Beware of people using bad faith delegitimisation tactics

Before we even get started let's be absolutely clear that I'm not saying centrists are the same as the modern day extreme-right. I'm not doing that, so don't even dare try to misrepresent my point to pretend that I am.

Yes centrists wilfully collude with the extreme-right in preference to working with the left, as in the Lib-Dem pact with UKIP to take control of Bolton Council, or the Centre Party's fateful decision in 1933 to seal their own destruction by elevating Adolf Hitler to German Chancellor. And yes both ideologies revere capitalism. But nobody is pretending that they're the same.

What I am going to point out is that centrists and the modern day extreme-right have a tendency to use the exact same cynical debating trickery to delegitimise their critics, or anyone who dares question the groupthink of their ideology.

The extreme-right continually present their critics as being motivated by hatred of Britain and hatred of (their utterly warped interpretation of) "British values". They also regularly claim that opponents of their ideology are the victims of "brainwashing".

Centrists use the exact same tactic, repeatedly insinuating that criticism of their beloved ideology is motivated by hatred, bitterness, or insanity, and delighting in the accusation that anyone supporting the anti-austerity, anti-privatisation, pro-investment politics of the Labour left is a "cultist".

If you don't believe our propaganda, you're 'brainwashed'.

If you don't believe in our unquestionable centrist groupthink, then you're a 'cultist'.

It's the exact same delegitimisation tactic, and it's absolutely commonplace in both ideologies.

The point of it is to deter people from even considering the critique of their own ideology by labelling the critic as dangerous, unstable, insane, brainwashed, motivated by hate, or whatever other slur they can think of.

They don't want people actually debating the topic at hand, so they concentrate all of their effort on delegitimising the source, in the hope that others will not even bother looking into what the argument is actually about.

It's the tactic of bad faith cowards who know that they'd lose the argument if the debate was conducted fairly and decently, so they resort to cynical delegitimisation trickery to prevent that from happening.

Lib-Dems

I think it's important to criticise the Liberal Democrats for their role in helping the Tories enforce the living standards destroying austerity fanaticism that laid the groundwork for Brexit, then cashing in on the crisis they helped create by posing as glorious saviours who are going to rescue us all from the madness by ... errr ... printing up "Bollocks to Brexit" T-shirts" and begging for another referendum with no deal Tories running the show so they can totally rig the ballot by picking the options, wording, and timing of the vote to their own advantage.

It doesn't matter how much you base your criticism on facts, evidence, logic, and links to verifiable sources, the Lib-Dem response in the comments always consists of the same barrage of evasions, deflections, straw man misrepresentations, whataboutery, excuses, absurd Lib-Dem fairy stories, outright lies, and cynical delegitimisation tactics.

The strategy is to deflect debate away from the actual criticisms, and undermine the critic with claims that they must be insane, brainwashed, hysterical, deluded, or motivated by hate to even dare trying to criticise the ideological groupthink.

Ian Dunt

If you're not on Twitter you probably won't be familiar with this guy, but he's hot shit in the centrist and Remainer echo chambers like FBPE.

He's one of these noxious Remain Ultras who gets off on sneering at left-behind working class communities (rather than reaching out to try to explain that the living standards collapse they experienced was caused by domestic austerity fanaticism, not immigrants and the EU), smearing all Leave voters as horrible right-wingers, and constructing bizarre fantasies that the UK was some kind of magnificent utopia under the Tory/Lib-Dem Austerity Coalition, before Brexit arrived, out of nowhere, and ruined everything.

He's a toxic Remainer who does more damage to the Brexit-sceptic cause with his wittering than good, and if other Remainers had any vague understanding of the strategic need to actually attract people to the cause rather than driving them away with toxic groupthink nonsense, they wouldn't revere and retweet him so god-damned much.

So the Guardian columnist Dawn Foster wrote an exceptional article in the Guardian criticising the Labour deputy leader Tom Watson for his campaign of internal wrecking tactics, and having a dig at the kind of centrist groupthink that Dunt and his ilk absolutely revel in.

Obviously Dunt hated it, but his Twitter response was absolutely telling.

Instead of critiquing any of the actual points raised in the article, or presenting anything even remotely counter-evidence, he resorted to ridiculing it as "off planet" insane, before questioning the fact that the mainstream media would allow such opinions to be published at all!

1. Refuse to debate or critique any of the actual points raised, simply deride opposing opinions as insane "thought crime".  

 2. Demand the mainstream media only ever promote the 'correct' groupthink worldview. 

 How is this mentality any different from the mentality of the far-right?

How is it even remotely possible to consider this kind of delegitimisation of non-conformist views, and craving for media censorship as any kind of liberalism?

Conclusion

As I said in the introduction I'm not arguing that centrism and the extreme-right are the same thing, so don't even try to pretend that I am.

What I'm saying is that their ideological adherents are prone to using the exact same delegitimisation tactics to deter people from even listening to their ideological opponents.

From deriding non-conformist opinions as insane, or deluded, or hate-motivated "thought crime" to demanding that the function of the mainstream media is solely to endlessly and unquestioningly repeat their own approved groupthink mentality.

Their politics may be different, but the illiberal and intolerant mindset, and the cynical debating trickery are very often exactly the same.

 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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Remain liars are every bit as politically toxic as Leave liars

People who vehemently oppose this ongoing Tory Brexit farce are perfectly understandable. After all it's been obvious from the beginning that the Brexiteers had no real plan for how to extricate the UK from the political union we've been integrating with for four decades, and that their Leave campaign was run by a bunch of opportunistic liars.

The problem of course is that there are liars on the Remain side too. People who have seen the effectiveness of the Leave lies, and instead of thinking 'we need to find more efficient and effective ways of countering these lies' they've gone for the 'if they won by lying, we need to lie through our teeth too' strategy.

One of the worst things about Brexit is the way it created such a tribalist division that ordinary Brexiters have felt compelled to defend the most extreme and egregious Brexiteer lies out of some weird tribal loyalty to people on the same side of the Brexit division.

Anyone with a social media account must have seen some desperate Brexiter performing absurd mental gymnastics to try and defend Boris Johnson's "£350 million for the NHS" lie, even after the Vote Leave director Dominic Cummings admitted that it was a lie, and that Leave probably wouldn't have won without it.

And the same goes for Remainers and the outright liars in the extremist fringes of the Remain camp.

When Eddie Marsan publishes an 18 month old picture of Jeremy Corbyn doing an Eric Morcambe pose on Twitter in order to spit vitriol at Jeremy Corbyn for campaigning in one of Britain's poorest and most austerity-damaged communities, he's lying through his teeth.

And when the lawyer Jo Maugham amplifies Eddie Marsan's lie by Retweeting it with a sneering anti-Corbyn screed of his own, it's simply another outright lie.
Spreading political lies and dismissing the people of Morecambe (and their 26.4% child poverty rate) because Jeremy Corbyn decided to campaign there instead of attend an anti-Brexit march in London with the likes of Alistair Campbell (anti-Semite and the professional liar who helped create the Iraq disaster), Tom Watson (who announced that he actually wants to vote in favour of Theresa May's shambolic Brexit deal to a chorus of boos from the crowd), and Chuka Umunna and his band of parliamentary squatters (who are literally begging Theresa May to let them prop up her pro-Brexit pro-austerity government) is exactly the kind of elitist London-centrism that people often unfairly smear the entire anti-Brexit movement as being.

All these lies do is reinforce the idea that Remain is some kind of elitist project with absolutely no regard for the truth, or for left-behind communities like Morecambe that have been ravaged by issues like deindustrialisation, austerity dogma, collapsing wages, child poverty, exploitative employment practices, trashed public services, barren high streets, failing schools, food bank dependency, local government cuts ...

But instead of calling out these lies, loads of Remainers (especially the #FBPE cultists) have actively retweeted them, and used them to publish bitter and shockingly dishonest anti-Corbyn screeds of their own.

If people like Marsan and Maugham are willing to use outright lies in order to further their political agenda, then they're clearly just as politically toxic as the Brextremists who created this Tory Brexit farce in the first place.

And if you're willing to help amplify, or even just make excuses for these Remainer lies just because you feel like you have some tribal debt of allegiance to them because they're on the same side, then you're every bit as bad as the Brexiters who think that the Leave campaign were justified in lying their way to victory in 2016 because they ended up getting what they wanted as a result.
But in a way the people spreading these sneering Remainer lies are even worse, because at least the Leave lies had a clear sense of purpose (tricking and terrifying people into voting Leave) while sneering-at-Morecambe type lies just make Remainers look like a bunch of smug, lying, sneering, metropolitan elitists who don't give a shit about ordinary people or left-behind communities, which is clearly a staggeringly counter-productive way of portraying yourself and your movement. 

In conclusion, political lies erode the standard of political discourse, and political liars should be called out, no matter whether these liars are on your side of any particular political divide or not.

 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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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.

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