It's a busy election campaign so I shouldn't really be wasting my Sunday analysing the activities of a silly nonsense party like the Lib-Dems, but their latest policy announcement of 'Ultra-Austerity Forever' is so bizarre, so wrong headed, so economically illiterate, so off the charts crazy, it's a matter of morbid curiosity.
Like a horrific pile up on the other side of the motorway, it's giving me the compulsion to slow down and have a look.
I know it's sick and wrong to gawk like this, when I've got much more important election priorities to focus on like hammering the Tories for their malice and incompetence, or talking about the ambitious democratic socialist policies Labour are putting forward, or taking a more detailed look at the political landscape in Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland ... but I just can't help it.
So here are 12 things you should know about Lib-Dem Ultra-Austerity Forever.
Ultra-Austerity forever
There are two main strands to the Lib-Dem policy of Ultra-Austerity Forever.
The first is the enforcement of a "fiscal rule" that the government must create a permanent budget surplus of 1%, meaning that the government permanently extracts more wealth out of the economy than it invests back into it.
The second element is that the government deny funding to any project that cannot prove itself economically profitable, no matter the other benefits (social, environmental, public health, immeasurable effects on future economic prosperity ...).
No apologies
The Lib-Dems have never apologised for the ruinous consequences of the austerity fanaticism enforced by the 2010-15 Tory/Lib-Dem coalition (collapsing living standards, soaring poverty, the worst sustained decline in the value of workers' wages since records began, the slowest economic recovery in centuries, vandalism of the social safety net, deliberate under-funding of public services, the worst house building figures since the 1920s, the loss of the UK's AAA credit ratings, the lowest levels of infrastructure investment in the developed world ...).
Neither have they apologised for the fact that austerity extremism caused the living standards collapse that drove the Leave vote marginally over the winning line in 2016.
All of this devastation and chaos was caused by George Osborne's incompetent efforts to cut state spending back to a balanced budget (a 0% deficit).
The Lib-Dems aren't just unapologetic about their role in this devastation, they're actually promising to intensify austerity by aiming for a budget surplus of 1% (a deficit of -1%)!
They're not just refusing to apologise for austerity extremism, they're doubling down on it and pushing it harder than ever!
Investment vs Austerity
Investment economics says that you create prosperity by investing in stuff like infrastructure, housing, skills and education, high skill jobs, quality services.
Austerity economics says that you create prosperity by wantonly slashing away at all aspects of state spending in the vain hope that your economy will finally be the one that breaks precedent by demonstrating that it is possible to mindlessly cut your way to growth and prosperity.
There's absolutely no way that any Lib-Dem can pretend that their party leaders are intending to use tried and tested investment economics to achieve this 1% surplus because their political language is utterly infested with the kind of economic baby talk we've come to expect from austerity fetishists.
During the Lib-Dems' Ultra-Austerity Forever launch speech Ed Davey said "The spending competition between the Labour and Conservative fantasists has made Santa Claus seem like Scrooge".
He's literally ridiculing the idea of investing in public services and infrastructure projects! You'd have to be utterly clueless to not understand that this kind of anti-investment rhetoric is motivated by undying belief in crackpot 'let's cut our way to prosperity' austerity dogma.
Arbitrary economic illiteracy
Politicians love to put inflexible targets on things because they think "fiscal rules" make them sound important and knowledgeable, but in reality economists tear their hair out at nonsense like an inflexible 1% budget surplus, no matter what the circumstances.
You don't even need to have any economics training whatever to understand the idiocy of arbitrary targets like this. Just ask yourself why exactly 1% is the economically ideal number. Why not a 0.9% surplus? Why not a 1.25% surplus?
There's clearly been no actual calculation done. They've just settled on 1% because it sounds catchy and memorable, haven't they?
Also, what happens if something changes dramatically? What if these's a natural disaster? or a nuclear power station melts down? Or somebody explodes a dirty bomb in a British city?
Or what if it's something utterly mundane like the cost of government borrowing going up or down dramatically?
Under what circumstances does it become acceptable to break this completely arbitrary 1% fiscal rule?
Shrinking the state
An arbitrary fiscal rule enforcing the government to only ever spend 99% of what it extracts from the economy is quite obviously a recipe for shrinking the state relative to the size of the economy.
The desire to shrink the state has always been a mainstay of hard-right politics, and the Lib-Dems have actually thought of a way to legislatively encode this state shrinking ideology!
Bully for them. They're more dedicated to the hard-right state shrinking ideology than the Tories!
The price of everything, the value of nothing
The Lib-Dem strategy of using beancounters to analyse every single bit of government spending to ensure it is capable of turning a profit might sound fairly sensible in practice, but in reality it's an exercise in knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Just think about investments like a NHS diabetes awareness campaigns, or providing children's music lessons in schools, both of which cost money in the present, but have extremely nebulous and hard-to-measure potential future economic benefits in the long-term.
How is it even possible to estimate the long term economic benefit of these things in terms of reduced demand on NHS services and fewer lost sick days from work, or the potential future contribution to the £100 billion UK creative industries market?
And what might the cost of scrapping their funding turn out to be in 25 years time? How would you even begin to calculate the long-term economic repercussions?
Then there's the simple fact that money isn't everything.
OK, maybe a public investment only returns 90p in the pound, but what about other factors like the social benefit? Environmental benefits? Public health benefits? Quality of life benefits?
Why scrap all of that into the bin just to fixate on whether the investment pays back more than it cost in monetary terms?
How about paying for granny's operation after she's had a fall?
It turns out that elderly people with broken hips become exponentially more likely to die the longer they wait for treatment , which means the state would save huge amounts of money on the cost of the operation, the cost of future medical care and social care, the cost of future pension payments etc.
Spending money on reducing hip replacement waiting times for elderly people is clearly counter-productive if you view things from a purely fiscal perspective.
If it's more profitable to just let granny slowly die in agony rather than replace her broken hip, isn't that the fiscally responsible thing to do?
Incompatibility with their own damned policies
The idea of scrutinising every single element of government spending from a purely financial perspective isn't just narrow-minded, it's also incompatible with a number of the Lib-Dems own policies!
Take their pledge to plant 60 million trees.
From an environmental perspective tree planting is actually a fairly good idea (although not as good as setting aside land to naturally re-wild itself), but in terms of an economic investment alone, it's unjustifiable.
How on earth is planting millions of trees over thousands of acres of viable farmland ever going to spin an economic profit for the government?
The Lib-Dems are so inept that their headline election pledges are completely at odds with their proposed fiscal rules!
Outflanking the Tories
It's quite extraordinary to see the party of Charles Kennedy attempting to outflank the Tory party on the economic hard-right, with their state-shrinking, Ultra-Austerity Forever agenda.
This is a party that competed with Labour for socially progressive centre-left votes until just a decade ago, yet now they're presenting themselves as the most radical economically right-wing political party in British politics!
The last of the Cameroons
The last politician to dare raise the spectre of austerity to infinity was David Cameron, who gave a truly extraordinary speech promising permanent austerity for the masses, whilst surrounded by gold ornaments and all of the trappings of wealth and privilege at the Lord Mayor's banquet in 2013.
Promising 'austerity forever' was a bold move, even at the height of austerity mania in 2013, but promising it now, in the middle of an election campaign, when austerity has gone completely out of fashion so much that even the Tory party is trying to distance itself from it ... well it's absolutely wild, isn't it?
The Lib-Dems are clearly pining for their glory days of coalition government, six figure salaries, ministerial cars, important cabinet meetings ... And in their pathetic attempts to bring those past glory days they've resorted to the magical thinking of channelling David Cameron's political ghost!
Reconsidering the austerity coalition
Jeremy Corbyn has won the Investment vs Austerity argument so comprehensively that even the Tories are trying to distance themselves from austerity extremism, so it's incredible that the Lib-Dems have decided to double down on it as the last austerity party standing.
Given the Lib-Dems are the last remaining advocates of hard-right austerity fanaticism in British politics, surely it's time to reconsider their claims to have moderated the Tories during the austerity coalition years?
Why are we taking their claims at face value, when it now seems much more likely that they were just as keen on austerity as the Tories at the time, if not actively egging them on?
Tory target seats
Attempting to outflank the Tories to the economic hard-right looks like a suicidal political move if you think the Lib-Dems are after 'centrist' socially progressive votes, but in reality almost all of the Lib-Dems' priority target seats are Tory-held constituencies in the south and in suburbia.
Are they attempting to portray themselves as "more Tory than the Tories" in order to poach Tory target seats?
With the Lib-Dems there's always the strong possibility that whatever they're doing is the result of abject strategic incompetence, but in this case it does seem possible that they're attempting to resuscitate Cameroonian austerity extremism in order to woo voters in these marginal Tory seats.
Remainer doublethink
What the Lib-Dems clearly haven't considered is how their efforts to reanimate the political corpse of austerity is going to come across to the other core demographic they're targeting: Remainers.
For the last three years Remainers have been arguing against Brexit by saying it would mean "more austerity"*, so how on earth can Remainers even try to square this austerity is bad anti-Brexit argument with the Lib-Dems' stated economic policy of delivering ultra-austerity forever?
If you see yourself as a socially progressive 'centrist' type, who opposes Brexit because of the disastrous effect it would have on ordinary British people, how on earth would it be possible to support a party that's going to push ruinous austerity extremism even harder than Cameron and Osborne did?
Orwellian doublethink seems like the only plausible answer.
Conclusion
The Lib-Dems haven't just learned absolutely nothing from the two thoroughly deserved electoral kickings they've taken in 2015 and 2017, they've somehow convinced themselves to believe the polar opposite of the lesson they should have learned.
The obvious lesson they should have taken from these electoral routs is that they colluded too closely with the Tories, and that austerity extremism was a social and economic disaster that they should apologise for.
They should have not just apologised for the dire destruction in living standards that austerity delivered, but for the fact this austerity living standards collapse contributed directly to their own worst nightmare of the 2016 Brexit vote.
But what they've actually convinced themselves to believe is that the 2010-15 pre-Brexit period was some kind of magnificent utopia, and that the only way to return to those marvellous glory days is to dig up all the corpses from the austerity graveyard and reanimate them as ultra-powerful austerity zombies!
They're trying to bring back their own personal glory days by returning to the very stuff that actually brought their party crashing down!
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 Remainer argument that "Brexit means more austerity" is every bit as dishonest as the Brexiteers' "£350m for the NHS" ... and I say this as a Brexit-sceptic.
Austerity is a policy of cutting investment in an economic downturn. It's an economically illiterate response to crises. The tried, tested, and proven response to economic crises is investment in stuff like infrastructure, housing, transport, manufacturing, services, skills and education (create quality jobs and modern infrastructure = create prosperity).
No matter the scale of a Brexit economic downturn, austerity would always be the wrong answer, and anyone claiming it would be inevitable is guilty of legitimising the outright lie that austerity is the correct response to a crisis, when the slowest economic recovery in centuries and the worst period of wage decline since records began post-2008 is damning proof that austerity is absolutely the wrong one.
Here's an article on this tragic piece of remainer 'groupthink': Are you unwittingly guilty of spreading hard-right Tory propaganda
On Sunday December 9th 2018 some 3,000 people attended an extreme-right "Brexit Betrayal" protest in London led by the street thug and convicted fraudster Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (Tommy Robinson) and the absolute dregs who haven't yet abandoned UKIP (even former leaders Nigel Farage and Paul Nuttall have recently quit the party in disgust at what it's become).
Here are 12 things you should know about the protest.
Stephen Yaxley-Lennon
Most of the other speakers barely managed to hold the attention of the crowd because the majority of them were just waiting for their idol "Tommy Robinson" to stick it to the Muslims and immigrants.
Yaxley-Lennon followers don't give a damn that he's using a fake name, that he's a convicted fraudster, that he's a hate-preacher who has inspired deadly terrorist attacks against innocent people, and they don't care that he's living the high life on the back of all of their donations and hundreds of thousands in payments from shady hard-right propaganda outfits in the US who are seeking to destabilise Britain and other developed nations by funding extreme-right agitators.
Yaxley-Lennon has amassed a fortune in donations and used it to build a significant property portfolio, including a large country house in rural Bedfordshire.
Do the people who throw cash at him realise that he's just siphoning it off to enrich himself?
They probably do realise it, but just don't care, just like "Tommy" and his extreme-right flock don't care about all the evidence that the EDL street thug organisation that he founded is absolutely riddled with paedophiles and other sex offenders.
The decline of UKIP
The UKIP leader Gerard Batten was at the demo alongside Yaxley-Lennon, and it just goes to show how far the party has collapsed since their heyday just a few years ago when they won 24 seats at the 2014 European elections (all but 7 of them have subsequently quit the party) and bagged almost 4 million votes at the 2015 General Election.
Now they've been reduced to a tiny kernel of ideological extremists pathetically riding on the coat tails of an extreme-right hate preacher and convicted fraudster, and even then only attracting 3,000 people to the event they invested so much time, money, and effort to publicise.
I'm obviously not at all fond of Nigel Farage or his successor Paul Nuttall (to put it mildly), but it's no surprise that even hard-right cranks like them have quit the party in disgust at what UKIP has become.
Huge counter-protest
3,000 people turned up to the extreme-right Brexit Betrayal protest, an estimated 15,000 turned up to the anti-fascist counter-protest.
It's clearly not going at all well for the extreme-right if there are five counter-protesters telling them to piss off for every extreme-right supporter at their event.
A noose for Theresa
One of the Brexit Betrayal protesters brought a noose to the protest. When asked why he was carrying it he explained that it was for Theresa May. "That's for Theresa May, that's what treasonous people get".
It's obviously despicable and barbaric for people to go around calling for their political opponents to be hanged, but then Theresa May and her hack mates in the right-wing propaganda rags bear a lot of responsibility for actively creating this febrile and abusive political environment.
Remember "Crush the Saboteurs"?
Remember the McCarthyite Tory witch hunt against pro-European academics?
Remember when the Daily Mail printed their "enemies of the people" front page and sparked a wave of abuse and death threats against the three High Court judges who ruled against Theresa May's Brexit power grab because parliament is sovereign?
Well Theresa May actually hired the hack who wrote the "Enemies of the People" article shortly afterwards as her Downing Street press secretary!
Let's be clear that nobody deserves this kind of vile political abuse, but surely Theresa May and her mates must have had an inkling that their strategy of whipping up such torrents of ultranationalist fervour, hatred, and death threats over Brexit would one day rebound back on them if they ever tried to do anything whatever that went against the wishes of the radical extreme-right Brextremist fringe?
High-viz jackets
One of the most despicable things about the extreme-right Brexit Betrayal mob is the way they've tried to appropriate the yellow high-viz vest thing from the French gilets jaunes movement.
Like them or loathe them (over 70% of French people support them by the way) it's impossible to deny that the central theme of their movement is anger at economic injustice.
French people are furious that Macron is imposing fuel tax hikes on ordinary people to protect huge corporations (70% of carbon emissions come from 100 of the biggest corporations), and even lavishing a vast tax break on the 1% of wealthiest people in France.
The "no deal" fanatics at the Brexit Betrayal march are protesting in favour of the opposite.
They actually want to trigger an economic meltdown and yet another collapse in British living standards by demanding the most chaotic and economically damaging interpretation possible of the Brexit vote.
Presumably they're doing this because they're fully aware that extreme economic deprivation and the rise of extreme-right ideologues and tyrants go hand-in-hand.
It's an absolute insult to nick the symbolic and effective yellow vests off the French protesters for entirely contradictory purposes.
Extreme-right recruitment
Aside from all the UKIP propaganda at the Brexit Batrayal March, there were several extremist organisations using the demo as a recruitment opportunity. There were loads of banners and literature and placards from the vile white supremacist Generation Identity movement , and the extreme-right EDL successors the "Democratic Football Lad's Alliance" were handing out their propaganda too.
Jo Cox
Nooses, home made banners full of outright political lies, extreme-right and white supremacist literature and banners are appalling enough, but they pale into insignificance in comparison to this absolutely vile conspiracy theory about the murdered MP Jo Cox.
There is no doubt whatever that Cox was brutally murdered in the street by a "Britain First" screaming extreme-right terrorist who later gave his name in court as "death to traitors, freedom for Britain".
Just imagine the mindset and motivation of someone who would chose to claim that this murder was some kind of false flag operation by the political establishment to murder one of their own.
The extreme-right inclinations of Jo Cox's killer is obviously so close to the extreme-right views of the person holding this vile placard that they'd rather promote outrageous and sickening conspiracy lies than accept that the murder was committed by one of their own.
Funding
As usual the question needs to be asked, where did this rag-tag band of extreme-right fanatics dig up all the cash to promote and hold this demonstration? Who paid for the publicity? Who paid for the flags and banners? Who paid for the stage and sound equipment?
You'd have to be delusional to think it was Ordinary Joe right-wingers who stumped up the cash given that only 3,000 odd even bothered to turn up. So who was it? Another one of the shady US propaganda outfits who bankroll Yaxley-Lennon, or someone else?
Israel and the British extreme right
On the face of it Zionists and the British extreme-right make extremely odd bedfellows, especially given the history of extreme-right abuse of British Jewish communities (the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, Wood Green in the 1970s) but there were Israeli flags on display amongst the Union flags, pro-Trump propaganda, UKIP banners, and white supremacist placards.
It was always the left (the socialists, the communists, and the anarchists) who stood in solidarity with British Jews against the extreme-right thugs trying to parade through their neighbourhoods, so seeing Israeli flags at extreme-right marches really does induce confusion.
What do Zionists hope to achieve from colluding with the British extreme-right fringe, and what do the extreme-right fringe get out of promoting Zionism?
Jonathan Pie
Everyone with a social media account must have seen at least one Jonathan Pie video. At his peak his brilliant eviscerations of the Tory government were social media gold.
He's disappeared off the radar a little bit recently, but then he's re-emerged at the Brexit Betrayal march, getting welcomed like a hero and doing loads of grinning selfies with the Ukippers and Tommy Robinson fanboys.
Is he working on some kind of undercover exposé of the inner workings of the extreme-right fringe, or was he just basking in the adulation of a bunch of extreme-right fanatics?
The Daily Mail hate chamber absolutely loved it
The comments on the Daily Mail article about the Brexit Betrayal march are exactly what you'd expect from the extreme-right echo chamber of hate that the Daily Mail have cultivated.
The top rated comment of all is a declaration of 100% support for 'Tommy Robinson'. Just imagine offering your uncritical and unyielding 100% support to any political figure, let alone a street thug, wife-beater, and convicted fraudster like Yaxley Lennon!
Most of the other top rated comments praised extreme-right agitators, smeared the left-wing and anti-fascist counter-demonstration, hurled abuse at someone called MacConnell (I think they probably meant the Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell), and spread the usual extreme-right victimhood narratives.
One of the most down rated comments? A concerned Brexiteer saying that Brexit should be about Brexit and sovereignty, not a platform for providing free publicity to criminal extreme-right thugs like Yaxley Lennon.
Conclusion
This collection of 3,000 bigots, racists, ukippers, EDL street thugs, and outright cranks clearly doesn't represent all of the 17.4 million people who voted for Brexit, but then Brexiteers never were a unified group with unified demands.
Unfortunately for those who held their noses and voted alongside the millions of bigots, xenophobes, Ukippers, extreme-right agitators, Britain First followers, EDL street thugs, and the hard-right fringe of the Tory party in favour of Brexit, they've got virtually no representation in the mainstream media, meaning this grotesque circus of bandwagon-jumping extreme-right cranks is how they're're going to be portrayed unless you start speaking out, condemning this revolting freakshow, and explaining what it is that reasonable Brexiteers like you actually want.
Of course not all Brexiters are racists, but on the evidence of the Brexit Betrayal protest, all the racists are definitely Brexiters.
If you're an non-racist, no-bigoted, non-fascist Brexiter, are you really going to let this utterly vile mob speak for you?
Are you really going to allow extreme-right agitators and hate preachers to usurp Brexit and use it to promote their disgusting ideology?
Well if you do you're either dooming your Brexit ambitions to failure, or worse, dooming Britain to a terrifying future of extreme-right demagoguery, ethnic and religious persecution, and extreme repression of political non-conformity.
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.
Over the last week France has been rocked by the biggest riots in over a decade but much of the media coverage has been sketchy at best.
Fuel protest
The gilets jaunes (yellow vests) movement started as a grassroots protest against a hugely unpopular hike in fuel tax designed to load the economic burden of climate change goals onto ordinary people, and especially those in non-urban areas who rely on cars to survive.
That these planned tax rises on petrol and diesel have coincided with a global spike in fuel prices has exacerbated the situation, leaving millions of French families wondering where they're going to find the cash to pay for these huge fuel price hikes.
Climate change
As gilets jaunes the movement has spread it has evolved and grown into a much broader protest against Emmanuel Macron and the French government.
Macron and his supporters keep on banging on about ecology and how progressive it is to tax fuel, but they're talking a completely different language to the people facing the economic burden of these policies.
Of course a lot of people accept that something needs to be done to combat climate change, but loading the majority of the burden onto ordinary people who have no choice but to drive, whilst actually giving handouts to the mega-rich with the other hand is the exact opposite of a progressive approach.
Anyone trying to characterise the gilets jaunes movement as a simple fuel protest against reasonable and progressive climate change measures is either catastrophically under-informed or behaving in a deliberately disingenuous manner.
Yellow vests
The reason for the yellow vests is that since 2008 French drivers have been required by law to have a yellow high visibility vest in their vehicle in case of breakdown, meaning that high visibility jackets are a cheap and widely available symbolic "uniform" for the protesters.
Violence
The vast majority of the 280,000+ gilets jaunes protesters have been peaceful and non-violent, but as is always the way the vast majority of the mainstream media coverage has focused on the violent minority.
This isn't an effort to downplay or excuse any of the unacceptable violence and vandalism, it's just an effort to redress the balance a bit by pointing out that the violence and chaos in Paris is unrepresentative of the enormous movement that is going on across the whole of France.
Delegitimisation
Assorted 'centrists' and Macron fanboys have tried to create the argument that the entire movement "lost legitimacy as soon as it turned to rioting/looting/car burning".
The problem with this tactic of tarring an entire movement of hundreds of thousands with the behaviour of the very worst minority is that it would make it ridiculously easy to render all political protest illegitimate through the tactical insertion of a small number of violent agent provocateurs into any and all protest movements.
Any reasonable person should be capable of differentiating between the hundreds of thousands of non-violent protesters across France who blocked roads and fuel depots without rioting or violence, and the small minority of lawless thugs the media have concentrated on.
The price of Macron
When Emmanuel Macron won the French Presidency "I'm alright Jack" centrists across the world went into raptures that their favoured brand of neoliberalism-lite was back on the agenda, but now that Macron's opinion poll ratings have collapsed to minus 50, hundreds of thousands of people are actively protesting against the government, and the streets of Paris are ablaze, perhaps it's time for a quick reappraisal.
Macron only won the Presidency because the only other option on the ballot was the hate-mongering extreme-right ultranationalist Marine Le Pen. In a choice between the neoliberal frying pan and the fascist fire, the French public understandably chose to stay in the frying pan.
As you'd expect from a neoliberal with a huge parliamentary majority, the result has been a massive squeeze on poor and ordinary people in order to fund handouts and tax cuts for the mega-rich.
It's not like the French public could have had any illusions about what was going to happen given that Macron was personally responsible for the massively unpopular anti-worker legislation that destroyed the parti socialiste from within before he jumped ship to create a 'centrist' protest movement against the political establishment that he was one of the worst examples of!
Given the long history of public protest in France, a revolt against Macron and his neoliberal agenda was always on the cards, the only surprising thing being that it's taken so long to happen.
Rebellion
One of the big ironies is that Macron connived his way into power by creating and leading a faux rebellion against the French political establishment, yet he's only halfway into his second year in office and he's the focus of a new, more genuine, and more furious anti-establishment revolt.
If you promise the people a revolution and a government that listens to and works on behalf of ordinary people, then deliver nothing but a 'more of the same' anti-worker, neoliberal agenda, is it any wonder they'd be furious?
Social media
The gilets jaunes movement began on social media with petitions and a Facebook event aimed at disrupting traffic on November 17th. Since then it's spread onto the streets.
The spontaneous social media growth of the protest means there's no real defined leadership structure, which has its advantages and disadvantages.
Extreme-right opportunism
The French extreme-right have been quick to jump on the protests with Macron's defeated Presidential rival Marine Le Pan trying to associate herself with the movement and encouraging her supporters to infiltrate it.
The structureless and leaderless nature of the movement has made it possible for the French extreme-right to infiltrate the protests, but this leaderless nature also prevents them from usurping it by establishing themselves as its leaders.
Popularity
Various opinion polls have put public support for the gilets jaunes at between 72% and 84%. meaning Macron is in a really tricky situation. He's styled himself as an authoritarian who won't give in to protest, but he's only going to increase his (already extraordinary) levels of unpopularity if he seeks to crush this extremely popular movement by force.
The squeezed middle
The reason the gilets jaunes movement is so popular is that they're representing the frustration of millions of ordinary French people who feel they're getting insufficient return for their labour and their taxes.
Like most Europeans the French are reasonably content to pay high taxes in return for quality public services, decent pensions, and a strong social security system, however Macron's fuel tax hikes have coincided with hardline neoliberal policies from Macron such as gutting the social security system, attacking pensions, and attempting to flog off the French rail network to his private sector mates. And to top it all off one of Macron's first reforms was to slash wealth taxes paid for the extremely rich.
Of course anti-worker legislation, privatisation mania, attacks on the social security system, and massive handouts to the mega-rich must sound familiar to British people who have been suffering these same policies under 8 years of disastrous Tory rule, but the French are different. They won't just sit back and accept this ideologically-driven assault on their living standards, and even twice re-elect the bastards who have been doing it like the British have, they're making it clear they're simply not having it.
What next?
With Macron outright refusing to drop the next 6.5% hike in fuel prices sceduled for January, and with such high levels of public support it seems unlikely the gilets jaunes protests will just stop altogether any time soon.
The extent to which the protests continue over the next few weeks and months would seem to depend on whether Macron decides to cede ground by dropping the planned fuel hike, or intensifies the situation by outright ignoring the concerns of protesters and seeking to forcibly clamp down on the protests by imposing emergency legislation.
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.
How can the Tories expect us to believe that they can run the country when they can't even send vile propaganda-ridden begging letters to pensioners without screwing it up by addressing them to "Youmustbe Fuckingjoking".
The blunder obviously came about because the Tories used "Youmustbe Fuckingjoking" as the default Addressee on their mailing list, then forgot to change it when they input the address.
The Tories have admitted that the offensive letter was sent out by their propaganda arm and apologised for the sweary piss-taking, but there's plenty of other concerning stuff within the content of the letter that the Tories did not bother to apologise for.
See the full letter here (credit: Laura McCormack)
Begging pensioners
Why are the Tories begging pensioners for cash when they're almost completely bankrolled by mega-rich donors, including the kinds of Russian oligarchs and Putin cronies who can afford to pay £160,000 for a game of tennis with Boris Johnson?
Instead of begging for £52 - £160 per year from pensioners, surely the Tories could just ask one of their hedge fund mates or Russian oligarchs for an extra half million or so and let the pensioners keep their cash.
A Britain fit for the future?
In the opening paragraph of the letter the Tories claim to be "building a Britain that is fit for the future" but the reality is that they're investing less in infrastructure development than any of our economic rivals, meaning we're getting left behind in the global economic race, and that they're actually retarding our future economic potential with their fixation with hard-right austerity dogma.
Brexit
The letter then goes on to brag about what a supposedly great Brexit deal the Tories are securing, but what they don't admit is that their own economic assessments (you know, the ones they spent months trying to hide) found that every form of Brexit will result in an economic downturn.
The Single Market and Customs Union version of Brexit would be the least damaging, but Theresa May already ruled that out under pressure from the right-wing Brextremist faction of her party, meaning the options were facing are two even more damaging versions of Brexit (hard right-wing Brexit & "no deal" chaos).
Stamp Duty
The next bit of Tory bragging is their Stamp Duty cut for first time buyers. They pretend that this is a great thing for first time buyers, but their own evidence said that it's not, and that it actually works as a significant unearned bonus for sellers, paid for at the taxpayers' expense.
Who would have thought that the Tories would try to dress up a taxpayer-funded handout for the rich as a benevolent gift for struggling first-time buyers?
Well, anyone who has been paying the slightest bit of attention for the last 8 years obviously.
The environment
The Tories then resort to bragging about how much they care about the environment, hoping that the recipient is unaware of their ghastly environmental record which includes handing massive tax breaks to fracking companies, ignoring massive local objections to grant fracking licences in beautiful rural locations like Ryedale, trashing the UK solar industry by slashing solar subsidies, and vehemently opposing European Parliament efforts to clamp down on plastic pollution, only to dress the policy up as their own idea when it came to implementation time!
Then there's the fact that they voted down Labour's amendment to their EU Withdrawal Bill that would have prevented them from using Brexit as an excuse to scrap EU derived environmental laws. If they have no intention of scrapping environmental laws, why on earth would they have voted down an amendment to stop them doing it?
Misleading rubbish
The letter then sets about fearmongering about Jeremy Corbyn and Momentum in order to frighten people out of voting Labour at the local elections. This is especially disingenuous given that the Tory party Twitter account has explicitly admitted that local elections are about local issues, not who rules the roost in Westminster.
Outright lies
One of the fearmongering claims about Labour is that they're promising to "take £350 billion from the pockets of hard-working taxpayers".
There's absolutely nothing in the Labour Manifesto "promising" to raise taxes by £350 billion, and in fact it actually pledges to avoid raising income tax for everyone except the top 5% of earners.
If the UK electoral authorities weren't a completely toothless joke these kinds of political lies would be clamped down on hard, but as we saw with the complete inaction on Tory dark ads during the 2017 General Election, the Tories are free to lie with total impunity.
Army of footsoldiers
The letter admits that the Tories see their only hope of beating Labour is by pumping huge amounts of cash into their political campaigns to recruit "an army of footsoldiers".
This plan sounds awfully similar to the plan cooked up by the Tory Chairman Brandon Lewis to hire a troll army of social media propagandists.
The letter openly admits that the Tories are forced to pay people to be activists while Labour's policies are popular enough to attract huge numbers of volunteers willing to do the work for free. Doesn't this tell us everything we need to know?
No credible policies
The letter then goes on to claim that Labour have "no credible policies for improving the lives of people in London".
Since 2010 the Tories have cut £600 million from the London police budget, resulting in the loss of 7,000+ police officers and PCOs. They also have plans to slash another £400 million from the London police budget by 2022.
Labour have a costed plan to reverse these cuts and put more police back on the streets of London in order to help deal with the shocking increase in violent crimes like stabbings, shootings, and acid attacks.
Defeat Socialism
The letter contains a quite extraordinary footnote that proves what a bunch of ideological fanatics the Tories really are. When they promise to "defeat socialism" there's no other way of reading this than a death sentence for the NHS, because it is indisputably one of the finest examples of socialist policy on the planet.
The concept of prioritising health care to those who need it most, rather than those with the largest wallets is an unmistakable example of socialism, so when the Tories openly state that they're on a mission to defeat socialism, make no mistake at all, they're admitting that they hate the NHS and want to see it destroyed.
The only way that sending a letter out to a bunch of pensioners that admits their ideological commitment to wrecking the NHS is if they're so damned arrogant that they assume that the pensioners won't put two and two together and actually realise what the real world implications of "defeat socialism" really are.
Theresa May's signature
Theresa May's signature appears on this letter, which means that she's personally approved this lamentable pack of lies, distortions and distractions, and that she approves of the ideological attack on the NHS that appears in the footnote.
Piss-taking Tories
The fact that the automatic addressee in the Tory mailing software has been set as "Youmustbe Fuckingjoking" strongly suggests that even the Tories responsible for sending out these letters have no faith in what they're doing, and no faith in the absolute bullshit they're being asked to peddle by Theresa May and her propaganda team.
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