"Humiliation is Victory" - Orwell would be proud

"May's Finest Hour" blares the front page of the Express, while the S*n and Daily Mail also carried similarly delusional interpretations of Theresa May's humiliation at Salzberg.

From the moment her Chequers Plan was released it was always going to come to this.
Theresa May was warned time and again that her effort to threaten the EU into letting her cherry-pick the benefits of EU membership without shouldering any of the responsibilities was doomed to failure.

But she carried on regardless, in the desperate hope that her endlessly repeated threat to launch a mutually destructive "no deal" flounce if she isn't given her way would frighten the EU negotiators into caving in to her demands.

Then the Tories made yet another one of the glating strategic errors that have plagued the party ever since David Cameron's time as PM. They decided to defy the mainstream EU consensus by aligning themselves with all of the extreme-right, neo-Nazi, and Europhobic parties in the European Parliament to oppose a move to censure the vile anti-Semitic, judiciary-rigging, free speech repressing Hungarian government of Viktor Orbán.

This Tory tactic was intended to divide the EU27 by getting the hard-right Hungarian and Polish governments onside, but it backfired spectacularly as this disgustingly cynical move pissed off the EU negotiators to such an extent that they finally put their foot down at Salzberg.

Having her desperately unrealistic wish list publicly rejected was clearly a humiliation for Theresa May and a humiliation for Britain, yet the right-wing propaganda rags are celebrating this shameful farce as some kind of wonderful victory.

This reality-reversal is so transparent that comparisons with Orwell are inevitable. So let's just get it out of the way. "Humiliation is Victory" easily fits in alongside the 1984 slogans "War is Peace", "Freedom is Slavery" and "Ignorance is Strength".

How on earth did we get to this point?

• How did over 17 million people end up voting in favour of a Tory administered Brexit when it was clear from the beginning that the Brexiteers had no plan for how to actually achieve it?

• How did we allow Theresa May to trigger Article 50 without even having drawn up a proper negotiating tactic first? 

• How did we allow Theresa May to inhibit the chance of ever getting a workable Brexit by scribbling "red lines" all over the place? 

• How did we allow Theresa May to make a diplomatically inept and toddler-like threat the centrepiece of our negotiating strategy? 

• How did we allow Theresa May and the Tories to sideline the House of Commons, UK businesses, trade unions, civic society, opposition parties, devolved parliaments, charities ... to run the whole Brexit show themselves? 

• How did we allow Theresa May to be dictated to by the most fanatically right-wing Europhobic wing of the Tory party whilst anyone attempting to talk sense has been dismissed as "traitors", "mutineers", "rebels", and "Remoaners" and bombarded with abuse and death threats by the vile Brextremist mob?

• How did we allow Theresa May and her Brexiteers to waste away the vast majority of the Brexit negotiating period? 

• How did we allow Theresa May and the Tories to present the shockingly unrealistic Chequers Plan as some kind of negotiating triumph, rather than an absolute shambles that doesn't even satisfy the Tory party that developed it, let alone the rest of the UK, or the EU negotiators who quite understandably shot it down in Salzberg after the Tories defied the mainstream European consensus to side with Viktor Orbán.

The answer to all of this is obvious. It's the toxifying influence of the right-wing propaganda rags. They promoted Brexit when they knew the Brexiteers had no plan for how to achieve it.

They celebrated Theresa May's ridiculous red lines, her toddler-tantrum negotiating tactics, and her decision to trigger Article 50 with no negotiating plan.

They attacked the judges as "enemies of Britain" when they overruled Theresa May's efforts to sideline parliament and tried to orchestrate an ideological witch hunt of academics who dare to question or critique the Brexit process.

They triggered cascades of Brexiteer death threats every time they called the remain-oriented Tories "mutineers" and "traitors". They did nothing to hold Theresa May and the Brexiteers to account over their ridiculous time-wasting tactics. And now they're presenting Theresa May's inevitable humiliation as some kind of epic triumph!

And if they're prepared to reverse reality in order to re-write Theresa May's humiliation into a wonderful victory, don't doubt that there's no lengths these propagandists won't go to in order to con people into continuing to support Tory misrule, even when it's ludicrously obvious that they're lying through their teeth.

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OR

Why on earth is the Guardian editor siding with The S*n over the people of Liverpool?

If you ever needed a demonstration of how far to the right the Guardian has shifted, consider the fact that their political editor Heather Stewart decided to insult the people of Liverpool, and insult the intelligence of the rest of us by presenting hacks from the S*n as poor innocent victims, solely in order to score ridiculously cheap political points against the Labour left.

The Tweet in question relates to a Momentum event in the city of Liverpool. It wasn't Momentum's choice to hold the Labour Party Conference in the city (it was the Labour leadership) but once it was settled that all the conference events were going to be in Liverpool it was obvious that anyone with any decency and respect for the victims of the Hillsborough disaster would avoid inviting hacks from The S*n to their events.

The reason is simple. When police negligence resulted in the deaths of 96 innocent Liverpool fans in 1989, The S*n produced a truly vile pack of lies on their front page to deliberately deflect blame from the police onto the victims of the tragedy. Worst of all, the headline above the extraordinary pack of front page lies read "The Truth".

For decades this grotesque fan-blaming narrative was used to deflect blame from the true culprits onto the victims of the disaster.

Just imagine how the families of the deceased felt to have their loved ones falsely blamed for their own deaths. Just imagine how the traumatised survivors of the tragedy felt to be smeared as drunks who pickpocketed the dead and urinated on the "brave cops" (you know the "brave cops" who actually caused the tragedy through their negligence).

Just imagine how it felt to suffer these lies for decades before the truth was finally admitted; that police negligence caused the disaster and the fan-blaming propaganda was all a pack of lies.

To their eternal credit the fans of Liverpool's rival club Everton FC put aside all their footballing differences and supported the Boycott the S*n campaign too out of solidarity for their friends, family members, neighbours, and work colleagues from the red half of the city.

So if you can't see why The S*n is still boycotted across Liverpool to this day, you really can't have much in the way of basic human empathy.

Despite this well-known and commonly understood history between The S*n and the city of Liverpool, Heather Stewart decided to use this show of respect for the Boycott The S*n campaign as a stick to beat Momentum with, publicly calling the decision "outrageous" and comparing it to Donald Trump's tactic of excluding journalists who criticise his Presidency or dare to ask him awkward questions.

After being called out on her misrepresentation, Heather's response was to feign ignorance with 'oh, I couldn't have imagined that not inviting a S*n hack to an event in Liverpool could have had anything to do with Hillsborough' type Tweets.

There's no way that the political editor of a British newspaper could have remained entirely ignorant of the reasons The S*n is boycotted in Liverpool. No way at all.

So dressing this respect for the Boycott The S*n campaign up as some kind of Trumpian press censorship, rather than respect for a Liverpool-specific boycott is clearly an attempt to deceive the reader.

And feigning ignorance in the aftermath is perhaps even worse. 

Not only is siding with hacks from The S*n to present them as the poor innocent victims of lefty oppression an gross insult to the people of Liverpool, it's an insult to the intelligence of everyone else that she expects us to believe it too.

It's a clear demonstration of the level of contempt Heather and many of her fellow Guardian hacks seem to have for ordinary people. 

They think we're crap-brained and gullible enough to fall for their politically partisan smears, even when they're as poorly crafted as Heather's.

Heather's smear also demonstrates something else about the media. Her decision to shit all over the people of Liverpool in a show of solidarity with hacks at The S*n, just in order to smear the left-leaning grassroots campaign group Momentum is evidence that the mainstream media is a clique where comfortably wealthy hacks from the hard-right Murdoch propaganda empire and from the supposedly left-leaning Guardian have way more in common with each other than they do with ordinary people.

In recent years The Guardian have run countless articles bitterly attacking left-wing independent media sites like mine, and decrying the fact that the traditional mainstream media hacks are having their role as gatekeepers of political discourse undermined, and Heather's S*n solidarity Tweet is about the best demonstration of why this is happening that you could ask for.

If the Guardian's political editor has more empathy towards hacks from the Murdoch propaganda empire than she does for the people of Liverpool and the victims of the Hillsborough tragedy, then she's clearly living in an insulated bubble very far removed from the real world.

And if she's willing to distort the Liverpool Boycott The S*n campaign solely in order to score cheap political points against the Labour left, she's using the same kind of despicable and deceptive journalistic tricks as S*n hacks do, and displaying the same outright contempt for her audience too.

So it's absolutely no wonder at all that ever more people are cancelling their subscriptions to The Guardian and making donations to independent media sources instead.

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OR

Here's the reason "centrism is really struggling to make headway"

In a speech to the Lib-Dem conference Gina Miller lamented the fact that "centrism is really struggling to make headway" before going on to call people to the left and right "fascists" with "cold hard ideologies".

The obvious problem with centrism is that the term itself is a complete misnomer that implies that hovering aimlessly around near the centre has some special moral virtue no matter how far off into the political extremes the prevailing political orthodoxy might go.

Thus during the post-war decades the political centre was the mixed economy of public ownership of vital infrastructure, services and industries combined with a strong welfare state and regulated capitalism (a position occupied by Labour, the Liberals, and the Tories), and the privatise everything, "greed is good" deregulate the financial sector right-wingers were fringe lunatics.

Fast forward to 1979 and the hard-right fringe were propelled into power and their mass privatisation, welfare-wrecking, deregulation mania has continued unabated for four decades with truly appalling consequences.

Just look at the behaviour of the self-declared centrists between 2010 and 2016 and you can see the disastrous consequences of this morally weak and utterly wrong-headed determination to occupy the centre ground between raving ideological extremism of the Tories and the Blairism that went before it:

• Despite warning that an ideological cuts agenda would wreck the recovery before the 2010, the Lib-Dems leapt into coalition with the Tories to actively help them wield George Osborne's economically illiterate and unspeakably ruinous austerity wrecking ball.

• The Lib-Dems enabled countless attacks on ordinary people, from the unprecedented campaign of wage repression, though their savage cuts to in-work benefits, to the unspeakably cruel impoverishment and mistreatment of hundreds of thousands of disabled people.

• Meanwhile the Lib-Dems voted through all kinds of unpopular hard-right Tory reforms like selling off the Royal Mail at a fraction of its true value, lumbering students with astronomical debts, carving the NHS open for the benefit of private profiteers, slashing corporation tax to by far the lowest rate in the G7, and literally giving away thousands of state schools to unaccountable private pseudo-charities (many run by Tory party donors!).

• To get an idea of how lost the Lib-Dem centrists became, consider the fact that they agreed to allow Iain Duncan Smith to condemn thousands more to absolute destitution by toughening his draconian sanctions regime in return for the limited roll-out of the 5p plastic bag charge! Of course plastic pollution in the environment is a bad thing, but deliberately and knowingly throwing thousands of real, often extremely vulnerable people under Iain Duncan Smith's bus to combat it is just grotesque.

• In 2014 Theresa May introduced her extremist "hostile environment" legislation and bragged about how the Tory government could "deport now, hear appeals later". Dozens of black British citizens were deported under these rules. Several died in exile. Thousands more were denied employment, housing, access to public services, access to banking services, even medical treatment. The majority of 'centrists' either voted in favour of this disgusting legislation, with only a tiny minority of MPs opposing it on principle (or because their "cold hard ideologies" wouldn't allow them to enable it as Gina Miller would no doubt describe it).

• Then the Labour centrists threw away the 2015 general election with their ridiculous decision to pathetically imitate ruinous Tory austerity dogma rather than oppose it head on.

• After their election defeat Labour centrists like Chris Leslie actually tried to argue that losing the election by copying Tory extremism rather than opposing it meant Labour should shift even further to the right! Thankfully the Labour membership strongly disagreed and voted for a candidate who would actually oppose ruinous Tory austerity dogma instead of meekly copying it.

• During the Labour leadership election the Labour centrists decided to abstain on a massive programme of Tory welfare cuts designed to further impoverish the poor, especially the working poor. Jeremy Corbyn was the only Labour leadership candidate to vote against it.

Centrist collusion with Tory austerity dogma had appalling consequences: The longest period of sustained wage devaluation on record, public services put under massive strain or shut down entirely, in-work benefits slashed, soaring food bank dependency, exploitative employment practices like Zero Hours Contracts and fake self-employment spreading like wildfire ...

Then it came to the Brexit vote and suddenly the complacent centrists were trapped in a pit of their own digging. The far-right Brextremists opportunistically blamed immigrants and the EU for the wage collapse, the failing public services, the in-work poverty, the suffering ... But the centrists couldn't fight back with the truth that these things were the result of austerity, because they were all complicit with austerity.

The only way the centrists have countered the far-right anti-immigrant anti-EU lies would have been to admit that 'centrism' itself was a fraud!

Amazingly centrists still occupy this bubble of delusion that it's somehow morally superior to triangulate with hard-right Tory austerity dogma than to oppose it. That all the 'centrist' MPs abstaining on Theresa May's vile "hostile environment" policy was acceptable and palatable xenophobia, but the xenophobic Brextremist lies were somehow so much worse than a policy they couldn't even be bothered to oppose that eventually led to British citizens dying in exile abroad!

The problem is that centrists promised us that their watered down version of neoliberalism would bring prosperity, but what it's actually delivered is Tory austerity dogma, collapsing wages, failing public services, exploitative employment practices, ridiculous privatisation scams, grotesque "hostile environment" policies, soaring in-work poverty, and eventually the centrist's own worst nightmare; Brexit.

But rather than admit their culpability in creating this dreadful situation, they're intent on moral high-horsing and abusing everyone to the left, and everyone to the right of them as "fascists"!

And it's exactly this kind of self-aggrandising and aloof sneering that's going to keep them in the political wilderness, because like it or not, the idea of aimlessly drifting around in the totally artificial territory of the 'centre ground' is finished.

The choice now is between the hard-right neoliberals who want to keep us on the same course we've been on for four decades (more privatisation, more undermining of workers rights, more public service cutbacks, more under-investment in infrastructure spending and research and development, more welfare cuts for the poor, more tax cuts and lavish handouts for the mega-rich) or those on the left who want to change direction and make Britain more of a high-tech, high-skill society with a decent welfare system like Norway, Finland, Germany, or Denmark.

Of course it's necessary to take an ideological position to step away from the complacency and aimlessness of the political 'centre', but there's nothing "cold" or "hard" about opposing the political orthodoxy of welfare cuts on the most vulnerable people in society (the sick, the disabled, the working poor, the jobless, the children, the elderly and infirm ...) in order to lavish corporations and the mega-rich with ever more tax cuts and handouts.

Quite the contrary, it takes a "cold hard" heart to go along with such barbarity solely because you want to maintain the illusion that by doing so you're somehow a 'moderate' occupying the 'centre ground'!

When centrism actively helps the Tories grind the most vulnerable people in society into absolute destitution for five years in order to feed the greed of the mega-rich, and then centrists accuse others who object to this horrific agenda of "fascism" and having "cold hard ideologies" then you really can't expect anyone other than your ever-diminishing echo chamber of delusional 'centrists' to applaud your unbelievably hypocritical message.

 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.

OR

Why do Tory MPs get a total free pass on their astounding anti-business attitudes?

Today a Tory MP publicly accused the boss of a major UK employer of lying. The accusation was made by Bernard Jenkin who responded to the fears of Jaguar Land Rover that a "no deal" Brexit would be catastrophic for their company and their workforce by saying "I think he's making it up".

Now just imagine for a moment that a Labour Party MP had openly accused the boss of a major British employer of lying to the public.

The mainstream media would obviously be absolutely teaming with "Labour are the anti-business party" takes, at least for the rest of the day, and with the incident referenced over and again for months as evidence of Labour's anti-business agenda.

But because the badmouthing of British business is coming from a Tory MP, it's barely elicited a whisper of condemnation from mainstream media hacks, other than a few Tweets from half-decent journalists like Gavin Esler and Norman Smith.

Sustained media partisanship

Alarmingly this isn't the only example of highly partisan editorial decisions to avoid vehement condemnation of the Tories. Last week the majority of Tory MPs joined all the fascist parties in the European Parliament to vote in support of Viktor Orbán's anti-Semetic, judiciary-rigging, free speech-attacking, human rights-trashing regime in Hungary.

Again, just imagine the deafening howls of condemnation had it been Labour MEPs defying the European consensus to vote in favour of the most notorious anti-Semite in Europe, but somehow the Tories get a free pass.

Labour are now the party of business!

If you believed all the mainstream media rhetoric about Labour being rabid extreme-left fanatics under Jeremy Corbyn, the idea that they've taken over as the obvious pro-business party would seem insane, but the reality is very different from what orthodox neoliberals in the mainstream media are trying to make you think.

Admittedly Jeremy Corbyn has said that corporations would have to pay their fair share in tax (especially if they want to bid for government contracts) and that the Corporation Tax rate is going to have to rise so that it's back in line with the G7 average, which wouldn't go down all that well with Britain's most avid tax-dodgers and corporate profiteers.

However, most business leaders should be able to see the sense in many of Corbyn's strategies, and that the economic responsibility of paying their fair share in tax comes with significant payoffs too.

Making sure that major corporations pay their fair share in tax would create a much fairer playing field for hundreds of thousands of small and medium sized businesses that can't afford to pay expensive tax lawyers to hide their profits in tax havens.

Corbyn has clearly listened to British businesses (large and small) and to trade unions and he's made it clear that Labour would seek to retain access to the Customs Union and Single Market, while the Tories keep on threatening the ruination of a "no deal" Brexit and smearing prominent business leaders who express their concerns about this reckless game of ideological brinkmansip as liars!

Labour's policies of investing in Britain's creaking public infrastructure and building hundreds of thousands of affordable homes would clearly create huge opportunities for construction companies, engineering firms, and myriad suppliers.

Labour's "Build it in Britain" industrial policy certainly must make a lot of sense to British-based manufacturers.

And Labour's policy of introducing a National Education Service to provide free education and training to all, would clearly help to ensure that the UK has the kind of flexible and highly-skilled workforce that is needed in order to reverse the Tory productivity crisis and make Britain a high-tech economy fit for the 21st Century.

Whether you support Jeremy Corbyn's investment-based economic strategy or not, you certainly won't be hearing any Labour MPs saying "fuck business" like Boris Johnson, or smearing prominent British business leaders as liars like Bernard Jenkin just did.

You can read more about Labour's industrial strategy here.

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OR

When it comes to democratic reselection and a 2nd EU referendum Jeremy Corbyn's reputation is at stake

One of Jeremy Corbyn's main points of appeal (beside his longstanding commitment to genuine democratic socialist values when so many Labour MPs abandoned them), is his policy of democratising the Labour Party and making it much more responsive to the views of ordinary Labour Party members.

Given that so much of his support relies on this reputation as a democratiser, his leadership is facing a huge litmus test at the Annual Labour Party Conference (September 23-26).

It's becoming absolutely clear that huge numbers of Labour Party members want to see changes, and two specific changes in particular.

Brexit referendum

The first clear demand from the membership is the widespread call for a second referendum on the terms of the Brexit agreement. Jeremy Corbyn's policy to date has been to subject the Brexit terms to Keir Starmer's six tests, and then oppose Brexit in parliament if the tests are not met.

So far scores of local Labour Party branches have called for a Conference vote on a second referendum, which would almost certainly be won given that well over 70% of Labour Party supporters are opposed to the Tory Brexit shambles.

A vote in favour of Labour supporting a second referendum would surely force Jeremy Corbyn to adapt his method of opposing Tory Brexit from parliamentary opposition (if you look at the actual parliamentary records, Labour have opposed the Tories on practically every single Brexit vote) to officially backing a second referendum on the final Brexit agreement.

Democratic reselection

The second demand from the membership is the introduction of democratic reselection of Labour MPs in order to put an end to the complacency of the 'jobs for life' brigade by allowing local constituency parties to weed out the most corrupt/self-serving/abusive/lazy/incompetent of Labour MPs.

Under the current system the only way to get rid of a disgraceful Labour MP is through the trigger ballot process, which necessitates negative campaigning against the incumbent MP rather than positive campaigning for a rival candidate.

Democratic reselection for all Labour MPs (including Corbyn and his allies of course) would create a much more positive environment where individuals who wish to challenge their local Labour MP get to run a positive campaign focused on how they propose to do a better job of representing the Labour Party and the local community in parliament.

Democratic reselection is hardly a controversial policy (except for those incumbent MPs who would feel understandably afraid of being held to account for their atrocious behaviour of course).

Every single one of the 54 of the Scottish National Party's MPs were democratically reselected before the 2017 General Election because they'd all done a fantastic job of representing the party in Westminster.

But then look at the Democratic primaries in the united States for examples of how open selection contests have reinvigorated Democratic politics. Consider the shock selection of the 28 year old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over a 10-time incumbent, and a wave of other progressives taking Democratic slots in the midterm elections.

Without open selection contests how many potential Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez type figures within the Labour Party are being denied the chance to shine in favour of keeping utterly complacent and self-serving old-timers in their party political sinecures?

If MPs do a good job of representing the Labour Party and their local communities then there's hardly any chance of them being ousted through democratic selection (because removing the incumbent MP and replacing them with a newcomer risks increasing the chance of losing the seat to a rival party), but democratic reselection would certainly invigorate local Labour Party politics, gives local people a fair shot at getting rid of the laziest and most self-serving Labour MPs, and give rising stars in the Labour Party a chance to make their own positive cases to be selected as candidates in their local areas.

The litmus test

If the Labour leadership deliberately stonewalls either of these internal democratic campaigns, then Corbyn's reputation is surely going to take a significant hit.

Personally I think it's an incredibly dangerous idea to hold a second referendum when the electoral rules haven't been reformed to prevent the absolute tidal wave of dark ads, lies, distortions and outright fraud we saw in 2016, and because the Electoral Commission who would oversee it are a shockingly discredited joke (just a week before Labour Conference the courts found they had given Vote Leave misleading and unlawful advice that they could channel excess funds through shell campaigns).

But if it's the will of the Labour Party membership to hold a second referendum under such risky conditions, Corbyn would tarnish his own reputation as a respecter of democracy by stonewalling it.

When it comes to democratic reselection I'm strongly in favour. I can't see any reasonable objection whatever against Labour MPs being required to renew their mandate to serve in democratic processes. All the objections centre around a seething contempt for the whole concept of democratic accountability.

If the Labour leadership caves in to the demands of Labour MPs in safe seats that democratic reselection proposals be taken off the table, this would be a much bigger betrayal than stonewalling a second referendum because Corbyn has staked his reputation on the internal democratisation of the Labour Party,.

If the Labour Party ignore the membership calling for democratic reselection in order to protect incumbent Labour MPs from democratic accountability, it'd be a betrayal of one of Corbyn's main points of appeal.

Next week Jeremy Corbyn faces probably the biggest test of his credentials since the General Election, so let's hope he manages to pass it. 

 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.

OR

The shockingly inadequate reaction to the bankers' crisis is the reason Britain is in such a state today

It's 10 years to the day since Lehman Brothers collapsed into bankruptcy and practically nothing has been done to rein in the excesses of the mega-rich speculator class who created the Bankers' insolvency crisis.

First the entire establishment class rallied around to ensure that their mega-rich speculator mates wouldn't lose out as a result of the crisis they caused with their reckless gambling, with bailouts, and quantitative easing cash galore to prop up the value of the assets of the rich.

Then Tories cynically used the bankers' economic crisis as an excuse to impose ruinous austerity dogma as a means of pushing the cost of the crisis onto ordinary people through wage repression, in-work benefits cuts, welfare cuts for sick and disabled people, local service cuts, etc.

Meanwhile the Tories actually rigged the economy even further in favour of the mega-rich by slashing corporation tax, slashing taxes on the mega-rich, and lavishing the speculator class with ridiculously one-sided outsourcing contracts, and handing them massive chunks of public infrastructure and services at bargain basement prices (like the Royal Mail) or even for free (like the state schools given away to private academy profiteers).

The bankers' insolvency crisis called for decisive action to ensure such a meltdown could never happen again. Action like breaking up the "too big to fail" banks, restraining the ridiculous short-term bonus culture to make financial rewards dependent on the long-term sustainability of the institutions paying them, jailing the most reckless and fraudulent of the financial sector gamblers, increasing competition and diversity in the financial sector, reducing the amount of wealth that gets funnelled into non-productive areas of the economy like property price speculation and the vast global derivatives casino ...

But instead of decisive action nothing was done, so that the property bubble and the the global derivatives casino have continued sucking vast amounts of wealth away from the real productive economy.

But what's even worse is what the Tory response to the bankers' crisis taught the mega-rich speculator class.

It taught them that financial crises are absolutely fantastic news for them. Their losses will be protected through bankers' bailouts and obscene policies like quantitative easing, while the cost of the meltdown is borne by the poor and ordinary.

And now, instead of waiting for the next crisis to come along (when the housing bubble bursts, or major banks gamble themselves into insolvency on the global derivatives casino again) the mega-rich speculator class are seeking to deliberately cause the next crisis.

They know that they can plunge the entire UK economy into a much bigger crisis than the bankers' meltdown if they can ensure that the UK conducts a "no deal" flounce out of the EU.

If they know exactly how and when the crisis is going to occur, the opportunities for making £billions by betting against Britain are obviously absolutely huge.

Then once they've made a killing by betting against Britain, and against the elements of the real economy they know will suffer huge losses in a "no deal" meltdown (manufacturing, haulage companies, leisure and tourism, aviation, shipping, agriculture, the automotive industry ...) they can pile back in with the £billions they made by betting against Britain in order to buy up masses of distressed British assets on the cheap.

The UK establishment response to the bankers' crisis created moral hazard by proving that the state would not let the mega-rich speculator class fail under any circumstances (even when they gambled themselves into insolvency).

Tory austerity dogma made the moral hazard even worse by demonstrating that the Tory party would deliberately load the cost of the crisis onto ordinary people, whilst actually rigging society even further in favour of the mega-rich speculators who trashed the economy in the first place.

And Brexit is the culmination of this truly outrageous response to the bankers' crisis.

First the Brexiteers used the wave of public anger at the consequences of austerity madness to deliver the Brexit vote, by attacking immigrants and the EU as the reason wages were collapsing, public services were failing, and poverty was rising ...

And now they're seeking to use this Brexit vote as an excuse to deliberately trigger another economic meltdown so that their greedy billionaire speculator mates can make even bigger fortunes on the social and economic suffering of the rest of us.

You'd have to be a fool to not see how the shockingly inadequate response of the establishment class to the bankers' crisis, and the imposition of ruinous hard-right Tory austerity dogma are responsible for the absolute state of Britain ten years later.

 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.

OR

Theresa May and the Tories are the ones with the serious anti-Semitism problem

One of the first world leaders Theresa May met after she was appointed Prime Minister was the fanatically right-wing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

Since then the Tory party have continued to cosy up to Orbán and his anti-Semitic, xenophobic, judiciary-rigging, free speech-attacking regime.

After Orbán retained power in the 2018 Hungarian elections which featured a massive anti-Semitic poster campaign the then Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson Tweeted gushing praise for Orbán and his party.

And in September 2018 Tory MEPs in the European Parliament sided with all the exreme-right nasties in Europe (Front National, Golden Dawn, PiS, PVV, AfD, Swedish Democrats, True Finns, FPÖ, Lega Nord, and Britain's own UKIP) in order to defend Orbán's government against a motion of censure that was overwhelmingly supported by the European centre (from conservatives, through liberals to the socialists and greens).

The Tories were the only (supposedly) mainstream government in Europe to ally themselves with Orbán and the extreme-right.

Here's one of Orbán's most notorious quotes about Jews: "We are fighting an enemy that is different from us. Not open, but hiding; not straightforward but crafty; not honest but base; not national but international; does not believe in working but speculates with money; does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the whole world".

Isn't it extraordinary that the mainstream media spent the entire summer digging around in Jeremy Corbyn's past to cherry-pick absurd out-of-context quotes, fixate over images of him laying a wreath (at a graveyard where none of the Munich terrorists were even buried), and even smear a Jewish Holocaust survivor as an anti-Semite to paint Corbyn as an anti-Semite ... but when yet more evidence of the Tories' active collusion with a horrifically right-wing government led by an unmistakably anti-Semetic tyrant comes to light, suddenly the mainstream media anti-Semitism guns have fallen silent?

Orbán's extremism isn't just limited to anti-Semitism either. He's continually attacked Muslims as "invaders", he's been rigging the Hungarian judiciary by stacking it with pro-government figures, he's clamped down on free speech and attacked the free press. His supporters have even drawn up a blacklist of charity workers, campaigners, journalists, academics and other public figures considered "enemies of the state".

It's quite incredible that Theresa May and the Tories have openly colluded with this vile regime right in front of our eyes, for years, safe in the knowledge that they won't be held to account for it by Britain's docile, compliant, and ridiculously right-leaning press.

Even now, when the Tories' scandalous support for this vile regime is incontestably recorded in the voting record of the European Parliament, there's nowhere near as much condemnation and noise from the people who were howling at Corbyn, and making hyperbolic accusations that Labour are an "existential threat" to Jewish people just a few weeks previously.

Instead of vehemently condemning this outrageous Tory collusion with one of the most notorious anti-Semites in Europe, the Jewish Board of Deputies expressed only "disappointment"!

Others to have whipped up the anti-Semitism furore to attack Jeremy Corbyn and undermine the momentum towards genuine democratic socialism haven't even said a word.

The day after this Tory collusion with Orbán, Jonathan Sachs stood up in the House of Lords to talk about anti-Semitism and didn't even mention it!

BBC heavyweight Andrew Neil, who has repeatedly pushed the anti-Semitism attacks against Corbyn remained silent, which is hardly surprising given his personal involvement with the Hungarian government.

All of this raises the question of how stupid and gullible they think we are. 

They seem to imagine that they can manipulate us into believing that the lifelong anti-racist campaigner Jeremy Corbyn is the Jew-hater, whilst they actively turn a blind eye to Theresa May and her party repeatedly sucking up to the most notorious anti-Semite in Europe!

In reality this is such a spectacular display of over-reach that swathes of the mainstream media are permanently wrecking their own reputations. 

Repeatedly trying convince people that black is white is bad enough, but then after posing as valiant anti-Semitism campaigners for the entire summer of 2018, their deafening silence on the Tory collusion with Orbán clearly exposes their political partisanship and their utter hypocrisy.

If you decide to present yourself as a valiant anti-Semitism campaigner all summer, then you'd better not turn a blind eye to it in the autumn when your political allies are up to their necks in it, otherwise you've just burned your journalistic reputation to the ground.

Anti-Semitism is a vile form of racist bigotry that needs to be confronted wherever it's found.

It's not a convenient issue to be weaponised and used as political ammunition, only to be immediately forgotten about when your political allies decide to defy the European political consensus and actively support the most notorious anti-Semite in Europe.

This political weaponisation of anti-Semitism is particularly disgusting because it cheapens the fight against anti-Semitism by making the issue seem like partisan political point scoring, rather than a serious problem that need to be confronted wherever it arises.

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