"Politics is Broken" and guess what? Only they can save us!

The 11 (and counting) squatter MPs are all pushing this populist "politics is broken" trope as hard as they can, and positioning themselves as the heroic saviours.

In this article I'm going to look at the absolute chaos this "politics is broken" trope has already unleashed in three other major economies, before looking at the squatter MPs and their Independent Group (AKA 'Tinge') in more detail.

What I'm not going to do is argue that politics isn't broken. Britain wouldn't be in this farcical Brexit shit-show if the political establishment class hadn't put us here, and anti-vaxxers, grifters, and smarmy charlatans would never have got their hands on the levers of power in Italy, the United States, and France had their political systems not been flawed enough to allow them to either.

The point is that just because someone is repeatedly saying "politics is broken" doesn't mean you have to unquestioningly accept the way they position themselves as the only possible saviours.

Italy

The Five Star Movement is a populist anti-politics political party founded in 2009 by the stand-up comedian and polemicist Beppe Grillo.

This party has used the big tent political strategy to build a disparate coalition of all kinds of people with eurosceptics, anti-globalists, direct democracy advocates, and anti-vaxxers making up several of their core demographics.

Initially attractive to people on the left for their anti-establishment, environmentalist, and direct democracy advocacy, it soon became clear that this party was shifting rapidly towards the extreme-right.

This rightwards shift became absolutely indisputable when the 5 Star MEPs in the European Parliament joined Nigel Farage's rag-tag band of far-right eurosceptics in 2014, but unfortunately, as in Britain, Italians pay very little attention to the internal machinations of the European Parliament, so this collusion with far-right fanatics and outright fascists went virtually unnoticed.

The March 2018 Italian General Election was the huge M5S breakthrough moment, they won the most votes and landed enough seats to make them kingmakers in the Italian parliament. In May 2018 they created a coalition with the fascist party Lega Nord bringing fascism back to the Italian government for the first time in decades.

Since then the popularity of Five Star has waned (although they're still extremely popular with the anti-vaxxer movement for the radical anti-science policies they've enacted) while the fascists they enabled into power have soared in popularity from the 3rd most popular party to by far the most popular.

So the lesson from Italy is clear: Vote for the "politics is broken" populists and get anti-vaxxers and fascism.

United States

I'm pretty sure I don't need to explain all that much about the last few years in US politics.

Donald Trump used "politics is Broken" style populism to position himself as the ideological saviour who was going to "drain the swamp" and "bring the jobs back" to places like the rust belt.

People believed him, he got elected, he immediately filled the top administration jobs with more Wall Street bankers, corporate stooges, and inherited wealth billionaires than any government in US history, then he set about attacking the health care and social security systems, and then he implemented the biggest tax handout for the mega-rich ever.

Nothing for the little people who voted him into power, and a massive windfall for his mega-rich mates. Who would have thought such a thing could happen when you elect billionaire from the international speculator class as your President?

So the lesson from the United States is clear: Vote for the "politics is broken" populists and get Trumpism.

France

The situation in France is by far the most analogous to what's currently happening in Britain.

Emmanuel Macron was a right-wing neoliberal who embedded himself within the centre-left socialist party. 

As minister of economy and finance in the socialist government he set about implementing spectacularly unpopular labour reforms that triggered mass protests and trashed the government's popularity.

After destroying the socialist government from within he walked away to set up a shiny new "centrist" party called En Marche which used the whole "politics is broken" and "we are the saviours" schtick to great effect.

What better way to sell neoliberalism to the public than point out all of the failings of neoliberalism (several of which you were personally involved with), then present yourself as the shiny new alternative?

The problem of course is that when you promise people change, but then deliver more of the same but even worse in the form of massive tax cuts for corporations and the mega-rich, fuel price increases loaded on the poor, even more ideological attacks on labour rights, deeply unpopular education reforms, and significantly collapsing living standards - people tend to get angry.

And when the French get angry they don't just unthinkingly vote in favour of a massive act of national self-harm and then grovellingly re-elect the bastards who trashed their living standards in the first place like us Brits do. They revolt, they protest, they riot.

France has been wracked by 14 consecutive weeks of mass protests and Macron has gone from winning the Presidency and an absolute landslide in the French parliament, to being the most unpopular President in French history with an approval rating only slightly better than cancer.

The most incredible thing about it is that he's managed to nose-dive his Presidency and reduce his nation to mass protests, riots, division, police brutality, and chaos in significantly less than two years!

So the lesson from France is clear: Vote for the "politics is broken" populists and get absolute bloody chaos.

Britain

So the Independent Group ('Tinge') parliamentary squatters are pushing the exact same rhetoric as these other populist movements. "Politics is broken", and guess what? Only they can save us!

The problem of course is that every single one of them is an establishment insider to the core, with several of them being particularly to blame for the current shit-show.

Before the EU referendum Chuka Umunna added fuel to the anti-EU bonfire by fulminating against Freedom of Movement and scapegoating European immigrants. Now he actually expects us to believe him when he positions himself as the glorious saviour to the Brexit mess that he actually helped to create by actively turning Labour Party members against free movement!

Mike Gapes, Joan Ryan, and Ann Coffey are all responsible for the thing that created the biggest ever rift in trust between British people and the Westminster political establishment class. Despite the biggest public protests in British history in 2003, these people voted in favour of the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq on the grounds of terrifying Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Hundreds of thousands died, millions were displaced, these terrifying WMDs were never found because they didn't exist, and Iraq was turned into a lawless terrorism breeding ground that eventually gave birth to the monstrosity of ISIS.

To make matters even worse these warmongers all repeatedly voted against holding an inquiry into their disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq, and all hate Jeremy Corbyn on the basis that he was absolutely right that Iraq was going to be a disaster, and because they simply can't bear to admit that they have the blood of hundreds of thousands of people on their hands.

Anna Soubry is one of the three Tories to have joined the squatters citing her opposition to Brexit as a factor in her decision, but incredibly she actually voted in favour of Theresa May's hard-right EU Withdrawal Act in January 2018 while Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour front bench opposed it! Some brave and principled Brexit saviour eh?
 

Perhaps the most telling thing of all is that all 11 of the squatter MPs are either austerity-enforcers who actually voted in favour of the ruinous Tory austerity dogma that trashed British living standards and created the massive wave of public anger that drove Brexit narrowly over the winning line, or they're austerity abstainers from the right-wing fringe of the Labour Party who actually turned a blind eye to the suffering of millions of their fellow citizens to sit on their hands as the Tories voted though the biggest package of social security cuts in British history in 2015.

Anyone who imagines that this opportunistic group of pro-austerity fanatics, ideological contortionists, self-serving opportunists, and unrepentant warmongers from deep within the ranks of the political establishment class is going to fix our "broken politics" and lead a glorious British revival is clearly working at the same extraordinary level of delusion as those who voted in favour of Brexit thinking a Tory administered abandonment of the EU would immediately turn the UK into the land of milk and honey for all.

But the worrying thing is that there is already a lot of support for this fake political party (established as a private company in order to evade scrutiny of their financial affairs) with no policies, no members, no internal democracy, no leader, no respect for the people in their constituencies, and no disciplinary procedures for bigoted MPs who spout racist nonsense on the TV!

It's looking a lot like the shiny but empty promise of Macronism all over again, built by another bunch of hopeless charlatans desperately trying to keep orthodox neoliberalism alive by rebranding it as a wonderful new form of 'centrism' that will somehow miraculously "fix our broken politics".

Unfortunately this blatant con trick has been shown to work effectively in other major economies with predictably disastrous results, so only the complacent would imagine that it couldn't possibly work here too.

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12 things you should know about the gilet jaunes movement

Over the last week France has been rocked by the biggest riots in over a decade but much of the media coverage has been sketchy at best.

Fuel protest

The gilets jaunes (yellow vests) movement started as a grassroots protest against a hugely unpopular hike in fuel tax designed to load the economic burden of climate change goals onto ordinary people, and especially those in non-urban areas who rely on cars to survive.

That these planned tax rises on petrol and diesel have coincided with a global spike in fuel prices has exacerbated the situation, leaving millions of French families wondering where they're going to find the cash to pay for these huge fuel price hikes.

Climate change

As gilets jaunes the movement has spread it has evolved and grown into a much broader protest against Emmanuel Macron and the French government.

Macron and his supporters keep on banging on about ecology and how progressive it is to tax fuel, but they're talking a completely different language to the people facing the economic burden of these policies.

Of course a lot of people accept that something needs to be done to combat climate change, but loading the majority of the burden onto ordinary people who have no choice but to drive, whilst actually giving handouts to the mega-rich with the other hand is the exact opposite of a progressive approach.

Anyone trying to characterise the gilets jaunes movement as a simple fuel protest against reasonable and progressive climate change measures is either catastrophically under-informed or behaving in a deliberately disingenuous manner.

Yellow vests

The reason for the yellow vests is that since 2008 French drivers have been required by law to have a yellow high visibility vest in their vehicle in case of breakdown, meaning that high visibility jackets are a cheap and widely available symbolic "uniform" for the protesters.

Violence

The vast majority of the 280,000+ gilets jaunes protesters have been peaceful and non-violent, but as is always the way the vast majority of the mainstream media coverage has focused on the violent minority.

This isn't an effort to downplay or excuse any of the unacceptable violence and vandalism, it's just an effort to redress the balance a bit by pointing out that the violence and chaos in Paris is unrepresentative of the enormous movement that is going on across the whole of France.

Delegitimisation

Assorted 'centrists' and Macron fanboys have tried to create the argument that the entire movement "lost legitimacy as soon as it turned to rioting/looting/car burning".

The problem with this tactic of tarring an entire movement of hundreds of thousands with the behaviour of the very worst minority is that it would make it ridiculously easy to render all political protest illegitimate through the tactical insertion of a small number of violent agent provocateurs into any and all protest movements.

Any reasonable person should be capable of differentiating between the hundreds of thousands of non-violent protesters across France who blocked roads and fuel depots without rioting or violence, and the small minority of lawless thugs the media have concentrated on.

The price of Macron

When Emmanuel Macron won the French Presidency "I'm alright Jack" centrists across the world went into raptures that their favoured brand of neoliberalism-lite was back on the agenda, but now that Macron's opinion poll ratings have collapsed to minus 50, hundreds of thousands of people are actively protesting against the government, and the streets of Paris are ablaze, perhaps it's time for a quick reappraisal.

Macron only won the Presidency because the only other option on the ballot was the hate-mongering extreme-right ultranationalist Marine Le Pen. In a choice between the neoliberal frying pan and the fascist fire, the French public understandably chose to stay in the frying pan.

As you'd expect from a neoliberal with a huge parliamentary majority, the result has been a massive squeeze on poor and ordinary people in order to fund handouts and tax cuts for the mega-rich.

It's not like the French public could have had any illusions about what was going to happen given that Macron was personally responsible for the massively unpopular anti-worker legislation that destroyed the parti socialiste from within before he jumped ship to create a 'centrist' protest movement against the political establishment that he was one of the worst examples of!

Given the long history of public protest in France, a revolt against Macron and his neoliberal agenda was always on the cards, the only surprising thing being that it's taken so long to happen.

Rebellion

One of the big ironies is that Macron connived his way into power by creating and leading a faux rebellion against the French political establishment, yet he's only halfway into his second year in office and he's the focus of a new, more genuine, and more furious anti-establishment revolt.

If you promise the people a revolution and a government that listens to and works on behalf of ordinary people, then deliver nothing but a 'more of the same' anti-worker, neoliberal agenda, is it any wonder they'd be furious?

Social media

The gilets jaunes movement began on social media with petitions and a Facebook event aimed at disrupting traffic on November 17th. Since then it's spread onto the streets.

The spontaneous social media growth of the protest means there's no real defined leadership structure, which has its advantages and disadvantages.

Extreme-right opportunism

The French extreme-right have been quick to jump on the protests with Macron's defeated Presidential rival Marine Le Pan trying to associate herself with the movement and encouraging her supporters to infiltrate it.

The structureless and leaderless nature of the movement has made it possible for the French extreme-right to infiltrate the protests, but this leaderless nature also prevents them from usurping it by establishing themselves as its leaders.

Popularity

Various opinion polls have put public support for the gilets jaunes at between 72% and 84%. meaning Macron is in a really tricky situation. He's styled himself as an authoritarian who won't give in to protest, but he's only going to increase his (already extraordinary) levels of unpopularity if he seeks to crush this extremely popular movement by force.

The squeezed middle

The reason the  gilets jaunes movement is so popular is that they're representing the frustration of millions of ordinary French people who feel they're getting insufficient return for their labour and their taxes.

Like most Europeans the French are reasonably content to pay high taxes in return for quality public services, decent pensions, and a strong social security system, however Macron's fuel tax hikes have coincided with hardline neoliberal policies from Macron such as gutting the social security system, attacking pensions, and attempting to flog off the French rail network to his private sector mates. And to top it all off one of Macron's first reforms was to slash wealth taxes paid for the extremely rich.

Of course anti-worker legislation, privatisation mania, attacks on the social security system, and massive handouts to the mega-rich must sound familiar to British people who have been suffering these same policies under 8 years of disastrous Tory rule, but the French are different. They won't just sit back and accept this ideologically-driven assault on their living standards, and even twice re-elect the bastards who have been doing it like the British have, they're making it clear they're simply not having it.

What next?

With Macron outright refusing to drop the next 6.5% hike in fuel prices sceduled for January, and with such high levels of public support it seems unlikely the gilets jaunes protests will just stop altogether any time soon.

The extent to which the protests continue over the next few weeks and months would seem to depend on whether Macron decides to cede ground by dropping the planned fuel hike, or intensifies the situation by outright ignoring the concerns of protesters and seeking to forcibly clamp down on the protests by imposing emergency legislation.

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The timeline of shame

In March 2018 the Saudi tyrant Mohammed bin Salman began a month-long tour of Western nations, securing new arms deals with Britain, the United States, and France.

In early March 2018 the brutal Islamist tyrant received a warm Tory welcome in London. Against a backdrop of widespread criticism of the repressive Saudi regime and their ongoing campaign of war crimes in Yemen, Theresa May agreed a new arms deal with the Saudi regime to supply them 48 Typhoon jets. This deal was signed off by the UK government despite their full knowledge that the Saudis have been using British-manufactured weapons to commit horrific war crimes.

Later that month Bin Salman rocked up in the United States to meet Donald Trump. The President of the United States demeaned his office and his nation by begging the Saudi tyrant to "share the wealth" by buying more American-manufactured weapons. The trip concluded with a new $670 million deal to supply the repressive kingdom with anti-tank missiles and spare parts for tanks and helicopters.

And then Bin Salman appeared in Paris to meet Emmanuel Macron. The trip concluded with the French government agreeing to essentially scrap their managed arms export strategy in order to hawk weapons to the Saudi tyrants directly. Of the three leaders Macron is under the most domestic pressure to halt arms sales to the Saudis because of their appalling human rights record and their war crimes in Yemen, but he ignored public opinion in order to make French arms sales to Saudi Arabia even easier!

And then just one week later France, the United States and the United Kingdom collaborated to launch missile attacks on Syria (including targets that had been declared free of chemical weapons just weeks earlier by the OPCW).

It's absolutely obvious that the main beneficiaries of these attacks on Syria are the Saudi-backed Islamist terrorists who have been losing the war there. We know they're Saudi backed because the US government admitted as much in the leaked Hillary Clinton emails.

We also know that Saudi Arabia has produced the second most ISIS fighters (after Tunisia), and that the country is the single biggest source of pro-ISIS propaganda on social media.

Within five weeks of starting his arms deal tour all three of his major arms-dealer nations have decided to bypass their own parliaments in order to militarily support the Saudi destabilisation agenda in Syria.

The truly alarming thing about this scandalous situation isn't that France, the US and the UK are selling weapons to tyrannical regimes like Saudi Arabia (they're three of the five biggest arms dealing nations on earth), nor that they're actively assisting the Saudis in their strategic destabilisation of their Middle East neighbours (they've been happy to watch Saudi Arabia spread Salafi Islamist extremism all over the globe for decades), but that the mainstream press in all three countries simply refuse to explain the Saudi role in all of this.

All three leaders cynically bypassed their parliaments to carry out these attacks. All three leaders defied public opinion to carry out these attacks. And all three leaders are sickeningly close to the vile and repressive Saudi regime whose Islamist proxies in Syria are the main beneficiaries of these attacks.

If mainstream media hacks were even remotely interested in holding the powerful to account then the scandalous involvement of democracy-hating Saudi Arabia in all of this would be a central theme of the Syria airstrikes coverage, but it simply isn't.

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Centrism is bust

A recent political trend seems to be for comfortably well off people to pine for what they call political centrism. 

In this article I'm going to expose centrism as the busted political myth that is way beyond its sell by date.

Gary Lineker

I quite like the football pundit and crisps-salesman Gary Lineker for the fact that he's been willing to put his head above the parapet to defend refugees and speak out in favour of human rights (provoking tides of right-wing social media abuse in the process), but when it comes to his recent Twitter call for a rejuvenation of centrist politics, he's absolutely wrong because centrism is totally bust.

Anyone else feel politically homeless? Everything seems far right or way left. Something sensibly centrist might appeal?

— Gary Lineker (@GaryLineker) June 29, 2017

In his Tweet and subsequent comments Lineker failed to made it clear what he was arguing for (a Lib-Dem revival, the return of Blairism, a charismatic neoliberal Trojan Horse candidate like Emmanual Macron, something else entirely ...), but he definitely kicked a hornet's nest by saying what he did.

Historical context

The problem for centrism was always the extremely strong right-wing bias of the mainstream media. For the last four decades the billionaire propaganda barons have worked tirelessly to drag the political spectrum ever further towards the fanatical extreme-right. 

Most Tories have gleefully tracked ever further rightwards into the fanatical far-right territory that even Margaret Thatcher would never have tried to get away with (ideologically driven privatisation of the Royal Mail, thousands of publicly funded schools given away for free to unaccountable private sector interests, even vital components of the police service carved up and given away).

From the mid-1990s Labour also tracked hard to the right to chase the ever shifting "centre ground" meaning that they soon ended up occupying right-wing pro-privatisation economic territory that is actually way to the right of the economic stance of the Tory party between the early 1950s and the mid-1970s!

Looking at politics in any kind of sensible historical context makes it clear that Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party are the true centrists because they're trying to push the UK back towards the balance between capitalism and socialism that existed before the long march towards the fanatical hard-right was initiated in 1979, but as far as the bulk of the mainstream media are concerned, anything but adherence to the fanatical hard-right orthodoxy of neoliberalism is extremist thought crime.

What is and isn't "way left"

Jeremy Corbyn's policy of raising corporation tax back up to 26% in order to fund investments in infrastructure ans services isn't way left, unless you're the kind of hard-right Tory fruitcake who thinks that the United States is currently a fanatically left-wing socialist country because their corporation tax rate is more than double the 17% the Tories are planning to reduce the UK rate to, and who thinks Margaret Thatcher was an outright communist because corporation tax was 52% for the first three years of her reign, and never dipped below 34% under her rule.

Wanting British infrastructure and services like the rail network and national grid to be run by the British for the benefit of the British people (rather than being used as cash cows by foreign governments like China, Saudi Arabia, France, the Netherlands, Singapore, Oman, Germany, the UAE & Italy) isn't way left, it's common bloody sense.

Treating access to education as a benefit to the whole of society, rather than a commodity to be sold at the highest possible price so that graduates from English universities don't have to rack up enormous debts that 70% of them will never pay off despite a lifetime opportunity destroying 9% aspiration tax on their disposable income isn't way left, it's perfectly normal in the majority of other European countries (Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Netherlands, Scotland ...).

Wanting to reverse the Tory policy of building the fewest houses since the early 1920s and construct a new wave of affordable social housing in order to make owning a house more than a totally impossible fantasy for millions of under-40s isn't way left, it's the kind of sensible housing policy that has been so sorely lacking for the last four decades.

All Jeremy Corbyn wants to do is reverse some of the worst hard-right ideological vandalism that has been done to the UK since 1979, much of it under the centrist flag of New Labour between 1997 and 2010.

Publicly owned transport networks, postal services and energy distribution grids are commonplace in Europe. Free university education or low, affordable fees are commonplace in Europe. Corporation tax rates significantly higher than Corbyn's proposed 26% rate are commonplace in Europe. Sensible housing policies are commonplace in Europe. Wages that actually rise in real terms rather than shrink are commonplace in Europe.

Jeremy Corbyn isn't proposing anything radically far left, he's proposing policies with wide public appeal that are absolutely normal on the continent.

European context

A look at the fate of other socialist-turned-centrist parties across Europe gives an idea of what could well have lain in store for Labour had they refused to move away from right-wing neoliberal economic dogma and back towards traditional centre-left politics.

Pasok were the most successful party in post-dictatorship Greece having never polled less than 38% until 2011, but they signed their own death warrant when they decided to prop up their pro-austerity conservative rivals in 2012, and by 2015 they'd collapsed to below 5% of the vote, making them the 7th party in the Greek parliament.

In 2012 the Dutch Labour Party formed a centrist coalition with their hard-right conservative rivals and at the next election in 2017 they collapsed from 24.8% of the vote to 5.7%, reducing them from the second biggest party (by a whisker) to the 7th biggest party.

The warning signs are clear that socialist parties that abandon all traces of socialism in favour of pushing hard-right neoliberal dogma under the banner of centrism have no future.

British context

You don't even have to look outside the UK to see the damage that centrism has done to the traditional centre-left. You just have to look at the way the Blairites lost Scotland by pushing Tory-lite centrism onto the Scottish election well past its sell-by date.

Hawking hard-right economic dogma under the banner of centrism was the most popular political position for decades but it's gone badly out of fashion and resulted in Labour losing 40 of their 41 Westminster seats in Scotland.

The neoliberal orthodoxy dressed up as centrism is politically toxic, and everyone bar the Lib-Dems has now cottoned onto this fact.

The Tories have surged off into the more UKIP than UKIP fanatically right-wing ultra-nationalist territory to chase the burgeoning extreme-right demographic, Labour have moved back to their traditional centre-left stance and won back millions of voters in the process, and the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Green Party all sit on the centre-left too.

The only party that hasn't shifted away from the centrist neoliberal orthodoxy are the Lib-Dems, and look at the paltry 7.5% share of the vote they bagged at the 2017 General Election.

If there was a genuine public appetite for centre-right economic policies dressed up as centrism than Ed Miliband would have won the 2015 General Election with Ed Balls' insipid and appallingly uninspiring prescription of "austerity lite".

If there was a genuine public appetite for right-wing economics dressed up as centrism in 2017, then the Lib-Dems would have surged back into contention, but their vote share actually declined even further from what most of us assumed to be their absolute nadir at the 2015 General Election.

Macron

A lot of people seem to imagine that the new French President Emmanuel Macron is some kind of moderate centrist, but the reality is that he's just more of the same neoliberalism dressed up as centrism who got a massive lucky break when his rival for the French Presidency was the Front National extremist Marine Le Pen.

Of course the former investment banker Macron looked like a moderate in comparison to the extreme-right fanaticism of Le Pen and the Front National, but Macron is a pro-corporate, anti-worker neoliberal to the core. 

His success in the lowest turnout French election in history is proof that the French prefer neoliberalism to fascism, but it also needs to be noted that record numbers were so disillusioned by the choice between hard-right and extreme-right that they simply didn't bother to vote at all.

Many British centrists who admire Macron's personality cult seem to be totally unaware that before he established En Marché (reflecting his own initials) he infiltrated the French Socialist party and destroyed it from within by implementing riot-inducing hard-right pro-corporate, anti-worker labour reforms, then walked out of the ruins to form his new centrist political party.

Of course you have to give Macron credit for his absolute audacity, but anyone who sees him as some kind of centre-ground moderate rather than a more of the same adherent of the hard-right neoliberal orthodoxy who rode a tide of political apathy into power is living in a total political fantasy world.

Apathy

One of the key components of centrism is political apathy, on which it thrives. 13 years of Labour Party centrism resulted in the four lowest general election turnouts since universal suffrage (2001, 2005, 2010, 2015) and an ever declining Labour Party share of the vote that only reversed in 2017 after Jeremy Corbyn defined Labour as an actual alternative.

The cause of this centrist apathy is obvious. If the electorate are presented with a choice of more of the same neoliberal orthodoxy under Labour, or another significant lurch to the hard-right under the Tories, millions of people who want an actual alternative to hard-right economics end up not bothering to vote at all.

The centrist myth is dead

Wrapping up hard-right neoliberal economic policies in a load of slick misleading spin and then parading them under the flag of centrism worked a treat for a while (1997 until the global financial crisis) but now that the devastating social and economic consequences of almost four unbroken decades of hard-right economics are becoming clearer and clearer, people are desperate for an actual alternative.

Tony Blair and Nick Clegg were the two UK politicians who made the biggest deals out of being centrists, and look at how they're reviled now for the way they subverted and betrayed the central ideologies of their own parties (democratic socialism & liberalism) in order to hawk hard-right neoliberal dogma.

The only remaining centrists are the people who have done perfectly well out of neoliberalism, financial sector deregulation, handouts for the mega-rich and austerity for the rest of us, housing market chaos, and privatisation mania thanks very much, and don't care about those of us who are faring much worse than they are.

They're alright Jack, so they only really want superficial tinkering to a fundamentally broken system that punishes the poor and ordinary with austerity dogma to fund lavish giveaways for the mega-rich; systematically abuses disabled people in disability denial factories; impoverishes 70% of university students from ordinary backgrounds for their entire working lives; and considers countries like Oman, China, Singapore, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates better custodians of British infrastructure than Britain itself. 

Of course centrists will try to kid anyone who is daft enough to listen to them that they're not fans of the hard-right neoliberal orthodoxy, but the fact that they oppose any real reversal of the four decade long rightward drift is evidence that they're not centre-ground, or progressive, or moderate at all. They just want to tread political water like Blair did, holding position more or less wherever the Tories leave us until whenever the Tories get back in and continue marching the nation towards the fanatical hard-right again.

Centrism doesn't really stand for anything or change anything. It just hopes to win power for power's sake by standing ever so slightly to the left of wherever the Tories are standing, no matter how far to the bonkers hard-right the Tories keep shifting.

Thankfully there is no real public appetite for this kind of deceptive apathy-inducing neoliberal con game any more because people can see through it.

If they want more fanatical hard-right dogma they can vote Tory, if they want a recalibration away from it they can vote Labour, SNP, Plaid Cymru or Green, and if they're genuinely not tired of the centrism con game yet they can do like the vast majority of us didn't and vote for the Lib-Dems. 

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

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