Is Theresa May "a bigger threat to the Falklands than Argentina"

Remember back in January 2016 when Jeremy Corbyn suggested that Britain and Argentina should enter negotiations to co-operate over the Falkland Islands so that both countries can share in the prosperity, rather than restricting economic opportunities through animosity, trade sanctions, antagonism and militaristic posturing?

Remember how the Tories and the right-wing press spouted lie after lie after lie about what Corbyn was suggesting and even tried to claim that Corbyn's policy was to give away the Falkland Islands?

Remember how the Tory defence minister Michael Fallon even claimed that Jeremy Corbyn is "a bigger threat to the Falklands than Argentina"?

Remember how this hyperbolic nonsense was spouted ad nauseum by the mainstream press and  how David Cameron even got in on the act by including it in one of his most incredibly evasive* and downright dishonest "answers" ever at PMQs (see image) in which he lied five times in the space of thirty seconds? 

Fast-forward just eight months and Theresa May has sent Alan Duncan over to Argentina in order to come up with a deal to ... erm ... work out a deal for Argentina and the UK to co-operate over the Falkland Islands.

Where are the shrieking headlines about the Tories surrendering to the Argies? Where are the bile dripping editorials? Why isn't Michael Fallon attacking his Tory colleague as "a bigger threat to the Falklands than Argentina" for doing exactly what Jeremy Corbyn suggested just eight months previously?

The Falkland Islanders are apparently delighted that the Tories have pinched Jeremy Corbyn's idea, and are rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of an end to the decades of crippling trade sanctions on hydrocarbons, fishing, shipping and tourism.

Not only did the Tories (and their attack-dogs in the mainstream press) savage Jeremy Corbyn for suggesting an entirely sensible policy of economic co-operation between the UK and Argentina rather than militaristic antagonism, the Tories have actually gone and nicked it off him within the space of a year!

The lack of bile-dripping articles in the mainstream press about how Theresa May is "a bigger threat to the Falklands than the Argentinians" for doing precisely what Jeremy Corbyn was slaughtered for proposing just eight months ago is indicative of the extraordinary levels of pro-Tory bias of the UK mainstream press.

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* = The Jeremy Corbyn question that Cameron was evading was about the sweetheart deal the Tories had concocted to allow Google to pay an effective tax rate of just 3%.

David Cameron the innocent victim!

It took a few days of excruciating floundering from David Cameron and his party, but it's now clear that the Tory narrative on the Panama Papers has been set.

The ludicrous story they've concocted is that the Tories and the super-rich people caught up in the Panama Papers leak are the virginal innocent victims who have done nothing wrong, and the real villains in all of this are any ordinary members of the public who think they have a right to question the conduct of their Lords and masters!

The dodgy Tory donors

The Panama Papers have revealed that a whole host of major Tory party donors had links to offshore companies listed on the books of Mossack Fonseca these included:

• Anthony Bamford: £4 million in Tory donations, made into an unelected Tory peer in 2013.

• David Rowland: £3.8 million in Tory donations, former party treasurer.

• Fleming Family: Over £400,000 in Tory donations, including direct donations to David Cameron

• Juniper Equities Trading: £250,000 loan to the Tory party from an offshore fund with an opaque ownership structure. It is still not known who was behind this donation.

• Tony Buckingham: £100,000 donation to the Tories.

Cameron the "victim"

The Tory MPs and the right-wing press stumbled around for a while without a narrative to deflect criticism, leaving David Cameron to get backed into a corner. Following days of evasive answers and extraordinary press releases about how his offshore dealings during his time as an MP were supposedly a "private matter", Cameron eventually had to admit that he held a five figure stake in his fathers' dodgy offshore business which he never declared on the Parliamentary register of Members' Interests for nine years as an MP.

After all of this excruciating floundering, Tory party HQ eventually settled on the quite extraordinary story that David Cameron and the Tories are somehow the innocent victims in the Panama Papers scandal, and the villains are any ordinary members of the public with the temerity to complain about it. Here is a short selection of some of the ludicrous statements that Tory apologists have come up with:

"You often hear of people being trapped in poverty, but it's also possible to be trapped in wealth. This is David Cameron's fate" - Charles Moore, Daily Telegraph

This is shockingly offensive drivel to anybody who understands the deliberate upwards redistribution of wealth that has gone on as a consequence of Tory ideological austerity and how it has resulted in ordinary people suffering the most severe income declines since records began, reduced to food bank dependency, hit with ludicrously harsh benefits sanctions, unfairly thrown off disability benefits, rendered homeless (homelessness has risen dramatically since 2010) and even in death.

Poverty is a trap that can, and does, result in premature death. Wealth is not a trap.

David Cameron isn't under fire because he's wealthy. He's under fire because he deliberately hid his shareholding in his father's offshore business off the Parliamentary Register of Members' Interests and then spent four days obfuscating about it before finally admitting it. The problem isn't that he's rich, it's that he's dishonest.

"Shouldn't the Prime Minister’s critics snap out of their synthetic indignation and admit that they hate anyone with a hint of wealth in their life?" Tory MP Alan Duncan - Parliamentary question

This is an almost perfect example of the sanctimonious Tory "class war" ideology, where the Tories and their super-rich backers are always beyond reproach, and anyone who dares complain about anything they do must be vermin from "the lower orders" who are just filled with petty jealously and should damned well know their place.

According to Alan Duncan's smug Tory "logic", anyone who does have "a hint of wealth" who also feels entitled to be angry that David Cameron failed to register his significant offshore shareholding on the MP's Register of Interests for nine years must be a self-hater who is bitterly jealous of their own wealth!

Another thing to note is Alan Duncan's use of the term "synthetic indignation", which is quite extraordinary given the performance of Tory MP Charles Walker who gave a ludicrous display of synthetic indignation on BBC The Daily Politics show, painting David Cameron as the innocent victim of a "bullying" campaign, only to give the game away completely at the end by getting caught by the camera aiming a triumphant wink at his fellow Tory MP on the panel.

It's absolutely extraordinary that the Tories have simultaneously decided to cynically play the synthetic moral indignation card in defence of David Cameron, then smear anyone still asking questions about his failure to declare his offshore shareholding for nine years as an MP as being guilty of "synthetic indignation".

Following on from his broad-brush smear against anyone with the temerity to question their Tory betters, Alan Duncan went on to claim that non-millionaires are "under-achievers" which is a perfect example of the foul-minded Tory fallacy of natural economic justice (the idea that rich people are rich because they're virtuous, and poor people are poor because they're worthless scum).

"May I tell the Prime Minister that he should not be ashamed that he had the good fortune to be born into a well-off family" - Michael Fabricant, Parliamentary statement

This one is just absurd. It must surely be one of the weakest and most obvious straw-man fallacies ever uttered in parliament. Nobody at all is saying that David Cameron should be ashamed of being born into a wealthy family. The complaint is that he deliberately hid some of his assets off the Parliamentary Register of Members' Interests when he couldn't possibly have imagined that nobody at all in Britain could have reasonably have thought that such a shareholding might "influence his actions, speeches or votes in Parliament, or actions taken in his or her capacity as a Member of Parliament". It's completely obvious that he refused to declare the interest precisely because he thought people would think that, which means he was in clear breach of the MP's code of conduct.

The straw-man tactic (deliberately mischaracterising your opponents argument as something utterly facile and then criticising that, in place of what has actually been said) is truly one of the weakest and most contemptible debating tactics known to humanity.

It just goes to show how far the standards of public debate have fallen that Tory MPs think that they can get away with such blatantly fallacious debating tactics, and how much utter contempt they must have for "the lower orders" that they think we'd all just mindlessly accept such drivel and stop complaining.

Conclusion

The Panama Papers leak has revealed that the Tory party are funded by people with proven interests in a load of dodgy offshore companies and that they're led by a guy who cynically concealed his own offshore interests by deliberately omitting to mention them on the Parliamentary Register of Members' Interests for nine years. However, the Tory party are riddled with such utter contempt for "the lower orders" that they're trying to spin this situation to claim that they're the innocent victims and the any ordinary members of the public who dare to continue complaining are a pack of bullies motivated by nothing more than jealously!

The big thing isn't the fact they're trying to lie. distort, mislead and spin their way out of this situation. That's to be expected because the establishment class are trained to do this from a young age. The issue is the shocking level of contempt that these people clearly have for "the lower orders" that they think that they can fool us into thinking that they're the poor innocent victims and that ordinary members of the public are the contemptible bastards for daring to continue asking questions of their betters.

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The energy expenses scandal

In November 2013 the Sunday Mirror revealed that 340 MPs (more than half of them) have been claiming their energy bills on parliamentary expenses. I've already written extensively on energy policy so I'll stick to a few quick points.
 
It is hardly surprising that energy price inflation is soaring out of control in the UK. Not only are the establishment class already insulated from the adverse effects of energy price inflation by virtue of their wealth, more than half of MPs have their energy needs met at the taxpayers' expense. The problem of fuel poverty, and the fact that it will claim countless lives this winter is quite clearly an alien subject to those that can keep their heating on full bore, 24 hours a day at the taxpayers' expense throughout the winter.
 
MPs from either side of the house have been caught up in this taxpayer subsidised energy scandal, however the bulk of the criticism must surely be aimed at the coalition government politicians, who without a hint of irony railed against Ed Miliband's proposed government intervention in the energy market in order to protect the poorest and most vulnerable people in society from energy price inflation, in order to side with the energy companies that threatened to impose energy blackouts on the nation should curbs on their profiteering ever be imposed.

The most egregious claim of £5,822 was submitted by the Millionaire Tory MP Nadhim Zahawi for energy use on his vast 31 acre estate. This is a bloke who has bragged about his achievements on the energy bill committee in improving energy efficiency in homes and businesses. One wonders what incentive he has to improve the energy efficiency of his own country mansion, given that his enormous energy bills are paid for at taxpayers' expense no matter how well insulated his walls, windows and roof spaces are.

Another egregious claim was submitted by another Tory millionaire, the MP for East Devon Hugo Swire, who billed the taxpayer £3,192 to cover his energy bills. Just a few weeks previously he told his local newspaper that "The reason we are not introducing a price freeze is it simply won’t work. If we want the lights to stay on, consumers and taxpayers are, by some means or other, going to have to pay for it". It is absolutely clear that he believes the taxpayer are "going to have to" pay for his energy usage, but us common plebs ("consumers") "are going to have to" pay for our own, whether we can afford to subsidise outrageous corporate profiteering or not.

Another high profile Tory MP to put in a ludicrous claim for his energy bills was Alan Duncan, who billed the taxpayer £3,998 for energy use at his second home. A few weeks before the Mirror revealed the ludicrous personal energy subsidy he benefits from, he had a rant to his local paper about Ed Miliband's energy freeze policy. In his rant he constructed a catastrophically poor argument that energy price inflation is as inevitable as the tides, based on little more than feeble appeals to authority (I worked as an oil trader for 20 years don't you know? I've been an MP for over 20 years don't you know?), ludicrous fantasies (in Duncan's worldview the UK energy market is a highly competitive "free market" rather than a price rigging cartel riddled with foreign state owned eneteprises such as EdF and E-On) and topped off with some childish tribalist political mudslinging. No wonder he is opposed to caps on energy prices, the cost of his utilities bills don't matter a jot to him because the taxpayer pays it for him, whatever the price.

I've already written an article exposing the ludicrously hypocritical energy policy of the Tories, which consists of calling Ed Miliband a "market rigger" and a "price fixer" for daring to propose that energy price inflation is brought under control for 20 months, then just a couple of weeks later signing off on a ludicrous price fixing deal with EdF to pay almost double the market rate for electricity for 35 years. You can read that article here: 12 Things you should know about the Tory nuclear price fixing subsidies.

I've also written an article on MPs pay and expenses, in which I propose that all of their perks are removed and that their salary is pegged to the median income, meaning that if the public get poorer in real terms, they get poorer too, but if the public get richer then the MPs benefit from increased prosperity too. This would give them a financial incentive to make sure that conditions improve for the majority, and it would also allow us to actually believe them when they made claims like "we're all in this together". You can read that article here: The Case For ... Proportional Pay for MPs.

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