Regular readers will be all-too-familiar with my recurring complaint that mainstream media pundits, self-appointed 'centrists' (orthodox neoliberals), and the Twitter Blue tick brigade are shockingly inept at holding the Tory government to account, and the absurd fact that the font Comic Sans is trending on Twitter is the most compelling piece of proof yet.
When the Tories put out a Tweet written in Comic Sans, it should have been blindingly obvious to everyone that they were banking on a load of hate shares whining about the use of this unpopular font in order to subversively spread their utterly disingenuous "get Brexit done" propaganda trope all over social media.
Little enough has been done to combat this absurdly backwards idea that rushing approval of the Withdrawal Agreement phase of Brexit is akin to getting Brexit done and dusted, but now "centrists" are actually sharing it in order to complain about the font it's written in!
Anyone with the most basic grasp on the actual process understands that the Withdrawal Agreement is just step one in a multi-step process, and furthermore, that if this initial step is botched, it makes the following phases even more complex and time-consuming to deal with.
But instead of aiming their fire at the central Tory deceit that rushing the initial phase is akin to completing the whole process, 'centrist Twitter' and even Remain Ultras like Ian Dunt decided to actively amplify the deceit in order to take aim at the font it was presented in.
Yes some political commentators had the sense to see the ploy for what it was, with Matt Turner and Jim Waterson both identifying and describing the ploy to their followers.
Matt came from the successful independent media site Evolve Politics, and Jim was one of the tiny minority of journalists to clock the crucial role social media virality was playing during the 2017 General Election, so it's little surprise that they have the social media awareness to actually spot what's going on.
Shamefully plenty of other social media commentators uncritically amplified the Tory Brexit deceit in order to have a dig at them for using Comic Sans, including the usually reliable and fairly impartial Election Maps UK Twitter account. I don't recall them having ever retweeted partisan party political propaganda before, but the comic sans bait was enough to trigger them into amplifying disgracefully misleading Tory propaganda.
As far as I'm concerned one of the absolute basics of social media literacy is to not retweet or share political lies, and if it is absolutely necessary to quote something, to do it in the form of a screenshot with annotations in order to clearly critique the lie.
But this Comic Sans thing is even worse than the all-too-common practice of actively amplifying political lies in order to criticise them, because the chosen criticism is so wildly misplaced.
Dunt and his ilk didn't even mention the fact that the central claim in the Comic Sans Tory statement was a grotesque misrepresentation of reality, because they were too busy fussing over the presentation!
People often complain about presentation taking precedence over policy in the political sphere, but this debacle illustrates another problem. So many of our political commentators these days are so obsessed with presentation that they'll endlessly fixate on trivialities like the font a statement was written in, or whether Johnson bothered to sign the extension letter, rather than the crucial core details - the central claim is a grotesque misrepresentation of reality, and the fact that Johnson had said he'd "rather die in a ditch" than send the extension letter that he ended up sending.
These people are supposed to be holding the Tories to account, rather than falling for their tricks and misdirection tactics like a bunch of hopelessly gullible rubes.
And the most worrying thing is that a lot of these absolute dupes have positioned themselves as the champions of the Brexit-sceptic movement.
But if these people are so intensely credulous and easily played that they can be tricked into uncritically amplifying Tory pro-Brexit propaganda, just because it's written in a notoriously naff font, how the absolute hell are they actually going to win this 'another roll of the dice' referendum they seem to want so much?
Our nation's future teeters on the cliff edge of a disastrous Tory-administered Brexit meltdown, and the people who should be holding the government to account are too busy railing against a god-damned font to actually notice that they're actively amplifying the bullshit Tory propaganda that they should be trying to criticise and critique.
If these people really are our Brexit-saviours, we might as well accept that we're well and truly doomed hadn't we?
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.
Before we even get started let's be absolutely clear that I'm not saying centrists are the same as the modern day extreme-right. I'm not doing that, so don't even dare try to misrepresent my point to pretend that I am.
Yes centrists wilfully collude with the extreme-right in preference to working with the left, as in the Lib-Dem pact with UKIP to take control of Bolton Council, or the Centre Party's fateful decision in 1933 to seal their own destruction by elevating Adolf Hitler to German Chancellor. And yes both ideologies revere capitalism. But nobody is pretending that they're the same.
What I am going to point out is that centrists and the modern day extreme-right have a tendency to use the exact same cynical debating trickery to delegitimise their critics, or anyone who dares question the groupthink of their ideology.
The extreme-right continually present their critics as being motivated by hatred of Britain and hatred of (their utterly warped interpretation of) "British values". They also regularly claim that opponents of their ideology are the victims of "brainwashing".
Centrists use the exact same tactic, repeatedly insinuating that criticism of their beloved ideology is motivated by hatred, bitterness, or insanity, and delighting in the accusation that anyone supporting the anti-austerity, anti-privatisation, pro-investment politics of the Labour left is a "cultist".
If you don't believe our propaganda, you're 'brainwashed'.
If you don't believe in our unquestionable centrist groupthink, then you're a 'cultist'.
It's the exact same delegitimisation tactic, and it's absolutely commonplace in both ideologies.
The point of it is to deter people from even considering the critique of their own ideology by labelling the critic as dangerous, unstable, insane, brainwashed, motivated by hate, or whatever other slur they can think of.
They don't want people actually debating the topic at hand, so they concentrate all of their effort on delegitimising the source, in the hope that others will not even bother looking into what the argument is actually about.
It's the tactic of bad faith cowards who know that they'd lose the argument if the debate was conducted fairly and decently, so they resort to cynical delegitimisation trickery to prevent that from happening.
Lib-Dems
I think it's important to criticise the Liberal Democrats for their role in helping the Tories enforce the living standards destroying austerity fanaticism that laid the groundwork for Brexit, then cashing in on the crisis they helped create by posing as glorious saviours who are going to rescue us all from the madness by ... errr ... printing up "Bollocks to Brexit" T-shirts" and begging for another referendum with no deal Tories running the show so they can totally rig the ballot by picking the options, wording, and timing of the vote to their own advantage.
It doesn't matter how much you base your criticism on facts, evidence, logic, and links to verifiable sources, the Lib-Dem response in the comments always consists of the same barrage of evasions, deflections, straw man misrepresentations, whataboutery, excuses, absurd Lib-Dem fairy stories, outright lies, and cynical delegitimisation tactics.
The strategy is to deflect debate away from the actual criticisms, and undermine the critic with claims that they must be insane, brainwashed, hysterical, deluded, or motivated by hate to even dare trying to criticise the ideological groupthink.
Ian Dunt
If you're not on Twitter you probably won't be familiar with this guy, but he's hot shit in the centrist and Remainer echo chambers like FBPE.
He's one of these noxious Remain Ultras who gets off on sneering at left-behind working class communities (rather than reaching out to try to explain that the living standards collapse they experienced was caused by domestic austerity fanaticism, not immigrants and the EU), smearing all Leave voters as horrible right-wingers,
and constructing bizarre fantasies that the UK was some kind of magnificent utopia under the Tory/Lib-Dem Austerity Coalition, before Brexit arrived, out of nowhere, and ruined everything.
He's a toxic Remainer who does more damage to the Brexit-sceptic cause with his wittering than good, and if other Remainers had any vague understanding of the strategic need to actually attract people to the cause rather than driving them away with toxic groupthink nonsense, they wouldn't revere and retweet him so god-damned much.
So the Guardian columnist Dawn Foster wrote an exceptional article in the Guardian criticising the Labour deputy leader Tom Watson for his campaign of internal wrecking tactics, and having a dig at the kind of centrist groupthink that Dunt and his ilk absolutely revel in.
Obviously Dunt hated it, but his Twitter response was absolutely telling.
Instead of critiquing any of the actual points raised in the article, or presenting anything even remotely counter-evidence, he resorted to ridiculing it as "off planet" insane, before questioning the fact that the mainstream media would allow such opinions to be published at all!
1. Refuse to debate or critique any of the actual points raised, simply deride opposing opinions as insane "thought crime".
2. Demand the mainstream media only ever promote the 'correct' groupthink worldview.
How is this mentality any different from the mentality of the far-right?
How is it even remotely possible to consider this kind of delegitimisation of non-conformist views, and craving for media censorship as any kind of liberalism?
Conclusion
As I said in the introduction I'm not arguing that centrism and the extreme-right are the same thing, so don't even try to pretend that I am.
What I'm saying is that their ideological adherents are prone to using the exact same delegitimisation tactics to deter people from even listening to their ideological opponents.
From deriding non-conformist opinions as insane, or deluded, or hate-motivated "thought crime" to demanding that the function of the mainstream media is solely to endlessly and unquestioningly repeat their own approved groupthink mentality.
Their politics may be different, but the illiberal and intolerant mindset, and the cynical debating trickery are very often exactly the same.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
One of the most irritating tropes that keeps doing the rounds in the Remainer echo chambers is that pre-2016 Britain was some kind of glorious good-natured utopia until 17.4 million Leave voters decided to fuck everything up on purpose for no good reason.
Aside from all the stuff I've detailed in the header image, just consider these facts:
- Tory austerity fanaticism also resulted in the closure of literally thousands of public facilities and services (hospitals, police & fire stations, Sure Start centres, libraries and other local government services ...) and left the remaining services massively over-stretched, under-funded, and under-staffed.
- Between 2010 and 2016 the two main areas of growth in Britain were in exploitative and unstable Zero Hours Contracts, and in people reduced to such poverty that they were left reliant on food bank charitable handouts.
All of this stuff was happening before the EU referendum in 2016, and the self-serving silence of the Tories and centrists during the EU referendum (because they didn't want to implicate themselves for supporting all of these ruinous policies) left the door wide open for the Brexiteers to cynically blame all of it (collapsing wages, crumbling public services, widespread poverty, shitty low-paid jobs ...) on immigrants and the EU.
Of course a lot of smug "centrists" were having a whale of a time between 2010 and 2016, entirely unconcerned by the ravages of austerity, social security vandalism, and wage repression because the horrifying consequences weren't falling on them ... but millions of us were fully aware that Britain wasn't the "moderate", "good-natured", "fundamentally calm country" of "good practical judgement" that exists in this absurd centrist delusion.
The most damaging thing about this bone-headed centrist delusion that because everything was fine and dandy for them pre-2016, it was fine and dandy for everyone else too, is the fact that this stance is so damned counter-productive.
If Remainers really wanted to convince Leave voters to switch allegiances in the "another roll of the dice" referendum they've invested so much effort in demanding, hitting the people you need to convince with this "everything was fucking marvellous before you stupid fuckers fucked it all up for no reason at all" attitude is about as counter-productive as you could imagine.
A practical approach to undoing this Brexit farce would be to try to understand the underlying causes of the Brexit vote, and to point out that most of the crap people were suffering in the neglected, de-industrialised, and left-behind communities that voted for Brexit was due to decades of hard-right neoliberal economic policies, ruinous Tory austerity fanaticism, unprecedented wage repression, and malicious public service vandalism ... not immigrants and the EU.
There's no way you change the minds of the appalling far-right ultranationalist Blue-Kippers in the Home Counties and the Shires because they'll always be financially insulated from the worst of the Brexit chaos, but it is at least possible to reach out to people in left-behind communities and explain that their suffering was caused by malicious domestic government policies like deindustrialisation, austerity, welfare vandalism, infrastructure under-investment, and severe public service cuts, not by membership of the EU.
But the smug centrist approach is to tell people in these communities that everything was always quite simply marvellous, and that they should have been perfectly happy with the pathetic crumbs that they were getting in a system that was working absolutely fine for the well-to-do, rather than deciding to fuck everything up for no reason at all.
The worst impact of Tory austerity fanaticism a lot of these smug centrist Remainers will have felt is having their bin collections reduced from weekly to fortnightly, so it's no wonder they're absolutely incapable of empathising with the pain, and misery, and hopelessness, and stress of the poor and vulnerable people who suffered under the jackboot of it.
So they sneer at them: How dare working class Leave voters fuck everything up for us for no good reason? How dare you all be so stupid and irresponsible? How dare you not listen to us when we've told you what's best for you? How dare you ruin our beloved delusions that Britain was some kind of magnificent utopia? How dare Jeremy Corbyn go to a laughable shit hole like Morecambe rather than pandering to us?
And somehow these people imagine that they'd actually be able to win another EU referendum by campaigning like this!
Remainers tend to absolutely hate it when their opponents portray them as smug, out-of-touch metropolitan elitists who are only concerned with their own comfort.
But when extremely high-profile Remainers resort to this sickening rose-tinted glorification of past circumstances that were indisputably nightmarish for millions of us, and thousands of other Remainers retweet this counter-productive nonsense all over the Internet, how else do they expect to be perceived?
The terrifying thing is that having intolerably smug and strategically inept people like this push themselves to the forefront of the anti-Brexit movement means that it's almost certainly doomed to fail, and their failure will mean that the austerity-victims that they quite clearly didn't give a shit about during their imagined pre-2016 utopia will be the ones to bear the brunt of it all over again.
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.
When it comes to non-apathetic Brexit opinions, there are two main types.
There are those of people who know enough about the EU, politics, diplomacy and international trade to recognise that it's immensely complicated and confusing, and then there are those who insist on talking about it in glib sound bites as if the whole thing can be explained in a couple of simplistic generalisations.
Interestingly those who err towards the extreme ends of the spectrum (Brexit obsessives and die-hard "Remainiacs") tend to be the people who are most likely to talk about the subject in glib over-simplifications, while those who lie somewhere in the middle are more likely to accept that the whole thing is an incredibly complex maelstrom of potential consequences (both negative and positive).
A desperately inadequate lexicon
One of the main problems with discussing Brexit is the appalling inadequacy of the Brexit-vocabulary.
Ask a dozen people to give more detail on what Brexit means beyond "Britain leaving the EU", and you'll likely get a dozen different answers.
This is hardly surprising given that the Leave campaign was based on selling a load of totally undeliverable (and often mutually exclusive) promises of a wonderful future fantasy land in order to dupe people into signing a blank contract with the hard-right faction of the Tory party to make the whole thing up as they go along.
When the hard-right of the Tory party actually won, they had no idea what they were going to do, so Theresa May further muddied the waters of what Brexit actually means by repeating her tautological platitude that "Brexit means Brexit" for six tedious months as the government scrabbled around trying to come up with some kind of actual plan.
Only the most simple-minded of people ever bought into Theresa May's "Brexit means Brexit" gibberish, because it's obvious that there are all different ways of quitting the EU, and obvious that the UK government should have taken steps to calm uncertainty by explaining which they were going to pursue rather than hiding behind empty platitudes.
The problem of course is that political language is so often divided into binary choices (left vs right, libetarian vs authoritarian, austerity vs investment, Leave vs Remain ...) but a binary "hard" vs "soft" dichotomy simply isn't sufficient to explain the numerous potential forms Brexit could take.
Here are just a few of the potential ways Brexit could go:
- A very limited Brexit where certain core issues are agreed (security co-operation) but no trade deal or travel rights are established.
- A trade deal is agreed, allowing the UK cartain access to the EU Single Market in a similar way to other non-EU states like the FTA deal with South Korea, or the CETA deal that's just been struck with Canada.
- The UK remains in the Customs Union, but leaves the Single Market.
- The UK remains in the Customs Union and the Single Market.
- The UK decides to revoke Article 50 and actually remain in the European Union.
These aren't even all of the options, and then there's the choice of whether the final settlement (whatever it is) is subjected to another public referendum, which is an idea that increasing numbers of people seem to support.
The idea that a simplistic binary division between "hard Brexit" and "soft Brexit" is even remotely sufficient to cover all of these choices and potential outcomes is absurd.
What is "hard Brexit"?
So if "hard Brexit" is woefully inadequate to describe what's going on, what do people actually mean when they use it?
Hard-line Remainers have been trying to lump Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May together as "hard Brexit" even though there are significant differences between the two approaches.
Theresa May has made the threat of a nuclear "no deal" strop the absolute centrepiece of her so-called negotiating strategy, while Jeremy Corbyn says that a economy-wrecking, job-destroying, trade-freezing nuclear Brexit is not an option.
Lumping two very different approaches to the negotiations together as "hard Brexit" simply because both involve ending membership of the Single Market is clearly misleading, so why do they do it?
The reason people keep using "hard Brexit" is that it's actually little more than a pejorative term used by Europhiles to attack any form of Brexit that doesn't suit their objective of either remaining in the EU, or remaining in all but name by keeping membership of the Single Market, Customs Union and free movement zone.
Lexit
I have to admit that during the EU referendum campaign I considered the left-wing Brexit movement delusional because I saw no way that the Tories would be daft enough to release their grip on political power before the next scheduled election in 2020, which meant that they could impose a savagely right-wing Brexit with no way of stopping them.
But then Theresa May decided to call her vanity election and the idea of a progressive left-wing exit from the EU suddenly looks a heck of a lot more likely now than it did during the EU referendum debate.
The reason Jeremy Corbyn wants to leave the Single Market is that the rules of membership make several of his core manifesto pledges impossible.
If the UK remains in the Single Market the EU would be able to impose economic sanctions on the UK if Corbyn ever tried to deliver his pledges to repatriate the UK rail system, water companies and National Grid from the assortment of profiteering corporations and foreign governments that operate them now.
The notorious Twitter bore Ian Dunt recently claimed that "there is no left-wing case for Brexit" which is both utterly wrong, and exactly the kind of glib over-simplified platitude that has plagued the Brexit debate from the beginning.
A Tory administered Brexit was always going to result in more pro-corporate, austerity-fixated, neoliberal, hard-right dogma than the EU could ever have forced onto the UK, but a progressive left-wing Brexit could actually free the UK from the hard-right economic dogma that has infested the EU over the years.
The idea that "there is no left-wing case for Brexit" couldn't actually be more wrong.
A left-wing Brexit definitely looked like an absurd fantasy when the Tories had a majority government and the ability to maintain their grip on power until 2020, but now that Theresa May has thrown that advantage away, the left-wing case for Brexit is actually way stronger than it's ever been.
More confusion
The problem with Brexit is that the subject is highly complex, and partisan forces on both sides are intent on sowing confusion through the use of spectacularly over-simplified, and often desperately misleading terms and phrases (like "Brexit means Brexit", "no deal is better than a bad deal", "hard Brexit", and "there is no left-wing case for Brexit") because they see promotion of their own personal agendas as very much more important than keeping the public informed and actually providing us with a lexicon of terms and phrases that is fit for the purpose of discussing the subject in a coherent manner.
Calling it out
The only way to stop people spreading confusion is to call them up on it.
If they're ranting about "hard Brexit" ask them whether they're referring to leaving the EU with no deal whatever (Theresa May's threat), leaving the Single Market to allow for the repatriation of UK infrastructure and services (Jeremy Corbyn's manifesto commitment) or all forms of Brexit beyond actually remaining in the EU in all but name.
If you hear somebody saying "no deal is better than a bad deal", ask them to explain in terms of the economy and jobs how a "no deal" strop away from the negotiating table would be better than a negotiated settlement. Ask them to provide facts and statistics to back up any economic or employment claims they make.
If you hear someone repeating the absurdity that "there is no left-wing case for Brexit" ask them to explain the left-wing case for remaining in the Single Market and ensuring that the UK is subjected to neoliberal rules that would prohibit Labour from carrying out their manifesto commitments to repatriate vital national infrastructure and services.
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.
