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No alternative – why I’ll vote for Labour on May 7

TORY Prime Minister David Cameron displays the common characteristic of his class — an utter inability to empathise with the majority of Britain’s population.

As journalist Kevin McKenna recently pointed out: “He ?comes? from a life of gilded and unearned privilege for whom ‘disadvantage’ is not having a mother who was a maid of honour at Queen Elizabeth’s coronation.”

With his public relations hard hat on, Cameron comes across as enthusiastic, interested, sympathetic, “I feel your pain” head-to-one-side-hand-wringer.

In reality he leads a government which has dished out a great deal of unnecessary pain, having introduced the bedroom tax, cut welfare benefits to the bone, demonised the sick, disabled and unemployed and raised VAT, which hits working-class people the hardest — all while cutting income tax for the richest 1 per cent.

He’s like a little bee pollinating with pollution the lives of everyone but the most wealthy.

Alongside their Thatcherite predecessors, the senior members of Cameron’s Cabinet are the most class-prejudiced bunch of political thugs to have governed this nation in my lifetime. They have absolutely no comprehension of what makes working-class people tick. Worse, they have no wish to learn.

Having spent their lives mixing in “elitist” circles, they see us as a single homogeneous lump of ignorance and want, who can only be ruled and brought to heel by wielding a big stick.

I doubt a single one has a working-class acquaintance, let alone a friend. They are unlike previous generations of Tory toffs, who went through WWII and mixed with and worked alongside working-class people, often in the armed forces.

Today Cameron and co use filters to shelter themselves from the real world: private medicine, elitist public schools and universities. In the PM’s case they were Eton and Oxbridge.

They first gained employment due their privileged position and their parents’ old boys networks, and climbed the greasy pole in much the same manner.

I would bet my pension that even when they need working-class people to “service” their lives — gardeners, plumbers, car mechanics, or carers to wipe their aging parents’ backsides — they use agencies to act as middlemen so they’re not contaminated by coming into contact with the working class.

We’ve now been told by Chancellor George Osborne that if Cameron and co are returned to power they will cut welfare benefits by £12 billion. Further cuts on this scale would make the bedroom tax look like small beer.

It is pretty obvious that the working class will shoulder the majority of such cuts — otherwise why would the Tories be so unwilling to say which benefits would be cut?

What arrogance. What monumental skulduggery to put out a general election manifesto without telling the electorate on whose shoulders the burden of these cuts will fall.

It epitomises perfectly the lack of common decency which Cameron and his Cabinet ministers have displayed since they came to office in 2010.

Having received a leaked government document, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has said that these dramatic cuts will be in areas such as housing, working-age and disability benefits — the very areas in which the coalition has already cut to the bone.

As a reward for the Tories’ corporate backers who are financing their general election campaign, there will also be more privatisation of the NHS and social care.

There can be little doubt after George Osborne’s announcement of ever-more cuts that Cameron has used austerity not as a short-term disruption to balance the nation’s accounts after the crash of 2008, but as the means to demolish the welfare state and NHS.

If elected on May 7, none of us will be able to claim we weren’t forewarned of Cameron and Osborne’s intent to turn the clock back to the 1930s. This was a decade when life was very harsh for the majority of British people as there was no welfare state or NHS.

As I have no viable political alternative in my constituency of Thurrock, I will vote for Ed Miliband and the Labour Party candidate as the only option which can and must stop such political chicanery happening.

Will I be disappointed by a Miliband government? Almost certainly, although less so perhaps than that of Blair’s new Labour administration. However on some of the core issues which are important to me — the NHS, the welfare state, housing and foreign wars — there is clear blue water between the Tories and Labour.

A friend of mine who is somewhat cynical about politics to say the least, has a benchmark test when judging governments — have they left the nation in a worse state when leaving office than they found it in when they first came to power? As far as the Tory-Lib Dem coalition is concerned, it has failed this test miserably.

Despite Osborne’s pathetic attempts to spin otherwise, wages are down, working conditions have worsened, the NHS is a mess due to underfunding and privatisation, the welfare state is much reduced and Britain’s relationship with our European neighbours is in freefall.

Only Miliband’s good sense stopped Cameron embroiling Britain in the Syrian civil war. Inequality has grown by leaps and bounds, homelessness stalks the land, rents are sky-high and the majority of young people don’t have a hope in hell of owning their own homes.

It’s time for some bright sunny uplands, an end to Cameron’s awful diet of austerity and fear, come May 7 I will cast my vote for Ed Miliband and the Labour Party with a slight glimmer of hope in my heart.

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