Even though the Tory party have been caught out fielding two absolutely despicable local election candidates, the mainstream media focus is still firmly on Labour when it comes to anti-Semitism. George C. Stoakley When Pete Wilson had Tory local election propaganda shoved through his door he decided to check out what the candidates were saying on Twitter. What he found was absolutely disgusting. One of the candidates describing himself as a "libertarian Conservative" had used the phrase "sweating like a Jew in an attic" (a reference to Anne Frank) as well as a load of other bigoted extreme-right rubbish including the use of homophobic slurs, a joke about AIDS being "weaponised semen", and a call for handguns to be legalised in Britain featuring the hashtag #ArmBritain. After the comments were exposed Stoakley locked down his Twitter account to prevent anyone else from finding incriminating evidence of his anti-Semitism and bigotry, and the Tory party have simply decided to ignore the scandal in the hope that it goes away rather than immediately suspending him and issuing an apology that such an individual was ever selected as a Tory council candidate. Darren Harrison Just one week previously another Tory local election candidate was exposed as being a supporter of the extreme-right white supremacist Generation Identity movement who are so extreme that their leaders have been banned from entering the UK by the Tory government. Generation Identity is an absolute hotbed of anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry (especially Islamophobic abuse), yet the Tories saw fit to stand the active neo-Nazi fanatic and Generation Identity supporter Darren Harrison as a Conservative local election candidate in Watford. Tory anti-Semitism
Let's not forget that the Tory party have fostered very close links with some of the most anti-Semitic governments on earth. Anti-Semitism is rife in Saudi Arabia, and the Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán just won another term in power via a profoundly anti-Semitic election campaign. Do the Tories criticise either of these regimes? No, they continually grovel before the Saudis begging for more arms contracts, and Boris Johnson sent Orbán a fawning congratulation Tweet on his election win saying "We look forward to working with our Hungarian friends to further develop our close partnership". The mainstream media double standard The Tories can field bigoted anti-Semites and neo-Nazis as their election candidates, they can grovel and fawn over some of the most anti-Semitic regimes on earth, their supporters can be found to be the most anti-Semitic of the lot on numerous occasions, and their leader can even be seen using the vile "self-hating Jew" trope in parliament, yet the mainstream media will never stand up and accuse them of anti-Semitism. The reason is obvious. If mainstream media pundits really cared about anti-Semitism then they'd demand that Boris Johnson condemn Victor Orbán rather than cosying up to him. If they gave a damn they'd ask why the Tories keep standing anti-Semites and neo-Nazis as their election candidates. If they gave a damn they would highlight the fact that anti-Semitism is far more common amongst Tories than labour supporters, and they would have furiously condemned Theresa May for using an anti-Semitic trope in parliament. Through their inaction they've proven conclusively that they don't actually care about anti-Semitism at all, they just see it as a convenient stick to attack Jeremy Corbyn with (despite the fact that anti-Semitic views amongst Labour supporters have fallen dramatically since he became Labour leader). And the worst thing about this double standard? It's the fact that when the mainstream media make a huge fuss about anti-Semitism in one political party whilst turning a total blind eye to it in another, they trivialise the fight against anti-Semitism, which remains a very serious issue in British society, alongside many other dangerous forms of bigotry such as anti-Muslim hate, racism, homophobia, misogyny, and extreme-right fanaticism - all of which are welcomed and tolerated within the Tory party.
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In 2014 Theresa May introduced her vile UKIP-pandering anti-immigrant legislation with only limited opposition from 18 honourable MPs. Since then this hard-right Tory legislation has been used to deny employment, deny housing, deny social security and pensions, deny NHS care, and deny the right of return to Britain to Windrush Brits who came to help rebuild Britain after the Second World War. For years the Tories ignored all the concerns, and as the full scale of the horrors she had unleashed started to become clearer, Theresa May actually tried to ignore and stonewall Commonwealth leaders who wanted to discuss the issue with her. Eventually the Tories relented, Theresa May went to the meeting and they issued grudging apologies for their grotesque treatment of the Windrush Generation, but even now they're still getting it completely wrong. The Home Secretary Amber Rudd has announced that Windrush Brits will be "offered British citizenship". The problem of course is that Windrush Brits are already British citizens, just British citizens without the paperwork to prove it.
By offering back what they've spent four years trying to forcibly take away from Windrush Brits, the Tories are acting like a pack of thieves expecting praise and plaudits for returning stolen goods, but only after they got caught red handed. In any sane society the calls for Theresa May and Amber Rudd to resign over this disgraceful scandal would be deafening, but they're being allowed to get away with it because the bulk of the mainstream media are absolutely focused on attacking and undermining Jeremy Corbyn (one of the 18 honourable MPs who voted against Theresa May's anti-immigrant legislation that created the Windrus scandal). The mainstream media political pundit class know that a Theresa May resignation would plunge the Tory party into chaos, with the Britain First and UKIP backedhard-right Brextremist Jacob Rees-Mogg as one of the favourites, and a pro-EU candidate likely to step forward too, which would reignite the Tory civil war that has been brewing over Europe for decades. So the mainstream media pundit class just refuse to call for it. Not because they can't see that Theresa May is as guilty as sin, but because they fear the political consequences of not allowing her to go unpunished for the barbarity she unleashed.
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The treatment of Windrush Brits by this horror show of a Tory government is an absolute outrage, but it's vital to remember that this dreadful scandal is just one example amongst many in a pattern of callous Tory abuse against pretty much anyone who is not a member of the wealthy establishment class that the Tory party exists to serve. Windrush Brits
Since 2014 the Tories have been using this legislation to dehumanise and discriminate against Windrush Brits without the paperwork to prove their nationality. This systematic Tory discrimination has resulted in people being denied employment, denied accommodation, denied social security, denied pensions, denied NHS treatment, denied their freedom in immigration detention centres, and denied the right to return to Britain. Other commonwealth Brits
Labour, the Lib-Dems, the SNP, Plaid Cymru, and the Green Party all agree that providing peace of mind to the EU 3 million should be an absolute priority, but Theresa May still insists on forcing them to live under the shadow of uncertainty, despite having had almost two years since the Brexit votes to give them a cast iron guarantee that they won't be deported or denied their rights. Sick and disabled people
The fact that the hated disability assessment regime costs far more to run than it will ever be able to save is conclusive proof that the Tories aren't even treating people maliciously for financial reasons, they're doing it because they enjoy it, and believe the taxpayer should subsidise their malicious treatment of some of the most vulnerable people in society. The jobless Another one of the malicious Tory policies that costs way more to administer than it will ever save in reduced benefits payments is their draconian sanctions regime against the unemployed.
Not only does the sanctions regime cost far more to run than it saves in reduced benefits payments, the evidence is absolutely clear that condemning people to absolute destitution (often for utterly trivial offences) actually reduces their ability to find work. People with mental health problems
That Theresa May persists with this brazenly sexist economic dogma is a clear demonstration that you don't have to be a man to be a misogynist. The elderly Given that the elderly are far more likely to vote Tory than working age people, you might have thought that they'd be somewhat protected from the worst Tory malice, but you'd be wrong.
If you're not one of the mega-rich elitists the Tory party exists to serve, yet you still vote for them, you're not just voting against the interests of the majority of British people, you're also voting against your own interests too (unless of course you imagine that you'll never be poor, never be sick or disabled, never be elderly, never have children, never be female, and never actually have to actually work for a living).
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In 2016 former Tory Chancellor George Osborne introduced a new 3% Stamp Duty rate for people buying property to rent out, but for some reason he decided to create an exemption for anyone purchasing more than six properties at the same time. The very next year the Tory Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt took advantage of this loophole by purchasing seven luxury flats in Southampton, saving himself almost £100,000 in Stamp Duty. Osborne's loophole was obviously designed to benefit the mega-rich with sufficient capital to purchase seven or more properties at once, but to see one of his actual Tory colleagues taking advantage of it just goes to show what a grotesque bunch they really are, designing legislation to benefit themselves and their mega-rich mates at the expense of everyone else. The scandal doesn't stop there either. Jeremy Hunt also defied parliamentary ethics when he "forgot" to declare this investment on the parliamentary register of interests, and he also broke the law when he "forgot" to tell Companies House about his financial interest in the company used to buy the flats (an offence that could result in a two year prison sentence if it was one of us that did it, rather than a member of the privileged class). This scandal reveals the sheer self-serving greed of the Tory party by proving that they design legislation to benefit them and their own class at the expense of the rest of us, but don't expect it to dominate the mainstream news because exposing this scandal runs entirely counter to the current primary objective of trying to ensure a poor Labour result at the local elections. If this was one of Jeremy Corbyn's shadow ministers then we know they'd be hounded from pillar to post over it until they were forced into resigning, and how the scandal would dominate the headlines for days, but because it's a Tory member of the establishment class it'll receive very limited coverage, and Hunt will ride out the storm without even coming close to being under pressure to resign.
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Jacob Rees-Mogg is threatening to trigger a catastrophic trade war with the European Union if the bunch of Brextremists he leads don't get their own way. In an interview with Sky News he made two specific threats against the EU. One that Britain could deliberately refuse to pay their outstanding liabilities to the EU, and the other that they the UK government could impose punitive 70% spite tariffs on Irish beef in an effort to wreck the Irish economy. Here's exactly what he said: "If Britain trades on WTO terms, we could potentially slap tariffs of up to 70 per cent on Irish beef. That could bankrupt Ireland, who export £800 million of beef to us every year. And if there is no deal, the EU doesn't get their £40 billion divorce bill money and becomes insolvent." Irish beef The problem with threatening to impose punitive 70% tariffs on Irish Beef is that the EU would obviously side with Ireland in such a dispute by imposing tit-for-tat tariffs on the UK's most valuable exports. It's so ridiculously obvious that the EU would defend the interests of one of their member state against Rees-Mogg's spite tariffs that it feels rather patronising to point out that that's exactly what would happen, and that Britain stands to lose an awful lot more in a bitter trade war with the EU than the EU stands to lose by reciprocating Britain's use of spite tariffs.
UK exports to the EU are worth around £240 billion, so endangering all of that in a spiteful effort to damage £0.8 billion worth of Irish beef exports to the UK would clearly be a massive strategic blunder, but that's exactly what Rees-Mogg is proposing. Pariah Britain If the United Kingdom decides to walk away from EU membership without paying what British negotiators have already agreed that they owe in debts and future liabilities, it's mind-bogglingly obvious that the rest of the world would take note of the fact that the British are liable to walk away from their trade agreements without fulfilling their legal obligations. The Brextremists are absolutely insistent that the UK must leave the Single Market and Customs Union so that the British government can negotiate new trade deals with the rest of the world, but who on earth would want to sign up to a trade deal with us if they've got absolute proof that we're a bunch of deal-breakers who are prone to leaving their trade partners in the lurch? Populist protectionism If you think about it, the idea of Britain using punitive "spite tariffs" to attack their nearest neighbour is an absolutely extraordinary thing to hear from a Tory politician. For decades the Tories have pushed hard-right neoliberal economics, globalisation, and free trade. In fact the Tories were one of the main driving forces behind the creation of the Single Market in the first place! What Rees-Mogg is proposing is a total break with this Tory globalist free trade tradition to push a form of extreme-right ultranationalist populist protectionism.
How is this ongoing shift in the Tory ideological stance from free trade, to militant protectionism isn't attracting more attention/concern from the mainstream media? The ERG You might be inclined to dismiss Rees-Mogg's threats as the ravings of an attention-seeking backbench Tory MP, but he's not just a backbench MP, he's the leader of the ERG Brextremists who control Theresa May's every move. The secretive ERG "party within a party" have easily enough MPs to trigger a Tory leadership contest, so Theresa May knows perfectly well that she has to do whatever they want if she wants to cling to power. If Theresa May steps out of line and angers the ERG mob, then she knows that she's gone, and Rees-Mogg is one of the bookies' favourites to replace her as Tory leader. Extremism It's extraordinary to see Jeremy Corbyn gradually steering the Labour Party back towards traditional centre-left democratic socialism represented in the mainstream media as some kind of scary lunatic take-over of the party, while they provide almost no critical analysis of how the Tory party is actually being taken over from within by a bunch of radical rabble rousing hard-right ultranationalist extremists right before our eyes. The jingoists
A scroll through the highest rated Daily Express comments about these Rees-Mogg threats reveals the kind of baying extreme-right ultranationalism we're dealing with, and they're precisely the audience Rees-Mogg is targetting with this kind of extreme rhetoric. "Walk away", "GET US OUT", "the best deal for the UK is no deal", "If May won't do it the Moggster will", "Come on Rees-Mogg, start a new party, you could call it the democratic people party. It would sweep to power". Rees-Mogg knows perfectly well that the UK economy would be wrecked by a ruinous "no deal" Brexit and a massive trade war with the EU, especially if the UK government signal to the rest of the world that they shouldn't sign trade deals with us because we're unreliable trade partners too, but he actively whips up this kind of extremist rhetoric because he sees it as fundamental to his leadership ambitions. There's no way such a ludicrous individual could ever seize political power on a tide of common sense, so he's clearly aiming to build a tsunami of extreme-right ultranationalist fanaticism instead.
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The vile UKIP-pandering anti-immigrant legislation that Theresa May introduced in 2014 has been used to deny employment, housing, social security, pensions, NHS care and even UK residency to Windrush Brits without the documentation to prove their citizenship. After her initial attempts to just ignore the Windrush scandal became totally untenable Theresa May was cornered into apologising. She reluctantly told a gathering of Commonwealth leaders how "genuinely sorry" she was for the Windrush scandal in the hope that apologising through gritted teeth would make coverage of her despicable treatment of Windrush Brits go away. But despite her apology Theresa May and the Tories are still working away behind the scenes to deny Windrush Brits even more rights, through through new voter ID laws that are being trialled in five local authority areas at the local elections, meaning those without photo ID will be denied the right to vote. The excuse behind the voter ID laws is that it's intended to prevent voter fraud, but there is no evidence base at all to suggest that voter fraud is a serious enough issue to justify denying citizens without ID the right to vote. In fact there has only been one solitary conviction for the crime of personation at the polling booth relating to the 2017 General Election, meanwhile an astounding 49% of all complaints of electoral fraud were made against the political campaigners themselves [source for both stats: Electoral Fraud Analysis by the Electoral Commission]. If the Tories were actually serious about cracking down on electoral fraud, they'd deal with the enormous mountain of fraud committed by political campaigners, rather than the tiny molehill of people impersonating others at the polling station. Of course it's wrong that a tiny tiny minority of people try to commit voter fraud by impersonating others at the polling booth, but if your solution to that problem involves denying the right to vote to a significantly larger number of innocent people (or even one innocent person) then your claims to be acting in the interests of democracy are clearly a total farce. The true motivation for these new voter ID laws is obvious. Poor people and elderly commonwealth citizens are far more likely to have no photographic ID, and they're also much more likely to vote against the Tory party than in favour of them (especially in light of the disgraceful Windrush scandal).
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Ultra-cynical Tories in Southampton are so desperate for power that they're blaming Labour for the consequences of their own party's actions in government. The reason council tax bills are going up while services are worse than ever is that the austerity fixated Tories in government have cut the local government budget by a whopping 67% since 2010. In Southampton the result of this hard-right ideologically driven Tory madness is a £485 per household cut to the council's budget. It's not just Southampton either, these brutal hard-right Tory cuts have left councils up and down the country with no choice but to ruthlessly slash back local services (bin collections, libraries, leisure centres, social care, highways maintenance, children's services, planning departments, street cleaning ...) to save money, whilst raising Council Tax as much as they can get away with in order to plug the gaps in the most critical services (domestic abuse shelters, children's services, care services for the elderly and infirm) in order to prevent the most damaging outcomes (domestic abuse, child abuse, deaths).
And make no mistake, these Tory cuts weren't driven by necessity, they were driven by the Tory desperation to ensure the upwards redistribution of wealth via massive tax breaks and handouts to corporations and the mega-rich. Just imagine the cynicism of knowing that your own party's ideological fixation with hard-right austerity dogma has caused this dreadful situation, but deciding to print up a load of propaganda to blame your political opponents for it. That's the cynicism of the Tories in a nutshell. Deliberately and systematically wrecking local government services up and down the country for eight ruinous years, then trying to actually take over local councils that have been gutted by this strategic wrecking by blaming the local councils themselves for the appalling financial position that Westminster Tories have left them in. The really sad thing is that because of the mainstream media refusal to critique Tory austerity dogma as the disastrous hard-right fanaticism it so obviously is, a lot of people will be unaware of the massive cuts the austerity obsessed Tories have imposed on their own local council, and will actually believe this kind of outrageous Tory propaganda when it gets shoved through their door.
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There is obviously a link between the Tories slashing 20,000+ police jobs and the soaring rates of violent crime, but the Tories will try to deny it because to admit it would be extremely damaging. So instead of admitting the truth they assume that the general public are so thick that we'd actually reject our own common sense understanding of cause and effect, and mindlessly accept the Tory fairy story that slashing the police force back to 1970s levels of per capita policing has had absolutely no effect whatever on rates of serious crime! 3. In 2010 you lot said you'd eliminate the deficit by 2015 but you failed, what is your projection now? When the Lib-Dems enabled the Tories back into power in 2010 they endlessly promised that their hard-right austerity project would eliminate the budget deficit by 2015. They obviously missed that target by miles because it's mid-2018 and the deficit is still there. Again the Tory canvasser at your doorstep is likely to try to bluff and bluster their way out of answering the question, because they either don't know, or they know that the answer is awful. Maybe allow them bluster away for a while before you burst their bubble by informing them that the latest projection is 2031, and asking them if they think it's acceptable to take 21 years to achieve what they promised to do in less than 5. 4. Does the Tory party have a problem with bigotry?
The answer is 400,000. 11. Why do you expect me to pay compensation for the consequences of your horrible policies? Theresa May has announced that she's considering compensation for the Windrush Brits who have been denied housing, employment, social security, pensions, and NHS treatment, and been made to live in fear of imprisonment and deportation. What she hasn't been clear about is that the Windrush scandal came about because of her own vile UKIP-pandering anti-immigrant legislation in 2014. So what she's actually saying by promising compensation is that she's going to completely evade responsibility for her own actions by not resigning, then compound matters by using taxpayers' money to pay off the victims of her own malicious legislation. See if you can get the Tory canvasser to admit that it's wrong for Theresa May to make the general public to pay the cost of her own horrible mistake, while she suffers no negative consequences at all.
12. Which political party has imposed the biggest armed forces cuts since the end of the Cold War?
The answer is the Tory party who have dramatically slashed the size of the armed forces since 2010.
Don't be afraid to print this article off and leave it by your front door so you can use it as a guide (I absolutely don't give a damn about copyright issues). These Tory canvassers will be speaking from a script, so it's totally fair for you to refer to notes too. Feel free to compile other questions you can stump them with too. If there's some local issue or controversy you can hit them with use that, or take a scroll through this list of 50 disgraceful Tory controversies to find other issues that you're particularly concerned with and make note of them. Remember that the information in this article doesn't specifically have to be presented in the form of questions, it can also be used to rebut several of the set talking points the Tory canvasser will try to raise. Also remember that the longer you can keep the Tory canvasser engaged in discussion, the less time they'll have to try to convince other less well-informed people into voting Tory through their bombardment of lies and deceptions. It's actually much better for you to keep them occupied by asking them questions like these and watching their absurd displays of mental gymnastics, than just angrily telling them to get off your doorstep.
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