Why You Should Vote Tory, According to the Tories

The Conservatives are used to burying bad news, so it was no real surprise they chose to launch their manifesto on a Sunday, with most of the country hungover or working the second job they've had to take in order to pay rent.

Far from leaping through the front door with a giant bird in his mouth, Boris Johnson was leaving a half eaten baby shrew out by the bins and hoping no one would notice. "If the Labour and Liberal Democrat manifestos were notable for the scale of their ambitions, the Conservative one is not," said Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, not known as a hotbed of red-blooded socialism.

In contrast to Labour's proposed £83 billion increase in public spending, the Conservatives are promising a £3 billion increase, which is less than the amount of money Labour intends to find for women unjustly impacted by changes in the state pension age. Austerity, it seems, is very much not coming to an end.

"As a blueprint for five years in government, the lack of significant policy action is remarkable," Paul Johnson added. "Health and school spending will continue to rise. Give or take pennies, other public services, and working age benefits, will see the cuts to their day-to-day budgets of the last decade baked in."

This lack of action is almost artistic. Boris Johnson could have announced this manifesto in an empty warehouse gallery, pointing to a small puddle in the middle of the room and announcing simply, "This is life." The lack of any kind of positive vision seems to almost be deliberate, to avoid making any blunders and to simply return to the main theme of the Conservative campaign, which is: Jeremy Corbyn is a monster who can't be trusted, and Labour will rob you in your sleep.

Even after launching their manifesto, the Conservative party's reasons to vote for the Conservative party are still basically all to do with their opponents. Let's take a look:

This obsession was on display from the very start. Launching his party's election campaign with a front-page article on his personal blog, the Daily Telegraph, a newspaper owned by the Barclay brothers, who live on Brecqhou, a channel island that is also conveniently a tax haven, Boris Johnson wrote – and this bit was part of the actual headline – that Jeremy Corbyn's party "point their fingers at individuals with a relish and a vindictiveness not seen since Stalin persecuted the kulaks".

Across the shires, stockbrokers and retired colonels perusing their newspaper of choice paused to take a journey back into the deep, misty regions of their mind, where a stray school lesson on Soviet history might exist. It can't have worked out very well for the kulaks, whoever they were, and no doubt this monster Corbyn – with his plan to raise taxes for corporations and those earning about £80,000 a year – would be putting them on the first bus from Tunbridge Wells to Siberia the moment he got in.

Alternatively, Jeremy Corbyn is not an iron-fisted dictator ready and willing to send millions to their death, he is a contemptible, woollen-brained hippie incapable of stiffening his back and leading from the front.

While the Conservative position on Brexit is basically, "We are prepared to burn this country to the ground in order to continue ruling you like the worms you are," Corbyn's desire to stay neutral on the subject during a second referendum between Remain and a deal negotiated by Labour is, they say, proof he can't be trusted. And unlike Jo Swinson, Corbyn is not prepared to man up and push the big red button of nuclear death.

Since the Conservatives came to power in 2010, around 60p in every pound received by local government from central government has been cut. Council house waiting lists are close to a million, but last year only 2,640 were built.

Starter homes were promised in 2014, but none have been built. Average weekly earnings are lower than they were in 2009. By next year, only 5 percent of local authorities are "fully confident" they will meet their legal duties to provide social care. More than 4 million people are trapped in deep poverty. Homelessness has shot up and up and up.

And yet again and again, Conservative politicians point to Labour as the "fantasy" party, with – in Boris Johnson's words – a "money forest" they will chop down to pay for all their pie-in-the-sky promises. Do not expect anything better or anything more, the Conservatives tell us. This is life. You're naked and you're in a pit full of other naked people. You all have to fight each other. See if you can find a knife.

When the Tories move into the realm of fantasy promises, it turns out that all they are doing is saying they will begin to address some of the cuts they have been merrily making for almost an entire decade.

The number of police officers in England and Wales fell by 20,600 between March of 2010 and March of 2019, but don't worry: the big Tory promise for this election is 20,000 NEW police back on the streets. The Tory manifesto launch promised 50,000 new nurses, but it quickly became clear that, among many other deceptive elements, 19,000 of these nurses would actually just be "retained", meaning they would be somehow convinced not to leave the health service.

It's oven ready!

This deal of Johnson's, he's dumped a load of ingredients – a return to sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland, stripping away worker's rights, not keeping up with European environmental regulations, that kind of thing – into a massive trough, and is ready to mash them into the microwave and hit defrost.

If you want a Tory vision that isn't just fixated on Labour, this is it: the sequel to "Brexit means Brexit", a slogan that completely ignores the fact that making all the trade deals Johnson promises will take a number of years, meaning that Brexit is very much not done, meaning that Brexit in fact just becomes the background noise we live our lives soundtracked by, disrupting and dismantling everything until large parts of the country are underwater.

There was a nice moment during that ITV debate when Boris Johnson was asked if he thought the truth was important during this election, and he paused and then said that it was, and the audience laughed, knowing that he had lied about thinking the truth was important.

The Conservative party press office rebranded as a fact-checking organisation and they set up a fake Labour manifesto site. Michael Gove has gone full Donald Trump, accusing the press of being "left wing" or "polemical", and in the end simply questioning the very existence of truth itself.

So here we are in the future, where nothing matters and what has happened has not happened and so who can say what the Conservatives have done in power all this time – who even knows if they've been in power.

All you need to know is that it just doesn't matter anymore – and so, with that in mind, vote Conservative.

@oscarrickettnow