How social media platforms reward misinformation-spreaders

Dan Hodges is the anti-left polemicist who wrote the Daily Mail's grotesque "Labour Should Kill Vampire Jezza" article, just ten days after Labour MP Jo Cox was brutally murdered in the street in 2016.

Dan's absolutely notorious for his ability to find the wrong take on pretty much any subject, and many have even argued that he's actually delivering some kind of absurd wrong-on-purpose performance piece designed to create as much reaction as possible.

You may well ask why on earth anyone would want to make themselves look like a venal, mindless idiot on purpose, just for attention?

The reason of course is that social media sites are designed in such a way that the loudest, crudest, most attention-seeking idiots actually get rewarded by the algorithm, as a result of the reaction to the bile and misinformation they spew.

These grifters either get their content positively shared by users who have had their minds rotted away by years of exposure to the venal radical right culture war bollocks, or it gets amplified by masses of reasonable people trying to point out how wrong and/or completely unreasonable they're being.

The golden ticket for attention-seeking grifters is the kind of post that does massive numbers from both of these target audiences, like that dreadful GB News hack who was invited onto the BBC to argue in favour of drowning migrants, which caused the extreme-right demographic to gleefully retweet clips of it, and liberal icons with vast social media followings like Gary Lineker to spread it further and wider by retweeting it in order to say how much they disagreed with it.

This kind of polemical attention-seeking grift is the entire modus operandi of GB News, and it's absolutely no surprise that Dan Hodges has got himself involved with their professional grifting operation.
 

In some cases the traffic is entirely made up of condemnation, as with Dan Hodges' economically illiterate interpretation of a BBC News item about a tiny fall in the rate of inflation, which he tweeted with a caption reading "Cost of living falls, just as everyone predicted".

Over a thousand people responded with comments pointing out that Hodges was completely misrepresenting the meaning of the story, either through economic illiteracy, or out of a desire to deliberately spread misinformation.

It's absolutely obvious that a fall in the rate of inflation from 3.2% to 3.1% is not wonderfully good news for the British people, or for the government, when the inflation target is 2%, and the Bank of England rate of interest is a paltry 0.1%, but who cares about facts and evidence, when Dan can just claim the article he's sharing means the opposite of what it actually says?

A fall in the rate of inflation, is simply not the same thing as inflation falling (deflation), and it's no wonder that public understanding of economic issues is so poor, when high profile commentators like Dan Hodges spread economic misinformation like this with impunity.

After such a large backlash, anyone with a shred of decency would delete the post and put up an apology, but attention-seekers who value their social media numbers above their reputation would never erase such a post, because 1,400+ negative replies, and 400+ negative quote tweets all still point to the Twitter account of Dan Hodges.

For being totally wrong about something, Twitter rewards him with thousands of links pointing to his profile, and the algorithm even begins automatically offering his account as a 'suggested follow' to people who got involved in the conversation about how wrong he was!

Why on earth would Dan Hodges delete his reward for spreading misinformation?

And it's clear that he knows it's misinformation too, because his follow up Tweet admitted that he got it wrong, then smugly implied that the people at fault are actually the ones who got "agitated" by his misinformation (which produced himself another reward of hundreds more negative replies and negative quote tweets).

Dan Hodges publicly admits that he knows that it was wrong, but he's leaving it up anyway, meaning there's no way it can now be interpreted as anything other than deliberate misinformation.

And he's actually gloating at all the people who have called him out, and revelling in all the attention and free publicity!

If social media sites like Twitter actually cared about confronting misinformation, they'd allow users the means to effectively report misinformation (crowdsourced peer review), reduce the visibility of misinformation-spreading accounts, and improve the visibility of accounts that routinely tell the truth and cite their sources.

Instead, social media algorithms reward misinformation-spreaders by treating all the criticism of their misinformation as if it's people merely sharing and replying to something that's "interesting"!

We're well into the second decade of the social media age, and none of the social media platforms have even attempted to try to effectively resolve this rewarding misinformation problem.

In fact Facebook has even developed a bizarre "violations" system designed to reduce the visibility of accounts that cite evidence and sources, whilst allowing outright liars to get off scot free!

This failure to address the rewarding misinformation problem means the rabble-rousers, hate-mongers, attention-seekers, and misinformation-peddlers are obviously going to continue gaming poorly-designed algorithms to bag themselves ever more social media prominence.

In a system in which the more wrong, more venal, and more provocative the content, the higher the reward, it's natural that amoral attention-seeking grifters like Dan Hodges would continue to work the system to their advantage, isn't it?

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OR

Why are footballers held more accountable than establishment politicians?

The mainstream media non-reaction to the Labour Leak scandal, and the ongoing lack of suspensions within the party are extraordinary in their own right.

What the leaks revealed was a bunch of horrific right-wing wreckers embedded within the Labour Party deliberately trying to lose elections, misallocating party funds, engaging in racist and misogynistic abuse against their party colleagues, and endlessly slagging off their own party's leader, policies, and supporters.

But a little thought experiment puts this scandal, and the almost complete non-reaction to it into a clearer perspective.

If leaked WhatsApp chats revealed that several players on a Premier League football team had been conspiring to deliberately lose crucial games in a misguided attempt to drive out their manager, all hell would break loose.

Especially if the players were also caught out spewing racist abuse at their own black team mates, deliberately undermining their own team's anti-racism initiatives, and repeatedly deriding their own team's fans with mental health slurs.

You could bet every penny you've got on these players being immediately suspended, coverage of the story dominating the newspaper front and back pages for weeks, the regulatory authorities getting involved, and several of the worst perpetrators ending up in jail and never playing professional football again in their lives.

But just imagine if the club decided not to suspend a single one of the players.

How do you imagine the club's fans would react if the team just carried on like nothing had happened?

And do you really think the players' mates in the media would be composing articles portraying the cheating racist scunners as the "poor innocent victims of a terrible invasion of privacy" (despite the fact that they only got caught because one of the hypothetical players had been stupid enough to upload the entire WhatsApp chat history onto the club's computer system!).

But we've seen articles from the Guardian to the Telegraph portraying these bigotry-dripping right-wing saboteurs as the poor innocent victims, and whoever blew the whistle by leaking the report as the dreadful horrible monster of the situation.

In reality we don't even need to imagine how football would react to a scandal like this, because we've got plenty of evidence of how the football community reacts to cheating, disrespect, and racism.

When the former Huddersfield, West Brom, and Notts County player Delroy Facey was caught match fixing he was jailed for two and a half years.

Two England managers have been forced out of their jobs, Glenn Hoddle over his bizarre ableist tirade accusing disabled people of being at fault for their own conditions because of "karma" and Sam Allardyce was removed after one solitary game for financial impropriety.

When former West Brom and Manchester United manager Ron Atkinson was recorded saying that a black footballer was a "lazy, thick N-word" he was cancelled. Despite being one of the pioneering managers who brought black players into his teams in the 1970s and '80s, he clearly stepped way over the line with this racial slur and lost his commentary and football columnist jobs over it.

Just think about how many times football managers and players have been sanctioned and fined for "bringing the game into disrepute", and how establishment politicians have been allowed to get away with absolutely egregious lies, expenses scamming, and horrific abuse of each other and random members of the public.

Just think about the vitriol that a whole host of football players have faced over charges of  "going down to easily", even though the referees have shown time and again that they simply don't award free kicks unless players make a big show of falling over at the point of contact.

People who fall over too easily on a sports field get more public derision than politicians who sabotage elections and spew racist, misogynistic, and ableist abuse!

The establishment political class get in comparison to footballers is extraordinary:

Consider Tony Blair's lies that led us into the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the hundreds of thousands who died as a consequence, and how he's still treated as some kind of beloved political oracle by the press, instead of the lying pariah he should be.

Consider David Cameron hiding behind parliamentary privilege like a coward to spew libellous abuse at a random Muslim guy, purely in order to falsely portray Labour's Sadiq Khan as a terrorist sympathiser.

Consider Theresa May's sickeningly racist "Hostile Environment" legislation, and how nobody in the political establishment class has faced any real consequences for the systematic abuse of black British citizens, to the extent of actually deporting scores of UK citizens.

Consider the fact that 88% of Tory Facebook ads were shown to be lies during the 2019 General Election, and absolutely nothing was done about it.

And consider the ludicrous non-reaction to the racism, mental health slurs, delaying of antisemitism investigations, and deliberate electoral sabotage carried out by the Labour right-wingers that was exposed in the Labour Leaks.

It turns out that the United Kingdom is a country with absurd priorities, where the media and regulatory authorities hold footballers, football managers, and football commentators to a vastly higher standard of conduct than the establishment politicians who actually rule over our lives!

We've just become so accustomed to the political establishment lying, and cheating, and scamming their way through their careers that we accept it as a normal part of the job.

But to make matters worse, when one politician showed up who eschewed the lying, and scheming, and self-interested scamming, the mainstream media and the rest of the political class turned on him, continually portrayed him as some kind of repulsive extremist monster, and even deliberately sabotaged his party from within to prevent him from becoming Prime Minister.

Even if it had been players from a football club you don't even like, you'd want them disciplined for bringing the game into disrepute if they'd behaved like the right-wing Labour saboteurs, but somehow, because it's happened in politics rather than football, most of the nation has turned a complete blind eye to it.

And this extraordinary non-reaction provokes the question of how politics can ever be cleaned up if establishment politicians can get away with the kind of deliberate sabotage and rampant bigotry that would result in footballers, or anyone else in any other job, getting sacked, and probably jailed if they did the same.

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OR

Boris Johnson's tax bribe certainly worked a treat on Alan Sugar

In December 2018 Alan Sugar was furious about the Tory Brexit chaos. He was so furious that he publicly stated that he wanted Boris Johnson to be jailed for the political lies he told during the 2016 EU referendum.

Fast forward just seven months and Sugar is running free publicity for Boris Johnson's bid to become Tory leader and Prime Minister by default.

So what's changed in the meantime?

Boris Johnson hasn't apologised for the lies he told during the EU referendum, in fact his supporters have actually doubled down on his right to lie to the public using spurious appeals to "free speech".

The Tory Brexit chaos hasn't improved a jot. In fact it's far worse. We over-ran the Article 50 deadline and Theresa May was left with no choice but to scuttle off to Europe to pathetically beg for an extension in order to avoid actually following through on her endlessly repeated threats to launch a ruinous "no deal" Brexit meltdown if she didn't get her own way.

Who would have thought that "I'll shoot myself in the head on a specific date if I don't get my own way" would turn out to be an incompetent negotiating strategy?
 

The Tory government's own impact assessments show
that a "no deal" Brexit is the worst possible outcome.

Now we're faced with the prospect of a Boris Johnson-led Tory Brextremist government forcing through the most damaging possible version of Brexit (so bad that it's significantly worse than Theresa May's three times rejected hard-right Brexit proposal) and Sugar is cheering him on from the sidelines.

The only high-profile policy that Johnson has announced is an extraordinary £1,500 per year tax bribe to people earning salaries of above £80,000 per year (with diminishing benefits down to those on £50,000 salaries, and absolutely nothing for anyone earning less than that).

This tax bribe would cost £9.6 billion per year, to be paid for the rest of us in the form of more austerity, more public service cuts, more Tory wage repression, more vandalism of the social safety net ... during the Brexit crisis that Johnson and his ilk wish to manufacture for the benefit of their mega-rich speculator mates who are betting against Britain and British assets in the hope of making a killing on the economic meltdown their Tory chums have promised to deliver.

Consider this egregious Tory tax bribe aimed at the tiny minority of top earners like Sugar and paid for by the rest of us.

And compare it with Jeremy Corbyn's policy of no tax rises for the 95% of lowest earners, and making corporations pay their fair share of tax.

It's absurdly easy to see why Sugar has undergone this remarkable conversion from "lock him up" to "Boris for PM".

He's blatantly just let his greed do his thinking.

And he's done it in such a blatant manner that he's switched from bitterly opposing Brexit to social media cheerleading for one of the most egregious Tory Brextremists!

Sugar's greed-override is so ugly, and selfish, and transparent, that even the most obtuse of people should be able to see it for what it is.

 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

The Brexity lies that have gone mega-viral on Facebook

Numerous people have written to me asking me to look into a list of 26 reasons to be afraid of the Lisbon Treaty that has gone mega-viral on Facebook numerous times via copy n' paste reposting, often with changes to the introduction to make it look like the list was personally compiled by the poster, not just copied from elsewhere.

I've included a image of one of the most widely shared versions of this pack of lies so you check it out as I go through it point by point.
 

Introduction:

Before we even get to the 26 points there are already a load of red flags in the introduction.

We're expected to believe that the poster read the entire Lisbon Treaty, which is a crude and highly suspect appeal to authority.

They're positioning themselves as the "expert" who has read and analysed the whole Lisbon Treaty, meaning we should uncritically take them at their word about what they say about it.

This posturing as an expert is then completely undermined by a paragraph of ALL CAPS SHOUTING which includes the first glaringly obvious lie. The Lisbon Treaty does not come into force in 2020, it already came into force in 2009!

The Lisbon Treaty is not a future threat to be afraid of, it's the current circumstances that have existed within the EU for the last decade!

Then we get to the assertion that no Remainer ever asks what will happen if we stay in the EU, which is another outright lie.

I'm a massive critic of Tory hard-right Brexit yet I also have all kinds of legitimate concerns about the future of the EU, such as the draconian copyright extremist legislation they're trying to pass, the blind eye the EU institutions have turned to the extraordinary political repression in member states like Spain, Hungary, and Poland, their enforcement of ruinous austerity dogma on member states like Greece, and their use of extrajudicial ISDS measures in trade deals.

It is possible to have reservations about the EU, yet not believe that the best solution to these problems is to conduct a chaotic job-destroying Tory-administered flounce out of the EU.

Having legitimate questions about the future of the EU obviously is a completely different thing to wilfully spreading a pack of fear-mongering lies, which is what everyone who has shared iterations of this Facebook post has been doing.

Point 1: Loss of abstention veto (lie)

There is no abstention veto to lose. No country has ever been able to torpedo EU legislation just by abstaining. Unsurprisingly it's always necessary to actually vote against legislation in order to stop it. So the only people who could be upset about point 1 are those who don't understand the structures of the EU, or even just how voting works in general, meaning they fear the UK losing a right they never actually had.

Here's an article detailing how voting in the European Council actually works if you're interested.

Point 2. Federalisation (lie)

The Lisbon Treaty does not introduce EU federalisation. In order for that to happen the EU member states would have to agree a new treaty to extend the powers of the EU.

Voting on treaties is very different to the European Council voting system. Treaties must be agreed by all member states unanimously, so if a treaty enforcing federalisation of all member states is proposed, all member states must vote in favour of it.

This has not happened, and will not happen.

3. Accept the Euro by 2022 (lie)

If you mindlessly believe this copy n' paste thread all member states will be forced to join the Euro by 2022. If you believed the Daily Telegraph in 2014 all member states would be forced to join the Euro by 2020. If you believed the Daily Express in 2017 all member states would be forced to join the Euro by 2025.

Why do they all use different dates? Because they're making it up, but this Facebook propaganda thread is particularly bad because it outright lies that the Lisbon Treaty forces member states to join the Euro when it does no such thing.

4. Moving the London stock exchange to Frankfurt (lie)

How utterly gullible would you have to be to actually believe that the EU could force the London stock exchange to move to Germany through the Lisbon Treaty?

The origin for this lie is the proposed merger between the London and Frankfurt stock exchanges that was eventually blocked by the EU competition regulator!

If you are worried about British-based financial services moving overseas, then you should be absolutely horrified by Brexit, which has already caused a mass exodus of capital ($1 trillion in assets) and thousands of financial services jobs to other countries that remain in the EU.

Even Tory Brextremist Jacob Rees-Mogg has joined the exodus by shifting his investment fund to Ireland in order to keep a foot in the Single Market!

5. Supremacy of European Parliament and ECJ (lie)

This point relies on a crass misunderstanding of what the ECJ (European Court of Justice) is, and how powers can be shared between different legislative bodies (consider the federal and state governments in the United States, and how state law can over-rule federal law on all manner of issues such as cannabis legalisation).

A good example of how they've got this so wrong is to consider the December 2018 ECJ ruling that found that the UK Parliament has the sovereign democratic right to revoke Article 50, and that the European Parliament or any of the other EU institutions can do absolutely nothing to tinker with the UK's terms of membership as a punishment for the three year farce we've put them through.

The ECJ actually ruled that the UK parliament is sovereign and that there's nothing any of the EU institutions can do about it, yet somehow, according to this copy n' paste fear-list they're the enemy to be feared and despised!

6. Abolish parliament! (lie)

The nasty EU and ECJ are going to force the UK to accept everything they say so we might as well abolish the House of Commons and the House of Lords!

In reality EU legislation only makes up 13% of UK law (even after decades of integration), so even if we completely accept the ludicrous proposition that the UK would be forced to accept 100% of EU law, then there's still the other 87% of UK law for parliament to concentrate on.

Even if this fear-mongering nonsense were true, why on earth would it mean that parliament would cease to exist as we know it? It's a complete non sequitur.

7. No trade deals (absurdity)

The threat that the Lisbon Treaty somehow rules out Britain's future ability to make trade deals is absolutely absurd because this isn't some future threat, it's the actual current state of affairs.

The EU Single Market is the single largest trading block on the planet which gives it enormous power to craft trade deals to its own advantage. All of the individual states that decided to join made the decision to give up their ability to make their own trade deals in return for access to the Single Market and the advantage of pooled negotiating power.

Repurposing the actual current state of affairs as a terrifying future threat is an extraordinary tactic, and it just goes to show how gullible people can be that the tens of thousands to have shared this nonsense didn't even notice that they were being directed to fear the introduction of what is actually the norm, and has been for decades.

8. No trade tariffs (absurdity)

This is basically just a reiteration of the previous point to present the current state of affairs as a terrifying future threat. Trade tariffs are decided communally by the EU. If it didn't work like this the Single Market and Customs Union couldn't exist in their current form.

9. No trade quotas (absurdity)

Another reiteration of the same idiotic effort to present the current state of affairs as a terrifying future threat.

10. Loss of fishing rights (lie)

EU member states will not lose control of their fishing rights in 2020. It's hard to tell where this lie even stems from. It's got nothing to do with the Lisbon treaty, that's for sure.

There are EU plans to improve sustainable fishing practices in 2020 in order to prevent the depletion of fishing stocks (the next step after the abandonment of discards in 2015), but these plans actually introduce more regionalisation, and more stakeholder consultation.

Anyone who tries to present these sustainability plans as a loss of all fishing rights is simply lying through their teeth. 

11. Loss of oil and gas rights (lie)

There is absolutely nothing in the Lisbon Treaty forcing member states to give up their oil and gas rights. In fact this complaint is so loosely worded that it's not even clear what it means. Are they trying to say that the exploration rights are to be given up? The territorial rights? The rights to collect tax revenues on oil industry profits? The right to assign oil industry revenues to national GDP?

It's just naked fear-mongering about the nasty EU taking what is "ours". The contentiousness of this point should be obvious to all Scottish people given that the UK government has essentially forced Scotland to give up its oil and gas rights so that tax revenues on oil industry profits can be seized by London.

Essentially this "loss of oil and gas rights" argument makes a much better case in favour of Scottish independence, than it does against the EU!

12. Forced entry into Schengen (lie)

Only six member states are outside the Schengen zone: Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Ireland, Romania and the UK.

There are no plans to force member states to join the Schengen free travel area by 2022, and definitely not in the Lisbon Treaty. In fact the only reference to forced Schengen acceptance anywhere is a 2017 article in the Daily Express based on a load of fear-mongering nonsense about how the EU might punish Britain if it cancels Brexit (punishment the December 2018 ECJ ruling declared unlawful should the UK parliament decide to revoke Article 50).

Perhaps the original author of this copy n' paste propaganda mistook their copy of the Daily Express for the Lisbon Treaty?

13. Loss of control of planning legislation (lie)

Town and city planning is not an EU competence. This means they don't set planning rules for member states. Sometimes EU laws impact national planning legislation (stuff like air pollution laws) but the idea that the nasty EU superstate is going to take over your local council planning office is so absurd it's extraordinary that people actually believe this nonsense.

14. Loss of armed forces and nuclear weapons (lie)

The EU does not have an army and any decision to create an EU army would have to be made unanimously. Many member states remain steadfastly opposed to the idea. Additionally there is absolutely nothing in the Lisbon Treaty forcing the creation of an EU army, forcing member states to give up their own armies, or compelling member states to hand over their nuclear weapons (in the case of the two member states that actually have them).

The Lisbon Treaty doesn't even mention the creation of an EU army. All it mentions is a the framing of common defence and security policies, which means cooperation between EU states on issues like combating terrorism (do we want to share intelligence on terrorist threats with our European allies or not?) and mutual defence (if you don't like that idea you should absolutely hate NATO shouldn't you?).

One of the most absurd things about this threat that "the EU are going to steal our nukes" is that they've already been stolen. In 1997 the Tory government privatised Trident into the hands of a consortium which is now run by three private companies, two US-based (Jacobs Engineering & Lockheed Martin) and one UK-based (Serco).

Imagine the detachment from reality it would take to be horrified and outraged about an entirely fictional threat that "the EU are going to steal our nukes", but 100% relaxed about the observable reality that our nukes are actually being run by a bunch of private corporations!

15. Loss of taxation policy (lie)

According to this point the EU is supposedly planning to revoke member states' ability to form their own taxation policies at some point in the near future.

Why member states would ever allow that to happen is not explained. Neither is the section of the Lisbon Treaty that supposedly proposes this radical policy (exactly like all of the other 26 points).

What kind of cognitively illiterate idiot believes the assertion the the EU is going to unilaterally take over all member states' taxation policies based on absolutely no evidence whatever?

16. Loss of national law (lie)

Again, what kind of idiot just believes that the EU is going to be able to prevent member states from creating their own laws with no evidence whatever?

Which member states would vote in favour of a treaty to abolish the legislative role of their own parliaments?

Somehow we're expected to believe that all of the nations of the EU are so stupid that they'd vote to abolish themselves! 

17 The UK loses its standing in the Commonwealth (lie)

Again, there's no reference to any specific legislation here. People are just expected to unquestioningly accept the vague assertion that the UK must lose standing in the Commonwealth, and this loss of standing has something to do with the Lisbon Treaty (which doesn't even mention the Commonwealth in the entire text).

Talk about assuming your audience to be a bunch of idiots!

18. Loss of British overseas territories (lie)

Not only does this point fail to explain how this supposed loss of British Overseas Territories like the Falklands, Gibraltar, and Cayman Islands has anything to do with the EU or the Lisbon Treaty, it doesn't even explain where the sovereignty of these territories is transferred to. Do they become independent states, vassal states of the EU, or do they just get erased from existence by some kind of space laser?

It's just another reiteration of the nasty EU bully boy stealing our toys, but the author is lagging now so they can't even be arsed to explain it any more, we're just expected to believe it because they set themselves up as an authority figure at the beginning with their claim to have read the Lisbon Treaty (a document that doesn't even mention the British Overseas Territories).

19. Loss of control of judicial system (lie)

What does the claim that "the UK loses control of its judicial system" even mean?

The British judicial system isn't just one entity, it's divided into three different systems (Scottish Law, Northern Ireland Law, English and Welsh Law). All of these three systems are necessarily independent from government control. The idea of government appointed judges is the terrifying stuff of totalitarianism.

So who "controls" the justice system in Britain now? And by what means are the EU supposedly threatening to seize control of it for themselves?

And how does any of this fit in with the fact that the EU has been suing the Polish government in an effort to protect the independence of the Polish judiciary?

20 & 21 Loss of control of national and international policy (lies)

This is such a vague complaint it's difficult to figure out which section of the Lisbon Treaty supposedly enables this terrible power-grab by the EU bully-boys.

Like most of the crap in this list, concerns over national and international policy are already covered by points 6 and 16 that wildly claimed that the EU would result in the abolition of parliament and the eradication of UK law.

How a country is supposed to develop "national policy" or "international policy" without a national parliament or national law is an interesting question ... Or it would be if all of the claims weren't just fear-mongering bullshit with no basis in reality whatever.

22. Loss of nationhood (lie)

I'd really like to see the section of the Lisbon treaty that says that all member states lose their right to call themselves a nation in their own right.

It's easy to see that whoever compiled this list was badly running out of steam by this point, but the idea that the identities of member states would be completely erased is such lazy hyperbolic nonsense that anyone with the faintest grip on reality should have been laughing out loud at the idiocy of it by this point.

But somehow no! Somehow tens of thousands of people actually read this shit, believed it, wrote furious comments about it, and helped spread these transparently obvious lies even further by sharing it.

23. Loss of space exploration programme (lie)

The British Space Agency was established in 2010. It has a budget of £372 million, much of which is accounted for by Britain's investments in multinational collaborative projects like the Galileo Satellite Navigation system, the European Space Agency Subscriptions, and the EU Satellite Centre.

The European Space Agency has a budget of £5 billion, and by walking away from the EU the UK is going to lose access to this project, and the British Space Agency is going to be left as a deflated husk with no space programme at all.

There never was an EU plan to take over the British Space Agency, however by quitting the EU the Brexiteers are absolutely trashing Britain's space exploration potential.

There's so much wrong in this list of lies that it beggars belief, but like the financial services fear-mongering in point 4, this one is especially egregious in the way it completely reverses reality by addressing a subject which provides one of the strongest reasons against quitting the EU as a reason to quit the EU.

Just ask any astrophysicist (or scientist in general) if they think that Britain quitting the EU is going to be great news for British science and space exploration.

24. Loss of aviation and sea lane jurisdiction (lie)

Guess what ... The Lisbon Treaty doesn't even mention aviation or shipping.

25. Loss of rebate (lie)

This lie is particularly easy to disprove. The Lisbon Treaty doesn't even mention the rebate, let alone set out a hard and fast expectations of increased contributions from member states.

As a result of the definitely-not-cancelled rebate, the UK (population 66 million) still pays significantly less than Italy (population 60 million) for its EU membership!

The aforementioned ECJ ruling on Article 50 found that the EU couldn't punish the UK by cancelling the rebate, so even if we decide to stay in after pissing them about for three years, the rebate stays.

26. Dodgy financial calculations (lies)

The list finishes of with a list of dodgy unsourced calculations referring to the claim in point 25, and speculating vastly increased UK contributions to the EU budget.

It's unclear when the first iteration of this absurd list of lies was compiled, but the Lisbon Treaty came into effect in 2009, which was followed by a period in which the UK's contribution to the EU budget declined significantly between 2013 and 2017!

If the Lisbon Treaty did set out specific financial expectations of member states (it didn't) then they must have got their maths spectacularly wrong to demand an extra £billion+ year on year, only for the UK contribution to fall by well over £1 billion between 2013 and 2017!

Conclusion

The conclusion to the post tends to vary like the introduction, with people replacing the original with screeds of their own.

This particular version does a bit of sneering contempt for young people positing that their pack of lies about the future is what the younger generations are complaining about, when their actual legitimate complaints are that they don't want another economic crisis because we still haven't recovered from the last one thanks to 9 years of ruinous Tory austerity dogma, they don't want to lose their right to live, work, study, and travel across Europe, they don't want a wave of job losses, or chaos at our ports and airports, and they don't want their European-born friends/family members/work colleagues/neighbours treated with derision and contempt by Theresa May's xenophobic government.

It then goes on to claim that young people should be "on their knees" thanking Brexit voters for saving them from becoming Orwellian automatons, which is decidedly ironic given the clearly identifiable use of loads of Orwellian reality-reversing propaganda within the 26 point barrage of lies.

Then it finishes off with a conspiracy theory that Brexit is not dragging out because the process of quitting a political union you've been integrating with for four decades is a lot more complex than just putting a cross on a piece of paper and hoping for the best, but actually because there's some special deadline in 2020 (or is it 2022? as several of the 26 points claim) that will result in the seizure of our army, resources, and assets, the subjugation of our parliament and judiciary, the theft of our financial industry and space agency, the destruction of our borders, and the de facto abolition of the UK!

And do you know what the worst thing is?

If you ever point out that all the evidence points to the fact that Brexit is going to be an economic disaster, jobs will be lost, industries will flee, and Britain will be humbled on the international stage, the type of people who shared this despicable pack of fear-mongering lies will shriek "project fear" at you in order to discredit all the facts and evidence you try to bring to the table as if you're the one pushing fear-mongering lies!

 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

Meet the liar Vicky Ford

Emboldened by the absolute flood of lies told during the EU referendum debate the Tories came to believe that they can outright lie to the public with total impunity.

During Theresa May's vanity election they lied over and again. 

Theresa May herself was one of the worst culprits of all, lying about Diane Abbott, lying about Labour's immigration policies, and lying that she would quit as Prime Minister and let Jeremy Corbyn take over the Brexit negotiations if the Tories lost just 6 seats (they lost 13).

The Tory campaign of lies and smears resulted in the Tories losing their majority, and a massive surge of Labour Party support amongst the under-45s (a demographic time bomb that looks set to lock the Tories out of power in the long-term), but they still haven't learned their lesson that ever growing numbers of people are completely sick of political lies and Murdoch style muck-raking.

The newly elected Tory MP in the super-safe seat of Chelmsford Vicky Ford doesn't seem to have learned this lesson about political integrity.

In a Sky TV interview less than two weeks after the chastening Tory losses she decided to outright lie that leading Labour Party politicians have been "calling for riots on our streets". 

Here's what John McDonnell actually said (which is obviously precisely the opposite of what Vicky Ford's claims):

To everyone planning on demonstrating against Theresa May's government over the next few weeks, it is vital that these protests are peaceful

— John McDonnell (@johnmcdonnellMP) June 20, 2017

Presumably she thinks that she's now got such a safe Tory seat that she can lie to the British public like this with complete impunity.

The mainstream media obviously won't hold her to account for lying to the public like this, so it's up to the public to make sure she doesn't get away with it.

Just as the disgraced Liam Fox will always be referred to as the disgraced Liam Fox for having allowed his special friend Adam Werrity to snoop on classified meetings and documents (behaviour which would have seen any ordinary civil servant or soldier jailed), I'm now going to refer to Vicky Ford at all times as the liar Vicky Ford as if it's her official title, and I hope you do too.

If enough of us do this then perhaps she'll learn that making up political lies does far more damage to her own reputation than to the people she was trying to slur.

We should also remember that the people of Chelmsford elected a liar, and that if they re-elect her at the next election, then they'll mark themselves out as a disgraceful town that actively endorses political liars and political lies.

 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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11 General Election 2017 issues that mustn't be allowed to drop

A lot of the post-election focus has (understandably) been on Theresa May's efforts to cling onto power by throwing members of her inner circle under the public opinion bus and sucking up to the most extreme political party in parliament, but we mustn't forget some major issues from the campaign.

All of these issues need to be addressed

1. Security
During the election extreme security lapses led to two avoidable terrorist atrocities.

One was committed by an Islamist fanatic known to be plotting a terror attack against the UK who was allowed to come back through the UK border and was left unwatched as he planned and executed his attack.

The ringleader of the next was such a well known extremist he'd even featured in a Channel 4 documentary called "The Jihadists next door".

During the election Theresa May refused to release the report into the funding of terrorist networks in the UK, presumably because it allegedly implicates Saudi Arabia.

The extreme security lapses can't just be allowed to pass because they happened during an election and everyone was focused on campaigning, and serious pressure needs to be applied to get the government to admit what they know about foreign funding of terrorist networks in the UK.

2. The Naylor Report
If it wasn't for a citizen journalist called Chris Holden few of us would ever have considered the contents of the Naylor Report that Theresa May was championing. 

It's basically a plot to use public money to bribe hospitals into selling their land off on the cheap to property speculators, and if they don't take the bribe they get their funding slashed.

It's nothing less than Tory asset stripping of the NHS.

There needs to be a concerted effort to oppose the implementation of the Naylor Report.

3. Dark ads
The Tories ran an unprecedented campaign of dark ads, spending millions on spewing their propaganda all over social media, front loading Youtube songs with political attack adverts, and hijacking political Google searches with paid ads.

There are several things to consider.

In my view the specific targeting of particular voters in particular constituencies with dark ads should surely be declared under local, rather than national campaign budgets.

There should be an absolute requirement that copies of every political advert are lodged with the electoral authorities.Many of these Tory adverts (including the one they used to hijack Google searches for the Labour manifesto) contained outright lies about opposition parties and politicians. The electoral authorities really need to explain to the public what they intend to do to stop the dissemination of outright political lies.

Additionally steps should be taken to ensure that no political party is allowed to hijack legitimate Google searches by paying for sponsored ads at the top of the search.

4. Lying politicians
Aside from the campaign of Tory dark ads, numerous Tory politicians were guilty of outright lying to the British public. Theresa May herself told a couple of absolute whoppers.

Theresa May outright lied about Diane Abbott's stance on the DNA database (she doesn't want it scrapped, she wants the DNA of innocent people, including victims of crime, removed from it).

May also lied that Labour proposes "uncontrolled immigration", when in reality their manifesto pledged clampdowns on all kinds of harmful migration and increased funding of services for areas that have had large immigration influxes (see here) and is actually far more sensible than the Tory approach of recycling their twice-broken promise to reduce immigration to an arbitrary number.

After Brexit and now this, something really needs to be done to prevent our politicians from deliberately lying to us.

5. Yes First Strike
One of the most bizarre aspects of the General Election debate was the way Jeremy Corbyn was repeatedly rounded on by the public and the mainstream media for his sensible No First Strike nuclear weapons policy, but Theresa May wasn't hauled over the coals at all about the announcement of a crackpot Tory Yes First Strike nuclear policy.

I oppose nuclear weapons, but I at least understand the nuclear deterrent argument people put forward in favour of them. Yes First Strike makes no such sense. It's total and utter madness that would, in times of global conflict, actually significantly increase the chances of a nuclear strike against London in order to eradicate the insane strike first leader before they themselves launch a nuclear attack.

The Tory government needs to be pressed a lot more on Theresa May's Yes First Strike nuclear policy because I'm pretty sure that public opinion would be strongly against Britain being the country to trigger Armageddon by using nukes as attack weapons.

6. Austerity
Tory austerity dogma resulted in the slowest recovery from a recession since the South Sea Bubble burst in the 18th Century, the lowest level of house building since the early 1920s, the worst wage collapse since records began, and the least affordable house prices in history.

Not only that, but we've been getting left behind on the world stage because the Tories have been investing far less in infrastructure development (the foundations of future economic prosperity) than any other developed nation because of the Tories' ideological fixation with their economically inept and self-defeating cost-cutting exercises.

For seven ruinous years the mainstream media has pitifully failed to hold the Tories to account over their ideological fixation with austerity dogma. But after more voters supported anti-austerity parties than pro-austerity parties in this election, surely now is the time for austerity dogma to be subjected to proper public scrutiny, especially at the supposedly impartial BBC?

7. Dementia Tax
The Tories' depraved policy of asset stripping people who need social care has not gone away. They've simply announced that there will be a limit on how much wealth they can extract from frail old people and other disabled people. They've not said how much that limit would be, nor whether it would be an overall cap (a weak incentive to suicide) or an annual limit that rolls over indefinitely (a strong incentive to suicide).

Questions need to be asked about the details that Theresa May failed to disclose, and also over the morality of the policy.  How is it remotely justifiable to asset strip frail old people whilst simultaneously giving tens of £billions in handouts to corporations and your mega-rich chums?

8. Tory self-interest
Theresa May could have maintained political power until 2020, but she clearly and undeniably put her own self-interest above the good of the nation by calling a snap election when her poll lead was at an all-time high.

Instead of conducting Brexit amicably (taking the views of opposition parties and devolved governments into consideration and forming some kind of UK-wide consensus) she wanted to crush all political opposition to be crowned the undisputed Brexit queen to dictate the whole process herself.

After the failure of David Cameron's EU referendum gamble (wagered in order to poach a few hundred thousand UKIP voters in 2015), Theresa May's vanity election is the second time in a single year that the Tories have thrown the nation into chaos by putting their own opportunistic self-interest first.

It's now abundantly clear that the Tory party simply can't be trusted to consider the good of the nation as a whole above the self-serving opportunism of their leaders.

9. Press corruption
One of Theresa May's most despicable manifesto pledges was to sling the Leveson investigation into press corruption into the bin as if Rupert Murdoch's minions had never hacked into the phone of a murdered teenage girl.

During the election the billionaire-owned propaganda rags went into absolute overdrive with an unprecedented smear-mongering campaign against Labour.

Thankfully the smear-mongering tactics didn't pay off and deliver Theresa May the super-majority she was expecting when she called her vanity election, but the malign influence of the billionaire press barons was still enough to help her avoid a resounding defeat, which means there's still the possibility that the Tories will try to bin the Leveson investigation as a favour to their faithful mainstream media attack dogs.

The astoundingly biased smear-mongering conducted by certain publications during the election is another important reason that the investigation into press corruption absolutely mustn't be dropped.

10. Internet freedom
Theresa May is obsessed with controlling the Internet. Even after the woeful security lapses that led to murderous acts of barbarism during the election campaign, her initial response was to piggyback her pre-existing authoritarian fixation onto the atrocities by harking on about censoring the Internet.

Theresa May doesn't like the freedom of the Internet because it allows people to think outside the constraints of the neoliberal consensus that she is the figurehead of.

All the talk about preventing terrorism is just a front for her extreme-surveillance agenda. If she actually gave a crap about terrorism then she wouldn't have ignored all the expert advice (community engagement is the very first defence against Islamist and extreme-right radicalisation) and ploughed on with her plan to devastate community policing by scrapping 20,000 police jobs.

11. Human rights
Theresa May didn't just opportunistically piggyback her hatred of Internet freedom onto the terrorist atrocities that happened under her watch, she also tried to infect the debate with her visceral hatred of our human rights.

She's so incapable of thinking things through that she doesn't even understand that the destruction of our western justice-based human rights would be seen as a massive ideological victory for the Islamist extremists.

These depraved fanatics absolutely hate our liberal values and our non-Sharia justice systems. If we scrapped our human rights after one suicide bombing and a couple of sick rampages through the streets of London, they'd obviously see it as a huge victory and wonder what more could be achieved with a more concerted and coordinated sequence of attacks.

What we can do

Write to your MP:

If you have an opposition MP you can ask them what their party intends to do to hold the Tories to account over these 11 issues (feel free to include a link if you want to raise all 11 issues, or copy and paste from this blog if you intend to raise one or just a few specific issues).

If you have a Tory MP you can write to them and ask them to provide explanations. I'd be interested to see what they come up with to defend all of this hideous stuff.

Write to your MP here (remember to include your name and postal address and then they have an obligation to reply to your message)

Contact mainstream media:

Get in touch with mainstream media publications to request more coverage on these issues. Submit contributions to their letters pages. Contact individual mainstream media journalists that you respect and ask them if they would consider working to shed more public light on any of these subjects.

 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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