A letter a day to number 10. No 1,493
Thursday 14 July 2016.
Dear Mrs May,
I am most interested that the target demographic for your reign as prime minister is: “If you’re from an ordinary working class family, life is much harder than many people in Westminster realise. You have a job but you don’t always have job security. You have your own home but you worry about paying the mortgage. You can just about manage, but you worry about the cost of living and getting your kids into a good school. If you’re one of those families, if you’re just managing, I want to address you directly.”
If that is your datum point, you are aiming high, there are many millions below that who are traditionally ignored, voiceless and, indeed, have been the target of social cleansing under David Cameron’s leadership from 2010. Oxfam finds that ’13 million people in the UK do not have enough to live on, and most do not have the power to speak out about what this feels like and why it is wrong’.
You said that your party is called the Conservative and Unionist Party, I would remind you that a union, like a chain, is only as strong as its weakest link.
It is to Britain’s shame that we now have food banks the length and breadth of Britain, that further education is subject to a life time of debt, that many women are facing years of hardship having been denied a pension or any interim help for which they have spent a lifetime working, that the provision of universal health care is no longer a duty of the state, that those in the most need face a sanctions regime that deprives them of the means of survival, that sick and disabled people have been cast aside through brutal cuts.
If your focus is not on building a nation from the bottom up, of supporting the most vulnerable, living the most precarious existence, of giving the voiceless a voice, then we are no further forward and those without hope are facing the same future that David Cameron, George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith have cast them into. In this time of political upheaval we need change, drastic change, and I am not at all sure you are offering anything like what is needed for Britain as a whole.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/theresa-mays-first-speech-prime-8415313
https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-a2b8-Camerons-Social-Cleansing-of-Britain#.V4aUuKKzzc4
http://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/our-work/poverty-in-the-uk
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a1c27f38-0c86-11e6-b0f1-61f222853ff3.html#axzz4EJqsz2Zn
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/110776
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/19/benefit-sanctions-ruin-lives-dwp-fiction
Fear and Loathing in Great Britain 