The Tories think the rest of us are thicker than London, let's prove them wrong

Remember the shocking BNP-style election campaign the Tories ran against Sadiq Khan in the 2016 London Mayor election?

It's obvious that they're doing the exact same thing now.

The same total lack of focus on their own policies. The same desperate smearing. The same pathetic attempts to associate their opposition with terrorism. The same pandering to the extreme-right. The same total lack of respect for basic decency and honest debating tactics. The same anti-Muslim rhetoric (Theresa May appealing to the Britain First crowd by trying to blame the Muslim community for her own government's security lapses).

It's hardly surprising that they've adopted this abusive style of campaigning, after all the same man is behind both of them: The tax-dodging Australian muck-slinger Lynton Crosby.

The Tory campaign in London failed abysmally. Zac Goldsmith was absolutely hammered by Sadiq Khan, who won a great deal of respect for the dignified way in which he kept his calm and rose above the tide of Tory abuse.

The 2017 General Election is playing out the exact same way, with the Tories slinging as many lies, misrepresentations and smears as they can at Jeremy Corbyn, and with him trying to rise above it to continue focusing on policy issues and conducting the election debate in a dignified manner.

I'm sure London will reject this disgusting Tory muck-slinging again, like they did in 2016. As will Scotland, most of the big English urban areas (Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds-Bradford, Bristol, Newcastle-Sunderland, Sheffield) and probably Wales too.

The big question is whether the less urban regions of England and the Tory shires will buy into these disgraceful personal abuse tactics of a party that is clearly totally out of ideas?

Will Britain have the basic human decency to see this vile Tory propaganda campaign for what it is:

The desperate cowardly smears of an depraved political party that doesn't have a single positive policy of their own to champion.

 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

Jeremy Corbyn's response to the Tory election fraud charges

The news that a Tory politician has been charged with electoral fraud may have passed you by today, but it's happened.

It was easy to imagine another whitewash was on the cards after the previous whitewash ruling by the CPS that most of the Tory election fraud cases should be dropped, not because no crimes were committed (they obviously and undeniably were), but because they couldn't prove a conspiracy at Tory HQ (somehow the "I didn't know it was a crime guv" defence never works for us mere mortals does it?).

However Craig Mackinlay has been charged with two counts of election expenses fraud in South Thanet, which is a tad awkward for the Tories since he's standing there again as their candidate next week!

He wouldn't be the first politician facing criminal charges to stand for election (Jeremy Thorpe did so in 1979) but he'd certainly be the first candidate standing for election in a constituency whilst simultaneously facing criminal charges for electoral fraud in that constituency at the previous election.

Jeremy Corbyn's response to the news that Mackinlay has been charged was an incredibly restrained and dignified display of political integrity. Instead of using the case to score political points and boost his election campaign, this is what Corbyn said:

"Nobody should be commenting on the details of an ongoing case. The police must be allowed to act independently to investigate on the basis of any evidence they’ve got, and the Crown Prosecution Service must be allowed to make its decision on whether to proceed on a case.

It is a very bad road when democratically elected politicians start offering a running commentary on independent judicial processes. We have to have total separation of political and judicial powers in this country.

"All politicians need to be extremely careful – politicians are elected to parliament to be held to account by the public."

Just think about it for a moment and imagine if the boot was on the other foot. 

Imagine of it was a Labour politician who had been charged with cheating his way into parliament within a week of an increasingly tight general election.

Imagine what the Aussie muck-slinger Lynton Crosby would be advising Theresa May to say about the story.

Imagine what kind of low digs political opportunists like Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Iain Duncan Smith would be spewing all over the shop.

Imagine the political advantage that so many unscrupulous Tories would be trying to worm out of the situation.

But Jeremy Corbyn just rose above the temptation to cast aspersions or try to make political capital out of it, and gave the correct response: The guy is innocent until proven guilty, and it's not his place to provide a running commentary.

Surely even Corbyn's harshest critics have got to admit that responding in the way he did, rather than trying to use the situation to score cheap political points, is actually decent, honourable and impressively statesmanlike behaviour?

For years we've complained about dishonest, untrustworthy, muck-slinging politicians and slick spin-doctor propagandists dragging down the standard of political debate, and now along comes a man who seems to rise above it all, and people just believe all the atrocious smears they read about him in the right-wing propaganda rags.

Outside the tabloid-addled worldviews of the political sleepwalkers, Jeremy Corbyn clearly represents a fantastic opportunity for Britain to drag our politics out of the gutter and begin focusing on the really important stuff like policies that work for all the people - not just the super-rich minority, investment strategies, and above all democratic accountability (one of Corbyn's strongest beliefs).

Whether us Brits take this opportunity to clean up our political system, or hand the keys of power back to Lynton Crosby's band of Tory muck-slingers, well that's up to us isn't it?

 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

What are the likely consequences of Tory electoral fraud?

Despite efforts by swathes of the mainstream media and the political establishment to starve the Tory electoral fraud allegations of coverage, it keeps on getting bigger. 


The Electoral Commission had to take the unprecedented step of resorting to the courts to demand documentation that the Tory party had been trying to hide from their investigation, more than a dozen police forces have initiated enquiries into fraudulent Tory campaign spending, leaked emails show that senior Tory figures (Lynton Crosby, Andrew Feldman, and Stephen Gilbert) approved the decision to pass off local campaign spending as national expenditure, and more questions are being asked about other local Tory election expenses in marginal constituencies that the party failed to declare as constituency spending.

Despite concerted efforts by many in the media and the political establishment to downplay, dismiss or ignore the electoral fraud story, it looks like it is definitely not going to go away. However there is still absolutely no guarantee that action will be taken to punish the perpetrators and beneficiaries of the electoral fraud.

In this article I'm going to consider some of the most likely, and most unlikely consequences are.

Legal consequences

It is a criminal offence to commit electoral fraud and if found guilty the punishment can be up to a year in jail or unlimited fines.

There's plentiful evidence that the Battle Bus teams were campaigning for particular candidates in their local areas (see image), so short of a complete whitewash, there's little chance that the Tories are going to get away scot free.

The Tory approach to the electoral fraud scandal seems to be to claim that it's all just some innocent administrative mix up. This kind of excuse looks an awful lot like they are preparing the ground to throw some lowly administrator under the (battle) bus.

The problem with this age old strategy of pinning the whole scandal on some lowly minion within the organisation is that the leaked email about the Battle Bus clearly implicates the Tory party treasurer Andrew Feldman, the deputy treasurer Stephen Gilbert and the recently knighted Tory party election strategist Lynton Crosby, because they all signed off on the plan to miscategorise the Battle Bus spending as national party spending rather than candidate spending.

The emails make it absolutely clear that they signed off the plan to avoid declaring the Tory Battle Bus expenses (running the bus, catering, hotel bills ...) as local spending, even though the entire purpose of the Battle Bus campaign was to tip specific marginal constituencies in their favour.

It doesn't matter if these senior Tories try to plead ignorance about UK electoral law becuase "I didn't know it was a crime" has never been an acceptable defence in any court of law. Ignorance of the law does not magically render unlawful actions lawful, especially if it is the actual job of the accused (two party treasurers and an election strategist) to ensure that the party complies with electoral law.

"I didn't know it was a crime" is clearly not a defence, but alongside a guilty plea it could certainly be used in mitigation. If the Tories pull off their attempt to dismiss the whole thing as an "administrative error" it's highly unlikely that anyone will ever end up going to jail for it, because an establishment whitewash of the whole affair is still a possible outcome.

Even if the allegations are proven, it's unlikely anyone would go to jail for it unless they are found guilty in court after trying to contest the charges, rather than pleading guilty and accepting a few fines and suspended sentences.

Electoral consequences

Several people have tried to argue that the Tory electoral spending fraud should trigger a re-run of the General Election, but in my view this would be an unfair consequence. The Daily Mirror investigation revealed that the hidden Tory campaign spending would have pushed some two dozen constituencies over their campaign spending limits. Even if another ten or twenty additional constituencies get dragged into the scandal over other issues (like undeclared spending on adverts in the local press, undeclared spending on campaign leaflets, or undeclared expenditure on flying in of Republican Party activists activists from the US) a re-run of the General Election would clearly be extremely unfair on the 600 odd MPs who complied with electoral law when they won their seats. For example, why on earth should the 56 SNP MPs in Scotland have to re-contest their seats as a consequence of a spate of Tory electoral fraud in England?

In my view a full re-run of the General Election would constitute punishment of the majority of innocent MPs for the crimes of a small minority of guilty MPs who gained unlawful advantage from undeclared campaign spending.

A fairer course of action would be to hold By-elections in any constituencies where the sitting Tory MP benefited from electoral fraud. If the allegations of Tory electoral fraud are proven, this could result in By-elections in 20 or more constituencies, which would be more than sufficient to end the Tory majority in the House of Commons assuming enough people were to vote against the Tory candidates who cheated their way into the House of Commons.

Legislative consequences
If it turns out that twenty or more Conservative MPs benefited from electoral fraud in winning their seats, there could be some very interesting legislative consequences. If these politicians entered the House of Commons by fraudulent means, any legislation that was passed as a result of their votes could clearly be seen as having been fraudulently imposed on the public.

The situation is clearly unprecedented, so I'm not exactly sure of the legal grounds for overturning legislation that could have been passed as a result of Tory electoral fraud, but if the Tories are found guilty of electoral fraud, I can't see any reason why legal efforts couldn't be made to overturn legislation that made its way through the legislative process as a result of votes by people who cheated their way into parliament.

Conclusion

The Tories would like nothing more than to have the whole electoral fraud scandal brushed under the carpet as some kind of innocent administrative error, while possibly pinning the blame on some lowly minion. Until the leaked email detailing how the Battle Bus plans had been signed off by senior Tory figures came to light, an establishment whitewash and sacrifice of a lowly scapegoat seemed to be the most likely outcome. Now that senior Tory figures are clearly implicated, it might be a lot more difficult for them to whitewash the whole affair or pin the whole fraud on some lowly admin worker.

If the complaints are upheld it seems likely that By-elections would have to be held in any constituency where campaign spending limits were broken. It would be extraordinary if people who cheated their way into power were allowed to continue reaping the benefits of their fraudulent activities. Whether the constituencies would reject the Tory candidates who cheated their way into office is another matter. It would only take the loss of seven or so Tory seats to put an end to the Tory majority in the House of Commons, however it's likely that they would still be able to cling onto power by seeking the backing of the likes of the DUP, UUP (who are already affiliated to the Tory party) and the UKIP MP Douglas Carswell.

Whether it would be possible to overturn legislation that was passed with the backing of MPs who cheated their way into the House of Commons is an interesting legal question, and one that will definitely need to be asked if the allegations of Tory electoral fraud are proven.

 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

12 Things you should know about David Cameron's austerity to infinity speech at the Lord Mayor's Banquet

On 11 November 2013 David Cameron gave another ludicrous speech which demonstrated  how desperately out of touch with reality he is.

There was plenty of the same tired Tory rhetoric we've heard so many times before. Especially incitement of the public with scare stories of how scroungers, immigrants and the Labour party are to blame for the state of the economy, so that they are distracted from blaming the wealthy establishment minority, who are clearly the real culprits. I haven't got time to analyse all of the guff he came out with, so I'll just stick to a few of the most egregious bits of nonsense.

The golden lectern

The most glaringly obvious demonstration that Cameron's brain has been addled by the bubble of wealth and privilege he inhabits is the fact that he decided to announce that he plans for the UK public to suffer permanent austerity, whilst reading his speech at the Lord Mayor's Banquet from a gold encrusted lectern.

The evidence is absolutely clear: Tory austerity is for the poor and ordinary, whilst the rich have used this economic crisis to make themselves richer than ever. Corporations and the super-rich get tax cuts, ludicrous pay hikes and state subsidies, whilst the rest of us suffer wage repression, cuts and loss of services.

That Cameron appealed for this economic apartheid to continue forever, whilst reading from a golden lectern and surrounded by many other golden objects was an appalling error of judgement (one wonders whether he consulted Lynton Crosby about the tone and setting of this speech beforehand) but the contents of his speech were just as dire.

The budget deficit

Cameron used his speech to outline his vision that once the budget deficit is eliminated, austerity should be made permanent. The big problem here is that there are absolutely no signs that adherence to George Osborne's extremist ideological austerity experiment will ever actually get rid of the budget deficit.

Surely Cameron hasn't forgotten that the Tories came to power on the back of their plans to eliminate the budget deficit in a single parliament. They claimed they would eliminate the budget deficit by May 2015, but there isn't a hope in hell that they can achieve that now. Even the ludicrously over-optimistic economic forecasts of the Office for Budget Responsibility Recklessness now put the balanced budget date at around 2020. The best that David Cameron can offer is the tired old line "we have cut the deficit by a third". This doesn't mean they've reduced the debt (as Cameron has dishonestly implied before), but that they have slightly reduced the rate at which money is being borrowed.

The fact is that the deficit was slightly reduced in the first couple of years of Tory rule* but since then it hasn't budged, in fact, the OBR now admit that the deficit is actually growing again (not that David Cameron or George Osborne would ever admit as much).

More NHS lies

David Cameron has a proven track record of lying about the NHS. Who could forget "We'll cut the budget deficit, not the NHS", "no more top down reorganisations of the NHS" or "the NHS is safe in our hands"? All three of these pre-election statements have been shown up as lies. NHS funding has been cut by £20 billion; within months of gaining power the Tories launched the biggest top-down reorganisation in the entire history of the NHS; and the NHS has been carved wide open for privatisation.

Cameron used this speech to continue his campaign of NHS lies with an absolute corker. He claimed that the NHS now has "shorter waiting times". In August 2013 it was announced that the number of people on NHS waiting lists has grown to the highest level in five years; in September 2013 it was announced that Accident and Emergency waiting times had reached their highest level since 2003-04, in and in the week before David Cameron's speech it was revealed that some NHS facilities stand accused of putting the lives of cancer patients at risk by falsifying waiting time data.

Anyone with the slightest familiarity with the NHS knows that things have got a lot worse under the Tories programme of privatisations, top down reforms and cuts. When the Tories came to power in 2010 public satisfaction with the NHS was at an all-time high, but within just two years of Tory rule, public satisfaction plummeted to an all time low.

Justice

At one point Cameron Brags about the strengths that are "absolutely key" to the success of the UK economy. Aside from the traditional neoliberal fare (our "property rights" and our "access to markets") one of the other things he cites is "equality before the law" - something the Tories have been deliberately undermining since they returned to power in 2010. From their sustained attacks on legal aid to their decision that poor defendants will no longer be allowed to chose their own legal representatives; from the introduction of secret courts that have been condemned by human rights groups across the world to Iain Duncan Smith's decision to retroactively rewrite the law to avoid compensating the victims of his unlawful labour party approved Workfare schemes, it is absolutely obvious that the Tories have utter contempt for the concept of equality before the law.

Skills

David Cameron lamented the fact that "at the moment, the UK has the lowest ratio in Europe for women in STEM subjects and in engineering, less than 1 in 6 graduates are women" however a look at Tory higher education policy reveals that the Tories have tripled tuition fees for young women wanting to study such subjects, meaning that they will have to accrue the largest debts anywhere in the world to study these subjects at public universities, and face a lifetime "aspiration tax" of 9% of their income to pay for it.

What makes these enormous fees even worse is that scientists and engineers are paid significantly more in other countries where tuition fees are significantly lower. Take engineering as an example. The average engineer in Germany or France takes home significantly higher wages than their UK counterparts, yet they have to pay much lower fees to obtain the necessary qualifications.

Given the huge cost of tuition fees in the UK, it would be in the rational self-interest of any British youngster with an interest in engineering to devote some of their time to improving their French or German with a view to studying abroad (where it is cheaper) and working abroad (where the pay is better). This incentive to leave the UK doesn't just apply in engineering, it applies across all kinds of fields.

What the Tories have actually done is to provide a massive financial incentive for the smartest youngsters to quit the UK altogether in search of lower tuition fees and better employment opportunities abroad. Only the ones dumb enough to pay £9,000 a year for something they could get for a tiny fraction of the price elsewhere in Europe are likely to remain.

Rebuilding the economy

One of the most pitiful sections of Cameron's speech addressed the economic recovery:

"We can’t simply try and rebuild the same type of economy that we had before the crash. We can’t just go back to how things used to be. We need to build something better. A vision of a new kind of economy where the benefits of growth are shared by all"

There is so much wrong with this I could fill a whole article with criticism.

1. "We can’t simply try and rebuild the same type of economy that we had before the crash" - but this is precisely what the Tories have been doing: banks that should have been left to die have been kept alive with bailouts and quantitative easing; financial sector reform has been booted into the long grass; adherents of the neoclassical pseudo-economic gibberish that created the crisis still dominate the financial sector, the regulatory authorities, government, the media and academia; bankers bonuses have risen way above pre-crisis levels, tax-dodging is still rife; and not least, George Osborne is busy inflating another housing Ponzi bubble with his ridiculous "Help to Buy" schemes. It is absolutely clear that the establishment minority have learned absolutely nothing from the economic crisis and they're determined to return to business as usual for them, whilst extracting the cost of their failures from the rest of us via ideological austerity.

2. "We can’t just go back to how things used to be" - We certainly shouldn't have gone back to the way things used to be, but that is precisely what has been happening, with the only difference being that the establishment minority are determined to use the crisis in order to ensure that they get a bigger slice of the cake than before, whilst the rest of us must subsist on crumbs.

3. "We need to build something better" -  but they're building something even worse!

4. "A vision of a new kind of economy where the benefits of growth are shared by all" -  A vision which is completely at odds with the true Conservative agenda, which is a massive widening of the poverty gap and a sustained assault on the concept of social mobility. It is impossible to see how this "vision" is even remotely compatible with the fact that it is Tory party policy to impose harsh below-inflation pay raises on the entire public sector, apart from MPs, who look set to bag an inflation busting 11% pay raise for themselves. How about the fact that this Tory government has overseen the longest prolonged period of wage repression since the 19th Century, whilst giving vast tax cuts to corporations and the super-wealthy minority, allowing the corporate executive class to enrich themselves with unprecedented wage rises.

The fact is, that like so much of what comes out of David Cameron's gob, this vision of a fairer economy is an utterly dishonest representation of what he actually believes. Lying about his "vision" for Britain is contemptible stuff, I'd have more respect for him if he showed a bit of honesty and actually admitted that the real Tory agenda is to enrich the wealthy minority at the expense of the majority - but expecting an honest statement of intentions for a Tory would take similar levels of gullibility as naively accepting David Cameron's word that he wants a fairer Britain "where the benefits of growth are shared by all" when his actions demonstrate that he believes in precisely the opposite.
  Welfare

As we have come to expect from any Tory speech, Cameron engaged in a bout of welfare bashing; the tired tactic of trying to divert blame away from the financial sector and towards the poorest people in society.

One of the most ludicrous assertions he made was that "through universal credit, we’re ensuring that for every extra hour you work and every extra job you do – you should always be better off". Research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has shown that Universal Credit will have precisely the opposite effect for many people - that under Iain Duncan Smith's botched flagship welfare reform, many people will be made poorer for every extra hour of work that they do. Some of the examples of how universal credit will penalise hard work can be seen here.

Taxation

"At a time when family budgets are tight, it is really worth remembering that [social] spending comes out of the pockets of the same taxpayers whose living standards we want to see improve."

On the face of it this seems like ludicrous nonsense because the savings that are being made through cuts to social spending are not being used to cut the taxes of ordinary families, but on closer inspection it does make some sense. Cameron doesn't specifically state who these taxpayers whose living standards we want to see improve" actually are, he's just hoping that people assume that it refers to the families mentioned at the beginning of the sentence. The demographic that the Tory party is determined to improve living standards for is clearly not hard working families (you don't improve living standards for them through a campaign of wage repression, VAT hikes and cuts to in-work benefits), it is the wealthy minority Cameron is referring to. If you read it in the right way, this statement can be seen as an admission that Cameron and the Tories are determined to cut social spending in order to further improve the living standards of the rich.

It is also worth noting that Cameron made absolutely no mention of tax-dodging in his speech. If Corporations and the super-rich were made to pay their fair share of tax, then most of these drastic cuts in social spending could easily be avoided. The problem for Cameron of course is that many of the biggest financial donors to the Tory party are serial tax-dodgers. It serves Cameron's political self-interest to allow this plague of economically destructive tax-dodging to continue unchecked, as long as the beneficiaries fling a small portion of their ill-gotten gains into the coffers of the Tory party.

Immigration

In one breath David Cameron blamed immigrants for the state of the economy and the changes in society (in an transparent attempt to appeal to UKIP voters), and in the the next he was bragging about the Tory plan to make it easier for people from Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to get into the UK!

The new income requirements for British families with non-EU members introduced by the Tory party openly discriminate against British people and their families, meaning that countless low-mid income British people have been left with the appalling prospect of either breaking up their families, or living in exile. Meanwhile the government is powerless to discriminate against non-EU migrants that are married to citizens of other EU states in the same way, because their freedom of movement is protected under EU law. Thus a Brazilian or Indonesian that is married to a British person, speaks perfect English, has a high skill occupation and has British children can be barred from entering the UK, but if they are married to a Hungarian or Portuguese, speak no English at all, have no skills and no connections to the UK at all, they are absolutely free to come and go as they please!

Confidence

Cameron concluded his speech with what he wanted to be a rousing appeal to "confidence". The problem of course is that David Cameron and his cronies in the Tory party have done everything they can to destroy confidence in the UK economy. Cameron himself is guilty of repeatedly describing the UK as "bankrupted" which is hardly confidence inspiring language.

Then there's the consequences of their rotten policies; the fact that the public know that their incomes are being cut in real terms every single month is hardly confidence inspiring stuff; the fact that the UK lost its AAA Credit ratings under George Osborne's watch is hardly inspiring confidence in his extremist economic austerity experiment; the fact that the UK is lagging far behind high-tech economies like Germany and Japan hardly inspires confidence in our manufacturing sector; the fact that the Tory government have steadfastly refused to reform the financial sector hardly inspires confidence that there isn't another enormous economic crisis just around the corner; and the fact that the UK is plummeting down the league tables for academic achievement hardly inspires confidence in our future either.

Essentially what David Cameron is saying is that it is important that we all maintain a false sense of confidence, and just ignore the painful bouts of cognitive dissonance every time we hear him, or another Tory, describing the UK economy as "bankrupted" in order to score cheap political points against the Labour party.

Bucaneers

"We need to support, reward and celebrate enterprise. That requires a fundamental culture change in our country. A culture that’s on the side of those who work hard, that values that typically British, entrepreneurial, buccaneering spirit"

Again, there's so much wrong with this I could fill an entire article with criticisms of these two sentences.

1. "We need to support, reward and celebrate enterprise." - Cameron doesn't bother to define what he means by "enterprise". For all we know he could be talking about the kinds of financial sector innovations (like Collateralised Debt Obligations, Credit Default Swaps and all kinds of other complex financial derivatives) that nearly collapsed the entire global economy in 2007-08. To support this interpretation we could point to the conclusion of the speech where he praises the City of London as "the great innovator that has led the way in finance for centuries". It is not difficult to interpret Cameron's words as a call for more support, reward and celebration of the financial sector (that provides more than half of all donations to the Tory party).
 
2. "That requires a fundamental culture change in our country. A culture that’s on the side of those who work hard" - Cameron is clearly implying that British culture is against those that work hard and in a way he is right: British culture rewards those that were born into wealth and privilege, whilst millions of people that have worked hard all their lives are having their pensions and savings raided by Quantitative Easing and many others are being treated like criminal scum by the DWP. Tens of thousands of people that have worked hard all their lives are being forced onto mandatory unpaid labour schemes or being subjected to the psychological torture that is the Atos administered Work Capacity Assessment.

The silver spoon brigade abuse their inherited privilege by engaging in rent seeking behavior and outright corruption to ensure that they stay wealthy for the least possible effort, whilst hard working people across the country are being made to feel like criminals because the blatant economic mismanagement of the privileged classes has created an unemployment crisis in which they have become trapped, or they are being told that their meagre disability benefits are being stopped because their heart attack, stroke, blood clot in the brain, degenerative condition or terminal cancer are too trivial to prevent them from seeking work.

3. "that values that typically British, entrepreneurial, buccaneering spirit" - The Oxford English Dictionary defines a buccaneer as "a person who acts in a recklessly adventurous and often unscrupulous way, especially in business". Thus David Cameron is explicitly telling us that we must support, reward, celebrate and value the most reckless and unscrupulous in society! Instead of criticising the reckless and unscrupulous financial sector workers that crashed the global economy with their over-leveraged gambling and outright fraud, Cameron reckons we should be celebrating their achievements and rewarding them with ever higher bonuses!
 
Schools
 
At one point in the speech David Cameron brags that there are "over 3,000 more free schools and academies" - but this doesn't mean that 3,000 schools have been set up, it means that some 3,000 schools have been given away for free, property deeds and all, and in many cases to high profile Tory party and Liberal Democrat donors. Billions worth of land and infrastructure that was paid for at the public expense has been given away for free to unaccountable private sector interests. Only a Tory could possibly believe that this is something to brag about.

The fact that Cameron saw fit to brag about the fact his government has given so many £billions worth of public infrastructure away for free wasn't even the most alarming reference to education policy within his speech. The worst part was his claim that a pro-capitalism propaganda will be taught in schools. Cameron and his party wish to see future generations of our children indoctrinated into hero worshiping the unscrupulous "buccaneers" that David Cameron is full of praise for.

"We want to make sure [enterprise] is boosted everywhere. Promoted in schools. Taught in colleges. Celebrated in communities. Recognised properly in the honours system."

I always had my suspicions that the reason The Tories have been so keen to transfer our schools to unaccountable private sector interests** was so that kids could be more easily indoctrinated with pro-Tory propaganda. To hear David Cameron spell out his plan for our schools to be used as pro-capitalism indoctrination centres is confirmation of what I always suspected.

Conclusion

Cameron's speech was appalling for many, many reasons: The blatant lies; the distortions and misrepresentations; the outright denials of reality; the grotesque misuse of language; the logical contradictions; the feeble attempts at scapegoating immigrants and the least fortunate in society; and the announcement of plans to indoctrinate our children with pro-capitalist propaganda - but perhaps the most visible sign that Cameron has no grip at all on reality is the fact that he delivered his "austerity-to-infinity" speech from a golden lectern whilst surrounded by the trappings of wealth and privilege.

 Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for  Another Angry Voice  is the  PayPal  donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

* A fall in borrowing was to be expected, the previous government had been spending money like crazy to keep the City of London from collapsing into insolvency in the wake of the biggest financial crisis in nearly eight decades.

** So keen to get shot of it that they would just give all these £billions worth of property and land away for free and provide lucrative annual subsidies to the unaccountable private interests they handed it over to.

MORE ARTICLES FROM
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 
           
What is ... Wage Repression?
                        
David Cameron's witch hunt against truth and opennness
                     
The Tory "war on justice"
                      
Asset stripping "bankrupt" Britain
                          
George Osborne's economic extremism
                

David Cameron's petulant reaction to defeat
          
What is... Neoliberalism?
           

David Cameron's debt reduction lie

          
How David Cameron's internet firewall would change the Internet
                 
Libeling the evidence, the Iain Duncan Smith fallacy
  

12 things you should know about the Daily Mail slurs against Ralph Miliband

The Tories thought they were going to win some kind of PR coup by using their 2013 party conference to do little more than announce that they've completely run out of ideas and their only policies are even more malicious attacks on the unemployed and then engaging in a spot of empty bragging about how well they are managing the economy (when everyone knows that the only people experiencing "recovery" are the establishment elite and their Tory chums - the rest of us are still being punished with the longest sustained period of wage repression since the 19th Century).

Their plans have come badly unstuck because the headlines, and the social mediascape have been dominated by reactions to an article in the Daily Mail slurring the deceased academic Ralph Miliband, for no reason other than the fact that he was the father of the Labour party leader.

This smear attack spent an awful lot of effort analysing diary entries Ralph Miliband made when he was 17 but almost completely glossed over the three years he spent serving in the Royal Navy during the Second World War. It also contained outright lies about his political stance on the Soviet Union and included a photograph of Ralph Miliband's grave with an incredibly tasteless pun. After a great deal of criticism from across the political spectrum, the Daily Mail published an bombastic editorial, in which, instead of apologising for their insults and lies, they actually made things even worse (here's an annotated copy of that editorial).

Here are twelve things you should know about this revolting Daily Mail smear attack.

Inappropriate moral arbitration

The Daily Mail proprietor Harold Harmsworth
with his hero, Adolf Hitler.

By condemning Ralph Miliband as "evil" and "unpatriotic" the Daily Mail have appointed themselves arbiters of what is moral, and what is British. It is difficult to imagine a more inappropriate organisation to decide such things. 

Surely everyone now knows that the Daily Mail has a long history of supporting fascism?

During the interwar years the Mail was run by a fascist sympathiser called Harold Harmsworth who used the Daily Mail to push for an alliance between Britain and Nazi Germany and to praise and promote Oswald Mosely's British Union of Fascists.

Harmsworth's fixation with fascism and his adoration of Adolf Hitler led him to write to Hitler on several occasions congratulating him on his military conquests. He described Hitler's as "superhuman" and predicted that he would become known in Britain as "Adolf the Great". Harmsworth also travelled to Germany to have a personal meeting with Adolf Hitler too (see photo).

It's not as if the Daily Mail have learned their lesson about supporting "evil" regimes either. Decades later they chose to openly propagandise in favour of General Pinochet's murderous military dictatorship in Chile. The Daily Mail columnist Paul Johnson famously defended the mad Chilean torturer by claiming that "the demonisation of General Pinochet [is] the most successful, mendacious propaganda exercise ever carried out in the 20th century".

What a revolting spectacle to see a newspaper that openly praised and supported Adolf Hitler attacking a Jewish immigrant who served three years in the Royal Navy (including the D-Day landings) as unpatriotic and "evil". If the Daily Mail had any sense of decency, they would of course, keep silent (out of shame at their support for Adolf Hitler) when it comes to determining whether people (especially Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe) were patriotic or whether their politics were "evil".

Attack the ancestor

The fascist promoter  Harold Harmsworth was more commonly known as
Viscount Rothermere, I don't use such terms because, like Ralph Miliband,
I believe that the UK would be a much better place without so much
inherited wealth and privilege.

Anyone who is familiar with debating techniques, knows that one of the weakest strategies of all is the ad hominum (attack-the-man) tactic. When the weak debater has nothing resembling an adequate retort to the argument of his opponent, he resorts to smear tactics.

The Daily Mail attack on Ralph Miliband as a consequence of Ed Miliband's strong performance at the 2013 Labour Party Conference is lower even than an ad hominum attack. It really does show the paucity of their criticism of Ed Miliband if they think that slurring his dead father represents any kind of reasonable argument.

The worst thing about this attack-the-ancestor strategy is that the Daily Mail is still owned by the descendants of the Hitler adoring Harold Harmsworth. If the Daily Mail see fit to attack Ed Miliband by criticising his father, surely that then gives everyone else the right to attack the current Daily Mail proprietor Jonathan Harmsworth for the fact that his great-grandfather, from whom he inherited his vast media empire, was a filthy Hitler worshiping, Nazi loving anti-Semitic shitbag of a man.

Unpatriotism

Instead of using the fact that his great-grandad was a fascist-promoting Hitler fanboy to criticise the current Daily Mail owner, we can instead focus upon his his own activities, namely his dodgy tax affairs.

Harmsworth is such a "patriot" that he lives in France in order to avoid paying UK tax. His wealth was estimated to be over £1 billion back in 2006, but he is such a "patriot" that he sees no moral obligation to actually pay UK tax on his earnings from the Daily Mail, unlike the vast majority of taxpaying people who are stupid enough to buy a paper that lectures them about what is and isn't patriotic, that is owned by someone who deliberately lives abroad and registers his shares in that newspaper in a tax haven in order to avoid paying tax in the UK!

You'd have to be living in cloud cuckoo land to believe that it isn't unpatriotic to go and live in France in order to deliberately damage the UK economy by dodging-tax on your vast UK earnings.

Outright Lies

There were several outright lies in the Daily Mail slur attack, one of the most egregious was the assertion that Ralph Miliband approved of, and supported human rights abuses by the Soviet Union.

Anyone who is actually familiar with Ralph Miliband's work and views would know that he was actually a critic of the Soviet Union. To put it into rather crude terms, Miliband believed that the Soviet Union represented an absolute bastardisation of Marxism, which gave him a very strong motivation to criticise Soviet human rights abuses. Not because he opposed Marxism out of abject fear of it, like most of the British establishment, but because he saw these abuses as a betrayal of true Marxism, which does not in any way support the idea of a vast, all-powerful state torturing, imprisoning and killing anyone who dares raise a dissident opinion, read dissident literature or listen to dissident music.

One conclusive piece of evidence that Miliband was not an apologist for Soviet human rights abuses was presented by a particularly unlikely source. The Times is owned by Rupert Murdoch and pushes the same toxic neoliberal nonsense as the Daily Mail, but they delighted in pointing out that Ralph Miliband was a signatory on a letter to the Times in 1983 which complained about exactly the kind of political persecutions that the Daily Mail accused him of supporting.
               
"Evil" ideas

The Daily Mail claim that Ralph Miliband's ideas and works were "evil" and un-British. Anyone with the slightest amount of curiosity could easily find out for themselves what Miliband actually wrote and conclude that his ideas were far from "evil" ( Here's a short article explaining some of the key themes in Ralph Miliband's works).

Unfortunately, the typical Daily Mail reader has no natural sense of curiosity, and instead simply recycles the opinions they've read in their Fascist Hate Comic in lieu of actually developing anything resembling ideas of their own. 

There are probably hundreds of thousands of Daily Mail readers sold on the idea that Ralph Miliband was an evil Stalin loving commie, and  that his works and legacy should be destroyed to protect future generations, perhaps in a Nazi style public book burning event (we know how much the Daily Mail has a history of supporting Nazi ideas and practices).
            
Misconceptions about Marxism

The attempt to smear Ralph Miliband as an apologist for Soviet oppression simply because he was a student of Marxist philosophy betrays an extreme level of political ignorance. To slur a student of Marxist ideas by association with the worst excesses of the Soviet Union is akin to slurring anyone who believes in capitalist ideas with claims that they support, by implication, the crimes against humanity committed of any number of vile capitalist regimes such as Nazi Germany, Mussolini's Italy, Apartheid South Africa or General Pinochet's Chile.

Still, overt displays of political ignorance from a publication that serves no other purpose than to fill the minds of the politically illiterate with simplistic propaganda narratives is hardly surprising is it?

Neoliberalism: A truly unpatriotic ideology

The Daily Mail tried to claim that Ralph Milibands left-wing ideas (such as his opposition to hegemony and inherited privilege and his promotion of participatory democracy and meritocracy) were unpatriotic, but it should be absolutely clear to anyone who has followed political developments since Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, that if there is one particularly unpatriotic economic ideology it is the brand of orthodox neoliberal pseudo-economic gibberish that the Daily Mail has ceaselessly championed.

Just think about it for a couple of minutes. Was it the tiny minority of obscure Marxist academics that ensured huge chunks of our nation were sold off on the cheap to unaccountable corporate interests, no matter where they came from?

Of course it wasn't. It was neoliberal economists and politicians, (vociferously supported by the Daily Mail) who have ensured that our utilities companies are mainly owned by foreign interests, including the French state (EDF) and a collective of German municipalities (E-on). The neoliberal brigade also ensured that our public transport system was hived off to foreign interests in a disastrous privatisation experiment that resulted in Britain ending up with the most decrepit and most overpriced public transport network in Western Europe. The neoliberals also ensured that the media could be largely controlled by foreign interests (foreign media ownership is even prohibited in the neoliberalism fixated United States). Thanks to the neoliberal pseudo-economic ideology relentlessly pushed by the Daily Mail, our airports are now operated by a Qatari sovereign wealth fund, our tax collection offices are owned and administered by a tax-dodging company based in Bermuda and even our so-called "independent nuclear deterrent" has been privatised into the hands of a consortium 66% owned by American corporations!

Even now, the darling of the Daily Mail Michael Gove is busy giving away our schools, for free, to unaccountable foreign interests such as the American owned Aurora Academies Trust, which uses a transfer pricing scheme to make sure that British taxpayers' cash is used to pay for an American curriculum to be taught to British kids at their formerly state owned school. 

Do you think Marxists would have allowed this grotesquely unpatriotic sell-off of state infrastructure to happen?

Of course they wouldn't - Had people like Ralph Miliband been in charge, our utilities, transport infrastructure, our military hardware, our schools and our tax collection offices would not be owned by a bunch of corporations that don't give the faintest damn about what is best for the UK economy, they would still be under democratic British control. It doesn't matter whether you believe the right-wing myth that state owned infrastructure is inefficient or not, it is undeniable that had the Marxists been in charge, Britain would still own it's own infrastructure.

Academic Marxism is clearly not as unpatriotic as the Daily Mail's favoured pseudo-economic ideology of neoliberalism. For further demolition of the right-wing "wrap themselves in the flag" appeals to patriotism, check out this article I wrote in 2012.

Some Tories are decent!

The reaction of a few old school Tories demonstrated that in a political world dominated by slimy PR men and vile mud slinging tactics, there are still a few dinosaurs who remember a better, more honourable way of doing politics.

Michael Heseltine was one of these decent Tories. He openly condemned the Daily Mail slur campaign as "unjustified" and accused them of "carrying politics to an extent that is just demeaning".

Another old school Tory called John Moore (who was also a cabinet minister in the Thatcher government), who studied under Ralph Miliband at the London School of Economics, went a lot further than Heseltine, accusing the Mail of telling lies about his former professor. Here's what he said:

"Ralph Miliband taught me and I can say he was one of the most inspiring and objective teachers I had. Of course, we had different political opinions but he never treated me with anything less than complete courtesy and I had profound respect for his integrity ... He had come here as a refugee, done his duty to his adopted country by serving in our Royal Navy during the war, become a great academic and raised a good family ... I saw him week after week and it beggars belief that the Daily Mail can accuse him of lacking patriotism. I never heard him ever say one word which was negative about Britain – our country ... The Daily Mail is telling lies about a good man who I knew. The people of this country are good and decent too. They do not want the Daily Mail attacking the dead relatives of politicians to make political points." [source]

A different approach from Tory HQ

The response from Tory party HQ was a lot more mealy mouthed. They instructed Tory MPs to say nothing more than statements along the lines of "any child would want to defend a parent". 

This is quite clearly an effort to manage the reaction in a way that allows the Tories to be seen to be responding to the negative public reaction to the slur attack, but to keep the political capital the Mail have given them by creating the caricature of "Red Ed defending his Stalinist Dad".

Instructing their MPs to simply state that any child would defend their parent, without condemning the lies, the underhand tactics of attacking a man by slurring a dead relative, or the distasteful gravestone pun is a rotten tactical move, which is akin to saying "even serial killers have loving families". This kind of carefully managed malice has the fingerprints of Lynton Crosby all over it. It is quite clear from this PR manouvre that top decision makers at Tory HQ are delighted about the political capital they've gained through the Daily Mail slurs, so they've decided to respond in the most mealy mouthed manner possible, so as to avoid undermining the useful public perception that Ed Miliband's dad was "evil".

Lack of respect for the dead

I've already demonstrated the disgusting hypocrisy of the Daily Mail in two of the previous sections (A newspaper that openly supported Adolf Hitler accusing other people of supporting "evil" regimes, A newspaper owned by a foreign resident tax-dodger accusing other people of being unpatriotic) but there is one other piece of hypocrisy that is really quite remarkable.

I'm sure everyone remembers the wave of cognitive dissonance inducing right-wing political correctness that swept the nation in the week following the death of Margaret Thatcher.

One of the loudest cheerleaders of this brand-new "mustn't criticise the dead" form of political correctness was the Daily Mail. They published one particularaly cringeworthy piece in which they described any criticism of Margaret Thatcher or her toxic legacies as "bilious hatred and lack of respect" and claimed it as a "disturbing new low in British life".
 
Just a few months later, they've taken to openly lying about a dead academic in order to score political points against his son, and printing an extremely distasteful "pun" next to a picture of his grave.

I'm sure we can all agree that this kind of utterly hypocritical and downright dishonest political point scoring marks a "disturbing new low in British life".

Two million people read this shit!

The thinking person knows that the Daily Mail is a revolting tabloid newspaper with a long history of promoting fascistic ideas, aimed at the simple-minded reactionary; the kind of intellectually sub-normal half-wit who lives their life in a constant state of fury at things they don't properly understand. People who are so incapable of critical thought that they are completely immune to cognitive dissonance. People who willingly buy into the Daily Mail's moral purity campaign against pornography (which has helped enormously with David Cameron's plans to censor the internet), whilst enjoying the disgracefully sexist and voyeuristic Daily Mail sidebar of smut and the regular appearance of articles which describe teenage girls (usually the children of celebrities) in overtly sexual language.

What the thinking person often fails to realise is that the Daily Mail has a circulation of around 2 million, and when combined with massive circulation of the criminal organisation know as the Murdoch gutter press, it is absolutely clear that us thinking people are now hopelessly outnumbered by these foaming right-wing reactionaries.

Fear 

If the motivation behind such a cowardly attack on the deceased parent of a politician tells us one thing above all others, it is that the attackers are motivated by fear. It is no surprise at all that this attack came within days of Ed Miliband's generally well received conference speech, in which he outlined a few almost left-wing ideas.

Had Ralph Miliband been alive to see his son's speech he would surely have been as disappointed as I was that all Ed offered was a pledge to cap the profits of the gouging foreign multinationals that run our energy infrastructure, rather than a pledge to begin renationalising our energy infrastructure in order to bring it back under democratic control.

But the idea of capping the obscene profiteering of the energy multinationals sent the Daily Mail apoplectic with rage, and the result was their bile-fest against Ed Miliband's dad.

It seems that, if he's got the rabid right-wing press foaming at the mouth and running scared, perhaps Ed Miliband is actually doing something more-or-less right after all?

 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.