When IPPR analysis of the Tory budget revealed that once again the Tories are rigging the economy against women, the vast majority of mainstream media outlets refused to even mention the evidence that the misogynistic Tory "war on women" is continuing unabated. Only The Guardian covered the story in any detail.
Fast forward just a few days and there's a huge mainstream media frenzy going on about Margaret Thatcher being long-listed to be the 'scientist' to appear on the new £50 note because of her 'contributions to science'.
Her claimed contribution being a short stint between 1949 and 1951 working for the processed food company that introduced soft-serve ice cream to the UK. A fact that has gradually been inflated over the years to her being the sole and outright inventor of Mr Whippy type ice cream.
Nobody seems to care that soft-serve ice cream was actually invented the decade before in the United States, and that the company Thatcher worked for had teamed up with the US giant Mr Softee to bring it to the UK.
So Tories are openly celebrating that they've managed to game the system to get Margaret Thatcher long-listed as a "scientist" based on the absurdly-easy-to-disprove urban myth that she invented soft serve ice cream, and the mainstream media are pushing out as many articles on the Thatcher-£50-ice cream story as possible in order to hoover up all the clicks.
If sense prevails then Thatcher should get nowhere near the final shortlist because her contribution to science is trivial at best, if not entirely fanciful.
But the real issue here isn't that Tories have gamed the system in a pathetic effort to replace legitimate British scientific legends (Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Rosalind Franklin, Francis Crick, Edmund Halley, Alan Turing, Ada Lovelace, Peter Higgs ...) with their ridiculously divisive political idol, it's that the mainstream media have made such a huge frenzy over this trivial story, after steadfastly ignoring the ruinous impact of Tory austerity dogma on the hundreds of thousands of poor and ordinary women just a few days ago.
People are literally starving, low-income workers are relying on food bank charity in ever greater numbers, hundreds of thousands of struggling single mothers are struggling to feed and clothe their kids, children are turning up to school so hungry and malnourished they can't concentrate on their work, and the Tory government is actively making this situation worse ... but fuck that eh? Who would even read about that, even if we published it, so here are 20 virtually identical churnalised articles about Thatcher, and ice cream, and £50 notes.
They're doing it because they think this Thatcher-£50-ice cream idiot fodder is way more likely to generate clicks and advertising revenue than the evidence that the Tory party is continuing with their grotesque and profoundly misogynistic economic attacks on the poorest women in society.
They're doing it because they think you prefer being distracted with utterly trivial nonsense like this than being informed about reality.
So shut up, don't think about or research anything for yourself, and eat your delicious Tory ice-cream straight from the mainstream media churn.
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.
On Tuesday February 20th 2018 Jeremy Corbyn gave a speech to the EFF confederation of British manufacturers about Labour's economic strategy. The response of the Evening Standard (edited by former Tory Chancellor George Osborne) was to publish a front page hatchet job describing the speech as a "red rag" to the City of London, and Jeremy Corbyn's economic strategy as a plot to turn London into "the last Soviet era city west of Pyongyang".
Shockingly hundreds of thousands of Evening Standard readers will have uncritically accepted this ludicrously hyperbolic appraisal of Jeremy Corbyn's speech without even referring to the source material and judging it for themselves.
So here's the speech so that you can judge for yourself whether George Osborne's minions at the Evening Standard were justified in claiming that Corbyn's speech is some kind of proof of his intention to turn Britain into a Soviet style state where private industry is banned, or the outline of a sensible economic strategy to undo the damage and reduce the private debt mountains caused by four decades of hard-right economic dogma:
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Industrial revolution
Britain was the birthplace of the industrial revolution and many great inventions from the cash point to the jet engine. Manufacturing continues to punch way above its weight accounting for 10% of output, but 44% of exports and a massive 70% of business investment in research and development.
Output per hour is £4 higher in manufacturing than the average for all sectors and the average annual earnings of someone working in manufacturing are nearly £4000 higher than average earnings from across the whole economy.
I know from my childhood the value of manufacturing jobs. My dad had one, as an electrical engineer who worked successively for Westinghouse, English Electric and GC. He enjoyed good, satisfying work with decent pay. The contributions of manufacturing of all of you to our economy cannot be understated, and the case for supporting more manufacturing jobs and industries is undeniable. And yet for too long Government hasn’t done enough to support you.
Lagging behind
Businesses are crying out for infrastructure investment. We are lagging behind other leading countries, but the Government simply isn’t delivering. That’s why we have pledged to create a National Transformation Fund to upgrade our transport, energy and digital infrastructure so that it is worthy of the 21st Century.
We must also invest in our people as well as our physical infrastructure. We have, on the one hand, university graduates who can’t find a suitable job while thousands of underemployed workers can’t get the skills they need to advance. And on the other hand, businesses are struggling to recruit workers with the right skills.
Time and again, businesses tell me how difficult it is to hire employees with the skills they need. And that far too often school leavers are unprepared for the workplace. Life-long learning Labour’s National Education Service will tackle that problem head-on, providing free, life-long learning to all, so that anyone can retrain or upskill at any point in their life.
We will put vocational education, too often the poor relation of our education system, at the heart of the National Education Service ensuring that science and technical learning starts early in primary schools.
Children should engage in practical learning from a young age not just in the classroom, but through play and activities.
And we will build links with industry into the National Education Service, to make sure that our education system keeps pace with the changing needs of our economy, expanding the type of training that qualifies under the Apprenticeship Levy so that businesses can actually use it for the skills they need.
The Tories’ approach to Brexit is threatening to turn our skills crisis into a catastrophe, especially for manufacturers who rely on recruiting skilled workers from overseas.
Labour said from the start; we would give an unconditional guarantee to EU citizens of their right to stay in the UK. Not just now but during the transition period as well.
This is not just because of the valuable role EU citizens play in our economy and in many of your businesses, but because they are people who have built a life here.
Unlike the Tories, we will not use people, mothers, fathers, neighbours, friends as bargaining chips.
Brexit position
Brexit is for many an emotive subject. But for business, it is first and foremost a practical matter.
To make decisions about where, when, perhaps even whether to invest, you need to know what markets you will have access to, what regulations and product standards you will be subject to, who you will be able to recruit, what will happen to our supply chains, which we all know are currently integrated across many national borders. That’s why Labour has from the start taken the practical position of accepting the result of the referendum and insisting the economy must come first.
We are leaving the EU, but our businesses must not withdraw from European markets. Business needs clarity and with four out of six of the Government’s “Road to Brexit” speeches already delivered, the Tories approach to Brexit is if anything less clear.
It’s time for the Cabinet to stop fighting and the Government to say where it wants to take the country.
And it’s not just in its approach to Brexit that the Government is failing to put the economy first. For too long manufacturing has been undervalued.
Those who make things
For all their warm words, whether Osborne’s “March of the Makers” or this government’s new-found enthusiasm for the words ‘industrial strategy’ for decades now, the Conservatives have created, encouraged and sustained a system that rewards those who lend and speculate over those who make things.
Thatcher’s progressive abolition of restrictions on financial trading culminating in the ‘Big Bang’ deregulation of 1986 placed the needs of speculative finance at the helm of British economic life.
When Thatcher took office the ratio of private debt to GDP was 60%. In the 30 years that followed, that trebled.
That increase wasn’t due to banks supporting a healthy and productive economy by lending to businesses represented here today. It was because banks started lending to households and inflating asset prices on a scale never seen before. At the same time, investment banks began trading new kinds of financial products, packaging up debt in increasingly opaque ways and becoming ever more removed from the real economy.
Now let me be clear, finance has a central and essential role to play in a functioning economy.
Oiling the wheels
Without access to finance, how would the entrepreneur or business person just starting out find the means to get their idea off the ground?
How would a growing company afford new equipment that will make their business more productive and more profitable? Or expand their activities by opening new premises?
Finance is the grease that oils the wheels of our economy, and without it, economic activity would seize up.
But when private debt is twice the size of the real economy, when traders no longer understand the products they are trading and banks are funding speculation, rather than productive investment, something has gone grossly wrong.
Banks should be helping the real economy not suffocating it. Let me remind you of the words of John Maynard Keynes when he said: “There cannot be a real recovery . . . until the ideas of lenders and the ideas of productive borrowers are brought together again . . . . Seldom in modern history has the gap between the two been so wide and so difficult to bridge’.
“ Keynes was writing about the Great Depression of the 1930s but the gulf between finance and the real economy may be even wider today.
Money flows away
We know the results, money flows away from the productive activities that you are engaged in that create jobs and exports to instead inflate asset prices, concentrating money in the hands of a few owners, not producers, while households become more reliant on borrowing.
And we end up with an economy with more risk, more volatility and more instability.
It was a “heads I win, tails you lose” gamble for the banks, not my words, but those of the Governor of the Bank of England. And we’re all still paying for the inevitable crash.
When the last Labour Government stepped in to shore up our major banks as they stood on the brink of collapse it prevented a total meltdown. But the public should have been given a say in how the banks, propped up by our money were being run.
And there should’ve been a much more concerted effort to rein in banks’ speculation to refocus on productive lending.
We need a fundamental rethink of whom finance should serve and how it should be regulated.
Sluggish economy
There can be no rebalancing of our distorted, sluggish and unequal economy without taking on the unfettered power of finance.
For forty years, deregulated finance has progressively become more powerful. Its dominance over industry, obvious and destructive; its control of politics, pernicious and undemocratic.
The size and power of finance created a generation of politicians who thought the City of London could power the whole economy.
Out of control financial wizardry and gambling were left barely regulated, while the real economies in once strong industrial areas were put into managed decline.
The welfare state was left to pick up the slack with sticking plaster redistribution to the people and places held back by the finance-led boom of predominantly the South East of England.
For a generation instead of finance serving industry, politicians have served finance.
We’ve seen where that ends, the productive economy, our public services and people’s lives being held hostage by a small number of too big to fail banks and financial institutions.
No more.
The real economy
The next Labour Government will be the first in 40 years to stand up for the real economy. We will take decisive action to make finance the servant of industry not the masters of all.
The reign of finance doesn’t stop at the gates of the City of London. Its extractive logic has spread into all areas of life with short-term performance and narrow shareholder value prioritised over long-run growth and wider economic benefit.
Take GKN, one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious engineering firms with a big factory in Telford where I grew up. It employs 6,000 workers across the UK, contributes an estimated £1.3 billion to the economy, paid a healthy £174 million in tax each year and invested £561 million in Research and Development in the UK alone.
And yet GKN is currently facing a hostile, allegedly debt-fuelled takeover bid by Melrose, a company with a history of opportunistic asset-stripping.
A quick buck
It’s an all too familiar story like when Kraft took over Cadburys. A valuable company could be sacrificed so that a few can make a quick buck.
We rightly praise the growth of companies like GKN and their location in the UK. And yet when we are faced with the possible destruction of that company, the Government refuses to act.
That’s why the next Labour government will broaden the scope of the ‘public interest test’ to include explicit consideration of the needs of our economy taking advantage of new freedoms outside of the EU to allow Government to intervene to protect our industrial base.
An important step towards reprogramming the economy, so that it works for the many, not the few.
Reprogramming our economy; to reward good business practices, reining in speculative finance so that it serves – not distorts the whole UK economy – backed up by a strong industrial strategy, as well as investing in our physical infrastructure and our people. This approach is vital if we are to develop our manufacturing strength. That is what the next Labour Government is committed to working with you to achieve.
Thank you very much.
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Anyone with a grain of sense should be able to see that Corbyn isn't outlining a plan to abolish private industry or the financial sector, he's just calling for a better, fairer system that is geared more towards those who make things than those who recklessly gamble with other people's money.
He's not saying there's no place for speculative finance, but that finance should be used to fund new businesses, new infrastructure, and better services, rather than for unregulated gambling on extraordinarily complex derivatives that even most of the traders don't even understand.
You could see why city traders who have enjoyed four decades of enriching themselves at the expense of the real economy would object to any effort to get them to invest in the real productive economy rather than gambling away with impunity, knowing that they'll be bailed out by the taxpayer again whenever they next fail.
But Corbyn's speech should be music to the ears of anyone who values the real economy above the selfish interests of a tiny clique of city speculators who see it as their right to live off the backs of the rest of us, and have us pay for their economic crises through austerity dogma while the government actually lavishes handouts on them.
And even if you think that the interests of city speculators should trump the needs of the real economy, you'd have to be absolutely clueless to accept the idea that a call for more financial investment in private sector manufacturing is some kind of Soviet style communist plot.
Sadly though, there are actually people thick enough to accept such brazen Tory propaganda at face value, hence eight years of ruinous Tory austerity dogma damaging the future economic potential of the UK, rather than anything even remotely resembling an actual plan to make sure the financial sector insolvency crisis can never happen again.
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.
Whatever your opinions on the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, it's very easy to see what he stands for.
There's obviously a lot of deceptive interference being run by right-wingers who despise Corbyn's political stance and want the public to believing in a terrifying caricature of the man rather than thinking about his actual policies, but if you haven't picked up the basics of what he stands for by now, you've really not been paying attention at all have you?
Here are three of the things Corbyn undeniably stands for:
When it comes to Theresa May, the question of what she stands for is almost impossible to answer.
If you judge her solely by her words she cares about things like social mobility, making Britain a fairer place, and making sure nobody gets left behind.
However if you judge her by her actions, she's clearly driven by a desire to reduce social mobility, and to make Britain a more unequal place where ever more people are getting left behind while the mega-rich elitists get richer at a faster rate than ever before.
Take May's crocodile tears in her inaugural speech over poor working class boys being the least likely to go to university of all. But then one of her very first actions as Prime Minister was to completely scrap the system of maintenance grants designed to help students from the poorest backgrounds!
Take Theresa May's claims that she wants to make Britain a fairer place. Then she continues with the hard-right wage repression and austerity policies that impoverish the poor and ordinary as the mega-rich literally double their wealth, and fall hardest of all on low-income women.
How can anyone see these brazen Tory economic attacks on students from poor backgrounds and low-income women as being remotely compatible with all of Theresa May's fine words about wanting to make Britain a fairer place?
Her speechwriters clearly believe that millions of British people are too lacking in critical judgement to spot the glaring contrast between the cruelty and elitism of Theresa May's policy decisions, and the deceptive saccharine slop they fill out her speeches with.
They honestly seem to believe that a significant proportion of the British electorate are so naive that they prefer to judge people on their fine words, rather than by their repulsive and highly contradictory actions.
May's willingness to say literally anything her speechwriters put in front of her, no matter how glaringly these fine words are contradicted by her actions, makes it seem difficult to discern what she actually believes in. However this willingness to deceive is actually one of the biggest clues of all.
Her willingness to engage in this kind of deception makes it clear that she's prepared to do pretty much anything to serve her own interests.
She knows that a certain demographic wants to hear noble words about her Christian faith and her desire to make Britain a fairer place, so that's what she says.
But she also knows there's another demographic who fear and despise social mobility, and they're the ones who pour millions in donations into the Tory party, so she makes a big show of deliberately attacking social mobility to keep them happy.
Anyone who can act in this grotesquely dishonest two-faced manner clearly has no real principles at all, and is guided solely by their own selfish self-interest.
Then there's Brexit: The way she campaigned in the weakest possible manner for Remain because keeping her job as Home Secretary was the number one priority from a career perspective (Remain win = natural successor to Cameron / Leave win = holder of high office of state and "safe pair of hands" candidate to replace Cameron); the way she immediately switched from Remain to hard Brexit extremism when it suited her career to do so; the way she bribed the DUP bigots into backing her so as to retain her grip on power; the way she continually dances to the tune of the secretive cabal of Tory hard Brexit fanatics because she knows that she's finished as Prime Minister the moment they turn on her.
In light of all of this, how is it even possible to see her as anything but the self-serving charlatan that she is?
This deceptive and self-serving behaviour is grotesque, but in a way it's actually understandable because Theresa May is a woman who has clearly been brought up immersed in the bizarre hard-right dogma that humans are essentially self-serving economic units (homo economicus) and that the more ruthlessly self-serving people are, the more efficiently the economy operates!
In a way Theresa May is actually the logical product of the four decades of fanatical hard-right dogma that has infested the British establishment ever since Margaret Thatcher introduced it in 1979: A political leader who sees the serving of her own personal self-interest, not as a vice, but as an expression of the highest possible virtue.
So she doesn't care how incredibly damaging it is that the UK is lumbered with such a weak, directionless, self-serving, and downright dishonest Prime Minister as we face up to the most complex and risky diplomatic challenge since the 1940s, her only real political principle is to do whatever it takes to serve her own personal self-interest.
She'll lie, and deceive, and evade responsibility for her actions, and repeatedly act against the best interests of the nation, because her priority will always be to do what is in her own selfish self-interest. And anyone who expected Westminster's four decade obsession with hard-right Thatcherite dogma to turn out any other way clearly wasn't paying attention to the "greed is good" ideological lunacy that underpins it 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.
We've all seen how right-wing people often use words like "lefty" and "socialist" as if they're insults, and how they continually try to smear centre-left democratic socialists with claims that they're "hard-left", "trots", and "Stalinists". But being left-wing is actually something to be proud of.
Left vs right
I'm going to start out by explaining the difference between left-wing and right-wing.
Apologies if you're already familiar with the distinction between socialism and capitalism, but there are an awful lot of people out there who genuinely don't seem to understand the difference because the only definitions of words like socialism that they ever come across in the mainstream media are pejorative and deeply misleading.
The more left-wing a person is the more they believe in public ownership, and the more right-wing a person is the more they believe that private individuals and corporations should run everything for their own profit.
Thus someone on the hard-left would think that pretty much everything should be run by the state. A centre-left person would think that things like hospitals, schools, public transport, the police, energy infrastructure and core national industries should be run in a democratically accountable not-for-profit manner. A centre-right person would believe in a minimal state where only basic functions like the police, army, schools, and courts should be run by the state. And hard-right extremists would believe that literally everything (including schools, the police, the army, and the courts) should be run in order to generate private profits.
Despite their continual posturing as economic moderates, the Tories are actually hard-right fanatics who have spent the last seven years pursuing policies that only a tiny percentage of the British public support. Policies like privatisation of the NHS (10%), state schools (6%) and police services (3%).
The overwhelming majority of British people fall somewhere between centre-left and centre-right on economic issues, and way off to the left of Tory party politicians.
Opinion polls have shown time and again that there is massive public support for centre-left policies like running the National Health Service as a not-for-profit public service (84%), as well as widespread support for other centre-left policies such as nationalisation of the railways (60%), water companies (59%), and national energy infrastructure (53%), but only a minority of people are economically far-left enough to think that telecommunications companies (30%) and airlines (14%) should be government run.
Nationalism
One of the favourite tropes right-wingers love to rely on is the idea that they're proud patriots, and the left are a bunch of anti-British traitors.
Not only is wrapping yourself in the flag to score cheap political points an incredibly ugly thing in its own right, economically right-wing people don't have a leg to stand on either.
Just ask yourself why Britain's nuclear expertise now belongs to the French, meaning we need to bribe the French and Chinese into building Hinkley Point C instead of building our own energy infrastructure? (It was privatised in 1995 and bought out by the French government in 2008).
Ask yourself why 74% of UK rail franchises are operated by foreign governments? (Because the rail network was privatised in 1994 and has been gradually cannibalised by foreign state rail companies while the UK remains the only country that is blacklisted from bidding to run UK rail contracts!).
Ask yourself why the Chinese and Qatari governments own chunks of previously public assets like our water supply and National Grid? (Because they were privatised by the Tories and then sold on to foreign governments by corporate profiteers).
Ask yourself why the system of underground fuel supply pipelines that was built at UK public expense is now operated by the governments of Oman and the UAE and being rented back for more cash than the sum it was sold off for? (Because in 2016 Theresa May decided to skip the corporate middleman and sell off these British public infrastructure direct to foreign governments).
Anyone who considers themselves a patriot and is moved by "let's take our country back" type rhetoric should be absolutely horrified that so much British public infrastructure is now being used as cash cow investments by foreign governments, and should be delighted with Jeremy Corbyn's plans to bring these chunks of vital public infrastructure back under British control.
But no. Somehow these self-styled patriots are willing to totally overlook the fact that the Tories have been systematically selling off our country just because they've been bamboozled into mindlessly following the Brexit flag that Theresa May opportunistically nicked off the likes of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson when it suited her career to do so.
The centre-left
Although many people try to dismiss my Another Angry Voice work as hard-left extremism, my views are very much in the centre-left economic territory.
Do I think that things like the National Health Service, schools, universities, national grid, and railways should be operated as democratically accountable not-for-profit public services for the national good?
Of course I do.
Do I think the government should operate factories making stuff like sunglasses, selfie-sticks, snack foods, children's toys, computer games, and Christmas cards?
Of course I don't.
The government obviously has a role to play in regulating these kinds of private industries: Making sure that consumers are protected from dangerous or defective products, ensuring that the companies pay their fair share of tax on their profits, and keeping markets competitive by working to avoid the development of monopolies, oligopolies and cartels. But the idea of government operated selfie-stick factories is just laughable isn't it?
I'm not ashamed to hold these left-wing opinions. I'm proud of it.
And I'm also quite proud of the British public for holding broadly similar economic views despite having had a four decade long immersion in hard-right propaganda thanks to the noxious influence of propaganda barons like Rupert Murdoch (S*n, Times), the Harmsworths (Daily Mail, Metro), and the Barclay brothers (Telegraph, Spectator), the hard-right ideological fanaticism of the Tories, and the craven subservience of the centre-right New Labour government between 1997 and 2010.
Workers' rights
One of the main achievements of the political left is the massive improvements in workers' rights.
The genuine political left gave us all of our modern workers' rights (the weekend, paid holidays, sick pay, parental leave, freedom from unfair dismissal and workplace discrimination ...) and continues to side with workers against unscrupulous and exploitative bosses.
The political right works to undermine and reverse these advancements. Consider the exponential growth in zero hours contracts and the gig economy since 2010, the fact that since 2010 UK workers have suffered the longest period of falling real terms wages since records began, the systematic Tory attacks on workers' rights, and their unlawful policy of forcing people to pay £1,200 fees in order to seek compensation from bad bosses.
One of the most dispiriting things about British politics is the existence of millions of ordinary working people who actually allow billionaire-owned right-wing propaganda rags (The S*n, Daily Mail, Telegraph, Express ...) to manipulate them into voting for the billionaire-bankrolled Tory party that continually sides with exploitative and profiteering bosses against ordinary working people like them, and all of the other working people in their communities.
Social liberalism
Aside from the fact that the traditionally left-wing Labour Party created confusion and widespread political apathy by adopting right-wing economic dogma between 1994 and 2015, one of of the other main reasons a lot of people get confused about the actual difference between left and right (socialism vs capitalism) is that the right-wing dominated media continually misrepresent the left as if it's some kind of identity politics driven campaign to police language and enforce political correctness, rather than an economic stance.
It's easy to see how this misrepresentation has taken hold, because economically left-wing people and social liberals are natural bedfellows.
Back in the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher was sucking up to murderous tyrants like General Pinochet (the brutal Chilean dictator) and Suharto (a million people died during his rise to power in Indonesia), the Tory government were arming Saddam Hussain in Iraq, and the Tory youth were printing "hang Nelson Mandela" posters and T-shirts, Jeremy Corbyn was busy being on the right side of history by campaigning against right-wing dictatorships, apartheid, and arms sales to Iraq.
Just look at the current situation. The Tories have learned that the tide is changing and that the right-wing can't maintain their racist, sexist and homophobic policies of the past, but it's impossible for them to hide deeply illiberal stuff like the fact that their current leader Theresa May has a long parliamentary track record of voting against equal rights for gay people, that 86% of the economic burden of the socially and economically catastrophic Tory austerity dogma has been loaded onto the shoulders of women, and their discriminatory and dehumanising mistreatment of disabled people in corporate disability denial factories.
Shifting demographics
The Tories and their right-wing attack dogs in the mainstream media have found themselves in a terrible pickle as bigoted right-wing attitudes are being rapidly consigned to the past as younger generations reject the racist, sexist and homophobic attitudes that were commonplace in previous generations.
The makeshift solution the Tories have come up with is to completely reverse reality and pretend that the left, which has traditionally championed equality and human rights, is somehow riven with bigotry, while turning a blind eye to the fact that Jeremy Corbyn was championing stuff like gay equality in the 1980s, back when the Tories were pushing their deeply homophobic Section 28 regulation against a backdrop of profoundly bigoted anti-gay rhetoric in right-wing propaganda rags like The S*n and the Daily Mail.
Thus the right-wing rhetoric against the left has grown increasingly confused. They know they can't attack Labour on their extremely popular economically left-wing manifesto commitments to renationalise public infrastructure and build more affordable housing (a policy the Tories have actually nicked for themselves as a desperate last ditch attempt to appeal to the youth vote with some Corbyn-lite investment economics!) because these policies are actually really popular with the majority of British people. So they're trying to attack Labour for being bigots, whilst simultaneously trying to appeal to their ageing blue-kip demographic who have spent decades rote learning bigoted tripe from the pages of the right-wing propaganda rags.
Condemning your political opponents as bigots in order to try to con the socially liberal younger generations into supporting your party, whilst simultaneously remaining fundamentally reliant on your core vote of profoundly illiberal blue-kippers who want nothing more than to bring back blue passports, corporal punishment and the routine beating of children in schools is quite a balancing act for the Tories to try, and it's one of the reasons the right-wing definition of what it is to be a lefty is getting ever more confused.
Apparently the centre-left are not only a bunch of politically correct, language-policing, snowflake millennials who insist on hiding in safe spaces, we're simultaneously a tyrannical bunch of bigoted, hard-left, brick-lobbing, Trotskyite extremists too!
In reality, aside from a few extreme outliers, the overwhelming majority of people on the left are social liberals who favour the public and democratic ownership of vital national infrastructure and services, and believe that there's nothing wrong with people getting rich through private enterprise as long as they play by the rules and pay their fair share of taxes.
Conclusion
So the next time you see someone using lefty as an insult, just remember that being a lefty is actually something to be proud of, and that the vast majority of people in Britain actually have centre-left economic views.
In fact, it's actually highly likely that the person trying to insult you for being a lefty has economically left-wing views too (like supporting the NHS, or believing the railways and energy companies would be better off under public ownership, or that workers should be entitled to stuff like holiday pay, sick pay, and compensation if they're unfairly sacked by their boss).
It's just that they've become so hopelessly confused by the bile and bias of the right-wing dominated media that they don't actually understand what it means to be left-wing at all, and use terms like lefty like insults, when they're actually compliments.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
Sometimes you see an article that is so excruciatingly bad it makes you wonder how the hell it got written, let alone published.
In this case the abomination of an article was written by an Lib-Dem politician called Annabel Mullin, and was somehow published in the Independent, which was actually one of the least-bad mainstream media sources during Theresa May's vanity election.
The article
The article is entitled "From Luciana Berger to Margaret Thatcher, women in politics are held to a completely different standard to men" which provides fair warning that it is likely to be an absolute abomination, but I clicked on it anyway in order to see what kind of mental gymnastics would be performed to conflate the experiences of two such different politicians from two different eras to draw such an obvious conclusion (that sexism in politics is still rife).
What I found was one of the most ridiculously out-of-touch articles I've ever had the misfortune of reading.
Luciana Berger
The article starts out by reciting a highly misleading right-wing interpretation of what happened after Liverpool Wavertree Labour Party elected pro-Corbyn representatives to 9 out of the 10 positions on their executive committee.
In reality one of these newly elected figures said that the local MP Luciana Berger should apologise for her role in the extremely damaging and spectacularly failed Anyone But Corbyn coup last summer.
Annabel Mullin decided (either through ignorance, or deliberate political partisanship) to tell a different story, that it was the whole Executive Committee who formally demanded that Berger abandon her own political views.
These kinds of extremely exaggerated distortions of events have become very familiar to Labour Party members, most of whom will be familiar with the extreme exaggerations over brick-gate.
The author then weaves her distorted and politically partisan version of events in Liverpool Wavertree into the ridiculous narrative that Berger was only asked to apologise because of a "chilling" effort to force her into changing position because she is a woman, rather than because she betrayed the will of the party membership by trying to overthrow the leader they'd elected less than a year previously with an anti-democratic bullying campaign.
This shoehorned version of events doesn't even make sense at the most rudimentary levels. Mainly because other coup-plotter MPs who happen to be male have also been told (often by women) that they've betrayed the party and should apologise, but also because Luciana Berger has already changed position and aligned herself firmly behind the party leadership.
If anyone is treating Berger with sexist contempt here, it's the author for having completely ignored Berger's own opinion ("The Labour Party In Liverpool Wavertree is a vibrant, democratic organisation with around 1,800 members. Quite rightly, the members elect officers of the party to oversee its work. We are united in wanting to secure a new General Election and the return of a Labour government under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn as soon as possible .. it is thanks to the hard work of local members and a revitalised national party under Jeremy Corbyn. It is a fantastic foundation for the next General Election, whenever it comes.") in order to construct a highly misleading account of what actually happened.
Instead of listening to and respecting Berger's opinion, this appalling Lib-Dem has ignored it completely in order to weave a dishonest and demeaning "poor ickle woman" narrative.
I know I'm hardly an expert on the subject, but isn't rendering women voiceless and using them as objects in your own warped fantasies a classic example of sexism?
Hasn't Annabel Mullin just clearly proven that it's not only men who can be guilty of misogyny?
Margaret Thatcher
The misleading drivel about Luciana Berger pales into insignificance when it comes to the following bit about Margaret Thatcher, which revolves around the decision to not erect a £300,000 statue of Thatcher, which was, according to the author, motivated purely by sexism.
The author either deliberately avoids mentioning, or is shockingly ignorant of a number of crucial points including:
- It is customary to wait at least 10 years after the death until statues of political figures are erected, which means erecting a monument to Thatcher before 2023 would break protocol.
- Thatcher's family didn't like the statue and expressed their objections.
In order to force the statue decision into her sexism narrative Mullin not only decided to ignore the points above, she also decided to write a Thatcher hagiography in which Thatcher is fully "deserving" of having normal protocol broken and a statue that her family actually hate erected.
Apparently Thatcher's fixation with hard-right economics which caused mass unemployment, the decline of British manufacturing, the establishment of powerful privatised cartels in the former public utilities, the shocking waste of the Scottish oil bonanza, the loss and non-replacement of social housing stock, eye-watering interest rates that Mullin could never imagine paying on her mortgage, the reckless deregulation of the financial sector, and an apathy inducing hard-right political consensus that's only just coming to an end with the SNP in Scotland and the Corbyn surge in England and Wales.
No. Thatcher didn't deliver a toxic brew of neoliberalism, privatisation mania, centralisation of executive power, financial market deregulation ... she delivered wonderful and unquestionable "economic stability".
Tell people in the still-broken mining, steel working, ship building and train building communities of the north, midlands, and South Wales that Thatcher delivered them "economic stability" and see what reaction you get.
I'd like to see Annabel Mullin go and tell some of the wives and children of the millions of proud working men who were thrown on Thatcher's scrap heap to their faces that she deserves a statue so much that she needs to be held to a different standard to men, so that her effigy can be erected long before the usual 10 year waiting period is over.
It's difficult to imagine that this disgracefully out-of-touch Thatcher hagiography was actually authorised by the Lib-Dems, unless they're actually intent on chasing away even more of their voters than they already have.
Sexism in politics
One of the worst things about this absolute abomination of an article is that the subject is actually really important and deserves to be written about with respect, care and consideration.
- Just look at the abuse suffered by Diane Abbott during the election after she made a spectacle of herself by getting her numbers mixed up, and contrast it with the ridiculous blunders by male politicians like Philip Hammond and Michael Gove, and ask yourself why the Tory posh boys' blunders didn't make the headline news bulletins, which were reserved for the black, female from a non-establishment background.
- Just look at the vile misogynistic comments that are lobbed around every time a female politician (of whatever political persuasion) hits the headlines.
- Just look at the continuing under-representation of women in politics, and especially the under-representation of women from working class backgrounds.
- Just look at the way the few female politicians with non-elitist regional accents (Angela Rayner, Laura Pidcock, Diane Abbott) have been pilloried and abused as "thick" for not talking in upper-class cut glass accents.
Recycling a misleading right-wing interpretation of what happened in Liverpool Wavertree and then idealising Margaret Thatcher in order to demand a protocol-shattering statue that would be seen as a grotesque insult by millions of women across the UK is a truly shocking effort to address the vitally important issue of political sexism, especially in light of the absolute mountain of real evidence that Mullin has glossed over or ignored completely.
Blinkered elitism
Perhaps the worst thing about the article is the way that the author ignores the lived experiences of real women in order to create her elitist narrative.
Mullin started off by ignoring Luciana Berger's own views in order to recycle the hard-right Guido Fawkes/Daily Mail version of events in Liverpool Wavertree, then she went on to ignore the plight of the millions of actual women who suffered terrible deprivations because of Thatcher's ideological agenda.
Mullin doesn't have a word of condolence for the hundreds of thousands of miners' and steel workers' wives who suffered impoverishment, and often even the breakdown of their marriages because of Thatcher's ideological agenda; she doesn't have a word of condolence for the women who have grown up in blighted, high-unemployment, low-opportunity former industrial towns; she doesn't have a word of condolence for the women who lost their homes when Thatcher let mortgage interest rates spike above 20% not once, but twice; she doesn't have a word of condolence for the millions of women who are suffering under this latest incarnation of callous Thatcherite hard-right economics called "austerity".
No. Mullin lives in such an insulated bubble of wealth and privilege that she expects us to shed tears of pity for Margaret Thatcher because she doesn't get a protocol-shattering statue!
You see, in the mind of privileged elitists like Mullin, the real victims of the sexist political system are not the ordinary women who have suffered 86% of the burden of austerity; it's not the ordinary women who suffered the appalling consequences of Thatcherism; it's not the 1950s WASPI women who have had years worth of their pensions snatched away by a callous and uncaring political elite; it's not the women from working class backgrounds who find themselves locked out of the political system, and then cruelly ridiculed as "thick" for their regional accents if they somehow defy the odds and make it.
No, the real victim of political sexism in the minds of people like Annabel Mullin is a stone effigy of Thatcher!
The conclusion
The conclusion to the article is one of the most irritatingly delusional and condescending things I've read in weeks. The author actually concludes that "we must create a new home for those who, like me, currently find that speaking up for what is sensible feels more and more radical".
Openly declaring yourself one of the only ones talking sense in a world of madness is a very poor look even if you have some shred of justification to make such a claim, but after such a parade of senseless elitist drivel it's a display of absolutely ludicrous posturing.
Thankfully though there is already a home for people like Mullin.
It's a home for people who are hopelessly out of touch with the public mood; it's a home for people who care more about the welfare of unwanted statues than they do about millions of ordinary women; it's a home for people who mindlessly recycle right-wing propaganda and write uncritical hagiographies of the woman who did so much damage to the UK economy and political system; it's a home for people with no real political principles; and it's a home for people with an ability to render incredibly important issues unlikeable and annoying simply because they explain them in such outlandishly disengaging ways.
This home for people like Annabel Mullin is the Liberal Democrat party, and she's perfectly welcome to stay there and continue making them look as out-of-touch with reality as they are.
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