But yes, you can draw a line of history through Peterloo, Croke Park, the Troubles, the Miner's strike, and the wider colonial policing such as the Amritsar massacre. And between the Tory party of those days and the Tory party of today.
There's a difference between having the voters and serving the voters. One might reasonably ask how tax cuts and spending cuts serve working class voters, and the answer would inevitably involve trickle-down economics, which is a theory for which startlingly little evidence exists. Modern laissez-faire parties instead play on the aspirations of working class voters... the argument that when you're rich you'll want low taxes, as well as fears, the dangerous foriegner coming to take your job.
> but it's more cock-up than conspiracy.
This is demonstrably not the case. There has been an active policy of reducing regulation (eg. the "one in two out" policy), which included regressive decisions around fire safety regulation both at a central policy level and in large numbers of individual cases.
Here's Jacob Reese Mogg, poster-boy of a particular strain of the Tory party, and an elected Tory MP, arguing in 2016 (before the Grenfell fire) that safety regulations should be rolled back from EU standards to the (cheaper) standards used in India:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-safety-...
With Grenfell, exactly the same cladding that exacerbated the fire has been applied to buildings in Labour as well as Conservative boroughs. And the cladding only existed in the first place to meet climate change targets. I really don't think that you can claim that Grenfell is a party political issue.
This is a fallacious argument based on the assumption that people are all engaged and informed, which is not the case, and working class people aren't alone in that.
People make decisions based on the information environment available to them. When your information environment consists of The Sun and The Daily Mail making up fictional anti-EU anti-immigrant headlines (then issuing retractions a few weeks later in small print) then your decisions are being... framed... by a very small number of very influential people.
You can try and argue that propoganda doesn't work, but you'd be arguing against the history of the 20th century, from Goebbels to Madison Avenue.
> With Grenfell, exactly the same cladding that exacerbated the fire has been applied to buildings in Labour as well as Conservative boroughs.
I haven't seen reports on that.
> And the cladding only existed in the first place to meet climate change targets.
What's the relevance of this? Are you blaming climate change now?
> I really don't think that you can claim that Grenfell is a party political issue.
Nonsense. Go listen to Mogg argue for fire safety deregulation. He wouldn't be able to do that as a Labour MP, and he certainly wouldn't garner support.
I would rather see people hang themselves with their own rope than be told how to tie a noose by others who supposedly know what's best for them.
I don't see the relevance of this.
I assume you don't literally mean you don't want people to be taught to tie knots...
Let's not forget millions of people suffering in serfdom under the Ancien Regime.
> Banners bearing slogans such as “Liberty and Fraternity” and “Taxation without Representation is Unjust and Tyrannical” flapped in the breeze