The farcical handling of the Westminster sex pest scandal

The Westminster sex pest scandal is being handled atrociously, both by the political parties and by the media. 

One of the worst aspects is the huge disparity in the way different MPs are being treated by their parties, and by the media.

In the cases of Clive Lewis and Kelvin Hopkins of the Labour Party, and Damian Green of the Tories, all three of the politicians firmly deny the allegations made against them by single accusers. Yet Kelvin Hopkins has been suspended and had the party whip removed, while Clive Lewis and Damian Green have not. 

It's impossible to explain this kind of double standard. Either MPs should get suspended during investigations, or not. You can't have a completely ad hoc system where some get suspended and some don't.

In contrast to the firm denials from three MPs mentioned above, the Tory MPs Stephen Crabb and Mark Garnier have openly admitted their revolting sexual misdemeanours (Garnier laughing his unacceptable behaviour off as if it was just some kind of joke), but they haven't been suspended by their party.

How can MPs who admit their guilt get off Scot free, while (some of the) MPs who protest their innocence get punished?

Then there's the Tory MP Charlie Elphicke who has been suspended from the Tory party and reported to the police for "serious allegations". He is protesting his innocence but has  been suspended from the Tory party. 

However the details of the allegations against him have been kept secret, so after a day of the mainstream media fixating on the unsubstantiated and strongly denied allegations against the two Labour MPs who protest their innocence, the media barely covered the Elphicke allegations because there are no "juicy details" for them to fixate upon on.

Then there's Michael Fallon who preemptively resigned as Defence Secretary with an admission about his inappropriate behaviour with women, but he avoided getting suspended from the Tory party despite openly admitting his guilt. Theresa May decided that instead of admonishing him or suspending him, she'd actually send him a glowing love letter to tell him what a wonderful guy he is!

Then there are the two dozen plus Tory MPs who stand accused of sexual misdemeanours by their own party in the Tory Sex Pest Dossier, and the evidence that Theresa May was warned three years ago that the Tory whips collected details of sexual abuse by their MPs in order to blackmail them into compliance.

The existence of the Tory Sex Pest Dossier (which jumbles up allegations of extreme sexual misconduct with basic blackmail material like consensual affairs between Tory MPs, unusual sexual proclivities, and an apparently false claim against the MP Rory Stewart), and the statement from Theresa May's former communications director Kate Perrior explaining how the culture of blackmail was still ongoing under Theresa May's leadership are both absolutely damning, and should be one of the main elements of the scandal.

But somehow, despite the Tory whips office being at the centre of the scandal, Theresa May saw fit to actually promote her two most senior whips. She caused a storm of internal dissent in the Tory party by promoting her Chief Whip and close personal ally Gavin Williamson to replace Michael Fallon as Defence Secretary, and then she promoted his deputy Julian Smith to Chief Whip to replace him.

So not only are the Tories still studiously ignoring allegations that their whips office have used allegations of sex abuse as blackmail material for party political advantage, they've also promoted the two most senior whips at the centre of these allegations!

The Labour MP Rupa Huq is absolutely right that the House of Commons has "no real structure for complaints" and that the rules on sexual harassment are "lax if not non existent".

It's hardly surprising that sexually inappropriate behaviour has been happening in such a large workplace, especially in one with no clear rules and procedures for sexual misconduct, but the way complaints are being dealt with in completely ad hoc manner by the parties is totally unacceptable. It's created a situation where three Tory MPs who have openly admitted sexual misdemeanours have avoided suspension from their party, while one Tory and one Labour MP have been suspended despite firmly denying the accusations against them.

The next thing to note is that the press have focused much more negative attention on MPs when the allegations are made public, than when the party keeps the actual details of the allegations under wraps (as the Tories have done with the Charlie Elphicke case), which obviously gives the political parties a clear incentive to bury the details of the allegations as much as possible in order to avoid negative publicity.

Then there's what I consider to be the core element of the scandal, which is the way a very senior Tory adviser has admitted that the Tory whips office used accusations of sexual misconduct in order to blackmail MPs into compliance, rather than launching investigations and working to ensure the safety of people like journalists and junior staff as a first priority.


Yet the two men at the very centre of this scandal have actually been handed promotions!

The major problem is the way the parties are currently dealing with the cases in a bizarre "make it up as we go along" manner that punishes people who deny any wrongdoing, lets people off Scot free when they openly admit being creepy sex pests, and then actual hands promotions to two Tory whips who stand accused of having used allegations of sexual misconduct as blackmail material, rather than doing anything whatever to actually deal with the inappropriate behaviour.

The way the whole thing is being handled is an absolute farce. 

If our political parties can't even deal with a scandal like this without implementing glaringly obvious double standards, and actually promoting people at the epicentre of the most damning accusations, then how on earth can they be capable of actually running the country in a decent manner?

 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

Is it any wonder more women don't speak out about sex pests?

We all know that the Daily Mail is a despicable hard-right propaganda rag with a long history of launching sickening attacks on people, stretching all the way back to their attacks on Jewish refugees back in the 1930s when they were propagandising for Adolf Hitler and imploring their readers to join the British Union of Fascists.

Recent Daily Mail hate campaigns include their constant bombardment of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant front pages; attacking a dead war hero as "evil" and "un-British" just because his son went on to lead the Labour Party; attacking judges as "enemies of the people" for daring to defy Theresa May's autocratic effort to bypass parliament; attacking non Brexit fanatics as "saboteurs" who deserve to be crushed; and attacking university academics who dare to speak about Brexit in anything but the most gushingly positive terms.

All of these Daily Mail hatchet jobs are deeply concerning for their divisiveness, their extreme-right sentiments, their lack of respect for democracy and the rule of law, and the degrading anti-intellectualism that the Daily Mail editorial staff clearly want to foster in their readers.

However the Daily Mail's latest hatchet job just goes to show that their servitude to the Tory political establishment has become so repugnant that they've actually set about smearing someone who claims to be a victim of sexual harassment.

I have no sympathy for Kate Maltby's right-wing politics whatever, but when she said that the Tory MP and First Secretary Damian Green touched her inappropriately and sent her sexually suggestive text messages, she deserves to be believed, not smeared and harangued in the press.

Damian Green (Theresa May's right-hand man) has already instructed libel lawyers to take Kate Maltby down, and his mates at the Daily Mail have waded in to support him with a full page spread of vitriolic attacks against the young journalist, calling her a "very pushy lady" and accusing her of playing a "poor little me act".

The Daily Mail have never attacked her like this before, when she was just a compliant little rich girl hanging around the Tory party, but as soon as she speaks out: Bang - here's a double page spread of absolute vitriol.

One of the most grotesque things about the hatchet job is the way the Daily Mail claim that she's "a woman determined to make it in politics - whatever the cost".

It's absolutely crazy to imagine that making allegations of sexual misconduct against one of the most senior politicians in the country is a way of advancing her political career. 

Everyone knows that countless women (and not just a few men either) have kept quiet about the sexual harassment/abuse that they've suffered at work because the perpetrator is in such a position of power they could easily wreck their careers.

If Maltby's accusations against Damian Green turn out to be true, then there won't be a "cost" either. Her decision to speak out will have resulted in a Tory sleazeball being exposed for what he is: Not just a man who touches young women inappropriately, but one who actually tries to sue them for daring to speak out about it!

If on the other hand it turns out Maltby invented or exaggerated the incidents (I'm very unsure why she would have) then her reputation will be left in tatters, but until it's established which of them is telling the truth, the sympathy has to be with the victim.

By wading in to attack the woman who made the claims, the Daily Mail have not just shown their ugly bias in favour of the Tory establishment either, they've also provided clear evidence of why so many sexual harassment/abuse victims are afraid to speak out.

Why would anyone speak out against rich and powerful sex pests when they know that the sex pest's friends in the mainstream media are likely to launch this kind of repulsive hate campaign against them just for daring to speak out?

Anyone who is familiar with the Daily Mail knows that they've got a long history of doing the worst possible take on things. From their pro-Hitler propaganda in the 1930s, through their disgusting anti-gay "abortion hope after gay genes finding" headline in the 1990s, to their recent vitriolic attacks on any judges and academics who dare to question Theresa May's shambolic and profoundly anti-democratic handling of the Brexit process. 

So a double page spread of vitriolic attacks on a woman who claims to have been the victim of the inappropriate sexual behaviour of a high profile Tory MP is just another example of a worst possible take from the depraved right-wing hacks at the Daily Mail.

 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 Tory sex dossier is an absolute mess

I've seen an uncensored copy of the Tory sex pest dossier and it's an absolute mess. The big problem with it is that it's not actually a list of MPs accused or suspected of sexual misconduct, it's more like a list of sex-related issues that could be used to blackmail MPs into silence or conformity.

Thus the list combines details of absolutely outrageous sexual misconduct, alongside stuff like extramarital affairs, consensual relationships, and the unusual private sexual proclivities of certain MPs (all ideal blackmail material).

Most of the details are very sketchy, and restricted to a single sentence, or even just a few words. For example the entry on the International Trade Secretary Liam Fox is nothing more than "Adam Werrity". 

It's impossible to gather whether this refers to what the public already know about Liam Fox breaching the ministerial code by allowing Adam Werrity access to classified meetings and official secrets, or whether the Tory party know that there's more to the Adam Werrity scandal than the public were ever told.

In a lot of cases it's simply impossible to tell whether the sexual conduct was consensual or not. 23 of the 40 cases involve MPs' researchers and office staff. In some cases it's obvious that there was harassment involved, but in others it's impossible to tell if what happened was fully consensual or not.

One thing that is absolutely clear is that this dossier was never intended as an exercise in identifying unacceptable sexual misdemeanours like sexual harassment and assaults, otherwise it wouldn't include numerous cases of tittle-tattle like private sexual proclivities, apparently consensual affairs between Tory MPs, and use of prostitutes.

One thing that is very odd about the list is how it names two female Tory MPs for having had sexual relationships with the same male Tory MP, but the male Tory MP isn't included on the list himself.

It appears very much as if the dossier holds female Tory MPs to a much lower standard of what constitutes sexual misconduct, apparently just in order to fill out the list with a few female names. 

One of the most serious cases on the Tory dossier is the case of a married Tory MP who apparently had an affair with a researcher in his office, and then pressurised her to have an abortion after she got pregnant. I thought about naming the guy, but then it struck me that the victim in this case deserves privacy if they don't want their experience to become public knowledge. Since there's a strong possibility that they could be identified if I chose to release the name of the MP who did it to her, it would be irresponsible to name him.

After Guido Fawkes released a heavily redacted version of the dossier many people have been speculating about who the Tory party have identified as "perpetually intoxicated and very inappropriate with women" might be. I don't feel that I'm breaching any victims' confidentiality by saying that's the Tory MP for Beckenham Bob Stewart.

Four other male Tory MPs that this document suggests women should be very wary of are the First Secretary Damian Green, Theresa May's private secretary George Hollingberry, the DWP minister Guy Opperman, and the Tory whip Chris Heaton-Harris (author of the McCarthyite University letters). They're all listed as being "handsy" (which is apparently a quaint euphemism for "a groper").

Another case that leaps out is the Tory MP Nigel Evans. The internal Tory document accuses him of being "inappropriate with male researchers - long history". The long history bit here is key. If people in the Tory party knew that this guy had a long track record of being sexually inappropriate with junior staff, why was nothing done to actually protect junior staff from his inappropriate sexual behaviour?

The Tory dossier also includes two examples of male Tory MPs apparently paying women to be quiet (one former cabinet minister, and one current cabinet minister) and the dossier also accuses another current cabinet minister of having an injunction against him for inappropriate behaviour with a woman.

One of the weirdest inclusions is the former disabilities minister Justin Tomlinson who is listed as dating his researcher, but that's already public knowledge after he ditched his wife for his 25 year old assistant Katie Bennett in 2016.

As I mentioned at the beginning, a minority of the details included in the Tory dossier are clearly private sexual proclivities of the kind that tabloid rags would crawl all over, but don't constitute non-consensual sexual misdemeanours like harassment or assault at all. 

I decided not to publish the whole document because I have no interest in exposing these people for their personal sexual tastes. As much as I detest them for callously and uncaringly imposing the economically ruinous and poverty inducing policies of their party, I actually have a bit of sympathy for them over the way they've been listed by their own party alongside a bunch of actual sex pests, just because they apparently like a bit of kink in their sex lives.

I didn't want to be responsible for outing people just because the Tory party consider a bit of kink to be as bad as being a serial sex pest, but it's obvious that if I've seen the document, it's going to leak out into the public domain sooner or later. So I'm in the unusual position of actually feeling a bit sorry for a few Tory MPs.

All in all the Tory sex pest dossier looks an awful lot more like a poorly cobbled together blackmail list than anything resembling an internal Tory party effort to identify and properly deal with actual sexual misdemeanours. 

The suspicion that it's actually a blackmail list fits with what Theresa May's former communications manager Kate Perrior said about the Tory whips collecting dirt in order to "use it to make sure that MPs know that other people within the party know exactly what they’ve been up to, and that behaviour either is not acceptable, or it will be used against them – you will vote in a certain way or we will tell your wife exactly what you’ve been up to".

 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

Legal note: All of the accusations in this article are made in the Tory sex dossier. I had no role in compiling the dossier, and this article simply offers commentary on the contents. I have been careful to qualify all commentary with the fact that these are accusations by others within the Tory party, not established facts.

How did Damian Green's audition for Theresa May's job go?

The Tory First Secretary of State Damian Green stood in for Theresa May at Prime Minister's Questions and put on a very accomplished display of evasion to put Theresa May's charmlessness and inathenticity into perspective.

The press continually describe Green as a loyal Theresa May ally but today's performance popped that particular balloon. The relative competence with which he evaded answering all of the questions, and the confidence with which he wove several ludicrous narratives about how swimmingly everything is going made his performance look a hell of a lot more like a job interview to succeed his hapless boss than a man loyally holding the fort in her absence.

Green is an accomplished liar who has a long track record of lying through his teeth in order to sell the toxic Tory snake oil that is austerity dogma, so it's no real surprise that he put on a competent display of evasion and misrepresentation as he provided a series of tangential and downright misleading non-answers to Emily Thornberry's six questions about the very real threat of a ruinous Tory "no deal" strop away from the Brexit negotiating table.

When he was asked what would happen to the Irish border if Theresa May decides to strop away from the negotiations with nothing, Green responded by claiming that that's not what the outcome the Tories want, as if claiming to not want something to happen is the same as explaining what the consequences would be if it did happen.

Thornberry pressed him again about what a "no deal" strop would mean, and again he evaded answering the question with a load of partisan political bluster as if it's perfectly fine for the Prime Minister to threaten to do something, then not explain what the consequences would be for jobs, the economy, international trade, peace in Northern Ireland, or anything else if she actually does it.

Green's blustering political attack on Labour provided Thornberry with the opportunity to land a glorious counter-punch; accusing him of not getting the Prime Minister's memo because "you're supposed to be building consensus man!".

It was a cracking riposte against the lame duck Tory Prime Minister, and it's absolutely telling that her supposedly loyal ally Damian Green could only sit there and chortle away with the rest of the house at ludicrousness of his absolute laughing stock of a boss.

Thornberry persisted with another question on the "no deal" threat, and instead of answering the question Green resorted to bragging about how the Tories have juked the unemployment statistics through an unprecedented campaign of wage repression, a barbaric sanctions regime that costs more to administer than it saves in reduced benefits, a bonfire of workers' rights, and an absolute explosion in low-pay, low-skill exploitative Zero Hours Contract, fake self-employment, part-time and gig economy jobs since 2010.

Thornberry tried to address the "no deal" threat yet again by bringing up the dreadful Tory inconsistency over whether there is actually a government contingency plan for a "no deal" nuclear Brexit strop, or whether Boris Johnson was right to claim that there is no such "no deal" plan the day before.

Again Green evaded the question in the kind of glib and effortless manner that David Cameron used to manage so easily, but which Theresa May struggles so badly with.

This time Green evaded the question by once again falling back on the juked unemployment figures that only total dipsticks could believe have come about through good economic management, rather than continual Tory attacks on wages, labour rights and working conditions.

Thornberry muddled her words in her final question, but had the good grace to laugh at herself in exactly the way that Theresa May would be incapable of if she'd messed up, and Green responded to the question with a truly fantastical fairy story about how the Brexit negotiations are going swimmingly, and how it's bumbling David Davis who is firmly setting the agenda, rather than the EU27.

We all know that the EU27 forced Davis to collapse his own negotiating stance in the first bloody meeting, and that the belated Tory offer on citizens rights was derided as an absolute insult by all other parties, but Green was enjoying his fantasy, and his moment in the spotlight so much that it didn't seem to matter.

My political sympathies are obviously with Emily Thornberry, but I thought Damian Green did well too under the circumstances (excusing the chaotic mess the country is in after seven years of ruinous Tory mismanagement is hardly an easy job).

Thornberry is quick-witted, engaging, actually funny at times (a rare trait indeed in Westminster), and definitely the kind of person you'd want on your side of a debate rather than arguing against you. She was one of the absolute stars of Theresa May's vanity election, and while the Blairites continue to skulk around in the shadows of the back benches, she's one of the Labour politicians continually building a bigger and better public profile by staying fiercely loyal to the wishes of the party membership.

Not only did Green do his job effectively by doggedly evading every single question without resorting to displays of sneering, grimacing, and uncontrollable fury responses like his lame duck of a boss, he also came across as actually having a bit of a sense of humour, which is not something that can be said of Theresa May (humourless glowering is more her forte), David Cameron (slick, but far too slow-witted to be genuinely funny), Michael Howard (his combination of creepiness and ineptitude was funny, but not deliberately so) or Iain Duncan Smith (about quick-witted as a fence post and about as funny as a terminal cancer diagnosis).

Green must have dramatically improved his odds of succeeding his hapless boss on the strength of this job audition, but given the absolute mess that Cameron and May have created between them, and the near-inevitability of another election before the summer of 2019, it looks like he'd have to make good use of that sense of humour from the opposition benches.

 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

We all benefit from an educated population

The Tories are in civil war over tuition fees. Theresa May's loyal ally Damian Green obviously doesn't actually give a damn about student debt, but he is smart enough to recognise the demographic time bomb the Tories are sitting on, which has inspired him to say that the Tories need to think again about the electoral consequences of lumbering English students with the highest public university tuition fees in the entire world.

Michael Gove represents the regressive hard-right faction of the Tory party and he thinks that forcing such huge debts onto students that 70% of graduates will never pay them off despite an opportunity destroying 9% aspiration tax on their disposable income for their entire working lives.

We can all see Damian Green's grubby opportunism for what it is. He voted in favour of creating a huge barrier to social mobility with the highest university fees in the world, but at least he has the strategic cunning to realise that economically assaulting the younger generations for daring to try and get professional qualifications is a recipe for future electoral doom.

Michael Gove doesn't even have that level of brains. All he's driven by is a vindictive desire to divide society into an absurdly selfish bunch of narrow-minded materialist individuals with no social consciousness whatever, because the essence of bonkers hard-right economic dogma is that the economy only functions efficiently if we all abandon social conscience, solidarity, empathy, charity and philanthropy in order to ruthlessly maximise our own personal self-interest at all times.

When he appeared on the Andrew Marr show Michael Gove's best effort to defend lumbering the majority of university students with unpayable mountains of debt was the absurd claim that "if you don't benefit from a uni education you shouldn't pay for those who do".

Gove is famous for his ability to make ludicrous arguments (that all schools should be above average, that we shouldn't listen to experts, that the First World War was not "a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite", that the peace process in Northern Ireland was akin to condoning paedophilia...) but this appeal to blinkered selfishness is so absurd (especially coming from a Tory freeloader like Michael Gove) it's absolutely extraordinary.

The wonderful thing about Gove's latest divisive anti-intellectual statement is that it's so easy to hack.

• "I don't benefit from the Tory party using £1 billion of public money to bribe the DUP into propping up their failing government, so why should I pay for those who do?"

• "I don't benefit from the tax breaks given to private schools where elitists send their kids, so why should I pay for those who do?"

• "I don't benefit from the £130 elephant lamps that Michael Gove claimed on parliamentary expenses, so why should I pay for those who do?"

• "I don't benefit from lavish Tory handouts to the mega-rich, so why should I pay for those who do?"

The idea that there are no social or indirect economic benefits whatever to having an educated population is such a backwards hard-right delusion it's ridiculous.

We all benefit from having university educated doctors and surgeons in our hospitals. We all benefit from having university educated engineers and architects design and build our buildings and public infrastructure projects.  We all benefit from having university educated teachers in our schools. 

The social and indirect economic benefits of having an educated population are so numerous and so obvious it's extraordinary that anyone would seek to deny their existence.

If you ever went to school; ever use roads, rail, airports, or public buildings; ever enjoy the arts or use technology; have ever used the NHS; have ever needed a lawyer, solicitor or accountant; then you've benefited from somebody else's university education.

The fact that some (but by no means all) people who got a university education ended up getting highly paid jobs is hardly an injustice. If they worked hard and got highly paid jobs they should be paying back into society by paying the higher rate of income tax on their earnings.

If they're not paying the higher rate then the injustice is the fact that successive right-wing and centre-right governments have refused to clamp down on tax-dodging, not that some people got good jobs after graduating from university.

The idea that the benefits of a university education accrue only to the individual who received it is such arrant narrow-minded nonsense it's clearly designed to appeal only to the intensely thick, which is exactly the kind of dangerous anti-intellectual nonsense that Michael Gove so loves to peddle.

This attempt to create a sense of jealously and burning injustice amongst people who are too thick to recognise the social and wider indirect economic benefits of having a well educated and highly skilled population is yet another attempt by the political establishment to create an Orwellian reality reversal.

The real injustice is that kids from poor and ordinary backgrounds are being lumbered with vast unpayable debts, while the kids of the elitist establishment class have their fees paid up front by their parents and never have to pay the loans, and the ridiculous interest payments on the loans, via the 9% aspiration tax on their disposable income.

The children of the super-rich elitists already have life massively stacked in their favour, but the elitists in Westminster (including a lot of right-wing Blairite Labour MPs) see educated working class people as a horrible threat to their own establishment class, and consider lumbering them with unpayable debts just for getting an education to be a necessary measure to reduce the social mobility of the "lower orders" that they hate and fear so much.

The norm in developed European nations is either free university education, or affordable fees. People in countries like Germany, Denmark, France, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland, Norway, and Scotland are capable of seeing the wider benefits of having an educated population, but somehow the English have been convinced that education is not a right, and not a benefit to all of society, but actually a commodity that only benefits the individual, and which should be paid for through the imposition of literally unpayable debts.

What a narrow-minded and vindictive country England must have become to have allowed the establishment elitists to erect such huge barriers to social mobility, and to then justify it by appealing to the basest and most selfish instincts of the classes who are actually having their kids lumbered with the unpayable debts.

If countries like Germany and Scotland can afford to give all students from all backgrounds the opportunity to get a good education, what the hell is so wrong with England that Michael Gove thinks he can get away with promoting such blinkered selfishness with his absurd society-denying myth that the only beneficiaries of an educated population are those who received the education?

 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

A Coalition of Lying Thieving Bastards

On the 28th of January 2013 the BBC broadcast a shocking episode of the investigative documentary show Panorama in which it was revealed that employees of a government Work Programme contractor called Triage engage in a practice called "parking" a company strategy of enrolling disabled people on their scheme (which comes with an initial £400 -£600 "attachment fee, paid by the taxpayer) but to then spend as little time as possible helping them to find work in order to maximise profits.

The allegation that "parking" exists as company policy amongst work programme providers gives a clear indication of how the Tory Work Programme has managed to achieve significantly worse results than had nothing been done at all, at a cost to the taxpayer of over £500 million pounds. According to the government's own figures £326 million has been paid out in "attachment fees". It seems obvious to me that the payment of a large upfront attachment fee actually encourages practices like "parking". 

If a company can get a cash windfall of £400 for simply signing someone onto their scheme, the temptation must be to prioritise staff towards signing up more people, rather than attempting to find work for people that would struggle to find work in a healthy economy due to the severity of their disabilities, let alone in the economically stagnant mess George Osborne has created with his lunatic "cut now, think later" austerity experiment.

Not only have this company been using gaping flaws in Iain Duncan Smith's poorly conceived, hopelessly inefficient and ludicrously expensive Work Programme in order to milk the taxpayer by collecting large "sign on" fees, then doing as little as possible to help the clients find work, the staff there have also invented an offensive code to describe the disabled clients that they are deliberately not helping to find work (despite the fact that the whole point of the Work Programme is supposed to be to help people find work). The offensive code the Triage staff have been using is LTB, "Lying Thieving Bastards". The company obviously issued the utterly predictable denials that they engage in "parking" and described the use of the LTB code as "isolated incidents".

The initial temptation is to turn the table on this parasitic outsourcing company to say they are clearly the "Lying Thieving Bastards": Taking taxpayers' cash in order to help people find work, but then immediately abandoning clients that are too old, under-skilled or disabled as soon as the attachment fee has been paid is a pretty clear cut case of Thieving. Referring to disabled people by an offensive code marks their employees out as callous Bastards and the denials look like the usual pack of Lies that get churned out every time a corporation gets caught out like this.

Another, much stronger candidate to wear the tag of "Lying Thieving Bastards" is the coalition government that put the whole sorry shambles that is the Work Programme into place.

Liars

There are several candidates for "Chief Liar" of the coalition government. Nick Clegg is a strong contender for his very public betrayal of the millions of students, former students and academics that voted for him after he held a signed pledge that the Lib-Dems would block any increases in tuition fees. Just a few months after joining the coalition government, Clegg and his Lib-Dem party voted through proposals to triple tuition fees for English (but not Scottish or Welsh) students, making future students pay the highest fees in the entire world for education at public university.

More pre-election lies were told by David Cameron, who famously stated "no more top-down reorganisations of the NHS" and "we'll cut the budget, not the NHS" as part of the Tory election campaign. After the election was over, Cameron appointed Andrew Lansley to push through the biggest top-down reorganisation (mass privatisation of infrastructure and services) in the entire history of the NHS and allowed George Osborne to slash £20 billion from the NHS budget.

Another strong candidate for "Chief Liar" is Minister of State for Police and Criminal Justice Damian Green, who put on such an astonishing display of lying in public that I even wrote an article about it.

Iain Duncan Smith is another man that seems to struggle with the truth. He repeatedly claims that schemes like the Work Programme, Workfare and Atos administered Work Capacity Assessments are benevolent schemes aimed at "helping" the unemployed and the disabled to get off benefits and back to work. A closer look at the Tory policy on disabled employment creates a completely different picture. Since 2010 the government have shut down 34 government backed Remploy factories, with 1,021 redundancies amongst the mainly disabled people that work there. It turns out that only 35 of these disabled people have managed to find work elsewhere, the rest are presumably on benefits, or suffering appalling destitution. Even though they are fully aware that Remploy staff will struggle to find employment elsewhere, the Conservatives are planning to axe another 875 jobs at the remaining 18 Remploy sites. The Tory policy of destroying Remploy is resulting in hundreds of people being forced out of their jobs and onto benefits, exactly the opposite of what Iain Duncan Smith's claims the Tories are doing.

Despite strong competition from across the coalition the winner has to be Cameron who continues lying to the public. His most recent lies include a party political broadcast in which he claimed that the coalition are "paying down Britain's debts", when the debt is actually growing at an alarming rate and telling the public that there would be "No UK army boots on the ground" in Mali just two weeks before u-turning to send British troops to provide logistical support to the French.

Given his willingness to repeatedly lie to the public, Cameron should perhaps be better known as Secretary of State for Lies, rather than Prime Minister.

Thieves

There are dozens of MPs sitting on the government (and opposition) benches that were caught out in the Parliamentary expenses fraud. One of the most noteworthy cases is George Osborne's use of the Parliamentary second home allowance to fund a property speculation scheme in Cheshire. The second home allowance allows MPs to claim mortgage payments on their second property. Osborne claimed on a mortgage that also included other, separately registered property, including a paddock. None of which were mentioned on his expenses claim.

Much has been written about Osborne's fraudulent expenses claims, (here's Mike Sivier's take on the scandal) yet little seems to have been done to investigate, let alone prosecute Osborne for this theft of public funds.

I know there are plenty more egregious examples of expenses fraud out there, but the revolting irony of having a man with a track record of pilfering state funds working as Chancellor of the Exchequer (the job of administering the national finances) is so hard to stomach that the award of "Chief Thief" has to go to Gideon Osborne.

Bastards

It is no hard task to identify bastards in a coalition government that is mainly comprised of MPs from what is commonly known as "the Nasty Party", however one Tory MP stands head and shoulders above the rest. This man is Iain Duncan Smith. Not only is he the man that is directly responsible for rolling out the ludicrously inefficient Work Programme that led us to the situation where private sector contractors like Triage abuse their disabled clients as "Lying Thieving Bastards" whilst doing as little as possible to help them find work in order to maximise their taxpayer funded profits, he is also an odious cretin of a man.

One of the strongest examples of Iain Duncan Smith's bastardry (see embedded video) was a performance he gave on Question Time in November 2012, where he shouted down a tribute to two disabled people that had died as a result of the Atos Work Capacity Assessment regime. It doesn't matter how strong your political views are, if you take to callously shouting down tributes to the dead, (instead of expressing regret and offering condolences to the families) you are an inhuman bastard. 
 


One can only imagine the reaction of the right-wing press had it been a Muslim or some kind of "leftie" peace activist interrupting a description of how some British soldiers had tragically died in Afghanistan with an angry politically motivated tirade. They would have undoubtedly been made into a national hate figures overnight. Iain Duncan Smith's disrespectful rant received very little criticism in the mainstream press and even elicited a round of applause from around half of the studio audience. Sadly it seems that in modern Britain dead disabled people and their families are due infinitely less respect than dead British soldiers and their families. This doesn't prevent Iain Duncan Smith getting marked as a bastard by anyone with the human decency to expect people to respect the dead and their families.

Conclusion

OK, part of this article has been a slightly irreverent look at who are the worst Liars, Thieves and Bastards in the current government, but there are serious issues at play here. Iain Duncan Smith's Work Programme has been an absolute disaster (in social and economic terms). It is so bad that even the bitterly right-wing Daily Telegraph are extremely half arsed in trying to come up with excuses for it.

These revelations about the practice of "parking" and the shocking attitudes of some of the staff that work for these corporate outsourcing parasites clearly demonstrate what is going wrong with Iain's Work Programme. The companies are only interested in rinsing as much profit as possible out of their contract (a task that is made that much easier by the lunatic payment of huge upfront Attachment Fees that are not dependent on the achievement of outcomes) and they seem to staffed by people that have an even higher level of contempt for the people they are supposed to be helping than the Jobcentre staff they are replacing.

A "back-to-work" regime built on payment before results, corporate profiteering and an atmosphere of contempt towards those that are supposed to be being helped is a recipe for social and economic disaster and the man to blame is not the ignorant little shit that calls disabled people a LTB, not the bosses at a profiteering outsourcing company intent on sponging public cash, it is the man that is responsible for implementing this shambolic reform, "Chief Bastard", Iain Duncan Smith.
 

More articles from
ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE

Iain Duncan Smith's callous contempt for the dead 

The Atos "disability denial factory"
 
A letter to fans of Workfare

"Lord" Freud: Risks, corpses and slums
 
 Damian Green: An egregious public liar

The catastrophic failure of "Osbornomics"
  
David Cameron's "Economic War"

Another Angry Voice is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for Another Angry Voice is the PayPal donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

Tory Debt Fearmongering

One of the most commonly heard justification narratives trotted out to defend Tory policies such as George Osborne's self-defeating ideological austerity experiment and Iain Duncan Smith's brutal attacks on the welfare system is the argument that "the country is broke". There are so many examples of this crude propaganda it would be impossible to list them all, but there are several common themes. The most regular of which are the ideas that the national debt is "too high" and that Labour "wasted too much money". I'm fairly confident that everyone has heard these kinds of argument on a regular basis and it is the objective here to demonstrate these debt fearmongering arguments are both completely false, and also nothing but a crude narrative to justify elements of Tory ideological policy.

To give a specific example of debt fearmongering: On the 8th of November the Tory Police and Criminal Justice minister Damian Green appeared on the BBC show Question Time, where he was confronted with the accusation that debt fearmongering has a harmful effect on the economy. The accusation was made by David Blanchflower, a former member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee, a guy I disagree with when it comes to monetary policy, but who made a strong argument that debt fearmongering harms confidence ("animal spirits") within the economy. Green's response to the accusation that Tory debt fearmongering has been damaging the economy was absolutely stunning, he retorted with brazen display of  inaccurate Tory debt fearmongering! Here's what he said:

"The reason that the 'animal spirit' of the economy was destroyed was that we had the worst debt of any G20 country, because the previous government spent money like water and left us bankrupt"

The use of the word "bankrupt" to describe the state of the UK economy in early 2010 is clearly inaccurate fearmongering for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that the Coalition government have continued deficit spending (adding to the national debt), meaning that if the UK was "bankrupt" in 2010, it would have been liquidated and sold off for pennies in the pound by now!

The next observation must be that his assertion that the UK economy had the worst national debt of any G20 country is an outright lie whichever way you look at it. checking the 2009 figures reveals that five of the G20 nations had significantly higher debts that the UK (68.5%) as a proportion of GDP behind Japan (192.1%), Italy (115.2%), France (79.7%), Germany (77.2%) and Canada (72.3%). In real terms the claim is just as false; the UK national debt ($2.183 trillion) was significantly smaller than the United States ($14.256 trillion), Japan ($5.068 trillion), China (4.909 trillion), Germany (3.352 trillion) and France (2.675 trillion).

If we examine the tribalistic dig at Labour for "spending money like water", it is also clear that this is a pretty spectacular misrepresentation. Until the global economic crisis hit, the national debt under Labour had never exceeded the 41.9% GDP debt they inherited from their Tory predecessors. Even after the spectacular financial sector meltdown in 2007-08, the debt under Labour rose to 52.1% which is significantly lower than the average debt in either the 19th or the 20th Centuries (the average debt throughout the 20th Century was 89.5% of GDP). In fact, even after two and a half years of catastrophically self-defeating ideological austerity and Tory economic stagnation, the UK national debt has still not even passed the 20th Century average, and is absolutely nowhere near the 1948 peak of 237% of GDP.

Given that the UK suffered the effects of the worst banking crisis in the modern capitalist era during the previous Labour administration, a resultant spike in government borrowing must be expected. Before the crisis hit Neo-Labour never exceeded 42% (lets call it 57% if we include all of Gordon Brown's dodgy PFI scams that were, and still are, misleadingly kept off the national balance sheet). This is quite high compared to the Thatcher years of industrial decline, social unrest and mass unemployment, but compared to virtually any other period in the last 200 years it is actually low.

Once the economic crisis hit, the economy contracted sharply, meaning that simply maintaining government spending plans that had been drawn up without foreknowledge of the impending crisis would mean adding to the debt. Although Labour can be blamed for intensifying the effect of the global economic crisis with their disastrous financial sector deregulations (which were supported by the Tories, but criticised for not going far enough!), their decision to abandon Gordon Brown's stupid and arbitrary 40% of GDP "golden rule", to stick to their government spending plans in order to avoid further "shocking" the economy and to attempt to stimulate the economy with policies such as the VAT cut were actually reasonably sensible. On the other hand, the decision to bail out the recklessly over-leveraged banks, (a plan which was enthusiastically supported by the Tories) was abject lunacy, but we'll gloss over that idiotic short-termist blunder for the sake of the argument.

Labour's decision to stimulate the economy by cutting VAT and not ruthlessly slashing spending, actually produced some half-decent results. After five consecutive quarters of economic contraction at the height of the global financial sector crisis, the UK returned to weak economic growth between Q3 2009 and the general election.

As you can see, this is far from a glowing review of Neo-Labour's economic record, but in comparison to the ideologically driven lunacy built upon a foundation of debt fearmongering lies and the consequent double-dip recession and vast trade deficits that have followed, it actually begins to look like reasonably competent stuff.

So to return to the subject of debt fearmongering, simply through the analysis of one specific example of Tory debt fearmongering, the premises that the debt is "too high" and that "Labour spent too much money" have been blasted to bits as the lies and misrepresentations they are.

Another factor that must be considered when we're talking about the national debt, is the fact that the Bank of England's manipulations of the government bond market with £375 billion in freshly invented money have resulted in the lowest cost of UK government borrowing since records began! If there is ever a time when more government borrowing could be justified, it is when the rate of interest on government borrowing is significantly lower than the rate of inflation. A situation where risk averse lenders are actually prepared to incur real terms losses in order to stash their money in the relative safety of the UK bond market. Obviously it would be important to spend the borrowed money wisely, on things that stimulate economic growth (fiscal multipliers such as infrastructure investment, education, science, R&D, social housing construction, welfare payments...) however, what the Tories are doing is cutting spending on all kinds of fiscal multipliers, whilst deficit spending in order to hand out ever greater sums to the wealthy (via tax cuts and the dreation of tax loopholes) and to a host of parasitic outsourcing companies and pseudo-charitable organisations that have built their business models on soaking up taxpayers' cash.

Not only are the Tories failing to cut the national debt they are fearmongering about, they are deficit spending on an absurd range of utterly wasteful corporate welfare scams and tax cuts for the wealthy instead of targeting the cheap money they have at their disposal at things that actually promote long-term economic growth (infrastructure projects, affordable housing construction, direct loans to small and medium enterprises, scientific research, education..). In fact they are not only failing to spend on proven fiscal multipliers that drive economic growth, they are actually deliberately targeting them with their ideological spending cuts.

Tory debt fearmongering is an obvious propaganda campaign aimed at duping the public into supporting their drastic ideological policies, whilst government largess continues apace when it comes to drawing up insane schemes aimed at directly distributing taxpayers cash to private sector interests to run all kinds of services including the NHS, frontline police, ridiculously inefficient welfare programmes, thousands of secondary schools, farcical Olympic security operations and even Britiain's arsenal of nuclear weapons.

The debt fearmongering narrative is built upon a foundation of transparent lies, and the policies it is intended to justify are actually adding to the nation's indebtedness by slashing investment in proven fiscal multipliers. What is even worse, is that the whole narrative of deficit reduction and spending cuts is completely thrown out of the window every time a Tory minister signs another absurdly one-sided contract to distribute ever greater cash mountains to unaccountable private sector interests.

See also

An entirely avoidable "Osbornomic" recession

Damian Green: An egregious public liar

What is... A Justification Narrative? 
  

What is... A Fiscal Multiplier?
 

Tory policy: All narrative, no substance

Even the police are protesting against this Tory lunacy