Let me start by saying that I think the Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr has done some fantastic work exposing the dodgy dealings and deceptiveness of interlinked Brextremists like Arron Banks, interfering foreign billionaires like Robert Mercer, Vote Leave, and the network of dodgy opaquely-funded hard-right pseudo-charity like the Taxpayers' Alliance and the IEA.
The work she's been involved in is a prime example of the kind of large scale investigative journalism that mainstream media organisations can do incredibly well when they focus on holding the powerful to account rather than attempting to shape public opinion through the dissemination of their groupthink-inspired political narratives, blatant smear campaigns, and/or recycling government press releases or the output of shady publicly-funded propaganda units.
The scale of the abuse she's received from Brextremist mobs like the Arron Banks' Leave.EU propaganda operation is a testament to what a good job she's been doing.
If Brexiteers like the BBC's Andre Neil really believed she was the ridiculous cat lady crank woman they routinely portray her as, they'd ignore her completely, rather than deliberately whipping up storms of online abuse to try to intimidate her into silence.
The problem of course is that if you set yourself up as a political integrity campaigner, then you need to make sure you're absolutely clean yourself, and unfortunately Carole has dropped a total clanger, that doesn't just undermine her integrity, but damages the fightback against the shady Brextremist liars by association.
When the Institute For Statecraft scandal broke people were rightly outraged that this UK government-funded pseudo-charity has been caught interfering in the domestic affairs of our European neighbours and smearing the government's political opponents at home.
Sure people should be allowed to criticise Jeremy Corbyn if they like, but if the Tory government has just flooded £2 million+ into their covert propaganda operation, there's absolutely no excuse for them repaying the favour by launching social media attacks on the Tories' political opponents.
Just imagine if it was the other way around and Jeremy Corbyn had handed £2 million in public cash to a shady left-wing propaganda unit to attack and smear his political rivals, the media outrage would be white hot and relentless.
In the wake of the breaking scandal Carole Cadwalladr made what seemed like a very strange intervention with a Twitter thread that clearly and quite brazenly pivoted criticism away from the Institute For Statecraft and back onto Jeremy Corbyn and other senior Labour figures.
Who writes a thread about the scandalous smear tactics of a publicly-funded propaganda outfit that bounces criticism back onto the target of their smears by basically repeating all the hyperbolic accusations?
At the time I pointed out that what she'd done was a classic example of a propaganda pivot, but what I didn't know then was that Carole had deliberately concealed her own personal involvement with the organisation in question while she was deflecting criticism away from them and back onto the target of their smears.
Deliberately pivoting criticism away from a very dodgy government-funded propaganda unit by echoing their attacks on a political rival of the party that pumped £2 million+ into their coffers is bad enough, but omitting the fact that she'd actually worked with them just a month previously, well that's exactly the kind of deceptiveness and lack of integrity that Carole has so successfully exposed in others.
And given that she's an award-winning investigative journalist, there's absolutely no believing that she failed to spot the link between the Integrity Initiative organisation who invited her to speak at their lavish taxpayer-bankrolled seminar for journalists, and the Integrity Initiative Twitter account she worked so hard to pivot criticism away from in her Twitter thread just a month later.
She's been caught red-handed playing the exact same deceptive propaganda games as the people she (rightly) criticises, but her reaction isn't to stop, take stock of how damaging this mess is for her campaign for greater political integrity and accountability, or to apologise.
Nope, it's to play the victim and create false equivalence between the right-wing Brexiteers who abuse her so disgustingly, and critics who point out that she's been caught making a shocking lapse in judgement.
Of course Carole can involve herself with the shady government-funded Institute for Statecraft if she wants to, and nobody with any sense of proportion is going to say that she's a "deep state operative" for giving a speech at one of their many lavishly-funded anti-Russia seminars.
However people can rightly point out that if the Putin government had been caught red-handed pumping £2 million into a shady psuedo-charity propaganda unit that works to create a 'new cold war' siege mentality in European politics and the media, deliberately interferes in the domestic politics and media organisations of European democracies, and spreads anti-opposition propaganda at home, Carole would obviously have been all over it rather than actively running social media distraction for them.
People can justifiably claim that she's spectacularly undermined her own credibility by writing a prolonged Twitter thread pivoting criticism away from them and onto Jeremy Corbyn, without even bothering to mention her own connection to the organisation in question.
The sensible approach would obviously be for her to attempt to repair the damage with an apology for her appalling lapse in judgement, but we'll see what happens.
Judging by her antics so far, it'll be more spinning, more deflection, and more efforts to dismiss people's legitimate concerns about her behaviour with straw-man 'the Russian stooges are calling me a deep state operative ho! ho! ho!' tactics.
In the hope that you're reading this Carole, please just apologise for this terrible lapse in judgement, undertake to try and avoid such poor and deceptive choices, be open and honest about your associations with any organisation you write about in future, and get back to what you're good at (investigating the shady behaviour of people like Arron Banks and dodgy opaquely-funded hard-right pseudo-charities like the Taxpayers' Alliance and the IEA).
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.
After Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party in 2015 the party membership swelled with hundreds of thousands of new members, mainly traditional Labour folk enthused by the party's first democratic socialist leader in decades.
The mainstream media were horrified by this surge of support for a guy who threatens the hard-right neoliberal orthodoxy that has served people like them so well for the last four decades, at the expense of millions of the rest of us, so the attacks on these new Labour Party members have been pretty much constant ever since.
The Labour membership surge
Ever since the Labour membership surge mainstream media hacks and opponents of democratic socialism have worked tirelessly to discredit it.
Aside from all of the abuse ("trots", "dogs", "rabble", "thugs", "Nazi stormtroopers") two themes have constantly stood out, the idea that left-wing people joining Labour are "entryists", and that Corbyn supporters are a "cult".
Anyone who is familiar with the history of the Labour Party would surely put up a counter-argument that the likes of centre-right pro-privatisation Thatcherites like Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, John McTernan, Margaret Hodge, and Alistair Campbell were the "entryists" who took over the party, and that the post-Corbyn membership surge is the mass home-coming of those who were driven away from the party by the right-wing pro-privatisation pro-austerity Tory lite agenda between 1997 and 2015.
But still the mainstream media persists in portraying the hundreds of thousands who joined Labour since 2015 as "entryists" and "cultists" rather than just ordinary people enthused by an actual alternative to the hard-right Thatcherite consensus of the last four decades.
Ukipification of the Tories
Ever since the 2016 EU referendum it's become increasingly obvious that the Tory party is being usurped by the small hard-right anti-EU faction (the crackpot element John Major used to refer to as "the bastards").
Theresa May called her vanity election in 2017 because she believed that having unified the traditional Tory vote with the extreme-right ultranationalist Blue-kip demographic, a landslide majority would be inevitable. But she didn't count on Jeremy Corbyn or the energised Labour membership orchestrating the biggest turnaround in British politics since universal suffrage.
Since the 2017 general election we've all seen how Theresa May dances to the tune of the ERG Brextremists, knowing that Jacob Rees-Mogg and his ERG mob easily have the parliamentary numbers to trigger a leadership election if she refuses to obey their instructions.
And now we've even got the spectacle of Nigel Farage's extreme-right anti-immigrant Leave.EU campaign openly bragging that they've infiltrated the Tory party membership with 10,000 Brextremists in order to ensure that the next leader of the Tory party is a hard-right Brexiteer.
They're so confident of their success that they've actually announced what they're up to on Twitter!
The mainstream media silence on this ongoing Brextremist takeover of the Tory party is staggering given the absolute brazenness of it, and the enormous fuss they made over the Labour membership surge.
The Orwellian state of the British media
On the one hand you have hundreds of thousands of left-leaning people finally coming home to the Labour Party after years in exile due to the right-wing pro-privatisation, pro-austerity gruel being offered by the orthodox neoliberal leadership.
And on the other hand you've got an extreme-right Brexit campaign group openly and publicly bragging about the way they've infiltrated the Tory party in order to interfere in the party's leadership election.
But somehow the former is the grave concern worthy of hundreds of columns and TV segments ranging from patronising faux outrage to outright abuse of ordinary people, and the latter barely gets a single mention.
If anyone in British politics is an "entryist" surely it's got to be a follower of Nigel Farage and Arron Banks tearing up their UKIP membership in order to join the Tory party and influence the next leadership election in favour of the most extreme Brexiteer in the running?If anyone in British politics is a "cultist" surely it's people who continue to glibly dismiss every single piece of evidence that a "no deal" flounce out of the EU would be a social and economic catastrophe as "Project Fear".
Yet somehow left-wing Labour supporters are still continually derided as "entryists" and "cultists" by the mainstream media, while the Brexit cultists who are openly and brazenly usurping the Tory party in front of our eyes are just left in peace to get on with it!
The only conclusion that can be drawn out of this extraordinary contrast in mainstream media coverage is that the vast majority of the coddled mainstream media class are way more comfortable with extreme-right, anti-immigrant, Brextremists brazenly taking over the ruling Tory party in front of our eyes than they are with the Labour opposition returning to its democratic socialist roots!
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The hard-right Trojan Horse political party UKIP is collapsing into farce and bankruptcy, but the big hitters have already jumped ship. Nigel Farage quit as UKIP leader immediately after the 2016 EU referendum result came in, and the Brexiteer and major Leave.EU donor Arron Banks bailed out soon afterwards too. in order to concentrate on building the profile of his fanatically right-wing Westmonster propaganda operation.
We've all seen how Theresa May has redirected the Tory party towards hard-right ultra-nationalism in order to attract all of these fickle Ukippers fleeing the wreckage of their party.
We've seen how former UKIP councillors have been welcomed into the Tory party with open arms, and even utilised as pro-Tory plants in the BBC Question Time audience.
And we've all seen how the majority of Tories have simply put up with this rapid shift towards the extreme-right political fringe because their power at any price ideology still sees this Blue-kip bastardisation of their own party as preferable to a centre-left government that would work to reverse inequality, protect the vulnerable, and dismantle barriers to social mobility.
They'd genuinely rather see their own party turned into a demeaning UKIP tribute act than live in a slightly fairer society.
The extent to which the Tory party is being colonised by radical hard-right blue-kippers was obvious enough even before the 2017 General Election, but now Arron Banks has come out and actually explained his plot to seize control of the Tory party.
While the Labour Party membership has soared to over half a million since Jeremy Corbyn became leader, the Tory party membership has slumped so pathetically that they've been refusing to even admit how embarrassingly low it actually is for four years. Estimates put their membership at somewhere between 50,000 - 70,000, which is somewhere between 8% - 12% the size of Labour's.
Arron Banks' idea is for UKIP to fold and for their politicians and party members to infiltrate the Tory party en masse in order to push for the hardest and most economically ruinous "no deal" Brexit.
Here's what he said:
"We could have a clear majority in the Tory party for a real Brexit within months if UKIP wound up and all its members and FORMER members, all of its latent support in the country now joined up to the Conservative Party … Maybe by flooding back into the Conservative party we can change the course of history again. With a leadership challenge on the cards once more, this may be the perfect time."
So here we have a former UKIP donor explicitly outlining his plot to infiltrate and usurp the Tory party for his own purposes, yet the Tories are doing nothing at all to stop it. In fact it seems likely they'd welcome the half million or so remaining Ukipper die-hards with open arms, because they're looking down the barrel of an absolute trouncing at the next General Election without them.
If centre-right Tories had any decency and dignity at all they'd be demanding new rules to prevent ex-Ukippers flooding in to their party and taking it over from within (perhaps a ban on membership or leadership election votes for anyone who has been a UKIP member in the last five years).
But the disgraceful reality is that most of them actually seem to see the rapid Ukipification of their party as the only hope to retain their weakening grip on political power.
They realise that they wouldn't have even had sufficient MPs to bribe the DUP bigots into propping up their government if it hadn't been for the support of the fanatically right-wing and demonstrably fickle Blue-kip demographic, so they're now absolutely terrified of making any move whatever that might drive them away again.
One of the most extraordinary things of all is that Tories can look at the undeniable and ongoing Ukipification of their party, and even read about Arron Banks' plot to usurp the Tory party completely, yet believe the reality-reversing mainstream media trope that Labour are the party that has been taken over by a radical fringe element!
They actually choose to believe that Labour's popular centre-left policy platform that has attracted hundreds of thousands of new members to the party is the terrifying and sinister plot, whilst minimising/ignoring their own party's grotesque metamorphosis into a UKIP tribute act headed by a cowardly and directionless leader who is terrified of doing anything that might anger the fickle blue-kip demographic she's courted so egregiously, the secretive cabal of hard-Brexit Tory MPs who could oust her at any moment, the DUP bigots who prop up her government, or the Daily Mail hate mob who unleash torrents of abuse and death threats at anyone who dares defy Paul Dacre's fanatically right-wing and profoundly anti-democratic interpretation of the Brexit vote.
There are still a few centre-right "one nation" type Tories left, like Ken Clarke, Sarah Wollaston, Dominic Grieve, Anna Soubry, Nicky Morgan and the like.
Let's be absolutely clear that none of these people are heroes because they've actively promoted grotesque and destructive Tory policies like austerity dogma, wage repression, catastrophic infrastructure funding cuts, privatisation mania, and the systematic abuse of sick and disabled people.
However it's important to distinguish between these old school Tory-Tories and the much more rabidly right-wing Blue-kippers.
The problem is that these old school Tories know from experience that whenever they defy the ongoing Ukipification of their party then they get bombarded with hate mail and death threats from the Blue-kip hate mob.
Will the old school Tory-Tories have the courage and the strength to fight back against the ongoing extreme-right drift of the Tory party?
Or will they simply acquiesce to the Ukipification process because they either believe in maintaining political power at any cost, or they're too afraid of the growing power of the Blue-kip mob to dare stepping out of line again?
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The former UKIP leader Nigel Farage has propelled himself back into the headlines by announcing that he's coming around to the idea of a second referendum on EU membership.
This is obviously quite a sensational announcement given the absolute bile Brexiters generally fling at people who suggest that perhaps the British people deserve a democratic vote once the terms and conditions of Brexit are actually known.
Most Brexiters strongly resist the idea of a second referendum because they know that the 2016 referendum was a freak result, won with a tiny minority against a backdrop of collapsing public services and stagnating wages caused by ruinous Tory austerity dogma.
Brextremists are understandably afraid that a second vote would result in a reversal of Brexit, especially in light of Theresa May's catastrophic, increasingly unpopular, and profoundly anti-democratic handling of the Brexit process so far.
The fact that Farage is going against the position held by the majority of Brexiters by suggesting a second referendum raises the obvious question of why?
If we take Farage at his word, he's claiming that a cancel-Brexit campaign fronted by the likes of Tony Blair and Nick Clegg would fail spectacularly, and anyone with a grain of political sense must be able to realise that Clegg and Blair are now so politically toxic they would undoubtedly damage any 2nd Remain campaign by association.
However, it's also worth noting that the likely leaders of the 2nd Leave campaign would also be politically toxic too. Only a fool would put their trust in the likes of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove after their "£350 for the NHS" lies, and Theresa May would be at the forefront of the whole 2nd Brexit campaign trying to argue in favour of whatever lamentable deal she's managed to cobble together.
Even taking into account the fact that Blair and Clegg are politically toxic, a second EU referendum campaign looks like an almighty risk for Brexiters, given that their likely figureheads are just as politically toxic as the their opponents.
Aside from saying that he's coming around to the idea of a second referendum, Farage said something else telling. He said that the idea of a multiple choice referendum would confuse the British people.
This is interesting because he's clearly envisioning a binary choice between just two options.
Obviously the hard-right Brextremist mob have jumped on this idea saying that the choice should be a fake Brexit or Brexit choice between whatever hard-right Tory Brexit Theresa May manages to cobble together, and a totally catastrophic "no deal" flounce out of the EU.
But this kind of ridiculous false choice is clearly not what Farage has in mind, because it's impossible that Blair or Clegg would front either of those campaigns.
Farage clearly wants to re-fight the battle all over again and win a decisive Brexit victory against those who wish to remain in the EU.
This is interesting because it indicates that he's willing to shackle himself to whatever deal Theresa May and her three Brexiteer charlatans come up with. This seems like a pretty bold gamble given the chaotic and incompetent shambles the Tories have been making of the Brexit process so far.
Farage also doesn't seem to have considered the fact that that a second Brexit vote could be seen as a way of slapping the government in the face.
Just as huge numbers of people saw the 2016 Brexit vote as an ideal opportunity to slap David Cameron and George Osborne in the face by voting Brexit, a second referendum could easily be seen as a means of slapping Theresa May in the face, but this time by voting to lob her chaotic Brexit shambles onto the scrapheap.
One of the more compelling explanations behind Farage's U-turn on the idea of a second referendum is pure self-interest.
Ever since Farage felt the euphoria of winning the Brexit vote in June 2016 his star has been fading. He's gone from being a leader of one of the most consequential political rebellions in decades to begging unsuccessfully to be made Donald Trump's butler, backing Marine Le Pen's failed National Front presidential bid in France, speaking at extreme-right rallies in Germany, and backing an alleged paedophile who actually managed to lose an election for the Republicans in Alabama!
Perhaps Farage wants a second referendum because he wants to be back in the limelight again?
Then there's Farage's financial backer Arron Banks who managed to build up a huge social media propaganda empire through the last EU referendum. Unlike the official Vote Leave campaign that folded up after the 2016 referendum, Banks' Leave.EU operation has continued churning out extreme-right propaganda and links to Banks' own Westmonster propaganda site ever since.
A second referendum campaign would obviously allow Banks to further expand his extreme-right propaganda empire, no matter what the final result.
All in all Farage's confidence that a second referendum would result in a landslide for Brexit seems massively over-optimistic given that such a scenario would offer the British public a chance to step back from the cliff edge, and to give Theresa May a massive slap in the face in the process.
However, whether Farage is motivated by exuberant over-confidence, or by self-interest, or just by a desperation to push himself back into the limelight, one thing is for sure; whether he intended it or not he's done a huge favour to those of us who believe democracy would be better served by a serious and properly informed Brexit referendum once the terms and conditions have been made clear, than by the hastily rushed and profoundly dishonest farce of a debate that happened in 2016.
Like him or not, Farage has completely shattered the Brextremist trope that a second referendum would be anti-democratic and against "the will of the people", because we now have one of the leading Brexiteers arguing that a second referendum would actually be a democratic opportunity to decide the situation once and for all.
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One of the most insidious things about extreme-rightg Brexit propagandists is the way that they deliberately foster victim-complex thinking.
The latest example is an article on the Arron Banks bankrolled propaganda page Westmonster crying that the nasty EU is punishing the UK for leaving by not immediately agreeing to let Brits keep one of the primary benefits of EU membership after we leave.
Westmonster/Leave.EU
The EU referendum allowed the extreme-right fanatic Arron Banks a perfect opportunity to massively increase his influence over British politics by setting up a rival pro-Brexit campaign called Leave.EU (the one that used Nazi style imagery to fearmonger about refugees).
Instead of packing the campaign up after the referendum (like the official Vote Leave and the pro-Remain Stronger In Europe), Banks has opportunistically turned the Leave.EU into his own personal propaganda outfit.
Attracting over a million social media followers (867,000+ on Facebook, 133,000+ on Twitter) by waving a Brexit flag at them and then using this huge social media audience to promote the most fanatically right-wing interpretation of Brexit, bigoted xenophobia, pro-Trump propaganda, and endless links to his own Westmonster website (which is absolutely blathered in adverts for Banks' own Go Skippy car insurance company).
The EHIC card
The latest Westmonster/Leave.EU propaganda attack on the European Union entitled "Spiteful EU threatens to scrap free healthcare for Brits abroad" relates to the European Health Insurance Card (EHIC) which currently allows EU citizens to travel in Europe and claim back the cost of any medical treatment from their home countries.
The Tories are arguing that British travellers in Europe should still have access to the EHIC scheme even after we quit the EU, but the EU negotiators have said that they need to study the issue further before making a decision.
Despite Theresa May and the Tories using the lives of EU citizens in the UK as disposable gambling chips in the negotiations, the extreme-right Westmonster/Leave.EU mob are spitting bile that the EU aren't immediately caving in and handing the UK one of the biggest advantages of EU membership!
Project fear
The possibility of the UK losing access to one of the really big benefits of EU membership as a consequence of quitting the EU was always pretty damned obvious, but you'll remember how the Brexiteers shrieked "project fear" at anyone who dared suggest that Brexit might be a highly complex process fraught with pitfalls and dangers for Brits and the British economy.
The likes of Arron Banks and the Leave.EU mob operated on the model of pushing blatant fearmongering and lies (like the Nazi style anti-refugee posters and the "eek Turkey is joining the EU" lies) and then howling "project fear" at anyone who raised legitimate doubts about the fact that the Brexiteers were clearly just making things up as they went along, with no actual plan for what to do if they actually managed to win the referendum with such despicable tactics.
Now they're having an absolute hissy fit because one of the potential consequences they dismissed as "project fear" during the referendum debate is still a possibility.
Brazen Tory propaganda
One thing that jumps straight out of the article is the claim that the UK made a "fair and serious offer" on EU citizens rights.
Anyone who did the slightest research knows that the UK ofer was an absolute insult that has been severely criticised by EU citizens in the UK, UK citizens in the EU, and which came 11 days after the submission of a much better and more comprehensive citizens' rights offer from the EU that went completely ignored by the Tories.
The fact that Westmonster chose to uncritically recycle the "fair and serious offer" Tory propaganda word for word just goes to show what their real agenda is.
They have no intention whatever to hold the Tory government to account for the inept way they're handling Brexit because their primary objective is to spread hatred of the EU, not to get a good deal for British citizens.
Bullying
The word-for-word repetition of Tory propaganda appears in the most sickening paragraph of all:
"It's especially bad considering Theresa May has already made a 'fair and serious offer' to EU citizens living in Britain, allowing them to apply for settled status. But that was on the condition that British citizens living abroad would maintain their rights. So has the EU just kiboshed its own citizens getting a good deal too?"
There is no other way to read this than as a threat against EU citizens' living in the UK if the EU doesn't cave in and give Brits one of the main membership benefits of their "spiteful, vengeful dictatorship"!
If the EU don't let us keep our access to EHIC even after we've left, then the absolute insult of an offer on EU citizens' rights is going in the bin, presumably to be replaced with a very much worse collective punishment policy against EU citizens in the UK.
The Westmonster article basically says "give us what we want or we'll deliberately punish EU citizens living in the UK" and has the absolute gall to accuse the EU of being the spiteful bullies at the same time!
Endangering the negotiations
Framing the EHIC debate as a plucky honest UK taking on a "spiteful EU" is exactly the kind of extreme and divisive rhetoric that endangers the negotiations.
Just think about it for yourself for a moment: Which proposition would you be most likely to accept?
Arron Banks' extreme-right propaganda machine is poisoning the political debate over the EHIC card with divisive rhetoric accusing the EU negotiators of being "spiteful" people "sticking two fingers up at Britain" and the describing the EU as a "spiteful, vengeful dictatorship" all based on the fact that the EU aren't immediately caving in to Tory demands that Brits get to keep one of the primary benefits of membership of the ... err ... "spiteful, vengeful dictatorship"!
Could we continue with the existing arrangement we already have in this area because it has obvious benefits to both of us?
Give me what I want immediately you fucking spiteful bully or I'll collectively punish people you care about.
Even infant school children know that you're more likely to get what you want by being nice than by lobbing a load of insults and threats around.
Anyone who thinks that toxifying the Brexit negotiations with this kind of divisive extreme-right rhetoric is anything but an impediment to Britain getting a good deal has to be suffering extreme diplomatic illiteracy.
And only the most terrifyingly delusional of halfwits could possibly imagine that Brits will somehow retain access to the benefit of EHIC if the divisive rhetoric from the Arron Banks' propaganda mob succeeds in triggering a nuclear "no deal" Tory strop out of the EU.
Victim-complexing
The idea that the EU are horrible bullies because they won't immediately cave in and hand the UK one of the prime benefits of EU membership is a classic example of the extreme-right victim-complexing propaganda tactic.
It doesn't really matter what the story is, the extreme-right will always find a way of framing it as a piteous victim narrative in order to dupe people into wallowing in self pity instead of actually engaging their critical thinking skills.
This tactic works a treat because once the extreme-right have inflated people's victim complexes to the size of hot air balloons, it only takes the slightest puff of hot air to get them all floating in the political direction they want them to, and the direction the Arron Banks/Westmonster/Leave.EU mob are blowing towards a socially and economically ruinous nuclear "no deal" Tory strop out of Europe.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
The terrorist who attacked Westminster has now been confirmed as British-born, yet before his origins were revealed the extreme-right were absolutely desperate to use the attack to fuel their divisive anti-immigration, and to misleadingly portray London as a weak, scared and divided city.The UKIP and Leave.EU bankroller Arron Banks was one of the first to use the attack as an excuse to promote his fanatical and divisive anti-immigration rhetoric. Long before the (British) origins of the attacker were known, Banks started blabbering on about immigration and borders, Retweeting extreme-right comments, and slinging abuse at people who dared contradict his divisive rhetoric.Nigel Farage was another extreme-right politician to see the carnage as a golden opportunity to spread divisive anti-immigrant nonsense. Instead of waiting for information about who the attacker was, he charged onto Fox News to opportunistically weave the Westminster attack into his personal anti-immigration narrative.It's not just anti-immigrant sentiments that extreme-right used this attack to promote. They also wanted to instil fear. The woman who will not be named on this blog also scuttled off to Fox News to tell the Americans that in London "people are cowed, people are afraid, people are not united".The woman who will not be named was obviously lying through her teeth because the vast majority of Londoners are not cowed into submission, they're getting on with their lives and refusing to let the terrorists win.
London survived the Blitz; London survived loads of IRA attacks in the 70s, 80s, and 90s; London survived the appalling 7/7 bombings; and London will survive this.
The extreme-right want to portray London as a weak city that is quivering with fear because it helps to sell their fanatical fearmongering agenda to the lucrative American audience, but the reality is totally different.
The real stories are the remarkable displays of bravery in the immediate aftermath of the attack, and the stoic solidarity of Londoners on the day after it.
The extreme-right elements who misleadingly portray London as weak, scared and divided are shameful opportunists who know that their ugly divisive fiction is more marketable to the right-wing news channels in the US than the reality; the stoicism and resilience of London.
The extreme-right don't care about waiting for the facts before they start spouting off.
The extreme-right don't care about the reality that most Londoners are determined to get on with their lives rather than wallowing in fear or self-pity.
The extreme-right are absolutely desperate to use anything they can to spread their agenda of fear and division.
The grand irony of course is that by behaving like this they're doing the work of the Islamist fanatics. The Islamist terrorists want to make us live in abject fear of their attacks. The Islamist terrorists want to create divisions and even more anti-Muslim prejudice in the West.
The extreme-right love to see themselves as defenders of our culture, but by deliberately spreading fear, hatred, and division they're actually reacting in precisely the way the Islamist fanatics want them to.
In fact the extreme-right and the Islamist fanatics both share the same vision. They both crave a violent and destructive clash of civilisations. They're the opposite sides of the same disgusting coin. The Islamist fanatic in ISIS occupied Syria who joyously celebrates the attack on London is no different to the extreme-right fanatic in Britain who is full of glee because they see the attack as another wonderful opportunity to spread their divisive and dishonest hate-fuelled rhetoric.
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.
Nigel Farage is having a huge hissy fit because he wants a seat in the unelected House of Lords or a Knighthood and Douglas Carswell (UKIP's only actual MP) lightly mocked him over it.
The jaw-dropping hypocrisy of Britain's self-proclaimed saviour from the terrible anti-democratic EU technocrats scuttling around in search of peerage to sit in the unelected House of Lords is so brazen that perhaps even a few 'Kippers might actually be capable of thinking "hang on a minute".
When asked by UKIP insiders to intervene in order to help secure anti-democratic gongs for Farage, Carswell responded in an internal party email that maybe Farage could be nominated as an OBE for "services to headline writers". Carswell's email has now been leaked and Farage is having a total meltdown over it.
Farage's furious reaction to Carswell's jibe is an illustration of just how enormously over-inflated his ego has now become. Farage has claimed that Carswell's slightly mocking words were motivated by "jealousy" and then demanded that the comically inept new UKIP leader Paul Nuttall expel Carswell from the party for daring to criticise him.
Imagine the size of the ego that imagines a bit of light personal ribbing against the dear ex-leader is more damaging to the party than a witch hunt to expel the party's only MP!
Carswell is also clearly despised by Arron Banks, the obnoxious millionaire UKIP donor who is busy blackmailing the party into making him party chairman by threatening to stop pumping cash into the party if they don't.
I'm no big fan of Douglas Carswell because (like Farage, Nuttall and Banks) he's an ex-Tory, and he consistently votes in favour of pretty much every appalling scam the Tories come up with. However, being called "a terrible individual" by a slimeball like Arron Banks is clearly a feather in his cap that he can be well and truly proud of. And winding up Farage so much that he's has a pathetic dictatorial foot-stamping fit ... well that's provided everyone with a little bit of light political amusement, which we can all be thankful for in these dark and dangerous days.
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