John Oliver has been credited for delivering a superb NSFW plea to the British public ahead of the general election on July 4th.
The broadcaster looked homeward in the latest Last Week Tonight, calling out the Conservatives for the “unremitting cruelty” that has “stained the last decade and a half of British life”.
Oliver, born in Birmingham, took the opportunity to recap the last five Tory prime ministers, starting with David Cameron, who through his austerity programme made “brutal cuts to government services” and attributed Britain’s struggles “not to the 2008 financial crisis, but to years of frivolous spending under Labour”.
Cameron also appeased Euro-skeptic members of his own party by calling a referendum on Brexit that he thought would fail.
It did not, and he immediately resigned in disgrace, leaving his successor Teresa May to deal with the mess before Boris Johnson took Britain out of the EU and was replaced with Liz Truss and then Rishi Sunak.
“It gets less fun when you look at what they did to the country”
“It’s objectively fun to look back on what a collection of weirdos ran for Britain for years,” Oliver joked. “But it gets considerably less fun when you look at what they did to the country,” starting with Brexit.
The pitch was that it would free British businesses of European restrictions, but instead, trading goods with the EU has become so onerous that many UK businesses have opted to move to mainland Europe.
But austerity “might be the most insidious legacy of Cameron and his successors”, Oliver argued, “because it has, in so many ways, obliterated the social safety net”.
Years of underinvestment in the National Health Service have left it “gutted and understaffed”.
More than 7.5 million people are waiting for non-emergency treatment, up from 2 million when conservatives first took office. “It’s gotten to the point where significant numbers of British people are now going to Europe and paying out of pocket to get treatment,” said Oliver.
Additionally, “the Tories have literally starved the country,” said Oliver, citing a massive increase in families referred to food banks and more hospitalizations for nutritional deficiencies; British five-year-olds are now, on average, a centimeter shorter than they were in 2010. “It is pretty hard for conservatives to say they are working toward the future growth of Britain when its future generations are quite literally shrinking,” Oliver quipped.
Independence Day
Rounding on the party in a superb closing monologue, he surmised:
“On July 4th, Britain has a chance to wash itself clean of 14 miserable years of Conservative rule, and it’s a chance it simply must take.
“If I may quote Bill Pullman yelling about aliens, if we do this the 4th of July will no longer be known as just an American holiday, but also as the day when Britain looked at the Conservatives – who’ve driven the entire country into a ditch – and said in one voice, loud and clear …
“Fuck off into the Sun, you cunts, fuckpigs and weirdos. You tossers, wankers, dick-splashes and cockwombles.”
“If Britain stands together this July the 4th, it will finally celebrate its Independence Day.”
Related: Alan Sugar: Those responsible for Brexit turmoil should be in prison