Why do so many people adore Theresa May?

One of the most astounding things about the rise of Theresa May is the way that millions of people have just uncritically rote learned the right-wing media trope that she is some kind of "safe pair of hands" and then set about mindlessly repeating it as if it's their own opinion, rather than something bizarrely counter-factual that they've been programmed to say.

Even the remotest familiarity with Theresa May's track record at the Home Office makes this "safe pair of hands" story look absolutely ridiculous. This is a woman who promised to cut net migration to below 100,000 but actually oversaw the biggest inward migration peaks in all of British history!

Not only does May have a track record of brazen incompetence, she's also a hard-right authoritarian with a penchant for totalitarian policies like secret courts, discriminatory immigration rules for British spouses, hopelessly flawed, evidence-free and unworkable drugs laws, unprecedented state snooping powers and the abolition of our human rights.

Even if we ignore her track record of appalling incompetence and savage authoritarianism, it should be easy to see what a horrifying person she is: 

• In her inaugural speech as Prime Minister she cried crocodile tears about how white working class kids are so unlikely to make it to university, then immediately set about scrapping all of the grants and bursaries that allowed kids from low-income families to get a university education. 

• She bragged in parliament about her willingness to incinerate 100,000 innocent men, women and children in a nuclear fireball. 

• She gave a disgustingly obnoxious right-wing Twitter troll a massive and unprecedented "shout out" by quoting him at Prime Minister's Questions and writing him into the permanent Hansard record as a consequence. 

• She blatantly evades answering the questions she's asked and continually talks in mind-numbingly stupid platitudes like "Brexit means Brexit" and "living within our means" as if the public are just a gigantic collection of total halfwits who can be easily fobbed off with ridiculous economic fairy stories and tautological gibberish.

• She decided to completely screw over the UK taxpayer by continuing on with Cameron and Osborne's shambolic scheme to bribe the French and Chinese into building our nuclear power infrastructure for us by guaranteeing them double the market price for electricity for 35 years and then promising to load the astronomical nuclear waste storage costs onto the UK taxpayer too!

• She introduced the most extreme state surveillance laws in any developed nation that will allow the employees of all manner of non-terrorism related state agencies (the Food Standards Agency, the Gambling Commission, the Health and Safety Executive ...)  to snoop on the private communications data of innocent people. Additionally the Snoopers' Charter will also allow the police and secret services to lie in court in order to secure convictions!

• She is determined to scrap the concept of parliamentary sovereignty so that she can make up the law as she goes along to suit herself and the rogues gallery of bankers, hedge fund managers, tax-dodgers, landed gentry, property speculators and private health corporations who bankroll the Tory party.

Given the mountain of evidence that Theresa May is a nasty, dishonest and blatantly incompetent politician with alarming hard-right authoritarian tendencies, it's astonishing that so many people have rote learned the absurdly inaccurate "safe pair of hands" trope from the mainstream media that she's actually become Britain's favourite politician!

It's obvious that the Mainstream media have helped to create this misleadingly positive impression by completely failing to hold her to account for her blunders (imagine the absolute furore if Jeremy Corbyn had quoted a vile misogynistic Twitter troll in parliament) or her dictatorial Snoopers' Charter that would have made the East German Statsi turn green with envy.

It's astonishing that people allow themselves to be hoodwinked like this but it's undeniable that they have been. So what is it that people like about Theresa May?

Perhaps there's just something in the British psyche that makes an awful lot of people adore Theresa May's overly strict nanny persona? Perhaps millions of people share the same shameful and deeply buried perversion that wants some kind of dominatrix nanny figure to punish and abuse them with impunity? What other explanation is there?

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The utterly hypocritical Tory attitude to electoral fraud

The absolute brass neck of Tories like Eric Pickles never ceases to astound.

The latest Tory wheeze is to massively exaggerate the scale of voter fraud in order to introduce new American style voter ID rules that would end up disbarring hundreds of thousands of poor voters (who are very much less likely to vote Tory than wealthier demographics).

Pickles' own report admits that there were only 130 allegations of voter fraud in the General Election year 2015, which means that the allegations of electoral fraud to votes cast ratio was 0.00025%, or one allegation of voter fraud for every 395,384 votes cast!

This minuscule figure contrasts sharply with the ratio of electoral fraud allegations aimed at Tory MPs. In all 29 Tory MPs have been accused of fraudulently rigging the 2015 General Election by faking their accounts. The Tory party orchestrated a deliberate policy overspending in marginal constituencies by falsely declaring local spending in their national campaign budget.

With 29 of the 330 Tory MPs elected in 2015 accused of electoral fraud, the ratio of fraud allegations to Tory MPs is 8.8%, or one allegation of electoral fraud for every 11 Tory MPs.

This means that in 2015 the ratio of electoral fraud allegations levelled against Tory MPs was 32,500 times higher than the ratio of electoral fraud allegations against members of the public!

Instead of addressing the incredibly serious allegations against his fellow Tory MPs, Eric Pickles is determined to distract attention away from the Tory electoral fraud scandal by pointing the finger of blame at us, the general public.

Pickles' report contains hundreds of recommendation points, but not a single one of them relates to the 29 Tory MPs who stand accused of cheating their way into parliament!

Sadly there are an awful lot of Tory tribalists out there who will celebrate this latest cynical effort to rig the electoral system even further in favour of the Tories by disenfranchising innocent voters who have done nothing wrong.

The irony is that if the opposition parties put up a fight against this latest Tory vote-rigging scam, the 29 Tory MPs who stand accused of cheating their way into parliament will end up holding the balance of power on whether to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

As Eric Pickles report says in the introduction: "a group of people who cheat their way to power are unlikely to hold a higher moral standard when handing out public contracts, or making [other decisions]".

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Nigel Farage's warped, staggeringly hypocritical and defamatory bullshit

Nigel Farage is increasingly keen to stoke up publicity for his party by saying and doing ridiculous things. Experience has taught him that every time some fruitcake Ukipper politician came out with some absolute drivel (like the Somerset floods being God's revenge for gay equality legislation), his party was rewarded with a massive load of free publicity by the mainstream media. The more outrageous the drivel, the more free publicity.

Farage has resigned as UKIP leader so that he can dedicate himself to his new career of being Donald Trump's butler, and he's clearly learned a lot from his new master. Trump's Presidential campaign was characterised by such extreme displays of bigotry and divisiveness they really put Ukipper fruitcakery into the shade. The more outrageous Trump's attacks on women, Mexicans, immigrants, blacks, liberals, climate scientists, Muslims or the left, the more free publicity Trump was granted by the mainstream media.

Farage used to regularly expel Ukippers for talking contemptible gibberish and tried in vain to police Ukippers' use of social media to prevent storms of negative media publicity. What he's learned from Donald Trump is that negative publicity is still publicity, and that as UKIP leader he should actually have been saying as many outrageous things as possible in order to win mainstream media coverage, not actually trying to stop his fellow Ukippers from spouting so much hateful and bigoted nonsense.

Farage's latest efforts to increase his own public profile by courting mainstream media controversy involved blaming a terrorist attack on the leader of the country that got attacked, and then accusing a man whose wife was recently killed by an extreme-right terrorist of "supporting extremism".

Such despicable victim-blaming tactics should be enough to fill any decent person with revulsion, but the problem is that after four decades of hard-right "I'm alright Jack" Thatcherite dogma, Britain is such an unequal, divided and resentful place that decency is an increasingly uncommon virtue.

There are many problems with trying to blame Angela Merkel for an attack carried out by (at that point) unknown terrorists. The most obvious one is that it's a massive leap of logic to blame Merkel's policy towards Syrian refugees when the perpetrator was unknown.

Another major problem is that Angela Merkel's acceptance of refugees from Syria is an absolutely clear and undeniable demonstration that ISIS are wrong when they try to tell Muslims that they're hated by the West. In accepting Syrian refugees Merkel demonstrated that compassion and decency are western virtues. In spreading so much anti-migrant and anti-Muslim hatred the likes of Farage and Trump are actually guilty of acting as ISIS recruitment agents. ISIS and the extreme-right are two sides of the same hateful equation because they're both intent on fostering hatred between Muslims and non-Muslims in order to bring about the violent clash of civilisations they crave.

After four decades of hard-right "I'm alright Jack" Thatcherite dogma,
Britain is such an unequal, divided and resentful place that
decency is an increasingly uncommon virtue

When Jo Cox's widower Brendan tried to call Nigel Farage out on the danger of blaming politicians for the actions of extremists, Farage was quick to retort with a personal attack, accusing Cox of "supporting extremism".

The accusation that a guy whose wife was recently assassinated in the street by a right-wing extremist is a supporter of extremism would be bad enough coming out of anyone's mouth, but it's particularly appalling when uttered by a guy with such clear and undeniable links to extremism himself.

After a Latvian MEP quit UKIP's rag-tag parliamentary group in 2014, Farage needed to find a new member as quickly as possible in order to avoid losing their lucrative political subsidies from the European Union, so he cobbled together a deal with the extreme-right Holocaust-denying Polish party KNP to allow one of their politicians (Robert Iwaszkiewicz)  to join the UKIP group.

The KNP leader Janusz Korwin-Mikke has openly stated that women are too stupid to vote, that disabled people should not be allowed on the television, that trade unions and workers' rights should be destroyed and that democracy is "the stupidest form of government ever conceived".

Iwaszkiewicz himself has said that wife beating "can help bring a lot of wives back down to earth" and argued that it's not wrong to praise Adolf Hitler for his low-tax policies during the Nazi occupation of Poland!

Having struck such a dodgy deal with bigoted, misogynistic, anti-democratic, Holocaust-denying extremists like these, anyone would think that Farage would have the sense to steer clear of accusing other people of "supporting extremism". The problem is that Farage just doesn't care that decent people will see his staggering hypocrisy for what it is. As far as he's concerned, decent people are a now minority and him and the extreme-right can win political power by appealing to the basest instincts of those without basic human decency.

Farage's justification for accusing Brendan Cox of "supporting extremism" is that the Jo Cox Foundation contributes to the anti-fascist organisation Hope Not Hate. In Nigel Farage's warped worldview the fascists, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other extreme-right groups that Hope Not Hate oppose are noble freedom fighters, while those who oppose their extreme-right bigotry are the nasty extremists.

Hope Not Hate have said that they are considering legal action against Nigel Farage for his defamatory comments that they are an extremist organisation, and I hope that unlike Nigel Farage (who chickened out of his threat to hold an anti-democracy march in order to intimidate the Supreme Court into giving Theresa May free rein to make up the law as she goes along), Hope Not Hate end up actually following through and ensuring that Farage ends up in court over his warped, outrageously hypocritical and blatantly defamatory bullshit.

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Labour are their own worst enemies

Whenever Labour lose the occasional council by-election the New Labour wrecking mob trigger a massive tide of negative media coverage with their anti-Corbyn whinging.

This week the Tories lost all four of the council seats they were defending. Instead of infighting and bitching on Twitter the Tories held ranks and didn't mouth off at all about their humiliatingly poor performance. Consequently the mainstream media said virtually nothing about this woeful quadruple wipe-out!

The New Labour wrecking mob

To give a specific example of the New Labour wrecking mob kicking off a highly destructive media stink over a by-election result, consider the absurdly destructive reaction by the Anyone But Corbyn camp to the loss of the Mosborough ward in Sheffield on September 8th 2016.

The New Labour faction made a huge song-and-dance of blaming Corbyn for the loss, whilst steadfastly failing to acknowledge that the candidate had vehement anti-Corbyn views. Another important bit of context the fuming anti-Corbyn mob failed to mention was that unlike the local winning Lib-Dem candidate, the anti-Corbyn Labour candidate lived miles outside the ward on the other side of the city!

It's hardly Corbyn's fault that the anti-Corbyn lot put up such a woeful candidate, yet the New Labour wrecking mob publicly lambasted him for it regardless.

Tory loyalty in the face of difficulties

Contrast the storm of negative Labour publicity in reaction to each by-election loss to the Tory reaction to losing all four of the local council seats they were defending in the December 15th by-elections.

Hardly a mutter of complaint from the lot of them.

Despite the undeniably woeful performance, even Theresa May's critics within the Tory party remained studiously tight-lipped and loyal to her chaotic and autocratic leadership. Thus there was no tide of critical mainstream media articles bludgeoning Theresa May for the quadruple by-election wipe-out.

Negative publicity storms

There was no storm of mainstream media articles and social media coverage hammering the Tories for this noteworthy quadruple by-election wipe-out for three main reasons. Firstly because the mainstream media are demonstrably biased against Jeremy Corbyn to begin with; secondly because there was hardly any internal Tory dissent for the media to pick up on; and thirdly because Labour abjectly failed to capitalise on the potentially headline grabbing quadruple Tory wipe-out.

Even more incredible than Labour's failure to capitalise on this dramatic Tory by-election capitulation, the Labour List website actually published an article damning the slight statistical fall in Labour's vote share across the seven by-elections contested (even though they held the one seat they were defending)d.

The actual result on the night was that Labour held the one seat they were defending and the Tories lost all four of theirs, but instead of pointing out the signs of Tory weakness at the local level, people within the Labour Party actually saw fit to slam the Labour leadership for an almost meaningless statistical percentage fall in the Labour vote!

Ungovernable and unfit to govern

This kind of introspective and highly damaging criticism within the Labour ranks is utterly absurd and highlights the unworkable position Jeremy Corbyn finds himself repeatedly trapped in. 

Corbyn and his team end up having to fire-fight the internal damage caused by people within the Labour Party so often that they end up distracted from focusing their criticism on Theresa May's woeful trail of incompetence and dictatorial authoritarianism.

The absurdly self-destructive whinging from the Anyone But Corbyn camp not only produces appalling negative publicity for the Labour Party leadership when it's Theresa May who should be under scrutiny, but it also reinforces the idea that the Labour Party is essentially ungovernable, and consequently unfit to govern the country.

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Theresa May doesn't deserve any mates in Europe

I'm sure most of us have seen the short clip of Theresa May looking like Betty No Mates at the EU Summit that has gone viral.

An alarmingly common reaction from British people has been to actually express sympathy with her. Some people even brought up their own feelings of isolation at school and the like in expressions of solidarity with her.

The problem with these outpourings of sympathy is that they're totally underserved. Theresa May doesn't deserve sympathy at all. Her behaviour towards our European neighbours and their citizens has been utterly atrocious.

Theresa May has time and again made it clear that she intends to use the continued presence of EU nationals in the UK as a bargaining chip in her Brexit negotiations. Time and time again she's refused to commit the Tory government to guarantee that EU nationals who have settled in Britain will not be subjected to mass deportations.

Compare Theresa May's attitude that these people's lives are just gambling chips for her to play poker with with, to the attitudes to of our European neighbours towards British migrants living in their countries.

The EU's chief negotiator Guy Verhofstadt has been trying to secure the rights of British citizens all over Europe with a bold plan to offer continued European citizenship to any Brit who wants it.

Germans has also been very forthcoming with with proposals to offer fast-track citizenship to Brits working in Germany in order to offer security to their valued British migrant population.

Take Spain as another example. The likelihood of Spain taking steps to expel their huge British migrant population is vanishingly small. British tourists may have quite a reputation for drunkenly trashing Spain's tourist resorts in the summer, but the British migrant population in Spain represents a significant and welcome net contribution to the Spanish economy.

Rather than acting in the same manner as Theresa May and treating British migrants in their countries as disposable pawns in their cynical power games, our European neighbours are keen to demonstrate that British workers are welcome in their countries.

In the case of hard Brexit does anyone seriously think that cities like Dublin, Paris and Frankfurt will try to turn back the tide of skilled British financial sector workers looking to follow the jobs as they flood away from London towards the countries that remain in the single market?

Does anyone really imagine that our European neighbours would seek to slam the door on skilled British workers who will inevitably end up with the temptation to follow the flow of high-tech manufacturing jobs over to Europe if the Hard Brexit mob succeed in isolating the UK from the single market and the customs union?

The idea that Theresa May deserves sympathy because she was momentarily cold-shouldered by a few European politicians is mind-bogglingly absurd. The actual surprising thing about the situation is that levels of hostility towards Theresa May and her Tory Brexit charlatans aren't very much higher (both from our European neighbours and from within the UK).

Theresa May doesn't deserve any mates in Europe, and she certainly doesn't deserve any sympathy whatever for isolating herself by treating the lives of the estimated 3.6 million EU migrants in the UK as disposable pawns in her reprehensible power games.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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The Tory rail privatisation rip-off

When the Tories were introducing their ideologically driven and hopelessly botched plan to privatise the UK rail network the Tory Transport Secretary John MacGregor claimed that passengers would benefit from reduced fares.

Anyone who understood the basics of monopolies (captive markets) knew that MacGregor's promises were fantastical nonsense. Once a monopoly service is handed to a private profit-seeking entity, prices are certain to rise because there's no price competition in a captive market.

Two decades after rail privatisation the average train fare has increased by 117% (24% adjusted for inflation). On some journeys fares have increased by well over 200%.

Aside from the direct hit to passengers' wallets, there's also the fact that the private rail operators are being showered with £billions in direct and indirect taxpayer subsidies.

Annual direct subsidies to the private rail franchises far exceed the entire cost of running the entire UK rail network back when it was run as a not-for-profit public service.

Aside from the direct subsidies there is also the issue of the indirect subsidy that occurs because the publicly owned rail infrastructure company (Network Rail) allows the private rail franchises to use the tracks at significantly below the actual cost of maintaining them.

Hiring out the tracks at way below market value in order to secure the profitability of the private train operators has meant that Network Rail has built up a vast debt mountain of £41 billion. This is about as clear an example as possible of the Tory ideology of privatising the profits and nationalising the debts.

Aside from costing far more in direct and indirect subsidies, the privatised rail franchises do far less than British Rail with all of the extra money.

Before privatisation British Rail designed and developed new trains, including many that are still in service today generating huge profits for their private operators. Privatisation of the UK rail network put a swift end to Britain being a world-leader in trainbuilding.

Immediately after privatisationthe private franchises were so intent on reaping as much profit as possible out of the old taxpayer-funded rolling stock that there wasn't a single new train order for 1,064 days, causing the annihilation of the UK trainbuilding industry.

These days the UK buys most of its new trains from Germany, Japan, China and even Italy, which is an absolutely shameful state of affairs for the country that invented the railway and was a world leader in trainbuilding well into the 1980s.The abject failure of rail privatisation is perhaps the most glaring example of all amongst a litany of other woeful Tory privatisation scams, yet the Tories will never undo their mistake because they're ideologically opposed to British infrastructure being owned by the British public and operated on their behalf.

In fact the Tories have such a strong ideological opposition to British infrastructure and services being owned by the British people that they would demonstrably prefer our rail infrastructure to be owned and operated by foreign states like Germany, France, Netherlands, Hong Kong and Singapore. 

Just a few decades ago a government would be considered shockingly treasonous for promoting a policy of prohibiting the British from owning our own rail network so that it can be used as a cash cow by foreign states, but these days, thanks to the Tory rail privatisation scam, it's not just their policy, it's the actual reality!

Tory rail privatisation has been an absolute failure for everyone apart from the profiteering rail franchises and train leasing companies. Passengers have suffered massive ticket price inflation and ever more over-crowded and unsafe conditions; the taxpayer continues to pay far more in subsidies than the entire cost of running British Rail; Network Rail is sitting on a £41 billion debt mountain; the UK trainbuilding industry has been annihilated; and railway staff have suffered declining wages and worsening working conditions.

The two political parties that deserve credit for promoting the extremely popular policy of rail renationalisation are Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party and the Green Party (who supported rail renationalisation back when the New Labour mob were still pushing neoliberalism-lite under Miliband and Balls).

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Paul Golding jailed for contempt of court

The Britain First activist and former leader of the extreme-right hate group has been jailed for contempt of court.

Just four days after the High Court banned Paul Golding and Jayda Fransen from organising Mosque invasions, Golding drove four Britain First extremists to a mosque in Cardiff to conduct another mosque invasion.

Involving himself in a mosque invasion just days after the High Court ruling was clearly an attempted act of defiance. However when Golding was faced with a much stiffer sentence for contesting the court case, Golding decided to take the coward's way out and plead guilty pretending that he had simply misunderstood the court ruling to stop him from harassing Muslims.

Contemptuously ignoring a court order is far from the only example of Paul Golding and his Britain First mob displaying outright disdain for Britain and British values.

• In 2001 Paul Golding insulted British veterans by attending a Remembrance Day event at a cenotaph wearing a pair of underpants on his head as some kind of National Front publicity stunt (see photo).

• Golding's underpants stunt isn't his only display of contempt towards veterans. Britain First have been asked on multiple occasions by the Royal British Legion to stop using the red poppy symbol to hawk their own tawdry products, but they have persisted regardless.

• Britain First have regularly displayed shocking levels of contempt for British history, culture and values. Not least with their brazenly ignorant efforts to deny the existence of the Celtic nations and languages.

• In 2016 Golding put on a bigoted display of contempt for democracy by turning his back on the newly elected mayor of London Sadiq Khan during his acceptance speech. 

• After the suspected Britain First activist Thomas Mair killed the Labour MP Jo Cox, Golding displayed utter contempt for the concept of open and fair justice by calling for Mair to be "strung up from the nearest lamp post" by a lynch mob instead of being brought to justice in a court of law. 

Paul Golding and his disgusting Britain First hate-mob have repeatedly shown their contempt for British values, the British justice system, British history and British democracy, yet still hundreds of thousands of people share their bigoted and deeply divisive posts all over Facebook.

If you know someone who shares Britain First posts, perhaps you could share this article with them to give them an idea of the kind of contemptuous Britain-hating extreme-right fanatics they're giving free publicity to every time they share one of their posts?

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Militants are being given safe passage out of Aleppo

The siege of Aleppo has resulted in an extraordinary amount of savagely partisan propaganda. The absence of reliable journalists and humanitarian organisations on the ground there means that distortions, exaggerations and lies from either side have spread like wildfire.

One incredible example of the spread of bizarrely distorted propaganda is the endlessly repeated claim that up to 100,000 civilians remained trapped in the 2km militia controlled area of Aleppo. If this claim is true then that besieged district of Aleppo was by far the most heavily populated area on the planet, with over seven times the population density of Hong Kong!

It's not clear where this ludicrous 100,000 claim originated, but it was soon being spread all over the mainstream media, being repeated unquestioningly by mainstream media stooges and supposedly anti-establishment commentators like Owen Jones alike.

The brazen misrepresentation of reality can also be seen in the mainstream media coverage of the ongoing evacuation of the last militant occupied area of Aleppo. In reality the evacuation has been carefully negotiated to allow the militant occupiers of Aleppo safe passage to the militant controlled area of Idlib in return for the safe passage of aid convoys into the besieged Assad-loyal villages of Al-Fu'ah and Kafriya.

The fact that the combatants who occupied Aleppo for four years have been allowed to leave on convoys of busses to fight another day (perhaps in Syria, perhaps elsewhere in the Middle East, or in Europe) is being portrayed very oddly in the British mainstream media.

Instead of admitting that militants and their families are being allowed to escape from the small besieged district of Aleppo they had been cornered in, so that the relentless fighting in Aleppo can finally come to an end, the British press are describing the evacuation of militant fighters purely as an evacuation of civilians.

The Daily Mirror described the evacuation of militant fighters and their families as "buses packed with terrified civilians leaves besieged city". The Guardian coverage barely even implied that militants were amongst the evacuees by quoting an International Red Cross source saying that the "majority" of evacuees were civilians (meaning some were combatants). The BBC at least openly admitted the fact that militants were being evacuated, but waited until the fourth paragraph to do so. Not only did the ITV coverage fail to mention that militant fighters were among the evacuees, but they also recycled the ludicrous 100,000 trapped civilians figure too.

It's a sign of the contempt that mainstream journalists hold towards the general public that they expect us to believe that all of the evacuees from Aleppo are all innocent civilians, and presumably that the militants who occupied the city for four years just somehow just disappeared into the ether, despite being totally surrounded in their final besieged enclave.

The question has to be why the UK media appears so reluctant to tell the British public the truth about Islamist militants being allowed to leave Aleppo amongst the civilian evacuees.

Another mainstream media agenda to consider is the glaring contrast between the hysterical mainstream media reaction to the siege of Aleppo and the near complete silence over the ongoing siege of Mosul in Iraq. The parallels between the two sieges are undeniable. Both cities are occupied by Islamist militants with thousands of civilians trapped in the crossfire. The big difference is that the siege of Aleppo was carried out by Syrian government forces, Iranian fighters and Russia, while the siege of Mosul is being carried out by Iraqi government forces, Kurdish fighters and the United States.

One battle has been routinely described in the western media with phrases like "complete meltdown of humanity" while the other has gone almost totally ignored since the early days of the siege.

The mainstream media's over-reliance on the grandiose sounding Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is another example of western media organisations reporting biased material at face value. Reports in the mainstream press never mention the fact that this official sounding organisation is actually run from Coventry by a single anti-Assad campaigner who hasn't visited Syria in ten years. It doesn't matter how often this is pointed out, the mainstream press continue to give the partisan SOHR the same kind of billing as the United Nations or legitimate aid organisations like the Red Crescent.

Of course Russian media outlets are biased in the other direction (some of them describing all of the evacuees as "militants and their families"), but that's absolutely no excuse for the western mainstream media spreading absurdly inflated figures, relying on information gleaned from partisan sources, or the absurd efforts by the UK press to portray the evacuation of militants from Aleppo as a purely civilian relief operation.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Would Syria be better under ISIS rule?

The situation in Syria is appalling beyond words. The scale of human suffering has been absolutely enormous for years and in December 2016 the battle for Aleppo has caused even more death, destruction and misery.

A common human response to human suffering is to look for someone to blame, but in Syria the situation is too complicated to fit simplistic "good vs evil" narratives about how Russia, Iran, and the Syrian government are the bad guys, and the insurgents as the good guys.

An awful lot of media commentators are using the suffering in Aleppo to push "good vs evil" narratives as a concerted propaganda drive. The majority of the Western media are focusing on criticising the Syrian government, the Russians and the Iranians. While the Russian media focus on criticising the Islamist terrorists, their Western and middle eastern backers and the opportunistic involvement of Turkey.

Perhaps the best way to look at the ongoing tragedy in Syria is to consider any armed participants as the "baddies" no matter which side they're on, and the poor unarmed civilians still trapped in the middle of the violence as the only "goodies".

Anyhow, there are always a few cold-hearted cynics who can look at a vast human tragedy like Aleppo solely as a convenient excuse to push their own warped political agendas. To this kind of person all of the appalling human suffering is easily worthwhile because it gives them a wonderful opportunity to settle old political scores and rewrite history the way they would have liked it to have been.

In 2013 David Cameron became the first Prime Minister to lose a war vote since 1782 when Westminster MPs (including a large number of Tory party rebels) derailed his ill-conceived rush to war.

This humiliating historical defeat still rankles with a lot of Tories of the neo-conservative persuasion, and these sickening opportunists are now crawling out of the woodwork to use the terrible suffering in Aleppo to try to redefine David Cameron's failed rush to war as some kind of brilliant "missed opportunity" to secure peace.

The problem with this kind of absurd historical revisionism (as exemplified in this appalling article) is obvious to anyone with even the remotest understanding of the region and its recent history.

In 2013 David Cameron was pushing the same interventionist ideology that created the vast humanitarian disaster in Iraq from 2003 onward, and another huge humanitarian disaster in Libya from 2011 onward. The lesson that should have been learned from both of those catastrophes is that the removal of an authoritarian dictator may be a noble intention in itself, but the creation of political power vacuums is a very dangerous game to play and can make bad situations very much worse.

The power vacuum in Iraq resulted in years of dangerous instability and sectarian violence, eventually culminating in the rise of ISIS. And the power vacuum in Libya has empowered and emboldened a load of Islamist extremists there too. Only a fool could have thought that weakening the Assad regime when the region was being flooded by Saudi-backed Jihadists would be a good move from a humanitarian perspective.

One of the leaked Hillary Clinton emails dated August 17th 2014 admitted that Saudi Arabia and Qatar "are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to Isis and other radical groups in the region".

It was always beyond obvious that ISIS was being bankrolled by our so-called allies in the region (and now we have the evidence to prove that the American have known it perfectly well for several years). It's also obvious from Western interventionist disasters in Iraq and Libya that terrorist groups like ISIS thrive in political power vacuums.

In light of this information it's obvious that destabilising and removing the Assad government would have ended up handing control of Syria to Islamist fanatics. This kind of catastrophic outcome was so obvious even in 2013 that Westminster MPs saw the stupidity of Cameron's rush to war and rightly voted it down.

Now the people who supported David Cameron's failed neo-con warmongering efforts back in 2013 are brazenly trying to rewrite history. They want people to believe that Cameron's rush to war wasn't a dangerous folly that was rightly stopped in its tracks, but actually the most noble of endeavours.

These opportunists are using the suffering in Aleppo as if it constitutes evidence that David Cameron was right to want to create a power vacuum in Syria for ISIS to occupy.

In making this argument these people are demonstrating a fundamental unwillingness to ask themselves how much worse the situation might have become if ISIS had taken advantage of the power vacuum to take control of the whole of Syria.

Maybe these people crying over the failure of David Cameron's rush to war really do imagine that the world would somehow be better if the Western powers had actively helped ISIS to take over Syria? Perhaps these people actually think that a bunch of barbaric Islamist fanatics bankrolled by Saudi Arabia and Qatar would somehow make better rulers of Syria than the (admittedly awful) Assad regime?

When faced with scenes of appalling suffering it's natural for people to think "what could have been done to avert this tragedy?" but trying to pin blame on the level-headed opponents of David Cameron's failed rush to war in 2013 is utterly ludicrous. Things would almost certainly have ended up even worse in Syria had David Cameron got his way.

If people are looking for somewhere to point the finger of blame, then a much more logical place to start is looking at the unyielding Western support for the autocratic regimes in Saudi Arabia and Qatar that have fuelled and escalated the conflict in Syria.Even the Tory Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has admitted that the Saudis are malign influence in the middle east, but still this unrelenting Tory support for Saudi Arabia remains so unbreakable that Theresa May humiliated Britain by prostrating herself in front of them right in the middle of the siege of Aleppo.

If we're going to wring our hands about what could have been done to avoid the humanitarian disaster in Aleppo, firstly we should be thankful that David Cameron was denied the opportunity to make the Syrian situation very much worse, and then ask the question of why the UK government has continued its unbreakable support for Saudi Arabia and Qatar despite their bankrolling of Jihadi terrorist groups in Syria.

If David Cameron,Theresa May or the Tories actually gave a damn about the suffering in Syria, they could have de-escalated the conflict by putting diplomatic pressure on Saudi Arabia and Qatar to stop their involvement. But they didn't do this because British arms companies are making fortunes selling weapons to these autocratic Islamist states and the Tories didn't want to upset the apple cart by pissing-off their head-chopping Islamist customers.

We all know that profit comes before people in the Tory ideology, and we should all be able to see the cynical right-wing crocodile tears over Aleppo for what they are.

If these opportunists really gave a damn about human suffering they would have done everything in their power to scale-down the Saudi and Qatari backing for the Jihadi militias that have been destabilising the country (and the entire region), thus ensuring the fall of Aleppo could never have become such a bloody disaster in the first place.

If we want to ask questions about Aleppo, perhaps some of the most important ones are these:

• Why, in the middle of the siege of Aleppo, did Theresa May humiliate Britain by prostrating herself in front of the Islamist autocracies that have actually been funding the Jihadis in Syria? 

• Why the undying Tory support for the brutal autocratic Islamist regimes that have caused such chaos and misery by flooding Syria with weapons and Jihadi fighters?

• Are British arms contracts with countries like Saudi Arabia so important that the Tories and the establishment media are willing to turn a total blind-eye to their involvement in Syria?

• Why are so many right-wingers so intent on rewriting history to exonerate David Cameron for the failure of his ill-conceived rush to war when the squalid relationship between the UK and Islamist regimes like Saudi Arabia is very much more relevant to what has been going on in Aleppo?

• If the right-wing warmongers had got their way in 2013 and David Cameron had intervened to destabilise the Assad regime and help ISIS take over the country, would Syria now be a better place?

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