The extreme-right always revel and delight in terrorism. Whenever an attack happens they gleefully flock to social media to spread their hateful and divisive ideologies, and bask in the extra publicity they get.
Witless abuse
Some of these people are thick. There's no other way of putting it. They react to hateful acts against innocent people with hate speech and abuse of innocent people because they don't have the thinking skills to react in a coherent manner. They see something terrible and they instinct is to lash out. They spew bigoted abuse and call for extremist measures because they don't know any better.
The three examples cited in this article illustrate the kind of hateful and divisive extreme-right drivel that gets spouted by countless thousands of stupid bigots every time a barbarous act of terrorism is committed.
Right-wing polemicists
This article isn't about stupid bigots though, it's about something much more sinister.
Some of these hatemongers are not thick. They're intelligent enough to know exactly what they are doing. Extreme-right ghouls like Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson always spring into action the moment an act of terrorism happens.
In the wake of the Manchester Arena atrocity a journalist from the right-wing Daily Telegraph called for the introduction of imprisonment without trial and the building of "internment camps" for "suspects". Another journalist from the even-more-right-wing Daily Mail openly called for a "final solution".
These people aren't furious thickos blabbering their vile opinions onto Twitter because they're too stupid to process terrorist atrocities in a more coherent manner, these right-wing polemicists are deliberately piggybacking on a tragic event in order to promote their dream of the abolition of British values and their replacement with their own extreme-right ideological fanaticism.
Allison Pearson
The Telegraph journalist is called Allison Pearson (you may remember her as the one who called for the Scottish First Minister to be killed just for expressing her political opinion a few months ago). She decided to use the tragedy in Manchester to call for the abolition of the legal principle of innocent until proven guilty so that "suspects" can be rounded up and put into "internment camps".
The stated aim of Pearson's wish to abolish the British legal principle that it's wrong to imprison innocent people is to "protect our children", but we all know the real reason. Pearson hates and resents the fact that other people are protected by the legal system and can say things that she disagrees with.
She has already expressed her wish to see Nicola Sturgeon killed for expressing political ideas that conflict with Pearson's own, and now she wants to use this atrocity to give the government carte blanche to indefinitely imprison anyone they don't like, without having to prove that they're guilty of any crime first.
Pearson also doesn't care that the internment camps in Northern Ireland were massively counter-productive, with the injustice of mass imprisonment without trial triggering an immediate upsurge in violence and providing perfect recruitment rhetoric for the terrorist organisations that the half-baked policy was actually intended to disrupt.
Pearson doesn't give a damn about an effective response to terrorism, she simply doesn't like living in a liberal democracy with a judicial system and the presumption of innocence. She just really wants to live in a police state where the government can drag people out of their houses and lock them up without presenting any actual evidence that they're guilty of anything, and the atrocity in Manchester is nothing more to her than a glorious opportunity to piggyback her beloved fantasy of living in an extreme-right police state onto other people's suffering.
The unspeakable woman
We all know that the unspeakable woman who writes for the Daily Mail and appears on the LBC radio station is a relentless self-publicist who spews extreme-right views because they garner her more and more attention, and because all of this attention does wonders for her earning potential.
Whenever an atrocity happens this vile woman pops up to spew some outrageous comment and then revel in the tide of hate that she's triggered, laughing at the liberals who generate even more publicity for her by getting upset and spreading links to her work all over social media to condemn whatever outrageous shit she's deliberately decided to spew this time.
Make no mistake about it. The use of the term "final solution" was no mistake. The unspeakable woman will have spent a considerable amount of time thinking about the phrase "final solution" and it's obvious Nazi connotations before deciding to use it.
She'll have weighed up the huge tide of free publicity against the risk of her losing her job at LBC, or facing criminal charges for hate speech, and concluded that the publicity tide from calling for a Holocaust of Muslims outweights the potential repercussions.
The unspeakable woman will have concluded that if anyone actually tries to hold her to account for using Nazi language to promote the idea of a genocide of Muslims, she can just play the victim card.
She knows how easily extreme-right people can be lured into self-pitying victim complex mode, so she's hoping that she can set herself up as the poor innocent martyr of the extreme-right who is being unfairly punished for expressing an opinion.
Whether she actually wants to see a Holocaust of Muslims is actually beside the point. She might actually believe it, or she might have expressed that particular opinion just for the publicity and cash without actually believing in it at all.
The important thing is the intent. She knows that the only possible outcome from using the Nazi term for the Holocaust in such a way was going to be a significant tide of free publicity. If she gets sacked or put on trial for it, all the better, that's just even more free publicity.
The right-wing press are out of control
A journalist from the Daily Telegraph (a once respected highbrow newspaper of the centre-right) has openly called for the demolition of British values and the establishment of a police state in which the government can imprison anyone without trial just on the suspicion of criminal intent. A journalist from the Daily Mail has gone even further by calling for a Holocaust against Muslims.
These are extremist views that would have only found acceptance on the National Front fringe back in the 1970s, but the right-wing press has degenerated to such an extent these days that these abhorrent fanatical views are becoming more and more mainstream. It's the influence of right-wing polemicists like Allison Pearson at the once respected Daily Telegraph who are doing the groundwork in shifting these abhorrent, fanatically right-wing, and profoundly anti-British ideas into the political mainstream.
What we can do
- Write to the Daily Telegraph to complain about Allison Pearson's increasingly erratic conduct here.
- Write to LBC (here) and The Daily Mail (here) to complain about the unspeakable woman's use on Nazi language.
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In an LBC interview the figurehead of the Vote Leave campaign Boris Johnson has claimed that it's well known that there's "an operation in Downing Street" to bribe and blackmail business leaders into supporting Remain. He went on to detail claims that the Tory government have been using the honours system as a carrot and threats of no more government contracts as a stick.
It doesn't matter whether you're a Leave supporter or a Remain one, Boris Johnson's claims of such high level corruption in the Tory party provide absolute proof that he himself is corrupt.
There are two options:
Johnson is either lying about this Downing Street operation to blackmail and bribe businesses into supporting Remain, which means he's prepared to spread fantastical conspiracy theories about the leadership of his own political party in order to serve his own personal interests.
Or he's not lying and he's openly admitted to being a member of an exceptionally corrupt political party, but rather than leave the party in disgust, he's staying in the Tory party, and even backing David Cameron (the man he accuses of this appalling corruption) to stay on as Tory party leader even if the Brexit campaign is sucessful!
Whichever way you look at it, Boris Johnson has put himself in a logical bind where the only possible conclusion to be drawn is that Boris Johnson supports corruption.
Either he's prepared to corruptly feed the public a bunch of fantastical lies in order to promote his personal agenda, or he's willing to turn a blind eye to the most shocking levels of corruption at the very top of the Tory party and even back the man he accuses of this corruption to remain at Tory party leader and Prime Minister.
The logical bind Boris Johnson has put himself in leaves us with the obvious question of why we should ever believe a word he says about anything if his own words act as an open admission that he supports corruption.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
When Natalie Bennett was interrupted an incredible 125 times by the ex-Murdoch hack Andrew Neil in January 2015, opponents of the Green Party gleefully used clips of it as ammunition to shoot at the Green Party. Few of them seemed to care that later in the very same show Andrew Neil went on to give an incredibly lenient interview to the Tory party chairman Michael Green Sebastian Fox Grant Shapps (or whatever he's calling himself these days), in which he allowed Green Fox Shapps to endlessly repeat himself instead of answering any of the questions he was being asked.
Having seen what an enormous PR disaster a poor interview can be, Natalie Bennett had absolutely no excuses for the "car crash" interview she did with Nick Ferrari (another ex-Murdoch hack) on LBC just a few weeks later.
If we listen to the full interview, she actually does reasonably well for the first few minutes, talking up Caroline Lucas' exemplary record as an MP, mentioning how the Scottish independence debate has re-energised political discourse in Scotland, explaining how Green Party policies are the most popular of all on the Vote for Policies blind test and criticising the Tories butchering of the NHS in order to hand out the dismembered pieces to their party donors.
The problems started when she couldn't answer a seemingly simple question about how much Private Finance Initiatives (PFI) debt legacies are costing the NHS. The answer is not an easy one to find because both the Tories and Labour before them have been understandably keen to hide these enormous debts from the public, so there is actually no easy answer.
What is clear however, is that these costs are enormous. Even back in 2012 PFI debt legacies were estimated to be worth £300 billion, and the coalition government has still been signing up to more and more of them. It's also an established fact that many of the most financially unstable NHS trusts are ones that are tied in to paying off these vast PFI debt legacies.
Natalie Bennett was right to raise the issue of these rip-off deals, but wrong to be so hopelessly unprepared to speak authoritatively about a subject that she had actually raised herself!
Once the interview got onto the subject of Green Party housing policy, the interview went every bit as badly as Nigel Farage's infamous LBC "car crash" interview from May 2014. Once again Natalie Bennett was exposed as being hopelessly unprepared to answer basic questions about her own parties policies.
Natalie couldn't explain how the pledge to build 500,000 affordable houses was going to be funded, and failed badly to explain the fact that investment in social housing returns at least £2.40 to the economy for every £1.00 spent by the government. In my view it is actually a positive that she tried to raise the important macroeconomic theory of fiscal multiplication, however it's something that hardly anyone is going to have heard of, so a garbled explanation (like the one she gave) is certain to sound like a load of completely made-up rubbish to a significant proportion of the public. Sometimes it's better to not say anything, than to give a totally incoherent explanation of something important.
Damage to the Green Party
People who follow my work will know that I'm broadly sympathetic towards the Green Party (they're in the same quadrant of the political compass as I am, so it's no surprise I agree with quite a few of their policies) but when it comes to problems with the party, I'm not going to pull my punches.
The Andrew Neil interview was perhaps excusable because she was heckled and interrupted to an incredible extent by a blatantly biased interviewer, but to go into another interview with another ex-Murdoch hack just a few weeks later in the same state of unpreparedness was a terrible blunder.
What the LBC interview has done is created a perfect piece of evidence for the anti-Green brigade to post every time they want to make the Greens look like a clueless bunch of amateurs. And unlike the Andrew Neil interview, there is no possibility of offering the defence that she "lost it" because she was being heckled and interrupted so rudely, because the worst you could say about Nick Ferrari is that he was a tad condescending.
Anyone who tries to deny that clips of the last minute or so of that Nick Ferrari interview are going to damage the Green Party by dissuading a lot of potential Green Party voters is quite frankly deluding themselves.
Damage to the anti-austerity movement
A few people have raised concerns that Natalie Bennett is in danger of damaging or derailing the anti-austerity movement with her inability to answer seemingly basic questions.
It is of fundamental importance that left-wing and centre-ground politicians begin to show how ideological austerity has failed in its own terms (George Osborne has missed all of his 2010 economic projections by absolutely miles) and explain that it doesn't work because it's nothing more than a crackpot right-wing agenda that ignores the fundamental basics of macroeconomics.
Thankfully Natalie Bennett isn't the only politician arguing against ideological austerity. In fact she's not even the most important one in the UK. When it comes to the pre-election leaders' debates, Nicola Sturgeon from the SNP and Leanne Wood from Plaid Cymru will be there; they're both anti-austerity; and they're both competent public speakers. Nicola Sturgeon is particularly good judging by the well crafted demolition of Tory ideological austerity she presented in a speech in early February.
Looking beyond the UK, the emergence of high profile anti-austerity figures elsewhere in Europe is an important factor. The new Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis clearly knows what he's talking about (I've been following his excellent blog for a few years) and Pablo Iglesias has taken the anti-austerity Podemos (We Can) party to the top of the Spanish polls, even though the party was only founded in March 2014!
In my view, the idea that more of Natalie Bennett's stumbling and mumbling might deliver a death-blow to the anti-austerity movement is completely unwarranted hyperbole.
Excuses and justifications
I've heard a lot of excuses from Green Party loyalists, and none of them are particularly convincing.
One of the most commonly proffered tropes is that the other parties can afford loads of image consultants to help them look slick and professional, whilst on their shoe-string budget (the Greens don't accept donations from millionaire tax-dodgers), the party simply can't afford it. The problem with this excuse is that there is a vast difference between being not having been coached to appear slick and professional, and being woefully ill-prepared for an important public interview.
Other Green Party supporters have tried to say that Natalie's woeful performance was okay because "we all make mistakes" and "at least it shows that she's human". While there is an element of truth to both of these points, it doesn't prevent the fact that many thousands of potential Green Party voters will have been put off by this performance, and Green Party critics will now be able to use it as ammunition for the remainder of Natalie's tenure as Green Party leader.
Some people have tried to offer the defence that "policies are more important than personalities", which again is a fair point when considered in isolation. However if the politician who you've chosen to be the figurehead of your party is incapable of offering a coherent explanation of the carefully costed policies that you've been working on, and in fact makes them appear to be a bunch of made-up nonsense, then that's not a matter of "personality politics" at all, its a matter of basic competence.
Sometimes it is important to look beyond our desire to defend people with whom we have an affinity, and realise that making excuses for them isn't going to help. The only thing that is going to actually help is if we let them know that they've made a mistake, tell them that we expect better, and offer them the support that they need in order to avoid making that same mistake again.
Natalie's apologies
Natalie Bennett has tried to mitigate the damage by making a lot of apologies for her "brain freeze", including this one in the Guardian.
Making such apologies is clearly the right thing to do in the short-term, because she has damaged the Green Party and disappointed an awful lot of Green Party supporters. However such apologies are not going to win over very many neutrals.
It is certainly important to apologise when we've let people down, but something my mother always tried to instill in me was that the most important part of the apology is not actually the words that comprise it, but the effort we make to not do the same thing again.
What Natalie Bennett needs to do now is to work out a strategy so that she doesn't end up getting all flustered like that again the next time she's asked for specific facts and figures, because it's now absolutely certain that almost every interviewer she faces is going to try to catch her out again so that they too can go viral like Andrew Neil and Nick Ferrari have.
What the Green Party can learn
The Green Party have learned that Natalie Bennett is limited when it comes to remembering specific facts and figures, thinking on her feet and answering questions under stress. It's far too close to the election for her to stand down, so the Green Party are just going to have to play with the hand they've got.
The fact that Natalie Bennett struggles in interviews is a very serious problem, but it is a problem that can be mitigated through the use of a few simple tactics (tactics that anybody can use).
- Always agree the topics of discussion with the interviewer beforehand, then make sure you're well prepared on those subjects.
- If you're going to talk about something that the majority of people aren't aware of (like fiscal multiplication) you've got to make sure you give a very clear and authoritative explanation, because if you don't, it will sound like completely made-up rubbish to most of your audience.
- Always take detailed notes so that you can look up specific figures if you forget them under pressure.
- Remember that taking a moment to look up a specific figure actually gives you the time to prepare a nice clear answer to the question.
- If any interviewer attacks you for not knowing a specific figure off the top of your head, turn it back on them by asking whether they want to know the precise answer to their question (in which case they'll have to wait a moment while you look it up) or whether they want to have a completely different debate about your personal ability to accurately memorise thousands of precise figures.
Conclusion
I've always had my reservations about Natalie Bennett as leader of the Green Party, but rather than make a song and dance saying "I told you so didn't I?", I've decided to try to give a more-or-less neutral appraisal of the damage Natalie Bennett's stumbling and mumbling is doing to the Green Party and to the wider anti-austerity movement, and offer some advice on how the Green Party can try to mitigate these problems in future.
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.
