For the last nine years Britain has been charging headlong to the far-right, with one increasingly militant Tory government after another.
In 2010 the Lib-Dems enabled the Tories back into power for the first time in 13 years, and the results were disastrous. The Lib-Dems voted through every single piece of wanton Tory ideological malice, including the austerity fanaticism that trashed our living standards and laid the groundwork for the Brexit backlash to happen.
The Lib-Dems love to pretend that they were some kind of wonderful moderating force, but the truth is easy to find. If we look at the absolute worst stuff the austerity coalition did, Lib-Dem fingerprints are all over all of it: Austerity fanaticism, unprecedented wage repression, disability persecution, NHS privatisation, catastrophic local government cuts, Bedroom Tax, 75% of secondary schools in England privatised, Theresa May's unlawfully racist Hostile Environment ...
And to make matters even worse leading Lib-Dems actually took personal responsibility for delivering the absolute worst of it, the most egregious examples being Vince Cable's outrageous decision to flog off our Royal Mail at miles below its true value to a bunch of city spivs, and Jo Swinson doing nothing whatever to stop the imposition of unlawful tribunal fees, despite being Employment Minister in the austerity coalition!
Things did get even worse after the Lib-Dem collapse in 2015 as the unrestrained Tories intensified the already unprecedented rate of privatisations, and imposed the most brutal social security cuts in the history of the welfare state, but it's beyond obvious that things could never have even got to that stage without the deliberate calculated collusion of the Lib-Dems.
Then in 2016 the Tories gambled away the nation's future on a ludicrous Brexit referendum in which the Leave option was left entirely undefined, allowing Brexiteers to cynically promise voters the moon on a stick, with absolutely no intention of following through on their false promises.
The day after his gamble backfired Cameron was gone, replaced by the fanatically right-wing wannabe tyrant Theresa May, who had all the hard-right politics, inflexible stubbornness, control-freakery, and authoritarianism of an all-powerful autocrat, but thankfully not the competence, or self-awareness, or discipline to actually follow through on her outrageous threats, or actually 'crush the saboteurs'.
May did manage to inflict even more ideological damage during her two year reign, not least her decision to starve the NHS of new recruits by wantonly scrapping NHS bursaries, creating a ticking time bomb of a recruitment crisis that will destroy the NHS if it is not resolved soon.
And now we have Boris Johnson, who is so wilfully intent on pandering to the far-right ultranationalist demographic that stalwarts of Conservatism who backed all of the austerity fanaticism, and wage repression, and welfare vadalism, and disability persecution, and public service cuts, and infrastructure under-investment are now fleeing the party in droves in absolute disgust at what it's becoming, including Johnson's own brother Jo.
It's mind-bogglingly obvious that the UK needs to rapidly abandon this race to the extreme-right fringe and reset back towards the centre ground. It's equally obvious that it's literally impossible to move away from the territory of the hard-right without moving somewhat to the left.
Thus there are actually two kinds of 'centrists'. One type who recognise the obvious truth that the UK needs to move significantly leftwards in order to gravitate back towards the traditional centre ground, and another smug, complacent, orthodox neoliberal bunch who just want to pause where we are with a "more of the same" agenda, enjoy the trappings of power for a few years, and then hand deliver power back to the next hard-right government that comes along.
The problem of course is that there's no commonly understood distinction between these two different kinds of 'centrism'.
There are those 'centrists' who believe in the mixed economy of socially owned infrastructure and services, and privately owned but well-regulated businesses, who believe Britain has gone way too far to the right.
And there are those 'faux centrists' who believe in always standing just a couple of milimetres to the left of the Tory party, no matter how far off to the crackpot far-right extreme they've gone, and never shifting an inch back towards where the traditional centre actually used to be.
Unfortunately an awful lot of the second kind of 'centrist' have made their home in the Liberal Democrats, hoping to turn it into a Conservatives MkII party to hold firm on the hard-right political territory, to keep the crushing living standards-destroying austerity coming, to keep the tax dodge loopholes open for the benefit of their mega-rich backers, and to keep annihilating the wages and working conditions of ordinary working people under the utterly misguided delusion that the best way to make the rich richer, is to force the poor and ordinary into destitution.
I'm as guilty as anyone for vehemently condemning this kind right-wing faux 'centrism', and maybe genuine 'centrists' who do actually recognise the need for a dramatic leftward turn back towards the centre ground might have felt caught in the crossfire as the left have repeatedly slammed the faux 'centrists' for their ludicrous pretence that their pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, anti-worker, welfare-vandalising, infrastructure under-investing, hard-right fanaticism is anywhere near the legitimate political centre.
I'm sorry if this is the case, and people who just wants things to return to normality feels caught in the crossfire.
It's just that a bunch of right-wing neoliberal militants intent on creating a veneer of legitimacy for their radical hard-right agenda by pretending that it's some kind of moderate, mainstream, centrist philosophy have stolen the positioning of legitimate 'centrists', who do actually recognise the need to rebalance somewhat towards the left.
Any legitimate 'centrist' really has to understand that millions of people in Britain literally can't afford yet more years of "more of the same" neoliberal orthodoxy shamelessly disguised as 'centrism'.
We need fundamental change to undo some of the worst hard-right excesses of the last decade; investment instead of austerity, a well earned wage rise for British workers, restoration of the wantonly vandalised social safety net, de-privatisation of police, hospitals, schools, and prisons, and de-centralisation of political power ...
Legitimate 'centrists' should be saying "no bloody way" to Jo Swinson and the Lib-Dems' transparent efforts to restructure their party as Conservatives 2.0 disguised as 'centrism' to dupe the gullible, and "yes please" to Labour's strategy of actually investing in Britain's future, and undoing as much of the hard-right Tory damage as they can.
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.
Lib-Dem leader Jo Swinson has been rummaging through the political rubbish bin again to scavenge yet another Tory-reject to join her absolute shambles of a political party, bringing the number of ex-Tories in the Lib-Dem ranks to five, which means Tory defectors now make up a ridiculous 24% of the Lib-Dem parliamentary party!
One of the most amazing things about the Lib-Dem acquisition of so many Tory rejects is the absolute state of their voting records, and the latest recruit Antoinette Sandbach is no different.
Her voting record is absolutely vile, having loyally backed every piece of poverty-spreading Tory welfare vandalism, every rip-off privatisation scam, every attack on workers' rights and wages, every economically illiterate austerity measure, every tax cut and handout for corporations and the mega-rich, and every catastrophic cut to public services like the NHS, policing, the fire service, social care, local government services ...
But the mind really starts to boggle when it comes to Sandbach's voting record on Brexit.
- When Labour and the other opposition parties attempted to prevent the Tories from using Brexit to attack workers' rights, environmental laws, food standards, and consumer protections, Sandbach voted the amendment down.
- Sandbach voted 15 times to deny the EU citizens the right to reside in the UK after Brexit.
And how does the duplicitous weasel Jo Swinson welcome Sandbach into the Lib-Dem ranks? By going on about working with her to stop Brexit!
The fact that the Lib-Dems are welcoming another hard-right pro-Brexit, EU citizens rights denier into their ranks just goes to prove that the Lib-Dems love Tories an awful lot more than they actually want to stop Brexit.
And the expectation that their supporters will mindlessly accept the glaring contradiction between the Lib-Dems' anti-Brexit posturing and the red carpet treatment they afford to a bunch of Brexity Tory-rejects like Sandbach just goes to prove what a gullible and intellectually lazy bunch they imagine their own supporters to be.
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.
Ever since Jo Swinson became Lib-Dem leader she's been shifting the Lib-Dem position ever further towards the extreme fringe of Remain, to the point tearing up the longstanding Lib-Dem policy of demanding another referendum and replacing it with a threat to stop Brexit without even holding a referendum.
Swinson's increasingly militant behaviour and language makes it pretty obvious that she's attempting to position herself as the Nigel Farage of Remain.
Here are ten similarities between Swinson's approach to politics and Farage's.
EU fanaticismThis first similarity is the most obvious. Swinson and Farage both promote fanatically one-sided views of the EU.
Farage's rhetoric tells us that the EU is irredeemably corrupt and corrosive to the British way of life, while Swinson's rhetoric holds the EU up as the essential and irreproachable source of all that is good and decent.
Both of these positions are extreme and over-simplistic. There's an element of truth in both, because there are dreadful problems with the EU like the undemocratic and austerity-pushing European Central Bank, and the passage of endless pieces of unashamedly pro-corporate legislation through the European Parliament, but the EU is also the source of many of our rights, liberties, and living standards (workers' rights, environmental laws, food standards, consumer protections, freedom from discrimination, and of course the right to move freely around most of the continent of Europe).
We don't live in a Star Wars universe of heroic goodies and irredeemable evil empires. We live in reality, where virtually all large organisations, including the EU, have a mixture of good and bad characteristics.
To focus exclusively on one side without acknowledging the other is profoundly dishonest, and in this regard Farage and Swinson are two cheeks of the same arse.
Lies
Besides adopting one-sided and profoundly dishonest EU militancy, both of these figures are also perfectly willing to resort to outright lies to push their agendas.
Farage has lies so many times it's impossible to compile them all here. Just think of his endless claims that the majority of British laws are made in Europe when the real figure is 13.2%, or his EU referendum lies about Turkey being on the verge of joining the EU, when in reality they've still only managed to complete a single one of the 33 chapters required for membership in 13 years!
Swinson proved her willingness to lie through her teeth on her very first day in the job as Lib-Dem leader, publicly accusing Jeremy Corbyn of taking a two week holiday during the EU referendum period.
In reality the longest break Corbyn took from an extensive campaign schedule was in the mourning period after the brutal murder of Jo Cox.
Meanwhile Swinson barely campaigned at all for Remain in 2016, making virtually no public appearances, in preference for sitting at home tweeting cat pictures!
Swinson has also been caught out telling other lies like supposedly opposing unlawful Tory employment tribunal fees when she actually voted in favour of them!
Both of these politicians have proven themselves such ideological fanatics that they'll resort to deliberate lies in order to con members of the public into supporting them.
DefectorsFarage and Swinson have both benefited from the significant publicity boost of attracting defectors from other political parties, however in this regard Swinson is clearly even worse than Farage.
When Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless defected from the Tories to UKIP in 2014, at least they put their decision to their constituents by resigning and calling parliamentary by-elections.
There's no such respect for democracy in the Lib-Dems, with Swinson welcoming six defector MPs into the Lib-Dem ranks (now making up a full third of their parliamentary party) without a single by-election being held.
It's extraordinary to think that a party with "democrats" actually in their name are demonstrably more averse to democratic accountability that the Ukipper extremists at the far-right fringe of the political spectrum!
Goalpost shifting
Another thing Farage and Swinson have in common is their disingenuous goalpost-shifting tactics.
During the EU referendum Farage repeatedly insisted that the UK could easily get a deal with the EU so that we could be like Norway, or Switzerland, but he's now shifted to No Deal militancy, and treats the basic idea of leaving with any kind of withdrawal deal or future trading arrangement as if it's treason.
Swinson on the other hand has spent the last few years loudly and repeatedly calling for an "another roll of the dice" referendum. But then suddenly at her first Lib-Dem conference as their divine leader, she's flip-flopped to the new, much more militant position of just cancelling Brexit without even seeking a public mandate to do so!
Both of these politicians have demonstrably shifted the goalposts on Brexit to more militant positions, so anyone with a grain of sense must be extremely wary that these slippery snakes will simply switch position on any of their other stated principles if they think it serves their interest to do so.
Political chameleons
In order to make excuses for lying and flip-flopping from one position to another, it's necessary to engage in reality-reversing Orwellian history revisionism, and both of these politicians are adept at changing their political colours at will.
Farage's chameleon-like behaviour is more obvious, having effortlessly switched from the purple and yellow of UKIP to the light blue of Brexit Party, but Swinson's is actually more pernicious because she adopts different colours at the same depending on who she's talking to.
One minute Swinson is justifying her new "screw democracy, just scrap Brexit" policy by saying we need to get on with reversing austerity, but then within hours she's appealing to hard-right fiscal conservatives in Tory/Lib-Dem marginals by attempting to outflank the Tories to the right with grotesque pro-austerity tropes like "magic money tree" and "tough economic choices".
Media fawningAnother similarity between Farage and Swinson is the way the mainstream media seem to fawn over the pair of them, endlessly affording them airtime to flip-flop around, and spout their deceptions, and smears, and distortions, and outright lies, almost always unchallenged.
Farage usually gets more pushback from random members of the public who call into his radio show than from the mainstream media hack pack, and Lib-Dem tribalists responding to fact-based criticism of Swinson and her disgusting voting record with torrents of abuse, whataboutery, excuses, smears, and mental health abuse just goes to show how unfamiliar they are with the idea of their divine leader actually being held to account on anything.
Austerity
One of the most interesting similarities between Farage and Swinson is the way that both of them are entirely unwilling to admit that years of ruinous austerity fanaticism laid the groundwork for Brexit to happen.
Their reasons for refusing to acknowledge reality are very different, but the wilful austerity ignorance is the same.
Farage is loathe to admit that the domestic austerity policies of the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition were responsible for collapsing living standards prior to the 2016 EU referendum, because the main Brexiteer shtick during the EU referendum was to blame the consequences of austerity fanaticism (collapsed wages, huge NHS queues, unaffordable housing, failing public services, failing local services, failing social safety net) on immigrants and the EU.
Swinson is even more loathe to admit the link between austerity fanaticism and the Brexit backlash, because to admit that austerity laid the groundwork for Brexit would be to admit her own role in causing this Brexit chaos.
Not only does she consider it to be politically unwise to admit fault, she's also far too much of an egomaniac to apologise for her outrageous living standard-annihilating actions in the past.
Overseas allegiances
One of the weirdest things about the pair of them is their unmistakable loyalty to overseas political figures.
Farage is quite obviously enamoured with Donald Trump to the point where you wonder whether his obsession with forcing a calamitous No Deal Brexit meltdown actually has more to do with forcing Britain into subservience to Trump, than it has to do with Brexit purism.
Swinson on the other hand is full of adoration for Guy Verhofstadt, who was the leader of the ALDE group in the European parliament for 10 years, and is a man who personifies pretty much everything that's wrong with the EU.
Just consider the appalling speech Swinson invited him to give at her first Lib-Dem conference as party leader. Verhofstadt claimed that the reason the UK should stay in the EU is that the world is dividing up into empires, and that Britain would be safer within the European mega-empire.
Reject Brexit not because it's an ill considered and chaotically administered mess, but because it would cause Britain to miss out on the game of Liberal neo-imperialism Verhofstadt envisages for the future of mankind!
It's such a disturbing view of the world on so many levels, but Swinson adores the guy, and he even got a rousing round of applause from the Lib-Dem audience for his Liberal neo-imperialist fearmongering!
Betrayal
One of the starkest similarities of all between the pair is the way they resort so willingly to the divisive rhetoric of "betrayal".
Farage constantly bangs on about betrayal of the leave vote, but Swinson uses the exact same divisive rhetoric to attack Jeremy Corbyn for supposedly betraying Remainers.
Who cares that Labour is offering the referendum that the Lib-Dems spent years demanding, as far as Swinson and her ilk are concerned, attacking Corbyn is even more important than opposing Brexit, to the point that they're using the Brexiteer-style rhetoric of betrayal to attack him.
One suspects that even if Corbyn got the EU flag tattooed on his face and leapt into a volcano humming Ode to Joy, Swinson and her mob would still be screeching "betrayal" at him.
Fringe politics
Another of Swinson's attacks on Corbyn is that he supposedly exists at the fringe, or the sideline of political debate, but anyone with the slightest acquaintance with political reality can see that Farage and Swinson are the ones positioning themselves at the fringes of the Brexit debate, both screeching "fuck off" at half the voting electorate who didn't vote the way they wanted, while Corbyn is trying to position himself near the centre in order to try and clear up the mess, rather than spewing hyper-partisan rhetoric to deliberately exacerbate tensions for party political advantage.
But according to Swinson's absurd reality-reversed logic, the militant fringe intent on ignoring one half of the electorate or other, is the "centre ground" and Corbyn's attempts at compromise and deescalation are the militant fringe!
Conclusion
Jo Swinson continually pretends that she's positioned on the sensible centre-ground of politics, but her grotesque track record of enabling ruinous austerity fanaticism, her outright refusal to acknowledge that austerity dogma laid the groundwork for the Brexit backlash, or to apologise for it, her willingness to lie through her teeth, her increasingly militant Remain tactics, and the remarkably easy ride she's afforded by the mainstream media demonstrate that she's just as much a political extremist as Nigel Farage.
Additionally the unquestioning cult-like loyalty of the Lib-Dem tribalists to her ever-changing position, and the torrents of abuse they spew at anyone who dares question their divine and irreproachable leader suggests that she's every bit as dangerous too.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
The Green Party's only MP Caroline Lucas has completely and utterly lost the plot over Brexit.
For years she was one of my absolute favourite politicians. She led the Greens when they were the only UK-wide party opposing ruinous austerity fanaticism (Labour pushed pathetic austerity-lite rubbish until this pathetic non-opposition cost them the 2015 general election and triggered the Corbyn fightback against the "centrist" policy of imitating Tory austerity fanaticism, rather than opposing it). Lucas has also consistently been on the right side of important parliamentary votes (alongside Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, John McDonnell, and Dennis Skinner she was the only other MP with sufficient principles to vote against Theresa May's racist hostile environment, David Cameron's disastrous war-mongering in Libya, and Theresa May's enhanced state snooping powers, and George Osborne's welfare vandalism bill).
Over the last few months it's been bad enough watching the Greens voluntarily turning themselves into recruitment agents for the austerity enabling, privatisation scamming, welfare vandalising, workers' rights attacking, fracking tax cutting, disability persecuting, student impoverishing, electoral reform abandoning Lib-Dem warmongers, but Lucas' "fantasy cabinet" of herself and ten all-white, all-female MPs is an extraordinary blowout.
Here are details on the ten other women Lucas wants to orchestrate a "foil Brexit at any cost" coup with:
Anna Soubry: Ex-Tory Soubry talks a good game pretending to oppose Brexit, but when it came to the crunch she actually voted in favour of Theresa May's hard Brexit shambles of a Withdrawal Agreement! Soubry has also made it absolutely clear that she'd prefer a ruinous Tory-administered Brexit than stopping Brexit under a Corbyn-led Labour government. She also referred to the ruinous living standards destroying policies of the austerity coalition that laid the groundwork for Brexit as "marvellous".
Heidi Allen: Another ex-Tory. As a Tory she once cried in parliament about the devastating impact of Tory welfare vandalism to gather "compassionate Conservative" headlines, before wilfully marching through the lobby to vote in favour of even more of the welfare vandalism and devastating cuts she was crying over. She's also responsible for the stupidest and most dangerous Remainer idea yet, which is to just let No Deal go ahead, then try to magically undo it using retroactive legislation!
Jo Swinson: She isn't a Tory, but she might as well be, having been more loyal to the Tory whip during the ruinous austerity coalition than numerous Tory MPs (including recent Tory leadership candidate Jeremy Hunt!). Whatever horrible abuse and economically illiterate nonsense the Tories were pushing, Swinson wilfully voted it all through, refusing to protest by resigning as Employment Minister, even when they launched their vile and unlawful policy of protecting bad bosses by pricing low-income workers out of the justice system with £1,200 upfront Tribunal Fees. She's also bankrolled by the owner of a fracking operation and voted in favour of Cameron and Osborne's massive tax cut for onshore fracking (which makes her a very odd bedfellow for a Green MP).
Justine Greening: If you're going to stuff your "fantasy cabinet" full of ex-Tory austerity enforcers and Lib-Dem austerity enablers, you might as well include a sitting Tory MP just to hammer home the point that opposing the austerity fanaticism that caused Brexit in the first place will be an absolute non-priority. Aside from being a horrifying austerity-enforcer, Greening was also personally in charge of the mass privatisation of state schools in England. The vast majority of Brits believe that schools should be run as not-for-profit public services, but somehow Lucas wants to include a hard-right school-privatising extremist in her "fantasy cabinet".
Nicola Sturgeon: Sturgeon does occasionally let herself down with cheap partisan political point scoring (which is regrettable, but understandable given the tides of absolute filth that are spewed in her direction), but in general she's a really strong and popular leader. The main problem with the inclusion of SNP figures like Sturgeon and Kirsty Blackman is that Swinson and the Lib-Dems have outright refused to work with the SNP to stop Brexit because they actually see preventing another Scottish independence referendum as a much higher priority than stopping Brexit.
Liz Saville Roberts: Including Plaid Cymru's only female MP is an obvious choice if you're doing a stupid identity politics driven all-female "fantasy cabinet". She has been a hard-working MP since arriving in parliament in 2015, and she's on the decent side of parliamentary divisions the majority of the time. It's hard to see how an alliance between a Welsh independence MP and the ultra-unionist Lib-Dems could ever really hold up for very long though.
Sylvia Hermon: Again, there's nothing particularly wrong with the former UUP, now independent Northern Irish MP Sylvia Hermon. It's just an odd selection to pick a solitary independent MP from Northern Ireland, unless the reason is the tokenism of picking the only Brexit-sceptic MP in Northern Ireland (the DUP are hard Brexit militants and Sinn Féin refuse their Westminster seats on principle).
Emily Thornberry: Reaching out to a serving Labour Party cabinet minister to engage in a plot to sideline Labour from the anti-No Deal fightback is a bold move, but Thornberry is surely far too sensible a political operator to ditch her career by joining this ludicrous identity politics publicity stunt.
Yvette Cooper: Cooper is one of the oddest picks of all. Yes she's involved herself in opposing Brexit, but she's stopped short of calling for another referendum (unlike Labour front bench MPs like Diane Abbott, who has repeatedly made the case for a final say referendum on Brexit).
- The inclusion of a load of pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, pro-fracking, Heathrow expansion-supporting, solar subsidy slashing MPs in Lucas' "fantasy cabinet" just goes to show how wildly she's lost her way. She won so much admiration for her principled stances on austerity, welfare, privatisation, and the environment, and now she's bulldozing the lot into a fire pit in order to cavort with hard-right austerity enablers and fracking advocates!
- The idea of gender exclusion is absolutely terrible too. Anyone who is genuinely opposed to Brexit must understand that a ludicrous identity politics dick-counting exercise is a pointless distraction. Anyone who thinks an unprincipled loudmouth like Anna Soubry is more of an asset to the Brexit fightback than Dominic Grieve or Keir Starmer, simply because she's female, is absolutely out of their god-damned tree.
- An all-white cabinet which includes several Brexit enablers, whilst excluding significantly more anti-Brexit BAME women like Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler, Marsha de Cordova, and Rupa Huq is extraordinary. And their exclusion makes no sense either. Lucas reached out to Thornberry who is in Corbyn's shadow cabinet, so she could have reached out to Abbott and Butler too, and she reached out to Cooper who is a Labour back bencher, meaning there must be some other reason she decided not to involve BAME Labour backbenchers like Huq and de Cordova.
- One of the most worrying things is that nobody in the Green Party seems able or willing to take her to one side and ask her to stop this increasingly erratic and damaging behaviour. There's absolutely no way that this all-female all-white "fantasy cabinet" idea including a load of austerity-enablers, privatisation fanatics, and environmental vandals was approved at Green Party conference, so she's not only making a fool of herself, she's also making a mockery of the Green Party's claim to be the most democratic and accountable party in UK politics.
- The whole thing seems to be a desperate last-ditch effort to exclude Corbyn and the Labour-left from the process, even though it's absolutely obvious that the support of the Labour-left would be absolutely vital if Lucas ever gets the "another roll of the dice" referendum she's expended so much energy on demanding (whilst ignoring the role austerity fanaticism played in causing Brexit in the first place).
- And last but not least the whole idea of a "foil Brexit at any cost" cross-bench coup is absolutely terrible anyway. If you wanted to think of the ideal way of empowering Boris Johnson to seize the moral high ground and romp to a general election victory, an unelected Westminster establishment clique overturning Brexit without even a General Election or Referendum result to give them a mandate would be pretty much exactly what the Brextremists would be wishing for!
Caroline Lucas is far from the only person to have been driven to absolute insanity by Brexit, but seeing a strong and principled woman I really admired degenerate to the point of proposing ludicrous unworkable nonsense that burns all of her preexisting principles to ashes is definitely the saddest case of Brexit Brain Worms yet.
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.
In order to actually understand why so many left-wing and socially progressive people are horrified at the elevation of Jo Swinson to the Lib-Dem leadership, it's useful to look beyond her outrageous voting record, and consider the fate of Sarah Teather.
Sarah Teather
Teather, who was the youngest MP elected to the 2005 parliament, was once touted as a potential future leader of the Lib-Dems, and for around two and a half years she served in the Coalition government, but then she finally did the decent thing and resigned in protest.
The specific issues she raised were the xenophobic anti-immigrant policies being pushed by Theresa May's Home Office, David Cameron's imperialist war-mongering in Syria, and the continual assaults on poor, disabled and vulnerable people orchestrated by Iain Duncan Smith through relentless vandalism of the social safety.
She was sick of rubber-stamping this bombardment of Tory malice, and one day she finally got up off her knees, did the decent thing, and resigned, explaining how her party's collusion with the monstrous Tory agenda left her feeling "desolate" and "depressed".
It can be argued that her resignation came far too late (which is exactly how I felt at the time) but the reality is that at least she eventually did the decent thing, and doing the decent thing ended up costing her her political career.
She was marginalised and ostracised, just like the minority of other decent Lib-Dems like Charles Kennedy who recoiled in horror at what the party had been enabling, and she left politics entirely in 2015.
Jo Swinson
Swinson remained an ultra-loyal government minister throughout the Austerity Coalition, and in 2013 she had her opportunity to stand up and and oppose over the issue of anti-worker Tribunal Fees (which was such a despicable policy it was ruled unlawful in the Supreme Court in 2017).
Swinson now loves to claim that she fought back against these outrageous £1,200 upfront fees, designed as a barrier to the justice system to protect bad bosses from paying compensation to the low-income workers they've been exploiting and abusing.
But the reality is that she actually voted in favour of the anti-worker attack she now claims to have opposed, and even praised the policy in interviews and press releases at the time.
As Employment Minister in the Austerity Coalition she could have made a real impact by resigning over this attack on workers' rights, but she chose not to, because to resign as a government minister would have meaint forfeiting her six figure ministerial salary, her ministerial car and all the perks.
But more importantly she would have put herself on the blacklist of disloyal Lib-Dem MPs, meaning she'd be permanently out of favour with the Lib-Dem hierarchy, which would have delivered a massive blow to her ambitions to one day lead the party.
She put her own material circumstances, and her own political ambitions above the right of millions of British workers to seek justice from bad bosses when she voted to unlawfully scrap it., and now she lies through her teeth to pretend that she didn't.
The contrast
Had the Lib-Dems chosen someone like Sarah Teather to lead their party then it would be possible to see it as an act of contrition, a demonstration that they want to move on from the terrible crimes they committed against the British people between 2010 and 2015 (similar to the way the election of the anti-war campaigner Jeremy Corbyn illustrated the Labour Party membership's contrition over the devastating invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003).
But the Lib-Dems didn't choose someone from the principled sidelines. They chose one of the worst and most unapologetic workers' rights-attacking, austerity-enabling, wage-repressing, welfare-vandalising, public service-slashing, bought and paid for nasties from the worst period in their political history.
They cast Sarah Teather adrift for her disloyalty to the party leadership and their neoliberal agenda, and they've amply rewarded Swinson for her slavish loyalty.
It's absolutely horrifying to see so many self-declared "centrists" falling for the absurd Lib-Dem portrayal of the rise of Swinson as some kind of new dawn for the party, when in reality it's nought but their reward to her for her slavish subservience to the old order.
Had she ever actually stood up and fought for the rights of ordinary people during the Austerity Coalition era, she would have been marginalised by the party leadership, ostracised, and almost certainly prevented from trying to win back the seat she lost to the SNP in the 2015 Lib-Dem wipeout.
She would have suffered the same political fate as Sarah Teather.
If the Lib-Dems were willing to demonstrate that they were actually sorry and genuinely intended to change, then they'd still have a lot of work to do to earn back the trust they burned to ashes in return for a tiny taste of 2nd hand Tory power, but at least we could accept their intentions in good faith if it involved picking a new leader who either stood up and opposed austerity fanaticism (or who became an MP after the austerity-collusion period ended in 2015 at the least).
But as it stands now their insincerity is absolutely obvious.
And it's especially obvious given the fact they've picked a leader who was slavishly loyal to Tory austerity fanaticism, and insists on repeatedly deflecting from criticism of her voting record with absurdly dishonest claims that she opposed sicking and unlawful anti-worker legislation that she actually voted in favour of!
If they'd elected Sarah Teather as their new leader instead of marginalising her for her disloyalty, then I'd understand people giving them a second look.
But the election of Swinson is spit in the eye of everyone who suffered the dire consequences of all the austerity fanaticism, and wage repression, and privatisation mania, and attacks on workers' rights, and disability persecution, and infrastructure under-investment, and social security vandalism that she wilfully rubber stamped in return for keeping herself in the Lib-Dem inner circle.
So despite wracking their party to the edge of destruction, the Lib-Dems still insist on demonstrating that self-serving expedience is a virtue to be rewarded in their ranks, while displays of integrity and moral decency are aberrations that need to be punished and driven out.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
The new Lib-Dem leader Jo Swinson has been getting a staggeringly easy ride from the mainstream media, and from smug blue tick Twitter "centrists" over her disgusting track record in government.
One of the commonest excuses that Lib-Dem tribalists wheel out is that the Lib-Dems somehow "moderated" the Tories by ... errr ... voting through all of their malice in order to avoid resigning as ministers in the 2010-15 austerity coalition.
Even when Swinson does receive a light grilling over her votes in favour of monstrous stuff like Bedroom Tax, rip-off tuition fees, and disability benefits cuts, the mainstream media hacks who are supposed to be holding her to account just let her lie through her teeth about other stuff.
One of Swinson's favourite lies is that she supposedly opposed imposing upfront £1,200 Tribunal Fees on workers seeking compensation from bad bosses who had exploited or abused them.
Swinson repeatedly claims that she opposed these fees, and even opportunistically joined in the celebrations when they were declared unlawful by the Supreme Court and scrapped in 2017.
But the reality is that Swinson actively voted in favour of this unlawful Tory assault on UK workers' right to seek justice against abusive and exploitative bosses.
Not only did she vote in favour of the policy, she also promoted the policy in press interviews and press releases.
If she knew that this policy was a despicable assault on workers' rights, yet she publicly promoted it and wilfully voted in favour of it, instead of resigning as Employment Minister over this scandalous policy, there's only one sensible explanation.
She decided against taking a stand because to do so would have meant giving up on her six figure ministerial salary, giving up her ministerial car and other perks, and giving up on her ambition to one day lead the Lib-Dem party.
She put her own personal enrichment and career prospects above the legal right to access the UK justice system for millions of British workers.
Yet instead of apologising for this disgusting decision, she resorts to revisionist lies that she opposed it all along.
And this Tribunal Fees situation perfectly illustrates what's so wrong with the Lib-Dem excuse that they somehow "moderated Tory excesses" during the austerity coalition.
The reality is that their new party leader had an absolutely golden opportunity as Employment Minister to stand up for British workers by resigning from her post in protest, but she chose not to for the benefit of her own career prospects.
And just like Swinson's revisionist lie that she opposed the unlawful tribunal Fees that she actually voted in favour of, the general Lib-Dem excuse that they "moderated the Tories" is also a revisionist fabrication.
Choosing to govern with the Tories gave them the opportunity to moderate their malicious tendencies, but more often than not Swinson and her Lib-Dem colleagues wilfully rubber stamped the absolute worst of it, because to actually rebel would have cost them personally.
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.
