AAV

Check out Another Angry Voice on Substack

2025-02-01T00:00:00.001+01:00

During the Another Angry Voice heyday I was getting huge amounts of traffic from Facebook and Twitter, but I've gradually been tuned down to such an extent that links I post to this blog are now virtually invisible to the 400,000 people who follow AAV across these platforms.

During the 2017 General Election Facebook virality made me the most shared political writer of the entire election campaign. Three of my articles achieved over a million hits each (the #1, #2, and #7 most shared articles of the entire campaign), and almost all the other articles easily passed 100,000.

These days AAV has been tuned down so much that it's a rarity when one of my increasingly rare blog posts beats 10,000 hits, which equates to a 90%+ collapse in visibility since 2017, despite my follower count continuing to rise slightly.

The Facebook algorithm has basically made AAV invisible to 97% of the people who follow the page, including many thousands who have explicitly asked for AAV to be prioritised in their feed via the "see first" option.

I've basically got no choice at this point but to try to diversify my social media presence, and creating a new AAV Substack seems like the logical pace to start.

Substack is like a blog host, social media account, fundraiser, and mailing list all rolled into one.

The main benefit is that there is no dodgy social media censorship algorithm between me and my Substack audience, deciding on their behalf that the majority of them no longer want to to see any of my content.

If you follow me on there, you'll get notifications every time I put up a new post, unless you decide to unsubscribe for yourself.

I'll aim to do around five posts per week to begin with to avoid overwhelming people with too much stuff.

I'll continue posting things on Facebook too, because I still have a huge audience there. But the new plan is to try to build Substack up as a kind of "inner circle" for my most supportive and enthusiastic readers.

I fully expect the majority of Substack subscribers to choose the free option, but if you can afford to sign up for a paid subscription you will be helping me out enormously, and supporting me to keep producing more content.

Here's the link:

Another Angry Voice on Substack

Thanks everyone,

Tom (Another Angry Voice)

Donald Trump's 100% tariff threats against BRICS could seriously backfire

2025-01-31T18:00:00.003+01:00

Donald Trump has announced the threat of 100% tariffs on imports from BRICS countries unless they commit to the perpetual superiority of the US Dollar in international trade.

There’s nothing new about Donald Trump threatening extreme protectionist measures against other countries, in fact he’s about to shatter the USMCA trade agreement by imposing 25% tariffs on the United States’ neighbours and allies Mexico and Canada.

However the extreme threat of 100% tariffs on products from Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, UAE, Iran, Indonesia, and a multitude of other BRICS aligned economies just goes to show how threatened his administration feels by any kind of transnational economic cooperation that doesn’t involve the United States.

Despite all of Trump’s assurances (lies) that the tariffs he imposes will be paid by the countries he’s trying to economically sanction, the reality is that they’ll be paid by US businesses and citizens when they purchase imported products.

Raising the price of imported goods via tariffs incentivises consumers to buy domestically produced goods and services by making them artificially cheaper, however it’s impossible to boost US output overnight, so more tariffs mean more price rises.

And 100% tariffs would mean that prices would literally double.

Take China as an example. Over the last few decades US capitalists have made fortunes by closing down domestic production and importing from China instead, where lower wages, weaker regulation, and poorer environmental standards mean much higher profit margins.

In 2023 China exported $501 billion in goods and services to the US, while the US exported $147 billion to China in return, meaning the US trade deficit with China is over $350 billion.

If Trump were to impose 100% tariffs on Chinese imports, that would end up lumbering US consumers with hundreds of $billions in extra taxes.

Then bear in mind that it wouldn’t just be China either. If you add up US imports from the BRICS member states alone (setting aside the 9 partner states and 8 more that have applied for membership), it adds up to over over $660 billion per year in imports.

It’s beyond fantastical to imagine that US companies that rely on Chinese manufacturing and $160 billion+ in imports from other BRICS member states would be either capable of, or willing to close down their overseas operations and build replacement factories in the US overnight, so prices will go up.

You can’t just expect production to shift back to the United States overnight. Neither for high tech electronic components, nor cheap mass produced consumer goods.

You can’t just slam the door shut on global supply chains and expect factories producing hundreds of $billions worth of goods to spring up in your own country overnight.

Who is going to pay for their construction? Who is going to staff them? Who is going to train up all of these new workers, especially in high tech manufacturing and services? Who is going to cover the additional costs of the required machine tools if they’re produced in countries that are subject to Trump’s sanctions? Where are the raw materials that the US cannot produce for itself in sufficient quantities (rare earth metals for example) going to come from?

Trump’s repeated threats to impose tariffs are akin to the behaviour of a local mob boss trying to bully their local community into conformity. Either everyone does as he says, and conduct business through his cartel, or they suffer reprisals and punishment beatings.

And the punishment beatings aren’t just being meted out on rival economies like China either. Trump’s economic sanctions on Mexico and Canada illustrate the fact that the new US administration is prepared to sanction and destabilise its allies, as well as geopolitical rivals.

There are quite obvious parallels between Trump’s tariffs and Brexit. Both raised trade barriers between themselves and their neighbours; both have been sold to the public with a pack of outright lies about the consequences and exaggerations of the benefits; both can be seen as self-applied sanctions with dramatic effects on domestic businesses that rely on imports and exports; and both diminish the country’s reputation and diplomatic standing by unilaterally tearing up previously agreed treaties and agreements.

Then there’s the fact that previous US attempts at protectionism have backfired spectacularly, like the embargo on the sale of advanced AI chips to China, which seemed to force the Chinese into coming up with better and more efficient AI language models, and the $1trillion implosion of US tech stocks after the release of DeepSeek-R1.

It’s vanishingly unlikely that countries that are targeted by Trump’s tariffs would just lie down and take it, without replying with tit-for-tat tariffs of their own, which would seriously damage US exports.

And seeking to bully other countries into subservience to US interests could end up being highly counter-productive to the stated aim of weakening BRICS.

If the US gains the reputation of a bully that purposefully disrupts and damages other countries economies to pursue their own agenda, or simply due to the whims of their unstable and unreliable President, doesn’t that make it more likely that countries will turn towards BRICS for stability and mutually beneficial trade, rather than against it?

Wouldn’t Trump’s trail of disruption and broken trade agreements hasten the development of a global currency "to replace the mighty U.S. Dollar" rather than dissuade it?

Take a look at how the World has changed since the beginning of the neoliberal era in 1980 when China was a trading minnow compared to the United States.

By 2018 China was already doing more trade than the United States with well over half the countries in the world.

If the United States becomes a global bully that doesn’t just destabilise China and its allies on the whims of its increasingly deranged President, but attacks its own allies and trading partners like Canada and Mexico too, doesn’t that further strengthen the Chinese?

If the US seeks to bully a country into coming over to their side of Trump’s new isolationist iron curtain with the threat of tariffs, but China is their bigger trading partner, and doesn’t resort to intimidation and threats of economic destabilisation, who are they likely to choose?

It seems that all China and BRICS need to do for now is to maintain respectful relations with their trading partners and offer a stable alternative to increasingly erratic Trumpian chaos, and they get to expand their sphere of influence by default, right?

Another Angry Voice is an ad-free Pay As You Feel publication. If you value this kind of content there are various ways to support AAV below.

Rachel Reeves' "new approach" is just "more of the same"

2025-01-30T15:15:00.002+01:00

In her latest economic speech Rachel Reeves claimed that "at the election people voted for a whole new approach". That’s possibly true, although a more realistic interpretation could be that Labour won by default because the Tories imploded, and millions stayed at home in despair at the lack of alternatives to the failing status quo.

Even if we accept Reeves’ interpretation of the election result at face value, it’s still deeply problematic.

If people "voted for a whole new approach" then where are the new ideas? Where are the policies designed to make life better for ordinary people? And why does Rachel Reeves’ economic rhetoric sound indistinguishable from the succession of Tory Chancellors who preceded her?

Let’s look at some of the Labour government core positions under Keir Starmer’s leadership.

Austerity

One of the first things Rachel Reeves did was to launch another economically debilitating round of austerity cutbacks, pinning blame on the previous government for her actions.

That’s pretty much identical to George Osborne’s strategy in 2010, of blaming Labour’s supposed economic mismanagement for his ruinous programme of austerity cuts.

Conclusion: "More of the same"

Privatisation profiteering

Starmer’s Labour outright refuses to countenance taking vital services and infrastructure away from parasitical privatisation profiteers to run them as not-for-profit public services.

In fact Starmer’s health secretary Wes Streeting is salivating at the mouth at the prospect of carving the NHS open for even more private profiteering, to the benefit of several private health figures who have donated hefty sums to Starmer’s front bench.

Even Labour’s renationalisation of the railways is a sham which keeps the trains and freight services under the control of greedy private profiteers.

Labour are on the side of the privatisation profiteers, just like the Tories before them.

Conclusion: "More of the same"

Wittering on about "growth"

Rachel Reeves keeps going on and on about creating "growth" but without setting out any kind of realistic framework to get the economy growing in real terms, and without defining any redistribution strategy to ensure that any additional growth isn’t simply hoovered up by greedy corporations, exploitative landlords, financial speculators, and the tax-dodger brigade, leaving the rest of us even deeper in the mire of inequality.

Without redistribution policies Reeves’ "growth agenda" amounts to the same old trickle down economic bunk that neoliberal political grifters have been spouting for decades.

’Just let the rich get richer, and eventually some of it will trickle down to plebs like you’ - It didn’t work in the 1980s, it didn’t work in the Tory austerity years, and it’s not going to work now.

Conclusion: "More of the same"

Child impoverishment

One of Keir Starmer’s first acts as Prime Minister was to purge seven Labour MPs from the parliamentary party for the crime of voting to scrap the Tories’ diabolical poverty-spreading Two Child Policy.

Recent research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation shows that child poverty is due to rise in England and Wales under Starmer’s leadership, due to Labour’s draconian welfare policies.

Meanwhile in Scotland, child poverty rates are set to fall as the SNP government works to mitigate the terrible consequences of Reeves’ poverty-spreading agenda.

If Labour were to follow the SNP example and scrap the Two Child policy, it’d raise 800,000 kids out of poverty, but they don’t want to do that because they’re too busy pandering to the rich.

Labour aren’t just sticking with Tory child-impoverishment policies, they’re wittering on about how growth is magically going to fix everything while a third of all British kids grown up in poverty.

Conclusion: "More of the same"

Welfare scapegoating

One of the most depraved things about the 2010-2024 Tory governments was the way they continually attacked the most vulnerable people in society. Not just whipping up public hate against the poor, the unemployed, and the disabled, but implementing cruel and draconian policies to drive the most vulnerable people in society deeper into destitution (Bedroom Tax, Two Child Policy, Benefit Sanctions, "Fit For Work" assessments …).

Rachel Reeves has been copying from the same Tory playbook by distracting from her own economic failings by whipping public resentment against disabled people, and pledging yet another round of austerity cuts to the disability welfare system.

Conclusion: "More of the same"

The panacea of deregulation

Reeves bangs on and on about deregulation, as if giving powerful corporations even more leeway to do whatever they like is magically going to result in prosperity for the rest of us.

Look at the Grenfell tragedy. Look at our rivers and coastal waters full of raw sewage. Look at the life-ruining Post Office Horizon scandal. Look at the outrageous P&O sackings. Look at the collapse of Carillion. Look at the orgy of corruption going on in Teesside.

Who on earth thinks that any of these things would be have been made better by even less regulation than there was?

And who can forget David Cameron endlessly fulminating against "red tape" and promising a "bonfire of regulations".

How is Reeves’ anti-regulation rhetoric any different from what came before?

Conclusion: "More of the same"

Brexit

Reeves only mentions Brexit once in her speech to say "we are pragmatic about the challenges that we have inherited from the last government’s failed Brexit deal".

But what does this even mean?

Keir Starmer whipped Labour MPs into backing Boris Johnson’s Brexit shambles, and he’s repeatedly insisted that the country is stuck with it now, and there’s nothing to be done to try and mitigate the damage.

How can anyone give a speech on "growth" without acknowledging the diabolical impact that Brexit has had on the British economy?

It doesn’t matter how many pensioners, children, and disabled people Reeves drives into destitution in her cruel and counter-productive austerity book-balancing exercises, when the Brexit sanctions we applied on ourselves are such a massive millstone on the UK economy.

Conclusion: "More of the same"

More of the same

In conclusion Reeves is pretending to offer the change that she says the British public wanted, but in reality whole swathes of her speech, and Labour’s policy agenda are indistinguishable from the rhetoric and policies of preceding Tory governments.

And when people are handed the cold gruel of "more of the same" when they’ve been promised that everything will change for the better, that’s the environment of disillusion that the extreme-right absolutely thrive in.

Another Angry Voice is an ad-free Pay As You Feel publication. If you value this kind of content there are various ways to support AAV below.

Capitalism vs Socialsm

2025-01-30T13:40:00.000+01:00

The vast majority of British people prefer public ownership of vital infrastructure and services like energy, the NHS, water, and public transport.

The Westminster establishment cabal and their capitalist backers prefer privatisation profiteering, so that's what we're stuck with.

Another Angry Voice is now on Substack. Follow there for long-form articles.

Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

Is AI really a threat to the survival of humanity?

2023-05-31T14:40:00.001+02:00

AI experts have once again warned that AI represents a potential threat to the survival of humanity, putting it on a par with pandemics and nuclear war.

The smug conspiratorial response from people who aren't AI experts is that the AI experts are deliberately overstating the existential threat to human survival to drum up interest in AI, which they're doing for their own personal profit.

"The tool I've helped create could wipe out humanity" seems like a very odd way of advertising your services if it's actually just a harmless piece of tat that simply creates new memes and writes fake essays isn't it?

However the dangerous applications and consequences of AI are already becoming clear to those who have been paying attention.

One of the most concerning things is the way AI simply invents citations (research papers, news reports, criminal cases ...) to support the assertions it's asked to make.

One teacher set their students the task of getting AI chatbots to write an essay for them, and then finding the errors for themselves. 100% of the 63 AI generated essays contained hallucinated information, fake quotes, citations to invented sources, and/or misrepresented citations to real sources.

A lawyer in the United States was caught using ChatGPT to write a legal filing, which referenced legal cases that did not exist, and when the lawyer asked the chatbot for its source for the fictional legal cases, it lied that they were found on real legal databases.

ChatGPT has already accused multiple innocent people of being criminals, including a law professor it accused of groping students on a trip to Alaska, citing a 2018 Washington Post article. In reality the professor has never been accused of sexual misconduct, he's never even been to Alaska, and the Washington Post article does not exist.

The fact that AI chatbots are capable of ruining people's lives with false accusations, outright lying, and making up false sources is just the tip of a very dangerous iceberg.

These AI lies are fairly easy to spot now because the fake sources they cite are so obvious, but when challenged the chatbots have attempted to create the fake sources for themselves, to back up their own lies.

You only have to imagine the potential for chaos when these chatbots get better at lying, and better at creating fake sources to justify their lies.

Imagine somebody gets AI to spread lies about an impending nuclear attack on Russia and China by the United States, backed up by fake news articles, fake maps with fake secret nuclear bases in Turkey or wherever, deepfake video of the US President discussing this nuclear attack strategy ... (or threats of nuclear attack on the US and its allies from China or Russia).

We all know that fake news spreads across social media like wildfire, and the when the truth is revealed it invariably travels at a snail's pace and gets only a tiny fraction of the engagement, so how dangerous could a hoax like this actually be?

AI obviously doesn't have to bring the world to the brink of nuclear war to pose a threat to humanity, this is just a hypothetical example.

Imagine the destructive consequences of ever more powerful AI misinformation tools in the hands of the climate change denial lobby; fascist dictators; genocidal maniacs; stock market speculators; corrupt politicians police, and/or secret services; bonkers conspiracy theorists; scam artists; terrorists; or downright trolls who just want to watch the world burn.

As AI lies become more and more convincing, it's going to become even more difficult for people to discern the difference between reality and fiction, to a point where nothing remains believable.

We already live in a world where the boundaries between truth and fiction have been alarmingly eroded away, with so little pushback and punishment against dishonesty that the biggest political liars of all have already risen to become heads of state of some of the most powerful countries on earth (I don't even need to name them do I?)

But AI has the potential to accelerate the process dramatically, so that stock markets and governments tumble based on AI fakery, and real events and scandals are increasingly ignored and dismissed as fake.

We don't have to get locked into a debate over the worst case scenario of human extinction to recognise the very real dangers.

So what could be done about it?

There's already strong resistance to AI regulation from within the industry, and even if regulation were to be introduced, there would be significant problems.

What would stop AI industries simply moving to the countries that have the least AI regulation?

And if regulation was introduced to prevent AI misinformation, where would the line be drawn?

Banning AI from telling lies is nowhere near as simple as it sounds, because every time someone asks AI to do a funny task like find out who Nathan Fielder's "out of frame" friends are in his viral tweet, they're asking AI to lie about reality.

How do you make a computer programme discern the moral difference between faking an image for laughs, or faking an image to cause a stock market crash or to incite political/ethnic tensions?

So, is AI capable of making humanity extinct?

Nobody really knows. Maybe AI experts are overstating the power of their industry for dramatic effect, or maybe things just keep on getting more and more insane and dangerous from here on, until human survival is genuinely at risk.

But what is beyond doubt is that AI in the wrong hands will clearly have the power to spread conspiracies and lies; crash stock markets; topple governments; cause false persecution; accelerate climate change; trigger wars and ethnic cleansing; and erase the boundary between truth and fiction, which are all legitimate grounds for serious concern.

Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

Is it time for Britain to adopt "geniocracy"

2023-05-16T13:52:00.003+02:00

There's suddenly a lot of fuss about vote-rigging with Labour and the Conservatives both bitterly accusing the other side of "gerrymandering".

The Tory press have been bitterly accusing Labour of vote-rigging over the idea of expanding the franchise to 16/17 year olds, and to people from overseas who are long-term resident and tax-payers in the UK.

Keir Starmer is such a dishonest and unprincipled flip-flopper it's impossible to know whether he'd actually go through with what he's "pledged", but the principle is sound. Giving more people the right to vote is a good thing, within reason.

Then there's the absurd Tory toff Jacob Rees-Mogg, who outright admitted that the Tory government implemented new voter ID rules in order to gerrymander elections in favour of their own political party, which is exactly what a lot of critics accused them of doing as they were doing it.

Lots of Tories have tried to argue that it's ridiculous to give votes to 16/17 year olds because they're too ignorant and uninformed about the world to use their votes wisely, however it's an absurd generalisation to pretend that the average 16/17 year old is more ignorant and unwise than the most ignorant people in older generations, who all get the right to vote, no matter how dull-witted or politically illiterate they happen to be.

This Tory insistence that youngsters are too ignorant to be allowed to vote raises the question of why intelligent and informed 16/17 year olds should be denied the vote, while the even the most stupid and gullible of over-18s get exactly the same voting power as people who actually know anything about what's going on.

If the Tories are right, and ignorance is something that needs to be combatted in elections, there are ways to do it.

People could do a simple politics test at polling stations, with the results defining the weighting of their vote, with the votes of those who score highly on the test counting for more than those who get all the answers wrong.

I'm not talking about some kind of intense and intimidating exam, just a check up on the absolute political basics:

Who is the current Prime Minister?
Who is the current head of state?
Who is the current MP in your constituency?
Which is the UK's finance minister? [Home Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Leader of the House of Commons, Speaker of the House of Commons]
Which is the UK's upper legislature? [House of Commons, House of Lords, Supreme Court, Houses of Parliament]
When is the name of legislation when it becomes law? [White Paper, Bill, Act, Point of Order]
Which level of government is responsible for libraries and bin collections? [The Government, House of Commons, House of Lords, Local Authority]
Which organisation isn't Britain is a member of? [UN, NATO, WTO, EU]
What is a measure of national wealth? [Average wage, GDP, Population density, Gini Coefficient]
Which political ideology is based on public ownership of core industries? [Capitalism, Liberalism, Socialism, Conservatism]

The first three could be set questions, followed by a random selection of (relatively easy) multiple choice questions about politics.

Tories would obviously scream that it's unfair to make people do a test before they're allowed to vote, but this would just expose their hypocrisy, because they're the ones who just introduced the principle of making people do things before being allowed to vote (acquiring and bringing the correct photographic ID).

They'd also object to the idea that those who know about politics should have more say than those who know nothing, because they know that tricking the gullible into voting against their own political interests is absolutely crucial to the success of Tory politics.

And in objecting, they'd be demonstrating their hypocrisy and venality. They want smart 16/17 year olds to be collectively punished because some of their age group are ignorant and uninformed, but they want the votes of ignorant and uninformed over-18s to count exactly the same as the votes of those who actually know what's going on!

The name for knowledge-based voting systems is "geniocracy", and with modern technology, it's easily implementable, and the data would be easy to collect and work with.

Hardcore "geniocrats" reckon that only people of above average intelligence should be allowed to vote, and only the very intelligent should be allowed to stand for public office, but there's absolutely no need to ban people from voting at all. The system could simply be operated to assign more weight to the votes of the politically informed than the politically ignorant.

If the post-election data showed that certain demographics (age, region, voting preference etc.) are lacking in basic political understanding, it would be in the public interest to help them to improve.

The data would tell us which parties had been most politically disadvantaged by the ignorance of their own voters, which would create very strong incentives for all political parties to ensure that their voters have a basic level of political understanding.

Of course it's almost impossible to conceive a system like this ever actually being implemented, because no ruling party truly wants an informed and politically engaged electorate capable of actually following what's going on, and holding them to account. But it's an interesting idea, because it's the logical solution to the problem of political ignorance that the Tories say they're so concerned about, and it's entirely compatible with their new policy of making people prove things before voting, isn't it?

Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

Keir Starmer: A Misunderstood Political Genius

2023-04-01T03:03:00.006+02:00

He may have his detractors on the left, but Keir Starmer is a true political phenomenon who has already proven himself perhaps the greatest politician in the history of British politics.

Just consider his remarkable track record.

You have to admit that it takes a certain amount of genius to get parachuted into a safe Labour seat that's never been lost to the Tories since it was created in 1983.

Then to participate in an internal coup against the party's democratically elected leader just over a year later was a demonstration of his breath taking audacity (it's just a shame that silly Labour Party members failed to appreciate Owen Smith's ice cream van of political delights isn't it?).

After the Labour right's failed 2016 chicken coup, they then almost failed in their efforts to sabotage the 2017 election meaning the Labour surge delivered the biggest swing in the party's favour since 1945.

Something needed to be done, and Keir Starmer was the man to do it.

In 2019 the Labour right desperately needed to lose the next general election in order to take back control of the Labour Party, and handing Boris Johnson a whopping great majority to impose a ruinous radical-right Brexit shambles was clearly a small price to pay for to achieve this over-riding objective, wasn't it?

These people clearly have their priorities absolutely spot on.

So Keir Starmer came up with the ideal plan to drive away pesky northern Labour voters in their millions. He was going to tell the 150+ Labour held constituencies that voted leave in 2016 that Labour was now "The Party of Remain", and indicate to everyone, that after three tedious years of Brexit horse trading he was going to prolong the whole interminable process even longer by holding a "sore loser" referendum.

And if anyone needed to be shown that they had no place in the Labour Party, it's the stupid gullible idiots who thought Britain would be better off outside the EU. Am I right?

2017 proved that it's much harder to deliberately throw a general election than anyone had ever imagined, but in 2019 Keir Starmer turned out to be the man to deliver Labour the electoral thumping that so many of their MPs were craving.

This guy really delivers doesn't he?

Then Starmer delivered again with a masterful Labour leadership election campaign, in which he lied through his teeth about virtually everything in order to dupe Labour members into believing in the absolute fantasy that he was going to continue with Corbyn's humanist democratic socialist policies, when he was, and always will be, a loyal servant of capitalism and establishment interests.

It's been genuinely delightful to see Starmer backtrack on all of his pro public ownership pledges and impassioned speeches against NHS privatisation, hasn't it?

And if anyone needed to suffer a cruel betrayal, it's the stupid gullible socialists who genuinely believe that some things (public transport, energy, water, mail, education, health ...) are too important to be left in the hands of greedy and reckless capitalist profiteers. Am I right?

Then in another political masterstroke Starmer bragged to Andrew Marr that he would lie to people again if he thought it would win him more political power, proving that he's every bit as dishonest as Boris Johnson, but somehow even more open and upfront about being a cynical and opportunistic political liar than the bloviating oaf.

If anyone deserved to be shown that Labour's not the political party for them, it's people who are sick of being lied to by politicians, isn't it?

After winning the Labour leadership election Keir Starmer immediately binned all of his pro-Remain posturing, rubber stamped Boris Johnson's shambolic Brexit mess, and pledged never to try to make any substantial improvements to it.

And if anyone needed to be shown that the Labour Party delights in betraying them, it's stupid gullible Remainiacs who thought Britain made a mistake in quitting the EU in a hailstorm of Tory jingoism, incompetence, and hubris. Am I right?

After he cleverly cheated his way to the top of the party Starmer immediately brought in new leadership election rules to make sure the Labour Party would always be led by people like him. We all rolled around laughing at the way his new rules would have excluded every person of colour who has ever stood to be Labour leader, as well as all but two of the women who have ever been nominated too, including both of the women who had the temerity to stand against him in 2020.

If anyone needed to be given a right good kicking by the Labour Party it's uppity women and pesky people of colour isn't it?

One of the absolute best things about Starmer is the way he's finally got to grips with antisemitism.

Instead of endlessly apologising and desperately trying to get the right-wing dominated Labour Party bureaucracy to deal with antisemitism allegations in a quick and efficient manner like his disgraced predecessor, Starmer's playing an absolute blinder by having his goons systematically accuse left-wing Jews of being self-hating antisemites, and driving more Jews out of the Labour Party than any Labour leader in history!

After the shambles of the Corbyn years, Starmer honestly doesn't get enough credit for turning Labour into an institutionally antisemitic party that weaponises the antisemitic "self-hating Jew" trope to bully and exclude scores of Jews.

And if anyone needed to be subjected to systematic persecution by Starmer's Labour Party it's the Jews isn't it?

Another of Starmer's great achievements is his development of an excellent "Hierarchy of Racism" within the Labour Party, and making Labour a Hostile Environment for people of colour. Imagine the balls it takes to block 19 mainly Black and Asian Labour councillors from seeking re-election in Britain's most multicultural city of Leicester, after having deliberately thrown the Forde Report and all of its anti-racism recommendations in the bin!

Starmer is a man who takes a no-nonsense approach to telling Black and Asian voters that Labour isn't the party for them, and he deserves a lot of credit for it.

Not only is Starmer doing a wonderful job of maintaining a "Hierarchy of Racism", he's also brought back all the anti-immigrant mug people like Yvette Cooper who so wisely abstained on Theresa May's unlawfully racist Hostile Environment in 2014, facilitating the Windrush scandal and the systematic abuse of thousands of Black and Asian Brits across the country.

And if anyone needed to be made unwelcome in Starmer's Brave New Labour Party it's Windrush Brits and those stupid, annoying anti-racists, isn't it?

Another of Starmer's major political achievements was driving anyone with any kind of socially liberal principles out of his shadow cabinet by instructing them to abstain on Tory legislation to give impunity to rape cops, and to those who commit war crimes in British military uniforms.

If anyone needed to be driven away from the Labour Party it's the kind of wishy washy social liberal who thinks British soldiers shouldn't be committing war crimes, and that undercover cops shouldn't be tricking unsuspecting women into having sexual relationships with them. Am I right?

Another of Starmer's triumphs was banning several Labour-affiliated organisations, and then retroactively purging loads of Labour Party members for having shared links and social media posts in the times before they were banned.

It's genuinely hilarious that Labour is led by a lawyer who clearly detests the concept of due process, and if anyone needed to be driven away from the Labour Party it's the kind of naive idiot who believes in fairness and natural justice, isn't it?

One of the best things about Starmer is the way he's actively turned his back on ordinary workers in the midst of an unprecedented inflation crisis. He's absolutely right to ignore the pleas of British workers who have simply had it too easy for too long, and fully deserve to have their living standards eroded away by inflation and capitalist greed. It's not like the founding principle of the Labour Party was to represent the interests of workers in the corridors of power, is it?

And if anyone needed to to be shown the cold shoulder by the Labour Party it's those tiresome workers and irksome trade unionists, isn't it?

And Keir's made it absolutely clear that when he tries to drag Britain into another foolish, unwinnable, and unlawful war of aggression, he'll viciously purge anyone within the Labour Party who tries to warn him not to.

If anyone needed to be driven away from the Labour Party it's the kind of pathetic snowflake who thinks Britain shouldn't be arming apartheid states and blood-soaked tyrannies like Israel and Saudi Arabia, or creating terrorism breeding grounds and vast refugee crises by reducing foreign countries to rubble, isn't it?

Another of Keir's genius moves was to get a trendy bunch of London image consultants to tell him to try to trick working class people into voting for him with a fascism-adjacent ultranationalist propaganda blitz of "flags, family, and fatherlandism", before rigging Labour selection processes to exclude working class people in favour of the kind of upper middle class, comfortably wealthy liberal-capitalists the Labour Party is meant to be represented by.

If anyone needed to be patronised like a bunch of idiots and excluded from participation in the Parliamentary Labour Party, it's the working class, isn't it?

You have to applaud Starmer's judgement in appointing a private health bankrolled lickspittle like Wes Streeting as his shadow health minister, and allowing him to publicly attack NHS workers and repeatedly spout NHS privatisation propaganda.

If anyone needed to be completely disillusioned by the Labour Party it's those daft idiots who love the NHS, and consider it the finest achievement of any Labour government in history, isn't it?

These awful leftists have tried to claim that Starmer's politics is just reheated Blairism, but this is incredibly unfair. In 1997 Blair stupidly tried to give people hope that Britain deserved better than Tory sleaze, chaos and continued national decline, and he foolishly tolerated alternative views within the Labour ranks, allowing the likes of Tony Benn, Robin Cook, and Jeremy Corbyn to defy him over the Iraq invasion, without even mercilessly hounding them out of the party to create a closed ideological echo chamber like Starmer obviously would have done.

Keir Starmer is just a man with the the downright good sense to tell centrists exactly what they want to hear? "We're lying to you, we don't care, nothing is going to get better, and we're just going to be marginally more competent than the Tories at managing Britain's inevitable economic decline", and he deserves a lot of credit for that.

So it's sickening to see all these Jews, people of colour, socialists, trade unionists, social progressives, and Remainers queuing up to air their petty grievances about being lied to and abused by Starmer's Labour when people have been saying literally the most horrible things about our beloved leader.

They've called him "The Silent Knight", and "Keith Stalin", and "a haircut in a suit", and they've even deliberately misspelled his name as "Kier"!

Just think about the pain and trauma these awful people have caused to poor old Keir with their horrible mouth words ... and then they have the absolute temerity to whine that they're merely being systematically purged, marginalised, discriminated against, abused, and ignored!

Have they no sense of perspective?

Keir Starmer is like a 1997 era Tony Blair without any of the useless and unimportant things like charisma, inspiration, oratory skills, verve, or tolerance of other people's opinions.

All in all, he's an absolute dream boat for sensible liberal-capitalist centrists isn't he?

It's as clear as day that Keir Starmer is so much more than a "boring haircut in a suit". He's as dishonest, vindictive, and profoundly unlikeable as politicians get, and isn't this exactly the kind of person that us Brits demonstrably love to be ruled over by?

And who could possibly doubt Starmer's genius strategy of driving away pesky, annoying, and unimportant minorities like:

People who wanted the UK to leave the EU
People who wanted the UK to remain in the EU
People who are sick of political liars
Workers
The trade unionists who actually fund the Labour Party
The clear majority of Brits who believe in public ownership
People who disapprove of rape cops and war criminals
Genuine socialists
200,000+ Labour Party members and activists
People who don't want Britain to repeat horrifying foreign policy disasters like Iraq
Social progressives
The working class
People who believe in democracy and natural justice
People who love the NHS and respect NHS workers
Anti-racists
Women
People of colour
Jews

In order to appeal exclusively to important core political demographics like:

Comfortably wealthy Guardian hacks on six figure salaries
Fading celebrities who remember their receding heydays coinciding with Blairism
Liberal-capitalist twonks who support political liars, as long as it's their political liar
Billionaire capitalists, media moguls, and private health profiteers
"Soft Tories" who want vicious, dishonest, radical-right neoliberalism that's just a fraction less malicious than the Tories themselves

The man's a misunderstood political genius, and there's no way that the British public could ever be foolish enough to believe that they deserve better.

Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

Technology is already driving inequality, now the AI bots are eroding human creativity

2023-02-24T13:52:00.002+01:00

The rise of AI art and chat bots is getting deeply concerning.

The problems are obvious.

If you can generate artwork for your blog, for example, by typing a few prompts into an AI art bot, to almost instantaneously generate free, or ultra-cheap content, why expend the time, effort, and money on commissioning a human to do the job?

As an online writer it's vital to keep hitting the zeitgeist, because the content that shares most is usually the content that's about the topic of the moment, and because these days the news cycle moves incredibly quickly. So it makes sense to generate images as quickly as possible, rather than going through the lengthy process of commissioning real artists to do the work.

Under these circumstances what happens to the human artists, especially the emerging ones who haven't yet built up a client base or sufficient fans to support their work?

Artists were amongst the first to begin feeling the pressure from AI bots, but the AI chat bots are on the rise, and encroaching into written communication too.

Several of the chat bot issues have already been covered in detail by others, like the use of chat bots to cheat exams, people prompting the chat bot to produce hate speech and extremist content, and the fact that chat bots have no morality, so they're capable of outright lying, to the extent of inventing a load of made up citations to add fake legitimacy to their lies, but there's also a growing threat to writers' livelihoods.

The Science-Fiction magazine Clarkesworld is one of the best places for aspiring sci-fi writers to submit their work. They're not only really quick and efficient at dealing with submissions, they also pay well too.

Over the last couple of months they've been completely inundated with AI-generated content, submitted by scammers seeking to get commission fees for bot-written stories.

There's not really much chance that they'd actually succeed, because the bots have a long way to go before they can generate content that's good enough to pass as the kind of high quality sci-fi that Clarkesworld specialises in, but the sheer number of bot-written submissions has overwhelmed them, forcing them to close all new submissions.

As the magazine has outlined in a Twitter thread, there's no obvious solution:

Chat bot detectors are too unreliable.

"Pay-to-Submit" policies sacrifice too many legitimate writers, especially those from poor countries and under-privileged backgrounds.

Third party identity confirmation tools are too expensive, and would create regional holes which would amount to effectively banning submissions from entire countries.

Paper submissions are unrealistic in this day and age.

Restricting submissions to those who have already submitted would effectively ban all new authors.

If these are the problems faced by just one publication, then it's obvious how bad things could get across the publishing industry.

For now the main problem is scammers ruining opportunities for real writers by overwhelming submission systems with junk, but as time goes on the fake submissions are going to become more and more indistinguishable from genuine content.

And this problem obviously won't just apply to aspiring authors, it could potentially impact anyone who writes for a living.

As an example, why would media outlets continue to pay substantial wages to so many journalists if future chat bots become capable of writing news articles, reviews, opinion pieces, rabble-rousing polemics, etc, all at the click of a button?

The philosopher Bertrand Russell used to say that if capitalists could be prevented from extracting all of the gains for themselves in unearned profits, improvements in technology could eventually reduce the need for human labour to such an extent that humanity could focus more on the things that make life worth living, such as the creative arts.

Sadly things haven't gone in this direction at all, to such an extent that the 1% minority now takes a bigger share of new technology-generated wealth than the rest of humanity combined; retirement ages are being driven up across the world; wages have been stagnant in real-terms for decades; and ultra-exploitative low-pay gig economy exploitation is rife.

Consider Amazon and food delivery apps.

The technology isn't being used to alleviate humanity from mundane low-paid labour by automating processes, it's being used as a means of extracting obscene amounts of unearned wealth by making workers subservient to the demands of in-work apps.

As workers toil away for a pittance, the owners of the technology that directs their tasks generate literally £billions.

And to make matters even worse, the technological advancements that could have saved us from poverty and the drudgery of mundane labour are now encroaching on the creative arts, and undermining the already limited scope for people to make a living through creativity, rather than unfulfilling grunt work.

Not only is the technology making workers ever more machine-like, it's now also eroding the possibility of escaping this kind of mundane toil by usurping our creative arts.

It used to be the case that humans told the machines what to do. Now the machines increasingly tell us what to do. And as we are forced to become more like the machines, the machines become more like us.

Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

Why does Starmer keep insisting that the public are wrong?

2022-06-25T14:42:00.001+02:00

Keir Starmer was elected as Labour leader on the back of 10 pledges, which promises party unity, the continuation of Corbynite policies, and a clear cut commitment to communal ownership of vital infrastructure and services like water, rail, and energy.

Starmer knew he couldn't win the Labour leadership without promising these things, because public ownership is not just overwhelmingly popular with the Labour Party members who were voting, they're popular policies across the entire British public.

Polling consistently demonstrates that overwhelming support for renationalisation of the energy sector, the water supply in England, and the railways.

In the two years after his election as Labour leader circumstances have handed Starmer a series of ideal opportunities to promote these overwhelmingly popular renationalisation policies.

Raw Sewage

In 2021 Johnson's Tory rabble triggered a massive public backlash when they voted to allow privatised water companies to keep artificially inflating their profits by dumping vast quantities of raw sewage into our waterways and coastal waters.

Starmer could easily have used this scandal to promote the popular policy of bringing England's privatised mess of water suppliers back under public ownership.

Instead he sent his subordinates out to argue that the profiteers must stay in charge of the water supply, in order to signal that Labour represents no threat to vested capitalist interests.

Energy Crisis

We've all seen the chaos of massively inflated energy bills, soaring energy producer profits, a sequence of energy suppliers going bust, and the government regulator forcing abandoned customers onto much more expensive tariffs.

Starmer could have highlighted the way the French government imposed a 4% cap on energy bill rises onto their publicly owned energy company (EdF), while the Tory government allowed EdF and other energy companies in the UK market to raise bills by an astonishing 54%.

He could have offered the public the renationalisation policies they want, but instead he decided to once again adopt the position that the public are wrong, and that the private profiteers must stay.

And Starmer didn't just spurn the opportunity to promote the energy renationalisation policies that the public want, and that he pledged in his leadership bid, he even publicly bragged that he lied in his leadership campaign, and insisted that he'd lie to people again to win more power!

Rail Strikes

Labour is supposed to be the party of working people (the clue is in the name), but Keir Starmer has decided to oppose the RMT rail strike against below-inflation pay offers and mandatory redundancies.

He's so vehemently opposed to the strikes that his minions are trying to force Labour MPs to apologise for showing solidarity with striking workers!

It's truly absurd to see Starmer's shadow cabinet team insisting that they won't support the strikes because they don't want to "pick a side".

It's capitalist profiteers and a profoundly malicious Tory transport secretary against ordinary low-paid rail workers (not train drivers).

If Labour won't even pick a side in this scenario, what the hell is the point in them.

And then the polling has come out to show that the British public are overwhelmingly on the side of the rail workers, meaning once again Starmer has positioned himself far to the right of public opinion.

Outflanking the public to the right

Despite pledging popular renationalisation policies in his leadership election, Keir Starmer has deliberately placed the Labour Party well to the right of the British public on water, energy, and now rail.

Instead of offering the public what they want, Starmer is siding with the capitalist profiteers and insisting that the public are wrong to want things to just be a bit better and fairer for British consumers and British workers.

Starmer's dedicated to the protection of vested capitalist interests, so he's going to keep Labour positioned well to the right of public opinion; offer a bland and uninspiring "more of the same" policy platform; and hope that he can win the next election purely by not being quite as repulsive and divisive as Johnson.

It looks a lot like a deliberate attempt to replay Ed Miliband's catastrophically uninspiring 2015 Tory-lite election campaign, in which Labour decided to pathetically imitate Tory austerity ruination, rather than opposing it and pledging to invest for the future instead.

It seems an absurdly inexplicable strategy to repeatedly chide the public that they're wrong to want things to be a bit better, and then expect them to vote for you regardless.

Unless of course Starmer considers the protection of capitalist profiteering to be so important that he'd risk driving millions of traditional Labour voters away, and throwing an election over it.

And if that's the case, what the hell is this absurd person doing as leader of the Labour Party?

What the Mick Lynch phenomenon tells us about UK politics and the media

2022-06-24T17:31:00.004+02:00

Not so long ago few people outside of the rail industry had even heard of Mick Lynch, but in the space of a week, the head of the RMT union has absolutely taken the UK media by storm by calmly stating the facts in the face of relentless provocation from members of Britain's depraved media class.

Lynch has been such a success that even liberal dweebs like Gary Lineker have been singing his praises, because in just a few days he's managed to do more to stand up for working people and hold this atrocious Tory government to account, than the Silent Knight Keir Starmer has done in two interminable years.

This fascination with Mick Lynch is easy to understand, because we live in a country where left-wing and working class voices are routinely marginalised.

The media, politics, and the whole rotten establishment is absolutely stuffed with people from privileged backgrounds. And it's absolutely obvious that most of the tiny minority of working class people who did ever get anywhere near the top, knew that they needed to demonstrate conformity to the establishment ideology to get where they were.

And just look at the absolute state of the Labour Party, which was founded to represent the interests of ordinary working people in parliament, yet all but a few of its MPs are anti-socialist, "more of the same" liberal-capitalists from comfortably wealthy backgrounds, not real workers and real socialists from working class families.

For a few years Labour had a party leader who wanted to bring more local, working-class, and genuinely socialist people back into the PLP, but the liberal dweebs had a four and a half year tantrum aimed at keeping the Tories in power until Corbyn could be driven out and replaced by someone who would deliver what they wanted; marginalisation of the left and the relentless rigging of internal party elections and nomination processes to parachute in ever more of these turgid, uninspiring middle class yes men.

The liberal dweebs got exactly what they wanted, yet now they're looking at Mick Lynch's brand of passionate, informed, and authentic politics with envy, and wondering why the bland, unprincipled, triangulating liberal mess they've made of the Labour Party is so utterly incapable of generating the same kind of popular appeal!

Imagine how different things would be if the BBC actually committed to its so-called neutrality by balancing every politician from a posh background with a working class voice, and by balancing every capitalist mouthpiece with an alternative view (socialism, anarchism, trade-unionism, left-libertarianism, communism, anti-capitalism, syndicalism, green-left ...).

But we all know the BBC commitment to neutrality only extends to countering evidence based stuff like climate science with some slimy mercenary creep from an oil industry bankrolled radical-right think tank, and never to balanced class representation in the media; ensuring trade unionists get equal airtime to capitalists; or highlighting actual alternatives to the ruinous hard-right capitalist orthodoxy Britain's been trapped in since 1979.

It's in this context that Lynch has, in the space of a few days, made Kay Burley, Richard Madeley, and Piers Morgan look like the vapid hyper-partisan fools they are, which makes for incredibly viral content, but you'd have to be profoundly naive to not see that he's playing a very dangerous game.

There are an awful lot of people in Britain who absolutely hate to see uppity working class people making their social superiors look stupid and venal by calmly stating facts at them, not least Britain's depraved punditocracy themselves.

And the media class motivation to take Lynch down keeps on multiplying. There's their underlying hostility to left-wing and working class voices; the class solidarity amongst the pundit class is making them furious that he's repeatedly making their compatriots look foolish; and there's now the self-interested desire to go viral by being the first media figure to finally take this 'uppity pleb' down a peg or two.

They're behaving like a swarm of bees trying to eject an intruder from the hive, and they're doing it right in front of our faces.

This relentless bias against left-wing and working class voices means we've all just become normalised to the idea that it's generally only posh capitalists who participate in politics, or talk about politics in the media.

But in reality there are hundreds of thousands of educated, informed, genuinely left-wing, politically active working-class people like Mick Lynch in Britain, it's just that the establishment gatekeepers don't want people like us in the media, or anywhere near the corridors of power.

The fact that Lynch is being portrayed as some kind of strange and exciting novelty by all and sundry speaks volumes about the under-representation of working class voices in British political discourse.

Something's gone terribly wrong with Labour

2022-06-16T18:03:00.003+02:00

Keir Starmer has once again demonstrated Labour's chaotic lurch to the right under his lamentable leadership, this time by forcing Wes Streeting to apologise for expressing a bit of solidarity with striking UK rail workers last week.

Let's not forget that Labour is supposed to be the party of the workers (the clue is in the name).

It's supposed to defend ordinary people from the greed and exploitation of capitalists and landlords.

If Labour founding-father Keir Hardie was alive
today, Starmer would no-doubt force him to
apologise for saying things like this

It was founded by socialists and trade unionists, and it's still almost entirely funded by socialists and trade unionists through their membership fees and union subs.

But Starmer sees it as his own personal fiefdom, which he rules over through relentless factionalism; petty diktats; depraved ideological purity tests; constant vote-rigging; forced apologies; and regular witch-hunts against those who refuse to bow down to his authoritarian hankerings.

Starmer started off by hastily driving anyone with a shred of decency out of his shadow cabinet by insisting that they abstain on a couple of truly vile pieces of Tory legislation designed to allow undercover cops to rape women with impunity, and to provide impunity to British soldiers who commit war crimes overseas.

These ideological purity tests did what they were designed to, and drove all of the genuinely left-wing and socially progressive figures out of his shadow cabinet, so he then set about demoting all the so-called "soft-left" figures too (like Dodds and Thomas-Symonds), replacing them with his right-wing allies.

Starmer and his bully-boy enforcer on the NEC David Evans have issued loads of diktats banning local party members from discussing certain subjects, or holding no confidence votes in Starmer or Evans, because if there's one thing that petty tyrants can't tolerate, it's open and free discussion amongst people they believe to be their inferiors.

Starmer forced Alex Sobel (hardly a radical leftist) to issue a grovelling apology for suggesting that he thought capitalism was to blame for climate change, then he cynically rigged the Labour leadership nomination process to make it almost impossible for his successor to be socialist, female, or a person of colour.

Then Starmer positioned himself miles to the right of Tony Blair by going after the anti-war group of Labour MPs, threatening to expel them from the party if they refused to bend to his will.

Even though Iraq turned out to be an absolutely horrific disaster, meaning Blair really should have listened to the warnings of rebels like of Robin Cook, Tony Benn, Tam Dalyell, Jeremy Corbyn ... he still allowed them to dissent without threatening to expel them from the party like Starmer does to anyone with a different opinion to his own.

And now Starmer's humiliating Wes Streeting, and showing utter contempt for the trade union movement that pays the Labour Party's bills, by demanding Streeting issue a grovelling apology for his expression of sympathy towards striking rail workers!

If Starmer's punishing a right-wing lickspittle like Streeting for coming across as too left-wing, it's beyond obvious that something has gone catastrophically wrong with the Labour Party.

It's been usurped by the political right, and under Starmer's leadership it's being used as a battering ram to undermine, disempower, demoralise, and silence the left, instead of offering a better alternative to this cesspit of Tory incompetence, corruption, and degeneracy.

The workers' party has been taken over by people who favour greedy capitalists over exploited workers; selfish private landlords over suffering tenants; the power of the state over the power of the people; and property rights over people.

It's been taken over by a wannabe-tyrant who refuses to accept any opinion other than his own, and clearly considers the genuine left within his own party to be a much bigger problem than Johnson's malicious, corrupt, and incompetent ghouls in government, who he repeatedly refuses to properly oppose.

I would never have picked Starmer as Labour leader, but I could also never have imagined that things would have degraded so rapidly under his perpetual abstention of a leadership.

He's more of a right-wing control freak than Blair; he's more obsessed with defending the neoliberal economic order than Brown; he's more other-worldly and unengaging than Miliband; and he's far worse at getting to the point and hammering home the political advantage than Corbyn was!

He's like some kind of Frankenstein's monster composed of all of the worst aspects of other Labour leaders, without any of the good bits.

Without the charisma of Blair; without Brown's aura of decency; without Miliband's desire to make the Labour Party more democratic and accountable; and without Corbyn's popular policies.

What's more is how utterly dismal Starmer is on policy and strategy.

He seems to be convinced that his strategy of repeating the same mistakes of the past will prove successful this time.

Attacking the left rather than properly holding the Tories to account delivered Neil Kinnock his absolute pratfall of an election in 1992, and in 2015 Ed Miliband's mistake of pathetically imitating Tory economic insanity rather than opposing it turned what should have been an absolute gimme of an election, into a humbling defeat.

Starmer's going to do both at the same time, as well as insisting that the public are wrong to want energy and water renationalisation, when the sewage scandal and the energy crisis had actually provided him absolutely golden opportunities to offer the public the renationalisations that they've repeatedly told pollsters that they want (and what he'd promised in his leadership election pledges to boot!).

Starmer's just as determined to lecture the public that they're wrong, as he is to ignore the lessons from Labour Party history!

It's absolutely mind-boggling that there are still people within the Labour ranks who insist on trying to gaslight the public into believing that this unlikeable, unengaging, unsympathetic, untrustworthy figure is actually brilliant, funny, charismatic, relatable, and honest, and that we're all at fault for not having noticed yet!

Starmer's been far worse than even his harshest critics could have imagined in 2019, and yet Labour seem determined not to get rid of him, and to go into the next general election with this absolute dud dictating, and foot-stamping, and micromanaging the party into another devastating electoral pratfall.

13 things everyone should know about the ECHR

2022-06-15T14:34:00.002+02:00

Priti Patel's Rwanda deportation flight was never actually intended to take off.

It was a £500,000 publicity stunt designed to ramp up the culture war against the European Convention on Human Rights, and the court that protects these rights and liberties.

The Tory ploy was to deliberately try to break the law, in order to claim that the nasty Europeans are preventing us from doing what we want to, and agitate for Britain to leave the jurisdiction of the ECHR.

Given that the UK government is intent on whipping up culture war propaganda against it, here are 13 things that people should know about the ECHR:

It's got nothing to do with the EU

The ECHR has absolutely nothing to do with the EU. It's an independent institution established in 1950.

So all these far-right polemicists shouting "leave means leave" over the Rwanda situation are either thick as mince, or being deliberately misleading.

Churchill's finest legacy

Winston Churchill was a true enigma of a man. A right-wing racist who despised Indians and set soldiers on British workers, but a war leader in the fight against Nazism, and a man who promoted the idea of internationally accepted human rights to prevent the horrors of fascism from happening again.

The development of the ECHR was supported by both Churchill and Labour PM Clement Attlee, meaning anyone who wants to rip Britain out of of the ECHR is trashing the legacies of the favourite 20th Century Prime Ministers of both the right and the left!

Protection from fascism

The ECHR was designed to protect European citizens from fascism, and make sure nothing like the horrors of the Second World War could ever happen again. So you've really got to wonder about the true motivations of any government that wants to drag their country out of it.

The life's work of Johnson's own grandad

Boris Johnson's own grandfather James Fawcett was a member of the ECHR from 1962-1984, serving as its President from 1972-1982. He dedicated his life's work to human rights, and wrote books on international law, and the application of the ECHR.

It's not just an indication of the decline of Fawcett's family lineage that his own grandson is the radical-right philistine who is intent on wrecking his life's work, it's indicative of our national decline too.

For all of our many faults, Britain was once a great nation in some ways, stocked with decent, honest, earnest men like Fawcett who worked for the betterment of humanity.

These days we lift up and celebrate the absolute worst among us, like the bone-idle, incompetent, lying, philandering oaf who is intent on wrecking the life's work of his own grandfather, purely because he knows contemptuously undermining human rights and international law plays well to Britain's depraved hard-right capitalist media.

These days it's all about self-interest, not the betterment of others, and it's a crying shame that we've fallen so far as a nation in just a couple of generations.

Red meat for tabloid-addled reactionaries

It's hard to imagine the warped mindset of the kind of tabloid-addled reactionary who desperately wants to see their own human rights ripped up, purely because they're angry that their beloved Tory government couldn't unlawfully deport a few poor refugees, who they've never even met, and know nothing about.

But this kind of rabidly right-wing ultranationalist reactionary is Johnson's base. The Tories knew they couldn't win elections without attracting the millions who used to vote for UKIP and the BNP, so this policy of destroying our human rights is red meat, intended for their consumption.

ECHR protects British rights

We regularly hear about how the ECHR protects immigrants, by preventing the UK government from defying the law to deport them, but it also protects the rights of British citizens too.

It was thanks to the ECHR that the bans on homosexuality were lifted in Scotland and Northern Ireland; employers were prevented from discriminating against their workers on religious grounds; teachers were banned from brutalising children with corporal punishment; the ban on people in Gibraltar voting in general Elections was lifted; and the multiple rulings to protect the British public from police brutality.

A very British institution

The ECHR was largely drafted by British lawyers, and British judges have always been major players in the institution, with three of Britain's eight ECHR judges having served as president of the court (Nicholas Bratza, Humphrey Waldock, A.D. McNair).

Only France and Italy out of the other 46 member states have even had two presidents of the court, and many nations have never had a single one.

Leaving would be Putinesque

In all of Europe, only Belarus has never signed up to the ECHR. The only countries to have walked out of it are Greece, after they suffered a violent military coup in 1969 (then re-joined 1974), and then Putin's Russia after the invasion of Ukraine.

Do we really want to join the brutal Papadopoulos Junta and Vlad Putin's Russia as the only European regimes to have torn up their own citizens' European rights?

Crucial to the Irish Peace Process

Boris Johnson has already made his contempt for the Irish Peace Process absolutely clear by barefaced lying that his Brexit deal wasn't going to create a border down the Irish Sea, creating a border down the Irish Sea, and then defying international law with his efforts to rip up the Northern Ireland Protocol after having told everyone it was a great deal, and signing us up to abide by it.

Britain can't quit the ECHR without ripping up the Good Friday Agreement, which stipulates that the UK have the ECHR enforceable in Northern Ireland.

This latest attack on the ECHR demonstrates that Johnson's contempt for the Irish Peace Process knows no bounds.

Internationally accepted rights, or a set of Tory allowances?

The Tories want to tear up the ECHR and replace it with a British "Bill of Rights" which will be drawn up by ministers from the billionaire-bankrolled Tory party!

What kind of idiot wants to have their internationally accepted rights lobbed in the bin, so that the radical-right ghouls Johnson has surrounded himself with can decide what rights and liberties they will and won't allow us to keep?

Know your rights

The first 18 Articles of the ECHR are the most fundamental. Most of the rest relate to technical details of how the court functions. Here are the rights that Boris Johnson and the Tories are seeking to rip up:

Why the British press hate it

Johnson is intent on attacking the ECHR because Britain's rabidly right-wing corporate media outlets hate it.

The main reason they hate it is because of Article 8, which guarantees British citizens the right to privacy, and prevents them from engaging in the phone-hacking and private surveillance scandals that led to the Levenson Inquiry.

They're still furious that they can't hack into our phones, private communications, medical records, etc ... to do stuff like leak gossip about celebrities and their families, smear left-wing and socially progressive figures, and release the private information of dead British soldiers.

Why the Tories hate it

The Tories hate the ECHR for a very similar reason to the right-wing capitalist media; it constrains their ability to make life worse for people.

Whenever they want to deport immigrants (or black British citizens) they detest having to try to do it in a way that complies with the ECHR rules.

When they defund the justice system and scrap entitlement to Legal Aid, they know that they're denying people the right to a free and fair trial.

When they implement mandatory unpaid labour schemes for the unemployed, they know they're trampling over people's right not to be subjected to forced labour.

When they bring in legislation to erase our ancient British right to participate in non-violent protest, they know they're attacking our rights to free expression, assembly, and association.

They hate the ECHR because it stands in the way of them being the vicious, malicious bastards that they really want to be.

Conclusion

I'm fairly certain that few could read all of this and still conclude that they want the Tories to trample all over Churchill's finest legacy by walking out of the ECHR, to join Belarus and Putin's Russia as Europe's only non-signatories.

You'd have to be the worst kind of simpleton to imagine that Johnson's billionaire-bankrolled Tories are better placed to decide what our fundamental rights and liberties should be, than a Europe-wide panel of human rights advocates and legal experts.

The big problem is that the kind of low-information voter this malicious anti-ECHR rabble-rousing is aimed at doesn't have the intellectual rigour to actually learn about the issue they're being programmed to froth about, or the patience/comprehension ability to read a detailed summary, if they were ever to somehow come across one.

it's bad enough that decades of failing education and exposure to radical-right capitalist media has created such an enormous demographic of reactionary low-information voters, but that the government actively panders to them like this is a national disgrace.

Britain never had a reckoning with the fascists in our midst

2022-06-14T16:25:00.003+02:00

In the 1930s the British upper classes were absolutely riddled with fascists and antisemites.

There was Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists, which boasted tens of thousands of members, and loads of high-profile supporters including the Daily Mail proprietor Lord Rothermere (great-grandfather of the current owner), who was a personal friend of Adolf Hitler.

There were fascist-sympathisers throughout the aristocracy and the royal family. We've all seen the pictures of Edward teaching the young future queen Elizabeth to do Nazi salutes in the gardens of Balmoral Castle (despite royalist efforts to censor them).

The Tory party was particularly infested with fascists, with loads of Tory MPs and lords signed up to secretive organisations aimed at promoting fascist and antisemitic ideologies.

The Anglo-German Fellowship was dedicated to fostering stronger relations with Nazi Germany. It boasted dozens of Tory party politicians amongst its membership, as well as Bank of England director Frank Cyril Tiarks (who was also a member of the British Union of Fascists), Bank of England governor Montagu Norman, Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, and Geoffrey Dawson who was editor of The Times.

Tory members of the Anglo-German Fellowship included Peter Agnew, Lawrence Dundas, Ernest Bennett, Robert Bird, Robert Tatton Bower, Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, Robert Vaughan Gower, Thomas "Loel" Guinness, Norman Hulbert, Archibald James, Alfred Knox, John Macnamara, Thomas Moore, Assheton Pownall, Frank Sanderson, Duncan Sandys, Murray Sueter, Charles Taylor, Ronald Tree, Lord Brocket, Lord Galloway, the Earl of Glasgow, Lord Mount Temple, Lord Londonderry, Lord Nuffield, Lord Redesdale, Lord Rennell, and the Duke of Wellington.

The Anglo-German Fellowship was supported by a propaganda operation called The Link, headed up by the traitor Barry Domville.

There was also the Imperial Fascist League which was led by the virulent antisemite Arnold Leese, who continued propagandising in favour of Nazi Germany deep into the Second World War from a series of hideouts.

Then there was the truly despicable Right Club which sought to drive Jewish people out of public life, founded by the Tory MP Archibald Ramsay.

The Right Club attracted a load of high profile establishment figures, including the 5th Duke of Wellington, Lord Redesdale, Lord Lymington, Arnold Leese, A. K. Chesterton, George Henry Drummond, the 2nd Duke of Westminster, Tory MP John Hamilton Mackie, and William Joyce (who went on to become Lord Haw-Haw).

The Right Club finally collapsed in 1940 when they were discovered plotting to undermine the British war effort by stealing secret cables between Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt, with the intention of leaking them.

And let's not forget that the widely-celebrated Tory MP Nancy Astor was one of the leaders of the fascist-sympathising Cliveden Set.

Tories, royals, capitalists, and establishment elitists adored Nazi Germany because the first thing Adolf Hitler did when he came to power was to send all the socialists, communists, anarchists, trade unionists, and other assorted leftists to the concentration camps.

They saw fascism as the perfect means of preserving their own wealth, power and privilege, through the ruthless persecution of the political left.

A small minority of the most egregiously pro-fascist figures like Barry Domville, Arnold Leese, Oswald Mosley, and Archibald Ramsay were interned as national security threats during the Second World War, and Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) was captured and executed for treason in 1946.

However the vast majority of these establishment fascists were allowed to keep their positions of power and influence in the upper echelons of British society throughout the Second World War, and long into the post-war period.

Loads of these aristocratic fascists were even handed important promotions in the post-war period, and lavished with establishment honours like knighthoods and seats in the unelected House of Lords.

Is anyone really naïve enough to believe that all of these people simply gave up their extreme-right, antisemitic, and rabidly anti-left politics, despite having suffered absolutely no punishment whatever for holding such disgusting beliefs, even after our cities had been pounded to rubble by the people they'd been championing?

Of course they didn't. They just learned to hide their despicable extreme-right political views more carefully.

This abject post-war failure to stamp fascists out of public life is one of the big reasons why there's still a disturbing and powerful seam of fascist ideology within Britain's grotesque establishment class.

You look at the racism of the British tabloid press and their constant scapegoating of immigrants; the revocation of British rights from Commonwealth citizens in the 1970s; Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech; the anti-gay hysteria of the 1980s; the decades-long campaign of blacklisting of left-leaning journalists from the BBC; the rampant racism within institutions of state like the Metropolitan Police; the casual disregard for the millions of victims of Britain's imperialist war-mongering; the systematic demonisation of all left-wing political figures; the extreme-right ultranationalism that drove Brexit over the winning line; the fetishisation of nationalist symbolism and the military; the idolisation of disgustingly antisemitic Nazi-sympathisers like Nancy Astor; the massive blacklists of trade union activists across numerous industrial sectors; the ongoing systematic persecution of disabled people; Theresa May's unlawfully racist "Hostile Environment" and the Windrush Scandal; the constant right-wing agitation for the destruction of our human rights; Boris Johnson's depraved "let the bodies pile high" attitude to the plight of vulnerable people during the pandemic; and Priti Patel's deportation of refugees to Rwanda ...

The reason the British establishment class is so rotten is that we never had a reckoning with the people who wanted Britain to emulate Nazi Germany.

Instead we let them keep their positions of power and influence, and quietly seep their disgusting fascist ideology into the fabric of British society.

Justin Welby's 'forgive Andrew' comments look even worse in light of his sordid past

2022-06-01T15:02:00.000+02:00

The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has made some extraordinary statements about Prince Andrew's sexual abuse case, claiming that Andrew is "seeking to make amends" and framing the rest of us as being at fault, because we apparently need to “learn to be a more open and forgiving society”!

In reality, one of the most important aspects of "making amends" is admitting what you did wrong, which Andrew has steadfastly refused to do by denying he ever even met his accuser (despite paying her £millions to drop her case against him, and despite that notorious photo at Ghislaine Maxwell's house).

Andrew hasn't even vaguely sought to "make amends". He's just used his family's immense wealth to buy his way out of trouble, and now he's hoping to ride the scandal out and return to public life as if nothing has happened.

And the head of the Church of England is publicly siding with him in this ambition, and making out that it's the rest of us who have the real problems if we object to it!

This is far from the first example of Welby's scandalous behaviour.

Few could forget the way he tore up the political neutrality of the Church of England during the 2019 general election campaign, by vitriolically attack Jeremy Corbyn, in order to pressure people into voting for his fellow Old Etonian Boris Johnson.

It was illustrative of how corrupted the Church of England has become to see the head of the organisation wilfully rip up the institution's longstanding political neutrality to endorse a bigoted, lying, greed-worshipping philanderer for Prime Minister, because you could barely imagine a more unchristian character than Johnson could you?

This call to forgive Andrew isn't even the first time Welby has wheeled out this 'importance of forgiveness' narrative to defend his establishment chums either.

Just last year Welby used the same narrative to obfuscate the massive Tory coronavirus corruption scandal, when they cynically used the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to tear up the anti-corruption procurement rules, and then fill their own pockets via secretive lobbying and dodgy untendered multi-million PPE contracts.

Then there's the fact that Welby is guilty of turning a blind eye to child sex abuse within the Church of England during his time as dean of Liverpool Cathedral.

When Welby was informed about child sex abuse allegations against Canon John Roberts in 2011, he didn't just decide not to inform the police or initiate internal disciplinary action against him, he actively sided with Roberts and banned his victim from the cathedral!

What makes it so much worse is that Welby knew at the time that Roberts had a 1989 conviction for child sex offences, and that he'd been allowed to continue working in the church. Despite knowing that Roberts had a history of abusing children, Welby chose to take his side, and take action against his accuser.

When Roberts was finally convicted of the abuse that Welby ignored, he issued a statement saying how much he regretted siding with the sex offender against his victim, but Welby's public statements in support of Andrew over his child sex abuse allegations just go to prove the absolute insincerity of the man.

And let's not forget Welby's personal involvement in sadistic abuse camps in the 1970s, that were set up to indoctrinate young Christians into a radically right-wing version of Christianity.

The church knew about the violent beatings at these Iwerne "bash camps" in the early 1980s and exiled the main perpetrator to Zimbabwe in 1982, but they kept the whole thing secret, allowing Iwerne members like Welby to rise up the ranks of the Church of England.

It's remarkable that the media have just left Welby alone on his personal involvement in this sadistic indoctrination cult, but that's just the way things work in Britain.

Establishment elitists benefit from a protective culture of impunity, which allows them to get away with all kinds of corruption and depravity that ordinary folk would be monstered for.

And whenever one of them appears to be in trouble, the rest close ranks to protect them.

Welby defending Andrew like this is just another example of one establishment sadist demanding impunity for another.

And the worst thing is that the Church of England is apparently happy to have such a sordid individual repeatedly portray their institution as a bunch of savagely right-wing child sex abuse apologists.

The Mail on Sunday's glaring front page lie

2022-05-29T13:04:00.002+02:00

Boris Johnson's latest ruse to distract attention away from the corruption, incompetence, and degeneracy of his regime is to stoke up a load of culture war bullshit over imperial weights and measures and crown symbols on pint glasses.

Appealing to the nostalgia of a bunch of tabloid-addled geriatrics is a simplistic distraction tactic, but it's one that Johnson and the Tories have played before with blue passports, and the right-wing propaganda rags are once again enthusiastically helping him out with this trivial nonsense.

This time it's got so bad that the front page of one of Britain's most widely read newspapers is blaring out the absolute lie that the EU banned crown symbols on pint glasses.

What the EU actually did, if you're interested in the actual facts, was to pass directive 2004/22/EC to introduce the CE mark on pint glasses in order to protect European citizens from undersized measures.

There was never anything in the CE rules to say the crown symbol had to go. In fact the EU commissioner Günter Verheugen explicitly stated that the crown symbol could be kept "as long as it is done in a way that is not confused with the CE marking".

Not only did the EU not ban the crown symbol, they explained that Britain could keep using it if they wanted to. But the UK government decided that they couldn't be bothered pointlessly duplicating the certification process, and scrapped it from 2007 onwards.

If the Tory party really cared so much about crown symbols on pint glasses they could have brought them back at any time between coming to power in 2010 and the present, because they were never banned by the EU.

So why is the Mail on Sunday pushing this brazen front page lie that the EU forced Britain to remove the crown symbol from our pint glasses, and that plucky Bodger Johnson is bravely bringing it back?

Daily Mail propaganda hacks know perfectly well that aside from corporations and the mega-rich, who vote Tory out of self-interest, the Tory party's core demographics are the far-right ultranationalists they nicked off UKIP and the BNP, and other low-information voters.

Tory propaganda hacks love to appeal to the nostalgia, nationalism, and anti-European xenophobia of their readers by portraying trivial and archaic stuff like blue passports, crown symbols on pint glasses, and ludicrously over-complicated imperial weights and measures as quintessentially British things that have been banished by the evil EU.

It doesn't matter to Daily Mail readers that the UK could actually have kept blue passports for the entire time it was in the EU.

It doesn't matter to them the EU never forced UK retailers to stop using imperial weights and measures if they wanted to.

And they literally don't care that the EU never actually banned anyone from putting crown symbols on pint glasses.

Tell them that the European Union forced Britain to get rid of these beloved things, and low-information voters quiver with rage.

Tell them that brave Bodger Johnson freed Britain from the EU tyranny in order to bring this stuff back, and they're supposed to jiggle with delight.

We've entered an age in which people are actively encouraged to ignore the facts, and evidence, and experts, to believe whatever the hell they want.

And it's got to the point now that the newspapers feel emboldened to tell outright lies on their front pages, in order to help Johnson push this absurdly vapid culture war bullshit.

Do the royals really make us richer?

2022-05-28T18:11:00.004+02:00

At times like this, the crawling sycophants always appear in droves to misleadingly insist that the royal family constitute a net benefit to the UK economy.

The absurd creeps making these claims are often so economically illiterate, that they've even been known to claim the entire £19 billion (declared) net worth of the royal family as an annual benefit to Britain!

Putting aside the ludicrous claims that the royal family contribute their entire net wealth to the UK economy every single year, the usual tactic of these subservient grovelers is to place the annual profit generated by the Royal Collection Trust, and the revenue of the Crown Estates in the positive column, without any effort whatever to properly explain what these things actually are, or to add any of the costs of the royal family into the negative column.

Tourism

The most common claim from these fawning royal boot-lickers is that the royal family generates huge amounts of cash in tourism, usually citing the annual profits from the Royal Collection Trust, which are mainly made through tickets to visit royal properties, and gift shop sales.

In 2019/20 they made £49.9 million in profit, but this figure has to be offset by the fact that most of these royal residences would be making far higher profits without a bunch of idle scroungers occupying the properties and dictating opening times.

The former royal palace of Versailles is one of the most profitable tourist attraction in France generating 65 million euros in ticket sales alone in 2019, yet the combined income of all of the royal properties in the UK combined amounted to only £71 million!

Versailles obviously wouldn't be generating anything like as much cash if it was barely open to the public because it was still being occupied by a bunch of inherited wealth squatters, would it?

Imagine how much Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle would generate if they were fully open to the public most days of the year, rather than used almost exclusively for private purposes.

Imagine how much these properties might generate as ultra-luxurious hotels, where obscenely wealthy guests could pay tens of thousands to dress up in royal garb and pretend to be king or queen of England for the night.

In reality the £50 odd million royalists endlessly claim as a benefit to Britain actually represents a huge loss on what could be being made if the royal family was abolished and the properties were efficiently managed to actually maximise revenues.

The Crown Estates

The claims about tourism are misleading enough, but royal brown-nosers adding Crown Estates revenue into the positive column constitutes downright deception.

The Crown Estates include a 384,000 acre landholding, and the Duchy of Cornwall (another separate estate which has been run since 1377 for the benefit of the heir to the throne) which consists of another 133,000 acres.

Added together, over half a million acres makes the Crown Estates the third biggest land holding in the entire country, after the Ministry of Defence and the Forestry Commission, yet somehow it only brings in £269.3 million in net profit (2021).

If you were some kind of simpleton, you'd add this £250m+ into the positive column for the royal family, but this would simply illustrate that you don't know what the Crown Estates actually are, or how they operate.

In the 18th Century the debt-laden royal family handed over the royal property portfolio to parliament in return for an annual subsidy paid out of public funds, which is loosely based on Crown Estates revenues. In 2020-21 this subsidy amounted to a whopping £86.3m.

Without this whopping Sovereign Grant being taken out of Crown Estates revenues to fund the lifestyles of these inherited wealth layabouts, the public finances would be almost a hundred million quid better off per year!

It's absurd to argue that the wealth generated by the Crown Estates constitutes a net positive, while allowing the royals to siphon off a massive chunk for themselves, and without considering the potential that this vast land-holding could be put to more efficient use without their involvement.

Just like with potential tourist revenues, the continued existence of the royal family actually cause a drain on Crown Estates revenues.

The hidden costs

Aside from the royal sycophants' tactic of brazenly misusing tourist and crown property revenues to make an misleadingly-positive case in favour of the royal family, these grovelling creeps also love to omit the hidden costs from the negative column too.

Boot-lickers love to forget that the fortunes of the royal family are not subject to Inheritance Tax.

If we accept the £19 billion net worth figure as legitimate, they'd owe £7.6 billion when Elizabeth II dies, which adds up to an astonishing £109 million for every single year of her reign so far!

If anyone was interested in doing a fair cost-benefit analysis on the royal family, they'd surely have to add in the £100m+ annual cost of their absurd Inheritance Tax exemption, wouldn't they?

Then there are the secretive royal powers to interfere in parliamentary legislation for their own financial benefit. The UK government still vehemently refuses to reveal which laws have been tampered with by the royal family, meaning it's extremely difficult to estimate what these secretive powers have ended up costing the UK economy.

It's been especially difficult to estimate the economic damage since the Tory government decided to exempt the royal finances from Freedom of Information requests back in 2011, However it's still easy to see how the royals could use this secret veto on democratic legislation to enrich themselves at the expense of the wider UK economy.

Beyond economic considerations

beyond the money, there are other costs to be considered too:

The United Kingdom one of the most unequal countries in the developed world with unacceptably high rates of poverty and destitution, and incredibly low levels of social mobility.

The royal family exist as the figureheads of this unequal and iniquitous system, which is built on valuing inherited wealth and establishment connections ahead of qualities like hard work, integrity, ingenuity, and intelligence.

A bunch of idle malingerers occupying the very top positions in the social order, based on nothing more than hereditary privilege, provides compelling evidence that the UK is nothing like a meritocracy.

Some people are so lacking in self-respect that they actually like to think of themselves as lowly serfs in comparison to their inherited-wealth lords and masters, but the existence of this squalid mob at the top of the pile is an absolute affront to those of us who consider no human as being more inherently valuable than any other, purely by virtue of birth.

Then there's the national embarrassment of a family that insists on bailing out an absolute creep like Andrew, to the tune of £millions, in order to buy his way out of facing up to child sex allegations in court.

What does it tell the rest of the world about the British people that we allow this disgusting creep to continue parading around in public, and representing our nation on the world stage?

What does it tell child sex abuse survivors in Britain, and across the rest of the world, that this vile individual is being allowed to get away with what he's accused of, purely because he was born into a family of born-to-luxury grifters?

Conclusion

Tourist revenues would obviously be higher if the royal properties were fully opened to the public, rather than housing an idle bunch of inherited wealth squatters

The Crown Estates could almost certainly be run more efficiently without the involvement of Elizabeth's squalid mob, and definitely without them siphoning the best part of a hundred million quid out of the public finances each year to fund their lavish lifestyles.

Even if we accept the £19 billion net wealth figure is valid, and not minimised through the hiding of overseas assets, that still adds up to a whopping £7.6 billion in Inheritance Tax these idle parasites are going to avoid through their unjustifiable tax exemption when Elizabeth II dies.

The royal powers to interfere in democratic legislation are so secretive that it's impossible to even estimate how many £billions worth of damage they've done to the wider UK economy by rewriting legislation for their own benefit, but even with such a shroud of secrecy protecting the actual figures, it's clearly an affront to democracy that these powers exist at all.

And then there's the social damage of maintaining such a grotesque social hierarchy, especially when one of the most high-profile figures at the top of it is a sweatless-creep like Andrew.

In light of all of this, the only way to maintain the fiction that the royal family constitutes any kind of benefit to the UK, is through an absurdly biased, and downright misleading interpretation of the actual facts.

Why is Starmer so intent on reanimating the corpse of late-stage Blairism?

2022-05-10T18:16:00.002+02:00

Keir Starmer’s inner circle is heavily dominated by Blairite loyalists. That’s a pretty indisputable assertion right?

Starmer’s Blair-hagiography of a Conference Speech made it absolutely clear that he’s worshipping at the altar of Blairism (to anyone who had the misfortune of actually listening to it at least).

And to match his words with actions, it’s also crystal clear from his strategy of removing and demoting the soft-left, which has followed his purge of all the genuine socialists and social liberals from his so called “unity cabinet” (via his depraved loyalty tests of whipping Labour MPs to abstain on vile Tory stuff like rape cops and war crime impunity, and booting them out of his cabinet if they refused).

One of the most interesting aspects of this Blairite involvement in Starmer’s vapid form of managerialist posture politics is the way they fail to even recognise the way Starmer has been imitating the failing late-stage Blairism that ended up driving millions of traditional Labour voters away, rather than the exciting early Blairism that promised to do away with a shambolic and sleaze ridden Tory government, that should surely have been removed from power at least half a decade previously.

In order to make the case that they’re imitating the wrong kind of Blairism, it’s necessary to admit that Blair and his government actually got some things right, which I’ve always been willing to do.

The increased investment in public services that began in 1997 was a damned-sight better than the privatisation-obsessed Tory shambles that preceded it, or the economically ruinous austerity extremism that succeeded it.

Other positives included The Good Friday Agreement and improved economic freedom for Scotland and Wales. But it’s the economic investment in infrastructure and services and the living standards increases that are most relevant here. We don’t need to talk about their lamentable policy failings here, because everyone who has even read this far should be well aware of where Blairism went badly wrong.

Blair did some things right to win power and then delivered some good policies in the early years in government ,and the parallels with now are pretty damned obvious. Yet for some absurd reason Starmer and his inner circle are intent on bringing back the hectoring and unpopular late-stage Blairism that drove people away instead.

In 1997 Blair absolutely trounced Major’s Tories by giving people a bit of hope, then he cemented his position in power by being seen to deliver: Rising wages, economic growth, resuscitating the UK’s vandalised social safety net, education, and NHS funding.

So if Starmer and the people who surround him idealise Blair so much, and have so much nostalgia for the Blair years, why aren’t they following Blair’s recipe for electoral success, rather than desperately trying to reanimate the risible and unpopular politics that Labour slumped into after they’d been in power for ages, run out of ideas, and complacently imagined themselves invincible after winning a third straight election, even after creating a disaster like the invasion of Iraq?

Why are they like this?

The answer seems to be that most of the architects and big players in the early Blair years are past it, retired, or deceased, leaving a pathetic residue of obsequious yes people, who were parachuted into positions of power and influence by Blair’s inner circle, without ever having learned where the power actually comes from.

The power comes from the people.

Even in a country like the UK that suffers a hopelessly rigged, archaic, unrepresentative, and decaying democratic institution like Westminster, you have to offer people what they want, rather than overtly mocking and ridiculing their desires for policies that would actually make life just a bit better and fairer for ordinary people.

But the Labour right Blair-loyalists who control the party now have no idea how to offer this, because they were raised in an environment in which it was their job to bend public will to fit the objectives of the Labour government, and to castigate anyone who argued that they should actually be doing things better.

How many of the big figures from Blair’s 1997 triumph are still kicking around? Blair retired to his riches a decade and a half ago. Brown only pops up occasionally. Prescott’s long-gone. Darling, Milburn, Straw, Hoon, and Blunkett are dinosaurs. Beckett and Harman are among the last in still serving in the Commons, and they’re both retiring next time around. Robin Cook, Frank Dobson, Tessa Jowell, Mo Mowlam, and Donald Dewar are all dead. And long-standing Labour Chief Whip Nick Brown has recently been kicked to the sidelines by Starmer.

What’s left of Blairism now is a profoundly unpleasant residue of arrogant and complacent career politicians who mainly got their positions through privilege and patronage, without ever having put in the the hard work of creating genuine public appeal.

Between 2015 and 2019 these second generation Blairites saw Corbyn trying to offer hope, But they clearly thought that he was ‘doing politics wrong’ by trying to appeal to the public, especially his efforts to woo young voters and new demographics who had rarely or never voted before.

As far as they were concerned he should have been offering uninspiring neoliberal gruel, performing parlour tricks for the media, rehashing the arrogant “this is all you’re getting” stance they cut their political teeth on, and bitterly chastising any objectors for the impertinence of suggesting politicians could and should be doing better.

They were so convinced that Corbyn was wrong, that once they took control of the Labour Party again, they even made it an immediate party priority to kill off public hopes and aspirations by systematically salting Corbyn’s allotment of policies, and deliberately driving away the hundreds of thousands of politically engaged and active supporters he’d attracted to the cause.

Rather than picking the best and most popular of Corbyn’s policy crop for their own use (investment economics, public ownership of essential infrastructure and services, workers’ rights, higher wages, better education, mass party membership rather than reliance on mega-rich donors ...) and discarding anything they really disliked, they decided to salt the lot, and revert to the only kind of politics they’re familiar with:

Telling people what to think, playing parlour tricks for the media, and chastising the public for daring to want any better from them.

So here’s the challenge for any Blairites who have managed to read this far without suffering fits of rage at the “thoughtcrime” of believing that Labour actually needs to be doing miles better at the moment:

Can you offer a better explanation than mine for why Starmer and his supporters have failed to adopt the positive, vibrant, hope-inspiring and ultimately winning version of Blairism, in favour of trying to reanimate the rotting corpse of late-stage Blairism that the electorate had already had more than enough of 12 years ago?

And more importantly, do you think it’s even possible to make them change course now, after watching them try to flog the same rotting corpse into action for two interminable years?

I mean these are people who steadfastly refused to learn or utilise the power-winning tactics of their own political figurehead before they resumed control over the Labour Party, so what would it actually take to make such a bunch of nitwits suddenly and dramatically improve their game now, after two years of this mind-numbing inertia?

Essays and video clips from from the likes of Another Angry Voice, Novara Media, and Owen Jones certainly aren’t going to wake them up to what they’re doing wrong.

So unless you’re going to sit there and actually try to convince people, including yourself, that these hopelessly inept people aren’t asleep at the wheel, what is it that you need to do to wake them up?

And I say “you do” because they’re only ever going to listen to it from their supporters, if they listen to it from anyone at all. Never from anyone like me.

Do you guys want to wake the sleeping driver? Or do you want to just sit tight, pretend they're doing an excellent job, and hope that everything’s somehow going to work out fine through pure luck?

It’s clearly up to you lot if you want to save your own project from itself, isn’t it?

What the Will Smith slap tells us about the war in Ukraine

2022-04-01T10:00:00.001+02:00

Everyone has been talking about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars, and before that loads of people have been talking about the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine.

In this article I'm going to explain what the Will Smith slap tells us about the war in Ukraine:

The Will Smith slap tells us absolutely nothing about the war in Ukraine.

It's got bollocks all to do with it, and this headline is obviously an April Fool's prank from a commentator you'd hopefully expect not to conflate two completely unrelated things for clicks (on any normal days of the year).

It's especially insulting to conflate completely unrelated things when one is a bit of Hollywood pantomime between two millionaire mates, and the other is a massive humanitarian tragedy, resulting in thousands of deaths, and millions of refugees.

Unfortunately there are people out there who are so desperate for clicks and attention that they'll do it in earnest.

The shocking truth about Saudi Arabia that Facebook doesn't want you to know

2022-03-28T09:45:00.002+02:00

In March 2022 Facebook deleted one of my posts about the tyrannical government in Saudi Arabia, and accused me of "hate speech".

I was allowed to appeal, but only by clicking a button saying that I disagreed with their decision. There was absolutely no means of submitting evidence that what I'd said was true.

The deleted image, and
Facebook's warning

The deleted post made a number of claims about Saudi Arabia, which I will substantiate in this article.

"The Saudi tyranny just mass executed 81 people"

This is a completely uncontroversial statement of fact.

This barbaric mass execution was widely reported across scores of media sources, including the BBC, left-leaning outfits like Byline Times and hard-right broadcasters like GBNews (archived) It was also condemned by the United Nations, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

Saudi Arabia is "committing war crimes in Yemen"

Saudi Arabia's ongoing bombardment of Yemen hardly gets a fraction of the coverage of Putin's attack on Ukraine, but that doesn't mean that it isn't happening.

Human Rights Watch have documented multiple Saudi war crimes in Yemen, and it should be widespread knowledge that the Saudis have bombed all kinds of civilian targets from funeral gatherings, to children's school busses.

Saudi Arabia "fund and support terrorism"

In 2016 Hillary Clinton's leaked emails demonstrated that the US government were well aware that Saudi Arabia were funding terrorism in Syria.

Furthermore US President Joe Biden has openly admitted that Saudi Arabia provided "hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons" to Al Qaida's successor organisations in Syria.

Then there's Boris Johnson, who accused Saudi Arabia of "twisting Islam" and conducting proxy wars across the middle east.

Saudi Arabia have also provided funds to terrorist insurgencies in Afghanistan, which led to the creation of Al Qaida, and the 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States, in which 15 of the 19 attackers were Saudis.

Saudi Arabia "brutally repress political opposition"

Saudi Arabia's repression of political opposition is well documented. Amnesty International reports that in Saudi Arabia freedom of expression, association, and assembly are all repressed.

Their repression of political dissent is so extreme that they've even sentenced a 14 year old child to death for attending a pro-democracy march!

It's hardly hateful conduct to point out that one of the most tyrannical regimes on earth is politically repressive.

Saudi Arabia "dismember critical journalists"

This is clearly a reference to the Jamal Khashoggi assassination, where the Saudi regime lured him to the Saudi embassy in Turkey, where they tortured him, murdered him, dismembered his body, and dissolved it in acid.

The murderers then reportedly took Khashoggi's severed fingers back to the Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salmen as a trophy, because he'd boasted that he'd cut off the fingers of any writer who criticised him.

Khashoggi was just one of the dissidents and critical journalists targeted for assassination by the so-called "Tiger Squad".

Saudi Arabia are "misogynists and homophobes"

Saudi Arabia is one of the most repressive regimes on earth for women's rights, and they still have the death penalty for homosexuality.

Even when they don't condemn homosexuals to death, they dish out utterly barbaric punishments like public lashings, and long prison sentences.

Saudi Arabia "threaten terrorist attacks against western countries to get their own way"

The Saudi regime famously threatened terrorist attacks against Britain in order to get an investigation into corrupt arms deals shut down, and during a spat with Canada a verified Saudi Twitter account posted a photoshopped picture of a 9/11 style terrorist attack against Canada!

Boris Johnson went to Saudi Arabia to "grovel for more oil"

Johnson's grovelling trip to Saudi Arabia was widely reported. And the reason for his visit was repeatedly given as seeking an oil deal in an attempt to reduce reliance on Russian energy supplies.

Conclusion

I've substantiated every single assertion in the banned infographic, but the truth simply doesn't matter to Facebook.

They've set up reporting systems that are incredibly easy to game. Whether a post is true or not is completely irrelevant. The simple truth is that if the post gets mass reported, then it'll be deleted as hate speech, no matter how easy it is to substantiate literally all of the points.

What we're witnessing is an absurd weaponisation of liberal language in order to erase fact-based criticism of probably the most illiberal regime on earth.

Defenders of this disgusting regime are gaming Facebook's report functions, and using the language of anti-racism to pretend that truthful criticism of Saudi Arabia is racist hate speech.

And by going along with these tactics, Facebook are complicit in attacking the truth.

The deletion of my post came with a warning that the Another Angry Voice Facebook page is under threat of deletion, so if it does disappear, you'll know that one of the main reasons it was deleted out of existence was the fact that I chose to tell the truth about Saudi Arabia, and instead of standing up for the truth, Facebook stood with the tyrannical regime to attack me for telling the truth.

Kwasi Kwartang's brazen nuclear energy deceptions

2022-02-16T11:55:00.001+01:00

Tory Energy Minister Kwasi Kwartang has released a short Twitter video boasting about the Tory government's nuclear energy policies.

The problem of course is that it's every bit as honest as you'd expect from a government led by the most notorious liar in British politics.

Kwartang's description of the government's nuclear energy policy states that it will deliver "clean, affordable power generated in the UK, for the UK".

Every single word of this is either deceptive, or a downright lie.

Clean

The idea that nuclear power is "clean" is an absolute fairy story. In reality Finland is the only country in the world preparing permanent safe storage for all of their nuclear waste. Britain's nuclear waste storage is an absolute shambles. For decades we just lobbed it in landfill, buried it in trenches, threw it down a well at Dounreay, and even set ourselves up as the nuclear dustbin of the world, importing nuclear waste from as far afield as Japan.

Most of Britain's nuclear waste is stored at the Low Level Waste Repository near Drigg in Cumbria. This enormous 270 acre site contains one million tons of nuclear waste, in temporary storage, and it's at risk of coastal erosion and flooding!

Amazingly this huge nuclear dumping ground is being run as a private profit-making company, but when it needs clearing up, there's absolutely no doubt that it will be paid for out of public funds.

Around 75% of the most radioactive waste in the UK is in temporary storage at Sellafield. The most recent cost estimate (2015) for cleaning up the radioactive dumping ground there is an astonishing £117 billion.

Anyone claiming nuclear energy in the UK is "clean", when we don't even have a single permanent nuclear waste storage facility is quite simply lying through their teeth.

Generated in the UK

One of the main boasts in Kwartang's little clip is about the construction of the Hinkley Point C reactor, which will admittedly be geographically located within the UK.

But what Kwartang deliberately omits to mention is the fact the the UK government has bribed the French government (in the guise of EDF) and the Chinese government (CGN) to build it for us.

The reason Britain can't build its own new nuclear infrastructure is that the Tory government privatised away our nuclear expertise, with Britain's entire fleet of nuclear power stations eventually falling into the hands of the French government (EDF).

Have you ever been informed by the BBC or by corporate media about the fact Britain handed control of its entire fleet of nuclear power plants to the French government?

Maybe ask yourself why the majority of the UK population have been kept in the dark about this utterly extraordinary situation.

Affordable

The only way the Tory government could get the governments of France and China to build them a new reactor at Hinkley Point C was to bribe them into doing it by promising to pay them double the market rate for electricity for 35 years.

The National Audit Office have estimated that the terms of this deal mean that UK energy customers will end up paying an astonishing £50 billion above the natural market rate.

£50 billion siphoned out of the pockets of UK energy consumers, by the state-run energy companies of France and China, and this deceptive Tory piss-taker is telling us how "affordable" it's going to be!

For the UK

The idea that energy generated in the UK is exclusively "for the UK" is another deception.

In the case of natural gas, exports out of the UK have doubled during the energy crisis, because the profiteering private companies operating our energy sector are driven exclusively by the profit motive, not by any desire to maintain the energy security of whichever nation they're operating in.

The only reason the French and Chinese governments would definitely be selling their electricity to the UK, is that the UK is the only country on earth stupid enough to promise to pay them double the market rate for 35 years.

If the UK government seriously wanted to secure the nation's energy supply, they'd take the sector out of the hands of the private profiteers and foreign governments it's fallen into since privatisation, and operate it as a not-for-profit publicly owned business, run for the good of the British people and the British economy.

Only a fool would think that promising to pay the governments of France and China double the market price for electricity was a good idea, and something to boast about. And only a downright liar would try to pretend that it represents a strengthening of the nation's energy security!

Conclusion

The inescapable conclusion is that Kwasi Kwartang is a profoundly deceptive character, who either doesn't understand the first thing about his ministerial role, or is lying through his teeth.

But it's more sinister than just one Tory minister churning out deceptions. The whole department is rotten to the core.

It's beyond doubt that energy privatisation has been an absolute disaster for the UK, but instead of bringing it back under public ownership, they're bribing the French and Chinese governments to build our energy infrastructure for us, and then dressing this absurd nonsense up as if it represents some wonderful safeguarding of Britain's energy security.

Anyone in the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy with even the slightest clue what's actually going on knows perfectly well that it's a pack of deceptions and lies.

And any BBC/corporate media journalist who pays the slightest attention can see what a shambles it is too, and how deceptive Kwartang's being.

But there's a code of silence, so nobody speaks out.

Rishi Sunak the loan shark

2022-02-06T11:51:00.001+01:00

Tory Chancellor Rishi Sunak has announced an insultingly inadequate policy of offsetting soaring energy bills with paltry but mandatory £200 mini-loans for all domestic energy consumers, which then has to be paid back in instalments over the next five years.

The £200 will be automatically discounted from all household energy bills, whether customers want to be drawn into energy-debt or not, then Sunak's five £40 annual repayments will be added onto all energy bills, regardless of whether the bill-payer actually received the £200 discount or not!

Let's consider how this policy will work for students, people working their way out of poverty, people who get a home of their own after a period of homelessness, or couples who separate/divorce over the next five years, which obviously amounts to a very significant number of people.

Imagine a multi-occupancy house, with say five adults. They can be students in the final year of university, or people trying to work their way out of poverty by house-sharing to save rent.

The household receives a single £200 energy bill discount between the five individuals, but then the household splits up and the individuals get houses of their own (the students graduate, the workers go their separate ways).

One household with one energy bill becomes five households with five energy bills, mandating five sets of five £40 annual "repayments".

A £200 loan ends up requiring up to £1,000 in repayments is the kind of exploitation you'd expect from payday lenders and loan sharks.

Separating/divorcing couples will also be forced to repay up to double what they initially received when they were living together.

As for the recently homeless (street-sleepers, squatters, couch-surfers, hostel-dwellers) who find themselves a home of their own in the next few years, they'll be forced to make years of repayments on loans they never even received a penny of!

When it comes to people who are lucky enough to be living in comfortable housing situations for the foreseeable future, Sunak's misleadingly named "rebate" is just an ineffective and insulting 'sticking plaster on a severed limb' solution.

But when it comes to people in multiple occupancy homes, the working-poor, separating couples, people escaping the horror of homelessness, and others in insecure housing situations, Sunak's strategy is pure daylight robbery.

Of course Sunak and his millionaire Tory chums don't give a damn about the young, the working poor, the recently-homeless, or others in insecure housing situations, and when they devised this crackpot policy, they probably didn't even consider the implications for people they perceive to be lower than scum.

But neither do most of the over-privileged UK media commentariat, who, let's remember worked tirelessly to keep these malicious and economically illiterate Tories in power (because they were so utterly horrified at Corbyn's proposal that the wealthiest minority like them should pay a bit more tax, so life could be a bit fairer for the rest of us).

Of course the £billionaire-bankrolled Tories are going to keep legislating against the interests of the young, the poor, and the marginalised, and of course most of the over-privileged commentariat aren't going to hold these vile and vindictive Tories to account for it, because the majority of them are simply far too concerned with promoting their own class interests, to bother about those of us getting trampled and exploited at the bottom.

Don't forget to check out my other article detailing loads of other problems with Sunak's mandatory energy bill mini-loans.

Seven reasons Rishi Sunak's energy bill mini-loan policy is an insulting joke

2022-02-04T15:32:00.002+01:00

Tory Chancellor Rishi Sunak has announced that the energy price cap is going to rise by an astonishing 54%, meaning a £694 hike in the energy bills of ordinary households.

In order to pretend that he's doing something to help, he's announced that energy consumers will be automatically enrolled in £200 mini-loans, which will be subtracted from their inflated bills, but then be paid back in £40 energy bill additions over the next five years.

In this article I'm going to briefly explain why Sunak's absurd energy bill mini-loans are dishonest, inadequate, over-optimistic, complacent, ineffective, economically illiterate, and driven by hard-right capitalist ideology.

1. Dishonest

Sunak's mini-loans are being presented as a "rebate". This is astonishingly dishonest because rebates (like the massive UK rebate on EU membership fees before the big flounce) are discounts that do not have to be paid back at a future date.

If it has to be paid back at a future date, like Sunak's deluded nonsense, then it's not a rebate at all, it's a loan.

So when the Chancellor of the Exchequer; and a load of Tory MPs; and Britain's woefully biased media hacks keep describing these loans as "rebates", they're being profoundly dishonest.

2. Inadequate

You don't have to be any kind of maths genius to figure out that a £200 loan is insufficient to cover a £694 price hike.

3. Over-optimistic

Sunak's decision to force a "borrow now, pay later" strategy on all UK energy consumers relies on the very big assumption that energy prices will quickly fall back to lower levels by next year.

But what happens if they don't fall back, and remain high, or even continue inflating even further?

The answer of course is that UK energy consumers would then be facing sky-high energy bills, with repayments on Sunak's mandatory loans piled on the top.

4. Complacent

Sunak's complacency is obvious if you just care to look at what other European nations are doing in the face of inflating energy prices.

The left-leaning Spanish government have temporarily scrapped energy taxes, banned energy suppliers from cutting off non-paying customers, and introduced windfall taxes on energy company profits.

Meanwhile in France the liberal-capitalist Macron government have imposed energy windfall taxes and limited energy bill rises to 4%.

If the Spanish or French governments had allowed prices to soar by 54% and offered anything as pathetically inadequate as Sunak's mini-loans, there'd be massive public protests, especially in France.

But Sunak complacently expects the British public to just quietly suck it up like good, obedient little plebs.

5. Ineffective

Sunak's shoddy little mini-loans are a spectacularly ineffective sticking plaster on a severed limb sized economic problem.

What's needed is serious consumer protections, and urgent reforms to the UK's absolute shambles of an energy sector.

Here are a few ideas:

The Energy Price cap should only have only been increased at the rate of inflation, if at all.
There should be new legislation to protect non-paying customers from being cut off.
Windfall taxes to be levied on the obscene profits of private energy companies.
Energy suppliers that go bust should be renationalised.
Energy infrastructure should be brought back under public ownership in order to put the energy needs of the nation above the profit-seeking behaviour of private businesses.
The government should implement a Green New Deal to speed up adoption of renewable energy, in order to end the UK's dangerous over-reliance on expensive imported gas.

But instead of any real action to combat the current crisis, or to protect the UKs energy security in the future, all we get is Sunak's insultingly inadequate energy bill mini-loans.

6. Economically illiterate

Anyone who has ever run a business will know that there's absolutely nothing wrong with taking out loans in order to make investments, in things like property, machinery, or training.

But if you're taking out loans to cover the cost of your day-to-day expenses, like payroll, materials, or bills, then you're in really serious trouble and veering towards insolvency.

Rishi Sunak is so economically illiterate that he thinks that loans to cover expenses are such a good idea that he's going to forcibly sign every energy customer in the UK up to them!

Surely now it's time to turn the persistent myth of Tory economic competence into the joke it should have been ever since they started enforcing their ludicrous and economically illiterate "let's cut our way to prosperity" austerity ruination agenda in 2010?

7. Ideological

Sunak is allowing profiteering energy companies to keep their unearned gains, while insulting the British public with the fake-help of these ludicrously inadequate mini-loans.

His decision to protect capitalist interests while throwing insulting crumbs at the public in order to pretend he's helping is a product of his hard-right capitalist ideology.

The entire purpose of the modern day Tory party is to prioritise the interests of capital above what's best for the British people and the British economy.

Just look at who bankrolls the Tory party operation, and look at all the multi-millionaires in Johnson's cabinet of hard-right ghouls, topped by Sunak himself.

You'd have to be hopelessly naive to expect the Tories not to side with capital, and against ordinary British people, which is why some of us have been consistent in our advice to "Never Trust a Tory".

Conclusion

Sunak's energy bill mini-loans are clearly dishonest, inadequate, over-optimistic, complacent, ineffective, economically illiterate, and driven by hard-right capitalist ideology.

But the Tories firmly believe they can get away with offering nothing but this insultingly inadequate fake-help in the midst of the worst living standards collapse in decades.

After all, the British public have let the Tories get away with an entire decade of economically illiterate austerity ruination, so why on earth would they suddenly rise up and demand change over soaring energy bills and Sunak's woefully inadequate insult of a response?

How to lose support and alienate people: The Progressive Alliance communication strategy

2021-12-03T20:21:00.002+01:00

When attempting to build a broad political coalition you've decided to call "The Progressive Alliance", it may be considered wise not to deliberately antagonise pretty much anyone with vaguely progressive or left-leaning views ... but there's no telling liberal capitalist aggro-centrists how to do political communication is there?

Liberal capitalists laid the groundwork for Brexit by propping up the ruinous Austerity Coalition, which caused the unprecedented wage collapse, failing public services, the housing crisis, and the devastating under-investment that the Brexiteers then cynically weaponised by blaming on immigrants and the EU.

They delivered their own worst nightmare of Brexit with their condescending and ineffective "jobs for the boys" non-campaign.

They blew probably the best opportunity ever to hammer the Tories by turning the Brexit referendum result into an excuse to launch a bitter factionalist coup to get rid of Labour's democratically elected leader instead!

Then they handed the keys of Downing Street to Boris Johnson by turning the 2019 General Election into a rerun of the Brexit referendum they'd already lost.

If these people has 1% of the strategic capabilities they imagine themselves to have, we wouldn't be in anything like as much of a mess as a nation, but they will keep insisting that tepid, unappealing, liberal capitalist gruel must be the only alternative to radically right-wing conservative capitalist poison.

A lot of the People's Vote campaigners who invested so much work in throwing the 2019 general election have respawned themselves as The Progressive Alliance, which apparently aims to remove the Tories from power by building an astonishingly unlikely political coalition.

I won't spend too much time explaining why it's so unlikely, you just have to consider the vitriolic anti-SNP bile in Keir Starmer's much-lauded Labour conference speech to understand that the Labour right detest the SNP Westminster-outsiders infinitely more than they mildly disapprove of their Tory Westminster brethren.

Anyway. Onto the astonishing infographic in the article header image.

This is a real thing, that was actually designed and approved by Progressive Alliance people, and posted on their social media accounts (here's the link on Facebook, at least until they delete it).

"But The Lib-Dems went into coalition with the Tories"

The Progressive Alliance may try to trivialise this with the misleading claim that it all happened "a decade ago" when the Lib-Dems were still enabling Tory malice will into 2015, and the Brexiteer-style cry of "get over it", but the fact is that the ruinous Austerity Coalition imposed a shocking range of anti-progressive policies that are still causing devastating social and economic consequences today.

What's more, the Lib-Dems are completely unapologetic about it, to the extent that they picked one of the very worst Tory-collaborators, Ed Davey, as their their new leader, when they had the chance to turn over a new leaf with the much more progressive Layla Moran.

The message here is that if you're horrified by austerity ruination; systematic "fit for work" disability persecution; Theresa May's unlawfully racist Hostile Environment and the ensuing the Windrush scandal; the worst period of wage repression in recorded history; unlawful Tribunal Fees; the Royal Mail scam and £billions in other privatisation rip-offs; the student loan betrayal; the brutal social security sanctions regime; arms sales to tyrants, despots and war criminals; privatising literally thousands of schools into the hands of unaccountable private profiteers; devastating local government cuts; economically illiterate cuts to the drivers of future economic prosperity (education, infrastructure, R&D); or any of the other profoundly anti-progressive policies enacted between 2010 and 2015, you can just piss off, because this lot don't want your vote.

"Jeremy Corbyn is no longer Labour leader"

The logic of attacking Jeremy Corbyn supporters and socialists in general is unclear.

Apparently sneering at them with the Brexiteer style slogan "he lost, get over it" is going to magically win them over to the Progressive Alliance cause!

Who cares that Corbyn was demonised by the press and repeatedly sabotaged from within his own party, purely for promoting progressive social and economic policies?

If you supported Corbyn's policy platform, you can also piss off, because the so-called Progressive Alliance don't want your vote!

"Blah blah jabber jabber Tony Blair blah blah Iraq"

The UK government ignored the legitimate concerns of millions of British people, illegally invaded another country, caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, and a refugee crisis of millions.

They triggered a cycle of terrorist violence that spread throughout the target country, across the entire region, and eventually culminated in terrorist atrocities across Europe perpetrated by the ISIS fanatics that metastasised out the lawless terrorism breeding grounds that Tony Blair and his ilk created in Iraq.

"Blah blah jabber jabber ... get over it": What an arrogant and offensive way to dismiss legitimate concerns over one of modern Britain's most horrific foreign policy catastrophes!

If you're the kind of progressively-minded person who opposed the Iraq war, the so-called Progressive Alliance clearly hold your political opinions in the same regard as dog much on their shoes, they simply don't want your vote.

"The Lib-Dems will just flounce off with the Tories"

They want to re-argue point one over again, just to make their list look longer, but the essence of their case is that we should just trust the Lib-Dems this time, despite them being led by one of the worst Lib-Dem ministers in the ruinous Austerity Coalition!

This is less an effort to tell potential voters to piss off, more of a desperate appeal to the astonishingly gullible!

"But Keith ... [insert politically illiterate rant here]"

Ah right.

listen up!

Anyone who has any concerns whatever about Keir Starmer's pathetic abstention of a leadership so far; his broken pledges; his obsession with factionalist infighting; his campaign of abuse against left-wing and socially progressive Jews; his repeated purges of left-wing and progressive voices out of his shadow cabinet; his abject failure to hold the Tory government to account; his repeated abstentions on sickeningly anti-progressive pieces of Tory legislation like the Rape Cops Bill; or even just his robotic lack of charisma.

You can all piss off too!

"I will always vote for [party] out of loyalty"

Nobody doubts that tribal voters exist, but has anyone ever uttered such an unconvincing phrase to say that they won't tactically vote to get the Tories out?

I guess if we're expected to believe that people said "blah blah jabber jabber Tony Blair jabber jabber Iraq". we're expected to believe anything!

And as for pointless tribally motivated voting, what about all the liberal capitalist dweebs who went out and belligerently voted Lib-Dem and Green in ultra tight Labour-Tory marginals in 2019, despite Labour caving in and offering them the sore loser referendum they said they wanted?

Loads of these people, who helped create a Tory mega-majority, have now quietly thrown away their "People's Vote" outfits, and come back wearing "Progressive Alliance" garb, to tell other people how to vote!

Conclusion

Given the shockingly outdated and unrepresentative Westminster voting system, I tend to agree with tactical voting, and have voted tactically myself in the past.

People like me should be the natural target audience for a campaign like The Progressive Alliance, but for whatever reason they've decided to tell me to "piss off" four different ways, taken me for a gullible idiot, and insulted my intelligence, all in a single infographic!

They're clearly more concerned with laundering the reputations of their liberal capitalist idols like Tory Blair, the Lib-Dem austerity enablers, the right-wing Labour saboteurs, and the democracy-defying CUK squatters, who all helped turn people away from progressive politics in different ways. and installed Boris Johnson in Downing Street, than in actually building a broad coalition of progressive and left-wing people.

If our hopes of a better future rely on the strategic capabilities of this lot, we're clearly doomed to Tory rule forever!

A compendium of Tory corruption

2021-11-15T15:24:00.051+01:00

Some people don't seem to grasp the sheer scale of Tory corruption, so here are details of just a fraction of what we already know about (with sources):

🔵 Tory MP Owen Paterson was caught red-handed breaking the ministerial code of conduct by lobbying for his employers within government. Randox were paying Paterson £100,000 per year, he sat in on ministerial meetings about the company, and they ended up getting £600 million in Covid contracts.

🔵 A cross-party committee of MPs found that Paterson had brazenly defied the rules, and ordered him to serve a 30 day suspension from parliament. Instead of accepting the findings of the Paterson investigation Boris Johnson ordered Tory MPs to vote through controversial legislation designed to tear down the parliamentary standards authority, and let Paterson off scot free!

🔵 Tory leader of the House of Commons Jacob Rees-Mogg was one of the leading advocates of using the Owen Paterson scandal as an excuse to demolish the parliamentary standards authority. In 2018 Rees-Mogg used his company Saliston to lend himself almost £6 million at significantly below the market rate of interest, and he didn't even bother to declare these loans on the register of MPs interests (no wonder he was so keen to tear down the parliamentary standards authority!).

🔵 Boris Johnson has been caught up in multiple scandals himself, dating back to before he even became Prime Minister. There was the £126,000 in public cash paid to his mistress Jennifer Arcuri without any declaration of their relationship as one of Johnson's registered interests; the dodgy loan he received to decorate his Downing Street flat; his false declaration of a luxury holiday in Mustique; and his recent holiday in the luxury Spanish villa owned by a tax-dodging company operated by former Tory MP Zac Goldsmith, who Johnson gifted a lifetime peerage in the unelected House of Lords after he lost his parliamentary seat in the 2019 General Election.

🔵 On the subject of the House of Lords, all sixteen of the Tory Party's former treasurers over the last seven years have been handed unelected lifetime peerages in the House of Lords, after having donated over £3 million each to the Tory operation!

🔵 Tory politicians have been handing out untendered PPE contracts like sweeties, to such an extent that former Health Secretary Matt Hancock's former pub landlord, and his dad's mate, and his sister even got lucrative £multi-million contracts. Hancock 'accidentally' failed to include his 20% stake in his sister's PPE contract winning company on the register of MPs interests!

🔵 The Tory government was found to have broken the law in handing a £560,000 coronavirus contract to former colleagues of Tory minister Michael Gove and Boris Johnson's ex-adviser Dominic Cummings.

🔵 Another of the major winners of this no-tender PPE bonanza was Meller Designs, which was a fashion designer until they bagged £160 million worth of PPE contracts, boosting their annual profits from £144k to £13 million. The owner is a regular Tory Party donor called David Meller, who personally lobbied the unelected Tory minister James Bethell for PPE contracts.

🔵 P14 Medical was turned from a failing company into an absolute cash cow via a whopping £276 million in untendered PPE contracts. The owner Steve Dechan, a Tory party councillor in Stroud, used his profits from the Tory PPE bonanza to buy himself a luxurious £1.5 million country house in the Cotswolds.

🔵 A company called Clipper Logistics got in on the untendered PPE bonanza with a £1.3 million contract. No surprise that the owner of the company is a major Tory Party donor called Steve Parkin.

🔵 Another major Tory donor called Haraldur Agustsson bagged over £100 million worth of untendered PPE contracts across his companies Globus Shetland and Alpha Solway.

🔵 After raking in over £1 billion in untendered coronavirus contracts, Tory-linked firms repaid the favour by kicking back a small percentage of their gains via £615,000 in donations to the Tory party!

The Tory minister who oversaw so many of the astounding no-tender PPE contracts was the unelected House of Lords stooge James Bethell who failed to declare 27 meetings with private health companies that went on to rake in over £1 billion in untendered covid contracts and then made up loads of nonsensical and contradictory excuses as to why he couldn't hand over his phone after he was caught red-handed using private WhatsApp chats to conduct government business.

🔵 The Tory government has pumped an astonishing £37 billion into the privatised shambles that is their Test and Trace operation, which has become the largest publicly funded corporate feeding frenzy in British medical history. It's been hit by ballooning costs, missed targets, 600 million lost covid tests, and scandalously high consultancy fees. The Public Accounts Committee have slammed it as an unimaginable waste of money that's had "no clear impact". No worries for Dido Harding who has presided over this absolute shambles, because she's married to the government's "anti-corruption tsar", Tory MP John Penrose!

🔵 The corporate outsourcing giant Serco have been lavished with literally hundreds of millions of pounds worth of Test and Trace contracts. Their CEO is Rupert Soames, brother of former Tory MP Nicholas, and grandson of Winston Churchill!

🔵 Former Tory DWP minister Iain Duncan Smith got in on the private medical pilfering, chairing a government taskforce that produced a report advising the government to give the green light to non-alcoholic hand gel, while earning a £25,000 per year salary from Britain's largest producer of non-alcoholic hand gel (a salary he forgot to declare as an interest in the report).

🔵 More than a quarter of Tory MPs use the practice of second-jobbing in order to boost their salary of £82,000 (plus lavish expenses).

🔵 In 2015 the Tory government scrapped the requirement that MPs who take second jobs register their employment contracts with parliamentary authorities, which means that the employment details of every single one of the second-jobbing MPs across parliament are secret.

🔵 Perhaps the most egregious Tory moonlighting MP is Ben Bradley who claims salaries for 60 hours per week on top of his MPs duties. The average MP works 69 hours a week, so if Bradley's not shirking his responsibilities as an MP, we're expected to believe that he's putting in 129 hours a week at work, leaving him less than five and a half hours per day for sleeping, eating, travel, leisure, shopping, personal hygiene, and family life. All combined!

🔵 Tory MP Mark Pawsey has a moonlighting £30,000 per year second job as chairman of the Foodservice Packaging Association. He leads Westminster’s All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Packaging Manufacturing Industry (no conflict of interests there eh?), and he's repeatedly spoken during parliamentary debates to criticise regulation of the food packaging industry, and to decry efforts to make retailers and manufacturers contribute more to the cost of recycling their plastic waste.

🔵 Tory MP Alun Cairns was hired on a lucrative £15,000 salary (more than £200 per hour) by a company that was part of a consortium that was awarded a £10 million coronavirus contract the following month.

🔵 More than 50 former Tory ministers have taken up private sector jobs in sectors they covered during their time as government ministers, many of them are still in parliament as MPs, or in the vast unelected crony club that is the House of Lords.

🔵 Tory Minister Nadhim Zahawi banked £1.3million from oil company Gulf Keystone Petroleum while working as an MP, but kept his second job earnings secret via a parliamentary loophole that allowed him to avoid declaring the payments by diverting them through a consultancy company he established with his wife.

🔵 At least 90 Tory MPs also boost their incomes by over £10,000 per year as private landlords, and many of these exploitative landlord MPs have repeatedly voted against proposals to regulate the private rental sector, and 72 of these landlord-MPs voted down legislation to require landlords to make private rented accommodation "fit for human habitation".

🔵 34 Tory MPs have accepted political donations from firms linked to the Russian oligarch Viktor Fedotov, whose dodgy dealings were revealed in the Pandora Papers. Not a single one of these donations has been returned.

🔵 The Pandora Papers also revealed that the unelected Tory lord Paul Deighton, a former government minister, had failed to declare a load of his secret offshore investments.

🔵 Former Attorney General Geoffrey Cox has been raking in literally £millions for legal consultancy work, which included representing the British Virgin Islands tax haven, while arguing against closing tax loopholes in parliament!

🔵 In 2004 Cox bought a £535,000 Battersea flat, relying on public funds to pay his £1,750 a month mortgage repayments. He now rents the property out for about £1,000 a week, living in a different London flat so he can claim £1,900 a month in public cash to pay the rent!

🔵 Former Prime Minister David Cameron was caught lobbying the Tory government on behalf of a company called Greensill Capital, who were paying him absolutely vast consultancy fees. The government then over-rode their own £50 million limit on emergency Covid loans to award Greensill a whopping £400 million, all of which was loaned to companies associated with billionaire Tory-donor Sanjeev Gupta. Greensill went bankrupt a matter of months later!

🔵 Tory MPs have been taking thousands of pounds worth of freebies and junkets from gambling companies and the gambling lobby then making pro-gambling statements in parliament and producing pro-gambling advertorials for websites like ConservativeHome. Probably the worst offender is Tory MP Laurence Robertson who earns £24,000 per year (at £200 per hour) as a gambling lobbyist who argued against stronger regulation of the gambling industry in parliament, then had the barefaced cheek to claim that there was no conflict of interest.

🔵 The leader of the Scottish Conservatives Douglas Ross "forgot" to declare £28,000 in earnings from his second job, but insists that it's all just a big mistake.

This lot is just the visible tip of the Tory corruption iceberg!

If you're aware of any other Tory corruption scandals, feel free to add details in the comments.

Spot the Difference

2021-11-11T15:09:00.000+01:00

In 2019 voters in the Don Valley constituency in South Yorkshire elected their first ever Tory MP, a private landlord by the name of Nick Fletcher.

It's absolutely astonishing that people in a poverty-stricken post-industrial part of South Yorkshire would wilfully elect a member of the Tory party as their MP, but political memories are clearly incredibly short, and it seems like people have already forgotten the horrific Tory de-industrialisation policies of the 1980s and 90s that annihilated local economies across the north of England.

They've forgotten the disastrous de-industrialisation policies; they've forgotten the demented Tory "leave it to market forces" fanaticism of just leaving entire towns to rot, so that younger generations had no choice but to leave for more affluent areas where they could actually find decent well-paid jobs; and they've forgotten the Tory austerity ruination that siphoned £billions out of local government budgets as they were simultaneously lavishing tax cuts and handouts on corporations and the mega-rich!

It's bad enough that people in a left-behind former coal mining area elected any Tory to represent them on the political stage, but it's especially galling that he's a property-hoarder who profiteers off parasites like him buying up all of the affordable housing, so that ordinary people are forced into paying off his mortgages, rather than buying houses of their own.

He's not just an economically unproductive exploiter representing a party that inflicted ruination on the area he represents, he's also ridiculously dishonest, to the extent of taking people for absolute mugs.

On December 21st 2020 he posted a Facebook selfie, taken in the town of Thorne.

On September 20th 2021 he posted the exact same selfie, with Christmas trees still visible in the background.

And on November 10th he posted the same selfie again claiming to have visited the town, and seen it "thriving again after a tough year".

Of course using the same photo over and again isn't even remotely on the same scale of dishonesty and corruption that Johnson's Tory party is absolutely mired in (dodgy PPE contracts, the Owen Paterson scandal, Geoffrey Cox skiving parliament to earn £hundreds per hour representing a tax haven; Tory donors apparently buying peerages at £3 million a pop; MPs accepting freebies from gambling companies then lobbying for them in parliament; David Cameron lobbying for Greensill to get £350 million in Covid loans just before they went bankrupt; Rishi Sunak's wife investing in a firm just weeks before her husband gave them a massive loan ...), but misleadingly posting the same photo multiple times is the kind of dishonest behaviour ordinary people would call their friends out for, isn't it?

It's similar to Tory liar Lucy Allan's bizarrely staged election pictures in 2017.

Of course her mendacious lie about not being invited to remembrance day events (when she actually had her constituency manager reject both invitations) is worse, as is the way she fabricated a death threat in order to smear a constituent who wrote to her in 2015 urging her to oppose David Cameron's war-mongering in Syria, but the fact these people resort to deception, when it would almost certainly be easier to just tell the truth is illustrative of their characters, isn't it?

It absolutely boggles the mind that people wilfully vote to put charlatans like this in parliament, especially when it's people in deprived former coal mining areas like the Don Valley.