Why are the mainstream media ignoring the shocking Tory bigotry and bullying scandals?

The mainstream media are absolutely desperate to assist the Labour right-wingers in their plot to reduce Labour's vote at the local elections by amplifying their anti-Semitism smears, but the huge story they're ignoring is the very real problem of bullying and bigotry within the Tory party.

Just two weeks ago the Tories relaunched their youth movement with the disgraced Tory Vice Chair Ben Bradley at the forefront of the launch.

Bradley is a guy who promoted the forced sterilisation of poor people and got caught spreading totally outrageous lies on Twitter, but somehow the mainstream press didn't bother to ask how this odious man is still in his job, let alone why such a bigot is being entrusted with the Tory youth movement.

Another question they didn't bother to ask is why the Tory youth movement needed to be relaunched. The answer of course is that it was shut down after a young Tory activist was bullied so badly that he was driven to suicide.

The Tories had to close down their youth movement because they actually bullied someone into suicide, and then they had the cheek to cry victim that right-wing young people are supposedly being told (by unspecified persons) that "they have to be Corbynistas"!

Bigotry and bullying have always been part of the right-wing Tory agenda, from Daily Mail articles abusing Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and Tory politicians signing up to anti-Semitic groups in droves; through the shockingly racist "If you want a coloured for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour" election leaflets of the 1960s; the homophobic Section 28 legislation of the 1980s; the profoundly sexist Tory austerity dogma that has loaded 86% of the economic burden of the financial crisis onto the shoulders of women; to Theresa May quoting a disgustingly bigoted and misogynistic extreme-right Twitter troll in parliament in order to score cheap political points against Jeremy Corbyn in the recent past.

But Tory bigotry and bullying aren't just issues from the past, they're very much going on right now too.

It's just that providing proper coverage of the disgusting behaviour of the Tories runs entirely against the current mainstream media objective, which is to assist the right-wing Blairites in their plot to drive down the Labour vote at the local elections in order to have another crack at deposing Jeremy Corbyn.

If the media were in any way balanced, the following four examples of Tory bigotry and bullying would have got an absolute storm of publicity but instead they've been buried underneath a landslide of anti-Semitism smears against Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party, and the left in general.

Tolerance of racism

Las t week the bigoted Tory MP Ben Bradley made a huge song and dance about attracting two defectors from the Labour Party into the Tory fold.

What Bradley forgot to mention was that one of them had been suspended as a Labour Councillor for his appalling 44% attendance record, while the other one was running away from Labour because he was under investigation for alleged racism.

What a truly wonderful story for any racist politicians out there: If you get caught being a racist prick, avoid going through the investigation and expulsion process in your own party, just jump ship to the Tories before the investigation is concluded!

Self-hating Jews

At Prime Minister's Questions on March 21st Theresa May was rattled. Jeremy Corbyn was asking difficult questions about the devastating impact of Tory austerity on local council budgets, so she retorted with the classic "whataboutery" distraction tactic of talking about something else. The subject she picked was the anti-Semitism storm the Labour right-wingers have been brewing in order to attack their own party's chances at the local elections.

The problem for Theresa May is that she's such a third rate thinker that she managed to accidentally use a grotesque anti-Semitic smear during her attempted criticism of anti-Semitism within Labour. When she claimed "there is no place in Labour for those who want to tackle anti-Semitism" she  labelled every single Jewish person within the Labour Party as tolerant of anti-Semitism. 

A non-Jew accusing a significant number of Jewish people of being tolerant of anti-Semitism is clearly an act of anti-Semitism in itself because it's an invocation of the deeply anti-Semitic trope of the "self-hating Jew".

Astoundingly the mainstream media refused to even address the fact that the Prime Minister of the UK used a well worn anti-Semitic trope in order to attack the opposition party as anti-Semites.

Homophobic bullying

Within days of her team of advisers telling her to use an anti-Semitic trope to attack Jewish members of the Labour party, Theresa May's inner circle did something even more bigoted. They decided to out someone as gay against their will in a desperate effort to discredit their whistleblowing over alleged cheating by the Vote Leave campaign.

Theresa May's reaction to this outrageous piece of homophobic bullying wasn't to apologise to the victim and sack the perpetrator. In fact she didn't even bother to apologise to the victim at all, and instead put out a statement of "full confidence" in the homophobic bully!

It was possible to imagine that the decision to revenge out someone as gay was made without Theresa May's knowledge, but when she intervened to express her absolute support for the homophobic bully on her team it became obvious that Theresa May is still the raging homophobe who spent the majority of her parliamentary career voting against gay rights.

Islamophobia

On the same weekend that Theresa May's team resorted to homophobic bullying in order to defend their beloved Brexit the Tory MP Bob Blackman took to Facebook in order to share a grotesque piece of extreme-right, Islamophobic, anti-Somalian propaganda from the United States.

Blackman subsequently deleted the post and issued the extraordinary excuse that he had never actually visited the website he shared a link to, but this is a guy with a proven track record of bigotry that even went as far as promoting the EDL founder Tommy Robinson.

Has Theresa May reprimanded Blackman for his disgusting behaviour. Of course she hasn't, she's just remained completely silent and relied on the mainstream media to almost completely ignore the scandal.

Tory sexism

Over the last 8 years the Tories have pushed the deeply sexist policy of loading 86% of the economic burden of their austerity dogma onto women, but occasionally they betray their sexist attitudes in person. Take Boris Johnson's pathetic effort to demean Labour's shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry by referring to her by her husband's title.

The Speaker John Bercow rightly chastised Boris Johnson for his sexism, but the fact remains that the Tory party is stuffed full of political dinosaurs who consider addressing women by their husband's title is some kind of incredibly witty putdown.

Conclusion

You won't hear very much about the numerous Tory bigotry and bullying scandals of the last week because that would run entirely counter to the establishment objective of driving down the Labour vote at the local elections in order to give the coup-plotting Labour right-wingers another crack at deposing Jeremy Corbyn and reverting Labour to the same hard-right neoliberal economic dogma as the Tories and Lib-Dems.

But just because you don't hear about it in the mainstream media, doesn't mean that the rampant Tory bigotry and bullying aren't happening, they are, and they're absolutely scandalous.

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If the Tories had any sense they'd make hapless Ben Bradley delete his Twitter account

The Tory MP Ben Bradley isn't just a nasty piece of work who defames his political opponents, calls for the sterilisation of poor people, and joked with Iain Duncan Smith about castrating a journalist who dared to criticise him, he's also a remarkably dim bulb who couldn't spot a public relations own goal if it slapped him in the face.
 

Fresh from creating the most viral political Twitter disaster British politics has ever seen with his apology for defaming Jeremy Corbyn, Ben Bradley must have thought that he'd scored a magnificent public relations goal by announcing the defection of two Ashfield councillors from Labour to the Tories.

'Oh good' he must have thought, 'a chance to bash Jeremy Corbyn by citing "Momentum" as the reason for the defections'.

The problem of course is that these defections don't really do anything to make the Tories look good, but do an awful lot to reinforce the Labour left narrative that the Labour Party has been somewhat over-run by a bunch of self-serving right-wing neoliberals in recent decades, and that re-selection is a means of removing the worst of these "Red Tory" infiltrators from the party.

If these defecting councillors have decided that they've got more in common with the pro-privatisation, pro-austerity, welfare-slashing, workers' rights trashing, NHS vandalising, disability discriminating, local government wrecking, blue-kip panderning, hard-right ultranationalist Tories than with their fellow Labour Party members ... then what the hell were they doing in the Labour Party in the first place?

Aside from actively confirming the accusation that the Labour Party has been infiltrated by "Red Tories" and adding weight to the calls for re-selection of Labour MPs to ensure they actually represent the will of the party membership rather than their own right-wing agenda ... there's more.

It turns out that one of the defectors has actually been democratically deselected as a Labour Party candidate by local people, and was being investigated by the party over allegations of racism!

It tells us a lot about the Tories that they're so keen to make a fanfare of poaching a Labour councillor, but that they "forgot" to mention the fact their new guy ran away because he's under investigation for alleged racism.

I'm a strong believer in due process, so it's absolutely right that Labour were investigating the issue internally before taking action, but now that Lee Anderson has damaged the Labour Party further by defecting to the Tory party, it seems like the racism allegations should be made public, because there's no conceivable justification for conducting an internal party investigation into the alleged racism of a guy who is now another party's politician.

So in one failed PR stunt Ben Bradley has managed to clearly demonstrate the validity of the left-wing "red Tory" narrative about the problem of pro-austerity pro-privatisation neoliberals in the Labour Party, and also make the Tory party look so desperate that they're lapping up the Labour Party's disgusting unwanted dregs!

But then again, don't the unwanted backstabbing alleged racist Lee Anderson and the elitist sterilise the poor proven liar Ben Bradley just make a perfect couple?

 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.

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The Tories are now so toxic they're having to pay people to support them on Twitter

Over the last few years the Tories have been completely thrashed on social media.

During the 2017 General Election there wasn't a single pro-Tory article in the top 25 most shared articles on Facebook, and since the General Election by far the most viral Tory tweet is Ben Bradley's grovelling apology for writing defamatory comments about Jeremy Corbyn, rather than anything that casts them in a good light.

The Tories know that they're getting thrashed on social media. They know that the Tory brand is increasingly toxic to the under-50s, and that they only really appeal to the hard-right ultranationalist Blue-kip demographic, and that Labour's 500,000+ membership equates to a voluntary army of online campaigners they haven't got a hope of competing with.

The Tory solution to this situation is quite extraordinary. Instead of devising policies that actually appeal to the younger generations, their Chairman Brandon Lewis has announced his plan to lob a load of cash at the problem by hiring huge numbers of paid Twitter astroturfers to spread pro-Tory propaganda.

This Tory astroturfer strategy is useless for a number of reasons.

One of the main reasons this strategy stinks is that people are very much more likely to engage with a political post from a friend, family member, or a famous person they admire, than with the posts of fake @ToryBoy28783654 type propaganda accounts, so the Tories are going to be paying out significant amounts in wages to people who will have far less natural reach than genuine Labour campaigners.

Another problem is that widespread public knowledge that the Tories have hired an army of astroturfers will seriously delegitimise the social media postings of genuine Tory supporters.  The existence of the Tory astroturf army will create the suspicion that genuine Tory types are just paid social media mercenaries, rather than people who genuinely believe in what they're doing.

Another problem for the Tories arises from the election expenses rules. If any of this mercenary army of Tory astroturfers promote specific Tory MPs during election periods, then their wages should surely be classed as local election expenses.

If the Tory astroturf mercenary army are to comply with the election rules, there needs to be transparency about who these people are, what they're being paid, and which social media accounts they're operating.

A lack of transparency would allow the Tories to bypass election expenses rules, but transparency would wreck the whole project, because what's the point of running a load of fake pro-Tory accounts if everyone knows that they're fake accounts?

Additionally there's the Russia thing. It's a well established fact that Russians have been using "bot farms" staffed by paid propagandists to interfere in other countries' elections. In fact the Tory MP Damian Collins has been probably the most vocal MP in attacking Facebook and Twitter for their inadequate responses to questions about Russian meddling. 

The fact that the Tory Chairman is suddenly proposing that the Tories use the exact same shady "bot farms" and astroturfing propaganda tactics as the Russians in order to influence political debate creates a very strong impression that the Tory party is a ridiculously contradictory shambles, where one hand literally doesn't have a clue what the other is doing.

Then there's probably the most obvious problem of the lot. If you have so little natural support that you need to pay people to campaign for you, you quite obviously don't have any policies that are actually worth campaigning for.

 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.

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The most viral Tory Tweet of 2018 so far is a grovelling apology for defamation!

There's no better proof of the absolute ineptitude of the Tories when it comes to social media than the Tory MP and vice-chair Ben Bradley issuing a humiliating retraction of his seriously defamatory comments about Jeremy Corbyn. 

On the 19th of February I made a defamatory statement about @jeremycorbyn. I have apologised to Mr Corbyn and here is the complete text of my apology. Please retweet. pic.twitter.com/6JZc8O9E82

— Ben Bradley MP (@bbradleymp) February 24, 2018

Part of the apology agreement specified by Jeremy Corbyn was that Bradley would Tweet his apology.

Theresa May is letting Ben Bradley keep his job

As the rest of us were celebrating the New Year, the Tories decided to quietly sneak out an announcement that they'd appointed the vile hard-right polemicist Toby Young to their new (and supposedly impartial) universities watchdog.

Within a matter of hours it became clear that the Tories had failed to do even the slightest due diligence on the guy they were handing a job to. Not only did Toby Young have a disgusting back catalogue of misogynistic, homophobic, and downright disgusting Tweets, he'd also been attending secretive pro-eugenics conferences full of white supremacists and paedophilia apologists, and writing articles attempting to rehabilitate the concept of eugenics.

Eventually, after a nine day shit-storm over his repulsive comments and views, Toby Young resigned, and any sensible and/or vaguely competent political party would have looked into how they managed to appoint someone with such an appalling track record, but not the Tories.

On the very same day that Toby Young resigned over his back catalogue of despicable articles and Tweets, Theresa May appointed the recently elected Tory MP Ben Bradley as Vice Chair for Youth.

Apparently his job would be to get more young people to engage with the Conservative party.

Had they bothered to check Bradley's Internet history before appointing him, they would have come across a truly disgusting blog post calling for the sterilisation of unemployed people, as if unemployment is some kind of genetic disease, rather than a necessary condition in capitalist economies. 

I mean just think about it, how else are the exploitative capitalist class going to extract as much profit from the labour force as possible if there isn't a permanent pool of unemployed workers ready to replace any worker who agitates too loudly for pay raises or better working conditions?

One of the most shocking things about his elitist views on unemployment is that Bradley is the first ever Tory MP in the former mining town of Mansfield.

If anyone should know that unemployment can be thrust upon people, families, and even entire communities through no fault of their own, then surely it's people in a former mining town that was socially and economically decimated by the closure of the mines (as well as the textiles industry and the Mansfield brewery)?

But no, they've actually gone and elected this elitist Tory prig as their MP.

How someone with such vile elitist views about the sterilisation of the poor ever made it through the selection process to become a Tory parliamentary candidate is bizarre enough, but his appointment to Theresa May's government as a kind of youth engagement officer, well it just defies belief doesn't it?

Bradley and his right-wing backers have attempted to defend his comments by making out they happened ages ago, but 2012 wasn't that long ago, and his comments were made in defence of Iain Duncan Smith's welfare cuts, as if sterilisation of the unemployed is somehow a natural extension of Tory party welfare policy.

We all know that if Labour (or any other political party) had appointed someone with such vile views to an official position, the Tories, the right-wing dominated print media, and the Guido Fawkes smear-mongering operation would be in all out attack mode over it. But because this guy is a Tory, they're churning out excuses, and pretending that the Tory mask hasn't slipped.

Theresa May has decided that someone who has so recently expressed such vile elitist views is an appropriate person to try to engage young people with right-wing politics.

But the truth is obvious for everyone to see. Not only did the Tory party welcome Bradley with open arms and promote him to an official position within the party, and either they did no due diligence on his background at any state, or they did do due diligence and concluded that sterilise the poor blog posts are well aligned with the Tory party ethos.

The Tory mask has well and truly slipped, and Theresa May's decision to let Bradley keep his job could well backfire. Perhaps he has more extreme pro-eugenics views lurking around in his past, and even if not, any youth Bradley tries to get hooked on right-wing politics can be easily warded off with warnings "don't listen to him, he's the sterilise the poor guy".

 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.

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