Let the healing begin, Boris Johnson says.

No, let the healing not begin.

What healing can there be? This election was won on a campaign of outright lies, misinformation, and smears. It was the dirtiest campaign in generations. It is a template of things to come. The Tories made full use their funds to hijack opponents’ keywords on social media and run a huge online misinformation campaign that included the use of trolls. Lies were the language of their campaign.

The consequences of the election result and the way it was obtained are dire — for the economy, for our security, for the most vulnerable people, for minorities.

Let’s be clear: this is not a normal Conservative party, this is the most vicious rightwing gang of thugs that the country has ever seen. 

This Conservative win will have real consequences. This is not like seeing your favourite team lose the FA cup final. People are going to die. Already in the last 10 years upwards of 130,000 people have died due to Tory austerity politics. Now the party feels it has a mandate, it is going to lay into public services with a machete. 

An independent fact-checking group found 88 per cent of Tory election claims to be misleading.

Eighty-eight per cent. Against zero percent of Labour campaign claims. That’s 88 to nothing. Quite a scoreline.

The Conservatives made a wealth of promises about the NHS, about police numbers, about the number of presents Santa will bring you this year. Most of the promises were misleading and fake: the number of police officers (no actual increase), the numbers of new hospitals (there won’t be any), and, less than a week after the election, they are already backtracking on other promises such those about new nurses. Essentially, the promises were not true the moment they were made.

After 10 years of ideologically-driven austerity should anyone believe the Tories? Ten years? Forty years — since Margaret Thatcher became PM in 1979 they have pursued their agenda to dismantle the country and sell it to their friends. 

The Conservatives are free-market fundamentalists. Everything must be commodified and sold to you at a profit for private companies. This includes not just the infrastructure of the country, but your health and wellbeing too. This is in the DNA of the party. It’s why they exist. Do we really think they are now going to change over night, or do we think they made a lot of good noises to compete with the other parties and get your vote?

The Tories were helped to their win by billionaire press barons whose interests are aligned with the Tories’ backers. Those billionaire press barons own most of the commercial media in the UK. They produced an almost constant stream of propaganda for the Conservatives and against the other parties. Another fact check project found that Jeremy Corbyn was the most smeared political leader ever in Britain.

While Labour was smeared with the manufactured issue of anti-semitism, people elected a prime minister with a very public record of racism and homophobia. Since the general election less than a week ago, reports of racist and homophobic abuse have been on the rise. This continues a trend that started with the 2016 referendum. Latent hostility has been sanctioned and given free rein by Johnson and his fellow travellers like Farage. 

Many people think the press is in the Tories’ pocket. The opposite is true. The Conservative party is the representative on earth of powerful money interests. These interested parties comprise not only the media billionaires, but corporations, hedge funds, staggeringly wealthy individuals with an ideological axe to grind.

Once out of the EU, there will be a bonfire of the safeguards that cushion us from the worst excesses of the free market. Human rights, workers rights, health and safety, safeguards for the environment. These are all seen as inconveniences to these nameless, faceless corporates. This is what Brexit was all about for the Tories’ sponsors. This is why they have paid for it. And for this Tory win to facilitate it. 

Many of these interested parties are not even British. They are American and Russian libertarians enforcing a free market ideology for their own convenience. How is this taking back control?

A number of hedge funds have bet against Britain’s economy after Brexit — one reason they were so eager to fund the campaign.

This is not conspiracy theory: all this information is in the public domain. On top of that, Johnson’s own sister spilled the beans in an interview.

This is buying politics for your own advantage. Is this democracy?

The rich will get richer while ordinary people get poorer, and the already poor suffer more.

Already, Johnson’s government is planning on changing electoral law to help them stay in power indefinitely.

When Boris Johnson says let the healing begin, what he actually means, is ‘Let the submission begin!’

So why do we have to heal? Why make life easy for this gang of thugs?