Why are the BBC actively amplifying Lib-Dem lies?

Last night on BBC Question Time the Lib-Dem MP and party leadership candidate Jo Swinson told a blatant lie claiming that just 4% of kids from Govan in Glasgow end up going to university, blaming "lack of aspiration" and "lack of investment".

The real figure is that 22.8% go on to university or higher education colleges, which is not particularly high compared to more affluent areas, but 570% higher than Swinson's unsourced claim.

The worst thing about this Lib-Dem lie isn't that Swinson used fake statistics, it's the pure classism of making out that kids from poor areas like Govan are less likely to succeed academically because of "lack of aspiration".

The lie also seemed to be motivated by a desire to terrify middle class English voters by raising the awful caricature of the terrifying working-class Govan shit hole (which is a bit like using Moss Side's fearsome reputation to terrify southerners about the whole of northern England).

Then there's the fact that the Lib-Dems actively helped their Tory mates to absolutely trash investment in education between 2010 and 2015 resulting in an unprecedented collapse in per pupil funding.

Furthermore the Lib-Dems helped their Tory chums to significantly lower infrastructure investment in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and the north of England, while massively boosting investment in London and the South East.

This means that that any kids from working class communities who do overcome the odds to succeed out of austerity-ravaged areas will end up being drawn away to London and the South East if they want the best jobs and opportunities. A brain-drain scenario that leaves abandoned northern communities even further behind.

And let's not forget that Swinson and her Lib-Dem pals' broken promise not to hike tuition fees, resulting in English students facing the highest fees in the world to study at public universities (Scotland escaped this grotesque Lib-Dem betrayal thanks to devolution and the SNP government's commitment to education as a right, not a commodity to be traded by the rich).

Even more concerning than Swinson's classism, lies, and white-washing of her own party's track record in government is the way the BBC uncritically amplified what she said.

Of course nobody expects the host Fiona Bruce to know precise higher education attainment statistics for every local area in the UK off the top of her head, but we could at least expect the BBC to check that statistics aren't lies before they tweet a clip of the lie, with an uncritical repetition of the lie written in the actual text of the Tweet!

If the BBC had any intention of actually holding the political class to account, they'd fact check the all of the Question Time clips they're thinking about tweeting to make sure they're not amplifying lies, and then publicly call out people who get caught lying on their show in order to actually hold them to account.

But far from calling this lie out, the BBC actively helped Swinson spread it even further by uncritically retweeting it.

Middle class Brexit-sceptic Lib-Dem types are often the first to complain when the BBC actively helps to amplify Brexiteer lies and false promises, but in order to avoid being total hypocrites they also have to complain when one of the darlings of their pro-austerity, pro-student debt, pro-privatisation, anti-investment, welfare-vandalising Lib-Dems spouts made up statistics. Especially when the made up statistics are intended to push the classist trope about kids in poor working class areas "lacking aspiration", as if it's their own fault for having severely reduced life opportunities, when in reality it was the Lib-Dems and their Tory mates who spent five ruinous years slashing education funding and deliberately rigging the UK economy against kids from Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and the north of England.

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Elitist rule-bending should have no place in the Labour Party

During the 2016 Labour leadership elections the right-wing controlled NEC orchestrated a massive purge of ordinary Labour membesr designed to prevent them voting for Jeremy Corbyn in the leadership election.

Literally thousands of people were instantly kicked out for the most trivial of offences. Stuff like retweeting a Green Party politician, admitting that they used to support another political party in the years before they joined Labour, and even for tweeting that they love the Foo Fighters.

There were no tears of frustration and screams of outrage from Labour right-wingers or elitist hacks in the mainstream media.

They didn't speak out because they tacitly approved of what was going on, knowing that a mass purge of ordinary members in order to rig the leadership election against Corbyn was their only chance of crushing Labour party socialism and returning the party to orthodox neoliberalism.

Their plot failed spectacularly because they would have had to have purged well over 120,000 members, but their absolute contempt for ordinary party members, and their willingness to abuse the rules for their own advantage was made absolutely and undeniably clear.

Fast forward to 2019 and these same Labour right-wingers and neoliberal media hacks are screeching with outrage that Alistair Campbell got himself kicked out of the Labour Party for openly bragging that he voted for the unrepentant, pro-austerity, welfare-vandalising, wage-repressing, Royal Mail-privatising Lib-Dem neoliberals who wilfully helped the Tories lay the groundwork for Brexit by trashing our living standards for five ruinous years.

So after saying absolutely nothing to condemn the bending of the party rules to purge thousands of ordinary party members in 2016, they're suddenly spewing outrage because the party rules haven't been bent in the complete opposite direction to let a high profile party figure publicly flaunt the party rule that you don't campaign and vote for rival political parties.

The distinction here is absolutely clear, and yet again it's elitism.

Labour right-wingers and mainstream media hacks don't give a shit about ordinary people like you and I, and wouldn't dream of speaking up for us when the rules are being deliberately bent to punish "the lower orders" for their political opinions.

But when it's one of their fellow elitists from deep within the Westminster establishment class getting punished for wantonly defying the party rules, suddenly it's tears of outrage and demands for an exception to a rule that would certainly have seen any ordinary member instantly purged from the party at any point in its history.

This idea that the rules should be bent to discriminate against ordinary people, but bent the complete other way to excuse those at the top of the party is outright and ugly elitism, and there's no excuse for it whatever, especially in a party like Labour.

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Tory austerity fanaticism is nonsensical backwards-economics

The Tory austerity myth told us that the only way to reduce public borrowing was a massive programme of public sector spending cuts.

During the austerity years the Tories and their Lib-Dem enablers pushed all kinds of ruinous policies that resulted in the slowest economic recovery in centuries, and the worst collapse in the value of UK workers' wages since records began, but perhaps the most damaging aspect of all was their deliberate reduction in infrastructure investment so that the UK became the lowest-investment country in the entire developed world.

The bulk of the Tory austerity cuts (especially reductions in local government funding and cancelled infrastructure projects) have been deliberately aimed at non-Tory voting areas like the North East, South Wales, the central belt of Scotland, and the former industrial cities of Yorkshire, the North West, and Midlands.

Infrastructure investment is generally a strong fiscal multiplier, especially at times where the cost of borrowing is exceptionally low (like the last decade), because this kind of spending creates jobs and economic demand in the short-term, and increases the future economic potential of an economy in the long-term (high-skill, high-tech, high-pay companies are far more likely to locate in places with great infrastructure, than places with failing public services and outdated and over-crowded public transport links).

It seems too obvious to have to spell it out in simple like this, but a near-decade of Tory austerity fanaticism has proven that huge swathes of the UK population will simply believe that the only way to reduce borrowing is to wantonly slash spending on the things that actually increase economic potential and prosperity!

The latest evidence that "let's cut our way to growth" austerity fanaticism is completely backwards comes from the Office for National Statistics data on economic surpluses and deficits by region, which demonstrates a strong correlation with their data on investment on stuff like infrastructure and public transport.

It's surely no coincidence that the two regions with by far the highest levels of public investment in infrastructure and public transport also have the biggest per capita surpluses, while the three most austerity-blighted regions with the lowest levels of investment are the ones with the worst per capita deficits.

Of course this isn't a hard and fast rule, because the North West and Scotland buck the trend slightly in the graph with larger per capita deficits despite higher rates of investment, but it's important to note that these regions have also suffered much more severely due to Tory austerity fanaticism compared to regions with higher levels of habitual Tory-voting, like the South West, East of England, and East Midlands.

All the evidence points to the fact that the Tories have got it completely backwards. That cutting the deficit is achieved by increased public investment, and that low-investment high-austerity regions continue running deficits.

The more you cut, the worse the deficit.

But this blatant Tory backwardness won't bother most people.

Most of the mainstream media will continue refusing to explain explaining the relatively simple fact that austerity fanaticism does exactly the opposite of what the Tories claimed it would, so they people won't even know about it, and many of those who do somehow come across the mountains of evidence that austerity is completely backwards economic gibberish will simply ignore it because it actually takes bravery to admit that you've been the subject of a decade-long con job, when it's much easier on the ego to just ignore the compelling evidence that you got totally duped.

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People's Vote are just as willing to use deceptive propaganda as the Brextremists

Despite all the numpties trying to pretend that Labour's Brexit position is too complicated to understand, it was always a quite simple strategy of trying to de-escalate and de-toxify Brexit by reconciling Leave and Remain instead of picking either the 52% or the 48% and tailoring their policies exclusively for them.

With Labour's vote share collapsing to leave them in 3rd place between the (exclusively 52%) Brexit Party and the (exclusively 48%) Lib-Dems, it's quite clear that people don't actually want Brexit reconciliation.

It doesn't matter how much it actually makes sense to try to de-escalate Brexit so that it doesn't continue degenerating towards an outright culture war between the two polar extremes, there's no way to pretend that it's popular.

Compromise and reconciliation are deeply unsexy political concepts when most people seem to want the certainty of picking one side or the other and naively hoping that their side doesn't end up on the losing side of the culture war they're gearing up for.

If I was forced to pick a side in a do-or-die showdown between the two polar extremes of the debate I'd obviously end up on the Remain side because "no deal" is such an unbelievably stupid concept that would trash our economy and absolutely burn all of the UK's negotiating capital the instant we did it.

But there's no denying that the Remain faction is just as riddled with ideological militants, opportunists, and outright liars as the opposite end of the spectrum.

The People's Vote graph in the article header is proof of how far these people will go to deceive.

After months of relentlessly misrepresenting Labour's position (oppose "no deal", repeatedly oppose Tory Brexit, push for a general Election, propose a fail safe least harmful version of Brexit, support calls for a final say referendum) as nasty pro-Brexit fanaticism in order to drive voters into the arms of the Lib-Dems, they're suddenly claiming Labour as a Remain party because it's the only possible way to make it look like the pro-Brexit parties (Brexit Party, Tories, UKIP) didn't win a bigger vote share than the exclusively Remain parties.

The weirdest thing about this kind of deception is the cultish myopia of it.

It's not designed to deceive Leave voters into change their mind, nor to deceive the undecided.

It's pure self-delusion aimed at convincing their own tribe that they won a clear majority, when the only way to create this deception is to suddenly appropriate the support of the very people they've been relentlessly misrepresenting, attacking and abusing for over a year in order to erode their support and pinch their voters!

An herein lies the danger of an another roll of the dice referendum.

It doesn't matter how much you dislike the Brextremists, it's obvious that their propaganda is clearly and unambiguously designed to win people over to their cause. They won the 2016 referendum, and Farage's Brexit Party just stormed these Euro elections. No matter how much we may dislike it, their propaganda is effective, and it clearly works.

Even though Remain lost in 2016 and they've got a lot of convincing to do in order to make up the ground, People's Vote propaganda like this isn't designed to win people over at all, it's purely self-righteous reassurance for the echo chamber.

The only people retweeting this blatantly deceptive graph are clearly on a Remainer self-delusion trip.

They don't want to admit that they've wasted the last three years so badly that despite all the Brexit chaos, and uncertainty, and deadlock, the exclusively 52% parties still somehow bagged a bigger vote share than the exclusively 48% parties.

The Tories have done such a spectacular job of ballsing Brexit up that Remain should be winning the argument all over the country by now, but their absolute obsession with a sore-loser referendum, their mobilisation behind the pro-austerity Lib-Dems who helped the Tories cause Brexit in the first place, and their spreading of absurd self-deception nonsense like this clearly answers the question of how Brexit Party swept the vast majority of English and Welsh constituencies.

It turns out that an awful lot of Remainers aren't even remotely interested in reaching out to left-behind communities to explain that it was domestic government policies like neoliberalism, privatisation mania, austerity fanaticism, wage repression, public service cuts, infrastructure under-investment, and vandalism of the social safety net that caused the living standards collapse, not immigrants and the EU.

In fact they're so uninterested in winning this argument they've actually flocked to support the pro-austerity, pro-privatisation Lib-Dem neoliberals, which is all very well in the mainly-metropolitan and well-to-do patches of the country that never experienced the full force of ruinous Tory austerity, but Remainers actively rewarding the austerity-enablers makes winning the argument even harder in the much more numerous places that were wracked by austerity fanaticism, and just turned out in much bigger numbers to vote for the far-right Brexit Party Faragists.
These people aren't interested in effective campaigning at all, all they're interested in is smugly congratulating themselves that they were right all along.

If they wilfully refuse to deal with the issues and injustices that caused Brexit in the first place in preference for spreading ridiculously misleading infographics designed to convince themselves that they won when they're still somehow losing, then they're never going to triumph in the "another roll of the dice" referendum they've invested so much of their time, effort, and resources on demanding are they?

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Theresa May's tears of self-pity

With tears in her eyes Theresa May announced that she will be resigning on June 7th.

Some people will feel pity for her, and believe the mainstream media hagiographies about how "she did her best", but the fact that she cried tears of self-pity as she resigned simply serve to illustrate her selfishness and callousness.

She cried no tears for the Windrush Brits she unlawfully discriminated against and even forced into exile overseas.

She cried no tears for the victims of the Grenfell fire when she rocked up to the scene and refused to even meet the survivors.

She cried no tears for the four million British kids growing up in dire poverty, and even sought to scrap their free school meals and replace them with a 7p per child breakfast.

She cried no tears for the millions of sick and disabled people that her government has systematically abused to the point of literally thousands of people being treated like idle scroungers and told that they're "fit for work" just weeks before their deaths.

She cried no tears for the millions of people who suffered the devastating consequences of Tory austerity fanaticism, and even lied through her teeth that "austerity is over" while continuing it.

She cried no tears for the Yemeni children blown to pieces by the tyrannical Saudi war criminals, in fact she kept on signing more and more arms contracts with them despite knowing that they're using British weapons to commit their war crimes.

Yet she cried tears for herself as she finally let go of her grip on political power.

No tears for the Windrush Brits she deported

No tears for the Grenfell fire victims

No tears for the disabled people her government has systematically abused

No tears for the 4million kids growing up in dire poverty

Tears of self-pity when she resignspic.twitter.com/4HQI78ZkiI

— Another Angry Voice (@Angry_Voice) May 24, 2019

Many people will argue that she was the worst Prime Minister ever, but in a way she was actually the perfect Tory Prime Minister. A perfect distillation of the utterly selfish, greed is a virtue, rob the poor to give to the rich, 'no such thing as society' Tory philosophy.

The only person she's ever felt sorry for is herself, so don't be fooled into taking pity on her.

If you want to feel sorry for anyone, take a moment to remember the millions of victims of her policies.

And if you don't want to do that, then have some pity on yourself and your fellow Brits, because whichever Brextremist the tiny clique of Tory party members pick out as our next Prime Minister is surely going to be even worse than she was.

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Neoliberalism is in decline, but don't celebrate too soon

Just a few weeks ago the Tories suffered their worst local election results in a quarter of a century.

This week they're going to get so smashed at the Euro elections it'll almost certainly be their worst electoral result in history. Most of the polls put them battling with the Greens for 4th/5th place.

Over 80% of the public think Theresa May has done a bad job of negotiating Brexit, and she's so unpopular within her own party that the Tory top brass are trying to tear up the party rule book in a desperate effort to force her out within six months of the last effort to depose her*.

A malicious and incompetent leader selfishly clinging onto power for as long as possible while her political party disintegrates around her.

This is what neoliberalism in decline looks like.

For four decades the Tory party have relentlessly served the interests of the mega-rich elitists who bankrolled their operation at the expense of everyone else, and at the expense of the UK economy as a whole.

They were bad enough before 1979, but when Thatcher injected the toxic hard-right political virus of neoliberalism into Westminster and the UK government they've turned into absolute monsters, continually asset stripping the UK and transferring as much wealth as possible from the ordinary majority to the tiny mega-rich minority.

Entire working class industries shut down as part of their ideological war on trade unions, communities all over Britain left to rot, continual government attacks on workers' rights and working conditions, ruinous austerity dogma, unprecedented wage repression, devastating public service cuts, deliberate under-investment in infrastructure, housing and education, wanton vandalism of the social safety net ...

Meanwhile they've provided a continual banquet of tax cuts, lavish handouts, and privatisation scams for their mega-rich backers to gorge themselves upon.

The ruination they've inflicted on ordinary workers, the poor, the vulnerable, the disabled, and left behind communities all over the United Kingdom is finally coming back onto them.

Their neoliberal policies have left millions of people broke, stressed and looking at the future without hope, so it's nice to think that just for once these elitist toffs are in a complete mess and looking at the future with dread, because it means they're getting just a tiny taste of the panic and distress their neoliberal agenda has inflicted on millions of other people's lives for the last four decades.

It's extraordinary to think that just four years ago all three of the main Westminster establishment parties went into the 2015 General Election with pro-austerity pro-privatisation orthodox neoliberal manifestos, yet now the godawful Lib-Dems look like they're going to be the last neoliberal standing!

Thankfully Labour have shifted back to their traditional pro-investment, pro-worker, pro-public ownership stance since Jeremy Corbyn became leader, and the Tories are on the brink of abandoning the neoliberal orthodoxy altogether in order to chase the repulsive extreme-right ultranationalist blue-kip demographic who have been abandoning them in droves since Theresa May completely banjaxed the Brexit negotiations.

Labour's position is to try to reverse the damage of the last four decades by investing in our public services and infrastructure projects, giving Britain a pay rise, and making corporations and the mega-rich stop dodging tax and pay their fair share.

Under whichever Brextremist replaces Theresa May the Tories are going to try to use the dire consequences of their own neoliberal policies in order to push an even more fanatically right-wing agenda.

And the Lib-Dems will be left in the abandoned neoliberal territory begging for a return to "more of the same" and facing the eventual choice of whether to help Labour undo the damage, or back the far-right Tories.

It's pretty damned obvious what they'll chose, given that they participated in the 2010-15 coalition government that unlawfully discriminated against and deported black British citizens, introduced deeply illiberal secret courts, imposed ruinous austerity dogma, unlawfully attacked workers' rights, stripped the police and fire services to the bone, trashed our future economic potential by under-investing in infrastructure, gagged charities, flogged the Royal Mail off at miles below its true value, turned Libya into a lawless terrorist breeding ground, gutted local government funding, delivered unprecedented rates of wage repression, privatised 3/4 of English secondary schools into the hands of unaccountable private profiteers, systematically abused sick and disabled people, and so much more ...

They're hardly likely to back a Labour government intent on undoing as much of this damage as possible, so they'll stand in opposition to Labour in order to protect this appalling stuff that they actually see as 'gains', and if the chance comes up to form another coalition with the Tories, they'll obviously jump at it, because if Theresa May's fascistic Hostile Environment and vile anti-immigrant hatemongering as Home Secretary weren't too much for them between 2010 and 2015, they'll likely be fine with whatever far-right antics Boris Johnson/Dominic Raab/Michael Gove get up to won't they?

The ongoing collapse of orthodox neoliberalism means there's going to have to be a paradigm shift in British politics.

Either we try to reverse course and undo the worst of the four decades of neoliberal damage, or we double down and embrace the far-right.

This means anyone attempting to occupy the rapidly evacuated faux centre-ground of orthodox neoliberalism is going to have to accept the risk that they're going to end up backing the far-right by default, because neoliberalism has an awful lot more in common with outright fascism than it does with democratic socialism.

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* = I'm not even a fan of an "another roll of the dice" referendum but it's funny how the Tories think they should be allowed to vote again within a matter of months because they've changed their minds, but the British public shouldn't have another say after over three years isn't it?

Why are so many Remainers voting for the Lib-Dem austerity-enablers?

So apparently the UK political scene is so banjaxed that we're actually trusting Lib-Dems again, and it's not even four years since their disastrous coalition with the Tories came to an end!

Maybe Remainers flocking to support the pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, social safety net-trashing Lib-Dems would make some kind of sense if the Lib-Dems had shown any kind of remorse for what they wilfully helped the Tories to do to the United Kingdom. But no. There's no remorse at all. 

• There's no remorse over the economically illiterate austerity agenda that led to the slowest post-crisis economic recovery in centuries, and which still hasn't eliminated the deficit despite the fact they said it would have done before May 2015 (over four years ago).

• There's no remorse over the deliberate wage repression policies that led to the worst sustained decline in UK workers' wages on record, and set up an entire decade of lost wage growth.

• There's no remorse over the privatisation of the Royal Mail property portfolio at an absurdly tiny fraction of its real value. In fact the remorse is so non-existent that they even elected the man who ripped the public off to the tune of £hundreds of millions as their current leader!

• There's no remorse about the soaring rates of child poverty, and in-work poverty, nor over the fact that the vast majority of austerity cuts were loaded onto the shoulders of women, especially single mothers.

• There's no remorse over helping Theresa May slash the police force by 21,000 and close literally hundreds of police stations, which has contributed to the violent crime epidemic we're suffering today.

• There's no remorse about their decision to oversee the lowest rate of house building since the 1920s, while using financial trickery to re-inflate the housing bubble and drive housing costs back up and beyond the unsustainable levels before the 2008 bankers' insolvency crisis.

• There's no remorse over the brutal Tory sanctions regime, nor the despicable disability denial system that has resulted in literally thousands of people dying within weeks of being declared "fit for work" and thrown off their disability benefits.

• There's no remorse over Lib-Dem votes in favour of deeply illiberal policies like secret courts, the gagging law, bedroom tax, dripa, Theresa May's Hostile Environment, and the catastrophic strategy of turning Libya into a lawless terrorism breeding ground like Blair and Bush did to Iraq.

• And worst of all there's no remorse about the way the far-right blamed the collapsing living standards these disgusting policies causes on immigrants and the EU in order to promote Brexit, and the Lib-Dems just bit their tongues, because any effort to explain that the real causes of the living standards collapse (austerity, wage repression, infrastructure under-investment, public service cuts, vandalism of the social safety net) would have illustrated their own complicity. So they just stayed silent and let the far-right win.

And now just look at the delight on the faces of Danny Alexander, Nick Clegg, and George Osborne in the photo above.

These three men impoverished literally millions of their fellow countrymen, and deliberately trashed the future economic potential of the UK in order to fund a disgusting sequence of tax cuts and handouts to corporations and the mega-rich.

They raked in lavish six figure salaries while they were doing it, and now all three have quit politics to rake in even more extravagant salaries from private sector employers.

They don't give a shit about all the people they trampled into destitution, nor the fact that their ruinous economic policies created the dramatic collapse in living standards that led directly to Brexit.

But somehow, even when there are plenty of explicitly anti-austerity options for Remainers to choose from (Green Party, SNP, Plaid Cymru) Remainers are flocking to support the austerity-enabling Lib-Dems.

Assuming that people aren't completely gullible idiots with goldfish-memories, the only possible conclusion is that an awful lot of Remainers are the comfortably well off who never suffered the truly dire consequences of austerity dogma, wage repression, welfare cuts, and public service destruction.

They want to reward the party that enabled all of this malice in the first half of this decade because they were comfortably well-to-do during that period, and quite content at the time because the impoverishment was happening to other people below them on the social ladder.

They want to go back to the way things were before because they were perfectly comfortable when the destitution was being forced on "the lower orders" in order to fund tax cuts and handouts for corporations and the mega rich.

And they certainly don't want to consider that the vile poverty-spreading policies the Lib-Dems enabled were one of the main causal factors in the Brexit chaos in the first place.

They're like lung cancer sufferers dramatically increasing the amount of cigarettes they smoke in the hope that it'll somehow cure the disease they've given themselves.

By supporting a party that enabled so much ideological malice against the poor, working classes, disabled people, local communities, they're actually intent on making themselves look exactly like the aloof metropolitan elitists that the Leave camp always love to portray Remainers as.

Every time they turn up in comments sections to proudly brag that they're voting Lib-Dem because they "don't care about anything else except stopping Brexit", they're displaying their outright contempt for the people who actually suffered under the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition.

If these people can afford to not care about austerity dogma, wage repression, public service cuts, vandalism of the social safety net, etc, then they can hardly complain when left behind communities say that Remainers don't give a shit about them and their problems can they?

And what makes it so much worse is that they're so mindlessly optimistic that the Lib-Dems won't just completely shaft them again.

How exactly does electing a load of pro-austerity pro-privatisation neoliberals into the European Parliament do anything to stop Brexit when the only place it can actually be stopped is Westminster?

Voting for the austerity-enablers who helped create the Brexit backlash in the first place is nonsense, especially since boosting the number of austerity-enforcing neoliberals in the European Parliament does nothing practical to actually stop Brexit whatever.

But then the Brexit Party Faragists are ridiculous nonsense on the other side of the Brexit spectrum, so I guess maybe the thinking of these Lib-Dem supporters is as simple as "if Brexit supporters are going to vote for a polarised right-wing nonsense party, then so will we"!

 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 BBC's outright hypocrisy over racism

When Danny Baker Tweeted a picture of a chimp dressed up like an aristocrat in reaction to the royal baby coverage, he was quite rightly criticised.

He later apologised and claimed that he was trying to lampoon inherited privilege, and hadn't even considered the racial connotations, but by then it was too late for him, he'd already been sacked by the BBC.

Having listened to Danny Baker's shows many times in the past I've never heard him say anything remotely racist (it's mainly irreverent nonsense) and given his long broadcasting history of never saying anything even remotely racist or bigoted, my opinion is that his apology should be taken in good faith.

The problem of course is that the BBC's decision to sack Baker betrays barefaced hypocrisy.

You only have to look back to Alan Sugar's brazenly racist Tweet about the Senegal football team last year to find a completely different approach from the BBC. Sugar was completely unapologetic about his racist Tweet, and the BBC somehow decided not to sack the star of their hit show The Apprentice.

Either the BBC's attitude to racism has developed extremely quickly from allowing unapologetic racists to get away with it last year, to sacking people for racist-looking Tweets now, or there's something else at play.

Maybe the BBC considers social media racism to be perfectly fine when it's aimed downwards, at nations like Senegal, and at African beach vendors, but when it's aimed at the royals, even inadvertently, it's an instant sacking offence.

This kind of Nazi-style racism is considered
fine and dandy by the BBC.

Then to exacerbate the hypocrisy on the very evening that Danny Baker was sacked they invited Nigel Farage onto their flagship Question Time show for a record 33rd time. 

Despite Farage's long history of making racist comments about Romanians, using Nazi style propaganda to attack refugees, aligning with outright fascists in the European Parliament, whipping up anti-Muslim sentiments, and wilfully spreading the extreme-right white supremacist "great replacement" conspiracy theory, he's always welcome in BBC studios.

And then there was the time that they invited the extreme-right hate preacher Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) onto Newsnight for a softball interview on the very day one of his acolytes was jailed for a murderous terrorist rampage in Finsbury Park.

And then there was the time that the BBC invited leader of the Generation Identity hate group onto Newsnight on the very day one of their followers had carried out the mass killings in Christchurch, New Zealand.

And then on the day after Danny Baker's sacking, the BBC invited the right-wing polemicist Ben Shapiro onto their Daily Politics show, despite his history of anti-Muslim hatemongering, his racist comments about Arabs, his constant spreading of far-right conspiracy nonsense like Obama birtherism and the Nazi-derived cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, and the fact he inspired the extreme-right terrorist who carried out the Quebec City Mosque shooting (who obsessively viewed Shapiro's Twitter output).

 

If Danny Baker's Tweet was so offensive he had to
be barred from the BBC, why isn't this?

The BBC's warped explanation for platforming Shapiro was to boast about how many Facebook and Twitter followers he has, as if his popularity is somehow a shield against his repulsive political views, and his dangerous extreme-right conspiracy-mongering.

Of course the BBC's 'he's got loads of supporters' argument could have been used in favour of inviting Hitler onto the BBC in 1939, or the murderous Chilean dictator Pinochet in the 1980s, or Osama Bin Laden in the 2000s.

This facile 'he's popular so we have to give him a platform' argument also creates the impression that if Danny Baker had had a few hundred thousand more followers on social media, perhaps he wouldn't just have not been sacked, but he would have actually been invited onto flagship BBC politics shows to talk about his distasteful Tweet!

It seems that if you're an out-and-our racist or an extreme-right polemicist with a long history of spreading racist ideas and far-right conspiracies, the BBC are clamouring to invite you on their shows to help you to widen your profile, and if you're a star of one of their hit shows and you aim your despicable social media racism downwards and then outright refuse to apologise for it, that's perfectly fine too.

But woe betide you if the royal family are the subject of your ridiculously ill-considered Tweet.

I'm not trying to argue that Danny Baker is blameless, or that he didn't deserve criticism for what he Tweeted.

What I'm saying is that the BBC's hypocrisy is absolutely undeniable if they sack him over what he did despite his long broadcasting history on non-racism, and his apology, while they continue to wilfully platform unrepentant racists, and extreme-right polemicists like Alan Sugar, Nigel Farage, 'Tommy Robinson', Generation Identity, and Ben Shapiro.

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