Today was the opening of the 9th European Parliament, and oh what a farce the British contingent turned it into!
We've come to expect nothing more than pointless publicity-seeking pantomime from the Faragists, who love nothing more than empty gesture politics, grandstanding speeches, and collecting £millions in expenses in return for doing no work whatever. So it's absolutely no surprise that the 29 Brexit Party MPs turned their back on the European Parliament during Beethoven's Ode to Joy.
These ludicrous scammers have continually shamed Britain with their endless expenses frauds, their laziness, their belligerence, their petulant publicity-seeking stunts, and their despicable allegiances with extreme-right fanatics and neo-Nazis.
The kind of people who vote for them actually enjoy seeing our European neighbours treated with contempt and disdain. They get off on it because they hate Johnny Foreigner so much they'd rather have a bunch of attention-seeking clowns in the EU parliament than people there to actually represent British interests on the continental stage.
But us Brits didn't just decide to send even more of these far-right scammers into the European Parliament, we also upped the British contingent of Lib-Dems from 1 to 16 based on their opportunistic single-issue "Bollocks to Brexit" campaign!
It's highly unlikely that a tenth of the people who voted for these appalling Lib-Dem austerity enforcers understand that they're part of Guy Verhofstadt's awful ALDE group in the European Parliament, or that ALDE and their antics are one of the worst things about the EU for the way they relentlessly back every sickening piece of hard-right, economically liberal, pro-corporate shite from TTIP, to efforts to ban people from using the term "veggie burger", to link taxes and upload filters designed to benefit corporate media sites and online tech giants at the expense of small websites and independent content creators.
It's also highly unlikely that most of the people who decided to vote Lib-Dem actually bothered to think through why Brexit happened in the first place, nor the crucial role the Lib-Dems' played by actively helping the Tories to destroy our nation's living standards for five ruinous years with austerity fanaticism, unprecedented wage repression, massive public service cuts, endless privatisation scams, grotesquely illiberal legislation like unlawful Tribunal Fees, Hostile Environment, Bedroom Tax, and Snooping Powers, deliberate infrastructure under-investment, and wanton vandalism of the social safety net.
Let's vote for the people who helped cause Brexit because they make a fuss about opposing Brexit!
Let's give our kids ice cream for destroying their bedroom because they say they intend to tidy it up one day!
What Lib-Dem voters must surely have noticed is the way the people they elected turned up to the European Parliament in absurd matching "Bollocks to Brexit" T-shirts like it's a sodding stag do rather than a serious parliament.
Turning up dressed like you're on the piss with Auntie Susan turns the EU Parliament into just as much of a joke as the Brexiteers and their absurd antics.
So that's 45 of Britain's 73 MEPs treating the European Parliament like an absolute circus.
This puerile and contemptuous behaviour from both fringes of the Brexit divide shames our nation, and makes it seem like the Europeans would actually be a hell of a lot better off without us sending ever larger numbers of absolute divs into their parliament to piss about like they're on holiday.
So thanks a lot to all of you single-issue wankers who decided to turn the European elections into an absurd Proxy-referendum on Brexit.
And thanks a lot to the almost 2/3 of people who couldn't even be arsed to go out and vote to decide who represents us on the continental stage too, this level of apathy is what has allowed a small and unrepresentative bunch of fringe single-issue extremists to completely hijack Britain's contingent in the European Parliament, and end up making us look like a nation of total dick heads.
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.
When you look at the facts and evidence, it's pretty damned clear that quitting the EU without at least maintaining very close cooperation on the economy, security, citizens' rights and the environment would be a disastrous move for the UK.
When even Brexiteers like Jacob Rees-Mogg are claiming that Britain won't see any Brexit benefit for at least 50 years, it's hardly an uncontroversial point to say that Brexit is going to be disastrous until almost everyone of working age is a pensioner or dead.
However one point that is rarely raised is whether the EU would actually be better off without us.
You see the over-whelming British attitude towards the EU is apathy, while most of those who do express a view do so with so little regard for the actual structure and makeup of EU democracy, it's pretty much indistinguishable from contempt.
The turnout at the EU elections was just 37%, meaning two thirds of eligible voters didn't even bother to express a view, and of the minority who did bother voting, a massive swathe of them treated the election like a ridiculous proxy referendum on EU membership, with 31% backing the Faragist Brexit Party, and 20% backing the absurd single-issue "Bollocks to Brexit" Lib-Dems.
How many Lib-Dem voters know, or even care, that the Lib-Dems belong to the despicable ALDE group in the European Parliament, and by returning 15 of them, they've massively increased the power of one of the most toxic groups in the European Parliament.
If one thing is absolutely guaranteed in the European Parliament, it's that is some sickening pro-corporate piece of legislation, or an egregious attack on European citizens' rights and freedoms (the TTIP corporate power grab, banning people from using the term "veggie burger" at the behest of the meat industry, attacking Internet freedoms with Link Taxes and Upload Filters ...) comes along, ALDE will be cheering for it and voting it through.
So in order to say "bollocks to Brexit" like a bunch of political toddlers, literally millions of Brits voted for the European Parliamentary group that makes the EU so bloody bad in the first place, and literally millions more had an equally embarrassing political toddler tantrum in the opposite direction by voting for a bunch of lazy expenses-scamming far-right shit-stirrers to protest against the EU.
Aside from our woefully immature attitude to electing members to the European Parliament, there's also the fact that Britain is so often completely out of step with the general European Consensus.
I'll give just a few examples:
When the EU tried to clamp down on excessive bankers' bonuses, George Osborne was the only finance minister in Europe to oppose the proposals, using public money to fight a doomed-to-lose rearguard action in defence of bankers' rights to extract vast bonuses even as they drive their institutions into insolvency!
When the EU tried to protect the European steel industry by putting tariffs on artificially cheap Chinese steel flooding into European markets, once again the Tories were the only major ruling party to object to and obstruct these moves.
When the EU tried to discipline the far-right Orbán government in Hungary for their interference in the independence of the judiciary, the Tories were the only ruling party in Europe to align themselves with all the extreme-right and neo-Nazi parties in the European parliament to vote in favour of Orbán's anti-Semitic regime.
And it's not just limited to British obstruction against the European political consensus, there's a hard-right British mindset that just doesn't exist on the continent.
Even in countries like Germany, where the centre-right CDU have ruled the roost since 2005, publicly owned not-for-profit public services are commonplace and they've actually reintroduced free university education across the board.
In the UK Jeremy Corbyn is derided as some kind of dangerously radical extremist for espousing these policies that are absolutely commonplace on the continent. Policies like publicly owned rail, water, national grid, and mail system, free university education, and decentralisation of economic control and infrastructure investment funds.
What's absolutely commonplace and uncontroversial over there is derided as lunatic extremism over here, and then when it comes to UK government policy Europeans are genuinely shocked when you tell them what the UK government have been doing over the last nine years.
They're shocked when you tell them that they've privatised 3/4 of the schools in England into the hands of unaccountable private pseudo-charities who fill their own pockets at the public expense through bloated executive salaries and dodgy no-bid supply contracts to their friends and family.
They're shocked when you tell them that English kids are facing £9,000 per year university fees on rip-off inflation+3% repayment terms that mean 83% of graduates will never pay off their debts despite entire working lifetimes of paying 9% of their disposable incomes in "education tax".
They're shocked when you tell them that the Tory government has privatised prisons, and the probation service, and the forensic science service, and front line police operations, and absolutely gutted Legal Aid to turn the courts back into the playgrounds of the rich.
What is our normal is radical hard-right extremism to most of them.
And what's their normal is almost universally derided in the media as dangerously extreme Marxist nonsense when Corbyn proposes it over here.
On Brexit we're just an embarrassment hanging around in the doorway, threatening to leave the party in the most destructive way possible, with senior government ministers, right up to our soon-to-be-departed Prime Minister spreading bizarre anti-European conspiracy theories, and her senior ministers referring to our EU neighbours as "Nazi concentration camp guards".
Then after three years of threatening to shoot ourselves in the head if we don't get exactly what we want, we repeatedly rejected the departure deal that we ourselves negotiated, and then pathetically begged and grovelled for yet more time to sort ourselves out, because nobody here can even agree on how to actually do Brexit.
They've shown remarkable patience in the face of this unprecedented chaos and uncertainty, with all 27 remaining EU states coming together to agree their negotiating position, while we, on our own, remain pathetically divided over ours!
When it comes to foreign policy, once again we're completely out of step with the rest of the EU.
When Jeremy Corbyn appealed for calm, and asked to see conclusive proof that Iran were responsible for the tanker explosions in the Gulf of Oman, he was roundly derided in Britain as some kind of lunatic anti-British traitor for daring to question the suspiciously evidence-light assertions of US warmongers like Mike Pompeo and John Bolton.
But then you look at the European reaction to the same incident, and you see that far from being some kind of wildly deranged commie, Corbyn's just expressing the general European consensus.
Germany’s foreign minister Heiko Maas said the grainy video provided by the US is far from sufficient to prove that Iran was behind the attacks.
France's foreign ministry called on all sides in the region to "act with restraint and towards de-escalation".
And the EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini called for "maximum restraint".
Nobody in Europe is spitting abuse and shrieking "traitor" at these figures for saying the same kind of stuff Corbyn did, nor demanding that the European public unquestioningly accept the American's evidence-light assertions, and war-mongering rhetoric.
Whichever way you look at it, Britain is glaringly out of step with the general European consensus.
Of course a lot of Brits who believe in more liberal social values, and peaceful internationalist ideals, and the mixed economy social democratic way of doing things, would prefer not to leave the EU at all, but maybe it's just time for people like us to accept that (outside of Scotland) we're actually in the minority, surrounded by a majority comprised of tub-thumping hard-right little-Englanders and those who are outright apathetic towards European principles and ideals, which means that the Europeans might well be better off without us continually mucking things up for them.
The other option of course is for Britain to change course, to ditch the obstructionist British attitudes in the European Parliament, to adopt the European consensus on public ownership and affordable/free university education, to unwind all the egregious Tory privatisation scams that most Europeans are genuinely shocked by when they hear about them, and to seek de-escalation in volatile conflict zones rather than spitting undiluted hate at those who preach caution instead of jingoistic war-mongering bollocks.
But if we're going to take this other option, we've got a heck of a lot of work on our plates to reform the way we do things in Britain haven't we?
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.
Brexit Party and the Faragists know exactly what they're doing when it comes to propaganda. Make as many false-promises to as many people as possible in the hope that they're dumb enough to believe that they'll actually follow through on any of it.
Their position on British Steel is absolutely extraordinary. They've proposed a John Lewis style workers' partnership to save the institution from insolvency, but they also propose reducing UK tariffs on almost all imports to zero, meaning the UK would be absolutely flooded with cheap imports, meaning the inevitable ruination of the British Steel industry, workers' partnership or not.
But besides the fact that their stated aims are mutually contradictory nonsense, it gets even worse. The candidate they're standing in the Peterborough by-election is a guy called Mike Greene who works for a private investment fund called Greybull Capital LLP.
These are the owners who have driven British Steel into insolvency, which is just one of the numerous company collapses they've overseen in recent years.
They were behind the collapse of Monarch Airlines that collapsed owing £500 million to suppliers and creditors, and leaving 110,000 stranded tourists across Europe who needed repatriating at a cost of £60 million to the British taxpayer.
Then there was the subsequent collapse of the spun-off Monarch Aircraft Engineering the following year with the loss of 408 jobs.
Snooker and pool fans will remember the collapse of Rileys in 2012, which was then acquired by Greybull who then flogged off half the chain's sites before ditching the lot in 2014. Rileys was destroyed, but Greybull made a 10% profit on their dealings so hooray for them eh?
They were involved in the Comet buyout before the electrical retailer collapsed into insolvency in 2013 triggering the loss of 7,000 jobs. This bankruptcy resulted in a £25 million loss to the public purse in unpaid VAT.
Then there was the collapse of My Local in 2016 with the loss of 1,200 jobs, with Greene intimately involved in that particular Greybull insolvency.
And now in 2019 we've got Greybull driving British Steel into administration too, with 5,000 jobs at risk, and another 2,000 through supply chains.
And Brexit Party are gleefully fielding one of Greybull's senior figures as their parliamentary candidate in the Peterborough by-election.
And herein lies the great deceit of the Faragists.
They appeal to people's patriotism and pretend that it's the prideful British thing to do to vote for the most militant form of Brexit possible, but then their first candidate ever for parliament is a guy who works for a faceless vulture fund that's driven loads of British businesses into insolvency, destroyed literally thousands of British jobs, and left the UK taxpayer footing the bill time and time again.
They're not pushing a "no deal" Brexit because they think it'll be good for Britain, they're pushing it because they know that they can make vast amounts of money by betting against Britain, the Pound, and British companies as they push the UK economy over an avoidable cliff.
Then they can make even more by flooding their ill-gotten gains back into the UK to buy up £billions in distressed British assets on the cheap in the resulting chaos.
They want to do to Britain what Mike and his Greybull mates have been doing to British companies like Monarch, Rileys, My Local, Comet, and British Steel.
"No deal" Brexit is a deeply unpatriotic national asset stripping strategy being sold to the gullible as the patriotic thing to support, but the fact that the Brexit Party's first ever parliamentary candidate is a key player in the Greybull asset-stripping operation tells you all you need to know.
But then the bookies have Greene and Brexit Party as favourites to win in Peterborough, so none of the opposition parties are being clear enough in highlighting this guy's insolvency-strewn CV.
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.
Despite all the numpties trying to pretend that Labour's Brexit position is too complicated to understand, it was always a quite simple strategy of trying to de-escalate and de-toxify Brexit by reconciling Leave and Remain instead of picking either the 52% or the 48% and tailoring their policies exclusively for them.
With Labour's vote share collapsing to leave them in 3rd place between the (exclusively 52%) Brexit Party and the (exclusively 48%) Lib-Dems, it's quite clear that people don't actually want Brexit reconciliation.
It doesn't matter how much it actually makes sense to try to de-escalate Brexit so that it doesn't continue degenerating towards an outright culture war between the two polar extremes, there's no way to pretend that it's popular.
Compromise and reconciliation are deeply unsexy political concepts when most people seem to want the certainty of picking one side or the other and naively hoping that their side doesn't end up on the losing side of the culture war they're gearing up for.
If I was forced to pick a side in a do-or-die showdown between the two polar extremes of the debate I'd obviously end up on the Remain side because "no deal" is such an unbelievably stupid concept that would trash our economy and absolutely burn all of the UK's negotiating capital the instant we did it.
But there's no denying that the Remain faction is just as riddled with ideological militants, opportunists, and outright liars as the opposite end of the spectrum.
The People's Vote graph in the article header is proof of how far these people will go to deceive.
After months of relentlessly misrepresenting Labour's position (oppose "no deal", repeatedly oppose Tory Brexit, push for a general Election, propose a fail safe least harmful version of Brexit, support calls for a final say referendum) as nasty pro-Brexit fanaticism in order to drive voters into the arms of the Lib-Dems, they're suddenly claiming Labour as a Remain party because it's the only possible way to make it look like the pro-Brexit parties (Brexit Party, Tories, UKIP) didn't win a bigger vote share than the exclusively Remain parties.
The weirdest thing about this kind of deception is the cultish myopia of it.
It's not designed to deceive Leave voters into change their mind, nor to deceive the undecided.
It's pure self-delusion aimed at convincing their own tribe that they won a clear majority, when the only way to create this deception is to suddenly appropriate the support of the very people they've been relentlessly misrepresenting, attacking and abusing for over a year in order to erode their support and pinch their voters!
An herein lies the danger of an another roll of the dice referendum.
It doesn't matter how much you dislike the Brextremists, it's obvious that their propaganda is clearly and unambiguously designed to win people over to their cause. They won the 2016 referendum, and Farage's Brexit Party just stormed these Euro elections. No matter how much we may dislike it, their propaganda is effective, and it clearly works.
Even though Remain lost in 2016 and they've got a lot of convincing to do in order to make up the ground, People's Vote propaganda like this isn't designed to win people over at all, it's purely self-righteous reassurance for the echo chamber.
The only people retweeting this blatantly deceptive graph are clearly on a Remainer self-delusion trip.
They don't want to admit that they've wasted the last three years so badly that despite all the Brexit chaos, and uncertainty, and deadlock, the exclusively 52% parties still somehow bagged a bigger vote share than the exclusively 48% parties.
The Tories have done such a spectacular job of ballsing Brexit up that Remain should be winning the argument all over the country by now, but their absolute obsession with a sore-loser referendum, their mobilisation behind the pro-austerity Lib-Dems who helped the Tories cause Brexit in the first place, and their spreading of absurd self-deception nonsense like this clearly answers the question of how Brexit Party swept the vast majority of English and Welsh constituencies.
It turns out that an awful lot of Remainers aren't even remotely interested in reaching out to left-behind communities to explain that it was domestic government policies like neoliberalism, privatisation mania, austerity fanaticism, wage repression, public service cuts, infrastructure under-investment, and vandalism of the social safety net that caused the living standards collapse, not immigrants and the EU.
In fact they're so uninterested in winning this argument they've actually flocked to support the pro-austerity, pro-privatisation Lib-Dem neoliberals, which is all very well in the mainly-metropolitan and well-to-do patches of the country that never experienced the full force of ruinous Tory austerity, but Remainers actively rewarding the austerity-enablers makes winning the argument even harder in the much more numerous places that were wracked by austerity fanaticism, and just turned out in much bigger numbers to vote for the far-right Brexit Party Faragists.
These people aren't interested in effective campaigning at all, all they're interested in is smugly congratulating themselves that they were right all along.
If they wilfully refuse to deal with the issues and injustices that caused Brexit in the first place in preference for spreading ridiculously misleading infographics designed to convince themselves that they won when they're still somehow losing, then they're never going to triumph in the "another roll of the dice" referendum they've invested so much of their time, effort, and resources on demanding are they?
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 Tory Blue-Kip strategy was 20 years in the making, but when Theresa May activated it in April 2017 by triggering the snap election, it backfired spectacularly and actually ended up costing the Tory party their parliamentary majority, and now, just a couple of years later the Tory party is teetering on the brink of electoral ruin thanks to multiple splits in the political right.
The Blue-Kip strategy
Before Theresa May called the 2017 General Election, the numbers seemed to make perfect sense for the Tories. If they could combine the Tory vote with the UKIP vote, Labour would be annihilated and the other opposition parties wouldn't stand a chance either.
After years of upping the far-right, anti-immigrant, ultranationalist rhetoric in order to appeal to the Ukip crowd, Theresa May and the Tories decided to put their plan into action, and to an extent it worked. The far-right ultranationalist boost increased the Tory vote by 2.2 million from 2015, but what they didn't count on at all was the Corbyn surge which added an astounding 3.6 million votes for Labour.
Not only did the Tories fail to achieve the 150-200 seat mega-majority they'd dreamed of, they actually lost their parliamentary majority and put themselves at the beck and call of the Northern Irish DUP sectarians.
Demographics
One of the most obvious consequences of this massive shift in British politics was that the Tories have rendered themselves utterly reliant upon the extremely fickle Blue-Kip demographic, because if the 2.2 million flowed out as quickly as they'd flowed in, the Tory party would obviously end up getting hammered at the next General Election.
So the Tories were forced to continue pandering to the Blue-Kip demographic with far-right politics, anti-immigrant posturing, rabble-rousing, and overt displays of ultranationalism, despite the fact that the less rabid type of Tory voter and the younger generations are absolutely repulsed by this stuff.
In a way Theresa May and the Tories did reasonably well to keep this almost impossible shambles rolling for as long as they did, alternating top spot in the polls with Labour for the next year and a half.
OK they've had the majority of the mainstream media firmly on their side, and "centrists" continued helping the Tories by refusing to critique the ruinous austerity policies that trashed our living standards and caused the Brexit vote in the first place (the Lib-Dems who colluded with austerity fanaticism for five years, and the Labour right-wingers who lost the 2015 General Election by pathetically imitating austerity instead of vehemently opposing it) but the demographic trapdoor they've painted themselves over was always going to give way at some point.
And now that the Tories have failed to deliver the far-right ultranationalist fantasy of Brexit they're clearly in very deep trouble.
Brexit
Delivering Brexit was always absolutely crucial for the Tories to retain the support of the fickle Blue-Kip demographic.
I guess May imagined it would be easy enough to do with a 150-200 seat mega-majority in parliament, but once that fantasy was destroyed by the Corbyn surge in 2017, delivering any kind of Brexit became impossible, hence the national humiliation of the UK government having to go to Brussels to beg the EU to give us more time to sort out the extraordinary constitutional deadlock that Theresa May has created for us.
She knows that her endlessly repeated threat of punishing the British people with a devastating "no deal" meltdown if she didn't get her own way would have utterly destroyed the myth of Tory economic competence and driven millions of people away from the Tories for ever, so she knew that she could never actually follow through on her threats, despite wasting literally £billions on "no deal" planning to make it look like she was serious.
And she also knows that she can't get her shitty almost universally unpopular deal through parliament without significant compromise, and that any compromise towards Customs Union membership, Single Market access, protected workers' rights and the like would sound the death knell for Toryism by driving the far-right Blue-Kip demographic away from the Tories for good.
So she can't deliver Brexit, she can't follow through on her threats, and she can't compromise.
After steering the nation into this absurd deadlock situation and then simply clinging to power instead of letting someone else have a go, it's extraordinary that the Tories have any political support left at all.
Brexit Party
Theresa May's failure to deliver Brexit has led to her worst nightmare, the resurrection of UKIP under a new shinier brand, and in a matter of weeks pretty much the entire Blue-Kip demographic has surged away from the Tory party to pledge allegiance to Nigel Farage's new opaquely-funded Brexit Party.
The worst Tory local election results since 1995 (despite the Brexit Party not even standing candidates) have been followed up by extraordinary polls showing Labour establishing significant leads after huge numbers of people have abandoned the Tories to switch support to the Brexit Party.
So the people Theresa May has spent her entire time as PM pandering to have disappeared even more quickly than they flocked into the Tory ranks in the first place!
CUK and the Lib-Dems
The Brexit Party is clearly Theresa May's biggest problem, but then she also has another major headache too because there are two so-called "centrist" parties jostling to hoover up the Tory vote at the other edge by imitating their pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, orthodox neoliberal policies under the Remain banner.
At the 2016 EU referendum 57% of Tories voted for Brexit, but 43% voted Remain, which is hardly an insignificant proportion.
If these people start to believe that they can have the exact same "impoverish the poor to further enrich the wealthy" neoliberal policies elsewhere, without the inconvenience of being ideologically tied to this Tory Brexit shambles, significant numbers of them are going to buy into yellow or grey versions of orthodox neoliberalism, and the more effort Theresa May puts into preventing the Blue-Kip exodus, the more she's going to drive people out at the other end of the party.
The egotistical CUK squatters have made an absolute mess of almost everything they've touched in their first three months, but picking an ex-Tory leader who positions them to the right of the Tory party on economic policy, appointing the austerity fanatic Chris Leslie as their economics lead man, and the pro-privatisation Angela Smith as their business, environment, and transport bod are clearly moves designed to bring orthodox neoliberals into the CUK fold, and to attract the big money donors who are getting close to losing their patience with bankrolling the decaying Tories and their interminable Brexit farce.
Division of the right
Even those of us who were only children, or not even born in the mid-80s know all about the SDP and how divisions on the political left ended up handing Margaret Thatcher a majority so large that it wasn't finally eroded until 1997, but now, as a result of Theresa May's extraordinary incompetence, the political right is fracturing into various factions.
The far-right ultranationalists are deserting the Tory party in droves to back the Brexit Party Faragists and the remnants of UKIP, while the orthodox neoliberal right-wingers are ever more tempted by the pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, pro-EU posturing of the CUK squatters and the Lib-Dems.
It's looking increasingly likely that all that will be left of the Tory party will be the rump of political tribalists who treat political parties with the same undying loyalty as football fans treat their teams (no matter how shit they are they'll never abandon them to support another team, the worst they'll ever do is stop turning out to support them).
Labour
The division of the political right and the vast Labour membership surge since Jeremy Corbyn binned orthodox neoliberalism and returned Labour to their democratic socialist roots mean that the party will probably never have a better shot at regaining the government than the next General Election, and finally reversing the neoliberal economic fanaticism that has done so much damage to the UK since Thatcher infected the Westminster political establishment class with this toxic hard-right militancy in 1979.
Of course the CUK squatters and Lib-Dems will try to erode the Labour vote too, by appealing to the orthodox neoliberals in the Labour ranks, but grotesque living standard-eroding stuff like austerity dogma, privatisation mania, brutal social security cuts, and deliberate infrastructure under-investment have far more appeal to right-wing Labour MPs than they do to ordinary Labour Party members and voters.
Labour will continue to be attacked from both sides for their policy of trying to de-escalate Brexit, rather than whipping it up even more for their own political purposes with cries of "betrayal" and "treason" from the Brextremists, and the desperate pining for a final 'do or die' 'now or never' clash of civilisations 'another roll of the dice' referendum from the Remain Ultras.
This is unfortunate, but the Tories created this massive social division, and political opportunists from both sides are fully intent on whipping up the hate, and actually widening the divide for their own selfish political purposes, rather than seeking some kind of compromise that neither side will particularly like, but most ordinary people can live with.
This isn't to say Labour shouldn't back another referendum (they've voted in favour of one twice already), it's just that they should make sure they offer a more moderate Brexit (Customs Union, Single Market, protected workers' rights, co-operation on science, security & environment) and do everything in their power to make sure ruinous undefined options like "no deal" are kept off the ballot (surely the #1 lesson from the 2016 referendum is that undefined options in national referendums are a dreadful idea?).
The worst mistake Labour could make is to follow Theresa May's lead and pick one side of this hyper-partisan Brexit division, because you only have to look at the chaos she's created through this wilful partisanship, and the ongoing breakup of the Tory vote to understand the risks.
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.
There is literally no reason to vote Tory in the upcoming European Parliament elections (you know the elections that Theresa May previously swore that the UK wouldn't be participating in).
No matter what kind of political perspective you have, there's now clearly a better choice for you:
Orthodox neoliberal + Brexit sceptic
If you're a traditional pro-privatisation, pro-austerity, orthodox neoliberal who used to consider the Tory party home, but you're sceptical about quitting the EU then you can vote for CUK or the Liberal Democrats.
CUK have clearly indicated their pro-austerity stance by handing their economics spokesperson role to Chris Leslie (one of the core architects of Labour's disastrously uninspiring pro-austerity agenda at the 2015 General Election).
They've also indicated their pro-privatisation credentials by appointing Angela Smith as their transport, energy, and environment spokesperson (she's a lobbyist for the privatised water industry).
The Lib-Dems spent five years in coalition with the Tories enforcing the ruinous austerity policies that trashed our living standards and caused the wave of public anger that carried the Leave vote narrowly over the winning line in 2016.
They also helped the Tories introduce all kinds of bonkers hard-right privatisation scams including flogging off the Royal Mail property portfolio at a fraction of its real value, the shambolic privatisation of the probation service, the Eurostar sell-off, the privatised forensic science service shambles, privatisation of thousands of taxpayer-funded schools, privatised prisons chaos, flogging off the aviation fuel supply network and then renting it back for 10 years at three times the sale price, the sale of every fire engine in London for two pounds ...
If you love austerity and privatisation but have your doubts about Brexit, there are much better choices than voting Tory.
Orthodox neoliberal + Brexit supporter
If you adore the pro-privatisation, pro-austerity, anti-worker, neoliberal ideology and want a hard-right Brexit at any cost, then the Brexit Party definitely seem to fit the bill.
Nigel Farage is a Thatcher-worshipping, pro-privatisation, right-winger who has a track record of openly fantasising about the full privatisation of the NHS.
If you want to see Brexit used as a Trojan Horse to trash workers' rights, abolish our environmental laws and food standards, and to privatise what's left of our public land and public services, why would you vote Tory when you can support Farage and the Brexit Party?
Fan of far-right extremism
A significant proportion of Tory MPs have been deliberately trying to attract the extreme-right ultranationalist demographic. From Zac Goldsmith's vile BNP-style London Mayoral campaign in 2016, through Theresa May's unlawful racist "Hostile Environment" abuse of black British citizens, to the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Steve Baker publicly promoting the German extreme-right and cheering on the sinister activities of an imported far-right youth radicalisation programme from the US, Tories have been working hard to attract extreme-right bigots into the Tory fold.
But if you're an extreme-right bigot why vote Tory when you can vote for a much more brazen far-right operation that continually peddles anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim bigotry, and even supports their candidates when they make "jokes" about raping their female political opponents!
If you want far-right filth, despite the concerted Tory efforts to ramp up the hate, UKIP are now in a totally different league.
Anti-austerity + Brexit-sceptic
Maybe you're a former Tory voter who has recently woken up to the fact that austerity was always a con job designed to transfer as much wealth as possible from the majority of people to the mega-rich elitist class (you know, the economic class who completely bankroll the Tory party).
And maybe you're also dismayed at the Tories for abandoning the European Union and the Single Market that they helped to create in the first place?
Well if you're after an anti-austerity Brexit-sceptic party, then look no further than the Greens (or the SNP in Scotland/Plaid Cymru in Wales).
Anti-austerity + soft Brexit
If you're a Tory voter who has eventually come to realise that David Cameron and George Osborne's austerity agenda was always just a scam to make the poor and ordinary pay the cost of the bankers' insolvency crisis while the Tories showered the mega-rich with tax cuts and handouts, and you think that Brexit should go ahead but in the least damaging form possible, then Labour are offering what you're looking for.
Labour would reverse austerity and begin actually investing in our country and building our future economic potential, rather than doing precisely the opposite. And Labour's policy is to develop a close negotiated relationship with the EU that doesn't involve driving the UK economy off a "no deal" cliff edge or trashing our manufacturing industry with customs checks and causing absolute chaos over the border in Northern Ireland.
Conclusion
Whatever your stance on several of the most important issues of our era (Brexit, Austerity, the rise of the far-right) there's always a better option than voting Tory in the European Parliament elections.
And when it comes to the local elections, why on earth would anyone ever consider voting Tory when they're the ones who have absolutely trashed local government funding since 2010, meaning councils up and down the country are charging much higher Council Tax rates in return for reduced, scrapped, over-stretched, and downright failing local services?
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.
This article exists as an accompaniment to the political guide infographic. It's all pretty self-explanatory but it's important to back up some of the assertions with evidence and analysis.
Political position
The Green Party and Labour under Corbyn are Democratic Socialist parties occupying the traditional centre-left position before neoliberalism came along and dragged the entire political spectrum off to the right.
The Tory leadership are hard-right neoliberal being the party that originally injected this toxic strain of economic fanaticism into the UK government when they won the 1979 general election. A significant proportion of Tory backbenchers are far-right rabble rousers, but since the party leadership has not been completely usurped yet, they're still best classified as hard-right neoliberals.
The Lib-Dems and the new CUK squatter party are both "centrist" neoliberal, in that they're not as militant about their neoliberal ideology as the Tories, and often choose to focus on other issues (like Brexit, or social policies) but they also strongly resist any challenge to the established neoliberal orthodoxy, and actively support it if it suits their selfish political purposes.
The SNP and Plaid are both quite mixed political parties held together more by civic nationalism than economic stance. Overall they're more-or-less centre-left and I don't think many of their members would complain too vehemently as being described as social democrats.
Under Gerrard Batten UKIP have turned into a militant hard-right political force, expending far more effort on whipping up anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim hate, rather than detailing real political policies.
Farage's Brexit Party have only just been launched, but going on the fact they've already had two party leaders exposed as outrageous bigots, and Farage's willingness to participate in far-right rabble rousing throughout his political career, it'd take a hefty dose of gullibility to believe they're going to suddenly become centrists or social democrats.
Austerity
The Green Party deserve a lot of credit for being the only explicitly anti-austerity UK-wide political party in 2015, however Labour have learned their lesson from their abject failure to oppose Tory austerity fanaticism that lost them that election, and under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership they've moved to opposing Tory austerity dogma, rather than pathetically imitating it.
SNP and Plaid are both opposed to ruinous Tory austerity fanaticism too.
The Lib-Dems repeatedly try to distance themselves from the devastating Tory austerity fanaticism they enabled between 2010 and 2015, and will tie themselves in cognitive knots trying to pretend that the collapse in living standards these austerity policies caused had nothing to do with the massive upswell in public anger that carried Leave marginally over the winning line in the 2016 EU referendum.
The CUK squatter party are definitely pro-austerity. They've appointed Chris Leslie as their economics spokesperson, and he was one of the key architects of Labour's disastrous "austerity lite" agenda at the 2015 general election. Anna Soubry described the policies of the 2010-2015 austerity years (wage repression, public service cuts, infrastructure under-investment, defunding of local governments, vandalism of the social safety net ...) as "marvellous", and every single one of them either voted in favour of, or cynically abstained on George Osborne's devastating austerity cuts in 2015.
UKIP were explicitly pro-austerity before Batten became leader, but neither they, nor Farage's Brexit Party like to talk about austerity at all, because it's a lot easier to pin the blame for the devastating consequences on immigrants and the EU if you simply ignore the fact that austerity even exists.
Brexit
Theresa May and the Tory leadership are still trying to force their botched thrice-rejected hard-right Withdrawal deal through parliament.
Labour want to create a soft Brexit with Single market and Customs Union access, protected workers' rights, food standards, and environmental laws, and cooperation on science and security. They're also willing to hold a confirmatory referendum, and to consider retention of Free Movement (as demonstrated when they voted in favour of Nick Boles' compromise Brexit in the indicative votes).
The Lib-Dems, CUK, Greens, SNP, and Plaid Cymru are all Brexit-sceptic and they all seem to be prioritising another referendum, which is fine, but there's clearly no guarantee that Remain would win it given that nothing at all has been done since 2016 to clamp down on electoral liars and cheats (with serious punishments like bans from public office and jail time) or to regulate online social media dark ads.
It's fair enough opposing Brexit, I'm highly sceptical about it too, but if your strategy is simply another roll of the dice in a rigged game, you've got to acknowledge the risk of creating an inescapable double-mandate for a ruinous hard-right Brexit.
UKIP and Farage's Brexit Party are both pushing for a militant "no deal" Brexit that would bring economic chaos to the whole of the UK, and massively re-ignite tensions over the Northern Ireland border.
Social issues
When it comes to stuff like gay rights the Tories have moved dramatically from their homophobic Section 28 discrimination in the 1990s, but on disability rights their systematic abuse of disabled people has been condemned as a human rights violation by the United Nations. In any decent and compassionate society this despicable abuse would be considered an national scandal, but the mainstream media and most Brits don't even seem to care that tens of thousands of disabled people have died within weeks of being declared "fit for work" in Tory disability denial assessments.
The Tories also introduced Theresa May's vile Hostile Environment which led to unlawful abuse of black British citizens, including being forced into exile from their own countries.
And anyone supporting the use of British weapons in war crimes committed in Yemen by the homophobic, misogynistic, head-chopping, democracy-crushing, terrorism-spreading, journalist-dismembering Saudi tyrants has no right whatever to pose as any kind of "social liberal".
The Lib-Dems pose as social liberals, but they spent five years in coalition with the Tories vandalising the social safety net, systematically abusing disabled people, and supporting Theresa May's unlawful abuse of the Windrush generation. In fact the Lib-Dems agreed harsher social security sanctions (which mainly affect the mentally ill and the severely under-educated) in return for 5p charges on plastic bags!
Labour and the Greens have been vehemently opposing the systematic Tory abuse of sick and disabled people. The SNP and Plaid also have strong track records when it comes to opposing abusive Tory legislation like Theresa May's Hostile Environment, and the systematic Tory abuse of disabled people.
Not a single one of the CUK squatter MPs voted against Theresa May's hostile Environment. The ex-Tory members of the group actually voted in favour of it! They've also put Mike Gapes (a huge fan of imperialist war-mongering and the Saudi tyrants) in charge of their foreign policy agenda. If you believe in turning places like Iraq and Libya into lawless terrorist breeding zones, and support Saudi war crimes in Yemen, you're no social liberal, even if you pose as social progressives on domestic issues.
UKIP and the Brexit Party are rabble rousers intent on actually whipping up hatred against immigrants and minorities in order to push their far-right agenda. You'd have to be absolutely delusional to think they'd actually stand up for the vulnerable when it comes to social policy issues.
Privatisation
Labour and the Green Party campaign explicitly on policies like bringing the railways, water supply, schools, and hospitals back under public not-for-profit ownership. The vast majority of British people agree with this public ownership stance.
The Tories are privatisation fanatics. Since 2010 they've been busy outright defying public opinion by privatising NHS services, the Royal Mail, literally thousands of schools, and even massive chunks of the police and judicial system (including front line police services, probation, court translation, forensic science, and prisons).
Between 2010 and 2015 the Lib-Dems actively helped the Tories defy public opinion by privatising hospitals, schools, police services, probation, and prisons. Their leader Vince Cable was even the man the Tories put in charge of flogging off the Royal Mail at significantly below it's real market value!
The SNP have a more mixed approach. They've been in power in the Scottish government since 2007 so they could have done more to reverse privatisation in Scotland, however in areas where they have had the power to block it they have prevented a lot of the Tory privatisation mania that's infested England since 2010. In England 3/4 of secondary schools have been privatised, in Scotland the education system remains in the public sector.
The CUK squatter MPs clearly signalled their pro-privatisation credentials by appointing water privatisation propagandist Angela Smith as their energy, environment, and transport minister, numerous other CUK MPs have bitterly criticised Labour's public ownership plans, and they've just hitched their boat to the right-wing EPP European group, which includes the hard-right Spanish PP and Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party. Anyone expecting this neoliberal rabble to begin opposing and reversing Tory privatisation mania is clearly not paying any attention to what they're actually saying and doing.
UKIP used to be extremely vocal pro-privatisation fanatics to the point of promoting the full privatisation of the NHS, but they've quit talking about their economic policies these days in favour of immigrant-bashing and Muslim hate-mongering. Anyone imagining that UKIP and Farage's far-right Brexit mob would set about reversing Tory privatisation fanaticism is even more delusional than the CUK squatter fans!
Conclusion
Whatever your views on Brexit, be very careful that you don't end up endorsing a political party with terrible views and policies on other issues.
This is especially important when it comes to austerity fanaticism given that ruinous Tory austerity dogma was the root cause of the wave of public anger that caused the Brexit vote in the first place.
Voting for a pro-austerity political party because they make a big fuss about opposing Brexit is like worrying about your hair falling out and the blood in your piss as you continue wilfully drinking the political arsenic.
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.
