The gullibility of some people never ceases to astound.
Even when it's absolutely obvious that a breakaway group of right-wing Labour MPs and Tories has absolutely nothing to do with Brexit, and everything to do with a desperate last-ditch effort to divide the Labour vote and keep the Tory austerity agenda rolling on, huge numbers of people who consider themselves rational, suddenly begin falling over themselves to continue believing the lies and deceptions of a bunch of egotistical fabulists.
If you look at the facts rather than mindlessly and uncritically absorbing mainstream media propaganda tropes, the entire justification for the existence of the Independent Group is obviously a fraud.
The ex-Labour component said they had to quit Labour because the party wasn't doing enough to oppose Brexit, and the ex-Tory component said they had to quit the Tories because they were in hock to Jacob Rees-Mogg's ERG Brextremists and the bigoted DUP sectarians that Theresa May bribed into propping up her shambles of a government.
But the evidence proves this to be absolutely false.
On January 29th Labour tabled a Brexit amendment proposing another referendum as an option in order to prevent Theresa May and the ERG Brextremists driving the UK economy off a cliff, but the three ex-Tory members of the squatter group of MPs all actively sided with Theresa May, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson, and the 10 DUP sectarians to vote against this amendment [source].
If you ever needed absolute proof that opposing Brexit was never their true priority, the fact that these three voted against Labour's amendment 307 aimed at stopping Theresa May's reckless game of brinkmanship with the nation's future less than a month before becoming political squatters is it, isn't it?
And the fact that the ex-Labour component have joined up with these outrageous ex-Tories who less than a month previously were actively siding with the ERG Brextremsists and the DUP to prevent Labour's efforts to oppose Tory Brexit is proof that the priority isn't opposing Brexit for them either.
So if their stated justification is an easily demonstrable lie, what is the ulterior agenda?
Well the ex-Labour squatter MP Gavin Shuker (the one who decided to set their group up as a private company rather than a political party in order to hide who is bankrolling them) said that their primary objective was begging Theresa May to form a pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, anti-welfare coalition with them. "I'm willing to extend confidence and supply to your government so it doesn’t fall over" being his exact words.
The ex-Labour squatter MP Chris Leslie (one of the right-wing idiots who came up with the staggeringly unappealing austerity-lite posturing that trashed Labour's election chances at the 2015 general election) went even further, saying that the group would refuse to do everything in their power to stop the Tory Brexit chaos, because if stopping hard-right Tory Brexit meant giving Jeremy Corbyn another shot at removing Theresa May from power, they'd vote with the Tories to prevent that from happening!
The ex-Tory squatter MP Anna Soubry made things absolutely clear when she used the word "marvellous" to describe the Coalition austerity-enforcing, wage-repressing, public service-wrecking, social security-slashing, privatisation obsessed dogma of the 2010-2015 period that collapsed living standards and created the wave of public fury that drove Brexit narrowly over the winning line in 2016.
Instead of looking at the austerity disease that caused Brexit in the first place, Soubry is pretending to treat the symptoms (while actively voting against another referendum that may have helped to treat the symptoms) and actually continuing to praise the toxic Tory austerity dogma that caused the symptoms in the first place as "marvellous"!
And then Soubry went on the television to argue that she should be allowed to continue actively campaigning for the Tory party and their ruinous austerity dogma from under the umbrella of the Independent Group, and her fellow squatter MP Chuka Umunna actually sat next to her nodding and agreeing that members of his absurd vanity project should be allowed to actively campaign for the Tories and promote Tory austerity dogma!
The obvious problem is that the hopelessly gullible are incredibly difficult to convince, because in order to see the squatter MPs as the cynical opportunists hiding a pro-Tory pro-austerity, anti-worker, anti-investment agenda behind a cloak of Brexit rhetoric, people need to accept that they were foolish to take these politicians from deep within the heart of the Westminster establishment class at their word, and admit that this gullibility is why they got so easily duped.
If we've learned anything from the last few years in politics it's that huge numbers of people would rather ignore the facts and evidence to continue believing absolute nonsense, rather than take the ego hit of accepting they got conned.
So even when we point out that the squatter group's entire justification for existing is a fraud, and that they're just a bunch of austerity fetishists openly scrounging for places in a Tory-led pro-austerity coalition, people's egos won't allow them to admit that they were hopelessly gullible rubes to ever fall for it in the first place.
But then the gossamer-like transparency of their fraud is so fragile that it's enough to make us suspect that Brexit isn't actually the main issue with a lot of these "centrists" at all, and that the actual unstated priority all along has been an absolute desperation to keep the Tories in power so they can carry on brutally punishing the poor and disabled, trashing ordinary workers' wages, gutting public services, and throttling Britain's economic potential with their toxic austerity dogma like they have been doing for the last 9 years.
The Independent Group is not a brave new challenge to the political orthodoxy, it's people from deep within the political orthodoxy desperately hawking "more of the same" under the guise of opposing the hard-right Brexit that several of their group were voting in favour of less than a month previously!
So the only people left promoting these democracy-fearing squatter MPs are either hopelessly gullible idiots who just rote learn and repeat their political opinions without doing even the most basic fact-checking, or cynical and malicious propagandists who are deliberately hiding their pro-Tory pro-austerity agenda behind a crude veneer of anti-Brexit rhetoric.
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.
If you were the kind of person to believe what you read on the front page of the Daily Mail (stop laughing - some people do!) then today you'd be imagining that last night Theresa May engineered some kind of extraordinary political triumph which involved both "uniting her party" and "crushing Corbyn".
The reality of the situation is that Theresa May has pathetically caved in to the most fanatical fringes of the Tory-DUP axis that she cobbled together in order to stay in power after the failure of her 2017 hubris election.
Theresa May's capitulation was so humiliating that she was forced into whipping her MPs to vote against her EU Withdrawal Agreement (by supporting the Brady Amendment) so she can use this self-inflicted defeat to go back to the EU and pathetically beg for changes to the Irish border backstop that they've already categorically ruled out.
This is the deal that Theresa May and the Tory government just spent the last two months repeatedly describing as "the best possible deal", and yet they've voted against it themselves, and this humiliating U-turn is somehow a wonderful "triumph" according to the Daily Mail!
The reason Theresa May and the Tories are behaving in this extraordinary manner is that they know that they can only get their pathetic shambles of a Brexit deal through parliament with the support of the Northern Irish DUP sectarians and the radically right-wing ERG Brextremist faction of their own party.
They've got to keep their rabble of a coalition together otherwise they'll surely be out of power for at least a generation, so that means brazenly defying the national interest by continually ceding ground to the most fanatical elements in their midst.
The farcical spectacle of Theresa May and the Tories putting their own party political interests above the interests of the nation as a whole to vote against their own damned Brexit legislation isn't even the worst part of this "triumph" either.
The worst part of it is that the Tory government is behaving in this extraordinary manner with the rest of the world watching on.
The world has seen our government agree to a deal with the EU27 only to turn around and vote to tear up what they've just agreed to.
Add in the continual Tory threat of launching a ruinous "no deal" Brexit and refusing to pay Britain's share of the EU's debts and liabilities, and it's making Britain look like an incredibly unreliable actor on the world stage.
After Brexit goes ahead the UK is already going to be in the desperate position of having to beg for trade deals with other economies that all know that we need the deals far more than they do ... but they'll also be well aware that the UK government is a bad faith actor with a track record of threatening to rip off their trading partners and deliberately tearing up diplomatic agreements they've only just signed up to.
Who on earth would sign a trade agreement with a rogue state like that?
One of the main Tory arguments in favour of Theresa May's hard line interpretation of Brexit has been the importance of being able to sign our own trade deals, but their farcical handling of the Brexit process is wrecking that very objective by portraying Britain as a hopelessly unreliable rogue state that refuses to abide by the deals it's only just signed up to.
Theresa May and the Tories are not just humiliating themselves by voting against their own damned legislation, they're also wrecking their own post-Brexit dream of 'trade deals galore' by trashing what's left of Britain's already shattered reputation on the world stage.
So how on earth is it possible for the Daily Mail to present this shambolic and humiliating Tory farce as a "triumph" for Theresa May?
The answer is that they simply can't bear to tell the truth.
They can't bear to admit to their readers that the Tory administered Brexit they've spent the last three years promoting has turned out to be a farcical and humiliating shambles.
They can't bear to admit that Theresa May is a leader without talent or authority who is being forced to dance to the tune of the most extreme elements of the Tory-DUP coalition that she cobbled together to save her own political skin in 2017.
They can't bear to admit that the British government tearing up the deals it's only just signed up to is absolutely destroying any prospects of a boom in post-Brexit trade deals.
And when the most dishonest newspaper in Britain is faced with uncomfortable truths about the failure of the political agenda they've been promoting, why would anyone expect them not to resort to outright deception?
Yes the deception is so brazen and ridiculous that nobody with any sense is going to fall for it, but Daily Mail hacks know that people with any sense are not their target audience, and they know that their readers are such a gullible bunch of idiots that they regularly take the piss out of their idiocy with cognitive dissonance inducing juxtapositions.
So they simply repackage Theresa May's latest shambolic and humiliating capitulation as a wonderful and glorious triumph and expect their idiotic readers to lap it up and believe every word of it.
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.
Last night Vince Cable had a no-preconditions meeting with Theresa May over the extraordinary Brexit farce she's created, then lo and behold today he's announced that the Lib-Dems have de facto joined the Tory-DUP coalition by refusing to vote no confidence in Theresa May again, no matter the scale of her future incompetence or malice.
This solemn pledge of Lib-Dem fealty to Theresa May is intended as an attack on Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party, but even the most blinkered of "centrists" surely must be wondering how a Lib-Dem pledge to keep Theresa May in power indefinitely would harm Labour more than it harms the Lib-Dems themselves (especially if Theresa May continues her reckless game of "no deal" brinkmanship).
The loyalty pledge is intended to force Labour into backing another EU referendum, but leaving Theresa May in power during such a referendum would dangerously stack the odds in favour of Leave by giving the Tory party control over the options on the ballot, the wording of the options, and the timing of the vote. All decisions that would be made to maximise Tory party advantage.
Cable is clearly a gambler who just wants another roll of the dice so badly he doesn't even care whether they're loaded dice or not. What's even more worrying is that Cable is an unbelievably inept political strategist with a history losing referendum votes. The delusion that Remain would be guaranteed to win a second referendum with the Tories still running the show and an incompetent like Cable fronting the Remain campaign is inexplicably commonplace.
What's even more extraordinary than the assumption that this loyalty pledge will hurt Labour more than it hurts the Lib-Dems is that Vince Cable is doing Theresa May this enormous favour in her hour of need in return for absolutely nothing!
In 2017 the Northern Irish DUP sectarians showed up the Lib-Dems' feeble 2010 coalition negotiations by bagging a vast £1.5 billion bribe, a veto on the Brexit deal, and the ability to just wash their hands and walk away from it at any moment should they chose, all in return for just 10 parliamentary votes.
In 2010 the strategically inept Lib-Dems tied themselves into supporting every single illiberal piece of Tory malice for five years, supported policies they knew their core demographics would hate (like tripling tuition fees, abandoning House of Lords reform, and turning Libya into a lawless terrorism breeding ground), and generally acted as human shields for the Tories for the full five years.
They sold themselves out completely in a spectacularly one-sided coalition deal that ended up costing them 2/3 of their voters and 85% of their parliamentary seats when they had a comparatively huge 57 parliamentary votes to bargain with!
But instead of learning their lesson about the strategic ineptitude of adopting a weak bargaining position with the Tories, Vince Cable and the Lib-Dems have just gone and promised to keep Theresa May in power indefinitely (no matter what she does) in return for absolutely nothing at all!
Jeremy Corbyn is refusing to meet with Theresa May until she drops her malicious threat to punish Britain with a "no deal" economic meltdown if she doesn't get her own way, and Vince Cable meets her with no pre-conditions at all then comes away bragging about the loyalty pledge he's just given her in return for absolutely nothing at all!
And perhaps most amazingly of all, after making this hypocritical, absurdly one-sided, and strategically inept Lib-Dem loyalty pledge to the Tories, Vince Cable is accusing Jeremy Corbyn of being the one "playing party political games"!
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.
Some people are terrible at maths. If you add all the Labour, SNP, Lib-Dem, Plaid Cymru, and Green MPs together they're clearly outnumbered by the Tories plus the DUP, but some people still seem to imagine that Theresa May would lose a parliamentary confidence vote.
Yes Theresa May's cowardice is utterly despicable; Yes her decision to postpone the Brexit vote was an affront to parliamentary democracy and a national humiliation on the world stage to boot; Yes she's brazenly prioritising her own career over the best interests of the nation by selfishly clinging onto power for as long as possible; And yes her decision to shove a subordinate (David Liddington) into the parliamentary pit of fury at her despicable actions to go around Belgium and the Netherlands doing fake busywork further underlines the her absolute shamelessness.
But a vote of no confidence at this point would be a massively self-defeating waste of time and effort from everyone who is opposed to Tory rule, and everyone who is opposed to the Tory Brexit farce.
The reason is obvious.The DUP sectarians she bribed into propping up her government after her spectacularly failed hubris election have her exactly where they want her. Weak, desperate, unpopular, and absolutely dependent on their support.
They're essentially holding the Prime Minister hostage until she caves into their demands, so why on earth would they throw this advantageous position away by backing a vote of no confidence in her and toppling her government?
Why would they release the hostage without the payoff?
When Theresa May and the Tories decided to bribe the DUP bigots into propping them up last year they clearly had absolutely no idea what they were getting themselves into.
Presumably they imagined that it would be just like the Lib-Dem coalition all over again. A weak and pathetic minor party to use as lobby fodder to push through all kinds of vile and deeply illiberal legislation (austerity dogma, social security cuts, school privatisation, secret courts, the gagging law, NHS sell-off, Bedroom Tax, hostile environment, wage repression, tuition fees hike ...) then using them as willing human shields at the 2015 General Election to soak up the furious public backlash.
The DUP aren't a bunch of directionless power-hungry wets who would betray their supporters and reverse their principles just for a tiny taste of second hand Tory power. They're ruthless ideologically driven fanatics on the right-wing fringe of the sectarian divide in Northern Ireland.
Expecting them to cave in on their British unionist fanaticism like the Lib-Dems caved in on tuition fees and electoral modernisation is an absurd fantasy, and expecting them to just give up the unprecedented position of strategic advantage they've obtained is farcically naive.
Expecting any Tory MPs to put the national interest ahead of their own narrow party political interests is perhaps even more naive (especially given Anna Soubry's admission that she'd much rather inflict the economic ruination of Tory Brexit on the UK than give Labour a shot at political power).
The likes of Vince Cable, Chuka Umunna, Nicola Sturgeon, Caroline Lucas and the rest of the people calling for a futile confidence vote must be aware that surviving a confidence vote would actually give Theresa May a helping hand out of the Brexit shit pit she's dug for herself, and keep her appalling threat of a "no deal" meltdown on the table.
They're not idiots. They've shared the halls and chambers of power with the DUP bigots. they know what these ideological fanatics are like in person. And Nicola Sturgeon has witnessed the belligerent and unyielding face of hard-right British nationalism in person north of the border.
They should all know better.
None of them can possibly believe the DUP would give up the incredibly advantageous position they've worked themselves into. So what the hell are they playing at trying to help Theresa May win a confidence vote that would obviously be paraded around in the Tory press as a vindication of her appalling false dichotomy between her awful Brexit deal and her malicious threat to launch a "no deal" socio-economic catastrophe in retaliation if it's rejected?
Why are they playing the absurdly risky game of putting their faith in a bunch of ruthless hardline sectarian bigots, and a desperately futile appeal to Tories put the interests of the nation above the interests of their own political party?
It just doesn't make any sense.
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.
Last night Theresa May survived two incredibly close votes on Brexit legislation after whipping her MPs to support hard-right Brextremist amendments to the customs bill that have clearly been designed to make her Brexit White Paper unworkable.
There were 14 and 11 Tory rebels who voted against Theresa May and her Brextremist puppet masters in the two votes, but the vast majority of Tories (and their bigoted sectarian DUP backers) actually voted in favour of the Brextremist amendments.
Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party voted against Theresa May and the Brextremists, but they were let down by four of the usual suspects who actually voted alongside Jacob Rees-Mogg and his ilk, despite knowing that a defeat at this stage could have triggered the final collapse of this shockingly weak and incompetent Tory government.
The four Brextremist collaborators were Kelvin Hopkins, Graham Stringer, Frank Field, and Kate Hoey.
Nobody should be surprised that these four stepped in to save Theresa May's bacon. They've consistently sided with Theresa May and the hard-right Brextremists when the Labour leadership and the other opposition parties have voted to oppose them.
A much more shocking revelation is that the current Lib-Dem leader Vince Cable, and the former Lib-Dem leader Tim Farron didn't even bother to turn up to vote in the debate.
This is utterly extraordinary stuff from the most high profile politicians in a party that has relentlessly positioned itself as the "Stop Brexit" party since 2016.
Less than a month ago these two charlatans were smugly chanting "where's Jeremy Corbyn" at the pro-EU People's Vote protest event in London. But when it came to the crunch, and enough Tory rebels finally decided to stand up against the hard-right Brextremists who have usurped their party, Jeremy Corbyn showed up to vote against them, while these two posturing frauds were nowhere to be seen.
In fact, the extraordinary reason Tim Farron decided to not bother showing up to such a crucial parliamentary Brexit battle was that he was too busy banging on about how much he hates gay sex again at a £5 per head event at the Sherborne Institute!
This astounding no show from Farron and Cable is proof that (just like with tuition fees, proportional representation, and countless other Lib-Dem so-called policies) their opposition to Brexit doesn't come from any serious political principle at all, it's simply pure opportunism designed to soak up the votes of Remainers who are too gullible to realise that they're being played like idiots by the biggest bunch of morally-flexible political charlatans out there.
So in conclusion Theresa May gets to cling onto power for a little while longer, mainly thanks to her own MPs, many of whom voted against what they knew to be the national interest in order to stave off the collapse of the Tory party.
But more crucially (because Tories putting the interests of the Tory party above the interests of the nation is hardly 'news'), the Lib-Dems have now been totally exposed as a bunch of absolute charlatans whose leader couldn't even be bothered to show up to vote against the Tory Brextremists, and whose former leader was too busy banging on about his aversion to gay sex to participate in such a crucial knife-edge vote.
This ludicrous Lib-Dem performance is all the evidence any sensible person should need to understand that the Liberal Democrats are absolutely incapable of playing the role of "Brexit saviours" to defend us from the ideological lunacy of the hard-right Tory Brextremists who dictate Theresa May's Brexit strategy to her.
Anyone who still actually believes any of the Lib-Dem schtick about being the "anti-Brexit" party after this lamentable display is certifiably gullible.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
The Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson is a ridiculously brazen person, but on April 6th 2018 she truly excelled herself by posting a self-disproving lie on Twitter.
Even after all of this utterly brazen behaviour Davidson's latest effort is truly astounding. She's sent out a Tweet claiming that Scottish Income Tax payers earning over £26,000 will pay more tax under the SNP.
Not only is this claim a lie, it's actually contradicted by the newspaper clippings that she attached to her Tweet. The second attatched image includes a handy chart which clearly demonstrates that those earning £26,000 per year will pay £70 per year less in tax, and that only those earning over £33,000 will have to pay marginally more Income Tax in order to help fund the numerous things that make Scotland a much fairer society than England (free university tuition, free prescriptions, baby boxes, free eye care, free elderly care ...).
Just consider the arrogance of Ruth Davidson's self-disproving lie. And just think about how little regard Ruth Davidson must have for the people she's attempting to convince with it.
She obviously sees potential Scottish Tory voters as a spectacularly gullible bunch of barely literate knuckle-draggers if she thinks they'll be won over by a lie so blatant that it actually contradicts itself.
Still, given all the damage the Tories have inflicted on Scotland and the Scottish economy over the decades, Scottish Tory voters must be either absolutely riddled with gullibility, or be such servile and self-hating lowlifes that they actually get some kind of warped kick out of being lied to and mistreated by their merciless (and mainly English) Tory overlords.
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.
Nobody denies that there are problems with anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry within the Labour Party. Given that anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry are shockingly commonplace in wider society, any organisation of the size of the Labour Party is bound to have a few horrible people kicking around.
The problem is the way the mainstream media insist on presenting the anti-Semitism debate as if it's a Labour-specific problem that's getting worse under Jeremy Corbyn, when the actual evidence shows that anti-Semitic views are very much more common from Conservatives, and that rates of anti-Semitism have actually fallen dramatically amongst Labour supporters since Jeremy Corbyn became leader in 2015.
Falling Labour anti-Semitism
Comparison of two YouGov surveys in 2015 and 2017 shows that rates of anti-Semitism amongst Labour supporters has fallen dramatically, while the same polls show that anti-Semitism rates amongst Tory supporters is barely falling at all.
In 2015, 22% of Labour voters agreed with the statement that ‘Jews chase money more than other people’, whilst in 2017 the number of Labour voters agreeing with the statement had declined to 14%.
These results compare with 31% of Conservative voters who agreed with the statement that ‘Jews chase money more than other people’ in 2015, whilst in 2017 this had declined slightly to 27% who still agreed with the statement.
Tory supporters are almost twice as likely to agree with this anti-Semitic trope as Labour supporters, yet the mainstream press insist on portraying the anti-Semitism furore as if it's a Labour-specific problem.
The same pattern occurs across all of the other anti-Semitic statements in the two YouGov polls. The rate of agreement amongst Labour voters has fallen dramatically since Corbyn took over, while the rate of agreement amongst Tories is both much higher than the Labour rate, and falling much more slowly.
Comparative analysis
Then there's the research from the Campaign Against AntiSemitism that found that the prevalence of anti-Semitic views amongst Labour and Lib-Dem supporters is much lower than the general public, but that the prevalence of anti-Semitic views amongst Tories is higher than the public at large, and even actually higher than the average for Brexit voters!
Of course Labour needs to fight against anti-Semitic views amongst its members and supporters, but anyone who tries to make out that anti-Semitism is a Labour-specific problem when rates of anti-Semitism are loads higher, and falling much more slowly in the Tory ranks is clearly weaponising allegations of anti-Semitism for party political purposes.
Of course it's a still a problem that any Labour supporters agree with anti-Semitic tropes, but the reality of the situation is that they're significantly less likely to than the general public, while Tories are significantly more likely to.
Blue-kippers
Then there's the study from the Institute for Jewish Policy Research that found that rates of anti-Semitism are way higher on the right of politics than on the left (see image).
The fact is that the hard-right are the most anti-Semitic demographic of all, and the Tories have been openly and brazenly courting these hard-right ultranationalist blue-kippers ever since the Brexit vote and the collapse of Ukip.
It's absolutely astounding to see a political party that's intent on courting the most bigoted demographic of all suddenly pretending to be concerned about anti-Semitism.
If the Tories were really bothered about anti-Semitism they'd clean their own house first, and they'd definitely stop welcoming so many bigoted blue-kippers with open arms.
Mainstream media lies
Given the evidence is clear that that rates of anti-Semitism
are much higher amongst Tories and the political right, the effort to present anti-Semitism as if it's a Labour-specific problem is clearly dishonest journalism.
But plenty of mainstream media sources have gone much further than dishonesty, by wandering off into the realm of outright lies.
Take the Scotsman's claim that "rising anti-Semitism could bring Corbyn down". Not only is anti-Semitism actually falling, but it's falling much faster under Jeremy Corbyn than it is under Theresa May.
The problem of course is that the truth is largely irrelevant to a vast numbers of mainstream media hacks, who continually attack anyone who threatens the neoliberal orthodoxy because they're not really journalists at all, they're simply stenographers for the right-wing establishment.
Wedge strategy
The reason the anti-Semitism issue has arisen again, just before the local elections, is that it's a highly effective wedge strategy to attack the political left with.
The blind eye that's been turned to numerous Tory bigotry scandals over the same time frame as the anti-Semitism furore stands as proof that most Tories don't give the faintest damn about bigotry amongst their own ranks, but they know that people on the liberal-left do give a damn, which is why they're using the issue to attack Labour.
The effort to smear Labour as the party of anti-Semitism (when their own party is actually much worse) isn't really designed to pinch Labour voters and turn them into Tory voters. A person would have to be politically insane to abandon Labour over bigotry and defect to a party with the raving bigot Boris Johnson as their Foreign Secretary!
The anti-Semitism furore is all about causing disillusion amongst the liberal-left in the hope that they won't turn out to vote at the local elections.
Reality vs illusion
Just remember that a significant proportion of mainstream media hacks are Orwellian illusion-artists.
They don't give the faintest damn about rampant bigotry in the Tory ranks, and they don't give a damn that anti-Semitism is actually much higher amongst Tories than it is amongst Labour supporters.
All they caren about is using anti-Semitism to attack Labour, because they've completely lost the political argument so weaponising the fight against racism is pretty much all they've got left.
- The whole illusion crumbles when you look at the actual facts on anti-Semitism.
- The whole illusion crumbles if you look at the fact that the Labour anti-Semitism march was attended by a bunch of sectarian bigots from the DUP and the racist "Chingford skinhead" Norman Tebbit.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
The Tory party reaction to the Cambridge Analytica scandal is every bit as cynical and opportunistic as you'd expect.
Instead of focusing on the election rigging psychological warfare tools these shady characters have built on the the Facebook data they stand accused of stealing, the Tories are attempting to reframe the whole debate to paint Facebook as the big bad villains, and to promote the Tories' pre-existing agenda of clamping down on Internet freedoms.
In an article for George Osborne's Evening Standard propaganda sheet the Tory Culture minister Matt Hancock has bragged about his plan to "bring an end to the Wild West culture" of social media.
This article makes his Facebook-blaming, responsibility-shifting, censorship-pushing agenda all too clear. Not just by what he says, but also by what he conspicuously fails to say.
Here are some of the many issues that Matt Hancock "forgot" to mention in his "Wild West" article.
One of the reasons the Tories are trying to shift the focus of the blame onto Facebook is really obvious. They recognise that the intimate financial links between the big players in this dodgy election rigging outfit and their own party look terrible, so shifting as much of the blame as possible to Facebook is a simple deflection tactic.
Another reason they're keen to blame Facebook is the £2.1 million they blasted on targeted dark ads.
The Tories outspent Labour by 4:1 on Facebook ads, but their influence on the site was more than negated by a rag-tag bunch of viral left-wing bloggers working on shoestring budgets.
If you'd spent such a huge amount of money in an effort to buy Facebook popularity and ended up getting humbled by a tiny bunch of bloggers who didn't even spend a single penny on buying Facebook ads, you'd be furious too.
Which brings us to what the Tories have in store for Facebook. There's no doubt whatever that the Tories will seek to use this mess to their own advantage, even though the money trail flows right back to the Tory party.
The most likely approach they're going to take is to strong-arm Facebook into clamping down on the freedom that has allowed independent voices to gain popularity by challenging the pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, wage repression pushing, welfare slashing, hard-right political agenda that so often goes completely unchallenged by the mainstream media.
Meanwhile they have absolutely no intention of clamping down on the use of the kind of targeted political dark ads they used extensively during the 2017 general election campaign.
Sensible proposals include updating the existing rules against spreading political lies during elections, a requirement that all political ads be logged with the electoral authorities, and for geographically targeted social media ads to be classified as local election spending.
You'll never hear Tory politicians proposing any of these measures, because all of them would go against their self-interest.
When the Tories say that they want to make the Internet "safe", it's obvious that what they actually mean is that they want to turn social media into another comfortable "safe space" for themselves, where those who challenge the hard-right neoliberal orthodoxy are pushed to the margins. And if they can cynically make use of a crisis that was actually created by their fellow Tories at SCL/Cambridge Analytica to achieve it, all the better for them.
Anyone who paid attention to the bullet points above has got to be able to see that a bunch of Tories promising to keep us safe on the Internet is akin to a skulk of foxes promising to take care of security for your chicken coop.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
