UKConservativeParty

Quora Answer : Would it be fair to say the Tory Party hates poor people?

Nov 11, 2019

No.

It would be fairer to say that the Tory Party "don't care" about poor people.

They'd be perfectly happy if those poor people all became rich. Through some unspecific mechanism of them "working hard, to get on"

But they don't want to have to worry about the problem themselves.

What the Tories hate is that society should have to make an effort, and divert attention and resources to addressing the problems of poor people. They don't want a country that prioritizes everyone being reasonably comfortable, over a country that prioritizes their opportunities to get very comfortable.

That's why Tories love fairy-tales about how the poor people are held back by the welfare state and if you only removed that coddling and subjected poor people to a blast of harsh economic competition, they'd magically stop being ill, or depressed, or risk averse, or caring for sick relatives, or living in an area with no jobs, and suddenly start growing rich from their renewed efforts.

Wealthy Tories who have never been poor in their lives, imagine that poverty is like going to the gym to work off the excess indolence. No pain, no gain and all that.

That's how you end up with disasters like Universal Credit. Because Tories don't just want to make a few computer systems more efficient by combining them into one. They have to have the ideological goal of "making work pay" which is a fancy way of saying "make not working cost". More than it already was.

That's why we had millions of children falling into poverty under Cameron and May. And the explosion of food bank dependency.

Cameron didn't look at the children in poverty in 2010 and think. "This is a disgrace in a wealthy country like Britain. I must solve that"

He looked past the children in poverty and thought he had more important things to worry about.

Quora Answer : Should the decision to pay for free school meals throughout the summer holidays become permanent, because poverty will still exist after the coronavirus crisis passes?

Jun 17, 2020

I think a government commitment that "British children should not go hungry" should certainly be permanent.

Ideally, there wouldn't be the poverty that made this necessary in the first place.

But the problem is that every mechanism that exists to deal with poverty is immediately attacked by conservatives as "removing the incentive to work"

So ... a viable benefits system is destroyed by Tories to ensure that "work pays" (ie. poor people must be starved into working crap jobs when the real economy isn't capable of providing sufficiently good jobs to entice them to work)

It's that desire to destroy the basic safety net, to force adults to work, that has now left children hungry.

Yes, we should be ensuring children have food. If you ensured it by ensuring that their parents were also provided for, that would be better than focusing only on children.

But you won't do that, then "at least don't fucking starve the kids" should be a very, very low hurdle for an allegedly civilized country to get over.