The inane Twitter ramblings of Liz Truss

The current Tory government is rammed full of extremely low calibre individuals who have been promoted way beyond their abilities, and the current Chief Secretary to the Treasury Liz Truss is one of the worst examples of the lot.

You only need to look at her Twitter feed to see what a callous intellectual lightweight she is, yet somehow she's been clunking around at the top of the Tory party for years. Before she was made second in command at the Treasury Theresa May actually saw fit to appoint her Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice.

Feeling Tiggerish

Take Truss's January 26th Tweet celebrating the release of dire economic figures with a picture of the Winnie the Pooh character Tigger and a ludicrous #FeelingTiggerish hashtag.

As second in command at the Treasury Truss clearly has no excuse for not understanding that an annual growth rate of 1.8% is the lowest since 2012, and that a quarterly growth rate of just 0.5% makes for the 8th consecutive quarter of below 2% annual growth (the worst run since the bankers trashed the economy in 2007-08). She also has no excuse for not knowing that the UK economy is languishing with the second lowest growth rate in the entire developed world.

She has no excuse for not knowing this stuff, so she's either profoundly ignorant of the absolute basics of her own job, or she knows perfectly well how bad it is but she's trying to dress this Tory failure up as a success because she has so much contempt for the "lower orders" that she thinks they'll eat her turd and thank her for it, as long as she sprinkles a bit of glitter on it. Either way it's a disgrace.

Miners

Then take Truss's crass January 30th Twitter "joke" about the ideologically driven suffering her party inflicted on miners and mining communities across the United Kingdom.

As a result of the Tory ideological war on the miners and their merciless "leave it to market forces" approach to poverty and unemployment in the communities they trashed there are still dozens of poverty blighted towns across South Wales, the midlands, Yorkshire, the north east, and Scotland.

Yet here's a Tory minister laughing and joking about the miners' strike as if crushing an industry that was once the backbone of the empire, deliberately dividing communities, describing working people as "the enemy within", violently repressing workers' rights and political protests, and putting hundreds of thousands out of work is just a convenient setup for an attempted joke at the expense of a political rival.

What's even worse is that Liz Truss sat in the Tory cabinet that decided to not bother having a public enquiry into the police violence against miners at Orgreave, despite not having even bothered to review the police files first.

Authority

In another Tweet Truss tries to defend hard-right free market fanaticism by opining that that she's "pro freedom" because she has supposedly "never liked being told what to do".

This is a quite extraordinary statement from someone who's job it was until quite recently to head the entire UK legal system as Lord Chancellor and Minister for Justice.

It's a quite extraordinary statement from a woman who has sat in cabinet and voted in favour of scrapping one freedom after another for ordinary people (such as legislating away the freedom from unlawful state surveillance, introducing unlawful Tory charges designed to prevent fair access to the justice system, and the introduction of unlawful Tory forced labour schemes designed to revoke people's freedom to say to to working for highly profitable corporations with no wages and no workers' rights).

Worst of all it's astoundingly hypocritical from a woman who has not rebelled once against her own political party since 2015, no matter how depraved, economically illiterate, or downright incompetent their policies.

Capitalism

Truss's sub-juvenile and offensive Twitter timeline is an embarrassment that is entirely unbefitting of a government minister, but one tweet stands out above all for sheer idiocy, and it's a lazy rehash of the Mensch fallacy that posits that people are somehow a hypocrite if they in any way criticise the capitalist system if they happen to live in a capitalist system.

Apparently, according to Truss, it's somehow hypocritical for the centre-left Labour campaign group Momentum to use buildings, drink coffee, or use social media, presumably because they should only be allowed meet in buildings made of twigs, drink river water, and communicate by shouting if they intend to oppose stuff like corporate tax dodging, the Carillion scandal, low wages, and ruinous Tory austerity dogma.

The glaringly obvious counterpoint is to make the ridiculous argument that anyone who has ever benefited from social ownership or socialist policies (like using the NHS, driving public roads, having a state education, claiming a pension, tax credits, or child benefits, using any other aspect of the welfare system, or taking advantage of workers' rights like the weekend, paid leave, sick pay, parental pay, protection from unfair dismissal or dangerous working conditions ...) is precluded from ever criticising the excesses of the Soviet Union under Stalin, hyper-inflation in Venezuela, or the repression of human rights in China.

It's like the lord of the manor telling the serf that they can't criticise feudalism because the rags they're wearing are the product of the feudal economy.

Just look at the ridicule Truss's former Tory colleague Louise Mensch suffered for using this absurd fallacy, yet here we are years later with an actual government minister making the same idiotic argument.

Liz, you're sounding as stupid and desperate as your ex-colleague Louise Mensch with this pathetic drivel.

And to think you're an actual government minister! pic.twitter.com/4O9f3Fo5PY

— Tom (AAV) (@Angry_Voice) January 30, 2018

Conclusion

 A look at Liz Truss's lamentable Twitter feed, and the knowledge that she's been clunking around at the very top of the Tory government for years tells us all we need to know about the absolute dearth of talent they must be experiencing.

How far we've fallen as a nation that such a person could have risen so far in politics.

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OR

How the Jo Cox assassination brought out the best in some people and the worst in others

The assassination of the Labour MP and humanitarian campaigner Jo Cox has brought out the best in some people and the absolute worst in others. Hundreds of thousands of people have shared words of compassion from Jo Cox and her husband Brendan, but others have waded in to the debate to sling insults, moral high-horse and even try to get those words of compassion deleted from Facebook.

The general reaction
 

Very many people were utterly horrified by what happened to Jo Cox. It was great to see people put aside their political differences, praise her for her humanitarian work and condemn the killing as a barbaric attack on democracy itself.

The words of her husband Brendan were particularly moving:

"She would have wanted two things above all else to happen now, one that our precious children are bathed in love and two, that we all unite to fight against the hatred that killed her. Hate doesn’t have a creed, race or religion, it is poisonous."

The reaction of many on the right has been civilised and reasonable. I detest the socially and economically destructive political ideologies of people like David Cameron and Theresa May, and I'll continue to treat almost everything they say with intense suspicion. However it's impossible to doubt that they were being sincere in expressing their horror at what happened to Jo Cox, because even though she was on the other side of the chamber to them, she was savagely murdered in the street for doing the same job as they do. There's pretty much no way that they wouldn't be shaken at the fact that someone they know in person got brutally murdered whilst doing the same kind of constituency work that they do.

It's also good to see that various rival political parties (including the Tories and UKIP) have agreed to not contest the By-election to elect Jo Cox's successor.

I've never been inclined to praise the Vote Leave campaign because of their lack of anything even remotely resembling a coherent plan for what a post-EU British economy would look like, their endlessly repeated lies about the cost of EU membership and their streams of unaffordable false promises, however it has to be recognised that they did the decent thing in suspending their campaign for a couple of days out of respect for Jo Cox.

The reason I've acknowledged that many on the right responded with dignity and respect to the assassination is that I don't want anyone to think that this article is some kind of petty generalisation laden attack against everyone on the right, because it's not. It's an article identifying the searing hypocrisy and double standards of some people and organisations on the right.

Britain First

Britain First and their followers reacted furiously to mainstream media reports that multiple eyewitnesses had heard Thomas Mair yelling "Britain First" as he was attacking the Labour MP Jo Cox.

Before it was even announced that Jo Cox had died, the Britain First Facebook page and website were flooded with denials that they had any connections with the killer. Britain First and extreme-right sympathisers across the UK worked tirelessly to develop the propaganda narrative that Thomas Mair was in no way representative of right-wing politics, and that he was just a mentally unstable "lone wolf".

Apologists for the extreme-right also developed a fictional victim-blaming account of what happened, where the killing wasn't premeditated assassination at all. According to this warped right-wing narrative Jo Cox foolishly tried to intervene in an argument between two strangers and got shot, so it was "her own stupid fault".

Additionally Britain First instigated a campaign to discredit eyewitness accounts that Mair had been yelling "Britain First" and condemn the mainstream media for the appalling crime of ...erm ... reporting eyewitness accounts of a major breaking news story. Somehow they turned a political assassination by an extreme-right fanatic into a story of unacceptable persecution of the noble and patriotic far-right by an evil and disgustingly biased mainstream media!

The sheer number of extreme-right people who unquestioningly rote learned these feeble excuses and warped propaganda narratives then set about mindlessly regurgitating them all over the Internet was horrifying. This massive tide of extreme-right apologism was one of the most glaring large-scale displays of double standards in the history of British politics.

Just imagine for a moment that the murder suspect had been a mentally unstable person with a head full of radical Islamist politics shouting "Allahu Akbar". We can be absolutely sure that Britain First and their apologists wouldn't have been so keen to shout down any attempts to discuss the radical Islamist politics that motivated the attack as disgusting and unacceptable politicisation of the murder. Neither would they have been so keen to discredit eyewitness statements that the murder suspect was yelling "Alluha Akbar", invent fictionalised accounts of the incident where it was the victim's own fault, or to define the story in terms of a corrupt and biased mainstream media conspiracy to make radical Islamist politics look bad by association with the act of a single mentally unstable "lone wolf".

Had the murder suspect been an Islamist fanatic we all know that these people would have been leading the charge, baying for blood, framing the incident in their dangerous and divisive "clash of civilisations" terms and implying that all Muslims are guilty by association unless they immediately apologise in person for the incident.

Louise Mensch

The Tory MP turned professional self-publicist Louise Mensch is notorious for her simple-minded right-wing contrarianism, but even by her own woeful standards her response to the Jo Cox assassination was excruciatingly awful.

Mensch lambasted Jeremy Corbyn for suggesting that the Jo Cox assassination could have had political motives and elicited sympathy for Tommy Mair by talking up his mental health problems and how he did kindly "volunteer gardening for the elderly". She used her S*n column about the murder of a left-wing humanitarian politician by an extreme-right fanatic to repeatedly criticise the left, and even concluded that her readers should honour Jo Cox by voting for Brexit!

Mensch's stance that the killing wasn't a political assassination and that the alleged killer was just a poor sod with mental health problems and no strong political views was made to look extremely silly the very next day when the murder suspect Tommy Mair gave his name in court as "Death to Traitors, Freedom for Britain", and police officers testified that he had been describing himself as a "political activist" at the scene of the crime.

Just imagine for a moment that a radical left-winger stood accused of brutally murdering a UKIP politician in the street. Then imagine that a left-wing politician, Dianne Abbott for example, had tried to condemn people as petty political points-scorers for considering the political motivations behind the attack, tried to elicit sympathy for the perpetrator by talking up their mental health issues and voluntary activities, used the killing as an excuse to spit a load of toxic bile at right-wing politicians and right-wing politics in general, and even concluded that voting Remain would be a good way of honouring the political commitment of the UKIP politician.

Can you imagine the howls of outrage from the right-wing media if Dianne Abbott had been stupid enough to attempt to depoliticise such an attack by eliciting sympathy for the perpetrator and then concluding that the UKIP politician could be honoured by voting Remain? Can anyone imagine that Louise Mensch herself would not have joined in the vitriolic attacks against Abbott had she been stupid and insensitive enough to use the exactly same woeful tactics as Mensch herself?

The Daily Mail

Louise Mensch wasn't the only one to try to elicit sympathy for the alleged killer by talking up his mental health problems and his voluntary gardening for the elderly. The Daily Mail even produced an article headline describing Tommy Mair as "a timid gardener dogged by years of mental turmoil". It's beyond the bounds of possibility that the Daily Mail would have talked up the voluntary activities and mental health difficulties of the suspected killer in this way had they been a extremist Islamist fanatic, rather than an extremist right-wing fanatic.

We all know that the Daily Mail and the rest of the right-wing press would have been shreiking "Terrorism, Terrorism, Terrorism" if the alleged killer had had a head full of extremist Islamist politics, but because he was a white guy with a head full of extremist right-wing politics, they played up his mental health issues and refused to define the attack as being an act of extreme-right terrorism.

Conclusion

The assassination of Jo Cox has brought out the best in some people and the absolute worst in others. As much as I detest the cosy neoliberal consensus of the Westminster establishment, to see them come together in solidarity to express horror at the savage murder of one of their own is a reminder that they're actually capable of being compassionate human beings, not just the self-serving careerists that they appear to be most of the time.

Conversely, the staggeringly hypocritical double standards of some on the right has been truly awful to behold. To see extreme-right sympathisers try to shut down political discussion of the events with displays of synthetic outrage was particularly appalling given the way they would have immediately capitalised on the murder to promote their own political agenda had the perpetrator been an Islamist fanatic rather than one of their own.

One of the things that made these displays of synthetic outrage seem even more detestable was the way that certain right-wingers like Louise Mensch immediately set about using the assassination of a left-wing politician by an extreme-right fanatic to bitterly attack the left and hawk their own right-wing political agenda.

Attacking social liberals and people on the left for daring to criticise the extreme-right hatemongering politics that clearly motivated the alleged killer, whilst opportunistically using the assassination to promote their own right-wing political agenda is such a overt and disgusting display of hypocrisy. It's astonishing that so many people seem incapable of seeing these examples of blatant double standards and grotesque hypocrisy for what they are.

If you're one of those people who found yourself actively fire-fighting for the extreme-right by trying to silence political discussion of the events with displays of synthetic outrage, or promoting extreme-right propaganda narratives (that the suspected killer was an apolitical loner, that it was Jo Cox's own fault, that the multiple witnesses were lying, that it was a "false flag" operation by the Remain camp) then you should really be asking yourself what kind of person you are to react to a savage politically motivated murder in such a way.

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OR

The Mensch fallacy

The ideologically driven neoliberal dogma that has been the foundation of Conservative party policy for over three decades is defunct. It was holed beneath the water line when the "evil state sector" stepped in with the biggest state subsidies in human history (bailouts at above 90% of GDP by the government's own estimates and the near complete nationalisation of several debt stricken and insolvent banks) to rescue the financial sector temples of neoliberalism from the consequences of their own reckless gambling. Yet the political and economic establishment continue hawking exactly the same ideologically driven neoliberal clap trap under the new name of "austerity".

The best that (failed) Tories like Louise Mensch can offer in defence of their adherence to defunct ideologically driven pseudo-economic gibberish is to trot out truly pathetic arguments against those who complain about the defunct neoliberal model, excessive corporate greed, financial sector corruption and growing inequality.

The Mensch fallacy relies upon the straw man argument that anyone that opposes neoliberal economics, must be a raving anti-capitalist tree-hugger who opposes all forms of trade. Thus if these protesters have ever bought any commodity under the capitalist system (coffee and tents are her cited examples) they must be complete hypocrites.

Louise Mensch made this utterly lame point during an appearance on the long running BBC topical news comedy panel show Have I Got News For You and was immediately set upon by the other panellists for having made such a stunningly fallacious argument. That she tried to pull off a spectacularly lame right-wing fallacy in such a public setting gives her the unusual distinction of getting the first ever political myth busting fallacy named in her (dis)honour.

The Mensch fallacy is so lame it hardly needs further deconstruction, but I'll go on anyway.

Opposing the excesses of the deregulated financial sector does not equate to hating capitalism and all forms of trade. Living within a particular economic system does not disbar a person from criticising perceived problems with the system. You don't have to want to go back to a stone age barter system economy in order to complain that the FTSE 100 corporate executives awarded themselves a stonking 49% average pay rise in 2011, at a time when the vast majority of ordinary people were being made to suffer wage repression and harsh self-defeating Tory austerity.

Another huge flaw in the Mensch fallacy is that it would work just as well as a criticism of anti-communist protesters, in that they will almost certainly have benefited from provisions of the state at some point (used the state owned public transport system, drunk from the state owned water supply or relied on their state sponsored education for their ability to write their protest banners).

The fact that the Mensch fallacy is equally applicable to anti-communist protesters is particularly ironic as her argument is little more than a stunningly dim-witted extension of the pathetic "If you don't like it here, why don't you just go and live in North Korea" retort. 
              

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More articles from 
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 

Margaret Thatcher's toxic neoliberal legacies
 

The Tory "economic recovery" mantra is a lie

The Tory contempt for ordinary working people

Austerity is a con
 

My view on SlutWalk

The SlutWalk movement began in Canada in 2011 and has rapidly spread across the world, I think it is brilliant. Co-founders Sonya Barnett and Heather Jarvis started the campaign after Constable Michael Sanguinetti told students at a crime prevention seminar that "women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized".

The idea that women that dress in a particular way are "asking to be raped" is as old as the hills and it is disgusting, not only because it seeks to shift blame from the perpetrator to the victims of sexual assault but also because it relies on the attitude that all men are "potential rapists" who will attack if the victim acts or dresses provocatively enough.

Fighting back against the entrenched caveman mentality that allowed a Canadian high court judge to let a convicted rapist go free with the justification that he was just a "clumsy Don Juan" who had succumbed to "inviting circumstances" is a good thing but it is not the main reason I like the SlutWalk movement.

The main reason is that it SlutWalking is a bold assertion by ordinary women that female sexuality actually belongs to women. Men and the male dominated media have been allowed to control and commodify female sexuality for their own purposes, from male advertising executives who appeal to male audiences by draping images of scantily clad females all over the product they are endorsing, to the male dominated pornography industry and it's predominantly male audience.

The SlutWalk movement is an attempt to reclaim female sexuality through the appropriation of the word "slut", to mean "sexually empowered female" in the same way as the once derogatory word "queer" has been appropriated by the gay community to mean "homosexual and proud of it".

As a Quaker and an egalitarian, I'm a default feminist because I believe in equality of opportunity for everyone. I sometimes hesitate to use the word feminist to describe myself because I feel it has been misappropriated and tainted by a vocal minority of man-hating, female supremacists. It is almost impossible to hold a public discourse on gender politics without one or many of these sad "victim complex" sufferers monopolising the conversation with their shouty "all men are evil", "blame the patriarchy" rhetoric and completely undermining the causes of legitimate feminism.

For the purposes of clarity I'm going to refer to these shouty man-haters as "feminazis" and people who believe in gender equality as "feminists". However SlutWalk doesn't really fall into either category, SlutWalkers are not protesting because they hate men, neither are they protesting for full female equality, they are protesting on the specific subject of female sexual liberation, the right to look beautiful, sexy or even completely slutty without the implication that they are "asking to be raped".

SlutWalk has been heavily criticised by a number of "traditional feminists" but they should be seriously concerned that the baritone in their chorus of criticism is Rod Liddle (a man who described his ex-wife and the mother of two of his kids as a "total slut and slattern" and made vulgar Auschwitz jokes on the Millwall FC website) who compared women dressing provocatively to leaving a window open and your valuables on display when you pop out to buy a packet of cigarettes. The idea that being brutaly violated is in any way comparable to having your laptop nicked if you were silly enough to leave it on display is disproportionate at best and misogynistic at worst. Feminists should really think hard about whether they want to join in with people like Liddle and a host of rabid misogynists (see the comments beneath the Youtube vid at the top of the page) in putting the boot into a female empowerment movement.

For all of their gender politics terminology and lofty anti-patriarchy sentiments, I find it hard to see beyond my impression that these "academic feminists" are opposed to SlutWalk simply because they see it as direct competition. They don't want ordinary women to express views on rape and female sexuality in their own terms because it threatens the authority of feminist academia.

I think that this threat to academic feminism is a great thing. For far too long feminism has been the preserve of bookish academics and self-interested careerist businesswomen hoping to break into male dominated company boardrooms or political parties. So many high profile feminists are so badly out of touch with real women's issues that their pontifications on the subject belittle the whole concept of feminism. A classic example of out-of-touch feminism is former leader of the UK Labour party Harriet Harman, who was utterly preoccupied with things that wouldn't make a jot of difference to the vast majority of ordinary women, stuff like complaining about the glass-ceiling for high flying businesswomen and re-balancing the number of female MPs in Parliament using undemocratic measures like all-female shortlists. The vast majority of actually oppressed women wouldn't give a damn about whether a complete stranger was overlooked for a place on the board of directors at Acme Inc or worry over the percentage of highly paid politicians that have a penis, but like the rest of the Neo-Labour party, Harman was so surrounded with privilege that she began to believe that feminism would be best imposed from the top echelons of society downwards.

Feminists that actually care about the really important issues that effect millions of women around the world should be much more concerned with opposing religious organisations that attempt to restrict access to contraception or engage in child genital mutilation, demanding equal pay for equal work, helping to protect women from domestic violence and fighting to eradicate cavemen mentalities about what women should be allowed to do or wear.

One of the recurring criticisms of SlutWalk from traditional "academic feminists" and high profile politicians is that "slut" is such a pejorative term it should never be used by anyone. They claim that by using the word "slut", SlutWalk contributes to the "pornification" of everything, "puts pressure pressure on young girls to look like Barbie dolls" and according to the dreadful Tory MP Louise Mensch "lionises promiscuity".

I'd argue that SlutWalk does not do any of these things. SlutWalk is an attempt to take back ownership of female sexuality from the pornographers of the world. It doesn't pressurise anyone to dress sexy, it simply defends their right to dress as they like. If that means little girls can dress in the way that they enjoy without criticism, that's fine, and if feminists really care about little girls dressing like Barbies, perhaps Mattel Inc (the producers of Barbie) would be a more appropriate target for their criticism than a parallel feminist movement.

As for Mensch's "lionising promiscuity" complaint, this says a hell of a lot more about her inability to grasp the basics of the subject than it does about the number of sexual partners the average SlutWalker would deem appropriate. Even if the SlutWalk movement was about fighting for a woman's right to have as many sexual partners as she liked, Mensch would still be wrong, it would be better for everyone if puritanical Victorian moralists like Mensch who deem the private sexual preferences of others to be "harmful" would just keep their outdated opinions to themselves.

I think that feminists that are considering public criticism of SlutWalk should carefully consider what it is that SlutWalkers are actually protesting about. To me it is the concept of "rapeability", the idea that a woman should consider how "rapeable" she looks before she goes out of the house. Surely any objection to the use of the word "slut" or concerns that the SlutWalker hasn't properly understood "feminism" should be secondary to the protest against the normalisation of the concept of "rapeability", based on the scaremongering, absolute worst case scenario assumption that all men are potential rapists.

It is easy to see how the primitive "women are asking for it" mentality is harmful to women, but it is also harmful to men. It assumes that we are all rapists at heart, and that sexual assault is something that can be mitigated by "provocation". The majority of men are quite capable of restraining their sexual desires and behaving in an appropriate manner most of the time. It doesn't matter how scantly clad a woman is, or how beautiful he finds her body, the normal bloke doesn't consider rape as a viable option. Tarring all men with the crimes of a tiny minority of rapists is as wrong as binning the whole concept of feminism because of the witless shouting of a few man-hating "feminazis".

Many societies accept this bogus "men can't control themselves and are therefore potential rapists" reasoning as a truism about human nature. Some Islamic cultures end up forcing women to dress in oppressive clothing like the Burqa in case their hair, their lips, the curve of their shoulder or the shape of their legs "force" men that are not their husbands to sexually assault them. I'm much happier living in a free and liberal society where women can expose their breasts on the beach without fear that they are going to be gang raped by a hoard of sexual predators or lynched by a bunch of religious puritans. The advantages of topless sunbathing are numerous, women don't end up with silly strap lines on their skin, men on the beach learn to control their basic sexual urges and everyone gets to enjoy the beauty of the female body in a non-sexualised, non-pornographic environment.

Not only has the assumption that all men are "potential rapists" been the foundation of oppressive cultural practices it is also one of the principle weapons in the "feminazi" armoury. Just as the misogynist uses the word "slut" as a pejorative term to imply that the woman is asking to be raped, the misandrist uses the word "creep" to imply that the man is a potential rapist.

It is interesting to compare the fact that extremists at either end of the women's rights spectrum rely on this "potential rapist" fallacy to support their warped ideologies, with the fact that misogynistic male journalists and academic feminists have queued up alongside one another to give the SlutWalk movement a public kicking.

See Also

The Mensch Fallacy

The Sentient Concept fallacy

The Occupy Wall Street movement

The contrasting fates of Alan Turing and Lord Sempill