A hyper-partisan Tory diatribe is doing the rounds on social media, with many of the iterations purporting to be from the actress and comedian Jennifer Saunders.
It's become clear that hyper-partisan Tories are infecting all kinds of local "for sale" pages, community groups, and fan pages with their disgusting pro-government propaganda, and this obnoxious copy n' paste rant is still doing the rounds in Facebook pages and groups all over the country.
As far as I can see nobody has done a comprehensive critique of this mega-viral copy n' paste nonsense, so I guess it's up to me to go through it point by point:
Anyone who has questions about the government's handling of the crisis is a "crayon eater".
An opening sentence aiming insults at anyone who questions the government suggests that this is going to be a very long way from an impartial appraisal of the facts. The funny thing about this opening salvo is that someone has actually corrected the grammatical errors that appeared in the now deleted version from Fake-Jennifer, but they somehow decided not to correct any of the provable lies, deceptions, and displays of grotesque political illiteracy in the rest of the statement!
This is a lie. Plain and simple. It's a complete misrepresentation of how NHS procurement works.
The Tories restructured the NHS supply chains to put the health secretary in ultimate charge, but the hyper-partisan copy n' paste Tory liars definitely don't want you to know that.
It's difficult to express the level of contempt you should feel towards someone claiming to "respect" NHS doctors and nurses, whilst simultaneously seeking to deflect blame away from their beloved Tories, and onto the NHS.
Operation Cygnus took place in 2016, not "two years ago", and as already mentioned, the NHS actually said that they were unprepared for a respiratory pandemic, with particular concerns about the hopeless lack of protective gear, plus insufficient intensive care beds and respirators.
The Tories were still busy inflicting their austerity cuts to the NHS, and further reducing bed capacity, so the appeals for more PPE fell on deaf ears. The claim that the Operation Cygnus report included the quotes "we can flex" and "we are OK" is frankly absurd, as anyone who has ever set eyes on an internal bureaucratic report before can attest.
The Brexit bit is absolutely confounding. It's ridiculously obvious that four years of Brexit chaos, stemming from the fact the Brexiteers never even had a plan for how to actually do it, means government has been utterly distracted on all the Brexit issues.
The idea that the NHS said "we are OK" is bizarre enough, but "we are OK because ... Brexit" is absolute ridiculousness.
Questioning whether the NHS Supply Chain company which is ultimately controlled by Matt Hancock even understand that ships take time to travel from China is being posited as a defence of the government!
Then there's a criticism of globalisation. Why oh why didn't we prioritise UK-based manufacturers? Well because if any government had attempted to do that then the Tories and their minions in the right-wing propaganda rags would have screeched "protectionism", "communism", "Marxism" at them, just like they did with Labour's modest proposals to renationalise rail, water, and the national grid.
You see running things in the national interest is absolutely forbidden by the Tory ideology, if there's the remotest chance of it interfering with the profiteering of capitalists.
And now to make excuses for this grotesque capitalism above the national interest Tory ideology, the Tory tribalists are making out that NHS managers are responsible for the neoliberal globalisation agenda, not the politicians who made the prioritisation of local suppliers illegal!
As a result of four decades of neoliberal pro-privatisation politics, mainly pushed by the Tories, the majority of care homes are now operated by profit-seeking private companies, therefore the Tories are absolved of blame!
The idea that the government should just let care home residents die in a pandemic because the care home is privately operated is quite frankly disgusting.
OK, if the care homes couldn't cope with their responsibilities during the crisis and needed bailing out at the public expense, lets have the debate about renationalisation of care services after the crisis is over, but the government's first priority in this pandemic should obviously be to prevent people from dying, wherever they happen to be.
It doesn't matter how many times you write MANAGERS in capital letters, the fact remains that the secretary of state Matt Hancock has ultimate responsibility.
And look, it's not just the NHS to blame for the Tory failings either, it's journalists and ordinary members of the public too (who the copy n' paste Tory propaganda brigade quite obviously regard with absolute contempt).
As for ordinary members of the public expressing their opinions, you hardly had to be a trained virologist or epidemiologist to figure out that just letting the virus spread exponentially through the population for weeks instead of following the established WHO protocol (test, trace, isolate) was a very poor strategy in the crucial early stages.
"The government has probably made some mistakes" is some hell of an under-estimate in regards to a crisis that's taken tens of thousands of lives, followed by rather a lot of words to argue that anyone who dares to discuss what these "probable mistakes" might be, deserves to be dead.
Ah yes, "let's get through this and beat this together" by ... erm ... copy n' pasting incredibly divisive, hyper-partisan Tory screeds full of outright lies, blame-shifting, Trumpian rhetoric, ALL CAPS SHOUTING, and a load of insults and sneering condescension towards ordinary members of the public who dare to ever engage their critical thinking skills.
The worst thing about fake-Jennifer and all the other Tory partisans sharing this outrageous rubbish is that they're probably stupid enough to believe that propagating such egregious blame-shifting lies is good for the country, because they're incapable of separating the interests of Boris Johnson and his cabinet of hard-right thugs, from the interests of the nation as a whole (which are obviously best served by not having a lazy, incompetent, elitist liar like Johnson running the show).
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The problem of course is that embedding a very senior government adviser into the scientific advisory group absolutely trashes any claim that the advice they're giving to government is independent from government.
Having a senior member of the government in the meeting changes the entire dynamic, making it much less likely that the scientists will openly criticise or condemn government policy when they think it's wrong.
Everyone knows that people are less likely to speak up freely about institutional problems and mistakes if one of the bosses is in the room, especially when the boss has got a very recent track record of ideologically purging dozens of people who dared to stand up to him, like Cummings did in the Tory mass expulsion in September.
It's beyond obvious that if the scientific advice is to be considered independent, senior government figures should not be embedded in the scientific advisory group.
The official government line is that Cummings was only there to observe, ask questions, and act as an interface between the scientists and 10 Downing Street, which is bad enough for the aforementioned reasons, but former Tory Chancellor George Osborne has openly admitted the actual truth in a remarkable Tweet.
It's absolutely unmistakable that Osborne is admitting that the purpose of embedding Cummings in the scientific advisory group was to politicise the science.
In any kind of functional democracy the scientists would deliver their advice to the government, and then the government would use that advice as the basis for the political decisions they make.
The scientists propose certain measures, then the government combines this scientific advice with the advice they're receiving from their economic advisers to make the political decision whether the suggested measures are justifiable.
Deliberately infecting the scientific advisory group with the politics is clearly the wrong way to go, and one of the main reasons we're now in such a terrible mess, with the highest death rate in Europe, and one of the largest death tolls in the entire world.
The concept of allowing senior government spin doctors to interfere with the scientific or expert advice is an incredibly dangerous one, but George Osborne has come out and openly admitted that this was exactly what the government was doing by embedding Cummings in the scientific advisory group.
The most infuriating thing about this is the absolute non-reaction of people who should be horrified about it.
Recall how every criticism of the government's lamentable inaction in the crucial early stages of the Covid-19 crisis was met with the faux-outrage moralising of "how very dare you politicise this crisis!"
Anyone who has dared to point out how a decade of wanton Tory austerity destruction severely damaged our national ability to respond effectively to the crisis has witnessed the "don't politicise" howling reaching absolute fever pitch.
But then the architect of this austerity ruination comes out and admits that the Tory government deliberately politicised the science, and the "don't politicise" mob say nothing.
Funny isn't it, how their vehement objections to "politicisation" only come into play when people are using facts and evidence to criticise the Tory government, but when a very senior Tory-establishment figure openly admits that the Tory government deliberately politicised the crisis, they have absolutely nothing to say about it whatever!
Almost as if these "don't politicise" screechers are a bunch of absolute hypocrites driven purely by fealty to their Tory lords and masters isn't 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.
The mainstream media non-reaction to the Labour Leak scandal, and the ongoing lack of suspensions within the party are extraordinary in their own right.
What the leaks revealed was a bunch of horrific right-wing wreckers embedded within the Labour Party deliberately trying to lose elections, misallocating party funds, engaging in racist and misogynistic abuse against their party colleagues, and endlessly slagging off their own party's leader, policies, and supporters.
But a little thought experiment puts this scandal, and the almost complete non-reaction to it into a clearer perspective.
If leaked WhatsApp chats revealed that several players on a Premier League football team had been conspiring to deliberately lose crucial games in a misguided attempt to drive out their manager, all hell would break loose.
Especially if the players were also caught out spewing racist abuse at their own black team mates, deliberately undermining their own team's anti-racism initiatives, and repeatedly deriding their own team's fans with mental health slurs.
You could bet every penny you've got on these players being immediately suspended, coverage of the story dominating the newspaper front and back pages for weeks, the regulatory authorities getting involved, and several of the worst perpetrators ending up in jail and never playing professional football again in their lives.
But just imagine if the club decided not to suspend a single one of the players.
How do you imagine the club's fans would react if the team just carried on like nothing had happened?
And do you really think the players' mates in the media would be composing articles portraying the cheating racist scunners as the "poor innocent victims of a terrible invasion of privacy" (despite the fact that they only got caught because one of the hypothetical players had been stupid enough to upload the entire WhatsApp chat history onto the club's computer system!).
But we've seen articles from the Guardian to the Telegraph portraying these bigotry-dripping right-wing saboteurs as the poor innocent victims, and whoever blew the whistle by leaking the report as the dreadful horrible monster of the situation.
In reality we don't even need to imagine how football would react to a scandal like this, because we've got plenty of evidence of how the football community reacts to cheating, disrespect, and racism.
When former West Brom and Manchester United manager Ron Atkinson was recorded saying that a black footballer was a "lazy, thick N-word" he was cancelled. Despite being one of the pioneering managers who brought black players into his teams in the 1970s and '80s, he clearly stepped way over the line with this racial slur and lost his commentary and football columnist jobs over it.
Just think about how many times football managers and players have been sanctioned and fined for "bringing the game into disrepute", and how establishment politicians have been allowed to get away with absolutely egregious lies, expenses scamming, and horrific abuse of each other and random members of the public.
Just think about the vitriol that a whole host of football players have faced over charges of "going down to easily", even though the referees have shown time and again that they simply don't award free kicks unless players make a big show of falling over at the point of contact.
People who fall over too easily on a sports field get more public derision than politicians who sabotage elections and spew racist, misogynistic, and ableist abuse!
The establishment political class get in comparison to footballers is extraordinary:
And consider the ludicrous non-reaction to the racism, mental health slurs, delaying of antisemitism investigations, and deliberate electoral sabotage carried out by the Labour right-wingers that was exposed in the Labour Leaks.
It turns out that the United Kingdom is a country with absurd priorities, where the media and regulatory authorities hold footballers, football managers, and football commentators to a vastly higher standard of conduct than the establishment politicians who actually rule over our lives!
We've just become so accustomed to the political establishment lying, and cheating, and scamming their way through their careers that we accept it as a normal part of the job.
But to make matters worse, when one politician showed up who eschewed the lying, and scheming, and self-interested scamming, the mainstream media and the rest of the political class turned on him, continually portrayed him as some kind of repulsive extremist monster, and even deliberately sabotaged his party from within to prevent him from becoming Prime Minister.
Even if it had been players from a football club you don't even like, you'd want them disciplined for bringing the game into disrepute if they'd behaved like the right-wing Labour saboteurs, but somehow, because it's happened in politics rather than football, most of the nation has turned a complete blind eye to it.
And this extraordinary non-reaction provokes the question of how politics can ever be cleaned up if establishment politicians can get away with the kind of deliberate sabotage and rampant bigotry that would result in footballers, or anyone else in any other job, getting sacked, and probably jailed if they did the same.
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.
If this eugenicist "let them die to save capitalism" mentality wasn't absolutely commonplace in the Tory ranks, then surely someone would have stopped Boris Johnson from publicly pledging to defy the international consensus, under the delusion he'd be celebrated as a capitalist superhero for deliberately allowing the virus to spread through the UK population like wildfire.
In the end Tory "take it on the chin" eugenics had to be abandoned when it became obvious that letting the virus spread uncontrolled through the population had been a terrible mistake, making the measures needed to contain it far more economically harmful than the standard pandemic protocol of Test, Contact Trace, Quarantine, that they had been so desperate to avoid in the first place. Many on the political right regard this abandonment of "take it on the chin" as an error, because they believe that if the virus was left to spread freely through the population killing hundreds of thousands of people and utterly overwhelming the health service, it would be somewhat better for the economy.
They can't pretend that allowing the virus to spread wouldn't result in a lot more deaths, so what they try to do is minimise the importance of Covid-19 deaths with claims like "they would have died anyway", and the semantic trickery of quibbling over "died of Covid-19" and "died with Covid-19" as if the deadly viral infection isn't still a contributing factorno matter if the deceased had any other health conditions.
"They would have died anyway" was always obviously vile right-wing eugenicist bullshit, but a new study provides the evidence that it's a total crock.
A group of academics from the University of Edinburgh, University of Glasgow, and Public Health Scotland have shown that the average number of additional years of life lost for Covid-19 deaths are 13 for males, and 11 for females.
It's early days in the research of a strain of virus that's only been known about for six months, so a lot more research will come, but what's absolutely clear is that huge numbers of Covid-19 victims were nowhere near 'death's door' as the hard-right eugenicists like to pretend.
Anyone continuing to push the "they were going to die anyway" type narratives to push for lockdown to be lifted needs to come up with evidence-based research to disprove the research showing that it wipes at least a decade off the average victim's life don't they?
Otherwise they're essentially saying that killing tens of thousands of people over a decade early is what they consider "a price worth paying" to get their beloved capitalist profits flowing again.
And if government concedes to the hard-right eugenics brigade and lifts the coronavirus measures before proper Test and Trace measures are in place, hundreds of thousands more years of life will be erased, potentially from your own elderly relatives.
But that's the thing with the hard-right. Stuff like human life, public health, long-term economic sustainability, the environment, fairness, and basic human decency are continually thrown to the wayside, because capitalist profiteering is their ultimate and overriding objective.
And if this capitalist profiteering means lopping a decade or more off your gran's life, they absolutely won't hesitate. All they'll do is continue to lie that "she was going to die anyway".
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.
Somebody has been stealing the identity of NHS staff in order to set up fake Twitter accounts to sow public confusion and support the government narrative of the day, whatever it happens to be.
These fake NHS worker accounts began by pushing the pseudo-scientific "herd immunity" strategy before switching purpose to begin pushing for the easing of coronavirus restrictions - which will obviously lead to another wave of deaths if it's done before the government has developed the capacity to carry out mass testing and contact tracing.
The "NHS Susan" account was one of them, which posed as a pro-EU, disabled, trans, junior doctor who was pushing a #BanTheClap campaign to stop people clapping for the NHS on Thursdays.
The intention was clearly to sow confusion and create a fake veneer of medical approval towards policies and ideas that the vast majority or real NHS staff would strongly object to. But it was always completely fake because the photograph that was used on the "NHS Susan" account is actually a picture of a Greek nurse called Mia who was featured in an article about the valuable contribution of foreign medical workers in the NHS.
An independent investigator from Far Right Watch has claimed that "NHS Susan" was part of a botnet of at least 128 propaganda accounts, all operated from a single Hootsuite account.
The investigator hasn't released the bot operators' identities yet, but they claim to have contacted the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), asking questions, and offering to share the data they've collected on the propaganda botnet for the purposes of internal investigation, but they've said they've been given the cold shoulder.
You would have thought that at the very minimum the DHSC would have a duty of care towards NHS employees who have had their identities stolen, but apparently nobody there is even remotely interested in investigating what's been going on.
One thing that did happen was that when people started investigating who was behind these bots, the Tory propaganda accounts like "NHS Susan" were instantly killed off.
It seems highly unlikely the mainstream media will pay any attention to this pro-Tory disinformation campaign, just like they ignored the massive orchestrated Tory election fraud on election day 2019, and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and the bizarre antics at the Department of Education when Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings were running the show there.
It's absolutely undeniable that fake accounts like "NHS Susan" were created by somebody, and that they stole the identity of real NHS staff for the profile pictures, so the claim that the story is "categorically false" is blatantly untrue.
Perhaps some of the assertions aren't exactly correct (we'll see soon enough if/when additional data is released), but the kernel of the story, the fake pro-Tory Twitter accounts, is undeniably true because people have got the screenshots, so it's simply a lie to say the whole thing is "categorically false", especially when not a shred of counter-evidence has actually been produced.
A more sensible and less partisan approach from the DHSC would have been to announce an investigation into who was behind the fake NHS accounts, and to categorically condemn the theft of NHS staff members' identities (who, after all, are their own employees).
The fact that the DHSC has gone down the road of blanket denial, whilst offering no condemnation of the identity theft, and providing no counter-evidence whatever to actually undermine the claims does look deeply suspicious.
There will be more revelations about this Tory propaganda botnet later today, hopefully including the exact identities of the individuals who have been operating it.
The account to follow for more information is John O'Connell.
Footnote: You may have noticed that I stopped producing blog posts for several months. The reason is that Facebook has changed their algorithm to make links to my site almost invisible. Even when literally thousands of people share the link, barely anyone actually sees what's been shared. It feels like wasted effort producing articles that virtually nobody reads, when I can still produce infographics and informative posts that are seen by hundreds of thousands.
I'm going to give it another try, but it's unlikely that I'll return to writing blog posts as consistently as I used to.
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.
I said from the beginning that I would give the new Labour Party leader a chance, but that I'm no party political tribalist, so no party should ever assume that they're entitled to my vote. They have to earn it through their policies and their actions.
Watching Keir Starmer allow the Times to hide his first editorial as Labour leader behind a paywall is somewhat of a blow given that I was at least hoping, on the basis of his widely reported intelligence, that he would do quite well.
What's especially galling about this paywall move is the fact that the Times is owned and operated by the billionaire propaganda baron Rupert Murdoch, who is clearly no friend of the labour movement.
The two glaring issues that should occur to anybody are that it makes very little sense for a new leader to hide one of their crucial first statements behind a paywall so that huge numbers of people won't even read it, and that it doesn't make a lot of strategic sense to actively drive traffic and new subscribers towards a publication that is staffed by a bunch of right-wing orthodox neoliberals who will viciously tear you down if you ever dare to propose anything even remotely left-wing or socially progressive.
Beyond the issues of who will actually read this, and the wisdom of actually driving traffic and subscriptions towards a publication that will no doubt be attacking you in the very near future, is the appalling optics of it.
If they wanted to reach out across the political divide (which is a sensible thing), it would have been easily possible for Starmer's team to insist that the paywall was lifted for this particular article, so that everyone could read it.
Failing that they could have pitched to other right-leaning publications with the "no paywall" stipulation. The most important thing from a communications perspective is that people actually access and read what you're saying, and you do that by making it openly available on the Internet, rather than pitching it almost exclusively to few thousand die hard Tories on their ancient dead tree technology.
Just imagine if Corbyn had released a statement on a massively important public health issue, but hidden it behind a paywall on some left-leaning publication.
The 'sensibles' would have been going absolutely crackers over it, and deriding it as another example of uselessness wouldn't they?
Competent political leaders should ensure that their statements are never hidden behind anyone's paywalls as a matter of course, especially on really important public health issues, and the publications that won't go along with it simply don't get the exclusive editorials, and don't get the clicks.
But they didn't do this. They allowed it to be hidden away behind a Murdoch paywall which sends a very clear message, not from Starmer to the public (most of whom won't even have read what he said below the paywall fade out) but from the Murdoch propaganda empire to the public.
"Starmer is our boy. If you want to know what he's saying, then you come through us. We're in control of the narrative. We're in control of what you see and hear. And look, Starmer is wilfully going along with our way of doing things. There's no hope of ever doing things differently."
Why Starmer would go along with this is anyone's guess.
He knows that he's never going to win over the Murdoch propaganda empire. They absolutely despise him, not just for his involvement in chasing down their phone hacking illegality as Director of Public Prosecutions in the early 2010s, but for standing with the striking Murdoch empire print workers in Wapping, back in the 1980s.
Starmer is supposed to be an intelligent player, but within a day of becoming leader his optics are absolutely hopeless. He's hiding his statements behind paywalls instead of hosting them on open platforms, and he's willing to allow himself to be presented as a Murdoch stooge, even though he knows perfectly well that the Murdoch hacks will never ever accept him!
What on earth is going on? And who approved this hopeless idiocy?
Footnote: You may have noticed that I stopped producing blog posts for several months. The reason is that Facebook has changed their algorithm to make links to my site almost invisible. Even when literally thousands of people share the link, barely anyone actually sees the shares or follows the links. It feels like wasted effort producing articles that virtually nobody reads, when I can still produce infographics and informative posts that are seen by hundreds of thousands.
I'm going to give it another try, but it's unlikely that I'll return to writing blog posts as consistently as I used to.
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.
