Kwasi Kwartang's brazen nuclear energy deceptions

Tory Energy Minister Kwasi Kwartang has released a short Twitter video boasting about the Tory government's nuclear energy policies.

The problem of course is that it's every bit as honest as you'd expect from a government led by the most notorious liar in British politics.

Kwartang's description of the government's nuclear energy policy states that it will deliver "clean, affordable power generated in the UK, for the UK". 

Every single word of this is either deceptive, or a downright lie.

Clean

The idea that nuclear power is "clean" is an absolute fairy story. In reality Finland is the only country in the world preparing permanent safe storage for all of their nuclear waste. Britain's nuclear waste storage is an absolute shambles. For decades we just lobbed it in landfill, buried it in trenches, threw it down a well at Dounreay, and even set ourselves up as the nuclear dustbin of the world, importing nuclear waste from as far afield as Japan.

Most of Britain's nuclear waste is stored at the Low Level Waste Repository near Drigg in Cumbria. This enormous 270 acre site contains one million tons of nuclear waste, in temporary storage, and it's at risk of coastal erosion and flooding!

Amazingly this huge nuclear dumping ground is being run as a private profit-making company, but when it needs clearing up, there's absolutely no doubt that it will be paid for out of public funds.

Around 75% of the most radioactive waste in the UK is in temporary storage at Sellafield. The most recent cost estimate (2015) for cleaning up the radioactive dumping ground there is an astonishing £117 billion.

Anyone claiming nuclear energy in the UK is "clean", when we don't even have a single permanent nuclear waste storage facility is quite simply lying through their teeth.

Generated in the UK

One of the main boasts in Kwartang's little clip is about the construction of the Hinkley Point C reactor, which will admittedly be geographically located within the UK.

But what Kwartang deliberately omits to mention is the fact the the UK government has bribed the French government (in the guise of EDF) and the Chinese government (CGN) to build it for us.

The reason Britain can't build its own new nuclear infrastructure is that the Tory government privatised away our nuclear expertise, with Britain's entire fleet of nuclear power stations eventually falling into the hands of the French government (EDF).

Have you ever been informed by the BBC or by corporate media about the fact Britain handed control of its entire fleet of nuclear power plants to the French government?

Maybe ask yourself why the majority of the UK population have been kept in the dark about this utterly extraordinary situation.

Affordable

The only way the Tory government could get the governments of France and China to build them a new reactor at Hinkley Point C was to bribe them into doing it by promising to pay them double the market rate for electricity for 35 years. 

The National Audit Office have estimated that the terms of this deal mean that UK energy customers will end up paying an astonishing £50 billion above the natural market rate.

£50 billion siphoned out of the pockets of UK energy consumers, by the state-run energy companies of France and China, and this deceptive Tory piss-taker is telling us how "affordable" it's going to be!

For the UK

The idea that energy generated in the UK is exclusively "for the UK" is another deception. 

In the case of natural gas, exports out of the UK have doubled during the energy crisis, because the profiteering private companies operating our energy sector are driven exclusively by the profit motive, not by any desire to maintain the energy security of whichever nation they're operating in.

The only reason the French and Chinese governments would definitely be selling their electricity to the UK, is that the UK is the only country on earth stupid enough to promise to pay them double the market rate for 35 years.

If the UK government seriously wanted to secure the nation's energy supply, they'd take the sector out of the hands of the private profiteers and foreign governments it's fallen into since privatisation, and operate it as a not-for-profit publicly owned business, run for the good of the British people and the British economy.

Only a fool would think that promising to pay the governments of France and China double the market price for electricity was a good idea, and something to boast about. And only a downright liar would try to pretend that it represents a strengthening of the nation's energy security!

Conclusion

The inescapable conclusion is that Kwasi Kwartang is a profoundly deceptive character, who either doesn't understand the first thing about his ministerial role, or is lying through his teeth.

But it's more sinister than just one Tory minister churning out deceptions. The whole department is rotten to the core. 

It's beyond doubt that energy privatisation has been an absolute disaster for the UK, but instead of bringing it back under public ownership, they're bribing the French and Chinese governments to build our energy infrastructure for us, and then dressing this absurd nonsense up as if it represents some wonderful safeguarding of Britain's energy security.

Anyone in the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy with even the slightest clue what's actually going on knows perfectly well that it's a pack of deceptions and lies.

And any BBC/corporate media journalist who pays the slightest attention can see what a shambles it is too, and how deceptive Kwartang's being.

But there's a code of silence, so nobody speaks out.

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"Politics is Broken" and guess what? Only they can save us!

The 11 (and counting) squatter MPs are all pushing this populist "politics is broken" trope as hard as they can, and positioning themselves as the heroic saviours.

In this article I'm going to look at the absolute chaos this "politics is broken" trope has already unleashed in three other major economies, before looking at the squatter MPs and their Independent Group (AKA 'Tinge') in more detail.

What I'm not going to do is argue that politics isn't broken. Britain wouldn't be in this farcical Brexit shit-show if the political establishment class hadn't put us here, and anti-vaxxers, grifters, and smarmy charlatans would never have got their hands on the levers of power in Italy, the United States, and France had their political systems not been flawed enough to allow them to either.

The point is that just because someone is repeatedly saying "politics is broken" doesn't mean you have to unquestioningly accept the way they position themselves as the only possible saviours.

Italy

The Five Star Movement is a populist anti-politics political party founded in 2009 by the stand-up comedian and polemicist Beppe Grillo.

This party has used the big tent political strategy to build a disparate coalition of all kinds of people with eurosceptics, anti-globalists, direct democracy advocates, and anti-vaxxers making up several of their core demographics.

Initially attractive to people on the left for their anti-establishment, environmentalist, and direct democracy advocacy, it soon became clear that this party was shifting rapidly towards the extreme-right.

This rightwards shift became absolutely indisputable when the 5 Star MEPs in the European Parliament joined Nigel Farage's rag-tag band of far-right eurosceptics in 2014, but unfortunately, as in Britain, Italians pay very little attention to the internal machinations of the European Parliament, so this collusion with far-right fanatics and outright fascists went virtually unnoticed.

The March 2018 Italian General Election was the huge M5S breakthrough moment, they won the most votes and landed enough seats to make them kingmakers in the Italian parliament. In May 2018 they created a coalition with the fascist party Lega Nord bringing fascism back to the Italian government for the first time in decades.

Since then the popularity of Five Star has waned (although they're still extremely popular with the anti-vaxxer movement for the radical anti-science policies they've enacted) while the fascists they enabled into power have soared in popularity from the 3rd most popular party to by far the most popular.

So the lesson from Italy is clear: Vote for the "politics is broken" populists and get anti-vaxxers and fascism.

United States

I'm pretty sure I don't need to explain all that much about the last few years in US politics.

Donald Trump used "politics is Broken" style populism to position himself as the ideological saviour who was going to "drain the swamp" and "bring the jobs back" to places like the rust belt.

People believed him, he got elected, he immediately filled the top administration jobs with more Wall Street bankers, corporate stooges, and inherited wealth billionaires than any government in US history, then he set about attacking the health care and social security systems, and then he implemented the biggest tax handout for the mega-rich ever.

Nothing for the little people who voted him into power, and a massive windfall for his mega-rich mates. Who would have thought such a thing could happen when you elect billionaire from the international speculator class as your President?

So the lesson from the United States is clear: Vote for the "politics is broken" populists and get Trumpism.

France

The situation in France is by far the most analogous to what's currently happening in Britain.

Emmanuel Macron was a right-wing neoliberal who embedded himself within the centre-left socialist party. 

As minister of economy and finance in the socialist government he set about implementing spectacularly unpopular labour reforms that triggered mass protests and trashed the government's popularity.

After destroying the socialist government from within he walked away to set up a shiny new "centrist" party called En Marche which used the whole "politics is broken" and "we are the saviours" schtick to great effect.

What better way to sell neoliberalism to the public than point out all of the failings of neoliberalism (several of which you were personally involved with), then present yourself as the shiny new alternative?

The problem of course is that when you promise people change, but then deliver more of the same but even worse in the form of massive tax cuts for corporations and the mega-rich, fuel price increases loaded on the poor, even more ideological attacks on labour rights, deeply unpopular education reforms, and significantly collapsing living standards - people tend to get angry.

And when the French get angry they don't just unthinkingly vote in favour of a massive act of national self-harm and then grovellingly re-elect the bastards who trashed their living standards in the first place like us Brits do. They revolt, they protest, they riot.

France has been wracked by 14 consecutive weeks of mass protests and Macron has gone from winning the Presidency and an absolute landslide in the French parliament, to being the most unpopular President in French history with an approval rating only slightly better than cancer.

The most incredible thing about it is that he's managed to nose-dive his Presidency and reduce his nation to mass protests, riots, division, police brutality, and chaos in significantly less than two years!

So the lesson from France is clear: Vote for the "politics is broken" populists and get absolute bloody chaos.

Britain

So the Independent Group ('Tinge') parliamentary squatters are pushing the exact same rhetoric as these other populist movements. "Politics is broken", and guess what? Only they can save us!

The problem of course is that every single one of them is an establishment insider to the core, with several of them being particularly to blame for the current shit-show.

Before the EU referendum Chuka Umunna added fuel to the anti-EU bonfire by fulminating against Freedom of Movement and scapegoating European immigrants. Now he actually expects us to believe him when he positions himself as the glorious saviour to the Brexit mess that he actually helped to create by actively turning Labour Party members against free movement!

Mike Gapes, Joan Ryan, and Ann Coffey are all responsible for the thing that created the biggest ever rift in trust between British people and the Westminster political establishment class. Despite the biggest public protests in British history in 2003, these people voted in favour of the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq on the grounds of terrifying Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Hundreds of thousands died, millions were displaced, these terrifying WMDs were never found because they didn't exist, and Iraq was turned into a lawless terrorism breeding ground that eventually gave birth to the monstrosity of ISIS.

To make matters even worse these warmongers all repeatedly voted against holding an inquiry into their disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq, and all hate Jeremy Corbyn on the basis that he was absolutely right that Iraq was going to be a disaster, and because they simply can't bear to admit that they have the blood of hundreds of thousands of people on their hands.

Anna Soubry is one of the three Tories to have joined the squatters citing her opposition to Brexit as a factor in her decision, but incredibly she actually voted in favour of Theresa May's hard-right EU Withdrawal Act in January 2018 while Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour front bench opposed it! Some brave and principled Brexit saviour eh?
 

Perhaps the most telling thing of all is that all 11 of the squatter MPs are either austerity-enforcers who actually voted in favour of the ruinous Tory austerity dogma that trashed British living standards and created the massive wave of public anger that drove Brexit narrowly over the winning line, or they're austerity abstainers from the right-wing fringe of the Labour Party who actually turned a blind eye to the suffering of millions of their fellow citizens to sit on their hands as the Tories voted though the biggest package of social security cuts in British history in 2015.

Anyone who imagines that this opportunistic group of pro-austerity fanatics, ideological contortionists, self-serving opportunists, and unrepentant warmongers from deep within the ranks of the political establishment class is going to fix our "broken politics" and lead a glorious British revival is clearly working at the same extraordinary level of delusion as those who voted in favour of Brexit thinking a Tory administered abandonment of the EU would immediately turn the UK into the land of milk and honey for all.

But the worrying thing is that there is already a lot of support for this fake political party (established as a private company in order to evade scrutiny of their financial affairs) with no policies, no members, no internal democracy, no leader, no respect for the people in their constituencies, and no disciplinary procedures for bigoted MPs who spout racist nonsense on the TV!

It's looking a lot like the shiny but empty promise of Macronism all over again, built by another bunch of hopeless charlatans desperately trying to keep orthodox neoliberalism alive by rebranding it as a wonderful new form of 'centrism' that will somehow miraculously "fix our broken politics".

Unfortunately this blatant con trick has been shown to work effectively in other major economies with predictably disastrous results, so only the complacent would imagine that it couldn't possibly work here too.

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Is ambulance-blocking the most depraved Brextremist tactic yet?

Surely we all already know that the Leave.EU campaign are a truly despicable mob?

They used a flood of xenophobia, anti-immigrant fearmongering, and outright lies to push the Brexit vote just over the line in 2016, and then ever since then they've been used as Arron Banks' personal propaganda campaign to promote his businesses, abuse journalists who investigate his finances, and promote plots to usurp the Tory party and drive it even further towards the extreme-right political fringe by flooding it with Brextremist ultranationalist entryists.

But their latest stunt has to be their most despicable yet.

On Friday 14th December 2018 a small group of Brextremists blocked Westminster Bridge to protest in favour of a ruinous "no deal" meltdown.

WATCH | Brexiteers in yellow vests bring Westminster Bridge to a standstill in protest at Theresa May's Brexit sell-out.

This is what happens when the Establishment ignores the will of the people...

🙋‍♂️ Support us at https://t.co/iICfFb8qqg pic.twitter.com/ydgkOWRJec

— Leave.EU (@LeaveEUOfficial) December 14, 2018

They could have chosen to upload a video clip of any moment of their protest to their Leave.EU propaganda account, so it's absolutely telling that they chose to upload a 50 second clip of the protest blocking a paramedic emergency response vehicle from attending an emergency . Even more disturbing is the caption on the Tweet which reads "this is what happens when the establishment ignores the will of the people".

There's absolutely no mistaking what they're threatening. If they don't get the ruinous hard-right "no deal" chaos they're craving there's no depth to the depravity of the actions they're going to take in retribution.

If they're willing to block a rapid response paramedic from attending an emergency and then actually gloat about it on Twitter, they're sending a message that that people will die if they don't get the extreme Brexit they want.

Aside from the fact they blocked a paramedic and then gloated about it on Twitter, there's also the fact that they've hijacked the yellow vest idea of the French gilets jaunes protest.

What makes this theft so despicable is that the gilets jaunes in France is a popular uprising against collapsing living standards that commands the support of the overwhelming majority of French people.

This bunch of Brextremists who have hijacked the yellow vest look are the polar opposite.

They're protesting in favour of a "no deal" socio-economic catastrophe that would cause an appalling collapse in UK living standards, and their extremist interpretation of the 2016 Brexit vote is only supported by a minority of the British public.

And of the minority of Brits who actively want Theresa May to follow through on her threat to trash the UK economy with a "no deal" Tory economic meltdown, I suspect only an even smaller minority of them would be extreme enough to support this strategy of blocking ambulances and gloating about it on Twitter to achieve it.

Of course not all of the 17.4 million of Brits who voted Leave in 2016 are vile extreme-right nasties like the Brextremist ambulance-blockers yesterday, but it's impossible to deny that whatever anyone's reasons for voting for Brexit, they were unconcerned about aligning themselves with fascists, racists, xenophobes and liars when they did it.

And even if people actually crave the chaos and suffering of a "no deal" economic crisis, any Leave voter with any sense of human decency whatever should be just as outraged about this Brextremist ambulance-blocking tactic as the rest of us.

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Good news workers, you're poorer than you were 8 years ago!

Somehow millions of people still believe the ludicrous fairy story that the Tories are the party of economic competence despite the overwhelming evidence that they're nothing of the sort.

Take this Tweet from Dominic Raab. It clearly shows that UK workers' wages have collapsed in real terms, and that they're only just crawling back towards the level they were at when the Tories came to power in 2010.

The huge dip we can see in the graph that happened between 2010 and 2014 was the longest sustained collapse in workers' wages since records began, and it all came from the economically illiterate Tory assumption that the poorer the workers, the richer the bosses, and the richer the bosses the richer the nation.

This assumption is obvious bollocks because if workers' wages collapse they have less disposable income, and if they have less disposable income the economy flat lines because of the lack of demand (this stuff is so obvious it should barely need stating).

 As a result of this sustained ideologically driven Tory assault on our wages and living standards, British workers are getting one of the worst deals in Europe. The only country where workers have had it worse over the last 10 years is crisis-stricken Greece, while workers in other basket-case economies like Italy, Spain, and Serbia are the only other ones to have endure an entire decade of negative wage growth like the Brits have.

Just look at France, where the gilets jaunes protesters are boiling with rage over falling living standards. In reality they've had a 6% increase in workers wages over the last decade in comparison to the 5% collapse the Tories have inflicted on British workers!

Not only are Brits not out on the streets protesting against conditions that are far worse than in France, they've actually twice re-elected the Tories who did this to them!

The extraordinary subservience of the Brits still isn't even the most incredible thing about this.

Just look at what Dominic Raab has written about the graph he shared.

Not only has he blatantly failed to understand the graph by claiming it shows real wages are "rising at fastest rate in 10 years" when it shows absolutely nothing of the sort*, he also tries to present evidence of 8 ruinous years of Tory wage collapse as "good news for working Britain".

With the Tories there's always the suspicion that they actually understand the truth that wage repression and austerity dogma are appalling economic policies for ordinary people and the economy as a whole, but that they continually spew demeaning economic idiot fodder about how great they are because they arrogantly assume the British public to be a bunch of economically illiterate pisswits.

This Tweet from Dominic Raab demonstrates something even more worrying.

Remember that this was the guy who was until recently entrusted by the Tory government to do the extraordinarily complex and important job of leading Britain's Brexit negotiations. Yet here's absolute proof that he can't even understand a very simple average weekly wage chart.

His ridiculously clueless Tweet is clear cut evidence that he can look at damning proof of the truly appalling consequences of his party's 8 year campaign of austerity and wage repression, and then conclude that his party are doing a fantastic job, and British workers should be thanking them!

The guy just simply doesn't have a clue what's been going on for the last 8 years.

He's so insulated by privilege, so unwilling to think outside the Tory echo chamber, and so economically illiterate that he clearly can't even read a simple chart.

Yet Theresa May and her Tory inner circle actually decided to give this unbelievably useless charlatan responsibility for heading by far the most complex and risky set of negotiations of the entire post-war era!

And even now millions of mainstream media rote-learning dupes still believe the Tories to be the party of economic competence!

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* = The fastest rise in the last 10 years was when the Tories eased wage repression just before the 2015 General Election in the hope that British workers would relieved to be able to breathe again that they'd totally forget whose boot had been standing on their necks for the previous four years.

Why are the Brits such willing doormats?

Just a year and a half after winning an unprecedented landslide victory the French President and his En Marche! "centrist" party have triggered a huge crisis with their policies of punishing workers and the poor, and pushing hard-right neoliberalism.

One of their first moves on assuming power was to lavish a huge tax cut on the wealthiest 1%, and ever since it's been one regressive and unpopular policy after another: Attacks on pensioners' incomes, anti-worker legislation, a move to flog off the French rail network to Macron's speculator mates, extremely unpopular education reforms, and the final straw was a series of fuel tax hikes designed to load the economic cost of combating climate change onto ordinary people, especially those who live in remote rural areas and rely on their cars for survival.

The result has been the rise of organic and leaderless gilets jaunes (yellow vests) mass demonstration all across France.

The mainstream media have obviously focused on examples of violence and vandalism in Paris in order to discredit the movement as much as possible, but the reality is that the vast majority of gilets jaunes protests are peaceful marches and roadblocks outside of Paris, which the overwhelming majority of French people support.

Within 18 months of Macron coming to power and imposing neoliberal policies and enforcing an unjustifiable upwards redistribution of wealth, the French public have had enough and they're fighting back.

Now just consider how different things are in Britain. It's over 8 years since the Lib-Dems enabled the Tories back into power (103 months). We've had ruinous austerity dogma, a massive unprecedented upwards redistribution of wealth, massive public service cuts, a ruinous "lost decade" of zero wage growth, draconian social security cuts, countless hard-right privatisation disasters (including the mass giveaway of state schools to unaccountable private profiteers), and shocking rises in child poverty, in-work poverty, and homelessness.

Not only has a gilets jaunes protest failed to materialise, but the British public have actually twice reelected the Tories who have been brutalising us like this!

The only hint of protest was the spectacular act of self-harm in allowing the very same hard-right Tories who trashed our standards of living (Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Iain Duncan Smith, Priti Patel ...) to convince us that immigrants and the EU were to blame for the horrific consequences of their own damned austerity policies and then voting for Brexit!

And when an opposition leader comes along to actually oppose the devastating hard-right fanaticism of the Tories (as opposed to pathetically imitating it like his predecessor) the political establishment, mainstream media hacks, and the "I'm alright Jack" chattering classes spew unprecedented amounts of hatred at him!*

Even now, after eight years of austerity dogma, wage repression, public service cuts, ruinous privatisations, and malicious attacks on the social security safety net, and two and a half years of stewing in their own damned Brexit mess, they're soaring high in the polls (between the high-30s and low-40s).

To really put this contrast between the Brits and the French into context consider the changes in our standards of living over the last decade.

While Brits have experienced an outrageous 0.5% per year collapse in real wage growth, the French have experienced annual real wage growth of 0.7%.

For the last decade French workers have experienced growing real terms wages (at just about the average rate for Europe), while the British have been slumped at the bottom of the table with other European stragglers like Greece, Italy, and Spain.

But who are the ones engaging in a mass popular revolt against neoliberalism and the greed of the mega-rich?

The French!

So what is it about the Brits that makes them such willing doormats?

What makes them so comfortable with the erosion of their wages and living standards that they actually vote in favour of the culprits rather than fighting back?

I'm not actually sure I can answer the question.

Yes, it surely has something to do with Britain having the most right-wing media environment in Europe which repeatedly gives free passes to outrageous examples of Tory malice and incompetence, whilst holding opposition figures to way higher standards.

Yes, it probably has something to do with traditional British attitudes like "stiff upper lip" and "make do and mend".

And yes, the sickening deference to establishment figures with plummy accents that's still rife in Britain is surely a factor in the almost total impunity for the Tory toffs who have spent most of the last decade ideologically vandalising our country and vindictively abusing our most vulnerable citizens.

But are these factors enough to explain why the French stand up for themselves and the Brits just sit there and take dogs' abuse from millionaire Tory elitists for years, and then actually vote the callous abusive bastards back into power?

What do you think?

How do you explain it?

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Incidentally the Venn diagram of self-declared "centrists" who have been bitterly spewing hate at Jeremy Corbyn for the last three years, and those who greeted Macron's election in France as if it was the second coming of Christ would be more-or-less a perfect circle.

12 things you should know about the gilet jaunes movement

Over the last week France has been rocked by the biggest riots in over a decade but much of the media coverage has been sketchy at best.

Fuel protest

The gilets jaunes (yellow vests) movement started as a grassroots protest against a hugely unpopular hike in fuel tax designed to load the economic burden of climate change goals onto ordinary people, and especially those in non-urban areas who rely on cars to survive.

That these planned tax rises on petrol and diesel have coincided with a global spike in fuel prices has exacerbated the situation, leaving millions of French families wondering where they're going to find the cash to pay for these huge fuel price hikes.

Climate change

As gilets jaunes the movement has spread it has evolved and grown into a much broader protest against Emmanuel Macron and the French government.

Macron and his supporters keep on banging on about ecology and how progressive it is to tax fuel, but they're talking a completely different language to the people facing the economic burden of these policies.

Of course a lot of people accept that something needs to be done to combat climate change, but loading the majority of the burden onto ordinary people who have no choice but to drive, whilst actually giving handouts to the mega-rich with the other hand is the exact opposite of a progressive approach.

Anyone trying to characterise the gilets jaunes movement as a simple fuel protest against reasonable and progressive climate change measures is either catastrophically under-informed or behaving in a deliberately disingenuous manner.

Yellow vests

The reason for the yellow vests is that since 2008 French drivers have been required by law to have a yellow high visibility vest in their vehicle in case of breakdown, meaning that high visibility jackets are a cheap and widely available symbolic "uniform" for the protesters.

Violence

The vast majority of the 280,000+ gilets jaunes protesters have been peaceful and non-violent, but as is always the way the vast majority of the mainstream media coverage has focused on the violent minority.

This isn't an effort to downplay or excuse any of the unacceptable violence and vandalism, it's just an effort to redress the balance a bit by pointing out that the violence and chaos in Paris is unrepresentative of the enormous movement that is going on across the whole of France.

Delegitimisation

Assorted 'centrists' and Macron fanboys have tried to create the argument that the entire movement "lost legitimacy as soon as it turned to rioting/looting/car burning".

The problem with this tactic of tarring an entire movement of hundreds of thousands with the behaviour of the very worst minority is that it would make it ridiculously easy to render all political protest illegitimate through the tactical insertion of a small number of violent agent provocateurs into any and all protest movements.

Any reasonable person should be capable of differentiating between the hundreds of thousands of non-violent protesters across France who blocked roads and fuel depots without rioting or violence, and the small minority of lawless thugs the media have concentrated on.

The price of Macron

When Emmanuel Macron won the French Presidency "I'm alright Jack" centrists across the world went into raptures that their favoured brand of neoliberalism-lite was back on the agenda, but now that Macron's opinion poll ratings have collapsed to minus 50, hundreds of thousands of people are actively protesting against the government, and the streets of Paris are ablaze, perhaps it's time for a quick reappraisal.

Macron only won the Presidency because the only other option on the ballot was the hate-mongering extreme-right ultranationalist Marine Le Pen. In a choice between the neoliberal frying pan and the fascist fire, the French public understandably chose to stay in the frying pan.

As you'd expect from a neoliberal with a huge parliamentary majority, the result has been a massive squeeze on poor and ordinary people in order to fund handouts and tax cuts for the mega-rich.

It's not like the French public could have had any illusions about what was going to happen given that Macron was personally responsible for the massively unpopular anti-worker legislation that destroyed the parti socialiste from within before he jumped ship to create a 'centrist' protest movement against the political establishment that he was one of the worst examples of!

Given the long history of public protest in France, a revolt against Macron and his neoliberal agenda was always on the cards, the only surprising thing being that it's taken so long to happen.

Rebellion

One of the big ironies is that Macron connived his way into power by creating and leading a faux rebellion against the French political establishment, yet he's only halfway into his second year in office and he's the focus of a new, more genuine, and more furious anti-establishment revolt.

If you promise the people a revolution and a government that listens to and works on behalf of ordinary people, then deliver nothing but a 'more of the same' anti-worker, neoliberal agenda, is it any wonder they'd be furious?

Social media

The gilets jaunes movement began on social media with petitions and a Facebook event aimed at disrupting traffic on November 17th. Since then it's spread onto the streets.

The spontaneous social media growth of the protest means there's no real defined leadership structure, which has its advantages and disadvantages.

Extreme-right opportunism

The French extreme-right have been quick to jump on the protests with Macron's defeated Presidential rival Marine Le Pan trying to associate herself with the movement and encouraging her supporters to infiltrate it.

The structureless and leaderless nature of the movement has made it possible for the French extreme-right to infiltrate the protests, but this leaderless nature also prevents them from usurping it by establishing themselves as its leaders.

Popularity

Various opinion polls have put public support for the gilets jaunes at between 72% and 84%. meaning Macron is in a really tricky situation. He's styled himself as an authoritarian who won't give in to protest, but he's only going to increase his (already extraordinary) levels of unpopularity if he seeks to crush this extremely popular movement by force.

The squeezed middle

The reason the  gilets jaunes movement is so popular is that they're representing the frustration of millions of ordinary French people who feel they're getting insufficient return for their labour and their taxes.

Like most Europeans the French are reasonably content to pay high taxes in return for quality public services, decent pensions, and a strong social security system, however Macron's fuel tax hikes have coincided with hardline neoliberal policies from Macron such as gutting the social security system, attacking pensions, and attempting to flog off the French rail network to his private sector mates. And to top it all off one of Macron's first reforms was to slash wealth taxes paid for the extremely rich.

Of course anti-worker legislation, privatisation mania, attacks on the social security system, and massive handouts to the mega-rich must sound familiar to British people who have been suffering these same policies under 8 years of disastrous Tory rule, but the French are different. They won't just sit back and accept this ideologically-driven assault on their living standards, and even twice re-elect the bastards who have been doing it like the British have, they're making it clear they're simply not having it.

What next?

With Macron outright refusing to drop the next 6.5% hike in fuel prices sceduled for January, and with such high levels of public support it seems unlikely the gilets jaunes protests will just stop altogether any time soon.

The extent to which the protests continue over the next few weeks and months would seem to depend on whether Macron decides to cede ground by dropping the planned fuel hike, or intensifies the situation by outright ignoring the concerns of protesters and seeking to forcibly clamp down on the protests by imposing emergency legislation.

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