It's obvious that whether a man is a a self-entitled sex pest or not has pretty much nothing to do with his professed political orientation, but the way the political left and the political right deal with accusations of sexual misconduct differ wildly.
The most obvious high profile examples to chose from are the different fates of the liberal film producer Harvey Weinstein who is being shunned and ostracised by the liberal-left after the torrent of allegations about his appalling behaviour towards women, and Donald Trump who was actually elected President with the support of right-wingers and even evangelical Christians, despite numerous allegations of sexual misconduct against him and an actual recording of him bragging about how he feels entitled to grope and molest women.
The contrast between the American liberal-left's rejection of Weinstein and the conservative right's continued embrace of Trump, even after his taped confession became public, couldn't be starker.
In Britain a very similar scenario has played out with two journalists who have been outed as creepy sex pests, one from the left and one from the right.
Admittedly Sam Kriss and Rupert Myers are hardly household names, but the very different reactions to their behaviour are very telling indeed.
Both men have been accused of sexual misconduct, both issued cringeworthy apologies for their completely inappropriate behaviour, and both have been dropped by at least one of their employers (Kriss was dropped by Vice and Myers by GQ magazine).
There is very little sympathy for Sam Kriss from the left, with several high profile members of the trendy lefty set condemning his behaviour and expressing solidarity with the victim of his inappropriate sexual conduct, but the reaction on the right towards Rupert Myers has been an absolutely bizarre propaganda effort to reinvent Myers as a lefty!
Make no mistake about it, Rupert Myers is a right-winger. Not only has he written for numerous intensely right-wing publications (Daily Mail, Telegraph, Spectator), he's also served as the Deputy Chairman of the Bermondsey & Old Southwark Conservative Association and written numerous blog posts for the Tory party website Conservative Home.
Yet now that he's been outed as a creepy sex pest the Internet is suddenly crawling with right-wingers attempting to pretend that Myers is some kind of extreme-left Corbynist social justice warrior!
Instead of accepting that the problem of sexual harassment isn't actually a left/right issue at all, many on the political right are determined to weaponise the issue as an attack on the political left, even if that means redefining an actual Tory party activist as some kind of hard-left militant in order to spew their partisan venom.
I'm not aware of anyone at all on the left who has tried to suddenly disown Sam Kriss and pretend that he was always some kind of raving hard-right Ukipper because his creepy behaviour has been made public, but a lot of people on the right have no such willingness to accept the fact that one of theirs is a sex pest too.
Just look at these ridiculous examples of right-wing revisionists (James Delingpole and Breitbart) suddenly trying to pretend that the active Tory party member Rupert Myers was on the far-left of the political spectrum just because he's been publicly accused of being a sex pest.
But to get an idea of how many right-wingers are actively spreading the ludicrous lie that Rupert Myers is some kind of spokesperson for the far-left, take a look at the comments beneath the execrable Spiked article about the pair entitled "The Twittermob just went from irritating to dangerous" by the victim-blaming Spiked editor Brendan O'Neill. Here's a selection:
So according to the kind of furious right-wing blowhard male who hangs about in Spiked comments threads, we're all supposed to believe that an active member of the Tory party and former Daily Mail columnist is actually a "puritainical left-wing", "social justice warrior", "middle-class lefty", "Corbynist blowhard" just because he got caught out being a sex pest!
I would never use the sexual misconduct of a creep like Myers to attack the political right because they give us plenty of real ammunition with stuff like their obsession with socially and economically ruinous austerity dogma, their systematic abuse of disabled people, and their zeal for flogging off public assets to their mega-rich mates.
However the reality-reversing propaganda that right-wingers are spewing all over the Internet about how Tory-boy Myers is some kind of extreme-left Corbynist just because he got outed as a creepy sex pest illustrates the frankly delusional lengths these right-wing revisionists will go to in order to maintain their childishly absolutist fantasy that absolutely everything nasty is by definition left-wing, even if the nasty thing is clearly, obviously and demonstrably one of their own.
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A notorious Tory blogger has openly admitted that the lies and deceptions spread by the extreme-right Guido Fawkes hate chamber are "gold" for the "Conservative attack machine".
In a post on the Conservative Home website the blogger Henry Hill (you may remember him as the guy who carefully detailed the Tory blueprint for wrecking the NHS) gleefully celebrated the success of an anti-Corbyn smear job on the extreme-right Guido Fawkes blog.
The Guido smear-job berates Jeremy Corbyn for breaking a student debt promise that he never actually made.
Jeremy Corbyn never said that he would wipe out all student debt. The Labour manifesto never said that it was Labour policy to wipe out all student debt. Neither Guido nor the Tories have provided a single quote of anyone from Labour promising to wipe out all student debt. Yet they're still relentlessly banging on about student debt and Jeremy Corbyn's supposed broken promise to get rid of it all as a pathetic effort to drive a wedge between Labour and the student vote.
Other than a snide dig at the Liberal Democrats for shafting their student voters, Henry Hill's entire blog post on student debt makes no mention at all of why student debts are now so high that 75% of graduates will never pay them off.
Just think about the brass-necked opportunism of a party that has deliberately erected a huge economic social mobility barrier by lumbering the poorest students with eye-watering £57,000 debts then using the issue of vast unpayable student debt levels as a stick to bash their political opponents with!
The glee with which Henry Hill celebrates the virality of the Guido smear job suggests that he imagines that all of the 1.3 million views must have come from people who are mindless enough to be 100% receptive to the transparent fake news story that Jeremy Corbyn broke a promise that he didn't even make.
As I pointed out previously, it seems likely that a high percentage of under-40s who will have came across the Guido smear-job would have been absolutely disgusted by the vitriolic comments section which derides students as "idiots", "dimwits", "useless members of society" and "snowflakes" who are full of "entitlement" and indoctrinated with "cultural Marxism".
Aside from the tide of anti-student, anti-intellectual abuse from bitter old extreme-right blowhards, there is also a sickening seam of bigotry in the comments section including brazen displays of sexism, and calls for the execution of people who oppose Brexit.
The fact that leading Tories are sharing the hell out of this deceptive Guido Fawkes article and the intense hate filled echo chamber in the comments section just goes to show how staggeringly out of touch they are with reality.
Instead of countering Labour's popularity with the under-40s with some policies that would actually benefit the under-40s in any way, they're sharing the fundamentally dishonest propaganda of an extreme-right hate chamber as if they think that liberally-minded under-40s will be won over by a blatantly deceptive blog post and the depraved slobbering of extreme-right blowhards who hate students with all their black little hearts, and even want to bring back the death penalty for their political adversaries!
If the Tories had any clue at all they'd realise that explicitly associating themselves with such an extreme-right hate fest and describing it as "gold" is actually exactly the kind extreme-right nastiness that's created the intense unpopularity of their party with the under-40s.
It's as if they're so blind to reality that they're incapable of understanding that under-40s generally want a bit of honesty and integrity, and some political policies that might actually benefit their lives in some way, not just even more of the kind of intensive extreme-right smear-mongering that demonstrably failed to win Theresa May her coveted super-majority.
This failure was not down to the Tory attack machine failing to land any punches on Corbyn as Henry Hill asserts in his article, it's that the Tories were so focused on smearing Corbyn that they failed to actually provide any decent reasons for anyone under the age of 40 to actually vote Conservative.
It's as if they believe one more smear will be the golden key to success, rather than simply being a demonstration that they've absolutely failed to learn even the simplest of lessons about why their 2017 general election campaign was such a failure.
The Tories have deliberately created a student debt system where three quarters of students will never pay off their debts despite a lifetime of paying a 9% Aspiration Tax on their disposable income, and now they're assuming that students and graduates are so intensely gullible that they'll turn against Labour because Jeremy Corbyn's team haven't yet clearly identified how they could fix the vast student debt problem that the Tories created!
The Tory elitists are obviously delighted with the system they've created to lumber "the lower orders" with unpayable debt levels for the "crime" of aspiring to improve their skills and obtain professional qualifications, yet they're assuming that students and graduates are so dimwitted that they'll suddenly abandon Labour over the easily disprovable extreme-right misrepresentations they're pushing as hard as they can.
Just imagine the brass neck of it. "They've not yet come up with a plan to fix the problem we created so you should hate them instead of us" and "look at the success of this blog post where the below-the-line comments deride students and young people like you as self-entitled idiots, gleefully celebrate the fact that we've lumbered your generation with such huge unpayable debts, and revel in the kind of extreme-right bigotry that you detest".
If pushing this extreme-right Guido Fawkes smear-mongering rubbish as hard as they can is really the Tories' best effort to win back the under-40 vote, then they're obviously even more demographically doomed than the 2017 General Election result suggests.
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A poll conducted by Conservative Home has revealed that an astounding 72% of Tories want Theresa May to quit as party leader before the next General Election, which surely has to be one of the worst votes of no confidence any Prime Minister has ever suffered from within their own party.
The really interesting thing about the result isn't that almost three quarters of Tories want Theresa May to go before the next election, but that 56% of them want her to hang around as a kind of political shit-magnet to attract all of the public contempt that seven years of malicious and incompetent Tory misrule has generated, in the desperate hope that it all sticks to her personally, rather than to their beloved Conservative brand.
This desire to see Theresa May desperately hanging onto power against the national interest just goes to show the power-hungry mentality that infects Tory tribalists.
They know perfectly well that Theresa May is a lame duck Prime Minister, that the deal with the DUP bigots is going to be a stinking orange order millstone around their necks for as long as it lasts, and that core pillars of the Tory ideology (hard-right austerity dogma, wage repression, slashing in-work benefits for the working poor, erecting barriers to social mobility, lavish handouts to the mega-rich, privatisation mania) are now so politically toxic that they'll pay a very heavy price if they try forcing more of it through parliament.
They also know that the popular Tory fantasy of a socially and economically catastrophic "no deal" strop away from the Brexit negotiations just isn't going to fly. Not only do their DUP enablers oppose it, dozens of their own MPs just wouldn't stand for Theresa may turning the UK into an international pariah because she's being embarrassingly outmaneuvered at every turn by the EU27.
Tory tribalists know perfectly well that they have such a weak and directionless leader that she keeps ripping pages out of her own manifesto, and U-turns so often that nobody knows which way she'll be facing in the morning.
Tory tribalists also know that Theresa May's cowardice, controlling-temperament, and directionlessness make her terrifyingly unfit to negotiate the most complex and risky diplomatic process the UK has ever faced.
These Tory loyalists know that their lame duck Prime Minister is shockingly unfit to lead their own party, let alone the whole country. But they also know that getting rid of her now, with a minority government, would result in an unstoppable public demand for another election, which the Tories would almost certainly lose so badly it would make 1997 look like a teddy bear's picnic.
The Tory tribalists know that letting Theresa May cling onto what is left of her power is blatantly against the national interest, but these people have so much invested in the Conservative Party that they're perfectly prepared to sling the national interest into theresa May's bonfire of vanity in order to maintain their grip on political power for as long as possible.
It doesn't matter how many dodgy bungs they have to lob at the DUP, nor how many of their own rotten principles they have to bin, because the most important Tory principle of all is power for power's sake.
This self-serving Tory willingness to let allow a woman that they now absolutely hate cling on to power is a clear and undeniable demonstration that Tory tribalists are willing to put the interests of the Conservative Party above the interests of the nation in order to maintain their grip on power.
Let's hope that the British public are smart enough to see this shockingly self-serving Tory opportunism for what it is, and give these power-hungry parasites an absolute walloping at the next opportunity, whenever that arises, and whether they're led by Theresa may or not.
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 don't often frequent the political cesspit that is the Conservative Home Blog, but I was pointed in the direction of an article entitled "How a government can beat the BMA" written by the site's deputy editor Henry Hill.
Before I get to explaining the Tory blueprint for tearing apart our public services, I'm first going to look at what this blog post tells us about the rotten Tory mentality of the author.
Class war politics
Before we even get to the contents of the article, it's clear from the title alone that the author is of the stunted Tory class war mentality, where workers and trade unions are the enemy, and any kind of compromise or co-operation between employers and workers is political weakness. This rotten and destructive class war mentality completely dominates Tory politics because they consider their ideological assault upon the trade unions in the 1980s to be one of their greatest victories. It doesn't matter a jot to these people that the UK keeps lagging further and further behind Germany, where trade unions and employers generally co-operate for the best of their industries rather than retrenching into destructive ideological class war at the first opportunity.
As far as most Tories are concerned, trade unions and ordinary workers are always the enemy and if disputes don't come about naturally they can always be deliberately provoked (as with the junior doctors contract and the force privatisation of every school in England) in order to bring back the ideological class war struggle they crave for.
The miners' strike
The class war mentality of the author was clear from the title, but the actual contents reveal the sheer scale of his absurd class war obsession. The article is peppered with references to the Miners Strike in the 1980s. The author tries to imagine Jeremy Hunt as a victorious Thatcher figure destroying the power of the British Medical Association (and presumably condemning their industry to destruction in the process, as was the case with the coal miners), he draws tortured parallels between the Junior Doctors' strike and the Miners' strike and concludes chillingly that "one day the BMA will have their 1984".
Comparisons between the Miners' Strike and the dispute over the Junior Doctors contract are obviously utterly facile.
- The Miners' Strike concerned pretty much the entire coal mining industry, the Junior Doctors dispute only concerns a small fraction of the total NHS staff.
- The Miners' Strike was a full scale strike that crippled the industry and lasted almost an entire year. The Junior Doctor's strikes have been a series of short strikes with cover provided by other medical professionals to ensure patient safety.
- Margaret Thatcher used the police as her own personal militia in order to attack the mining communities of the UK. The idea of David Cameron sending the police in to violently oppress a bunch of doctors is clearly ludicrous.
- There is a strong global demand for medical professionals. If the Tories do successfully manage to crush the BMA and destroy the working conditions of NHS workers, unlike the striking miners, medical professionals have many more opportunities to move somewhere like Canada or Australia where they would be treated with a little less contempt by their government.
Anyone drawing parallels between these two staggeringly different examples of industrial action is clearly living in cloud cuckoo land.
Forcing people to live longer
Before I get to outlining the details of the Tory strategy to privatise the NHS, I'm just going to detail one more thing that highlights the rotten mentality of the author. Henry Hill has a big whinge about the NHS saving people's lives as if preventing people from dying is not only some kind of economic crime, but an act of cruelty against the individual who has been saved from death!
"Anybody who the NHS 'saves' from a tobacco or food-related deaths will die of something and the NHS will pay for it. If that person is forced to live a long life, they will likely end up costing the NHS more than they would had they died younger."
The idea that the NHS is somehow forcing people against their will to live longer is utterly absurd and an insult to anyone unfortunate enough to read such drivel. Of course people are likely to continue using the NHS if they're not shovelled into an early grave, but it's not beyond the bounds of reason that they will continue working, contributing to their family life or to their local community in some way too is it?
Reducing people's lives down to a balance sheet consisting of nothing more than their costs to the health service is a perfect example of the Tory "price of everything and the value of nothing" mentality.
The strategy
There are four main prongs to the strategy Henry Hill details in his blog post. Diluting the workforce with unqualified staff, removing the right to take industrial action, breaking up the service into many separate employers and drip-feeding the destruction of the NHS slowly so that the public are less likely to notice.
Diluting the workforce with unqualified staff
The author suggests that most of the work doctors do is easy and could be done "by a physicians' assistant with a fraction of the training or wages". He then goes on to fantasise about a health service filled out with well-meaning volunteers based on the Territorial Army model. A health service increasingly staffed by low-skill, low-paid workers and well-meaning volunteers doesn't seem to be a recipe for efficiency to me, but then it just depends how efficiency is defined doesn't it? If quality of service isn't included as a measure of efficiency at all, then the lower the staff costs the more efficient the service.
Removing the right to industrial action
The author wants to see medical professionals stripped of the right to take industrial action like soldiers and the police. If that proves unpopular, then destruction of the right to strike can be achieved in other ways. One is to attack the right to strike at source by introducing a Trade Union Bill designed to make trade union democracy completely unworkable by rendering an abstention as a stronger vote against strike action than an explicit vote against strike action. Another method is the third prong of the Tory attack.
Breaking the service into many separate employers
Breaking the NHS up into many separate employers would remove the power of collective bargaining and render attempts at cross-NHS strikes "sympathy strikes", which were outlawed when the Tories introduced the harshest anti-worker trade union rules in western Europe back in the 1980s. Other benefits to the Tories (and the private health investors who bankroll them) is that smaller chunks of NHS services are not only easier to privatise, it also makes it much easier for private corporations to cherry-pick all the profitable pieces for themselves, whilst leaving the unprofitable bits for the taxpayer to run.
Drip-feeding the destruction of the NHS in doses the public won't notice
The 2012 Health and Social Care Act was a masterclass in the privatisation by stealth strategy. The former Tory party leadership candidate Michael Portillo once explained why this plan to carve the NHS open for mass privatisation wasn't even mentioned in the 2010 Tory manifesto. He said it was because "they did not believe they could win an election if they told you what they were going to do". Even now there are still an awful lot of people out there who are so misinformed that they scoff at the idea that the NHS is being steadily privatised and NHS facilities turned over to the treatment of private patients. Through their policy of deliberately under-reporting the Health and Social Care act and the subsequent waves of privatisations, the mainstream media have been complicit in fostering this all-too-common public mentality that the ongoing privatisation of the NHS is some kind of insane lefty fantasy rather than observable reality.
The education system
There are several parallels between the Tory plot to carve up and privatise the English NHS against the will of medical professionals and public, and the Tory plot to carve up and privatise the entire English education system against the will of the teaching profession and the public alike.
Tory academies and free schools are allowed to employ completely unqualified teachers. The carve up of the education system into the control of numerous private sector academy chains (many owned and operated by major Tory party donors) allows wages and working conditions to be undermined and will eventually be used by the Tories to rule out coordinated industrial action by teachers.
The only difference seems to be that George Osborne and Nicky Morgan are so full of hubris that they were unwilling to continue with their slow and steady approach that has already seen 5,000+ schools handed over to shady unaccountable private sector operators and chose to announce the forced privatisation of every school in England by 2022 as part of George Osborne's 2016 budget of failure.
Conclusion
The Tories are usually very reticent about explaining their true intentions, but occasionally one of them lets it slip.
One example is the vice-chair of the Conservative Health group Paul Charlson explained that abandoning universal NHS healthcare for a fee based system "would be political suicide" unless "there was a feeling in the country that the health service was falling apart" which explains the constant barrage of right-wing propaganda about how crap the NHS is.
This "How a government can beat the BMA" blog post from Henry Hill is in a different league. It doesn't just accidentally let a piece of Tory ideology slip out, it clearly explains the Tory blueprint for tearing apart our public services, repressing workers' rights and wages and diluting the workforce with unqualified labour, as well as openly displaying the disgusting class war mentality and utter contempt for working people that is so rife within the Tory party.
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.
