Who Are the Big Winners from the Tory Manifesto?

Theresa May just launched the Conservative Party's manifesto for strong and stable leadership in a room full of Cabinet members and, surprisingly, some journalists. The speech was typical May: full of tautologies and repetition, culminating in an awkwardly strained call for us to "all go forward together!"

The manifesto is built around "tough decisions" designed to tackle head-on the "five great challenges that our country faces". Its statement that the Conservative Party "does not believe in untrammelled free markets" and the "cult of selfish individualism", suggests, on the surface at least, that it might not be the typical kind of Tory manifesto we're used to. But rather than do anything as crass as go through the pros and cons of all the policies they've announced, we thought we'd take our cue from today's tabloids and work out who's gonna WIN BIG from this blue-print for a better Britain. (Which also looks like the service booklet for a posh funeral.) So are you one of Theresa's big winners? See if you recognise yourself below…

The most significant policy announcement is about social care, i.e. the way society takes care of old people. The Tories' answer? It won't, their friends in the City will.

Rather than an NHS-style, free-at-the-point-of-use social care system, the plan is to make people to re-mortgage their houses using complicated financial products. This will allow them to pay for their own social care until their assets run below £100,000, after which point the state will intervene (presumably after a protracted series of means and needs testing).

This takes the massive "burden" of social care off cash-strapped councils – who are cash-strapped, let's not forget, because of the 2008 financial crisis – and moves it onto home-owning, old people, i.e. Tory voters.

If you want to spin this so it looks good, you could say it means old people won't have to sell their homes to pay for social care while they're alive. It also means poorer old people, whose assets are less than £100,000, won't have to pay for social care. On the other hand, the changes mean people who bought property and paid off their mortgages over the past few decades – like endless governments have encouraged them to – will soon themselves without much to give on to their children.

As always, the real winners of this are the people selling financial products and the private healthcare companies who'll inevitably step in to provide services. By forcing an even further financialisation and commodification of housing, the Tories have managed to renew the things we're supposed to live in as a source of valuable capital for the City of London.

As Iain Duncan Smith told the BBC this morning, this is all about "enabling the market to look at products to help people invest" so they can create a "flexible savings regime". If that doesn't sound like care, what does?

The controversial and unachievable target to reduce net migration to tens of thousands is reaffirmed in the manifesto. An editorial in yesterday's Evening Standard (editor, George Osborne) claimed that none of the cabinet support this in private, and "all would be glad to see the back of something that has caused the Conservative Party so much public grief".

Writing in the Guardian last week, Ryan Shorthouse, a former policy advisor to the Conservatives before the 2010 general election, said "there was no scientific or comprehensive process for coming up with this policy. It was chosen because it was the level of immigration we had in the 1990s, before the New Labour era." In other words, it's a sop to anti-migrant sentiment, and if you have those sentiments, you're winning big from this manifesto.

In a move that's already branded the Prime Minister a "lunch snatcher", the Tories have announced plans to cancel the programme providing free school lunches for all primary children, which was introduced under the Coalition government. Instead, the government will provide free breakfasts to primary school kids – which are a lot cheaper because they don't have to be hot – and give free school lunches to only those who pass means testing.

Nick Clegg, who devised the free schools scheme when he was in government, to put a human face on the Tories' Terminator visage, has already expressed his unease with the idea. He took to Twitter to point out that going back to means-tested lunches will mean kids who need them will still go hungry, since "4 in 10 kids who DIDN'T receive free lunches prior to infant provision were officially in poverty".

If you're the kind of person who thinks children should go through a punch of demeaning means tests to prove they deserve hot food, you're in luck.

@SimonChilds13 / @Yohannk