Today was the opening of the 9th European Parliament, and oh what a farce the British contingent turned it into! We've come to expect nothing more than pointless publicity-seeking pantomime from the Faragists, who love nothing more than empty gesture politics, grandstanding speeches, and collecting £millions in expenses in return for doing no work whatever. So it's absolutely no surprise that the 29 Brexit Party MPs turned their back on the European Parliament during Beethoven's Ode to Joy. These ludicrous scammers have continually shamed Britain with their endless expenses frauds, their laziness, their belligerence, their petulant publicity-seeking stunts, and their despicable allegiances with extreme-right fanatics and neo-Nazis.
The kind of people who vote for them actually enjoy seeing our European neighbours treated with contempt and disdain. They get off on it because they hate Johnny Foreigner so much they'd rather have a bunch of attention-seeking clowns in the EU parliament than people there to actually represent British interests on the continental stage. But us Brits didn't just decide to send even more of these far-right scammers into the European Parliament, we also upped the British contingent of Lib-Dems from 1 to 16 based on their opportunistic single-issue "Bollocks to Brexit" campaign! It's highly unlikely that a tenth of the people who voted for these appalling Lib-Dem austerity enforcers understand that they're part of Guy Verhofstadt's awful ALDE group in the European Parliament, or that ALDE and their antics are one of the worst things about the EU for the way they relentlessly back every sickening piece of hard-right, economically liberal, pro-corporate shite from TTIP, to efforts to ban people from using the term "veggie burger", to link taxes and upload filters designed to benefit corporate media sites and online tech giants at the expense of small websites and independent content creators. It's also highly unlikely that most of the people who decided to vote Lib-Dem actually bothered to think through why Brexit happened in the first place, nor the crucial role the Lib-Dems' played by actively helping the Tories to destroy our nation's living standards for five ruinous years with austerity fanaticism, unprecedented wage repression, massive public service cuts, endless privatisation scams, grotesquely illiberal legislation like unlawful Tribunal Fees, Hostile Environment, Bedroom Tax, and Snooping Powers, deliberate infrastructure under-investment, and wanton vandalism of the social safety net.
Let's vote for the people who helped cause Brexit because they make a fuss about opposing Brexit!
Let's give our kids ice cream for destroying their bedroom because they say they intend to tidy it up one day! What Lib-Dem voters must surely have noticed is the way the people they elected turned up to the European Parliament in absurd matching "Bollocks to Brexit" T-shirts like it's a sodding stag do rather than a serious parliament. Turning up dressed like you're on the piss with Auntie Susan turns the EU Parliament into just as much of a joke as the Brexiteers and their absurd antics. So that's 45 of Britain's 73 MEPs treating the European Parliament like an absolute circus. This puerile and contemptuous behaviour from both fringes of the Brexit divide shames our nation, and makes it seem like the Europeans would actually be a hell of a lot better off without us sending ever larger numbers of absolute divs into their parliament to piss about like they're on holiday. So thanks a lot to all of you single-issue wankers who decided to turn the European elections into an absurd Proxy-referendum on Brexit.
And thanks a lot to the almost 2/3 of people who couldn't even be arsed to go out and vote to decide who represents us on the continental stage too, this level of apathy is what has allowed a small and unrepresentative bunch of fringe single-issue extremists to completely hijack Britain's contingent in the European Parliament, and end up making us look like a nation of total dick heads.
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When you look at the facts and evidence, it's pretty damned clear that quitting the EU without at least maintaining very close cooperation on the economy, security, citizens' rights and the environment would be a disastrous move for the UK.
When even Brexiteers like Jacob Rees-Mogg are claiming that Britain won't see any Brexit benefit for at least 50 years, it's hardly an uncontroversial point to say that Brexit is going to be disastrous until almost everyone of working age is a pensioner or dead. However one point that is rarely raised is whether the EU would actually be better off without us. You see the over-whelming British attitude towards the EU is apathy, while most of those who do express a view do so with so little regard for the actual structure and makeup of EU democracy, it's pretty much indistinguishable from contempt. The turnout at the EU elections was just 37%, meaning two thirds of eligible voters didn't even bother to express a view, and of the minority who did bother voting, a massive swathe of them treated the election like a ridiculous proxy referendum on EU membership, with 31% backing the Faragist Brexit Party, and 20% backing the absurd single-issue "Bollocks to Brexit" Lib-Dems. How many Lib-Dem voters know, or even care, that the Lib-Dems belong to the despicable ALDE group in the European Parliament, and by returning 15 of them, they've massively increased the power of one of the most toxic groups in the European Parliament. If one thing is absolutely guaranteed in the European Parliament, it's that is some sickening pro-corporate piece of legislation, or an egregious attack on European citizens' rights and freedoms (the TTIP corporate power grab, banning people from using the term "veggie burger" at the behest of the meat industry, attacking Internet freedoms with Link Taxes and Upload Filters ...) comes along, ALDE will be cheering for it and voting it through. So in order to say "bollocks to Brexit" like a bunch of political toddlers, literally millions of Brits voted for the European Parliamentary group that makes the EU so bloody bad in the first place, and literally millions more had an equally embarrassing political toddler tantrum in the opposite direction by voting for a bunch of lazy expenses-scamming far-right shit-stirrers to protest against the EU. Aside from our woefully immature attitude to electing members to the European Parliament, there's also the fact that Britain is so often completely out of step with the general European Consensus. I'll give just a few examples: When the EU tried to clamp down on excessive bankers' bonuses, George Osborne was the only finance minister in Europe to oppose the proposals, using public money to fight a doomed-to-lose rearguard action in defence of bankers' rights to extract vast bonuses even as they drive their institutions into insolvency! When the EU tried to protect the European steel industry by putting tariffs on artificially cheap Chinese steel flooding into European markets, once again the Tories were the only major ruling party to object to and obstruct these moves. When the EU tried to discipline the far-right Orbán government in Hungary for their interference in the independence of the judiciary, the Tories were the only ruling party in Europe to align themselves with all the extreme-right and neo-Nazi parties in the European parliament to vote in favour of Orbán's anti-Semitic regime. And it's not just limited to British obstruction against the European political consensus, there's a hard-right British mindset that just doesn't exist on the continent. Even in countries like Germany, where the centre-right CDU have ruled the roost since 2005, publicly owned not-for-profit public services are commonplace and they've actually reintroduced free university education across the board. In the UK Jeremy Corbyn is derided as some kind of dangerously radical extremist for espousing these policies that are absolutely commonplace on the continent. Policies like publicly owned rail, water, national grid, and mail system, free university education, and decentralisation of economic control and infrastructure investment funds. What's absolutely commonplace and uncontroversial over there is derided as lunatic extremism over here, and then when it comes to UK government policy Europeans are genuinely shocked when you tell them what the UK government have been doing over the last nine years. They're shocked when you tell them that they've privatised 3/4 of the schools in England into the hands of unaccountable private pseudo-charities who fill their own pockets at the public expense through bloated executive salaries and dodgy no-bid supply contracts to their friends and family. They're shocked when you tell them that English kids are facing £9,000 per year university fees on rip-off inflation+3% repayment terms that mean 83% of graduates will never pay off their debts despite entire working lifetimes of paying 9% of their disposable incomes in "education tax". They're shocked when you tell them that the Tory government has privatised prisons, and the probation service, and the forensic science service, and front line police operations, and absolutely gutted Legal Aid to turn the courts back into the playgrounds of the rich. What is our normal is radical hard-right extremism to most of them.
And what's their normal is almost universally derided in the media as dangerously extreme Marxist nonsense when Corbyn proposes it over here. On Brexit we're just an embarrassment hanging around in the doorway, threatening to leave the party in the most destructive way possible, with senior government ministers, right up to our soon-to-be-departed Prime Minister spreading bizarre anti-European conspiracy theories, and her senior ministers referring to our EU neighbours as "Nazi concentration camp guards". Then after three years of threatening to shoot ourselves in the head if we don't get exactly what we want, we repeatedly rejected the departure deal that we ourselves negotiated, and then pathetically begged and grovelled for yet more time to sort ourselves out, because nobody here can even agree on how to actually do Brexit. They've shown remarkable patience in the face of this unprecedented chaos and uncertainty, with all 27 remaining EU states coming together to agree their negotiating position, while we, on our own, remain pathetically divided over ours! When it comes to foreign policy, once again we're completely out of step with the rest of the EU. When Jeremy Corbyn appealed for calm, and asked to see conclusive proof that Iran were responsible for the tanker explosions in the Gulf of Oman, he was roundly derided in Britain as some kind of lunatic anti-British traitor for daring to question the suspiciously evidence-light assertions of US warmongers like Mike Pompeo and John Bolton. But then you look at the European reaction to the same incident, and you see that far from being some kind of wildly deranged commie, Corbyn's just expressing the general European consensus. Germany’s foreign minister Heiko Maas said the grainy video provided by the US is far from sufficient to prove that Iran was behind the attacks. France's foreign ministry called on all sides in the region to "act with restraint and towards de-escalation". And the EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini called for "maximum restraint". Nobody in Europe is spitting abuse and shrieking "traitor" at these figures for saying the same kind of stuff Corbyn did, nor demanding that the European public unquestioningly accept the American's evidence-light assertions, and war-mongering rhetoric. Whichever way you look at it, Britain is glaringly out of step with the general European consensus. Of course a lot of Brits who believe in more liberal social values, and peaceful internationalist ideals, and the mixed economy social democratic way of doing things, would prefer not to leave the EU at all, but maybe it's just time for people like us to accept that (outside of Scotland) we're actually in the minority, surrounded by a majority comprised of tub-thumping hard-right little-Englanders and those who are outright apathetic towards European principles and ideals, which means that the Europeans might well be better off without us continually mucking things up for them. The other option of course is for Britain to change course, to ditch the obstructionist British attitudes in the European Parliament, to adopt the European consensus on public ownership and affordable/free university education, to unwind all the egregious Tory privatisation scams that most Europeans are genuinely shocked by when they hear about them, and to seek de-escalation in volatile conflict zones rather than spitting undiluted hate at those who preach caution instead of jingoistic war-mongering bollocks. But if we're going to take this other option, we've got a heck of a lot of work on our plates to reform the way we do things in Britain haven't we?
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If you were gullible enough to believe the the extreme-right propaganda promoted by billionaire owned rags like the Daily Mail, S*n and Express, you'd end up believing that liberals and the left are terrible bullies intent on repressing freedom-loving right-wingers like Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen and Theresa May's Brexiteer squad. The reality couldn't be more different. Any Brit with a social media account must be familiar with the baying mob of Brexiters who insist on shouting down any effort to question what Theresa May is actually up to with insults, abuse and instructions to "shut up" and "get over it" because they simply can't tolerate anyone holding a different opinion to their own. This savagely dictatorial mentality that wishes to silence and eradicate dissenting opinion isn't just limited to the followers of extreme-right demagogues like Farage, Trump and Le Pen. These demagogues and their inner circles also have the same intolerant attitude towards dissent and questioning. Look at the way Marine Le Pen's thugs dragged away the journalist Paul Larrouturou for daring to ask her a question about the 300,000€ in expenses she scammed from the European Parliament and is still refusing to repay. This is far from the only example of right-wing demagogues hatred of being held to account by the free press. Take a look at the American Spanish-language journalist Jorge Ramos being thrown out of a Trump press conference and then told to "get out of my country" by one of Trump's minions.
The extreme-right feed into the victim complexes of the gullible by telling them that the evil liberal elites want to silence them and remove their freedoms, whilst simultaneously violently repressing and disparaging members of the press who try to hold the extreme-right to account!
Anyone who actually thinks about things from a rational perspective couldn't possibly fall for this kind of abject hypocrisy, but unfortunately lots of people are easily swayed by emotional manipulation. Thus the extreme-right use themes like victimhood, fear and patriotism to emotionally sway their audience, and it doesn't matter how many coherent rational critiques are offered afterwards, once swayed by emotions the supporters of extreme-right demagogues are highly unlikely to be won back over by dry facts and analysis.
Even video evidence of the violent ejection of a journalist is unlikely to overcome this demagogue-worship because it's always much easier to fool a person than to convince them they've been fooled. But at least evidence like this has got a better chance than cold factual analysis if it's framed in the same kind of emotional way; as a breathtakingly hypocritical attack on freedom by a bunch of cry-bullies who constantly claim that they're the victims of censorship and persecution whilst seeking to silence and repress others.
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The Labour MEP Seb Dance held up a piece of paper saying "he's lying to you" behind Nigel Farage as he was busy spouting his usual brand of xenophobic, fearmongering anti-European rhetoric in the European Parliament. The action was a breech of parliamentary etiquette for sure, and Dance will inevitably end up getting punished for it, but the hypocrisy of the official UKIP complaint really is something else.
The UKIP MEP who submitted the complaint is a guy called Bill Etheridge who said that it was "disgusting behaviour".
Etheridge was a Tory Party local council candidate until 2011 when he was forced to resign in disgrace after he decided to indulge in a spot of social media race-baiting. It's not often that someone's bigoted behaviour is so overt and extreme that they end up getting shoved out of the Tory party, but Bill is one of the rare examples.
We are living in interesting times indeed, where wealthy white western males like Nigel Farage can play the perma-victim and millions of people actually take them seriously, and light-hearted objections to Farage's shameful victim-complex grandstanding can actually be self-righteously described as "disgusting" by a Hitler-praising social media race-baiter and failed Tory like Bill Etheridge!
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The re-run of the 2016 Austrian Presidential election ended in a reasonably convincing victory for the left-wing candidate Alexander Van der Bellen over Norbert Hofer of the extreme-right Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs. Van der Bellen stood as an independent candidate, but he's still a member of the Austrian Green Party that he was the leader of between 1997 and 2008. This means that he will be the first Green Party politician ever to serve as an elected European head of state when he is sworn in on January 26th 2017. The defeated candidate Norbert Hofer represents Europe's growing extreme-right fringe. His Austrian Freedom Party was founded by former Nazis and the first two leaders of the party (Anton Reinthaller and Friedrich Peters) were both members of the SS during the Second World War. The Freedom Party is aligned in the European parliament with other extreme right-wingers like the French National Front, the Italian Northern League, Geert Wilders' Dutch Freedom Party and the absolute dregs of European politics like the (so corrupt she got thrown out of UKIP) independent MEP Janice Atkinson.
Hofer dislikes being called a fascist, but over the years he has done numerous things to appeal to fascists. One of the most famous examples of Hofer appealing to fascists was the time he wore the Nazi blue cornflower symbol in public. He regularly uses Nazi era language and terminology, he hangs out with extreme-right Greater Germany fanatics who deny Austria's nationhood as a fiction, and he refuses to endorse the longstanding anti-Nazi consensus in Austrian politics. The fact that next President of Austria will not be a representative of Europe's extreme-right fringe has come as a relief to an awful lot of people. After the UK electorate voted for the chaos of a completely unplanned Brexit and then the American public voted for the chaos of electing a clearly unstable man-child as their President, the idea of Austria electing a fascist as their President didn't actually seem as utterly far-fetched as it would have done in the past. It's understandable that a lot of people are relieved at this defeat for the lunatic far-right fringe, but the Daily Mail are bitterly disappointed at the failure of the extreme-right candidate they championed on so many occasions.
It should come as no surprise that the Daily Mail were backing the candidate for the extreme-right party that was founded by ex-Nazis in the 1950s. After all, back in the 1930s the Daily Mail were enthusiastic supporters of another extreme-right fanatic from Austria called Adolf Hitler. The Daily Mail reaction to Hofer's defeat was an extraordinary rambling tantrum of a headline accusing relieved liberals of "gloating" and mourning the loss of their fantasy that Hofer's election would have severely damaged the European Union. Is Europe's Brexit revolution over? Gloating left-wing supporters wave 'Thank God' signs after far-right candidate LOSES Austrian presidential election which was set to deliver body blow to the EU the headline wailed. The idea that a win for Norbert Hofer would have delivered a "body blow" to the EU is fantastical gibberish. Hofer knew perfectly well that he would stand absolutely no chance of winning the Austrian Presidency if he threatened to drag Austria out of the EU, so he repeatedly expressed pro-EU sentiments. He talked about a referendum on Austrian membership of the EU, but only if the EU introduces a new (and spectacularly unlikely) centralisation and federilisation treaty. The pathetic efforts of the right-wing press in the UK to dress Hofer up as some kind of Austrian Nigel Farage were totally undermined by Hofer repeatedly saying stuff like "It would undoubtedly damage Austria if it were to leave the EU". But then when did gullible extreme-right fanatics like Daily Mail and Express readers ever let stuff like facts, evidence, or reality get in the way of their favoured political narratives? The Daily Mail habit of trying to warp every bit of news to suit their anti-EU agenda was already preposterous, but trying to make out that a win for Hofer would have resulted in Brexit for Austria (Öexit) is totally fantastical rubbish. Even if Hofer had've won and then conducted a total U-turn on his EU stance, there's pretty much no chance that the Austrian public would have voted to quit the EU even if Austrian Presidents had the power to call a referendum, which they don't. As for left-wing people "gloating", I'm pretty sure most of the celebrating Austrians were just mightily relieved to avoid the absolute embarrassment of having a far-right fanatic as their head of state.
On the other hand the piteous wailing from the Daily Mail at the defeat of their favoured extreme-right candidate certainly is cause for celebration. The thought of some dejected Daily Mail hack crying into their keyboard over the defeat for their favoured Nazi iconography wearing extreme-right fanatic is enough to lift the spirits of anyone with the remotest shred of human decency.
The most up-voted comments beneath the Daily Mail article really are indicative of the putrid right-wing mentality that is infesting political dialogue in the UK. Several comments make the same feeble excuses for Hofer, pretending that he has no history of wearing Nazi iconography or leading a political party founded by ex-Nazis. As far as these Daily Mail readers are concerned, Hofer is apparently "only slightly right of centre". The Daily Mail readership adore Hofer because he shares the same vitriolic hatred of immigrants, and especially Muslims, as they do. Therefore Hofer can do no wrong, and anyone pointing out the fascist roots of his party is a "leftie hand-wringer".
Imagining the impotent rage of these bigoted Daily Mail mind-washed fascism apologists over the defeat of their latest extreme-right demagogue is another thing to brighten the day of any decent human being.
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With the majority of Labour Party MP having decided to commit collective suicide in response to the Brexit vote by launching a pre-planned and incredibly ill-timed coup attempt against their party leader, it looks highly likely that the Tory leadership contest is going to determine which direction post-Brexit Britain goes in, and the right-wing tabloid press have already chosen their favourite. Theresa May represents the right-wing authoritarian faction of conservatism. She doesn't just believe in the classic Tory stuff like the upwards redistribution of wealth, deregulated financial services and mass privatisation of public property, but she also has a belief that the government has a right, or even a duty, to interfere in the lives of citizens as much as possible.
She also hates the concept of human rights with a passion, believing that our human rights should be scrapped and replaced with a set of Tory allowances. She's been pushing this policy for years.
Toxic legislation
May has served as Home Secretary since the Lib-Dems enables the Tories back into power in 2010. In her time in office she has been responsible for some of the absolute worst legislation to come out of David Cameron's government.
The ban on Khat: Against pretty much all advice from drug experts May decided to make the mild stimulant Khat illegal. It is similar in addictiveness and harm to coffee, and is mainly used by Somalian communities).
Secret Courts: Theresa May introduced new legislation to introduce secret courts (which applies to civil as well as criminal courts). This means that a defendant can have their fate determined in a courtroom they are not allowed to enter, on charges that they are not allowed to know, based on evidence that they are not allowed to see.
Ripping apart British families: Theresa May oversaw the introduction of harsh and discriminatory income thresholds for the non-EU spouses of British citizens. These ridiculous rules discriminate against people in poorer communities, and against women. May's draconian crackdown has left tens of thousands of British families with the awful choice of living in exile from their own country, or living apart/splitting up.
DRIPA: When the Snowden leaks revealed that the UK intelligence services had been doing all kinds of unlawful spying activity without any parliamentary approval, Theresa May rushed through emergency legislation to make the unlawful mass trawling of data and other things lawful. Shockingly, only 48 MPs opposed this appalling cover up operation.
Psychoactive Substances Act: Theresa May decided that banning mild stimulants like Khat wasn't enough and that the UK should ban all drugs (whether they even actually exist or not) except things on a pre-approved government list which includes two of the most harmful, addictive and lucrative substances of all: Alcohol and Tobacco. Despite evidence that the introduction of a similar law in Ireland had coincided with a massive spike in the numbers of people using novel psychoactive substances, and complaints from law enforcement specialists that the "ban everything, even if it doesn't exist" law was completely unworkable, May pushed it through anyway.
Deporting workers: In April 2016 Theresa May oversaw the introduction of new rules to deport non-EU workers from the UK for the "crime" of earning less than £35,000 per year. Thus people who have come to the UK to work and contribute to society as teachers, nurses, care workers, other health specialists, engineers, IT experts and all manner of other professions face being thrown out of the UK because the Tories believe that anyone who earns below £35,000 (the vast majority of workers in the UK, immigrant or not) is useless scum.
The Psychoactive Substances Act (detailed above) is another example of severe incompetence. Not only did she imitate a disastrously failed policy from Ireland, she also pushed on with it despite experts in the field condemning it as completely unworkable.
The reason Theresa May hates human rights so much is her incompetent efforts to deport the hate preacher Abu Qatada. He fought several successful appeals against deportation, but was eventually deported anyway. Theresa May blames the concept of human rights for the repeated failures to deport him, but she's the real culprit. She managed to deport him eventually, so if she'd found a way to deport him without ignoring his human rights in the first place, she could have deported him the first time around. Just because Theresa May and her team can't be arsed to learn the law and abide by it in their actions, doesn't mean that the law should be scrapped.
The future
Theresa May has been working on a number of other right-wing authoritarian plots. One of them is a brazen assault on civil liberties dressed up as an attempt to counter Islamist extremism. The plan involves scrapping long held British liberties like freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, the presumption of innocence and the right to privacy in order to silence and oppress so-called "extremists" who haven't actually broken any laws whatever. Anyone who thinks that a law that can revoke the freedom of speech from people who have not broken any law whatever will only ever be used to combat Islamist fanaticism is clearly very naive and unaware of the concept of function creep.
Another of Theresa May's right-wing authoritarian schemes is to scrap our human rights and replace them with a set of Tory allowances. The whole idea of the European Convention of Human Rights was that there should be a set of minimum standards below which no country could fall. It was a British idea championed by Winston Churchill (Tory) and Clement Attlee (Labour) after the Second World War in order to try to prevent what happened in Nazi Germany ever happening again. If Theresa May ends up dragging the UK out of the ECHR, then we would join the severely authoritarian post-Communist dictatorship of Belarus as the only non-signatories on the whole continent of Europe.
Conclusion
Theresa May embodies a terrifying mix of barkingly right-wing politics, severe moral authoritarianism and brazen incompetence.
The vision of a post-Brexit UK led by this appalling woman is beyond nightmarish. It's bad enough that David Cameron allowed her to continue her reign of savage right-wing authoritarianism and incompetence for six long years at the Home Office, if she becomes Prime Minister, there's no telling how bad things could get.
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.
