A compendium of Tory corruption

Some people don't seem to grasp the sheer scale of Tory corruption, so here are details of just a fraction of what we already know about (with sources):

🔵 Tory MP Owen Paterson was caught red-handed breaking the ministerial code of conduct by lobbying for his employers within government. Randox were paying Paterson £100,000 per year, he sat in on ministerial meetings about the company, and they ended up getting £600 million in Covid contracts. 

🔵 A cross-party committee of MPs found that Paterson had brazenly defied the rules, and ordered him to serve a 30 day suspension from parliament. Instead of accepting the findings of the Paterson investigation Boris Johnson ordered Tory MPs to vote through controversial legislation designed to tear down the parliamentary standards authority, and let Paterson off scot free!

🔵 Tory leader of the House of Commons Jacob Rees-Mogg was one of the leading advocates of using the Owen Paterson scandal as an excuse to demolish the parliamentary standards authority. In 2018 Rees-Mogg used his company Saliston to lend himself almost £6 million at significantly below the market rate of interest, and he didn't even bother to declare these loans on the register of MPs interests (no wonder he was so keen to tear down the parliamentary standards authority!).

🔵 Boris Johnson has been caught up in multiple scandals himself, dating back to before he even became Prime Minister. There was the £126,000 in public cash paid to his mistress Jennifer Arcuri without any declaration of their relationship as one of Johnson's registered interests; the dodgy loan he received to decorate his Downing Street flat; his false declaration of a luxury holiday in Mustique; and his recent holiday in the luxury Spanish villa owned by a tax-dodging company operated by former Tory MP Zac Goldsmith, who Johnson gifted a lifetime peerage in the unelected House of Lords after he lost his parliamentary seat in the 2019 General Election. 

🔵 On the subject of the House of Lords, all sixteen of the Tory Party's former treasurers over the last seven years have been handed unelected lifetime peerages in the House of Lords, after having donated over £3 million each to the Tory operation! 

🔵 Tory politicians have been handing out untendered PPE contracts like sweeties, to such an extent that former Health Secretary Matt Hancock's former pub landlord, and his dad's mate, and his sister even got lucrative £multi-million contracts. Hancock 'accidentally' failed to include his 20% stake in his sister's PPE contract winning company on the register of MPs interests! 

🔵 The Tory government was found to have broken the law in handing a £560,000 coronavirus contract to former colleagues of Tory minister Michael Gove and Boris Johnson's ex-adviser Dominic Cummings.

🔵 Another of the major winners of this no-tender PPE bonanza was Meller Designs, which was a fashion designer until they bagged £160 million worth of PPE contracts, boosting their annual profits from £144k to £13 million. The owner is a regular Tory Party donor called David Meller, who personally lobbied the unelected Tory minister James Bethell for PPE contracts. 

🔵 P14 Medical was turned from a failing company into an absolute cash cow via a whopping £276 million in untendered PPE contracts. The owner Steve Dechan, a Tory party councillor in Stroud, used his profits from the Tory PPE bonanza to buy himself a luxurious £1.5 million country house in the Cotswolds. 

🔵 A company called Clipper Logistics got in on the untendered PPE bonanza with a £1.3 million contract. No surprise that the owner of the company is a major Tory Party donor called Steve Parkin. 

🔵 Another major Tory donor called Haraldur Agustsson bagged over £100 million worth of untendered PPE contracts across his companies Globus Shetland and Alpha Solway. 

🔵 After raking in over £1 billion in untendered coronavirus contracts, Tory-linked firms repaid the favour by kicking back a small percentage of their gains via £615,000 in donations to the Tory party!

The Tory minister who oversaw so many of the astounding no-tender PPE contracts was the unelected House of Lords stooge James Bethell who failed to declare 27 meetings with private health companies that went on to rake in over £1 billion in untendered covid contracts and then made up loads of nonsensical and contradictory excuses as to why he couldn't hand over his phone after he was caught red-handed using private WhatsApp chats to conduct government business.

🔵 The Tory government has pumped an astonishing £37 billion into the privatised shambles that is their Test and Trace operation, which has become the largest publicly funded corporate feeding frenzy in British medical history. It's been hit by ballooning costs, missed targets, 600 million lost covid tests, and scandalously high consultancy fees. The Public Accounts Committee have slammed it as an unimaginable waste of money that's had "no clear impact". No worries for Dido Harding who has presided over this absolute shambles, because she's married to the government's "anti-corruption tsar", Tory MP John Penrose!

🔵 The corporate outsourcing giant Serco have been lavished with literally hundreds of millions of pounds worth of Test and Trace contracts. Their CEO is Rupert Soames, brother of former Tory MP Nicholas, and grandson of Winston Churchill!

🔵 Former Tory DWP minister Iain Duncan Smith got in on the private medical pilfering, chairing a government taskforce that produced a report advising the government to give the green light to non-alcoholic hand gel, while earning a £25,000 per year salary from Britain's largest producer of non-alcoholic hand gel (a salary he forgot to declare as an interest in the report). 

🔵 More than a quarter of Tory MPs use the practice of second-jobbing in order to boost their salary of £82,000 (plus lavish expenses).

🔵 In 2015 the Tory government scrapped the requirement that MPs who take second jobs register their employment contracts with parliamentary authorities, which means that the employment details of every single one of the second-jobbing MPs across parliament are secret.

🔵 Perhaps the most egregious Tory moonlighting MP is Ben Bradley who claims salaries for 60 hours per week on top of his MPs duties. The average MP works 69 hours a week, so if Bradley's not shirking his responsibilities as an MP, we're expected to believe that he's putting in 129 hours a week at work, leaving him less than five and a half hours per day for sleeping, eating, travel, leisure, shopping, personal hygiene, and family life. All combined! 

🔵 Tory MP Mark Pawsey has a moonlighting £30,000 per year second job as chairman of the Foodservice Packaging Association. He leads Westminster’s All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Packaging Manufacturing Industry (no conflict of interests there eh?), and he's repeatedly spoken during parliamentary debates to criticise regulation of the food packaging industry, and to decry efforts to make retailers and manufacturers contribute more to the cost of recycling their plastic waste.

🔵 Tory MP Alun Cairns was hired on a lucrative £15,000 salary (more than £200 per hour) by a company that was part of a consortium that was awarded a £10 million coronavirus contract the following month.

🔵 More than 50 former Tory ministers have taken up private sector jobs in sectors they covered during their time as government ministers, many of them are still in parliament as MPs, or in the vast unelected crony club that is the House of Lords.

🔵 Tory Minister Nadhim Zahawi banked £1.3million from oil company Gulf Keystone Petroleum while working as an MP, but kept his second job earnings secret via a parliamentary loophole that allowed him to avoid declaring the payments by diverting them through a consultancy company he established with his wife.

🔵 At least 90 Tory MPs also boost their incomes by over £10,000 per year as private landlords, and many of these exploitative landlord MPs have repeatedly voted against proposals to regulate the private rental sector, and 72 of these landlord-MPs voted down legislation to require landlords to make private rented accommodation "fit for human habitation".

🔵 34 Tory MPs have accepted political donations from firms linked to the Russian oligarch Viktor Fedotov, whose dodgy dealings were revealed in the Pandora Papers. Not a single one of these donations has been returned. 

🔵 The Pandora Papers also revealed that the unelected Tory lord Paul Deighton, a former government minister, had failed to declare a load of his secret offshore investments.

🔵 Former Attorney General Geoffrey Cox has been raking in literally £millions for legal consultancy work, which included representing the British Virgin Islands tax haven, while arguing against closing tax loopholes in parliament! 

🔵 In 2004 Cox bought a £535,000 Battersea flat, relying on public funds to pay his £1,750 a month mortgage repayments. He now rents the property out for about £1,000 a week, living in a different London flat so he can claim £1,900 a month in public cash to pay the rent! 

🔵 Former Prime Minister David Cameron was caught lobbying the Tory government on behalf of a company called Greensill Capital, who were paying him absolutely vast consultancy fees. The government then over-rode their own £50 million limit on emergency Covid loans to award Greensill a whopping £400 million, all of which was loaned to companies associated with billionaire Tory-donor Sanjeev Gupta. Greensill went bankrupt a matter of months later! 

🔵 Tory MPs have been taking thousands of pounds worth of freebies and junkets from gambling companies and the gambling lobby then making pro-gambling statements in parliament and producing pro-gambling advertorials for websites like ConservativeHome. Probably the worst offender is Tory MP Laurence Robertson who earns £24,000 per year (at £200 per hour) as a gambling lobbyist who argued against stronger regulation of the gambling industry in parliament, then had the barefaced cheek to claim that there was no conflict of interest. 

🔵 The leader of the Scottish Conservatives Douglas Ross "forgot" to declare £28,000 in earnings from his second job, but insists that it's all just a big mistake.

This lot is just the visible tip of the Tory corruption iceberg!

If you're aware of any other Tory corruption scandals, feel free to add details in the comments.

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Brexit is a £1 trillion con job

Just over a decade ago the British state conjured up staggering amounts of money in order to save the City of London financial sector from insolvency.

This unprecedented tsunami of cash included £200 billion in liquidity support, £76 billion to bail out RBS and Lloyds, £40 billion to bail out Bradford and Bingley and the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, £280 billion in insurance cover for financial sector assets, and £435 billion in quantitative easing.

In 2010 the general public decided to punish Labour for having been in power during the financial sector insolvency crisis by replacing them with a Tory/Lib-Dem coalition (despite the fact that the Tories had been squealing for even more financial sector deregulation even right up until the financial sector meltdown was kicking off!).

The Tories and their despicable Lib-Dem enablers immediately began loading the cost of the bailouts onto ordinary British people via a ruinous programme of austerity fanaticism, unprecedented wage repression, devastating public service cuts, deliberate under-investment in infrastructure, and vandalism of the social safety net.

Meanwhile they continually lavished vast tax cuts and extravagant handouts on corporations and the mega-rich, as they raided the infrastructure budgets of Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and northern England to further boost spending in already wealthier areas like London and the south east.

The consequences of these policies were absolutely dire. The slowest economic recovery in two Centuries, the longest period of real terms wage depreciation since records began, soaring child poverty and in-work poverty, unprecedented cuts to the education system, unprecedented cuts to local government budgets, catastrophically failing public services like the NHS, police & fire service, tens of thousands driven into early graves, the most unaffordable housing in history ...

And then David Cameron decided to gamble the entire nation's future in order to nick a few thousand UKIP votes at the 2015 General Election.

An environment of collapsing wages, insecure jobs, soaring poverty, failing public services, unaffordable housing, and an annihilated social security system was exactly what the Brexiteers needed in order to push Leave marginally over the winning line in the 2016 referendum.

All they needed to do was blame the consequences of these devastating domestic policies on immigrants and the EU, then watch the votes flood in as the Tories and Lib-Dems outright refused to admit the truth, that it was actually them to blame for the living standards collapse, not immigration or the EU.

The austerity fanatics and their vile austerity-enabling sidekicks couldn't counteract the lie without implicating themselves, so they just sat back allowed the lie to stand, and allowed Leave to win.

Britain has been in a state of constitutional chaos ever since, especially so after Theresa May decided to give the British public the chance to get rid of the Tories who created this Brexit chaos in the first place, and instead of seizing the opportunity we decided to intensify the chaos by keeping them in power but without a majority so that the government was beholden to the Northern Irish DUP sectarians and the ERG Brextemists in the Tory ranks.

Hence huge numbers of financial institutions simply giving up on all the chaos and uncertainty in the UK to seek economic refuge in the safety of the Single Market, taking £1 trillion in assets with them as they flee.

Dublin, Frankfurt, Paris, and Luxemburg being the main beneficiaries so far.

So that's £1 trillion in financial sector bailouts. The British people being forced to cover the cost of these bailouts through Tory/Lib-Dem austerity fanaticism. Then a furious backlash against collapsing living standards resulting in the financial sector pissing off out of Britain taking £1 trillion in assets with them!

The saddest thing of all is that millions of Brits remain absolutely incapable of seeing this con go on right in front of their eyes, and it's not just an inability to synthesise information without allowing the mainstream media propagandists to do their thinking for them that's causing people to completely miss the bigger picture, it's an extraordinary level of political forgetfulness.

Remainers flocking to support the Lib-Dems seem to have completely forgotten* all of the Lib-Dem lies, and their red-handed culpability in laying the groundwork for Brexit by helping the Tories wantonly trash our living standards for five devastating years.

It's just four years since the Coalition ended, yet huge numbers of people have apparently already forgotten how appallingly the Lib-Dems behaved, and we're somehow back to trusting them again, despite all their betrayals, despite their austerity-collusion, despite the fact that their entirely unrepentant leader Vince Cable wilfully served as George Osborne's austerity hatchet man at the treasury for five years, and despite the fact he defrauded the UK taxpayer of hundreds of millions by selling off the Royal Mail property portfolio at a fraction of its true value.

If people can't even remember four years ago, what hope is there of them remembering how the very same financial sector that's scarpering with £1 trillion in assets today were the beneficiaries of £1 trillion in bailouts 11 years ago?

So what are the lessons here? 

• Brexit is a chaotic and ongoing economic disaster.

• There's nothing patriotic about supporting the diminishment of your own nation.

• Capitalism has no national loyalties, even to the extent of scarpering just a decade after being lavishly bailed out at the public expense.

• People are apparently so forgetful the bankers' bailouts are ancient history to them, and they're even back to trusting the Lib-Dems again!

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OR

* = Well, either they've forgotten, or they were actually perfectly fine with ruinous austerity fanaticism all along because they were socially and economically insulated from it. So they've either somehow forgotten it all in the space of four years, or they're a bunch of horrible "I'm alright Jack" wankers who simply didn't mind austerity malice at all because the dreadful consequences always fell on other people, meaning they're exactly the kind of insufferably aloof and uncaring metropolitan elitists their opponents always claimed that they were.

Jeremy Hunt's austerity bragging proves he always knew how bad it was

Tory austerity was always a massive con job designed to justify their pre-existing ideological obsession with transferring as much wealth as possible from the majority to the mega-rich minority.

Austerity is a con

The lessons of economic history are absolutely clear. If you want a quick economic recovery then invest in productive areas of the economy (housing, infrastructure, services ...), if you want a slow drawn out recovery go on a wanton ideological slash-fest, and if you want to really stymie the economy then coincide your slash-fest with a deliberate upwards redistribution of wealth from ordinary working people (who spend and create economic demand) to the mega-rich who are far more inclined to stash the additional wealth you hand them in tax haven hideaways.

Jeremy Hunt knows all of this. He knows that Tory austerity resulted in the slowest economic recovery in Centuries; he knows that Tory wage repression policies caused the longest real terms decline in UK workers' wages in decades; he knows that the Tories have spectacularly failed to deliver their promise of eliminating the budget deficit by 2015 (it's still not gone and it's 2019) he knows that unprecedented public service cuts have choked the NHS and severely damaged the education system; he knows that austerity cuts have vandalised the social safety net; he knows that the Tory 30% cut to the police budget has coincided with soaring violent crime; and he knows that austerity dogma has led to the impoverishment of millions, and the deaths of tens of thousands.

He also knows that the living standards collapse that these policies delivered are one of the main causes of the wave of public anger that drove the Brexit vote narrowly over the winning line in the 2016 EU referendum.

So when Jeremy Hunt praises the "genius" of David Cameron and George Osborne for imposing austerity without causing riots on the streets he's not saying that the policy of austerity, wage repression, public service cuts, infrastructure under-investment, and vandalism of the social safety net was "genius", he's saying that convincing the British public to believe in a package of radical hard-right policies that ruined their living standards, at the exact same time as the Tories were showering corporations and the mega-rich with lavish tax cuts and handouts.

The reality is quite different. Cameron and Osborne were hardly geniuses for pulling off such a damaging con on the British public, they just benefited from a shocking lack of opposition as they did it.

Lib-Dem collusion

The Liberal Democrats played a key role by switching from their warnings about the folly of excessive spending cuts before the 2010 General Election to enthusiastically backing every last Tory cut in order to hang onto their six figure ministerial salaries, their chauffeur-driven cars, and their temporary senses of self importance.

Mainstream media

The mainstream media openly colluded with Tory austerity dogma. Hardly surprising from the billionaire-owned propaganda rags like the Daily Mail, S*n, Times, Telegraph, Express, Spectator ... but a catastrophic failure on behalf of the supposedly "impartial" BBC.

Given that the BBC always love to create artificial "balance" by giving equal airtime to science-denial idiots and oil industry lobbyists to "balance" the debate on humanity's ongoing ruination of the environment, they abjectly failed to "balance" the economic debate with at least an equal number of sensible pro-investment voices on every panel to counter the ideologically driven austerity gibberish of the Tories.

Labour right-wingers

The Blairite right-wingers who controlled the shadow treasury under Ed Miliband were perhaps the worst offenders of all. They saw the mainstream media refusal to question austerity madness, and instead of redoubling their efforts to oppose this wanton Tory malice, they folded completely and decided to offer a sickly "austerity-lite" agenda at the 2015 General Election in the pathetic hope of converting a few thousand "soft Tory" voters in marginal constituencies.

What they didn't factor into their calculations was that for every "soft Tory" they won over by pathetically imitating Tory austerity fanaticism, they drove away dozens of natural Labour voters.

Failure of opposition

This abject failure of opposition across Westminster and the mainstream media left the UK in the frankly ridiculous situation where the mainstream media and all three of the Westminster establishment parties were all simultaneously pushing ruinous austerity dogma, while the only sustained opposition was coming from the widely ignored economics academics, the Green Party, the SNP in Scotland, Plaid Cymru in Wales, and a small bunch of bloggers and independent media sites.

The Public

And the public don't get off without criticism either. Even if the political and mainstream media establishment abjectly failed in their duties to hold the Tories to account and offer alternatives to their malicious and destructive agenda, people could still have risen up in protest.

Since 2008 British workers have suffered an unprecedented 5% collapse in the value of their wages, while the French have seen a modest 6% increase in the same period. Who are the ones protesting in the streets every single weekend, and who are the ones who sit at home with their apathetic "keep calm and carry on" attitude in the face of relentless economic persecution by the wealthy policial establishment class?

Labour offering hope again

Now that Labour has moved decisively away from hard-right Tory austerity dogma things are better, but the damage austerity caused, and the Brexit chaos it unleashed can never be undone. Even if we reversed course tomorrow and began actually investing in our economy, and building our future economic potential, we're now 9 years and a catastrophic brexit mess behind where we would have been without austerity fanaticism.

Credit must be given to the small minority of Labour MPs who refused to jump on board the Tory austerity train when Blairites all around them were clamouring to actually drive it.

Credit also must be given to the Greens, SNP, and Plaid Cymru for opposing austerity all the time, even in the face of outright hostility from most of the the pro-austerity mainstream media.

Conclusion

Cameron and Osborne were opportunists to try such a destructive con job on the British people, but they weren't geniuses, they simply benefited from a near complete lack of political opposition, from the Lib-Dems who enabled them, the cowardly right-wing Labour idiots who imitated them instead of vehemently opposing them, the mainstream media who consistently failed to hold them to account for the economic crimes they were committing against the British people, and a frankly apathetic population who actually reelected the party that did this to them not once, but twice!

But at least we know that Hunt is well aware of the fact that austerity was so bad that it should have triggered 'riots in the streets'.

At least we know that the Tories were fully aware of how evil their agenda was at the time, but they did it anyway because their core ideology has always been to serve the interests of the wealthy establishment class (who completely bankroll their party) at the direct expense of everyone else in society, and they knew that they would probably get away with it due to the compliance of the Westminster establishment club, the complicity of the mainstream media hack pack, and the downright apathy of the British public.

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Bloody Sunday wasn't "dignified" or "appropriate" and undemining the rule of law is despicable.

On January 30th 1972 the occupying British army in Northern Ireland opened fire and shot 28 unarmed civilians who were attending a civil rights march in Derry, Northern Ireland, 14 of them died and many others have lived with the physical injuries and trauma of that day for the rest of their lives.

For decades the UK government pretended that the shootings on Bloody Sunday were somehow justified, but in 2010 the extensive Saville Inquiry found that all of the victims were unarmed, that several had been shot in the back while running away, that others had been shot while attending to the wounded, and that numerous military figures had given false testimonies in order to cover up the truth.

When the Saville Report was released the Prime Minister David Cameron gave a long-overdue apology to the families of the victims and publicly admitted that the killings were "unjustified and unjustifiable".

Of course anyone with any economic sense or basic human decency must detest Cameron for the ruinous austerity dogma, economy-choking infrastructure underinvestment, and wage repression policies that have trashed living standards for the last 9 years, and for the grotesque systematic abuse of sick and disabled people his government enacted.

However credit where credit is due, he did actually apologise for probably the most grotesquely indecent display of violence and political repression perpetrated by the British state during the "troubles" in Northern Ireland.

But attitudes within the Tory party have shifted dramatically since then with the hard-right Tory Brextremists coming to prominence and the party continually seeking approval from the extreme-right ultranationalist blue-kip demograhpic they're now electorally reliant upon.

The unapologetic Tory contempt for Northern Ireland is quite clear from their continued collusion with the corrupt DUP sectarians, their arrogant stance on the Irish border issue, and from today's extraordinary announcement by the Tory Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Karen Bradley that killings by the UK security services in Northern Ireland were "not crimes" and that those responsible for the killing spree on Bloody Sunday acted in a "dignified and appropriate way".

Of course any government minister with the vaguest grip on reality would know that it's actually up to the judicial system to determine what is and isn't a crime, and that government ministers deliberately interfering in judicial matters is the kind of authoritarian undermining of the rule of law you'd expect to see under crackpot extreme-right governments like the ones in Poland, Hungary and Brazil.

And any minister for Northern Ireland should also know that the UK government has already accepted that Bloody Sunday was outrageous and unacceptable and apologised for it, and that calling the killers "dignified" and their actions "appropriate" is not just grotesque, it's blatantly whacking a political hornets' nest with a stick.

It's as if these hard-right Tories are still upset that the Irish peace process ever happened at all, and they're desperate to actively inflame tensions with their outbursts of offensive and irresponsible rhetoric, their open and ongoing collusion with one side of the sectarian divide, and their outright arrogance over the Irish border issue so that they can settle old scores.

Looking at Karen Bradley's lawless and despicable rhetoric today (and the fact that Theresa May hasn't immediately sacked her for publicly undermining the rule of law) it hard not to notice how an austerity-obsessed inveterate liar with a gambling problem like David Cameron was actually a quite a moderate in comparison to the current Tory rabble!

If Theresa May had any sense she would never have appointed such a gaffe-prone and catastrophically ignorant woman as Northern Ireland Secretary in the first place, and if Theresa May has any respect for the rule of law whatever then Bradley should be sacked for deliberately and publicly undermining it.

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Why are the British political class such reckless gamblers?

2016

When David Cameron promised an EU referendum in order to stop the flow of Tory party MPs and voters defecting to UKIP he knew that he was gambling the entire future of the UK in return for a bit of short-term party political advantage, but he did it anyway because he was blindly confident that he was going to win.

We all know what happened next, and it's pretty obvious why. It's because David Cameron was a crap gambler.

In 2014 he agreed to a Scottish independence referendum and then watched on in horror as the SNP turned the thing into a massive 9 month long grassroots campaign that brought the Yes vote a hell of a lot closer than anyone was expecting.

So Cameron's strategy for his EU referendum gamble was to squeeze the whole thing into as short a time span as possible in order to keep the debate as quick and ill-informed as possible.

What Cameron failed to factor in when he compressed the debate like this was that unlike the Scottish independence referendum where the mainstream media and Westminster establishment class were firmly on his side, in his EU referendum the right-wing propaganda rags and half of his own MPs were agitating for Brexit.

Cameron lost because he was too stupid to understand that he was playing a completely different game to the last one, and that the rushed campaign he organised ended up massively favouring the loudest and most dishonest players, and gave little time and space for actual experts to be heard.

And what made it even worse is that Cameron didn't bother to compel the Brexiteers to compose a Brexit manifesto to which they could be held should he lose, or even draw up the skeleton of a contingency plan in case people didn't vote the way he told them to.

Cameron was such a reckless gambler that he didn't even realise that he rigged his own game against himself, and outright refused to even consider the possibility that he might lose.

2019

So we're all clear about how how David Cameron gambled away Britain's future in 2016, so let's move forward to 2019 where we have Remainer politicians like Vince Cable agitating for another referendum.

It's absolutely clear that another referendum is simply another roll of the dice. The Tory party is still full of Brexiteer ideologues, the right-wing propaganda rags will still promote Brexit to their audience of millions, and public opinion has barely shifted against Brexit despite 30 months of untrustworthy and brazenly incompetent Brexit floundering from Theresa May and the Tory government.

Additionally we have to consider the Electoral Commission that allowed the 2016 referendum to turn into an orgy of fear-mongering (from both sides), outright lying, and financial cheating. They've not been reformed at all, they have no extra powers than they had before to properly punish the liars and cheaters.

And then we have to consider the most risky element of all from a Remain perspective, the fact that if Theresa May remains in power then she'll have the power to decide the options on the ballot paper, the wording of the options, and the timing of the ballot.

Anyone who imagines she wouldn't use these crucial decisions to maximise Tory party political advantage clearly knows nothing about what the Tory party is, or how it operates.

So the Remainers who are calling for another referendum can see how badly loaded the dice are likely to be if Theresa May gets to run the game, but somehow they still want to play, and they still refuse to consider the dire consequences if they lose.

If they lose their gamble with the nation's future then they will have created an inescapable double-mandate for Brexit, and what's worse is that they'll have left the Tories in charge to administer it.

We all saw how the Tories dealt with the 2008 economic crisis that was triggered by the reckless gambling of their banker mates. They loaded all of the economic burdens on poor and ordinary people through austerity dogma, wage repression, severe social security cuts, public service cuts, and privatisation mania. Meanwhile they protected the wealth of the the mega-rich and even showered the bankers who caused the crisis in the first place with tax cuts and handouts!

Does anyone honestly believe that the Tories wouldn't take exactly the same approach with a Brexit economic crisis?

Does anyone honestly believe that a double-mandate for Brexit wouldn't be used as an excuse for more austerity dogma and wage repression for the masses, and more tax cuts and handouts for the mega rich?

So if the lives and livelihoods of millions are at stake like this, why are the Remainers so desperate to roll the dice again with the Tories still in charge?

The only possible answer is that they're too arrogant to believe in the possibility that they could lose.

"This time we'll make the stupid plebs see sense", "this time they'll vote the way we tell them to", "this time we'll save them from their own stupidity", "this time we'll defeat the combined force of the right-wing propaganda rags with our earnest facts and statistics and unbelievably cringeworthy trampoline jumping escapades".

Another referendum is likely to happen sooner or later, but it's an extraordinarily risky gamble without first removing the Tories who created this entire Brexit mess in the first place, and without scrapping Theresa May's malicious threat of deliberately triggering a "no deal" economic meltdown into the dustbin of history where it belongs.

If these people absolutely insist on playing with loaded dice and then lose, then they'll be even more responsible than David Cameron was for having delivered the ensuing Tory carnage.

Conclusion

In answer to the question I asked at the top of this article, there are many reasons that the British political class are such reckless gamblers that they'd even play with loaded dice without accepting the possibility that they might actually lose.

One of the main reasons is arrogance. They believe in their own righteousness so much that they can't comprehend that there isn't much room for righteousness in a game of dice.

Another reason that gamblers gamble is that it's exciting. The political class love being in campaign mode, appearing on the telly, speaking in front of crowds, the breathless excitement of uncertainty, the adoration of their supporters.

But probably the main reason is that e ery ast one of them is financially insulated from true hardship. They've got hefty parliamentary salaries and gold-plated pensions to fall back on if it all goes wrong.

All the Westminster establishment class have got to lose if their gamble goes wrong is personal pride. They can just say "oops" if it all goes wrong then retire to put their trotters up like David Cameron. Meanwhile it's millions of ordinary people up and down the country who will be the ones who pay the actual costs of suffering, and job losses, and food inflation, and hardship, and death.

The main reason they're so addicted to gambling is that it'll always be ordinary people like you and me who have to pay down their gambling debts when it all goes wrong. And who would say no to free bets at the casino with other people's money?

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Why we need to get this Tory rabble out of power before holding another EU referendum

There's no doubt that British politics has become incredibly polarised, with the divisions over Brexit being the prime example. However it's always important to remember that the most vocal on either side of the polar divide actually represent relatively tiny factions of the British public as a whole.

Brextremists

The Brextremists relentlessly pushing for a "no deal" socio-economic meltdown (so they can cash in by speculating against Britai when the crash they engineered happens) are obviously a bunch of raving headbangers, many of whom were deeply involved in the staggeringly dishonest and unlawfully funded Leave campaign in 2016.

I don't think I really need to go into much more detail about how much everyone should detest the hard-right Brextremists.

Remain extremists

On the other polar opposite of Brexit the extremism is no less severe. Any hint of criticism of the EU (no matter how deserving or justifiable) and certain pro-EU factions will savage you online. And woe betide anyone who supports Jeremy Corbyn because the hatred the Remain extremists have for him is seemingly the only thing that outweighs their opposition to Brexit.

Just take the Tory Remain icon Anna Soubry as an example. This is a woman who openly admits that she'd rather enforce a ruinous Brexit under Tory rule than have "no Brexit" under Labour rule, yet the #FBPE Remainer echo chamber still absolutely adores her and hangs on her every word.

Instead of tackling the Tory government head on in order to ensure Theresa May's appalling threat to launch a ruinous Tory "no deal" Brexit is removed from the table for good, an awful lot of Remain extremists seem to divide their efforts between pivoting Tory criticism onto Jeremy Corbyn, and demanding "another referendum now".

Counter-productive behaviour

Remain extremists pivoting criticism away from the Tories and onto Corbyn is appallingly self-defeating stuff from their own perspective because they'll absolutely need to convince the majority of the Labour left to side with them if they want to have any chance of winning a second referendum (especially given the vast campaigning power Labour have built up under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership). So their tactic of associating an atrocious and constant barrage of anti-Corbyn, anti-Labour, anti-left misinformation, abuse, and lies with the Remain camp is clearly massively and ridiculously counter-productive.

But then the "another referendum now" demand is even more problematic because another referendum now does absolutely nothing to deal with any of the underlying problems that caused Brexit in the first place, and leaving the Tories in power as another referendum happened would obviously play right into the hands of the "no deal" Brextremists.

The threat of "no deal"

Another referendum under Tory rule would clearly be a much riskier proposition that an referendum under a Labour or progressive coalition government, because to have the government actively pushing their awful Brexit plan and continually threatening "no deal" if they don't get their own way would substantially increase the hyper-nationalist fervour, and risk delivering another Leave vote that would absolutely set Tory Brexit in stone, and massively increase the probability of them pushing ahead with a ruinous "no deal" meltdown.

Double-mandate

Another reason that another Brexit vote under Tory rule could end up in complete disaster is that a second win for Leave with them in charge would obviously serve as a double-mandate for leaving the EU and destroy the possibility of ever stopping the Tories from driving on with their hard-right interpretation of Brexit (gutting wages and workers' rights, slashing corporation and wealth taxes, scrapping food standards and consumer protections, reversing environmental legislation, and revoking our rights and liberties) whether that be through Theresa May's hopelessly botched deal, or a "no deal" meltdown.

Austerity

Another crucial factor is that the Tories have a huge incentive to hide the fact that failing public services, collapsing wages, ruined social welfare systems, soaring poverty, and collapsing living standards are all the result of their ideologically driven hard-right austerity agenda, and what better way to hide their guilt by passing blame off onto immigrants and the EU?

A Labour or progressive coalition government could at least try to explain to the British people that it was Tory austerity dogma that trashed their living standards over the last 8 years, not the EU, and that whatever the outcome of a second referendum the emphasis of all government policy would be switched from relentlessly serving interests of the mega-rich at the expense of everyone else like the Tories did, to protecting the living standards of the poor and ordinary.

Suffering

The risk of a second referendum creating a double-mandate for Brexit obviously wouldn't be stopped by a Labour or progressive coalition government because the government simply can't control the way the public chose to vote (otherwise we wouldn't be in this mess at all would we?).

However at least a non-Tory government could deliver a much less harmful version of Brexit if that's what the people vote for again.

Just witness the way the Tories spent the last 8 years deliberately loading the economic burden of paying for the bankers' insolvency crisis onto the poorest and most vulnerable people in society (as they simultaneously showered the mega-rich speculator class who created the crisis with tax cuts and handouts).

Does anyone honestly believe that a Tory government wouldn't seek to load the economic burden of their own Brexit meltdown onto the poor and ordinary too in order to protect the wealth of the mega-rich class who totally bankroll their party?

At least a Labour or progressive coalition government could work to protect the most vulnerable people in society from the worst Brexit consequences if they ended up binding themselves into it by calling and losing a second Brexit referendum.

Electoral rules

The Electoral Commission is woefully unfit for purpose and has been for years. Their bone-idle refusal to update the electoral rules to account for the rise of political propaganda on social media, their blind eye to extreme-right parties scamming donations out of gullible people, their whitewash of the 2015 Tory electoral fraud, the ever-growing barrage of political lies they do nothing to combat, fining electoral cheats a tiny fraction of the money they actually spent on vote rigging, and the extraordinary fact that they actively advised the Vote Leave campaign to break the electoral spending rules by funnelling excess donations through shell campaigns!

Nothing has changed. Nothing has been reformed. The same incompetent organisation is running the show.

So why on earth does it make sense to have another referendum under the same rules, and with the same incompetent clowns in charge? Surely the risks of a repeat show are obvious, especially since all the liars and lawbreakers totally got away with it last time!

Surely one of the first priorities of a new government would be electoral reforms to clamp down on election rigging, online dark ads, and deliberate lying, so offenders face the very real prospect of jail time rather than a tiny slap on the wrist?

Unicornism

The fantasy that everything is going to be fine as long as we get a second referendum right now is just as absurd as the unicornism of the Brexit voters who actually thought that the Brexit process would be quick and easy, and that it would result in a wonderful bonanza of extra NHS funding, lavish new trade deals, more jobs, more wealth, more prosperity!

A second referendum definitely does provide the possibility of escaping from Brexit, but then it creates an almost equal possibility of making it nailed-on 100% certain too.

And whatever the outcome of another referendum, if we don't get rid of the Tories who created all this Brexit chaos in the first place, whatever the outcome we're still stuck with austerity dogma, wage repression, deliberate under-investment, crumbling public services, malicious persecution of disabled people, and the rest of their callous ideologically driven nonsense.

Why the rush?

The desperate rush to secure a second referendum before March 29th was vaguely understandable before the European Court of Justice ruling that the UK parliament could unilaterally withdraw Article 50, because of the "ticking clock" aspect, but now it makes no sense at all.

The logical course of action is to make the argument that the unprecedented chaos Theresa May and the Tories have inflicted on parliament, the nation, and our European allies means we're going to need more time to sort out the mess.

The logical plan would go something along the lines of: Revoke or extend Article 50. Call a General Election. Establish a new government. Put the Brexit issue to the people again. Then do as the people advise by either cancelling Brexit or going back to square one to try to do Brexit properly this time.

And by properly I mean that the Brexiteers must agree on an actual Brexit plan before the vote so everyone in Britain can read their proposals and there's absolutely no ambiguity about what they're promising in regards to stuff like single market access, the customs union, the Irish border, immigration, trade deals, workers' rights, rights of EU citizens in the UK, environmental standards ...

Letting them do it as a "make it up as we go along" farce again must be absolutely out of the question.

If Remain wins the UK gets to stay in the EU under the same conditions (according to the the terms of the ECJ Article 50 ruling they're not allowed to punish us for inflicting this 30 month Tory farce on them), and if Leave wins the terms of their published Brexit proposals will be legally binding on the new government.

Gambling

I'll detest David Cameron for the rest of my living days for the way he recklessly gambled away the nation's future solely in order to grub a few thousand votes off the ukippers in the 2015 General Election without even bothering to develop a contingency plan in case he somehow lost.

If the "People's Vote" campaigners somehow manage to secure another referendum without taking care of the vital first step of removing the Tories first, then end up losing it, I'll detest them with the same kind of passion.

If they gamble away the nations' future simply because they were in such a rush that they didn't even think to clear out the Tories who created the mess in the first place, they won't be just as bad as Cameron, they'll be worse.

For Cameron his gamble was just an abstract political feud between his super-privileged and out-of-touch Etonian and Bulligdon Club mates.

He never gave a shit about the living standards of "the lower orders". He didn't give a shit when he was punishing them with austerity dogma, so why on earth would he have given a shit about them when he gambled with the entire future of their nation?

The "another referendum now" campaigners have no such excuse. They've spent the last two years (quite rightly) worrying about the impact of Brexit on ordinary people's lives, freedoms, and living standards, so none of them can pretend to be an ignorant, aloof, and out-of-touch toff like Cameron.

If they end up getting another referendum but losing it and setting a ruinous Tory Brexit in stone simply because they didn't take the necessary step of removing the callous and incompetent Tories from power first, their gamble will be absolutely and totally unforgivable because they fully understood what the consequences would be if they screwed it up.

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