We know from Boris Johnson's utterly demented "superman of capitalism" speech on February 4th that the eugenicist idea of letting masses of people die in order to "save capitalism" was an idea that had a lot of traction in Tory circles.
If this eugenicist "let them die to save capitalism" mentality wasn't absolutely commonplace in the Tory ranks, then surely someone would have stopped Boris Johnson from publicly pledging to defy the international consensus, under the delusion he'd be celebrated as a capitalist superhero for deliberately allowing the virus to spread through the UK population like wildfire.
In the end Tory "take it on the chin" eugenics had to be abandoned when it became obvious that letting the virus spread uncontrolled through the population had been a terrible mistake, making the measures needed to contain it far more economically harmful than the standard pandemic protocol of Test, Contact Trace, Quarantine, that they had been so desperate to avoid in the first place.
Many on the political right regard this abandonment of "take it on the chin" as an error, because they believe that if the virus was left to spread freely through the population killing hundreds of thousands of people and utterly overwhelming the health service, it would be somewhat better for the economy.
They can't pretend that allowing the virus to spread wouldn't result in a lot more deaths, so what they try to do is minimise the importance of Covid-19 deaths with claims like "they would have died anyway", and the semantic trickery of quibbling over "died of Covid-19" and "died with Covid-19" as if the deadly viral infection isn't still a contributing factorno matter if the deceased had any other health conditions.
"They would have died anyway" was always obviously vile right-wing eugenicist bullshit, but a new study provides the evidence that it's a total crock.
A group of academics from the University of Edinburgh, University of Glasgow, and Public Health Scotland have shown that the average number of additional years of life lost for Covid-19 deaths are 13 for males, and 11 for females.
Here's a link to the study: COVID-19 – exploring the implications of long-term condition type and extent of multimorbidity on years of life lost: a modelling study
It's early days in the research of a strain of virus that's only been known about for six months, so a lot more research will come, but what's absolutely clear is that huge numbers of Covid-19 victims were nowhere near 'death's door' as the hard-right eugenicists like to pretend.
Anyone continuing to push the "they were going to die anyway" type narratives to push for lockdown to be lifted needs to come up with evidence-based research to disprove the research showing that it wipes at least a decade off the average victim's life don't they?
Otherwise they're essentially saying that killing tens of thousands of people over a decade early is what they consider "a price worth paying" to get their beloved capitalist profits flowing again.
According to analysis of the ONS figures, the Financial Times have reported that the real Covid-19 death toll is likely to be over 41,000 by now, meaning almost half a million years of life lost already if the Scottish lefe expectancy study findings are correct.
And if government concedes to the hard-right eugenics brigade and lifts the coronavirus measures before proper Test and Trace measures are in place, hundreds of thousands more years of life will be erased, potentially from your own elderly relatives.
But that's the thing with the hard-right. Stuff like human life, public health, long-term economic sustainability, the environment, fairness, and basic human decency are continually thrown to the wayside, because capitalist profiteering is their ultimate and overriding objective.
And if this capitalist profiteering means lopping a decade or more off your gran's life, they absolutely won't hesitate. All they'll do is continue to lie that "she was going to die anyway".
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We all know there are a lot of right-wing people out there who secretly think that the Nazi concentration camps were a great idea, but that few of them are actually stupid enough to actually come out and promote Nazi-style eugenics in public, because they know the idea of state-administered murder of political non-conformists, ethnic minorities, disabled people, and so-called 'degenerates' fills most normal people with horror and revulsion.
One right-winger who is actually stupid enough to publicly promote the idea that people on benefits should be sent to death camps is the new Tory parliamentary candidate for the Gower constituency in Wales, Francesca O'Brien.
We're all aware of how "poverty porn" shows like Benefit Street were designed in order to whip up public hate against people who rely on benefits to survive, and to justify the Tory ideological agenda of vandalising the welfare state.
O'Brien is clearly one of the shows' target audience, because after watching an episode in 2014 she went onto Facebook to declare that the people on the show needed "putting down", and then endorse a reply proposing a "twat a tramp Tuesday".
Someone actually proposed a campaign of public beatings for homeless people, and instead of calling it out as vile vigilante nonsense, O'Brien responded "I'm liking that idea ... ha ha. Made me laugh"!
O'Brien has subsequently deleted the vile comments in the pathetic belief that the Internet will just forget the fact that she's some kind of hateful far-right ranter from the Britain First school of social media discourse.
And the Tory party have indicated how far they've moved to the extreme-right by continuing to endorse this vile woman as their chosen candidate.
yes they've spent the last nine years driving millions into absolute destitution with policies like sanctions, the benefits freeze, wage repression, disability benefit cuts, disability denial assessments ... but now they're unapologetically standing a candidate who says the state should go even further than systematically hounding disabled people and driving vulnerable people into starvation and suicide, and actually just kill them.
Let's hope the people of Gower have the good sense to reject this awful woman, and elect someone who has never actually proposed Nazi style eugenics, or laughed about vigilante violence campaigns against the homeless.
If she loses her bid to become an MP and then falls on hard times because of employers' understandable reservations about employing someone with such vile views, perhaps one day she might learn just a little bit of humility and decency?
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.
As the rest of us were celebrating the New Year, the Tories decided to quietly sneak out an announcement that they'd appointed the vile hard-right polemicist Toby Young to their new (and supposedly impartial) universities watchdog.
Within a matter of hours it became clear that the Tories had failed to do even the slightest due diligence on the guy they were handing a job to. Not only did Toby Young have a disgusting back catalogue of misogynistic, homophobic, and downright disgusting Tweets, he'd also been attending secretive pro-eugenics conferences full of white supremacists and paedophilia apologists, and writing articles attempting to rehabilitate the concept of eugenics.
Eventually, after a nine day shit-storm over his repulsive comments and views, Toby Young resigned, and any sensible and/or vaguely competent political party would have looked into how they managed to appoint someone with such an appalling track record, but not the Tories.
On the very same day that Toby Young resigned over his back catalogue of despicable articles and Tweets, Theresa May appointed the recently elected Tory MP Ben Bradley as Vice Chair for Youth.
Apparently his job would be to get more young people to engage with the Conservative party.
Had they bothered to check Bradley's Internet history before appointing him, they would have come across a truly disgusting blog post calling for the sterilisation of unemployed people, as if unemployment is some kind of genetic disease, rather than a necessary condition in capitalist economies.
I mean just think about it, how else are the exploitative capitalist class going to extract as much profit from the labour force as possible if there isn't a permanent pool of unemployed workers ready to replace any worker who agitates too loudly for pay raises or better working conditions?
One of the most shocking things about his elitist views on unemployment is that Bradley is the first ever Tory MP in the former mining town of Mansfield.
If anyone should know that unemployment can be thrust upon people, families, and even entire communities through no fault of their own, then surely it's people in a former mining town that was socially and economically decimated by the closure of the mines (as well as the textiles industry and the Mansfield brewery)?
But no, they've actually gone and elected this elitist Tory prig as their MP.
How someone with such vile elitist views about the sterilisation of the poor ever made it through the selection process to become a Tory parliamentary candidate is bizarre enough, but his appointment to Theresa May's government as a kind of youth engagement officer, well it just defies belief doesn't it?
Bradley and his right-wing backers have attempted to defend his comments by making out they happened ages ago, but 2012 wasn't that long ago, and his comments were made in defence of Iain Duncan Smith's welfare cuts, as if sterilisation of the unemployed is somehow a natural extension of Tory party welfare policy.
We all know that if Labour (or any other political party) had appointed someone with such vile views to an official position, the Tories, the right-wing dominated print media, and the Guido Fawkes smear-mongering operation would be in all out attack mode over it. But because this guy is a Tory, they're churning out excuses, and pretending that the Tory mask hasn't slipped.
Theresa May has decided that someone who has so recently expressed such vile elitist views is an appropriate person to try to engage young people with right-wing politics.
But the truth is obvious for everyone to see. Not only did the Tory party welcome Bradley with open arms and promote him to an official position within the party, and either they did no due diligence on his background at any state, or they did do due diligence and concluded that sterilise the poor blog posts are well aligned with the Tory party ethos.
The Tory mask has well and truly slipped, and Theresa May's decision to let Bradley keep his job could well backfire. Perhaps he has more extreme pro-eugenics views lurking around in his past, and even if not, any youth Bradley tries to get hooked on right-wing politics can be easily warded off with warnings "don't listen to him, he's the sterilise the poor guy".
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.
After eight days of damaging revelations about the odious hard-right polemicist Toby Young, he has resigned from the Tory government's new universities watchdog.
Young had tried to hide his disgusting past by deleting some 50,000 Tweets, but people had already taken screenshots of some of the worst comments including anal rape 'jokes', casual misogyny and homophobia, a description of masturbating over images of starving children, and crude comments about the breasts of an underage girl.
Aside from the shower of gross Twitter comments there was Young's journalistic output, which included an article admitting the supply of cocaine, an article describing his efforts to trick lesbian women into having sexual contact with him, and most concerning of all, articles in which he tried to rehabilitate the concept of eugenics.
Had this been a Labour Party figure (like Jared O'Mara for example), we all know what the reaction would have been from the likes of Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, and the hard-right Guido Fawkes blog. But instead of a tidal wave of faux outrage we witnessed a week-long exercise in ridiculous Tory excuse-making.
Theresa May said that she was "not impressed" by Toby Young's comments, but refused to sack him; Boris Johnson described Young as having a "caustic wit" as if describing wanking over dying children is the work of a modern day Oscar Wilde; Toby Young even thanked the Guido Fawkes blog for their support in his ludicrous Facebook self-exoneration; and the universities minister Jo Johnson (the brother of Boris) even found himself defending anal rape jokes and modern eugenics in parliament after opposition MPs secured an emergency debate over Toby Young's appointment.
After a the furore showed no signs of dying down after a week the Tories even circulated a memo urging Tory MPs to deflect attention away from Toby Young by attacking and smearing Labour politicians. This wasn't just members of the Tory boys club sticking up for their horrible mate, it was an orchestrated effort by the Tory party machine to defend the indefensible.
Despite the desperate rearguard action from the Tory party machine, the pressure eventually told and Toby Young gave in and announced his resignation. It's astounding that despite all the repulsive comments and articles, he was allowed to walk away of his own volition, not fired.
The fact that the Tories stuck with such a repulsive and desperately unsuitable appointment to a supposedly neutral and impartial public sector role tells you all you need to know about how nasty they are, but there's another angle too.
The way they spent eight days robustly defending the indefensible and sustaining damage to their reputation just to let the guy resign illustrates their sheer incompetence.
Any competent organisation would have nipped the scandal in the bud by admitting the comments and pro-eugenics articles were unacceptable, and cancelling the appointment. But that's just not the way the Tory party works, especially under the weak and directionless leadership of Theresa May.
Toby Young is part of the Tory boys club and untouchable. Even if Theresa May had the inclination to sack him, she couldn't because she's in such a weak position and Toby's fellow members of the Tory boys club like Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, and Jo Johnson would have kicked up a stink that would have threatened her position as party leader, so as usual she put self-interest above all and let the obnoxious creep keep his position.
Even after Young's resignation, Tories like Jo Johnson are still intent on making the situation worse by continuing to spew one-sided Toby Young eulogies and smearing everyone who objected to his appointment as "armchair critics".
It's as if they genuinely can't see what's wrong with appointing such a savagely biased and repulsive character to a supposedly impartial public position, and they're going to take their fury out on any members of the general public with the rudimentary judgement skills necessary to see why such a person is so catastrophically unfit for public office.
In their warped minds masturbating over starving children, anal rape 'jokes', casual misogyny and homophobia, obsessing over the breasts of a minor, and efforts to rehabilitate eugenics are absolutely fine, and Toby Young is some kind of unfortunate martyr, and that's the ridiculous narrative these out-of-touch Tory boys club buffoons are actually running with!
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.
