Woman in clown costume issues ridiculous ultimatum

I don't usually write tabloid style headlines for my articles, but given the extraordinary state of the mainstream media front pages this morning I feel more than justified in making an exception for today.

It's not just the usual offenders spewing right-wing jingoistic nonsense either, because the supposedly left-wing Mirror even got in on this "tough-talking Theresa socking it to the Europeans" gibberish. 

Just take a look at the state of the delusional jingoistic drivel that millions of people will see on newspaper stands all over the country, and all over Europe too.

Theresa May's long-awaited Brexit speech would have been woeful enough under ordinary circumstances, full of dishonesty, delusion and blatantly self-contradictory nonsense as it was, but given the fact that it's apparently taken the Tories six months of scheming to come up with this vacuous drivel, it should have been universally lambasted. 

Instead of being pelted with rotten tomatoes Theresa May is actually being lauded by the mainstream media as if her ludicrous posturing represents some kind of triumph for the plucky-Brits, rather than a truly embarrassing moment in the history of British diplomacy and terrifying forewarning of the savagely right-wing, isolationist and grotesquely unequal hard-right dystopia Theresa May and the Tories have been plotting for us all along.

Is the long-awaited Tory negotiating strategy really just to crudely threaten our 27 former European allies into giving us the deal Theresa May and the hard-right fringe of the Tory party want?

Just consider what Theresa May's tax haven threat actually implies. Who will be the people who will suffer the most if Theresa May and Philip Hammond set about turning the UK into a bargain basement corporate tax haven economy where stuff like human rights and the vestiges of the social security system are swept away in a fit of hard-right jingoism?

Will it be the European technocrats that the right-wing press have conditioned a sizable percentage of the UK public into hating? Of course it won't.

The real victims will be the British people who will see their rights, freedoms, public services, wages and living conditions eroded away in order to re-engineer the UK economy to favour the corporations and the super-rich even more than it already does.

Theresa May isn't holding a gun to her own head demanding a cushy deal for her corporate mates from the EU. Of course she isn't. She's holding a gun to the heads of millions of ordinary British plebs. 

"Give us what we want or millions of British plebs will suffer and die" she's shrieking at the EU, and instead of reacting in horror, that after all of these months of waiting, that this ludicrous nonsense is all the Tories have got to show for their supposed negotiating strategy, the mainstream media are actually showering her in praise and making out she's putting up a heroic fight!

Why should the EU technocrats give a damn about the fate of the British public, especially after 37% of us just stuck two fingers up at them in June 2016 in order to entrust our future to the hard-right fringe of the Tory party?

Most alarmingly of all, there will be millions of delirious plebs out there punching the air with delight over all these mainstream media caricatures of a clown-suited Theresa May standing up to the nasty foreigners, that they've completely failed to even understand that the gun is pointing at their temple.

They won't even understand that if the EU don't cave in to Theresa May's ludicrous ultimatum (which they obviously won't), it's going to be them, and their families, and their communities who will end up suffering the appalling consequences of living in a savagely right-wing Tory corporate dystopia, not the EU technocrats.

 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.

OR

Militants are being given safe passage out of Aleppo

The siege of Aleppo has resulted in an extraordinary amount of savagely partisan propaganda. The absence of reliable journalists and humanitarian organisations on the ground there means that distortions, exaggerations and lies from either side have spread like wildfire.

One incredible example of the spread of bizarrely distorted propaganda is the endlessly repeated claim that up to 100,000 civilians remained trapped in the 2km militia controlled area of Aleppo. If this claim is true then that besieged district of Aleppo was by far the most heavily populated area on the planet, with over seven times the population density of Hong Kong!

It's not clear where this ludicrous 100,000 claim originated, but it was soon being spread all over the mainstream media, being repeated unquestioningly by mainstream media stooges and supposedly anti-establishment commentators like Owen Jones alike.

The brazen misrepresentation of reality can also be seen in the mainstream media coverage of the ongoing evacuation of the last militant occupied area of Aleppo. In reality the evacuation has been carefully negotiated to allow the militant occupiers of Aleppo safe passage to the militant controlled area of Idlib in return for the safe passage of aid convoys into the besieged Assad-loyal villages of Al-Fu'ah and Kafriya.

The fact that the combatants who occupied Aleppo for four years have been allowed to leave on convoys of busses to fight another day (perhaps in Syria, perhaps elsewhere in the Middle East, or in Europe) is being portrayed very oddly in the British mainstream media.

Instead of admitting that militants and their families are being allowed to escape from the small besieged district of Aleppo they had been cornered in, so that the relentless fighting in Aleppo can finally come to an end, the British press are describing the evacuation of militant fighters purely as an evacuation of civilians.

The Daily Mirror described the evacuation of militant fighters and their families as "buses packed with terrified civilians leaves besieged city". The Guardian coverage barely even implied that militants were amongst the evacuees by quoting an International Red Cross source saying that the "majority" of evacuees were civilians (meaning some were combatants). The BBC at least openly admitted the fact that militants were being evacuated, but waited until the fourth paragraph to do so. Not only did the ITV coverage fail to mention that militant fighters were among the evacuees, but they also recycled the ludicrous 100,000 trapped civilians figure too.

It's a sign of the contempt that mainstream journalists hold towards the general public that they expect us to believe that all of the evacuees from Aleppo are all innocent civilians, and presumably that the militants who occupied the city for four years just somehow just disappeared into the ether, despite being totally surrounded in their final besieged enclave.

The question has to be why the UK media appears so reluctant to tell the British public the truth about Islamist militants being allowed to leave Aleppo amongst the civilian evacuees.

Another mainstream media agenda to consider is the glaring contrast between the hysterical mainstream media reaction to the siege of Aleppo and the near complete silence over the ongoing siege of Mosul in Iraq. The parallels between the two sieges are undeniable. Both cities are occupied by Islamist militants with thousands of civilians trapped in the crossfire. The big difference is that the siege of Aleppo was carried out by Syrian government forces, Iranian fighters and Russia, while the siege of Mosul is being carried out by Iraqi government forces, Kurdish fighters and the United States.

One battle has been routinely described in the western media with phrases like "complete meltdown of humanity" while the other has gone almost totally ignored since the early days of the siege.

The mainstream media's over-reliance on the grandiose sounding Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is another example of western media organisations reporting biased material at face value. Reports in the mainstream press never mention the fact that this official sounding organisation is actually run from Coventry by a single anti-Assad campaigner who hasn't visited Syria in ten years. It doesn't matter how often this is pointed out, the mainstream press continue to give the partisan SOHR the same kind of billing as the United Nations or legitimate aid organisations like the Red Crescent.

Of course Russian media outlets are biased in the other direction (some of them describing all of the evacuees as "militants and their families"), but that's absolutely no excuse for the western mainstream media spreading absurdly inflated figures, relying on information gleaned from partisan sources, or the absurd efforts by the UK press to portray the evacuation of militants from Aleppo as a purely civilian relief operation.

 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.

OR

Why are the Anyone But Corbyn mob celebrating a Labour by-election loss in Sheffield?

I've pointed out the bizarrely divisive habit of Anyone But Corbyn Labour Party people wildly celebrating every Labour by-election loss on Twitter several times before, but the spate of celebrations over Labour's loss to the Lib-Dems in the Mosborough Ward in Sheffield on Thursday September 8th really does take the biscuit.

In all of the gloating and celebration over this Labour Party loss from Anti-Corbyn Labour members, one of the crucial facts they all *forgot* to mention is that the Labour candidate Julie Grocutt was staunchly anti-Corbyn. She refused to include the party leader on her campaign leaflets, repeatedly spread anti-Corbyn propaganda on Twitter (that she has subsequently hidden by deleting her account) and openly admitted that she went around the ward having chit chats with people about how terrible the Labour Party leader is (before she deleted her Twitter account)!

Another thing the Anyone But Corbyn camp failed to mention is that the Lib-Dem candidate Gail Smith was a popular former councillor who was seeking a return to local government after she was one of the many thousands of Lib-Dems in local government to suffer the furious public backlash against Nick Clegg's appalling collusion with the Tories during the Coalition government years.

Another thing these blinkered anti-Corbyn ranters routinely failed to mention in their gloating was that the Labour candidate didn't even live in the ward and the Lib-Dem candidate did. This is probably a bigger issue than all of the other stuff added together because as the local journalist Chris Burn pointed out, it's "not unreasonable for people to vote for a local councillor who actually lives locally".

Yet another thing that anti-Corbyn ranters *forgot* to mention was that the turnout was an appallingly low 28%. It's absolutely clear that the Labour vote in the ward stayed at home. Could this poor Labour turnout have anything to do with the Labour candidate being a supporter of the Anyone But Corbyn coup who also happens to lives 16 miles away in Stocksbridge on the other side of the city?

Of course not the ABC lot will say. "it's all Jeremy Corbyn's fault"!

Just a few weeks after Jeremy Corbyn secured a huge turnout at a rally in Sheffield, the Labour candidate took the electorally dubious decision to run an anti-Corbyn campaign that saw the Labour Party percentage of the vote in the ward slump by 9.2% which allowed the Lib-Dem candidate to storm past Labour to victory. But instead of admit that her divisive anti-Corbyn views ensured the low Labour turnout that cost her the election, Grocutt actually had the brass neck to try to blame Corbyn for the loss!

Grocutt was far from the only person from the Anyone But Corbyn camp to try to use her by-election loss as ammunition against Corbyn. The shadowy "Saving Labour" lot (where exactly does all of their funding come from?) took to gloating about it; The Daily Mirror once again exposed their glaring anti-Corbyn bias by painting the loss as a disaster for Corbyn without even bothering to mention the staunchly anti-Corbyn views of the candidate; and savagely Anti-Corbyn Labour MPs like Ian Austin, Wes Streeting and Tom Blenkinsop took to Twitter bragging about how the defeat of their fellow anti-Corbyn coup-supporter is somehow a massive blow for Corbyn!

Even Owen Smith's floundering leadership campaign got in on the act by trying to blame Corbyn supporters for the loss as if they should have all rallied around and actually helped a divisive anti-Corbyn candidate into local government! Maybe if Grocutt wanted even more help from Momentum activists than the help she got, perhaps she should have considered supporting him rather than repeatedly slagging him off on Twitter? Or at the very least toning down the anti-Corbyn rhetoric a bit and expressing a desire to work with whoever becomes party leader on September 24th?

The Anyone But Corbyn habit of using the post-coup Labour Party poll slump that they caused with their ridiculous ill-timed, ineptly executed and woefully failing putsch attempt is bad enough, but actively gloating over an anti-Corbyn local election candidate handing the Lib-Dems a shock by-election steal is even worse.

The gleeful Twitter celebrations from the Anyone But Corbyn camp every time Labour lose a by-election are outrageous enough in their own right (especially considering some of the utterly trivial things Corbyn supporters have been purged from the party for), but using the abject failure of one of their fellow divisive anti-Corbyn coup-plot supporter in order to paint Corbyn as "unelectable" really is unbelievably egregious stuff.

 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.

OR

The mainstream media propaganda war against Jeremy Corbyn

For anyone but the most incapable of reading between the mainstream media lines it's been obvious that there has been a vicious propaganda war going on against Jeremy Corbyn ever since he became the star of the show during the 2015 Labour leadership election. Now there is some serious academic research to back it up too.

The London School of Economics have produced a report called "Journalistic Representation of Jeremy Corbyn in the British press" that demonstrates the existence of an extreme systemic bias against Jeremy Corbyn in the corporate mainstream media.

The report analysed hundreds of articles about Jeremy Corbyn in the mainstream newspapers and identified three main delegitimisation propaganda tactics used to attack Jeremy Corbyn.

• Ignoring Jeremy Corbyn's words/policies, or actively misrepresenting them

• Using Scorn, ridicule and personal attacks

• Smear by association tactics

 These are some of the specific findings in the report:

• Almost three quarters of all stories failed to accurately report Jeremy Corbyn's actual views on subjects.

• 52% of all newspaper articles didn't mention Corbyn's actual views at all, while another 22% misrepresented his views or took them out of context.  

• Only one in five Daily Telegraph articles about Jeremy Corbyn even bothered to quote anything he had said whatever.

• The worst offenders at misrepresenting Jeremy Corbyn's views/policies were the Evening Standard (39% of articles), Express (37%) and Telegraph (29%).

• In the period between September 1st and his election as Labour leader on September 12th an astonishing 42% of all newspaper articles attempted to frame him as a communist.

• 0% of Daily Mail and Express articles presented Jeremy Corbyn's views/policies without alteration. The average across all newspapers was just 11%.

• 22% of all newspaper articles designated Jeremy Corbyn as "dangerous", rising to 50% of articles in the Telegraph and 63% of articles in the Express.

• 27% of Daily Mail articles portrayed Jeremy Corbyn as hating Britain (which is ironic given that the hard-right Tory ideology he opposes has seen massive swathes of British infrastructure sold-off to foreign interests).

• All newspapers ran significantly more critical articles than positive ones, including the supposedly left-liberal Guardian, Mirror and Independent. On average over 50% of articles about Corbyn were negative or highly critical, while less than 10% adopted a positive tone.

• 80% of Daily Express articles about Jeremy Corbyn used ridicule and scorn to delegitimise him. The other worst offenders at using ridicule tactics were the Daily Mail (54%), Evening Standard (47%) and Sun (45%).

• The worst offenders at publishing personal attacks were the Express (40% of all articles) and the Evening Standard (26%).

• The supposedly left-liberal Daily Mirror and Independent newspapers were far more likely to include quotes from anti-Corbyn Labour politicians, than quotes from those who support him.

The report finished with some damning conclusions about the extreme levels of anti-Corbyn bias in the mainstream print media:

"Jeremy Corbyn is systematically ridiculed, scorned and the object of personal attacks by most newspapers."

"With the vast majority of the British newspapers situated moderately to firmly on the right of the political spectrum, the analysis of our data also points to a strong ideological bias. The rightwing newspapers were particularly negative and acerbic towards Corbyn. At the same time, we could also clearly observe a degree of"anti-Corbyn reporting in the left-leaning and liberal newspapers. This was especially visible through the amplification of internal struggles and tensions within the Labour Party regarding Corbyn. This manifested itself by the newspapers providing an extensive and enthusiastic platform to those forces in the Labour Party that aggressively contested Corbyn and what he stands for. Arguably, exposing the internal tensions within the Labour Party could be seen as part of the watchdog role of the media. However, as pointed out above, there was quite a considerable amount of coverage that was very one-sided, only giving voice to those that are against Corbyn and at the same time ignoring those that are in favour of him and his policies."

"Is it acceptable that the majority of the British newspapers uses its mediated power to attack and delegitimise the leader of the largest opposition party against a right-wing government to such an extent and with such vigour? This is not merely a political question, but also an ethical and a democratic one. Certainly democracies need their media to challenge power and offer robust debate, but when this transgresses into an antagonism that undermines legitimate political voices that dare to contest the current status quo, then it is not democracy that is served."

It's quite extraordinary to see the mainstream press who have spent the last year systematically misrepresenting, ridiculing, abusing and bullying Jeremy Corbyn jumping on examples of abusive behaviour (many of them hugely exaggerated or entirely fabricated) in order to portray Jeremy Corbyn as the leader of a pack of thugs.

The tide of mainstream media support for the botched anti-democratic effort by Labour coup plotters to bully Jeremy Corbyn into resignation (which included a Daily Mirror front page demanding he quits) shows how much the press pack continue to hate and fear him.

The corporate newspapers still command a huge amount of power to shape the parameters of political discourse. The mainstream media trope that Jeremy Corbyn is "unelectable" has been rote learned and repeated so often that it's simply accepted as a folk-truth by millions of people. The new trope that the savagely authoritarian right-winger Theresa May is "a safe pair of hands" is already doing the rounds, and being mindlessly repeated by people who know nothing about her six year track record of authoritarianism and incompetence at the Home Office.

Just as the mainstream press are on a mission to delegitimise Jeremy Corbyn as much as they can, they're determined to gloss over Theresa May's appalling track record and sing her praises, and the sad fact is that blatant propaganda tactics like this work a treat. After 10 months of extremely biased anti-Corbyn press coverage his approval ratings are at an all-time low, while an incredible 55% of people are positive about Theresa May becoming Prime Minister despite her utterly toxic track record at the Home Office.

 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.

OR

What are the likely consequences of Tory electoral fraud?

Despite efforts by swathes of the mainstream media and the political establishment to starve the Tory electoral fraud allegations of coverage, it keeps on getting bigger. 


The Electoral Commission had to take the unprecedented step of resorting to the courts to demand documentation that the Tory party had been trying to hide from their investigation, more than a dozen police forces have initiated enquiries into fraudulent Tory campaign spending, leaked emails show that senior Tory figures (Lynton Crosby, Andrew Feldman, and Stephen Gilbert) approved the decision to pass off local campaign spending as national expenditure, and more questions are being asked about other local Tory election expenses in marginal constituencies that the party failed to declare as constituency spending.

Despite concerted efforts by many in the media and the political establishment to downplay, dismiss or ignore the electoral fraud story, it looks like it is definitely not going to go away. However there is still absolutely no guarantee that action will be taken to punish the perpetrators and beneficiaries of the electoral fraud.

In this article I'm going to consider some of the most likely, and most unlikely consequences are.

Legal consequences

It is a criminal offence to commit electoral fraud and if found guilty the punishment can be up to a year in jail or unlimited fines.

There's plentiful evidence that the Battle Bus teams were campaigning for particular candidates in their local areas (see image), so short of a complete whitewash, there's little chance that the Tories are going to get away scot free.

The Tory approach to the electoral fraud scandal seems to be to claim that it's all just some innocent administrative mix up. This kind of excuse looks an awful lot like they are preparing the ground to throw some lowly administrator under the (battle) bus.

The problem with this age old strategy of pinning the whole scandal on some lowly minion within the organisation is that the leaked email about the Battle Bus clearly implicates the Tory party treasurer Andrew Feldman, the deputy treasurer Stephen Gilbert and the recently knighted Tory party election strategist Lynton Crosby, because they all signed off on the plan to miscategorise the Battle Bus spending as national party spending rather than candidate spending.

The emails make it absolutely clear that they signed off the plan to avoid declaring the Tory Battle Bus expenses (running the bus, catering, hotel bills ...) as local spending, even though the entire purpose of the Battle Bus campaign was to tip specific marginal constituencies in their favour.

It doesn't matter if these senior Tories try to plead ignorance about UK electoral law becuase "I didn't know it was a crime" has never been an acceptable defence in any court of law. Ignorance of the law does not magically render unlawful actions lawful, especially if it is the actual job of the accused (two party treasurers and an election strategist) to ensure that the party complies with electoral law.

"I didn't know it was a crime" is clearly not a defence, but alongside a guilty plea it could certainly be used in mitigation. If the Tories pull off their attempt to dismiss the whole thing as an "administrative error" it's highly unlikely that anyone will ever end up going to jail for it, because an establishment whitewash of the whole affair is still a possible outcome.

Even if the allegations are proven, it's unlikely anyone would go to jail for it unless they are found guilty in court after trying to contest the charges, rather than pleading guilty and accepting a few fines and suspended sentences.

Electoral consequences

Several people have tried to argue that the Tory electoral spending fraud should trigger a re-run of the General Election, but in my view this would be an unfair consequence. The Daily Mirror investigation revealed that the hidden Tory campaign spending would have pushed some two dozen constituencies over their campaign spending limits. Even if another ten or twenty additional constituencies get dragged into the scandal over other issues (like undeclared spending on adverts in the local press, undeclared spending on campaign leaflets, or undeclared expenditure on flying in of Republican Party activists activists from the US) a re-run of the General Election would clearly be extremely unfair on the 600 odd MPs who complied with electoral law when they won their seats. For example, why on earth should the 56 SNP MPs in Scotland have to re-contest their seats as a consequence of a spate of Tory electoral fraud in England?

In my view a full re-run of the General Election would constitute punishment of the majority of innocent MPs for the crimes of a small minority of guilty MPs who gained unlawful advantage from undeclared campaign spending.

A fairer course of action would be to hold By-elections in any constituencies where the sitting Tory MP benefited from electoral fraud. If the allegations of Tory electoral fraud are proven, this could result in By-elections in 20 or more constituencies, which would be more than sufficient to end the Tory majority in the House of Commons assuming enough people were to vote against the Tory candidates who cheated their way into the House of Commons.

Legislative consequences
If it turns out that twenty or more Conservative MPs benefited from electoral fraud in winning their seats, there could be some very interesting legislative consequences. If these politicians entered the House of Commons by fraudulent means, any legislation that was passed as a result of their votes could clearly be seen as having been fraudulently imposed on the public.

The situation is clearly unprecedented, so I'm not exactly sure of the legal grounds for overturning legislation that could have been passed as a result of Tory electoral fraud, but if the Tories are found guilty of electoral fraud, I can't see any reason why legal efforts couldn't be made to overturn legislation that made its way through the legislative process as a result of votes by people who cheated their way into parliament.

Conclusion

The Tories would like nothing more than to have the whole electoral fraud scandal brushed under the carpet as some kind of innocent administrative error, while possibly pinning the blame on some lowly minion. Until the leaked email detailing how the Battle Bus plans had been signed off by senior Tory figures came to light, an establishment whitewash and sacrifice of a lowly scapegoat seemed to be the most likely outcome. Now that senior Tory figures are clearly implicated, it might be a lot more difficult for them to whitewash the whole affair or pin the whole fraud on some lowly admin worker.

If the complaints are upheld it seems likely that By-elections would have to be held in any constituency where campaign spending limits were broken. It would be extraordinary if people who cheated their way into power were allowed to continue reaping the benefits of their fraudulent activities. Whether the constituencies would reject the Tory candidates who cheated their way into office is another matter. It would only take the loss of seven or so Tory seats to put an end to the Tory majority in the House of Commons, however it's likely that they would still be able to cling onto power by seeking the backing of the likes of the DUP, UUP (who are already affiliated to the Tory party) and the UKIP MP Douglas Carswell.

Whether it would be possible to overturn legislation that was passed with the backing of MPs who cheated their way into the House of Commons is an interesting legal question, and one that will definitely need to be asked if the allegations of Tory electoral fraud are proven.

 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.

OR

The mainstream media sometimes get it right

Over the years I've written several articles criticising the mainstream press for their biased coverage and the way that they frame the political debate in order to create the impression that popular liberal and centre-left ideas (opposition to imperialist warmongering, renationalisation, serious action against tax-dodging) are radical, extremist or unelectable, whilst portrying failed hard-right Thatcherite economic dogma (the austerity con, privatisation of core services like schools and the NHS, tax cuts for corporations and the super-rich) as normal, necessary or even fundamentally unquestionable. However it is important to recognise that the mainstream media is not one homogeneous blob, and that elements of the mainstream media are capable of providing good political coverage. 

Even though huge numbers of mainstream journalists are perfectly happy to collect their pay packets for lazily churnalising press releases direct from Tory party HQ or some rotten Blairite thinktank, rather than doing anything resembling investigative journalism of their own, there are still journalists in the mainstream press who do a good job of holding the powerful to account.

One recent example of good work from elements of the mainstream media is the investigation into the massive electoral fraud that helped the Tories to win two dozen marginal seats at the 2015 General Election. The Daily Mirror exposed the way in which the Tories failed to declare expenses from their 2015 "Battle Bus" (the cost of the bus, hotels, catering ...) even though they explicitly admitted that the bus was campaigning for individual Tory candidates on their Twitter feed. Channel 4 News kept the public informed about the ongoing criminal investigations into Tory electoral fraud when the story was being studiously ignored by the news departments of other channels.

Of course independent media has also played an important part in exposing the 2015 Tory electoral fraud. I've posted several updates on it on the Another Angry Voice Facebook page, Éoin Clarke has covered it on Twitter, and without the campaign by the Canary to get people to contact their local police forces to report the Tory election fraud, it seems unlikely that at least police forces would be actively investigating their fraudulent over-spending.

As a result of the hard work of the Daily Mirror, Channel 4 News and various independent media sources, the Electoral Commission took the unprecedented step of  resorting to the High Court to demand documentation that the Tory party had been trying to hide from the electoral fraud investigation. Such a drastic step from the Electoral Commission must come as quite a shock to anyone who remembers their timid failure to properly investigate Britain First's extraordinarily dodgy fundraising activities.

After the Electoral Commission used the courts to demand the evidence the Tories had been refusing to hand over, Andrew Neil (a staunch Conservative and ex-Murdoch hack who now works for the BBC) took an interest in the story that most of the mainstream media seem intent on ignoring. Even though in the past I've been highly critical of Andrew Neil's biased reporting, he deserves some credit for (eventually) highlighting a story that few at the BBC or other mainstream news outlets seemed willing to touch.

The development of social media means that the mainstream press is under serious pressure from independent journalism like never before, but the idea that the corporate press will simply disappear to be replaced by hard-working independent journalists is a complete fantasy. The mainstream press will remain a powerful force for shaping the political debate. The important though factor is that it is possible for us to make the mainstream press better. If they get a lot of positive feedback, and a lot of shares on social media for running good investigative campaigns, they'd clearly be likely to invest more effort in producing that kind of journalism in the future.

If we want a mainstream media that does good investigative work and tries to hold the powerful to account (rather than lazily churnalising government press releases or pushing the hard-right propaganda favoured by sociopathic press barons like Rupert Murdoch, Jonathan Harmsworth and the Barclay Brothers), we need to demand 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.

OR

More blacklist victims receive compensation

Several of Britain's biggest building firms have agreed to pay £millions in compensation to 420 workers for destroying their careers through the use of an illegal blacklist designed to deny jobs to workers who did things like get involved in trade union activity or complain about safety violations at work.

This settlement follows on from a £5.6 million payout to 71 blacklisted construction industry workers in February 2016.

Another 90 construction workers look set to take their case to court in May rather than accept out-of-court damages. Hopefully this case will go all the way to court so that the appalling facts of the case can be given the full public investigation they deserve.

The companies who made use of the illegal blacklist (including Balfour Beatty, Carillion, Costain, Kier, Laing O’Rourke, Sir Robert McApline, Skanska UK and Vinci) have implicitly admitted their guilt by handing out compensation to many of the victims, however to hear an explicit guilty verdict declared in a court of law would be much more satisfying to the thousands of men who had their careers destroyed and their lives blighted as a result of this blacklist and it's widespread use across the UK construction industry.

The existence of this illegal blacklist has been known about since 2006 when a construction industry manager called Alan Wainwright blew the whistle. Since then, like so many whistleblowers before him, Wainwright has suffered severe repercussions for doing the right thing. It's hardly surprising that an industry that denied work to thousands of workers though a secret illegal blacklist now appears to be denying work to the manager who blew the whistle on these illegal practices.

It is incredible that it has taken ten years for these workers to get the compensation they deserve from the companies that colluded to deny them work. In fact, it's taken so long that the guy who profited from maintaining the illegal list (Ian Kerr) has long since died.
    

Astonishingly the companies responsible for this campaign of illegal discrimination tried to gloss over their culpability with absurd language, even referring to the compensation payouts as "fair and reasonable" and saying that they want to "draw a line under the matter"!

How these companies imagine that there has been a line drawn under the matter when they're facing court proceedings in May is anybody's guess, and I'm pretty sure that no amount of financial compensation would be enough to console the many workers who lost their families as a result of the severe financial stress caused by their inability to find work due to their name being on a secret and illegal construction industry blacklist.

Hopefully the 90 others will hold firm in the face of lucrative out-of-court settlement offers and ensure that the criminal behaviour of these construction companies is fully revealed in the courts.     

 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.

OR

Image credit: Daily Mirror

How the press have turned the actions of a mass murderer into a fearmongering campaign against depression

On the 24th of March 2015 the German co-pilot Andreas Lubitz caused the destruction of the 4U9525 Germanwings flight from Barcelona to Dusseldorf resulting in the deaths of everyone on board (himself, 144 passengers and 5 other crew) making it one of the most deadly murder-suicides in history.

At first the cause of the crash was a mystery but it soon became clear that Lubitz had deliberately locked the pilot out of the cabin, used the cabin door override to prevent the captain from using his passcode to open the door from the outside, initiated the descent sequence that resulted in the crash and remained alive (and calmly breathing) until the moment of impact.

A few days later it was revealed that Lubitz's flight training had been interrupted for several months due to mental health issues. It's not entirely clear what these issues were, but several German sources cited depression as being the cause of the interruption. These revelations provoked lurid headlines across the British press. The front page of the right-wing Daily Mail screeched "Why on earth was he allowed to fly" and the pro-Labour tabloid The Daily Mirror also boldly linked the actions of the killer with his depression on their front page. The tabloid press weren't the only ones either, the Times and the Telegraph both also ran the killer was depressive theme on their front pages too.

The Daily Mail wasn't the only paper to write
hyperbolic headlines about depression, the Daily Mirror
got in on the act too.

The mental health charity Mind quickly stepped in to complain about the way that such lurid headlines add to the stigma associated with common mental health problems like depression and several bloggers and columnists have spoken up to draw attention to the fact that they have suffered depression and the idea of committing a mass murder-suicide has never crossed their minds.

The fact is that there are millions of people out there who have suffered depression. Amongst them are countless people with high responsibility jobs. Pilots, train drivers, bus drivers, fuel tanker drivers, nuclear power plant workers, air traffic controllers, engineers, operators of dangerous machinery, firemen, policemen, military personnel and health professionals. If the lurid Daily Mail headlines about the fact that Andreas Lubitz had depression are enough to make you think these people should all be stripped of their jobs because they represent a danger to the public, then I'd suggest that your mental problems (paranoia, delusional thinking, a bizarre lack of perspective, lack of empathy) are far more serious than those of most of the people you want to have fired from their jobs.

I am one of the tens of millions of people with a history of suffering severe depression. In fact depression is the reason that this is the first article I've posted on my blog in over a month. I'm currently struggling with personal circumstances that are beyond my control, leaving me with no choice but to figure out which of the highly unfavourable options in front of me is the least bad. As a consequence of facing such an appalling decision I've slipped into a prolonged depression.

Even though I get an immense amount of satisfaction from writing articles, designing infographics and debating politics with people, the idea of doing any of that stuff when I'm in the pit of depression, struggling with issues that are beyond my control, is frankly ludicrous. The only thing that has snapped me out of this depression for a while is the way that the UK press have resorted to demonising depression, as if people like me are all potential mass murderers to be frightened of.

How the press have turned the actions of a psychopath into

Simply having suffered depression isn't enough to turn a person into a mass murderer. In order to commit an act of mass murder the individual needs to be suffering much more serious issues than depression, because being depressed doesn't necessarily mean that the individual suddenly loses their ability to feel basic human empathy for others. In fact I'd argue that many people who have suffered from severe depression are actually inclined to be very empathetic indeed, since familiarity with their own suffering gives them great scope for understanding the suffering of others.

Adreas Lubitz may well have suffered from depression, but the premeditated decision to murder 144 passengers and 5 work colleagues, for whatever reason, are clearly the actions of a psychopath without the capacity to feel basic human empathy. If Lubitz had had any capacity for empathy whatever, he would have considered the enormous wave of suffering such an action would unleash on the families and friends of his 149 victims and realised that such a vast tsunami of grief would massively outweigh his own depressive issues. Such a realisation would have driven him to either quietly commit suicide on his own, or to actually accept the medical help he had been offered and rejected. Only a psychopath would be able to consider going ahead with a plan that involved murdering so many other people and causing such a huge amount of human suffering as a consequence. 

Andreas Lubitz's ex-girlfriend claimed that he killed all of those people in order to "make people remember him". Without a suicide note it's impossible to know for sure that this was his intention, but if it was, then this suggests that he wasn't actually that severely depressed at all. People with severe depression tend to try and reduce their suffering through medication, withdrawal, distraction, therapy, alcohol, drug use, or even suicide. They're usually far to busy with their (often highly ineffective) coping mechanisms to spend their time fantasising about how they might make themselves infamous and calmly planning acts of mass murder.

The efforts by the UK press to draw a causal relationship between Andreas Lubitz's depressive tendencies and his premeditated decision to murder 149 other people is grotesquely irresponsible, and such ignorant fearmongering about depression only make it more likely that many other people with depression will try to hide their suffering out of fear that people will demonise them as potential killers or hound them out of their jobs.

As a sufferer of depression with a reasonably large public profile I feel compelled to stand up on behalf of millions of others and say that it doesn't matter how severe our depression gets, we won't be murdering anyone, ever - because we're not psychopaths.

 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.

MORE ARTICLES FROM
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 
         
       
How I overcame social anxiety to become a successful political writer
                             
We need to talk about cyber-bullying
                        
Recommended reading - heterodox economics
           
What is ... a Credit Default Swap?
                     
What is ... fiscal multiplication?
                                                
What is ... wage repression?
                          
The terrifying scale of political illiteracy in the UK
                
The myth of right-wing patriotism
                      

Why I want you to question everything - even me!
                                
Margaret Thatcher's toxic neoliberal legacies