The Tories got eviscerated on social media so now they want to censor it

Tory politicians know that social media played a vital role in stopping them from winning the super-majority they were expecting when Theresa May called her vanity election in April 2017, and they're now determined to crack down on it.

One of the keenest supporters of a social media crackdown is the Tory MP for South East Cornwall Sheryll Murray, who wants to see new restrictions on political commentary introduced on social media during elections.

It's hardly surprising that Sheryll wants to see a social media clampdown on freedom of speech after a clip of her provoking outrage at a hustings by saying that she was "really pleased that we have food banks" went absolutely viral in the hours after she said it.

This clip went absolutely viral during the general election, & now @sheryllmurray wants to restrict social media free speech. I wonder why🤔 pic.twitter.com/DiIkBCam2e

— Another Angry Voice (@Angry_Voice) June 29, 2017

The clip I posted on Facebook was seen 1.5 million times, and I was obviously far from the only person to upload it on social media.

Sheryll knows that in the olden days of carefully managed media presentation of the news most people would never have heard of a Tory hustings gaffe like hers or her appalling attitude towards her critics, but now that ordinary people have a measure of control over what is newsworthy (shareable) her out-of-touch gaffe has been seen by millions, and she's absolutely terrified.

Sheryll doesn't like ordinary people to have the ability to hold elitists like her to account for their words and actions, so she's reacting like all right-wing authoritarians do when challenged, and calling for censorship because she's terrified of people power.

South East Cornwall MP @sheryllmurray calls for new legal restrictions on social media use during election campaigns. pic.twitter.com/ucapCqCbyS

— Martyn Oates (@bbcmartynoates) June 28, 2017

One of the most interesting things about her call for restrictions on social media is the fact that of all of the political parties it was her Conservatives who were the worst offenders, spending £millions to spew their smears and outright lies into people's Facebook feeds, Youtube videos and even their Google search results.

This unprecedented Tory campaign of dark ads was particularly bad because they refused to provide copies of their adverts to the electoral authorities.

It just goes to show what a pack of absolute hypocrites the Tories are that they just spent £millions pushing the most extreme social media smear campaign in UK general election history, but because it failed and people chose to share genuinely viral content rather than Tory smear jobs, they suddenly want impose a clamp down on social media free speech.

The Tories are so terrified that ordinary people were sharing "the wrong content" that they want to censor what we can say and share on social media.

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Framing the debate

The mainstream media have made Diane Abbott getting her numbers in a muddle their lead political story of the day. Even the evening news shows are running with it as if nothing else has happened in the day.

It's understandable that it would get coverage, it was a total mid fart from someone who should have known better, but all the fuss about Abbott's mind-fart displaced much more sinister and downright dishonest stories.

Theresa May

Just for comparison have you seen any mainstream media coverage of Theresa May's political minders locking a load of journalists into a room today so that they couldn't invade her Tory "safe space" with their awkward questions and journalistic scrutiny?

Did the mainstream media tell you about the fact that Theresa May's minders refused to allow the media to film or photograph her replies to their pre-approved questions (which turned out to be yet more evasive repetition of her election sound bites like a broken robot) in case she was filmed making another gaffe like the one where she couldn't even remember the name of the town she was visiting the other day.

This happened on the same day as Diane Abbott's mind-fart, but apparently this kind of despotic control-freakery from Theresa May and her minders is so normal it's not worth covering at all.

In the grand scheme of things do you think that getting your minders to lock a load of journalists in a room to hide you from journalistic scrutiny is better or worse than getting your numbers in a muddle then correcting yourself later?

Richard Graham

Or how about the lack of mainstream media coverage of the Tory MP Richard Graham who publicly lied that there are some permanent degenerative diseases that "get better" on the Victoria Derbyshire show, then refused, point blank, to back up his assertion that permanent degenerative diseases "get better" with a single example.

So we have a Labour Party politician who got her numbers in a muddle over a good policy to lower crime by reversing the Tories' agenda of imposing the most extreme cuts in policing levels since records began.

She gets ridiculed and dragged over the coals as the number one item on several news channels despite the fact it was a mistake that she apologised for and corrected later... but a Tory MP openly and brazenly lying about permanent degenerative diseases getting better gets no headlines at all.

In the grand scheme of things do you think that openly lying that permanent degenerative diseases "get better" then refusing to back up your assertion with a single example is better or worse than getting your numbers in a muddle and then correcting yourself later?

Framing the debate

This disparity between the way the mainstream media holds opposition mistakes up to scrutiny and the way they wilfully overlook the worryingly autocratic tendencies and outright unforgivable lies of the ruling party is why the Tories are almost certainly going to win the next election.

The Tories are almost certainly going to win because the vast majority of the mainstream media are intent on framing the news in a way that always holds the opposition to account a lot more vigorously for mistakes than it ever holds the government to account for the dictatorial control-freakery of their leader, the outright unforgivable lies of their politicians, or their utterly lamentable track record in government.

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Theresa May's visit to Cornwall

Theresa May is terrified of scrutiny so she's following a strategy of conducting her general election campaign from a succession of Tory safe spaces where the public are excluded and the ability of the press to hold her to account is severely restricted by her minders.

On her visit to a factory in Helston in Cornwall the press were banned from filming her arrival and departure (in case any protesters turned up like they have at other campaign events) and they spent most of her actual visit locked in a room.

The local press were eventually released and allowed to ask questions, but only two pre-approved ones each.

Tory control over Theresa May's safe spaces has got ever more extreme through the first two weeks of the election campaign.

The door that local press were locked behind in order to preserve
Theresa May's safe space (picture courtesy of Cornwall Live)

Following on from the excruciating blunder where she was filmed failing to remember the name of the place she was visiting and calling it "this particular town" the clampdown has been intensified. Members of the press are now being banned from filming or photographing Theresa May's replies evasive non-answers to the pre-approved questions her minders let them ask.

Cornwall is one of the poorest regions in the entire United Kingdom, but for some inexplicable reason the people decided to elect Tories in all six of their parliamentary seats.

Several other Tory dominated regions like the Home Counties and rural Yorkshire have avoided the worst of the Tory cuts because the Tories have systematically targeted the most savage local government cuts at the poorest regions, whilst actually handing funding increases to some leafy Tory councils!

Despite their craven loyalty to the Tories, Cornwall has been hit with massive funding cuts meaning Cornwall Council has suffered a £194 million funding deficit since 2013.

Theresa May's contemptuous response to questions about this deficit was to evasively resort to more robotic repetition of her "strong and stable leadership" mantra.

This kind of evasive non-answer demonstrates absolute Tory contempt for the people of Cornwall, and her minders' attempts to control and restrict what the media could report about her visit demonstrates a severe right-wing authoritarian streak that is terribly incompatible with traditional liberal British values.

Theresa May's strategy of campaigning in ruthlessly enforced Tory safe spaces has already earned her the nickname Kim Jong May, but will the public wake up to the fact that she's behaving like a petty little tyrant who is smugly confident of winning a thumping majority and absolute power to continue chaotically making things up as she goes along?

Probably not if the mainstream media insist on reporting the slick propaganda from within her safe spaces, and not the fact that the public have been excluded, or that the local press spent most of the visit locked in a room by Theresa May's minders.

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She knows it's an act of self-harm, but she's doing it anyway

Theresa May knows that triggering Article 50 will be a massive act of social and economic self-harm.

May didn't campaign much during the EU referendum debate because she knew that hanging onto one of the big offices of state, keeping her head down and biding her time was the best strategy for becoming Prime Minister. However on the rare occasions she did bother to campaign she was absolutely clear about how harmful quitting the EU would be.

Here's what she told a secret meeting of Goldman Sachs bankers just weeks before the EU referendum:

"I think the economic arguments are clear. I think being part of a 500-million population trading bloc is significant for us. I think, as I was saying to you a little earlier, that one of the issues is that a lot of people will invest here in the UK because it is the UK in Europe ... If we were not in Europe, I think there would be firms and companies who would be looking to say, do they need to develop a mainland Europe presence rather than a UK presence? So I think there are definite benefits for us in economic terms."

And here are a few extracts from her speech to parliament in April 2016:

"Remaining a member of the European Union means we will be more secure from crime and terrorism"

"If Brexit isn’t fatal to the European Union, we might find that it is fatal to the Union with Scotland ... I do not want the people of Scotland to think that English Eurosceptics put their dislike of Brussels ahead of our bond with Edinburgh and Glasgow."

"If we do vote to leave the European Union ... we risk going backwards when it comes to international trade."

"The reality is that we do not know on what terms we would win access to the single market. We do know that in a negotiation we would need to make concessions in order to access it, and those concessions could well be about accepting EU regulations, over which we would have no say, making financial contributions, just as we do now, accepting free movement rules, just as we do now, or quite possibly all three combined. It is not clear why other EU member states would give Britain a better deal than they themselves enjoy."

"With no agreement, we know that WTO rules would oblige the EU to charge ten per cent tariffs on UK car exports, in line with the tariffs they impose on Japan and the United States. They would be required to do the same for all other goods upon which they impose tariffs. Not all of these tariffs are as high as ten per cent, but some are considerably higher."

Even though Theresa May didn't bother to campaign very hard at all, the few things she did bother to say indicated that she thought that quitting the EU would be an act of social and economic self-harm.

This brings us to the question of why she's doing it if she knows it's such a bad idea. In my view the answer is the same as to the question of why she didn't bother to campaign properly during the referendum debate: She's putting her own self-interest above what she knows is best for the nation.

If she cared more about the best interests of the nation instead of her own political self-interest she would have campaigned against Brexit with everything she had instead of taking a back seat and waiting for the opportunity to become Prime Minister.

If she cared about the best interests of the nation instead of hanging onto political power, she'd make sure that the British people had a say on whether they accept whatever the outcome of the Brexit negotiations are, but she's determined to use her position of power to decide the future of the UK for herself. She wants to act as an autocrat and choose between a hard Brexit (without full access to the Single Market) or a catastrophic "no deal" nuclear Brexit, and give neither the British people nor parliament a proper say on what she decides.

One of the main reasons she feels comfortable committing this act of national self-harm is that she knows that she's insulated from the economic consequences. She will always have her parliamentary pension to fall back on, and no doubt she'll follow other former Prime Ministers like Tony Blair and David Cameron into cushy corporate directorships and onto the lucrative public speaking circuit. She knows that the people who will suffer the consequences of her actions will be the ordinary plebs who work in jobs like manufacturing or live in EU dependent areas like Cornwall or the north east of England.

Theresa May doesn't care about the best interests of the nation; she doesn't care about giving the public any kind of democratic say on whether they agree with the Brexit terms she comes up with; and she doesn't care that it will be other people who suffer the appalling consequences of her actions.

All Theresa May cares about is her own self-interest and hanging on to the position of power that she cunningly worked herself into, and that's why she's triggering Article 50 even though she knows it will go down as one of the most notorious acts of social and economic self-harm in the history of the United Kingdom.

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The abusive Tory relationship with Cornwall

The Labour Party legend and founder of the NHS Nye Beven once described the art of Conservative politics as wealth persuading poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power. There's no better example of poor people handing political power to wealthy out-of-touch Tories than Cornwall.

Cornwall has the highest rate of poverty in England (in fact it's classed as the second poorest region in the whole of northern Europe behind only the West of Wales), yet somehow every single one of the six MPs in Cornwall belongs to the Tory party.

Not only do people from the poorest region in England vote for the party of wealth and privilege, they also voted massively in favour of Brexit and giving the Tories free rein to drastically reform the United Kingdom in favour of multinational corporations, landed gentry and the super-rich.

The mystery of why Cornwall is populated by so many forelock-tugging Tory voters is one of the biggest puzzles in British politics. How can so many poor people be so politically naive that they imagine that the party of wealth and privilege is ever going to represent their interests?

It's absolutely clear that the Tory party has no intention whatever of rewarding the Cornish people for their misplaced loyalty, in fact the Tories are intent on administering a savage economic punishment to the Cornish serfs so that there's no danger of them ever getting ideas above their lowly station.

Cornwall already looks set to lose the £60 million per year in funding they get through the EU when Brexit goes ahead, and now the Tories have offered Cornwall a paltry £18 million in Growth Deal funds, which is 14% of the £127 million in funding that Cornwall applied for.

Despite the grovelling loyalty of so many Cornish Tory voters, the Tory party are totally content for Cornwall to remain an under-developed backwater and one of the poorest regions the whole of northern Europe.

The Tory relationship with Cornwall is like a cruel and merciless 19th Century lord of the manner who believes that administering savage beatings and harsh pay cuts are the best methods of keeping his servants in line. It doesn't matter how much the servants doff their caps, bow and scrape or tug their forelocks, their cruel lord and his obnoxious family members will always rigidly adhere to the policy that the only way to instil discipline in the servant class is through a draconian regime of impoverishment and severe beatings.

The really sad thing for Cornwall is that if it wasn't obvious that voting Tory is a counter-productive strategy for England's poorest region; and it wasn't obvious that voting out of the EU when your region benefits so significantly from EU Structural Adjustment Funds - then it's clearly not going to be obvious to the Tory voters of Cornwall that they're getting absolutely shafted by a party that has always worked relentlessly to protect the interests of the rich and powerful at the expense of everyone else.

Cornwall is pretty much the perfect example of people being content with their servitude. It doesn't matter how much damage the hard-right Tories do to Cornwall, the Cornish people seem intent on electing ever more of them, and then signing ludicrous blank contracts with the Tories that allow them to just make things up as they go along to suit the interests of their wealthy financial backers.

Some people just love their abusers.

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The Tory plot to lock themselves into power forever

The Tory Party are planning to rig the Westminster electoral system in an attempt to lock themselves into power forever. There's no other way of putting it. All of the commonly attempted Tory justifications for the boundary changes are woeful at best. In this article I'm going to detail just a few of the main objections.

The House of Lords

During his six years in power David Cameron stuffed an additional 213 unelected peers into the House of Lords, many of them major Tory party donors and his own personal cronies (his hairdresser, Samantha Cameron's stylist ...). In fact he stuffed unelected peers into the House of Lords at a faster rate than any Prime Minister in history.

The idea that it's necessary to cut the number of elected MPs by 50 in order to "reduce the cost of politics" is an extraordinary attempted justification when the Tories have just added over 200 politicians to the unelected £300 per day for life club. As aresult of all of this crony-stuffing the House of Lords is now the second biggest legislative chamber in the entire world (second only to China) and by far the biggest unelected legislative body on the planet!

What contempt the Tories must have for the electorate to claim that their boundary changes are motivated by a desire to reduce the cost of doing politics when they've spent the last six years stuffing the unelected and already hopelessly bloated House of Lords full of their cronies.

One of the first priorities for any party that is genuinely serious about reducing the cost of politics would be the democratisation of the House of Lords and its reduction in size to a much more manageable level.

The (elected) upper chambers in other large developed nations have far fewer members.

Canada (population 36.2 million): Senate 105 elected members
Spain (population 46.4 million): Senate: 266 elected members
Italy (population: 60.7 million): Senate: 315 elected members
France (population: 66.7 million): Senate: 348 elected members
Germany (population: 82.2 million): Bundesrat: 69 elected members
Japan (population: 127.1 million): House of Councillors: 242 elected members
United States (population: 324.1 million): Senate: 100 elected members

UK (population: 65.1 million): House of Lords: 807 unelected members

It's absolutely clear from these figures that the unelected House of Lords is massively bloated in comparison to other developed nations. If it was democratised and the number of members halved, it would still be significantly bigger than any comparable upper chamber in the developed world.

The English democratic deficit

Devolution for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland has led to an appalling constitutional mess where residents of these nations have proportionally elected parliaments, while all of the English regions outside of London (which has its own proportionally elected assembly) have none.

The English regions should be given a referendum on whether they want regional autonomy and their own parliament (like London) or whether they want to be part of a wider English parliament. Regional autonomy could work well for big regions like Yorkshire (which has a similar size population and economy to Scotland) and also for smaller regions like Cornwall (which has its own unique cultural identity and language). Other areas might prefer to be part of a wider parliament of the English regions.

It's completely unacceptable that residents of the English regions continue to be treated as second class citizens of the UK with no proportionally elected parliament like residents of Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and London.

Any attempt to define the Tory electoral boundary changes in terms of "fairness" is absolutely absurd when no effort is being made to address the English democratic deficit.

The incomplete voting register

Another factor that makes the proposed Tory boundary changes incredibly unfair is the way they have decided to use an incomplete voting register to base the new constituency sizes on.

It's bad enough redrawing constituencies in line with the number of registered voters instead of the actual population of the areas, but using an out-of-date register to make the calculations with is utterly ridiculous.

The Tory decision to base the rejigged boundaries on the electoral register in December 2015 (just after they threw millions of people off it by introducing individual registration) is transparently unfair when it's now clear that two million people have joined the electoral register since (presumably to vote in the EU referendum).

In many areas there are discrepancies in the tens of thousands between the number of people registered in December 2015 and those registered in June 2016. Lewisham is the worst example with a discrepancy of 31,025 voters, which represents a huge 18.6% change in the registered electorate in the space of half a year.

It's literally impossible for Tories to argue that these boundary changes are being done to "more fairly represent the size of the electorate" unless they cynically ignore the fact that the size and distribution of the registered electorate has changed dramatically since the figures they're basing their changes upon, meaning that they're already terribly outdated.

The power imbalance

Reducing the number of MPs while keeping the number of government ministers the same will obviously reduce the ability of parliament to hold the government to account, because there will be fewer non-ministers to scrutinise all of the legislation.

This problem of reduced accountability will be exacerbated by the fact that each MP will experience an average 8.3% increase in their constituency workload on top of the fact that there will be fewer MPs to hold the government to account.

The UK political system is already terribly over-centralised, with the Prime Minister and their cabinet members operating without proper scrutiny, accountability or censure. A reduction in the number of elected MPs would only make this situation much worse.

A growing population and a shrinking parliament?

The number of MPs in Westminster has fluctuated slightly over the years, but the last time the number of MPs went below 615 was the 18th Century. The UK has had well over 600 MPs ever since 1801, with the absolute low point since then coming between 1922 and 1945 when the number was set at 615 (just after independence for the Republic of Ireland).

A comparison between the number of MPs and the population of the United Kingdom reveals that the Tory plan to reduce the number of MPs will leave the UK with by far it's worst level of political representation.

The absurd 5% threshold

Nobody objects to the principle that constituencies should be of more-or-less the same size, but in setting the threshold at just 5% the Tories are ensuring that there will need to be a costly and disruptive set of boundary changes after every election.

If the threshold was set at 5% of the actual population of the areas then changes in population dynamics would necessitate regular boundary changes, but setting it at 5% of the registered electorate makes it even more messy, because (as the situation in Hackney proves) the number of registered voters can fluctuate wildly..

This is yet another example of the Tories "saving money" narrative failing to make sense. If they were really concerned about saving money, they wouldn't have set their arbitrary limit so low and created the need for a costly set of constituency tampering after every single election.

Legitimacy

An awful lot of people seem to have forgotten that over two dozen Tory MPs stand accused of cheating their way to victory at the 2015 General Election by breaking the election spending limits in marginal constituencies. The Tories only have a tiny majority in parliament, and if these boundary changes are enforced it will be through the backing of these MPs who financially doped their way into parliament in the first place.

Fair Votes

If there is one flaw in the Westminster electoral system it's not that there are "too many MPs" it's that millions of people are locked out of the political system as a result of the archaic and unrepresentative Westminster voting system.

There are so many flaws with the Westminster voting system it's wise to stick to just four of the main ones in order to stop this article from getting over-long.

Safe seats

The current Westminster voting system ensures that there are hundreds of "safe seats" where the incumbent party could put up a severed pig's head with their rosette on it and romp to a landslide victory.

The existence of safe seats means that there are an awful lot of extremely complacent MPs in parliament who think they can get away with pretty much anything, safe in the knowledge that their place in parliament is assured by the tribalistic attitudes of their constituents.

One of the benefits of a multi-member proportional election system is that it could pit members of the same party against one another, meaning only the ones who best serve their electorate would be guaranteed a seat.

Disproportionality

The 2015 General Election was staggeringly disproportional. The two new contenders (UKIP and the Green Party) polled over 5 million votes between them but ended up with just two of the 650 MPs. In return for 16.4% of the vote, these parties ended up with just 0.3% of the MPs!

If you add the Liberal Democrats into the mix, UKIP, the Lib-Dems and the Green Party collected 25.3% of the votes between them and got 10 MPs. Labour got 30.4% of the vote and 232 MPs and the Tories got 36.9% of the vote and 330 of the MPs (more than half of them).

If any party is serious about "fairness" they wouldn't be tinkering with the number of MPs, they'd be ensuring that the smaller parties get a fairer representation of the MPs.

Apathy
A system that traps millions of people in "safe seats" and massively discriminates against the smaller parties is one of the fundamental drivers of political apathy. If people thought that their vote actually counted for anything, they'd be far more likely to actually get out and vote. 

Non-representation

One of the quirks of the current Westminster voting system is that the vast majority of MPs end up getting elected with less than 50% of the vote, meaning that the vast majority of voters in their constituencies actually voted against them.

The introduction of larger multi-member constituencies would put an end to this farce by ensuring that people have numerous local MPs to turn to. It's funny how Tories always harp on about competition being the driver of efficiency and good performance, but when it comes to competition between local MPs they're suddenly ever so keen to keep hold of their cosy constituency monopolies.

Imagine if you lived in a bigger constituency with six local MPs. Maybe two Tories, two Labour an Lib-Dem and a Green. You could turn to any of them with your issue. Don't you think the rivalry would give the various MPs a very strong incentive to provide the best level of service possible to people like you?

Conclusion
If the Tories were honestly committed to providing a more representative political system (rather than a means of rigging the boundaries to lock themselves into power forever), then the first thing on the list would have to be a fair voting system. 

The Tory rhetoric simply doesn't match their proposals. If they cared about the cost of politics they'd address the bloated unelected House of Lords, not trim down the size of the elected House of Commons. And if they cared about fairness then they'd introduce fair votes and put an end to the English democratic deficit.

They don't actually give a stuff about the cost of politics or fairness. All they're interested in is rigging the system to their own advantage by abolishing a load of mainly Labour constituencies in the elected chamber whilst simultaneously stuffing the unelected House of Lords with a load of Tory cronies.

Sign the petition

Stop the boundaries changes - on the official government petition site.

 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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Why do turkeys vote for Christmas?

The North East, Cornwall and the Welsh valleys voted overwhelmingly in favour of Brexit. These are the poorest regions in Britain, and as such have been the beneficiaries of huge amounts of EU funding through the EU Structural Investment Fund.

The EU identified West Wales and the valleys region as the poorest in the whole of North West Europe, and then used the Structural Adjustment Fund to assign the area a whopping £1.8 billion to finance infrastructure improvements, new facilities and improved services in an attempt to revitalise the economy and attract businesses investment, yet the people of Ebbw Vale voted 62% in favour of Brexit, the highest leave vote in the whole of Wales.

The North East and Cornwall have also benefited enormously from the EU Structural Adjustment Fund, yet there too people flocked to the polling stations to vote to have these funds cut off.

As a result of the vote for Brexit the Tory government is due to lurch even further rightwards from the austerity fetishist, NHS wrecking, local authority starving, education system vandalising, upwards wealth distributing, privatise everything ideological extremism of the last six years.

The idea that an even more radically right-wing "leave it to market forces" Tory government is going to decide to replicate the EU funding to these deprived regions rather than distribute the cash towards corporations and the super-wealthy minority who make up the vast majority of their party donors is so utterly delusional that surely nobody could believe it.

The Tories have spent the last six years imposing such severe cuts to local authority funding that even David Cameron's local council were reduced to pleading with him to consider the damage he's doing. Surely it should be common knowledge that the Tories have reserved all of their harshest local authority cuts for the poorest and most deprived areas in the UK? If the much less severe cuts to Tory councils has them squealing for mercy, just imagine how bad the significantly more brutal cuts are in the most deprived regions of the UK.

The Tories knew that Brexit was going to lead to severe economic turmoil and another gaping hole in their budget, but Iain Duncan Smith assured us that several more years of savage Tory austerity would be "a price worth paying" to achieve Brexit. We all know why he thought it was a reasonable price to pay; he liked the price because it's not going to be paid by people like him, it's going to be paid by the sick and disabled, the working poor and people in the poorest areas of Britain who will see even more cuts to their local services that have already been stripped down to the bones after six years of malicious Tory cuts.

It's hard to fathom the thinking of people who have just voted to turn off the supply of EU funding to their regions, and subject themselves and their communities, and the rest of us an even more brutally right-wing Tories.

It looks an awful lot like turkeys voting for Christmas, and it would be easy to dismiss Brexit voters in the poorest areas as merely being hopelessly gullible tabloid reading idiots who let a bunch of psychopathic right-wing press barons who don't even live or pay tax in Britain (Rupert Murdoch, Jonathan Harmsworth, the Barclay brothers) convince them to vote against their own economic interests. It would be easy to say that these people are stupid as hell and thoroughly deserving of what's coming to them, but it wouldn't be useful.

The huge groundswell of support for Brexit in these deprived areas is undeniably a shocking display of economic self-harm, and it's easy to glibly attribute it to stupidity, but it's clearly no coincidence that so many of the poorest areas of all were also the ones that voted the most strongly for Brexit. Something other than stupidity drove these people to act in this way, and desperation and unfocused anger look like likely candidates.

The hard-right economic dogma that every Westminster government since 1979 has subscribed to has left these areas rotting at the margins. For every £1 of infrastructure spending per person in the north east, London gets £24. As vital as the EU Structural Adjustment Fund cash has been to Britain's most deprived areas, it's still nowhere near enough to make up for epic disparities like that.

After six years of brutal Tory austerity, much of it deliberately targeted at the poorest areas of the country, it's no wonder that these places were full of people who were absolutely livid with the status quo, and when, for once in their life they were given an opportunity to vote on something that actually mattered, they lashed out at David Cameron and George Osborne.

The Labour Leave movement fed into this anger by deliberately casting the referendum as an opportunity to punish David Cameron and George Osborne (see image), but it's now become undeniably clear that Labour Leave was completely funded by hard-right Tories, so this ostensibly left-wing "give the Tory toffs a kicking" propaganda was actually paid for by a different, even more rabidly right-wing bunch of Tories seeking to steal Cameron's place at the top table.

The Guardian wrote an article about how Ebbw Vale ended up voting to turn their noses up at hundreds of millions of pounds of EU funding, and one of the guys they interviewed gloried in the fact that "David Cameron got a good kicking" as if seeing a guy who is set to remain a multi-millionaire toff for the rest of his life forced to resign a few years earlier than he'd planned to, is somehow adequate compensation for the fact that his community is now going to be so much worse off.

I guess the conclusion is that when people allow unfocused anger to dictate their actions they can end up making awful decisions.

It really didn't take much mental effort to figure out that the Vote Leave campaign was founded on blatant lies, immigration fearmongering, false promises and the strategy of presenting the referendum decision as a "simple problem - simple solution" choice, when it was actually the most complex multi-layered consideration anyone in the UK (outside of Scotland) has been presented with in decades.

Apparently a lot of people just wanted to lash out at the establishment powers that had spent the last four decades grinding their communities into the dirt, and they didn't give much thought to the actual consequences of their votes would be.

I'm not tempted to gloat at the stupidity of "Turkeys voting for Christmas", because I'm all too aware that the consequences are going to be appalling for an awful lot of people. Many of the wealthier, more highly educated people who voted Remain will no doubt be insulated from the worst of it by virtue of the fact that they're not the traditional victims of Tory ideology. And many of the poorer, less educated people who voted for Brexit will undoubtedly suffer the worst of the Tory ideological rampage that is set to come. But there's no justice in that because there is no justification for hard-right Tory fanaticism, even if the victims brought it upon themselves because they allowed themselves to be misdirected into angrily lashing out in the wrong direction.

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Britain First and their exceptionally ignorant brand of nationalism

The Britain First Facebook page is an absolute abomination, but what is worse than the extremist content of the page itself is that hundreds of thousands of people have brought into their vile brand of ignorant extreme-right nationalism.

Of course many people have been duped into following their page via "honey trap" images, (the most famous example being the picture of the abused dog they used to raise funds for their party, without actually bothering to inform donors that they were giving money to a political party, let alone an extreme-right one), but there are plenty who willingly buy into the ignorant Britain First brand of nationalism too.

In the week before the Scottish independence referendum I decided to take a quick look at the Britain First page to see what their stance is. Unsurprisingly they are strongly opposed to Scottish independence, and their page is littered with appeals to "save the Union". I'm pretty sure that the majority of right thinking Scots would be absolutely disgusted by the racist BNP-splinter group that is Britain First, and that these appeals to "stay with us" from from a fascist organisation would have the opposite effect, and send Scottish people rushing to the polls to vote Yes.

As I was scrolling through Britain First's output, I came across a quite extraordinary image, one that clashes with their professed love for Scotland in a way that should cause disorientating bouts of cognitive dissonance for anyone with a coherent worldview (one in which mutually contradictory ideas are not easily compatible). Not only does the image clash terribly with their professed love of Scotland, it is also the perfect illustration of nationalist sentiments built on foundations of sheer ignorance (to see my annotated version of this image scroll down to the end of this article).

The image is one of those "share if you agree" Facebook memes, which had been shared by almost 6,000 people, and liked by over 10,000. The sentiments the image expects us to agree with are quite extraordinary, yet all of these people have explicitly agreed with them, spreading the work of a racist hate group in the process, without apparently giving the slightest effort to apply their critical judgement first. I'll detail and respond to the three claims made by the image in the following sections.

Claim 1: "In Briton we have room for only one flag, the British flag"

I'll quickly gloss over the fact that the spelling "Briton" is usually used to denote a resident of Britain, rather than to denote the island itself, and that this island of "Briton" must be an exceptionally small island indeed if it only contains sufficient physical space for a single flag. I'm glossing over the incredibly poor wording because as funny as it is, the feeble standard of literacy of the idiot who wrote it is not the issue. The issue is the ludicrousness of the actual sentiment.

The sentiment that the union flag is the only acceptable flag in Britain is completely absurd. Scotland, Wales and England are separate countries, each with their own flag. Anyone who understands the composition of the Union flag should know that it's a combination of the cross of St George (England), the saltire of St Andrew (Scotland) and the saltire of St Patrick (Ireland). So to claim that it is the only legitimate flag is to display complete ignorance of what the flag actually means.

I'm pretty sure that it's only the most nationalist of Scots and Welsh who would take offence at the sight of the Union flag. However most Welsh and Scottish people would take exception to the implicit claim that the Union flag is the only legitimate flag in great Britain, and that the Welsh and Scottish flags are unacceptable abominations.

On the island of Great Britain there is clearly more than one national flag, but then there are also a load of regional flags, the flag of St Piran (Cornwall), the white rose (Yorkshire), the red rose (Lancashire) and the three swords (Essex) are among the most well known of dozens. Then several cities (London, Edinburgh, Durham, Birmingham ...) have their own flags too.

The idea that the island of Great Britain is united under one single flag, and that all other flags are abominations is completely ridiculous, yet thousands of people have explicitly expressed their agreement with this sentiment by sharing the image.

Claim 2: "We have room for only one language, the English language"

This claim is even more extraordinary than the one about the flags.

The first thing to note about the English language is that it is one of the most etymologically mixed languages in the world. The main influences include the Germanic languages of the Anglo Saxons, Scandinavian from the Vikings, French from the Normans, the Latin of the Catholic church, Greek derived words used by the scientific community and more recent imports from the many outposts of the British empire (especially India, South Africa and the West Indies).

One thing that it is extremely important not to forget is the influence of the Celtic languages, which all predate English, and are still spoken today in Scotland, Wales and Cornwall.
The attempted claim that "English is the only legitimate language of Great Britain" is a brilliant example of hopelessly ignorant nationalism. Anyone who explicitly agrees with such a sentiment is betraying their ignorance of the origins of the very language that they speak, and also their ignorance of the fact that the Celtic peoples still speak their native languages, despite foreigners turning up here for Millennia imposing their own cultures and languages on the island of Great Britain.

The idea that English is the only legitimate language of Great Britain is offensively ignorant, yet thousands of people have implicitly endorsed it by sharing the image.

Claim 3: "We have room for one sole loyalty and that is to British traditions and the British way of life"

The mindless ignorance necessary to explicitly support such a statement is terrifying. In my view one of the great things about Britain is that we have freedom of thought and freedom of expression. If I want to say that the Royal family are an expensive anachronism and should be abolished, I have the right to say so, but nobody is forced to agree with me. If these ignorant buffoons want to say that "Briton" only has one flag and one language, they're free to do so, but again, nobody is forced to agree with them.

These people are completely out of touch with reality if they think there's just one thing that British people are loyal to. A look at the reality of the UK tells us something completely different. Thankfully we have religious freedom in Britain so people are completely free to be loyal to whichever god(s) they like, or none. Some people in Britain are loyal to their friends and family, others are loyal to their local communities. Some are loyal to particular charities and causes, others to particular football teams or other sports clubs. Some are loyal to lofty ideas and principles and others are loyal only to the pursuit of material wealth.

There are all kinds of different loyalties in the UK, and despite the fact that many choose to pin their loyalty on things that I find repulsive (the royal family, the ridiculous honours system, hierarchical religions, the pursuit of material wealth ...) Britain is undoubtedly a better place for the fact that we are free to choose what we are loyal to.

The appeal to "traditional British values" is another common right-wing tactic. There are all kinds of traditional British values that have fallen badly out of fashion, such as state sponsored piracy, the buying and selling of human beings during the slave trade, the barring of all but the male landed aristocracy from participating in democracy, and the invasion and occupation of other people's countries in order to create the largest empire in the history of humanity.

So since "British values" are so evidently malleable, who is the arbiter of what they are currently? I'd argue the case that a bunch of militant right-wing extremists are just about the last people to lecture anybody on "British values", especially given that one of the established British values since the 1930s has been fighting against right-wing extremism.

From the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 when the working people of London stood in solidarity to give Oswald Mosley and his bunch of black shirted fascists a beating they never recovered from, through the grim fight for survival against European fascism that was the Second World War, even up until the intensely hostile reception given to Nick Griffin when he appeared on Question Time in 2009, one of the most common British values over the last seven decades has been an intense opposition to fascism.

Anyone who believes that there is only one true form of "Britishness" and just one set of "British values" is hopelessly ignorant about the rich, varied and often unsavoury history of this island. Not only are they ignorant of history, they're also just as ignorant of that most important of British values, the freedom to think, speak and behave as one pleases (as long as you're not completely fucking things up for other people by doing it).

Conclusion

The most important conclusion is that there are an awful lot of people out there who are willing to explicitly endorse things without the slightest consideration for the actual meaning of the words they are giving their approval to.

In my view critical thinking skills should be taught in schools, so that the majority of people end up with the cognitive skills to weed out completely ignorant rubbish. However it has suited the interests of the British establishment that the majority of "plebs" are not given training in philosophy, critical thinking, economics or politics during their state education, and that these subjects are reserved for the children of the elite, at fee-paying schools. The danger with this deliberate stupification of the masses - so that they're too dumb to understand that they are being ruthlessly exploited by the privileged establishment class - is that eventually they'll start believing in stuff that is even stupider that the crap that establishment class and the mainstream media have been dripfeeding to them for decades.

As a final observation, I'd like to think that at least a few Scottish people will have taken such offence at the assertion that their flag and their language are illegitimate, that they'll vote for Scottish independence, meaning that the St Andrews cross has to be removed from the union flag. Thus, these rabid, ignorant nationalists wont just be losing their claim to speak for the Scottish part of "British culture" that they deny even exists, they'll also be losing their supposed "one true flag" after it is redesigned without the Scottish element (hopefully to include a Welsh dragon - because dragons' are cool).

 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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