Jo Swinson is positioning herself as the Nigel Farage of Remain

Ever since Jo Swinson became Lib-Dem leader she's been shifting the Lib-Dem position ever further towards the extreme fringe of Remain, to the point tearing up the longstanding Lib-Dem policy of demanding another referendum and replacing it with a threat to stop Brexit without even holding a referendum.

Swinson's increasingly militant behaviour and language makes it pretty obvious that she's attempting to position herself as the Nigel Farage of Remain.

Here are ten similarities between Swinson's approach to politics and Farage's.


EU fanaticismThis first similarity is the most obvious. Swinson and Farage both promote fanatically one-sided views of the EU.

Farage's rhetoric tells us that the EU is irredeemably corrupt and corrosive to the British way of life, while Swinson's rhetoric holds the EU up as the essential and irreproachable source of all that is good and decent.

Both of these positions are extreme and over-simplistic. There's an element of truth in both, because there are dreadful problems with the EU like the undemocratic and austerity-pushing European Central Bank, and the passage of endless pieces of unashamedly pro-corporate legislation through the European Parliament, but the EU is also the source of many of our rights, liberties, and living standards (workers' rights, environmental laws, food standards, consumer protections, freedom from discrimination, and of course the right to move freely around most of the continent of Europe).

We don't live in a Star Wars universe of heroic goodies and irredeemable evil empires. We live in reality, where virtually all large organisations, including the EU, have a mixture of good and bad characteristics.

To focus exclusively on one side without acknowledging the other is profoundly dishonest, and in this regard Farage and Swinson are two cheeks of the same arse.

Lies

Besides adopting one-sided and profoundly dishonest EU militancy, both of these figures are also perfectly willing to resort to outright lies to push their agendas.

Farage has lies so many times it's impossible to compile them all here. Just think of his endless claims that the majority of British laws are made in Europe when the real figure is 13.2%, or his EU referendum lies about Turkey being on the verge of joining the EU, when in reality they've still only managed to complete a single one of the 33 chapters required for membership in 13 years!

Swinson proved her willingness to lie through her teeth on her very first day in the job as Lib-Dem leader, publicly accusing Jeremy Corbyn of taking a two week holiday during the EU referendum period.

In reality the longest break Corbyn took from an extensive campaign schedule was in the mourning period after the brutal murder of Jo Cox.

Meanwhile Swinson barely campaigned at all for Remain in 2016, making virtually no public appearances, in preference for sitting at home tweeting cat pictures!

Swinson has also been caught out telling other lies like supposedly opposing unlawful Tory employment tribunal fees when she actually voted in favour of them!

Both of these politicians have proven themselves such ideological fanatics that they'll resort to deliberate lies in order to con members of the public into supporting them.

DefectorsFarage and Swinson have both benefited from the significant publicity boost of attracting defectors from other political parties, however in this regard Swinson is clearly even worse than Farage.

When Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless defected from the Tories to UKIP in 2014, at least they put their decision to their constituents by resigning and calling parliamentary by-elections.

There's no such respect for democracy in the Lib-Dems, with Swinson welcoming six defector MPs into the Lib-Dem ranks (now making up a full third of their parliamentary party) without a single by-election being held.

It's extraordinary to think that a party with "democrats" actually in their name are demonstrably more averse to democratic accountability that the Ukipper extremists at the far-right fringe of the political spectrum!

Goalpost shifting
Another thing Farage and Swinson have in common is their disingenuous goalpost-shifting tactics.

During the EU referendum Farage repeatedly insisted that the UK could easily get a deal with the EU so that we could be like Norway, or Switzerland, but he's now shifted to No Deal militancy, and treats the basic idea of leaving with any kind of withdrawal deal or future trading arrangement as if it's treason.

Swinson on the other hand has spent the last few years loudly and repeatedly calling for an "another roll of the dice" referendum. But then suddenly at her first Lib-Dem conference as their divine leader, she's flip-flopped to the new, much more militant position of just cancelling Brexit without even seeking a public mandate to do so!

Both of these politicians have demonstrably shifted the goalposts on Brexit to more militant positions, so anyone with a grain of sense must be extremely wary that these slippery snakes will simply switch position on any of their other stated principles if they think it serves their interest to do so.

Political chameleons
In order to make excuses for lying and flip-flopping from one position to another, it's necessary to engage in reality-reversing Orwellian history revisionism, and both of these politicians are adept at changing their political colours at will.

Farage's chameleon-like behaviour is more obvious, having effortlessly switched from the purple and yellow of UKIP to the light blue of Brexit Party, but Swinson's is actually more pernicious because she adopts different colours at the same depending on who she's talking to.

One minute Swinson is justifying her new "screw democracy, just scrap Brexit" policy by saying we need to get on with reversing austerity, but then within hours she's appealing to hard-right fiscal conservatives in Tory/Lib-Dem marginals by attempting to outflank the Tories to the right with grotesque pro-austerity tropes like "magic money tree" and "tough economic choices".

Media fawningAnother similarity between Farage and Swinson is the way the mainstream media seem to fawn over the pair of them, endlessly affording them airtime to flip-flop around, and spout their deceptions, and smears, and distortions, and outright lies, almost always unchallenged.

Farage usually gets more pushback from random members of the public who call into his radio show than from the mainstream media hack pack, and Lib-Dem tribalists responding to fact-based criticism of Swinson and her disgusting voting record with torrents of abuse, whataboutery, excuses, smears, and mental health abuse just goes to show how unfamiliar they are with the idea of their divine leader actually being held to account on anything.

Austerity

One of the most interesting similarities between Farage and Swinson is the way that both of them are entirely unwilling to admit that years of ruinous austerity fanaticism laid the groundwork for Brexit to happen.

Their reasons for refusing to acknowledge reality are very different, but the wilful austerity ignorance is the same.

Farage is loathe to admit that the domestic austerity policies of the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition were responsible for collapsing living standards prior to the 2016 EU referendum, because the main Brexiteer shtick during the EU referendum was to blame the consequences of austerity fanaticism (collapsed wages, huge NHS queues, unaffordable housing, failing public services, failing local services, failing social safety net) on immigrants and the EU.

Swinson is even more loathe to admit the link between austerity fanaticism and the Brexit backlash, because to admit that austerity laid the groundwork for Brexit would be to admit her own role in causing this Brexit chaos.

Not only does she consider it to be politically unwise to admit fault, she's also far too much of an egomaniac to apologise for her outrageous living standard-annihilating actions in the past.

Overseas allegiances
One of the weirdest things about the pair of them is their unmistakable loyalty to overseas political figures.

Farage is quite obviously enamoured with Donald Trump to the point where you wonder whether his obsession with forcing a calamitous No Deal Brexit meltdown actually has more to do with forcing Britain into subservience to Trump, than it has to do with Brexit purism.

Swinson on the other hand is full of adoration for Guy Verhofstadt, who was the leader of the ALDE group in the European parliament for 10 years, and is a man who personifies pretty much everything that's wrong with the EU.

Just consider the appalling speech Swinson invited him to give at her first Lib-Dem conference as party leader. Verhofstadt claimed that the reason the UK should stay in the EU is that the world is dividing up into empires, and that Britain would be safer within the European mega-empire.

Reject Brexit not because it's an ill considered and chaotically administered mess, but because it would cause Britain to miss out on the game of Liberal neo-imperialism Verhofstadt envisages for the future of mankind!

It's such a disturbing view of the world on so many levels, but Swinson adores the guy, and he even got a rousing round of applause from the Lib-Dem audience for his Liberal neo-imperialist fearmongering!

Betrayal

One of the starkest similarities of all between the pair is the way they resort so willingly to the divisive rhetoric of "betrayal".

Farage constantly bangs on about betrayal of the leave vote, but Swinson uses the exact same divisive rhetoric to attack Jeremy Corbyn for supposedly betraying Remainers.

Who cares that Labour is offering the referendum that the Lib-Dems spent years demanding, as far as Swinson and her ilk are concerned, attacking Corbyn is even more important than opposing Brexit, to the point that they're using the Brexiteer-style rhetoric of betrayal to attack him.

One suspects that even if Corbyn got the EU flag tattooed on his face and leapt into a volcano humming Ode to Joy, Swinson and her mob would still be screeching "betrayal" at him.

Fringe politics

Another of Swinson's attacks on Corbyn is that he supposedly exists at the fringe, or the sideline of political debate, but anyone with the slightest acquaintance with political reality can see that Farage and Swinson are the ones positioning themselves at the fringes of the Brexit debate, both screeching "fuck off" at half the voting electorate who didn't vote the way they wanted, while Corbyn is trying to position himself near the centre in order to try and clear up the mess, rather than spewing hyper-partisan rhetoric to deliberately exacerbate tensions for party political advantage.

But according to Swinson's absurd reality-reversed logic, the militant fringe intent on ignoring one half of the electorate or other, is the "centre ground" and Corbyn's attempts at compromise and deescalation are the militant fringe!

Conclusion

Jo Swinson continually pretends that she's positioned on the sensible centre-ground of politics, but her grotesque track record of enabling ruinous austerity fanaticism, her outright refusal to acknowledge that austerity dogma laid the groundwork for the Brexit backlash, or to apologise for it, her willingness to lie through her teeth, her increasingly militant Remain tactics, and the remarkably easy ride she's afforded by the mainstream media demonstrate that she's just as much a political extremist as Nigel Farage.

Additionally the unquestioning cult-like loyalty of the Lib-Dem tribalists to her ever-changing position, and the torrents of abuse they spew at anyone who dares question their divine and irreproachable leader suggests that she's every bit as dangerous too.

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OR

Welcome to the idiocracy!

Last week I wrote an article detailing the extraordinary bad faith tactic of Performative Stupidity, which is the increasingly prevalent journalistic method of attacking something, not by detailing it and then highlighting criticisms, but by simply pretending to be too stupid to understand it!

This week I've come across the most glaring example yet of this Performative Stupidity dumbing-down of political discourse, which takes the form of a Tweet that implies that any policy that takes more than three words to explain is somehow inferior to policies which can be expressed in three words or fewer, or "less" as the supposedly award-winning journalist puts it.

The intended take away being that super-simple policies for dealing with massively complex and divisive issues are credit-worthy, while anything that takes more than three words to explain is open to derision!

Labour's Brexit policy

Labour's Brexit strategy really isn't that difficult to understand. Here it is again:

1. Prevent Tory No Deal chaos and economic ruination. 

2. Remove the Tories (who created all this Brexit chaos in the first place) from power. 

3. Renegotiate the Withdrawal Agreement (Customs Union, Single Market access, no border in Ireland, protection of workers' rights, cooperation on environment, science, and security). 

4. Put the renegotiated deal to a confirmatory referendum with remain as an option, meaning that there are sensible (non-meltdown) options on either side.

Of course this is more than three words, because it's rather difficult to cram a 4-point action plan into "three words or less [sic]" isn't it?

But if you did insist, for some unfathomable reason, on dumbing it down to just three words, you could say "Final Say Referendum" - but why on earth would you even want to do that?

Labour's policy is to offer representation to both sides of the Brexit divide in a way that avoids completely trashing the economy if people once again reject the option to Remain (sorry 27 words is far too many for my tiny little journalist brain to comprehend, how about you cut it down to 3 and I'll have another go!).

But then you look at the Lib-Dem and Tory Brexit policies that are supposedly so wonderful and virtuous for being reducible to just three words, and they really should be setting off all kinds of alarm bells, at least for the kind of journalist who uses the traditional method of actually scrutinising things, rather than the new method of pretending not to understand them.

Lib-Dems: Revoke Article 50

Two questions about this spring immediately to mind.

The first is what the hell happened to the Lib-Dem policy of demanding another referendum?

Demanding a People's Vote referendum has been the Lib-Dem shtick for the last couple of years, but now they've transitioned to a completely different policy, of revoking article 50 with no democratic mandate from the people via a referendum, and there's no criticism from the mainstream media hack pack whatever!

Every time Labour has even slightly modified or reworded their Brexit stance it's been met with a barrage of mainstream criticism and derision, but the Lib-Dems publicly tear up their entire policy and flip-flop to something entirely different, and they actually get praised on the basis that the new policy can be summed up in just three words!

The second glaringly obvious question is how?.

How do the Lib-Dems intend to revoke Article 50 when a parliamentary majority to revoke Article 50 with no democratic mandate from the people is literally impossible in the current parliament, and vanishingly unlikely in the next parliament?

These are the kind of questions that award-winning journalists should be asking, rather than evaluating policies purely on how few words they can be reduced to.

Tories: Leave October 31st

There are plenty of questions any reasonable journalist could ask about this, but I'll just stick to the two most glaringly obvious ones.

How do the Tories ensure the UK leaves the EU on October 31st when they've thrown away their parliamentary majority by hoofing 20+ Tory MPs out of the party for daring to defy Dominic Cummings, when they've completely lost control of the parliamentary order paper, and when they've lost every single parliamentary vote since Johnson became Prime Minister?

Just like the Lib-Dems, it's easy having simple ambitions. But without a realistic plan of action for how you actually achieve them, what are they actually worth?

The other glaring question is why?

Why the rush to leave on a specific date, even if the consequences of leaving in such a rush are likely to be extremely catastrophic (by your own government's internal Yellowhammer impact assessment).

Little children know to wait for a safe opportunity to cross the road rather than rushing out across busy traffic because an arbitrary amount of time has passed, but somehow the Tory government don't, and furthermore their "run in front of traffic" Brexit strategy is apparently praiseworthy for the fact it can be condensed to just three words!

Welcome to the idiocracy!

Any journalist with any kind of integrity would seek to present all of the main parties' Brexit strategies, and then subject them to criticism. But the current trend is to either pretend to be too stupid to understand Labour's position, or to praise other parties' policies, not because they make any kind of pragmatic sense, but because they can be simplified into the simplest of simple sound bites!

Is the best measure of a policy whether it is achievable from a pragmatic perspective, or how few words it can be expressed in?

Apparently the new answer to this question is the word count!

And the guy responsible for this deliberate stupidification of British political discourse isn't just some Twitter idiot mouthing off, he's an apparently award-winning Financial Times journalist.

If award-winning journalists at one of Britain's most prestigious newspapers is engaging in this kind of ludicrous performative stupidity, then it just goes to show how broken our mainstream media is.

We want super-simple solutions to massively complicated and multi-faceted problems or we're going to pretend to be too stupid to understand is a corrosive and irresponsible bad faith stance in its own right.

But in light of the fact that Brexit was caused by exactly this kind of simple solution (quit the EU) to complex problems (austerity, failing public services, unaffordable housing, negative wage growth, soaring utility bills, NHS queues, over-crowded schools, vandalised social safety net ...), it's illustrative of the fact that award-winning journalists at the top of their god-damned profession haven't even learned one of the most basic and salient lessons from this whole Brexit debacle: "sometimes things are a lot more complex than a slogan you can fit on the side of a bus, let alone into "three words or less [sic]".

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OR

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.

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OR

This misty-eyed Remainer revisionism needs to stop

One of the most irritating tropes that keeps doing the rounds in the Remainer echo chambers is that pre-2016 Britain was some kind of glorious good-natured utopia until 17.4 million Leave voters decided to fuck everything up on purpose for no good reason.

Aside from all the stuff I've detailed in the header image, just consider these facts:

• Tory wage repression policies resulted in the longest sustained collapse in the value of UK workers wages since records began.

• Economically illiterate "let's cut our way to growth" Tory austerity fanaticism resulted in the slowest post-crisis economic recovery in Centuries.

• Tory austerity fanaticism also resulted in the closure of literally thousands of public facilities and services (hospitals, police & fire stations, Sure Start centres, libraries and other local government services ...) and left the remaining services massively over-stretched, under-funded, and under-staffed. 

• Between 2010 and 2016 the two main areas of growth in Britain were in exploitative and unstable Zero Hours Contracts, and in people reduced to such poverty that they were left reliant on food bank charitable handouts.

All of this stuff was happening before the EU referendum in 2016, and the self-serving silence of the Tories and centrists during the EU referendum (because they didn't want to implicate themselves for supporting all of these ruinous policies) left the door wide open for the Brexiteers to cynically blame all of it (collapsing wages, crumbling public services, widespread poverty, shitty low-paid jobs ...) on immigrants and the EU.

Of course a lot of smug "centrists" were having a whale of a time between 2010 and 2016, entirely unconcerned by the ravages of austerity, social security vandalism, and wage repression because the horrifying consequences weren't falling on them ... but millions of us were fully aware that Britain wasn't the "moderate", "good-natured", "fundamentally calm country" of "good practical judgement" that exists in this absurd centrist delusion.

The most damaging thing about this bone-headed centrist delusion that because everything was fine and dandy for them pre-2016, it was fine and dandy for everyone else too, is the fact that this stance is so damned counter-productive.

If Remainers really wanted to convince Leave voters to switch allegiances in the "another roll of the dice" referendum they've invested so much effort in demanding, hitting the people you need to convince with this "everything was fucking marvellous before you stupid fuckers fucked it all up for no reason at all" attitude is about as counter-productive as you could imagine.

A practical approach to undoing this Brexit farce would be to try to understand the underlying causes of the Brexit vote, and to point out that most of the crap people were suffering in the neglected, de-industrialised, and left-behind communities that voted for Brexit was due to decades of hard-right neoliberal economic policies, ruinous Tory austerity fanaticism, unprecedented wage repression, and malicious public service vandalism ... not immigrants and the EU.

There's no way you change the minds of the appalling far-right ultranationalist Blue-Kippers in the Home Counties and the Shires because they'll always be financially insulated from the worst of the Brexit chaos, but it is at least possible to reach out to people in left-behind communities and explain that their suffering was caused by malicious domestic government policies like deindustrialisation, austerity, welfare vandalism, infrastructure under-investment, and severe public service cuts, not by membership of the EU.

But the smug centrist approach is to tell people in these communities that everything was always quite simply marvellous, and that they should have been perfectly happy with the pathetic crumbs that they were getting in a system that was working absolutely fine for the well-to-do, rather than deciding to fuck everything up for no reason at all.

The worst impact of Tory austerity fanaticism a lot of these smug centrist Remainers will have felt is having their bin collections reduced from weekly to fortnightly, so it's no wonder they're absolutely incapable of empathising with the pain, and misery, and hopelessness, and stress of the poor and vulnerable people who suffered under the jackboot of it.

So they sneer at them: How dare working class Leave voters fuck everything up for us for no good reason? How dare you all be so stupid and irresponsible? How dare you not listen to us when we've told you what's best for you? How dare you ruin our beloved delusions that Britain was some kind of magnificent utopia? How dare Jeremy Corbyn go to a laughable shit hole like Morecambe rather than pandering to us?

And somehow these people imagine that they'd actually be able to win another EU referendum by campaigning like this!

Remainers tend to absolutely hate it when their opponents portray them as smug, out-of-touch metropolitan elitists who are only concerned with their own comfort.

But when extremely high-profile Remainers resort to this sickening rose-tinted glorification of past circumstances that were indisputably nightmarish for millions of us, and thousands of other Remainers retweet this counter-productive nonsense all over the Internet, how else do they expect to be perceived?

The terrifying thing is that having intolerably smug and strategically inept people like this push themselves to the forefront of the anti-Brexit movement means that it's almost certainly doomed to fail, and their failure will mean that the austerity-victims that they quite clearly didn't give a shit about during their imagined pre-2016 utopia will be the ones to bear the brunt of it all over again.

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OR

Boris Johnson's tax bribe certainly worked a treat on Alan Sugar

In December 2018 Alan Sugar was furious about the Tory Brexit chaos. He was so furious that he publicly stated that he wanted Boris Johnson to be jailed for the political lies he told during the 2016 EU referendum.

Fast forward just seven months and Sugar is running free publicity for Boris Johnson's bid to become Tory leader and Prime Minister by default.

So what's changed in the meantime?

Boris Johnson hasn't apologised for the lies he told during the EU referendum, in fact his supporters have actually doubled down on his right to lie to the public using spurious appeals to "free speech".

The Tory Brexit chaos hasn't improved a jot. In fact it's far worse. We over-ran the Article 50 deadline and Theresa May was left with no choice but to scuttle off to Europe to pathetically beg for an extension in order to avoid actually following through on her endlessly repeated threats to launch a ruinous "no deal" Brexit meltdown if she didn't get her own way.

Who would have thought that "I'll shoot myself in the head on a specific date if I don't get my own way" would turn out to be an incompetent negotiating strategy?
 

The Tory government's own impact assessments show
that a "no deal" Brexit is the worst possible outcome.

Now we're faced with the prospect of a Boris Johnson-led Tory Brextremist government forcing through the most damaging possible version of Brexit (so bad that it's significantly worse than Theresa May's three times rejected hard-right Brexit proposal) and Sugar is cheering him on from the sidelines.

The only high-profile policy that Johnson has announced is an extraordinary £1,500 per year tax bribe to people earning salaries of above £80,000 per year (with diminishing benefits down to those on £50,000 salaries, and absolutely nothing for anyone earning less than that).

This tax bribe would cost £9.6 billion per year, to be paid for the rest of us in the form of more austerity, more public service cuts, more Tory wage repression, more vandalism of the social safety net ... during the Brexit crisis that Johnson and his ilk wish to manufacture for the benefit of their mega-rich speculator mates who are betting against Britain and British assets in the hope of making a killing on the economic meltdown their Tory chums have promised to deliver.

Consider this egregious Tory tax bribe aimed at the tiny minority of top earners like Sugar and paid for by the rest of us.

And compare it with Jeremy Corbyn's policy of no tax rises for the 95% of lowest earners, and making corporations pay their fair share of tax.

It's absurdly easy to see why Sugar has undergone this remarkable conversion from "lock him up" to "Boris for PM".

He's blatantly just let his greed do his thinking.

And he's done it in such a blatant manner that he's switched from bitterly opposing Brexit to social media cheerleading for one of the most egregious Tory Brextremists!

Sugar's greed-override is so ugly, and selfish, and transparent, that even the most obtuse of people should be able to see it for what it is.

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OR

Snake oil and arsenic pills: Beware the political quack doctors on both sides of the Brexit debate

Whatever your position on the Brexit spectrum, it's impossible for anyone with rudimentary critical thinking skills to deny that there are loads of obnoxious and downright dishonest people on both sides of this increasingly polarised debate, and that the further towards the polar extremes, the higher the liar and fanatic intensity becomes.

Brexit snake oil

The biggest lie of all during the 2016 EU referendum debate came from the Brexit snake oil sellers who opportunistically used the dire consequences of ruinous hard-right Tory austerity dogma as a weapon to attack immigrants and the EU with.

It's absolutely obvious that it was six years of callous and divisive domestic government policy that was causing the collapse in living standards that these opportunists weaponised to push their agenda.

• Ruinous Tory austerity dogma resulted in a massive transference of wealth from the majority to the mega-rich establishment class (who bankroll the Tory party).

• Tory wage repression led to the longest real-terms collapse in UK workers' wages on record.

• Tory vandalism of the social safety net led to massive reductions in in-work benefits for the working poor, as well as the systematic impoverishment and abuse of sick and disabled people.

• Tory under-investment in stuff like infrastructure, affordable housing, and education led to a short-term collapse in economic demand, and a long-term ruination of our future economic potential.

• Tory cuts to public services like the NHS, policing, the fire service, and local government created all kinds of devastating consequences like massive NHS queues, soaring violent crime rates, huge increases in fire-related deaths, and crumbling local services.

Far-right Brextremists (many of them Tory MPs who actively voted in favour of all of these devastating policies) cynically weaponised this collapse in living standards to falsely point the finger of blame at immigrants and the EU.

The snake oil solution they were selling was that quitting the EU and abolishing our own rights to Freedom of Movement would magically resolve all problems like stagnating wages, failing public services, unaffordable housing, violent crime, huge NHS waiting lists, and all of the other austerity-related ills caused by the Tory government's austerity fanaticism.

Sadly millions of people fell for it and bought this Brexit snake oil.

The failure of centrism

The reason that the far-right Brextremists managed to get away with flogging this ludicrous blame-switching snake oil is the abject failure of centrism to oppose this destructive Tory austerity ideology.

For five years between 2010 and 2015 the Liberal Democrats actively supported all of the disastrous Tory austerity policies that caused the living standards collapse. They couldn't very well turn around in 2016 and point out that the real blame lay with the destructive austerity policies they helped the Tories enforce rather than immigrants and the EU without demonstrating their own culpability. So they sat on their hands and just let the far-right Brextremists sell their immigrant-blaming snake oil.

The right-wing orthodox neoliberal centrist faction of the Labour Party had a very similar problem because during the 2015 General Election they adopted a ludicrous "austerity lite"  policy of pathetically imitating Tory austerity dogma rather than actively opposing it.

They couldn't reverse position completely the very next year and point out that Tory austerity dogma was to blame for collapsing living standards, not immigrants and the EU, without making themselves look like a bunch of U-turning idiots.

Furthermore any centrist conversion to anti-austerity positioning in order to undermine the blame-shifting lies of the Brextremists would have completely validated Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour-left who had opposed Tory austerity fanaticism from the very beginning.

The Labour right-wingers knew that if they admitted that austerity was a con in order to denounce the snake oil of the far-right Brextremist political quack doctors, they'd end up actively validating the man they were itching to get rid of, as demonstrated by the Anyone But Corbyn coup they launched immediately after the Brexit vote came in.

They chose not to counter the Brextremists' blame-shifting lies because their primary over-riding priority wasn't preventing Brexit at all, it was plotting their coup to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn and re-establish neoliberal control of the Labour Party leadership.

Centrist arsenic tablets

The abject centrist failure to criticise the Brexit snake oil sellers was bad enough, but now that we're stuck in the middle of this interminable Brexit farce these appalling people have actually turned to the same kind of political quack doctor tactics as the Brextremists who created brexit in the first place.

Centrists like the Liberal Democrats and the CUK squatters have now set themselves up as quack doctors too, promising that their disgusting political concoctions of neoliberalism, austerity, and privatisation are a magical cure to this Brexit ailment.

They're attempting to sell the exact policies that created the Brexit disease in the first place as their magical quack doctor cures to the Brexit problem!

There's absolutely no denying the fact that the Lib-Dems are a disgraceful bunch of pro-austerity pro-privatisation neoliberals (just look at their disgraceful track record in government voting through every nasty Tory austerity policy, every deeply illiberal Tory assault on freedom, and every rip-off Tory privatisation scam).

The CUK squatters are just as bad, if not worse. Their economics spokesperson is Chris Leslie (one of the main architects of Labour's election-losing "austerity-lite" strategy at the 2015 General Election), Anna Soubry described the ruinous living standards-wrecking policies of the coalition years as "marvellous", their Transport, Environment, and Energy spokesperson is the private water industry lobbyist Angela Smith, and they've just hitched their boat to the pro-privatisation neoliberal EPP group in the European Parliament.

What makes CUK perhaps even worse than the Lib-Dems  is that they know perfectly well that they're pushing "more of the same" - more austerity - more privatisation - more neoliberal orthodoxy - more imperialist warmongering - but they've given themselves the Orwellian reality-reversal of a name Change UK.

The centrist Lib-Dems and CUK squatters are selling the austerity arsenic tablets that actually cause Brexit in the first place as their wonderful miracle cure to the Brexit problem!

Anyone who falls for this quackery because they love their soothing mouth words about opposing Brexit is wilfully drinking this toxic centrist arsenic pills even though their hair is already falling out and they've started pissing blood as a consequence.

Avoid the quackery

Fortunately there are other political parties opposing hard-right Tory Brexit besides the neoliberal arsenic pills quacks.

The Greens, SNP (Scotland), and Plaid Cymru (Wales) have all vehemently opposed austerity fanaticism, privatisation mania, public service cuts, and the rest of the hard-right economic vandalism that caused the Brexit vote in the first place since long before the 2016 EU referendum.

Their policies on Brexit is pretty much identical to the Lib-Dems and the CUK squatters, in that they want another roll of the dice in a do-or-die final say referendum showdown between Remain and a hard-right Tory administered Brexit. But they come with the added bonus of opposing ruinous austerity fanaticism.

Perhaps putting Remain up against a hard-right Tory version of Brexit will increase the chances of a Remain win, perhaps it won't, but the possibility of creating a devastating and inescapable double-mandate for Brexit can't be discounted, especially given the complacency, condescension, and downright incompetence of the remain campaign back in 2016.

Labour's position is different. They want to create a fail safe Brexit with access to the Customs Union and Single Market, no border in Northern Ireland, and cooperation on science, the environment, and security. Once they've disarmed Brexit to make it as economically harmless as possible. Then they're willing to put it to a final say referendum against Remain (which is a policy agreed on at Labour Conference and supported by the majority of Labour Party members).

Labour have changed direction dramatically since the unbelievably inept austerity-lite betrayal of the Labour centrists in 2015. The two chief architects of this nonsense are gone (Ed Balls lost his seat and Chris Leslie is dictating the economic stance of the CUK squatters), and Corbyn has moved Labour to an economically literate anti-austerity, pro-investment economic position.

So if you're going to vote against the far-right Brexit snake oil salesmen in the upcoming European Parliament elections (like you should), make sure you choose sensibly, and try to avoid actively endorsing the equally repulsive arsenic tablet vendors on the Remain side of the debate.

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