The sheer Tory entitlement

It doesn't matter how badly you fail in life, if you're born into the gilded British establishment class then you'll be given once chance after another to completely screw even more things up.

Just look at the state of George Osborne. Only the most brainwashed of Tory tribalists could even try to argue that his six year tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer was anything but a disaster for the British economy.

• He pushed an economically illiterate austerity agenda from the very beginning, insisting that all the evidence from economic history showing that targeted infrastructure investment and the creation of skilled jobs are the drivers of economy recovery was wrong, and that wanton across the board austerity cuts, the proliferation of exploitative low-paid McJobs, and a endless tax cuts and handouts for corporations and the mega-rich were the only way out of the banker's insolvency crisis!

• He missed every economic target he set himself, most notably the promise that austerity fanaticism would have completely eliminated the budget deficit by early 2015. It's well over four years past his deadline, he's been gone for three years, and it's still nowhere near eradicated.

• All of these missed targets meant that he ended up creating more new debt than every single Labour government in history combined.

• Osbornomics resulted in the slowest post-crisis economic recovery in modern British history, going back at least two Centuries to when economic records were extremely crude.

• Osborne also delivered the worst collapse in the value of UK workers' wages since records began, meaning we're still earning less in real terms than we were a decade ago.

• Despite staking his reputation on Britain keeping its AAA Credit Rating, he lost it for the first time since the 1970s!

• After only a few years of austerity stagnation even devoutly neoliberal economic organisations like the OECD and the IMF were warning against the ideological fanaticism of austerity cuts, but Osborne soldiered on regardless.

• And to top it all off the collapse in living standards caused by Tory austerity fanaticism, wage repression, pubic service cuts, infrastructure under-investment, and welfare vandalism caused a Brexit backlash that was sufficient to push Leave marginally over the winning line and dump the UK into the three years of interminable chaos we've suffered since.

After losing his job as Chancellor and quitting as an MP Osborne took up a number of jobs. Several of them look just like the kind of highly-paid corporate directorship bribes you'd expect him to receive after carving up so many public assets to give away to city spivs, and slashing Corporation Tax to by far the lowest rate in the G7. But becoming Editor of the London Evening Standard was quite a surprise given his absolute lack of experience in the newspaper trade.

Within a couple of years in the Evening Standard job Osborne has reduced a slightly profitable news outlet into an extraordinary money-burning pit, losing a staggering £23 million in the last two years.

But now Christine Lagarde is potentially moving on as head of the IMF for a position in the EU, George Osborne and his cheerleaders are promoting him as her replacement!

The absolute entitlement of it is staggering. His incompetence as Chancellor will go down in economic history as a lesson in exactly what not to do after a crisis, his tenure at the Evening Standard is an absolute joke, and here he is pushing himself forward for one of the top economics jobs on the planet!

presumably the rest of the world will piss themselves laughing at the idea of the most incompetent British finance minister in living memory fancying himself for such a job, but that hasn't stopped the Tory press from championing the idea as if they actually see him as some kind of magnificent economic genius, rather than a living embodiment of Britain's dangerous subservience to over-entitled and under-qualified Tory toffs.

What a country we live in where poor and ordinary people experience one barrier after another to progression no matter how capable they are (sexism, racism, classism, regionalism, homophobia, lack of old school connections ...) while those born into the gilded establishment class can stumble from one unbelievably catastrophic cock-up to another, and remain perfectly confident that there's always another high profile and lavishly remunerated position for them to waltz into.

 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.

OR

Why not read Jeremy Corbyn's "red rag" speech for yourself?

On Tuesday February 20th 2018 Jeremy Corbyn gave a speech to the EFF confederation of British manufacturers about Labour's economic strategy. The response of the Evening Standard (edited by former Tory Chancellor George Osborne) was to publish a front page hatchet job describing the speech as a "red rag" to the City of London, and Jeremy Corbyn's economic strategy as a plot to turn London into "the last Soviet era city west of Pyongyang".

Shockingly hundreds of thousands of Evening Standard readers will have uncritically accepted this ludicrously hyperbolic appraisal of Jeremy Corbyn's speech without even referring to the source material and judging it for themselves.

So here's the speech so that you can judge for yourself whether George Osborne's minions at the Evening Standard were justified in claiming that Corbyn's speech is some kind of proof of his intention to turn Britain into a Soviet style state where private industry is banned, or the outline of a sensible economic strategy to undo the damage and reduce the private debt mountains caused by four decades of hard-right economic dogma:

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Industrial revolution

Britain was the birthplace of the industrial revolution and many great inventions from the cash point to the jet engine. Manufacturing continues to punch way above its weight accounting for 10% of output, but 44% of exports and a massive 70% of business investment in research and development.

Output per hour is £4 higher in manufacturing than the average for all sectors and the average annual earnings of someone working in manufacturing are nearly £4000 higher than average earnings from across the whole economy.

I know from my childhood the value of manufacturing jobs. My dad had one, as an electrical engineer who worked successively for Westinghouse, English Electric and GC. He enjoyed good, satisfying work with decent pay. The contributions of manufacturing of all of you to our economy cannot be understated, and the case for supporting more manufacturing jobs and industries is undeniable. And yet for too long Government hasn’t done enough to support you. 

Lagging behind 

Businesses are crying out for infrastructure investment. We are lagging behind other leading countries, but the Government simply isn’t delivering. That’s why we have pledged to create a National Transformation Fund to upgrade our transport, energy and digital infrastructure so that it is worthy of the 21st Century.

We must also invest in our people as well as our physical infrastructure. We have, on the one hand, university graduates who can’t find a suitable job while thousands of underemployed workers can’t get the skills they need to advance. And on the other hand, businesses are struggling to recruit workers with the right skills.

Time and again, businesses tell me how difficult it is to hire employees with the skills they need. And that far too often school leavers are unprepared for the workplace. Life-long learning Labour’s National Education Service will tackle that problem head-on, providing free, life-long learning to all, so that anyone can retrain or upskill at any point in their life.

We will put vocational education, too often the poor relation of our education system, at the heart of the National Education Service ensuring that science and technical learning starts early in primary schools.

Children should engage in practical learning from a young age not just in the classroom, but through play and activities.

And we will build links with industry into the National Education Service, to make sure that our education system keeps pace with the changing needs of our economy, expanding the type of training that qualifies under the Apprenticeship Levy so that businesses can actually use it for the skills they need.

The Tories’ approach to Brexit is threatening to turn our skills crisis into a catastrophe, especially for manufacturers who rely on recruiting skilled workers from overseas.

Labour said from the start; we would give an unconditional guarantee to EU citizens of their right to stay in the UK. Not just now but during the transition period as well.

This is not just because of the valuable role EU citizens play in our economy and in many of your businesses, but because they are people who have built a life here.

Unlike the Tories, we will not use people, mothers, fathers, neighbours, friends as bargaining chips.

Brexit position

Brexit is for many an emotive subject. But for business, it is first and foremost a practical matter.

To make decisions about where, when, perhaps even whether to invest, you need to know what markets you will have access to, what regulations and product standards you will be subject to, who you will be able to recruit, what will happen to our supply chains, which we all know are currently integrated across many national borders. That’s why Labour has from the start taken the practical position of accepting the result of the referendum and insisting the economy must come first.

We are leaving the EU, but our businesses must not withdraw from European markets. Business needs clarity and with four out of six of the Government’s “Road to Brexit” speeches already delivered, the Tories approach to Brexit is if anything less clear.

It’s time for the Cabinet to stop fighting and the Government to say where it wants to take the country.

And it’s not just in its approach to Brexit that the Government is failing to put the economy first. For too long manufacturing has been undervalued.

Those who make things 

For all their warm words, whether Osborne’s “March of the Makers” or this government’s new-found enthusiasm for the words ‘industrial strategy’ for decades now, the Conservatives have created, encouraged and sustained a system that rewards those who lend and speculate over those who make things.

Thatcher’s progressive abolition of restrictions on financial trading culminating in the ‘Big Bang’ deregulation of 1986 placed the needs of speculative finance at the helm of British economic life.

When Thatcher took office the ratio of private debt to GDP was 60%. In the 30 years that followed, that trebled.

That increase wasn’t due to banks supporting a healthy and productive economy by lending to businesses represented here today. It was because banks started lending to households and inflating asset prices on a scale never seen before. At the same time, investment banks began trading new kinds of financial products, packaging up debt in increasingly opaque ways and becoming ever more removed from the real economy.

Now let me be clear, finance has a central and essential role to play in a functioning economy.

Oiling the wheels

Without access to finance, how would the entrepreneur or business person just starting out find the means to get their idea off the ground?

How would a growing company afford new equipment that will make their business more productive and more profitable? Or expand their activities by opening new premises?

Finance is the grease that oils the wheels of our economy, and without it, economic activity would seize up.

But when private debt is twice the size of the real economy, when traders no longer understand the products they are trading and banks are funding speculation, rather than productive investment, something has gone grossly wrong.

Banks should be helping the real economy not suffocating it. Let me remind you of the words of John Maynard Keynes when he said: “There cannot be a real recovery . . . until the ideas of lenders and the ideas of productive borrowers are brought together again . . . . Seldom in modern history has the gap between the two been so wide and so difficult to bridge’.

“ Keynes was writing about the Great Depression of the 1930s but the gulf between finance and the real economy may be even wider today.

Money flows away

We know the results, money flows away from the productive activities that you are engaged in that create jobs and exports to instead inflate asset prices, concentrating money in the hands of a few owners, not producers, while households become more reliant on borrowing.

And we end up with an economy with more risk, more volatility and more instability.

It was a “heads I win, tails you lose” gamble for the banks, not my words, but those of the Governor of the Bank of England. And we’re all still paying for the inevitable crash.

When the last Labour Government stepped in to shore up our major banks as they stood on the brink of collapse it prevented a total meltdown. But the public should have been given a say in how the banks, propped up by our money were being run.

And there should’ve been a much more concerted effort to rein in banks’ speculation to refocus on productive lending.

We need a fundamental rethink of whom finance should serve and how it should be regulated.

Sluggish economy

There can be no rebalancing of our distorted, sluggish and unequal economy without taking on the unfettered power of finance.

For forty years, deregulated finance has progressively become more powerful. Its dominance over industry, obvious and destructive; its control of politics, pernicious and undemocratic.

The size and power of finance created a generation of politicians who thought the City of London could power the whole economy.

Out of control financial wizardry and gambling were left barely regulated, while the real economies in once strong industrial areas were put into managed decline.

The welfare state was left to pick up the slack with sticking plaster redistribution to the people and places held back by the finance-led boom of predominantly the South East of England.

For a generation instead of finance serving industry, politicians have served finance.

We’ve seen where that ends, the productive economy, our public services and people’s lives being held hostage by a small number of too big to fail banks and financial institutions.

No more. 

The real economy 

The next Labour Government will be the first in 40 years to stand up for the real economy. We will take decisive action to make finance the servant of industry not the masters of all.

The reign of finance doesn’t stop at the gates of the City of London. Its extractive logic has spread into all areas of life with short-term performance and narrow shareholder value prioritised over long-run growth and wider economic benefit.

Take GKN, one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious engineering firms with a big factory in Telford where I grew up. It employs 6,000 workers across the UK, contributes an estimated £1.3 billion to the economy, paid a healthy £174 million in tax each year and invested £561 million in Research and Development in the UK alone.

And yet GKN is currently facing a hostile, allegedly debt-fuelled takeover bid by Melrose, a company with a history of opportunistic asset-stripping.

A quick buck

It’s an all too familiar story like when Kraft took over Cadburys. A valuable company could be sacrificed so that a few can make a quick buck.

We rightly praise the growth of companies like GKN and their location in the UK. And yet when we are faced with the possible destruction of that company, the Government refuses to act.

That’s why the next Labour government will broaden the scope of the ‘public interest test’ to include explicit consideration of the needs of our economy taking advantage of new freedoms outside of the EU to allow Government to intervene to protect our industrial base.

An important step towards reprogramming the economy, so that it works for the many, not the few.

Reprogramming our economy; to reward good business practices, reining in speculative finance so that it serves – not distorts the whole UK economy – backed up by a strong industrial strategy, as well as investing in our physical infrastructure and our people. This approach is vital if we are to develop our manufacturing strength. That is what the next Labour Government is committed to working with you to achieve. 

Thank you very much.

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Anyone with a grain of sense should be able to see that Corbyn isn't outlining a plan to abolish private industry or the financial sector, he's just calling for a better, fairer system that is geared more towards those who make things than those who recklessly gamble with other people's money.

He's not saying there's no place for speculative finance, but that finance should be used to fund new businesses, new infrastructure, and better services, rather than for unregulated gambling on extraordinarily complex derivatives that even most of the traders don't even understand.

You could see why city traders who have enjoyed four decades of enriching themselves at the expense of the real economy would object to any effort to get them to invest in the real productive economy rather than gambling away with impunity, knowing that they'll be bailed out by the taxpayer again whenever they next fail.

But Corbyn's speech should be music to the ears of anyone who values the real economy above the selfish interests of a tiny clique of city speculators who see it as their right to live off the backs of the rest of us, and have us pay for their economic crises through austerity dogma while the government actually lavishes handouts on them.

And even if you think that the interests of city speculators should trump the needs of the real economy, you'd have to be absolutely clueless to accept the idea that a call for more financial investment in private sector manufacturing is some kind of Soviet style communist plot.

Sadly though, there are actually people thick enough to accept such brazen Tory propaganda at face value, hence eight years of ruinous Tory austerity dogma damaging the future economic potential of the UK, rather than anything even remotely resembling an actual plan to make sure the financial sector insolvency crisis can never happen again.

 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.

OR

Why is a supposedly pro-Labour Twitter group sharing George Osborne's anti-Labour propaganda?

The #FBPE hashtag on Twitter started off as a pro-EU movement on the continent, but it's clearly morphed into a radical anti-Corbyn, anti-Labour rallying cry in the UK.

People who use the #FBPE hashtag repeatedly claim to be opposing Brexit, but a scroll through the latest #FBPE hashtags at any time usually reveals hardly any Tweets criticising Theresa May, but dozens of comments attacking Jeremy Corbyn and Labour, despite the fact that Labour actually voted against Theresa May's hard-right and profoundly anti-democratic EU Withdrawal Bill.

Why would anyone who opposes Brexit spend more time attacking the party in opposition that is at least trying to moderate the shambolic hard-right Brexit that Theresa May is pushing, rather than criticising the Tories who are actually in power and pushing this extremist interpretation of the Brexit vote?

There seem to be three main camps within the anti-Corbyn #FBPE campaign.

• The most obvious are the ever-cynical Lib-Dems, who see creating divisions within Labour as their best chance of scratching together a few extra votes in the vain hope that people will have forgotten how their wilful collusion with ruinous Tory austerity dogma and their unprecedented wage repression policies created the wave of public anger that made Brexit possible in the first place.

• Another clear component of the #FBPE campaign are the Tory concern trolls, who pretend to be disillusioned Labour supporters abandoning the Labour Party over their Brexit stance in order to trick others into doing the same. To anyone with a grain of sense these concern trolls are easy to spot, but there doesn't seem to be much sense in the #FBPE community given the extraordinary amounts of likes and retweets some of these right-wing wreckers keep getting.

• Possibly the largest component of the anti-Corbyn #FBPE mob are the politically clueless. They're not blaming the opposition rather than the government and spreading blatant lies about Labour on purpose. They're just genuinely clueless people who are shockingly naive about the reality of the situation. They simply don't care that Labour voted against the Tories' anti-democratic EU Withdrawal Bill, and they simply don't care that the "sore loser" cancel Brexit position they want Labour to adopt would render Labour totally unelectable (like the Lib-Dems at the 2017 General Election) and actually end up being a massive gift to the Tory Brextremists who are the ones who are actually imposing Brexit!

In this article I'm going to look at one extraordinary Tweet from a group calling itself Labour Against Brexit to illustrate the shockingly naivety that abounds in this third #FBPE demographic of politically clueless people.

The first thing to note about this extraordinary Tweet is that it legitimises hard-right Tory austerity dogma by presenting it as an unavoidable consequence of any post-Brexit economic crisis.

It doesn't matter a jot to these people that Tory austerity dogma has spectacularly failed over the last eight years, they just see the threat of more of it as convenient propaganda to fear-monger with.

The reality of the situation is that the pre-Corbyn incarnation of Labour made Brexit possible in 2015 with their strategically inept failure to oppose ruinous Tory austerity dogma head on.

Had Labour harnessed the public anger at the disastrous consequences of Tory austerity dogma and their unprecedented campaign of wage repression, they could have won the 2015 General Election. But instead they squandered it with their austerity-lite strategy, and thus allowed UKIP and the hard-right fringe of the Tory party to co-opt the public anger at the consequences of hard-right economics by blaming the consequences of Tory right-wing extremism on immigrants and the EU instead.

Despite losing an easily winnable election as a consequence of the woeful austerity-lite strategy devised by the likes of Ed Balls and Chris Leslie, and allowing the hard-right to co-opt public anger against austerity in order to drive the Brexit vote, it's clear that there are many within the Labour Party who still actually believe in austerity dogma!

Another thing to note about this extraordinary Tweet is the source material. The current editor of the Evening Standard is George Osborne, the former Tory Chancellor who was the man responsible for the implementation of austerity dogma for six ruinous years!

So here you have a man who was clearly and undeniably responsible for six years of economically devastating hard-right austerity dogma, who is now using his propaganda rag to pin the blame for future Tory austerity onto Labour!

This is the man who tried to dress austerity dogma up as a good thing for six ruinous years now using his propaganda rag to attack Labour by trying to hold them responsible for Tory Brexit, the Tory post-Brexit meltdown, and any future Tory decision to use this meltdown as an excuse to impose even more of his ruinous hard-right austerity dogma!

And them when you look at who the author of the piece is, it's none other than Chris Leslie, one of the clueless Labour right-wingers in the 2015 Labour shadow cabinet who gave George Osborne such an easy ride by meekly imitating his hard-right austerity dogma, rather than confronting it head on.

After chucking the 2015 General Election with their inept austerity-lite strategy Chris Leslie and his ilk should have resigned in shame, but instead here he is scrawling anti-Labour pro-austerity propaganda in George Osborne's propaganda rag for the Tories to use as a hard-right wedge strategy to attack the current Labour leadership with!

The worst thing isn't that pro-austerity right-wingers are colluding to use such a ridiculously cynical piece of concern trolling to attack the current anti-austerity Labour leadership (such dishonest and manipulative propaganda is bread and butter to the Tories and the ever duplicitous Labour right), it's that this brazen propaganda has actually been picked up and recycled by a supposedly pro-Labour group!

The Evening Standard article is clearly hard-right concern trolling, because the editor who commissioned it is Mr Austerity Dogma himself, and the author is one of the hard-right pro-austerity Berserkers still embedded within the Labour Party.

Yet the shockingly clueless people behind the Labour Against Brexit page have uncritically lapped it up and Tweeted it out to their followers as if it's a genuine critique of Labour's Brexit stance, rather than a deliberate right-wing wedge strategy designed to split the Labour Party, present ideological austerity as an unquestionable response to economic crises, and allow the Tories to carry on ruling in the interests of their mega-rich donors with as little opposition as possible.

It would obviously not be Labour's fault if the Tory Brextremists get their way and trigger an economic meltdown with their extremist version of Brexit, then the Tory government uses this self-made crisis as an excuse to impose even more destructive hard-right austerity dogma on the British economy.

However it is increasingly difficult to see how Labour could ever govern efficiently when the party is infested by people who are ideologically wedded to the hard-right theory that more austerity dogma is the only conceivable response to an economic crisis, and so gullible that they can't even spot right-wing divide and conquer concern trolling tactics, even when it's been published in a newspaper edited by the former Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer!

 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.

OR

Painting the establishment class as the true victims of Grenfell tower is depraved Tory propaganda

On June 14th 2017 at least 80 people were killed in the horrifying Grenfell tower fire.

The disaster generated a huge emotional response because it was such a visual demonstration of the huge inequality in austerity Britain. Of course we all knew how bad it was before the fire.

You'd have to be criminally ignorant to not know that tens of thousands of sick and disabled people have died within weeks of being declared "fit for work" in corporate disability denial factories.

You'd have to have been living in a bubble to not know that tens of thousands of vulnerable people have died as a consequence of savage Tory cuts to the social care system.

You'd have to be profoundly ignorant of the way the world works to imagine that the increased emergency service response times, and increased NHS waiting times due to Tory austerity cuts haven't been paid for in human lives.

But people being burned alive in a tower with inadequate safety features and covered with highly flammable cladding is obviously more immediate and more visual, and as a consequence the anger is more visceral, especially given the aloof response of the Tory government, the shocking ineptitude of the local Tory council, and the absolute barrage of lies and excuses from the Tories and their attack dogs in the right-wing media.

In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy the extreme-right Breitbart London editor and former UKIP adviser Raheem Kassam tried to paint the Tory party as the true victims of the Grenfell fire by spreading a load of absolute lies that the Labour Party were responsible, including the easily disprovable assertion that the Local council was Labour controlled (unsurprisingly in actual reality the local council in the richest area of London has been permanently ruled by the Tory party).

Kassam's lies were so sickeningly obvious that only the most freakishly fact-averse extreme-right fanatics could possibly have fallen for them, but his central narrative that the establishment are the true victims of the fire was obviously considered useful by the right-wing media, and hence, within a month of dozens of neglected and ignored poor people burning alive in the richest borough of one of the richest cities in the world, we have Clare Foges of the Times using the same disgusting argument that the true Grenfell victims are the poor establishment class.

In her abomination of an article Foges tries to portray anyone who considers the political ramifications of the fire for themselves as engaging a circus of "blame-mongering" and "mob-rousing".

Thus anyone who draws their own political conclusions about the fire and the hopelessly inadequate local government response is an unreasonable "blame-monger", and anyone who actively engages in protest isn't an angry citizen utilising their right to peaceful protest, but a member of a scary and detestable "mob".

Foges also gets the excuses in early by predicting that the Grenfell investigation (cover up?) may find that nobody was to blame with a claim that "we should be wary of attributing to conspiracy that which is adequately explained by cock-up; that there were simple failures of foresight, questions unasked that should have been asked".

So the essential themes of what Foges is arguing are:

Don't think for yourself. Don't question the establishment line. It was probably all just an unfortunate mistake for which the establishment elitists are absolutely not to blame. Anger is unreasonable. You should hate anyone who is angry about Grenfell. They're a dangerous mob. They're the true villains. 

The conclusion of Foges article plays a very cynical trick by conflating criticism of the establishment class with criticism of Britain.

Foges criticises the concept that Britain is "a country rigged by an unfeeling elite that cares nothing for people because they are poor" with the absolute non sequitur that Britain is "a nation that is compassionate, generous and decent".

It's profoundly dishonest to argue that it's shameful to accuse the elitist establishment class of callous and uncaring elitism because British society as a whole still retains elements of compassion, generosity and decency. But that's exactly the cynical and manipulative trick that Foges plays on the reader.

The obvious bad faith conflation of the establishment class with Britain as a whole in order to use faux patriotism to attack "the left" is such a sickening display of contempt for the reader it's extraordinary that people buy into this kind of insulting propaganda crap.

But unfortunately we know that millions of people do willingly buy into this kind of intellectually dishonest rubbish because we spent six infuriating years listening to David Cameron spout this kind of logically incoherent, bad faith, fallacy-riddled propaganda gibberish, which brings us neatly to the fundamental thing that Foges "forgot" to mention in her impassioned defence of the establishment class ...

What Foges "forgot" to mention that she was employed as a special adviser and speechwriter for David Cameron for seven years, and that Cameron including one of her jokes in a speech is what she considers the absolute highlight of her career so far!

Is it any wonder that a woman who helped David Cameron by scripting his intellectually dishonest pro-austerity speeches would come out swinging wildly against anyone making the argument that mindless adherence to ruinous austerity dogma could have played a crucial role in the Grenfell tower tragedy?

Is it any wonder that a journalist with such an intimate relationship with the Tory party would seek to manipulate the minds of middle England by deliberately recasting the all the players in the Grenfell tower tragedy into different roles?

Is it any wonder that an establishment insider would seek to portray the callous and uncaring political elitists who allowed it to happen, and responded so inadequately, as the poor innocent victims, write the poor women who tragically burned to death after having had their fire safety complaints repeatedly ignored out of the script entirely, and merge the angry local residents and "the left" together into a single character to play the role of the detestable villain for middle England to hate and pour scorn upon?

This attempt to rewrite the establishment class as the poor innocent victims of the Grenfell fire would be sick enough in its own right, but that it's coming from a very recent member of the most powerful Tory inner circle of all reveals another revolting aspect.

The fact that someone with such close links to the Tory party can pose as some kind of objective journalist in order to spread such intellectually dishonest Tory propaganda reveals the ongoing collusion between the Tory party and the mainstream media.

Is it any wonder that huge numbers of people have completely lost faith with the mainstream media when the architect of ruinous austerity dogma George Osborne can walk straight out of parliament and into the offices of the Evening Standard as their editor; when employees of the supposedly impartial BBC politics department can walk straight into 10 Downing Street to write biased political propaganda for the Tory Prime Minister; and former Tory propagandists like Clare Foges can continue writing the exact same intellectually dishonest Tory propaganda in the pages of Rupert Murdoch's Times?

Is it any wonder that ever more people are turning to independent media for their news because they can see that the establishment insiders club that the mainstream media are supposed to hold to account, and the mainstream media themselves are pretty much the same damned thing.

 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.

OR

The communist takeover of the UK, and Jeremy Corbyn's plan to stop it

George Osborne's appointment as the editor of the Evening Standard was just another example of the incredible pro-Tory bias of the mainstream media.

Screwing the economy

George Osborne is the guy who pushed his ruinous ideological austerity agenda on the UK. Slashing public investment in the immediate aftermath of the bankers' insolvency crash strangled the post-crisis recovery at birth by subjecting the British workforce to the worst slump in the value of their wages since records began.

When inflation outpaces wage growth, workers have less cash in their pockets and the economy stagnates due to falling demand. The only thing that kept the GDP figures looking positive was that Osborne's mate Theresa May allowed the biggest inwards migration surge in UK history to go on.

Of course GDP was going to grow a bit if the home secretary let a city the size of Coventry worth of people flow into the UK in a single year, but the amount of wealth per person in the economy has flatlined for an entire decade.

Of course there's nothing wrong with immigration in principle, but if the government allows the biggest immigration surge in history at a time when they're ruthlessly slashing back public services and local government budgets, and also overseeing the lowest levels of house building since the early 1920s, of course it's going to exacerbate problems like over-stretched local services and rampant house price inflation.

Sucking up to communist China

Aside from screwing the economy George Osborne did something else too. He signed up to one of the worst rip-off deals ever concocted. He decided to bribe the communist government in China to build the UK a nuclear power plant by guaranteeing them that the UK would pay double the market rate for the electricity it produces for 35 years.

Theresa May had the opportunity to scrap this ludicrous deal, but when it came to a choice between shafting the UK public, or pissing off the Chinese communists, you know exactly what she chose don't you?

"Why can't the UK just build our own nuclear power plant?" you may well ask.

Well the reason we can't is that the UK's nuclear power stations and expertise was privatised by the Tories in 1996 and eventually ended up in the hands of the French government in 2008.

The red flag

So here we have the guy who promised £billions in taxpayers' cash as a bribe to communist China to get them to build the UK a nuclear power plant accusing Jeremy Corbyn of "flying the red flag" on the front page of the newspaper he now edits.

The hypocrisy of a guy who saw fit to use UK taxpayers' cash to bribe the Chinese communists using communist symbolism to attack a political rival is bad enough, but it gets worse.

The communist take over

As a result of Tory privatisation mania, large chunks of UK infrastructure have been taken over by the Chinese communists. One of the biggest stakeholders in the National Grid is the Chinese CIC sovereign wealth fund. CIC is one of the biggest stakeholders in Thames Water too.

It's less than two months since the Tory transport secretary Chris Grayling announced that he was handing another chunk of the UK rail network over to the communists by allowing the Hong Kong state railway to take over the South Western Rail Franchise.

Tory privatisation mania has created the opportunity for communist China to buy up significant chunks of UK infrastructure, but instead of opposing this communist takeover, the Tory government actually announce these communist takeovers with great fanfare as if they're wonderful success stories!

Repatriation

What Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party are proposing is that the UK's vital infrastructure should be run by the UK, for the benefit of the UK.

Corbyn wants to repatriate lots of the vital public infrastructure that has fallen into Chinese hands, and the Tories oppose his plans.

Backwards Orwellian propaganda

But somehow, if you listen to the political zombies who allow themselves to be brainwashed by the right-wing press, Corbyn is the nasty communist for wanting to repatriate our infrastructure, and the ones who allowed it to fall into the hands of communists, and want to keep things that way are the wonderful British patriots who they're all going to rush off and vote for!

The fact that so many people are so deluded about who the real communist sympathisers are is a testament to the power of the mainstream media to convince gullible people into believing that black is white, good is bad, and selling the UK off to communist Chine one piece at a time is patriotism.

A clear choice

A vote for the Tory party is a vote to keep vital UK infrastructure in the hands of the Chinese communists.

A vote for Labour is a vote to repatriate vital UK infrastructure and run it for the good of the British people, and for the good of the British economy.

What we can do

• If you ever hear anyone talking about Jeremy Corbyn as if he's a "communist", show them this article and/or ask them if they oppose Jeremy Corbyn's plan to repatriate British infrastructure from the Chinese communists, or whether they prefer the Tory policy of continually giving them even more of our infrastructure.

• If you don't register to vote, you can't vote against the Tories and their policy of keeping swathes of UK infrastructure under Chinese communist control.

 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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The "fake news" furore

The growing mainstream media furore over "fake news" is telling. Of course there are loads of dodgy websites out there pushing deliberate misinformation and abject made up nonsense, but the idea that the corporate mainstream press is some kind of bastion of reliability, and somehow not guilty of pushing "fake news" of their own is extraordinarily naive.


The mainstream press has undeniably been guilty of churning out "fake news" for decades. There was the uncritical front-page regurgitation of Tony Blair's Iraq distortions (see image). Before that there were the utterly disgraceful Hillsborough lies on the front page of the S*n. and the deliberate reversal of the Orgreave film footage by the BBC to make it look like it was the miners who attacked the police, rather than the other way around.

Even back in the 1920s the Daily Mail published the forged Zinoviev letter four days before the 1924 General Election as a desperate attempt to secure victory for the Tory party.

Even when the mainstream media isn't just making up the news completely by publishing crudely photoshopped images to smear their political enemies, lying about war heroes, or brazenly misrepresenting survey results in order to provoke anti-Muslim hatred, biases like the anti-NHS agenda of the right-wing tabloids are completely obvious for all to see.

It's clear that the problem of "Fake news" has been with us for decades, the only difference is that these days, thanks to the Internet, the corporate mainstream hacks no longer have such a powerful monopoly on the spreading of misleading and downright dishonest political propaganda. The "fake news" furore is more a demonstration of mainstream media hacks' fury that other people are usurping their ability to use lies and distortions to warp the political agenda, than a genuine concern about accuracy in reporting.

Aside from the erosion of their monopoly on controlling the news agenda with fake stories, another thing that mainstream journalists are struggling to cope with in the social media age is the rise of reliable alternative media.

Mainstream media hacks had become so used to spoon-feeding their political agenda to the public that many of them are now utterly complacent, and don't really know what to do about the upsurge in new alternative media sites that are dedicated to critiquing the manufactured news tropes pushed by the establishment media, and focusing attention on the information the mainstream press ignore.

We shouldn't be surprised if mainstream media hacks begin using "fake news" as a crude synonym for all alternative media, no matter how well researched and evidence based it actually is. Time and again mainstream media hacks have displayed their utter contempt towards alternative media and social media news sites, so sweeping up the whole lot under the pejorative term "fake news" would certainly suit their purposes of making all non-mainstream media sources seem inherently dodgy and unreliable.

Alternative media is also a thorn in the side of the Tory government because independent non-corporate websites tend to hold the government to account for things that mainstream hacks have so often been willing to ignore. So don't be surprised if the Tories decide to collude with the mainstream press by introducing legislation to clamp down on reliable and informative independent news sites under the guise of dealing with the problem of "fake news".

Of course I'm not trying to claim that "fake news" isn't a problem. It absolutely is, and it's clearly a problem that long-predates the Internet and the social media revolution too. What I'm trying to say is that the political establishment and their chums in the mainstream press are likely to try to use the "fake news" furore in order to achieve an unspoken agenda of smearing and obstructing the legitimate (non-fake) alternative news sites that they see as a threat to their own comfortable positions at the top of the news hierarchy.

In my view the only truly effective way to combat "fake news" is through a drive to improve the critical thinking skills of the general public so that people tend to ask questions like "who is telling me this?", "why are they telling me this?", "did the writer get paid for writing this, and by whom?", "is this piece evidence-based or opinion-based?", "what are the underlying assumptions in this article?", "does this article cite reliable sources?" before they decide to accept or reject whatever it is that they're being told, no matter whether the source is an independent blog or a mainstream media outlet.

 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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