How to lose support and alienate people: The Progressive Alliance communication strategy

When attempting to build a broad political coalition you've decided to call "The Progressive Alliance", it may be considered wise not to deliberately antagonise pretty much anyone with vaguely progressive or left-leaning views ... but there's no telling liberal capitalist aggro-centrists how to do political communication is there?

• Liberal capitalists laid the groundwork for Brexit by propping up the ruinous Austerity Coalition, which caused the unprecedented wage collapse, failing public services, the housing crisis, and the devastating under-investment that the Brexiteers then cynically weaponised by blaming on immigrants and the EU.

• They delivered their own worst nightmare of Brexit with their condescending and ineffective "jobs for the boys" non-campaign.

• They blew probably the best opportunity ever to hammer the Tories by turning the Brexit referendum result into an excuse to launch a bitter factionalist coup to get rid of Labour's democratically elected leader instead!

• Then they handed the keys of Downing Street to Boris Johnson by turning the 2019 General Election into a rerun of the Brexit referendum they'd already lost. 

If these people has 1% of the strategic capabilities they imagine themselves to have, we wouldn't be in anything like as much of a mess as a nation, but they will keep insisting that tepid, unappealing, liberal capitalist gruel must be the only alternative to radically right-wing conservative capitalist poison.

A lot of the People's Vote campaigners who invested so much work in throwing the 2019 general election have respawned themselves as The Progressive Alliance, which apparently aims to remove the Tories from power by building an astonishingly unlikely political coalition.

I won't spend too much time explaining why it's so unlikely, you just have to consider the vitriolic anti-SNP bile in Keir Starmer's much-lauded Labour conference speech to understand that the Labour right detest the SNP Westminster-outsiders infinitely more than they mildly disapprove of their Tory Westminster brethren.

Anyway. Onto the astonishing infographic in the article header image.

This is a real thing, that was actually designed and approved by Progressive Alliance people, and posted on their social media accounts (here's the link on Facebook, at least until they delete it).

"But The Lib-Dems went into coalition with the Tories"

The Progressive Alliance may try to trivialise this with the misleading claim that it all happened "a decade ago" when the Lib-Dems were still enabling Tory malice will into 2015, and the Brexiteer-style cry of "get over it", but the fact is that the ruinous Austerity Coalition imposed a shocking range of anti-progressive policies that are still causing devastating social and economic consequences today. 

What's more, the Lib-Dems are completely unapologetic about it, to the extent that they picked one of the very worst Tory-collaborators, Ed Davey, as their their new leader, when they had the chance to turn over a new leaf with the much more progressive Layla Moran.

The message here is that if you're horrified by austerity ruination; systematic "fit for work" disability persecution; Theresa May's unlawfully racist Hostile Environment and the ensuing the Windrush scandal; the worst period of wage repression in recorded history; unlawful Tribunal Fees; the Royal Mail scam and £billions in other privatisation rip-offs; the student loan betrayal; the brutal social security sanctions regime; arms sales to tyrants, despots and war criminals; privatising literally thousands of schools into the hands of unaccountable private profiteers; devastating local government cuts; economically illiterate cuts to the drivers of future economic prosperity (education, infrastructure, R&D); or any of the other profoundly anti-progressive policies enacted between 2010 and 2015, you can just piss off, because this lot don't want your vote.

"Jeremy Corbyn is no longer Labour leader"

The logic of attacking Jeremy Corbyn supporters and socialists in general is unclear.

Apparently sneering at them with the Brexiteer style slogan "he lost, get over it" is going to magically win them over to the Progressive Alliance cause!

Who cares that Corbyn was demonised by the press and repeatedly sabotaged from within his own party, purely for promoting progressive social and economic policies?

If you supported Corbyn's policy platform, you can also piss off, because the so-called Progressive Alliance don't want your vote!

"Blah blah jabber jabber Tony Blair blah blah Iraq"

The UK government ignored the legitimate concerns of millions of British people, illegally invaded another country, caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, and a refugee crisis of millions.

They triggered a cycle of terrorist violence that spread throughout the target country, across the entire region, and eventually culminated in terrorist atrocities across Europe perpetrated by the ISIS fanatics that metastasised out the lawless terrorism breeding grounds that Tony Blair and his ilk created in Iraq.

"Blah blah jabber jabber ... get over it": What an arrogant and offensive way to dismiss legitimate concerns over one of modern Britain's most horrific foreign policy catastrophes! 

If you're the kind of progressively-minded person who opposed the Iraq war, the so-called Progressive Alliance clearly hold your political opinions in the same regard as dog much on their shoes, they simply don't want your vote.

"The Lib-Dems will just flounce off with the Tories"

They want to re-argue point one over again, just to make their list look longer, but the essence of their case is that we should just trust the Lib-Dems this time, despite them being led by one of the worst Lib-Dem ministers in the ruinous Austerity Coalition!

This is less an effort to tell potential voters to piss off, more of a desperate appeal to the astonishingly gullible!

"But Keith ... [insert politically illiterate rant here]"

Ah right.

listen up!

Anyone who has any concerns whatever about Keir Starmer's pathetic abstention of a leadership so far; his broken pledges; his obsession with factionalist infighting; his campaign of abuse against left-wing and socially progressive Jews; his repeated purges of left-wing and progressive voices out of his shadow cabinet; his abject failure to hold the Tory government to account; his repeated abstentions on sickeningly anti-progressive pieces of Tory legislation like the Rape Cops Bill; or even just his robotic lack of charisma.

You can all piss off too!

"I will always vote for [party] out of loyalty"

Nobody doubts that tribal voters exist, but has anyone ever uttered such an unconvincing phrase to say that they won't tactically vote to get the Tories out?

I guess if we're expected to believe that people said "blah blah jabber jabber Tony Blair jabber jabber Iraq". we're expected to believe anything!

And as for pointless tribally motivated voting, what about all the liberal capitalist dweebs who went out and belligerently voted Lib-Dem and Green in ultra tight Labour-Tory marginals in 2019, despite Labour caving in and offering them the sore loser referendum they said they wanted?

Loads of these people, who helped create a Tory mega-majority, have now quietly thrown away their "People's Vote" outfits, and come back wearing "Progressive Alliance" garb, to tell other people how to vote!

Conclusion

Given the shockingly outdated and unrepresentative Westminster voting system, I tend to agree with tactical voting, and have voted tactically myself in the past.

People like me should be the natural target audience for a campaign like The Progressive Alliance, but for whatever reason they've decided to tell me to "piss off" four different ways, taken me for a gullible idiot, and insulted my intelligence, all in a single infographic!

They're clearly more concerned with laundering the reputations of their liberal capitalist idols like Tory Blair, the Lib-Dem austerity enablers, the right-wing Labour saboteurs, and the democracy-defying CUK squatters, who all helped turn people away from progressive politics in different ways. and installed Boris Johnson in Downing Street, than in actually building a broad coalition of progressive and left-wing people.

If our hopes of a better future rely on the strategic capabilities of this lot, we're clearly doomed to Tory rule forever!

 

 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.

OR

The kinder, gentler gaslighters

Remember when Jeremy Corbyn said he wanted a find a less abusive way of doing politics?

And how the commentariat class absolutely ridiculed him for it, using the phrase "kinder gentler politics" whenever anyone from the left as much as used a swear word, despite Corbyn himself remaining calm, polite, and dignified in the face of undoubtedly the most concerted UK media vilification campaign in living memory.

The political establishment class and corporate media hack pack worked together to whip up raging firestorms of anti-left hatred; they accused Corbyn of disrespecting veterans by not bowing deeply enough at the Cenotaph; the next year they faked photos of Corbyn supposedly dancing at the Cenotaph; they faked photos of him wearing a Russian-style hat on a Kremlin background; they endlessly platformed every deranged anti-Corbyn ranter they could find; they spliced the wrong answers onto different questions to create outrage-mongering 'fake news' (and kept their jobs when caught red-handed); they derided Corbyn's "Chairman Mao style bicycle"; they spread nonsensical conspiracy theories about Corbyn being some kind of Czech Spy, Russian stooge, terrorism-loving, communist, Jew-hater; they ridiculed and grossly misrepresented virtually every policy position Corbyn ever took ("nationalise sausages"!); and they churned out endless hate-mongering rabble-rousing articles like "Labour Must Kill Vampire Jezza".

Just some of the political and media figures to switch
seamlessly from vilifying Corbyn to pretending they
oppose online hatred and abuse!

Then oh how they erupted in fits of laughter and frivolity when Corbyn was violently assaulted by that right-wing extremist; and how they chuckled and then instantly forgot about it when British soldiers used Corbyn's face as a target on a shooting range; and then they just ignored the multiple assaults on elderly Labour Party campaigners during the 2019 election (whilst uncritically amplifying outright Tory lies about Matt Hancock's aide supposedly being "punched" by a Corbyn-supporter).

To top it all off, they barely even bothered to object to the terrorist assassination plot against Corbyn and Sadiq Khan by the extreme-right Finsbury Park killer; or any of the numerous other examples of abuse and death threats against Corbyn and the Labour leadership team.

In fact their priorities were so utterly warped that they created vastly more faux outrage about a so-called "brick" through Angela Eagle's window in 2016, despite no evidence of who actually did it ever emerging, than coverage of an actual death threat made against Corbyn in the same week as brick-gate!

The political establishment and the commentariat class deliberately whipped up these firestorms of hatred because they detested normal democratic socialist policies like nationalised rail, energy, and water so much, and outright rejected the idea that the very-rich should just pay a bit more into the pot.

Then when their hate-mongering delivered the inevitable abusive, violent, and potentially deadly consequences, they simply turned their backs, refused to report it, belittled it, or even outright laughed at it.

Well now the very same people are all suddenly saying they want a 'kinder, gentler politics' in order to promote a right-wing authoritarian Tory crackdown on our Internet freedoms.

The gaslighting bastards!




NOTE: Of course these people and their supporters will resort to victim posturing, and pretending that proven facts about the vilification of Corbyn, and the conclusion "gaslighting bastards!" constitute the kind of horrifying abuse they're suddenly so concerned about. They didn't get where they were within the establishment order without knowing how to distort and manipulate everything to their advantage.

 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.

OR

Labour's "Fit for the Future" report is fit only for the bin

A group called Labour in Communications have launched a 26 page document entitled "Fit for the Future" which attempts to map out a strategy for reversing the party's catastrophic fortunes.

The problem of course is that the people who wrote it are a combination of useless political dinosaurs like Neil Kinnock, who should stay in the party's past rather than pontificating about the party's future, and some reality-averse political daydreamers.

The report comes out with 20+ recommendations, and I'll just go through a few of the report's lowlights here to illustrate how clueless and out of touch it all is.

Labour should have fewer policies

This "fewer policies" recommendation was what triggered all the gales of social media derision, and drew my attention to the existence of this flawed report in the first place.

Despite the fact that practically nobody in the country can name a single Labour Party policy since Starmer took over, and one of the most common complaints about Starmer is that nobody knows what he even stands for, this report suggests Labour needs even fewer policies!

The report claims that there's been over 200 policy announcements since Starmer took over, but the reason these policies haven't become well known isn't that there are too many of them, it's that so many of them have been derisory, hopelessly unappealing shit.

Take Thangam Debbonaire's announcement that she was going to side with landlords to help them bleed Covid-affected tenants dry, or Analiesse Dodds bizarre insistence that Labour would vehemently oppose any efforts to tax the windfall profits of profiteering corporations that made billions during the pandemic, due to the fact the rest of the economy had been forcibly shut down.

The problem here isn't that there are too many policies, it's that policies that side with exploitative landlords and profiteering corporations go entirely against what the Labour Party is supposed to stand for.

"Creating a political cabinet with a mandate to deliver Labour’s message to the public"

If delivering Labour's message to the public hasn't been one of the main priorities of Starmer's cabinet already, no wonder nobody seems to knows what Labour's policies are, or what the party stands for.

Creating a new "political cabinet" tasked with what the actual shadow cabinet should be doing is absurd and confusing.

But they can't recommend that the actual shadow cabinet simply do its job properly, because there's no surer way to lose influence over powerful people than tell them the truth about what they're actually doing wrong.

"Reintroducing a pledge card of announcements to tie together different policies"

Keir Starmer already made 10 pledges to Labour Party members during the post-Corbyn leadership election, all of which have been broken to one extent or another.

Who on earth would be gullible enough to believe a "pledge card" from someone who has already proven beyond doubt that his "pledges" aren't worth the paper they're written on?

It's actually an insult to all Labour Party members to even dare utter the word "pledge", without the slightest reference to Starmer's abandonment of all of his leadership election pledges.

"Integrating and investing in digital, placing it at the core of the communications strategy"

How far behind the curve are these people if they think embracing online activity is some kind of bold and inventive new strategy?

The really sad thing is that under Corbyn's leadership Labour took massive strides forward in online campaigning, but all of those advances have been burned to the ground by Starmer's factionalist right-wing advisers, who see everything through their bitter factional agenda.

They don't see the mass membership, and online campaign groups, and left-wing independent media outlets as powerful assets to the party in a landscape where the Tories hold almost all of the other cards, they see them as enemies who need to be attacked and destroyed.

They blame online activists for Corbyn becoming Labour leader in 2015, they blame them for Corbyn defeating their cowardly Anyone But Corbyn coup in 2016, and they blame them for Corbyn almost winning the 2017 general election.

How on earth are these people glibly blethering on about digital communication strategies, when the entire approach to Labour's existing online supporter base since Starmer took over has been antagonism and abuse!

The report makes no mention of the giant leap backwards the party has made since 2019. It's as if they're proposing the construction of a wonderful new house, without any mention of the pre-existing house that's been deliberately and spitefully burned to the ground!

"Holding shadow cabinet meetings outside of London on a rotational basis to detoxify the party’s London-centric image"

Holding a few shadow cabinet meetings outside of London isn't going to do anything to shift any perceptions that Labour is London-centric. Virtually nobody pays attention to actual government cabinet meetings, let alone shadow cabinet meetings.

If Labour wants to reach out to other parts of the UK, they don't need vapid gimmicky nonsense like this, they need bold, clear policy proposals aimed at improving the material conditions of people's lives, and rebuilding their shattered austerity-ravaged communities too.

"Refocusing Labour’s message to the public to be centred on our vision for the country, and not our own internal issues"

This is ambition is going to be incredibly difficult to pull off because of two main factors.

• The party's shocking inability to outline even the most basic pencil sketch of what their vision for what a post-austerity, post-Brexit, post-Covid Britain would look like so far.

• The ongoing factional war against the left (membership purges, shadow cabinet purges, endless Stalinist diktats, internal election-rigging, factionally motivated suspensions, persecution of left-wing Jews, the utterly divisive side-lining of Corbyn ...).

It's such an unrealistic daydream to imagine that the party can suddenly force the public to concentrate on their political messaging, when a significant portion of their members, activists, organisations, and previously supportive independent media sites that they'd need to spread the party message are actually busy fighting back against the bitter factionally motivated internal war the party bureaucrats are busy waging!

Party Conference

The report pins an awful lot of hope on the upcoming party conference, saying that it's an opportunity for Labour to "dominate the news agenda", and imploring the leadership to finally "give more thought to the overall narrative they want to convey", but under current circumstances this is wildly optimistic.

Just last week unionised Labour Party workers voted on taking industrial action against 90 proposed involuntary redundancies (which are being proposed as a solution to the vast hole in the party finances caused by Starmer 's minions deliberately driving 100,000+ paying members out of the party). 

It doesn't matter how many "primary colours" Starmer uses to paint his vision of Britain in his conference speech, it's going to be spectacularly undermined if he ends up having to cross a picket line of the Labour Party's own workforce to make it.

Then there's the fact that Starmer's bloodthirsty NEC henchman David Evans still hasn't had his position ratified at conference. Given the massively divisive internal civil war he's been waging since the moment he took over, it wouldn't come as much of a surprise if there was some kind of conference rebellion, and insistence that he's replaced by some kind of unity figure.

Then there's Starmer's absurdly divisive decision to keep Jeremy Corbyn suspended from the parliamentary party, which is yet another cause of entirely unnecessary division.

If Starmer had been honest about his pledge to promote party unity and kept Corbyn onboard, then a hugely energised audience for an on-message Corbyn conference speech would go down as a success, even if Starmer's speech underwhelms.

But if Corbyn turns up and gets big audiences under the current circumstances, Starmer is going to look a complete tit, no matter how well his own speech does or doesn't go.

Conclusion

There are elements of truth to this report.

It's beyond obvious that the party should be concentrating on stuff like online presence and effective communication.

The problem with it is that the recommendations seem to have been delivered from a position of absolute denial about the terrible state the party is in.

Wishing for a better online strategy is meaningless if you've pissed off and alienated most of your existing online activists.

Wishing for fewer and clearer policies is meaningless, if the policies you want to focus public attention on represent absolute betrayals of historic Labour Party values.

Wishing for more popularity outside of London is meaningless, if all you've got to offer is vapid gimmicks that have no material effects of people's lives or communities.

Wishing for internal party issues to go away is meaningless, if the party leadership is busy waging bitter factional warfare against your own members, supporters, activists, and voters.

Wishing for party conference to be some kind of magical turning point is meaningless, when it's looking more and more like the moment when all the problems you've been creating for yourself collide in an excruciatingly public humiliation.

Wishing for a bright future for your party is meaningless, if you're wishing from a position of denial about the terrible state it's in at the present.

 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.

OR

Why are footballers held more accountable than establishment politicians?

The mainstream media non-reaction to the Labour Leak scandal, and the ongoing lack of suspensions within the party are extraordinary in their own right.

What the leaks revealed was a bunch of horrific right-wing wreckers embedded within the Labour Party deliberately trying to lose elections, misallocating party funds, engaging in racist and misogynistic abuse against their party colleagues, and endlessly slagging off their own party's leader, policies, and supporters.

But a little thought experiment puts this scandal, and the almost complete non-reaction to it into a clearer perspective.

If leaked WhatsApp chats revealed that several players on a Premier League football team had been conspiring to deliberately lose crucial games in a misguided attempt to drive out their manager, all hell would break loose.

Especially if the players were also caught out spewing racist abuse at their own black team mates, deliberately undermining their own team's anti-racism initiatives, and repeatedly deriding their own team's fans with mental health slurs.

You could bet every penny you've got on these players being immediately suspended, coverage of the story dominating the newspaper front and back pages for weeks, the regulatory authorities getting involved, and several of the worst perpetrators ending up in jail and never playing professional football again in their lives.

But just imagine if the club decided not to suspend a single one of the players.

How do you imagine the club's fans would react if the team just carried on like nothing had happened?

And do you really think the players' mates in the media would be composing articles portraying the cheating racist scunners as the "poor innocent victims of a terrible invasion of privacy" (despite the fact that they only got caught because one of the hypothetical players had been stupid enough to upload the entire WhatsApp chat history onto the club's computer system!).

But we've seen articles from the Guardian to the Telegraph portraying these bigotry-dripping right-wing saboteurs as the poor innocent victims, and whoever blew the whistle by leaking the report as the dreadful horrible monster of the situation.

In reality we don't even need to imagine how football would react to a scandal like this, because we've got plenty of evidence of how the football community reacts to cheating, disrespect, and racism.

When the former Huddersfield, West Brom, and Notts County player Delroy Facey was caught match fixing he was jailed for two and a half years.

Two England managers have been forced out of their jobs, Glenn Hoddle over his bizarre ableist tirade accusing disabled people of being at fault for their own conditions because of "karma" and Sam Allardyce was removed after one solitary game for financial impropriety.

When former West Brom and Manchester United manager Ron Atkinson was recorded saying that a black footballer was a "lazy, thick N-word" he was cancelled. Despite being one of the pioneering managers who brought black players into his teams in the 1970s and '80s, he clearly stepped way over the line with this racial slur and lost his commentary and football columnist jobs over it.

Just think about how many times football managers and players have been sanctioned and fined for "bringing the game into disrepute", and how establishment politicians have been allowed to get away with absolutely egregious lies, expenses scamming, and horrific abuse of each other and random members of the public.

Just think about the vitriol that a whole host of football players have faced over charges of  "going down to easily", even though the referees have shown time and again that they simply don't award free kicks unless players make a big show of falling over at the point of contact.

People who fall over too easily on a sports field get more public derision than politicians who sabotage elections and spew racist, misogynistic, and ableist abuse!

The establishment political class get in comparison to footballers is extraordinary:

Consider Tony Blair's lies that led us into the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the hundreds of thousands who died as a consequence, and how he's still treated as some kind of beloved political oracle by the press, instead of the lying pariah he should be.

Consider David Cameron hiding behind parliamentary privilege like a coward to spew libellous abuse at a random Muslim guy, purely in order to falsely portray Labour's Sadiq Khan as a terrorist sympathiser.

Consider Theresa May's sickeningly racist "Hostile Environment" legislation, and how nobody in the political establishment class has faced any real consequences for the systematic abuse of black British citizens, to the extent of actually deporting scores of UK citizens.

Consider the fact that 88% of Tory Facebook ads were shown to be lies during the 2019 General Election, and absolutely nothing was done about it.

And consider the ludicrous non-reaction to the racism, mental health slurs, delaying of antisemitism investigations, and deliberate electoral sabotage carried out by the Labour right-wingers that was exposed in the Labour Leaks.

It turns out that the United Kingdom is a country with absurd priorities, where the media and regulatory authorities hold footballers, football managers, and football commentators to a vastly higher standard of conduct than the establishment politicians who actually rule over our lives!

We've just become so accustomed to the political establishment lying, and cheating, and scamming their way through their careers that we accept it as a normal part of the job.

But to make matters worse, when one politician showed up who eschewed the lying, and scheming, and self-interested scamming, the mainstream media and the rest of the political class turned on him, continually portrayed him as some kind of repulsive extremist monster, and even deliberately sabotaged his party from within to prevent him from becoming Prime Minister.

Even if it had been players from a football club you don't even like, you'd want them disciplined for bringing the game into disrepute if they'd behaved like the right-wing Labour saboteurs, but somehow, because it's happened in politics rather than football, most of the nation has turned a complete blind eye to it.

And this extraordinary non-reaction provokes the question of how politics can ever be cleaned up if establishment politicians can get away with the kind of deliberate sabotage and rampant bigotry that would result in footballers, or anyone else in any other job, getting sacked, and probably jailed if they did 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.

OR

Why do so many people who benefited from social mobility now want the ladder kicked down?

As a result of the changes introduced by Clement Attlee's post-war Labour government the 1960s and '70s saw the greatest levels of social mobility the United Kingdom has ever seen.

There was full employment so that pretty much anyone with the desire to work could find a job with at least half decent pay. There were plenty of houses, and even if you couldn't quite afford a house of your own there was an abundant supply of social housing too. If you were academically smart, then university education was free, and it even came with maintenance grants to cover your living costs. If you lost your job or fell ill then the welfare state provided decent social security payments to stave off absolute destitution. The legal aid system ensured that the poor and ordinary could have access to good legal representation so as to tip the scales of justice ever-so-slightly less in favour of the super-rich.

Of course this period was no utopia, and plenty of people still endured poor pay, dangerous working conditions, and discriminatory practices (especially when it came to stuff like sex, race, class and sexual orientation), but since 1979 many of the factors that allowed these all-time high levels of social mobility have been deliberately attacked and undermined by the Westminster political class.

• The supply of social housing has been catastrophically eroded since the 1980s, 40% of the sold-off homes falling into the hands of exploitative private landlords. 

• The lowest house building rates since the early 1920s has stoked house price inflation has made the prospect of home ownership an impossible fantasy to millions. 

• Since 2010 ordinary British workers have suffered the longest sustained decline in the real value of their wages since records began. 

• The current low unemployment figures that right-wingers love to brag about are a blatant fix which count anyone who does just 1 hour a week on a zero hours contract job as "employed". Additionally it counts anyone who has been thrown off benefits by zealous job centre staff as not being unemployed. Additionally people on unpaid workfare schemes are also classed as being employed!

• The welfare state has been persistently attacked so that unemployed people have to jump through countless hoops and even offer themselves up as unpaid slave labour at highly profitable multinational corporations in order to receive their meagre subsistence benefits. 

• Sick and disabled people have it even worse, having to go through demeaning, dehumanising and downright discriminatory Work Capacity Assessments administered by bureaucrats working for profitable outsourcing corporations. 

• Students are being lumbered with debts of £50,000+ before they even enter the workplace, and over 80% of graduates under this new regime will never be able to pay off their student debts, despite entire working lifetimes of repayments!

• Access to legal aid has been trashed so badly that hundreds of thousands of people are being left with no choice but to represent themselves in court, which not only shatters their chances of success, but also wastes vast amounts of court time and public money because they simply don't understand the legal processes.

It's completely understandable that the privileged classes and their pals in the Westminster establishment club have worked so hard and for so long to reduce social mobility. After all the beneficiaries of social mobility become rivals to the children of the upper classes.

The less social mobility there is, the more unearned opportunities there are to be handed on a plate to the children of the establishment class.

It's clearly a huge advantage to the children of the establishment class that their peers are lumbered with a lifetime 9% aspiration tax on their disposable income for their university education, while they avoid it because their parents can just pay the fees upfront. 

It's beyond obvious that an unaccountable political elite would increasingly selfishly rig society to benefit their own class if they found that they suffered no adverse electoral consequences for doing it (as the New Labour mob found when they first introduced aspiration taxes on university students from poor and ordinary backgrounds).

The establishment elitists who rig society to benefit their own class are undeniably the bad guys, but the truly despicable people are those who actually reaped the benefits of social mobility in the 1960s and '70s, who now desperately want to kick the ladder down to prevent the younger generations from climbing up too.

The people who came from poor and ordinary backgrounds and enjoyed the benefits of stuff like social housing and/or affordable house prices, full employment and decent wages, a decent social safety net, legal aid, and free university education, but who now vote in favour of denying these same opportunities to all future generations.

Perhaps some of these people have deluded themselves into believing that they achieved it all themselves, and the decent wages, affordable housing, social safety net, legal protections, and access to free university education had nothing whatever to do with it. That's called the self-attribution fallacy, and huge numbers of wealthy people love to imagine that they did it all by themselves.

On the other hand there are plenty who know perfectly well that they benefited from social mobility, but who want to kick the ladder down on younger generations for purely self-interested reasons. For example people who benefited from affordable housing in the past know that building more social and affordable housing now would slow down the inflating value of their own property portfolios, and reduce the profits from their buy-to-let slumlord empires.

Of course it was hard to avoid voting in favour of attacks on social mobility when Tony Blair and his ilk were running the Labour Party because both of the main parties were at it.

But now that Labour has a leader who is determined to reverse the trend and begin promoting social mobility again through policies like free education, house building, welfare reform, decent wages, regulation of the private rental market, and a crackdown on exploitative employment practices, there's really no excuse for voting for more Tory class war inspired attacks on social mobility unless you actively oppose social mobility.

The wealthy and privileged establishment class who have enforced four decades of neoliberalism, rigging British society in favour of themselves and their own are vile self-serving elitists, but the people who actually benefited from social mobility who actually vote in favour of the Tory war against social mobility are the truly despicable ones.

They're the kind of people who climb the ladder out of the flooding basement, then deliberately kick it down and let others from their own class drown, rather than risk sharing the benefits of not drowning with others.

They don't lose anything by letting other people escape, but it makes them feel important and special to look down on other people drowning, and feel superior.

Even those who have deluded themselves that social mobility is irrelevant and that they achieved everything in life themselves are guilty of class treachery. 

Perhaps they're too deluded to realise that voting in favour of the Tory war against social mobility is an utterly malicious thing to do? But since when was stupidity a defence?

Does the criminal get to avoid jail because he claims to be too stupid to have realised that robbing the Post Office was a crime?

Of course not.

So why on earth should Tory voters who came from poor and ordinary backgrounds get to claim that they're too narrow-minded to understand that it's unspeakably malicious for them to kick the ladder down to prevent younger generations benefiting from the social mobility they themselves enjoyed in the past?

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

OR

Who should own our vital national infrastructure and services?

One of the most absurd fictions in British politics is the idea that the Tory party are Britain-loving patriots because they wrap themselves in the union flag and pretend to love our country as they carve it up and give it away piece by piece, while Jeremy Corbyn and Labour are supposedly a bunch of Britain-hating traitors.

In order to recognise this nonsense as the reality-reversed lie that it is, all you need to do is look at the contrasting economic policies of the two parties.

The Tory party believe in a grotesque form of so-called "privatisation" that blocks the UK state from owning and operating its own infrastructure and services, whilst allowing foreign governments to come in and buy up stakes as cash cow investments for themselves!

The Tories are not opposed to national ownership in principle, because they allow the Chinese government to own stakes in our water supply, China and Qatar to own chunks of our National Grid, the national rail networks of loads of countries to buy up stakes in the UK rail network to siphon profits back into their own domestic rail networks (Netherlands, Singapore, Germany, France, Italy, Hong Kong ...), and they even sold off the UK's underground aviation fuel supply network directly to a company operated by the governments of Oman and the UAE, then immediately rented it back for ten years for three times the price they just sold it off for!

So the Tory "privatisation" ideology turns out to be the absurdly anti-British belief that every state in the world should be allowed to own chunks of British infrastructure and services, except for Britain itself!

And these are the people who pretend to be patriots!

The Tories also believe in outright defying the public will by privatising stuff like the police, NHS, Royal Mail, schools, and prisons into the hands of unaccountable private profiteers, mostly with disastrous consequences.

They flogged off the Royal Mail at a tiny fraction of its true value, they've privatised 75% of the secondary schools in England into the hands of unaccountable private profiteers, privatisation of the police forensic science service has resulted in a huge evidence tampering scandal, their prisons privatisation agenda has turned out to be an absolute disaster, and despite all the Tory lies that "the NHS is not for sale" NHS privatisation rose to an all-time record high in 2018 of £9.2 billion.

The Tories continually put the interests of private sector profiteers above the will of the British people that the profit motive has no place in our police forces, hospitals, and schools.

Labour's position is much clearer and more coherent. They don't believe that foreign states should be allowed to come in and buy up chunks of our national infrastructure and services as cash cow investments for themselves, because it should be being run as not-for-profit public services for the benefit of Britain and the British people.

Labour also believes in running the police, NHS, Royal Mail, schools, and prisons as not-for-profit public services, not as money making scams for parasitical private sector profiteers.

Labour believes in Britain, while the Tories detest Britain to such an extent they'd rather have foreign governments and parasitical private profiteers running our infrastructure and services than Britain running it's own stuff!

Yet somehow, the billionaire propaganda barons, and their vast army of mercenary media hacks have managed to convince vast swathes of the public that the Tories are the patriots who love Britain, and that Labour are the Britain-haters who want to do it down!

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So how many of Jeremy Corbyn's policies do you actually disagree with?

A London School of Economics study into how Jeremy Corbyn is represented in the media found that only a paltry 11% of all newspaper articles about him bothered to accurately state a single one of his actual policies. In the hard-right Daily Mail and Express that figure was 0%.

Given this lack of unbiased political coverage, it's not difficult to understand why so many people are so unfamiliar with Jeremy Corbyn's actual policies, and tend to judge him as if politics is some kind of vapid personality contest.

So here are some of the Jeremy Corbyn policies that the mainstream media really don't want to tell you about, so you can judge for yourself whether you like them or not.

Labour Party policies

Ban companies based in tax havens bidding for government contracts
It's astounding that this isn't the case already. How on earth could anyone even attempt to justify taxpayers' cash being paid to companies based in tax havens for the purpose of dodging tax?

£10 minimum wage for all workers over the age of 18
The UK is the only country in the developed world where workers' wages are declining in real terms, while the economy is actually growing. A £10 minimum wage would help to reverse this scenario, and it would also significantly reduce the cost of in-work benefits like tax credits and housing benefit (most of which goes to working families these days).

The Tories have are trying to outflank this by saying they'll raise the minimum wage to £10.50, but that's only by 2024, Labour's would come in immediately.

All rented accommodation to be fit for human habitation
Again, astounding that this isn't the case already, but in January 2016 the Tories (over 1/3 of whom are landlords) deliberately voted down a Labour Party amendment to their housing bill to ensure that all rented accommodation is fit for human habitation.

Renationalise the railways
This is a very popular policy that is supported by an overwhelming majority of the public. Do you support rail renationalisation too, or are you one of the minority who think that the current rip-off profiteer-administered shambles is acceptable?

Renationalise the NHS
The Tory party have been carving up the English NHS and distributing the pieces to the private sector, Jeremy Corbyn has pledged to reverse this process. Are you one of the 84% of people who thinks the NHS should be run as a not-for-profit public service, or one of the 7% who agree with the ongoing Tory privatisation agenda?

Free school meals
The policy of providing free school meals to all school children between the ages of 4 and 11 is based on evidence based research showing that universal free school meals lead to significantly improved grades. It will be paid for by ending the generous tax breaks (public subsidies) for the 7% of kids who go to private fee-paying schools.

Create a National Education Service
Jeremy Corbyn believes that education is a right, not a commodity. He wants to create an integrated National Education Service to ensure that education is freely available to anyone who needs it, no matter their age, income, or background.

Scrap tuition fees
Thanks to the Tories (and their Lib-Dem enablers) UK students now face the most expensive tuition fees in the developed world for study at public universities, meaning students typically leave university with £50,000 of debt, and two thirds of them will never pay off their student debts. Labour would end this lunacy by getting rid of student fees.

Restore NHS Bursaries
One of the first things Theresa My did when she came to power in 2016 was to scrap NHS bursaries for nurses and other NHS workers. This removal of financial support for trainee nurses has caused a huge decline in the number of applicants to nursing courses. The NHS is facing a vast recruitment crisis, and restoring NHS bursaries and investing heavily in medical training is the only way to prevent even more than the 130,000 avoidable deaths already caused by Tory austerity cuts to the NHS and social care systems.

Increase the carers' allowance
Labour are proposing to increase the Carers Allowance for the 1 million unpaid carers in the UK. This would be paid for by scrapping the Tories' Inheritance Tax cut for millionaires. Unpaid carers save the UK economy an estimated £132 million a year, and they've been doing ever more work as a result of the £4.6 billion in Tory cuts to the social care budget.

Create a National Investment Bank
This is actually one of Jeremy Corbyn's best policies, but few people actually understand it. It's absolutely clear that allowing private banks to determine where money is invested ends up in huge speculative bubbles in housing and financial derivatives, while the real economy is starved of cash. A National Investment Bank would work by investing in things like infrastructure, services, businesses and regional development projects, and would end up becoming a kind of sovereign wealth fund for the UK.

End the public sector pay freeze
Under Tory rule UK workers have suffered the longest sustained decline in real wages since records began. The public sector pay freeze contributed massively to this. You'd have to be economically illiterate to imagine that repressing public sector wages with below inflation pay rises for year after year would not exert downwards pressure on private sector wages too. Ending the public sector pay freeze would actually boost the economy by putting more money in people's pockets, meaning an increase in aggregate demand.

End sweetheart tax deals between HMRC and massive corporations
David Cameron (the son of a tax-dodger) repeatedly lied through his teeth about how serious he was about confronting tax-dodging, whilst allowing HMRC to concoct sweetheart deals with corporations like Google, Vodafone and Starbucks. One of the main reasons the corporate press are so strongly opposed to Jeremy Corbyn is that they know that unlike David Cameron, he's serious when he talks about clamping down on tax-dodging.

Stop major corporations ripping off their suppliers
Major corporations are withholding an astounding £26 billion through late payment, which is responsible for an estimated 50,000 small businesses going bust every year. The scale of this problem is so massive that it should be a national scandal, and Jeremy Corbyn is absolutely right to align himself with small businesses to defend their interests. 

Reverse the Tory corporation tax cuts
Since 2010 the Tories have cut the rate of corporation tax for major multinational corporations from 28% to just 17% (by 2020) meaning the UK has one of the lowest corporation tax rates in the developed world. The global average is 27% and the G7 average is 32.3%. Corbyn is proposing to reverse this ideological race to the bottom madness and restore corporation tax rates back in line with the rest of the developed world.

Prevent No Deal Brexit chaos
Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party are absolutely committed to preventing the UK from crashing out of the EU without agreeing a sensible process first. With Labour the worst possible Brexit option of No Deal will be taken off the table, and the choice will be given back to the public between a "soft" least-damaging version of Brexit (that protects the interests of British businesses and British workers alike) against Remain in a final say referendum.

Zero Hours Contracts ban
Almost a million UK workers are now on exploitative Zero Hours Contracts. Last year the New Zealand parliament voted to ban them, and Labour is proposing to do the same. Long-term employees and workers doing regular hours would be protected from Zero Hours Contract exploitation.

End Tory disability persecution
Ever since 2010 the Tories have been brutally persecuting sick, disabled, and terminally ill people. Cutting their pitiful subsistence benefits to pay for even more tax cuts for the rich, confiscating their motability vehicles, forcing them through demeaning corporate-administered "fit for work" disability denial assessments, even making terminally ill people sign on if they survive for more than six months!

Labour would scrap all of this, and build a new, more compassionate system to actually help the most vulnerable and unfortunate people in our society, rather than abusing and impoverishing them, and making them feel like useless idle scroungers who should just go and kill themselves.

House building
Under the Tory government the level of UK housebuilding has slumped to the lowest levels since the 1920s, even though demand for housing is extremely high. Labour are guaranteeing investment in a programme of house building, and committing to ensure that half of the new houses are social housing. 

This wouldn't just alleviate the housing crisis, it would also stimulate the economy (creation of skilled jobs, demand for supplies and materials, less disposable income being wasted on rip-off private rents ...).

Combat inequality
Tory austerity fanaticism resulted in the longest sustained decline in workers' wages since records began and condemned an additional 400,000 children to growing up in poverty, meanwhile the tiny super-rich majority literally doubled their wealth. Labour is pledging to reduce the inequality gap and introduce progressive policies to reduce the gap between the incomes of the highest and lowest paid. There is plenty of evidence to show that the least unequal societies are more economically successful places where the people are happier.

Conclusion

So out of these 20 Labour Party policies, how many do you actually strongly disagree with?

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Footnotes: How would this be paid for?

A lot of people tend to ask how all of this is going to be paid for, so here's some answers.

It turns out that quite a lot of these policies are actually investments that would pay for themselves in the long-term because they would stimulate more economic activity than the investment cost (see my articles on fiscal multiplication and the marginal propensity to consume to get a better idea of how). 

Other policies could easily be funded if we had a government that was actually serious about cracking down on tax-dodging, which costs the country vast amounts per year. Just ending sweetheart deals between HMRC and major multinational corporations would generate £billions, which would pay for stuff like restoring the NHS bursary many times over.

If anyone is genuinely worried about how stuff is going to be paid for, the first thing on their mind should of course be the impending threat of Boris Johnson's Brexit bodge, which is set to cost the UK economy £79 billion (the equivalent of the entire economy of Wales), or even worse a No Deal Tory Brexit strop.

If the Tories manage to engineer No Deal the IFS have estimated a 6.3% -9.5% collapse in GDP, which would be an even bigger economic meltdown than the one that was caused by the 2007-08 global financial sector insolvency crisis (that our economy and our wages have still nowhere near recovered from)!

What do you think would happen to stuff like the tax take and the budget deficit if the economy tanked even worse than it did in 2009 thanks to Tory Brexit?