Theresa May is openly taking Tory voters for gullible idiots again

Theresa May has had an awful time defending her party's relationship with British businesses since her Foreign Secretary decided to say "fuck business" in response to the concerns that a shambolic Tory "no deal" flounce out of the EU would leave them with no choice to quit the UK and relocate to the continent.

Jeremy Corbyn raised these concerns at Prime Minister's questions, emphasising the risk Theresa May's chaotic Brexit floundering represents to hundreds of thousands of skilled British workers.

The Tory benches laughed and jeered when Corbyn read out a letter from a worker in the car industry with concerns that his job could disappear if Theresa May allows Jacob Rees-Mogg and the ERG extremists to deliver the ruinous "no deal" catastrophe they're craving (so that they can make a killing buying up distressed British assets on the cheap).

The sound of dozens of privileged Tory MPs laughing and jeering at the concerns of a British worker who is worried about the future of his job is a perfect encapsulation of the absolute contempt that these people have towards ordinary working people.

But things got even worse when Theresa May resorted to the scripted drivel she always spews instead of ever bothering to answer the questions she's asked.

"If he wants to stand up and talking in favourable terms about business he's got a decision to make; he can either back business or he can want to overthrow capitalism. He can't do both" she skwawked.

More idiotic scaremongering rhetoric from Theresa May's scriptwriters.

What's the point of Corbyn proposing to realign Corporation Tax rates with the G7 average if he intends to 'abolish capitalism'?

What's the point of fairly taxing corporations if they don't exist? pic.twitter.com/Rm9mW4SP3o

— Another Angry Voice (@Angry_Voice) June 27, 2018

Presumably the privileged Tory wonk who wrote this riposte thought it was incredibly clever and witty, but the problem of course is that it's yet more contemptuous Tory idiot fodder.

Just consider the 2017 Labour Manifesto, and its commitment to reverse the Tory race to the bottom in order to restore Corporation Tax rates to nearer the G7 average.

What's the point in Corbyn doing this if he actually wants to 'overthrow capitalism' as the Tories accuse him of?

More specifically, what's the point of fairly taxing corporations if they don't exist?

Of course this kind of vapid scaremongering rhetoric plays well with the Tory base, because they're either too hopelessly misinformed to grasp that Corbyn is actually a middle of the road democratic socialist, not an extreme-left bogeyman intent on the destruction of capitalism, or they're well aware that it's utter bullshit but have so little faith in the rest of British society that they're happy to hear scaremongering propaganda gibberish from the Prime Minister because they imagine the rest of us are gullible enough to believe in it.

You'd have to be utterly delusional to imagine that a man who wants to slightly raise Corporation Tax rates (to a level lower than they were under Margaret Thatcher) is some kind of militant intent on completely overthrowing capitalism.

But then you'd have to be severely cognitively challenged in order to see a Prime Minister who allows her Foreign Secretary to go completely unpunished for saying "fuck business" in response to their legitimate concerns as some kind of champion of capitalism.

All in all you'd have to be hopelessly gullible to see the Brextremist-controlled Tories as a business-friendly party, but then by spewing such witless and sub-juvenile political caricatures of her opponent, Theresa May is clearly demonstrating that that's exactly how she sees most Tory voters: Hopelessly gullible dupes who will mindlessly believe whatever ludicrous crap she spouts.

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Want to know why your Council tax is going up again?

If you want to know why your Council Tax bill is going up, but the services your local council provide are worse than they've ever been before, I've got the answer for you.

The reason that councils across the country are increasing Council Tax bills whilst simultaneously cutting what they actually spend on services is that the Tory government have slashed central government funding for local governments by 67% since 2010, and they're still slashing away at the Communities and Local Government budget now.

This sustained Tory attack on local government funding means that councils have way less money to spend on maintaining local infrastructure and services.

• Local councils have far less to spend on waste services, so these ideologically driven Tory cuts are the reason that a huge number of councils have reduced bin collections to fortnightly.

• Local councils have far less to spend on local amenities like libraries, public toilets, leisure centres, and public spaces like parks and indoor markets, so these ideologically driven Tory cuts are the reason that they're being closed down and sold off to property developers.

• Local councils have far less to spend on running their planning departments, so these ideologically driven Tory cuts are the reason that simple planning applications are taking longer than ever to process.

• Local councils have far less to spend on highway maintenance, so these ideologically driven Tory cuts are the reason that our roads are deteriorating so badly.

• Local councils have far less to spend on youth services, so these ideologically driven Tory cuts are the reason that councils up and down the country have cut back on youth clubs andother programmes to keep young people occupied and out of trouble.

• Local councils have far less to spend on social care services for the frail and elderly, so these ideologically driven Tory cuts are the reason that millions of elderly and infirm people are being left with totally inadequate care, meaning they end up in hospitals, which puts a lot more strain on the NHS (which the Tories are also deliberately under-funding).

The infuriating thing is that despite the devastating impact of these ideologically driven Tory cuts going on all around us, our local councils have no choice but to raise Council Tax rates in a desperate attempt to plug a few of the most serious of the gaps.

So where has all the money gone that the Tories have saved by slashing the Communities and Local Government budget to pieces?

While they've been gutting local government budget the Tory government have simultaneously been distributing lavish tax cuts and handouts to corporations and the mega-rich.

They've slashed the top rate of income tax to give an average £100,000 annual tax break to Britain's 13,000 income millionaires, and since 2010 they've cut the corporation tax rate from 28% to just 19% today, (which is by far the lowest in the G7).

Then there's all the handouts the Tories have given to corporations and the rich through ridiculously one-sided outsourcing contracts that cost more to run than they'll ever actually save, rip-off privatisation scams to flog off public property at way below its true market value, and the wholesale give-away of public property to wealthy Tory donors.

So the next time you ask yourself why you're paying way more Council Tax when your local services are worse than they've ever been before ... some smug corporate fat cat somewhere has purchased a brand new luxury yacht to berth in Monaco, or blasted six figures on a classic Aston Martin to add to his already extensive car collection.

Thanks to the Tory ideological obsession with the upwards redistribution of wealth, that's what you're paying for.

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"I'd like to hear an example of a country where Corbyn and McDonnell's ideas have worked"

The bald man in the BBC Question Time audience demanded answers from the Labour shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry, but he wasn't remotely interested in what she had to say, because he'd already diligently rote learned his political opinions from the right-wing media.

When he said "I'd like to hear an example of a country where Corbyn and McDonnell's ideas have worked" you might have imagined that he was interested in listening to the answer, but when Thornberry replied "most of central Europe" and when pressed to name specific countries she said "Germany" and "Sweden" he sneered derisively as if she was the delusional one.

Thornberry's response elicited cackling and sneering from the Tory tribailists in the BBC audience, but that just goes to show how these people have been led like sheep into believing that Jeremy Corbyn is some kind of terrifying left-wing extremist, rather than a centre-left democratic socialist who is proposing economic policies that are perfectly normal across Europe and the rest of the developed world.

Of course there is no country on Earth where a government has come to power and enacted absolutely everything in the Labour Party manifesto, but significant elements of Labour's economic policies are absolutely commonplace across the developed world.

One of Jeremy Corbyn's most prominent headline policies is the abolition of  tuition fees (which should more accurately be described as Aspiration Taxes) and making university education free. University education is free (or very low cost) across most of Europe, including Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and let's not forget Scotland either. If Germany and Scotland can afford to offer free university education, why can't England?

Jeremy Corbyn wants to reverse the extreme Tory cuts to Corporation Tax that have been going on since 2010. He plans to increase the rate for major corporations to 26%, while setting a lower rate of 21% for small corporations. 26% would still be the lowest rate in the G7 advanced economies, which means Corbyn's tax policies are so far from being extreme-left that they're actually more pro-corporate than the USA, France, Germany, Japan, Italy and Canada!

One of Corbyn and McDonnell's most interesting ideas is the establishment of a National Investment Bank in order to fund future infrastructure projects. Other countries that have National Investment Banks/Sovereign Wealth Funds include Norway, Singapore, South Korea, Australia, and the Chinese economic powerhouse actually has several.

The Labour Party Manifesto pledged to renationalise the National Grid. Some might see this as radical leftist extremism, but they'd have to be utterly clueless to have been bamboozled into such a position by the right-wing dominated media, because the United States actually has a network of not-for-profit publicly accountable electricity distribution grids.

Perhaps if you're so rabidly right-wing that you think Texas is an extreme-left state awash with commies and Marxists you might believe that Corbyn's energy policies are extreme-left, or maybe you've got some semblance of a grip on political reality?

Corbyn and McDonnell also want to renationalise the railways. There are several countries in the developed world with national rail companies including France, Norway, Singapore, Hong Kong and Italy. The really interesting thing is that under the Tories' shambolic privatisation agenda these foreign state rail companies are actually running 74% of the franchises on the UK rail network, and the only country that is banned from bidding to run UK rail franchises is the UK itself.

Perhaps a more pertinent question when it comes to national rail networks wouldn't be where else do they have publicly owned railways, but where else have they managed to make such a godawful, inefficient, and ideologically-incoherent mess of their rail network?

Another Labour Manifesto pledge was to bring the Royal Mail back under public ownership. Other countries with national mail systems include Canada, Switzerland, Belgium, and Finland.

Then there's the policy of reversing the Tory strategy of carving up the NHS and distributing the pieces to profiteering corporations (including corporations run by major Tory party donors). You don't have to look very far for an example of a successful not-for-profit public health system. The NHS itself was doing brilliantly before the Tories set about vandalising it. The NHS was ranked as the most efficient health service in the world, and had the highest approval ratings ever, then the Tories imposed huge austerity cuts and imposed a massive top down reorganisation called the 2012 Health and Social Care Act. Since then waiting times have skyrocketed, huge numbers of A&E units, maternity wards and walk in centres have been axed (often against furious local opposition), NHS staff are overworked, underpaid and demoralised  and huge numbers of people are dying as a consequence.

The truth is that we don't have to look abroad for evidence that Labour's policies work, we just have to look at the devastating ideological vandalism the Tories are inflicting on the NHS, and recognise that Labour have pledged to stop the vandalism and set about reversing the damage.

The problem of course is that vast numbers of people are so shockingly gullible that they simply believe what the mainstream media tell them about Jeremy Corbyn being some kind of terrifying leftist bogeyman with bonkers extreme-left policies. They're unwilling to even consider the fact that most of Corbyn's headline economic policies are commonplace across the developed world, and in fact it's radically right-wing Tory policies like handing control of state schools to private sector pseudo-charities, privatising police services, and vandalising the health system that are desperately unpopular, and pretty bloody rare in successful developed economies.

So the big question has to be how do we reach out to people who are so damned gullible that they uncritically rote learn the mainstream media propaganda about Jeremy Corbyn being an extreme-left bogeyman, and sneer derisively when anyone points out the fact that Corbyn's policies are absolutely commonplace across the developed world while the Tories are the ideological extremists?

How do we reach out to people who prefer to believe in mainstream media lies than in observable reality?

 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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Isn't it incredible what right-wing Brexiteers are trying to pass off as "the will of the people"?

Had the Brexit campaigners actually ever come up with a serious policy document outlining their plans for how to manage the Brexit transition period, and a proposal for what post-Brexit Britain was to look like, I would have given the idea of quitting the EU some serious consideration. But since there was no policy document, nor any outline of realistic objectives, it was beyond obvious that the whole thing would turn into an extraordinarily damaging let's make it up as we go along Tory administered farce.

And just look at the state of it now:

• We've passed the halfway point between the Brexit vote and the deadline of March 29th 2019, we're still completely stalled on the very first phase of the negotiations!

• Theresa May made the catastrophic decision to trigger Article 50 before her ministers even really knew what they wanted out of Brexit, then wasted two months on her spectacularly misjudged vanity election, and even now the Tory bickering is still going on. Calling a referendum with no contingency plan for what to do if people voted for Brexit was bad enough, but setting the clock ticking on the exit process before they developed a coherent plan was even more reckless.

• The fanatical hard-right faction of the Tory party are propagandising ever more loudly for a ruinous "no deal" flounce out of Europe, and they're continuing to drag their weak and directionless leader ever closer to the economic cliff edge. 

• Tories like Liam Fox are proposing reductions in UK consumer protections and product standards as part of a UK-US trade deal. Any such reductions would render access to the Single Market impossible because continued free trade between the UK and EU would create a gateway for US companies to sneak their inferior products into the European market. 

• The right-wing fringe of the Tory party that are dictating Theresa May's every move are desperate to ensure the most chaotic possible form of Brexit because they know that the ensuing economic disaster will provide rich pickings for their disaster capitalist mates, who will use the post-Brexit economic meltdown to grab £billions in British infrastructure and assets, like vultures stripping the meat off a corpse. 

• The Tories are also determined to use Brexit as an excuse to erode parliamentary sovereignty by shrouding the Brexit process in secrecy, and trying to give themselves the power to rewrite thousands of UK laws with no democratic scrutiny whatever.

• Theresa May's behaviour makes it all too clear that she's powerless to stop the hard-right fanatics in her own party from using Brexit as a convenient Trojan horse to introduce the kinds of anti-worker policies millions of Brexit voters would abhor.

• The more moderate centre-right 'One Nation' type Tories seem entirely unwilling/unable to oppose the anti-democratic Blue-kip takeover of their party.

• Hard right Tories and billionaires like James Dyson are pushing ever harder to use Brexit as an opportunity to trash UK workers' rights and to turn Britain into a huge corporate tax haven with a 0% corporation tax rate.

The extraordinary thing is that the hard-right fringe of the Tory party are still trying to pass off this shambolic lurching towards an economic cliff-edge into a hard-right abyss of disaster capitalism, trashed workers rights, and ever more giveaways to corporations and the mega-rich as the "will of the people".

Hardly any Brexit voter will have voted the way they did because they actually wanted even more exploitation of British workers, even more handouts for corporations and the mega-rich, and a disastrous economic meltdown to make the bankers' crisis look like a picnic in comparison. But the hard-right Brexiteers are still trying to pass off their shambolic scheming as "the will of the people" regardless.

Only a tiny fraction of Leave voters must have envisioned a Brexit that involved gutting the value of the pound; tanking the British economy; allowing vulture capitalists to buy up £billions worth of British infrastructure and assets on the cheap; binning British workers' rights and consumer protections; trashing trading relationships with our European allies; eroding parliamentary sovereignty; scrapping British people's rights to live/work/study/retire in any of 31 other European countries; and reducing the British state to grovelling and begging on the world stage for trade deals.

But in a way the hard-right Brexit fanatics are right to continue calling this mess "the will of the people" because millions upon millions of people voted Leave despite the warnings that the Brexiteers had nothing even remotely resembling a coherent Brexit plan, and that a "let's make it up as we go along" Brexit administered by the Tory party would surely end up being an extremely damaging shambles, especially for people like the young, the working poor and the vulnerable.

Brexit voters had absolutely no excuse for not knowing that the Tories have spent the previous six years relentlessly squeezing the poor and ordinary in order to lavish huge tax cuts on corporations and the mega rich.

They must have known that the Tories had overseen the worst slump in the real value of UK workers' wages since records began; slashed in-work benefits for the working poor; massively increased child poverty; lumbered students with vast unpayable debts; attacked workers' rights; savagely mistreated sick and disabled people; devastated public services; and allowed an absolute explosion of exploitative employment practices.

They can't have failed to notice that while the Tories were loading the burden of austerity dogma onto ordinary people, they were simultaneously slashing corporation tax to the lowest level of any advanced economy, lavishing vast bonuses on bankers at loss-making publicly owned banks, selling off swathes of public infrastructure on the cheap to their mega-rich mates, stuffing the unelected House of Lords full of their cronies, and continually cutting taxes for the very richest people in Britain.

There's no way that it's possible to imagine that a political party with a proven track record like that would somehow reverse direction and suddenly decide to manage the Brexit process in the best interests of ordinary British people (rather than on behalf of the tiny mega-rich clique who bankroll their party).

So in a way this absolute farce is "the will of the people", because people were clearly and repeatedly warned that a Tory administered Brexit would surely descend into chaos and Tory fantasies of turning Britain into a hard-right dystopia, but they voted for it anyway.

 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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Centrism is bust

A recent political trend seems to be for comfortably well off people to pine for what they call political centrism. 

In this article I'm going to expose centrism as the busted political myth that is way beyond its sell by date.

Gary Lineker

I quite like the football pundit and crisps-salesman Gary Lineker for the fact that he's been willing to put his head above the parapet to defend refugees and speak out in favour of human rights (provoking tides of right-wing social media abuse in the process), but when it comes to his recent Twitter call for a rejuvenation of centrist politics, he's absolutely wrong because centrism is totally bust.

Anyone else feel politically homeless? Everything seems far right or way left. Something sensibly centrist might appeal?

— Gary Lineker (@GaryLineker) June 29, 2017

In his Tweet and subsequent comments Lineker failed to made it clear what he was arguing for (a Lib-Dem revival, the return of Blairism, a charismatic neoliberal Trojan Horse candidate like Emmanual Macron, something else entirely ...), but he definitely kicked a hornet's nest by saying what he did.

Historical context

The problem for centrism was always the extremely strong right-wing bias of the mainstream media. For the last four decades the billionaire propaganda barons have worked tirelessly to drag the political spectrum ever further towards the fanatical extreme-right. 

Most Tories have gleefully tracked ever further rightwards into the fanatical far-right territory that even Margaret Thatcher would never have tried to get away with (ideologically driven privatisation of the Royal Mail, thousands of publicly funded schools given away for free to unaccountable private sector interests, even vital components of the police service carved up and given away).

From the mid-1990s Labour also tracked hard to the right to chase the ever shifting "centre ground" meaning that they soon ended up occupying right-wing pro-privatisation economic territory that is actually way to the right of the economic stance of the Tory party between the early 1950s and the mid-1970s!

Looking at politics in any kind of sensible historical context makes it clear that Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party are the true centrists because they're trying to push the UK back towards the balance between capitalism and socialism that existed before the long march towards the fanatical hard-right was initiated in 1979, but as far as the bulk of the mainstream media are concerned, anything but adherence to the fanatical hard-right orthodoxy of neoliberalism is extremist thought crime.

What is and isn't "way left"

Jeremy Corbyn's policy of raising corporation tax back up to 26% in order to fund investments in infrastructure ans services isn't way left, unless you're the kind of hard-right Tory fruitcake who thinks that the United States is currently a fanatically left-wing socialist country because their corporation tax rate is more than double the 17% the Tories are planning to reduce the UK rate to, and who thinks Margaret Thatcher was an outright communist because corporation tax was 52% for the first three years of her reign, and never dipped below 34% under her rule.

Wanting British infrastructure and services like the rail network and national grid to be run by the British for the benefit of the British people (rather than being used as cash cows by foreign governments like China, Saudi Arabia, France, the Netherlands, Singapore, Oman, Germany, the UAE & Italy) isn't way left, it's common bloody sense.

Treating access to education as a benefit to the whole of society, rather than a commodity to be sold at the highest possible price so that graduates from English universities don't have to rack up enormous debts that 70% of them will never pay off despite a lifetime opportunity destroying 9% aspiration tax on their disposable income isn't way left, it's perfectly normal in the majority of other European countries (Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Netherlands, Scotland ...).

Wanting to reverse the Tory policy of building the fewest houses since the early 1920s and construct a new wave of affordable social housing in order to make owning a house more than a totally impossible fantasy for millions of under-40s isn't way left, it's the kind of sensible housing policy that has been so sorely lacking for the last four decades.

All Jeremy Corbyn wants to do is reverse some of the worst hard-right ideological vandalism that has been done to the UK since 1979, much of it under the centrist flag of New Labour between 1997 and 2010.

Publicly owned transport networks, postal services and energy distribution grids are commonplace in Europe. Free university education or low, affordable fees are commonplace in Europe. Corporation tax rates significantly higher than Corbyn's proposed 26% rate are commonplace in Europe. Sensible housing policies are commonplace in Europe. Wages that actually rise in real terms rather than shrink are commonplace in Europe.

Jeremy Corbyn isn't proposing anything radically far left, he's proposing policies with wide public appeal that are absolutely normal on the continent.

European context

A look at the fate of other socialist-turned-centrist parties across Europe gives an idea of what could well have lain in store for Labour had they refused to move away from right-wing neoliberal economic dogma and back towards traditional centre-left politics.

Pasok were the most successful party in post-dictatorship Greece having never polled less than 38% until 2011, but they signed their own death warrant when they decided to prop up their pro-austerity conservative rivals in 2012, and by 2015 they'd collapsed to below 5% of the vote, making them the 7th party in the Greek parliament.

In 2012 the Dutch Labour Party formed a centrist coalition with their hard-right conservative rivals and at the next election in 2017 they collapsed from 24.8% of the vote to 5.7%, reducing them from the second biggest party (by a whisker) to the 7th biggest party.

The warning signs are clear that socialist parties that abandon all traces of socialism in favour of pushing hard-right neoliberal dogma under the banner of centrism have no future.

British context

You don't even have to look outside the UK to see the damage that centrism has done to the traditional centre-left. You just have to look at the way the Blairites lost Scotland by pushing Tory-lite centrism onto the Scottish election well past its sell-by date.

Hawking hard-right economic dogma under the banner of centrism was the most popular political position for decades but it's gone badly out of fashion and resulted in Labour losing 40 of their 41 Westminster seats in Scotland.

The neoliberal orthodoxy dressed up as centrism is politically toxic, and everyone bar the Lib-Dems has now cottoned onto this fact.

The Tories have surged off into the more UKIP than UKIP fanatically right-wing ultra-nationalist territory to chase the burgeoning extreme-right demographic, Labour have moved back to their traditional centre-left stance and won back millions of voters in the process, and the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Green Party all sit on the centre-left too.

The only party that hasn't shifted away from the centrist neoliberal orthodoxy are the Lib-Dems, and look at the paltry 7.5% share of the vote they bagged at the 2017 General Election.

If there was a genuine public appetite for centre-right economic policies dressed up as centrism than Ed Miliband would have won the 2015 General Election with Ed Balls' insipid and appallingly uninspiring prescription of "austerity lite".

If there was a genuine public appetite for right-wing economics dressed up as centrism in 2017, then the Lib-Dems would have surged back into contention, but their vote share actually declined even further from what most of us assumed to be their absolute nadir at the 2015 General Election.

Macron

A lot of people seem to imagine that the new French President Emmanuel Macron is some kind of moderate centrist, but the reality is that he's just more of the same neoliberalism dressed up as centrism who got a massive lucky break when his rival for the French Presidency was the Front National extremist Marine Le Pen.

Of course the former investment banker Macron looked like a moderate in comparison to the extreme-right fanaticism of Le Pen and the Front National, but Macron is a pro-corporate, anti-worker neoliberal to the core. 

His success in the lowest turnout French election in history is proof that the French prefer neoliberalism to fascism, but it also needs to be noted that record numbers were so disillusioned by the choice between hard-right and extreme-right that they simply didn't bother to vote at all.

Many British centrists who admire Macron's personality cult seem to be totally unaware that before he established En Marché (reflecting his own initials) he infiltrated the French Socialist party and destroyed it from within by implementing riot-inducing hard-right pro-corporate, anti-worker labour reforms, then walked out of the ruins to form his new centrist political party.

Of course you have to give Macron credit for his absolute audacity, but anyone who sees him as some kind of centre-ground moderate rather than a more of the same adherent of the hard-right neoliberal orthodoxy who rode a tide of political apathy into power is living in a total political fantasy world.

Apathy

One of the key components of centrism is political apathy, on which it thrives. 13 years of Labour Party centrism resulted in the four lowest general election turnouts since universal suffrage (2001, 2005, 2010, 2015) and an ever declining Labour Party share of the vote that only reversed in 2017 after Jeremy Corbyn defined Labour as an actual alternative.

The cause of this centrist apathy is obvious. If the electorate are presented with a choice of more of the same neoliberal orthodoxy under Labour, or another significant lurch to the hard-right under the Tories, millions of people who want an actual alternative to hard-right economics end up not bothering to vote at all.

The centrist myth is dead

Wrapping up hard-right neoliberal economic policies in a load of slick misleading spin and then parading them under the flag of centrism worked a treat for a while (1997 until the global financial crisis) but now that the devastating social and economic consequences of almost four unbroken decades of hard-right economics are becoming clearer and clearer, people are desperate for an actual alternative.

Tony Blair and Nick Clegg were the two UK politicians who made the biggest deals out of being centrists, and look at how they're reviled now for the way they subverted and betrayed the central ideologies of their own parties (democratic socialism & liberalism) in order to hawk hard-right neoliberal dogma.

The only remaining centrists are the people who have done perfectly well out of neoliberalism, financial sector deregulation, handouts for the mega-rich and austerity for the rest of us, housing market chaos, and privatisation mania thanks very much, and don't care about those of us who are faring much worse than they are.

They're alright Jack, so they only really want superficial tinkering to a fundamentally broken system that punishes the poor and ordinary with austerity dogma to fund lavish giveaways for the mega-rich; systematically abuses disabled people in disability denial factories; impoverishes 70% of university students from ordinary backgrounds for their entire working lives; and considers countries like Oman, China, Singapore, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates better custodians of British infrastructure than Britain itself. 

Of course centrists will try to kid anyone who is daft enough to listen to them that they're not fans of the hard-right neoliberal orthodoxy, but the fact that they oppose any real reversal of the four decade long rightward drift is evidence that they're not centre-ground, or progressive, or moderate at all. They just want to tread political water like Blair did, holding position more or less wherever the Tories leave us until whenever the Tories get back in and continue marching the nation towards the fanatical hard-right again.

Centrism doesn't really stand for anything or change anything. It just hopes to win power for power's sake by standing ever so slightly to the left of wherever the Tories are standing, no matter how far to the bonkers hard-right the Tories keep shifting.

Thankfully there is no real public appetite for this kind of deceptive apathy-inducing neoliberal con game any more because people can see through it.

If they want more fanatical hard-right dogma they can vote Tory, if they want a recalibration away from it they can vote Labour, SNP, Plaid Cymru or Green, and if they're genuinely not tired of the centrism con game yet they can do like the vast majority of us didn't and vote for the Lib-Dems. 

 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 "corporations will just run away" is a stupid argument

The narrative that corporations will just up sticks and leave the UK if The Labour Party increase Corporation Tax to 26% (still the lowest in the G7) is preposterous.

Here are five reasons

First - This corporation-flight argument relies on calling 26% "high" when it's actually low.

Second - It assumes that shifting huge businesses between countries is a costless exercise (or at least significantly cheaper than just paying a slightly higher rate of tax on their profits). Just imagine how much it would cost Rolls Royce to relocate their jet engine factory in Derby to another country. Is that really going to end up saving them money? 

Third - It totally ignores the fact that major corporations have not fled countries like the United States, Japan and Germany because of their higher-than-26% Corporation Tax rates (it's almost as if Corporation Tax rate is not the only determining factor in where companies are located isn't it?).

Fourth - It seems to imply that big corporations are a benefit to society, but if they pay such low rates of tax that they don't contribute to the cost of public infrastructure, services, educating their workforce, or paying their workers a high enough wage that they don't end up reliant on social security or charity (Tax Credits, Housing Benefits, food banks ...) ... then they're not beneficial are they? They're leeches.

Fifth - One of the favourite tactics of the low-tax fanatics is repetition of the argument that "the lower the tax rate the higher the tax take". This is wrong on two fundamental levels. It's contradicted by reality because the Corporation Tax take has flat-lined since the Tories slashed Corporation tax from 28% in 2010 to 19% now, even though corporate profits have been rising. Then there's also the fact that this over-simplistic "lower tax = higher tax take" idiom completely breaks down when the rate approaches zero. I've tried to get low tax fanatics to explain how a 0% tax rate would result in the highest possible tax take, but none of them seem prepared to even try and answer.

Labour's plan is actually really good

Labour's Corporation Tax policy is actually pretty good because small and medium sized businesses will pay less corporation tax (21%) than the giant multinationals (26%).

This is a very good policy because it allows small businesses and entrepreneurs to actually compete with the giant corporations (which obviously benefit enormously from the advantage of economies of scale).

Differential corporation tax rates are actually a very good idea from an economic perspective because they support infant industries (some of which become the giants of the future) and because they promote economic competition.

The Tory plan is ridiculous

The Tory policy of reducing the UK Corporation Tax rate even further (to 17% on their current plans or even lower if they do the "no deal" Brexit strop thet're already planning for, then turn the UK into a corporate tax haven) is ideologically driven lunacy.

We've already got the lowest level of Corporation Tax in the G7 and we've also got the lowest level of infrastructure investment in the developed world (at just 1.7% of GDP), yet the Tories are on about cutting Corporation Tax even further, and even further reducing the tax take, so that big corporations have to contribute even less towards the infrastructure and services they rely upon in order to generate their profits.

Cutting the Corporation Tax rate from 28% to 19% has cost the country £9.7 billion per year, and their plan to cut it even further to 17% is set to cost the country another £6.8 billion per year.

The Tories tell us voters that we have to tighten our belts because of austerity, but then they're handing whopping great tax givaways to their corporate mates.

Either we're broke and we can't afford things, or we're awash with enough cash to give loads away. We simply can't be both simultaneously can we?

The choice

One of the biggest significant differences between Labour and the Tories at this election is on economic policy.

Labour wants major corporations and the super-rich to pay their fair share so that the country can invest in infrastructure and innovation for the future prosperity of the country (like Germany does).

The Tories want to continue giving tax giveaways to the corporations and the super-rich and cutting back on infrastructure and innovation spending in order to cover the £70 billion they want to stuff into the pockets of their super-rich mates.

The choice is between a costed Labour manifesto with a strategy of investment for the future (which will benefit us all in the long-term, even the big corporations) or an uncosted Tory manifesto outlining a plan for asset stripping and national decline.

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