Why did we reject Evil Santa's presents?

Here's a short list of some of the stuff that the British electorate rejected in the 2019 General Election:

• A 33% reduction in rail fares

• A National Education Service and an end to rip-off tuition fees

• The most ambitious environmental targets of all the major parties

• An end to the systematic government abuse of sick and disabled people

• £10 per hour minimum wage, and zero hours contracts banned

• Reversal of the 67% Tory cut to the local government budget

• Repayment of the pension money stolen from 1950s women

• The rollout of free super-fast broadband

• Re-investment in the NHS

• Free dental checkups

So why did the British electorate reject all of this, in favour of an economy-tanking Tory administered Brexit shambles?

In my view there are two main reasons that British people decided that Corbyn was some kind of evil Santa offering impossible gifts: the bombardment of lies and the credibility gap.

The bombardment of lies

The research shows that 88% of the sponsored Conservative adverts injected into millions of people's Facebook feeds were demonstrable lies, mainly about the cost of Labour's policies and the absurd lie that everyone's tax bill would jump by £2,400, despite Labour's costed pledge not to increase Income Tax for anyone earning below £80,000.

Then on election day a fake "independent" Conservative front organisation launched a massive illegal propaganda campaign targeting polling stations in marginal constituencies across the country.

If you look at their illegally posted anti-Corbyn poster, you can see how much they were lying.

Apparently Evil Santa was threatening to "steal the children's inheritance", by, err, properly funding their education, freeing them from student debt, paying them £10 per hour, charging them 33% less for getting to work, building hundreds of thousands of affordable homes, and investing in high-tech, high-skill, high-pay industries.

Labour's policy was actually to maintain the inheritance tax threshold at £325,000, but scrap an additional property allowance, meaning the absolute maximum extra inheritance tax anyone would have had to have paid was £40,000, but only on inheritances of over £425,000.

Apparently this £40,000 paid only by the children of the property rich, was "stealing the children's future", but saving everyone who attends university from repaying rip-off inflation + 3% loans that most won't even pay off in their entire working lives, guaranteeing them all a decent wage whenever they leave school, and saving any of them who end up commuting to work fortunes on their rail tickets every year is unspeakably awful!

Then Evil Santa apparently wanted to "dictate their education", which is a total reversal of reality. The fact is that 75% of secondary schools in England have been privatised into the hands of unaccountable private operators, many of them major Tory party figures and donors, who get to control the curriculum, and dictate our children's education. Corbyn wanted to reverse this.

Point three is the terrorism smear-mongering which has dogged Evil Santa the entire time because he openly proposed talking to the Sinn Féin politicians before the Irish peace process and the Good Friday Agreement, at a time when Thatcher and her Tory government were secretly negotiating with the actual terrorists behind a wall of secrecy.

As Foreign Secretary Johnson sold weapons to the Saudi head-choppers, despite knowing that they were using them to commit war crimes, and despite knowing they were passing military hardware onto Al Qaida terrorist groups, but yeah, Corbyn is the terrorist-sympathiser and Johnson is the guy to protect us from terrorism!

The bit in the black box is also highly relevant. Corbyn is apparently the economic extremist for proposing public ownership of the railways, water supply, national grid, Royal Mail, and NHS.

Johnson and the Tories are the 'economic moderates' despite their demonstrable track record of outright defying the public will to privatise front line police services, swathes of the NHS, thousands of schools, prisons, the probation service, and conducting an enormous swindle to flog off the Royal Mail property portfolio at a tiny fraction of its true value.

It's impossible to deny that such a barrage of lies was an important factor in the election, especially the illegal postering campaign, ensuring the last thing that hundreds of thousands of people saw before they voted was a bombardment of lies.

The credibility gap

The Tories lied their way to victory, but Labour did themselves absolutely no favours at all with their election strategy.

I have no idea whose plan it was to launch a load of surprise policies like free broadband, the 33% rail fare reduction, and the repayment of the stolen WASPI money, but doing it as a sequence of surprise announcements was a terrible idea, because it made the party look incredibly irresponsible.

If you want to argue the case for increased public spending and more money in people's pockets, you need to lay the groundwork, you don't just dump it all on people as if it's a load of reckless pre-election bribes.

The majority of people in Britain simply have no idea at all about macroeconomics, because they've never been taught, and it's just not the kind of thing most people would choose to research for themselves.

If you want to switch from austerity extremism to investment economics, you need to develop a clear and simple economic case for doing so.

You need to come up with a few slogans along the lines of "invest now for a prosperous future", "you don't grow a business by cutting it, you invest, so why would you cut a country", or "more money in your pocket is more money in the economy", then you repeat it and repeat it and repeat it until everyone has heard it so many times they're bloody sick of it, but it's in their heads, so when you announce big public investments, or policies to put more money in people's pockets, they can link it to the slogans.

If you fail to do this, they link your pledges to ludicrous economic baby talk nonsense like "no such thing as magic money trees", or "how will they pay for it?", or "the money will run out" and then you're absolutely screwed.

The fact that millions upon millions of people still somehow think about the economy as if its a household budget, with a limited supply of money that can potentially "run out" is the origin of Labour's economic credibility gap, and their failure to establish any kind of simple counter-narrative absolutely did for them.

Announcing grand spending pledges as surprises just hammered nails into their own economic coffin, especially since they were as much surprises to their supporters and social media cheerleaders as they were to everyone else.

If "rail fares are too high in Britain" (which they are) and "for the sake of the environment and killer air pollution we need to encourage people onto public transport by making it cheaper than going by car"  had been a significant talking point for the previous year, then a surprise 33% reduction in rail fares could have gone down really well, but again the architecture simply wasn't put in place to explain why, so it just came across as a reckless pre-election bribe.

Labour's absolute failure to clearly explain the macroeconomic case for investment and increased public disposable income was a lamentable failure in basic planning.

It's irrelevant if you've got the better economic policies if you don't give ordinary people the basic architecture to understand why they're good for the economy.

It's a quite astonishing Labour Party failure that the Tories are still widely considered the party of economic credibility after the slowest economic recovery in centuries, the worst period of wage stagnation since records began, the worst productivity crisis the UK has ever suffered, the soaring trade deficit, losing Britain's AAA credit ratings, failing to eliminate the deficit after an entire decade when they said they'd do it in 5 years, and dragging the nation to the brink of a chaotic economy-tanking, job-destroying Brexit meltdown.

It was bad enough that Ed Miliband failed to capitalise on Tory economic incompetence in 2015, which was only halfway through this economy strangling austerity chaos, but the Labour Party has subsequently failed to win the economic argument twice more under Corbyn, and it's pretty damned obvious that if they don't start communicating investment economics to the masses fairly soon, they're in for another defeat at the next election too.

It's now stunningly obvious that people will not elect a party they can't trust on the economy, even if the alternative is deliberately steering the economy towards an unprecedented self-inflicted crisis!

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