If you ever voted Conservatives, or intend to at the next elections, see what they tell you they are going to do in power and look at what they actually did whilst in government. Why fact-checking is essential before voting.

How we vote is mostly about our feelings, and then we hunt around for ways to rationalise those feelings. But look at the data, and if you voted Tory or Brexit... just think about this stuff. I am not taking the piss.

Just ... consider this:

1.

If you voted Tory in 2010 to reduce debt, you made a mistake. They have increased public sector debt every year.

ONS / Statista

2.

If you voted for Brexit to make us richer, you made a mistake. It has made us much, much poorer.

OECD / New Statesman

3.

If you voted for Brexit to improve all the trading we could do when we were free of the EU, you made a mistake. Our trading has gone off a cliff.

OBR / FT

4.

If you voted Tory to reduce inequality, you made a mistake. Inequality in the UK is now higher than any comparable economy, except the United States.

Resolution Foundation / The Guardian

5.

If you voted Tory to improve law and order, you made a mistake. Police numbers tumbled after they took office.

6.

If you voted Tory to reduce immigration, you made a mistake. Immigration from the EU shrank, but from the rest of the world, it grew.

ONS / BBC

7.

If you voted Tory or Brexit to improve your wages, you made a mistake.
Growth since 2015:
▫ Germany: 40%
▫ France: 39%
▫ UK: 9%
We are 1/4 the wage performance of our economic rivals.

Resolution Foundation / New Statesman

8.

If you voted Tory to reduce the number of people waiting for NHS treatment, you made a mistake. Numbers have grown every year (except during COVID, when most non-urgent treatments were postponed).

NHS England, latest data for April 2022. | BBC

9.

If you voted Tory to reduce waiting times, you made a mistake. They have also increased every year.

The number of people on waiting lists for routine procedures between 2007 and March 2022. | Statista

10.

If you voted Tory to improve education funding, you made a mistake. Education funding is down 8% since its peak in 2010.

Source: HM Treasury, Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses 2018; previous PESAs; Office for National Statistics, Blue Book; HM Treasury deflators, March 2018. | Institute for Fiscal Studies

11.

If you voted Tory to reduce the amount of council tax you pay, you made a mistake. The amount you pay is shown in blue, and has grown every year.

Local authority revenues by source, 2019/20 prices (£bn). | Institute for Government

12.

If you voted for the Tories to stamp down on corruption, you made a mistake. It has risen hugely, before even factoring in the 20% of COVID contracts that raised a ‘red flag’ for corruption by international standards.

United Kingdom - Control Of Corruption: Percentile Rank. | Tradingeconomics.com / Worldbank

13.

If you voted Tory to reduce racist or other hate crimes, you made a mistake. In the year ending March 2021, there were 124,091 hate crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales.

“As in previous years, the majority of hate crimes were racially motivated, accounting for around three-quarters of such offences (74%; 85,268 offences); these types of hate crime increased by 12 per cent between year ending March 2020 and year ending March 2021.”

Hate crime, England and Wales, 2020 to 2021. | Home Office

14.

If you voted Tory to control inflation, that was a mistake. UK inflation (CPI) hit 5.5 percent in January – the highest since 1992.

CPI 12-month inflation rate in the UK from 1989 to 2022. | Statista

15.

If you voted Tory to make housing more affordable, that was a mistake. Since 2013, house prices have significantly increased, especially since COVID.

Average UK house price. | BBC / ONS / HM Land Registry

16.

Finally, if you voted Tory because you wanted good leadership, you made a mistake. David Cameron scores worse than even Gordon Brown, and Theresa May worse than anybody. They are HUGELY negative in all categories.

And this does not even include Boris Johnson!

Impact of post-war British prime ministers on key issues. | The Conversation / Kevin Theakston & Mark Gill

We all make mistakes. I definitely do!

All I am saying is... try to learn from them. Next time you are nodding along to the Tories, just stop for a moment, and remember all the times you agreed with them in the past.

That was a mistake.

Don’t repeat it again!

— AUTHOR —

▫ Russell Jones, Writer, designer, data analyst.
► twitter
► website

• Russell Jones is also the author of The Decade in Tory

Sources

• Text: This piece was first published as a Twitter thread and turned into the above article on 28 July 2022 with the purpose of reaching a larger audience. It has been minorly edited and corrected, and published with the author’s consent. | The author of the tweets writes in a personal capacity.
• Cover: Flickr/Number 10. - Boris Johnson. | 20 July 2022. (Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.)