Showing posts with label London. Show all posts
Showing posts with label London. Show all posts

Tuesday, 5 November 2019

Jacob Rees-Mogg insinuates the Grenfell fire victims deserved to die because they lacked common sense


Tory Brextremist Jacob Rees-Mogg has provoked outrage by insinuating that the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire deserved to die because they lacked "common sense".

Rees-Mogg made these outrageously callous comments in an interview with LBC's Nick Ferrari, in which he tried to desperately spin the findings of the first report into the Grenfell fire to the advantage of the Tory party.

For some unfathomable reason the inquiry into Grenfell fire has been split into two segments, one critiquing the response of the fire service, and completely ignoring the decision to cover the building in highly flammable cladding because it was fractionally cheaper than the fire proof stuff, followed by another report into the actual causal factors to be released after the general election.

The first report criticised the fire brigade for advising people to stay in their flats, rather than advising them to attempt to escape down the smoke-clogged stairwell, but no attention was paid to the fact that this kind of cladding fire was unprecedented in Britain, nor the Tory government's failure to inform the fire brigade that they had allowed hundreds of buildings up and down the country to be turned into similar fire traps, so that they could consider actually altering their protocols.

Rees-Mogg seized on the "stay indoors" advice to claim that he would have been clever enough to fully appreciate the scale of the fire from within his flat, ignore the advice, and flee down the smoke filled stairs.

Rees-Mogg's callously insinuated that the victims died because they were too stupid to ignore official advice, rather than because the local Tory council turned their building into a deadly fire trap to save an absurdly small amount of money.

This insinuation betrays the elitist mentality that's all-too-common in the Tory circles that the likes of Rees-Mogg move in: The idea that the rich are rich because they're morally, genetically, and intellectually superior to the poor.

The idea that rich Tory elitists in a burning building wouldn't panic, but calmly assess the scale of the fire for themselves, with such impeccable intuition that they automatically understand the situation far better than fire service professionals with decades of experience outside.

According to this warped worldview the poor people died not because they were treated with contempt by an elitist Tory council who couldn't give a damn about the desperate and dangerous living conditions of the "the lower orders", but because of their inherent inferiority to the Tory elitist class.

If only they'd been morally, genetically, and intellectually superior like Rees-Mogg and his Tory mates, then they would all have survived the fire by virtue of their inherent excellence.

And besides, they would never have been living in a decrepit death trap of a building anyway, because they would have had the good sense and intuition to have been born into good genetic stock, a luxuriant country estate, an Eton education that costs more than the average salary in annual fees, and an automatic place at the top table of society like plucky quick-witted Jacob, wouldn't they?



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Friday, 28 June 2019

The Tories are claiming that cycling to work instead of driving causes congestion and air pollution!


The latest anti-Labour Tory attack line is so unbelievably stupid that you have to see it to believe it.

The Kensington and Chelsea Tories have been handing out flyers attacking the development of London's cycle infrastructure with absurd claims that measures to increase the number of people cycling to work instead of driving will increase "traffic congestion" and "air pollution".

Air pollution and traffic jams


Now, every evidence-based air pollution study I've ever seen on improved cycling and walking infrastructure has detailed massive reductions in air pollutants like nitrogen oxides, particulate matter, and black carbon.

According to a study by Sustrans, if the number of UK cycling trips could be doubled, and the number of short walking trips increased, this would produce such a significant reduction in air pollution that 8,300 lives a year would be saved.

Aside from the improvements in air quality and life expectancy, their study estimated a £5.67 billion boost to the UK over the course of 10 years. 

These are huge quality of life improvements with a significant economic benefit to boot, all for a relatively modest initial outlay in infrastructure improvements (the £42 million the Tories are shitting themselves with rage over is significantly less than 0.1% of the projected cost of HS2).

Research into a similar Cycle Highways scheme in the Netherlands found that the construction of 675 km of cycle highways resulted in a 3.8 million hours per year reduction in traffic jams!

Another study in Waltham Forest demonstrated a massive reduction in severe air pollution after the introduction of a Mini-Holland cycling infrastructure plan.

And another study in Washington DC indicated a 4% reduction in traffic congestion that was directly attributable to their Capital Bikeshare scheme.


If the Tories want to claim that improved cycling infrastructure increases traffic congestion and air pollution, they really need to show some counter-evidence to the numerous studies demonstrating the exact opposite effect.

Local Businesses

The claimed "damage to local businesses" is at least just misleading, rather than an outright inversion of reality.

Of course some local businesses may be inconvenienced during the construction phase, but you'd have to be utterly delusional to believe that more people walking and cycling along your street, rather than driving through in cars, would be a bad thing for local shops and businesses in the long run.


Trees

As for the tree removals that the Tories seem so upset about, I'm pretty sure the reduction in CO2 emissions from reduced car trips and traffic jams would be more than enough to offset the loss of a few trees, and if the Tories really did give a damn about trees, they could easily demand that the developers plant two or more trees in the local area for every one they need to remove.

The Tories obviously don't give a shit about trees, they've just added it because a list with two bullet points (one of which is the most absurd of lies) would have looked absolutely ridiculous.

True motivations

The worst thing about this Tory nonsense is that we know what all of this is really motivated by.

The Tories are blatantly pandering to car users because they know the kind of people driving massive pollutant-billowing SUVs around London are one of their core demographics.


Their attitude is screw people on bikes, and those in the poorer areas of London who are far more likely to suffer toxic levels of pollution, they're never going to vote Tory anyway, so "fuck them".

In fact the Tories have such contempt for people living in high pollution areas that Boris Johnson and his Tory minions deliberately buried a damning study about the dangerously high levels of toxic air pollution in London for several years, rather than do anything about it.

The Tories obviously don't give a damn about air pollution, or congestion, or trees, they simply want to disguise their real car-supremacist agenda with a load of misleading drivel instead of being honest about it.


So fuck all the people who would like to cycle to work but don't feel willing to risk their lives because the current infrastructure is too dangerous. Fuck all the kids with asthma and allergies that are triggered and exacerbated by air pollution. Fuck the thousands who die each year because of the filthy air in our cities.

As far as the Tories are concerned the car is king, and car drivers are the only demographic they're interested in pandering to, and they're going to pander so hard they're resorting to outright and easily disprovable lies.

What a noxious bunch they are.


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Thursday, 13 June 2019

Boris Johnson's leadership pitch is a pack of lies


It's no wonder Boris Johnson skipped over his shameful and shambolic tenure as Foreign Secretary in order to gloss up his record as London Mayor to pitch for the job of Tory Prime-Minister-by-default.

People are far more likely to have forgotten his tenure as London Mayor than recent stuff like the Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe farce, "fuck business", gratuitous Nazi comparisons, endless gaffes and insults, and quitting his job to oppose Theresa May's Brexit deal only to decide to actually vote in favour of it the 3rd time she put it before parliament!

Also people outside of London are less likely to know how lazy and incompetent he was because they didn't have to deal with it on a day-to-day basis.

So Johnson and his backers have decided to create a revisionist history of his glorious time as London Mayor that would have made Stalin proud.

Crime

Johnson's boast that he cut crime in London is staggeringly dishonest. Crime was falling when he came to power, but then he administered the process of annihilating London policing once his Tory mates and their vile Lib-Dem enablers took over government in 2010.

Tory austerity resulted in a 30% reduction in police numbers, and a 65% reduction in Community Support Officers (a reduction from 18,937 police and CSOs to 11,576 in just 8 years).

£600 million was slashed from the London police budget and 120 police buildings were shut down and sold off to property developers.

By the end of Boris Johnson's tenure the consequences of this agenda were becoming clear, knife crime rose in his last two years in office, and violent crime has continued to soar ever since (with ever-cynical Tories attempting to blame this violent crime epidemic on Johnson's successor Sadiq Khan!).

Investment

One of the biggest cons the Tories pulled when they got into power was their use of the austerity narrative to justify reducing infrastructure spending in Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, and the north of England whilst actually increasing infrastructure spending in London and the wealthy south east.

With London getting £24 per person spent on transport for every £1 per person in the north east of England, it's no wonder Johnson resorts to infrastructure boasting. When the game was so ridiculously rigged in his favour he'd be a fool not to.

However a look at some of the waste that went on under his watch tells us that London could probably have benefited an awful lot more from this vast spending disparity with someone competent in charge of delivering infrastructure projects.

£53 million wasted on the Garden Bridge project that never went ahead, a £40 million overspend on Routemaster busses, £24 million on the cable car to nowhere (a truly extraordinary sight for us northerners who have suffered one cancelled infrastructure project after another), £5.2 million on an Estuary Airport that never got built, renting West Ham the Olympic stadium for just £2.5 million a year when it cost £323 million to build and then convert, and another £300,000 spraffed up a wall on unusable water cannons that were eventually flogged off as scrap.

Living Wage

Every time the Tories boast about their "living wage" decent people should be absolutely furious at the Orwellian chicanery.

The National Minimum Wage was invented by Labour and vehemently opposed by the Tories at the time.

In 2016 David Cameron decided to rebrand the Minimum Wage as "living wage" principally to undermine the work of the Living Wage Foundation who promote the idea that the minimum wage should provide enough for people to live on.

Their calculation for London is £10.55 per hour. The Tory fake "living wage" in London is £8.21.

So when Boris Johnson brags about this fake Tory "living wage", he's actually bragging about employers underpaying London workers by £2.34 per hour.

Housing

The Tory track record on housing is absolutely atrocious. Between 2010 and 2017 they oversaw the lowest level of peacetime house building since the 1920s. They also deliberately pumped up the unsustainable house price bubble again by restricting supply and inflating prices with ludicrous schemes like Help to Buy. They slashed the already shockingly low levels of social home construction, And to top it all off they decided to redefine "affordable housing" as a £450,000 starter home in Greater London.

Boris Johnson contributed to this atrocious track record by missing his targets on affordable housing, and virtually eradicating new council housing in London.

Pollution


Of all of the issues that Boris Johnson should be keeping quiet about, London air pollution is up there with the fact that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is still in an Iranian jail after his decision to lazily repeat Iranian accusations against her as facts in parliament.

In 2013 the consultancy firm Aether handed in a report on London air pollution to Boris Johnson's administration, but instead of publishing it, they buried it for two and a half years until it was found by Sadiq Khan's team when he took over.

The report detailed shocking disparities in toxic nitrous oxide pollutants between poor and wealthy areas.

Instead of doing anything about it Johnson and his cronies just buried the report, and now he's got the absolute gall to brag about what a wonderful job he did of combating air pollution!


Alternative facts

Despite the fact Johnson's Tweet is incredibly deceptive, it's still generated hundreds of shares and thousands of likes, demonstrating his Trump-like relationship with his supporters.

It doesn't actually matter what he does, or how many lies he tells, the people who adore Johnson aren't actually interested in any of that stuff.

If reality gets in the way of their Boris-fandom, then it's quite clearly reality that has to make way, and unfortunately it's a tiny band of around 70,000 Tory tribalists, Brextremist infiltrators, and BoJo-worshippers who get to pick the next Tory Prime-Minister-by-default, while the other 70 million of us have to deal with the consequences.


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Friday, 19 April 2019

The Royal Mail property privatisation scam is really paying off (at the public expense)


After I pointed out Vince Cable's pivotal role in flogging off the Royal Mail at miles below its true value a couple of hard-right pro-privatisation astroturfers turned up with a novel argument aimed at defending the sell-off.

Their argument says that Vince Cable and George Osborne flogged off Royal Mail for 330p per share, and after initially soaring to 445p on the first day (because investors realised how under-valued it was) six years later this share price has receded to 260p.

Their argument goes along the lines that 2013 was actually a good time to sell off Royal Mail because six years later in 2019 the share price has fallen by roughly 20%.

What this argument completely ignores is what has been happening at Royal Mail since it was flogged off in 2013.

One of the main revenue streams the new capitalist owners have found is flogging off chunks of Royal Mail land to property developers for £hundreds of millions.

It's estimated that they've already raked in over £400 million in land sales. That's over half of the £787 valuation of the entire Royal Mail property portfolio at the point of sale, raked back in by selling off just a few chunks of inner city prime building land!

For example a 2.7 acres Royal Mail site in Battersea was sold to developers for £101.2 million, but the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition priced it at just £12.9 million.

The neoliberals in government flogged this piece of prime building land off at less than 13% of its real value, meaning the other 87% of the value of this public land went straight to the new private owners.

Another example is the 6.25 acre Mount Pleasant sorting office that was valued at £29 million by the Tory/Lib-Dem government at the point of sale, then flogged off for £193 million just a few years later. A cool £164 million profit for the new corporate owners from Vince and George's deliberately under-valued sale of public land.

That's almost £300 million of Vince Cable and George Osborne's £787 million valuation of the entire freehold Royal Mail property portfolio recovered through the sale of under 10 acres of Royal Mail land!


So did the new corporate owners reinvest these massive property windfalls in the Royal Mail business? Maybe to diversify in the face of collapsing demand for hand delivered letters?

Of course they bloody didn't. They paid it out in bloated executive salaries and shareholder dividends that have exceeded £1 billion since the privatisation!

The last Royal Mail boss just quit with a huge £2.7 million golden goodbye, and his replacement was welcomed with a staggering £5.8 million tax-free golden hello! All paid for not through successful operation of the business, but through selling off public land that was acquired at miles below its true value.

The owners of Royal Mail know that the postal delivery business is not a brilliant money spinner in itself, but that the Royal Mail property portfolio is an absolute goldmine of prime building plots in towns and cities across the nation.

Royal Mail is being asset stripped before our very eyes, with what was publicly-owned land until 2013 being flogged off for massive unearned corporate profits.

They're not doing anything smart, or innovative, or productive to "earn" this cash, they're simply gorging themselves on the vast difference between what the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition said the Royal Mail property portfolio was worth when they flogged it off, and what it's actually worth.

And the incredible thing is that defenders of this maniacal neoliberal zeal for privatisation that sees our public land flogged off at a tiny fraction of its true value will concoct ludicrous little fairy stories about how it was all good, and fine, and proper because the share price happens to have fallen slightly after six years of absolutely brazen asset stripping!

And the sad thing is that some people will be so gullible, and so averse to considering the facts for themselves, that they'll actually mindlessly believe this abject neoliberal nonsense that everything is fine and dandy, and that Osborne and Cable actually did us all a wonderful favour by flogging off our land at a ridiculous fraction of its real value.

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Sunday, 3 March 2019

"Shame it wasn't a brick/grenade": the disgusting social media response to Jeremy Corbyn getting egged


On 19 June 2017 an extreme-right activist and Tommy Robinson acolyte called Darren Osborne carried out a deadly terrorist attack against a random group of Muslims in Finsbury park. During his trial it was revealed that his original plot was to go assassinate Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Mayor of London Sadiq Khan.

On the day that Osborne was jailed for the extreme-right terrorist attack he committed, the BBC took the extraordinary step of inviting one of the extreme-right hate preachers who radicalised him onto their flagship news show Newsnight. The softball interview they lavished on Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) is one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the BBC and indicative of concerted efforts to actively bring extreme-right views into the political mainstream.


In March 2019 Jeremy Corbyn paid a visit to the Finsbury Park mosque where he was attacked with an egg. This is no big story in its own right, plenty of politicians have had eggs pelted at them. Anyone old enough to remember the 1990s will remember the footage of Labour stalwart John Prescott trying to batter the guy who egged him.

The story here isn't the egging itself, it's the absolutely despicable social media reaction of the political right.

This is a guy who was the target of an extreme-right terrorist plot who was visiting the site of the deadly terrorist attack the plotter eventually carried out, and literally hundreds of right-wingers have responded to him getting egged by wishing that Corbyn had actually been attacked with a brick or a grenade (the comments in the header image are just a tiny selection of an absolute barrage of violence-craving vitriol from the political right).

What a disgusting country we've allowed ourselves to become where people think it's absolutely fine to publicly wish violence and death on people they disagree with politically.

Labour figures like Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, and Sadiq Khan are the most common targets of these repulsive tides of right-wing hate, but let's not pretend they're the only victims.


There were the High Court judges who ruled against Theresa May's efforts to scrap parliamentary sovereignty who suffered barrages of abuse and death threats after the Daily Mail's despicable rabble-rousing "Enemies of the People" front page (Theresa May subsequently hired the author of this despicable hit piece as her chief spokesperson!).

There are the constant barrages of death threats against anyone who dares oppose, or even moderately critique the absolute shambles the Tory party are making of Brexit.


And there are the endless waves of abuse and threats of violence aimed at left-wing public figures, and especially left-wing public figures who happen to be female, non-white, and/or homosexual.
 

This kind of violent extremist mentality has been fostered by extreme-right figures and hate groups like Tommy Robinson and the Britain First hate chamber, but similar outbursts of abuse and cravings for violence can be found in the Daily Mail and Guido Fawkes comments sections, and especially in pro-Tory Facebook groups.

Huge numbers of people have become absolutely normalised to using social media to do stuff like lobbing abuse, craving and threatening violence, celebrating extreme-right acts of terrorism without any kind of repercussion.

Britain has become normalised to this kind of thing that it's a regular part of people's online experience to witness other people spewing bigoted abuse, wishing for ethnic cleansing, spreading absurd extreme-right conspiracy theories, and craving the violent deaths of politicians, journalists, and public figures.

The kind of stuff that would get us ostracised from our social groups, and probably even arrested if we did it in public spaces in the real world is considered normal in the online world.


I'm not here to tell you that there's some kind of easy solution to this because there clearly isn't. Right-wing websites like Guido Fawkes and the Daily Mail have fostered this grotesque abuse-lobbing violence-craving extreme-right ultranationalist mentality in their comments sections for years, and social media platforms have been letting people spread this kind of hate with impunity for years too.

Ordinary people have little power over these companies to stop them from hosting and actively fostering hate, and they've got a perverse financial incentive to allow it to continue, because their business models are based on maximising the number of users, regardless of whether they're racism-spewing, violence-craving, terrorism-sympathising extreme-right freaks or not.

Of course there are things we can do on the micro scale like reporting individual tweets/Facebook comments, or sending copies of people's hateful comments to their employers, asking advertisers whether they're comfortable placing their adverts next on platforms that allow, or even promote hateful views, but this kind of stuff is bailing out a sinking ship with an egg cup.

So what do you suggest. What can be done about the increasingly common normalisation of hate speech and the repugnant hate-fest that so much of our political discourse has degenerated into?



 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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Saturday, 15 December 2018

Is ambulance-blocking the most depraved Brextremist tactic yet?



Surely we all already know that the Leave.EU campaign are a truly despicable mob?

They used a flood of xenophobia, anti-immigrant fearmongering, and outright lies to push the Brexit vote just over the line in 2016, and then ever since then they've been used as Arron Banks' personal propaganda campaign to promote his businesses, abuse journalists who investigate his finances, and promote plots to usurp the Tory party and drive it even further towards the extreme-right political fringe by flooding it with Brextremist ultranationalist entryists.


But their latest stunt has to be their most despicable yet.

On Friday 14th December 2018 a small group of Brextremists blocked Westminster Bridge to protest in favour of a ruinous "no deal" meltdown.


They could have chosen to upload a video clip of any moment of their protest to their Leave.EU propaganda account, so it's absolutely telling that they chose to upload a 50 second clip of the protest blocking a paramedic emergency response vehicle from attending an emergency . Even more disturbing is the caption on the Tweet which reads "this is what happens when the establishment ignores the will of the people".

There's absolutely no mistaking what they're threatening. If they don't get the ruinous hard-right "no deal" chaos they're craving there's no depth to the depravity of the actions they're going to take in retribution.

If they're willing to block a rapid response paramedic from attending an emergency and then actually gloat about it on Twitter, they're sending a message that that people will die if they don't get the extreme Brexit they want.

Aside from the fact they blocked a paramedic and then gloated about it on Twitter, there's also the fact that they've hijacked the yellow vest idea of the French gilets jaunes protest.

What makes this theft so despicable is that the gilets jaunes in France is a popular uprising against collapsing living standards that commands the support of the overwhelming majority of French people.

This bunch of Brextremists who have hijacked the yellow vest look are the polar opposite.

They're protesting in favour of a "no deal" socio-economic catastrophe that would cause an appalling collapse in UK living standards, and their extremist interpretation of the 2016 Brexit vote is only supported by a minority of the British public.


And of the minority of Brits who actively want Theresa May to follow through on her threat to trash the UK economy with a "no deal" Tory economic meltdown, I suspect only an even smaller minority of them would be extreme enough to support this strategy of blocking ambulances and gloating about it on Twitter to achieve it.

Of course not all of the 17.4 million of Brits who voted Leave in 2016 are vile extreme-right nasties like the Brextremist ambulance-blockers yesterday, but it's impossible to deny that whatever anyone's reasons for voting for Brexit, they were unconcerned about aligning themselves with fascists, racists, xenophobes and liars when they did it.

And even if people actually crave the chaos and suffering of a "no deal" economic crisis, any Leave voter with any sense of human decency whatever should be just as outraged about this Brextremist ambulance-blocking tactic as the rest of us.


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Sunday, 9 December 2018

12 things you should know about the "Brexit Betrayal" march


On Sunday December 9th 2018 some 3,000 people attended an extreme-right "Brexit Betrayal" protest in London led by the street thug and convicted fraudster Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (Tommy Robinson) and the absolute dregs who haven't yet abandoned UKIP (even former leaders Nigel Farage and Paul Nuttall have recently quit the party in disgust at what it's become).

Here are 12 things you should know about the protest.

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon

Most of the other speakers barely managed to hold the attention of the crowd because the majority of them were just waiting for their idol "Tommy Robinson" to stick it to the Muslims and immigrants.

Yaxley-Lennon followers don't give a damn that he's using a fake name, that he's a convicted fraudster, that he's a hate-preacher who has inspired deadly terrorist attacks against innocent people, and they don't care that he's living the high life on the back of all of their donations and hundreds of thousands in payments from shady hard-right propaganda outfits in the US who are seeking to destabilise Britain and other developed nations by funding extreme-right agitators.

Yaxley-Lennon has amassed a fortune in donations and used it to build a significant property portfolio, including a large country house in rural Bedfordshire.

Do the people who throw cash at him realise that he's just siphoning it off to enrich himself? 


They probably do realise it, but just don't care, just like "Tommy" and his extreme-right flock don't care about all the evidence that the EDL street thug organisation that he founded is absolutely riddled with paedophiles and other sex offenders.

The decline of UKIP

The UKIP leader Gerard Batten was at the demo alongside Yaxley-Lennon, and it just goes to show how far the party has collapsed since their heyday just a few years ago when they won 24 seats at the 2014 European elections (all but 7 of them have subsequently quit the party) and bagged almost 4 million votes at the 2015 General Election.

Now they've been reduced to a tiny kernel of ideological extremists pathetically riding on the coat tails of an extreme-right hate preacher and convicted fraudster, and even then only attracting 3,000 people to the event they invested so much time, money, and effort to publicise.

I'm obviously not at all fond of Nigel Farage or his successor Paul Nuttall (to put it mildly), but it's no surprise that even hard-right cranks like them have quit the party in disgust at what UKIP has become.

Huge counter-protest

3,000 people turned up to the extreme-right Brexit Betrayal protest, an estimated 15,000 turned up to the anti-fascist counter-protest.


It's clearly not going at all well for the extreme-right if there are five counter-protesters telling them to piss off for every extreme-right supporter at their event.

A noose for Theresa


One of the Brexit Betrayal protesters brought a noose to the protest. When asked why he was carrying it he explained that it was for Theresa May. "That's for Theresa May, that's what treasonous people get".

It's obviously despicable and barbaric for people to go around calling for their political opponents to be hanged, but then Theresa May and her hack mates in the right-wing propaganda rags bear a lot of responsibility for actively creating this febrile and abusive political environment.

Remember "Crush the Saboteurs"


Remember the McCarthyite Tory witch hunt against pro-European academics?

Remember when the Daily Mail printed their "enemies of the people" front page and sparked a wave of abuse and death threats against the three High Court judges who ruled against Theresa May's Brexit power grab because parliament is sovereign?

Well Theresa May actually hired the hack who wrote the "Enemies of the People" article shortly afterwards as her Downing Street press secretary!

Let's be clear that nobody deserves this kind of vile political abuse, but surely Theresa May and her mates must have had an inkling that their strategy of whipping up such torrents of ultranationalist fervour, hatred, and death threats over Brexit would one day rebound back on them if they ever tried to do anything whatever that went against the wishes of the radical extreme-right Brextremist fringe?


High-viz jackets
 

One of the most despicable things about the extreme-right Brexit Betrayal mob is the way they've tried to appropriate the yellow high-viz vest thing from the French gilets jaunes movement.

Like them or loathe them (over 70% of French people support them by the way) it's impossible to deny that the central theme of their movement is anger at economic injustice.

French people are furious that Macron is imposing fuel tax hikes on ordinary people to protect huge corporations (70% of carbon emissions come from 100 of the biggest corporations), and even lavishing a vast tax break on the 1% of wealthiest people in France.

The "no deal" fanatics at the Brexit Betrayal march are protesting in favour of the opposite.

They actually want to trigger an economic meltdown and yet another collapse in British living standards by demanding the most chaotic and economically damaging interpretation possible of the Brexit vote.

Presumably they're doing this because they're fully aware that extreme economic deprivation and the rise of extreme-right ideologues and tyrants go hand-in-hand.

It's an absolute insult to nick the symbolic and effective yellow vests off the French protesters for entirely contradictory purposes.

Extreme-right recruitment
Aside from all the UKIP propaganda at the Brexit Batrayal March, there were several extremist organisations using the demo as a recruitment opportunity. There were loads of banners and literature and placards from the vile white supremacist Generation Identity movement , and the extreme-right EDL successors the "Democratic Football Lad's Alliance" were handing out their propaganda too.


Jo Cox


Nooses, home made banners full of outright political lies, extreme-right and white supremacist literature and banners are appalling enough, but they pale into insignificance in comparison to this absolutely vile conspiracy theory about the murdered MP Jo Cox.

There is no doubt whatever that Cox was brutally murdered in the street by a "Britain First" screaming extreme-right terrorist who later gave his name in court as "death to traitors, freedom for Britain".

Just imagine the mindset and motivation of someone  who would chose to claim that this murder was some kind of false flag operation by the political establishment to murder one of their own. 


The extreme-right inclinations of Jo Cox's killer is obviously so close to the extreme-right views of the person holding this vile placard that they'd rather promote outrageous and sickening conspiracy lies than accept that the murder was committed by one of their own.

Funding

As usual the question needs to be asked, where did this rag-tag band of extreme-right fanatics dig up all the cash to promote and hold this demonstration? Who paid for the publicity? Who paid for the flags and banners? Who paid for the stage and sound equipment?

You'd have to be delusional to think it was Ordinary Joe right-wingers who stumped up the cash given that only 3,000 odd even bothered to turn up. So who was it? Another one of the shady US propaganda outfits who bankroll Yaxley-Lennon, or someone else?


Israel and the British extreme right

On the face of it Zionists and the British extreme-right make extremely odd bedfellows, especially given the history of extreme-right abuse of British Jewish communities (the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, Wood Green in the 1970s) but there were Israeli flags on display amongst the Union flags, pro-Trump propaganda, UKIP banners, and white supremacist placards.

It was always the left (the socialists, the communists, and the anarchists) who stood in solidarity with British Jews against the extreme-right thugs trying to parade through their neighbourhoods, so seeing Israeli flags at extreme-right marches really does induce confusion.

What do Zionists hope to achieve from colluding with the British extreme-right fringe, and what do the extreme-right fringe get out of promoting Zionism?


Jonathan Pie

Everyone with a social media account must have seen at least one Jonathan Pie video. At his peak his brilliant eviscerations of the Tory government were social media gold.

He's disappeared off the radar a little bit recently, but then he's re-emerged at the Brexit Betrayal march, getting welcomed like a hero and doing loads of grinning selfies with the Ukippers and Tommy Robinson fanboys.

Is he working on some kind of undercover exposé of the inner workings of the extreme-right fringe, or was he just basking in the adulation of a bunch of extreme-right fanatics?


The Daily Mail hate chamber absolutely loved it

The comments on the Daily Mail article about the Brexit Betrayal march are exactly what you'd expect from the extreme-right echo chamber of hate that the Daily Mail have cultivated.

The top rated comment of all is a declaration of 100% support for 'Tommy Robinson'. Just imagine offering your uncritical and unyielding 100% support to any political figure, let alone a street thug, wife-beater, and convicted fraudster like Yaxley Lennon!

Most of the other top rated comments praised extreme-right agitators, smeared the left-wing and anti-fascist counter-demonstration, hurled abuse at someone called MacConnell (I think they probably meant the Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell), and spread the usual extreme-right victimhood narratives.

One of the most down rated comments? A concerned Brexiteer saying that Brexit should be about Brexit and sovereignty, not a platform for providing free publicity to criminal extreme-right thugs like Yaxley Lennon.



Conclusion

This collection of 3,000 bigots, racists, ukippers, EDL street thugs, and outright cranks clearly doesn't represent all of the 17.4 million people who voted for Brexit, but then Brexiteers never were a unified group with unified demands.

Unfortunately for those who held their noses and voted alongside the millions of bigots, xenophobes, Ukippers, extreme-right agitators, Britain First followers, EDL street thugs, and the hard-right fringe of the Tory party in favour of Brexit, they've got virtually no representation in the mainstream media, meaning this grotesque circus of bandwagon-jumping extreme-right cranks is how they're're going to be portrayed unless you start speaking out, condemning this revolting freakshow, and explaining what it is that reasonable Brexiteers like you actually want.

Of course not all Brexiters are racists, but on the evidence of the Brexit Betrayal protest, all the racists are definitely Brexiters.

If you're an non-racist, no-bigoted, non-fascist Brexiter, are you really going to let this utterly vile mob speak for you?


Are you really going to allow extreme-right agitators and hate preachers to usurp Brexit and use it to promote their disgusting ideology?

Well if you do you're either dooming your Brexit ambitions to failure, or worse, dooming Britain to a terrifying future of extreme-right demagoguery, ethnic and religious persecution, and extreme repression of political non-conformity.



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