Britain never had a reckoning with the fascists in our midst

In the 1930s the British upper classes were absolutely riddled with fascists and antisemites.

There was Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists, which boasted tens of thousands of members, and loads of high-profile supporters including the Daily Mail proprietor Lord Rothermere (great-grandfather of the current owner), who was a personal friend of Adolf Hitler.

There were fascist-sympathisers throughout the aristocracy and the royal family. We've all seen the pictures of Edward teaching the young future queen Elizabeth to do Nazi salutes in the gardens of Balmoral Castle (despite royalist efforts to censor them).

The Tory party was particularly infested with fascists, with loads of Tory MPs and lords signed up to secretive organisations aimed at promoting fascist and antisemitic ideologies.

The Anglo-German Fellowship was dedicated to fostering stronger relations with Nazi Germany. It boasted dozens of Tory party politicians amongst its membership, as well as Bank of England director Frank Cyril Tiarks (who was also a member of the British Union of Fascists), Bank of England governor Montagu Norman, Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, and Geoffrey Dawson who was editor of The Times.

Tory members of the Anglo-German Fellowship included Peter Agnew, Lawrence Dundas, Ernest Bennett, Robert Bird, Robert Tatton Bower, Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, Robert Vaughan Gower, Thomas "Loel" Guinness, Norman Hulbert, Archibald James, Alfred Knox, John Macnamara, Thomas Moore, Assheton Pownall, Frank Sanderson, Duncan Sandys, Murray Sueter, Charles Taylor, Ronald Tree, Lord Brocket, Lord Galloway, the Earl of Glasgow, Lord Mount Temple, Lord Londonderry, Lord Nuffield, Lord Redesdale, Lord Rennell, and the Duke of Wellington.

The Anglo-German Fellowship was supported by a propaganda operation called The Link, headed up by the traitor Barry Domville.

There was also the Imperial Fascist League which was led by the virulent antisemite Arnold Leese, who continued propagandising in favour of Nazi Germany deep into the Second World War from a series of hideouts.

Then there was the truly despicable Right Club which sought to drive Jewish people out of public life, founded by the Tory MP Archibald Ramsay.

The Right Club attracted a load of high profile establishment figures, including the 5th Duke of Wellington, Lord Redesdale, Lord Lymington, Arnold Leese, A. K. Chesterton, George Henry Drummond, the 2nd Duke of Westminster, Tory MP John Hamilton Mackie, and William Joyce (who went on to become Lord Haw-Haw).

The Right Club finally collapsed in 1940 when they were discovered plotting to undermine the British war effort by stealing secret cables between Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt, with the intention of leaking them.

And let's not forget that the widely-celebrated Tory MP Nancy Astor was one of the leaders of the fascist-sympathising Cliveden Set.

Tories, royals, capitalists, and establishment elitists adored Nazi Germany because the first thing Adolf Hitler did when he came to power was to send all the socialists, communists, anarchists, trade unionists, and other assorted leftists to the concentration camps.

They saw fascism as the perfect means of preserving their own wealth, power and privilege, through the ruthless persecution of the political left.

A small minority of the most egregiously pro-fascist figures like Barry Domville, Arnold Leese, Oswald Mosley, and Archibald Ramsay were interned as national security threats during the Second World War, and Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) was captured and executed for treason in 1946.

However the vast majority of these establishment fascists were allowed to keep their positions of power and influence in the upper echelons of British society throughout the Second World War, and long into the post-war period.

Loads of these aristocratic fascists were even handed important promotions in the post-war period, and lavished with establishment honours like knighthoods and seats in the unelected House of Lords.

Is anyone really naïve enough to believe that all of these people simply gave up their extreme-right, antisemitic, and rabidly anti-left politics, despite having suffered absolutely no punishment whatever for holding such disgusting beliefs, even after our cities had been pounded to rubble by the people they'd been championing?

Of course they didn't. They just learned to hide their despicable extreme-right political views more carefully.

This abject post-war failure to stamp fascists out of public life is one of the big reasons why there's still a disturbing and powerful seam of fascist ideology within Britain's grotesque establishment class.

You look at the racism of the British tabloid press and their constant scapegoating of immigrants; the revocation of British rights from Commonwealth citizens in the 1970s; Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech; the anti-gay hysteria of the 1980s; the decades-long campaign of blacklisting of left-leaning journalists from the BBC; the rampant racism within institutions of state like the Metropolitan Police; the casual disregard for the millions of victims of Britain's imperialist war-mongering; the systematic demonisation of all left-wing political figures; the extreme-right ultranationalism that drove Brexit over the winning line; the fetishisation of nationalist symbolism and the military; the idolisation of disgustingly antisemitic Nazi-sympathisers like Nancy Astor; the massive blacklists of trade union activists across numerous industrial sectors; the ongoing systematic persecution of disabled people; Theresa May's unlawfully racist "Hostile Environment" and the Windrush Scandal; the constant right-wing agitation for the destruction of our human rights; Boris Johnson's depraved "let the bodies pile high" attitude to the plight of vulnerable people during the pandemic; and Priti Patel's deportation of refugees to Rwanda ...

The reason the British establishment class is so rotten is that we never had a reckoning with the people who wanted Britain to emulate Nazi Germany.

Instead we let them keep their positions of power and influence, and quietly seep their disgusting fascist ideology into the fabric of British society.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

OR

Tory Brextremist Daniel Hannan is absolutely crap at lying

The Tory MP Daniel Hannan is a profoundly dishonest Brextremist. In this article I'm going to analyse just one of his Tweets to demonstrate what a spectacularly untrustworthy propagandist he is.

On February 8th 2018 Hannan Tweeted this graph from the Bank of England to illustrate his claim that real wages are rising. He also included a claim that the pound has recovered back to where it was before the EU referendum.

As you can see from the picture, over three hundred impressionable people liked this Tweet, and it was Retweted over 170 times, but it hardly takes any work to establish that both of the claims he makes in the Tweet are outright lies.

You don't even have to resort to Google to see that the first claim about real wages being on the rise is a lie, you just have to look at the graph he's Tweeted.

What the graph shows is that wages (the blue line) are currently rising at a slower rate than inflation (the red line). This means that in real terms wages are falling because they're rising at a slower rate than the cost of living.

Hannan is such a crap liar that he has Tweeted out a picture proving that he's lying.

What the graph actually shows is the Bank of England are projecting that wages will overtake inflation at some point in mid to late 2018, which would have been OK if Hannan had explained it that way, but he didn't, he lied that wages are already rising faster than inflation.

Even if Hannan had explained that he's happy to put his faith in the economic projections that real wages are set to rise (rather than just lying), here he is just the week before dismissing negative Brexit economic forecasts as the work of "scheming quangocrats". 

So if Hannan doesn't like the economic projections he describes them as a conspiracy by corrupt "quangocrats", but if he likes the economic projections he misleadingly presents than as being true now, rather than being mere economic projections.

You couldn't really ask for a clearer example of the toxic brew of confirmation bias and outright dishonesty that pervades the Tory party.

Now let's consider the meaning of the part of the graph I've highlighted here:

This period doesn't look much if you don't follow economics closely, but the part I've marked on the graph actually represents the longest sustained decline in workers' wages since records began!

This spectacular and unprecedented collapse in the value of workers' wages happened as a result of the Tory party imposing ruinous austerity dogma and extreme wage repression policies on the post-crisis economy.

If I was a member of a political party who had overseen such a catastrophic collapse in workers' wages, I certainly wouldn't be drawing attention to it by Tweeting it out in a graph!

Now we can turn our attention to Hannan's claim that the value of the pound has risen back to pre-referendum levels. 

It doesn't take much effort to Google the exchange rate between the pound and the euro, and lo and behold it's roughly 1.14€ to the pound.

The graph next to the exchange rate makes it pretty damned clear that the pound has not risen back above the pre-referendum level, but for the avoidance of doubt, here are the precise figures from the Pound Sterling Live website:

So in Daniel Hannan's world, a range between 1.122€ and 1.136€ is higher than a range between 1.284€ and 1.305€.

Either that he's just absolutely crap at lying.

Conclusion

Daniel Hannan is a liar.

He's such a liar that he lied twice in the same damned Tweet.

And he's such a crap liar that he included the evidence that he was telling lies in the same damned Tweet as he told the lies in!

Liars like Hannan are dangerous. Liars like Hannan prey on the gullible. He know perfectly well that his target audience has no interest in understanding the graph that he attached to the Tweet, he just put it there to add a veneer of legitimacy to his lies.

Beware of liars like Daniel Hannan.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

Meanwhile in Britain ...

Donald Trump winning the US election shouldn't really have come as a surprise to British people given that we're still dealing with the huge act of economic self-harm the British public inflicted on themselves earlier in 2016.

Even though it shouldn't have come as much of a surprise, Trump's shock victory has still dominated the mainstream press and social media alike since it happened.

Meanwhile several things have been going on in Tory Britain that have slipped quietly under the news radar during US election week.

• 1. The homelessness charity Shelter reported that 120,000 children will spend this Christmas homeless, and that the new lower Tory benefit cap will end up impoverishing an estimated 319,000 children. If it wasn't obvious before, it's crystal clear now that Tory austerity policies end up economically punishing children for the "crime" of being born into poor families.

• 2. The Tory assault on children's rights suffered a setback in the House of Lords where peers voted against the Tory plan to allow local governments to opt out of child protection measures. This Tory effort to build a "bonfire of children's rights" is clearly designed to make the privatisation of child protection services more appealing to corporate outsourcing giants like G4S, Capita and Serco. This vote in the Lords is more of a setback than a defeat though because Tory ministers can always simply reinstate the clause to scrap child safety standards when the child and social work bill returns to the House of Commons.

• 3. The latest figures from the Trussell Trust food bank showed that the increase in food bank dependency in the UK is still continuing. The charity handed out a record number of food parcels in 2015-16 and their evidence shows that two of the three leading causes of food poverty were benefit delays and Tory welfare cuts, accounting for over 40% of referrals between them.

• 4. A long-awaited report from the United Nations absolutely hammered the Tory government for their savage mistreatment of disabled people. Not only did the report find that Tory welfare cuts have disproportionately impacted disabled people and hindered their rights to live independently and be included in their communities, the report also found that disabled people in Britain have suffered a barrage of right-wing anti-disability propaganda that has routinely portrayed disabled people as "dependent or making a living out of benefits, committing fraud as benefit claimants, being lazy or putting a burden on taxpayers".

• 5. Theresa May's government suffered a humiliating setback in the Supreme Court where the High Court ruling that Tory "Bedroom Tax" discriminates against disabled adults and children was upheld.

• 6. The Brexiter argument that the collapse in the value of the pound has been a great thing for exports took a massive blow when it was revealed that the UK trade deficit has widened significantly to £12.7 billion. Not only did the vast gap between imports and exports grow dramatically, the volume of UK exports actually fell by £200 million. The Brexiter argument that a collapsing currency is great for the economy is utterly daft because the UK continues to import vastly more than it exports, but when the economic evidence shows that the collapse in currency value has coincided with a significant decline in exports, even the argument that it's good for the export sector begins to look incredibly weak. Even though the economic evidence shows that this Brexiter delight at the collapse in the value of the pound is misguided, we can look forward to Theresa May and the Tories continuing to spread the ludicrous myth that a weak currency is good for our (import dominated) economy.

• 7. The Bank of England responded to Theresa May's ignorant blame-casting rhetoric at the Tory party conference by releasing a report on the relationship between inflation and interest rates that demonstrated that Theresa May simply doesn't know what she's talking about when it comes to monetary policy (which is no surprise given the economically illiterate myths about monetary policy spread by her predecessors Cameron and Osborne).

• 8. The Institute for Fiscal Studies identified a £25 billion black hole in the UK public finances.

• 9. The Crown Prosecution Service are considering a "corrupt practices" case against the Vote Leave mob (which included high profile Tory government ministers like Boris Johnson) for lying to the electorate over claims like the "Let's give the NHS the £350 million a week ..." lie and their false claims that "Turkey is joining the EU".  

• 10. Theresa May visited India in order to beg for some kind of trade agreement with them, but ended up getting her ear bent about her obstructive attitude towards Indian migration and the "detrimental" immigration policies she implemented during her time as Home Secretary. Additionally Theresa May didn't even bother to schedule a meeting with the Indian conglomerate Tata to discuss the ongoing crisis in the British steel industry while she was in India.

• 11. After returning from her failure of a trip to India Theresa May continued the Tory policy of sucking up pathetically to the Chinese communist government, even allowing herself to be lectured about the importance of "mutual trust" by the Chinese when one of the contractors they lined up to build the UK's rip-off nuclear infrastructure for us has been charged with nuclear espionage in the United States!

• 12. The hope that the Tories are finally going to bin their economically ruinous ideological austerity agenda in order to pursue a sane investment led recovery strategy took another blow with the announcement that the rail electrification project for the South West of England has been indefinitely suspended.

The US election and Trump's victory have overshadowed what's going on in British politics, but it's important not to forget that the US isn't the only country suffering a political farce at the moment.

Whatever the mainstream media try to tell you about Theresa May being a "safe pair of hands" it should be beyond obvious that she's a profoundly dishonest and incompetent politician with a savage right-wing authoritarian streak and anti-democratic tendencies.

The twelve separate stories I've highlighted just from US election week illustrate the shambles that is going on, but as long as the bulk of the Labour Party opposition and the mainstream media continue failing to hold Theresa May and the Tories to account millions of people will continue believing the nonsense that Theresa May is  a competent politician doing a good job!

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

Brexiter rage

On June 23rd 2016 37% of the British public did something extraordinary. They voted for the UK to conduct a haphazard abandonment of the European Union without anything even vaguely resembling a coherent plan of action for how to actually do it. They voted for a blind leap in the dark as a reaction against the (admittedly woeful) political status quo.

Before the vote a lot of experts and political commentators tried to explain what some of the likely consequences of a vote for Brexit would be:

• We pointed out that the central "£350 billion for the NHS" claim of the right-wing Vote Leave mob was a blatant lie that would definitely be abandoned (it was abandoned by the Vote Leave mob within hours). 

• We pointed out that the economic uncertainty caused by voting to abandon the EU without a coherent plan for what comes would cause economic chaos (the value of the pound slumped dramatically and has remained low ever since, and the Bank of England had to make the biggest downwards revision in their economic growth forecasts since records began).

• We pointed out that Brexit would mean the replacement of David Cameron's government with an even more fanatically right-wing one (now the savagely right-wing authoritarian Theresa May is in power). 

• We pointed out that a vote for Brexit would be an excuse for this fanatically right-wing Tory government to set about restructuring the UK economy, foreign relations, legal system and constitution in line with their radical anti-worker pro-corporate ideology (they are already planning to blackmail developing economies into accepting fanatically right-wing trade deals that will make the TTIP corporate power grab look like a walk in the park).

On June 23rd the Brexit voters got what they wanted, and after a short period of celebration, the witch-hunting against Remainers began. Within days the right-wing tabloids had set the narrative that anyone still talking about the Brexit decision is a "whinger", "sore-loser", "cry baby", "anti-democrat" who needs to be angrily shouted down.

Every time I've tried to discuss the actual consequences of what the Brexiters have voted for since then, my posts have triggered mass outbursts of Brexiter rage. Obviously not all Brexit supporters immediately try to shut down discussion of the consequences of what they voted for, however any Brexit supporter who tries to deny this spate of shouting-down behaviour from their fellow Brexiters is clearly denying reality.

The desire to shout down and silence discussion of the actual consequences of their vote for Brexit is difficult to empathise with, but easy to understand.

Brexiter rage sufferers don't want to have to think about the consequences of their actions because they want the world to be a simple arbitrary place where Brexit was a wonderful victory for the forces of good with no questionable or negative consequences for anyone. Therefore anyone who tries to shatter this absolutist illusion by asking inconvenient questions is therefore a dangerous heretic who needs to be silenced.

A lot of people absolutely hate to have their views or their actions subjected to scrutiny, and if they had their way they'd cut out the tongues of anyone who dares question their judgement or ask inconvenient questions.

Anti-democratic

One of the most common attack lines the Brexiter rage crowd tend to use to shout down any commentary that doesn't try to reassure them that "Brexit is great and all the fallout is all other people's fault" is that it's "anti-democratic" to subject the outcome of the referendum to any kind of scrutiny.

The irony is that the referendum only came about because anti-European protesters spent 40 years questioning the overwhelming public support for European integration at the last referendum. If questioning the outcome of referenda is "anti-democratic", then the whole Brexit movement had its genesis in an anti-democratic refusal to accept the will of the majority last time around!

The whole point of a liberal democracy is that people are allowed to vote for something and other people are allowed to disagree with it. If this wasn't the case then elections would make no sense whatever. People would just have to accept the will of the majority and not utter a breath of criticism of the actions of the government until the next election. That's clearly not how liberal democracies work, and if criticisms of the consequences of General Elections were to be outlawed it would be an obvious recipe for the development of a totalitarian one-party state.

It's absolutely clear that the people using furious outbursts of Brexiter rage to try shut down legitimate political discourse are actually the ones with dictatorial anti-democratic attitudes.

Personal abuse and smears

Another common Brexiter rage tactic is to resort to abuse and smears.

One of the most extraordinary examples of this kind of furious Brexiter smearing came in response to the informative talk by the legal expert Michael Dougan discussing the consequences of Brexit. Despite the fact that his talk included a firm denial that his salary is funded by the EU to try to diffuse the appalling smear campaign he'd already been subjected to, the Brexiter rage mob still turned up in their droves in the comments threads with their woeful efforts to smear him with claims that his primary motivation for being critical of the Vote Leave lies and pessimistic about the consequences of Brexit is that he's some kind of paid EU shill.

Everyone has seen examples of furious Brexiters slinging abuse at people for daring to express their opinions. This abuse ranges from stuff like "sore-loser", "cry baby" and "whinger" to foul mouthed tirades and sinister threats.

One of my favourite example of abuse aimed at me was a comment saying "fuck off you whinging cunts" which perfectly exemplified the Brexiter rage mentality: No facts, no evidence, no analysis, no attempted counter argument, no attempt to even establish the basic fact that the target of their abuse is an individual not a group, just blind hatred.

It is easy for me to laugh off abuse like this because after five years of running this blog I've developed tough skin when it comes to abuse, insults, threats and smears, but it's easy to see how foul-mouthed tirades, personal abuse and sinister threats could intimidate other people who are a bit more sensitive than I am into silence.

Anti-working class

Another of the recurring Brexiter rage attack lines is that anyone who dares to discuss the consequences of Brexit in non-eulogistic terms is being "anti-working class" (even if, like me, they come from a working class background).

This "anti-working class" smear often goes hand-in-hand with the use of "middle class" as a pejorative term alongside words like "sneering", "condescending" and "snob". 

We all know that millions of working class people voted Remain and millions of middle class people voted Leave. These attempts to crudely define Brexit as some kind of class war between the working class and the middle class is pitifully divisive stuff, especially when everyone knows that Brexit was an issue that was so divisive that it split communities, political parties, friendship groups and even families into bickering rival factions.

This "anti-working class" attack line has to be one of the most backwards propaganda narratives I've ever heard. As far as these people are concerned anyone who dares to point out that the Tories are using Brexit as an excuse to restructure the UK in line with their fanatical pro-corporate anti-worker ideology should just "shut up" and let them get on with it, and anyone who continues complaining is guilty of being "anti-working class"!

Anti-intellectualism

A lot of Brexiter rage comments have very powerful anti-intellectual tones. During the debate the Tory politician Michael Gove fuelled a furious anti-intellectual mentality amongst Brexiters with his claim that "people in this country have had enough of experts". The tide of hatred and contempt towards expert opinion from Brexiters has continued to flourish after the referendum result became clear.

Here are a couple of examples of anti-intellectualism from the comments thread beneath that very interesting and informative Michael Dougan video I mentioned above:

"Why do the people have to watch so called experts when they can make there own minds up without this bull from both sides."

"Academics produce nowt. We have to pay for all your smart arse talk. I can't wear your talk, it don't put shoes on my kid's feet."

The idea that experts just generate confusion that interferes with these Brexiters' preference for making important decisions based on uninformed gut instinct is bad enough, but the idea that experts in constitutional law are some kind of useless frivolity is absolutely ridiculous, especially since the vote for Brexit is going to keep international law experts like Michael Dougan in business for decades sorting out the legal, constitutional and international relations mess.

Conspiracy theories

During the referendum debate the Tory MP Boris Johnson notoriously compared economic experts raising concerns about the impact of Brexit to Nazi scientists. Aligned with Michael Gove's anti expert ranting, Johnson's comments have helped to foster a Brexiter conspiracy theory mentality where every expert was a paid shill, every warning was a part of a fearmongering conspiracy, and every negative consequence of Brexit is further proof of a massive anti-Brexit conspiracy.

Nigel Farage and lots of other Brexit campaigners further fuelled the conspiracy theories by predicting that the vote was going to be rigged. In fact one survey found that 46% of Brexiters believed Farage's conspiracy theory that the vote was going to be rigged!

It doesn't matter that after the vote the widely predicted economic chaos came true because like all good conspiracy theories the anti-Brexit plot theory has a load of get out clauses including an elegant explain-all feedback explanation to undermine any inconvenient facts.

The explanation for the widely predicted economic slump is that everyone is to blame apart for the Brexiters themselves. Remain supporters are to blame for "talking down the economy", the Bank of England are to blame for "making self-fulfilling prophecies", the EU are to blame for ... "well ... whatever ... it doesn't matter. Brexit was a great idea and any evidence that it wasn't a great idea is clearly part of a plot by evil anti-Brexit forces. Open your eyes man, can't you see it's a conspiracy?".

The theory that any evidence of Brexit having negative consequences is further proof of a massive anti-Brexit conspiracy is just the kind perfect explain-all solution to help simple-minded people continue believing in their fairytale that Brexit was an unquestionably good move with no downsides whatever.

Drowning out

One of the worst things about these constant displays of Brexiter rage is that they drown out legitimate debate. Not only do these outbursts intimidate people with genuine questions and concerns into biting their tongues, the sheer number of these blind-fury responses means that the Brexit supporters with genuine points to make (yes they do exist) are often completely drowned out by the noise too.

Free speech

The Brexiter rage response to legitimate political discourse about the consequences of the thing they voted for is a very censorious attitude. These people hate the fact that other people don't think in the same way as they do so they try to shut down the debate in whichever way they can: Insults, abuse, threats, appeals to anti-intellectualism, smears, conspiracy theories about how everybody else is to blame apart from them ... They'll use any tactic they can think of to try to discredit and silence any opinions that contradict or even lightly question their own.

In 1943 Winston Churchill summed up this appalling dictatorial mentality when he said that "Everyone is in favour of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage".

A lot of Brexiters (including the hatemongering Britain First mob) have appropriated Winston Churchill's image and turned him into a symbol of British isolationism. The double irony is that Churchill was in favour of European integration (especially the European Convention on Human Rights) and he would have been utterly disgusted to see how the standards of political debate have declined so lamentably in the UK that outbursts of censorious Brexiter rage are now so commonplace.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

Are Brexiters immune to irony?

One of the most commonly cited objections to membership of the EU were the complaints that the EU is undemocratic and that it's not right that unelected technocrats and political appointees should rule over our lives.

On June 23rd 2016 37% of the UK electorate voted in favour of a haphazard abandonment of the EU without anything even remotely resembling a coherent plan of action for what comes next. The immediate reaction of the Prime Minister David Cameron was to hand in his resignation and begin drawing up a list of his Tory mates to stuff into the unelected House of Lords and shower with knighthoods, OBEs, CBEs and other gongs.

The House of Lords

In the end Cameron stuffed thirteen new Tory cronies into the ridiculously bloated House of Lords including two multi-millionaire Tory donors (Andrew Fraser and Jitesh Gadhia). He wanted to stuff two more Tory donors in there too but Michael Spencer (who was embroiled in the Libor rigging scandal) was rejected by the scrutiny committee and Remain Campaign bankroller Ian Taylor turned down the peerage because he didn't like the negative publicity.

Thanks to David Cameron's six years of cronyism the House of Lords is now the second biggest legislative chamber in the world, second only to the Chinese parliament. It's by far the biggest unelected chamber, and as such is an affront to democracy. An awful lot of Brexiters seem immune to the irony that their vote to quit the EU is going to hand even more political power to the unelected £300 per day plus expenses House of Lords political cronies club.

Theresa May

David Cameron's replacement as Prime Minister Theresa May outright refused to intervene to stop David Cameron's brazen display of political cronyism. Interestingly she was appointed as leader of the Tory party without a hint of democracy. The 150,000 Tory party members should have been given a vote on their next leader, but the other candidate Andrea Leadsom was leaned on to withdraw from the contest so that may could be anointed as Prime Minister without any filthy oiks having their say.

The Bank of England

As a result of the vote for Brexit the widely reported economic chaos happened. The Bank of England slashed their economic growth forecast for 2017 from 2.3% to just 0.8%, which was the worst decline in economic expectations since records began.

Nowadays in the UK monetary policy is decided by a small group of unelected technocrats called the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee (MPC).

The nine member MPC is comprised of the Governor of the Bank of England (appointed by the government) four external members (appointed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer), the Bank's chief economist and three deputy governors.

These nine unelected technocrats have enormous powers to influence the lives of ordinary people through tinkering with interest rates, propping up failed banks, inventing hundreds of billions of pounds out of nothing to flood the financial markets or buy up corporate bonds ... Yet there is no democratic accountability whatever and virtually nobody has even heard of the members of this tiny unelected group.

The response of these unelected technocrats to the Brexit mess was to use it as an excuse to create £170 billion out of nothing to flood it into the financial sector. Their own evidence from last time they did they created cash out of nothing after the financial sector insolvency crisis is that 40% of the economic benefit went to the 5% of wealthiest households, but they've decided to do exactly the same thing again rather than trying a different approach.

Instead of using the newly created cash to invest directly into stuff like infrastructure, jobs, house building, services, education, industrial development ... (things that benefit everyone) they've decided to distribute the cash to the private banks to funnel into unsustainable house price and asset inflation bubbles (things that almost exclusively benefit the wealthiest people in society).

The irony

As a direct result of the vote for Brexit David Cameron used his resignation as an excuse to stuff another 13 unelected Tory cronies into the House of Lords, the UK now has an unelected Prime Minister pursuing a fanatically hard-right agenda (just like a lot of people predicted) and the unelected technocrats at the Bank of England MPC are using the (widely predicted) economic chaos as an excuse to pump vast amounts of newly created cash into the private banks to gamble with as they please.

It's absolutely obvious that the UK is an undemocratic shambles dominated by political cronyism, private corporate power and unelected technocrats, yet there's hardly any outcry about it from Brexiters. It's as if they're perfectly content with cronyism and unelected technocrats ruling over their lives, as long as they're British* cronies and technocrats.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

* Or in the case of the Bank of England Governor Mark Carney - an unelected Canadian technocrat appointed by British Tories.

Unelected technocrats use the Brexit mess to launch more QE for the private banks

In the wake of the financial sector insolvency crisis the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee (a tiny band of unelected technocrats) decided to take the radical step of creating vast amounts of money out of nothing and flooding the financial markets with it. The policy was called Quantitative Easing (QE) and in the end £375 billion in new money was created and flooded into the financial markets.

Post-crisis QE

There were plenty of critics at the time who pointed to the Japanese experience (Japan used QE to keep their zombie banks alive then suffered two decades of economic stagnation called "the lost decades") and complained about the negative effect of dragging interest rates down to the all time record low of 0.5% on things like savings, pension funds and the investment portfolios of insurance companies.

Times were difficult and unorthodox economic policies were certainly required to resolve a huge financial sector crisis that orthodox economic theories had completely failed to predict.

In hindsight Quantitative Easing turned out to be an incredibly poor method of stimulating economic growth. Instead of directing the windfall of newly created cash towards economically beneficial activities (infrastructure projects, jobs, business loans, research, house building) the private banks simply used it to continue their previous behaviour of inflating unsustainable speculative house price and stock market bubbles, gambling on in the almost completely unregulated derivatives casino and maintaining their obscene bonus culture.

The Bank of England's own evidence showed that 40% of the direct economic benefit of Quantitative Easing ended up going to the 5% of wealthiest households.

Direct Quantitative Easing

One of Jeremy Corbyn's most important economic ideas is that if the central bank is going to create money out of nothing then it needs to be injected directly into the economy rather than being given to the private banks to gamble with as they please.

Corbyn's idea is that newly created cash should be directed at economically beneficial projects (infrastructure projects, jobs, education, house building, industrial development ...) via a National Investment Bank (something I'd been advocating years before Jeremy Corbyn became Labour Party leader).

Of course Corbyn's idea makes a lot of sense because private banks can never direct the money to achieve the best outcomes for wider society because they have a legal obligation to ensure the most profitable returns for their shareholders. The priority of the private banks is to make profits for themselves, the priority of a National Investment Bank would be to ensure the best returns on investment for the wider economy.

Corbyn's Direct QE idea has predictably been attacked by the incredibly hostile Westminster establishment club and their attack-dogs in the mainstream media. They've repeatedly derided Direct QE as nonsense and ridiculed its proponents for supposedly "believing in magic money trees".

It's funny how in establishment minds the creation of money out of nothing to give to private banks to do with as they please is referred to as "unconventional monetary policy" but when someone suggests creating money out of nothing to invest in infrastructure, jobs and house building suddenly it's "believing in magic money trees"!

Post-Brexit QE

After 37% of the UK electorate voted in favour of a haphazard abandonment of the EU with nothing even resembling a coherent plan for what comes next the UK economy took a huge (widely predicted) hit. The Bank of England revised their growth figures for 2017 downwards from 2.3% to just 0.8%, which is the biggest downgrade in their growth forecast since records began!

The BoE response to this self-inflicted economic turmoil was to announce another huge tranche of QE for the private banks. £60 billion in the same kind of QE as before and another £100 billion created out of nothing with a stipulation that the banks actually lend it rather than hoarding it (although the punishment if they don't lend it doesn't seem to be all that clear), plus an additional £10 billion to buy up a load of corporate bonds.

The Bank of England are well aware that their first experiment with QE was a cash cow for the wealthiest individuals in society to milk, and that very little of it ended up directed towards economically beneficial stuff like infrastructure investment, industry, house building, education, research and development ... yet they're doing more of the same.

Even as they announced their "more of the same" tactics, the Bank of England admitted that their interventions would neither be able to prevent the calamitous post-Brexit decline in economic expectations nor prevent some 250,000 job losses.

It really does beggar belief that the Bank of England have decided to recycle the exact same monetary policies that failed last time around. Given the findings of their own report about the last round of QE. One conclusion is that members of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee have the intention of further enriching the already extremely wealthy and no real concern for the long-term prospects of the wider UK economy (otherwise they would surely be trying a different form of unconventional monetary policy). The other conclusion is that they're ignorant of the findings of their own report and they don't have a clue what they're doing, their policies being nothing more than mindless knee-jerk reactions to an economic situation they don't have the faintest clue how to actually resolve.

Either they're deliberately and cynically using the Brexit mess to serve the interests of the wealthiest minority, or they don't actually have a clue what they're doing. Neither explanation inspires any confidence that this tiny band of unelected technocrats are capable of steering the UK in the right direction.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR