Tuesday 2 May 2017

The Tories are "gaslighting" us


In the Oscar winning 1944 thriller Gaslight a husband (played by Charles Boyer) tries to manipulate his wife (played by Ingrid Bergman) into believing that she is going insane in order to distract her from his ongoing criminal activities.

The Tory party are employing a "gaslighting" propaganda strategy aimed at misinforming, confusing and disorientating the public as much as possible so that they don't know what to believe, or who to turn to, as the Tories continue to run the country exclusively for the benefit of the super-rich elitists, private health companies, bankers and corporate fat cats who bankroll their party.

Here are 12 examples of completely backwards Tory propaganda that you'd have to be spectacularly divorced from reality to actually believe.

  • Theresa May claiming that her leadership is "strong and stable" when she's U-turning so often and on so many issues it's impossible to know which way she'll be facing in the morning. Her whole snap election is absolute proof that she's a weak and directionless leader who promises the UK public and UK businesses the stability of a fixed-term parliament that lasts until 2020, and then threw the country into the turmoil of a snap election based on a total lie purely to serve her own personal self-interest.
  • Tory ministers claiming that they're "making work pay" as they slash in-work subsistence benefits like tax credits and housing benefits and deliberately repress millions of workers' wages with their below inflation public sector pay freeze. The Tories have done such a woeful job of "making work pay" that NHS nurses are relying on food bank parcels to survive (Theresa May openly refused to admit that this is wrong).
  • Tories pretending that their party is "tough on crime" even though they know that their party has overseen the biggest cut in police numbers in British history, and that it's the Labour opposition who are promising to put an extra 10,000 bobbies on the beat.
  • Tories claiming that "we're all in this together" and saying that they will deliver "an economy that works for everyone" as they continue rigging the economy even more in favour of the super-rich; making sure giant multinational corporations pay less tax than their employees; making sure cleaners pay a higher percentage of their income in tax than corporate executives; overseeing the worst slump in ordinary workers wages ever as the super rich minority literally double their wealth; imposing a below-inflation 1% pay freeze on nurses and other public sector workers while they take an 11% pay hike for themselves ...
  • Tories talking about Jeremy Corbyn as if he's some kind of radical economic "extremist" for proposing an economically orthodox investment led recovery while the Tory party continue their radically right-wing and extremely destructive agenda of choking off any chance of an economic recovery by slashing investment in infrastructure and services and overseeing a massive transfer of wealth from the majority (who spend most of any extra income in the real economy) to the tiny super-rich elite (who stash extra income in tax-havens or spend it in the unregulated derivatives casino or inflating the unsustainable UK property bubble). 
Of course there will be a proportion of the UK public who are so shockingly under-informed that they actually believe all of this blatantly contradictory tripe, and will dutifully flock to the polls to vote Tory because the right-wing billionaires who own the tabloid propaganda rags tell them to.

But for the rest of us, those of us with functional critical thinking skills, this huge tide of Orwellain "black is white" gibberish has another purpose. The objective of all of this backwards propaganda is to confuse and disorient us. It's to create the impression that nothing can be believed, that nobody can be trusted, that politics is fake.

The Tory propaganda drive doesn't just exist to push an agenda and to misinform the gullible, it exists to mentally exhaust those of us with functional critical thinking, and to completely annihilate the concept of political truth.



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