Is there any proposition vile or ludicrous enough that the Tory mental gymnasts won't defend it?

Let's not pretend there's not a common human tendency to resort to absurd post hoc justifications for outrageous behaviour when it's our own, or perpetrated by those we support.

This tendency exists, and anyone who has ever even attempted to develop a rational worldview must have confronted their own tendencies to perform this kind of mental gymnastics routine.

Post hoc mental contortionism to defend the indefensible has been a feature of discourse for as long as any of us can remember, but in recent months there's been a constant stream of Tories willing to take the most absurd and demeaning positions to defend the outrageous behaviour of their political tribe.

There's never been a government full of people willing to absolutely demean themselves by defending the utterly indefensible.

The most obvious and glaring example that springs immediately to mind is the absurd story that Dominic Cummings engaged in a lockdown-defying 30 miles each way to the historic beauty spot of Barnard Castle in order to test his eyesight.

The idea that you'd conduct an eyesight test by packing your family into a car and driving them around the country is as absurd as the concept that undertaking such a reckless public-endangering test was an excuse to defy lockdown measures.

But a whole stream of Tories were herded onto social media to announce how convincing they'd found Cummings' explanation, and that it was 'time to move on'.

But the biggest absurdity of all came when Tory government minister Michael Gove told a right-wing radio interviewer that he too had conducted this kind of radically dangerous driving-eyesight test, which they both had a jolly good laugh about because deceiving the public with absolute bullshit is clearly some kind of lovely in joke for ex private school Tories to chuckle over.

On the subject of Michael Gove, he was at the centre of another one of these frenzies of Tory mental gymnastics when his wife posted a picture of his bookshelf, which proudly displayed the work of the Holocaust-denier David Irving, and the outrageous bible of racist pseudo-science, The Bell Curve.

It's not hard to imagine the absolute cacophony of outrage from the Tories had a figure from the left, like Jeremy Corbyn for example, been found with the work of racists and Holocaust-deniers on his bookshelf.

Yet the Tory reaction to Gove's bookshelf was to snap into ultra-defensive mode, and suddenly begin portraying Holocaust-denial as 'required reading actually' and even deriding critics of Holocaust-denial as Nazis!

Another Tory figure to have provoked numerous impromptu displays of Tory mental contortionism over the last few months is their beloved cult leader Boris Johnson.

When he skipped five consecutive COBRA meetings in the crucial early stages of the pandemic, the Tory mental contortionism circus pretended that it was supposedly perfectly normal (no Prime Minister in history before Johnson has skipped five COBRA meeting in a row during a national emergency), and that he was actually in the right to focus on other issues, despite skipping one of them to lark about with a Chinese dragon!

When Johnson publicly bragged about defying social distancing rules (and basic self-preservation) by shaking hands with coronavirus patients, and then presented "take it on the chin" as the preferable option to "draconian measures" like ... erm ... actually attempting to contain the virus, the Tories put on their cognitive clown outfits again and utterly demeaned themselves by jumping through all manner of hoops to defend the ridiculous behaviour and reckless rhetoric of their cult leader.

Then there was the absolutely ludicrous Tory decision to completely sideline the government's own scientific advisers in order to replace the clear and concise slogan "Stay At Home", with a sequence of nonsense verbiage like "Stay Alert By Washing Your Hands!".

Suddenly Tories were flocking onto social media to pretend that this absolute gibberish was perfectly clear and intelligible, despite the fact that if you'd said "Stay Alert By Washing Your Hands!" to anyone pre-2020, they'd have assumed you were having a stroke and called you an ambulance.

And now we've got the absolutely repulsive spectacle of Tories tying themselves in knots to actually defend monuments to slave traders.

When the people of Bristol took matters into their own hands, after six interminable years of political incompetence, to remove the statue of Britain's most notorious slave-trader Edward Colston, the Tories complained bitterly about the lawlessness and the vandalism.

But then when Tower Hamlets Council removed the statue of slave-trader Robert Milligan, in a completely calm, lawful, and safe manner, the Tories erupted in paroxysms of outrage again.

It turns out that the lawlessness and vandalism objection they started with was just a cover for their real objection, which is apparently that they just like statues of racists, because they get some kind of perverse dopamine kick out of the fact that other people find the memorialisation of Tory slave traders and Tory fascist sympathisers abhorrent and disturbing.

But they'll just keep on inventing one post hoc justification after another to defend what can essentially be boiled down to statue trolling.

The latest post hoc excuse is that they're simply defending history, but where on earth were they when their own party was using austerity extremism as an excuse to shut down 800 libraries, annihilate funding for museums, and trash public investment in history departments and history education at every level of the education system?

They clearly don't really give a damn about the nation's history, or they'd have raised concerns over the last decade of Tory historical vandalism, it's just the latest contortion required of them by the leaders of the CCHQ freakshow circus.

In a matter of months the Tories have proven themselves willing to excuse all kinds of nonsense and depravity, from pretending that driving a vehicle on public roads with failing eyesight constitutes reasonable behaviour, to vehemently defending Holocaust-denial as if it constitutes required reading. And from laughing off the actual Prime Minister mocking his own government's social distancing measures, to publicly eulogising slave-traders!

As a nation we've lumbered ourselves with the most inept and cultish government in British history, with piss-witted simpletons in almost every single crucial position, and no matter how badly they keep on screwing up, we're stuck with them for another four years thanks to their 80 seat majority.

There's very little we could do to rid ourselves of them, and the increasingly bizarre and contorted displays of mental gymnastics they're willing to perform to defend the outrageous words and actions of their own cult illustrates the fact that it simply doesn't matter how bad things get, they'll just spout total gibberish, and continue to get away with it.

They know the gibberish they're spouting is absolute bollocks. We know it's absolute bollocks. And worst of all they know that we know it's absolute bollocks.

But they also know there's basically nothing we can do about it, so they're actually getting a perverse kick out of doing stuff like defending the indefensible, excusing Holocaust-denial, and eulogising slave-traders, because they believe that a nation that elected an incompetent, bone idle bigot like Boris Johnson as their leader will never hold them to account for any of it.

Hopefully the British public with eventually grow tired of this lamentable Tory freakshow of mental contortionism, and get rid of them.

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It's too dangerously early to lift the lockdown restrictions

There are four deeply concerning factors about the Tory rush to ease lockdown measures, re-open schools, and try to return to business as usual.

High Death Rate

The future consequences were hard-baked and unavoidable when the Tory government decided to pursue Boris Johnson’s deranged ‘superman of capitalism’ strategy of letting the virus spread like wildfire in the crucial early stages.

Letting the virus spread uncontrolled in the exponential growth phase left the UK with two horrifically unappealing choices. Either continue letting the virus spread out of control and cause an absolutely vast death toll, or implement a much longer lockdown than the countries that actually took the situation seriously from the beginning.

Under huge public pressure the Tories eventually ditched Johnson’s ‘superman of capitalism’ lunacy to bring in a late lockdown, but this decision to save lives was clearly made against their initial intention to prioritise the economy over people’s lives.

As a result of the late lockdown the UK daily death rate (324) is still way higher than Italy (87), Spain (2), Germany (24), and France (52) all combined, but the Tories insist on undoing the lockdown measures as if we’re in a similar situation to our European neighbours, when we’re not.

The shockingly high UK death rate was caused by the Tories being too slow to introduce lockdown measures, and now they’re being too hasty to end the prolonged lockdown measures that were necessitated by their ineptitude in the first place.

Sidelining the science

Multiple scientists, including members of the government’s own scientific advisory group, have publicly declared that it's too early to ease restrictions, because the viral reproduction rate is still too high.

The Tory government completely bypassed scientists to change the clear and unambiguous "Stay At Home" message to absolutely nonsensical gibberish like "Stay Alert By Washing Your Hands", and now they're ignoring the scientific concerns again to push ahead with their bid to return to business as usual.

It makes an absolute mockery of the Tory government’s repeated claims to have "followed the science" when it's now clear that they're simply ignoring the science that contradicts their political agenda.

If the death rate rises again because of this Tory refusal to listen to the concerns of scientists, the decision to kill those people will obviously have been a political one.

Inadequate preparation

The Track and Trace app is unfit for purpose and riddled with problems and delays.

Countries like China and South Korea managed to get Track and Trace apps up and running within weeks, but the Tory government has created a hopelessly delayed shambles.

Then there's the fact there's still not even adequate protective gear for medics and other front line workers, let alone enough to support the culture of mandatory mask-wearing that’s become commonplace in the countries that really got their infection rates down.

It could be argued that the sensible course of action would be to wait until the Track and Trace app is fixed, and until the supply of PPE is adequate, but that would be to assume a level of competence that this dreadful Tory government simply doesn’t possess.

They’ve had over four months since the first reported UK case in January 2020, and it’s still an absolutely chaotic mess. It would take a dangerously large dose of over-optimism to imagine that it would only take them a few more weeks for them to find the competence they’ve been so sorely lacking for months.  

The problem of course is that it’s just not safe to relax the lockdown unless this hopeless shambles of a government somehow becomes competent, which it certainly doesn't seem capable of.

Undermining the rules

If lockdown isn’t to result in another spike in the death rate a few weeks down the line, it’s absolutely crucial that the majority continue following the social distancing and self-isolation rules.

The fact that Dominic Cummings has not been made to resign over his multiple flagrant breaches of self-isolation and 'Stay At Home' measures means that huge numbers of people are obviously going to conclude that if the rules don't apply to him, then they don't apply to me either.

The Tories haven’t just refused to punish Cummings for his brazen rule-breaking, they’ve actually been running a series of utterly absurd excuses for him, to the extent that they’ve been refusing to tell people to respect the 14 day self-isolation rules if the question is posed in the context of Cummings’ rule breaking.

Boris Johnson has decided to elevate the career of a single Tory adviser over the public health of the entire nation, and the longer Cummings is allowed to stay, the worse the damage is going to be.

Conclusion

The UK death rate is higher than the four largest EU states combined, the concerns of scientists are being ignored, the infrastructure simply isn't in place yet, and the partisan political decision not to sack Cummings is catastrophically undermining the social distancing and self-isolation rules that people must follow if the lockdown is to be lifted successfully.

It will take several weeks for the consequences to become clear, but if the death rate stops falling, or rises towards a second peak, we'll know that the Tories are entirely to blame.

And if the Tories do end up pushing thousands more people into early graves, we'll have to be extremely wary of their cynical efforts to offload the blame onto scientists, public health professionals, or the public.

 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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If he'll lie about coronavirus to make himself look cleverer than he is, why would you ever trust anything else he says?

It would clearly take days to unpack all the excuses, and blame-shifting, and deceptions, and lies, and open admissions of guilt, and refusals to take responsibility, but one thing in particular stands out from Dominic Cummings' press conference.

Cummings claimed to have predicted coronavirus on his blog last year by saying "only last year I wrote explicitly about the danger of coronaviruses".

This is a demonstrable lie.

He didn't predict coronavirus last year. In fact he edited his blog to make it look like that's what he did on the day he arrived back in London from his lockdown defying jaunt up to the north east. pic.twitter.com/kEdaVN5yrs

— Another Angry Voice (@Angry_Voice) May 26, 2020

 

But what he didn't seem to realise is that it's possible to look up what changes have been made to his blog posts, and when these changes were made.

It turns out that Cummings didn't predict coronavirus at all. What he did was retrospectively edit his blog to make it look like he predicted it, when he actually didn't, and he made these sneaky changes on the day he got back to London from his jolly jaunt to spread the disease up to the north east!

Obviously there are plenty of other very serious issues to consider, like the multiple admissions that he broke self-isolation and lockdown rules; the Prince Andrew level absurdity of the excuse that he drove his car 30 miles to a local beauty spot to test his eyesight; the outright refusal to apologise; the blame-shifting; the fact that of all the inaccurate media coverage he railed against his own wife's account of their coronavirus experiences was by far the most misleading and inaccurate; and the fact that he was somehow handed the 10 Downing Street garden and airtime on the BBC's main channel to make a speech that he openly admitted that he was making in a personal capacity.

However the fact that he sneakily edited his blog post to make himself look like some kind of great predictor, then lied about it on national television, is clear proof that the arrogant con-artist simply cannot ever be trusted on anything else he says.

If he's willing to lie to the nation about an issue as serious as coronavirus, purely to make himself seem smarter than he actually is, what else is he willing to lie about?

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George Osborne has admitted that the Tories deliberately politicised the science

The scandal over Dominic Cummings attending the scientific advisory group meetings revolves around the concept of independent expert advice.

The problem of course is that embedding a very senior government adviser into the scientific advisory group absolutely trashes any claim that the advice they're giving to government is independent from government.

Having a senior member of the government in the meeting changes the entire dynamic, making it much less likely that the scientists will openly criticise or condemn government policy when they think it's wrong.

Everyone knows that people are less likely to speak up freely about institutional problems and mistakes if one of the bosses is in the room, especially when the boss has got a very recent track record of ideologically purging dozens of people who dared to stand up to him, like Cummings did in the Tory mass expulsion in September.

It's beyond obvious that if the scientific advice is to be considered independent, senior government figures should not be embedded in the scientific advisory group.

The official government line is that Cummings was only there to observe, ask questions, and act as an interface between the scientists and 10 Downing Street, which is bad enough for the aforementioned reasons, but former Tory Chancellor George Osborne has openly admitted the actual truth in a remarkable Tweet.

It's absolutely unmistakable that Osborne is admitting that the purpose of embedding Cummings in the scientific advisory group was to politicise the science.

In any kind of functional democracy the scientists would deliver their advice to the government, and then the government would use that advice as the basis for the political decisions they make.

The scientists propose certain measures, then the government combines this scientific advice with the advice they're receiving from their economic advisers to make the political decision whether the suggested measures are justifiable.

Deliberately infecting the scientific advisory group with the politics is clearly the wrong way to go, and one of the main reasons we're now in such a terrible mess, with the highest death rate in Europe, and one of the largest death tolls in the entire world.

The concept of allowing senior government spin doctors to interfere with the scientific or expert advice is an incredibly dangerous one, but George Osborne has come out and openly admitted that this was exactly what the government was doing by embedding Cummings in the scientific advisory group.

The most infuriating thing about this is the absolute non-reaction of people who should be horrified about it.

Recall how every criticism of the government's lamentable inaction in the crucial early stages of the Covid-19 crisis was met with the faux-outrage moralising of "how very dare you politicise this crisis!"

Anyone who has dared to point out how a decade of wanton Tory austerity destruction severely damaged our national ability to respond effectively to the crisis has witnessed the "don't politicise" howling reaching absolute fever pitch.

But then the architect of this austerity ruination comes out and admits that the Tory government deliberately politicised the science, and the "don't politicise" mob say nothing.

Funny isn't it, how their vehement objections to "politicisation" only come into play when people are using facts and evidence to criticise the Tory government, but when a very senior Tory-establishment figure openly admits that the Tory government deliberately politicised the crisis, they have absolutely nothing to say about it whatever!

Almost as if these "don't politicise" screechers are a bunch of absolute hypocrites driven purely by fealty to their Tory lords and masters isn't it?

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

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The Tory election campaign so far

The general election was only announced days ago, yet the Tory campaign has already degenerated into farce.

Johnson and Cummings could have picked pretty much anyone on the political right to draw up their election manifesto, but somehow they decided to hire a lobbyist called Rachel Wolf for the task. In her day job she lobbies on behalf of fracking companies and multinational tax-dodging corporations (so no glaringly obvious conflicts of interest there eh?)

The BBC and most of the mainstream media obliged Boris Johnson's minders by presenting his visit to Addenbrooke's Hospital in exactly the way they planned it, but the truth soon came out on social media. Johnson was booed out of the hospital by staff and patients alike, and hospital workers were prevented from asking him questions.

The day of Johnson's disastrous hospital visit was also supposed to be Brexit Day, but just like his predecessor Theresa May, Johnson ended up cobbling together such a shambolic, economically ruinous, and downright divisive bodge job of a Brexit proposal it had literally no chance of actually passing.

Despite having said he'd "rather be dead in a ditch" than extend Brexit again, that's precisely what he ended up doing.

Then it turns out that one of the Tories' election candidates was guilty of costing the public a fortune by deliberately collapsing a rape trial in a desperate bid to help his mate get away with raping a woman (his rapist mate was eventually jailed for five years after a retrial).

If Tory candidate vetting processes are so bad that they end up standing a rape trial saboteur, just imagine how many other unspeakably awful people they must be putting forward.

Then it was revealed that on the day the election was announced Tory ministers signed off on a scam to use public money to push a load of pro-Tory Facebook ads in marginal constituencies. Facebook eventually blocked this brazen Tory electoral fraud, but the Tories are steadfastly refusing to admit how much public money has been spent on this cynical election-rigging effort.

A softball interview with Laura Kuenssberg should have been the perfect tonic for Johnson, but he somehow managed to fluff the absolute "gimme" question he was asked about NHS privatisation: Would he rule out more NHS privatisation on his watch? Waffle, waffle, waffle, evasion, deception, whataboutery!

And then to top it all off, the Metropolitan Police finally handed their files on Vote Leave criminality to the Crown Prosecution Service after 16 months, meaning the Prime Minister and his most senior adviser could be facing criminal prosecution for their referendum cheating at some point in the next parliament, whether they're running the government or not.

If Johnson and the Tories can involve themselves in so many scandals in just a matter of days since the election was called, try to imagine how bloody awful they'd be if the British public are reckless enough to hand them a parliamentary majority for the next five years. 

 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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The Tories are gearing up for a massive Facebook data-mining drive

If Remain campaigners had any kind of strategic sense, one of their primary objectives would have been to demand proper regulation of online campaigning to prevent the kinds of abuses that happened during the 2016 EU referendum from ever happening again.

Three years down the line and the shockingly incompetent Electoral Commission has done nothing to clamp down on social media dark ads, data-mining, or any of the other lies and cynical trickery that helped Leave fall just over the winning line in 2016.

Amazingly they've left it entirely up to the social media giants to decide how much to regulate themselves, which has resulted in Facebook voluntarily logging political adverts on their site.

If it had been left up to the Electoral Commission, we'd still be completely in the dark about what Boris Johnson and the Tories are up to.

When we look into the ads the Tories have been releasing to coincide with Boris Johnson several things become clear.

Data mining

The first is that these ads are simple data-harvesting scams which pose as feedback forms for telling Boris Johnson what you want him to do (yes of course he'll personally read all of your messages), but in order to press send you must provide your address, postcode, and email, as well as agreeing to let them bombard you with Tory propaganda for the rest of time.

If you remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal, you'll probably recall that one of their big innovations was linking people's online presence with their real life location, then grading them into psychological types to be sent political messaging that they've been calculated to be susceptible to.

How individually targeting online adverts at known individuals in specific geographic locations, down to their exact postal address, isn't classified as local campaign spending, and subjected to stringent local campaign spending rules, is a question that only the lazy and inept Electoral Commission could spend three years absolutely failing to answer.

Beta testing

There are literally hundreds of these Boris Johnson adverts, but only a few thousand pounds has been spent on actually pushing them into people's Facebook feeds.

If we look into the data Facebook makes available we can see what kind of people they're targeting (mainly male, mainly middle age and above, mainly English) but the scale is so small it's unlikely to make a blind bit of difference at the national level.

So what are they up to?

It seems pretty obvious that they're trying out all these different iterations of very similar adverts in order to determine which are the most effective with particular social profiles so that when their campaign gets properly underway they can hone specific tailored adverts to certain defined demographics and psychological profiles.

Just think about it. It must have taken a team of people a vast amount of time to create scores of videos, the data-mining website, the database, all the links, then upload literally hundreds of adverts onto Facebook.

Why would they invest all of that time, money, and effort in order to only spend a paltry few thousand pounds actually pushing the adverts into people's Facebook feeds?

Election?

The Tories are quite clearly gearing up for a massive social media propaganda drive, and the announcement of Dominic Cummings (the Vote Leave boss who openly admitted that they wouldn't have won without the £350 million for the NHS lie) as a chief Boris Johnson aide increases suspicion that there's going to be a snap election.

There's no guarantee of course, because a snap election would be an extraordinary gamble given that Labour are leading in the majority of polls, and the far-right ultranationalist Blue-kip demographic has abandoned the Tory party for Farage's latest outfit as quickly as they flooded in to support Theresa May's vapid "Brexit means Brexit" nonsense in 2017.

But political parties don't generally hire campaign strategists and beta test hundreds of online propaganda ads unless they're up to something do they?

Conclusion

We really should have done something to clamp down on online political campaigning over the last 3 years.

It's utterly extraordinary that it's only because of Facebook's voluntary self-reporting that we know what the Tories are up to at all.

And with EU referendum cheats like Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings now pulling the levers of power, it seems extraordinarily unlikely that they'd allow any kind of clampdown on the "wild west" social mediascape they've benefited so handsomely from is it?

Anyone calling for another EU referendum gamble without removing these two from power first is quite clearly playing an extraordinarily dangerous game of Russian roulette with the nation's future, and allowing a pair of provably dishonest Brexiteers to load the chamber of the gun in their own favour.

Still, "boo Corbyn", "hooray Lib-Dems", "another referendum now" ... that's the trendy Remainer groupthink isn't it?

Screw worrying about trivialities like absolutely nothing having been done to clamp down on all the cheating, lying, and social media dark ad trickery that helped deliver the Brexit vote in the first place!

Credit to Rowland Manthorpe for drawing attention to this latest blitz of Tory propaganda ads. Follow him here on Twitter.

 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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