Theresa May's January 2017 Brexit speech was absolutely woeful stuff. We've been waiting for six damned months for the Tories to cobble together a Brexit negotiating stance, and after all that time the best they could come up with is: "Give in to our ridiculous demands to 'have our cake and eat it' or we'll turn our entire country into a bargain basement corporate tax haven and then you'll be sorry!".
It's remarkable that after six months all they've managed to come up with is a load of fantastical nonsense about cherry-picking Single Market access for corporations with the financial muscle to bribe or coerce the Tory party into defending their interests, and a load of ridiculous threats against our 27 former EU allies if they don't just cave in and give Theresa May what she wants!
The extraordinary thing is that loads of people are celebrating this embarrassing new low point in the history of British diplomacy as if it's some kind of incredible triumph!
Aside from revealing her inept threat-based negotiation tactics, Theresa May's long-awaited Brexit speech was dishonest, delusional and full of inherently contradictory nonsense.
Anyone with basic comprehension skills must surely have been able to spot how terribly flawed it was, but right-wingers actually lauded her for it. The front pages of the mainstream press cast her as if she's 'Thatcher reincarnated' sticking one to the 'nasty foreigners' on behalf of the 'plucky Brits', and I even saw one guy claiming that this useless hotch-potch of a speech was the best thing since Winston Churchill (a man who would surely be turning in his grave at such an inept orator leading the Tory party and announcing her plan to scrap the European Human Rights that he worked so hard to establish)!
This obviously isn't the first time the mainstream press have framed an absolutely woeful speech as if it's the best piece of oratory in years. Just before the 2014 Scottish independence referendum Gordon Brown gave a ludicrous anti-independence speech that started out by implying that all Scottish independence voters are not real people and deteriorated rapidly from there. Seeing the right-wing press, who had routinely savaged him for years, suddenly start heaping praise on the man for delivering "the speech of his life" was extremely telling.
It really doesn't matter how incredibly poor the actual content of the speech, nor even who is making it, if the theme aligns with interests of the tax-dodging billionaire press barons who own most of our media, then it's framed as having been absolutely brilliant. If it doesn't align with media moguls' interests then it's either ignored or it's lambasted, no matter how well crafted it actually is.
So the answer to the question of how to make a woeful speech into a great one is easy: All the hacks who work for the billionaire press barons have to do in order to re-frame a load of woeful cobblers as a brilliant piece of oratory is to tell people that it was brilliant. So many of us these days are completely unwilling/unable to question what we read that blatantly obvious lies easily end up as "common sense" truths, and utterly pathetic speeches become incomparably great ones.
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The Economist is hardly what anyone would call a left-wing magazine. In fact the distinct lack of critical analysis during George Orborne's six ruinous years of ideological austerity, makes it fair to say that the Economist is the kind of magazine that sits comfortably on the coffee tables of plenty of blue-to-the-core Tories. This is a magazine that knows their market, and isn't prone to harming their bottom line by giving their centre-right audience cognitive dissonance headaches by ripping the guts out of the Tory party.
The Economist isn't prone to overt criticism of the Tory party, so their Theresa Maybe front page and the scathing editorial to accompany it has become quite the political sensation.
The Brexit shambles
The main thrust of the Economist editorial's criticism is that Theresa May is dithering over Brexit. The accusation is well founded. She's working to a self-imposed deadline of March 2017 to get her Brexit strategy sorted out but there simply doesn't seem to be any progress beyond feeble platitudinous sound bites like "Brexit means Brexit" and the even more pitiful "red, white and blue Brexit".
Nobody is asking Theresa May and the three Brexiteers to give away their entire negotiating strategy, but what everyone wants to see is the basic outline of a negotiating stance.
It's been almost six months since she bagged herself the top job, and her self-imposed Article 50 deadline is getting closer by the day, yet one of the top civil servants just resigned with a letter slamming the government for their lack of negotiating objectives.
How is it possible that the British people, and British businesses still don't even know the basics? We're two thirds of the way to her self-imposed deadline and nobody even knows if she's going to try to keep the UK in the single market or commit a massive act of economic self-harm by dragging us out of the biggest trading block on the planet on the back of a non-binding advisory referendum that didn't even mention the single market in the question.
What on earth have Theresa May and the Brexiteers been doing for six months? And how on earth can they justify keeping British industry in the dark for so long?
You don't have to be left-wing or right-wing to accept the fact that economic uncertainty is bad for the economy.
The situation seems to be that Theresa May believes that months of economic uncertainty are good for her political self-interest. She knows that whichever way she plays her cards she's going to take a pasting. Either she seeks to retain access to the single market which would provoke howls of outrage from the hard Brexiters (who are a fundamentally important Tory demographic) or she commits a massive act of economic self-harm by giving the hard Brexiters what they want, which would likely go down extremely badly with British businesses, especially the financial sector (which is by far the biggest source of Tory party donations).
Theresa May's solution to this Brexit conundrum is cowardice. She's clearly trying to hold off the storms of criticism for as long as possible by keeping the entire economy in a state of harmful uncertainty. As far as she's concerned the economic damage she's causing is a small price to pay in order to do what's best for her own political career, which she imagines to be a strategy of talking in platitudes and holding off the criticism for as long as possible.
The author is clearly a Tory sympathiser
The Theresa Maybe editorial is a good read because it's written by a clear Tory sympathiser who has obviously lost patience with Theresa May's Brexit shambles. They've lost patience so badly that they've finally stopped biting their tongue and come out and said it.
The article is peppered with clues that the author has Tory inclinations. The most bizarre of these numerous pro-Tory tells is the assertion that May had "a reputation for dogged competence at the Home Office".
- Theresa May insisted on swimming against the global tide towards rational drugs policy to force through an ideologically driven prohibitionist law that was derided by experts as "unenforceable".
If a woeful track record like this is capable of earning her a reputation for dogged ministerial competence, then I'd be fascinated to see what horrors would need to be committed in order for staff at the Economist to actually call someone out as incompetent.
Another pro-Tory tell is the way the article praises Theresa May for the way she "skillfully survived the Brexit referendum despite backing the wrong side". Theresa May clearly prioritised her own personal self-interest by keeping a low profile during the debate. It's obvious that she saw hanging on to one of the high offices of state and keeping as quiet as possible as a much better career move than picking a side and putting her best effort into supporting it.
Theresa May made just 29 media appearances during the EU referendum debate while Jeremy Corbyn made 123. Despite this massive gulf in effort between the pair, the mainstream media have set the narrative Jeremy Corbyn is to blame for Brexit, meanwhile Theresa May continues to actually get praised as "skillful" for her brazenly self-serving non-campaign!
The whole Theresa Maybe editorial is sprinkled with pro-Tory tells, but as infuriating as some of them are, these displays of pro-Tory bias actually give the piece a good deal of legitimacy. The author clearly isn't an obvious "leftie" like me, it's someone with strong Tory inclinations who has finally lost patience with Theresa May's abject dithering.
Control freakery
The Theresa Maybe article makes an interesting comparison. After raising the usual and predictable comparisons with Margaret Thatcher, the author then goes on to make a much more apt comparison with Gordon Brown.
"He, too, was thin-skinned. Like her, he moved into Downing Street without an election, in 2007. He also started with a fearsome reputation and big promises. And when it became clear he had little idea what to do with the job he had so coveted, he flopped."
It's undeniable that Theresa May displays two of the same glaring character weaknesses as Gordon Brown. She's a control freak who seems to think that the government has some kind of moral obligation to interfere in the lives of citizens as much as possible, and she's incredibly thin-skinned. When Jeremy Corbyn gets the better of her PMQs (which, despite his obvious limitations, he manages to do more often than not) May often completely loses her self-control and ends up scowling ferociously and giving furiously shrill replies.
Whether she ends up losing her grip on power at her first General Election like Gordon Brown did is another matter entirely. Admittedly it doesn't seem very likely now, but three years is a long time in politics.
What is "Mayism"?
The editorial points out that Theresa May was thrust into power just three weeks after David Cameron resigned in shame at the failure of his Brexit gamble. She got there via a farcical Tory leadership election in which Tory party members ended up being denied the opportunity to even vote, meaning that "Mayism" (whatever it is) has never faced any kind of electoral test at all.
The article then points out that May's political philosophy is hopelessly muddled, identifying her contradictory pronouncements on wanting Britain to be the most radical free-trade economy on the planet, whilst simultaneously going on about developing a British "industrial strategy". Unless May's industrial strategy consists of nothing more than "just leave it to the markets" then it's unlikely to be the kind of free-trade fanaticism she's hawking to the hard-right demographic.
This is the conclusion to the article:
"The need for every policy to be agonised over in Downing Street, the secrecy over Brexit and the silence on the government’s broader plans for Britain all point to the same problem: Theresa Maybe does not really know what she wants."
Does it really matter?
The inescapable conclusion is that Theresa May is a ditherer who doesn't really know what she wants.
She's clearly a self-serving career politician of the kind who seems to have been bought up on a diet of Ayn Rand's barmy hard-right pseudo-philosophy that pure self-interest is a virtue. She's got where she is by ruthlessly prioritising her own self interest, but now she's finally got her hands on the power she craved, she doesn't have any new ideas whatever. All she's got in her handbag is the authoritarian control freakery that saw her develop the most invasive state snooping laws in the developed world and indisputably the best Thatcher impersonation of all the female Tory MPs.
Disappointingly Thersa May's combination of incompetence, dithering, authoritarian control-freakery and an admittedly strong Thatcher impersonation are sufficient to satisfy millions of people. Her personal approval ratings are consistently better than any UK party leader aside from Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland, and the Tories are somehow soaring high in the polls.
It doesn't seem to matter how woefully inept the performances of Theresa May and her three Brexiteers continue to be. It doesn't seem to matter that her actions are clearly guided by ruthless self-interest rather than any great political conviction. It doesn't seem to matter that her rhetoric is profoundly dishonest or that her parliamentary answers are desperately evasive and clearly pre-written by a team of highly paid Tory wonks. She's got well over three years until the next election, and enough of the public adore her that she seems politically untouchable, no matter how much incompetent dithering she continues to do.
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Every Prime Minister leaves legacies. Margaret Thatcher left the Westminster establishment club utterly fixated on socially and economically ruinous hard-right neoliberal madness and the use of nasty divide and conquer propaganda, John Major left us the absolute shambles of rail privatisation, Tony Blair left the devastation of Iraq and the lawless sectarian chaos which eventually led to the rise of ISIS, Gordon Brown left us the enormous cost of bailing out the reckless bankers who had gambled themselves into insolvency, and David Cameron will always be remembered as the man who gambled the entire future of the UK in order to secure a bit of short-term political advantage at the 2015 General Election, and lost.
Cameron's failed EU gamble is clearly going to be the most significant defining legacy of his regime, but he leaves behind plenty of other toxic legacies too.
Cameron dragged the standard of political debate down from one appalling new nadir to the next; he brazenly misrepresented statistics; he evaded pretty much every parliamentary question with snidey pre-scripted put downs; he told countless outright lies to parliament and the public alike; and towards the end he even used parliamentary privilege to smear some random guy as an Islamist fanatic in an attempt to damage Sadiq Khan's London mayoral bid, when the only extremists he had actually been cavorting with was the Tooting branch of the Tory party!
Aside from losing his EU gamble and booting the standard of public debate into the gutter and then micturating on it for six revolting years, Cameron also left us the ideological vandalism of the English education system; the carve-up and mass privatisation of NHS services; a bigger increase in the national debt than every single Labour Prime Minister in history combined; an astonishing 205 unelected cronies stuffed into the House of Lords; the annihilation of local government services through ideological austerity; the longest sustained decline in wages since records began; an exponential rise in food bank dependency; 800,000 workers on exploitative Zero Hours contracts; financial sector reform booted into the long grass; the reinflation of the unsustainable house price inflation bubble; and huge numbers of deaths and suicides due to savage welfare reforms like "Bedroom Tax", sanctions targets and the WCA disability witch hunt.
It would take an amazing pair of blue-tinted spectacles to remain blind to all of the damaging legacies David Cameron has created, but one of his most significant blunders simply can't be ignored because he's left his successor Theresa May in an impossible bind over the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station.
The deal Cameron and Osborne struck to bribe the French and Chinese into building our energy infrastructure for us is absolutely woeful. In 2013 Cameron and Osborne agreed to a ridiculous price-fixing deal to pay double the market rate for electricity from the plant for 35 years, but the estimated cost of this rip-off deal has already quintupled in just three years to £30 billion!
The deal is so bad that even George Osborne's father-in-law (a former Tory energy minister) described the deal as "one of the worst deals ever for British households and British industry".
Not a single one of the nuclear reactors of this design has ever been successfully completed, and if it does go ahead it is already projected to become the most expensive object on earth (even before the inevitable cost overruns are taken into account).
Theresa May's only sensible option would be to scrap the deal, but that would be a foreign relations disaster. Not only would it anger the French at a time when we need to avoid infuriating our European neighbours as much as possible so that the Brexit deal isn't even worse than what we're already facing, it will also enrage the Chinese.
It really isn't a great idea to offer huge bribes to the Chinese to get them on board and then slap them in the face by scrapping the whole deal. Maybe that kind of behaviour is considered acceptable in Tory circles, but in China such behaviour is a grave insult because it leaves both parties in a face-losing situation.
Theresa May has been left in a situation where she's either going to have to gravely insult the Chinese and piss off the French at pretty much the worst juncture imaginable, or continue with Cameron's plan to lumber the British public with one of the worst rip-off deals in history.
For all of her faults (of which there are many) Theresa May is a belligerent sod, so there's still a small possibility that she'd choose to enrage the Chinese by scrapping Cameron's rip-off deal. However the much most likely course of action will to be lumber it on the taxpayer with full awareness that it's an abusively poor deal, but hit them with a propaganda war to redefine it as the best thing ever.
Whichever course of action Theresa May chooses, one of David Cameron's most appalling legacies is leaving this atrocious lose-lose situation for his successors to deal with.
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It was always astonishing that so many people still fall for the UKIP 'Trojan Horse' con, but the fact that UKIP have now created the Brexit chaos they wanted and their leader has cleared off as quickly as possible it's beyond explanation why so many people, especially working class people, still decide to support UKIP.
As has been pointed out many times before, UKIP is a Thatcherite political party. It is bankrolled by Tory party donors, it's stuffed full of failed, disgraced and defected Tory politicians and it pushes a "more Tory than the Tories" hard-right agenda.
For four decades the UK has been ruled over by a self-serving Westminster establishment with a fixation for hard-right neoliberal economic dogma. This fixation with hard-right economics has resulted in the deliberate destruction of British industries and the neglect of the communities they supported; an out of control self-serving financial sector elite who have pumped up vast house price and speculative asset bubbles at enormous detriment to the nation; the fire-sale/give-away of hundreds of £billions in public assets; rampant tax-dodging by corporations and the super-rich; and ever increasing levels of inequality.
Margaret Thatcher was the hard-right ideologue who started the process; John Major continued it (with stuff like his utterly botched privatisation of the railways); Tony Blair won the backing of the Murdoch propaganda empire by promising to continue the hard-right Thatcherite experiment; Gordon Brown squandered £1.5 trillion bailing out the reckless bankers with the biggest state subsidies in British history to save them from the bankruptcies they so richly deserved; then David Cameron spent six years pushing the same old hard-right economic dogma that caused the financial sector insolvency crisis as the cure to the crisis, simply by rebranding it as "austerity".
The purpose of UKIP is to soak up the discontent at the appalling consequences of the ideologically driven right-wing economic dogma favoured by the Westminster establishment club, and then channel it into a political party that serves to drag the political spectrum even further to the right.
The concept of a right-wing 'Trojan Horse' protest party designed to hoover up the anger at failed right-wing economic policies of the Westminster establishment and use it to drag the establishment political parties even further to the right is so cynical that it's obscene, but somehow people still keep falling for this faux protest party.
One of the main reasons people fall for it is that they are conditioned into believing in ludicrous right-wing tropes by an education system that teaches them to rote learn rather than apply critical thinking skills, and a mainstream media that constantly frames the political debate in terms of hard-right economics and immigrant-blaming being "common sense" and anything that actually questions the hard-right economic status quo of the Westminster establishment club as being "radical", "fanatical" or "dangerous".
When people are taught to mindlessly regurgitate what they're told from such a young age, it's no surprise that they end up rote learning the hard-right propaganda of the tabloid press and supporting fanatically right-wing political parties.
One of the most dispiriting things is the way UKIP have become so popular in the working class communities that have been completely ravaged by four decades of Thatcherite economic dogma. Given how hard-right economic ideology has trashed their communities, how could anyone from areas like the north east, the Welsh valleys or the former industrial towns in the Midlands end up throwing their support behind a bunch of hard-right Thatcherites like UKIP?
The only way it makes sense is if people have either failed to understand that the Westminster establishment has been dominated by hard-right Thatcherites for the last four decades (perhaps buying into the extraordinarily misleading extreme-right propaganda that people like Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron and Osborne were just a bunch of "lefties"), or they've failed to realise that UKIP is pushing an extreme version of the exact same policies that led to the social and economic ruination of their communities (perhaps buying into the simplistic propaganda narrative that immigrants, rather than the political establishment, are to blame for their problems).
Whatever the reason that people allowed themselves to be conned by the UKIP snake oil merchants, their main excuse for supporting UKIP is now gone. They can't continue to say, as so many of them used to, that they only support UKIP to get the UK out of Europe. After the vote for Brexit in June 2016 that reason is null and void.
If you're working class and you still find yourself supporting UKIP, now is the time to admit to yourself that your support goes beyond wanting to get the UK to quit the EU. It's time to admit that you actually support the hard-right economic policies that have ruined working class industries and communities up and down the country; distributed hundreds of £billions in public assets to private interests; repressed your wages; underfunded and undermined the services and welfare system you pay for through your taxes; turned a blind eye to the tax-dodging of corporations and the super-rich; and allowed the bankers to go on one reckless gambling spree after another resulting in an over-inflated housing market that has put home ownership beyond the means of millions of ordinary workers like you.
You need to admit to yourself that you support a "more of the same, but harder" party, and in doing so you're giving material support to the most right-wing elements of the Tory and Labour parties who think that the only way to win back the votes of people like you is to imitate UKIP by offering ever more right-wing policies.
You need to admit to yourself that by supporting UKIP, you're part of the problem, not part of the solution.
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.
Back in 2007 Theresa May wrote an article in which she furiously condemned the Prime Minister Gordon Brown for not having a democratic mandate after he was appointed as Tony Blair's successor and demanded an early General Election.
Nine years later when she was appointed as David Cameron's successor during an absolute fiasco of a Tory leadership election, she flatly refused to call a snap general election, which is extraordinary for other reasons beside the searing hypocrisy of it.
Probably the most important reason a general election would be far is that after the referendum vote for Brexit the UK is clearly at a crossroads in history. There are many potential ways in which Brexit could be negotiated, but instead of putting it to the nation to decide what kind of Brexit they want, the public are simply being lumbered with a probably the most fanatical right-wing authoritarian in David Cameron's cabinet who was appointed on the back of votes from just 199 Tory MPs, most of them millionaire, middle aged, white men.
Not only has Theresa May spent the last six years at the Home Office passing some of the most illiberal and draconian legislation ever seen in the UK, she also has an appalling track record of missed targets, ideologically driven lunacy and incompetence too.
Lots of Brexiters tried to deny the warnings that voting to quit the EU would end up with David Cameron being replaced with someone even more fanatically right-wing than he is and then them ruling over us with impunity for the next four years, but that is precisely what has happened.
Just imagine the damage that can be done during the negotiation period with the EU, during their comprehensive restructuring of the legal system, in dealing with extremely complex constitutional issues like a second Scottish independence referendum and the open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic.
Another consideration is that Theresa May will only benefit from a majority government because of the Tory electoral fraud that was committed in more than two dozen marginal constituencies. If Theresa May actually gave a damn about legitimate democratic mandates she'd at least call by-elections in all the constituencies that the Tory party cheated in.
Theresa May's complete U-turn on whether new Prime Ministers should call a General Election in order to seek a democratic mandate is a staggering display of self-serving hypocrisy. She's clearly not even remotely interested in democratic mandates, because if she was, she'd call the snap election she demanded of Gordon Brown back in 2007.
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.
The Labour coup plotters have selected Angela Eagle as their candidate to try to oust Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour party.
Given that she only managed to finish fourth out of five candidates in the Labour Deputy Leadership election less than a year ago, it does seem like a big stretch of the imagination to think that she's somehow more "electable" than the political phenomenon Jeremy Corbyn (who has managed to literally double the Labour Party membership in the space of a year). Somehow there are a lot of Labour MPs who live in such an insulated bubble of internal party politics that such a feat of imagination is possible, so she's their chosen Anyone But Corbyn candidate.
Eagle finally threw her hat into the ring over the second weekend of July 2016. after an interminable display of foot dragging over launching her official leadership challenge (which went on for so long that the Tory leadership contenders were whittled down from five to two during the wait!).
Her leadership bid got off to a very sticky start in a BBC radio interview with Rachel Shabi who did nothing more than attempt to ask her a question about her voting record:
"I am wondering why this time round, given the sort of political record you have got, supporting the Iraq War, opposing the inquiry into the Iraq War, supporting university tuition fees, abstaining from the welfare bill…"
Angela Eagle didn't even allow the journalist to finish asking the question before rudely interrupting with a ridiculous accusation:
"You sound like you are reading one of the rather nasty little memes going round on Twitter."
A response like that to a reasonable question about her voting record just goes to show how unsuited for leadership Eagle actually is. If she responds to an entirely factual question about her own voting record with a furious conspiracy type insinuation that the question is motivated by a social media bullying campaign, then how on earth is she going to cope with all the absolute muck that the right-wing press will inevitably throw at her?
Does Angela Eagle seriously imagine that right-wing hacks working for the Daily Mail, Express and Murdoch press are going to give her an easier ride than they gave to previous Labour leaders like Gordon Brown or Ed Miliband?
The facts are undeniable. Angela Eagle did vote for the invasion of Iraq, she did vote to obstruct an inquiry into the Iraq invasion, she did vote to lumber future generations of university students with huge debts, she did abstain from voting on the appalling Tory welfare bill.
The way that she was entirely unwilling to justify any of those voting decisions is telling. She clearly tried to avoid defending her own appalling actions by leaping straight into angry, defensive evasion mode. Behaviour like this is just another example of the evasive, dishonest, self-serving and unaccountable political class that the rise of a straight-talker like Jeremy Corbyn is a reaction against.
Another thing that beggars belief about Angela Eagle claiming that people pointing out her actual parliamentary voting record is inspired by some "nasty" social media vendetta is that she's just participated in a grubby pre-planned coup to overthrow Jeremy Corbyn in a staggeringly insincere manner.
Just two weeks after praising Jeremy Corbyn for "pursuing an agenda that would make a 25-year-old tired" in support of the Remain campaign, she slammed him for making the case for remain with "half-hearted ambivalence". How the hell can she claim that people presenting facts and evidence is "nasty" when she is willing to contradict herself so brazenly in order to stab her party leader in the back.
Just look at the calm manner in which Jeremy Corbyn has dealt with a load of members of his own party stabbing him in the back, and his obvious disappointment with such staggering insincerity and disloyalty from coup plotters like Angela Eagle. He hasn't descended into furious tirades or conspiracy theory nonsense. He's tried to get on with his job under ridiculously difficult circumstances, and even said that the pressure he is under is nothing compared to the real pressure of things like poverty, hunger, debt, job insecurity and homelessness.
Contrast Corbyn's calmness and his efforts to put his own political difficulties into real perspective with Angela Eagle's unhinged response to a totally legitimate question about her actual voting record and ask yourself who is more cut out for leadership: The guy who keeps his calm in a sea of chaos, or the woman who completely loses the plot over a perfectly legitimate question?
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.
The EU referendum debate is an incredibly important one, the outcome of which will decide the entire socio-economic future of the UK. It doesn't matter which side you're on, or whether you haven't made up your mind yet, it's clearly a decision that is going to have huge social and economic repercussions.
The problem of course is that both sides of the debate are engaging in desperate and pathetic fearmongering tactics in order to try to frighten people over to their side of the argument.
The Brexit camp have combined utterly dishonest fearmongering tactics and pathetic Third Reich comparisons with an abject failure to spell out anything resembling a coherent economic strategy for what a post-Brexit economy would actually look like. Meanwhile senior figures on the "Bremain" side of the debate have taken to fearmongering about economic Armageddon should the British public vote to leave the EU. No doubt Gordon Brown will soon be wheeled out to scare pensioners into believing that Brexit would cost them their pensions, just like he scared the overwhelming majority of Scottish pensioners into shooting down a Scottish independence movement that was actually supported by the majority of working age voters.
How did it come to this?
Anyone who followed the Scottish independence referendum will have seen how the Unionist camp beat the hope and optimism of the Yes campaign with their "Project Fear" tactics. In fact the director of Better Together Blair McDougall openly admitted that the Unionists could have lost the Scottish independence referendum without having resorted to such desperate fearmongering tactics.
The victory of "Project Fear" in Scotland made it completely inevitable that the EU referendum debate would turn into a desperate fearmongering competition replete with spurious Hitler analogies and terrifying forecasts of economic doom from both sides of the debate.
Tories on both sides
If the success of "Project Fear" in Scotland didn't make a fearmongering arms race completely inevitable, the presence of senior Tories on both sides of the debate certainly did.
Fearmongering rhetoric is the favourite tactic of the Tory party. If they're not still harking on about the 1970s or blaming Labour for the 2007-08 global financial sector insolvency crisis, they're running a filthy BNP style muck-slinging, Islamophobic divide and conquer campaign to get their latest Eton posh-boy installed as Mayor of London.
Any debate that has foul-minded people like David Cameron, Theresa May and George Osborne on one side and horrifically right-wing zealots like Michael Gove, Boris Johnson and Iain Duncan Smith on the other is clearly going to end up getting messy.
With self-serving and fundamentally dishonest Tories on both sides of the debate, the degeneration of the argument into a sub-Tabloid level fearmongering farce was completely inevitable.
Driving people away from the debate
Over the last few weeks by far the most common request from people who follow the Another Angry Voice Facebook page has been for some relatively unbiased, fact-based analysis of the EU debate.
There are clearly an awful lot of people who would actually like to make their minds up about the EU based on facts and evidence, but they're being driven away from the debate in droves by the heavily biased fearmongering propaganda being pumped out by both sides.
Totally unbiased coverage is impossible
I can't promise to give a completely unbiased angle because I believe that quitting the EU when the Brexiters have completely failed to come up with anything resembling a coherent economic strategy for what a post-Brexit UK would actually look like would be a spectacularly reckless move. Brexit under such conditions would empower the hard-right fringe of the Tory party, and with no actual blueprint for what they plan to do, it would give them free rein to do whatever the hell they want.
I strongly believe that it would be a classic case of "out of the frying pan, into the fire" to bail out of an EU that is riddled with right-wing economic dogma, but in the process hand even more political power to fringe right-wing Tories who are much more fanatical pushers of hard-right economic dogma than the EU institutions.
I'm not a big fan of the EU, but if your boat has a few holes in it, it's generally a good idea to first attempt to repair the holes and bail out the water, rather than immediately abandoning ship and trying to swim to some mystical fantasy island that doesn't even appear on any maps.
Even though I have my opinions and admit them openly, I'm certainly not going to allow my commentary to descend into the utterly pathetic fearmongering seen from both sides of the debate so far. If you ever see me comparing the EU to the Third Reich or uncritically repeating projections of doom sourced from the very financial institutions that failed to even project the biggest financial crisis since the Wall Street Crash, then feel free to call me out on it.
Who benefits the most from this farce?
I'm of the opinion that a low turnout in the EU referendum would strongly favour the Brexit camp, and that the lamentably low standard of debate so far is making a lower turnout very much more likely. If people end up believing that both sides are feeding them inaccurate fearmongering propaganda, they're more likely to just abstain.
The head of Leave.EU Arron Banks has admitted that Brexit depends on a low turnout. He told a gathering of policy experts at the (extremely right-wing) Cato Institute that "If turnout is low, we win. If it’s high, we lose, our strategy is to bore the electorate into submission, and it’s working."
Driving fair-minded people away from the debate through the use of fearmongering tactics plays right into the hands of fanatically right-wing Brexiters like Arron Banks. People like him don't just know that a low turnout is necessary for them to get what they want, they openly admit that they're depending on it.
Conclusion
Trying to form an objective view on the EU referendum debate is very difficult because all economic projections are riddled with uncertainty. One thing you can be sure of is that anyone who tries to present economic projections as if they're facts, rather than theoretical outcomes based on fallible economic models, is not to be trusted. Without looking at the underlying assumptions built into the economic model that generated the predictions, the numbers are pretty much meaningless.
Another much more obvious thing you can be sure of, is that anyone who tries to compare the peaceful and co-operative structure of the EU to Hitler's militarist Nazi empire building is using desperately low smear tactics, and should be completely ignored.
It's becoming more and more obvious that really strong arguments from either side of the EU referendum debate are pretty damned rare in comparison to the sheer volume of fearmongering propaganda. Admittedly this is quite a dispiriting conclusion, but a good starting point for dealing with this situation is the adoption of the policy that it's a good idea to apply your critical thinking skills to pretty much everything anyone tries to convince you to believe, whether it's about the EU referendum or not.
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