Tony Blair hasn't got a leg to stand on when it comes to "moderate values"

On September 6th 2018 the Tony Blair Institute published accounts that confirmed earlier reports of payments from Saudi Arabia of up to £12 million, then the very next day he was given a slot on Radio 4 to attack the Jeremy Corbyn and the current Labour Party leadership, and to pretend that the right-wing Labour faction are somehow "moderates".

What everyone should know about Saudi Arabia

• Saudi Arabia is one of the most tyrannical regimes on earth which is ruled over by a large extended family of royal figures who enrich themselves on the vast oil wealth of the territory, whilst slave labour is rife in the kingdom.

• Saudi Arabia is a profoundly misogynistic society. Until recently women were not even allowed to drive cars. Under current Saudi law all women are subject to the male guardianship law, which means they are barred from travel, education, access to public services, employment, opening a bank account, and even medical procedures without the permission of their male guardian (typically a father, brother, husband, or uncle).

• Saudi Arabia is one of the many extremely homophobic regimes in the Muslim world where homosexuality carries a death sentence. Even the UK government's own website makes it clear that it's incredibly risky for gay or transgender people to visit Saudi Arabia.

• Saudi Arabia is the epicentre of extremist Salafi Islamist terrorism. 15 of the 19 September 11th attackers were Saudis. Saudi Arabia supplies arms, fighters, finance, and supplies to Islamist terrorist groups across North Africa and the Middle East. Saudi Arabia is also the biggest source of pro-ISIS Internet propaganda. The Saudi's are also suspected of promoting and funding Islamist terrorism in the UK too (but Theresa May and the Tories are still hiding the report).

• The Saudi Arabian regime is violently opposed to democratic values and multiple Saudi citizens have been sentenced to death by beheading and/or crucifixion for the "crime" of attending non-violent pro-democracy protests.

• Saudi Arabia is currently committing horrific war crimes in Yemen. Aside from their use of British and American weapons to attack civilian targets, they're also using starvation and disease as weapons through their ongoing blockades of food and medical supplies, and their deliberate targeting of public facilities like water treatment plants.

The hypocrisy of Tony Blair

Just imagine having the brass neck to accept £millions in donations from probably the most illiberal regime on the planet, then attempt to lecture the British public on the importance of "moderate values" as an effort to get rid of one of the only political leaders in Europe who dares to stand up to the Saudi tyrants, rather than raking in donations from them like Blair does.

Despite knowing that the Saudi tyrants are using British weapons to commit war crimes in Yemen, the Tory government continues issuing £billions worth of arms export licences to them, something that Jeremy Corbyn says he would put a stop to if Labour come to power.

Conflict of interests

So here we have a man who has raked in £12 million from the Saudi tyrants actively propagandising against another man who is promising to harden Britain's relationship with them, and stop selling them weapons to commit their war crimes with.

Doesn't it strike you as rather a serious conflict of interests that a man who is essentially working for Saudi Arabia is pushing their interests by creating the fiction that the right-wing pro-Saudi faction of the Labour Party are the ones with "moderate" values, while Jeremy Corbyn and the majority of Labour Party members who are disgusted by Saudi Arabia's lack of human rights at home, and their war crimes abroad are the scary extremists?

Interestingly the BBC didn't quiz Blair over his £multi-million donations from Saudi Arabia during the interview, or ask him whether he considered it a conflict of interests that he's taking their cash whilst simultaneously propagandising against one of the only politicians in the western world who dares stand up to them*.

Reality-reversal

Aside from the hypocrisy and conflict of interests, perhaps the most remarkable thing about Tony Blair's latest attack of Jeremy Corbyn is the fact that it relies on such a transparent reversal of reality.

What Tony Blair is trying to convince us to accept is the idea that the kind of people who cause hundreds of thousands of deaths and a massive lawless terrorism breeding ground through the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq are moderates while those who opposed it are scary extremists.

That the people who take cash and gifts from the Saudi tyrants in return for supporting arms sales to the war crime-committing regime are the moderates, while those who oppose selling arms to tyrants to commit war crimes with are the disgusting extremists.

That people who support the orthodox neoliberal status quo that has enriched corporations and the incredibly wealthy at the expense of everyone else (through austerity dogma, wage repression, undermined workers' rights, public service cutbacks, financial sector deregulation, social mobility barriers like tuition fees, tax cuts for the rich, social security cuts for the poor) are the moderates while those who seek to make Britain a fairer place are the nasty extremists.

It just goes to show that Blair still hasn't moved on from the days of "weapons of mass destruction" and his contemptuous belief that people are idiots who can be lied to and tricked over and again without clocking the truth.

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* = Credit to Justin Trudeau in Canada who triggered Saudi economic sanctions and even threats of terrorism against Canada for daring to push them on their despicable human rights record. Also credit to the left-leaning Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez for cancelling the supply of 400 guided missiles to the Saudi tyrants.

Theresa May's weak leadership is a danger to Britain

Over the weekend the new Tory Home Secretary Sajid Javid decided to tear up the longstanding British convention that our government opposes the death penalty in all circumstances. He apparently made this decision entirely on his own, without any cabinet discussion, legal advice, or permission from the Prime Minister.

Theresa May is such a weak and incompetent leader that she's absolutely failed to correct or discipline Javid for making up government policy on the hoof, and ended up eventually agreeing with him in order to minimise the scandal, which is a very dangerous green light to all of her other ministers to just completely make things up as they go along without fear of repercussions.

It's possible to imagine that May's lackadaisical attitude to Javid inventing policy on the hoof could stem from the extraordinarily weak political position she's in (very few remaining allies, razor thin majority in parliament, under constant threat of a "no confidence" vote triggered by Jacob Rees-Mogg and the ERG Brextremists) but this incompetence isn't actually new.

Back during the 2017 General Election campaign her (now resigned in disgrace) Defence Secretary Michael Fallon made the shocking announcement that Britain would consider using nuclear weapons as attack weapons, which amounted to a sudden declaration that the UK is abandoning the long-established "no first strike" policy, and endangering the "Mutually Assured Destruction" deterrence compromise that has existed between the nuclear powers since the 1950s (by giving other nuclear powers a clear incentive to get their strike in first before Theresa May does).

Amazingly Fallon made this seismic change to Britain's nuclear weapons policy without cabinet discussion, legal advice, or permission from the Prime Minister. But Theresa May decided not to discipline him or put the record straight on Britain's actual nuclear weapons policy for fear of making one of her ministers look like a fool during an election campaign.

Even more amazing was the way the media (and especially the BBC) completely ignored this extraordinary on the hoof abandonment of Britain's longstanding nuclear weapons strategy in favour of a certifiably insane "yes first strike" policy, and instead focused all of their nuclear weapons political questions on relentlessly attacking Jeremy Corbyn for sticking with the traditional "no first strike" policy!

If Theresa May allows her ministers to just make up new policies on issues as important as nuclear weapons and the death penalty with no discussion, legal advice or permission, her incompetence and weak leadership is clearly and obviously a danger to Britain, British standards, and the British way of life.

And the fact that she actually ends up agreeing with them in order to save face, even though they went behind her back to announce these new policies has set a dangerous precedent. It doesn't matter how dangerous, regressive, un-British, or downright insane the new policy, she'll probably end up green lighting it just to avoid the fuss of disciplining them and putting the record straight.

Even if you somehow agree with the Fallon's crackpot "yes first strike" strategy or Javid's efforts to undermine Britain's longstanding opposition to the death penalty, there's absolutely no way that you can agree that the correct way to introduce these wild new policies was to do it behind Theresa May's back, safe in the knowledge that she's such a weak and directionless leader that she'd simply agree to them after the fact to avoid a fuss.

And if the non-reaction of the bulk of the mainstream media to Theresa May letting her ministers go unpunished for repeatedly going behind her back to announce wild new policies this is anything to go by, then she's not going to be held to account for this dangerously weak and incompetent attitude either.

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The blue passport farce

The results of a recent YouGov poll about what people think the government should do in post-Brexit Britain creates a horrifying picture of the delusional post-Brexit fantasy land that huge numbers of Brexiters are anticipating.

A post-Brexit fantasy land where the colour of your passport cover is of more importance than the rights that your passport gives you!

What Brexiters want

The single most popular thing Brexiters want to bring back is the death penalty. It's been proven time and again that the death penalty doesn't act as a deterrent (life sentences are much more of a punishment, that's why mass murderers and the like so often try to commit suicide in jail). It's also well understood that the death penalty creates appalling miscarriages of justice (many of the people executed by the British state during the 20th Century have had their convictions posthumously overturned). Despite all of the evidence an astounding 53% of Brexiters want the death penalty brought back.

42% of Brexiters say they want corporal punishment in schools brought back too, meaning that one of their top priorities for Brexit Britain is to give teachers the right to physically assault our children!

48% of Brexiters want things to bring back pounds and ounces. Firstly they never went away, it's always been legal to sell stuff in pounds and ounces in the UK as long as you include the metric conversion too. Secondly imperial measures are a ridiculously over-complicated anachronism. If Brexiters think that grams and kilograms are foreign unpatriotic muck they can avoid using them, but forcing the rest of us to abandon the sensible and easy to use metric measuring system so that we can all start dividing stuff by 14 and 16 again is ridiculous nonsense.

Blue passports

After pining for the return of the death sentence, the second most popular thing on the Brexiter wishlist is for the return of blue passports. 52% of Brexiters see this as one of the main priorities for Brexit Britain!

The hard-right tabloids and Eurosceptic MPs have fed into this nostalgic delusion that the colour of our passports is of such significance whatever and millions of Brexiters have lapped it up.

The Tory MP Andrew Rossindell has gone as far as describing the current burgundy passport as a "humiliation" and claiming that once the blue passport returns the British people "can once again feel pride and self-confidence in their own nationality when travelling"!

The idiocy of this stance is astounding. The current UK passport gives us all the right to travel, and work, and study, and retire in any of 27 nations across Europe. If the Tories insist on scrapping freedom of movement then it's obvious that the post-Brexit passport will not provide all of these rights, no matter what colour the cover is.

Over half of Brexiters are more bothered about the colour of their passport cover than they are about the fact that Brexit is going to significantly diminish the value of it!

The reintroduction of blue passports won't be a source of "pride and self-confidence" at all, it will be a constant visual reminder of the fact that the British passport has been reduced in value and rendered inferior to the Irish one.

Perspective

• Since the Brexit vote the pound has collapsed in value and not recovered. Millions of Brits living abroad suffered an instant 15% devaluation of their money, but people in the UK are much more insulated from the fact they're 15% poorer than they were before because price inflation takes time to seep through. It only becomes glaringly obvious that we're all poorer when we go on holiday and notice the shockingly poor exchange rates.

• The EEF manufacturing organisation has warned that hundreds of thousands of jobs could be lost if Theresa May follows through on her ludicrous threat to flounce away from the Brexit negotiating table with "no deal". 

• The London School of Economics have calculated that a "no deal" scenario could damage the UK economy by 6.3% to 9.5% of GDP, that's an astonishing £4,200 - £6,400 per UK household.

• Dozens of major UK-based businesses (including swathes of the financial sector) have already announced that they're making plans to abandon Britain in order to keep themselves in the Single Market zone.

• Record numbers of EU nurses have been quitting the NHS which is already severely understaffed after years of ideologically driven Tory cuts.

• Various sectors of the UK economy are warning of severe Brexit-related recruitment crises. The services and agricultural sectors are particularly worried.

• Scotland is preparing to remove itself (and all of its oilfields and enormous renewable energy capacity) from the Brexit car crash.

• The Australian foreign minister has said that Brexit represents a great opportunity for them to improve their trade relationship with Ireland because they remain in the Single Market, and Donald Trump's trade adviser Wilbur Ross has described Brexit as a "God-given opportunity" for the United States to take business away from the UK.

But screw all that stuff eh chaps. Our passports are going to be blue again, and that's the fundamentally important thing. Hooray for the magnificent benefits of Brexit! 

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"Your page is going to be taken down" - threats from the lunatic fascist fringe

I don't normally choose to share the threatening personal messages that I receive, however in this case I'm going to make an exception due to the extraordinary audacity of the right-wing fanatics who are threatening to get my Another Angry Voice Facebook page shut down.

The threatening message was sent to me by a guy using the made-up name "Jonathan Valkyrie" who claims to represent the fascist Facebook page National British Resistance, which is a feeble impersonation of the Britain First page.

Here's the text of the message:

Your page is going to be taken down because clearly you've been using it to put out a Left-Wing bias when you had a duty to inform the British public about the truth.
 
You've abused this trust and your position as a responsible page owner and now you may very well lose the Page.
 
We'll claim responsibility if it happens and wallow in your misery by contacting you on twitter. If it doesn't happen then we'll keep trying. Either way, the clock is ticking.

Before I get to the piece of information that shows exactly how ludicrous these extremist idiots are, I'll just run through a few objections to the actual content of the message.

The first thing to note is that these right-wing extremists have an absolute hatred of free speech. They cannot abide alternative viewpoints to their own. The reason they wish to censor my page is fear. These cowards are afraid that their own ideology is so weak and unjustifiable that that the only means of protecting it is to censor and silence all dissenting voices.

According to these fascists I have "a duty to inform the British public about the truth", which is what I believe I have been doing for the last four years. I always endeavour to back up my assertions with rational analysis and numerous links to supporting evidence, which is more than I've ever seen  any of these fascist groups do.

Of course I'm, "biased" because the only absolute form of neutrality is complete and utter apathy (which means that anyone who claims to be unbiased should be distrusted immediately). I'm biased towards concepts like social justice and participatory democracy, and I'm biased against the Westminster establishment and obnoxious neo-fascist groups who go around threatening to censor the free speech of anyone they disagree with.

Ridiculously the representatives of this National British Resistance page seem incapable of realising that they themselves are riddled with bias, and a much more dangerous and irrational form of bias than my own. Accusations of bias from a pack of people whose number one objective on their 22 point plan is the forced deportation of all non-whites are hilarious. At least I'm not "biased" against people due to nothing more than the colour of their skin!

Some of the other policies in the NBR 22 point plan include the expulsion of all Jews to Israel and the confiscation of Jewish assets, the formation of a one party dictatorship, reintroduction of the death penalty, reintroduction of national service, the use of forced labour schemes, the abolition of all trade unions, the abolition of feminism and the "unnatural agenda that preaches women are allowed to do the duties of men" and a plan to abandon all multinational treaties and unions apart from the Commonwealth, which is supposedly to be turned into an international dictatorship controlled by National British Resistance.

It's hard to see how a page with such a lunatic agenda has amassed some 57,000 followers, but given that their posts rarely receive more than a few dozen interactions, it seems pretty clear that the vast majority of their followers are actually the result of click farms (teams of low-paid workers in countries like Bangladesh that add fake Facebook likes for as little as $15 per 1,000). If you click on the "likes" button on the page, Facebook helpfully explains that the number one demographic is Istanbul in Turkey, which seems more than a little odd for the Facebook page of a British fascist group with a visceral hatred of Muslims.

A blatantly ripped off version of one of my own
images, here's a link to the original.

Now to the salient point that exposes these fascists as the ludicrous opportunists they are: Shortly before sending me a message to announce that they are actively working to censor my free speech, they stole one of my Another Angry Voice infographics, replaced my logo with their own and then posted it on their wall.

The absolute cheek of blatantly ripping off my work and then threatening to get my page shut down is laughable. I don't normally resort to insults in my work, but these people are absolute scum. Not only do they promote their revolting hate fuelled dictatorship, they are intent on using censorship to protect their closed ideology, but not before blatantly stealing the arguments of those they are intent on silencing.

In conclusion I suppose that I must be doing something right if vile extreme-right nutters like this have decided that I'm an enemy who needs to be silenced.

I'll leave it up to you whether you want to visit their Facebook page to counter their repulsive views, report the numerous posts that seem to contravene Facebook terms and conditions, or just have a good old laugh at the contemptible gibberish that passes for debate and analysis on the far right fringe.


UPDATE: In the week following these threats, the admin at the NBR Facebook page has repeatedly plagiarised my work. I've also been informed that the guy behind the page is a former Tory party member called Joshua Bonehill, who has been in and out of court since he was a teenager, and earlier in 2014 he was found guilty of malicious communications after making up fake news stories in order to incite hatred against Muslims.
2nd UPDATE: Joshua Bonehill has been arrested for sending death threats and anti-Semitic abuse to the Labour MP Luciana Berger.
 

 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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Michael Moore on "Occupy Wall Street" & the Troy Davis execution

I'm sure that US activist Michael Moore would be the first to admit that he is a bit of a fat tosser, but as usual he is bang on the money with these critiques of the corporatisation of America and the disgraceful execution of Troy Davis in Georgia.

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