Exactly a decade ago, on May 6th 2010, things began to go seriously wrong for the United Kingdom.
David Cameron's cynical ploy of blaming the global financial sector insolvency crisis on the incumbent Labour government paid off, but not quite well enough for the Tories to win a majority.
The hung parliament made Nick Clegg's Lib-Dems the kingmakers, but in their lust for a tiny taste of second hand Tory power they signed up to an absolute absurdity of a coalition deal.
The promised to redraw the parliamentary rules to shackle themselves to the Tory party for five ruinous years in return for a handful of nothing.
They volunteered to be the human bullet shields for some of the most vile Tory policies ever conceived, all of which would never have been passed without the votes of the Lib-Dem austerity-enablers.
The 2012 NHS carve-up, George Osborne's economically illiterate austerity agenda, Theresa May's unlawfully racist "Hostile Environment", Chris Grayling's unlawful attack on UK workers' right to unfair dismissal tribunals, Iain Duncan Smith's unlawful forced unpaid labour schemes, absolutely disastrous public service cuts, annihilation of local government funding, systematic disability persecution, the longest period of collapsing real terms wages in recorded history, the lowest rate of house building since the 1920s, wanton ideological vandalism of the social safety net, £billions on arms sales to murderous tyrannical regimes, the fraudulent sale of the Royal Mail at miles below its true market value, lumbering students with vast high-interest university debts that over 80% will never be able to repay despite entire working lifetimes of repayments ...
None of this ideological ruination could have been done without Lib-Dem collusion, and the wilful parliamentary votes of Lib-Dem MPs, and the resulting collapse in living standards went on to have extraordinary consequences.
After serving as human bullet shields for the Tories for five years the Lib-Dems were discarded like bad rubbish in 2015, but how on earth did Labour conspire to lose that election?
Instead of actively opposing the devastating austerity agenda at the core of most of this destructive ideological madness, they actually decided to imitate it, meaning the English electorate were left with a false choice between three near-identical versions of the same disgusting hard-right economic agenda, with only the colour of the rosettes really up for grabs.
Labour's ploy was to appeal to "soft Tory" voters in marginal constituencies with their Austerity-lite agenda, but it spectacularly failed because it relied on taking their natural support for granted (an error they still keep on making).
For every "soft Tory" vote they won in 2015, scores of natural Labour voters either refused to turn out, or protest voted for the anti-austerity Greens instead.
In Scotland the SNP ran an anti-austerity, anti-Tory campaign and ended up taking 56 of the 59 seats, including 40 from Labour, proving the absolute sense in actively opposing the Tories, rather than pathetically imitating them.
But this abject failure to oppose austerity had even more serious consequences than ineptly handing an absolutely gift-wrapped Labour election victory back to the Tories, it ended up causing years of Brexit chaos too.
Tory right-wingers cynically used their own collapse in living standards, caused by their austerity agenda, to propagandise against the EU.
They came up with the ultra-cynical line that immigrants and the EU were to blame for collapsing living standards, falling real-terms wages, the housing shortage, and shockingly overwhelmed public services.
And the god-damned 'centrists' couldn't argue back by pointing out that all of this damage was actually caused by austerity ruination, because to do that would have been to admit that they were absolutely wrong to have enabled (Lib-Dems) and imitated (the Labour right-wingers) Tory austerity extremism.
So the 'centrists' just bit their tongues and let this ultra-cynical right-wing lie stand, because to call it out would have meant implicating themselves.
That's how we got ourselves into the situation where a bunch of populist far-right liars with no actual plan ended up dictating the last four years of chaos ... but it gets even worse.
The Westminster establishment's fixation with austerity extremism delivered Brexit chaos, but the ruinous hard-right austerity agenda continued running in the background, further weakening our economy and our public services.
Multiple warnings that the NHS was unprepared for a potential pandemic were ignored on the grounds of cost, 17,000 hospital beds were scrapped, NHS stockpiles of protective gear were run down to empty, tens of thousands of NHS positions were left vacant, potential new nurses were driven away through the scrapping of NHS Bursaries, the social care system was absolutely cut to shreds, A&E waiting times soared, tens of thousands of people were driven into early graves, and scores of NHS facilities were shut down, often in the face of vehement local opposition.
When the coronavirus crisis hit, the health system was in such a run down and mismanaged state that an effective response had been rendered impossible to muster.
Doctors, nurses, and all the other NHS staff have worked tirelessly to combat the virus, but the system itself was in such a shocking state of disrepair after a decade of Tory austerity vandalism, that a vast death toll was already pretty much inevitable, even before Boris Johnson decided that he was going to become "Superman of Capitalism" by actively allowing the virus to spread like wildfire in order to eke out a few more weeks of "business as usual" before the true devastating cost of letting the virus spread out of control eventually became too obvious to ignore.
Back in 2010 the Lib-Dems could have formed a confidence and supply agreement with the Tories, backing what they supported, and winning plaudits by shooting down all the horrifying hard-right lunacy from the sidelines, but they were blinded by their lust for six figure ministerial salaries and chauffeur-driven cars, so they decided to wilfully enable all the austerity ruination.
The economic damage, and the dreadful reduction in ordinary people's living standards being "a price worth paying" in return for their ego trip of second hand Tory power.
The devastating and deadly consequences of this sell-out have continued into the present day, and will continue to get even worse into the future now that the lazy, incompetent, lying, elitist oaf Johnson has the biggest Tory majority since Thatcher, and an unwavering determination to drive us towards the most damaging "no deal" version of Brexit possible, purely because it offers the best disaster capitalist opportunities for his city speculator mates.
It all could have been so different if the bloody awful 'centrists' had just been a little less keen to actively collude with and imitate ideologically crazed hard-right Tory austerity extremism.
But they always knew that the price of this austerity collusion would be borne by other people, not by them.
No matter how bad it got for ordinary people, they always knew that they'd keep their gold-plated parliamentary pensions, and walk into six figure corporate consultancies, so they simply didn't care.
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