A short post this time – just to flag up a very good article from Owen Jones in The Guardian about the  various ways that the Tories have successfully manipulated the truth in various issues over recent years.

My favourite quote from the article is below:

“Illusions are what the Tories excel at. They back Labour’s spending – down to the last penny – when in opposition, then in government claim that it was financial extravagance that plunged the country into economic chaos. The crash may have originated in Britain’s financial hub, a sector whose lavish donations keep the Conservatives financially afloat, but Cameron and Osborne skilfully transformed a crisis of the market into a crisis caused by state spending. A failing of laissez-faire economics was spun into a historic opportunity to scale back the state.”

For me, this is the key fact about the last few years of Conservative (including the coalition) government, and I find it almost unbelievable that the media and the general public in the UK have swallowed whole the Tories’ narrative about austerity and why the cuts were needed, when it is so obviously a none-too-subtle smokescreen to enable them to push through the ideological cuts and further dismantling of the state that they had so yearned to complete after Thatcherism.

We need to make more noise about this false narrative, as everyone has been mislead, and the country is suffering for it.