Grand Wizards and Nazi conspiracy theories: what the hell has the Tory party turned into?

First we found out that the Tory Brextremist faction have been gleefully paying tribute to the KKK by going around calling themselves "the Grand Wizards" and then within the space of a day the Tory MP Suella Braveman openly promoted the modern era reworking of the anti-Semitic Nazi era conspiracy theory of Cultural Bolshevism (Kulturbolschewismus) by ranting about the threat of cultural Marxism.

This is definitely a story about obscene bigotry and extreme-right fanaticism within the Tory ranks, but it's also a story of two very different styles of journalism.

The chief political editor of the BBC News Laura Kuenssberg was the one to break the extraordinary Grand Wizards story, but she named no names, and did absolutely nothing to hold the Tories to account for their grotesque tribute to the KKK white supremacist terrorist group who have lynched and killed thousands of people.

In fact once the story that she broke started going mega-viral, she desperately tried to put the story back in its box with an extraordinarily panicked Tweet aimed at downplaying the story, and creating the absurd fiction that none of the Tory ERG Brextremists were aware of the fact that Grand Wizard is the name of the head of the KKK when they started calling themselves "the Grand Wizards".

What Kuenssberg tried to do was portray the scandal as just an innocent mistake, but it simply came off as a desperate last ditch PR damage limitation exercise on behalf of the Tory party after her original matter-of-fact Tweet ballooned into a huge scandal.

Suella Braveman ranting on about the extreme-right Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory  demonstrates an extraordinary lack of awareness, and to do it when the Grand Wizards thing was still brewing up into huge scandal was unbelievably bone-headed.

But this time the journalist didn't treat it as some kind of benign anecdote and then desperately try to row the story back when people pointed out how outrageous it was. This time Dawn Foster immediately pointed out to Braveman that the mass-murdering extreme-right terrorist Anders Breivik was fixated with the Cultural Marxist conspiracy theory.

Genuinely surprised an MP would double down after being directly confronted with the fact it’s a term used by Breivik, purely because it’s bound to attract press attention https://t.co/JmrXDk8VHs

— Dawn Foster (@DawnHFoster) March 26, 2019

This challenge resulted in Braveman actually doubling-down on her use of the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, claiming that "no one can be offended" because "we're in a war" and "it's damaging to our British genius"!

It's delightful to see a journalist actually holding a politician to account on the dangerous rhetoric they're spouting rather than running damage limitation PR for them like Laura Kuenssberg

But it's disheartening that Dawn is one of the minority who actually do their job and hold the powerful to account, and even more dispiriting to see that most of the mainstream media have chosen to just ignore the fact that a Tory MP and former government minister has been publicly spouting Nazi rhetoric.

Of course there are reasons for this lack of coverage. One is that highlighting an extremely overt and obvious case of Tory anti-Semitism would spectacularly undermine the carefully curated mainstream media narrative that Labour are the nasty bigots with the anti-Semitism problem.

Another reason this story isn't getting traction is that a lot of the pro-Tory establishment propagandists in the mainstream media hack pack understand how much of a headache this would present for Theresa May if it gets amplified.

May would be left with the choice of suspending Breveman from the party which would incur the absolute wrath of the ERG Brextremists, or she could ignore it which would infuriate the "moderate Tories" who detest what she's allowing their party to turn into.

Tories from all factions of the party are already itching to get rid of Theresa May, so her supporters in the press don't want to rock the boat by amplifying this story, for fear of causing the May government to collapse and ushering Jeremy Corbyn into Downing Street in the ensuing General Election.

These outrageous Tory scandals aren't just an indictment of a Tory party that is rushing headlong towards the extreme-right to such an extent that they're publicly espousing the vile rhetoric that motivated Anders Breivik and the Christchurch killer, it's an indictment of the mainstream media for allowing this to grotesque Tory radicalisation go on right in front of their faces as they desperately try every trick in the book to paint the vehemently anti-racist Labour opposition as the terrifying bigots.

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Laura Kuenssberg demonstrates everything wrong with BBC politics in two tweets

Laura Kuenssberg is the political editor of BBC News. She's already been in trouble for her displays of political bias before, especially when she was reprimanded for creating "fake news" about Jeremy Corbyn by misleadingly splicing his answers onto completely different questions.

In just two Tweets she managed to illustrate how far BBC standards have dropped under her watch.

In the first Tweet she casually reveals that the Tory Brextremist faction are calling themselves "the Grand Wizards", which is the title of the leader of the Ku Klux Klan (a white supremacist terrorist organisation, not just a bunch of freaky bigots in white cloaks).

Somehow Kuenssberg completely fails to point out how vile and outrageous this nickname is, which is a puzzling one to explain. Either she's so lacking in basic political knowledge she's unaware of the very clear KKK connotations, or she is aware of the KKK aspect but saw no problem.

Despite Kuenssberg's casual and offhand presentation of the "Grand Wizards" story, Twitter absolutely exploded in condemnation, with people from across the political spectrum weighing in to condemn this racist nickname.

But then in her second Tweet Kuenssberg did something even more extraordinary that the casual offhand presentation in the first.

She actually tried to row back the story that she had created by portraying the people who self-applied the Grand Wizards nickname as being so naive and innocent that they didn't realise that it had grotesque racist connotations, and making out that the seriousness of her story is diminished because it's only based on a couple of anonymous sources anyway (as if half the mainstream media's political coverage isn't based on tittle-tattle from anonymous sources).

She asks us to believe that the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson, Steve Baker, David Davis, and Iain Duncan Smith are all so ignorant that not a single one of them is aware that the leader of the KKK is called the Grand Wizard, and that  they came up with their "Grand Wizards" nickname with "no intended connection to anything else"!

She tries to shut down the mega-viral story that she created by asking us all to believe an absolute absurdity.

Now just try to imagine if a faction of the Labour Party had been calling themselves "the Gestapo" or something equally disgusting. Do you think Laura Kuenssberg would present the story in such a casual manner, as if she was incapable of even recognising that such a self-applied nickname is grotesque and offensive?

Of course she wouldn't. It'd be ammunition in a full frontal attack (and rightly so if anyone in Labour were sick enough to behave like that).

And do you think that she'd actually try to row the story back by creating an absurd fiction that the Labour faction were so unbelievably naive that they didn't see their "Gestapo" nickname as being offensive?

Would she try to claim that they were just "using the nickname informally" and that there was "no intended connection to anything else"?

Of course she wouldn't. She'd be repeatedly harking back to the offensiveness of it every time she mentioned anything to do with the Labour Party for months. It'd be the new endlessly repeated "brick through Angela Eagle's window" or "where's Jeremy Corbyn?" attack line.
There's absolutely no way that Kuenssberg would be trying to do free PR damage limitation work for the Labour Party if a Labour faction had self-applied such a sickening nickname.

When the chief political editor of BBC News is behaving in this extraordinary manner, the pro-Tory bias is impossible to ignore. 

But as we learned from the total lack of punishment Kuenssberg received over the Jeremy Corbyn "fake news" story she concocted, she'll continue to get away with this kind of overt political bias. And as long as she's still running the BBC's political output, it's entirely justifiable for the public to perceive the supposedly unbiased and impartial BBC News as simply the propaganda arm of the Conservative Party.

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Centrists: Your anti-Brexit heroes are total frauds

The gullibility of some people never ceases to astound.

Even when it's absolutely obvious that a breakaway group of right-wing Labour MPs and Tories has absolutely nothing to do with Brexit, and everything to do with a desperate last-ditch effort to divide the Labour vote and keep the Tory austerity agenda rolling on, huge numbers of people who consider themselves rational, suddenly begin falling over themselves to continue believing the lies and deceptions of a bunch of egotistical fabulists.

If you look at the facts rather than mindlessly and uncritically absorbing mainstream media propaganda tropes, the entire justification for the existence of the Independent Group is obviously a fraud.

The ex-Labour component said they had to quit Labour because the party wasn't doing enough to oppose Brexit, and the ex-Tory component said they had to quit the Tories because they were in hock to Jacob Rees-Mogg's ERG Brextremists and the bigoted DUP sectarians that Theresa May bribed into propping up her shambles of a government.

But the evidence proves this to be absolutely false. 

On January 29th Labour tabled a Brexit amendment proposing another referendum as an option in order to prevent Theresa May and the ERG Brextremists driving the UK economy off a cliff, but the three ex-Tory members of the squatter group of MPs all actively sided with Theresa May, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson, and the 10 DUP sectarians to vote against this amendment [source].

If you ever needed absolute proof that opposing Brexit was never their true priority, the fact that these three voted against Labour's amendment 307 aimed at stopping Theresa May's reckless game of brinkmanship with the nation's future less than a month before becoming political squatters is it, isn't it?

And the fact that the ex-Labour component have joined up with these outrageous ex-Tories who less than a month previously were actively siding with the ERG Brextremsists and the DUP to prevent Labour's efforts to oppose Tory Brexit is proof that the priority isn't opposing Brexit for them either.

So if their stated justification is an easily demonstrable lie, what is the ulterior agenda?

Well the ex-Labour squatter MP Gavin Shuker (the one who decided to set their group up as a private company rather than a political party in order to hide who is bankrolling them) said that their primary objective was begging Theresa May to form a pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, anti-welfare coalition with them. "I'm willing to extend confidence and supply to your government so it doesn’t fall over" being his exact words.

The ex-Labour squatter MP Chris Leslie (one of the right-wing idiots who came up with the staggeringly unappealing austerity-lite posturing that trashed Labour's election chances at the 2015 general election) went even further, saying that the group would refuse to do everything in their power to stop the Tory Brexit chaos, because if stopping hard-right Tory Brexit meant giving Jeremy Corbyn another shot at removing Theresa May from power, they'd vote with the Tories to prevent that from happening!

The ex-Tory squatter MP Anna Soubry made things absolutely clear when she used the word "marvellous" to describe the Coalition austerity-enforcing, wage-repressing, public service-wrecking, social security-slashing, privatisation obsessed dogma of the 2010-2015 period that collapsed living standards and created the wave of public fury that drove Brexit narrowly over the winning line in 2016.

Instead of looking at the austerity disease that caused Brexit in the first place, Soubry is pretending to treat the symptoms (while actively voting against another referendum that may have helped to treat the symptoms) and actually continuing to praise the toxic Tory austerity dogma that caused the symptoms in the first place as "marvellous"!

And then Soubry went on the television to argue that she should be allowed to continue actively campaigning for the Tory party and their ruinous austerity dogma from under the umbrella of the Independent Group, and her fellow squatter MP Chuka Umunna actually sat next to her nodding and agreeing that members of his absurd vanity project should be allowed to actively campaign for the Tories and promote Tory austerity dogma!

The obvious problem is that the hopelessly gullible are incredibly difficult to convince, because in order to see the squatter MPs as the cynical opportunists hiding a pro-Tory pro-austerity, anti-worker, anti-investment agenda behind a cloak of Brexit rhetoric, people need to accept that they were foolish to take these politicians from deep within the heart of the Westminster establishment class at their word, and admit that this gullibility is why they got so easily duped.

If we've learned anything from the last few years in politics it's that huge numbers of people would rather ignore the facts and evidence to continue believing absolute nonsense, rather than take the ego hit of accepting they got conned.

So even when we point out that the squatter group's entire justification for existing is a fraud, and that they're just a bunch of austerity fetishists openly scrounging for places in a Tory-led pro-austerity coalition, people's egos won't allow them to admit that they were hopelessly gullible rubes to ever fall for it in the first place.

But then the gossamer-like transparency of their fraud is so fragile that it's enough to make us suspect that Brexit isn't actually the main issue with a lot of these "centrists" at all, and that the actual unstated priority all along has been an absolute desperation to keep the Tories in power so they can carry on brutally punishing the poor and disabled, trashing ordinary workers' wages, gutting public services, and throttling Britain's economic potential with their toxic austerity dogma like they have been doing for the last 9 years.

The Independent Group is not a brave new challenge to the political orthodoxy, it's people from deep within the political orthodoxy desperately hawking "more of the same" under the guise of opposing the hard-right Brexit that several of their group were voting in favour of less than a month previously!

So the only people left promoting these democracy-fearing squatter MPs are either hopelessly gullible idiots who just rote learn and repeat their political opinions without doing even the most basic fact-checking, or cynical and malicious propagandists who are deliberately hiding their pro-Tory pro-austerity agenda behind a crude veneer of anti-Brexit rhetoric.

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Hypocritical Tory Brexiteers just voted to scrap parliamentary sovereignty!

So much has been happening in relation to Brexit over the last few weeks it's been difficult to keep on top of it all, especially given the incredibly sketchy mainstream media coverage.

Party Political chaos

Understandably a lot of coverage has been given to the fact that the Lib-Dem leader and his predecessor Tim Farron didn't even bother to turn up for a crucial knife-edge Brexit vote, despite having misleadingly championed themselves as anti-Brexit saviours for the last two years. Tim Farron's reason for missing the crucial vote was that he was too busy giving a gay-bashing speech about how he's such a victim because his outdated views on gay sex are pretty damned unpopular these days!

Also a lot of attention has fallen on a number of Tory grandstanders like Anna Soubry and Justine Greening who made passionate interventions to criticise the hard-right ERG Tory Brextremists who dictate Theresa May's every move, and to call for a second referendum. But for some reason very much less media attention has been given to the fact that they caved in to Theresa May's threats of another Tory meltdown of a General Election, and actually voted to support the ERG Brextremists that they pretend to oppose just to save their own skins from the threat of another General Election.

Then there's the four Labour cranks who repeatedly cast decisive votes alongside the hard-right ERG Brextremists too. Right-wing Blairite MPs have been implacably opposed the concept of reselection for MPs (a democratic safeguard against political squatters that is used by the SNP and is absolutely commonplace in other countries), but the treacherous scheming of Kate Hoey, John Mann, Graham Stringer, and Frank Field to prop up Theresa May's shambolic government and facilitate the ruinous "no deal" catastrophe the ERG Brextremists are plotting is surely grounds for the introduction of reselection so local people can get rid of these Tory collaborators.

The NC3 trade deal amendment

Beneath all of the party political chaos at least one MP was actually getting on with their job. Caroline Lucas of the Green Party tabled an amendment to the Tory governments' Trade Bill, which sought to ensure that "all post-Brexit free trade deals are subject to parliamentary scrutiny and approval, with a guaranteed vote for MPs".

One would have thought that Brexiteers who spent the entire EU Referendum campaign banging on about the importance of "democracy" and "parliamentary sovereignty" might have actually appreciated an amendment to ensure that parliament is sovereign, and that the government of the day can't just draw up trade deals with foreign powers behind closed doors, and then enact them without any parliamentary oversight or approval.

But if you expected any kind of consistency or integrity from the Brexiteers, you'd be wrong.

What they actually did was vote down the amendment by 314-284 in order to essentially kill parliamentary sovereignty when it comes to future post-Brexit trade deals.

Amendment 58

In light of this Tory vote to scrap parliamentary sovereignty when it comes to post-Brexit trade deals it's important to think back to the way they also scrapped the cross-party Amendment 58 to the EU Withdrawal Bill in November 2017.

This amendment sought to prevent the Tory government from using Brexit as a Trojan Horse to attack our workers' rights, weaken our environmental laws, water down our consumer protections, undermine our food standards, or scrap our equal rights rules.

By stripping out this amendment the Tories clearly indicated their intention to use Brexit as an excuse to attack these aspects of British life. Just think about it. If they had no intention of attacking these things, why on earth would they vote to scrap an amendment to prevent them from scrapping these things?

A Trump-Tory trade deal

Donald Trump's administration have already made it absolutely clear that if Britain seeks a trade deal with the United States, the UK government will be expected to trash workers' rights, open up the NHS for even more privatisation, and trash our food standards to allow the import of cheap, low quality, heavily-subsidised US produce like chlorinated chicken, hormone-riddled beef, and unlabled GM produce.

What the Tories have done is to wreck cross-party efforts to prevent them from using Brexit as an excuse to lower British standards first, and now they've voted to ensure that parliament has no ability to stop them from drawing up horrific trade deals behind closed doors and enacting them without any parliamentary oversight or approval whatever!

Hard-right Brexit

It should be blindingly obvious by now to anyone who has actually followed the details of the Brexit votes that we're heading for a hard-right, anti-democratic, economically ruinous Tory Brexit.

It should be obvious that the left-wing Lexit voters were absolute dupes. Useful idiots who voted for Brexit for left-wing reasons only to enable an unprecedented hard-right power grab by the Tory establishment.

It should be obvious that the Brexiteers were absolutely lying through their teeth when they talked about grand themes like "democracy" and "parliamentary sovereignty" during the referendum debate. Everything they've done since betrays their absolute contempt for democracy, and their intention to over-ride parliamentary sovereignty in order to centralise as much power as possible in the hands of the executive.

It should be obvious that the hard-right ERG Brextremists who control Theresa May's puppet strings are intent on inflicting the most economically damaging Breixt possible in order to make fortunes by picking £billions worth of distressed british assets out of the ashes of their Brexit bonfire.

It should be obvious. But unfortunately, to millions of people who don't pay attention to the details, and just base their decisions on sentiments and feelings, none of this is obvious, none of the details matter, and "we should just get on with it".

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Jacob Rees-Mogg has £millions in dodgy Russian investments

Aside from being a living 'Lord Snooty' caricature of the quintessential English Toff, Jacob Rees-Mogg has strategically positioned himself as one of the most powerful people within the ruling Tory party, despite never even having served as a junior government minister.

The way he's done this is by becoming the leader of the hard-right Brextremist 'party within a party' called the European Reform Group (ERG). This shadowy organisation rakes in taxpayers' cash to fund their campaign in favour of the hardest possible Brexit, and has easily enough members to call a no confidence vote in Theresa May at any moment.

The two previous leaders of this Brextremist pressure group Steve Baker and Suella Fernandes have both been rewarded with positions in Theresa May's government, but Rees-Mogg doesn't seem to just be interested in bagging some junior ministerial role, he's intent on using the ERG's influence over Theresa May to control her every move.

May knows that if she steps out of line over any issue, the ERG have the power to oust her because they've got more than enough members to trigger a leadership election by registering letters of no confidence with the Chairman of the 1922 Committee (the archaic method by which the Tory party dispose of unwanted leaders like Margaret Thatcher and iain Duncan Smith).

Theresa May knows that if she defies the ERG then she'll be out of Downing Street in a flash.

The upshot of all of this is that as the leader of the ERG Jacob Rees-Mogg is the de facto Prime Minister, a man who gets to call all the shots, but doesn't have to take any of the flak when things go wrong because he can use the hapless and hopeless Theresa May as a bullet shield.

One interesting question is whether Rees-Mogg has used his indisputable power over the Prime Minister to push for things that go beyond the hard Brexit fanaticism that the secretive ERG pressure group exists to promote.

For example have Rees-Mogg and the ERG had any influence over the Tories' extremely pro-Russian behaviour in the weeks before the Salisbury attack for example?

Given the revelation that Rees-Mogg's Somerset Capital Management fund has a huge £90 million investment in Russia, including £57 million in the blacklisted Russian Sberbank, the very recent Tory party decision to deliberately obstruct the introduction of Magnitsky powers to clamp down on dodgy Russian money looks a tad suspicious.

Sberbank is already subject to EU and US economic sanctions, but somehow Rees-Mogg and his Somerset Capital management chums have seen fit to retain this dodgy investment despite the sanctions, and £43 million worth of other Russian assets. 

These kinds of Russian investments obviously mean that any serious government moves to clamp down on Russian money flowing in and out of the UK would represent a risk to Rees-Mogg's profit margins.

Because of the secrecy of their operation it's impossible to know whether Rees-Mogg and the ERG are responsible for the Tory government's very recent policy of obstructing Magnitsky powers, but their continual secrecy (despite being bankrolled by the taxpayer) leaves questions like this hanging in the air.

If they insist on being so secretive about their influence on government policy, it's clearly invites questions about whether they would use this secret influence to further their own financial interests.

Unless they give up the secrecy and actually publish stuff like their membership list, all of their sources of funding, their contacts and communications with government ministers, their contacts with people and institutions outside the Tory party, and their own financial conflicts of interest, then these kinds of questions about how their influence could be misused are inevitable aren't they?

It is of course possible to come at it from an alternative direction and ask the Tory government to provide a detailed explanation of their decision to brazenly obstruct Magnitsky powers up until very days before the Salisbury attack, but then that would require some journalists within the Westminster lobby to earn their salaries by actually holding the powerful to account, rather than uncritically churning out whatever hard-right propaganda trope is the chosen narrative of the day.

Would Jacob Rees-Mogg abuse his position as the most powerful man in the Tory party to further his own financial interests?

Given the culture of secrecy that runs through the ERG and Theresa May's autocratic government, who knows if it's even theoretically possible to answer the question. But given the abject lack of decent journalists within the Westminster bubble, it's almost certainly a question that will never be answered.

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Jacob Rees-Mogg just shared some catastrophically innumerate Brexit propaganda from The S*n

The Tory Brextremist-in-chief Jacob Rees-Mogg has taken to Twitter to demonstrate what a gullible and innumerate fool he is.

He made this demonstration by Tweeting a clipping of some absolute idiot-fodder from The S*n.

Rupert Murdoch's hacks at the S*n helped to bring about the Brexit farce with a relentless barrage of misleading pro-Brexit propaganda, but they're so invested in it that they're refusing to admit what a shambles it's turning out to be, and continuing with yet more pro-Brexit distortions.

It hardly takes a genius to spot some of the many things that are wrong with the S*n clipping that Rees-Mogg liked so much he tweeted it to his followers.

One of the most obvious problems is that a significant number of the items mentioned are produced within the EU.

Why would you worry about paying a tariff of fake mozzarella-style cheese when membership of the European Single Market means that we can buy genuine mozzarella from Italy with no tariff at all, and be sure that you're buying the genuine thing because of protected designation of origin labelling rules?

Then there's the supposed saving on beef. Why on earth wouldn't you just eat British or Irish beef that come with 0% tariffs, rather than crying that you have to pay a tariff on imported hormone-riddled beef from the United States?

Aside from beef and mozzarella, there are numerous other products that could easily be purchased tariff free because they are mass produced in the EU, like cherry tomatoes, butter, and dog food.

Then there's the "no deal" Brexit scenario to consider. A decision to quit the EU with no trade deal in place would mean a reversion to WTO rules, and WTO tariffs. This would mean that tariffs would have to be paid on products imported from the EU, and that the EU would impose tariffs on products of British origin.

Brextremists like Rees-Mogg and the secretive "party within a party" ERG Brextremism group he leads are actually pushing for a "no deal" Brexit flounce that would dramatically increase the tariffs on regular supermarket items, but they're deliberately reversing reality and pretending that they're opposed to tariffs.

Then there's the LG flatscreen TV. It's hardly a secret that the EU has a bilateral Free Trade Agreement with South Korea, meaning that tariffs of South Korean flat screen TVs have already been eliminated.

A chaotic "no deal" flounce out of the EU would actually mean the re-imposition of tariffs on South Korean electronics. So that's yet another piece of Orwellian reality reversing nonsense from the Brexiteers at the S*n.

The S*n clipping is truly Orwellian in the way it invents fake tariffs on products to make Brextremism look like a great option, when everyone knows that the kind of hard Brexit favoured by Rees-Mogg and his ilk would result in new tariffs being applied on products from within the EU, and on products from within the dozens of other economies the EU has bilateral trade agreements with (like South Korea). 

Then there's the supposed tariff on the Viking bicycle. Whoever compiled this deliberate misinformation forgot to mention that Viking is actually a British company, and that British consumers wouldn't have to pay import tariffs on their bikes under any circumstances.

Perhaps the most shocking aspect of all is the disgraceful mathematical illiteracy of the whole thing. Take the butter as an example. If the butter costs £1 originally but has a 50% tariff applied on it, then the price rises to £1.50, not to £2.

If the price is £2 after the imposition of a 50% tariff, then the original price was £1.33, not £1.

The same goes for all of the other calculations too. Every single one of them have been made by someone so innumerate they'd fail Year 6 maths.

If the Brexiteers are so innumerate that they can't even cope with simple mathematical operations that my 9 year old son can understand, then who on earth would trust their judgement on an issue as complex as Brexit?

When it comes to Rees-Mogg actually sharing this nonsense, once again we're drawn back into the age old debate of whether the Tories have resorted to this lamentable propaganda because they're thick enough to believe it themselves, or because despite knowing that it's absolute reality-reversing and innumerate trash, they're such arrogant elitists they see the general public as such a bunch of gullible halfwits that we'll simply believe it without conducting any critical analysis whatever.

There is a case to be made that because Ress-Mogg is this type of arrogant elitist because he once described people who attended state schools as "potted plants".

If he's arrogant enough to dismiss 93% of the UK population as "potted plants" he's easily arrogant enough to deliberately spread such brazen misinformation. But in this case I think it's sheer stupidity. The man has seen something that triggers his confirmation bias, and instead of subjecting it to even the most rudimentary of critical analysis, he's just tweeted it out to his followers.

The way Rees-Mogg actually thanked the S*n for making these misleading and innumerate calculations indicates that he couldn't be bothered to check that they were accurate before sharing them, which is decidedly odd behaviour given that he considers himself a member of the vastly superior intellectual elite, yet it was state educated "potted plants" like me who actually bothered to conduct some rudimentary critical analysis on what he shared.

Idiot or elitist, either way, Rees-Mogg's dissemination of such abject and innumerate misinformation is absolutely unforgivable. But the Tory party is such a mess these days that there's not the flicker of a chance that he'll ever be made to apologise for spreading such easily disprovable lies.

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Theresa May is letting her ministers get away with publicly attacking the UK business community!

Between 2010 and somewhere around mid-2017 the CBI were relentless cheerleaders for ruinous Tory austerity dogma, and their unprecedented campaign of wage repression, but ever since it became clear that the Tory party has been completely taken over by the most extreme fringe of hard-right Europhobes, they've cooled their support for the Tories dramatically.

The CBI claim to represent the interests of 190,000 British businesses. While their relentless (and economically illiterate) support for Tory austerity dogma and wage repression seemed to go against the interests of many of their members* their stance on the Brexit negotiations is clearly focused on pushing for a Brexit deal that won't end up wrecking tens of thousands of the businesses they represent.

Some of their key priorities include not erecting damaging trade barriers with the Single Market, retaining a migration system that allows employers to find the labour they need to survive, and avoiding the economic catastrophe of a cliff edge "no deal" Brexit.

When Jeremy Corbyn announced that Labour will seek to develop a customs union agreement with the EU the CBI cautiously welcomed it as a "real world solution" to Brexit, but this mild praise caused fits of apoplexy from the Tory Brextremists.

Boris Johnson appeared on the radio to attack the once uber-Tory CBI and their leaders as "wrong". To put this in perspective, that's as extraordinary as a senior Labour figure publicly attacking one of the big unions like Unite or Unison.

The Tory International Development Secretary Liam Fox joined in the Brextremist attacks on the CBI accusing them of tying one arm behind Britain's back by not supporting his fanatical interpretation of the Brexit vote.

This series of attacks on Britain's biggest business lobby from the Tories is absolutely extraordinary stuff from the party that once claimed to be the party of business, but what's more extraordinary still is that Theresa May has done nothing whatever to intervene.

Any Tory leader with a shred of authority would have stopped her senior ministers from publicly attacking one of the Tories' most influential allies, but Theresa May is far too weak and directionless to do anything at all.

May knows that her future as Prime Minister is entirely dependent on the 70 or so Tory MPs who are aligned with the secretive ERG Brextremism pressure group led by Jacob Rees-Mogg, and that any effort to discipline any of the Brextremists in her cabinet could be her final move as Prime Minister.

When given a choice between what's best for the nation, and what's best for her own career, Theresa May chose to embrace Brextremism and the DUP bigots rather than relinquish power. Then When it comes to a choice between what's best for her own party, and what's best for her own career, she's choosing to allow the Tory Brextremists in her cabinet to publicly attack the British business community, rather than take a stand and risk triggering the Brextremist revolt that would drive her out of 10 Downing Street.

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* = The CBI's relentless support for ruinous Tory austerity dogma and unprecedented wage repression policies made very little sense from a pragmatic perspective. All businesses rely on good public services and infrastructure, so it made very little sense for the CBI to support the Tory austerity strategy of deliberately underfunding public services and reducing Britain's level of investment in infrastructure to the lowest in the developed world. Additionally most businesses tend to thrive when consumers have money in their pockets (disposable income), so the Tory policy of imposing the longest sustained collapse in the real value of UK workers' wages always seemed like a very odd thing for Britain's biggest business lobby to be supporting.

Theresa May is terrified of the secretive hard-right ERG Brextremists

If Theresa May wasn't such a weak and directionless leader the under-secretary of state for Brexit Steve Baker would be in serious trouble for the lunatic conspiracy theories he's been spewing in the House of Commons.

The Brexiteer conspiracy-mongering began in response to Buzzfeed getting hold of a leaked copy of the Tory government's damning Brexit impact assessment.

The conspiracy theory was introduced into the House of Commons by Jacob Rees-Mogg, who is the leader of the hard-right ERG Brextremist pressure group that Baker himself used to lead until Theresa May promoted him into her government. The conspiracy theory is that someone called Charles Grant from the CER had uncovered plot by civil servants to "develop an economic model to show that all [Brexit] options are bad".

Instead of dismissing this bonkers conspiracy theory as the nonsense that it is, the Brexit junior minister Baker responded by saying "I'm sorry to say that my honourable friend's account is essentially correct".

Opposition MPs reacted furiously to this attack on the impartiality of the civil service and Charles Grant immediately released a statement that "I did not say or imply that the Treasury had deliberately developed a model to show that all options outside the customs union were bad with an intention to influence policy." 

The leader of the civil servant's union Dave Penman slammed Baker's conspiracy-mongering by saying that "to stand at the despatch box and refuse to challenge a half-baked conspiracy theory about the civil service - one that even now is being disowned by its supposed source - is the height of irresponsibility from a serving minister." 

Penman went on to say that Baker is "incapable of separating his ideological position from being a minister of state" and called on Theresa May to reflect on whether he's fit to be a government minister. 

Aside from attacking the civil service Baker also provoked fury by claiming that the Brexit impact assessment should not be believed because all government reports are "always wrong".

So here we have an actual government minister undermining the government and the civil service with crackpot conspiracy theories and claims that all government research and evidence is worthless, yet Theresa May does absolutely nothing to hold him to account.

The reason for her cowardice is obvious. Both Baker and Rees-Mogg are influential members of the secretive ERG Brextremist pressure group. May knows that this group has sufficient members to force a vote of no-confidence in her leadership, so she doesn't dare stand up to them in any way.

In fact she keeps bribing them by promoting their leaders into her government. First she promoted Steve Baker, then Suella Fernandes in her shambolic January cabinet reshuffle, and now their new leader Jacob Rees-Mogg is clearly angling for a similar promotion.

May won't punish Baker or Rees-Mogg because she's terrified of them, so instead she's been throwing a load of red meat to the baying ERG dogs with a renewed attack on the rights of European citizens and a public dressing down for the Tory MP Phillip Lee who dared to suggest that the government should be led by "evidence, not dogma".

Incredibly Lee was disciplined by Theresa May's whips and told to air his (actually incredibly sensible for a Tory) views "in private", while Baker and Rees-Mogg have been let off scot-free for airing their bizarre conspiracy theory in the House of Commons, and bringing the government and the civil service into disrepute.

It's quite clear that Baker and Rees-Mogg's decision to engage in bizarre Brextremist conspiracy-mongering right underneath Theresa May's nose is a way of demonstrating their power over her. 

As long as they go unpunished they've proven to the rest the Tory party that they're an untouchable faction who can do and say whatever they like with total impunity, while anyone else who steps out of line from the Brextremist agenda will be hit by waves of abuse and death threats sent by the vile hard-right Blue-Kip mob that Theresa May has welcomed into the Tory party with open arms.

This debacle just goes to prove once again that Theresa May is a pathetically weak and directionless leader who is totally in hock to the hard-right Brextremist faction of her party. 

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