Don't be distracted by Tory toilet discourse

The UK economy is in an absolute state after 13 years of Tory misrule, yet Rishi Sunak is banging on about toilets!

After 13 years of ruinous Tory misrule the UK economy is in the toilet.

• The longest period of wage stagnation in centuries has left UK workers an average of £11,000 a year worse off than they would have been.

• Britain has become one of the lowest investment economies in the rich world, both in terms of state investment, and private sector investment.

• Poverty and low-pay have spread like wildfire across Britain, meaning that 4.2 million British kids are now growing up in poverty, with 71% of them actually living in working households.

• Privatised energy and water companies are ripping off customers with huge bills as they deliberately underinvest in maintenance and infrastructure in order to generate utterly obscene profits for themselves.

• Inflation is absolutely out of control (especially in comparison to countries that actually implemented anti-inflationary policies), meaning the price of everything is skyrocketing, while the value of our money is being eroded away before our eyes.

• How could anyone have imagined that leaving administration of the Brexit process in the hands of a bone-idle, incompetent, serial liar like Boris Johnson wouldn’t end up delivering the chaotic and ideologically incoherent act of national self-harm we’re now lumbered with?

• With buy-to-let slumlords buying up almost all the affordable housing for their idle profiteering schemes, and the slowest rate of house building since the 1920s, it’s hardly surprising that housing is more unaffordable than ever, and rates of home ownership are plummeting.

• Huge Tory austerity cuts to police budgets, youth services, and the criminal justice system have created a toxic mess of rising violent crime, falling conviction rates, and vast backlogs in our courts, meaning victims often have to wait literally years for justice and restitution.

• NHS waiting lists have soared to yet another all-time high, and the Tory government is busy scrapping the cancer waiting time targets that they’ve been failing to meet.

• Literally thousands of schools in England have been given away for free to a bunch of unaccountable private sector spivs, and per-pupil spending is still below 2010 levels.

• After almost three decades, the Tory rail privatisation agenda has turned out to be an absolute shambles that costs far more in subsidies to profiteering franchises and hidden black holes of debt than running the entire network used to back the days of British Rail.

Diabolical Tory economic mismanagement meant that the UK was the last G7 economy to lag behind pre-pandemic levels of economic activity.

• Local governments have had their budgets absolutely annihilated by Tory austerity, meaning people have to pay much higher rates of council tax in return for absolute bare bones levels of service.

The problem for the Tory government is that they caused all of this mess, so actually doing anything to fix any of it would take a deliberate change of direction, and tacit acknowledgement that they were the ones who caused all this poverty, chaos, collapsing living standards, and needless ruination.

So instead of doing anything to clear up their mess, they’ve decided to go for the tired old tactic of pandering to reactionary idiots. This time by going on about toilets like a bunch of obsessive weirdos, and pledging to bring in a new “Toilet Tsar” to force new toilet rules on developers.

The Tories have been pushing this bizarre toilet culture war agenda for literally years, having carried out a consultation on toilet provision back in 2020.

Unfortunately for the culture war grifters in the Tory party ranks, they didn’t get the results they were craving, with the overwhelming majority of respondents being generally supportive about gender-neutral toilets, with certain sensible caveats like no urinals, and no gaps above and below cubicles.

So having failed to get the results they wanted the first time around, the Tory culture war grifters announced another public consultation on toilets for the summer of 2023.

However they clearly didn’t get the results they wanted from this one either because Rishi Sunak suddenly announced bizarre new toilet rules on the day the consultation closed, and long before the results could actually have been compiled, analysed, and made sense of.

Anyone with a shred of sense can see why the Tories are intent on ignoring the evidence of their own consultations to bring in ridiculous new toilet rules.

The dispiriting thing is that this kind of Tory culture war distraction tactic actually works.

There are terrifying numbers of clueless, reactionary idiots out there who can see the entire country spiralling down the economic toilet all around them, and not give a damn, purely because Rishi Sunak has pledged to bring in a “Toilet Tsar” to force hypothetical future micro-cafes to cram two toilet facilities into their tiny premises, when most British people absolutely clearly don’t give a damn about gender neutral toilets (as evidenced by the government’s own consultations, and by obvious stuff like the absolute non-existence of gender segregated toilets on commercial aeroplanes in UK airspace).

Apparently the Tories have calculated that they’ll pick up more votes by pandering to Britain’s minority of frothing, reactionary idiots, than they’ll lose as a result of all the ridicule aimed at their bizarre lavatory obsessiveness and their absurd “Toilet Tsar”.

Their cynical assumption is that as long as they can get the British public talking about toilet discourse, they’re banking on us simply forgetting which political party deliberately flushed the UK economy down the pan.

Don’t let them get away with it.