The Mail on Sunday's glaring front page lie

Boris Johnson's latest ruse to distract attention away from the corruption, incompetence, and degeneracy of his regime is to stoke up a load of culture war bullshit over imperial weights and measures and crown symbols on pint glasses.

Appealing to the nostalgia of a bunch of tabloid-addled geriatrics is a simplistic distraction tactic, but it's one that Johnson and the Tories have played before with blue passports, and the right-wing propaganda rags are once again enthusiastically helping him out with this trivial nonsense.

This time it's got so bad that the front page of one of Britain's most widely read newspapers is blaring out the absolute lie that the EU banned crown symbols on pint glasses.

What the EU actually did, if you're interested in the actual facts, was to pass directive 2004/22/EC to introduce the CE mark on pint glasses in order to protect European citizens from undersized measures.

There was never anything in the CE rules to say the crown symbol had to go. In fact the EU commissioner Günter Verheugen explicitly stated that the crown symbol could be kept "as long as it is done in a way that is not confused with the CE marking".

Not only did the EU not ban the crown symbol, they explained that Britain could keep using it if they wanted to. But the UK government decided that they couldn't be bothered pointlessly duplicating the certification process, and scrapped it from 2007 onwards.

If the Tory party really cared so much about crown symbols on pint glasses they could have brought them back at any time between coming to power in 2010 and the present, because they were never banned by the EU.

So why is the Mail on Sunday pushing this brazen front page lie that the EU forced Britain to remove the crown symbol from our pint glasses, and that plucky Bodger Johnson is bravely bringing it back?

Daily Mail propaganda hacks know perfectly well that aside from corporations and the mega-rich, who vote Tory out of self-interest, the Tory party's core demographics are the far-right ultranationalists they nicked off UKIP and the BNP, and other low-information voters.

Tory propaganda hacks love to appeal to the nostalgia, nationalism, and anti-European xenophobia of their readers by portraying trivial and archaic stuff like blue passports, crown symbols on pint glasses, and ludicrously over-complicated imperial weights and measures as quintessentially British things that have been banished by the evil EU.

It doesn't matter to Daily Mail readers that the UK could actually have kept blue passports for the entire time it was in the EU.

It doesn't matter to them the EU never forced UK retailers to stop using imperial weights and measures if they wanted to.

And they literally don't care that the EU never actually banned anyone from putting crown symbols on pint glasses.

Tell them that the European Union forced Britain to get rid of these beloved things, and low-information voters quiver with rage.

Tell them that brave Bodger Johnson freed Britain from the EU tyranny in order to bring this stuff back, and they're supposed to jiggle with delight.

We've entered an age in which people are actively encouraged to ignore the facts, and evidence, and experts, to believe whatever the hell they want.

And it's got to the point now that the newspapers feel emboldened to tell outright lies on their front pages, in order to help Johnson push this absurdly vapid culture war bullshit.

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We're being ruled over by a lawless bunch of Tory thugs

This week both the Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and the Home Secretary Priti Patel have used their Tory party conference speeches to spit venom at “lefty lawyers” and “do-gooders” because they attempt to hold this malicious, lawless shambles of a government to the rule of law.

Meanwhile the Tories are trying to push through three outrageous pieces of legislation through parliament simultaneously, all of which seek to undermine international law, and drastically redefine the powers of agents of the British state to behave lawlessly.

Internal Market Bill

The Internal Market Bill is designed to tear up Boris Johnson’s “Oven Ready” Brexit deal with the EU, within a year of signing it.

Having rushed it through parliament and then hastily signing it off with the EU in January 2020 (to delirious Brexiteer celebrations) this isn’t just a Brexit plan any more, it’s now a signed and sealed international treaty.

For Johnson and the Tories to suddenly turn around and say that the deal they signed is flawed nonsense that has to be ripped up in the faces of the people they just signed it with is an outright affront to common decency, but it’s also an attack on the rule of law, because not only does it involve tearing up a binding international treaty they only just signed, it also severely endangers the Good Friday Agreement.

The Tory Northern Ireland minister Brandon Lewis actually stood up in parliament and admitted that the Internal Market Bill is intended to break international law, and somehow this lawless Tory regime is being allowed to get away with brazenly turning the UK into an international pariah state that reneges on its signed and sealed international commitments.

Overseas Operations Bill

The next outrageously lawless piece of Tory legislation is the Overseas Operations Bill, which seeks to provide British military personnel legal immunity from prosecution for torture, murder, and war crimes, as long as they can cover up what they did for five years.

This despicable effort to effectively legalise torture and war crimes clearly contravenes all kinds of international agreements and accords, most notably the UNCAT, which states that victims of torture are entitled to justice and redress, no matter when the violations occurred.

Aside from the lawlessness of this legislation, it also sets an appalling precedent because if the UK uses domestic legislation to exempt their military personnel from legal accountability for torture and war crimes, why on earth wouldn’t other rogue regimes follow suit?

Additionally, this drive to provide impunity for torturers, murderers, and war criminals within the ranks of the UK armed forces is likely to have severely adverse consequences on the front line, because the push back from opposition combatants is likely to be absolutely fierce if British soldiers are perceived to be a lawless and unaccountable militia who are encouraged by their government to torture, murder civilians, and commit heinous war crimes with promises of legal impunity.

Spy Cops Bill

Then there’s the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Spy Cops) Bill which seeks to give agents of the state extraordinary powers to commit crimes, up to and including rape, torture, and murder, with legal impunity.

We already know that Spy Cops have perpetrated all kinds of outrages whilst spying on all kinds of non-violent campaign groups; they’ve entrapped activists by orchestrating criminal actions themselves. They’ve conducted sexual relationships with their targets, up to the point of raising kids with their victims before hastily disappearing off the scene entirely once their assignment is over; and they’ve even infiltrated groups campaigning against police violence and miscarriages of justice in order to smear them and disrupt their activities.

This new Spy Cops Bill is designed to allow spy cops to do all of the above, and even to commit crimes in order to fit people up, as long as they invent some spurious excuse for why framing an individual (for example by uploading child sexual abuse or terrorist materials onto their computer) is “in the national interest”.

Alarmingly it isn’t just police, military, and secret services operatives the Tories are plotting to give immunity from prosecution for fitting people up, and committing heinous crimes like torture, rape, and murder. The same powers are being given to agents of all kinds of quangos like the Food Standards Agency, the Gambling Commission, the Competition and Markets Authority, and the Environment Agency!

Even if you’re the kind of drooling far-right authoritarian who believes that spy cops should be given immunity from prosecution if they commit forgery, perjury, fraud, rape, torture, or murder in the course of their work, surely you’ve got to be left left wondering why on earth the Tories are so keen to rush through legislation designed to exempt employees from the Food Standards Agency or Gambling Commission from prosecution from engaging in such criminality too.

And it hardly takes a genius to understand what a terrifying assault on the rule of law it is for the Tory government to give spy cops (and all kinds of other state employees) legal immunity from prosecution if they’re caught committing heinous crimes on behalf of the state.

How does the right to a fair trial survive legislation designed to give spy cops legal immunity from prosecution, even if they commit crimes themselves in order to fit up members of activist groups that the UK government has taken a dislike to?

How does the ECHR right to freedom from torture and degrading treatment survive legislation designed to give agents of the British state the power to commit acts of torture and abuse with legal impunity?

Tory lawlessness

All three of these bills are aimed squarely at undermining international law, and giving agents of the British state the power to behave lawlessly.

This sickening combination of radical anti-lawyer rhetoric from leading Tory figures, and all of this deliberately lawless Tory legislation should be terrifying to anyone who considers the rule of law to be one of the essential pillars of democracy.

But let’s not kid ourselves that this tsunami of Tory lawlessness and anti-lawyer rhetoric is something that’s come out of the blue, because there were loads of warnings before the 2019 general election, stretching all the way back to the coalition government era.

⚫ Page 48 of the Tory manifesto that pledged to tear up our human rights and replace them with a set of Tory allowances, and to dramatically reduce the powers of judicial review.

⚫ Johnson and Cummings’ decision to unlawfully suspend parliament in September 2019 in order to evade democratic scrutiny of their hopelessly flawed “Oven Ready” Brexit deal.

⚫ The appointment of Priti Patel as Johnson’s Home Secretary, despite the fact that she was forced to resign in 2017 after getting caught red-handed acting as an agent of a foreign state embedded in the UK government, and her plot to divert funds from the UK overseas aid budget into the illegal Israeli military occupation of the Golan Heights.

⚫ The outright Tory refusal to defend the High Court Judges after the “Enemies of the People” Daily Mail headline, and Theresa May’s subsequent decision to hire the author of that outrageous hit piece as one of her closest political advisers.

⚫ Theresa May’s unlawful and sickeningly racist “Hostile Environment” that led to the systematic persecution of black black British citizens, to the extent of thousands being denied jobs, housing, banking services, social security, and medical treatment, and scores of black British citizens even being deported out of the UK altogether.

⚫ Chris Grayling’s unlawful Tribunal Fees, designed to protect bad bosses by pricing low-income workers out of the justice system, with upfront £1,200 fees if they wanted to seek compensation for their mistreatment at work.

⚫ Iain Duncan Smith’s unlawful forced-unpaid-labour schemes, followed by his bizarre attempt to bypass the legal judgement against his lawless behaviour by retroactively rewriting his botched and unlawful legislation so that it would have made sense had it been written that way at the time, which was also subsequently declared unlawful in the courts.

It’s not like the British public had no warning that handing a Tory government a whopping great parliamentary majority would result in the deliberate destruction of law and order in the United Kingdom.

Anyone who has paid even the slightest attention since 2010 knew exactly what would be on the cards, but millions obviously concluded that the ideologically driven destruction of the rule of law, and Britain’s descent towards the status of lawless far-right pariah state would be a price worth paying in return for whatever (probably imaginary) benefit they thought they’d be getting from handing absolute power to the bone-idle, bigoted liar Johnson, and his cabinet of radically right-wing Tory ghouls.

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Marvel at the openness!

The Tory government has continually resorted to the manta that they were simply "following the science" to explain away their decision to ignore the established global pandemic protocol of Test - Trace - Quarantine in favour of letting the virus spread like wildfire through the population for weeks, and abjectly failing to provide proper protective gear to NHS and care home staff, and other essential workers.

However when asked about the scientific advice they've supposedly been relying on to develop this consensus-defying strategy, they've desperately tried to maintain a shroud of secrecy.

They wanted to keep the identities of the scientific advisory group secret, and we found out why when the attendees were leaked. They'd deliberately politicised the science by letting Johnson's henchman Dominic Cummings sit in and influence the meetings, as well as the brother of the dodgy Vote Leave linked data company that's been gobbling up lucrative government contracts ever since Johnson and Cummings got their hands on the nation's public finances.

And now the government has released a heavily redacted version of the SAGE advice.

Scientists at the meeting say that the redacted text is where the experts criticised government policy, with one saying "the impression I'm getting is this government doesn't want any criticism" and another saying "You want trust? You need to be open with people. This isn't open. It is reminiscent of Stalinist Russia".

But the Tories and their minions in the corporate media will keep on saying "following the science" because it is another easily memorable little sound bite like "get Brexit done" for the mindless and the gullible to rote learn and repeat.

It takes a lot more cognitive work to understand that the Tories were actually ignoring the science in favour of corrupted behaviourist pseudo-scientific junk driven by Johnson and Cummings' insistence that protecting capital was more important than saving lives.

And it takes a decent awareness of reality to understand that the concept of just "get Brexit done" was always utterly misleading, especially given that the Withdrawal Agreement was just the first stage in the process, and the fact that Brexit ramifications will echo down the ages, meaning people will never stop talking about it.

But we live in a facts don't matter society, where huge numbers of people simply believe what they want to believe, without any critical thought or fact checking.  So if they find glib pro-government sound bites soothing and easily understandable, that's what they'll believe, despite the very clear evidence that the Tories are literally desperate for the public not to know what the scientific advice actually was.

So even when the actual scientists who the Tories claim to have been listening to say that they think the government is behaving like Stalinist Russia, the Boris Bots and unthinking Tory propaganda drones will continue parroting the lie that they were "following the science" because it's what they want to believe to be true.

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12 things you should know about the Lib-Dem policy of Ultra-Austerity Forever

It's a busy election campaign so I shouldn't really be wasting my Sunday analysing the activities of a silly nonsense party like the Lib-Dems, but their latest policy announcement of 'Ultra-Austerity Forever' is so bizarre, so wrong headed, so economically illiterate, so off the charts crazy, it's a matter of morbid curiosity.

Like a horrific pile up on the other side of the motorway, it's giving me the compulsion to slow down and have a look.

I know it's sick and wrong to gawk like this, when I've got much more important election priorities to focus on like hammering the Tories for their malice and incompetence, or talking about the ambitious democratic socialist policies Labour are putting forward, or taking a more detailed look at the political landscape in Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland ... but I just can't help it.

So here are 12 things you should know about Lib-Dem Ultra-Austerity Forever.

Ultra-Austerity forever

There are two main strands to the Lib-Dem policy of Ultra-Austerity Forever.

The first is the enforcement of a "fiscal rule" that the government must create a permanent budget surplus of 1%, meaning that the government permanently extracts more wealth out of the economy than it invests back into it.

The second element is that the government deny funding to any project that cannot prove itself economically profitable, no matter the other benefits (social, environmental, public health, immeasurable effects on future economic prosperity ...).

No apologies

The Lib-Dems have never apologised for the ruinous consequences of the austerity fanaticism enforced by the 2010-15 Tory/Lib-Dem coalition (collapsing living standards, soaring poverty, the worst sustained decline in the value of workers' wages since records began, the slowest economic recovery in centuries, vandalism of the social safety net, deliberate under-funding of public services, the worst house building figures since the 1920s, the loss of the UK's AAA credit ratings, the lowest levels of infrastructure investment in the developed world ...).

Neither have they apologised for the fact that austerity extremism caused the living standards collapse that drove the Leave vote marginally over the winning line in 2016.

All of this devastation and chaos was caused by George Osborne's incompetent efforts to cut state spending back to a balanced budget (a 0% deficit).

The Lib-Dems aren't just unapologetic about their role in this devastation, they're actually promising to intensify austerity by aiming for a budget surplus of 1% (a deficit of -1%)!

They're not just refusing to apologise for austerity extremism, they're doubling down on it and pushing it harder than ever!

Investment vs Austerity

Investment economics says that you create prosperity by investing in stuff like infrastructure, housing, skills and education, high skill jobs, quality services.

Austerity economics says that you create prosperity by wantonly slashing away at all aspects of state spending in the vain hope that your economy will finally be the one that breaks precedent by demonstrating that it is possible to mindlessly cut your way to growth and prosperity.

There's absolutely no way that any Lib-Dem can pretend that their party leaders are intending to use tried and tested investment economics to achieve this 1% surplus because their political language is utterly infested with the kind of economic baby talk we've come to expect from austerity fetishists.

During the Lib-Dems' Ultra-Austerity Forever launch speech Ed Davey said "The spending competition between the Labour and Conservative fantasists has made Santa Claus seem like Scrooge".

He's literally ridiculing the idea of investing in public services and infrastructure projects! You'd have to be utterly clueless to not understand that this kind of anti-investment rhetoric is motivated by undying belief in crackpot 'let's cut our way to prosperity' austerity dogma.

Arbitrary economic illiteracy

Politicians love to put inflexible targets on things because they think "fiscal rules" make them sound important and knowledgeable, but in reality economists tear their hair out at nonsense like an inflexible 1% budget surplus, no matter what the circumstances.

You don't even need to have any economics training whatever to understand the idiocy of arbitrary targets like this. Just ask yourself why exactly 1% is the economically ideal number. Why not a 0.9% surplus? Why not a 1.25% surplus?

There's clearly been no actual calculation done. They've just settled on 1% because it sounds catchy and memorable, haven't they?

Also, what happens if something changes dramatically? What if these's a natural disaster? or a nuclear power station melts down? Or somebody explodes a dirty bomb in a British city?

Or what if it's something utterly mundane like the cost of government borrowing going up or down dramatically?

Under what circumstances does it become acceptable to break this completely arbitrary 1% fiscal rule?

Shrinking the state

An arbitrary fiscal rule enforcing the government to only ever spend 99% of what it extracts from the economy is quite obviously a recipe for shrinking the state relative to the size of the economy.

The desire to shrink the state has always been a mainstay of hard-right politics, and the Lib-Dems have actually thought of a way to legislatively encode this state shrinking ideology!

Bully for them. They're more dedicated to the hard-right state shrinking ideology than the Tories!

The price of everything, the value of nothing

The Lib-Dem strategy of using beancounters to analyse every single bit of government spending to ensure it is capable of turning a profit might sound fairly sensible in practice, but in reality it's an exercise in knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Just think about investments like a NHS diabetes awareness campaigns, or providing children's music lessons in schools, both of which cost money in the present, but have extremely nebulous and hard-to-measure potential future economic benefits in the long-term.

How is it even possible to estimate the long term economic benefit of these things in terms of reduced demand on NHS services and fewer lost sick days from work, or the potential future contribution to the £100 billion UK creative industries market?

And what might the cost of scrapping their funding turn out to be in 25 years time? How would you even begin to calculate the long-term economic repercussions?

Then there's the simple fact that money isn't everything.

OK, maybe a public investment only returns 90p in the pound, but what about other factors like the social benefit? Environmental benefits? Public health benefits? Quality of life benefits?

Why scrap all of that into the bin just to fixate on whether the investment pays back more than it cost in monetary terms?

How about paying for granny's operation after she's had a fall?

It turns out that elderly people with broken hips become exponentially more likely to die the longer they wait for treatment , which means the state would save huge amounts of money on the cost of the operation, the cost of future medical care and social care, the cost of future pension payments etc.

Spending money on reducing hip replacement waiting times for elderly people is clearly counter-productive if you view things from a purely fiscal perspective.

If it's more profitable to just let granny slowly die in agony rather than replace her broken hip, isn't that the fiscally responsible thing to do?

Incompatibility with their own damned policies

The idea of scrutinising every single element of government spending from a purely financial perspective isn't just narrow-minded, it's also incompatible with a number of the Lib-Dems own policies!

Take their pledge to plant 60 million trees.

From an environmental perspective tree planting is actually a fairly good idea (although not as good as setting aside land to naturally re-wild itself), but in terms of an economic investment alone, it's unjustifiable.

How on earth is planting millions of trees over thousands of acres of viable farmland ever going to spin an economic profit for the government?

The Lib-Dems are so inept that their headline election pledges are completely at odds with their proposed fiscal rules!

Outflanking the Tories

It's quite extraordinary to see the party of Charles Kennedy attempting to outflank the Tory party on the economic hard-right, with their state-shrinking, Ultra-Austerity Forever agenda.

This is a party that competed with Labour for socially progressive centre-left votes until just a decade ago, yet now they're presenting themselves as the most radical economically right-wing political party in British politics!

The last of the Cameroons

The last politician to dare raise the spectre of austerity to infinity was David Cameron, who gave a truly extraordinary speech promising permanent austerity for the masses, whilst surrounded by gold ornaments and all of the trappings of wealth and privilege at the Lord Mayor's banquet in 2013.

Promising 'austerity forever' was a bold move, even at the height of austerity mania in 2013, but promising it now, in the middle of an election campaign, when austerity has gone completely out of fashion so much that even the Tory party is trying to distance itself from it ... well it's absolutely wild, isn't it?

The Lib-Dems are clearly pining for their glory days of coalition government, six figure salaries, ministerial cars, important cabinet meetings ... And in their pathetic attempts to bring those past glory days they've resorted to the magical thinking of channelling David Cameron's political ghost!

Reconsidering the austerity coalition

Jeremy Corbyn has won the Investment vs Austerity argument so comprehensively that even the Tories are trying to distance themselves from austerity extremism, so it's incredible that the Lib-Dems have decided to double down on it as the last austerity party standing.

Given the Lib-Dems are the last remaining advocates of hard-right austerity fanaticism in British politics, surely it's time to reconsider their claims to have moderated the Tories during the austerity coalition years?

Why are we taking their claims at face value, when it now seems much more likely that they were just as keen on austerity as the Tories at the time, if not actively egging them on?

Tory target seats

Attempting to outflank the Tories to the economic hard-right looks like a suicidal political move if you think the Lib-Dems are after 'centrist' socially progressive votes, but in reality almost all of the Lib-Dems' priority target seats are Tory-held constituencies in the south and in suburbia.

Are they attempting to portray themselves as "more Tory than the Tories" in order to poach Tory target seats?

With the Lib-Dems there's always the strong possibility that whatever they're doing is the result of abject strategic incompetence, but in this case it does seem possible that they're attempting to resuscitate Cameroonian austerity extremism in order to woo voters in these marginal Tory seats.

Remainer doublethink

What the Lib-Dems clearly haven't considered is how their efforts to reanimate the political corpse of austerity is going to come across to the other core demographic they're targeting: Remainers.

For the last three years Remainers have been arguing against Brexit by saying it would mean "more austerity"*, so how on earth can Remainers even try to square this austerity is bad anti-Brexit argument with the Lib-Dems' stated economic policy of delivering ultra-austerity forever?

If you see yourself as a socially progressive 'centrist' type, who opposes Brexit because of the disastrous effect it would have on ordinary British people, how on earth would it be possible to support a party that's going to push ruinous austerity extremism even harder than Cameron and Osborne did?

Orwellian doublethink seems like the only plausible answer.

Conclusion

The Lib-Dems haven't just learned absolutely nothing from the two thoroughly deserved electoral kickings they've taken in 2015 and 2017, they've somehow convinced themselves to believe the polar opposite of the lesson they should have learned.

The obvious lesson they should have taken from these electoral routs is that they colluded too closely with the Tories, and that austerity extremism was a social and economic disaster that they should apologise for.

They should have not just apologised for the dire destruction in living standards that austerity delivered, but for the fact this austerity living standards collapse contributed directly to their own worst nightmare of the 2016 Brexit vote.

But what they've actually convinced themselves to believe is that the 2010-15 pre-Brexit period was some kind of magnificent utopia, and that the only way to return to those marvellous glory days is to dig up all the corpses from the austerity graveyard and reanimate them as ultra-powerful austerity zombies!

They're trying to bring back their own personal glory days by returning to the very stuff that actually brought their party crashing down!

 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 Remainer argument that "Brexit means more austerity" is every bit as dishonest as the Brexiteers' "£350m for the NHS" ... and I say this as a Brexit-sceptic. Austerity is a policy of cutting investment in an economic downturn. It's an economically illiterate response to crises. The tried, tested, and proven response to economic crises is investment in stuff like infrastructure, housing, transport, manufacturing, services, skills and education (create quality jobs and modern infrastructure = create prosperity). No matter the scale of a Brexit economic downturn, austerity would always be the wrong answer, and anyone claiming it would be inevitable is guilty of legitimising the outright lie that austerity is the correct response to a crisis, when the slowest economic recovery in centuries and the worst period of wage decline since records began post-2008 is damning proof that austerity is absolutely the wrong one.

Here's an article on this tragic piece of remainer 'groupthink': Are you unwittingly guilty of spreading hard-right Tory propaganda

Why are the Greens helping the Lib-Dems try to unseat pro-Remain Labour MPs?

If you're the kind of person who sincerely believe that the Brexit issue is far more important than other pressing concerns like the climate crisis, or combating the ruinous austerity fanaticism that caused Brexit in the first place, then the idea of a Remain Alliance between pro-EU parties makes some kind of sense.

However any such Remain Alliance must come with the obvious caveat that the Remain Alliance is only used to defend Remain parliamentary seats already held, and to unseat pro-Brexit MPs.

Unfortunately the newly announced Remain Alliance between the Lib-Dems, Greens, and Plaid Cymru goes a lot further, and actually targets the seats of a load of pro-EU MPs too.

One such target is the Labour MP for Warrington South Faisal Rashid, who holds a tight majority of 2,500 over the Tories (48.4% to 44.3%), with the Lib-Dem candidate coming in a distant 3rd place in 2017, with just 5% of the vote.

Rashid is a vocal anti-Brexit advocate, who wants another EU referendum, and represents a party that is committed to a Final Say referendum, opposes austerity fanaticism, and shares Green party views on de-privatisation of vital public services and infrastructure like the railways, water supply, national grid, NHS, and education system.

Rashid is also very vocal on the climate crisis, and in June 2019 he strongly urged Warrington Council to declare a climate emergency.

He sounds exactly like the kind of figure Green Party supporters should feel comfortable voting for, but according to the terms of the new Remain Alliance, the Greens are supporting the Lib-Dems in Warrington South, which seems like a very odd strategy for an alliance intended to put as many Brexit-sceptic MPs in parliament as possible.

If the Remain Alliance does succeed in their ambition to unseat Rashid, there are only two possible outcomes.

One is that the extraordinarily unlikely scenario where the Lib-Dem candidate comes from nowhere to achieve an unprecedented 40%+ swing, meaning a green, anti-austerity, democratic socialist who supports Remain is replaced pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, anti-worker, welfare-vandalising orthodox neoliberal who supports Remain.

Well, hooray for the Remain Alliance!

The other, vastly more likely outcome is that the Lib-Dems and their fellow Remain Alliance plotters split the anti-Tory vote, and let the pro-Brexit Tory take the seat (a scenario which would only necessitate a 4% swing).

Erm, hooray for the Remain Alliance???

Another ludicrous target for the Remain Alliance is Stephan Morgan in Portsmouth South, who is a vehement advocate of another referendum, who swears he'll lead the Remain campaign in Portsmouth if the referendum happens. He won the seat from the Tories in 2017 by 41% to 38%, the Lib-Dem the Remain Alliance is backing came a distant 3rd on 17%.

Again the most likely scenario is handing the seat back to a pro-Brexit Tory, with the remote outside chance of switching out an anti-austerity, anti-privatisation democratic socialist Remainer, for a pro-austerity, pro-privatisation neoliberal Remainer.

In what world does this make any sense whatever?

The reason the Greens are supporting this absolute lunacy is obvious. It's a quid pro quo.

In return for the Lib-Dems standing aside in a few Green target seats like the Isle of Wight, and Bristol West (which is also held by a vocal Labour Remainer, Thangam Debbonaire by the way) they're going to help the Lib-Dems sabotage other Labour Remainer MPs like Faisal Rashid up and down the country, helping them turn Labour Remain red, to Tory Brexit blue.

From a pragmatic perspective helping the Lib-Dems remove pro-remain, anti-austerity, environmentalist Labour MPs from parliament looks like dreadful self-sabotage from a wider green perspective, but from a narrow party political perspective it means a shot at increasing their representation from one seat out of 650 to maybe two, so it's a price they're apparently willing to pay!

The most charitable explanation possible is that all the Brexit chaos has given the Green Party a horrible dose of Brexit Brain Worms, rendering them incapable of thinking straight.

A less charitable explanation is that they're willing to embrace the notoriously untrustworthy Lib-Dem neoliberals and help them shoot down pro-Remain Labour MPs up and down the country, purely because they're prioritising their narrow party political interest above the interests of the nation as a whole.

Whichever way you look at it, it's incredibly disappointing and divisive stuff from a political party that most left-wingers, social progressives, and Labour supporters tend to agree with on most issues.

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Why genuine 'centrists' should be backing the left

For the last nine years Britain has been charging headlong to the far-right, with one increasingly militant Tory government after another.

In 2010 the Lib-Dems enabled the Tories back into power for the first time in 13 years, and the results were disastrous. The Lib-Dems voted through every single piece of wanton Tory ideological malice, including the austerity fanaticism that trashed our living standards and laid the groundwork for the Brexit backlash to happen.

The Lib-Dems love to pretend that they were some kind of wonderful moderating force, but the truth is easy to find. If we look at the absolute worst stuff the austerity coalition did, Lib-Dem fingerprints are all over all of it: Austerity fanaticism, unprecedented wage repression, disability persecution, NHS privatisation, catastrophic local government cuts, Bedroom Tax, 75% of secondary schools in England privatised, Theresa May's unlawfully racist Hostile Environment ...

And to make matters even worse leading Lib-Dems actually took personal responsibility for delivering the absolute worst of it, the most egregious examples being Vince Cable's outrageous decision to flog off our Royal Mail at miles below its true value to a bunch of city spivs, and Jo Swinson doing nothing whatever to stop the imposition of unlawful tribunal fees, despite being Employment Minister in the austerity coalition!

Things did get even worse after the Lib-Dem collapse in 2015 as the unrestrained Tories intensified the already unprecedented rate of privatisations, and imposed the most brutal social security cuts in the history of the welfare state, but it's beyond obvious that things could never have even got to that stage without the deliberate calculated collusion of the Lib-Dems.

Then in 2016 the Tories gambled away the nation's future on a ludicrous Brexit referendum in which the Leave option was left entirely undefined, allowing Brexiteers to cynically promise voters the moon on a stick, with absolutely no intention of following through on their false promises.

The day after his gamble backfired Cameron was gone, replaced by the fanatically right-wing wannabe tyrant Theresa May, who had all the hard-right politics, inflexible stubbornness, control-freakery, and authoritarianism of an all-powerful autocrat, but thankfully not the competence, or self-awareness, or discipline to actually follow through on her outrageous threats, or actually 'crush the saboteurs'.

May did manage to inflict even more ideological damage during her two year reign, not least her decision to starve the NHS of new recruits by wantonly scrapping NHS bursaries, creating a ticking time bomb of a recruitment crisis that will destroy the NHS if it is not resolved soon.

And now we have Boris Johnson, who is so wilfully intent on pandering to the far-right ultranationalist demographic that stalwarts of Conservatism who backed all of the austerity fanaticism, and wage repression, and welfare vadalism, and disability persecution, and public service cuts, and infrastructure under-investment are now fleeing the party in droves in absolute disgust at what it's becoming, including Johnson's own brother Jo.

It's mind-bogglingly obvious that the UK needs to rapidly abandon this race to the extreme-right fringe and reset back towards the centre ground. It's equally obvious that it's literally impossible to move away from the territory of the hard-right without moving somewhat to the left.

Thus there are actually two kinds of 'centrists'. One type who recognise the obvious truth that the UK needs to move significantly leftwards in order to gravitate back towards the traditional centre ground, and another smug, complacent, orthodox neoliberal bunch who just want to pause where we are with a "more of the same" agenda, enjoy the trappings of power for a few years, and then hand deliver power back to the next hard-right government that comes along.

The problem of course is that there's no commonly understood distinction between these two different kinds of 'centrism'.

There are those 'centrists' who believe in the mixed economy of socially owned infrastructure and services, and privately owned but well-regulated businesses, who believe Britain has gone way too far to the right.

And there are those 'faux centrists' who believe in always standing just a couple of milimetres to the left of the Tory party, no matter how far off to the crackpot far-right extreme they've gone, and never shifting an inch back towards where the traditional centre actually used to be.

Unfortunately an awful lot of the second kind of 'centrist' have made their home in the Liberal Democrats, hoping to turn it into a Conservatives MkII party to hold firm on the hard-right political territory, to keep the crushing living standards-destroying austerity coming, to keep the tax dodge loopholes open for the benefit of their mega-rich backers, and to keep annihilating the wages and working conditions of ordinary working people under the utterly misguided delusion that the best way to make the rich richer, is to force the poor and ordinary into destitution.

I'm as guilty as anyone for vehemently condemning this kind right-wing faux 'centrism', and maybe genuine 'centrists' who do actually recognise the need for a dramatic leftward turn back towards the centre ground might have felt caught in the crossfire as the left have repeatedly slammed the faux 'centrists' for their ludicrous pretence that their pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, anti-worker, welfare-vandalising, infrastructure under-investing, hard-right fanaticism is anywhere near the legitimate political centre.

I'm sorry if this is the case, and people who just wants things to return to normality feels caught in the crossfire.

It's just that a bunch of right-wing neoliberal militants intent on creating a veneer of legitimacy for their radical hard-right agenda by pretending that it's some kind of moderate, mainstream, centrist philosophy have stolen the positioning of legitimate 'centrists', who do actually recognise the need to rebalance somewhat towards the left.

Any legitimate 'centrist' really has to understand that millions of people in Britain literally can't afford yet more years of "more of the same" neoliberal orthodoxy shamelessly disguised as 'centrism'.

We need fundamental change to undo some of the worst hard-right excesses of the last decade; investment instead of austerity, a well earned wage rise for British workers, restoration of the wantonly vandalised social safety net, de-privatisation of police, hospitals, schools, and prisons, and de-centralisation of political power ...

Legitimate 'centrists' should be saying "no bloody way" to Jo Swinson and the Lib-Dems' transparent efforts to restructure their party as Conservatives 2.0 disguised as 'centrism' to dupe the gullible, and "yes please" to Labour's strategy of actually investing in Britain's future, and undoing as much of the hard-right Tory damage as they can.

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