Guido Fawkes' interpretation of Jeremy Corbyn's media strategy is blatant 'fake news'

When Jeremy Corbyn announced his plan to empower independent media sources, fund the BBC through a social media tax, democratise the BBC Board of Directors, and give investigative journalists more Freedom of Information powers it was obvious that defenders of the hard-right neoliberal orthodoxy would react with fits of outrage.

Nowhere was that blind right-wing fury more evident than in the Guido Fawkes hate-chamber.

By offering to strip away government control over who sits on the BBC Board of Directors, and to significantly increase Freedom of Information powers for investigative journalists, Corbyn's proposals actually represent a loosening of state control over the media - but you certainly wouldn't know that from the breathless fear-mongering diatribe on the Guido Fawkes blog.

As things stand now the government of the day gets to choose four members of the BBC Board, who then go on to pick the other ten members between them.

What Corbyn is proposing is that licence fee payers and BBC staff should get representation on the BBC Board, which means that if he becomes Prime Minister he'll be giving away his government's ability to hand-pick the BBC Board.

But somehow the deranged hard-right liars at the Guido Fawkes blog have turned this power-giveaway into a terrifying Corbyn power-grab that would see "left-wing activist cranks would get editorial control of the BBC and Laura Kuenssberg would be burnt at the stake".

So the Guido Fawkes analysis is that if the public are allowed to choose who sits on the BBC Board they'd pick more left-wing representatives than Corbyn would pick himself?

And people are thick enough to fall for this drivel?

As for Kuennsberg. The fact that she's still in her job at the BBC after being found guilty of inventing "fake news" is a sign of how dysfunctional the BBC has become.

Perhaps if BBC journalists knew that the BBC Board is made up of elected officials and their fellow BBC staff members with an interest in protecting their own reputations, they'd be a little bit more afraid of the consequences of inventing highly partisan fake news items?

Then consider Corbyn's proposal to scrap the process of BBC Charter renewal. That would remove his own ability to use the threat of cutbacks to demand loyalty from the BBC (as previous governments have done).

How on earth, other than by lying through your teeth, is it possible to present such an obvious removal of government influence over BBC output as a terrifying power-grab.

Then there's this absolute drivel "Profitable news outlets are fearless because they know they don’t have to bend the knee to survive".

We've all seen how mainstream media outlets bend their coverage to suit the interests of their billionaire-owners, and how politicians from Thatcher through to May have gone grovelling before the right-wing media moguls like Murdoch, Harmsworth, and the Barclay brothers in return for partisan political support.

We've also seen how wealthy advertisers have pressurised these "profitable" mainstream media organisations into dropping critical coverage (like HSBC did with the Telegraph, and how the despicable Saudi tyrants do with swathes of the mainstream media).

So not only do the hard-right Guido hacks try to present Corbyn's power-giveaway as a power-grab, they also sing from the corporate mainstream media hymn sheet that mainstream media outlets never "bend their knee" to the political ideology of their owners, or the whims of their advertisers!

In conclusion the Guido hack writes that "The hard-left and their opponents agree on one thing, a free press stands in their way of transforming society…". 

In a way this part is actually true, except the terms they use are loaded as hell.

It's beyond obvious that the shockingly right-wing biased mainstream media would do absolutely everything in their power to stop Jeremy Corbyn from transforming society.

• They'll oppose his efforts to bring public services back under democratic not-for-profit public control (as the majority of the public want).

• They'll oppose his effort to properly fund the NHS and reverse the Tory mass privatisation effort that's been going on since 2012.

• They'll oppose his policy of reversing the vast Tory Corporation Tax giveaway, to put the UK back in line with the G7 average.

• They'll oppose his efforts to improve workers' wages and working conditions.

• They'll oppose his introduction of a National Education Service to provide free education for all, from cradle to grave.

• They'll oppose his efforts to put an end to the systematic government discrimination against sick and disabled people.

• They'll oppose his new proposal to democratise the BBC.

• They'll oppose his proposal to support and encourage more independent journalism.

• And they'll definitely oppose his proposal to allow investigative journalists to submit freedom of information requests to find out what's going on with all the dodgy private sector outsourcing companies making £billions from the public purse.

But in regards to all of this hostility from the right-wing press barons Corbyn isn't actually proposing a crackdown on the corporate mainstream media at all, he's actually offering to give up his own power to pick the BBC Board of Directors should he become Prime Minister, and to give investigative journalists more powers to investigate what his government is up to!

But somehow the fake news merchants at the Guido Fawkes blog have reversed reality in order to present Corbyn's power-giveaway as a power-grab, and his policy of empowering independent and investigative journalists as an attack on the free press!

 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

Theresa May's Snoopers' Charter gives 20,000+ people the ability to go data trawling

People who were actually paying attention to what Theresa May was up to will already know that her Internet Snoopers' Charter allows all kinds of state employees to trawl through the private communications data of innocent people. Until now we didn't really have much idea of how many people Theresa May has given permission to snoop on innocent law-abiding citizens, but now we know that the number is at least 20,000!

The research was done by Claire Broadley at Who is Hosting This. Over 100 Freedom of Information requests were submitted, and although several government agencies including the Home Office (the department that actually introduced the Snoopers' Charter!) didn't bother to respond, those that did respond have revealed that over 20,000 people have been given the power to snoop on the private communication and browsing data of innocent people.

Unsurprisingly there are a lot of cops and military personnel in the list of 20,000+, but there are also 45 people at the Food Standards Agency, 56 at the Gambling Commission, 59 at the DWP, 326 at the Department of Health Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, 75 at the Information Commissioner’s Office, 548 at the Office of Communications, 45 at the Health and Safety Executive, and hundreds more at various other non-terrorism related government agencies.

Even if you're the kind of person who remains unconcerned at the government legislating that our Internet providers create massive hackable data dumps of all of the private communications data of millions of innocent people, and nonchalant that these data dumps can be browsed by the employees of all manner of UK government agencies, surely you've got to accept that allowing 20,000+ people to trawl these data dumps of private browsing and communications data is an obvious recipe for data misuse?

Do you really believe that nobody amongst these 20,000 government employees might try to use their new snooping powers to do stuff like search for blackmail material or tittle tattle to sell to the tabloid press, commit industrial espionage, settle old scores by leaking embarrassing personal information, search for inside information to sell on or manipulate markets with, trawl around looking for sexually explicit material to masturbate over or sell, cyber stalk their current or ex partner, or any manner of other ways of misusing the private communications data they've been handed access to by Theresa May's government?

The really interesting thing is that there are right-wing authoritarian people out there who defend this to the hilt. These right-wing blowhards are normally the kind of people to furiously decry the nanny state and the meddling of quangos like the Health and Safety Executive. But now, because it's their beloved nanny-dominatrix Theresa May has imposed the most extreme surveillance system of any developed nation in history, they're suddenly deliriously happy that so many government agencies have been given permission to trawl through everyone's private data, and unable to see any potential problem whatever with the creation of vast hackable data dumps, or the fact that over 20,000 people have been given permission to trawl them, and the recipe for large-scale data misuse that entails.

 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 AAV infographic that royalists don't want you to see

On the 18th of July 2015 I cobbled together a quick infographic to explain my reaction to the video of the infant Queen Elizabeth II doing Nazi salutes with her family in the garden. I thought I'd taken a pretty even handed approach to the issue. I'd explained my opposition to inherited privilege but also clearly stated my belief that judging a person by the things their family members taught them to do when they were six or seven years old is totally out of order, reserving my condemnation for the adults in photograph (Edward VIII and the Queen Mother) who were both clearly old enough to know better.

It wasn't one of my best images, nor one of my most popular, but it had been shared almost 1,000 times and attracted many hundreds of comments (ranging from highly supportive to critical to the point of hurling abuse and insults). After I returned from an evening out playing snooker with my brother I was surprised to find that the image had been unilaterally deleted by Facebook, without explanation, meaning that somewhere in the region of 1,000 people had had the item censored from their Facebook walls, and hundreds more had had their comments on the infographic erased without trace.

It was fairly easy to establish what had happened from the gloating private messages I'd received from the royalists who had mass reported the image to Facebook. In my view these people are just as bad as the Nazi sympathisers that they are trying to defend. Instead of attempting to debate the issue, they decided that the best course of action would be to have the subject censored out of existence, without a care for the freedom of speech of all of the people they were erasing the comments of.

Funnily enough I had no intention of writing more about the issue, but the actions of these censorious royalists mean that instead of a simple, and actually quite sympathetic infographic, they've provoked me into writing a whole article about the Nazi tendencies of the English establishment in the 1930s, the truly pathetic apologetics of the royalists, the evils of censorship and the shroud of secrecy that cloaks the royal family from proper scrutiny.

Nazi sympathisers in the English establishment

During Hitler's rise to power, and even up until the outbreak of war, there were a truly shocking number of Nazi sympathisers in the English aristocracy. It is uncontentious to assert that Edward VIII and the Queen Mother were Nazi sympathisers, as were the Daily Mail proprietor Lord Rothermere and a significant swathe of the Tory party (just look into things like the Anglo-German Link and the shockingly anti-Semitic Right Club if you don't believe me). 

I've written more about the subject of establishment Nazi sympathisers in this article contrasting the fates of the war hero Alan Turing and the traitor William Forbes Sempill.

Ridiculous apologetics from royalists

At first royalists didn't know what to say about the images of the Royal family practicing their Nazi salutes. Early efforts to distract people from the subject focused on their outrage that the copy of the short film clip had apparently been taken without the owners' consent, which is about as spurious a defence as I've ever heard. If someone stole a child porn collection from a paedophile and handed it to the police, should the concerned citizen be done for theft while the paedophile is left in peace?

The weird thing is that this technicality about how the archive footage had been obtained was soon replaced by an even more spurious argument about how nobody in 1933 could possibly have understood that Adolf Hitler and the fascist movements in Europe were a bad thing.

Here are a few salient facts:

• 1922: Benito Mussolini's fascist regime established (some 11 years prior to the royal family filming themselves doing fascist salutes).
• 1923: Hitler attempts to lead a fascist Coup d'etat against the German state.
• 1925: Volume one of Adolf Hitler's anti-Semitic diatribe Mein Kampf is published.
• 1926: All trade unionism in Italy is outlawed with the exception of a few fascist controlled unions.
• 1929: Heirich Himmler appointed head of the SS.
• 1929-1933: Hitler's Brownshirst participate in ever more violent and deadly street battles with opposing political groups.
• 1930s: Lord Rothermere directs his newspapers (Daily Mail, Daily Mirror) to publish regular pro-fascist propaganda pieces praising Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany.
• 1931: The convicted murderer and vehement anti-Semite Micah Von Helldorff is appointed as the head of the Berlin brownshirts.
• 1932: Oswald Mosley forms the British Union of Fascists, which begins to draw a great deal of support from the aristocratic classes.
• January 1933: Hitler rises to power and begins banning all other political parties.
• February 1933: Hitler begins enacting his plan to rearm Germany.
• March 1933: Dachau concentration camp is opened and Hitler's power over the German state is cemented by the passing of the Enabling Act.
• April 1933: New laws are introduced to purge Jews and members of left-wing organisations from public occupations in Germany.
• May 1933: Trade unionism is banned throughout Germany, while the public are encouraged to attend mass book burnings.
• July 1933: The Daily Mail proprietor Lord Rothermere lavishes praise on Hitler and the Nazi movement in an article entitled "Youth Triumphant".

It is entirely fair to say that people in the 1930s could have no conception of the full scale of the horrors that were to come as a result of the rise of Fascism in Europe, but to pretend that people must have been completely naive of what was happening at the time is an abject fantasy designed to deflect attention away from the fact that during the 1930s large numbers of the English aristocracy and members of the royal family were Nazi sympathisers, despite the growing public knowledge of the totalitarian and anti-Semitic nature of the ideology.

It is interesting to think about why the fascist ideology appealed so strongly to the inherited privilege classes of British society. In my view it makes a great deal of sense that people who had been brought up to believe in their inherent superiority over the common people would be attracted to an ideology based on the concept of an inherently superior master race, and the brutal repression of ordinary working people who might beg to differ.

The royal veil of secrecy

The leaked footage of the royal family doing Nazi salutes has brought new found pressure on the royal family to lift the veil of secrecy over the post-1918 political content in the royal archives, but this isn't the only example of the royal family hiding behind a shroud of secrecy.

Both Labor and the Tories spend years of effort and significant amounts of public money trying to prevent the public from seeing the "black spider memos" sent by Prince Charles to various government ministers, and in 2011 the Tory party introduced new legislation to exempt the taxpayer funded royal family from Freedom of Information requests.

In my view the royal family shouldn't be allowed to hide their interference in our democracy, nor their financial affairs behind a veil of secrecy because they receive £millions per year in taxpayer subsidies. I don't think they should be getting this money at all, but the fact that they can spend it as they please with no public scrutiny is totally outrageous.

The "I don't like what you people are saying so I'm going to have it censored" attitude

Regular readers will know that I maintain an almost unbreakable no-censorship policy on my Facebook page and blog. People are absolutely free to disagree with me, point out where they think I'm wrong, present their opposing opinions, even hurl foul mouthed abuse at me. I don't tend to delete anything unless it's either unlawful (libellous accusations, calls for ethnic genocide, incitement to murder ...) or bullying towards other users of the page.

I let all kinds of wrongheaded and abusive comments stand because I like to let people's words speak for themselves. To give an example - One short foul mouthed, bigoted and grammatically flawed tirade from an angry Ukipper is capable of telling people far more about the kind of people that UKIP attracts than the most well-crafted 2,000 word article from a "leftie" like me, so why on earth would I delete such a tirade?

This is the infographic that some royalists hated so much that
they got it deleted from Facebook.

One of the things that makes Britain a fairly decent place to live is that we have freedom of expression (at least for now, until Theresa May abolishes it). Thus I am free to say "I dislike the monarchy and other forms of anti-democratic privilege" and not be thrown in jail for it. It seems that the monarchists who had my infographic deleted have a completely different attitude. They don't give a damn about freedom of speech. They don't give a damn about tolerating other people who might have different beliefs and ideas to their own. They don't give a damn that their successful effort to have the image censored resulted in hundreds of comments being deleted, including many from other royalists.

I have nothing against the royalists who entered into debate in the comments beneath my image. They are just entitled to their opinions as I am entitled to mine. The people I have an issue with is those who have taken actions that resulted in the censorship of thousands of people, simply because they found what I've said offensive. These people are cowards who are afraid of open debate, and would surely be more at home in the very same kinds of fascist dictatorships that they are so keen to obscure the sympathies their beloved royal family had for back in the 1930s.

I'm pretty sure that these people are far too belligerent to fully appreciate the irony of what they've done.

 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.

Open government - you're having a laugh

In the buildup to the 2010 General Election David Cameron and the Tories made numerous pledges that they would lead the most open and transparent government ever. When they came to power thanks to the backing of the Liberal Democrats, they reiterated this pledge in the Coalition Agreement.

Here are a few quotes:

"We need to harness the internet to help us become more accountable, more transparent and more accessible - and so bridge the gap between government and governed. The democratization of access to information...is eroding traditional power and informational imbalances." - George Osborne March 2007 [source for quote]

"The Government believes that we need to throw open the doors of public bodies, to enable the public to hold politicians and public bodies to account."
(Coalition Agreement p20, 2010)

"Information is power. It lets people hold the powerful to account, giving them the tools they need to take on politicians and bureaucrats. It gives people new choices and chances, allowing them to make informed judgments about their future." - David Cameron - "We are creating a new era of transparency" June 2011

There are many indicators that this 'open and transparent government' agenda is nothing more than a hollow propaganda narrative. Here are just a few of them.

The Royal Family
[Main article  - Do the Royals really make us richer?]

After using a spurious justification in order to dismiss a Freedom of Information request into how members of the royal family had been using secretive powers of veto to interfere with government legislation, the Tories decided to do away with the problem once and for all in January 2011 by exempting the royal family and their staff from Freedom of Information legislation, even if the information happens to be in the public interest.

This was the reaction of Ian Davidson (a former member of the Public Accounts Committee):

"I'm astonished that the Tory led Government should find time to seek to cover up royal finances. When I was on the PAC, what we wanted was more disclosure not less ... Every time we examined royal finances we found extravagance and indulgence as well as abuse of expenses by junior royals ... Everywhere we looked, there were savings to be made for the Government. This sends the wrong message about public disclosure and accountability."

Workfare
[Main article - Letter to the Information Commissioner]

One of the longest running campaigns in the Tory "war on accountability" is their refusal to comply with numerous Freedom of Information demands that they release information on which companies are involved in their economically illiterate mandatory unpaid "Workfare" schemes. The astonishing justification for this refusal to comply with their statutory obligation to release the information is that disclosure of the involved companies would lead to a public backlash against them, causing them to abandon their involvement with Workfare and resulting in the collapse of these Tory unpaid labour schemes.

The quite extraordinary argument against disclosure is that if the public knew the truth, the Tories wouldn't be able to continue what they are doing.

Is this, "we can't reveal what we're doing, otherwise we wouldn't be able to continue doing it" argument in any way compatible with Tory claims that they want to democratise information and make government more transparent?

Secret Courts
[Main article - Secret Courts and the very Illiberal Democrats]

In march 2013 the coalition government passed legislation to introduce secret courts, a move which provoked international condemnation from human rights groups across the globe.

For those of you that are not familiar with this legislation - As it now stands, defendants (or claimants in civil cases) can be excluded from the hearings where their fates are decided; they will not be allowed to know what the case against them is; they will not be allowed to enter the courtroom; they will not be allowed to know or challenge the details of the case; and they will not be allowed representation from their own lawyer, their own lawyer will not be allowed to know the case or evidence against them, nor enter the courtroom - but they will instead be represented (in their absence) by a security-cleared government appointed 'special advocate'.
In order to introduce this totalitarian legislation in the way they intended it, the coalition had to carefully unpick several amendments added to the bill in the House of Lords, and then they had to vote down an amendment tabled by Caroline Lucas of the Green party to put an obligation on judges to at least consider "public interest in the fair and open administration of justice" before launching any secret court proceedings.

Does it seem like the action of a government with a commitment to openness and transparency to vote down an amendment to ensure that secret courts can only be used on the condition that judges first consider public interest in the fair and open administration of justice?

Raped by the state

One of the reasons for the introduction of repressive secret court legislation is that the government and the police are absolutely desperate that outrageous cases like the Mark Kennedy agent provocateur affair (the policeman that infiltrated an environmental movement, acted as an agent provocateur and formed sexual relationships with several women) and the Bob Lambert case (a policeman that stole the identity of a dead child to infiltrate an animal rights group, is accused of participating in a terrorist bomb attack, fathered a child with an activist and then abandoned them completely - paying no child support at all - when his deployment came to an end in 1989) being heard in open court.

In my view the public, and especially the women that bore children to these agent provocateurs have a right to know exactly who authorised these operations, who in government know about them, whether such operations still continue and what is going to be done to punish those responsible for these crimes. However, the public, and the victims of this state orchestrated abuse not get to find out because the decision has been made that such cases will be heard in secret tribunals.

Some commitment to transparency eh?

"Nothing to hide, nothing to fear"
[Main article - David Cameron's witch hunt against truth and openness]

In June 2013 the Foreign Secretary William Hague used the Orwellian "nothing to Hide - Nothing to Fear" argument in a desperate attempt to defend the anti-democratic mass surveillance operations of the state. Here's precisely what he said:

"If you are a law abiding citizen of this country going about your business and your personal life, you have nothing to fear—nothing to fear about the British state or intelligence agencies listening to the contents of your phone calls or anything like that." [Video clip]

 Over the following months the Edward Snowden leaks have revealed numerous things that demonstrate that not only was William Hague guilty of misappropriating an Orwellian argument, but that he was also being dishonest too. here are some of the revelations:

• The UK secret services routinely steal millions of private communications and store them on a vast database.
• The UK secret services allow the United States secret services access to this stolen information.
• Hundreds of thousands of private sector contractors in the US also have access to this stolen information.
• Many of the data stealing projects operated by the UK secret services were instigated without parliamentary approval, or parliamentary oversight. No bills were passed to authorise such schemes, and the Joint Intelligence Committee (the ones that are supposed to "watch the watchmen") were kept completely in the dark about the existence of several enormous data stealing operations.
• Several members of the intelligence services gave unreliable, and in some cases, downright misleading evidence to the Joint Intelligence Committee.
• GCHQ spied on numerous foreign politicians, who were clearly just "law abiding citizens" [of other countries] going about their business, but the UK surveillance state decided to use their anti-terrorism powers to steal their private data. If they are prepared to risk international condemnation by stealing the data of foreign leaders, what makes you think they would think twice about hacking into your emails, Facebook account or Skype conversations.

Even if all of these revelations are not enough to demonstrate that Hague's "nothing to hide - nothing to fear" argument is hopeless, then a simple appeal to "Tory logic" is enough to utterly destroy it.

The Tories are always desperate to tell us that the state is inherently inefficient in order to justify their ideological privatisation agenda - but to claim that we have nothing to fear is to imply that there is absolutely no incompetence and absolutely no corruption in the secret services, and that the secret services have a perfect system of oversight!

Either the state is inherently inefficient or the state is perfect. It simply can't be both.

In my view the opportunities for corruption and incompetence are stunningly obvious given that the Joint Intelligence Committee (who are supposed to be the ones that provide oversight) were kept completely in the dark about the existence of entire data stealing programmes.

In my view, Hague's misappropriated Orwellian "nothing to hide - nothing to fear" argument can easily be reversed and aimed at the intelligence community. If they have nothing to hide, they why on earth did they fear admitting the existence of entire data stealing operations to the Joint Intelligence Committee?

How have David Cameron and the Tories reacted to these shocking revelations? They've started a witch hunt against the newspaper that revealed the information of course. They're not bothered about the bypassing of parliament by the secret services in order to conduct unlawful data stealing operations, they're too busy trying to shoot the messenger!

Censoring the internet
[Main articles - A serious look at David Cameron's Internet Firewall & A satirical look at David Cameron's Internet Firewall]

In July 2013 David Cameron announced plans to roll out mass censorship of the Internet. He used the "Moral Trojan Horse"of protecting children from pornography to champion a Internet Firewall system which is run by a gigantic Chinese corporation (Huawei) in order to filter traffic for TalkTalk.

Cameron wants all Internet Service Providers to install similar Firewalls to all inteernet connections in the UK. It is important to note that the Chinese operated Firewall system David Cameron has been championing doesn't just filter out pornographic material, it also filters several other categories too, which include "games", "social networking", "dating", "drugs and alcohol" and "suicide and self-harm". It has been suggested that Cameron's firewall will also be used to block content that is described as "Extremist", "Esoteric" and "web forums".

It is absolutely clear that this is an effort to control the internet with a "net nanny" for every home. It is worth noting that Another Angry Voice is routinely blocked by "net nanny" software. If Cameron's Internet Firewall is rolled out, you'll either have to put yourself on a list of non-conformists by opting out of most of the filters, or you'll have to do without sites like mine, what is exactly what the Tories want. To them the Internet is way too open and free, they want to return to the days when the majority of the public got their news drip-fed to them by the corporate media, and the best way to achieve that is to censor the internet to ensure that the public never actually get to visit independent sites like my own.

Hiding the evidence 

In November 2013 Computer Weekly revealed that the Tory party have conducted a purge of their website in order to erase from history records of all of their speeches for before the 2010 election. The reason for such a purge seems to be quite obvious, they don't want people pointing out the lies they told before the 2010 General Election because they don't want people like me digging up embarrassing stuff to illustrate their dishonesty/hypocrisy - in the way that I did with the Lib-Dem energy minister Ed Davey last month.

The Tories claim that this purge of their website was just a "tidy up", but that interpretation is blown out of the water by the fact that they also introduced a special bit of code to ensure that the speeches are also erased from the Internet Archive. If this mass deletion of information was just a houskeeping exercise as the Tories would like us to believe, one is left wondering why they went to such efforts to ensure that the records of these speeches were also erased from the Internet Archive too.

It is quite remarkable that a party that bragged on and on about their commitment to open government and claimed that the Internet is a great tool for holding politicians to account, have gone to such lengths to erase their speeches (not only from their own website, but from the Internet Archive too) in order to prevent the public from holding them to account for their lies, misrepresentations and broken promises.

Conclusion

Given the wealth of evidence I've presented, it is absolutely clear that the Tory claims that they are creating a "new era of transparency" are just more Tory lies. That Tory politicians would spout entirely misleading propaganda narratives is hardly an earth shattering conclusion (if you haven't learned to distrust Tory politicians by now, you really are utterly beyond hope), so I'll add something else too.

The fact that the Tory propaganda narrative that they are creating an open and accountable government is totally contradicted by their actions (Secret Courts, their plans to censor the internet, their contempt for Freedom of Information rulings and their attempts to hide their lies by purging their own website and deliberately blocking the Internet Archive ...) yet there are still plenty of Tories queuing up to defend them, illustrates the astonishing levels of cognitive dissonance that tribalist Tories are able to tolerate. The tribalist Tory is so infatuated with the party that they render themselves completely incapable of spotting even the most blatant mutual contradictions in what the Tory party say and do.

There isn't the slightest chance that we will ever be able to convince these people (they are as immune to our facts, evidence and logical consistency as we are to their rhetoric, assumptions and outright lies) which means that our only hope is that we can outnumber them.

 Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for  Another Angry Voice  is the  PayPal  donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

 

More articles from
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 
            
David Cameron's witch hunt against truth and openness
         
Do the Royals really make us richer?
                   
Workfare, neoclassical economics and tabloid mindsets
          
Secret Courts and the very Illiberal Democrats
     
How David Cameron's Firewall would change the Internet
      
The myth of right-wing patriotism

           
The Tory "War on Justice"

        

What is ... Wage Repression?

  

The "all in this together" fallacy

    

What is ... a justification narrative?

                                            

Tory Bedroom Tax: tax the poor, subsidise the rich

One of the most unpopular policies from a government that seem absolutely intent on ramming through as much rotten legislation as possible, is "Bedroom Tax".

In the months leading up to the introduction of "Bedroom Tax" there was a storm of criticism. I wrote several articles damning the plans as malicious, grotesquely hypocritical and economically illiterate. I also pointed out that some 70% of affected families have one or more severely disabled members.

One of the main objections I raised was that a desperate shortage of smaller social housing, and the fact that priority is always given to the most needy (such as homeless families) ahead of people simply wanting to relocate, would mean that families would be trapped in a situation where they couldn't relocate to a smaller social property, even if they tried.

Now that the scheme has been in operation for four months, it has become absolutely clear that my prediction was absolutely correct. Freedom of Information requests have shown that (of the local councils that bothered to collect the data) there are an average of only 3.8 smaller social houses going spare, for every 100 families affected by "Bedroom Tax". This means that the stated Tory justification narrative for "Bedroom Tax" (that it will incentivise families to relocate to smaller properties) is totally inapplicable to an astonishing 96% of families effected by the scheme.

It is also important to remember that relocating families will be unlikely to get many of these smaller properties, given that high priority cases like homeless families, or people living in temporary accommodation like bedsits, will always get priority over people that have a stable home environment.

The fact that the overwhelming majority of social housing tenants affected by "Bedroom Tax" have absolutely no possibility of relocating to a smaller social housing property means that they are left with two options.

1. They can stay where they are and pay the tax. This would mean that "Bedroom Tax" works as a housing tax on some of the poorest families in society.

2. They can move to a smaller, but more expensive property in the private rental sector, meaning an increased Housing Benefit Claim. This would mean that "Bedroom Tax" works as method of increasing taxpayer subsidisation of the private rental sector.

The thing that exposes the sheer malice of imposing a housing tax on hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable families in the UK, is that in the very same week that "Bedroom Tax" was launched, the Tory led government also introduced an average £100,000 a year tax cut for Britain's 13,000 income millionaires.

The false economy of driving people out of their homes and into the private rental sector, meaning an increase in their Housing Benefit claims, is stunningly obvious. However economic literacy is clearly of little importance if the objective of the scheme is actually to greater transference of public wealth to the private rental sector.

It hardly seems like a coincidence that these two outcomes both align closely with the underlying philosophy of the Conservative party: "Take from the poor, to give to the rich". In a way the Bedroom Tax can be seen as quite a clever scheme which kills two birds with one stone; it smashes the (Labour voting) poor, and enrichens the wealthy (Tory voting) rentier class.

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Tory priorities: Serve the rich, smash the poor
        

Do the Royals make us richer?

 After posting an image relating to the royal birth on the Another Angry Voice Facebook page I was inundated with countless iterations of the same basic claim; that the Royal family bring in more money to the economy than the £38 million in annual subsidies the Queen receives from the taxpayer.

One of these royal sycophants laughably attempted to substantiate their claim with an absurdly pro-monarchist clip on Youtube, in which a £160 million a year "net benefit" to the UK economy was claimed. That's the figure I'm going to consider in this article.

Before I get around to discrediting this £160 million figure as the nonsense that it is, lets first assume for a while that it is true. £160 million may sound like a lot of cash, but in perspective it's a piddlingly small amount given the enormous assets at royal disposal and the size of the UK economy. To put this alleged "net contribution" into context:

• £160 million is just 1.2% of the Queen's estimated net worth.
• £160 million is just 0.01% of UK GDP (which was £1.54 trillion in 2012)
• £160 million is just 0.02% of UK government expenditure in 2012 (£682 billion)
• £160 million is just 0.007% of the total UK national debt (which stands at £2.33 trillion if financial sector bailouts are included, as they should be).

The Queen is by far the biggest landowner in the world with 6.6 billion acres to her name (the next biggest landowner in the world is King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia with 830 million acres, just 12% of the Queen's land portfolio). In the UK, the Crown Estates' 384,000 acre landholding is estimated to be worth at least £8-10 billion, whilst the Duchy of Cornwall (another separate estate which has been run since 1377 for the benefit of the heir to the throne) consists of 133,000 acres, now worth an estimated £1.5 billion. Aside from the Royal property portfolios, vast swathes of the UK are still owned by the descendants of the aristocratic classes that were gifted huge tracts of stolen land by the royal family over the centuries (but that's another story).

If all the royal estates are added together this gives the royal family the third biggest land holding in the entire country after the Forestry Commission and the Ministry of Defence. This property portfolio includes some of the most potentially valuable buildings in the entire country and even half of the UK coastal seabed (which comes in quite handy if the government decides to pay you heaps of cash to build a load of offshore windfarms there).

Does it not seem a little odd that the royalist crowd are trying to cheer a piddling net contribution of just 1/5,000th of current UK government expenditure, from what is undoubtedly the largest private landholding in the country? Is it not even remotely possible that the Crown Estate, the Duchy of Cornwall and the various other property assets in the royal portfolio could be put to much more efficient economic usage than they are currently? 

Another factor worthy of consideration before I get around to discrediting the claimed £160 million "net benefit" is that the only people who could possibly be convinced that a contribution of just 0.02% of government expenditure represents a good deal, are those that are fervorent supporters of the institution of monarchy. Other people that are capable of putting this supposed contribution into context and considering whether the maintenance of such anachronistic inequality have social costs that outweigh the claimed financial benefits, are less likely to consider this a good deal. Put simply, people that cite this kind of fabricated evidence are the kind of people that know the price of everything and the value of nothing. 

In order to generate their £160 million figure, the royal apologist likes to add income generated from tourism into the mix, however they carefully exclude the possibility that tourism revenues could actually be massively increased by opening up the royal palaces to tourism (making one of them the most uber-exclusive hotel in the entire world perhaps). The Palace of Versailles is the single most lucrative tourist attraction in France, it's hard to imagine that it would generate quite as much revenue if it were still a private monarchical residence.

Imagine if the Crown Estate were privatised; carved up and sold off to the private sector like so many of our (actually quite useful) public assets have been over the last three decades.

How much do you think might be raised through the sale of over half a million acres of land, all those castles and palaces, and all that treasure? If just 1% of it per year were privatised, that would raise far more than this imaginary net contribution of £160 million.

Another factor that the royal apologist neglects to include in their calculations is that the royal estates are not subject to inheritance tax (like the assets of most wealthy people are). Surely the vast amounts of inheritance tax that the royal family will avoid when the Queen dies should be subtracted from the pie-in-the-sky £160 million figure? The net worth of the Queen is estimated to be £13 billion, so the £5.2 billion in inheritance tax bill they will avoid (around £87 million a year for every single year of her reign to date) should surely be subtracted from this supposed royal "net contribution".

Another factor to consider is the secretive powers the royal family have to manipulate government legislation to their own advantage. The Guardian tried for years to reveal the truth about these anti-democratic interventions but their Freedom of Information requests into what kind of insidious influence the royal family have had over parliamentary legislation were quashed by the Tory Attorney General Dominic Grieve using a rarely used power of veto and the absurd justification that the contents must remain secret because they could ruin the public perception of Prince Charles' political neutrality and "seriously damage his future role as king"! So according to Tory party logic, the public mustn't be allowed to know how the royal family have undermined democracy to further their own interests, because if they did know, they would be so outraged by the revelations that the royal family might fall as a consequence!

One must wonder what a secretive veto over parliamentary legislation could be worth in financial terms. It is clearly impossible to subtract the financial benefit of a secretive legislative veto from the supposed "net benefit" the royals provide, since the government won't even disclose what laws have been tampered with, let alone in what ways. If it is impossible to know exactly how the royals have benefited from such anti-democratic meddling, it's also impossible to estimate how much financial harm may have been inflicted on the wider UK economy simply in order to appease royal whims.

In January 2011, shortly after the ridiculous decision to veto disclosure of these anti-democratic royal interventions on the most spurious of grounds, the Tory party introduced new legislation to exempt the royal family and their staff from the Freedom of Information Act entirely. Even if disclosure would clearly be in the public interest, the Tories have now hidden the royal finances and their political interferences behind an impenetrable veil of secrecy. Here's what the former member of the Public Accounts Committee Ian Davidson said:

"I'm astonished that the Tory led Government should find time to seek to cover up royal finances. When I was on the PAC, what we wanted was more disclosure not less ... Every time we examined royal finances we found extravagance and indulgence as well as abuse of expenses by junior royals ... Everywhere we looked, there were savings to be made for the Government. This sends the wrong message about public disclosure and accountability."

One must wonder why such a conspicuous veil of secrecy over the royal finances is necessary. If the royal family really are the "net contributors" that royal sycophants endlessly claim that they are, then surely they should be proud to demonstrate their "net contribution" in an accountable manner, rather than deliberately hiding it from public scrutiny.

Given the exemption from inheritance tax, the extremely dubious "increased tourism" claims, the secretive powers to influence parliamentary legislation and the cloak of official secrecy over the royal finances, I believe the only people who would actually be taken in by the fantastical £160 million "net benefit" figure would be intellectually lazy ideological royalists in search of some big looking numbers to feed into their personal confirmation biases.

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