If you use the mainstream media as your primary source of political information you are willingly allowing yourself to be misled.
A London School of Economics study found that just 11% of newspaper articles about Jeremy Corbyn bother to accurately represent a single one of his policies. In the extreme-right Daily Mail and Express the figure was 0%.
If you think the BBC is impartial you're deluding yourself. It was only earlier this year that an internal BBC investigation found that their politics editor Laura Kuenssberg fabricated a fake story about Jeremy Corbyn to launch a partisan political attack on him. She was allowed to keep her job, and she's still pushing so much pro-Tory bias that she recently warped the story of Theresa May hiding from the press into an "isn't Jeremy Corbyn shit" Tweet!
The UK print media is overwhelmingly dominated by right-wing propaganda rags, and even the supposed left-liberal media outlets (The Guardian, Mirror and Independent) that have much smaller circulations repeatedly fail to hold the Tory government to account for their shockingly woeful track record.and instead focus on dividing the opposition or lazily "churnalising" government press releases.
Just look at the appalling track record of the Tory government:
- They promised to eliminate the budget deficit by May 2015, but they now admit that they don't have a chance of clearing it until well after 2021. That's over eleven years to do what they said they would do in less than five, and now the person responsible for this abject failure is quitting as an MP in order to work as editor of one of the newspapers that is supposed to hold the government to account!
- The Tories have created more new public debt in seven years than every single Labour government in history.
- The Tory government has vandalised the NHS with £billions in cuts at a time of rising demand for services. They've also intensified the NHS recruitment crisis by driving 10,000 potential nurses out of the profession in a single year by scrapping NHS bursaries.
- The Tories have tripled university tuition fees meaning that students in England now face the highest fees for study at public university anywhere in the world. The debts they're incurring means that 2/3 of them will never pay off their student debts despite paying a 9% aspiration tax on their disposable income for their entire working lives.
- In 2010 Theresa May promised to reduce net migration to below 100,000. Instead she oversaw the biggest influx of migrants in British history during her time at the Home Office.
- The Tories have overseen the lowest levels of house building since the 1920s at a time of increased demand (thanks to the record braking immigration boom they've overseen) meaning house prices have soared to the most unafforadble levels in history.
- The Tories divided the nation over Brexit and didn't even bother to develop a contingency plan in case the public voted the way the hard-right fringe of the Tory party told them to. Then instead of dealing with the mess they created, they all ran away leaving the fanatically right-wing authoritarian opportunist Theresa May to take over unchallenged.
- Theresa May's Brexit "negotiating strategy" is a sick joke. It took her 6 months of dithering to come up with her "no deal is better than a bad deal" rhetoric, but she negligently didn't even bother to investigate the seriousness of the economic consequences of it before making the threat of a "no deal" strop away from the negotiating table the centrepiece of her strategy!
- The Tories' proposed Great Repeal Bill is an astoundingly bare-faced assault on democracy which will allow Tory ministers to rewrite thousands of laws with no parliamentary scrutiny (so much for voting for Brexit because the EU is undemocratic eh?).
- After dithering for 9 months Theresa May finally triggered Article 50 and then plunged the nation into the turmoil of an opportunistic and self-serving snap election when her ministers should undeniably have been concentrating on the most complex and risky set of diplomatic negotiations the UK has ever faced.
- The Tories have been conducting systematic abuse of disabled people, including the confiscation of over 50,000 mobility vehicles and a dehumanising and discriminatory corporate administered Work Capacity Assessment regime that costs the taxpayer far more to operate than it will ever save in reduced benefits payments.
- The Tories are imposing the harshest cuts to school funding in decades (click here to see how much they're planning to slash from your local school's budget).
- The Tories have created a social care funding crisis with their £4.6 billion worth of cuts. This means even more pressure on the NHS, more pressure on unpaid carers, and more vulnerable people dying.
- The Tories have overseen devastating local government cuts, and they've deliberately targeted the harshest cuts at the poorest Labour-voting areas, whilst actually handing funding increases to several well-to-do Tory councils in the Home Counties!
- The Tories just introduced the most extreme surveillance laws of any developed nation on earth that allow over 20,000 state employees to snoop on your private data, (including thousands of non-terrorism related workers employed by agencies like the Health and Safety Executive, The Gambling Commission and the Food Standards Agency).
- Three of Theresa May's senior staffers quit within a week of her announcing her self-serving snap election, but the mainstream press barely cover the story. Just imagine all the ridicule and condemnation from the press if it was Jeremy Corbyn's staffers abandoning ship at such a crucial juncture.
- In 2016 the Tories voted down an opposition amendment to their Housing Bill to ensure that all rented properties are "fit for human habitation". Just imagine the mentality of a party that believes that landlords shouldn't have an obligation to ensure they ensure their properties are habitable before they rent then to people to live in.
- Since 2010 the Tories have increased the number of children growing up in poverty by 400,000, and now their latest attacks on child welfare system and in-work benefits are set to dump 250,000 more kids into lives of poverty.
- Since 2010 the number of people using food banks and the number of workers on exploitative zero hours contracts have both risen exponentially.
- The Tories have overseen the longest sustained decline in workers' wages since records began meaning that the UK has suffered the worst decline in wages in the developed world apart from crisis-stricken Greece.
- Despite the parliamentary foreign affairs select committee finding that Saudi Arabia is using British weapons to commit war crimes in Yemen the Tories are still granting arms export licences to Saudi Arabia, and Theresa May was over there grovelling in front of their tyrannical islamist rulers this Easter.
- Under Tory rule the UK is the only country in the developed world where workers' wages are declining while the economy actually grows. Just think about it. If the economy is growing but the share of the wealth going to workers is falling, where on earth is all of that extra wealth going? To the tiny super-rich minority of course.
- The Tories signed up to an absolutely ridiculous nuclear price-fixing deal with the Chinese and French to bribe them into building a nuclear power station for us (we can't build our own because the Tories privatised all of our nuclear expertise in the 1990s) in return the UK taxpayer will subsidise them by paying double the market rate for electricity for 35 years!
- Theresa May keeps claiming to be a strong leader but she's such a self-serving coward that she's refusing to face the other party leaders in a live TV debate, she turns her campaign events into Tory "safe spaces" filled with Tory party loyalists bussed in from miles away, with ordinary members of the public banned and the press barred from asking her questions. She's behaving more like Kim Jong Un than a British Prime Minister.
Just think about it. Is it any wonder that the tax-dodging newspaper billionaires and the hacks who work for them are so biased in favour of the Tories given that Jeremy Corbyn is vowing to clamp down on tax-dodgers and make sure that the super-rich actually pay their way?
So never mind the newspaper billionaires, push out those who have brought your country to the verge of ruin.
Well, at least check out some of the Labour Party policies that the right-wing billionaire press barons don't want you thinking about before you decide how to vote.
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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