This article exists as an accompaniment to the political guide infographic. It's all pretty self-explanatory but it's important to back up some of the assertions with evidence and analysis.
Political position
The Green Party and Labour under Corbyn are Democratic Socialist parties occupying the traditional centre-left position before neoliberalism came along and dragged the entire political spectrum off to the right.
The Tory leadership are hard-right neoliberal being the party that originally injected this toxic strain of economic fanaticism into the UK government when they won the 1979 general election. A significant proportion of Tory backbenchers are far-right rabble rousers, but since the party leadership has not been completely usurped yet, they're still best classified as hard-right neoliberals.
The Lib-Dems and the new CUK squatter party are both "centrist" neoliberal, in that they're not as militant about their neoliberal ideology as the Tories, and often choose to focus on other issues (like Brexit, or social policies) but they also strongly resist any challenge to the established neoliberal orthodoxy, and actively support it if it suits their selfish political purposes.
The SNP and Plaid are both quite mixed political parties held together more by civic nationalism than economic stance. Overall they're more-or-less centre-left and I don't think many of their members would complain too vehemently as being described as social democrats.
Under Gerrard Batten UKIP have turned into a militant hard-right political force, expending far more effort on whipping up anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim hate, rather than detailing real political policies.
Farage's Brexit Party have only just been launched, but going on the fact they've already had two party leaders exposed as outrageous bigots, and Farage's willingness to participate in far-right rabble rousing throughout his political career, it'd take a hefty dose of gullibility to believe they're going to suddenly become centrists or social democrats.
Austerity
The Green Party deserve a lot of credit for being the only explicitly anti-austerity UK-wide political party in 2015, however Labour have learned their lesson from their abject failure to oppose Tory austerity fanaticism that lost them that election, and under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership they've moved to opposing Tory austerity dogma, rather than pathetically imitating it.
SNP and Plaid are both opposed to ruinous Tory austerity fanaticism too.
The Lib-Dems repeatedly try to distance themselves from the devastating Tory austerity fanaticism they enabled between 2010 and 2015, and will tie themselves in cognitive knots trying to pretend that the collapse in living standards these austerity policies caused had nothing to do with the massive upswell in public anger that carried Leave marginally over the winning line in the 2016 EU referendum.
The CUK squatter party are definitely pro-austerity. They've appointed Chris Leslie as their economics spokesperson, and he was one of the key architects of Labour's disastrous "austerity lite" agenda at the 2015 general election. Anna Soubry described the policies of the 2010-2015 austerity years (wage repression, public service cuts, infrastructure under-investment, defunding of local governments, vandalism of the social safety net ...) as "marvellous", and every single one of them either voted in favour of, or cynically abstained on George Osborne's devastating austerity cuts in 2015.
UKIP were explicitly pro-austerity before Batten became leader, but neither they, nor Farage's Brexit Party like to talk about austerity at all, because it's a lot easier to pin the blame for the devastating consequences on immigrants and the EU if you simply ignore the fact that austerity even exists.
Brexit
Theresa May and the Tory leadership are still trying to force their botched thrice-rejected hard-right Withdrawal deal through parliament.
Labour want to create a soft Brexit with Single market and Customs Union access, protected workers' rights, food standards, and environmental laws, and cooperation on science and security. They're also willing to hold a confirmatory referendum, and to consider retention of Free Movement (as demonstrated when they voted in favour of Nick Boles' compromise Brexit in the indicative votes).
The Lib-Dems, CUK, Greens, SNP, and Plaid Cymru are all Brexit-sceptic and they all seem to be prioritising another referendum, which is fine, but there's clearly no guarantee that Remain would win it given that nothing at all has been done since 2016 to clamp down on electoral liars and cheats (with serious punishments like bans from public office and jail time) or to regulate online social media dark ads.
It's fair enough opposing Brexit, I'm highly sceptical about it too, but if your strategy is simply another roll of the dice in a rigged game, you've got to acknowledge the risk of creating an inescapable double-mandate for a ruinous hard-right Brexit.
UKIP and Farage's Brexit Party are both pushing for a militant "no deal" Brexit that would bring economic chaos to the whole of the UK, and massively re-ignite tensions over the Northern Ireland border.
Social issues
When it comes to stuff like gay rights the Tories have moved dramatically from their homophobic Section 28 discrimination in the 1990s, but on disability rights their systematic abuse of disabled people has been condemned as a human rights violation by the United Nations. In any decent and compassionate society this despicable abuse would be considered an national scandal, but the mainstream media and most Brits don't even seem to care that tens of thousands of disabled people have died within weeks of being declared "fit for work" in Tory disability denial assessments.
The Tories also introduced Theresa May's vile Hostile Environment which led to unlawful abuse of black British citizens, including being forced into exile from their own countries.
And anyone supporting the use of British weapons in war crimes committed in Yemen by the homophobic, misogynistic, head-chopping, democracy-crushing, terrorism-spreading, journalist-dismembering Saudi tyrants has no right whatever to pose as any kind of "social liberal".
The Lib-Dems pose as social liberals, but they spent five years in coalition with the Tories vandalising the social safety net, systematically abusing disabled people, and supporting Theresa May's unlawful abuse of the Windrush generation. In fact the Lib-Dems agreed harsher social security sanctions (which mainly affect the mentally ill and the severely under-educated) in return for 5p charges on plastic bags!
Labour and the Greens have been vehemently opposing the systematic Tory abuse of sick and disabled people. The SNP and Plaid also have strong track records when it comes to opposing abusive Tory legislation like Theresa May's Hostile Environment, and the systematic Tory abuse of disabled people.
Not a single one of the CUK squatter MPs voted against Theresa May's hostile Environment. The ex-Tory members of the group actually voted in favour of it! They've also put Mike Gapes (a huge fan of imperialist war-mongering and the Saudi tyrants) in charge of their foreign policy agenda. If you believe in turning places like Iraq and Libya into lawless terrorist breeding zones, and support Saudi war crimes in Yemen, you're no social liberal, even if you pose as social progressives on domestic issues.
UKIP and the Brexit Party are rabble rousers intent on actually whipping up hatred against immigrants and minorities in order to push their far-right agenda. You'd have to be absolutely delusional to think they'd actually stand up for the vulnerable when it comes to social policy issues.
Privatisation
Labour and the Green Party campaign explicitly on policies like bringing the railways, water supply, schools, and hospitals back under public not-for-profit ownership. The vast majority of British people agree with this public ownership stance.
The Tories are privatisation fanatics. Since 2010 they've been busy outright defying public opinion by privatising NHS services, the Royal Mail, literally thousands of schools, and even massive chunks of the police and judicial system (including front line police services, probation, court translation, forensic science, and prisons).
Between 2010 and 2015 the Lib-Dems actively helped the Tories defy public opinion by privatising hospitals, schools, police services, probation, and prisons. Their leader Vince Cable was even the man the Tories put in charge of flogging off the Royal Mail at significantly below it's real market value!
The SNP have a more mixed approach. They've been in power in the Scottish government since 2007 so they could have done more to reverse privatisation in Scotland, however in areas where they have had the power to block it they have prevented a lot of the Tory privatisation mania that's infested England since 2010. In England 3/4 of secondary schools have been privatised, in Scotland the education system remains in the public sector.
The CUK squatter MPs clearly signalled their pro-privatisation credentials by appointing water privatisation propagandist Angela Smith as their energy, environment, and transport minister, numerous other CUK MPs have bitterly criticised Labour's public ownership plans, and they've just hitched their boat to the right-wing EPP European group, which includes the hard-right Spanish PP and Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party. Anyone expecting this neoliberal rabble to begin opposing and reversing Tory privatisation mania is clearly not paying any attention to what they're actually saying and doing.
UKIP used to be extremely vocal pro-privatisation fanatics to the point of promoting the full privatisation of the NHS, but they've quit talking about their economic policies these days in favour of immigrant-bashing and Muslim hate-mongering. Anyone imagining that UKIP and Farage's far-right Brexit mob would set about reversing Tory privatisation fanaticism is even more delusional than the CUK squatter fans!
Conclusion
Whatever your views on Brexit, be very careful that you don't end up endorsing a political party with terrible views and policies on other issues.
This is especially important when it comes to austerity fanaticism given that ruinous Tory austerity dogma was the root cause of the wave of public anger that caused the Brexit vote in the first place.
Voting for a pro-austerity political party because they make a big fuss about opposing Brexit is like worrying about your hair falling out and the blood in your piss as you continue wilfully drinking the political arsenic.
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.
First things first, this article is not intended as a defence of the Maduro government in Venezuela. Anyone who attempts to present it in such a way is simply lying in a desperate attempt to discredit what they don't like reading, and don't want other people to read.
Whether you like Nicolás Maduro or not, whether you understand the multitude of internal and external factors that have created the current situation in Venezuela or not, whether you even know anything much at all about the Venezuelan political system or not, there's one thing that's undeniable: Anyone who sides with a guy who appoints himself President of a country without standing in a Presidential election is displaying utter contempt for the concept of democracy.
This is exactly what's happened in Venezuela with Juan Guaidó appointing himself President of the country despite the fact he didn't even stand in the 2018 Presidential election, let alone win it.
Thus Venezuela now has two Presidents. One who won the 2018 Presidential election and the other who didn't even participate in it and simply appointed himself because he didn't like the outcome of the ballot he didn't even contest.
The United States immediately backed this anti-democratic coup and recognised the self-appointed coup-President, just like they rushed in to back the spectacularly failed 2002 coup in the country too.
Back in 2002 the US were the only country to recognise the coup leader Pedro Carmona as President of Venezuela before the coup rapidly collapsed and Hugo Chávez returned to power within two days.
The international reaction to this 2019 coup is very different, with numerous other countries rushing to throw their support behind this unelected self-appointed fake President.
The UK foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt has announced that the human rights defying Tory government support the unelected coup-President.
Another leader to have immediately thrown their support behind the coup-President is the recently elected Brazilian fascist Jair Bolsonaro.
Several other hard-right governments in Latin America have backed the unelected coup-President, including Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Paraguay.
None of this is remotely surprising given Britain's increasingly pathetic subservience to US foreign policy, and the massive historic divide in Latin America between US-backed right wing governments and US-opposed left-wing governments that has existed since the United States began their outrageous campaign of toppling left-leaning Latin American governments in the region decades ago.
What's ostensibly a lot more surprising is the way European liberals and self-declared centrists have been rushing to support the US-backed "regime change" that's happening in Venezuela.
Take the leader of the Liberal grouping in the European Parliament Guy Verhofstadt. His reaction to the coup attempt has been to personally recognise the self-appointed coup-President, lie that he's elected when he didn't even stand in the 2018 Presidential election, and then call for the EU to join Trump and Bolsonaro in recognising this coup leader as the legitimate President!
The very same guy who was furiously attacking Donald Trump as an "autocrat" and "a threat to Europe" back in 2017 is now wilfully sitting on Trump's knee like a yapping imperialist poodle!
Another Liberal to jump on the extraordinary 'this is a good coup' bandwagon is the centrists' darling Emmanuel Macron, who even had the gall to praise the bravery of the anti-government protesters in Venezuela as the French state brutally attacks and systematically represses the gilets jaunes protests against his own government!
Everyone knows that this US-backed coup is all about access to Venezuela's oil reserves (the biggest in the world) because Donald Trump's already publicly declared that US interventionism should be used to steal the natural resources of other nations.
It's extraordinary that so many trendy liberals and self-declared centrists are openly supporting this US imperialist "regime change" agenda while Trump's people openly talk about the prospect of making the already desperate situation even worse by launching military action in Venezuela.
They can't pretend to not understand what the motivation actually is after Trump's spelled it out for them so clearly. And it's especially alarming given the way that these people really should have learned all about the appalling consequences of imperialist "regime change" agendas after the Iraq invasion in 2003, and the destruction of Libya in 2011.
Both of these countries have been reduced to lawless terrorism breeding grounds with humanitarian conditions far worse than they ever were under the authoritarian governments of Hussain and Gadaffi.
Of course it's understandable that European liberals are no great fans of Maduro (neither am I, and I'm a leftie), but what does it tell you about their political principles when they're clamouring to align themselves with Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro to support a brazenly anti-democratic coup?
Even if you believe the 2018 Presidential election in Venezuela was rigged, supporting a self-appointed coup-President who didn't even stand in the election is utterly nonsensical from a democratic point of view.
And what does it tell you about their bone-headed refusal to learn the lessons of history when they wilfully ignore the unspeakable levels of death, destruction, and suffering that imperialist "regime change" policies have caused in Iraq and Syria to support the exact same imperialist agenda in Venezuela, only this time orchestrated by an even more unstable, profit-driven, and fanatically right-wing US President than George W. Bush was?
It's beyond question that anyone supporting the self-appointed and unelected fake-President Guaidó is siding with extreme-right ideologues like Trump and Bolsonaro, refusing to learn the lessons of history about the horrific consequences of imperialist "regime change" policies, and displaying their absolute contempt for the concept of democracy.
One of the most extraordinary things is that many of these liberals and centrists pledging support for the Venezuelan coup were the ones crying the loudest when Donald Trump won the US Presidential election, and bitterly decrying the rise of far-right populism when Bolsonaro won the Brazilian Presidential election in October 2018.
But scroll forward just a few months and these same trendy liberals and self-declared centrists are now wilfully stepping in line with the extreme-right demagogues they decried when they won power to actively support the transparently anti-democratic coup they've orchestrated in Venezuela.
This farce in Venezuela is far from the first time that liberals have ended up supporting and enabling extreme-right demagogues. We can delve into history to look at the way the liberal German establishment wilfully handed power the Nazis in 1933 by making Adolf Hitler Chancellor, or we can look to current day Italy to see how the trendy liberal MS5 party have enabled the fascist Lega Nord into power by joining them in a coalition government.
The fact is that given the choice between moving leftwards towards socialism, and rightwards towards fascism, an awful lot of self-declared centrists and trendy liberals will chose the fascist option because they understand that fascism goes hand-in-hand with corporatism meaning that their financial interests will be protected.
As long as corporations and their personal financial interests are protected, a lot of liberals and self-declared centrists are willing to overlook the obvious dangers of enabling the extreme-right into power, or siding with the extreme-right axis when it comes to global politics.
This centrist willingness to overlook the dangers of fascism most often comes from the position of extreme privilege.
Most wealthy, white, westerners know they have the least to fear from fascism (unless they have leftist political sympathies) because it's always the political left, minorities, the vulnerable, and people in the developing world who bear the brunt of the persecution and suffering under extreme-right rule.
Of course people should be able to recognise the thin end of a wedge, and they should be aware of Martin Niemöller's warning about the danger of escalating fascism (see picture), but in reality these coddled liberals and centrists keep making the same mistakes over and again.
Liberals and centrists will have tantrums for a while when fanatical right-wing ideologues like Trump or Bolsonaro are elected because they hate not having things their own way, and because deep in their hearts they know the extreme-right is wrong, but when push comes to shove they repeatedly fall into line and quickly start supporting them.
The gleeful reaction of so many self-declared centrists and trendy liberals to the anti-democratic US-backed imperialist coup in Venezuela is yet another perfect illustration of their outrageous tendency to wilfully align with and support the extreme-right thanks to the shared belief in corporatism.
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.
Just imagine for a moment that millions of Ukippers hadn't surged to Theresa May's rescue at the 2017 general election and Jeremy Corbyn had won, which is not such a crazy proposition because no political party bagging 40% of the vote like Corbyn did has failed to win an election since 1970.
Now imagine that Corbyn and the Labour Party were colluding to undermine parliamentary democracy at every turn, and their supporters in the media were busy orchestrating witch hunts against anyone who stood in his way (judges, opposition politicians, campaigners, university lecturers ...).
- Imagine if Jeremy Corbyn hadn't been (twice) elected Labour Party leader in massive landslide victories, but instead had been crowned party leader when his allies in the party and the mainstream media bullied his rival out of the leadership contest.
- Imagine if Corbyn supporters in the media then used this McCarthyite letter as inspiration to launch a hate-fuelled public witch hunt against any university staff who dare to oppose Corbyn's position.
Of course this is only a hypothetical exercise because Jeremy Corbyn is an elected democratic socialist who has actually been working hard to democratise the Labour Party so that ordinary members have much more say over the direction the party takes, so he would hardly behave in the same profoundly illiberal and anti-democratic manner as Theresa May has been.
But just imagine Corbyn and his supporters had done any of these things. We all know that the Tories and their bully boys in the mainstream media would be shrieking "red terror", drawing parallels with the Stalinist purges, and posing as if they're principled liberals who are determined to stand up for stuff like democracy, academic independence, parliamentary sovereignty, the rule of law, and freedom of speech.
But because these attacks on democracy, academic independence, parliamentary sovereignty, the rule of law, and freedom of speech are being orchestrated by Theresa May and the pro-Tory bully boys in the right-wing press, there's absolutely no talk of "the blue terror" whatever, no parallels being drawn with right-wing tyrants and dictators, and in fact the majority of the mainstream press insist on covering these extraordinary political circumstances as if there's nothing wrong at all, and these continual Tory attacks on democracy, freedom, and the rule of law are just business as usual.
The fact that there's virtually no condemnation from the mainstream media, and absolutely no efforts to frame the profoundly illiberal and anti-democratic scheming of the Tories as "the blue terror" tells us an lot about the attitudes of most of the people who work in the mainstream media.
When it comes to Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party they'll shriek outrage over the most inconsequential things (even completely fictional stuff they've lazily churnalised from the Guido Fawkes blog). But when it comes to the shockingly illiberal and anti-democratic scheming of Theresa May and the Tories, they'll turn a blind eye to pretty much anything.
Presumably they're intent on ignoring these extraordinary Tory attacks of freedom, democracy and the rule of law because they believe that Theresa May's ever increasing authoritarianism will never actually be a problem to them as long as they remain fiercely loyal to her cause.
Presumably they're confident that when the "blue terror" ideological purges of the media happen, they'll be safe while the ones who were foolish enough to ever criticise are forced out of their jobs, or dragged off by agents of the state in the middle of the night.
What they don't seem to have cottoned onto is that their continued complicity and collusion with the Tory party is turning ever more people away from the mainstream media, and fuelling the growth of independent media.
They don't seem to realise that if they keep up their sychophantic extreme pro-Tory bias and their complicity and collusion with Theresa May's illiberal and anti-democratic agenda, then many of them could well be out of their jobs anyway as mainstream media audiences collapse and their advertising revenues dry up.
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.
We've all seen how right-wing people often use words like "lefty" and "socialist" as if they're insults, and how they continually try to smear centre-left democratic socialists with claims that they're "hard-left", "trots", and "Stalinists". But being left-wing is actually something to be proud of.
Left vs right
I'm going to start out by explaining the difference between left-wing and right-wing.
Apologies if you're already familiar with the distinction between socialism and capitalism, but there are an awful lot of people out there who genuinely don't seem to understand the difference because the only definitions of words like socialism that they ever come across in the mainstream media are pejorative and deeply misleading.
The more left-wing a person is the more they believe in public ownership, and the more right-wing a person is the more they believe that private individuals and corporations should run everything for their own profit.
Thus someone on the hard-left would think that pretty much everything should be run by the state. A centre-left person would think that things like hospitals, schools, public transport, the police, energy infrastructure and core national industries should be run in a democratically accountable not-for-profit manner. A centre-right person would believe in a minimal state where only basic functions like the police, army, schools, and courts should be run by the state. And hard-right extremists would believe that literally everything (including schools, the police, the army, and the courts) should be run in order to generate private profits.
Despite their continual posturing as economic moderates, the Tories are actually hard-right fanatics who have spent the last seven years pursuing policies that only a tiny percentage of the British public support. Policies like privatisation of the NHS (10%), state schools (6%) and police services (3%).
The overwhelming majority of British people fall somewhere between centre-left and centre-right on economic issues, and way off to the left of Tory party politicians.
Opinion polls have shown time and again that there is massive public support for centre-left policies like running the National Health Service as a not-for-profit public service (84%), as well as widespread support for other centre-left policies such as nationalisation of the railways (60%), water companies (59%), and national energy infrastructure (53%), but only a minority of people are economically far-left enough to think that telecommunications companies (30%) and airlines (14%) should be government run.
Nationalism
One of the favourite tropes right-wingers love to rely on is the idea that they're proud patriots, and the left are a bunch of anti-British traitors.
Not only is wrapping yourself in the flag to score cheap political points an incredibly ugly thing in its own right, economically right-wing people don't have a leg to stand on either.
Just ask yourself why Britain's nuclear expertise now belongs to the French, meaning we need to bribe the French and Chinese into building Hinkley Point C instead of building our own energy infrastructure? (It was privatised in 1995 and bought out by the French government in 2008).
Ask yourself why 74% of UK rail franchises are operated by foreign governments? (Because the rail network was privatised in 1994 and has been gradually cannibalised by foreign state rail companies while the UK remains the only country that is blacklisted from bidding to run UK rail contracts!).
Ask yourself why the Chinese and Qatari governments own chunks of previously public assets like our water supply and National Grid? (Because they were privatised by the Tories and then sold on to foreign governments by corporate profiteers).
Ask yourself why the system of underground fuel supply pipelines that was built at UK public expense is now operated by the governments of Oman and the UAE and being rented back for more cash than the sum it was sold off for? (Because in 2016 Theresa May decided to skip the corporate middleman and sell off these British public infrastructure direct to foreign governments).
Anyone who considers themselves a patriot and is moved by "let's take our country back" type rhetoric should be absolutely horrified that so much British public infrastructure is now being used as cash cow investments by foreign governments, and should be delighted with Jeremy Corbyn's plans to bring these chunks of vital public infrastructure back under British control.
But no. Somehow these self-styled patriots are willing to totally overlook the fact that the Tories have been systematically selling off our country just because they've been bamboozled into mindlessly following the Brexit flag that Theresa May opportunistically nicked off the likes of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson when it suited her career to do so.
The centre-left
Although many people try to dismiss my Another Angry Voice work as hard-left extremism, my views are very much in the centre-left economic territory.
Do I think that things like the National Health Service, schools, universities, national grid, and railways should be operated as democratically accountable not-for-profit public services for the national good?
Of course I do.
Do I think the government should operate factories making stuff like sunglasses, selfie-sticks, snack foods, children's toys, computer games, and Christmas cards?
Of course I don't.
The government obviously has a role to play in regulating these kinds of private industries: Making sure that consumers are protected from dangerous or defective products, ensuring that the companies pay their fair share of tax on their profits, and keeping markets competitive by working to avoid the development of monopolies, oligopolies and cartels. But the idea of government operated selfie-stick factories is just laughable isn't it?
I'm not ashamed to hold these left-wing opinions. I'm proud of it.
And I'm also quite proud of the British public for holding broadly similar economic views despite having had a four decade long immersion in hard-right propaganda thanks to the noxious influence of propaganda barons like Rupert Murdoch (S*n, Times), the Harmsworths (Daily Mail, Metro), and the Barclay brothers (Telegraph, Spectator), the hard-right ideological fanaticism of the Tories, and the craven subservience of the centre-right New Labour government between 1997 and 2010.
Workers' rights
One of the main achievements of the political left is the massive improvements in workers' rights.
The genuine political left gave us all of our modern workers' rights (the weekend, paid holidays, sick pay, parental leave, freedom from unfair dismissal and workplace discrimination ...) and continues to side with workers against unscrupulous and exploitative bosses.
The political right works to undermine and reverse these advancements. Consider the exponential growth in zero hours contracts and the gig economy since 2010, the fact that since 2010 UK workers have suffered the longest period of falling real terms wages since records began, the systematic Tory attacks on workers' rights, and their unlawful policy of forcing people to pay £1,200 fees in order to seek compensation from bad bosses.
One of the most dispiriting things about British politics is the existence of millions of ordinary working people who actually allow billionaire-owned right-wing propaganda rags (The S*n, Daily Mail, Telegraph, Express ...) to manipulate them into voting for the billionaire-bankrolled Tory party that continually sides with exploitative and profiteering bosses against ordinary working people like them, and all of the other working people in their communities.
Social liberalism
Aside from the fact that the traditionally left-wing Labour Party created confusion and widespread political apathy by adopting right-wing economic dogma between 1994 and 2015, one of of the other main reasons a lot of people get confused about the actual difference between left and right (socialism vs capitalism) is that the right-wing dominated media continually misrepresent the left as if it's some kind of identity politics driven campaign to police language and enforce political correctness, rather than an economic stance.
It's easy to see how this misrepresentation has taken hold, because economically left-wing people and social liberals are natural bedfellows.
Back in the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher was sucking up to murderous tyrants like General Pinochet (the brutal Chilean dictator) and Suharto (a million people died during his rise to power in Indonesia), the Tory government were arming Saddam Hussain in Iraq, and the Tory youth were printing "hang Nelson Mandela" posters and T-shirts, Jeremy Corbyn was busy being on the right side of history by campaigning against right-wing dictatorships, apartheid, and arms sales to Iraq.
Just look at the current situation. The Tories have learned that the tide is changing and that the right-wing can't maintain their racist, sexist and homophobic policies of the past, but it's impossible for them to hide deeply illiberal stuff like the fact that their current leader Theresa May has a long parliamentary track record of voting against equal rights for gay people, that 86% of the economic burden of the socially and economically catastrophic Tory austerity dogma has been loaded onto the shoulders of women, and their discriminatory and dehumanising mistreatment of disabled people in corporate disability denial factories.
Shifting demographics
The Tories and their right-wing attack dogs in the mainstream media have found themselves in a terrible pickle as bigoted right-wing attitudes are being rapidly consigned to the past as younger generations reject the racist, sexist and homophobic attitudes that were commonplace in previous generations.
The makeshift solution the Tories have come up with is to completely reverse reality and pretend that the left, which has traditionally championed equality and human rights, is somehow riven with bigotry, while turning a blind eye to the fact that Jeremy Corbyn was championing stuff like gay equality in the 1980s, back when the Tories were pushing their deeply homophobic Section 28 regulation against a backdrop of profoundly bigoted anti-gay rhetoric in right-wing propaganda rags like The S*n and the Daily Mail.
Thus the right-wing rhetoric against the left has grown increasingly confused. They know they can't attack Labour on their extremely popular economically left-wing manifesto commitments to renationalise public infrastructure and build more affordable housing (a policy the Tories have actually nicked for themselves as a desperate last ditch attempt to appeal to the youth vote with some Corbyn-lite investment economics!) because these policies are actually really popular with the majority of British people. So they're trying to attack Labour for being bigots, whilst simultaneously trying to appeal to their ageing blue-kip demographic who have spent decades rote learning bigoted tripe from the pages of the right-wing propaganda rags.
Condemning your political opponents as bigots in order to try to con the socially liberal younger generations into supporting your party, whilst simultaneously remaining fundamentally reliant on your core vote of profoundly illiberal blue-kippers who want nothing more than to bring back blue passports, corporal punishment and the routine beating of children in schools is quite a balancing act for the Tories to try, and it's one of the reasons the right-wing definition of what it is to be a lefty is getting ever more confused.
Apparently the centre-left are not only a bunch of politically correct, language-policing, snowflake millennials who insist on hiding in safe spaces, we're simultaneously a tyrannical bunch of bigoted, hard-left, brick-lobbing, Trotskyite extremists too!
In reality, aside from a few extreme outliers, the overwhelming majority of people on the left are social liberals who favour the public and democratic ownership of vital national infrastructure and services, and believe that there's nothing wrong with people getting rich through private enterprise as long as they play by the rules and pay their fair share of taxes.
Conclusion
So the next time you see someone using lefty as an insult, just remember that being a lefty is actually something to be proud of, and that the vast majority of people in Britain actually have centre-left economic views.
In fact, it's actually highly likely that the person trying to insult you for being a lefty has economically left-wing views too (like supporting the NHS, or believing the railways and energy companies would be better off under public ownership, or that workers should be entitled to stuff like holiday pay, sick pay, and compensation if they're unfairly sacked by their boss).
It's just that they've become so hopelessly confused by the bile and bias of the right-wing dominated media that they don't actually understand what it means to be left-wing at all, and use terms like lefty like insults, when they're actually compliments.
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.
It looks a lot like the Liberal Democrats are lining Vince Cable up to run as an unopposed candidate to lead their party.
The problem of course is that Vince is a shockingly discredited figure whose appointment as leader would be yet another demonstration of the fact that the Lib-Dems are still living in denial about the damage they did by enabling the Tories back into power in 2010, rather than using the strong 3rd party position they had to actually hold them to account.
The economy
I used to quite like Vince Cable because he was one of the few politicians who seemed to have any real understanding of the global financial sector insolvency crisis at the time, but he pissed that reputation away completely when he conducted one of the most obviously self-serving U-turns in political history.
Before the 2010 General Election Vince repeatedly warned against deep ideologically driven cuts to public spending. He said "it would be reckless to plunge the economy back into recession through the immediate large-scale slashing of public services and jobs" and against making "damaging cuts in investment that undermine the country’s long-term future" [source].
Seven years of economic stagnation and failed economic targets from the Tories as a result of their ideological fixation with austerity dogma says that Vince was absolutely right to warn against reckless large-scale slashing of government expenditure and deliberate under-investment in the nation's future.
The problem of course is that Vince abandoned his anti-austerity position faster than you could say "opportunism" when the 2010 General Election resulted in a hung parliament, and went off to spend five years at the Treasury actually helping George Osborne to implement his socially and economically ruinous austerity agenda.
It's one thing being an ideologically driven nitwit like George Osborne who actually seemed to believe that "let's cut our way to growth" was a coherent and viable economic strategy, but Vince was one of the leading voices against this kind of economically illiterate delusion.
Vince abandoned economic sense entirely and lent a veneer of respectability to austerity dogma by actually serving George Osborne at the Treasury, which makes him an awful lot worse than Osborne, because Vince knew perfectly well how much damage he was actively helping Osborne to inflict, but he did it anyway.
Tuition fees
Vince Cable was one of the leading Lib-Dems who decided that completely shafting the students who helped vote them into power was a price worth paying for the self-satisfaction of a few years of ministerial salaries and the taste of some second hand Tory power.
The result of the Lib-Dem betrayal of their core student demographic is that students from the poorest backgrounds are now leaving university with £57,000 worth of debt, and an astonishing 75% of graduates are projected to never pay back their vast debts because of the extortionate 6% interest rates.
Despite these shocking statistics Vince Cable is insistent that the Lib-Dems imposing these vindictive disposable income-wrecking taxes on aspiration, despite their 2010 election pledge to actually scrap tuition fees, was the right thing to do.
Shafting one of your core demographics is an astoundingly inept move, and the Lib-Dems will never recover for as long as they continue the farce that imposing the highest public university fees in the world on English students was somehow a justifiable move.
It's much more than the fact that students won't come back to the Lib-Dems, it's the fact that anyone with any political sense at all will think to themselves "if the Lib-Dems were prepared to totally shaft their own student demographic for their own self-serving reasons, why wouldn't they shaft me too?"
Liberalism
Another Lib-Dem principle to get slung into the political dustbin during the coalition years was the party's commitment to liberalism. Between 2010 and 2015 the Lib-Dems helped the Tories to impose some of the most right-wing authoritarian and downright illiberal legislation since universal suffrage.
One of the worst examples of Lib-Dem backed illiberalism was Theresa May's depraved move to scrap the principle of open justice with Secret Courts (Closed Material Proceedings) in her 2013 Justice and Security Act.
This legislation creates the situation where a defendant can have their fate decided in a courtroom they are not allowed to enter, on charges they are not allowed to know, based on evidence that they are not allowed to see, and instead of having their own lawyer, they're given what is called a "special advocate" who is appointed to "defend" them by the state that is prosecuting them!
Vince Cable was an enthusiastic backer of this outrageously illiberal assault on the openness and accountability of the justice system, so anyone who supports the Lib-Dems because they consider themselves liberal should understand that Vince is so illiberal that he actively supported most of Theresa May's most illiberal and downright malicious schemes.
Warmongering
Before his conversion to Toryism Vince Cable was a man who described the invasion and occupation of Iraq as "the last straw" and complained about the nebulous ever changing justification for the occupation of Afghanistan.
After his conversion to Toryism Vince became a man who voted in favour of creating a terrorist breeding ground in Libya, and then even backed David Cameron's lunatic plan to hand Damascus to ISIS by attacking Assad (which was thankfully defeated when 30 Tory MPs and 10 Lib Dems had the good sense to rebel against Cameron's rush to war making him the first Prime Minister to lose a war vote since 1782).
Charles Kennedy won a great number of people to the Lib-Dem cause with his principled stance against imperialist warmongering, but Vince Cable helped to demolish that legacy by backing every imperialist adventure Cameron proposed, no matter how ridiculously ill-conceived.
Strategic ineptitude
Back in May 2010 one thing was absolutely clear to most of us; David Cameron and the Tories needed Nick Clegg and the Lib-Dems a hell of a lot more than the Lib-Dems needed the Tories, but Clegg, Cable, Alexander and co were so giddy with excitement at the chance to become government ministers that they agreed to an absurdly one-sided coalition arrangement that saw them shaft their own core demographics, abandon their own principles, and cement the Tories into power for 5 ruinous years.
A look at Theresa May's deal with the DUP bigots shows what kind of agreement the Lib-Dems should have aimed at.
The DUP knew that Theresa May needed their 10 votes more than they needed her, so they blagged everything they could, including a £1 billion bung for Northern Ireland, promises that the Tories would bin bits of their own manifesto, and on the DUP side they reserved the right to rebel against any particular bits of Tory malice they don't like, and limited the agreement to two years!
The Lib-Dems had 57 votes to bargain with, but they were the ones who made most of the concessions in their desperation to bag ministerial salaries for themselves!
The Lib-Dems were so strategically inept they willingly allowed the Tories to bind their hands and feet and then spend five years whipping them to within an inch of their lives, and Vince was a major player in negotiating this absolute capitulation of a deal.
Why would anyone with the remotest bit of political nous vote ever for a party led by such a strategically inept charlatan?
Vince Cable is dead wood
Vince Cable is the living embodiment of Lib-Dem betrayal. He stands for nothing except for self-serving political opportunism, and that's why he would make such a fantastic choice of leader for the Lib-Dems.
If they wanted to rebuild their shattered reputation then they would need to move on from the shockingly unprincipled old guard and find a leader with a coherent vision of what the purpose of the Liberal Democrats actually is, and the conviction to stick by this vision when opposition parties offer them trinkets and baubles to lob all of their convictions in the political bin.
Vince was a major player in the Lib-Dem leadership who saw their share of the vote plunge from 23% (on the verge of turning the UK into a genuine three party state) to below 8% (back to the kind of hopeless mess they were in under Jeremy Thorpe back in the 1970s).
You'd have to be as delusional as ... well ... as delusional as a Liberal Democrat to imagine that the voters will come flocking back to the Lib-Dems if one of the main architects of their collapse is handed the leadership in an uncontested election.
But good on them for finding their ideal leader. Who better to lead an unpopular party of self-serving political opportunists than one of the most discredited and unprincipled charlatans in British 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.
