The Tories are claiming that cycling to work instead of driving causes congestion and air pollution!

The latest anti-Labour Tory attack line is so unbelievably stupid that you have to see it to believe it.

The Kensington and Chelsea Tories have been handing out flyers attacking the development of London's cycle infrastructure with absurd claims that measures to increase the number of people cycling to work instead of driving will increase "traffic congestion" and "air pollution".

Air pollution and traffic jams

Now, every evidence-based air pollution study I've ever seen on improved cycling and walking infrastructure has detailed massive reductions in air pollutants like nitrogen oxides, particulate matter, and black carbon.

According to a study by Sustrans, if the number of UK cycling trips could be doubled, and the number of short walking trips increased, this would produce such a significant reduction in air pollution that 8,300 lives a year would be saved.

Aside from the improvements in air quality and life expectancy, their study estimated a £5.67 billion boost to the UK over the course of 10 years. 

These are huge quality of life improvements with a significant economic benefit to boot, all for a relatively modest initial outlay in infrastructure improvements (the £42 million the Tories are shitting themselves with rage over is significantly less than 0.1% of the projected cost of HS2).

Research into a similar Cycle Highways scheme in the Netherlands found that the construction of 675 km of cycle highways resulted in a 3.8 million hours per year reduction in traffic jams!

Another study in Waltham Forest demonstrated a massive reduction in severe air pollution after the introduction of a Mini-Holland cycling infrastructure plan.

And another study in Washington DC indicated a 4% reduction in traffic congestion that was directly attributable to their Capital Bikeshare scheme.

If the Tories want to claim that improved cycling infrastructure increases traffic congestion and air pollution, they really need to show some counter-evidence to the numerous studies demonstrating the exact opposite effect.

Local Businesses

The claimed "damage to local businesses" is at least just misleading, rather than an outright inversion of reality.

Of course some local businesses may be inconvenienced during the construction phase, but you'd have to be utterly delusional to believe that more people walking and cycling along your street, rather than driving through in cars, would be a bad thing for local shops and businesses in the long run.

Trees

As for the tree removals that the Tories seem so upset about, I'm pretty sure the reduction in CO2 emissions from reduced car trips and traffic jams would be more than enough to offset the loss of a few trees, and if the Tories really did give a damn about trees, they could easily demand that the developers plant two or more trees in the local area for every one they need to remove.

The Tories obviously don't give a shit about trees, they've just added it because a list with two bullet points (one of which is the most absurd of lies) would have looked absolutely ridiculous.

True motivations

The worst thing about this Tory nonsense is that we know what all of this is really motivated by.

The Tories are blatantly pandering to car users because they know the kind of people driving massive pollutant-billowing SUVs around London are one of their core demographics.

Their attitude is screw people on bikes, and those in the poorer areas of London who are far more likely to suffer toxic levels of pollution, they're never going to vote Tory anyway, so "fuck them".

In fact the Tories have such contempt for people living in high pollution areas that Boris Johnson and his Tory minions deliberately buried a damning study about the dangerously high levels of toxic air pollution in London for several years, rather than do anything about it.

The Tories obviously don't give a damn about air pollution, or congestion, or trees, they simply want to disguise their real car-supremacist agenda with a load of misleading drivel instead of being honest about it.

So fuck all the people who would like to cycle to work but don't feel willing to risk their lives because the current infrastructure is too dangerous. Fuck all the kids with asthma and allergies that are triggered and exacerbated by air pollution. Fuck the thousands who die each year because of the filthy air in our cities.

As far as the Tories are concerned the car is king, and car drivers are the only demographic they're interested in pandering to, and they're going to pander so hard they're resorting to outright and easily disprovable lies.

What a noxious bunch they are.

 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

If they want to fight a culture war, Brexit-sceptics urgently need to up their game

One of the most infuriating things about covering this interminable Brexit shambles is the stultifying 'groupthink' that infests the Remain movement.

It's impossible to count the number of times I've been insuted and accused of being a Brexiteer for questioning the strategy of investing so much time and effort in demanding an incredibly risky "another roll of the dice" referendum with the Tories still in power, and nothing whatever having been done to clamp down on electoral cheats, political liars, and social media dark ads since Remain lost the previous referendum in 2016.

Despite all the smears and abuse from the 'groupthink' mob I actually hold a significantly firmer stance against the Brexit chaos than a lot of them seem to, believing that Article 50 should be revoked (as per the ECJ ruling that the UK can revoke it at any time) and that another referendum should only ever be held under a specific set of circumstances:

1. The Brexiteers must come up with a detailed manifesto detailing how they would seek to implement Brexit (Single Market? Customs Union? Protection of workers' rights? Protection of environmental laws? Consumer protections? Security co-operation? Negotiating objectives for a post-Brexit trade deal with the EU. Plans for the Irish border issue. What if Scotland vote's against it again? ...) that they can be held to account on. 

2. Electoral laws must be strengthened to clamp down on electoral cheats and liars with substantial fines, bars from political office, and jail terms for the worst offenders. 

3. New regulations must be introduced to clamp down on social media dark ads.

The problem of course is that the trendy Remainer 'groupthink' is to continue demanding another referendum now, so my views that the absolute priority should be preventing a catastrophic "no deal" meltdown, and that another referendum with undefined options on the ballot is an insanely risky strategy are considered unacceptable thought crime by a significant swathe of Remainers, who spit hate at me and even accuse me of being a Brexiteer because I won't mindlessly go along with the insanely risky gamble that they insist is the best approach.

However with the impending prospect of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, surely it would be sensible for these another referendum now advocates to accept that their dream of a do-or-die, clash of civilisations culture war of another referendum is becoming vanishingly unlikely, and stop throwing even more energy and resources into demanding something that's just not going to happen?

But "sensible" just isn't in a lot of these people's natures.

From their spreading of delusional fantasies that pre-2016 Britain was some kind of magnificent utopia, to spitting hate at people who are even more sceptical about Brexit than they are for the heresy of thinking that an "another roll of the dice" referendum with the Tories still in charge is actually a terribly risky idea; from refusing to critique austerity and its living standards-trashing role in causing the Brexit backlash in the first place, to arrogantly sneering at left-behind communities like Morecambe; a lot of this behaviour is strategically inept, dangerously counter-productive, and about as far from "sensible" as it's possible to get.

And "sensible" simply doesn't take into account the sunk costs fallacy either.

In order to switch from Another referendum now to Revoke Article 50 and no more undefined options on ballots ever they'd have to admit that huge amounts of the time and effort they expended on their People's Vote hysteria were essentially wasted, when they should have seen sense months ago and switched to Revoke Article 50 after it become absolutely obvious that Theresa May and the Tories had made an absolute mess of the Brexit negotiations.

Even though the looming spectre of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister by default means their another referendum now objective is further away than it's ever been, the temptation for them will obviously to continue chucking away even more time, effort, and resources rather than admit that it was a mistake, and move on to a more coherent and less risky strategy.

You only need to look at how the Brexiteers have worked tirelessly to move away from the "we can be like Norway" and "only a madman would quit the Single Market" positioning of the 2016 referendum to the "no deal" militancy of today to understand that Brexit-sceptics need to adopt an equally firm position in response in the face of this ever intensifying ideological fanaticism.

If you're absolutely set against any kind of Brexit compromise as a strategy to ensure that a ruinous "no deal" meltdown can't happen, then you really need to take something solid into the culture war you're determined to provoke, rather than some pathetic wishy-washy "let's play again in the rigged game we lost at last time" nonsense.

Brexit-sceptics shouldn't be demanding a re-roll of the dice under the exact same circumstances they lost the last time, they should be demanding revocation of Article 50 because of the unbelievably shambolic mess the Brexiteers have made of their own damned project, and stipulations to ensure that any future referendums are conducted fairly, and with clearly defined options rather than vague objectives on the ballot.

Anything less is just doomed-to-fail weakness in the face of the extreme ideological militancy of "no deal" fanaticism.

 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 barbaric Tory sanctions regime is still going on

The draconian Tory sanctions regime is callous, shockingly ineffective, economically unjustifiable, and deadly.

The stated purpose of the DWP Sanctions regime is to shock benefits claimants into putting more effort into looking for work by consigning them to periods of absolute destitution.

The Sanctions regime hit its peak between 2012 and 2015 during the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition, with up to 90,000 people per month hurled into absolute poverty, and never fewer than 30,000 people per month subjected to either Jobseekers or Universal Credit sanctions in the austerity coalition era.

The sanctioning rate has dropped off since the Lib-Dems left government, but there are still thousands of people per month receiving letters like the one above, and being forced to go through lengthy (and expensive to the taxpayer) appeals processes, or just give up fighting against a system that's designed to abuse them and live in extreme poverty for as long as it takes.

Callous

Excerpt from a 2014 Johnny Void article
about Jobcentres rewarding staff for 
high sanctions rates.

We know that during the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition Jobcentre staff were given mandatory targets to sanction a set percentage of claimants per week, in order to get the unemployment figures down (people subjected to sanctions aren't counted as officially unemployed).

It's beyond obvious that Jobcentre staff ended up targeting the mentally ill and severely uneducated by sanctioning every minor error, or deliberately giving them impossible tasks to comply with (like two appointments at the same time so they miss one and get sanctioned).

It's just so much easier to target the vulnerable than it is to expend significant amounts of time and energy on catching the tiny minority of die-hard benefits scroungers who know exactly which hoops to jump through to avoid losing their payments.

Perhaps most shockingly of all, the Liberal Democrats have openly bragged about how they helped the Tories make this sanctions regime even more draconian, in return for 5p charges on plastic bags.

Ineffective

We know from extensive research that sanctions are a massively counter-productive method of encouraging people into work.

Just think about it for yourself. If you had your income reduced to just £5.82 to last an entire month, how would you afford to print CVs, travel to job interviews, clean your clothes, eat properly so you can concentrate on making a good impression?

Multiple research papers have found that the victims of DWP sanctions ended up suffering extreme poverty, ill-health, mental distress, and resorting to survival crime like shoplifting.

Yet the Tories persist in using these sanctions (which disproportionately hit disabled people) under their warped belief that you motivate the poor to work harder by making them poorer, while you motivate the rich to work harder by giving them ever more lavish handouts and tax breaks!

Deadly

It's no exaggeration to say that sanctions are deadly. The most notorious example was the death of the ex-serviceman David Clapson who died of diabetic ketoacidosis in 2016 after being left penniless by sanctions and having his insulin supply spoiled because his electricity supply was cut off.

Although the most high-profile case because of the campaigning of his family members, David Clapson is far from the only example, with dozens of people having been driven to suicide after suffering sanctions.

Economically unjustifiable

Three years ago the National Audit Office found that the benefits sanctions regime costs more to administer than it will ever save in reduced benefits payments.

This means that the Tories have actually been using public funds to treat people in this despicable manner, and they've continued doing so despite knowing that it's a total waste of public money.

These Tory devils know perfectly well that sanctions don't work, yet expect the rest of us to actually subsidise their barbaric treatment of vulnerable and disabled people through our taxes because they apparently get some kind of kick out of it.

It would be bad enough if they were behaving like this in order to save a few million quid, but they're not saving anything, it's actually costing us fortunes to subsidise their system for treating vulnerable people in this disgusting way!

Conclusion

Even if you're the kind of person who doesn't care about all of the evidence that sanctions are unspeakably cruel and demonstrably ineffective, or that they're disproportionately used against vulnerable and disabled people, or even if you're completely indifferent about all of the suffering, misery, and death this barbaric regime has caused, surely you can't believe that it's a good or sensible use of public funds?

Surely you can't approve of the money you pay in taxes being used to subsidise a system designed to make vulnerable and disabled people suffer absolute destitution?

Surely you can think of better uses of your money than that, even if it's just being allowed to keep a bit more of it in your own pocket?

 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

This misty-eyed Remainer revisionism needs to stop

One of the most irritating tropes that keeps doing the rounds in the Remainer echo chambers is that pre-2016 Britain was some kind of glorious good-natured utopia until 17.4 million Leave voters decided to fuck everything up on purpose for no good reason.

Aside from all the stuff I've detailed in the header image, just consider these facts:

• Tory wage repression policies resulted in the longest sustained collapse in the value of UK workers wages since records began.

• Economically illiterate "let's cut our way to growth" Tory austerity fanaticism resulted in the slowest post-crisis economic recovery in Centuries.

• Tory austerity fanaticism also resulted in the closure of literally thousands of public facilities and services (hospitals, police & fire stations, Sure Start centres, libraries and other local government services ...) and left the remaining services massively over-stretched, under-funded, and under-staffed. 

• Between 2010 and 2016 the two main areas of growth in Britain were in exploitative and unstable Zero Hours Contracts, and in people reduced to such poverty that they were left reliant on food bank charitable handouts.

All of this stuff was happening before the EU referendum in 2016, and the self-serving silence of the Tories and centrists during the EU referendum (because they didn't want to implicate themselves for supporting all of these ruinous policies) left the door wide open for the Brexiteers to cynically blame all of it (collapsing wages, crumbling public services, widespread poverty, shitty low-paid jobs ...) on immigrants and the EU.

Of course a lot of smug "centrists" were having a whale of a time between 2010 and 2016, entirely unconcerned by the ravages of austerity, social security vandalism, and wage repression because the horrifying consequences weren't falling on them ... but millions of us were fully aware that Britain wasn't the "moderate", "good-natured", "fundamentally calm country" of "good practical judgement" that exists in this absurd centrist delusion.

The most damaging thing about this bone-headed centrist delusion that because everything was fine and dandy for them pre-2016, it was fine and dandy for everyone else too, is the fact that this stance is so damned counter-productive.

If Remainers really wanted to convince Leave voters to switch allegiances in the "another roll of the dice" referendum they've invested so much effort in demanding, hitting the people you need to convince with this "everything was fucking marvellous before you stupid fuckers fucked it all up for no reason at all" attitude is about as counter-productive as you could imagine.

A practical approach to undoing this Brexit farce would be to try to understand the underlying causes of the Brexit vote, and to point out that most of the crap people were suffering in the neglected, de-industrialised, and left-behind communities that voted for Brexit was due to decades of hard-right neoliberal economic policies, ruinous Tory austerity fanaticism, unprecedented wage repression, and malicious public service vandalism ... not immigrants and the EU.

There's no way you change the minds of the appalling far-right ultranationalist Blue-Kippers in the Home Counties and the Shires because they'll always be financially insulated from the worst of the Brexit chaos, but it is at least possible to reach out to people in left-behind communities and explain that their suffering was caused by malicious domestic government policies like deindustrialisation, austerity, welfare vandalism, infrastructure under-investment, and severe public service cuts, not by membership of the EU.

But the smug centrist approach is to tell people in these communities that everything was always quite simply marvellous, and that they should have been perfectly happy with the pathetic crumbs that they were getting in a system that was working absolutely fine for the well-to-do, rather than deciding to fuck everything up for no reason at all.

The worst impact of Tory austerity fanaticism a lot of these smug centrist Remainers will have felt is having their bin collections reduced from weekly to fortnightly, so it's no wonder they're absolutely incapable of empathising with the pain, and misery, and hopelessness, and stress of the poor and vulnerable people who suffered under the jackboot of it.

So they sneer at them: How dare working class Leave voters fuck everything up for us for no good reason? How dare you all be so stupid and irresponsible? How dare you not listen to us when we've told you what's best for you? How dare you ruin our beloved delusions that Britain was some kind of magnificent utopia? How dare Jeremy Corbyn go to a laughable shit hole like Morecambe rather than pandering to us?

And somehow these people imagine that they'd actually be able to win another EU referendum by campaigning like this!

Remainers tend to absolutely hate it when their opponents portray them as smug, out-of-touch metropolitan elitists who are only concerned with their own comfort.

But when extremely high-profile Remainers resort to this sickening rose-tinted glorification of past circumstances that were indisputably nightmarish for millions of us, and thousands of other Remainers retweet this counter-productive nonsense all over the Internet, how else do they expect to be perceived?

The terrifying thing is that having intolerably smug and strategically inept people like this push themselves to the forefront of the anti-Brexit movement means that it's almost certainly doomed to fail, and their failure will mean that the austerity-victims that they quite clearly didn't give a shit about during their imagined pre-2016 utopia will be the ones to bear the brunt of it all over again.

 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

Education is a right and a social benefit, not a commodity to be traded by the rich

After nine years of deliberate Tory vandalism the UK education system is in absolute chaos, but Labour have a fantastic proposal to reverse this damage and make the British education system fit for purpose again.

Under Jeremy Corbyn Labour have developed some fantastic policies, such as publicly owned not-for-profit rail, national grid, water supply and Royal Mail, a National Investment Bank like Norway's Sovereign Wealth Fund, decentralisation of political and economic power, restoration of the NHS, investment economics instead of austerity fanaticism, and the long-overdue closure of the depraved Tory disability denial system.

But the shining jewel in Labour's policy proposals is the establishment of a National Education Service to provide quality education, for free, to all who require it.

It's a fantastic idea because access to a good education is a right, and an obvious benefit to all of society. And the Tories are horrifyingly wrong to have treated education as a commodity to be traded for profit by the rich.

The Tory damage

The damage the Tories have done to our education system over the last nine years will echo down the generations in the form of squandered opportunities, misallocated resources, wasted potential, and unpayable debts.

From the roots of the education to the branches Tory education policy has been a disaster. Here's just some of the detail.

• The imposition of unprecedented 8% school funding cuts since 2010, inflicted as a result of the Tory fixation with economically illiterate austerity fanaticism (to check the damage they've done to your local schools since 2015 use this school cuts calculator).

• Tory contempt for humanities and the arts has resulted in a sustained ideological attack on stuff like arts, drama and music in schools. The Tories don't seem to give a damn that the creative industries is one of the few areas where the UK is still a world leader, nor that this sector is now worth over £100 billion per year to the UK economy.

• Inequalities between schools have been dramatically exacerbated by Tory education reforms, meaning that whether your kids get a good education or a poor one is even more of a Postcode lottery than it ever was before.

• 75% of secondary schools in England transferred to the ownership of shockingly unaccountable and profiteering Academy chains which are designed to topslice our (already diminished) kids' education budget via bloated executive salaries.

• The imposition of outrageous levels of student debt via £9,000 per year university fees on rip-off inflation+3% repayment terms that mean 83% of post-2012 graduates will never pay them off, despite entire working lifetimes of paying out 9% of their disposable income in "aspiration tax".

• The Tory fixation with austerity dogma has had its most damaging effect on the education system in adult education, which has suffered an astounding 45% funding cut since 2010. It should be stark-staringly obvious that a well-funded and easily accessible adult education and retraining system should be a vital component in an ever increasingly volatile jobs market, but the Tories have cut it to shreds.

National Education Service

Labour's concept of an integrated National Education Service to provide quality education from cradle to grave is absolutely brilliant, and could revolutionise education in the same way that the introduction of the NHS in 1948 revolutionised our health system and improved our nation's health.

Stop the profiteering

The right-wing idea that education is a commodity to be traded by the rich is an affront to basic common sense.

The primary purpose of an education system should be to provide the best standard of education, not to extract quick profits out of the system.

It's just absurd short-term thinking to think about the education system as a primary source of profit (via profiteering academy chains, dodgy no-bid supply contracts, rip-off student debt repayments ...) rather than a crucial component of future economic prosperity.

The better educated we are as a nation, the more economic potential we have, and the more cash that gets siphoned away in bloated executive salaries and private profits, the less is left to actually spend on the principal task of providing a quality education.

The establishment of a National Education Service would squeeze out the profiteers and reorientate our schools, colleges, universities, and adult education facilities back towards what always should have remained the primary objective: providing the best possible education.

Workforce flexibility

Perhaps the most obvious area where the National Education Service would be an advantage would be the provision of adult education and retraining.

Instead of using draconian sanctions to hound people into finding work (that often simply doesn't exist), referrals to the National Education Service for retraining would clearly be an awful lot more effective.

Someone who loses their job in their 50s doesn't need hounding and abusing until they find work, what they probably need is a skills upgrade, from computer literacy to new skillsets entirely, and a National Education Service that provided these courses free of charge to anyone who needs them would be an obvious economic benefit to the nation in the long-term.

Education for all

One of the most commonplace right-wing whinges goes along the line of "why should I pay for other people's education opportunities when I didn't get a good education myself".

This unbelievably selfish but incredibly commonplace whinge would be eliminated by the introduction of a National Education Service providing access to free education for all.

If everyone is entitled to free education and training, then the only ones left whinging would be those who don't want to benefit. "why should I pay for other people's education opportunities when I don't want to be educated myself" doesn't have quite the same impact does it?

Policy-based debate

The proposal of a National Education Service is a fantastic policy, but few people know about it because the Tories and their cheerleaders in the mainstream media know that Labour and the left would win hands down when it comes to policy because the general public strongly support most of it (see image).

That's why politics is continually debased to such an extent with an endless barrage of trivial nonsense and outright smears.

Corbyn didn't bow properly. Corbyn didn't sing the national anthem. Corbyn doesn't dress in expensive Saville Row suits so he's unfit to be Prime Minister. Jeremy Corbyn's an IRA supporter (because he met members of Sinn Féin and the Ulster Unionists to appeal for a peaceful resolution to the conflict). Corbyn went to Morecambe. Corbyn is a Czech spy. Corbyn supporters are all Stalinists and Trotskyites. Let's focus on anti-Semitism in Labour all the time (when there are way more anti-Semites in the Tory ranks). Corbyn supported Hitler during WWII (even though he wasn't even born). Corbyn is a Russian stooge (even though the Tories are the ones raking in £millions from Russian oligarchs and Putin cronies). Corbyn muttered "stupid woman" (or was it "stupid people"? let's debate this for several days!)

The barrage of nonsense and smears is as endless as it is deliberate.

They'd much rather we expend our time and effort defending Corbyn, and Labour, and the left in general from this constant bombardment of gibberish, than spending it discussing and explaining Labour's policies.

And the concept of a cradle to grave National Education Service is one of the best Labour policies of all. Maybe let's talk about that for a while, rather than continually fixating on the latest faux outrage or manufactured smear?

 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 Golden Biscuit prize for duplicitous posturing goes to ... Ed Davey of the Lib-Dems

In 2014 Tory Home Secretary Theresa May pushed through the outrageous "Immigration Act" which was intended to create a "Hostile Environment" for anyone without the certification to prove that they had a right to live in Britain.

Toty Hostile Environment was eventually used to deny housing, employment, banking services, social security, and even life-saving medical treatment to Black british citizens of the Windrush generation.

Scores of black British citizens were even deported under Theresa May's "deport first, hear appeals later" principle, with several actually dying in exile overseas, thousands of miles away from their families and friends, and the land that they called home.

In March 2019 this despicable legislation was declared unlawful in a British court of law for the racist way it was used to discriminate against black Brits.

Yet on the newly instituted Windrush Day, Theresa May set about audaciously whitewashing her demonstrable track record of racist discrimination against black Brits, and the ever-duplicitous Lib-Dems are distancing themselves from the policy that they helped vote through, and even pretending that they're long-standing opponents of hostile Tory immigration policies!
 

Yes, Theresa May bears ultimate responsibility for the Hostile Environment, (and for making it even worse in 2016), but the Lib-Dems absolutely loved it at the time, in fact one of their MPs Mark Hunter actually served as one of the "tellers for the ayes" in the parliamentary vote!

Check Hansard if you don't believe me.

Former Lib-Dem leader Tim Farron voted in favour of Theresa May's unlawfully racist Hostile Environment.

Current Lib-Dem leader Vince Cabe voted in favour of Theresa May's unlawfully racist Hostile Environment.

Only 3 of the then 57 Lib-Dem MPs listened to their consciences and defied the Lib-Dem party whip to vote against Theresa May's unlawfully racist Hostile Environment.

But taking the Golden Biscuit prize for duplicitous posturing is current Lib-Dem leadership candidate Ed Davey who published a Windrush Day article pinning the blame entirely on the Tories, and whitewashing the fact that he himself voted in favour of Tory hostile immigration legislation in 2014!

It just goes to show how utterly degraded the standard of political discourse has become that we're surrounded by duplicitous liars on all sides, from the lying Brextremists who dragged us into absolute chaos via a tide of shockingly dishonest propaganda on one side, to the entirely unapologetic Lib-Dems on the other who whitewash their crimes against the British people (Hostile Environment, austerity fanaticism, wage repression, ruinous public service cuts, welfare vandalism, erosion of Legal Aid and the judicial system, shockingly illiberal secret courts, unpayable student debts, the slowest economic recovery in Centuries, and so much more) rather than fessing up and apologising to the nation for what they did.

And the worst thing of all is the tendency of these duplicitous liars to climb up onto their moral high horses and sneer down at those of us who refuse to buy into their despicable lies, or believe their Orwellian whitewashing of their utterly malicious track records.

According to them, the people who actively voted in favour of the Tory hostile environment they're now carping about from the sidelines, they're the reputable social progressives, and us on the left who opposed hostile environment all along are the partisan political militants!

I'm tempted to say you couldn't make it up, but the ever-duplicitous Lib-Dems already have.

 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's audacity

In March 2019 Theresa May's despicable 2014 Hostile Environment legislation was declared unlawful in a British court of law for the racist way it was used to discriminate against Windrush Brits.

This unspeakably vile piece of legislation was used to deny housing, employment, banking services, social security, and even life-saving medical treatment to black British citizens.

Scores of black Brits were even deported overseas under May's unbelievably outrageous "deport now and hear appeal later" principle. Several of these British deportees actually died in exile overseas.

When the Windrush scandal finally broke in 2018 May outright refused to take responsibility for the Hostile Environment rules she pushed through as Home Secretary, instead having Amber Rudd take the fall for it (before being rapidly bounced back into government to take over the DWP just a few months later).

Today Theresa May released a stomach-churningly hypocritical video praising the Windrush generation, banging on about Windrush day, and announcing a Windrush statue to be erected in Waterloo Station.

Theresa May and every single one of the MPs who voted in favour of her despicable Hostile Environment should never have the audacity to even utter the word "Windrush" unless it forms part of a profuse apology for their role in creating such a shameful national scandal.

But instead Theresa May and numerous others in the Westminster establishment class are using Windrush Day to pat themselves on the back, and to whitewash the pivotal roles they played in causing so much suffering.

Perhaps the only people rivalling Theresa May for audacity are the Lib-Dems who released a Windrush Day Tweet claiming that they would "Redouble [their] efforts to challenge the hostile immigration policies which created the Windrush Scandal".

Anyone reading Tweet this without knowing what a bunch of duplicitous tosspots the Lib-Dems are would probably imagine that May's Hostile Environment was passed despite vehement Lib-Dem objections.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In reality the current Lib-Dem leader Vince Cable voted in favour of it, his predecessor Tim Farron voted in favour of it, the new Lib-Dem leadership candidate Ed Davey voted in favour of it, and the other leadership candidate Jo Swinson joined the Labour right-wingers in abstaining in order to help it glide through parliament virtually unopposed.

Of the 57 Lib-Dem MPs at the time, just 3 had the decency to defy the party whip and vote against it (all of them departed from parliament now).

In fact the Lib-Dems were so keen on Theresa May's hostile environment that their MP Mark Hunter acted as one of the tellers for the "Aye" lobby!

The SNP, Plaid Cymru, and the Greens did themselves proud by opposing this disgusting legislation from the beginning.

Labour, which was still in catastrophic late-stage Blairism mode, badly let themselves down by whipping their MPs to abstain so the legislation could pass without substantial opposition, with just six Labour MPs defying the whip to vote against it. This honourable six include Jeremy Corbyn (now party leader), Diane Abbott (now shadow Home Secretary) and John McDonnell (now Shadow Chancellor).

The fact that three of the honourable six now occupy the top three jobs demonstrate that Labour have moved on from this despicable episode in their history, but the party should be deeply ashamed that they abandoned the principles of social justice like this, and be vigilant of ever going back to the dark days of Blairites, Tory enabling abstentions, and horrifying anti-immigrant mugs.

The Tories and Lib-Dems have no such excuses. The Tories elevated the architect of this disgusting and unlawful legislation to lead their party, and the Lib-Dems elevated Vince Cable, who actively voted it through, as leader of their party.

Neither of these parties has shown an appropriate level of contrition for their roles in this institutional racism scandal, and now they're both pathetically rewriting history to pretend that they ever gave a shit about the Windrush Brits they actively legislated to discriminate against.

As a white British person I'm fucking outraged at the audacity of this Orwellian revisionism from Theresa May, the Tories, and their Lib-Dem enablers, and I can only try to imagine how black British citizens must feel to see these audacious bastards rewriting history to whitewash away their demonstrable track record of supporting racism.

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