The Speaker of the House of Commons was forced to intervene when a braying and jeering mob of Tory MPs attempted to shout down a vitally important question from the Green Party MP Caroline Lucas.
Once order was more-or-less restored Lucas asked her question, and staying true to her usual tactics, Theresa May waffled on about a completely different issue in reply.
The question Caroline Lucas asked was about the urgent need to update Britain's electoral rules for the digital age in order to defend democracy from unscrupulous anti-democratic practices, but Theresa May blatantly evaded answering the question in order to waffle on about data protection measures.
Anyone who paid attention to the testimony of the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Chris Wylie the day before would have been horrified at the allegations of widespread cheating of the electoral rules.
Not only do the Vote Leave campaign stand accused of unlawful co-ordination with other supposedly independent Brexit campaigns like BeLeave, Wylie also made an astounding allegation that the American Billionaire Robert Mercer has used financial trickery to get around legal election spending limits.
The way it allegedly works is that Mercer pumps millions of dollars into Canbridge Analytica and the associated companies which then sell their psychological profiling/election-rigging products on to right-wing political campaigns at a loss.
Subsidising a company so that they can provide services to right-wing political campaigns at way below cost obviously gives them a huge advantage if other parties are sticking to the electoral spending rules but buying data analytics products at their true market value.
If the allegation is true, it's absolutely critical to British democracy that something is done urgently to close this loophole which essentially allows foreign billionaires to buy massive amounts of influence over our elections and referendums.
After all of their rhetoric about "defending British democracy" during the referendum campaign you would have thought the Brexiteers would be all over this story like a rash, demanding action to prevent foreign billionaires from interfering with British sovereignty.
But no!
When the issue was debated in parliament in the hours after Wylie gave his testimony, only seven Tory MPs bothered to turn up to the emergency debate, and the only one who made any meaningful contribution at all was the minister who was required to be there to represent the government!
The conclusions are obvious. They don't give a damn about alleged foreign interference in our democratic processes as long as the outcome of the interference aligns with their own personal agenda. And they don't want to address the issue because they fear that if referendum cheating is uncovered, then their beloved Brexit might be taken away.
Oh how shallow those Brexiteer referendum cries to "stand up for British democracy" ring now. Now that the very same people are determined to turn a blind eye to the extraordinary allegations about how our democratic processes have been undermined.
Caroline Lucas is absolutely right. Our electoral laws need to be updated as a matter of urgency to make them suitable for the digital age.
The loopholes that allow dishonest players to bypass election spending rules by flogging their services at below cost value must be shut down. The use of big data in election campaigns should be carefully regulated, not left as a total free-for-all. The use of dark ads should be stamped out. And the rules against campaign groups spreading outright lies should be strengthened and updated for the digital age.
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.
I've got no problem with people expressing opposition to Labour's six tests Brexit policy if they're still strongly in favour of remaining in the EU. The right to criticise and dissent are absolutely vital in any kind of democracy.
What I object to is the number of Remainers and Corbyn critics who insist on outright lying about what Labour's Brexit position actually is.
Labour's position
Despite continual misrepresentations by their political opponents, the Labour shadow cabinet position on Brexit is actually pretty clear and simple.
Labour have devised a compromise position that respects the result of the referendum, but which insists that the final Brexit deal is subjected to Keir Starmer's six tests.
This means that if the final Brexit deal the Tories negotiate with the EU is going to be a disaster for Britain (as the Tory government's own impact assessments indicate it will), the Labour Party will oppose it.
Labour have already shown their determination to fight against a hard-right Tory interpretation of Brexit by seeking to add amendments to the EU Withdrawal Bill in order to prevent the Tory government from using Brexit as a Trojan Horse to attack our workers' rights, consumer protections, environmental laws, equality rules, and food standards.
After the Tories ripped up these amendments Labour were left with no choice but to vote against the EU Withdrawal Bill (which is hardly colluding with the Tories as so many people like to claim they are).
Unfortunately Labour and the other opposition parties didn't have the parliamentary numbers to stop the Tory EU Withdrawal Bill because a whole load of so-called "mutineer" Tory MPs like Anna Soubry who make a lot of noise about opposing hard Brexit decided to back Theresa May and the secretive cabal of ERG Brextremists who dictate her every move, and actually voted in favour of it.
Owen Smith
The reason Owen Smith was sacked from the Labour Shadow cabinet is obvious. He decided to break ranks with the agreed position that Labour needs to subject the final deal to Keir Starmer's six tests, and publicly set out his own bespoke Brexit policy.
Any competent political leader can't have their ministers going off and making up their own policies on the hoof, because that's the path towards the kind of incompetence and directionless of Theresa May who has so little authority over her own party that she couldn't even sack Boris Johnson from her cabinet after he made up his own Brexit policy that totally contradicted her own!
Love them or loathe them, strong leaders like Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher would never have allowed their ministers to just make up their own policies on the hoof. That's why Corbyn was right to sack Owen Smith, just as he was right to force out the unmistakably Corbynite MP Chris Williamson a few months ago after Williamson decided to announce his own bespoke policy on Council Tax.
Of Course Owen Smith has every right to criticise Labour's Brexit position from the back benches, but only a ridiculously weak and directionless leader like Theresa May would allow him to criticise the party position from within the party leadership.
The timing
Perhaps the worst thing about Owen Smith's decision to announce his own Brexit policy from within the shadow cabinet is the appalling timing just as the 2018 local election campaign is gearing up.
You'd have to be astoundingly gullible to imagine that Smith only just realised his opposition to the agreed Labour position right now, just when attacking his own party from within the cabinet would do the maximum damage to Labour's chances at the local elections.
Agree with Smith's call for a second EU referendum or not, it's impossible to argue that the timing of his decision to cause chaos by breaking from the agreed party line is incredibly damaging to the chances of thousands of Labour local election candidates up and down the country.
The lies
I wrote an article pointing out that the Labour right-wingers have form for this kind of internal wrecking behaviour, and that Smith's decision to publicly defy the agreed party line looks an awful lot like a deliberate effort to damage Labour's chances at the 2018 local elections in order to use the poor result as an excuse to have another crack at deposing Jeremy Corbyn as party leader.
The response to this article was an absolute cascade of lies and misrepresentations from Remainers, and the anti-Corbyn faction of the Labour Party. Here are just a few of the examples:
Aside from these examples of various different lies and misrepresentations of Labour's Brexit position, it's easy to find plenty more. Just peruse through the #FBPE hashtag on Twitter and you'll find dozens upon dozens of people outright lying with claims that Labour support Tory hard Brexit.
Why people lie
As I said before I've got no objection to people opposing Labour's position under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership, that's an essential part of democracy. What I object to is this bombardment of lies, smears, and brazen misrepresentations of what Labour's position actually is.
So why do so many people insist on lying like this?
In my view there are two plausible answers:
They're either ignorant people who have heard the lies elsewhere, and uncritically regurgitate them as their own opinions, rather than actually checking the facts and rejecting them as lies.
The other alternative is that they do actually understand Labour's Brexit position, but they also know that the Brexiters won with a campaign of absolute lies, so they're adopting the same staggeringly dishonest tactics because they think it's the most effective way of attacking Corbyn.
It basically comes down to stupidity or mendacity.
Are these people just ignorant rote learners who don't even understand Labour's actual Brexit policy, but insist on attacking it with lies? Or are they cynical propagandists who believe that lying about Labour's position will have more impact than any kind of fact-based critique?
Why the truth is important
The thing is that whatever our political stance (pro-Corbyn, Corbyn-sceptic, Remainer ...) it's absolutely vital to demonstrate that we're actually better than the lying right-wing Brextremists.
The Brextremists use deceptions, smears, false promises and lies to get what they want.
That they rely on lies to achieve their objectives is absolutely undeniable after the Vote Leave director Dominic Cummings admitted that they would never have won without the "£350 million for the NHS" lie.
We know this because the other even more right-wing and dishonest Leave.EU Brexit campaign worked with Cambridge Analytica to con people into voting for Brexit, and that Cambridge Analytica openly admitted that their strategy is that "it doesn't have to be true, people just have to believe it".
Whether we support Labour's position of subjecting the Brexit deal to Keir Starmer's six tests or not, those of us who oppose the Tories and the hard-right Brexit liars must ensure that the foundations of our political positions are facts, evidence, cogent analysis, and honest presentation.
Otherwise we come across as being just as dishonest as they are, which leaves all the decent honest people in society with nowhere to turn but political apathy.
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 party reaction to the Cambridge Analytica scandal is every bit as cynical and opportunistic as you'd expect.
Instead of focusing on the election rigging psychological warfare tools these shady characters have built on the the Facebook data they stand accused of stealing, the Tories are attempting to reframe the whole debate to paint Facebook as the big bad villains, and to promote the Tories' pre-existing agenda of clamping down on Internet freedoms.
In an article for George Osborne's Evening Standard propaganda sheet the Tory Culture minister Matt Hancock has bragged about his plan to "bring an end to the Wild West culture" of social media.
This article makes his Facebook-blaming, responsibility-shifting, censorship-pushing agenda all too clear. Not just by what he says, but also by what he conspicuously fails to say.
Here are some of the many issues that Matt Hancock "forgot" to mention in his "Wild West" article.
One of the reasons the Tories are trying to shift the focus of the blame onto Facebook is really obvious. They recognise that the intimate financial links between the big players in this dodgy election rigging outfit and their own party look terrible, so shifting as much of the blame as possible to Facebook is a simple deflection tactic.
Another reason they're keen to blame Facebook is the £2.1 million they blasted on targeted dark ads.
The Tories outspent Labour by 4:1 on Facebook ads, but their influence on the site was more than negated by a rag-tag bunch of viral left-wing bloggers working on shoestring budgets.
If you'd spent such a huge amount of money in an effort to buy Facebook popularity and ended up getting humbled by a tiny bunch of bloggers who didn't even spend a single penny on buying Facebook ads, you'd be furious too.
Which brings us to what the Tories have in store for Facebook. There's no doubt whatever that the Tories will seek to use this mess to their own advantage, even though the money trail flows right back to the Tory party.
The most likely approach they're going to take is to strong-arm Facebook into clamping down on the freedom that has allowed independent voices to gain popularity by challenging the pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, wage repression pushing, welfare slashing, hard-right political agenda that so often goes completely unchallenged by the mainstream media.
Meanwhile they have absolutely no intention of clamping down on the use of the kind of targeted political dark ads they used extensively during the 2017 general election campaign.
Sensible proposals include updating the existing rules against spreading political lies during elections, a requirement that all political ads be logged with the electoral authorities, and for geographically targeted social media ads to be classified as local election spending.
You'll never hear Tory politicians proposing any of these measures, because all of them would go against their self-interest.
When the Tories say that they want to make the Internet "safe", it's obvious that what they actually mean is that they want to turn social media into another comfortable "safe space" for themselves, where those who challenge the hard-right neoliberal orthodoxy are pushed to the margins. And if they can cynically make use of a crisis that was actually created by their fellow Tories at SCL/Cambridge Analytica to achieve it, all the better for them.
Anyone who paid attention to the bullet points above has got to be able to see that a bunch of Tories promising to keep us safe on the Internet is akin to a skulk of foxes promising to take care of security for your chicken coop.
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.
