Is it time for Britain to adopt "geniocracy"

There's suddenly a lot of fuss about vote-rigging with Labour and the Conservatives both bitterly accusing the other side of "gerrymandering".

The Tory press have been bitterly accusing Labour of vote-rigging over the idea of expanding the franchise to 16/17 year olds, and to people from overseas who are long-term resident and tax-payers in the UK.

Keir Starmer is such a dishonest and unprincipled flip-flopper it's impossible to know whether he'd actually go through with what he's "pledged", but the principle is sound. Giving more people the right to vote is a good thing, within reason.

Then there's the absurd Tory toff Jacob Rees-Mogg, who outright admitted that the Tory government implemented new voter ID rules in order to gerrymander elections in favour of their own political party, which is exactly what a lot of critics accused them of doing as they were doing it.

Lots of Tories have tried to argue that it's ridiculous to give votes to 16/17 year olds because they're too ignorant and uninformed about the world to use their votes wisely, however it's an absurd generalisation to pretend that the average 16/17 year old is more ignorant and unwise than the most ignorant people in older generations, who all get the right to vote, no matter how dull-witted or politically illiterate they happen to be.

This Tory insistence that youngsters are too ignorant to be allowed to vote raises the question of why intelligent and informed 16/17 year olds should be denied the vote, while the even the most stupid and gullible of over-18s get exactly the same voting power as people who actually know anything about what's going on.

If the Tories are right, and ignorance is something that needs to be combatted in elections, there are ways to do it.

People could do a simple politics test at polling stations, with the results defining the weighting of their vote, with the votes of those who score highly on the test counting for more than those who get all the answers wrong.

I'm not talking about some kind of intense and intimidating exam, just a check up on the absolute political basics:

• Who is the current Prime Minister?
• Who is the current head of state?
• Who is the current MP in your constituency?
• Which is the UK's finance minister? [Home Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Leader of the House of Commons, Speaker of the House of Commons]
• Which is the UK's upper legislature? [House of Commons, House of Lords, Supreme Court, Houses of Parliament]
  
• When is the name of legislation when it becomes law? [White Paper, Bill, Act, Point of Order]
• Which level of government is responsible for libraries and bin collections? [The Government, House of Commons, House of Lords, Local Authority]
• Which organisation isn't Britain is a member of? [UN, NATO, WTO, EU]
• What is a measure of national wealth? [Average wage, GDP, Population density, Gini Coefficient]
• Which political ideology is based on public ownership of core industries? [Capitalism, Liberalism, Socialism, Conservatism]
  

The first three could be set questions, followed by a random selection of (relatively easy) multiple choice questions about politics.

Tories would obviously scream that it's unfair to make people do a test before they're allowed to vote, but this would just expose their hypocrisy, because they're the ones who just introduced the principle of making people do things before being allowed to vote (acquiring and bringing the correct photographic ID).

They'd also object to the idea that those who know about politics should have more say than those who know nothing, because they know that tricking the gullible into voting against their own political interests is absolutely crucial to the success of Tory politics.

And in objecting, they'd be demonstrating their hypocrisy and venality. They want smart 16/17 year olds to be collectively punished because some of their age group are ignorant and uninformed, but they want the votes of ignorant and uninformed over-18s to count exactly the same as the votes of those who actually know what's going on!

The name for knowledge-based voting systems is "geniocracy", and with modern technology, it's easily implementable, and the data would be easy to collect and work with.

Hardcore "geniocrats" reckon that only people of above average intelligence should be allowed to vote, and only the very intelligent should be allowed to stand for public office, but there's absolutely no need to ban people from voting at all. The system could simply be operated to assign more weight to the votes of the politically informed than the politically ignorant.

If the post-election data showed that certain demographics (age, region, voting preference etc.) are lacking in basic political understanding, it would be in the public interest to help them to improve.

The data would tell us which parties had been most politically disadvantaged by the ignorance of their own voters, which would create very strong incentives for all political parties to ensure that their voters have a basic level of political understanding.

Of course it's almost impossible to conceive a system like this ever actually being implemented, because no ruling party truly wants an informed and politically engaged electorate capable of actually following what's going on, and holding them to account. But it's an interesting idea, because it's the logical solution to the problem of political ignorance that the Tories say they're so concerned about, and it's entirely compatible with their new policy of making people prove things before voting, isn't it?

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

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A compendium of Tory corruption

Some people don't seem to grasp the sheer scale of Tory corruption, so here are details of just a fraction of what we already know about (with sources):

🔵 Tory MP Owen Paterson was caught red-handed breaking the ministerial code of conduct by lobbying for his employers within government. Randox were paying Paterson £100,000 per year, he sat in on ministerial meetings about the company, and they ended up getting £600 million in Covid contracts. 

🔵 A cross-party committee of MPs found that Paterson had brazenly defied the rules, and ordered him to serve a 30 day suspension from parliament. Instead of accepting the findings of the Paterson investigation Boris Johnson ordered Tory MPs to vote through controversial legislation designed to tear down the parliamentary standards authority, and let Paterson off scot free!

🔵 Tory leader of the House of Commons Jacob Rees-Mogg was one of the leading advocates of using the Owen Paterson scandal as an excuse to demolish the parliamentary standards authority. In 2018 Rees-Mogg used his company Saliston to lend himself almost £6 million at significantly below the market rate of interest, and he didn't even bother to declare these loans on the register of MPs interests (no wonder he was so keen to tear down the parliamentary standards authority!).

🔵 Boris Johnson has been caught up in multiple scandals himself, dating back to before he even became Prime Minister. There was the £126,000 in public cash paid to his mistress Jennifer Arcuri without any declaration of their relationship as one of Johnson's registered interests; the dodgy loan he received to decorate his Downing Street flat; his false declaration of a luxury holiday in Mustique; and his recent holiday in the luxury Spanish villa owned by a tax-dodging company operated by former Tory MP Zac Goldsmith, who Johnson gifted a lifetime peerage in the unelected House of Lords after he lost his parliamentary seat in the 2019 General Election. 

🔵 On the subject of the House of Lords, all sixteen of the Tory Party's former treasurers over the last seven years have been handed unelected lifetime peerages in the House of Lords, after having donated over £3 million each to the Tory operation! 

🔵 Tory politicians have been handing out untendered PPE contracts like sweeties, to such an extent that former Health Secretary Matt Hancock's former pub landlord, and his dad's mate, and his sister even got lucrative £multi-million contracts. Hancock 'accidentally' failed to include his 20% stake in his sister's PPE contract winning company on the register of MPs interests! 

🔵 The Tory government was found to have broken the law in handing a £560,000 coronavirus contract to former colleagues of Tory minister Michael Gove and Boris Johnson's ex-adviser Dominic Cummings.

🔵 Another of the major winners of this no-tender PPE bonanza was Meller Designs, which was a fashion designer until they bagged £160 million worth of PPE contracts, boosting their annual profits from £144k to £13 million. The owner is a regular Tory Party donor called David Meller, who personally lobbied the unelected Tory minister James Bethell for PPE contracts. 

🔵 P14 Medical was turned from a failing company into an absolute cash cow via a whopping £276 million in untendered PPE contracts. The owner Steve Dechan, a Tory party councillor in Stroud, used his profits from the Tory PPE bonanza to buy himself a luxurious £1.5 million country house in the Cotswolds. 

🔵 A company called Clipper Logistics got in on the untendered PPE bonanza with a £1.3 million contract. No surprise that the owner of the company is a major Tory Party donor called Steve Parkin. 

🔵 Another major Tory donor called Haraldur Agustsson bagged over £100 million worth of untendered PPE contracts across his companies Globus Shetland and Alpha Solway. 

🔵 After raking in over £1 billion in untendered coronavirus contracts, Tory-linked firms repaid the favour by kicking back a small percentage of their gains via £615,000 in donations to the Tory party!

The Tory minister who oversaw so many of the astounding no-tender PPE contracts was the unelected House of Lords stooge James Bethell who failed to declare 27 meetings with private health companies that went on to rake in over £1 billion in untendered covid contracts and then made up loads of nonsensical and contradictory excuses as to why he couldn't hand over his phone after he was caught red-handed using private WhatsApp chats to conduct government business.

🔵 The Tory government has pumped an astonishing £37 billion into the privatised shambles that is their Test and Trace operation, which has become the largest publicly funded corporate feeding frenzy in British medical history. It's been hit by ballooning costs, missed targets, 600 million lost covid tests, and scandalously high consultancy fees. The Public Accounts Committee have slammed it as an unimaginable waste of money that's had "no clear impact". No worries for Dido Harding who has presided over this absolute shambles, because she's married to the government's "anti-corruption tsar", Tory MP John Penrose!

🔵 The corporate outsourcing giant Serco have been lavished with literally hundreds of millions of pounds worth of Test and Trace contracts. Their CEO is Rupert Soames, brother of former Tory MP Nicholas, and grandson of Winston Churchill!

🔵 Former Tory DWP minister Iain Duncan Smith got in on the private medical pilfering, chairing a government taskforce that produced a report advising the government to give the green light to non-alcoholic hand gel, while earning a £25,000 per year salary from Britain's largest producer of non-alcoholic hand gel (a salary he forgot to declare as an interest in the report). 

🔵 More than a quarter of Tory MPs use the practice of second-jobbing in order to boost their salary of £82,000 (plus lavish expenses).

🔵 In 2015 the Tory government scrapped the requirement that MPs who take second jobs register their employment contracts with parliamentary authorities, which means that the employment details of every single one of the second-jobbing MPs across parliament are secret.

🔵 Perhaps the most egregious Tory moonlighting MP is Ben Bradley who claims salaries for 60 hours per week on top of his MPs duties. The average MP works 69 hours a week, so if Bradley's not shirking his responsibilities as an MP, we're expected to believe that he's putting in 129 hours a week at work, leaving him less than five and a half hours per day for sleeping, eating, travel, leisure, shopping, personal hygiene, and family life. All combined! 

🔵 Tory MP Mark Pawsey has a moonlighting £30,000 per year second job as chairman of the Foodservice Packaging Association. He leads Westminster’s All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Packaging Manufacturing Industry (no conflict of interests there eh?), and he's repeatedly spoken during parliamentary debates to criticise regulation of the food packaging industry, and to decry efforts to make retailers and manufacturers contribute more to the cost of recycling their plastic waste.

🔵 Tory MP Alun Cairns was hired on a lucrative £15,000 salary (more than £200 per hour) by a company that was part of a consortium that was awarded a £10 million coronavirus contract the following month.

🔵 More than 50 former Tory ministers have taken up private sector jobs in sectors they covered during their time as government ministers, many of them are still in parliament as MPs, or in the vast unelected crony club that is the House of Lords.

🔵 Tory Minister Nadhim Zahawi banked £1.3million from oil company Gulf Keystone Petroleum while working as an MP, but kept his second job earnings secret via a parliamentary loophole that allowed him to avoid declaring the payments by diverting them through a consultancy company he established with his wife.

🔵 At least 90 Tory MPs also boost their incomes by over £10,000 per year as private landlords, and many of these exploitative landlord MPs have repeatedly voted against proposals to regulate the private rental sector, and 72 of these landlord-MPs voted down legislation to require landlords to make private rented accommodation "fit for human habitation".

🔵 34 Tory MPs have accepted political donations from firms linked to the Russian oligarch Viktor Fedotov, whose dodgy dealings were revealed in the Pandora Papers. Not a single one of these donations has been returned. 

🔵 The Pandora Papers also revealed that the unelected Tory lord Paul Deighton, a former government minister, had failed to declare a load of his secret offshore investments.

🔵 Former Attorney General Geoffrey Cox has been raking in literally £millions for legal consultancy work, which included representing the British Virgin Islands tax haven, while arguing against closing tax loopholes in parliament! 

🔵 In 2004 Cox bought a £535,000 Battersea flat, relying on public funds to pay his £1,750 a month mortgage repayments. He now rents the property out for about £1,000 a week, living in a different London flat so he can claim £1,900 a month in public cash to pay the rent! 

🔵 Former Prime Minister David Cameron was caught lobbying the Tory government on behalf of a company called Greensill Capital, who were paying him absolutely vast consultancy fees. The government then over-rode their own £50 million limit on emergency Covid loans to award Greensill a whopping £400 million, all of which was loaned to companies associated with billionaire Tory-donor Sanjeev Gupta. Greensill went bankrupt a matter of months later! 

🔵 Tory MPs have been taking thousands of pounds worth of freebies and junkets from gambling companies and the gambling lobby then making pro-gambling statements in parliament and producing pro-gambling advertorials for websites like ConservativeHome. Probably the worst offender is Tory MP Laurence Robertson who earns £24,000 per year (at £200 per hour) as a gambling lobbyist who argued against stronger regulation of the gambling industry in parliament, then had the barefaced cheek to claim that there was no conflict of interest. 

🔵 The leader of the Scottish Conservatives Douglas Ross "forgot" to declare £28,000 in earnings from his second job, but insists that it's all just a big mistake.

This lot is just the visible tip of the Tory corruption iceberg!

If you're aware of any other Tory corruption scandals, feel free to add details in the comments.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

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Jacob Rees-Mogg insinuates the Grenfell fire victims deserved to die because they lacked common sense

Tory Brextremist Jacob Rees-Mogg has provoked outrage by insinuating that the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire deserved to die because they lacked "common sense".

Rees-Mogg made these outrageously callous comments in an interview with LBC's Nick Ferrari, in which he tried to desperately spin the findings of the first report into the Grenfell fire to the advantage of the Tory party.

For some unfathomable reason the inquiry into Grenfell fire has been split into two segments, one critiquing the response of the fire service, and completely ignoring the decision to cover the building in highly flammable cladding because it was fractionally cheaper than the fire proof stuff, followed by another report into the actual causal factors to be released after the general election.

The first report criticised the fire brigade for advising people to stay in their flats, rather than advising them to attempt to escape down the smoke-clogged stairwell, but no attention was paid to the fact that this kind of cladding fire was unprecedented in Britain, nor the Tory government's failure to inform the fire brigade that they had allowed hundreds of buildings up and down the country to be turned into similar fire traps, so that they could consider actually altering their protocols.

Rees-Mogg seized on the "stay indoors" advice to claim that he would have been clever enough to fully appreciate the scale of the fire from within his flat, ignore the advice, and flee down the smoke filled stairs.

Rees-Mogg's callously insinuated that the victims died because they were too stupid to ignore official advice, rather than because the local Tory council turned their building into a deadly fire trap to save an absurdly small amount of money.

This insinuation betrays the elitist mentality that's all-too-common in the Tory circles that the likes of Rees-Mogg move in: The idea that the rich are rich because they're morally, genetically, and intellectually superior to the poor.

The idea that rich Tory elitists in a burning building wouldn't panic, but calmly assess the scale of the fire for themselves, with such impeccable intuition that they automatically understand the situation far better than fire service professionals with decades of experience outside.

According to this warped worldview the poor people died not because they were treated with contempt by an elitist Tory council who couldn't give a damn about the desperate and dangerous living conditions of the "the lower orders", but because of their inherent inferiority to the Tory elitist class.

If only they'd been morally, genetically, and intellectually superior like Rees-Mogg and his Tory mates, then they would all have survived the fire by virtue of their inherent excellence.

And besides, they would never have been living in a decrepit death trap of a building anyway, because they would have had the good sense and intuition to have been born into good genetic stock, a luxuriant country estate, an Eton education that costs more than the average salary in annual fees, and an automatic place at the top table of society like plucky quick-witted Jacob, wouldn't they?

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Is this the dodgiest Lib-Dem bar chart ever?

The Lib-Dems are absolutely notorious for producing absurdly misleading bar charts aimed at duping the gullible into voting for them, but this year the Lib-Dems in North East Somerset have absolutely outdone themselves by producing one of the most shockingly deceptive political bar charts ever.

The North East Somerset constituency is a Tory safe seat for Jacob Rees-Mogg on 54%, with Labour trailing almost 20 points behind on 35%, and the Lib-Dems in a distant 3rd on just 8%.

So in order to produce a favourable bar chart for themselves the Lib-Dems conducted an absurd push poll asking "Imagine the result in your constituency was expected to be very close between the Conservative and Liberal Democrat candidate, and none of the other parties were competitive..."

They created a scenario that doesn't exist in reality, purely in order to manipulate non-Tory voters into saying they would vote Lib-Dem.

To put what they're doing into perspective, it's useful to consider the biggest constituency swing of all during the 2017 General Election, which happened in Gordon, north east Scotland.

The swing in Gordon was 20.4%, representing just over 15,000 votes.

If Labour were to defy the odds to win North East Somerset from 2nd place, they'd need a huge swing of 19% (over 10,000 votes).

If the Lib-Dems were to take the seat from 3rd place they'd need an unprecedented swing of over 35% (24,500+ votes).

The Lib-Dems are absolutely desperate to trick people into supporting their hopeless lost cause.

And the method the Lib-Dems have come up with to con people into voting for them is to pretend that they're the second party (when Labour are), and that Labour are in a distant third (when that's actually where the Lib-Dems finished last time).

If you ever needed more evidence that the Lib-Dems simply can't be trusted to be honest about anything, this staggeringly dishonest abuse of statistics, polling, and observable reality is surely it.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Rees-Mogg's far-right Tweet isn't an aberration, it's the Tory norm

Tory MP and Lord Snooty caricature Jacob Rees-Mogg already had a reputation for unapologetic sharing of outrageous things on Twitter before he decided to give a blast of free publicity to the German far-right AfD party by sharing a spech from their leader Alice Weidel.

If you look beyond the person making the speech and at who originally uploaded the Youtube video, it's clearly an extreme-right freak who absolutely adores every fanatically right-wing political operation in Europe (AfD in Germany, Lega Nord in Italy, Vox in Spain, Front National in France, PVV in the Netherlands ...).

Rees-Mogg didn't just amplify the leader of the German far-right, he amplified an extreme-right propaganda account on Youtube.
 

Traditionally the Tories have had way more in common with the German centre-right party CDU (Angela Merkel's party) than the German far-right, but in recent years they've broken up their traditional alliance with the European centre-right to build an alliance of radical right-wingers across the continent.

But their rightward shift is still continuing with Tory MEPs openly siding with the fascist fringe in the European Parliament, and high-profile Tory MPs like Rees-Mogg now publicly endorsing racist German far-right parties and amplifying imported extreme-right youth radicalisation propaganda outfits on UK university campuses, with absolutely no hint of censure from the party leadership.

If we look at Rees-Mogg's Twitter lies and endorsements of far-right politics in isolation it's possible to imagine that this is some kind of aberration, and that he's a "bad apple" in an otherwise decent party, but Rees-Mogg doesn't exist in a political vacuum, and there are huge amounts of supporting evidence for the fact that the Tories have veered wildly to the far-right.

In 2016 the Tories ran absolutely despicable BNP-style propaganda in the London Mayoral election, aimed at stirring up hatred against Muslims by spuriously associating Labour's Muslim candidate Sadiq Khan with the July 2005 London terrorist attacks, and hiding behind parliamentary privilege to smear a completely innocent Muslim as an ISIS-supporting terrorist hate preacher, simply because he'd been pictured with Sadiq Khan.

Thankfully the people of London saw through this despicable Tory hate-mongering campaign and elected Sadiq Khan in a landslide victory, but the rightward shift of the Tories continued apace.
 

The Brexit referendum saw Tory figures like Boris Johnson whipping up hate and xenophobia with absolute lies that Turkey were imminently joining the EU, and other Tories joining in with the even more despicable Leave.EU hate-mongering, with absolutely no censure from the party leadership.

Then Theresa May came to power and began pushing hard towards the far-right in the hope of unifying the Tory and UKIP votes to deliver a massive right-wing mega-majority in her snap 2017 General Election.

The hard-right posturing, the bigoted dog-whistles, and the overt displays of xenophobic untranationalism worked a treat in attracting the blue-kip demographic into the Tory fold, but it backfired spectacularly because the Corbyn surge was even bigger, meaning May didn't just lose her parliamentary majority, she ended up rendering her party absolutely reliant on the extreme-right ultranationalist demographic to stay ahead of Labour.

Even if the Tories wanted to move back away from extreme-right fanaticism, they can't because the fickle extreme-right ultranationalist demographic would flow out of the Tory party as quickly as they flowed in in 2017. They've got to keep appeasing the rabble or they'll lose their grip on political power.
 

Since then we've seen Tory MEPs actively siding with all the far-right nasties in Europe to support the anti-Semitic freedom-crushing Hungarian government of Victor Orbán. We've seen countless Tory bigots sneakily reinstated to the party after the fuss dies down over the bigoted diatribes that got them kicked out. We've seen Rees-Mogg and other Tories actively promoting imported far-right propaganda outfits on UK university campuses. We've seen pro-Tory Facebook groups full of the most hateful violence-promoting extreme-right comments. We've seen the Tory Brextremists calling themselves "Grand Wizards" (like the leader of the KKK). We've seen a former Tory cabinet minister spreading the extreme-right "Cultural Marxism" conspiracy theory that derives from anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda. And now Rees-Mogg is openly amplifying a bunch of racist German extreme-right fanatics!

The Tory party is disappearing down the extreme-right rabbit hole right in front of us, and only the wilfully blind would argue otherwise, but many in the mainstream media don't even see this as a problem, after all, the hard-right propaganda rags are one of the main sources of this virulent strain of xenophobic, extreme-right, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, white supremacist hate in the first place.

Why would they hold Rees-Mogg to account for deliberately amplifying the extreme-right, when they essentially agree with what he's doing and saying?

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Jacob Rees-Mogg's anti-intellectual fans want him purged from politics because he's got a degree!

Anyone who has ever taken a look through the various Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson fan pages on Facebook will be familiar with the racism, bigotry, anti-Muslim hate, xenophobia, anti-immigrant abuse, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, lionisation of far-right ideologues like Tommy Robinson and the Britain First hate group, extremist rhetoric, threats of violence & civil war, and gleeful fantasies about the public execution of their political opponents [sources 1,2,3,4,5,6] ... but in this article I'm going to take a quick look at something that is somewhat less sinister because it's quite frankly hilarious.

 

Anti-intellectual purges of the political system are actually a rarity
on a page where abuse, bigotry, racism, threats, conspiracy theories,
and fantasies about the public execution of political opponents
are the norm.

 Between all the abuse, bigotry and threats of violence that can be found in the Jacob Rees-Mogg Supporters' Group on Facebook, there's an extraordinary thread in which numerous Rees-Mogg supporters fantasise about an  anti-intellectual purge of the political system where anyone with a university degree is thrown out of the House of Commons and barred from standing for election!

The obvious problem of course is that their own demagogue Jacob Ress-Mogg would be one of the victims of this anti-intellectual cull of MPs as a result of the undergraduate degree in history he obtained from Trinity College Oxford in 1991 (in the days before the neoliberal-fixated Westminster establishment club introduced staggeringly high tuition fees designed to enforce a lifetime 9% education tax on those with parents unable to stump up tens of thousands per child to cover the fees).

The absurdity of wishing their own hero out of parliament because he's fallen foul of their anti-intellectual standards is hilarious, but it's also illustrative of the way anti-intellectualism is spreading like wildfire on the political right.

Surely everyone remembers Michael Gove's extraordinary "we've had enough of experts" appeal to anti-intellectualism during the EU referendum debate, and how experts and academics were almost completely sidelined in favour of fact-averse rhetoric-spewing Tories on either side of the debate?

And there's a reason the political right love to tell people to trust their base emotional instincts rather than looking to the kind of facts, evidence, logic, and reason that people like experts and university professors tend to use.

The reason for this anti-intellectual propaganda is that facts, evidence, logic, reason, and observable reality tend to defy their far-right worldview.

The extreme-right need people to reject facts, evidence, reason, science, and logic because reality has a left-wing bias.

If people actually listened to the evidence then it would be obvious that quitting the largest free trade area on the planet with an unprecedented shambles of a Tory government running the show is bound to end up causing a socio-economic chaos.

If people actually listened to the evidence then endlessly giving away not-for-profit public services to private profiteers so they can rent them back to us at way above the original cost is a bloody awful idea.

If people actually listened to reason they'd pin the blame for declining living standards and collapsing public services on 9 years of ruinous Tory austerity dogma, wage repression, social security cuts, and deliberate under-investment in public services and infrastructure projects, and never buy the extreme-right snake oil explanation that immigrants, the EU, political correctness, and human rights are somehow to blame.

So in order to dissuade people from thinking along these lines the extreme-right have to continually spread mistrust of experts and academics.

They tell us "why believe the experts when you can believe your own gut instincts instead?"

And they tell us "don't trust academics because they're actually terrifying lefties spreading dangerous "cultural Marxism" in order to destroy white western civilisation".

The Nazis used exactly the exact same techniques to justify their ideological purges of academia and the business world, and in fact the whole "cultural Marxism" theory the extreme-right use to discredit expertise and academia these days is lifted straight from Nazi Germany where it was called Kulturbolschewismus and blamed squarely on the Jews.

So yeah, the absolute ignorance of anti-intellectual right-wingers calling for their own demagogue to be purged from politics because he's got a degree is hilarious, but the anti-intellectual ideology that underpins this absurd nonsense is actually quite concerning.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Tory MPs are publicly promoting an imported extreme-right propaganda outfit

The Tories know that they're deeply unpopular with the younger generations, but instead of offering young people anything like actual reasons to vote Tory, numerous Tory MPs have secided to begin publicly promoting an extremely dodgy far-right propaganda outfit called Turning Point that has been imported directly from the United States.

The US chapter of this youth radicalisation programme has links to racists and white supremacists, spreads the anti-Semitic Nazi era trope of "cultural Marxism", and created a 'hit list' of supposedlty left-wing University professors for their followers to send abuse and death threats to.

Aside from their despicable tactics and dodgy political associations, the US Turning Point movement also have a propensity for ludicrous self-owns like the time they triggered universal ridicule for dressing themselves in diapers at Kent State University to protest against the concept of safe spaces.

There's absolutely no way that these Tory MPs can pretend that they don't know who is behind this far right youth radicalisation programme given that the founder has pumped £100,000 into Tory party coffers since 2017. 

And there's no way they can deny the links between this organisation and extreme-right propaganda outfits like Infowars and Breitbart, especially given the photographic evidence that the Turning Point UK leadership are associates of Infowars propagandist and soy salesman Paul Joseph Watson.

The Turning Point UK agenda is obvious. They're funnelling huge amounts of cash from dodgy mega-rich donors into efforts to radicalise young people on university campuses using the age old fascist technique of pretending that they're being censored in order to get the victimhood and self-pity vibe really going.

Tory MPs to have actively promoted this grotesque propaganda operation include Jacob Rees-Mogg, Priti Patel, Bernard Jenkin, Anne-Marie Trevelyan, and Steve Baker.

Noticeably all five of these Tory figures are Brexiteers, which makes their backing of a US-based mainly US-funded far-right indoctrination programmes on UK campuses seem rather unusual.
 

How can a bunch of people who never stop banging on about the importance of British sovereignty be so enthusiastic about the spread of imported far-right propaganda into British universities and British political discourse?

The answer is simple. They never actually gave a damn about sovereignty and simply saw Brexit as a convenient Trojan Horse to push their own radical right-wing agenda of scrapping workers' rights, food standards, environmental laws, freedoms from persecution, and consumer protections.

Thus their support for imported far-right Turning Point propaganda outfit derives from the fact that they're ideological blood brothers all pushing the same radically right-wing political agenda.

When UKIP attempted to jump on the alt-right bandwagon by signing up right-wing Youtubers like Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad), Paul Joseph Watson (Prison Planet), and Mark Meechan (Count Dankula) people saw it as a last desperate effort of a dying political party to remain relevant.

Now that the Tories are embracing far-right propaganda tactics things are a lot more serious. This isn't just the crumbling edifice of Nigel Farage's publicity vehicle embracing the extreme-right in a desperate effort to remain relevant, it's the actual party of government embracing the extreme-right to try and stay in power.

The last time we saw the British government embracing extremism to such an extent was the 1930s when Tory MPs signed up in droves to pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic groups like The Right Club and the Anglo-German Link.

Scroll forward eight decades and the majority of Brits who made such enormous sacrifices to beat fascism during the Second World War have passed away, our cultural memory of the horrors of Nazism is fading, and imported fascism and anti-Semitism are right back in fashion in the Tory ranks.

Anyone who is not concerned by this latest Tory lurch to the extreme-right is just as complacent as those who ridiculed Winston Churchill and the anti-fascists in the 1930s for warning of the dangers back then.

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