An open letter to Theresa May: Why I won't be backing your Brexit proposals

Dear Theresa,

One of the only arguments I've actually heard anyone actually make in favour of your last-minute shambles of a Brexit proposal is that we need to forget that you are a cold-hearted, ruthless, and self-serving Tory and back your Brexit proposal because it wouldn't be as economically damaging as a "no deal" flounce out of the EU.

This argument has a kernel of truth because the economic chaos of a "no deal" meltdown would undoubtedly be worse than the illogical and almost universally unpopular mess you and your Tory mates have cobbled together.

And we all know that under Tory rule it would be the poor and vulnerable who would be forced to suffer the costs of a "no deal" meltdown (while your mates Rees-Mogg, Redwood and mega-rich speculator class who bankroll your party would actually cash in on the crisis they created by speculating against Britain).

Just look at the way you lot callously loaded the burden of austerity dogma onto poor and ordinary people as you simultaneously lavished tax cuts and handouts on your mega-rich mates (you know the ones who bankroll your party).

But then there are four gaping flaws this argument that 'we should all pull together and back your rubbish deal because "no deal" would be worse'.

The Closed Tory Shop

If you wanted parliament and the nation to back your deal then you really shouldn't have run the whole Brexit show as a closed Tory shop for the last two years.

Not only did you deliberately exclude opposition MPs, devolved parliaments, UK business leaders, trade unions, academics and experts, charities, civic society, and everyone else from having a say in the negotiations, but you also fought tooth and nail to sideline parliamentary democracy too.

How many times has your autocratic Brexit scheming been defeated in the courts, and voted down in our sovereign parliament?

How many times did you attempt to hide Brexit impact assessments and legal advice from parliament and the public?

How many times did your chums in the right-wing propaganda rags whip up tidal waves of abuse and death threats against anyone who tried to hold you to account over your dictatorial and self-serving Brexit scheming (judges, academics, opposition MPs, you own damnend Tory MPs ...)?

You've cynically and deliberately excluded everyone from involvement for the last two years in order to run Brexit purely in the Tory party interest, and now you've actually resorted to begging us to get on board to back the absolute farce you incompetent Tories have cobbled together without our involvement!

Sorry Theresa. No. You don't get to repeatedly exclude everyone else from involvement and then beg us for support because you failed to "crush" the opposition in your ridiculous vanity election.

Stupid threats

The only reason that the threat of "no deal" is on the table at all is your stupidly threatening approach to the Brexit negotiations.

You were the one who lobbed the threat of a ruinous "no deal" flounce onto the negotiating table with all of the bravado of a spoilt toddler threatening to deliberately shit their own pants if they don't get the sweeties they're demanding.

Of course you need to have a fallback position if the negotiations don't go the way you want, but threatening to explode a massive economic bomb under the UK in the desperate hope that fear of the collateral damage would drive the EU into caving into your demands is such a woeful display of strategic ineptitude that (despite your obvious limitations) it's still surprising that it was the best that you could come up with.

And it absolutely beggars belief that your mates in the right-wing propaganda rags actually lavished praise on you for your pathetic toddler-tantrum of a negotiating strategy.

The basis of any competent negotiating strategy would have been to identify areas of mutual agreement (of which there are surely several) in order to develop a reasonable fallback position should the full negotiations end up in deadlock.

That you didn't work towards a reasonably safe fallback position is bad enough, but that you're actually using your own hyperbolic threat in order to coerce your fellow citizens into backing the hopeless shambles of a deal you've eventually come up with is beyond reprehensible.

Using your own incompetence to your political advantage in this way is so utterly appalling there simply aren't enough negative adjectives in the English language to accurately describe it.

100% reversal

The next thing to note is that using the threat of a "no deal" meltdown in order to coerce people into supporting your shambles of a deal is a 100% reversal of your previous position.

Don't you remember your endlessly repeated mantra that "no deal is better than a bad deal"?

Yet now you suddenly want us to believe your new position that your shitty deal is better than a no deal?

How thick do you think we are?

How much contempt towards the rest of us does it demonstrate that you expect us to not even notice that you've absolutely and totally reversed your position?

Did you honestly expect nobody to notice?

What the hell are you playing at?

Two better options

The fourth nail in the coffin for the argument that we should support your woeful deal because it's not as bad as a bad deal is obvious.

If we're assessing the options on which would be least bad for the British people and the British economy, there are clearly two vastly superior options to the false dichotomy you're presenting us with.

One is to let someone else have a go at the negotiations. Someone who is prepared to do it in an open, democratic and accountable manner in the national interest, rather than excluding everyone else to do it exclusively for the benefit of their own political party like you did.

Someone who is prepared to set up a wide-ranging Brexit commission, seek political consensus, avoid threats and divisive language, and conduct extensive research into what kind of Brexit the people of Britain actually want from the Brexit they so narrowly voted for in 2016.

If we were to get rid of you and Britain went back to the EU for an extension of Article 50 so that we could negotiate a Brexit-in-the-British-interest rather than a Brexit-in-the-Tory-party-political-interest, it's highly unlikely they'd say no isn't it?

The other less harmful option is obviously to remain in the EU and then seek to reform it from within to give Britain (and other member states) more leeway to pursue their own national interests from within the union.

We can all see that you're deliberately excluding other superior options ("back to square one" / "Remain and reform") in order to present your second-worst case scenario as better than a worst case scenario derived from your own damned threats.

And we can all see that the only barrier to both of these vastly superior options is you.

Your autocratic power grab has failed. You threw away any chance of forcing your unpopular Tory Brexit through parliament when you gambled your parliamentary majority away in your spectacularly failed vanity election (a cock up you would already have been forced out over if the rest of your party weren't such abject self-serving cowards).

It's clearly time for you to step aside and let someone else try to fix this outrageous mess that you and your predecessor Cameron have lumbered us with.

Aside from wishing to see the back of you, I genuinely wish you a quiet retirement that affords you the time to contemplate and truly consider the enormous legacy of damage you and your fellow Tories have wreaked on our nation with your ruinous austerity agenda (that created the wave of public anger that drove the Brexit vote marginally over the line), Cameron's spectacularly reckless Brexit gamble with the nation's future, and your self-serving, autocratic, and downright incompetent efforts to deal with the absolute mess your predecessor ran away from.

Tom (and everyone who shares links to this letter on your social media accounts)

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

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An open letter to anyone who claims to be voting Tory for the sake of their grandchildren

Dear potential Tory voter,

I'm writing this letter about the unbelievable claim that you made about how you would be voting Tory at the General Election because you care so much about the future your grandchildren will be facing!

I'd just like to clarify a few things:

You're going to vote for a woman who U-turns so regularly it's impossible to know which way she'll be facing tomorrow?

Presumably you want your grandchildren to grow up in a world where their political leaders just make things up as they go along to suit their own self-interest.

You're going to vote for a woman whose political party has already condemned 400,000 British kids to growing up in poverty, and who just condemned another 250,000 more to poverty with the child welfare and in-work benefits cuts they introduced at the beginning of April?

Presumably you want your grandchildren and/or their peers to spend their childhood years living in poverty.

You're going to vote for a woman whose political party has overseen the longest sustained decline in real wages since records began, meaning average real wages are an incredible 10% lower now than they were in 2008? 

Presumably you don't want your grandchildren to have well paid jobs.

You're going to vote for a woman who licks the boots of Saudi Islamist war criminals and the brutal Turkish tyrant Recep Erdoğan? 

Presumably you want your grandchildren to grow up in a world where Islamist war criminals and repressive dictators have more sway with the British government than your grandkids do themselves.

You're going to vote for a woman who has cut real terms spending on education in order to fund tax cuts for her rich mates? 

Presumably you don't want your grandchildren to grow up to be smart and well educated.

You're going to vote for a woman who is pushing the NHS to the brink of destruction with her severe funding cuts, hospital closures, her health secretary's ideological war with the junior doctors and the recruitment crisis she's exacerbated by driving EU nurses out of the NHS whilst simultaneously deterring tens of thousands of potential future nurses by scrapping the NHS bursaries?

Presumably you don't want your grandchildren to have access to a functioning health service that is provided on the basis of need, rather than the ability to pay for it?

You're going to vote for a woman whose party introduced the highest public university fees in the world for students in England, ensuring that 2/3 of today's students will never pay off their student debts in their entire working lives, despite paying a whopping 9% aspiration tax on their disposable income for having dared to try to better themselves? 

Presumably you don't want your grandchildren to get a professional qualification of any kind, or a massive unpayable debt mountain if they do have such aspirations.

You're going to vote for a woman who is vowing to strip UK citizens of their right to live, work, study or retire in any one of 27 other European nations in order to appease the anti-immigrant fanaticism of the hard-right demographic?

Presumably you don't want your grandchildren to have the same rights to travel and work abroad as you did yourself.

You're going to vote for a woman whose party has created far more new public debt in just seven years than every single Labour government in history combined?

Presumably you want your grandchildren to grow up paying off the massive debts that the Tories are obviously going to continue racking up in order to fund even more tax cuts for the already extremely rich.

You're going to vote for a woman whose party has overseen the least affordable house prices in history and the lowest level of new housebuilding since the 1920s? 

Presumably you don't want your grandkids to ever own a house.

Just admit it. You're not really thinking about your grandchildren's interests at all are you? 

In the grim amoral calculus you performed when you decided to you want to vote Tory, you decided that trashing your grandchildren's future was worth it in return for whatever (likely imaginary) personal benefit you'd be getting from a Tory government.

You're thinking entirely about yourself and what you want, and just invoking your poor grandchildren to present a (transparently thin) veneer of basic human decency to your utterly selfish "I'm alright Jack" attitude.

I feel sorry for your grandchildren having such a self-serving grandparent. I really do.

Tom (Another Angry Voice)

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

OR

An open letter to the people who used this woman's picture to spread hatred

Hi there,

You're one of the countless thousands of people who shared the slightly different picture of this poor woman (the carefully selected image where she didn't look quite so distressed) in order to whip up a storm of anti-Muslim hatred. This is an open letter to you explaining why you should be thoroughly ashamed of yourself.

Here's what the woman said about the incident and the way her image has been appropriated as extreme-right propaganda:

"Not only have I been devastated by witnessing the aftermath of a shocking and numbing terror attack, I've also had to deal with the shock of finding my picture plastered all over social media by those who could not look beyond my attire, who draw conclusions based on hate and xenophobia" [source]

It doesn't take a great deal of empathy to understand how devastating it must be to have been caught up in the aftermath of an appalling terrorist attack, and then to have had an out-of-context picture of you (taken as you called your family from the epicentre of a terrorist atrocity to tell them that you're OK) appropriated by extreme-right fanatics in order to whip up a storm of hatred.

The problem is though is that if you've adopted the divisive extreme-right hatemongering mentality, it's likely you're extremely lacking in basic human decency or empathy, which means you're likely incapable of feeling shame at the grotesque misrepresentation you've helped to perpetrate.

The poor woman who had her picture appropriated by the extreme-right wasn't the only one to be horrified. The photographer Jamie Lorriman also spoke out about the way his picture had been cruelly misappropriated by anti-Muslim hatemongers like the right-wing paedophile apologist Milo Yiannopoulos.

The grand irony of course is that by helping the extreme-right fanatics to whip up a storm of anti-Muslim hatred, you've actually been doing the terrorists work for them.

The extreme-right and the terrorists have far more in common with each other than they do with decent ordinary people. They both thrive in atmospheres of fear. They both incite division and hatred. They both crave for a violent clash of civilisations and work tirelessly to make their sick dreams come true.

By sharing misleading extreme-right propaganda like the desperately misleading image of this poor woman, you've actually been doing the work of the terrorists for them by spreading even more hatred and division.

The sad thing is that most of you will be far too cowardly to admit this fact even to yourselves, let alone to the rest of us. In fact I suspect most of you will have been too cowardly to even dare read this letter, even though in many cases it will have been posted on your social media account by friends and family who were rightly horrified at your shockingly divisive behaviour.

I genuinely hope that you have the strength of character to admit to yourself that what you did was cruel and divisive, and that this experience helps you to learn to be more careful about what you share in future.

Regards

Tom (AAV)

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

OR

Please help me to deliver my letter to potential Tory voters

I have written this letter to try to reach out to potential Tory voters and tell them a few things that the mainstream media have studiously avoided telling them.

You can help me to deliver this message to potential Tory voters by following the two very simple steps.

1. Click on this special link (which shows you which of your friends/acquaintances/family members/work colleagues have liked the Tory party Facebook page).

2. Copy this link to the letter ( http://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.com/2015/05/letter-potential-tory-voters.html ) and paste it onto their Facebook walls with a polite request that they read it. Alternatively you could send it to them in a private message if you don't want to embarrass them by posting politics stuff directly onto their public profile.

You can also help to raise awareness of this letter by sharing it with people who you know are potential Tory voters, but haven't liked the Tory party Facebook page. If you copy the letter  you can share it with them on Facebook, other social media sites or via email.

It would be especially useful if you could share the letter with people who are not regular users of social media sites. These people are much less likely to have come across alternative perspectives like the ones I try to present in my letter.

One other way you can help is by sharing the letter to my letter in chatrooms and asking people what they think of it. If you're going to do this please consider carefully where you're going to share it because most chatrooms have specific groups for stuff like "general discussion" or "politics". 

 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.

A letter to potential Tory voters

Dear potential Tory voter,

I'm writing to you in order to put a few things straight. I know there is a tendency for people on the left to caricature all Tory voters as selfish grasping individuals with no social conscience, and I know that this isn't how you see yourselves. In this letter I'm going to explain why this caricature is inaccurate, but also explain why people on the left tend to believe in it. I'm then going to go on about economics for a bit. This is quite a long letter so I hope that you have the patience to read it.

I don't assume that what I say will change your mind or your voting intentions, but I do hope that it at least gives you something to think about.

Lefty assumptions

The reason people on the left tend to think of Tory voters as being inherently selfish individuals stems from Tory party policy. It is undeniable that Tory party policies over the last five years have massively favoured the rich, whilst loading the burden of austerity onto the backs of the poor and ordinary. 

Thanks to Tory economic policies the wealthiest 1,000 families in the UK have literally doubled their wealth since the economic crisis, whilst ordinary working people have suffered the longest sustained decline in the value of their wages since records began (don't just take my word for it, click the links).

People on the left tend to assume that Tory voters are fully aware of these facts, and furthermore they assume that Tory voters intend to vote Tory because they actively approve of economic policies that transfer wealth from the poor and ordinary into the bank accounts of the super-rich.

Iain Duncan Smith
  
Another factor that makes lefties assume that all Tory voters are selfish people with no social consciences is the outrageous mismanagement of the social security system that has gone on for the last five years. 

There are many reasons that the Tory Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith is a totemic hate figure to people on the left, not least the sanctions regime that has left hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable people in Britain suffering absolute destitution for weeks, or even months at a time. Harsh and draconian sanctions have been inflicted on people for "crimes" such as being 9 minutes late for a Jobcentre appointment because their job interview over-ran, having a heart attack during a disability assessment and even selling poppies for a few hours a week for Remembrance Sunday. 

The fact that Iain Duncan Smith's treatment of the disabled and the unemployed has been declared unlawful by the courts on multiple occasions, only for him to completely ignore the court judgments against him and carry on regardless, adds to the anger that left-wing people feel.

Left-wing people often tend to assume that Tory voters vote Tory because they actively approve of Iain Duncan Smith's unlawful reign of terror over the lives of many of Britain's most vulnerable people. I prefer to think that most Tory voters aren't that disgustingly vindictive, it's that they just don't know about the appalling scale of the numerous rolling humanitarian disasters that have stemmed from Iain Duncan Smith's "welfare reforms".

Most Tory voters aren't selfish and vindictive

The reason a lot of left-wing people think of Tory voters as selfish grasping individuals with no social consciences is that Tory voters actively support a political party that imposes draconian sanctions on vulnerable people, treats the disabled and unemployed in an unlawful manner, and blatantly favours the interests of the already extremely wealthy whilst loading the burden of austerity onto the poor and ordinary.

The reality is completely different. Few Tory voters cast their votes on the basis that the Tories unlawfully abuse the most vulnerable people in society whilst overseeing a massive transfer of wealth from the poor and ordinary to the super-rich minority. Most Tory voters aren't that vindictive and self-interested. The main reason a lot of Tory voters choose to vote Tory is that they genuinely believe that it is the socially responsible thing to do.

The Tories and the right-wing press have been incredibly successful at convincing people that Labour bankrupted the country, that the Tory "economic plan" is necessary, and that this Tory plan is working well. Thus people decide to vote Tory because they're afraid that should Labour get back into power, they'll damage the economy.

The problem with this "Labour broke the economy and the Tories are fixing it" narrative is that every part of it is a load of baloney.

Labour didn't cause the global financial sector insolvency crisis

You really don't have to be a Labour Party supporter (I'm not) to understand that the global economic crisis happened because of the reckless virtually unregulated gambling of the banks, especially those on Wall Street and the City of London.

Of course Labour were somewhat to blame for allowing this gambling spree at UK banks to happen in the first place. However at the time, the Tories only complaints were that the Labour Party hadn't gone far enough with their financial sector deregulations! Had the Tories been in power and deregulated the UK financial sector even further than Labour had, the impact of the global financial crisis would have been a whole lot worse!

The Tory "economic plan" isn't necessary

The theory that a major economy can simply cut its way to growth is illiterate from a macroeconomic perspective and disproven time and again throughout history.

The idea that there is no alternative to ideological austerity is even worse, but somehow, through the tactic of endless repetition, the Tories and the right-wing press have managed to convince swathes of the public that ideologically driven, across the board spending cuts are the only option.

The problem with ideological austerity is that it is so arbitrary, relying on the naive assumption that all forms of government spending create a uniform return on investment of 50p in the pound. It should be obvious that some forms of government spending create better returns on investment than others, but the Tories failed to factor this into their equations, preferring instead to simply assume that all government spending is essentially 50% waste.

If you make a simplistic assumption that all forms of government spending are 50% waste then of course it makes sense to bring in across the board cuts. The problem is that reality obviously isn't that simple, and as in everyday life, some forms of spending are far better at producing good returns on investment than others. In fact the IMF (hardly a left-wing organisation by any stretch of the imagination) estimate that in the current economic climate the majority of government spending returns between 90p and £1.70 for every pound spent.

Once we understand that returns on investment are almost always a lot higher than the Tories lazily assumed they would be, it becomes completely obvious that the best way to improve the economy is to carry out a strategic spending review, then cut spending in areas with poor returns on investment, but actually increase spending in areas that produce strong returns on investment.

If we frame the austerity debate as a choice between between arbitrary across the board spending cuts vs evidence based strategic spending prioritisation, then the ideological austerity option begins to look like a very poor choice indeed, because if you lazily assume that all spending is waste, then you'll end up chucking out the baby with the bathwater and tanking the economy.

The Tory "economic plan" isn't working

There is a mountain of hard evidence that the Tory "economic plan" has been a disaster, but the right-wing press simply choose not to report it. I'll give a few examples:

• In 2010 George Osborne predicted that ideological austerity would have completely eliminated the budget deficit by now, in reality it hasn't even been halved.

• George Osborne staked his political reputation on retaining the UK's AAA credit ratings. In 2013 the UK economy was downgraded by the ratings agencies for the first time since the 1970s.

• George Osborne and the Tories harp on and on about "making work pay", but they've overseen the longest sustained decline in wages since records began!

• George Osborne and the Tories endlessly repeated their "we're all in this together" catchphrase, yet the richest 1,000 families have doubled their wealth whilst the full burden of Tory austerity has been loaded onto poor and ordinary people.

• Because of the failure of his ideological austerity agenda George Osborne has been forced to borrow hundreds of billions more than he originally claimed that he would. All of this additional borrowing means that in just five years Osborne has created more new public debt than every Labour government in history combined! 

Why haven't you heard about all of these failings?

A famous linguist and political writer once said that "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum".

The UK media is an almost perfect demonstration of this limited spectrum of acceptable opinion. You're never going to be told about George Osborne's failings by the majority of the press because it is owned and operated by right-wing billionaire press barons like Rupert Murdoch (The S*n, Times, Sky TV), Jonathan Harmsworth (Daily Mail, Metro), the Barclay brothers (Telegraph, Spectator) and Richard Desmond (Express, Star).

Anyone who expects a balanced view from the BBC is also hopelessly naive. The BBC know that their purse strings are controlled by the government of the day, that's why their political coverage is always slanted towards the government view. Whether the government is a Labour one or a Tory one, the BBC will curry favour with pro-government bias in their coverage.

The reason that you probably haven't heard very much about how badly George Osborne's ideological austerity agenda is failing, or about the shocking magnitude of Iain Duncan Smith's cock ups at the DWP, is that the vast majority of the mainstream media has absolutely no interest in telling you about it.

Austerity is a con

Ever since the beginning of ideological austerity, people like me have been claiming that austerity is a blatant con designed to transfer ever more wealth to the super-rich minority whilst pretending that the objective is getting the national debt under control.

After five years the results are in: George Osborne has missed all of his economic predictions by miles; he's borrowed hundreds of billions more than he said he would; and the national debt is still growing rapidly. Meanwhile the tiny super-rich minority have literally doubled their wealth.

These facts completely vindicate what I was saying back in 2010, but I take no pleasure from it, because witnessing someone make such a mess of the UK economy gives me no pleasure, and neither does the evidence of the ever widening poverty gap that George Osborne's wealth transfer con has caused.

Common sense?

Thanks to endless repetition by the Tories and their supporters in the right-wing press, the austerity narrative has become so ingrained in political discourse in the UK that "we've got to cut our way to growth" appears to be common sense to millions of people. However just because millions of people accept it as being common sense doesn't make it true.

Not so very long ago it was considered common sense that gay people were degenerates who should be forcibly castrated by the state (a fate that befell the war hero Alan Turing and thousands of others); before that it was common sense that women should not be allowed to vote (overturned thanks to the Suffragettes); before that it was common sense that only wealthy landowners should be allowed to vote in elections (overturned thanks to the Chartists); before that it was common sense that human beings should be able to own other human beings as property (overturned by the slavery abolitionists); and so on throughout human history.

One day the tide will turn and the majority of people will recognise austerity for the ideologically driven nonsense that it is. In fact the tide is turning now. Even the former Tory party spokesman for Treasury affairs Robert Skidelsky says as much. The question is whether you want to be one of the first people to accept that ideological austerity is a con (or at best a catastrophically failed experiment), or one of the last.

The problem

The Tories and the right-wing press have managed to fool an awful lot of people into believing that supporting their ideological austerity experiment is the socially responsible thing to do. The actual evidence paints a very different picture. George Osborne has missed all of his own economic predictions by miles; ideological austerity has badly hindered the post-crisis economic recovery; and one of the most significant outcomes from austerity has been a huge widening of the gap between the super-wealthy minority and the rest of us.

The problem is that so many people are so wedded to the familiar austerity narrative that they simply can't accept that it's demonstrably failed to achieve what George Osborne was claiming that it would back in 2010. 

In order to accept that it has failed people would have to accept that they've been duped into believing in something that doesn't actually work (or even make any sense at the most basic macroeconomic level).

Mark Twain (one of my all time favourite smartarses) once said "It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled". This is the problem. It's much easier for the Tories and the right-wing press to fool people into believing their deceitful austerity narratives than it is for others to point out to these people that they've been duped, and that austerity is a con.

Thanks

If you've managed to read this far it's fair to assume that you didn't flounce off in a cloud of confirmation bias at some point during this admittedly long letter, and for that you deserve some credit. Many people just tend to run away when they come across things that challenge their worldviews.

Thanks for taking the time to read what I had to say. Feel free to leave your replies in the comments section below.

Best regards

Tom (Another Angry Voice)

 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.

MORE ARTICLES FROM
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 
                 
Who really caused the economic crisis?
                                       
Austerity is a con
                
The "Making Work Pay" fallacy
                         
How George Osborne has created more debt than every Labour government in history combined
                        
Recommended reading - heterodox economics
           
George Osborne's "all in this together" fallacy
                     
What is ... Wage Repression?
                                                
What is ... Fiscal Multiplication?
                            

Why I want you to question everything - even me!
                                
The "New Labour are left-wing" myth
  

A letter to Scottish voters

Dear Voters of Scotland

As a Yorkshireman who currently resides outside of Scotland I feel like a bit of an outsider looking in on the independence debate. However I have my opinions and I'd like to share some of them with you.

I'm strongly in favour of greater political autonomy as a general principle, so I'm strongly in favour of Scottish independence on the grounds that the people of Scotland deserve a government that is much more responsive to their wishes than the Westminster establishment have proven themselves to be.

It has been fascinating to see the various ways in which the independence debate has been framed by the different sides. The political establishment, supported by the vast majority of the mainstream media, relentlessly push the overwhelmingly negative argument against independence, whilst the much more hopeful pro-independence perspective is provided by an impressive array of community groups, independent websites and ordinary people.

One of the most interesting tactics used by the anti-independence camp has been the emotive argument that the Scottish people would be tearing apart "the bond of citizenship" that you share with the English should you vote for independence. The most high profile example of this emotive "bond of citizenship" argument was the pleading letter from some 200 mainly English celebrities that appeared in the press in August 2014. The letter was signed by such luminaries as Cilla Black, Helena Bonham Carter, Simon Cowell, Richard Dawkins, Tracey Emin, Max Hastings, Ross Kemp, Rod Little, Peter Oborne, Sting, Alan Sugar and Ray Winstone.

That these celebrities would even consider basing their argument on an appeal to some abstract "bond of citizenship" just goes to show how desperately out of touch they have become with the everyday realities that so many normal folk endure. The fact that these celebrities range between comfortably well off and ludicrously rich provides some explanation of how they have completely missed the bigger picture in the Scottish independence debate.

The sheer number of establishment titles on this list (lords, sirs, dames, baronesses) shows that this is a bunch of people who are the beneficiaries of a system which keeps millions of people in Scotland, Wales and neglected areas of England in abject, soul destroying poverty. These people are not pleading with you to vote against Scottish independence because they feel it is in the best interests of the tens of thousands of Scottish kids growing up in such poverty that they have to go hungry on a regular basis (because it clearly isn't) they're pleading with you because they don't want to lose some abstract and inedible personal "bond of citizenship".

The referendum on independence isn't an opportunity to break some abstract "bond of citizenship" with the people of England as they like to frame it, it's an opportunity for the people of Scotland to stand up and free themselves from the misrule of the Westminster establishment. This mottly bunch of celebrities are incapable of understanding why this referendum is such a great opportunity for the Scottish people because they are part of the wealthy minority who have done pretty damn well out of the right-wing neoliberal economic system favoured by the Westminster establishment ever since 1979, which rewards wealth, punishes poverty and constantly builds ever more social inequality into the system.

I would like to present an alternative view from an ordinary English person, to show that we're not all as removed from reality as the English celebrities who put their personal abstract sense of shared citizenship above the very real needs of ordinary Scottish people.

Take the North East of England (England's poorest region) as an example. A recent study found that for every £1 spent per head of population on public transport in the North East, London gets £24 per head of population! This grotesque disparity in infrastructure spending between London and the North is just another way in which ever larger shares of the wealth are transferred down south. If Scottish independence means that a bit more of the wealth of the British isles is spread around a bit more fairly (instead of being siphoned off down to London), countless ordinary people will benefit from it. If only the North East of England had a bit more regional autonomy, perhaps things could be better and fairer for them too.

Another example can be seen in my home region of Yorkshire. If we'd had greater autonomy from Westminster, then perhaps our local representatives might have fought to protect our vital industries (steel, coal, fishing, transport), rather than letting the Westminster establishment deliberately ruin our industries, jobs and communities as part of their insane ideological experiment in turning the UK economy into a supposed "post-industrial society" built around the city of London financial sector (and we all know how that absurd fantasy turned out).

There are many in England who have seen our areas as badly misruled by the Westminster establishment as the Scottish have, the only difference being that you now have an opportunity to put this terrible misrule to an end for yourselves, but we must keep on fighting to achieve greater autonomy for ourselves. 

I, and many other English people, fully understand what it is like to see your own area left to poverty and ruin whilst the lion's share of the national wealth is diverted to London and the South East. Your problem is not with the English people at all, in fact you share exactly the same problem as many millions of English people; the problem of being ruled over from London by the corrupt and unaccountable Westminster establishment.

One of the strongest bonds between the people of Scotland, and ordinary people like myself from Northern England is that we understand the devastating consequences of having our local economies hopelessly mismanaged by the Westminster establishment. The fact is that this bond of mutual empathy is not one that can be broken should the people of Scotland take this wonderful opportunity to put Westminster misrule to an end.

These wealthy celebrities may imagine that they can sway you with their emotive argument about their loss of this abstract bond of citizenship, but there are many English people who understand that this is about something much more important than the hurt feelings of a few wealthy celebrities. You have an opportunity to free yourselves from Westminster misrule and to set about trying to build yourselves a better, fairer nation with a smaller, more responsive government.

I won't feel any loss at all if you guys decide to free yourselves from Westminster misrule, I'll celebrate with a drink, wish you all the best, and hope that Scottish independence acts as a catalyst for greater regional autonomy for the remaining countries and regions that must, for now, remain part of the United Kingdom.

On the other hand, I'd feel an immense sense of loss if you guys turn down this wonderful opportunity to free yourselves from Westminster misrule out of some misguided loyalty to the sense of "Britishness" that people like Simon Cowell, Tracey Emin, Mick Jagger, Ross Kemp, Alan Sugar and Ray Winstone base their vapid anti-independence arguments upon.

All the best for the future

Thomas G. Clark

 Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only sources of revenue for  Another Angry Voice  are small donations from people who see some value in my work. If you appreciate my efforts and you could afford to make a donation, it would be massively appreciated.

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