Thread by @exitthelemming

Fifteen years. Five prime ministers, seven chancellors, eight foreign secretaries, twelve culture secretaries and sixteen housing ministers.

A thread, for #RantyTuesday.

One third of all children in poverty. Triple the NHS waiting list (6.4m). Energy bills up a quarter in the last two years. Food prices up a fifth. Huge mortgage increases. Four million hours of sewage poured into our rivers and seas in 2023, more than twice as much as in 2022

Number of food banks up 7000% since 2010. More food banks than branches of McDonalds in the UK, and now 4250 food banks operating in British schools

230 000 deaths from COVID; £29 billion on Test and Trace. £10 billion on unused PPE; £4 billion on fraudulent COVID loans. People dying alone; meanwhile, 126 Partygate fines from 16 parties at 10 Downing Street, among “the worst governing ever seen.”

Two years of talk about “levelling up” leading to Bradford and Hull, among the most deprived councils in the country, being cut by 28.5% and 27.9% respectively, Sheffield by 27.2% and Doncaster 25.8%. Councils in Surrey and Oxfordshire got the smallest cuts

A 45-day Prime Ministerial reign by Liz Truss and a mini-budget from Kwasi Kwarteng that cost the country £30bn, enough for an inflation-equalling pay rise for every public sector worker in the country. Kwarteng said they “got carried away.”

Immigrants, the working poor, the hungry, the unemployed, the sick, the mentally ill and the disabled demonised for their circumstances. Half a billion pounds on the Rwanda scheme, a performatively cruel and unworkable policy that criminalises the trafficked, not the traffickers

Taking no responsibility. Blaming teachers, nurses, railway workers, lawyers, lifeboat volunteers, the BBC, care home staff, local government, the civil service, the C of E, footballers, refuse collectors, universities and people who use food banks. So that’s everybody, then

Accepting £8.4 million from fossil fuel interests and climate change deniers since the last election. In the face of climate disaster, green policies delayed or abandoned. Rowing back on Net Zero. F.o.I. requests about the state of the environment buried by the Environment Agency

A pledge for everyone in UK to live fifteen minutes from a green space quietly shelved. Plans to make the target for access to green space legally binding scrapped. Sunak not attending COP 27.

The dismantling of democracy. “Limited” law-breaking; proroguing Parliament; junking parliamentary standards; the Internal Market Act; the Elections Act; endangering the right to protest while claiming the Public Order Act only targets “Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati.”

The Home Office deliberately removing legal protection for Windrush immigrants in 2014. 164 people wrongly detained or deported in the ensuing scandal. 30 Windrush Report recommendations: nine not delivered; three cancelled by Suella Braverman

Very British scandals: Post Office; Grenfell; Windrush; Contaminated Blood; the Carers’ allowance. A cover-up culture: defend; deny; deceive.

A tax gap 100x bigger than that of benefit fraud. Huge systematic corporate tax avoidance by the government's friends and backers. FTSE bosses earning on average 120 times the average employee (people think the ideal ratio should be 7:1). 24 more new UK billionaires in 2021 alone

Local Government revenue funding cut by 48% since 2010. Culture funding down 43%. Our world-class arts organisations clinging to their reputation, begging a government who believes “music, dance, drama and performing arts, art and design …are not among our strategic priorities.”

A third of England’s libraries closed since 2010. A-level and GCSE arts entries down by 29% and 47% respectively. Humanities degrees defunded because they don’t produce “graduate outcomes in areas of economic importance.”

Cheerleading the self-inflicted wound of Brexit: border checks that cost £4.7bn. GDP down 4%. Food £250 a year more expensive. A trade border in Ireland which threatens the Good Friday agreement. An ‘oven-ready deal’ that turned out inedible

Systematic underfunding of the Health Service by people who never use it. Backdoor privatisation by stealth. Clapping for the NHS and refusing nurses a pay rise over 1%. Driving down public sector pay so healthcare becomes dependent on immigration, then demonising the immigrants

The average person in the UK £10 200 poorer. The worst fall in real wages in the G7. 2.2m women in low-paid jobs. UK workers earning £75 a month less in real terms than in 2008, though we work Europe’s third longest hours. Retirement age raised to 68 (women’s up from 60)

Voting down free school meals. Twice. Closing 500 Sure Start centres. Some of the least happy children in the developed world, and some of the worst child poverty. In 2014, there were no British cities where more than a third of children lived in poverty. By 2021, there were six

Record inequality in education. 70% of state schools’ funding cut. State school teachers run into the ground by people whose children don’t go to state schools. Child trust funds scrapped. Childcare costs up 30% in the last ten years - far higher than most European countries

Compulsory National Service for 18-year-olds. No money to feed hungry children or to remove the two-child benefit cap. But always money for a new nuclear arms race.

The highest rail prices in Europe; the second worst fuel poverty; the third highest housing costs; the fourth poorest elderly

Distracting from every failure of government with a culture war which sees challenging racism and inequality, making the curriculum factual or representative of historical truth and a changing Britain derided as “woke".

The wholesale dismantling of the Welfare State. Wealthy people running a wealthy country, choosing to create scarcity. Austerity sold to us as a financial necessity. Instead, every inequality increased; every benefit cut

The worst regional inequality in Western Europe and perhaps unsurprisingly, the lowest level of trust in politicians

We’ve had fifteen years of this shit. We need these people out, we need them out now, and we need to keep them out for a very long time.

3rd July 2024. One day to go.

This thread got nearly a million views in 72 hours. It obviously touched a nerve.

You also sent many suggestions of what I’d left out. So here’s an update, with an important correction at the end. Here we go:

Water companies paying record dividends despite record fines. Between them, eight English water companies paid out more than £1.35bn to shareholders last year. They discharged sewage for a total of 3.6m hours: that's £377 dividend for every hour of polluting rivers and seas

10 000 people hospitalised for waterborne diseases. Despite the disaster of water, energy and the railways, a mad rush for more privatisation. The collapse of 28 energy providers. British Gas profits up from £72m to £751m in one year (2023). Royal Mail sold to a Czech billionaire

Bus route miles down 14%. HS2 given go-ahead in 2012, estimated cost £37.5bn. In October 2023, Phase 2 Birmingham to Leeds and Birmingham to Manchester sections cancelled. DfT budget now £98bn. Phase 1 still won’t reach central London without private sector funding

Since 2015, 382 000 cancer patients in England not treated on time. The national NHS target (at least 85% of people starting treatment within 62 days) last met in December 2015. A pledge to double trainee doctor numbers by 7500. Actual number of new places: 350

Scrapping nursing bursaries. Closing more than 25 A&E departments. Giving the private sector £10bn to 'solve' a deliberately created waiting list crisis. A government line that the NHS is a charity we should feel bad for needing, not a system funded by tax to provide healthcare

The number of men under 25 classed as being ‘in despair’ more than doubled since 2009 (5% to 11%). Proportion not able to work because of ill-health up a third on pre-pandemic levels. The PM announced a crackdown on sickness and disability benefits to end a ‘sick note culture’.

The slowest wage growth since the Second World War. Average disposable income lower now than it was in 2019; the first parliament for decades in which household income has fallen

Food insecurity now affecting eight million adults (15% of UK); levels among children doubled in the year to January 2023. The cost of a nutritious adult diet up a quarter in two years. 11% of British school pupils now go without meals at least once a week; in Portugal it’s 3%

Children across the UK getting shorter, fatter and sicker. Obesity levels among 10- and 11-year-olds up almost a third since 2006; young people with type 2 diabetes up by more than a fifth in five years. The government shelved policies to tackle obesity and junk food until 2025

The height of five-year-olds in the UK falling since 2013; our children are shorter than those in almost all other comparable countries. Babies born in the UK today less healthy than babies born a decade ago

Infant mortality, which had been falling since the 1980s, starting to rise. Child deaths in England up 8% last year. Britain’s rate of infant deaths 30% above the median across EU countries, the risk higher for mothers who are poor, Black, young or living in deprived areas

More older children dying from abuse, neglect and suicide. Eight in ten English primary teachers now spend their own money to buy items for pupils who arrive at school hungry and without adequate clothing

The number of local authority-run youth clubs in England fell by more than half between 2012 and 2023. 4500 youth workers lost. After record funding cuts, council spending on youth services reduced by 75%

Councils selling off more housing than they can build. Under Right to Buy, two-thirds of Britain’s council homes transferred to private hands. A new generation of award-winning council houses sold off less than five years after they were completed

Private rents at record highs. Nobody young in their own space. Number of adults living with their parents up 700k in ten years; 30% of those age 25-29 now live at home. An average first-time buyer in London has to save for at least 30 years to afford a deposit on an average home

The number of people sleeping on the streets more than double what it was in 2010. 2023 figures for sleeping rough up 27% on the previous year. Homeless figures up in every UK region; the highest rise in the richest city, London

Ten education secretaries (including four in four months). Restrictions on international students and graduate visas; fewer international applications at 90% of universities; a 27% fall in postgraduate applications since last year. Academic salaries falling in real terms

52 out of the 90 British universities went down in this year’s World University Rankings. More than 50 have announced job cuts, directly linked to drops in enrolment resulting from recent government policies

Boris Johnson missing five consecutive COBRA meetings in the early weeks of the pandemic. The Commons Science and Technology Committee called late and inconsistent decisions on lockdown ‘one of the most important public health failures the United Kingdom has ever experienced’.

Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick suggesting the values of people crossing the channel in small boats ‘threaten UK social cohesion.’ He then ordered cartoon murals at a Kent asylum centre for lone children painted over because they were ‘too welcoming’.

Prisons overcrowded, dangerous and unfit for purpose; promising harsher sentences but making no room for more inmates. The government announced plans for an additional 20 000 prison places by the mid 2020s. The actual increase from 2010 figures is 300

Targeting the Human Rights act. Power used to criminalise protest, to disenfranchise voters, to limit judicial review, to alter constituency boundaries.  Meanwhile, the Supreme Court called ‘the enemy of the people’.

Five year delays for rape trials. The defunding and mismanagement of the criminal justice system causing record holdups and overcrowding. The Conservative Party manifesto doesn’t mention it

‘The biggest foreign policy failure since Suez’. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab on holiday when Kabul fell to the Taliban. A year after it was launched, not one Afghan affiliated with the British government accepted and evacuated under the Home Office resettlement scheme

Our UK press freedom score down. Our corruption score up: in 2024 Britain received its highest ever rating on the Global Corruption Public Services Index

Tory peer Michelle Mone supported a £203m bid for PPE; it was largely useless. Steve Parkin, top Tory donor, was given £11 million to buy PPE. When it was discovered to be unsafe and unfit for purpose, he was paid another £4.5m to burn it.

Somerset Capital Management, co-founded by Jacob Rees-Mogg and Business Minister Lord Johnson and since closed, owned £105m of Infosys shares. Infosys had been given more than £2bn in contracts by Rishi Sunak. Infosys is owned by Rishi Sunak's wife

In February 2021, Richard Sharp, Tory party donor and ex-boss of Rishi Sunak at Goldman Sachs, became Chair of the BBC. Weeks before, he had secured Boris Johnson an £800k loan. He resigned in June 2023. BBC funding since 2010 has been cut by more than a quarter

Eight Tory MPs lost the whip; five suspended; 75 standing down

The wealthiest 1% of the British population now owns more than the poorest 70%. In 2010 the combined wealth of the richest 1000 people in Britain was £248bn. In 2024 it was more than £1 trillion. Millenials are the first generation for a century to be poorer than their parents

Replacing a fair taxation system with “philanthrocapitalism”: charity donations by top 1% fell by a fifth in real terms from 2012 to 2019; a growing ‘generosity gap’, with poor people giving a larger proportion of their income to charity than rich ones

The hardest Brexit possible. But post-Brexit, ‘there was no plan’ (Heseltine). Ignorance of Irish history and the Irish border. Imaginary trade deals. Priti Patel boasting about ending freedom of movement. The loss of FoM catastrophic for touring, investment and collaboration

No US-UK trade deal, and now one sixth of trade posts responsible for US state-level deals cut: of trade jobs within British consulates in the USA, 24 out of 150 posts made redundant or unfilled. The decision was taken two weeks before Sunak called the general election

The Brexit conversation going from ‘The new deal will be better than the deal we had, and food will be cheaper’, to ‘The new deal will be better than No Deal’, and finally ‘More expensive food is a price we should pay for sovereignty.’ But blue passports.

Disaster charities drafted in to rescue lorry drivers stuck in post-Brexit queues. Petrol, CO2, milkshake and food shortages by mistake. Environmental protections and food safety standards abandoned

An unprecedented attack on nature. The UK’s Biodiversity Intactness Index rating now in the bottom 10% of 240 nations and territories: 53% of this country’s original nature intact, compared with the Index’s low safe limit of 90% and a global average of 79%

“No attempt to govern seriously. No intellectual tradition, no motivating principle, no grounding ethic, no moral impulse. The country ignored while factions quarrel over the fortunes of the Party. A morally and intellectually empty squabble for votes. A party with no soul.”

Most importantly, a correction: it’s fourteen years not fifteen.

My apologies, and credit where its due: the @Conservatives achieved all this a whole year earlier than I said.

@Conservatives Please #Vote, and #VoteTactically. These sites will help you:

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