Two contenders in the Tory leadership race have now admitted to taking drugs. Michael Gove has owned up to snorting cocaine on multiple occasions, while Rory Stewart admits that he smoked opium.
Now I'm certainly not going to moral high horse about drug use because I'm a strong believer in rational drugs policy aimed at regulation, harm reduction, and treatment rather than the prohibitionist orthodoxy of unregulated black markets, criminalisation, and imprisonment.
But it's impossible not to clock the absolute hypocrisy of these men.
They've both served in a militantly prohibitionist Tory regime for nine years which not only maintained draconian punishments for possession and use of the very Class A substances like cocaine and opioids they've admitted using, but actually introduced a raft of harsh new punishments on substances like the mild stimulant khat (which is mainly used by the Somalian immigrant community) despite their own scientific advisers pointing out that khat is such a mild stimulant that it would be inappropriate and disproportionate to criminalise it [source].
These hypocrites believe in other people suffering severe criminal punishments for possession of mild and virtually harmless stimulants and even drugs that don't even exist yet, but feel absolutely fine snorting cocaine and smoking opioids themselves!
These Tories firmly believe in criminalisation and imprisonment for thousands upon thousands of people from poor and ordinary backgrounds for using much less harmful and addictive substances such as cannabis, magic mushrooms, khat, MDMA, and mephedrone, while they've used much more harmful and addictive drugs like cocaine and opiods without the slightest worry that they'd ever end up in jail for it.
Politicians like Gove and Stewart support the draconian prohibitionist orthodoxy because they quite simply don't believe that the laws apply to people like them in the elitist establishment class.
As far as they're concerned the drug laws exist in order to keep the "lower orders" in line, while the wealthy and privileged like them can do whatever they like with absolute impunity.
So it's not the fact that they've used drugs, it's the sheer hypocrisy of these wannabe Prime Ministers actively supporting harsh prohibitionist drug laws for ordinary people because they know that the rules simply don't apply to elitists like them.
Who on earth wants to be led by people who believe in one harsh and punitive set of rules for the majority of us, and another extremely lax and forgiving set of rules just for them and their elitist mates?
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During the summer of 2018 the Westminster political establishment and their chums in the mainstream media ran an extraordinary smear campaign aimed at discrediting the lifelong anti-racist campaigner Jeremy Corbyn as a terrible racist. The reason they've kept relying on the tactic of continually smearing Jeremy Corbyn is that they know they haven't got a chance of winning the political debate if they ever allow it to focus on policies and issues, rather than personal attacks. So in this article I'm going to give brief overviews of some of Labour's policy positions that have been almost completely drowned out during the summer of smears. Media In August 2018 Jeremy Corbyn introduced a very interesting set of proposals for the media. These include reducing government influence over the BBC by democratising the BBC Board of Directors, empowering investigative journalists by giving them more Freedom of Information powers, and taxing social media giants in order to fund local journalism. Unsurprisingly the right-wing propaganda rags decided to misleadingly attack Corbyn's proposals to empower local and investigative journalists and reduce his own ability to interfere with the BBC as a terrible attack on free speech, before dropping the subject as quickly as possible and returning to the smear campaign. Railways Throughout the summer Jeremy Corbyn has continued highlighting Labour's popular policy of bringing the rail network back under public control so that it can be used for the benefit of British people rather than being milked as a cash cow by corporate profiteers and the state rail companies of foreign states. Another of Corbyn's rail policies is the upgrade of rail infrastructure in the north of England, especially a much-needed upgrade to the transpennine route between Liverpool and Hull to create a "Crossrail for the North". There is widespread public support for renationalisation of the railways, which is why you've probably heard very little about Labour's rail policies over the summer, buried as they have been under the landslide of smears. Police As violent crime continues to soar out of control across the UK, Jeremy Corbyn has reiterated Labour's policies of reversing the Tory cuts to the police force, putting an additional 10,000 police back on the streets, and actually listening to public order experts like the Police Federation (rather than attacking and belittling them as Theresa May does).
Industrial strategy In July 2018 Jeremy Corbyn delivered a detailed speech on Labour's industrial strategy, outlining multiple policies to make Britain a fairer and more prosperous place, but somehow an absolute hatchet job of an article portraying Corbyn's speech as some kind of Trumpian anti-immigrant rant went absolutely viral with the anti-Corbyn mob. In reality the speech focused on issues like reversing the decline of British manufacturing (from 32% of the economy in 1970 to 12% today), creating a level playing field when it comes to taxation, investing in infrastructure, and the importance of establishing a customs agreement with the EU as a matter of priority. It didn't matter to the anti-Corbyn mob that the fake news article they were sharing deliberately cherry-picked highly selective quotes and stitched them together to create a shockingly misleading account of Corbyn's actual speech. The article attacked Corbyn so they made it go mega-viral by sharing it, despite it being an utterly reprehensible pack of lies. You can read about what Corbyn actually said in that speech and how it was so brazenly misrepresented by his political opponents here. Education Jeremy Corbyn has spent the summer expanding on Labour's fantastic policy of introducing a National Education Service to provide free education and training for all, from cradle to grave. Corbyn is often presented as a clueless old duffer who hates business, but his education strategy is actually what's needed for Britain to become a high-skill high-pay economy like Germany. With technological developments moving at an ever faster pace, workforce flexibility is increasingly vital. And what better way to increase workplace flexibility than making sure every worker knows that they're entitled to free education and training to give them the skills to move from one job to the next? Aside from his unmistakable enthusiasm for higher education, further education, and life-long learning, Corbyn also recognises the damage that Tory cuts to the education system are doing to the younger generations. It's beyond obvious that kids growing up in over-crowded under-funded classrooms are less likely to be able to make full use of their potential, so that's why Corbyn is promising to begin the process of reversing the shocking 8% per pupil cut in education spending that's happened since the Tories came to power in 2010. Opposing Tory "no deal" Brexit If you believed Jeremy Corbyn's detractors you'd think that he was guilty of supporting the Tory Brextremists' every move, but if you actually look at the parliamentary votes it becomes clear that Labour have opposed the Tories in virtually every House of Commons vote on Brexit. Over the summer Corbyn has reiterated time and again that Labour oppose the extreme, hard-right anti-democratic, and economically ruinous "no deal" Brexit Theresa May and the Tories are working towards. In one vital vote on the Tory Trade Bill that could have ruled out a ruinous Tory "no deal" Brexit for good, Corbyn and the majority of the Labour Party voted against the government only to be betrayed by four Labour Brexiteers (including Frank Field who has somehow promoted to political sainthood by the very same people who claim Corbyn doesn't oppose Brexit enough after he quit the Labour whip with an anti-Corbyn tirade).
Aside from the four Labour Brextremists, the Lib-Dem leader Vince Cable and ex-leader Tim Farron didn't even bother to turn up to the vote at all. Farron was too busy giving a £5 per head speech about how wrong he thinks gay sex is! Water Privatised water companies cost the public £2.3 billion more per year than public ownership. The British public are split 70-30 in favour of water renationalisation. Over the summer Corbyn has raised the issue of water nationalisation several times, but if you search for mainstream media coverage of "Corbyn Water", you'll actually find more mainstream media articles written about the ridiculous Tory Love Island style water bottles they were giving away than on Jeremy Corbyn's water renationalisation policy! Saudi war crimes
When the Saudi Arabian tyrants blasted a bus full of small children to pieces with a guided missile in August 2018 as part of their campaign of war crimes against the Yemeni people, Labour strongly opposed it, while the Tories just sat on their hands and refused to do anything to intervene. One of Jeremy Corbyn's strongest positions is his stance that the UK should not be issuing arms export licences to regimes with poor human rights records at home, or records of committing war crimes abroad.
The Tories still believe in arming countries like Saudi Arabia, despite knowing that they're using British weapons to commit war crimes! Outsourcing Jeremy Corbyn is planning to introduce new rules to ensure that all companies that bid for government outsourcing contracts are registered in the UK and pay their fair share of tax. In a way it just goes to show how warped the political debate has become that people who have allowed tax-dodging corporations to suckle the public teat for decades are routinely described as "moderates" and "centrists", while the guy who wants to put a stop to this farcical situation is derided as some kind of far-left lunatic. Rational drug policy Globally the tide is turning on drug policy with more and more nations ditching criminalisation and punishment in order to adopt sensible evidence-based harm-reduction strategies. Unfortunately the UK has been left swimming against the tide thanks to Theresa May's right-wing authoritarian stance at the Home Office, and since she became Prime Minister. In the summer of 2018 Jeremy Corbyn signalled that he's open to rational drug policies by talking about how the drugs debate is moving on, and his personal preference for the decriminalisation of small amounts of cannabis. Basic Income In July 2018 Labour announced that they will include proposals for a Basic Income trial in their next manifesto. Basic Income is the concept of allowing every citizen a basic subsistence income, with the aim of ensuring nobody falls into absolute destitution, but also that everyone who works ends up better off by virtue of the fact that they get to keep their basic income payment as well as their wages. NHS In June 2018 Jeremy Corbyn addressed thousands of people at the 70th anniversary of the founding of the NHS where he spoke out against the Tories' hard-right agenda of cutting NHS and social care funding, and privatising NHS facilities and services. In his speech he made a clear commitment to ending the 8 years of Tory cuts to NHS funding, so that NHS funding rises as a share of GDP in order to deal with rising demand for services, rather than falling as it has done under the Tories. Ban employers from stealing staff tips Even if you've never worked in the service sector the fact that employers steal their employees should annoy the hell out of you. When we leave tips we leave them for the staff, not as an additional income stream for the restaurant owners. Jeremy Corbyn has pledged to put a stop to employers from pinching their staff tips. Austerity Jeremy Corbyn won the 2015 Labour leadership election by virtue of being the only one of the four candidates to actually oppose Tory austerity dogma, so it should come as no surprise that he's still opposing it. In the summer of 2018 he went further than ever before by raising the fact that Tory austerity dogma comes with a death toll when he said "there is clear and mounting evidence that austerity and inequality are killing people". In a way it's astounding that people thought that it would be possible to slash funding for the NHS and social care services without thousands upon thousands of people dying as a consequence, to cut the welfare system without extremely vulnerable people being left to die as a consequence, to cut fire services without more people dying in house fires, to cut 21,000 police without violent crime soaring out of control ... Even though Labour failed abysmally in their duty to oppose this ideological madness before Corbyn became leader, at least they're opposing it now.
Conclusion
The reason the mainstream media have concentrated their efforts on whipping up the anti-Semitism storm is beyond obvious. They know that the majority of British people would be strongly in favour of most, if not all, of these Labour Party policies, so they're intent on steering the political debate as far away from policy issues as possible. The more people hear about the Labour anti-Semitism row, the less time and space is dedicated to providing honest coverage of Labour's actual policies like the 14 I've outlined above. It doesn't matter a jot to the mainstream media hacks that anti-Semitism is actually much more rife in the Tory ranks, or that senior Tories have been meeting with the extreme-right white-supremacist kingmaker Steve Bannon, they'll keep on banging on about Labour anti-Semitism because they simply don't want the public thinking about all of the Labour Party policies that they're highly likely to agree with.
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Following the announcement that the former UN Security General Kofi Annan has died, a whole host of war-mongering monsters (Tony Blair, Theresa May, Alistair Campbell, David Miliband) took to Twitter to pay glib tributes to the man who did his best to avert the vast human tragedy that they created in Iraq. Annan remained unequivocal about the catastrophic invasion and occupation of Iraq, calling it a "disaster" and condemning it as "illegal" under international law, so it's hard not to see these war-monger 'tributes' as gloating that the man who tried so hard to tame their blood lust. Whether we approve of gung-ho war-mongers with the blood of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis on our hands like Tony Blair and Theresa May or not, there's something more we could do than posting glib platitudes on Twitter and then just soon forgetting all about Kofi Annan. One of the most important things we could do is support one of the ideas that he spent his later years promoting; the concept of a rational approach to drugs policy. Here's what he said on the issue.
We must take four critical steps. First, we must decriminalise personal drug use. The use of drugs is harmful and reducing those harms is a task for the public health system, not the courts. This must be coupled with the strengthening of treatment services, especially in middle and low-income countries. Second, we need to accept that a drug-free world is an illusion. We must focus instead on ensuring that drugs cause the least possible harm. Harm reduction measures, such as needle exchange programs, can make a real difference. Germany adopted such measures early on and the level of HIV infections among injecting drug users is close to 5 per cent, compared to more than 40 per cent in some countries that resist this pragmatic approach. Third, we have to look at regulation and public education rather than the total suppression of drugs, which we know will not work. The steps taken successfully to reduce tobacco consumption (a very powerful and damaging addiction) show what can be achieved. The legal sale of cannabis is a reality that started with California legalising the sale of cannabis for medical use in 1996. Since then, 22 US states and some European countries have followed suit. Canada looks likely to become the first G7 country to regulate the sale of cannabis next year. Initial trends show us that where cannabis has been legalised, there has been no explosion in drug use or drug-related crime. The size of the black market has been reduced and thousands of young people have been spared criminal records. But a regulated market is not a free market. We need to carefully think through what needs regulating, and what does not. Although most cannabis use is occasional, moderate and not associated with significant problems, it is nonetheless precisely because of its potential risks that it needs to be regulated. And therefore, the fourth and final step is to recognise that drugs must be regulated precisely because they are risky. It is time to acknowledge that drugs are infinitely more dangerous if they are left solely in the hands of criminals, who have no concerns about health and safety. Legal regulation protects health. The most risky drugs should never be available "over the counter" but only via medical prescription for people registered as dependent users, as is already happening in Switzerland.
It really is difficult to see anything in what Annan said that any rational person could take issue with. Yet somehow, under Theresa May's inept leadership (first at the Home Office, and then as Prime Minister) the United Kingdom has continued swimming against the changing tide on drugs policy, pushing the failed war on drugs harder than ever before, while others all around have been accepting that this ideological approach doesn't work and pursuing more rational strategies to deal with the issue.
Sadly Kofi Annan's efforts to avert the catastrophe in Iraq were ignored by the war-mongers, and we're still suffering the consequences today as brutal Islamist terrorist groups like ISIS and Al Qaida thrive in the power vacuum that was created. The least we could do is listen to what he said in later life, and concentrate on fighting for a rational approach to drugs policy that focuses on regulation, harm reduction and rehabilitation rather than the failing approach of propaganda, punishment, and leaving control of the drug market entirely to unscrupulous criminals.
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.
I've just seen a bunch of smug centrists on Twitter lauding the 2010-2015 Coalition government as some kind of great success story because it wasn't as bad as the current shambles (the turd in the hand is better than a turd in the gob defence) and describing their litany of failures as "niggles".
Well here are just some of the catastrophic failings that these intolerably smug centrist types and the small core of die-hard Lib-Dems are trying to shrug off as just minor niggles.
Niggle 1: After the Lib-Dems decided to abandon the their core student demographic to win a tiny taste of second hand Tory power, students these days are being lumbered with £50,000+ in debts which 77% of them will never pay off despite entire lifetimes of paying a 9% aspiration tax on their disposable income.
Niggle 2: Between 2010 and 2015 literally thousands of disabled people died within six weeks of being declared "fit for work" in Tory disability denial factories. Instead of doing something to combat this disgraceful situation, the coalition government tried to just hide the evidence of this death toll from public scrutiny. Imagine the kind of person who considers a government desperately trying to hide the death toll from their systematic abuse of disabled people to be just a "niggle".
Niggle 5: The Coalition government introduced the Justice and Security Act, which legislated Secret Courts into existence. This one flew under the radar because the mainstream press basically ignored it, but what they did was to undermine centuries of British legal tradition with new rules so that people can have their fates decided in courtrooms they're not allowed to enter, on charges they're not allowed to know, based on evidence that they're not allowed to see.
Niggle 6: Thanks to their deliberate policy of repressing wages, the Coalition government oversaw the longest sustained collapse in the value of workers' wages since records began. I guess some people are so comfortably well off that they can consider the worst ever devaluation in UK workers' wages to be just a "niggle", but for people living on or near the breadline already after the bankers trashed the economy, it was catastrophic.
Niggle 8: The Coalition obsession with hard-right austerity dogma meant that they set about cutting all kinds of beneficial forms of public spending in their blind ideological quest to make short-term savings. Of course you can save some money by cutting wasteful spending, but ideologically driven cuts to stuff like flood defence spending is complete lunacy, because for every £1 invested today, flood defences save £8 in avoided damage and disruption further down the line. To make matters even worse David Cameron rewarded the woman who introduced the government policy of 'save £1 now at a cost of £8 later' with a DBE for political and public service!
Niggle 9: The Lib-Dems binned most of their main principles in order to leap into bed with the Tories. Arguably the worst betrayal of all was the way they completely sold out the parliamentary reform movement by agreeing to a referendum on AV, rather than demanding a modern form of Proportional Representation as a condition of joining the government (with a referendum on the precise form the new voting system would take). Another betrayal was their failure to secure reform of the House of Lords. In fact the Lib-Dems watched on gormlessly as David Cameron stuffed the Lords with new unelected peers at a faster rate than any Prime Minister in history, swelling it to become the second largest legislative chamber on earth (after the Chinese parliament). The reason parliament is still such a mess today is that the Lib-Dems threw away their golden opportunity to enforce reforms in order to swan around in chauffeur driven ministerial cars for a few years.
Niggle 10: The Lib-Dems helped the Tories carve open the NHS for mass privatisation of services whan they backed the 2012 Health and Social Care Act. The current chaos in the NHS is a direct consequence of the Coalition government's health policies.
Niggle 13: Between 2010 and 2015 the global tide really began to change away from ideological puritanism and towards rational drugs policy. As Home Secretary Theresa May insisted on swimming in the opposite direction, criminalising the very mild stimulant Khat, pressurising the United Nations into not adopting rational drugs policy, and introducing a total farce of a law intended to ban possession of all non-approved substances, including drugs that haven't even been invented yet. May copied the legislation from Ireland, where handing the 'legal high' market to criminals resulted in the biggest surge in the usage of these drugs anywhere in Europe. Since Theresa May introduced the same legislation here, guess what? A huge upsurge in usage and the horrifying Spice epidemic!
Niggle 15: Coalition government ministers continually used the "striver vs skiver" false dichotomy to defend their cuts to the social security system, but the bulk of the cuts actually affected the working poor. They slashed tax credits, and imposed real terms cuts on loads of other in-work benefits like housing benefit, child benefit, parental pay, statutory sick pay, and benefits paid to help disabled people to stay in work.
Niggle 16: The Coalition oversaw an absolute boom in exploitative employment practices like Zero Hours Contracts, the gig economy, and employers forcing their employees to take on fake self-employed status in order to pay them below the minimum wage. It's no wonder that in-work poverty has soared so dramatically with the boom in exploitative employment practices combined with the Coalition government's systematic attacks in in-work benefits.
Niggle 17: The Coalition government oversaw an exponential growth in food poverty, with hundreds of thousands more people each year turning to food banks like the Trussell Trust in order to feed themselves and their kids.
Niggle 18: The Coalition government signed up to one of the worst rip-off deals in history by agreeing to bribe the French and Chinese into building us a new nuclear reactor at Hinkley Point C. Not only will this power station end up being the most expensive object on earth by the time it's completed, Coalition ministers agreed to pay double the market rate for the electricity it produces for 35 years.
Niggle 19: The Coalition government oversaw the worst UK productivity crisis since the early 19th Century, which is hardly surprising at all considering the boom in exploitative McJobs, and millions of workers subjected to increased workloads for decreased pay.
Niggle 20: The Coalition government had a very illiberal attitude towards criticism and dissent considering one of the component parties was the so-called Liberal Democrats. One of the ugliest pieces of legislation they passed was "the Gagging Law" designed to prevent organisations like charities, community groups, trade unions, and think tanks from criticising government policies.
Niggle 21: One of the most savage Coalition policies of all was their draconian benefits sanctions regime. 5 minutes late to sign on, suffer a heart attack during a meeting, miss an interview because you're in hospital to comfort your wife after your child was stillborn ... Fuck you! No money for months. Not only have people been sanctioned for the harshest of reasons, but it soon became clear that jobcentre staff were being actively pushed to comply with sanctions targets. Just think about it. If you're instructed to condemn 4 people per week to absolute destitution, is it easier to quickly trick a few people with mental health problems or learning difficulties into making a sanctionable mistake, or to spend hours and hours trying to catch out the minority of hardcore benefits scroungers who know the rules better than you know them yourself? Vulnerable people died because of this horrific punishment system.
Niggle 23: The Coalition government promised that by 2015 their hard-right austerity programme would have completely eliminated the budget deficit. When it came to 2015 and it was obvious that they'd failed, they simply rebranded their failure as a success by endlessly repeating "we've cut the deficit by a third" as if missing their target by 66% is super-brilliant. Now we're in 2017 and the deficit still hasn't gone, and the Tories are predicting they won't be able to eliminate it until 2025. Over 15 years to do what you said you would do in under 5. Good work guys!
Niggle 24: The Coalition government's obsession with hard-right austerity dogma dramatically prolonged the recovery from the 2007-08 bankers' crisis because "let's cut our way to growth" is an idiotic policy at the best of times, but it's economically suicidal when the private sector is hoarding assets rather than spending, and when the cost of government borrowing has been reduced to an all time historic low with central bank interest rates set at only marginally above 0%.
The reality is that hard-right Brexiteers like Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove deliberately rebranded the niggles (or "shocking failures" as normal people call them) of the 2010-15 Coalition government as failures of the EU, in order to con the British public into voting for Brexit. Of course the 2010-15 government looks less bad now than it was at the time, because in comparison to this post-referendum chaos and incompetence, every single government in living memory looks a lot less bad than it actually was. But this kind of comparison is delusional, because it was the niggles/catastrophic failings of the 2010-15 coalition government that led directly to the situation we're in now. It's utterly ridiculous to whitewash the failings of the 2010-15 government because they weren't quite as bad as the government is now, because the state of the current government is a direct consequence of the ruinous failings that these bloody awful centrists and Lib-Dem apologists are now trying to whitewash away as just niggles. Anyone with any sense can see that the pathetic state of the current government is the biggest Coalition failure of all, not a reason to create a revisionist story about how bloody great they were in hindsight.
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.
Theresa May has been prompted into admitting that she cried on election night when it became clear that she'd thrown away her parliamentary majority in a truly monumental display of hubris.
Image management
Theresa May has a team of new advisers, with the hated Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy forced out by a mutiny amongst Tory MPs and several others having walked out of their own accord, and their ploy is absolutely obvious: They're trying to soften her robotic uncaring persona.
They're obviously an inexperienced bunch because their first effort to soften her image was to completely reverse the "crush the saboteurs" rhetoric with an extraordinary appeal for Labour and the opposition parties to help her. This was such obvious ammunition for Labour it's incredible that nobody at Tory HQ pulled the plug on it. Jeremy Corbyn responded by sending Theresa May a signed copy of the Labour manifesto, and Emily Thornberry used it to land a couple of absolutely glorious sucker punches on Damian Green when the pair were standing in at PMQs.
The next ploy to soften Theresa May's glowering and aloof persona is this staged admission that she was so upset at the election result that she "shed a tear" when she realised what a monumental screw up she'd made of her opportunistic snap election. Self-pity
Theresa May has obviously been advised to soften her aloof and scarily authoritarian persona, but talking about how she cried over the failure of her of self-serving power grab is so obviously not the way to do it.
Does she not have the wit and wherewithal to understand that self-pity is not a good look under the best of circumstances, let alone when the wounds were purely self-inflicted?
Perhaps her advisers were too inept to point it out to her? Or perhaps Theresa May has already built herself another domineering inner clique so that people with sense enough to see that self-pity is a bad look were afraid to raise their objections?
Narcissism vs empathy Wallowing in self-pity over your own self-inflicted problems is not a good look, but wallowing like this when you're responsible for inflicting untold misery and suffering on hundreds of thousands of people is just ugly.
Think about all the people (and their families) to have had their lives wrecked by Spice. Theresa May was repeatedly warned that turning the entire market in novel psychoactive drugs over to the criminal underground would cause a surge in usage, just like it did in Ireland, but she ignored the expert advice and went ahead anyway, because her puritanical "ban it, ban it all now" attitude overrode all of the facts, evidence, and expert advice.
Has Theresa May shed tears for the victims of any of these Tory polices? Has she apologised for introducing Home Office legislation designed to rip apart so many families and destroy people's lives by handing the entire novel psychoactive substance market to unscrupulous criminals?
No. Of course she hasn't. She's too busy crying over her own self-inflicted political woes to give a damn about any of the real people she's condemned to death, suffering, impoverishment, life in economic exile from the UK, spice addiction, and systematic abuse at the hands of the state.
She won't ever shed a tear for any of the victims of her policies because the only person she's capable of genuine human empathy towards is herself. An unconvincing fantasy
Moving on from the contemptible way that she admits having wept over her own self-inflicted political failure, but not for the victims of real tragedies, another consideration has to be the sheer unlikeliness of Theresa May quietly weeping rather than having a temper tantrum.
We all saw her uncontrollable fury responses during the election when she wasn't getting her own way.
We all know that these uncontrollable facial grimaces and her tendency to erupt into bizarre temper tantrums ("nothing has changed. Nothing has changed!") are two of the big reasons she was advised to evade unscripted head-to-head debates with her political opponents.
I think we all, even those of us with some Conservative sympathies, can find it a lot easier to imagine Theresa May having a foot-stamping tantrum and shouting something along the lines of "how dare they disobey me" about the electorate that she so obviously holds in contempt, rather than quietly crying to herself in a corner.
Be wary The first two efforts to soften Theresa May's robotic and uncaring persona have been absolutely inept. First they handed the opposition parties a load of political ammunition every bit as potent as Liam Byrne's foolish "no money left" note at the treasury, then they tried to make her seem human by getting her to portray herself as the kind of utterly self-obsessed narcissist who cries over their own misfortunes, but who doesn't give a damn about the much more serious sufferings of others.
The Tory spin machine not going to give up trying to soften Theresa May's public image, and they'll probably get better at it with practice. So just beware that they're going to try every trick in the book to make her look more human by pulling your emotional strings to feel some kind of empathy towards her, and don't be suckered in by it.
Until she feels enough human empathy to put an end British arms sales to Saudi Arabia so that they can use them to commit horrific war crimes in Yemen, apologies for her previous actions, and sheds genuine tears of remorse for her victims, then you shouldn't let her spin doctors elicit the remotest shred of personal empathy towards her.
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.
In October 2008, at the very height of the global financial sector insolvency crisis, HSBC made a very strange decision: They made a massive £214.2 million loan to a struggling company called IPGL. To get an idea of what was more normal practice for banks during the insolvency crisis and the post-crisis recession, consider the behaviour of the (majority taxpayer-owned) bank RBS which deliberately withdrew loans or hiked repayment terms in order to drive thousands of British companies into financial difficulties, and then used their Global Restructuring Group to close down the businesses and asset strip them for their own profits. The RBS Global Restructuring Group destroyed 12,000 businesses in this way in what executives referred to in leaked emails as "the dash for cash". After the scandal was exposed by the hard work of people like Neil Mitchell they've now had to set aside a £400 million slush fund to compensate some of their victims. Interestingly HSBC took a very different attitude towards the struggling and massively indebted IPGL, which was being run at huge losses by the then Tory party chairman and massive Tory party donor Michael Spencer. Instead of attempting to shut it down and asset strip it, they pumped a massive £214.2 million loan into it at a time when getting loans out of a bank was like getting blood out of a stone. Spencer then funnelled over four million in donations to the Tory party via IPLG including over £1 million for their 2010 general election fighting fund. IPLG donations also covered the cost of flying David Cameron, George Osborne and others to the Davos World Economic Forum just months before the 2010 General Election.
If HSBC propped up a failing business and that business then went on to pump millions into the Tory party to help them win the 2010 General Election, it's easy to see how people might conclude that the failing business was used by HSBC to launder money into political donations.
In March 2012 Spencer was named by the disgraced former Tory party co-treasurer Peter Cruddas as one of the millionaires to have benefited from the "cash for access scandal".
In January 2015 the Times editor Camilla Cavendish had a dinner with David Cameron and then spiked an investigative story about fraud at HSBC. She was soon appointed as Cameron's adviser at the Number 10 Policy Unit.
In January 2016 George Osborne delayed a Competition and Markets Authority report into reducing the dominance of the big four banks that was widely regarded as a move to placate HSBC.
Although Spencer didn't make it into the unelected House of Lords in David Cameron's resignation honours list Camilla Cavendish (the former Times editor who spiked the HSBC fraud story) did.
The £214 million HSBC loan to the failing IPGL and their subsequent donations to the Tory party have now been referred to the Electoral Commission by the SNP's Roger Mullin, who is calling for an immediate investigation. The Labour MP John Mann has called for a public inquiry into what he called "the biggest party donor scandal ever".
There are so many revolving doors between Westminster politics, the financial system, the financial regulators and the media that it seems unlikely anyone will ever be properly held to account.
The whole thing reeks of corruption, but we all know by now how these things tend to play out. Even if the story does eventually get some limited mainstream media coverage it'll doubtlessly all be brushed under the carpet again, and if anyone ever does end up getting the chop for it, it'll almost certainly be some lowly minion who gets fed to the wolves, not any of the big players.
But at least you know some of the murky details now.
Credits
The investigative work into the HSBC-IPGL-Tory party money flow was done by Fionn Travers-Smith of Move Your Money. The story was publicised by Steve Topple of The Canary.
The SNP's Roger Mullin deserves credit for publicly raising this issue with the Electoral Commission and Labour's John Mann deserves some too for calling for a public inquiry.
Follow them here:
Fionn Travers-Smith (Twitter) Move Your Money (Twitter/Facebook) Steve Topple (Twitter) The Canary (Twitter/Facebook) Roger Mullin (Twitter) John Mann (Twitter) You should also follow the HSBC whistleblower Nicholas Wilson (Twitter) for more corruption coverage.
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