How I overcame social anxiety and became a successful writer

In November 2014 I was invited to give a couple of presentations to organisations in London about how, as an individual, I've managed to build up a social media reach that dwarfs the reach of so many worthy activist causes that each employ dozens of people and call upon hundreds of volunteers.

I was perfectly happy to give away some hints and tips on how to achieve a large following of politically engaged people, because I have no interest whatever in hoarding my secrets to prevent others from achieving what I have. As far as I'm concerned, I want to be at the crest of a wave of new, alternative media. An inundation of independent citizen journalists and social activist organisations to erode away the edifices of the establishment friendly corporate media.

By advising people on how to use social media more effectively in order to spread alternative political messages I hoped I could play a part in helping more and more people assert themselves as individuals and present distinct analyses to the recurring narratives pushed by the mainstream media and the Westminster establishment. The only way we can prevent these institutions from totally dictating the spectrum of political discourse is if those of us who think differently have the means to express ourselves and to be heard.

The first event went really well, especially considering it was my first effort at public speaking since I said my wedding vows over 10 years ago. It consisted of a speech, a questions and answers session and a short workshop on how spectacularly easy it is to create powerful infographics. I thought it went well, and the feedback seemed to be very positive.

As I was making preparations for my second event, it occurred to me that the process of becoming a successful writer began a long time before the day I decided to set up a political blog, eventually settling for the name Another Angry Voice simply because I couldn't be bothered wasting any more time trying to think of anything better!

At the time I set it up, I obviously had no idea of how much time and effort I would end up putting into it, or that one day it would provide me the power to spread my political views into over 3 million Facebook news feeds per week! At that time I just had something I wanted to write, and I quickly cobbled together a blog to write it on. However, the process of becoming a political writer didn't actually begin there.

For me, the story is incomplete without an explanation of my previous efforts to become a political writer. I've decided against "naming and shaming" the three organisations in the following section, because I don't actually feel any ill will towards them over what happened at all, and I wouldn't want to give them any unnecessary bad publicity.

Rejection

My first effort to become a political writer in 2004 manifested as an effort to seek out an alternative media website and attendance of one of their meetings, which took place in a pub around a number of small tables. For someone like me, even getting to the stage of going to a room full of strangers was a monumental effort. Gradually, as the evening progressed, people shifted around to talk to each other, so that at one point everyone around me was sitting with their backs to me. If that happened now, I'd simply relocate myself to the centre of the meeting, drawing attention to myself in the process. Back then I suffered quite serious social anxiety, so I just sat there on my own feeling ignored. At the end of the meeting I plucked up the courage to make one last effort to speak to someone, but they were not interested, so I went away feeling bitter and defeated and never went back. In the week prior to publication of this article over 100,000 people had engaged with (liked, commented or shared) my work on Facebook, whilst fewer than 100 people had engaged with the work of this particular organisation.

After that failure I gave up for several years, during which I slumped into several prolonged periods of depression. In 2007 I contacted another organisation who were campaigning on an issue I felt very strongly about, however my efforts to contribute to their campaign were also fruitless. Once again I gave up, feeling defeated and unwanted. In London I had the honour of meeting one of the leaders of this campaign. I told them how I'd tried to volunteer my services with their organisation, and they explained that (as I suspected) they were simply so busy and so short staffed at the time, there was no way they could arrange to meet everyone who emailed to volunteer their services. This didn't stop me feeling rejected at the time though, so once again I ended up setting aside my ambitions to write about political issues and spent the next few years slipping in and out of depression. This organisation continues to do incredibly good work in a field I am passionate about, and I will continue to promote their work.

My third effort to become a political writer manifested as a concerted effort to reach out to a mainstream news website in 2009-10 in order to submit an article about a specific political issue that was adversely affecting my family life at the time. Once again my efforts were rejected, and once again I gave up my ambitions to write about political issues.
              
Why am I telling you this?

The reason I'm explaining this is not about self-pity, nor about gloating that I'm now over 1,000x more successful on social media as the organisation that rejected me ten years ago. It is about consideration of the way rejection works. In my view this is useful for two purposes:

Firstly I want to help individuals understand how important it is that we do not let rejection destroy our confidence and our will to make a positive difference. This is particularly important for people like me who live with conditions such as social anxiety, depression, stress, and obsessiveness. We must never give up our ambitions in the face of rejection. The success of my Another Angry Voice project is a perfect illustration of the fact that information technology and social media now allow all manner of "outsiders" and neuro-atypical folk to reach out to huge audiences as individuals, without the need to work through the prism of collective organisations. If your efforts at political engagement have proven fruitless, there can be no harm whatever in trying, as I did, to set up your own political blog, Facebook page, Twitter account, Youtube channel, Buzzfeed profile, or whatever. 

It took me almost two years to pick up my first 1,000 followers, but now I've got so many that hundreds of people tend to start following things when I draw attention to them on my Facebook page. In order to help people with a quick blast of new followers I'd gladly consider giving people a helping hand with shares and retweets if the content is really high quality and interesting, so don't be afraid to Tweet your work at me or spam posts on my Facebook wall if you think I might be interested in them. I'll gladly give people a bit of a head start with a few hundred new followers if I think their work is really good stuff.

The second issue my experiences of rejection raises is that it may be useful to those who work within activist organisations to consider improving their engagement strategies. After all, the painfully shy bloke sitting at the back not saying anything may actually have turned out to have been the greatest asset you ever had, but because nobody spoke to him, he went away feeling rejected and defeated and never came back. In my view, effective first engagement and retention should be absolutely critical issues to any activist organisation. If your organisation does not have a good first engagement strategy, perhaps you should consider taking the initiative to establish good practice, so that nobody who wants to join your organisation ends up giving up and walking away because they feel unwanted.

Why I'm no longer bitter

At the time I experienced these rejections I had very low social confidence and I took them extremely badly, but in hindsight I retain none of the bitterness and negativity of the immediate aftermath. I've come to realise that these experiences were absolutely crucial steps towards the process of building myself a political platform where I have complete liberty to discuss whatever topic I like, and achieving the mind-bogglingly large audience I have today.

Had I had the social confidence to persist, and keep attending meetings at the alternative media organisation until I was accepted, it is certain that I would not have ended up where I am today. Had I badgered them until they let me write for them ten years ago, I would have learned to write within the paradigm of their organisation and gone forward on a completely different path in life.

It was only because I experienced such rejections that I eventually decided to do it all by myself, belligerently ignoring the norms and conventions of political writing style, graphic design, website layout, social media strategy and moderation policy, and developing my distinctive independent semi-anonymous status as a writer.

In my view the fact that I've ignored so many of the conventions I would have learned had I been accepted by any of these organisations, is actually one of the key factors that has driven the exponential growth of my audience, so I hold no grudges whatever. We are defined by our experiences in life, and without these experiences of rejection I wouldn't be who I am today.

Conclusion

Whether you have experienced rejection from campaigning organisations or not, I would advise anyone with strong political views to try to write them down and publicise them on social media.

Whether we do this through the prism of an established campaigning organisation, or as an individual blogger, it is really important that we at least try to spread awareness of the issues that are important to us.

The more of us who take the time to express our own political views, the bigger the alternative media tide will become, and the harder it will be for the mainstream media and the Westminster establishment to continue their near complete domination of the political debate.

 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

Owen Paterson's cyber-swarm

Last week the Tory so-called Environment minister Owen Paterson refused to support a precautionary ban on neonicotinoid pesticides.There is a growing body of evidence that they are harmful to bee populations. Bees are very important because they are pollinators. Many plant species rely entirely upon insect pollination, and a large proportion of the food we eat is pollinated by bees.

Paterson's excuse for trashing the precautionary principle is that the study his department has been doing into the effects of neonicotinoids has not been completed. The reason it was not completed is that the control group got contaminated with neonicotinoids because they are so widely used!

One factor that Paterson failed to mention is that one of the main European producers of neonicotinoid pesticides is the British based company Syngenta, who would stand to lose a lot of business were one of their main products to be banned in the EU.

There is a great deal of public concern over the issue of pesticides and bee populations. A save the bees petition on the Aavaz site has over 2.5 million signatures. As part of their campaign they suggested that people write to Owen Paterson in order to explain their concerns. Subsequently 84,000 people sent him emails.

Owen Paterson's response was frankly astonishing. He decided to smear these emails as a "cyber-attack" and complain that these bee emails prevented him from doing his job.

I'll deal with his complaint that these emails prevented him from doing his job before I get to his abuse of language. Anyone that is incapable of filtering their emails for the word "bee" and then moving the selected emails to a separate folder is clearly not fit to be running a major government department. Even if he is not tech savvy, there should be someone in his constituency office or the department that he heads capable of explaining this simple function to him.

This public display of computer illiteracy detracts terribly from his use of the phrase "cyber-attack" to describe this email campaign. If he's incapable of doing a simple IT task like filtering his emails, he's a functional computer illiterate who clearly has no authority to use IT terminology like "cyber-attack".

For those that don't know the precise definition of "cyber-attack" here it is:

"A cyber-attack is deliberate exploitation of computer systems, technology-dependent enterprises and networks. Cyber-attacks use malicious code to alter computer code, logic or data, resulting in disruptive consequences that can compromise data and lead to cybercrimes, such as information and identity theft."

Tens of thousands of individual people taking their time to express their legitimate concerns to a relevant government official does not, in any way, constitute a cyber-attack. The only way it could remotely be construed as a deliberate "cyber-attack" is if the people that orchestrated the email campaign deliberately attempted to deny service to Paterson's email account by exceeding the size limit. However, the strategy of getting tens of thousands of individuals to send one email each is just about the most inefficient possible way to do this.

The thinking behind Paterson's complaint is obvious. He doesn't want to hear people's legitimate concerns, so he'd like the act of suggesting that someone write to their MP over a specific issue to be redefined as cyber-terrorism. This way, pesky petition sites and independent bloggers (like me) could be criminalised for suggesting that people exercise their democratic right to complain.

Given that all three establishment political parties have now embraced the concept of introducing retroactive laws, when they do bring in a legislation to criminalise "Inciting communication with elected representatives" they might as well backdate it to the beginning of the internet age so that they can shut down all these pesky petition sites and round up all the independent bloggers that have ever used the internet to that their followers exercise their right to write to their MP!

To describe an email campaign by tens of thousands of concerned citizens as a "cyber-attack" is not only a grotesque misrepresentation of what a cyber-attack actually is, it also displays a breathtaking contempt for the concept of open and accountable governance. Not only is Paterson refusing to even consider the concerns of the people who wrote to him, he's actually smearing them as cyber-terrorists.

If you feel that Owen Paterson has been misusing the phrase "cyber-terrorism" to smear people with legitimate concerns, could I suggest that you drop him an email to complain at patersono@parliament.uk

If you haven't already signed the Aavaz "save the bees" petition, you can do that here.

Another Angry Voice is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for Another Angry Voice is the  PayPal  donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

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The Workfare ship is sinking

As anyone that gives a damn about the hard-won rights of the British people already knows, the Tory led coalition were dealt a huge blow by the Court of Appeals over the unlawful way they had been forcing people to give up their labour rights and work for no wages on so-called "Workfare" schemes.

Unfortunately the ruling does not explicitly rule out the practice of forcing people to work for no wages in order to boost corporate profits at corporations such as: A4e, Argos, Carrillion, Greggs, Hilton hotels, Marriot Hotels, McDonalds, Debenhams, Pizza Hut, Poundland, Poundstretcher, Primark, Serco, Superdrug, Topman, Topshop, Weatherspoons, WH Smiths, Wilkinsons and the Yorkshire Linnen Company.

The ruling was made by a three judge panel. Lord Justice Pill, Lady Justice Black and Sir Stanley Burnton ruled unanimously that the Work and Pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith had exceeded his powers as secretary of state because any such scheme must first be "authorised by Parliament". 

Stanley Burnton explained that under section 17a of the 1995 Jobseekers Act (as amended in 2009), the secretary of state could not simply do as he saw fit and has an obligation to lay the details of the those programmes before Parliament.

The legal team that brought the appeal explained the implications of the ruling; that anyone that had been thrown off benefits for refusing to participate in these taxpayer funded corporate welfare schemes should be able to claim back their lost benefits, since the sanctions had been applied unlawfully.

The DWP quickly stated that they "have no intention of giving back money to anyone who has had their benefits removed" and that they would resist paying back the benefits they had unlawfully stripped people of "until all legal avenues had been exhausted".

The court refused the government permission to appeal but the DWP said it would take the matter to the supreme court.

The Tories, the DWP and the baying right-wing press actually had the gall to describe this ruling as a victory. Citing Burnton's statement that "this case is not about the social, economic, political or other merits" as some kind of glowing endorsement of their mandatory unpaid labour schemes.

The judges were willing to gloss over the economic illiteracy of these Workfare schemes, since it lay outside the remit of the case. However it doesn't take an economics genius to see the glaring flaws in a scheme that forces highly trained people into menial unpaid jobs, that would surely be better filled by paid unskilled workers. There are two main strands to the argument:

Firstly: By providing a steady stream of unpaid and rightless workers for corporate interests to exploit, the Tories and the DWP are actually providing them with a perverse financial incentive to quit recruiting and to lay off their paid low-skilled workers then replace them with taxpayer funded free labour instead. The Tories love to claim that these schemes "help the unemployed to get into work", however it is absolutely clear that these schemes are actually job destroyers. The more people that get forced onto these corporate welfare schemes, the fewer paid jobs there will actually be!

Secondly: The whole mandatory unpaid labour ideology reeks of economic ignorance. The foundation of the capitalist system is demand. Henry Ford famously recognised that workers wages created demand and chose to price his cars cheaply enough, and paid his workers decently enough that they could eventually afford to buy them. Instead of maximising profits by paying his workers a pittance and selling his cars for a fortune he recognised this basic economic idea of demand that George Osborne and the Tories seem so fundamentally ignorant of. The Tory ideology seems to be to maximise short term corporate profits by providing corporations with an endless supply of free, rightless labour, with scant regard for the fact that consigning an ever greater proportion of the workforce to the pitiful subsistence income of unemployment benefits will actually reduce consumer demand in the UK economy, adding to the economic stagnation caused by Obsorne's other demand killing policy of ideological austerity.

Right, now that we've got past the fundamental economic illiteracy of these schemes, lets return to the moral case, which is where the Tories (absurdly) want to argue it. Take the ridiculousness of employment minister Mark Hoban's argument here:

"The court has backed our right to require people to take part in programmes which will help get them into work"

Not only is he trying to paint this catastrophic defeat as some kind of victory, he is also using the word "right" in an utterly surreal manner. If the appeal to "rights" was coming from the other side of the debate, we know exactly what people like Mark and his braying supporters in the right-wing press would say. Here are a few examples of legitimate appeals to rights:

"Workers have a right to earn the statutory minimum wage"

"Unemployed workers have the right to claim the unemployment benefits they have paid for through their National Insurance contributions, without being forced onto economically illiterate corporate welfare schemes."

"Unemployed people have a right to undertake their own voluntary work experience placements and jobseeking activities without being forced to give them up to stack shelves and sweep floors at Poundland for no pay."

Hoban and the right-wing press would condemn these "appeals to rights" as wishy-washy liberal nonsense then try to distract attention away from these legitimate rights issues by invoking "scrounger narratives" or dissembling about their fantasy of revoking the European Convention on Human Rights.

It is absolutely clear from Hoban's statement that he believes that as a member of the government it is "his right" to force people into unpaid corporate welfare schemes, in breach of their right to earn the statutory minimum wage. The man is using a fascistic definition of the word "right". He believes that any rights members of the public may have are secondary to his right to dictate what people should and shouldn't be doing, that ministerial rights supersede human rights. Essentially he is saying that the public have a duty to serve the government, not that the government has the duty to serve the public.

It is a small victory that the Appeal Court has ruled that these Tory mandatory unpaid Workfare schemes are unlawful. The Tories will now fight desperately to keep their corporate welfare ship afloat. Iain Duncan Smith has worked tirelessly to undermine the statutory minimum wage, to revoke our hard-won labour rights and to provide a stream of rightless, wageless workers to corporate interests.

We must now expect a full on barrage of "scrounger narratives" from the braying right-wing press and a desperate attempt to push these schemes through Parliament from the Tories.

We must keep up the fight against mandatory unpaid labour by writing to our local MPs, by signing petitions, by boycotting workfare scrounging companies (and emailing them to let them know exactly what we think of their exploitation of unpaid workers) and by maximising social media to assert that these brazen assaults on our labour rights are unacceptable and to demand that they are abandoned.

If you care about our hard-won labour rights here are some of the things that you can do:

• Use the Parliamentary website to find the email address of your local MP and let them know your views.
• Here is a link detailing the email addresses and social media contacts for "workfare scrounging corporations", why not let them know your views.
• If you know anyone that supports workfare mandatory unpaid labour, please make sure they read this letter. If you use Facebook then please take a moment to share this image with your friends.
• If you believe that the unemployment situation can be resolved without attacking labour rights and undermining the minimum wage, please take a moment to read these alternate welfare reform proposals.

Another Angry Voice is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for Another Angry Voice is the PayPal donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

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The catastrophic failure of "Osbornomics"
  

Even the police are protesting against this Tory lunacy

It is genuinely astonishing to see the police protesting against the Tory
led government in solidarity with trade unionists, given their role as 
Thatcher's bully boy militia during the 1984-85 miners' strike.

The Tories are a divisive bunch with have nothing but contempt for the labour of ordinary working people, believing that the only true wealth is either inherited wealth or wealth obtained through capitalist exploitation. They were not always so rabid. Before Margaret Thatcher's rise to power they had observed the post-war consensus, in which the UK economy was run as a mixture of regulated capitalism and state controlled core industries and services.

The right-wing apologists will tell you that the mixed economy was "broken" and that Thatcher's ideologically driven neoliberalisation somehow "saved Britain", but it is quite obvious that the opposite is true. The statistics speak for themselves. The mixed economy years were the most productive in British history and every sector of society benefited from this increase in wealth. Since the neoliberals took over in 1979, UK manufacturing has gone into steep decline and greater and greater proportions of the national wealth have been siphoned off by the economic elite, a process that continued under the Neo-Labour turncoats and is still going on now three decades later. Despite the Tory rhetoric that "we are all in it together", the wealthy are getting richer, whilst the ordinary are suffering the "austerity".

It doesn't seem to matter at all to the Coalition that their barmy self-defeating austerity drive has pushed the UK economy back into recession and their policies are allowing the super-rich economic elite to escape the effects of austerity. The Tories are on an ideological crusade, and they will let nothing get in their way.

A key component of this Tory attack on ordinary working people is their privatisation agenda. The objective is to ensure that an ever greater proportion of the national wealth goes to the economic elite by gifting state institutions to the private sector, who then use the industries to generate profits for themselves. One of the first post-privatisation steps is to slash the wages and labour rights of the workforce. Since their return to power in 2010 at the head of a Lib-Dem backed Coalition, they have already succeeded in introducing privatisation schemes in the forensic science service and the court translation service. Their biggest privatisation "success" to date, the ramming through of their National Health Service privatisation scheme that is hugely unpopular with the public and the general population alike.

The police brutally suppressed the miners' protests against
 Thatcher's Tories, yet their "reward" in the long term will
 be the same kind of job losses, pay cuts and privatisation
that the miners were protesting about in the 1980s.

Future plans include the privatisation of the Post Office, the road network and the privatisation and outsourcing of the police force. On Thursday 10 May 2012 thousands of police joined unionised public service workers to protest against the Tory agenda of public service cuts and large scale privatisations. It just goes to show how extreme this government is, that they are intent on privatising things that even their great idol Thatcher wouldn't have dared such as the NHS and the police force.

These strikes and protests are necessary because people are rightly angry that "the ordinary" are suffering all of the "austerity" in the form of public sector layoffs, pension cuts, stagnant wages, rising prices and loss of public services, whilst the economic elite are still getting richer and have just been gifted a large cut in income tax by the Tories. The Tories belligerent attitude is made clear by the Paymaster General Francis Maude who described the protests as "futile".

Julie Nesbit of the Police Federation complained that despite being a vital public service, the police are under attack, claiming that "we don't have industrial rights" and "cannot do anything about the poor treatment we are receiving". Many people would find it hard to have any sympathy for the police as they suffer this brutal assault from the Tories, after all, the police acted as Thatcher's bully boy militia during the Miners' strike in 1984-85.

For decades the police have been quite happy to support neoliberal governments in their suppression political opponents. They helped the state to crush the coal mining industry, later the steel yards and the ship builders. Under Neo-Labour they continued to use violence, intimidation and kettling to beat down dissent from anti-war, anti-globalisation and student fees protesters. Now the tables have turned and the Tory government have turned their attention the police force that so enthusiastically helped them to carry out the the neoliberalisation of the state by brutally crushing dissent.

The Paymaster General Francis Maude
must be a big fan of dystopian sci-fi, he even
  uses the catchphrase of The Borg as inspiration.

The idea of privatised profit making police forces feeding into a privatised profit-making justice system which sends people to privatised profit making jails sounds a lot like a scenario from a fantastical science-fiction dystopia, yet this is exactly the kind of profit making "justice system" that the ideologically driven neoliberals that run the Tory party are intent on creating.

You don't have to have any sympathy for the police to see that what the Tories are planning is a grotesque betrayal of their loyal neoliberal militia. That they would slash investment in and then sell off their most loyal public sector workers, the ones that did so much to help them divide Britain in the first place, tells you all you need to know about the Tories. They have no loyalty to anyone but the rich.

It doesn't matter who or how many people protest against these socially and economically destructive policies, the Tories are on a far-right ideological crusade that makes Margaret Thatcher look like a moderate, and according to Francis Maude "resistance is futile".

This situation the police find themselves in reminds me of that old Martin Niemöller statement, first they came....

First they came for the miners
and we helped the state to defeat them because we weren't miners.
Then they came for the students
and we helped the state to defeat them because we weren't students.
Then they came for the anti-war protesters
and we helped the state to defeat them because we weren't anti-war protesters.
Then they came for the anti-neoliberals
and we helped the state to defeat them because we weren't anti-neoliberals.
Then they came for us
and there was no one left to prevent us from being defeated too.

The Mensch fallacy

The ideologically driven neoliberal dogma that has been the foundation of Conservative party policy for over three decades is defunct. It was holed beneath the water line when the "evil state sector" stepped in with the biggest state subsidies in human history (bailouts at above 90% of GDP by the government's own estimates and the near complete nationalisation of several debt stricken and insolvent banks) to rescue the financial sector temples of neoliberalism from the consequences of their own reckless gambling. Yet the political and economic establishment continue hawking exactly the same ideologically driven neoliberal clap trap under the new name of "austerity".

The best that (failed) Tories like Louise Mensch can offer in defence of their adherence to defunct ideologically driven pseudo-economic gibberish is to trot out truly pathetic arguments against those who complain about the defunct neoliberal model, excessive corporate greed, financial sector corruption and growing inequality.

The Mensch fallacy relies upon the straw man argument that anyone that opposes neoliberal economics, must be a raving anti-capitalist tree-hugger who opposes all forms of trade. Thus if these protesters have ever bought any commodity under the capitalist system (coffee and tents are her cited examples) they must be complete hypocrites.

Louise Mensch made this utterly lame point during an appearance on the long running BBC topical news comedy panel show Have I Got News For You and was immediately set upon by the other panellists for having made such a stunningly fallacious argument. That she tried to pull off a spectacularly lame right-wing fallacy in such a public setting gives her the unusual distinction of getting the first ever political myth busting fallacy named in her (dis)honour.

The Mensch fallacy is so lame it hardly needs further deconstruction, but I'll go on anyway.

Opposing the excesses of the deregulated financial sector does not equate to hating capitalism and all forms of trade. Living within a particular economic system does not disbar a person from criticising perceived problems with the system. You don't have to want to go back to a stone age barter system economy in order to complain that the FTSE 100 corporate executives awarded themselves a stonking 49% average pay rise in 2011, at a time when the vast majority of ordinary people were being made to suffer wage repression and harsh self-defeating Tory austerity.

Another huge flaw in the Mensch fallacy is that it would work just as well as a criticism of anti-communist protesters, in that they will almost certainly have benefited from provisions of the state at some point (used the state owned public transport system, drunk from the state owned water supply or relied on their state sponsored education for their ability to write their protest banners).

The fact that the Mensch fallacy is equally applicable to anti-communist protesters is particularly ironic as her argument is little more than a stunningly dim-witted extension of the pathetic "If you don't like it here, why don't you just go and live in North Korea" retort. 
              

 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.

More articles from 
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 

Margaret Thatcher's toxic neoliberal legacies
 

The Tory "economic recovery" mantra is a lie

The Tory contempt for ordinary working people

Austerity is a con
 

Facebook censorship in the UK

In recent months social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter have played important roles in the opposition to brutal undemocratic autocracies across the middle east, causing western commentators to sing their praises and struggling middle eastern dictators to shut them down entirely as part of their last desperate attempts to cling onto power.

Back in the UK it is a different story with Facebook carrying out a large-scale account deletion drive against UK based anti-establishment Facebook accounts on the royal wedding day which also saw large scale police action across London to prevent anti-monarchy protesters from exercising their rights to free speech. It was seemingly an exercise of power on the day that the idle rich chose to rub our faces in their centuries old inherited privilege and that the establishment yet again act as if free speech officially is a crime against the state.

Activist organisations that had their accounts sumerily deleted include Save NHS, UK Uncut Bristol, York Anarchists, Sheffield Occupation, Central London SWP, North London Solidarity, Chesterfield Stopthecuts, Camberwell AntiCuts, Tower Hamlets Greens, No Cuts, ArtsAgainst Cuts, London Student Assembly & dozens more.

The pretext for these deletions is that these organisations should have created Facebook pages rather than registering as Facebook user profiles, in violation of their "real names policy". It seems to be no coincidence that lots of UK left leaning anti-establishment pages were targeted while far right extremist groups registered as individual users have been left alone to continue spreading their hate.

Facebook implicitly supports the racist EDL
as they chose not to apply the same profile deletion technicality
to EDL groups in Nottingham, Tamworth, Dorset & Carlisle.

The fact that Facebook has been selectively deleting only UK based left leaning anti-establishment accounts suggests that they have been presented with a list of anti-establishment profiles and have carried out this purge under request.

Anyone with experience of Facebook's intransigence when the public try to get a hate page taken down must realise that such a large scale operation must have been requested by someone powerful within the UK establishment, someone from within the government or police perhaps.

To me it is sickening that Facebook chose to disrupt the legitimate activities of activist groups like Save NHS and UK Uncut using a technicality that they are unwilling to apply to far-right nationalist Facebook hate mongers like the EDL, especially on a day of national flag waving.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of the organisations disrupted by Facebook's royal wedding day profile deletions.

• Save NHS
• Socialist Unity
• No Cuts
• Tower Hamlets Greens
• Bristol Bookfair
• Open Birkbeck
• UWE Occupation
• Chesterfield Stopthecuts
• Camberwell AntiCuts
• IVA Womensrevolution
• ArtsAgainst Cuts
• London Student Assembly
• Beat’n Streets
• Roscoe ‘Manchester’ Occupation
• Newcastle Occupation
• Whospeaks Forus
• Ourland FreeLand
• Bristol Ukuncut
• Teampalestina Shaf
• Notts-Uncut Part-of UKUncut
• No Quarter Cutthewar
• Freedom Isa StateofMind
• Claimants Fightback
• Ecosocialists Unite
• Comrade George Orwell
• Jason Derrick
• Anarchista Rebellionis
• BigSociety Leeds
• Slade Occupation
• Anti-Cuts Across Wigan
• Firstof Mayband
• Don’t Break Britain United
• Cockneyreject
• SWP Cork
• Westiminster Trades Council
• York Anarchists
• Rock War
• Sheffield Occupation
• Central London SWP
• North London Solidarity
• Southwark Sos
• Rochdale Law Centre
• Goldsmiths Fights Back

See also: The case for an UK republic

 If you enjoyed this post, maybe you could buy me a beer? £1 would get me a can of cheap lager whilst £3 would get me a lovely pint of real ale.