Where do the parties stand on fracking?

What is fracking?

Fracking (hydraulic fracturing) is an incredibly inefficient process for extracting natural gas, with an extremely low Energy Return on Energy Invested.

The process involves pumping vast quantities of pressurised water and chemicals into shale rock in order to force out natural gas.

The process has been linked with extraordinary levels of environmental destruction, pollution of the water table, and earthquakes.

Aside from the environmental concerns it's also barely viable from a purely economic perspective. The costs of extraction are so high that fracking is only economically viable at all when energy prices are high, and when governments hand fracking operations vast subsidies and tax cuts to give them an artificial advantage over traditional energy sources, and environmentally sound renewable sources too.

Tories

The Tories have an utterly disgraceful record on fracking.

In 2013 they introduced a new tax break for frackers, slashing their tax rate in half, to give them a massive artificial advantage over other energy sources like North Sea Oil drilling, offshore wind farms, biomass, and solar energy.

In their bid to encourage fracking in Britain the Tories also decided to eliminate the payment of insurance bonds on fracking rigs (which they even have in the United States) which are meant to cover the cost of any potential environmental damage, and dissuade frackers from taking undue environmental risks.

In 2016 they overruled massive local opposition and the local council to force fracking on Ryedale, which lies just on the edge of the stunning North York Moors national park, and then later that year they attempted to define anti-fracking activists as "extremists" and "terrorists".

And now Boris Johnson has actually hired a fracking lobbyist called Rachel Wolf to draw up the 2019 Tory election manifesto (no obvious conflicts of interest there then!).

Lib-Dems

During the Austerity coalition the Lib-Dems voted through all of the Tories' pro-fracking legislation, including the vast 2013 frackers tax cut designed to create fake financial viability for the industry.

In recent years they've realised how unpopular it is, and posture as if they oppose it, whilst staying tight-lipped about all the legislation they previously voted through to encourage it.

You'd have to be intensely gullible to trust the Lib-Dems after all of their U-turns and betrayals on issues like tuition fees, electoral reform, hiking VAT, nuclear subsidies, and imperialist warmongering in the Middle East, so it's always worth looking a little deeper ... and it turns out that the Lib-Dem leader Jo Swinson is personally bankrolled by a fracking company director!

Labour

Labour have an unequivocal stance on fracking. They will outright ban it.

Hang on, other parties exist too you know!

The Green Party have the most long-standing opposition to fracking, as you'd expect from an environmentalist party. Green Party politicians and activists have been at the heart of  anti-fracking protests up and down the country.

The SNP government in Scotland is refusing to allow fracking in Scotland by not allowing any fracking licences, but campaigners say they should go further and legislate a permanent ban on the practice.

Plaid Cymru have a moratorium policy on fracking in Wales, under which frackers would be banned from operating unless they can prove that the practice is environmentally safe (which is essentially an outright ban, because they can't).

CUK (or whatever they're calling themselves these days) are a laughing stock of a  party that are polling at 0%. They're a wasted vote. If they had even bothered to develop any kind of energy policy, this bunch of pro-privatisation, pro-austerity, orthodox neoliberal clowns would probably have come out in favour of it.

Brexit Party don't seem to have any actual policies other than continually pushing for the most damaging hard-right interpretation of Brexit imaginable, let alone detailed strategies on specific issues like fracking. They have welcomed fracking supporters into their party as candidates though, so on that basis it seems likely they'd be in favour of it, if they even bother developing an actual manifesto for the general election.

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OR

Tory propaganda vs actual reality

The Tory party are absolute masters of creating Orwellian reality-reversing propaganda in order to dress up their biggest failings as wonderful successes that we should be thanking them for!

Take this extraordinary Tweet from the CCHQ Press Office Twitter account. 

Every single one of the five areas they've listed as successes is actually a massive government failure, but they're so arrogant that they imagine the general public to be so gullible that they'll just look at the five green ticks and conclude that the Tories have been doing a great job, without bothering to conduct even the most rudimentary analysis of the actual claims.

This article exists just to provide verification of the information in the red boxes in the critique above.

Box one: The economy

When the Tories sneaked back into power in 2010 they immediately imposed hard-right austerity dogma, with the promise that their agenda of massive cuts to infrastructure investment, welfare spending, workers' wages. and public services would have eliminated the deficit by 2015.

It's now 2018 and there is still a huge deficit, which the Tories are now admitting won't be cleared until 2031. 

That's 21 years to achieve what they bragged they would do in less than 5!

Anyone would have thought that the Tories would be so ashamed of this that they'd keep as quiet as possible about their economic track record, but they've simply reversed reality in order to blow their trumpets about what a wonderful job they've been doing!

Box two: Public investment

Tory austerity dogma has resulted in the UK getting left behind on the world stage. We've got one of the lowest levels of investment in infrastructure spending in the developed world, and our public services have been cut back to the bone.

Then there's the fact that government funding for local government services (care for the elderly, highways maintenance, public libraries and leisure centres, bin collections, children's services, planning applications ...) has been slashed by an astounding 67% since 2010.

The Tory fixation with hard-right austerity dogma is a cancer eating away at public infrastructure and services, yet they're actually patting themselves on the back and pretending that they've been investing in this stuff rather than slashing it all to pieces.

Box three: Productivity

You'd have to have been living in a lead-lined box for the last few years to have not noticed the fact that the UK is suffering a massive productivity crisis.

Not only has the productivity of UK workers been flat-lining for the best part of a decade (the worst period since the 1820s), all the other major economies in the G20 except South Africa have experienced better productivity growth, meaning we're being badly left behind on the world stage.

The reason for this collapse in UK workers' productivity are obvious. The Tories imposed the longest sustained collapse in workers' wages since records began, and they've also overseen an absolute boom in unstable low-pay jobs like Zero Hours Contracts and fake self-employment in the gig economy.

The Tory drive to turn the UK into a low-wage low-skill economy has come at the expense of trashing workers' productivity, yet once again they're slapping themselves on the back over this catastrophe!

Box four: Housing

Of all the five claims, this is probably the most egregious. Since 2010 the Tories have overseen the lowest levels of house building since the 1920s, which is bad enough in isolation, but in the context of rising demand for housing and house prices soaring out of the reach of millions of ordinary people, it's an absolute bloody catastrophe ...

Yet once again they're seeking to take credit where they should actually be begging the public for forgiveness!

Box five: Environmental issues

In 2015 the Tories announced a massive cut to solar subsidies which predictably resulted in a collapse in solar power installations.

Meanwhile the Tories handed a vast tax break to fracking companies, and even granted licences to frackers despite overwhelming opposition from local people and environmental groups alike.

More recently the Tories have been trying harder to pretend that they care about the environment, but their efforts have been limited to dressing up new EU laws on plastic pollution as their own work, despite the fact that Tory MEPs voted against these new rules as they made their way through the European Parliament.

Once again, the Tories are passing off their failures as successes in the belief that the general public are a hopelessly gullible bunch of halfwits who mindlessly believe what they're told, even though it's entirely at odds with observable reality.

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OR

The 'centrist' bubble of delusion is absolutely extraordinary

I've just seen a bunch of smug centrists on Twitter lauding the 2010-2015 Coalition government as some kind of great success story because it wasn't as bad as the current shambles (the turd in the hand is better than a turd in the gob defence) and describing their litany of failures as "niggles".

Well here are just some of the catastrophic failings that these intolerably smug centrist types and the small core of die-hard Lib-Dems are trying to shrug off as just minor niggles.

Niggle 1: After the Lib-Dems decided to abandon the their core student demographic to win a tiny taste of second hand Tory power, students these days are being lumbered with £50,000+ in debts which 77% of them will never pay off despite entire lifetimes of paying a 9% aspiration tax on their disposable income. 

Niggle 2: Between 2010 and 2015 literally thousands of disabled people died within six weeks of being declared "fit for work" in Tory disability denial factories. Instead of doing something to combat this disgraceful situation, the coalition government tried to just hide the evidence of this death toll from public scrutiny.  Imagine the kind of person who considers a government desperately trying to hide the death toll from their systematic abuse of disabled people to be just a "niggle".

Niggle 3: The Coalition government introduced many unlawful pieces of legislation. Two of the most horrifying were Iain Duncan Smith's workfare schemes designed to unlawfully force jobless people into working for no wages at giant highly-profitable corporations, and a Coalition government scam to dissuade employees who have been mistreated at work from seeking compensation by unlawfully charging them £1,200 in fees to access the employment tribunal system. 

Niggle 4: As Home Secretary for the Coalition government Theresa May promised to reduce net migration to below 100,000. In reality they oversaw the biggest immigration surge in history peaking at 336,000 in 2015. Somehow, despite actually increasing net migration to its highest level ever, Theresa May remains popular with the bigot demographic because they adored her divisive anti-immigrant rhetoric and her "Go Home" vans so much that they allowed themselves to forget about her actual track record. 

Niggle 5: The Coalition government introduced the Justice and Security Act, which legislated Secret Courts into existence. This one flew under the radar because the mainstream press basically ignored it, but what they did was to undermine centuries of British legal tradition with new rules so that people can have their fates decided in courtrooms they're not allowed to enter, on charges they're not allowed to know, based on evidence that they're not allowed to see. 

Niggle 6: Thanks to their deliberate policy of repressing wages, the Coalition government oversaw the longest sustained collapse in the value of workers' wages since records began. I guess some people are so comfortably well off that they can consider the worst ever devaluation in UK workers' wages to be just a "niggle", but for people living on or near the breadline already after the bankers trashed the economy, it was catastrophic. 

Niggle 7: The Coalition government oversaw the lowest level of new house building since the early 1920s. Two things make this very much worse. House building is one of the proven ways of stimulating struggling economies, so cutting house building during an economic crisis is pure idiocy. The other of course is that a strategy of cutting house building whilst allowing the biggest immigration surge in history is guaranteed to stoke house price inflation, which is exactly what happened, with house prices soaring to their most unaffordable levels ever as a result. 

Niggle 8: The Coalition obsession with hard-right austerity dogma meant that they set about cutting all kinds of beneficial forms of public spending in their blind ideological quest to make short-term savings. Of course you can save some money by cutting wasteful spending, but ideologically driven cuts to stuff like flood defence spending is complete lunacy, because for every £1 invested today, flood defences save £8 in avoided damage and disruption further down the line. To make matters even worse David Cameron rewarded the woman who introduced the government policy of 'save £1 now at a cost of £8 later' with a DBE for political and public service! 

Niggle 9: The Lib-Dems binned most of their main principles in order to leap into bed with the Tories. Arguably the worst betrayal of all was the way they completely sold out the parliamentary reform movement by agreeing to a referendum on AV, rather than demanding a modern form of Proportional Representation as a condition of joining the government (with a referendum on the precise form the new voting system would take). Another betrayal was their failure to secure reform of the House of Lords. In fact the Lib-Dems watched on gormlessly as David Cameron stuffed the Lords with new unelected peers at a faster rate than any Prime Minister in history, swelling it to become the second largest legislative chamber on earth (after the Chinese parliament). The reason parliament is still such a mess today is that the Lib-Dems threw away their golden opportunity to enforce reforms in order to swan around in chauffeur driven ministerial cars for a few years.

Niggle 10: The Lib-Dems helped the Tories carve open the NHS for mass privatisation of services whan they backed the 2012 Health and Social Care Act.  The current chaos in the NHS is a direct consequence of the Coalition government's health policies.

Niggle 11: The Lib-Dems helped Michael Gove to vandalise the state education system by giving away thousands of publicly owned schools, for free, to unaccountable private sector pseudo-charities. Several of these private academy chains have gone bust leaving schools in crisis, or collapsed in orgies of fraud, others continue on gouging huge six figure executive salaries out of taxpayer funded education budgets to this day. 

Niggle 12: The Coalition government engaged in a massive fire sale of UK national infrastructure. Some of the worst deals included selling off the Royal Mail at way below its real market value (netting huge instant profits for a bunch of city spivs including one of George Osborne's best mates), selling off chunks of the nationalised banks at huge losses to the taxpayer, and flogging Britain's stake in Eurostar for an unbelievably tiny fraction of what it cost the country to build it. 

Niggle 13: Between 2010 and 2015 the global tide really began to change away from ideological puritanism and towards rational drugs policy. As Home Secretary Theresa May insisted on swimming in the opposite direction, criminalising the very mild stimulant Khat, pressurising the United Nations into not adopting rational drugs policy, and introducing a total farce of a law intended to ban possession of all non-approved substances, including drugs that haven't even been invented yet. May copied the legislation from Ireland, where handing the 'legal high' market to criminals resulted in the biggest surge in the usage of these drugs anywhere in Europe. Since Theresa May introduced the same legislation here, guess what? A huge upsurge in usage and the horrifying Spice epidemic! 

Niggle 14: Huge cuts to the police and emergency services mean that the per capita level of policing in the UK has fallen back to 1970s levels, huge numbers of crimes are going un-investigated, and the number of deaths in house fires has soared due to the closure of dozens of fire stations. But to self-declared centrist types dying in a house fire, or having the police fail to even investigate after your house was burgled are obviously just "niggles".

Niggle 15: Coalition government ministers continually used the "striver vs skiver" false dichotomy to defend their cuts to the social security system, but the bulk of the cuts actually affected the working poor. They slashed tax credits, and imposed real terms cuts on loads of other in-work benefits like housing benefit, child benefit, parental pay, statutory sick pay, and benefits paid to help disabled people to stay in work. 

Niggle 16: The Coalition oversaw an absolute boom in exploitative employment practices like Zero Hours Contracts, the gig economy, and employers forcing their employees to take on fake self-employed status in order to pay them below the minimum wage. It's no wonder that in-work poverty has soared so dramatically with the boom in exploitative employment practices combined with the Coalition government's systematic attacks in in-work benefits.

Niggle 17: The Coalition government oversaw an exponential growth in food poverty, with hundreds of thousands more people each year turning to food banks like the Trussell Trust in order to feed themselves and their kids. 

 Niggle 18: The Coalition government signed up to one of the worst rip-off deals in history by agreeing to bribe the French and Chinese into building us a new nuclear reactor at Hinkley Point C. Not only will this power station end up being the most expensive object on earth by the time it's completed, Coalition ministers agreed to pay double the market rate for the electricity it produces for 35 years.

Niggle 19: The Coalition government oversaw the worst UK productivity crisis since the early 19th Century, which is hardly surprising at all considering the boom in exploitative McJobs, and millions of workers subjected to increased workloads for decreased pay. 

Niggle 20: The Coalition government had a very illiberal attitude towards criticism and dissent considering one of the component parties was the so-called Liberal Democrats. One of the ugliest pieces of legislation they passed was "the Gagging Law" designed to prevent organisations like charities, community groups, trade unions, and think tanks from criticising government policies. 

Niggle 21: One of the most savage Coalition policies of all was their draconian benefits sanctions regime. 5 minutes late to sign on, suffer a heart attack during a meeting, miss an interview because you're in hospital to comfort your wife after your child was stillborn ... Fuck you! No money for months. Not only have people been sanctioned for the harshest of reasons, but it soon became clear that jobcentre staff were being actively pushed to comply with sanctions targets. Just think about it. If you're instructed to condemn 4 people per week to absolute destitution, is it easier to quickly trick a few people with mental health problems or learning difficulties into making a sanctionable mistake, or to spend hours and hours trying to catch out the minority of hardcore benefits scroungers who know the rules better than you know them yourself? Vulnerable people died because of this horrific punishment system.

Niggle 22: The Coalition government decided to hand a huge tax break to fracking companies by slashing their corporation tax rate in half. They did this because they knew fracking wasn't financially viable without such a vast tax break. Numerous senior Coalition ministers had clear financial interests in the fracking industry when this decision was taken. 

Niggle 23: The Coalition government promised that by 2015 their hard-right austerity programme would have completely eliminated the budget deficit. When it came to 2015 and it was obvious that they'd failed, they simply rebranded their failure as a success by endlessly repeating "we've cut the deficit by a third" as if missing their target by 66% is super-brilliant. Now we're in 2017 and the deficit still hasn't gone, and the Tories are predicting they won't be able to eliminate it until 2025. Over 15 years to do what you said you would do in under 5. Good work guys! 

Niggle 24: The Coalition government's obsession with hard-right austerity dogma dramatically prolonged the recovery from the 2007-08 bankers' crisis because "let's cut our way to growth" is an idiotic policy at the best of times, but it's economically suicidal when the private sector is hoarding assets rather than spending, and when the cost of government borrowing has been reduced to an all time historic low with central bank interest rates set at only marginally above 0%. 

I've stopped at 24 niggles because it's a nice round number, but there are so many more niggles I could have written about (the VAT hike, Bedroom tax, DRIPA, Internet snooping, the Libya disaster, Corporation tax cuts, soaring child poverty, railway chaos, legal aid cuts, flooding our schools with unqualified teachers, the social care crisis, tax-dodging, the prisons meltdown, ruination of the adult education system, armed services cuts and aircraft carriers with no aircraft, the massive trade deficit, selling arms to tyrannical regimes on their own blacklist of repressive states, mental health funding cuts ...)

The worst thing is that the combination of all of these factors (especially the erosion of wages and working conditions, the massive increase in in-work poverty, house price inflation, spectacularly missed immigration targets, public service deterioration, and the needlessly prolonged recovery period) created the surge in public anger that manifested in the "fuck this" Brexit vote.

So Liberal Democrats and the so-called centrists can try to delude themselves that the Coalition was a great success story with just a few niggles if they like, but it just goes to show what an out-of-touch bunch they are.

The reality is that hard-right Brexiteers like Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove deliberately rebranded the niggles (or  "shocking failures" as normal people call them) of the 2010-15 Coalition government as failures of the EU, in order to con the British public into voting for Brexit.

Of course the 2010-15 government looks less bad now than it was at the time, because in comparison to this post-referendum chaos and incompetence, every single government in living memory looks a lot less bad than it actually was. But this kind of comparison is delusional, because it was the niggles/catastrophic failings of the 2010-15 coalition government that led directly to the situation we're in now.

It's utterly ridiculous to whitewash the failings of the 2010-15 government because they weren't quite as bad as the government is now, because the state of the current government is a direct consequence of the ruinous failings that these bloody awful centrists and Lib-Dem apologists are now trying to whitewash away as just niggles. 

Anyone with any sense can see that the pathetic state of the current government is the biggest Coalition failure of all, not a reason to create a revisionist story about how bloody great they were in hindsight.

 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

Two completely different visions, one easy choice

The Labour and Tory manifestos are out now, and what a in incredible contrast, not just in policy but in the approach too.

One is a carefully costed vision of hope for the future where the government invests in the nation and its people to make things better. The other is a totally uncosted recipe for a dystopian nightmare where the government can asset strip terminally ill people in order to cover the cost of handing vast tax breaks to corporations and the super-rich!

Costings

It's quite extraordinary that the Tories spent days attacking the Labour Manifesto with accusations that "their sums don't add up" then they released a "magic money tree" manifesto of their own with no sums in it whatever!

Even the Lib-Dems managed to produce a manifesto with costings, but the Tories produced an absolute farce of a document stuffed full with over 50 uncosted policies.

It's obviously impossible to say that the Labour Party manifesto costings will be 100% accurate, because the future is impossible to predict. The UK could be hit by a huge natural disaster or a devastating terrorist attack in the next few years, which could throw the calculations off whack. The UK will definitely be hit by a Brexit recession whichever party wins the election, and we don't know how big that will be except to say that a "no deal" strop away from the negotiating table and over the economic cliff edge would obviously be significantly worse than a negotiated settlement.

The difference here is that at least Labour tried. They said where the money would come from for each of their spending commitments and put their sums out there to be scrutinised. The Tories seem to think they can evade having their sums scrutinised simply by not bothering to do any, and just making it all up as they go along!

The Labour manifesto

The 2017 Labour manifesto is full of really great ideas to make Britain a better place. It's not perfect (my main objections are the renewal of Trident, their strategically inept stance on Scotland, and their failure to take a stronger stance against the Tory policy of allowing profiteering academy chains to topslice education budgets in order to fund ridiculous six figure executive salaries) but it's by far the best Labour manifesto I've ever seen.

• The Labour concept of education as a universal right that benefits all of society through a National Education Service is fantastic.

• The Labour commitment to end the systematic Tory abuse of disabled people is music to my ears (even though I'm not currently disabled so it's of no personal benefit to me at the moment).

• The Labour plans to properly fund the NHS, social care and emergency services is something only the most blinkered of Tory tribalists could disagree with.

• The Labour measures to end the campaign of Tory wage repression and give British workers the pay rise they deserve is excellent, as is their commitment to defend workers' rights.

• The Labour commitment to end George Osborne's disastrous austerity agenda and replace it with an investment-based recovery strategy is a long-awaited blast of economic competence from the party that had lost its way so badly they went into the 2015 General Election promising "austerity-lite".

• The Labour policy of renationalising some of the UK's most vital public infrastructure (much of which has fallen into the hands of the Chinese government) is sensible, and very popular with the public.

• Labour are planning to extend the free school meals programme to cover all primary school children too. Who could possibly think that making sure all children are well-fed enough to concentrate on their school work is a bad idea?

• Labour are planning to gradually raise the level of corporation tax to 26%, which is still well below the G7 average. They're going to help small businesses to compete by restoring the small profits rate, so that entrepreneurs, infant industries and small businesses pay a lower rate than gigantic multinational corporations. This makes a huge amount of economic sense because it stimulates entrepreneurship and mitigates against the advantage that economies of scale gives to huge corporate behemoths.

• The Labour policies of keeping the pensions triple lock, winter fuel payments and properly funding social care should be big vote winners amongst the older generations (depending of course on whether the older generations actually find out about these policies).

• Labour's immigration policies are sensible. Instead of picking an arbitrary target out of the air and missing it year after year like Theresa May, Labour want to address the harmful impacts of migration with a series of specific policies (a clampdown on gamgmastering, a ban on exclusive overseas recruitment, preventing undercutting of legitimate businesses, making sure all employers pay at least the minimum wage, restoring the Migrant Impact Fund to boost public services in areas with high levels of immigration).

• The Labour guarantee to not increase taxation on the 95% of ordinary people is excellent. The principle of not raising tax on ordinary people and focusing any tax rises on those who can best afford to pay is a great principle after 7 years of the Tories doing things exactly the other way around (the full burden of austerity for the masses, endless tax cuts and lavish government subsidies for the super-rich).

The Tory manifesto
The Tory manifesto isn't all bad, but even the good stuff isn't costed.

They want to plant a million trees but don't say how much that will cost. After seven punishing years they want to slowly phase out their economically ruinous cuts in infrastructure spending, but they don't include any costings. They say they now want to invest in Further Education (after seven years of completely trashing it) but they don't say where the money is coming from. They vaguely promise to increase funding for cycling infrastructure, but again no sums are provided.

The good stuff is significantly outweighed by the bad, the terrible and the downright malicious.

• The most attention grabbing policy is their Dementia Tax policy of asset stripping elderly people for the "crime" of getting ill in their old age. Screw the fact these people worked hard and paid their National Insurance and Council Tax for decades in order to fund the NHS and social care. Their houses are low-hanging fruit for the Tories to harvest in order to fund their agenda of handing even more tax cuts to the corporations and the super-rich.

• The Tories are sticking with their plan to give corporations a £70 billion tax break by reducing corporation tax to just 17%. (that's 10% below the global average of 27% and pretty much half of the G7 average of 32.3%)

• The Tories want to bring back the barbaric practice of ripping wild foxes apart with packs of dogs. 84% of the British public oppose it, but they'll vote to bring it back if they get a big enough majority.

• The Tories want to give fracking companies the right to drill wherever they like, and they also want to strip local government of the ability to decide for themselves whether they want fracking or not by centralising fracking-related planning decisions in Westminster.

• The Tories are planning to throw the Leveson Report on the scrap heap and ignore its recommendations as if Rupert Murdoch's employees never hacked into Milly Dowler's phone at all. If this isn't compelling evidence that Theresa May is totally in the pocket of the right-wing press barons then you must be operating in the hopelessly confused fantasy realm that the right-wing propaganda rags are designed to bamboozle people into.

• The Tories have openly scrapped their 2015 pledges to not raise income tax, and to not raise National Insurance. If you work for a living, now you've been warned about what they have in store for ordinary working people (somebody has to pay the cost of their corporation tax cuts don't they?).

• The Tories are planning to scrap free school meals for infant children.

• The Tories are sticking with the arbitrary 100,000 immigration target even though they've missed it spectacularly over and again since 2010. Theresa May was the Home Secretary who oversaw the biggest migration inflow in UK history and now she thinks she can recycle her same broken promise for a third time and the gullible anti-immigration mob will just lap it up as if they've never heard it before (the extreme-right are so alarmingly fact-averse that she's probably right).

• The Tory manifesto admits that they won't get rid of the budget deficit until "the middle of the next decade", so that will be 15 years to achieve what they said they would do in less than five, and they're actually boasting about it! They're admitting that they're going to miss their own target by an entire decade (creating more new public debt in the process than every single Labour government in history in the process), yet they're still pretending to be the party of economic competence!

Different visions

It's absolutely clear that these two manifestos offer wildly different visions for the future. The Labour manifesto offers a positive investment-based strategy where the government works to improve the lives of all citizens by investing in infrastructure, public services, a National Education Service, housing and decent wages so people actually have money in their pockets to create the economic demand that is the fuel that powers all economies.

The Tory manifesto outlines a bleak dystopian future where the government works to confiscate as much wealth as possible from ordinary people (like the houses of terminally ill pensioners, or the tax rises their dropped commitments are signalling) in order to fund even more lavish tax breaks for the corporations and the super rich individuals who bankroll their party.

Conclusion

If you're a hopeful person who thinks that the government should work to make things better for ordinary people, rather than making things much worse in order to fund tax cuts for corporations and the super-rich, then there's absolutely no way you should be voting Tory.

If you think that political parties should at least attempt to explain how they're going to pay for the policies in their manifesto, there's no way you should be voting Tory.

If you think that after seven years of ruinous Tory austerity it's time to ditch the Tories' bonkers "let's cut our way to growth" strategy and try a more traditional investment based recovery strategy, there's no way you should be voting Tory.

Make sure you are registered to vote, because if you don't, you won't be able to vote against the dystopian nightmare Tory vision of the future.

 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 concerted effort to smear anti-fracking protesters as "extremists"

A report from Spinwatch has identified numerous schools, local councils and police forces that have been describing anti-fracking protests as "extremism", "extremists" and even "terrorist groups".

Labelling anti-fracking as "extremism" and "terrorism" 

The Spinwatch report identifies examples from various parts of the UK including North Yorkshire, Merseyside, Dorset and West Sussex. The unifying theme in all of these examples is that the documents and presentations equating anti-fracking protests with terrorism and extreme-right fanaticism are all linked with the Tory government's Prevent Strategy, which was signed off by Theresa May when she was Home Secretary.

Of course we know that the Tories are totally in hock to the fracking industry, so it serves their purposes to have their opponents labelled as "extremists" and "terrorists", but surely nobody in their right mind thinks that it's acceptable for multiple schools, councils and police forces to equate peaceful anti-fracking protests with savage murderers like ISIS and extreme-right fanatics like the MP killer Thomas Mair.

One of the worst examples of these smears against anti-fracking groups was identified in the Prevent policy of Chesswood School in West Sussex. The executive summary of their prevent policy identifies fracking protests as an "extremist ideology" associated with "terrorist groups" and equates environmental opposition to fracking with Al Qaida and far-right extremism.

British values

The Chesswood School Prevent document then goes on to define "extremist" as "vocal or active opposition to British values".

Whatever their opinion on the merits/harms of fracking, I'm pretty sure that most reasonable people would accept that anti-fracking protests consist of vocal or active opposition to fracking, not a vocal or active opposition to British values.

The Chesswood School Prevent strategy then goes on to define "British values" as respect for "democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, mutual respect for and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs, and those without faith".

The right to peaceful protest is an absolutely essential part of individual liberty. It's ludicrous to imagine that it's possible to have a free and liberal society without the right to protest against the actions of the government, major institutions or other individuals.

If anyone is guilty of disregarding "British values" it's clearly people who insist on smearing anti-fracking protesters as extremists and terrorists simply for opposing what they consider to be unacceptable environmental destruction. Anyone who denies the right to protest such issues is obviously denying individual liberty, and clearly opposing the Chesswood School definition of "British values".

If respect for democracy is a "British value" then many would argue that the Tory party are extremists because of their abject disrespect for democracy. Think about the Tory election fraud at the 2015 General Election, Theresa May's Supreme Court appeal to try to scrap the principle of parliamentary sovereignty and the decision by the Tory run North Yorkshire County Council to allow fracking in Ryedale despite the 131:1 scale of public opposition to the plan.

Tory extremism

This concerted effort to define opposition to fracking as "extremism" and "terrorism" ties in with another of Theresa May's appalling right-wing authoritarian schemes.

Since 2014 the Tories have been pushing an extremism strategy that would allow them to revoke the human rights of people who have committed no crime whatever.

If Theresa May's extremism policy becomes law, then law-abiding citizens could be banned from attending protests or public events, and have all of their online activities pre-vetted by the police.

All that would need to be shown in order to impose these restrictions on people's human rights is that there is a suspicion that the individual could become involved in "harmful activities".

Theresa May's definition of "harmful activities" includes "a risk of public disorder", "a risk of harassment, alarm or distress" and the extremely vague "threat to the functioning of democracy".

So if Theresa May gets her way people could have their rights to free speech, free assembly, the presumption of innocence and peaceful protest scrapped simply because some police officer says they suspect the individual may at some future point cause "alarm or distress" to specified or unspecified persons.

With such extraordinarily low thresholds it's easy to see how the government could use Theresa May's extremism orders to shut down legitimate peaceful protests. All it would take is for a police officer or fracking company employee to claim "distress" because of an anti-fracking protest, then individual law-abiding anti-fracking protesters could be rounded up and stripped of their human rights, banned from protesting again, and forced into a monitoring regime to censor everything they write on the Internet.

Before he resigned in shame after his EU referendum gamble backfired David Cameron summed up the objectives of this policy when he said that "for too long we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens 'as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone'."

It's extraordinary that a serving Prime Minister could get away with expressing such a sinister intention to interfere in the lives of law-abiding citizens, but the mainstream press gave him a free pass on it.

The mainstream media also gave a free pass to Theresa May who is the architect of this policy of stripping law abiding citizens of their human rights, and now this fanatical right-wing authoritarian is the Prime Minister, and still the mainstream media refuse to draw sufficient attention to her autocratic tendencies and her outright contempt for human rights.

Conclusion

It's impossible to not see the connection between this concerted effort to define anti-fracking protesters as "extremists" and "terrorists" and Theresa May's policy of stripping law-abiding citizens of their human rights.

The Tory party are clearly intent on serving the interests of the fracking industry. The widespread effort to brand anti-fracking protesters as "extremists" is clearly useful to the frackers, as will be the Tory policy of stripping people of their right to participate in public or online protests based on nothing more than a suspicion that "alarm" or "distress" may be caused.

You'd have to be staggeringly naive to imagine that the mainstream press would put up a fight to protect our human rights from this next Tory assault, especially given the way Theresa May's appalling Snoopers' Charter drifted into law with barely a whimper of opposition from the media. So it will be down to the public to stop the Tories from achieving their wet dream of labelling law-abiding citizens as "extremists" in order to criminalise peaceful protest.

 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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David Cameron's speaking gig with Bain Capital

Back in 2013 David Cameron's Tory party oversaw the sale of our NHS blood plasma supply unit to a vampire capitalist group called Bain Capital (which was founded by the 2012 Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney).

Fast-forward three years and Bain Capital have already handed David Cameron a lucrative speaking gig at one of their events just weeks after he quit politics after his Brexit gamble went so spectacularly wrong. Thanks to the extraordinarily lax rules covering financial rewards to former politicians it's not clear how much Cameron is going to be paid for his speaking gig, but given that that the former foreign secretary William Hague is expecting to make some £4 million per year on the speaking circuit at £50,000 - £100,000 per appearance, Cameron's speaking fees are unlikely to be less than six figures.

It's no wonder Cameron was so keen to abandon politics when there are such rich pickings to be had from the companies his government handed favours to during his time as Prime Minister.

Some other potential speaking gigs for David Cameron include:

Wonga: The revolving door between David Cameron's government and this appalling legal loan shark company has been well documented. Cameron's sack-at-will legislation (drawn up by the Wonga investor Adrian Beecroft) must have been a real boon to the company as desperate sacked workers turned to them for their rip-off 5,000%+ APR loans. Surely Beecroft and his boys at Wonga could return the favour by handing Cameron a few lucrative public speaking gigs?

Circle Health: This private operator of various NHS facilities across England was one of the major beneficiaries of Cameron's 2012 NHS privatisation by stealth bill. Circle (owned by numerous major Tory party donors) was responsible for the absolute debacle at Hinchingbrook hospital, yet they're still running other NHS facilities across the country. The least they could do for Cameron is stuff him a few hundred grand for all of the NHS services they've snapped up under his watch.

Landsdowne Partners: This hedge fund made a £36 million profit when Cameron's government sold off the Royal Mail at way below its true market value. Given their enormous profits surely they can shove a bit Cameron's way?

G4S and Serco: In 2013 these global outsourcing were caught defrauding the taxpayer out of £180 million by submitting false invoices for the electronic tagging of non-existent prisoners. Cameron's government promised to punish them by temporarily banning both companies from bidding for contracts, but secretly handed them £350 million worth of contracts when they were supposedly banned. Even worse than that, the Tories carried on paying these companies for electronic tagging services way into 2015, two years after they were caught defrauding the taxpayer. Surely these companies can find a few hundred grand apiece to stuff into Cameron's back pocket?

Caudrilla: The fortunes of Cuadrilla and other fracking companies received a massive boost when Cameron's government decided to halve the rate of corporation tax for fracking companies. The fracking boom and bust in the US is proof that fracking is only financially viable if energy prices remain high, so the champagne corks must have been popping at Cuadrilla headquarters when Cameron and Osborne signed the UK taxpayer up to an absolutely ludicrous deal with the French and Chinese states to pay them double the market rate for electricity from Hinkley Point C for an astonishing 35 year period. No doubt Cuadrilla and other fracking companies will feel a moral obligation to repay Cameron for the vast tax cut he handed them and his decision to ensure their financial viability by signing the UK taxpayer up to pay massively inflated energy prices for generations to come?

Virgin Group: Richard Branson's Virgin Group have been major beneficiaries of numerous Tory privatisation schemes. From heavily subsidised rail contracts to huge slices of NHS infrastructure Branson's business did extremely well at raking in taxpayers' cash during David Cameron's time in office. The least "beardie" could do is repay Cameron with a few six figure public speaking gigs?

Times have moved on since former Prime Ministers quietly stepped out of the limelight having achieved the pinnacle of public life. These days becoming Prime Minister or an important government minister is just a stepping stone in the process of becoming filthy rich.

After serving as Prime Minister John Major cashed in by hooking up with corporations like the Carlyle Group arms company, but Tony Blair really blazed the trail for David Cameron with his corporate consultancies with the likes of JP Morgan, his lucrative speaking gigs and his work as adviser to all kinds of brutal dictatorial regimes.

After shafting the British public with his failed Brexit gamble Cameron literally couldn't wait to get stuck into what was clearly always the endgame; making himself filthy rich gorging on corporate speaking fees and lucrative consultancy positions.

 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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