What's your position on Brexit?

In the United Kingdom there is an awful lot of confusion and delusion over what Brexit is eventually going to mean. The country seems to be even more divided than before the referendum. 

In this article I'm going to run through some of the distinct identifiable groups.

• Brexit utopians: People who, despite all of the available evidence, want to believe that post-Brexit Britain is going to be a land of milk and honey for all, and shriek "traitor", "Remoaner", "sore-loser" ... at anyone who dares think differently, or question what Theresa May and the three Brexiteers are actually up to.

• Brexit realists: People who accept that Brexit is going ahead, but understand that the UK is in a pathetically weak negotiating position due to the fact that any one of our 27 former European allies can torpedo any post-Brexit deal and that even if a deal is cobbled together, it's going to be negotiated by a callous and incompetent bunch of Tories. It doesn't take much grounding in reality to understand that the UK simply isn't going to get a better deal from the EU than the deal they had before.

• Brexit deniers: People (like Tony Blair) who seem to think that Brexit can somehow be undone before it is even started. As much as it's becoming clear that Brexit will end up being a disaster, especially for those who are least able to insulate themselves from the economic consequences, there's pretty much no way that the public can stop the Tories from pushing on with their longstanding dream of turning the UK into a right-wing tax haven. If a million plus people marching through London against the invasion and occupation of Iraq couldn't stop Blair from doing it anyway, it's hard to envisage what he thinks the public can do to stop the Tories from marching us on towards the cliff edge.

• Militant Brexiters: Not everyone in the Brexit enthusiast camp has the hyper-optimistic delusions of the Brexit utopians. Some people, like former the former DWP minister Iain Duncan Smith, accept that Brexit is going to have some very nasty consequences, especially for the poorest and most vulnerable in society, but they remain undeterred because they believe the economic and social suffering of others is a "price worth paying" for the opportunity for the Tory party to redesign the UK as some kind of hard-right authoritarian tax haven.

• The apathetic: 28% of registered voters didn't even bother to vote in the EU referendum. The ranks of the apathetic will likely have swelled significantly with people who have either been disengaged by bizarre platitudinous gibberish from the Tory government like "Brexit means Brexit" or "red, white and blue Brexit", the divisive, disrespectful and downright abusive tone of the ongoing Brexit debate, or by the seemingly endless quibbling over the specifics of what Brexit is actually going to look like.

• Brexit refugees: Believe it or not there are lots of people in the UK who don't look forward to being stripped of their European citizenship against their will, and lots of UK businesses who regard the abandonment of Single Market access as a major problem. There are several potential ways around these issues. If people have a parent from another EU member state, or an Irish or Italian grandparent, then they're entitled to inherit EU citizenship. An awful lot of businesses are looking to relocate part, or all, of their operations to countries that remain in the Single Market. Other people and businesses are looking at Scotland and the likelihood of a second independence referendum with the hope of keeping their EU citizenship, or at least access to the Single Market by living in, or relocating to a post-independence Scotland.

• Brexit sloganeers: There are some people who seem to contribute absolutely nothing to the debate other than the repetition of ridiculously over-simplistic slogans. "Brexit means Brexit" is the worst, but people can be found regurgitating all sorts of absolute drivel like "no deal is better than a bad deal". If the Tory government or the right-wing press say it, it seems there will always be people willing to mindlessly repeat it, no matter how devoid of meaning, or downright ridiculous it is.

• Brexit opportunists: You don't have to necessarily see Brexit as a great thing in order to see it as an opportunity. Scottish independence advocates can clearly see Brexit as an opportunity to call for a second independence referendum (justifiably in my opinion given that Scotland voted 62% - 38% to remain in the EU). There are individual opportunists too. Given the inevitable legal, economic and diplomatic complexity of Brexit, people are taking the opportunity to study subjects like international law, diplomatic studies or international trade in the expectation of well paid jobs sorting out the post-Brexit chaos.

• Resigned Brexiters: There seems to be a significant demographic who, despite originally not supporting Brexit, now think that since Brexit has been decided, it's best to "just get on with it". The problem for this group is that the process of quitting the European Union is just not as simple as saying "we quit". If the Tories submit the Article 50 notification in March as they say they're going to, the negotiation process is set to take another two years. The only way Brexit will be decided before March 2019 is if the Tories decide to go for "nuclear Brexit" when they realise that our 27 former EU allies aren't going to let them cherry-pick the best bits of EU membership, whilst scrapping all the bits they don't like. 

• Brexit doom-mongers: There are some people (on both sides of the debate) who are looking forward to Brexit because they're keenly anticipating some kind of appalling Doomsday scenario. There are plenty of Brexiters who seem to imagine that the UK is so important that the EU will collapse into social and economic Armageddon as soon as we leave. But there are also Doomsday Remainers who are smugly looking forward to being proven right by the appalling social and economic devastation they predicted for post-Brexit Britain.

This list isn't intended to be exhaustive, and I'm sure there are plenty of people who have their own different take on Brexit. Even if you don't identify with any of the ten groups I've described here, I hope this article helped to show that the debate is a whole lot more complex than the over-simplistic binary polarisation between pro- and anti-Brexit that an awful lot of people tend to rely on.

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OR

Not-voting is not revolutionary

  

Elections are looming and the "don't vote" brigade are once again out in force. I don't actually have anything against the concept of not voting, the people who annoy me are the ones who go around actively propagandising for other people to not-vote, as if they're participating in some kind of heroic anti-establishment revolution.

Not-voting isn't wrong in itself

Back in 2013 a friend of mine received their local election postal ballot but found that the only two candidates were a Tory (part of the coalition government they despised) and a Lib-Dem (part of the coalition government that they despised). I think their choice to tear the ballot paper into little pieces and send them off in the return envelope was perfectly justifiable.

The problem I have is with people who utter sub-Brandian platitudes like "if only everyone stopped voting then ..." because the huge glaring fault with this kind of assertion is that it's an exercise in extremely juvenile wishful thinking.

It's profoundly annoying that so many people keep repeating this kind of ludicrous appeal for everyone to "stop voting" based on the idea that revolutionary political change can be achieved through a vague hope that the powers that be will suddenly take notice if we all begin protesting against them by ... err ... doing nothing.

The PCC elections

A look at the results of the utterly farcical 2012 PCC elections in England demonstrate why this idle wish for mass non-participation doesn't have a hope of succeeding.

The average turnout for these ludicrous elections across the whole of England was just 15%, yet not a single one of the "winning" candidates refused to take up their cushy £65-£95,000 per year salaries because of their appalling lack of a democratic mandate. Several of the PCCs actually took up their positions with the backing of less than 5% of the eligible electorate in their constituencies!

The 2012 PCC elections were absolute proof that a lack of mandate from over 95% of the electorate still wasn't enough to prevent politicians from taking up their jobs. This leaves us with the question of how anyone thinks that wishfully appealing for everyone to just stop voting could ever result in revolutionary social change?

Even in the extraordinarily unlikely even that 99% of people refused to vote, it's still certain that the politicians themselves and their inner-circles of supporters would just cast a few dozen votes to "win" the election for themselves.

Not-voting is not revolutionary

There's nothing clever, or contrarian, or heroic about telling other people not to vote as if it's a revolutionary thing to do. It's a stupid stance that is literally indistinguishable from outright apathy when the voting statistics are compiled. If you want to make yourself indistinguishable from the hopelessly apathetic lumpenproletariat in the electoral statistics that's fine by me, but don't think that there's anything clever or revolutionary about telling other people to do it. There isn't.

Revolutionary social change certainly doesn't come about by taking the exact same non-action as the hopelessly apathetic. It comes about through direct action.

Social progress has been achieved when people have come together in solidarity to demand change from the powerful, when people educate themselves and educate each other, and when they cause enough economic disruption to cause the powerful and wealthy to give in to some of their demands (one of the best ways to frighten the wealthy and powerful is by threatening to hit them in the pocket).

Demographics

A look at the voter demographics from the 2015 General Election reveals a lot of interesting information about those who did and didn't vote. Old people are an awful lot more likely to vote Tory than young people, and they're also an awful lot more likely to actually vote too. The very wealthy are an awful lot more likely to vote than the very poor, and an awful lot more likely to actually vote Tory too.

Given these demographic trends is it any wonder that we ended up getting stuck with a Tory government that endlessly panders to the very wealthy and shields pensioners from the most brutal austerity measures, while they deliberately load the burden of their economic attacks on the poor, the young and the disabled?

If just a small fraction of the 35% of people who didn't bother to vote at all (either through apathy or disillusionment with the system) had've voted for anyone but the Tories, this extremely malicious and desperately incompetent government would never have achieved a majority of MPs, and they would never have been able to continue their project of tearing up long-standing British values and turning the UK into one of the most right-wing authoritarian state in the developed world.

Voting obviously isn't the "be all and end all" of politics

I'm entirely sceptical that revolutionary political change can be achieved through voting alone. Politics is about far more than scrawling a mark on a piece of paper every few years and then sitting back and waiting for the next paper scrawling exercise. The best way to effect political change is undoubtedly to demand it outside of the ballot box. However I do believe that voting is important because votes do determine who the custodians of political power are while progressive change is being demanded from those who are determined to achieve it.

The system is a mess, but not-voting won't fix it

The current system in the UK is an absolute disgrace, I know that this is the case because I spend so much of my time trying to expose the appalling malice, incompetence and corruption that's going on. However typing platitudinous "if only everyone would stop voting ..." type comments on political threads is definitely not the way to resolve the appalling problems we face, because it's absolutely clear that under the system we have, not-voting simply transfers even more political power to those who do vote.

Under the ludicrously unrepresentative Westminster voting system we suffer from, the sheer number of non-voters meant that the Tory party only needed 24% of the registered electorate to vote for them in order to gain a majority government.

As far as I'm concerned, anyone who thinks that simply not-voting is the route to revolutionary political change is even more delusional than the person who thinks that sticking a bit of paper in a box every few years is an adequate level of political engagement. 

Conclusion

If we want serious political change we need to educate ourselves, articulate it, demand it, fight for it.

Sticking a bit of paper in a box every few years is extremely unlikely to lead to revolutionary change, but it can help to ensure that things aren't quite as bad as they could be, while we build solidarity and take the direct action that is needed to promote the actual changes that we want to see.

If anyone thinks I'm wrong about not-voting doing nothing more than transferring more political power to those who do vote, I'd really like to see someone attempt to explain the exact mechanism by which an individual not-voting supposedly leads to revolutionary political change.

Make sure you are registered to vote

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OR

Fish and Ivory: UKIP's appalling EU voting record

Of all of the parties in all of the countries in the whole of the EU, UKIP representatives have the worst attendance record, worst voting record and worst work performance of the entire lot.

UKIP MEPs don't do anything to represent British interests in the EU, they just make grandstanding speeches and claim expenses. On the rare occasions they turn up, they belligerently vote against every piece of legislation, no matter how worthy, and with no consideration of how the legislation would affect British interests. All the while they claim expenses, and even, in some cases put their non-British family members on the taxpayer funded payroll.

In this article I'm going to provide two clear examples of how UKIP are an appalling party, that behave in a shamefully unpatriotic way, whilst simultaneously harping on about what a wonderful band of loyal British patriots they are.

Ivory

In January 2014 six UKIP MEPs, including party leader Nigel Farage, voted against an EU motion to clamp down on the illegal ivory trade. Aside from Farage, the other five UKIP MEPs to vote against this motion were Paul Nuttall (the deputy leader), Gerrard Batten, Stuart Agnew, William Dartmouth and Derek Roland.

Thankfully the motion passed by 671 votes to 14, but for me, it is a source of national shame that half of the votes against this motion were cast by British MEPs (6 of them the aforementioned UKIP members and the other one Nicole Sinclare, who was elected as a UKIP member in 2009 but defected to set up her own We Demand a Referendum party).

Not only are UKIP MEPs the laziest in the whole of Europe when they do bother to turn up to vote, they vote in a way that the vast majority of British people would find abhorrent.

The UKIP excuse for voting against the Combating Wildlife Crime motion is that they have an ideological obligation to vote against any piece of legislation that would give the EU more powers. I could write my own explanation of why it is bad to rigidly adhere to an ideological stance, even when doing so would cause you to do something appalling, but I'll leave it to the notoriously Eurosceptic historian and Daily Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley to state the case:

"[I] expect Ukip to explain that they always vote against anything that expands EU power. As a passionate anti-EU conservative, I appreciate that stance. But when it comes to taking action against something as squalid as the ivory trade, even this rabid patriot would compromise my anti-EU principles. What next? Refusing to uphold a ban on child labour?"

If you head off to the polls to vote for UKIP, be sure to remember that they are the laziest of all European political parties, and in all likelihood they're going to continue voting in appalling ways, that bring shame on our country.

Fish

The 2014 UKIP European election video contains a section attacking the EU for the damage that has been done to the UK fishing industry, and the practice of forcing fishermen to sling perfectly good fish back into the sea to be eaten by seagulls because of arbitrary quota requirements.

I actually agree with their argument that the EU fisheries policy has been a complete shambles for decades, that the discard policy wasted countless millions of tonnes of perfectly good fish, and that the British fishing industry has suffered appallingly as a consequence of this mismanagement.

There is one glaring problem with UKIP harping on about how terrible the EU fisheries policy is. That problem is that a certain Mr Nigel Farage was a member of the European Fisheries committee for three years, yet he only ever bothered to turn up to one single meeting out of 42*.

So UKIP are happy to use the suffering of the British fishing industry as part of their vote UKIP propaganda campaign, yet when Farage actually had an opportunity to stand up and fight for the British fishing industry in a place where he could have made an actual difference, he couldn't even be arsed to turn up to 97.6% of the meetings.

To put this absolute lack of effort into perspective, we can look at a celebrity chef called Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. This guy is not a politician, and he doesn't have access to the EU fisheries committee, however what he does have is a determination to fight against the appalling waste caused by the discards policy, and a commitment to stand up for the interests of small scale British fishing operations.

Hugh was so incensed by the insanity of the EU discards policy that he set up Hugh's Fish Fight, got more than 870,000 people all over Europe to sign his petition against the discards policy, and eventually got the EU discards law changed.

It really is a shameful performance from UKIP. They harp on about protecting the British fishing industry in their party political broadcasts, but when it comes to the crunch, some liberal, environmentalist celebrity chef has done infinitely more to make a positive difference than the supposedly patriotic leader of their party who was actually sat on the EU fisheries committee (which has the power to table amendments to existing legislation and table new legislation) but couldn't even be arsed to turn up to the meetings.

What is even worse is that the UKIP party political broadcast harps on about discards as a stick to beat the EU with, as if they are completely ignorant of the fact that some borderline hippy celebrity chef went and did what UKIP MEPs couldn't be arsed to do, and has already got the stupid discards law changed.

Working against Britain's interests

There are two very significant ways in which the behavoiur of UKIP MEPs work against Britain's interests.

Sometimes legislation is proposed that would actually work in Britain's interests, yet their ideological voting habits mean that they end up voting against it, on the grounds that they don't want to EU to have more powers. An example could be legislation to allow EU member states to impose import taxes on products that are produced in conditions that would be illegal in the UK. Putting a tax on pork products from caged pigs, or eggs from battery hens in tiny cages (both illegal in the UK but widely practised elsewhere in Europe) would help the British farming industry by preventing foreign farmers from undercutting their prices with barbaric animal welfare conditions. UKIP would probably belligerently vote against such a motion, even though the outcome would be positive for UK farmers and the UK economy.

The other way that UKIP work against the British national interest is their appalling attendance record, which means that they often don't bother to turn up to vote at all. This means that legislation that is bad for British interests can scrape through simply because UKIP couldn't be bothered to actually vote against it.

The former UKIP deputy leader David Campbell Bannerman (who quit through the revolving door between UKIP and the Tory party) criticised UKIP for their ideological stance and their lack of participation saying "I believe in leaving the European Union, but it is important to engage as much as possible . . . Not engaging is not helpful".

Alternatives

If you are Eurosceptic there are other parties you can vote for to get the outcome you want.

The Green party has a manifesto commitment to a referendum on membership of the EU, but you can guarantee that their MEPs will also work tirelessly to make the system better for Britain and more democratic too, rather than bagging millions in expenses despite being the laziest party in the whole of Europe.

If you don't like the idea of voting Green, there are several other Eurosceptic parties such as No2EU and New Deal that have strong anti-EU philosophies, but don't come with all of the toxic Thatcherite ideology, failed Tories and complete raving nutcases (the gay equality causes floods chap, the single finger salute woman, the my political opponents should be hung guy, the we should shoot a "poofter" guy, the gays have sex with animals woman, the "is Tuna a real fish like one that swims in the sea?" woman and the guy that calls the police on bloggers who fact check spoof UKIP posters).

Conclusion

You might think that voting UKIP is  good way of expressing your discontent with the EU, but it isn't. There are plenty of other anti-EU parties that offer us a referendum on the EU without being the laziest political party in Europe, voting against British interests for purely ideological reasons and shaming the UK by voting in appalling ways that virtually nobody in the UK would actually support.

Voting for UKIP is wasting your vote in an incredibly belligerent manner.

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OR

Why you should vote

In the weeks before the 2014 European and Local elections I did a lot of coverage in order to explain why it is a good idea to vote alternative, and to examine the policies of certain political parties in greater detail than the mainstream media care to.

One of the most commonly recurring comments has been the "why bother, they're all the same" expositions of apathy. Some people even made outright appeals to voter apathy with "Everyone should just stop voting" type comments (possibly inspired by Russell Brand).

In this article I'll explain why voting is important (without any platitudinous "you owe it to your ancestors" moralistic appeals) and explain why apathy is such a poor way of expressing discontent with the political system.

OK, I admit it, the voting system is rubbish

I believe that marking a piece of paper every five years or so for some rosette wearing politician to supposedly represent your interests from then until the next paper marking ceremony is an appallingly unrepresentative system, and that proper democracy should involve a great deal more citizen participation. If politicians had to actually consult the electorate (via local or national referendums) on the major decisions they take, there's no way they could get away with doing so many things that the majority of the public strongly oppose.

The voting system used in Westminster elections is particularly outdated and unrepresentative, and the vast number of "safe seats" (created by the lack of proportionality) has led to ever increasing levels of tactical voting (voting for a party you don't even like in order to keep out an even worse party) and outright political apathy.

However, realising that the current political system is flawed, unrepresentative and apathy inducing is no excuse for not voting. The system may be rubbish, but it's the only system we've got right now, so the key is to vote intelligently in order to change it from within.

Your options

When it comes to voting, you've got three options.

You can vote for the political establishment and support parties that have a vested interest in keeping the system pretty much exactly the way it is, because it keeps returning them to political power. The three parties that have governed the UK for the last 35 years have used this power to relentlessly push the Thatcherite ideology of neoliberalism, and they've sold off the national silver at bargain basement prices, despite the fact that the majority of the public would rather their essential infrastructure and services were publicly owned and run on a not-for-profit basis.

Voting for the establishment parties is essentially saying "more of the same please" to the political classes.

Voting alternative is seen as risky, especially in Westminster elections, because you might end up "splitting the vote" and letting one of the establishment parties that you strongly dislike get into power. This "splitting the vote" excuse doesn't wash in the European elections because they are conducted on a more modern proportional representation system, meaning that every vote counts, and minor parties are in with a good shout of actually getting MEPs elected. If you want to see real change then it is best to vote for a minor party that a. has a realistic chance of getting enough of the vote to return some MEPs and b. has a manifesto commitment to enact reform the voting system. 

Voting for an alternative party is essentially saying "I'm sick of this, I want change" to the political classes.

Not voting at all simply means that you're handing more political power to those that do choose to vote. Some people seem to think that by not voting at all they are expressing dissent, but it's simply not the case. Look at the 2012 PCC election farce. The turnout for this ludicrous election was the lowest in British electoral history, with 85% of the public not bothering to vote. In 8 of the regions the winning candidate ended up with votes from less than 5% of the eligible public! Do you think that any of them cared that 95%+ didn't bother to vote for them and then refused to take up their lucrative taxpayer funded jobs out of principle? Of course they didn't. Even if we upped the level of apathy so that everyone stayed at home, these people would still just vote for themselves, and still take up their jobs, without giving the slightest damn about their lack of mandate.

Not voting at all is essentially saying "I don't even care, I'll let other people decide for me" to the political classes.

Voting alternativeIn my view the only sensible option for people who are dissatisfied with the system is to try to change the system from within.

Put it this way, in 2010 David Cameron's Tory party received 23.5% of the eligible vote, yet 35% of people didn't even vote at all! The votes of less than a quarter of the public resulted in a shiny faced proven liar with no real world experience and appalling leadership skills becoming our Prime Minister, yet more than a third of people stayed at home!

If staying at home and not voting actually changed anything, then that 35% would have been the winner and the Prime Minister would have been decided in the most apathetic manner possible - perhaps the Queen picks a random National Insurance number out of a gigantic velvet bag and appoints that person Prime Minister (probably a better system than the one we've got). But that's not the way the system works, so instead we get a Prime Minister that 76.5% of the public didn't even want.

There are an awful lot of political tribalists who relentlessly vote for the same political parties. Put a red rosette on a donkey and there are former industrial heartlands that will vote it into power with a stonking great majority, and even if David Cameron killed, dismembered and ate a baby live on television, there are millions of habitual Tory voters who would still continue voting Tory. It's impossible to say exactly how many political tribalists there are, but I'd estimate around 15% each for the Tory party and Labour.

If a significant proportion of people who didn't bother to vote last time around decided to vote alternative, and people stopped voting tactically and voted for a party that they actually endorse, the establishment parties would probably still win the majority of seats because of the way they have rigged the system in their favour for the last hundred years, but alternative parties would gain a lot of seats and send a powerful shockwave through the establishment.

Why you should vote alternative in the European election

As I mentioned before, the European elections are conducted on a more modern proportional voting system, meaning there are no "safe seats", no "wasted votes" and no sane reason for voting tactically. If enough people in a region vote for a party, that party will end up with an MEP.

Another very good reason to vote in the European election is the appallingly low turnouts which have never exceeded 50%. In 2009 the turnout was just 34%. The fact that around two thirds of people won't bother to vote in this election has the effect of doubling the voting power of those who do. Not only do you get to vote for the party you actually like, your voting power is doubled too.

It is worth noting that the people of Wales and Scotland have their own national assemblies, which are elected on a proportional basis, but the people of England don't. If you live in England, the European elections are your only chance to vote under a fair electoral system.

Conclusion

The outdated and unrepresentative voting system used in Westminster elections is hopelessly unfair. The vast majority of people end up being represented by a politician they didn't even vote for. There isn't a single constituency in the whole of the UK where more than 50% of the electorate actually voted for the MP that supposedly represents their interests. Under such an unrepresentative system it is understandable that many people vote tactically (for parties they don't even like), and millions just give up hope and don't even bother to even vote at all.

The Westminster system badly needs to be reformed. My suggestions would be:

• Larger constituences with proportionality - This would get rid of all the safe seats, wasted votes and tactical voting rubbish, and it would provide people with a selection of local MPs, so that they can contact them all and judge which ones actually listen to their views and represent their interests, and then vote accordingly the next time around.

• Positive and negative voting - This would allow people to vote for the parties they actually like, and against the parties they hate.

• None of the above - A "none of the above" option would allow people to actively express their discontent with all of the candidates, rather than simply staying at home and not voting, which is easily mistakable for pure apathy.

• Local and national referendums - This would give people the chance to vote on the issues that concern them, rather than having that power outsourced to the local MP that in all probability, they didn't even vote for.

The European elections are different, and as far as I'm concerned, you've got no excuse for not getting out to vote for the party that best represents your political views (unless they are a really tiny fringe element without a chance of even picking up a few thousand votes). If you live in England and you don't bother to vote in the European elections, you're wasting the best opportunity you've got to vote for a party that you actually approve of.

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More articles from
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 

     
Reasons to vote alternative 
     
The AAV Euro election scorecard

                 
 The mainstream media oligopoly
        
Why 73% of UKIP supporters should actually vote Green
           

Do UKIP want to privatise the NHS? 
           
Margaret Thatcher's toxic legacies
                    
The ongoing destruction of the NHS
         
The "unpatriotic left" fallacy

             

Ukippers say the funniest things
    
A beginners guide to Universal Basic Income
           

Why voting Green is a good protest vote

There are millions of people in the UK who have been left politically disenfranchised by the dramatic shift to the right of the Labour party. You only need to look at the shadow chancellor Ed Balls (a man trained in neoclassical economics at Oxford University, where he was also a member of the Oxford University Conservative Association) to see that they no longer represent the interests of the working man as their name implies.

Although the mainstream media has been remarkably successful in demonising the word "socialism", the majority of British people still believe in explicitly socialist ideas. A 2014 YouGov poll found that 84% of the public want the NHS run as a not-for-profit public service, 68% want the profiteering energy companies to be nationalised, 67% think the Royal Mail should never have been sold off and 66% want the rail network renationalised.

There is still a massive appetite for left-wing political ideas in the UK, yet all three of the Westminster establishment parties (Blue Tories, Yellow Tories and Red Tories) are all ideologically opposed to democratic control over our vital national infrastructure, favouring adherence to the Thatcherite ideology of neoliberalism (that has resulted in decades of appalling neglect of UK manufacturing, soaring trade deficits, rising inequality and the complete meltdown of the recklessly deregulated financial sector in 2008).

Astonishingly, the party that is achieving the most success by posturing themselves as an "alternative" to this cosy Thatcherite consensus is UKIP, a party which is even more enthusiastic about right-wing neoliberal economics than the Westminster establishment three! The effect of this rise in UKIP popularity has been to drag the Conservatives even further to the right than they were before, resulting in ludicrous stunts like their trolling of ethnically diverse areas with taxpayer funded "Go Home" vans.

There are a number of smaller parties that explicitly oppose the cosy right-wing neoliberal consensus of the establishment, but most of them are very small factions that don't even have a chance of getting elected under the proportional representation system in the European elections, let alone via the archaic and absurdly unrepresentative voting system used in Westminster elections.

Of the parties that explicitly criticise the neoliberal crony capitalist orthodoxy, the Green Party is the only one making significant gains. They look set to win six seats in the European parliament and relegate the Liberal Democrats to the embarrassment of a 5th place finish, and they are even beginning to rival the Lib-Dems in the General election opinion polls too (8% Green, 9% Lib Dem according to a May 2014 YouGov poll).

One of the best signs that the Greens are an economically progressive party is their engagement with the Positive Money group, who have worked tirelessly to expose the dangerous folly of allowing banks to create money out of nothing, and then rent it out to the public as interest bearing loans and mortgages. In 2013 the Green Party passed a motion to place  money creation in public hands, rather than leaving it to the private banks to create interest bearing loans out of nothing*.

It is lunacy to imagine that political parties that adhere to the bankrupt ideology of neoliberalism that created the economic crisis are going to resolve the fallout from the economic crisis through continued adherence to the neoliberal orthodoxy. What is needed is a political party that is open to progressive new economic ideas, and the largest economically progressive party by far is the Green party.

If you are one of the majority of people who are completely sick of the way the UK economy has been recklessly mismanaged since Margaret Thatcher imposed the neoliberal ideology in 1979, voting Green is a surefire way of expressing your discontent.

It is no surprise at all that political apathy is at an all-time high when the three main parties are offering near identical economic policies. Only slightly more than a third of the electorate even bothered to vote in the last European elections in 2009, and there are no signs that the turnout will be much higher in May 2014. The fact that so many people won't bother to vote has one noteworthy consequence, the voting power of those who do bother to vote is dramatically increased. If the majority can't even be arsed to vote, the minority that do vote, end up with a disproportionate amount of influence over who is eventually elected.

Many people want to see the NHS protected from mass privatisation, the energy companies taken back from the private sector profiteers, and the financial sector properly reformed. If these people can be bothered to get out and vote for a party that proposes these things, it will send a powerful message to the political establishment, especially the Labour party.

It is clear that Ed Miliband isn't quite such a devout follower of the neoliberal ideology as his predecessors (Tory Blair & Gordon PFI Brown), but he is guilty of pussy-footing around instead of explicitly criticising the failed Thatcherite experiment. The most glaring demonstration of this weakness is his decision to offer a short-term energy price freeze, instead of giving the public what they want and backing renationalisation of the vital infrastructure that was sold off on the cheap by the Tories to a bunch of blatant profiteers.

If enough people can be bothered to vote Green, instead of not voting at all, this will send a very clear message to Ed Miliband that he needs to clear the Thatcherites like Ed Balls out of his cabinet and give the people of Britain what they want, which is vital national infrastructure run democratically and for the national good, rather than run as a corporate oligopoly for gouging vast private profits from the public.

If enough people get out and vote Green, this will have the effect of dragging Labour back towards the left, and away from the bankrupt ideology of neoliberalism, just as the rising popularity of UKIP has dragged the Tory party ever further to the right.

I'm not going to explicitly endorse the Green party, because unlike Rupert Murdoch and the other mainstream media press barons, I don't believe in telling people which party to vote for. But what I will say is this: If you want change, you've got to vote for change. Voting for the Westminster establishment parties, or for UKIP, is voting for "more of the same please", and not bothering to vote at all is simply handing more power to those who will vote for the continuation of the Thatcherite status quo.

 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.

* = The "money out of nothing" theory of money creation is hardly tinfoil hat stuff, because even the Bank of England now admits that the majority of currency in the economy is created out of nothing by private banks.

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"Stupid Fuckheadedry" in America and Britain

I recently came across a comment on the Another Angry Voice Facebook page that got me thinking. As I'm in the middle of a writing binge (where the words just flow out of me, rather than having to be painfully drawn out and strung together, as is often the case), I thought I'd write a comprehensive response. I believe that the phenomena alluded to in the quote would have been better referred to using George Orwell's conception of "doublethink", rather than with accusations of general "Stupid Fuckhededry". The use of the former would certainly have reduced the appearance of anti-Americanism.

"[Americans are] conceivably, the world's most messed-up population... They hate paying their taxes, because they're convinced that government wastes all that money on things the country doesn't need. But they don't mind a massive, illegal and unconstitutional surveillance programme, because they're convinced that government wouldn't waste all that money on something the country didn't need. They want to keep their guns because they don't trust the government to respect their freedoms. But they don't mind a massive, illegal and unconstitutional surveillance programme, because they trust the government to respect their freedoms... Stupidest fuckheads on the planet." - Mark Doran

Mark certainly pushes the boundaries of massive over-generalisation to make his point, but the contrast between the public apathy at the shocking NSA spy revelations, as compared to the hysteria over proposed automatic weapons regulation or the Zimmerman verdict is extremely concerning.

Another deeply troubling element is the fact that so many Democrats are willing to spin convoluted justification narratives in defence of the NSA's Prism mass surveillance operation (and the continuation and even expansion of other overtly totalitarian practices such as drone bombings and drone spying). Had the Republicans been caught wiretapping the private communications of the whole nation (and most of the rest of the world), Democrat supporters would surely have been squealing "unconstitutional" and appealing incessantly for impeachment of the President (there is precedent for this, In 1972 Republican President Richard Nixon was caught spying on the Democratic party and in 1974 became the first, and only American President to resign).

Just because this time it their guy wiping his ass (American's have asses, not Arses like us) with the American constitution, the tribalist Democrats are full of excuses. I wonder whether the massive expansion of a near omnipotent surveillance state (to make the powers of the East German Stasi look almost benign in comparison), and a Democratic administration more stuffed full of Wall Street millionaires than ever before in history, was the kind of "change" these people were envisioning as they campaigned so passionately for Obama in the midst of the Wall Street engineered financial collapse of 2007-08?

That so many Democrats are willing to develop these contorted justifications for the Obama administration, bodes extremely badly for when the Republicans get back in. After all of these excuses from tribalist Democrat apologists, the Democratic left is going to have an almost impossible job of making constitutional objections to any right-wing totalitarian lunacy from an extremist Republican administration hellbent on being far more right-wing and authoritarian than the uppity black liberal socialist they see Obama as. It is conceivable that the next Republican President could be so right-wing and authoritarian he'd make George W. Bush look like some kind of lovable chimp. And if this is the case, his Democratic critics will be easily trounced in debate with the accusation of hypocrisy: "You lot supported Obama's attacks on the constitution, so you've got no right to oppose our constitutional amendments".

Anyhow, returning to the quote. I've already mentioned that over-generalisations and accusations of "stupid fuckheadedry" are hardly the linguistic tools I'd use to make the point, especially given the gangrenous state of Westminster politics here in the UK.

I don't think we've got a leg to stand on when it comes to generalising about the intelligence of the American public. Our house is just as rotten as theirs is, and the British inhabitants (taken as a whole) seem just as feckless. I mean how many simple-minded reactionaries have bought into the Tory "scrounger" propaganda? It's been demonstrably shown that these scrounger narratives are based on nothing more than crudely falsified statistics, ideological zeal, enormous public misconceptions, and the ever powerful emotion of perceived injustice, yet millions have allowed themselves to get caught up in it.

At a time when people should be rising up in solidarity against the rotten establishment, the reckless bankers, the corrupt politicians and the greedy corporates, people instead are pointing the finger of blame at those they perceive to be below them on the social ladder, the unemployed, the underpaid, the disabled and the young.

The tiny establishment minority have continued getting ever richer throughout this crisis, whilst the vast majority have borne the burden of austerity. Instead of focusing their anger on those that caused the crisis, and those that continue to profit from it, a vast swathe of the public have turned to blaming the ones feeling the effects of the crisis even worse than they are themselves. The levels of "stupid fuckheadedness" in order to fall for this childishly transparent "divide and conquer" strategy are almost unimaginable. How is it possible for so many people to be so pitifully gullible?

That such large swathes of the British public can be played as fools like this is alarming. When did our nation become to servile and compliant? Didn't our ordinary people show remarkable solidarity and defiance when Oswald Mosely tried to march his blackshirted fascist along Cable Street in 1936? Didn't our population bravely unite against the onslaught of pan-European fascism in during the Second World War? Didn't all of the social classes bond together to rebuild our shattered, debt laden nation as a better, fairer society during the mixed economy post-war consensus? How have we been reduced to such a state of docile compliance, servility and apathy over the passing of just a few decades?

It is justifiable to wonder at how the ever boisterous and constitutionally obsessed American public have meekly accepted the revelation of the most deeply unconstitutional government programme in the entire history of their nation. However the implication that a great mass of British people are somehow less "stupidly fuckheaded" than the generalised American public is hardly justifiable. If anything the British are capable of worse, with countless reactionary voices positively appealing and begging for our basic rights and liberties to be stripped away and discarded in the process of constructing some kind of monstrous neoliberal dystopia built on inequality, inherited privilege, financial sector corruption, spiralling debt, Ponzi property speculation and "I'm alright Jack"-ism, administered by a callous cabal of corrupt crony capitalists.

 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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Infinite incompetence or Orwellian propaganda?