Theresa May should sack Tory MP Ben Bradley over his shameful blog posts
by Ben Bradley, the newly appointed Tory vice-chairman, found himself in a spot of bother this past week as a series of right-wing blog posts he had written before becoming a MP resurfaced.
They are pretty damn shocking.
The shameful blogs include articles written in support of deep Tory cuts to tax credits and social security, where he said low-income families should have vasectomies to prevent them having children and said the UK would soon be “drowning in a vast sea of unemployed wasters”.
He also criticised our public sector workers, including teachers and nurses, for opposing Tory austerity cuts to public services. Despite now earning £75,000 a year as an MP, he claimed workers in our schools and NHS were “lost in their own fantasy land”, “can’t see how good they’ve got it” and should quit if they don’t think they are paid enough.
If that wasn’t enough, even more blog posts have now come to light – revealing that he also thinks “police brutality should be encouraged” and “Scottish people should not be trusted with big jobs”. My SNP colleague Neil Gray, our social justice spokesman, has called on Theresa May to sack him. And rightly so. Bradley’s attacks on low-income families, and our dedicated public service workers, are deeply offensive and make him unfit for office.
The comments are all the more insulting given that it’s the Tory Government’s own policies that have made millions of low-income families poorer and worse off – with falling wages, an unfair public sector pay cap, cuts to social security and the longest period of falling living standards since records began.
In Tory Britain, the majority of families have suffered from stagnant wages, while those at the bottom have been forced to rely on food banks and payday loans as a result of the UK Government’s devastating cuts to support. The Tories rightly called for Labour MP Jared O’Mara to be suspended over his offensive blog posts. It would be hypocrisy of the highest order if they now fail to act themselves.
May’s failure to act on her own vice-chairman is no doubt partly because her position is weak. But the bigger issue for the Tories is that Bradley’s views are only slightly more extreme versions of ones that are widely held across the party.
This right-wing Tory dogma is the exact reason they keep dismissing the SNP’s calls to deliver a real living wage, to lift the public sector pay cap and end social security cuts. May once criticised the Tories for their “nasty party” reputation. Well, now she is responsible for it.