via bloated executive salaries, and dodgy untendered supply contracts.

• Give cops the right to rape women with impunity, and arrest people for just potentially thinking about committing a crime!

If any political leader explicitly set out an agenda like this, you’d think they’d completely lost their mind, and that they were deliberately trying to lose the next election, wouldn’t you?

However all of these things have already been done, which means any political party that doesn’t go into the next election with a bold reform agenda aimed at undoing this damage is implicitly endorsing these depraved and disastrous policies.

It’s incredible how people become so normalised to the absurd and despicable way things are in the present that politicians believe they can get away with offering a "more of the same" agenda, rather than the bold transformative policies that are desperately needed to undo all of this damage.