I have decided that it would be sensible for me to look at the promises made by the Conservative Party as a whole given they hold such a significant majority and have been in power for 12 years at the time of writing (though their ideology was at least slightly moderated by their need to form a coalition for the first five years). As such, these are the common promises from Conservative candidates for the 2019 General Election:
Many Conservative politicians have promised to make sure that the NHS continues to be funded, but under the Conservatives the NHS is on its knees, with both junior doctors and nurses threatening strike action over working conditions. Clearly a different approach is needed, and reducing the spending on the NHS for ideological reasons is doomed to failure. In addition, Conservatives promised to build 50 new hospitals, a promise which has simply not been kept.
Again, many Conservative politicians have run on a platform of improving transportation, but we are now facing an unprecedented cost of fuel for private travel, and in the realm of public transport we are again seeing widespread industrial action due to chronic levels of underfunding.
Conservatives have repeatedly called for improvements to education, but at the same time they have cut budgets in real terms, resulting in a lower standard of education for children. At the same time, Conservative ideologies have caused the cost of university education to spike upwards both in terms of tuition fees and the cost of actually living near a university for the years of study. Again, abject failure.
Across the board, every public service has had its budget decimated in the wake of austerity, and the latest attempt to provide tax breaks to the ultra wealthy certainly did nothing to help the countless people working to keep this country together in the public sector.
Clinging hard to the concept of a hard Brexit has damaged the country economically and reputationally. We need to find a way to mitigate that economic loss and improve relations with our nearest trading partners once again.
At the national level, Conservative policy is for the country to embrace fracking, which will increase our reliance on carbon-intensive energy generation for decades to come. As an alternative, we should be exploring mass adoption of renewable sources of energy, including solar, wind and tidal, all of which we have in abundance as a nation.
All politicians claim to support their constituencies, but in reality, the Conservatives have consistently voted against increased budgets for local authorities, against decent funding for the NHS and against the interests of other civil servants, all of whom work to provide our constituencies with services that we could not live without.
Conservative MPs have consistently voted against the introduction of Proportional Representation, a system that is designed to ensure that the electorate is accurately represented in Parliament. Instead they have opted to wholeheartedly support First Past The Post, a system set up to allow the largest parties to hoard a disproportionate amount of power compared to votes they actually received. For example, in the 2019 General Election, the Conservatives received 43.6% of the vote, which translated into 365 of the 650 seats (56.2%), which essentially gives them 100% of the power. This is authoritarianism masquerading as democracy.
In summary, the Conservative party has made a lot of promises over the years, but has broken them almost entirely. You deserve better than this.
In another blog post, I will look at the other parties, but the Conservatives are the worst offenders purely because they have been in power for 12 years, 7 of which as sole decision-maker for every major policy affecting the UK, and it is very clear right now that the UK is broken and needs new politicians to fix the mess that the Conservatives have dropped us into.
