Theresa May's extraordinary incompetence is fracturing the political right

The Tory Blue-Kip strategy was 20 years in the making, but when Theresa May activated it in April 2017 by triggering the snap election, it backfired spectacularly and actually ended up costing the Tory party their parliamentary majority, and now, just a couple of years later the Tory party is teetering on the brink of electoral ruin thanks to multiple splits in the political right.

The Blue-Kip strategy

Before Theresa May called the 2017 General Election, the numbers seemed to make perfect sense for the Tories. If they could combine the Tory vote with the UKIP vote, Labour would be annihilated and the other opposition parties wouldn't stand a chance either.

After years of upping the far-right, anti-immigrant, ultranationalist rhetoric in order to appeal to the Ukip crowd, Theresa May and the Tories decided to put their plan into action, and to an extent it worked. The far-right ultranationalist boost increased the Tory vote by 2.2 million from 2015, but what they didn't count on at all was the Corbyn surge which added an astounding 3.6 million votes for Labour.

Not only did the Tories fail to achieve the 150-200 seat mega-majority they'd dreamed of, they actually lost their parliamentary majority and put themselves at the beck and call of the Northern Irish DUP sectarians.

Demographics

One of the most obvious consequences of this massive shift in British politics was that the Tories have rendered themselves utterly reliant upon the extremely fickle Blue-Kip demographic, because if the 2.2 million flowed out as quickly as they'd flowed in, the Tory party would obviously end up getting hammered at the next General Election.

So the Tories were forced to continue pandering to the Blue-Kip demographic with far-right politics, anti-immigrant posturing, rabble-rousing, and overt displays of ultranationalism, despite the fact that the less rabid type of Tory voter and the younger generations are absolutely repulsed by this stuff.

In a way Theresa May and the Tories did reasonably well to keep this almost impossible shambles rolling for as long as they did, alternating top spot in the polls with Labour for the next year and a half.

OK they've had the majority of the mainstream media firmly on their side, and "centrists" continued helping the Tories by refusing to critique the ruinous austerity policies that trashed our living standards and caused the Brexit vote in the first place (the Lib-Dems who colluded with austerity fanaticism for five years, and the Labour right-wingers who lost the 2015 General Election by pathetically imitating austerity instead of vehemently opposing it) but the demographic trapdoor they've painted themselves over was always going to give way at some point.

And now that the Tories have failed to deliver the far-right ultranationalist fantasy of Brexit they're clearly in very deep trouble.

Brexit

Delivering Brexit was always absolutely crucial for the Tories to retain the support of the fickle Blue-Kip demographic.

I guess May imagined it would be easy enough to do with a 150-200 seat mega-majority in parliament, but once that fantasy was destroyed by the Corbyn surge in 2017, delivering any kind of Brexit became impossible, hence the national humiliation of the UK government having to go to Brussels to beg the EU to give us more time to sort out the extraordinary constitutional deadlock that Theresa May has created for us.

She knows that her endlessly repeated threat of punishing the British people with a devastating "no deal" meltdown if she didn't get her own way would have utterly destroyed the myth of Tory economic competence and driven millions of people away from the Tories for ever, so she knew that she could never actually follow through on her threats, despite wasting literally £billions on "no deal" planning to make it look like she was serious.

And she also knows that she can't get her shitty almost universally unpopular deal through parliament without significant compromise, and that any compromise towards Customs Union membership, Single Market access, protected workers' rights and the like would sound the death knell for Toryism by driving the far-right Blue-Kip demographic away from the Tories for good.

So she can't deliver Brexit, she can't follow through on her threats, and she can't compromise.

After steering the nation into this absurd deadlock situation and then simply clinging to power instead of letting someone else have a go, it's extraordinary that the Tories have any political support left at all.

Brexit Party

Theresa May's failure to deliver Brexit has led to her worst nightmare, the resurrection of UKIP under a new shinier brand, and in a matter of weeks pretty much the entire Blue-Kip demographic has surged away from the Tory party to pledge allegiance to Nigel Farage's new opaquely-funded Brexit Party.

The worst Tory local election results since 1995 (despite the Brexit Party not even standing candidates) have been followed up by extraordinary polls showing Labour establishing significant leads after huge numbers of people have abandoned the Tories to switch support to the Brexit Party.

So the people Theresa May has spent her entire time as PM pandering to have disappeared even more quickly than they flocked into the Tory ranks in the first place!

CUK and the Lib-Dems

The Brexit Party is clearly Theresa May's biggest problem, but then she also has another major headache too because there are two so-called "centrist" parties jostling to hoover up the Tory vote at the other edge by imitating their pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, orthodox neoliberal policies under the Remain banner.

At the 2016 EU referendum 57% of Tories voted for Brexit, but 43% voted Remain, which is hardly an insignificant proportion.

If these people start to believe that they can have the exact same "impoverish the poor to further enrich the wealthy" neoliberal policies elsewhere, without the inconvenience of being ideologically tied to this Tory Brexit shambles, significant numbers of them are going to buy into yellow or grey versions of orthodox neoliberalism, and the more effort Theresa May puts into preventing the Blue-Kip exodus, the more she's going to drive people out at the other end of the party.

The egotistical CUK squatters have made an absolute mess of almost everything they've touched in their first three months, but picking an ex-Tory leader who positions them to the right of the Tory party on economic policy, appointing the austerity fanatic Chris Leslie as their economics lead man, and the pro-privatisation Angela Smith as their business, environment, and transport bod are clearly moves designed to bring orthodox neoliberals into the CUK fold, and to attract the big money donors who are getting close to losing their patience with bankrolling the decaying Tories and their interminable Brexit farce.

Division of the right

Even those of us who were only children, or not even born in the mid-80s know all about the SDP and how divisions on the political left ended up handing Margaret Thatcher a majority so large that it wasn't finally eroded until 1997, but now, as a result of Theresa May's extraordinary incompetence, the political right is fracturing into various factions.

The far-right ultranationalists are deserting the Tory party in droves to back the Brexit Party Faragists and the remnants of UKIP, while the orthodox neoliberal right-wingers are ever more tempted by the pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, pro-EU posturing of the CUK squatters and the Lib-Dems.

It's looking increasingly likely that all that will be left of the Tory party will be the rump of political tribalists who treat political parties with the same undying loyalty as football fans treat their teams (no matter how shit they are they'll never abandon them to support another team, the worst they'll ever do is stop turning out to support them).

Labour

The division of the political right and the vast Labour membership surge since Jeremy Corbyn binned orthodox neoliberalism and returned Labour to their democratic socialist roots mean that the party will probably never have a better shot at regaining the government than the next General Election, and finally reversing the neoliberal economic fanaticism that has done so much damage to the UK since Thatcher infected the Westminster political establishment class with this toxic hard-right militancy in 1979.

Of course the CUK squatters and Lib-Dems will try to erode the Labour vote too, by appealing to the orthodox neoliberals in the Labour ranks, but grotesque living standard-eroding stuff like austerity dogma, privatisation mania, brutal social security cuts, and deliberate infrastructure under-investment have far more appeal to right-wing Labour MPs than they do to ordinary Labour Party members and voters.

Labour will continue to be attacked from both sides for their policy of trying to de-escalate Brexit, rather than whipping it up even more for their own political purposes with cries of "betrayal" and "treason" from the Brextremists, and the desperate pining for a final 'do or die' 'now or never' clash of civilisations 'another roll of the dice' referendum from the Remain Ultras.

This is unfortunate, but the Tories created this massive social division, and political opportunists from both sides are fully intent on whipping up the hate, and actually widening the divide for their own selfish political purposes, rather than seeking some kind of compromise that neither side will particularly like, but most ordinary people can live with.

This isn't to say Labour shouldn't back another referendum (they've voted in favour of one twice already), it's just that they should make sure they offer a more moderate Brexit (Customs Union, Single Market, protected workers' rights, co-operation on science, security & environment) and do everything in their power to make sure ruinous undefined options like "no deal" are kept off the ballot (surely the #1 lesson from the 2016 referendum is that undefined options in national referendums are a dreadful idea?).

The worst mistake Labour could make is to follow Theresa May's lead and pick one side of this hyper-partisan Brexit division, because you only have to look at the chaos she's created through this wilful partisanship, and the ongoing breakup of the Tory vote to understand the risks.

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What's going on here?

Every single time I mention the indisputable fact that the older demographics are more likely to vote Tory, to support Brexit, and to approve of right-wing authoritarian propaganda tropes, the inevitable response is a barrage of  self-defensive "how dare you!" comments from people stating their age and then saying that they never voted Tory in their lives.

Nowadays I always preface comments about age demographics with "obviously not all old people are like this and it's wrong to generalise" type disclaimers in order to deter the inevitable barrage of "how dare you!" comments, but it doesn't seem to matter.
 

They still turn up, state their age, and chastise me for generalising about all old people despite my explicit disclaimers explaining that discussion of demographic trends is not the same as generalising about all old people.

Whether I shroud my comments about demographic trends in disclaimers or not, these comments always appear without fail.

So what's going on here?

Why are so many older people so determined to self-defensively shout down commentary on the observable demographic reality about the voting habits of older people?

Surely we're all familiar with the fragile male who interrupts the conversation about issues like rape and domestic violence to proclaim "not all men", as if he's interpreted criticism of rapists and wife-beaters as being an attack on his personal masculinity.

And we're familiar with the ultra-defensive white fragility of some white people when it's pointed out that whites are still the beneficiaries of systemic racism, as if the fact that systemic racism still exists is somehow a personal attack on them for being white.

The same thing is going on with over-60s when they lash out at the demographic evidence that tells us that the majority of their peers vote Tory, support Brexit, and tend to fall for right-wing authoritarian and ultranationalist rhetoric.

They're lashing out because just like the "not all men" interrupter misinterpreting criticism of rapists as criticism of his masculinity, and the white fragility sufferer misinterpreting criticism of systemic racism as an attack on their white identity, these older people are misinterpreting the demographic discussion as an attack on their self-identity as an older person.

It turns out that it doesn't really matter how many facts and evidence and disclaimers we use because this self-defence response isn't a rational one, it's an emotive one.

As soon as people feel their identity as an older person, a male, a white, or whatever is under attack, logic and reason go straight in the bin, they tend to become impervious to facts and evidence, and a vehement emotive defence is mounted.

This kind of emotive reaction to perceived criticism of the self-identity is clearly a deeply embedded human trait, and one that it's easily possible to weaponise.

Older people who ignore all of the disclaimers to post their "I'm [insert age] and I'm not a [Tory/Brexiter], how very dare you generalise about me!" beneath any reference to age-related demographic trends are frustratingly predictable, but in the grand scheme of things they're pretty much harmless. After all their emotive response is to defend their self-identity as a good person who cares about society.

What's a lot more concerning is the way these emotive self-identity reactions are weaponised by the extreme-right, because the extreme-right know that once you've got people thinking with their emotions, they're incredibly easy to manipulate.

The reason victimhood narratives are so prevalent in extreme-right politics is that telling people their identity as a white/wealthy/male/heterosexual/Christian/Brit/whatever is under threat from the immigrants/Marxists/Feminazis/queers/atheists/PC thought police/Jews is designed to trigger this emotive self-defence reaction.

And the further towards the extreme-right the Conservative party drifts, the more we see Tory politicians and Tory supporters actively spreading these extreme-right victimhood narratives, conspiracy theories about "cultural Marxists", "the great replacement", "white genocide" and "postmodern neo-Merxism", and fear-mongering about the terrifying plot to erase Western culture and western people's identities.

This extreme-right political tactic is incredibly sinister and dangerous because these ideas are driving terrorist attacks like the Jo Cox assassination and the Christchurch massacres.

However the emotive self-identity defence these extreme-right victimhood narratives are designed to trigger have exactly the same emotional root as the old lefty typing out a furious "how dare you!" comment in response to the demographic data that proves that older people are generally more susceptible to this kind of identity-driven right-wing propaganda than the younger generations are.

Like I said before in my multiple disclaimers, these self-defensive "how dare you!" older people are not sinister, and they're not the enemy. At worst they're a mild annoyance for the way they just climb over the massive walls of disclaimers I've erected to post the exact same comments as if the walls weren't there at all.

But there is actually a lot to be learned by thinking about the instinctive and emotive self-identity defence reaction that drives these self-defensive comments, and how these often-harmless instincts and emotions can be manipulated for nefarious political purposes.

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Liz Truss's pitch to the young 'uns is extraordinary Tory gibberish

You may remember the Tory minister Liz Truss as the woman who told parliament that barking dogs could be used to deter drones, or as the woman who got inexplicably angry about cheese, but in a bid to outdo herself she's now decided that she can convince young people to vote Tory by treating them like a pack of infinitely gullible idiots.

It's not even clear where Truss made these comments, or even if she said them at all. They appear in multiple identikit articles in the mainstream media that have presumably been churnalised from the exact same Tory press release.

The press reports all start off by repeating an extraordinary Tory insult at the 18-24 demographic. Apparently a lot of people within the Tory bubble are going around claiming that young people voted so heavily in favour of Labour at the 2017 General Election not because the Tories trashed their wages, tripled their tuition fees, gutted investment in their public services, and maliciously threatened their grandparents with "dementia tax", but because they're a gullible bunch of "sandal wearing Corbynistas"!

Truss wants to tell young people that she thinks that's wrong, but in bringing up this patronising Tory trope in the first place she's admitting that it's one that has a lot of currency within the Tory party she's desperately trying to trick young people into voting for!

The press release that Truss puts her name to carefully avoids admitting any of the Tory policies that have devastated the lives of the younger generations.

She refuses to admit Tory responsibility for tripling tuition fees and ramping up the interest rates on repayments so much that 3/4 of graduates will never fully pay back their student debts despite an entire working lifetime of paying a 9% education tax on their disposable income.

She refuses to admit Tory responsibility for the longest sustained collapse in the value of UK workers' wages since records began, meaning that the average wage is lower in real terms now than it was a decade ago.

She refuses to admit that exploitative Zero Hours Contract and fake self-employment jobs have spread like wildfire since the Tories came to power, meaning that millions of mainly younger workers are trapped in stressful and hopelessly dispiriting in-work poverty.

But worst of all is her rhetoric when it comes to housing. Truss refuses to admit that the Tory governments' between 2010 and 2017 oversaw the lowest level of new house building since the mid-1920s. She refuses to admit that the Tory government classifying £450,000 homes as "affordable" is an absolute affront to millions of younger people who could hardly imagine the possibility of getting a mortgage for half that amount. She refuses to admit that the Tories actually voted down moves to prevent unscrupulous landlords profiteering from the housing shortage by renting out properties that are unfit for human habitation.

And now she expects young people to be naive enough to believe her "jam tomorrow" promises that the Tories will "turn up the heat of competition" to build more houses in the future (as if four decades of rigid adherence to Thatcherite competition dogma isn't the biggest cause of the housing crisis in the first place).

With technology it's the same. Vote Tory for better broadband is her message, but this is completely at odds with the Tories' atrocious track record of inflicting unprecedented ideologically driven cuts in infrastructure investment.

We've spent 9 years slashing investment in infrastructure but if you vote for us next time we'll usher in a golden dawn of investment in infrastructure! - This is the absurd message she's trying to flog to the young 'uns!

And then there's this extraordinarily garbled nonsense: "The state is not always the answer to our modern problems – and it’s precisely the opposite of what the new generation want".

She's switched from vote Tory and we'll completely reverse our track record of low house building and catastrophic under-investment in infrastructure to deliver a state-led recovery to young people are anarcho-capitalists who hate the state, so they should vote Tory!

The problem of course is that the Tories know they have nothing to offer the younger generations except more austerity, more wage repression, more under-investment in infrastructure and services, more privatisation and commodification of the education system, more cuts to the social safety net, more unsustainable house price inflation, and more of the kind of regressive hard-right ultranationalism that attracted the vile blue-kip demographic to the Tory party in 2017.

They know that they have to deliver all of this because if they rowed back on any of it then their corporate backers who bankroll their party would walk away and the selfish "I'm alright Jack" bastards who apparently make up the majority of the boomer generation would revolt in fury.
 

The younger generations absolutely hate regressive
hard-right ultranationalism, but that's exactly what
the Tories need to promote in order to keep the
blue-kip demographic on board.

 
The Tories know that they have to tell comforting lies to the younger generations, but they simply don't even understand what young people want (aside from the desires of grotesque extreme-right freaks the Tory party have been attracting from the younger generations in recent times), so with one hand they offer them pale imitations of the workers' rights and investment economics of the 2017 Labour Manifesto, but with the other they offer them the entirely contradictory promises of even more ideologically driven marketisation of the economy and the ridiculous Tory fantasy of a hard-right anarcho-capitalist utopia.

The essential takeaway from Truss's press release is that she admits that most of her colleagues believe in the insulting caricature of the younger generations as 'sandal wearing Corbynista hippies', but she believes something different.

She believes the younger generations are a bunch of infinitely gullible political illiterates who can be tricked into voting Tory with absurdly contradictory fantasies of a Tory government delivering more state-driven investment in the things they want (decent housing and infrastructure investment) as they simultaneously brag about their plans to turn Britain into an uncaring and unresponsive anarcho-capitalist hellscape where the state does even less to protect people from the extremes of unregulated capitalism than it does in the present!

Of course Truss didn't write this speech for herself, it was cobbled together by some ridiculously over-privileged Tory wonk(s) with absolutely no idea what it's like living in the real world after almost a full decade of ruinous Tory austerity dogma, wage repression, deliberate under-investment in infrastructure and services, social security cuts, and shocking Tory inaction on issues like the housing crisis and in-work poverty.

But she's the one who put her name to this condescending and mutually contradictory rubbish as if it wasn't just another slap in the face to the 60% of young people who absolutely detest her party for the immeasurable damage the Tories have done to our country, and their futures.

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The Tories want to attract the youth vote, but they're only attracting nasty extreme-right freaks

The Tories know that they're shockingly unpopular with the younger generations, and they're constantly preoccupied with how they're going to trick the under-45s into voting for them, including a Resolution Foundation event at the Tory party conference on winning back the under-45s that was mainly attended by over-45s.

Here are a few ideas for appealing to the under-45s

End austerity and wage repression: We've had a decade of this ruinous hard-right Tory economic nonsense now, which means that all workers up to the age of 28 have spent their entire careers in the Tory deadzone of real terms wage cuts, wrecked wage progression, outrageously exploitative employment practices, and scrapped workers rights. Any graduate under the age of 41 has now spent half of their working life in this Tory deadzone too. If the Tories really want to appeal to the under-45s, scrapping austerity dogma and wage repression would be an immediate first step.

Scrap "no deal" Brexit: If it was up to the under-45s there would never have been a Brexit in the first place, but they're being forced to bear the consequences because millions of retired people voted to trash the prospects and revoke the rights of the younger generations just because they believed Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Nigel Farage and the rubbish they read in the hard-right propaganda rags. The absolute least the Tories could do is follow Labour's lead and retract their threat of launching an economically ruinous "no deal" Brexit flounce because it's the under-45s who would have to deal with the extreme economic fallout of such a catastrophic move for decades.

Free education: One of the Tories' first moves when the Lib-Dems enabled them back into power in 2010 was to triple university fees to make England the most expensive place in the world to study at public university. As a result students are now leaving university with £50,000+ debts which grow at inflation plus 3%. This means that over 70% of graduates will never pay off their student debts despite paying a permanent 9% education tax on their disposable income for their entire working lives. Lumbering young people with such enormous and unpayable debts is clearly both unsustainable and a clear turnoff for anyone who has been lumbered with such debts.

Stop siding with the extreme-right: Not only is the Tory government propped up by the most bigoted and regressive extremist party in parliament (the extreme-right sectarian DUP mob), they also recently aligned themselves with every neo-Nazi party in the European parliament in order to side with Viktor Orbán's anti-Semitic, xenophobic, judiciary-rigging, free press attacking, ultra-nationalist government in Hungary. Denouncing the extreme-right, anti-Semitism and ultranationalism rather than actively siding with it would surely be a good way of winning favour with the under-45s.

Tackle the housing crisis: Between 2010 and 2017 the Tories oversaw the lowest rates of house building since the 1920s. This lack of house building resulted in house prices soaring to their most unaffordable level ever, and an unprecedented collapse in home ownership rates, especially amongst the under-45s. Not only did the Tories exacerbate the housing crisis, they also voted down a Labour Party effort to ensure that people who have been left trapped in the private rental sector have a right to live in homes that are "fit for human habitation". Any party intent on appealing to the under-45s would make tackling the housing crisis a major priority.

Save the NHS and social care system: One of the strangest things about the state of modern British politics is that the older people are, and more likely they are to rely on NHS and social care services, the more likely they are to vote for the Tory party that is starving these services of investment and vandalising them with closures, ideologically driven reorganisations, and privatisation scams. Investment in the NHS and social care and the reversal of their privatisation agenda would certainly appeal to under-45s who see the NHS and social care system as vital components of living in a civilised society.

Scottish independence: As with Brexit, the outcome of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum would have been completely different had it been up to the under-45s. In fact if the vote had been restricted to people of working age the result would have been independence, but Gordon Brown's fear-mongering about pensioners losing their pensions in an independent Scotland was enough to ensure a huge turnout of elderly people to trample down the hopes and aspirations of their children and grandchildren. Support for another Scottish independence referendum would definitely appeal to the younger generations in Scotland.

Of course none of these are even remotely realistic propositions for the Tory party because they all conflict with the central Tory ideology of protecting the wealth and power of vested establishment interests, and erecting as many social mobility barriers as possible to prevent people from ordinary backgrounds from challenging the children of establishment elitists for the top jobs.

In fact the Tory party is such a weird echo chamber of extremism that when the Guardian journalist Dawn Foster asked some young Tories what policies would attract under-30s back to the Tory fold they replied "bring back public hanging" and proposed the recolonisation of Africa!

Then you just need to look at the disgusting antics of the young Tories at Plymouth University to see what calibre of young people the Tory party is attracting. "Fuck the NHS", pro-Trump, "Enoch [Powell] was right", drawn on Hitler moustaches, anti-Semitic slogans, white power hand gestures ...

Since Theresa may took over as Tory leader, the Tory party has gone through an intense period of Ukipification, pushing hard-right ultranationalism and welcoming UKIP-voters, politicians, and activists into the the Tory fold in droves.

The big problem (from a Tory perspective) with this Ukipification of the thier party is that socially regressive hard-right ultranationalism is utterly abhorrent political cyanide to the vast majority of under-45s, meaning that the few young people who are left supporting the Tories are either the politically clueless who just mindlessly vote the same way their parents do, or the absolutely rabid extreme-right fanatics who would surely be voting for actual neo-Nazi parties (like the ones the Tories aligned themselves with to support Viktor Orbán) if Britain had a modern proportional voting system like the rest of Europe.

So for now the Tory party strategy for attracting the youth vote appears to be appealing to the most rabid extreme-right, anti-Semitic,  "fuck the NHS", socially regressive, "bring back public hanging", Enoch Powell-adoring, "recolonise Africa", white supremacist freaks, and screw the rest of them into the ground in order to feed the insatiable greed of the mega-rich!

 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 Tories are actually trying to spin their anti-Muslim bigotry scandal as a vote winner!

After the Muslim Council of Britain and several senior Conservatives demanded an investigation into anti-Muslim prejudice in the Tory party, many on the left have been quick to point out the tiny flicker of mainstream media coverage on the issue in relation to the massive Labour anti-Semitism furore before the local elections.

The discrepancy in coverage is obvious, but it should come as no surprise at all given the relentless pro-Tory anti-Corbyn bias that not only dominates the print media, but also thrives on the supposedly neutral BBC too.

The allegations of widespread Islamophobia in the Tory ranks and specific accusations of anti-Muslim discrimination against Michael Gove and the Tory leadership should surely be getting more media coverage, but the reason these stories aren't getting much traction are obvious.

Of course mainstream media journalists don't want to scrutinise Tory Islamophobia to the same extent they attacked Labour over allegations of anti-Semitism. Firstly such scrutiny would run entirely counter to the mainstream media groupthink objective of protecting the neoliberal status quo by working to oust Jeremy Corbyn, and secondly "the Tory party is over-run with bigots" is really more of a common sense assertion rather than a groundbreaking news story anyway, isn't it? 

For me the huge disparity between mainstream media coverage of the Labour anti-Semitsm row and the Tory anti-Muslim allegations is actually secondary to another issue, the shockingly cynical Tory response to these allegations of widespread anti-Muslim bigotry in their own party.

While Labour took the position that anti-Semitism is wrong, and that it should be stamped out in all of society, including when it arises in the Labour ranks (the correct response), the Tories have signalled that they're absolutely fine with the allegations and have no intention of investigating them, or dealing with anti-Muslim bigots in their ranks.

The refusal to take the allegations seriously was exemplified by the new Tory Home Secretary Sajid Javid when he attempted to publicly delegitimise the Muslim Council of Britain rather than deal with their concerns over Tory anti-Muslim bigotry.

Labour admitted that they had a problem and proposed to take action to combat it and mainstream media hacks hounded them for weeks over it, and the Tories have basically said "fuck you, we're fine with it" and the mainstream press have largely left them alone.

The interesting thing here is that the Tory response to these allegations has been clearly calculated. They're not just adopting this "fuck you, we're fine with it" attitude because they expect to be allowed to get away with it by their chums in the mainstream media, they will also have considered the public opinion consequences too.

Given that the Tories are only clinging onto power at all because they managed to absorb the majority of the hard-right ultranationalist voters who fled the wreckage of UKIP, a belligerent "fuck you" response to accusations of widespread anti-Muslim bigotry in their ranks is likely to resonate a lot more strongly with this crucial demographic than an admission that anti-Muslim attitudes are wrong, and the launch of an investigation into the problem.

The Tories seem to have calculated that their "fuck you, we're fine with it" attitude will play so well with the large extreme-right ultranationalist demographic they're so desperate to appease, that it will easily mitigate any fallout amongst Tory voting Muslims.

The logic being that any Muslim who still votes Tory after the outrageous BNP stype anti-Muslim fearmongering campaign they ran for Zac Goldsmith's London mayoral campaign in 2015, is clearly also likely to tolerate their refusal to investigate widespread accusations of anti-Muslim bigotry in the Tory ranks too.

An admission of the problem and the launch of an inquiry into it would infuriate the crucial blue-kip demographic the Tory party has rendered itself utterly reliant upon, whilst their belligerent refusal to engage with the criticisms creates the impression that they're exactly the kind of bigoted extreme-right anti-Muslim party this hard right blue-kip demographic are looking for.

just think about it. British society has not yet drifted so far to the extreme-right that the Tories can come out and explicitly position themselves as an anti-Muslim party, but what's the next best thing to appeal to the extreme-right - ultranationalist - white-supremacist - anti-Muslim demographic?

Publicly attacking and delegitimising the Muslim Council of Britain, and clearly signalling that they have no intention of rooting out anti-Muslim bigots from their party would seem ideal for the purpose don't you think?

The Tories are actually playing their anti-Muslim bigotry scandal as a vote winner, knowing that to a significant swathe of right-wing people, rampant anti-Muslim prejudice is actually an attractive quality!

 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

Fake News BBC parrot Theresa May's lie as their number one story

Theresa May stood at the dispatch box and lied. She lied that the decision to destroy immigration landing cards was taken by the Labour Party in 2009 when it wasn't. She lied because she was desperately trying to deflect criticism over her grotesque 'hostile environment' policies that led to the dehumanisation, detention, denial of rights and even and deportation of Commonwealth British citizens. And most of all she lied because she thought she could get away with it.

If the British press had any instinct to hold the UK government to account they would have looked into her claim, immediately found it to be contradicted by the previous day's Home Office admission that the documents were destroyed in October 2010, and run a story criticising the Prime Minister for lying to the House of Commons, and for cynically misleading the British public in order to deflect negative attention away from herself.

But that's not what happened. That's not what happened at all. Instead of investigating her claim, the BBC and various other mainstream media outlets uncritically parroted her lie, and helped her misleadingly deflect the Windrush criticism onto others.

Of course the billionaire owned right-wing propaganda rags and the legions of Tory social media propaganda accounts got in on the misdirection act, but the behaviour of the BBC is much more problematic. They didn't just make Theresa May's lie the number one story on their website, they also uncritically regurgitated her lie into millions of homes and workplaces in TV and radio news segments.

When the state broadcaster refuses to investigate even the most blatant of government lies, and instead uncritically parrots the lie into the homes and onto the devices of millions of people, they're not worthy of the name journalists, or news reporters, they're nothing but impotent court stenographers, and cynical mind manipulators.

But let's not forget the real issue here. The real issue isn't that a batch of documents were destroyed and when. It's that in 2014 Theresa May introduced horrific new anti-immigrant rules giving the government the power to deny employment, deny health care, deny benefits and pensions that people have paid for through decades of National Insurance contributions, and to make British citizens live in constant fear of imprisonment and deportation to places many of them last saw when they were toddlers.

The reason she inflicted this appalling state of limbo on thousands of British citizens was just to grub a few votes off UKIP by appealing to the extreme-right ultranationalist anti-immigrant demographic.

Nobody in the Tory party complained about this blatant Faragisation of the Tory party and the UK government back in 2014, and even now still none of the supposedly more liberal One Nation Tories dares to stand up and criticise what Theresa May has done in their name.

Theresa May brought in these harsh new rules in 2014, and she was undeniably warned at the time by Diane Abbott that such rules could be used against British Commonwealth citizens without paperwork, but May just evaded the question and waffled on about whatever she wanted to, in the way we've all become all-too-familiar with since she became Prime Minister.

If the BBC was up to it's job it would have reported that Theresa May lied. If the so called free press that are not constrained by impartiality rules were up to their jobs they would be calling for Theresa May's resignation for introducing such disgusting rules, then lying to parliament and the public to try to deflect the negative attention. And if Theresa May had the slightest shred of personal integrity she's would have already shown her contrition by tendering her resignation.

None of that has happened. None of that is likely to happen. But the more the media and the political establishment class circle the wagons to protect their own elitist class from the rest of us, the more furious the British public are going to get until something gives.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Esther McVey wants to make teenagers carry the can for Brexit

The Tory DWP minister Esther McVey has announced a bold new policy for mitigating the economic fallout from Brexit; she wants teenagers who were too young to even vote in the EU referendum to carry the can.

The exodus of EU workers is already harming various sectors of the British economy including health and care services, tourism and hospitality, manufacturing, and the agricultural sector.

The number of nurses coming to work in the NHS from the EU has collapsed by 90%; the hospitality industry are projecting a huge post-Brexit recruitment crisis; and £millions worth of fruit and veg are already being left to rot in British fields ... but Esther McVey thinks that the solution is to get British teenagers to plug the gaps by getting Saturday jobs!

It's not just that these youngsters are being robbed of their right to live, study, and work in any of 27 other European nations as the result of a referendum they weren't even able to vote in, they're now being told by out-of-touch Tory millionaires that they should carry the can for the economic fallout of this decision too.

In a way this approach does kind of make sense from a rudimentary greed-based, pro-corporate, hard-right agenda. Why should corporations pay European Union workers full minimum wage of £7.83 per hour to pick fruit and veg or work in the hospitality industry, when they could get a bunch of British teenagers in and pay them as little as £4.20 per hour?

But of course it's necessary to skip over the fact that the cumulative worker-hours of a few tens of thousands more teenagers doing evening and Saturday jobs will never be able to make up the huge labour shortfall Brexit is already delivering, but since when were stuff like facts and evidence ever important to the Brextremists?

It could be argued that Brexit was delivered by pensioners, so pro-Brexit pensioners rather than teenagers should be the ones to fill the gaps in the economy by picking fruit and veg or working in the hospitality industry for just £4.20 per hour.

This makes a lot more sense than trying to shift the workload onto teenagers because there are far more pro-Brexit pensioners than teenagers. And anyone who believes that Britain should be aiming to become a high-skill high-tech economy must surely believe that teenagers should be concentrating on their studies, rather than picking fruit and veg for £4.20 an hour because the Brextremists chased all the migrant workers away.

But the Brexit-voting pensioners obviously won't lift a finger because they'll be perfectly happy as long as all of the negative consequences of the chaotic "make it up as we go along" Tory Brexit farce are loaded onto the shoulders of the younger generations who didn't even get a vote on the issue.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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