Robert Kimbell is a Brexit fanatic, Ukipper and Twitter celebrity. He's regularly lauded as an economics expert by the hard right, but in this article I'm going to expose the cynical cherry-picking trick he keeps using to create utterly misleading EU-bad narratives.
A quick browse through Kimbell's Twitter feed reveals his extreme Brexit bias, with links to fanatically right-wing Brexit propaganda sites like Westmonster and Brexit Central strewn amongst links to the pro-Brexit right-wing corporate media (Daily Mail, Express, Telegraph, S*n) and Retweets of numerous hard-Brexit celebrities and commentators.
Kimbell's favourite Twitter trick is to pick a country in the EU that has fallen down the global GDP ranking a little bit since their entry to the EU, and then compare them to a random country from the developing world that has risen slightly in the global GDP ranking over the same period (see screenshots).
Beware of crude GDP figures
Anyone with a bit of basic economic nous understands that relying on crude GDP figures is a surefire way of creating misleading economic narratives.
Take the talk of the so-called Tory "economic recovery" between 2010-2015 that helped them win their unexpected majority at the 2015 General Election.
It is true that the UK's GDP grew a bit between 2010 and 2015, but what the Tories omitted to mention was that nearly all of that economic growth was generated by the rising population caused by Theresa May's all-time record breaking increases in the net immigration rate.
Between 2010 and 2015 our economy was only really growing because of the all-time high levels of immigration, with the amount of economic activity per person (GDP per capita) remaining well below the level it was before the economic crisis.
Reworking the crude GDP con for Brexiteering
Kimbell's approach is that if the Tories could win a General Election by pushing a shockingly misleading crude GDP narrative, he can use the same trick to make the ongoing Brexit shambles look like a fantastic idea.
Thus he's repeatedly used comparisons of crude GDP figures on Twitter to make EU countries look like failures compared to growing economies in the developing world.
I'll go through five examples of him using this trick to show how utterly misleading his little anti-EU propaganda tropes are.
Hungary vs Bangladesh
Since Hungary joined the EU in 2004 it has fallen from 44th to 58th in the global GDP ranking. In the same time Bangladesh has risen from 57th to 46th.
What Kimbell has omitted to mention is that Bangladesh has a population of 163 million people (the 8th most populous country on earth), while Hungary has a population of 9.8 million (the 92nd most populous).
A look at the International Monetary Fund's GDP per capita figures reveal that Hungary is the 45th most prosperous country per person ($27,482), while Bangladesh is 139th ($3,891 per person).
Additionally, since 2004 the GDP per capita in Hungary has increased by over $4,000 per person (more than the entire current GDP per capita of Bangladesh), while GDP per capita in Bangladesh has increased by less than $1,400 per person.
The idea that Bangladesh is now surpassing Hungary thanks to the failure of the EU is based on a crude statistical trick that completely ignores the fact that the population of Bangladesh is over 16 times the size of Hungary, and has in fact grown by over 20 million (double the population of Hungary) since Hungary joined the EU just 13 years ago!
Luxembourg vs Oman
Since 1960 Luxembourg it has fallen from 55th to 76th in the global GDP ranking. In the same time Oman has risen from 97th to 75th.
What Kimbell has omitted to mention is that Oman has a population of 4.6 million people (the 125th most populous country on earth), while Luxembourg has a population of below 600,000 (the 166th most populous).
The question shouldn't be why has Luxemburg fallen behind Oman, but why has it taken Oman so long to catch up given their population is over seven times the size, and the large oil and natural gas reserves they've been exploiting for decades.
The International Monetary Fund's GDP per capita figures reveal that Luxembourg is the 2nd most prosperous country per person ($104,003), while Oman is 21st ($46,698 per person).
Omitting to mention the fact that Oman has a population seven times the size of Luxembourg, the fossil fuel bonanza that has fuelled Oman's climb up the GDP rankings, and the fact that the people of Luxembourg are actually the 2nd most prosperous on earth to create an EU-bad narrative are all indications of the lengths Brexiteers will go to in order to con people into supporting Brexit.
Austria vs Nigeria
Since Austria joined the EU in 1995 it has fallen from 21st to 28th in the global GDP ranking. In the same time Nigeria has risen from 57th to 27th.
Again Kimbell is using the same trick of ignoring population growth, ignoring GDP per capita, and ignoring a huge fossil fuel bonanza going on in the cherry-picked developing nation. Here are some of the stats.
Austria has a population of 8.8 million (the 96th most populous nation). Nigeria has a population of 193.5 million (the 7th most populous).
A look at the International Monetary Fund's GDP per capita figures reveal that Austria is the 19th most prosperous country per person ($48,005), while Nigeria is 126th ($5,942 per person).
Nigeria has a population over 20 times the size of Austria's, yet they've only just climbed to one place ahead of them in the crude GDP statistics, and the amount of economic activity per person in Nigeria is one eighth of the amount per person in Austria.
In fact, since 1995 the population of Nigeria has grown by 85 million people, so in order to surpass Austria by one place in the crude GDP rankings, Nigeria has had to increase its population by over 9 times the total population of Austria!
In the same period GDP per capita in Austria has grown by over $10,000 per person, an increase of almost double the current total GDP per capita in Nigeria!
The idea that wealthy Austria is somehow being held back by the EU because their economy has fallen one place behind a poverty stricken developing nation country with over 20x the population is exactly the kind of hopelessly delusional drivel that hard-right Brexiters thrive on.
Slovenia vs Angola
When Slovenia joined the EU in 2004 it had the 65th biggest economy, now it's 85th. In the same period Angola has risen from 81st to 63rd.
It's exactly the same trick again.
In 2005 (one year after Slovenia joined the EU) Angola had a population of 16.5 million, now it has a population of 28.4 million (48th in the world). In the same period the population of Slovenia has changed from 2.00 million to 2.06 million (146th).
One country has almost doubled its population in the period, whilst the other has remained almost completely static. Is it any wonder that a country which now has a population eight times the size of the other has edged above them in the crude GDP ranking?
A look at the much more informative GDP per capita rankings paints a very much less misleading picture. According the the IMF, Slovenia are 37th in the world at £32,085 per person, while Angola are 120th at $6,844 per person.
The effort to attack the EU by painting Slovenia as some kind of failing dump and Angola as a thriving success story based solely on crude GDP figures is clearly the work of a person who takes their audience as a pack of absolutely gullible idiots.
Malta vs Zambia
Kimbell asserts that Malta has fallen from 124 to 132 in the crude GDP rankings, while Zambia has climbed from 126 to 107.
Between 2004 and the present the population of Malta has increased slightly from 401,000 to 437,000. In the same period the population of Zambia has increased from 11.4 million to 16.4 million.
In 2004 Zambia had a population over 28 times the size of Malta, and now it has a population over 37 times the size of Malta. It's not a surprise that the Zambian economy is now bigger than the Maltese economy at all. What is surprising is that they were still behind the tiny island of Malta just 13 years ago.
Let's compare the GDP per capita of failing Malta and booming Zambia:
Zambia are 140th in the world with $3,880 in economic activity per person per year. Malta are 28th with $39,834.
Only the most agenda driven fanatic could try to paint wealthy and stable Malta as some kind of failing economic basket case compared to poverty stricken Zambia, which has less than a tenth of the economic activity per person as the former-British colony in the Mediterranean.
Beware of Brexiter statistics
I'm sure most of us remember the disgraceful £350 million for the NHS lies promoted by the Vote Leave mob, but it's still worth remembering that these same dishonest Brexiteers are still out there programming people with warped narratives, cherry-picked statistics, and downright lies in order to con them into continuing to support the hard-right anti-democratic Tory Brexit shambles.
The really sad thing is that the UK education system has failed so spectacularly that huge numbers of people have not been equipped with the critical thinking skills to even see through such crude and manipulative statistical cherry-picking.
What to do about people who have been let down by the education system and left with such weak critical thinking skills that they don't even question such ludicrously cherry-picked stats is a question for another time, but what to do about Robert Kimbell and his ilk is easy: Call them out on their shockingly deceptive idiot fodder whenever we see them spewing it.
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 Daily Mail has been named as 2016 "Newspaper of the Year" by a bunch of mainstream media insiders. Their main justifications for this award were that the Mail "shaped the political agenda" (by propagandising for Brexit) and "reflected the temper of a large part of the country".
In this article I'm going to run through just a tiny fraction of the things that made the Daily Mail one of the most disgusting and contemptible news outlets in 2016.
Background
In case you are unaware of the basics, it's important to understand that the Daily Mail is an extreme-right propaganda outlet that is owned and operated by a tax-dodging billionaire called Jonathan Harmsworth (or the 4th Viscount Rothermere if you're one of these subservient forelock tuggers who actually use people's aristocratic titles instead of their actual names).
Harmsworth has set himself up as a non-dom in order to avoid paying UK taxes, and he also controls his Daily Mail investment through a Bermuda based shell company called Rothermere Continuation Ltd. Both of these things mean that you really have to take the Daily Mail's extreme British nationalist jingoism with a shovel full of salt.
If Harmsworth really loved Britain then he'd stop pretending to be resident in France in order to avoid paying UK taxes wouldn't he? And he definitely wouldn't use a Bermuda based shell company to pretend that his Daily Mail profits are "overseas income" so as to avoid paying UK taxes on them.
Political killings
Within two weeks of the Jo Cox murder the Daily Mail columnist Dan Hodges called for the Labour Party to "kill vampire Jezza".
Later in the year, when Jo Cox's killer was found guilty and sentenced, the Daily Mail published an article blaming immigrants for the murder that was actually carried out by one of their own demographic (low IQ, white supremacist, anti-refugee, Muslim-hating, extreme right-winger).
Staggering hypocrisy
When the Fawlty Towers actor Andrew Sachs died the Daily Mail published a fawning front page farewell.
Back in 1938 when Andreas Siegfried Sachs arrived in the UK as a child refugee from Nazi Germany the Daily Mail was busy shrieking that the arrival of Jewish refugees was an outrage.
If the Daily Mail had've got their way in the 1930s, Sachs would have died a horrific death in a Nazi concentration camp instead of finding refuge in Britain and becoming a beloved comedy icon in his adopted nation.
Mocking their own readers
The fact that the fond front page farewell to the 1930s migrant Andrew Sachs was printed alongside a load of fearmongering anti-migrant rubbish strongly suggested that the Daily Mail editorial team are actively taking the piss out of their own readers.
Another example of this kind of piss-taking front page juxtaposition happened when the main Daily Mail headline shrieked about how child refugees from Syria look too old, while another section of the front page drooled over the 15 year old daughter of a supermodel for looking older than she is!
Supporting fascism
One of the most enjoyable Daily Mail articles to read of 2016 was the one where they cried bitter tears of sorrow over the loss of their favoured fascist candidate Norbert Hofer in the Austrian presidential election.
Of course Hofer wasn't the first Austrian fascist the Daily Mail fell in love with, they spent most of the 1930s telling their readers how wonderful Adolf Hitler was didn't they?
Attacking judges
Perhaps the most disgusting thing the Daily Mail did in 2016 was to launch a vitriolic "Enemies of the People" front page attack on three High Court judges for daring to do their jobs and stand up for the principle of parliamentary sovereignty.
Isn't it funny how Brexiters went from endlessly banging on about the importance of parliamentary sovereignty before the EU referendum, to yelling abuse at judges for daring to protect the principle of parliamentary sovereignty from Theresa May's autocratic ambitions after it?
More staggering hypocrisy
Just three months after their appalling "Enemies of the People" front page the Daily Mail published an extraordinary piece in which they decried the use of the term "Enemy of the People" as a Soviet propaganda used by the likes of Stalin and Lenin!
Undisguised homophobia
One of the worst elements of the Daily Mail attack on the High Court judges who ruled in favour of parliamentary sovereignty was the homophobic way in which they described one of the judges as "openly gay".
Another example of the Daily Mail's homophobia came when they (and their Metro subsidiary) rushed to report the completely fictional story that the New York pressure cooker bomber was a militant gay activist.
In 2016 the Daily Mail also publicly attacked a 15 year old Australian transgender boy and went into full-on outrage mode about a Transgender TV show.
The tide of undisguised Daily Mail homophobia in 2016 should come as no surprise to people who remember their previous output like their 1993 article celebrating the possibility of identifying gay genes so that parents could abort gay fetuses!
April Fools
Despite their open contempt for LGBT people the Daily Mail still fell for the Pink News April Fools article about the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau doing a nude photo shoot for a gay magazine and published it on their website.
How far journalistic standards must have fallen if a newspaper that fell for an obvious April Fools prank and posted a lazily "churnalised" version of it on their website as actual news is the UK's "Newspaper of the year".
Being declared an unreliable source by Wikipedia
To top it all off the UK's "Newspaper of the Year" has recently been banned from Wikipedia as an unreliable source.
If standards at the Daily Mail are so low that they've been banned as an unreliable source by a website that can be edited by literally anyone with an Internet connection and they're our "Newspaper of the Year", what the hell does that say about standards of journalism at other British newspapers?
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 re-run of the 2016 Austrian Presidential election ended in a reasonably convincing victory for the left-wing candidate Alexander Van der Bellen over Norbert Hofer of the extreme-right Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs.
Van der Bellen stood as an independent candidate, but he's still a member of the Austrian Green Party that he was the leader of between 1997 and 2008. This means that he will be the first Green Party politician ever to serve as an elected European head of state when he is sworn in on January 26th 2017.
The defeated candidate Norbert Hofer represents Europe's growing extreme-right fringe. His Austrian Freedom Party was founded by former Nazis and the first two leaders of the party (Anton Reinthaller and Friedrich Peters) were both members of the SS during the Second World War. The Freedom Party is aligned in the European parliament with other extreme right-wingers like the French National Front, the Italian Northern League, Geert Wilders' Dutch Freedom Party and the absolute dregs of European politics like the (so corrupt she got thrown out of UKIP) independent MEP Janice Atkinson.
Hofer dislikes being called a fascist, but over the years he has done numerous things to appeal to fascists. One of the most famous examples of Hofer appealing to fascists was the time he wore the Nazi blue cornflower symbol in public. He regularly uses Nazi era language and terminology, he hangs out with extreme-right Greater Germany fanatics who deny Austria's nationhood as a fiction, and he refuses to endorse the longstanding anti-Nazi consensus in Austrian politics.
The fact that next President of Austria will not be a representative of Europe's extreme-right fringe has come as a relief to an awful lot of people. After the UK electorate voted for the chaos of a completely unplanned Brexit and then the American public voted for the chaos of electing a clearly unstable man-child as their President, the idea of Austria electing a fascist as their President didn't actually seem as utterly far-fetched as it would have done in the past.
It's understandable that a lot of people are relieved at this defeat for the lunatic far-right fringe, but the Daily Mail are bitterly disappointed at the failure of the extreme-right candidate they championed on so many occasions.
It should come as no surprise that the Daily Mail were backing the candidate for the extreme-right party that was founded by ex-Nazis in the 1950s. After all, back in the 1930s the Daily Mail were enthusiastic supporters of another extreme-right fanatic from Austria called Adolf Hitler.
The Daily Mail reaction to Hofer's defeat was an extraordinary rambling tantrum of a headline accusing relieved liberals of "gloating" and mourning the loss of their fantasy that Hofer's election would have severely damaged the European Union.
Is Europe's Brexit revolution over? Gloating left-wing supporters wave 'Thank God' signs after far-right candidate LOSES Austrian presidential election which was set to deliver body blow to the EU the headline wailed.
The idea that a win for Norbert Hofer would have delivered a "body blow" to the EU is fantastical gibberish. Hofer knew perfectly well that he would stand absolutely no chance of winning the Austrian Presidency if he threatened to drag Austria out of the EU, so he repeatedly expressed pro-EU sentiments. He talked about a referendum on Austrian membership of the EU, but only if the EU introduces a new (and spectacularly unlikely) centralisation and federilisation treaty.
The pathetic efforts of the right-wing press in the UK to dress Hofer up as some kind of Austrian Nigel Farage were totally undermined by Hofer repeatedly saying stuff like "It would undoubtedly damage Austria if it were to leave the EU". But then when did gullible extreme-right fanatics like Daily Mail and Express readers ever let stuff like facts, evidence, or reality get in the way of their favoured political narratives?
The Daily Mail habit of trying to warp every bit of news to suit their anti-EU agenda was already preposterous, but trying to make out that a win for Hofer would have resulted in Brexit for Austria (Öexit) is totally fantastical rubbish. Even if Hofer had've won and then conducted a total U-turn on his EU stance, there's pretty much no chance that the Austrian public would have voted to quit the EU even if Austrian Presidents had the power to call a referendum, which they don't.
As for left-wing people "gloating", I'm pretty sure most of the celebrating Austrians were just mightily relieved to avoid the absolute embarrassment of having a far-right fanatic as their head of state.
On the other hand the piteous wailing from the Daily Mail at the defeat of their favoured extreme-right candidate certainly is cause for celebration.
The thought of some dejected Daily Mail hack crying into their keyboard over the defeat for their favoured Nazi iconography wearing extreme-right fanatic is enough to lift the spirits of anyone with the remotest shred of human decency.
The most up-voted comments beneath the Daily Mail article really are indicative of the putrid right-wing mentality that is infesting political dialogue in the UK. Several comments make the same feeble excuses for Hofer, pretending that he has no history of wearing Nazi iconography or leading a political party founded by ex-Nazis. As far as these Daily Mail readers are concerned, Hofer is apparently "only slightly right of centre". The Daily Mail readership adore Hofer because he shares the same vitriolic hatred of immigrants, and especially Muslims, as they do. Therefore Hofer can do no wrong, and anyone pointing out the fascist roots of his party is a "leftie hand-wringer".
Imagining the impotent rage of these bigoted Daily Mail mind-washed fascism apologists over the defeat of their latest extreme-right demagogue is another thing to brighten the day of any decent human being.
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.
