Saturday, October 19, 2013

Over half a million pensioners dead and the Tories have gone from long johns to jumpers




Reblogged from Pride's Purge:


(no, not satire – it’s the Tories!)

In about 1987, Tory health minister Edwina Currie ‘advised’ elderly people who couldn’t afford to heat their homes properly that they should avoid hypothermia by wearing woolly hats and long johns.

And now, over 25 years later, the Tories are making exactly the same mistake – this time ‘advising’ elderly people who can’t afford to heat their homes properly that they should avoid hypothermia by wearing jumpers.

This ‘advice’ unsurprisingly isn’t working because Age UK estimate that as many as 200 old people die every day in the UK from cold during the winter. That’s around 24,000 old people dying of cold every year because they don’t have enough money to keep themselves warm.

Which means during the 25 years it’s taken the Tories to go from woolly hats and long johns under the Thatcher government to jumpers under David Cameron’s – well over half a million old people have died from the cold in the UK.

I wonder what the Tories will be telling hard-up pensioners to wear 25 years from now after yet another half a million of them have died as a direct result of fuel poverty? Thick woolly socks and willy warmers?

Same Old Nasty Tories.