The Daily Mail is a hateful and divisive hard-right propaganda rag that deliberately stokes divisions in society in order to deflect criticism away from the mega-rich establishment class (like their tax-dodging billionaire owner Jonathan Harmsworth, and the Tory political establishment they promote so relentlessly).
So it's particularly ironic to see the Daily Mail run a front page splash about how Facebook is supposedly "ripping society apart".
Anyone with a few brain cells to rub together knows that the main purpose of the Daily Mail is to rip society apart as much as possible in order to prevent solidarity forming between the lower orders, because they know as well as we do that if the British people actually stood together for once and demanded change, the tiny self-serving cabal of establishment elitists would be powerless to stop us because we massively outnumber them.
So they divide and divide and divide. They continually stoke hatred of immigrants, Muslims, single mothers, the unemployed, refugees, students, judges, public sector workers, Millenials, academics, and anyone who expresses even remotely left-wing or liberal ideas.
The central purpose of the Daily Mail is to continually divide society, yet here they are damning Facebook for "ripping society apart" on their front page on the very same day that Rupert Murdoch's biggest propaganda rag launched their own front page attack on Twitter.
Once we see this front page Daily Mail attack on Facebook as part of a concerted mainstream media campaign against social media, we get to the main point of it.
The Daily Mail hate Facebook and other forms of social media because they give a voice to other people. Social media gives a voice to people like me to point out what a vile extreme-right propaganda rag the Daily Mail is; their history of promoting fascism and praising Adolf Hitler; their support for modern day fascists like Norbert Hoffer in Austria, their contempt for democracy and the rule of law; their call for Jeremy Corbyn to be killed just weeks after Jo Cox was murdered in the street, the fact they've been banned from Wikipedia as an unreliable source; the racist, sexist and homophobic attitudes they continually promote; and the way they regularly ridicule the credulity of their own damned readers.
Despite being one of the most hateful and divisive publications in Britain, there are many at the Daily Mail who actually consider themselves to be the rightful gatekeepers of public discourse. So it fills them with impotent rage that social media is allowing other people to express dissenting opinions, and undermine the enormous power and influence of the right-wing billionaire press barons they work for.
Of course Facebook and Twitter are not perfect. Anyone who has ever ventured into the extreme-right Britain First hate chamber will know the kind of terrifying depravity that these companies host on their sites, yet the extreme-right, immigrant-hating, anti-Muslim, ultra-nationalist hate fest that is Britain First is simply a purer distillation of the hatred that Daily Mail hacks have spent decades deliberately stoking.
The Daily Mail can't really be angry at the existence of hatefests like Britain First, other than for the fact that they're stealing the target audience of hate-filled, extreme-right, white supremacist halfwits they've spent decades cultivating for themselves.
This furious front page splash is proof that Facebook and other social media sites are an absolute disaster for the Daily Mail.
Not only does social media provide a platform to decent people to stand up and offer alternatives to the divisive, hard-right, pro-establishment propaganda that the Daily Mail and the rest of the right-wing press churn out on an industrial scale, social media also provides a platform for extreme-right fanatics like the Britain First mob to steal and further-radicalise the Daily Mail's own core audience of angry hate-filled right-wingers.
So social media is undermining the power of the Daily Mail from both ends.
The direction of travel is obvious now. The Internet is breaking down the walled ideological gardens of the past. Only the older generations and the technology averse still turn to a single source like the Daily Mail for their news. Ever more people are obtaining their news from myriad different sources via our social media feeds, which may include the occasional Daily Mail article, but alongside all sorts of other stuff, including independent media pages like this one.
The Daily Mail hacks are like the Luddites who wanted to reverse the industrial revolution by smashing milling equipment. They're furiously decrying social media because they desperately want the social media cake to be unbaked and returned to its neatly segregated ingredients like it was before.
This anti-Facebook headline is another piece of evidence that the right-wing propaganda barons and their mercenary hacks are losing their vice-like influence over British political discourse, and the mix of terror and impotent fury this erosion of influence is provoking in them is an absolute joy to behold.
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 Daily Mail has been named as 2016 "Newspaper of the Year" by a bunch of mainstream media insiders. Their main justifications for this award were that the Mail "shaped the political agenda" (by propagandising for Brexit) and "reflected the temper of a large part of the country".
In this article I'm going to run through just a tiny fraction of the things that made the Daily Mail one of the most disgusting and contemptible news outlets in 2016.
Background
In case you are unaware of the basics, it's important to understand that the Daily Mail is an extreme-right propaganda outlet that is owned and operated by a tax-dodging billionaire called Jonathan Harmsworth (or the 4th Viscount Rothermere if you're one of these subservient forelock tuggers who actually use people's aristocratic titles instead of their actual names).
Harmsworth has set himself up as a non-dom in order to avoid paying UK taxes, and he also controls his Daily Mail investment through a Bermuda based shell company called Rothermere Continuation Ltd. Both of these things mean that you really have to take the Daily Mail's extreme British nationalist jingoism with a shovel full of salt.
If Harmsworth really loved Britain then he'd stop pretending to be resident in France in order to avoid paying UK taxes wouldn't he? And he definitely wouldn't use a Bermuda based shell company to pretend that his Daily Mail profits are "overseas income" so as to avoid paying UK taxes on them.
Political killings
Within two weeks of the Jo Cox murder the Daily Mail columnist Dan Hodges called for the Labour Party to "kill vampire Jezza".
Later in the year, when Jo Cox's killer was found guilty and sentenced, the Daily Mail published an article blaming immigrants for the murder that was actually carried out by one of their own demographic (low IQ, white supremacist, anti-refugee, Muslim-hating, extreme right-winger).
Staggering hypocrisy
When the Fawlty Towers actor Andrew Sachs died the Daily Mail published a fawning front page farewell.
Back in 1938 when Andreas Siegfried Sachs arrived in the UK as a child refugee from Nazi Germany the Daily Mail was busy shrieking that the arrival of Jewish refugees was an outrage.
If the Daily Mail had've got their way in the 1930s, Sachs would have died a horrific death in a Nazi concentration camp instead of finding refuge in Britain and becoming a beloved comedy icon in his adopted nation.
Mocking their own readers
The fact that the fond front page farewell to the 1930s migrant Andrew Sachs was printed alongside a load of fearmongering anti-migrant rubbish strongly suggested that the Daily Mail editorial team are actively taking the piss out of their own readers.
Another example of this kind of piss-taking front page juxtaposition happened when the main Daily Mail headline shrieked about how child refugees from Syria look too old, while another section of the front page drooled over the 15 year old daughter of a supermodel for looking older than she is!
Supporting fascism
One of the most enjoyable Daily Mail articles to read of 2016 was the one where they cried bitter tears of sorrow over the loss of their favoured fascist candidate Norbert Hofer in the Austrian presidential election.
Of course Hofer wasn't the first Austrian fascist the Daily Mail fell in love with, they spent most of the 1930s telling their readers how wonderful Adolf Hitler was didn't they?
Attacking judges
Perhaps the most disgusting thing the Daily Mail did in 2016 was to launch a vitriolic "Enemies of the People" front page attack on three High Court judges for daring to do their jobs and stand up for the principle of parliamentary sovereignty.
Isn't it funny how Brexiters went from endlessly banging on about the importance of parliamentary sovereignty before the EU referendum, to yelling abuse at judges for daring to protect the principle of parliamentary sovereignty from Theresa May's autocratic ambitions after it?
More staggering hypocrisy
Just three months after their appalling "Enemies of the People" front page the Daily Mail published an extraordinary piece in which they decried the use of the term "Enemy of the People" as a Soviet propaganda used by the likes of Stalin and Lenin!
Undisguised homophobia
One of the worst elements of the Daily Mail attack on the High Court judges who ruled in favour of parliamentary sovereignty was the homophobic way in which they described one of the judges as "openly gay".
Another example of the Daily Mail's homophobia came when they (and their Metro subsidiary) rushed to report the completely fictional story that the New York pressure cooker bomber was a militant gay activist.
In 2016 the Daily Mail also publicly attacked a 15 year old Australian transgender boy and went into full-on outrage mode about a Transgender TV show.
The tide of undisguised Daily Mail homophobia in 2016 should come as no surprise to people who remember their previous output like their 1993 article celebrating the possibility of identifying gay genes so that parents could abort gay fetuses!
April Fools
Despite their open contempt for LGBT people the Daily Mail still fell for the Pink News April Fools article about the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau doing a nude photo shoot for a gay magazine and published it on their website.
How far journalistic standards must have fallen if a newspaper that fell for an obvious April Fools prank and posted a lazily "churnalised" version of it on their website as actual news is the UK's "Newspaper of the year".
Being declared an unreliable source by Wikipedia
To top it all off the UK's "Newspaper of the Year" has recently been banned from Wikipedia as an unreliable source.
If standards at the Daily Mail are so low that they've been banned as an unreliable source by a website that can be edited by literally anyone with an Internet connection and they're our "Newspaper of the Year", what the hell does that say about standards of journalism at other British newspapers?
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.
Thomas Mair, the right-wing "Britain First" yelling white supremacist who killed Jo Cox refused to talk in police interviews, then he refused to enter a plea or give evidence in his trial.
This cowardly refusal to explain himself hasn't left many people in doubt about his motivations. The masses of extreme-right propaganda in his house, his associations with extreme-right political groups, the fact that he gave his name as "Death to traitors, freedom for Britain" on the one occasion he did decide to speak ... These things all point to a man so filled with right-wing hate that he decided to plot and execute the assassination of a local MP to prove some kind of political point.
It's difficult to have any sympathy with a person so filled with hate that they consider the murder of their political opponents to be a legitimate tactic. It's also very difficult to have any sympathy with a person who is so much of a coward that they're unwilling to explain their actions, and just sit there in silence pretending that they're the victim.
This didn't stop hacks at the Daily Mail from attempting to downplay Thomas Mair's crime by relegating the story of his conviction for murder to page 30 of their hate comic. In fact two of their hacks (Chris Greenwood and Emine Sinmaz) even attempted to foster sympathy for Thomas Mair by speculating that he might have murdered Jo Cox because he was afraid immigrants were going to steal his council house!
Apparently Mair had been the single occupier of a three bedroom council house ever since his grandmother died in 1996. The Daily Mail theory goes that Mair had been asked by the local council to consider downsizing to a smaller property, he got enraged that immigrants were going to steal his house, then he went out and killed Jo Cox because she wouldn't help him.
This appalling attempt to blame Mair's actions on immigrants, and on Jo Cox herself, is extraordinary, even by the Daily Mail's utterly disgusting standards.
The courtroom evidence showed that Mair had been plotting violent acts of right-wing terrorism for years (he bought his gun making manual from a US based neo-Nazi outfit in 1999), and that he had a printout of a pro-Remain article by Jo Cox in his house.
The Daily Mail totally failed to provide a single shred of evidence that Mair had ever approached Jo Cox for help with his council house situation (if he had had previous contact with the MP I'm pretty sure it would have come out during the trial).
Mair is too much of a coward to explain himself, but the evidence paints a picture of a right-wing extremist who had been determined to carry out a politically motivated attack since the 1990s. The fact that the local MP Jo Cox supported Remain while his extreme-right buddies (like the Britain First Northern Brigade) repeatedly described Remain supporters as "traitors" was apparently enough to trigger his violent urges.
It was bad enough that the Daily Mail tried to deflect criticism of white supremacist pro-Brexit extreme-right scum like Britain First by hiding the story of Thomas Mair's conviction for murder on page 30 of their paper (we all know their front page would have been shrieking about it for days if the killer had've been an Islamist fanatic, immigrant or "leftie"), but this effort to stoke sympathy for Thomas Mair by blaming immigrants and even his victim for his actions really is outrageous stuff.
One of the most disgusting things about it is that under normal circumstances the Daily Mail would undeniably be stoking hatred against an unemployed person under-occupying a council house. But somehow in the case of a murderous neo-Nazi they're suddenly so full of concern about him that they're prepared to completely fabricate a story that he approached his murder victim for help to protect him from the immigrants who were trying to steal his house, and that she turned a blind eye to him.
Imagine the sickening mentality of people who would sympathise with a white supremacist killer and attempt to shift the blame onto his victim with an invented story about how she refused to help protect him from immigrant bogeymen.
- The Daily Mail is an very harmful extreme-right propaganda rag owned by a tax-dodging billionaire called Jonathan Harmsworth. Don't read it and don't let anyone you love read it (if you can convince them to stop you'd be doing them a big favour).
- If you find a copy of the Daily Mail on the train or the bus, bin it. Don't leave it there in case someone else gets radicalised by their hateful extreme-right propaganda.
- You could also help to diminish the Daily Mail's toxic extreme-right influence by getting involved in the Stop Funding Hate campaign.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
One of the most amusing things about running the Another Angry Voice Facebook page is the way that it makes right-wing blowhards so furious that they can't resist impotently blurting angry diatribes directly onto my wall. In February 2016 I had one of these types advise me that I should "try reading a newspaper and stop being a angry little old man".
Physical characteristics
My friends and family would assure you that I'm neither "little" (6ft+ actually), nor particularly "old", and even if I were little and old, it would be pretty damned difficult for me to simply "stop" having those physical characteristics as suggested!
I've never put up a photograph of myself in relation to Another Angry Voice because I think my appearance is pretty much entirely irrelevant to my political writing, so you'll just have to take my word for it that I'm not the short, old, balding, red-faced, permanently furious old man that some people might imagine me to be.
Anger
It always amuses me that people project anger onto me simply because I chose the name Another Angry Voice as the name for my blog on the spur of the moment all those years ago, long before I had any idea that one day I'd reach an audience of millions on a weekly basis with my work. In those days I thought I'd be lucky to get 50 people interested in my political opinions!
It's as if some people imagine me as being a permanently furious individual who is incapable of relaxing, having a laugh with friends and family, meditating, enjoying the natural environment, reading a good book, listening to relaxing music, enjoying my hobbies ... simply because the title of my blog contains the word "angry"!
It's only actually when it comes to politics that I get really angry, but not with the furious bile-spitting type of anger that makes right-wing blowhards blather furious diatribes directly onto Facebook pages that have caused them to suffer cognitive dissonance.
I try to avoid this kind of crude emotional anger as much as possible because it completely overrides our higher brain functions. When we allow ourselves to get that emotionally angry, our cognitive skills (like reason and logic) get completely lost in the fog. I prefer the kind of calm analytic anger that allows us to develop coherent criticisms and reason based plans of action.
Emotional anger and propaganda
Furious, irrational, emotionally driven anger (of the kind that drives enraged right-wingers to dribble their impotent diatribes onto my Facebook page) is probably the most powerful tool of all in the guidebook to mainstream media propaganda. Once people allow themselves to get riled up with emotional anger they completely lose the ability to use the rational parts of their brain. They just want to lash out. This makes them extraordinarily susceptible to fallacious reasoning, misdirection tactics, repetitive propaganda soundbytes, cherry-picked statistics, misrepresentations and outright lies.
It hardly takes any complex analysis to understand that people who try to make you furiously angry about the likes of immigrant workers, Muslims, refugees and the unemployed are simply trying to divert your anger away from the powerful people who are really to blame for most of societies' ills (self-serving establishment politicians, the reckless bankers who trashed the global economy in 2007-08, mainstream media propaganda barons, unscrupulous buy-to-let slumlords, asset-stripping corporate fat cats ...).
Neither does it take a great deal of brainpower to understand the furious anger experienced by people who have spent decades uncritically rote-learning the output of the mainstream press when they happen to come across a source of information that contradicts the worldview that has been carefully crafted for them.
Read a newspaper!
The advice to "read a newspaper" seems utterly bizarre, but it's pretty obvious where it stems from. The fact that the items I tend to post on Another Angry Voice conflict with the mainstream media narratives of the day must make people with the tabloid rote-learning mentality think that I'm completely wrong about pretty much everything. Thus their solution would be for me to join them in uncritically rote-learning the output of the mainstream media in order to cure myself of my wrongness! It makes an amusing kind sense in a crude, sub-juvenile, pseudo-logical way.
I actually read various newspapers almost every day because it would be pretty much impossible to provide counter-narratives to the mainstream media without establishing what narratives they're pushing in the first place. But instead of rote-learning what they have to say I read them from a critical perspective.
There's actually little harm in reading newspapers as long as you remember that newspapers are propaganda devices and that you must engage your critical thinking skills at all times (who is telling me this? Why are they telling me this? What evidence is this based on? Is it reliable evidence? Who actually owns this newspaper? What is their political agenda? ...) rather than uncritically rote-learning whatever it is that press barons like Rupert Murdoch/Jonathan Harmsworth/The Barclay brothers/Richard Desmond/Evgeny Lebedev want you to uncritically rote-learn.
Quotes
I'll leave you with a few quotes about newspapers:
"If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." - Malcolm X
"If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed." - Mark Twain
The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors." - Thomas Jefferson
"Mainstream news wants to keep you as a useful idiot. Instead, try being a non-useful idiot." - Jarod Kintz
"I don't read newspapers anymore - I just lie to myself and cut out the middleman, but I think it's important to note that the press themselves are not actually outraged by what they report on as being offensive. No tabloid journo -whose life is invariably a shattered kaleidoscope of prostitutes, gambling, cocaine, self-loathing, literally going through a strangers bins, erectile disfunction and cocaine - is genuinely offended when some students dress up as the Twin Towers for Halloween. Outrage just makes good copy. It's easier to write, and simpler to understand. A tabloid hack knows that their average reader can barely read and they're not going to try to communicate anything like ennui in the vocabulary of a ten year old." - Frankie Boyle
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.
I'd like to begin this post by saying that I used to dislike Russell Brand rather intensely, but that he has gradually won me over into thinking that he's actually becoming a decent kind of bloke who wants to do the right things, but just isn't sure how to.
I warmed to him a bit when I noticed his early forays into talking about politics, power and other important issues because I thought it looked like he was trying to do some growing up, but the moment he fully won me over was when he sued the S*n for writing lies about his personal life, then gave his compensation to the Hillsborough Justice Campaign.
Anyone who is going to expose Rupert Murdoch's minions as liars and then give their compensation money to the victims of one of the Murdoch Empire's most sickening hate campaigns can't be all bad can they?
Rejectionism
I'm not going to say much about Russell Brand's rejectionist views (that were blasted into mainstream public conscience as a result of his notorious 'no point in voting' interview with Jeremy Paxman) because I wrote an article about it at the time (you can read that here if you want).
While I agree with Russell Brand's basic premise that voting is a very very small party of civic engagement, and that direct action is a much more powerful tool for achieving progressive social reform, I feel that his early efforts to engage people in alternative politics have been severely counter-productive.
I'm not saying that everything he says is wrong, far from it, he raises numerable interesting points and his analysis is sometimes exceptional. It's just that he's let himself down really badly by presenting a confused message to his audience, and worse than that, allowing himself to become enticed by party politics in the excitement of a General Election.
The real absurdity of his switch from rejectionism to the blanket endorsement of a political party stems from the fact that when he began deciding that certain politicians within the system were actually worth a vote, the deadline to register to vote for them had long since passed.
I'm not sure whether Brand himself had actually bothered to register to vote (which would have been an odd thing for someone who had advocated not voting to do), but I'm sure that he did nothing to encourage his audience to register as the voter registration deadline approached. I'm also sure that many of his fans would have been rendered incapable of actually doing as he was urging them, even if they'd wanted to, because they hadn't bothered to register to vote.
Caroline Lucas
I can fully understand why Russell Brand decided to ease his rejectionist stance to in order to endorse Caroline Lucas as the candidate for Brighton Pavillion, because she is amazing.
Caroline Lucas has achieved far more as a lone Green Party MP in a hostile Westminster environment in just five years than most of the career politicians from the three establishment parties will achieve in their whole taxpayer funded lives on the green benches. She is a brilliant champion of progressive politics and an inspirational hard worker to boot. I can fully understand making an exception to support one lone, tirelessly hard working, radical MP in a parliament rammed full of indolent, expenses fiddling, self-serving careerists.
Nobody is going to quibble if an exception is made for such a remarkable politician. The problem though is that once you've started making exceptions to your rules, more exceptions can be found, and more exceptions can be demanded of you.
Ed Miliband
It is easy to understand that once Russell Brand made it clear that his rejectionist stance was flexible, the pressure was on him to endorse other party politicians too.
The outrages inflicted by the Tory Party over the last five years are far too innumerable to detail but I'll provide a non-exhaustive list of links to illustrate the sheer scale of it (Secret Courts, discrimination against British families, the Gagging Law, privatising the profits and nationalising the losses, supporting the TTIP corporate power grab, the 'bungled' investigation into the Westminster paedophilia ring, Fracking conflicts of interest, The Liam Fox-Adam Werritty scandal, "Bedroom Tax", the ideological vandalism of the education system, wage repression, aspiration tax, sanctions league tables, Eric Pickles spending half a million quid on luxury limos, David Cameron's repeated lies, the NHS carve-up, stuffing the unelected House of Lords with Tory party donors, letting wealthy Tory party donors actually write legislation for them, David Cameron hiring a criminal like Andy Coulson as his adviser, the unlawful treatment of the mentally ill, the introduction of huge charges to bring unfair dismissal cases, the Tory war on justice, unlawful forced labour schemes, shocking abuses of parliamentary process, the Peter Cruddas scandal, countless multi-million pound DWP fuckups, and the demonstrable failure of austerity economics). It's no wonder that Russell Brand wanted to see the back of them, because who on earth wouldn't if they actually knew anything about all of that?
The lesser of two evils
The whole problem with backing the Labour Party, as most progressives already know, is that the party has only been offering a slightly watered down version of the same Thatcherite agenda as the Tories since the 1990s. There's no grand vision, no inspirational progressive agenda, just a strategically inept political platform of austerity-lite, which commits the cardinal error of accepting the premise of the opposing party (that the austerity con is even necessary in the first place) and thus allows them complete freedom to frame the spectrum of debate.
Not only is the Labour Party the lesser of two evils in reality when compared to the Tory Party, but by adopting austerity-lite as their policy platform they actually used 'but we're the lesser of two evils' as their 2015 election strategy!
How on earth the Labour Party leadership concluded that 'but we're the lesser of two evils' would play better with the electorate than the presentation of a clearly explained and evidence based counter narrative is absolutely beyond me. If they are that extraordinarily inept at running an election campaign, what good could they possibly be at actually running the country?
All in all, I think that pretty much everyone can agree that people continually voting for 'the lesser of two evils' is what has allowed Labour and the Tories to hold a duopoly on power that has now lasted so long that both parties have become hopelessly complacent, riddled with self-serving career politicians and virtually impervious to public opinion.
A demonstration of exactly how not to do politics
In my view, deciding to engage with a mainstream political party just days before a General Election is a demonstration of exactly how not to engage in party politics.
Party politics isn't like a shop that you visit every five years in order to buy a product, only making your mind up about which of them to buy in the very moment before you make your purchase. Politics is all about engagement, not about picking a side at the last minute and hoping that it wins.
Perhaps things would have been very different if, instead of advising his followers to actively disengage from party politics, Russell Brand had advised his followers to join the Labour Party en masse in order to work from within to turn it into a more left-libertarian and more progressive party. Then perhaps he could have personally worked with their communication team to help them craft a progressive message of hope, rather than a dour and gut wrenchingly dispiriting platform of 'lesser of two evils' austerity-lite.
Who knows if such an audacious plan would have defeated the Tory plan to fearmonger and bamboozle the English public into supporting them? However what we can be sure of is that a plan to flood the Labour Party with tens, or even hundreds of thousands of mainly young, mainly progressive new members would surely have produced a very different, and very much more engaging election campaign from the Labour camp than the pathetic, hopelessly uninspiring drivel that the two Eds served up.
The unprecedented SNP landslide victory in Scotland is a shining example that it is possible to achieve seismic political change with a mass membership political party full of politically motivated people uniting behind a clearly articulated message of hope.
Anyone who thinks that the Labour Party can't rise again from the ashes to become a progressive mass membership party it just wrong. If course it's totally fair to assert that you think it won't happen (in all likelihood you're right, and it won't), but you can't say that the idea is completely impossible, because if enough people want it to happen, and they elect the right leader to allow it to happen, then it will happen.
More harm than good
Russell Brand has a public image problem. Not only has he styled himself as a champion of the kind of liberal progressive politics that drives fear into the hearts of billionaire right-wing authoritarian propaganda barons like Rupert Murdoch (S*n, Times, Sky) and Jonathan Harmsworth (Daily Mail, Metro), he's royally pissed one of them off by suing him and then making a big point of giving his winnings away to some of the other victims of the guy's powerful propaganda empire.
For all his talent at manufacturing a public image that has made him wealthier than most could ever imagine for themselves, he's utterly failed to see how the negative portrayal of himself in the right-wing propaganda sheets is another completely different public persona that is detrimental to any political campaign with which it is aligned.
Let's put it this way. Pretty much everyone who cares deeply about alleviating the suffering of others and stamping out political corruption would have been voting against the Tories anyway. We didn't need Russell Brand to spell it out for us that the Tories have been doing lots of unacceptable things, we damn well knew it already.
Now let's think about the average consumer of right-wing propaganda sheets (people who actually pay for their own indoctrination under the impression that they are 'just buying a newspaper'). Think about the fact that tabloids are written in very simple English, with very simple arguments for very simple people to rote learn and then mindlessly regurgitate in lieu of actually doing the hard work of doing the research and finding things out for themselves.
Think about the kind of person so hopelessly gullible that they still believe in the austerity con. The kind of person who believes that Liam Byrne's ridiculous 'no money left' letter was a serious admission that the UK was 'bankrupt'. The kind of person who thinks that an unflattering picture of a politician eating a sandwich constitutes some kind of magically decisive debate winning counter argument! The kind of person who believes that they've got to vote Tory in order to save themselves from the 'nasty Scottish woman' their propaganda sheet has taught them to fear (even though the very same propaganda sheet was actively endorsing her on the front page of their Scottish edition).
Now think of how this kind of person is going to react when confronted with the 'news' that a person they have been programmed to hate is endorsing the very same political party that their beloved daily propaganda sheet is constantly slagging off. They're quite obviously going to think "fuck that guy, I'm not letting him tell me how to think or what to do".
The idiocy of it is that they're unwilling to listen to one guy because their daily propaganda sheet has ridiculed him, but they're incapable of thinking about the wider picture, and the fact that by voting the other way they're simply doing the bidding of the much more powerful and much more skillfully manipulative guy (be that Rupert Murdoch or Jonathan Harmsworth).
I don't have the evidence to back it up, but I'm fairly convinced that Brand's blanket endorsement of the Labour Party will have cost them multiple times the votes they gained by it, simply because of the "fuck that guy" effect in people too lacking in awareness to think also think "fuck that guy" about Rupert Murdoch and Jonathan Harmsworth every time they see the blatantly biased coverage their daily propaganda sheets are trying to infect their minds with.
Get engaged properly
For me, the lesson from all of this is quite simple. If you're going to engage with the party political system at all, you need to choose a party early and invest some effort in making sure that it is set up to deliver what you want. Just leaving it until the last minute and then picking the 'lesser of two evils' options is completely the wrong way of doing it at the best of times, but when you've built a public reputation as a rejectionist, it comes across as hopeless confusion at best, and deliberate insincerity at worst - both of which can be used by your ideological enemies to ridicule your endorsement and convince people in droves to vote the other way.
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.
