A compendium of Tory corruption

Some people don't seem to grasp the sheer scale of Tory corruption, so here are details of just a fraction of what we already know about (with sources):

🔵 Tory MP Owen Paterson was caught red-handed breaking the ministerial code of conduct by lobbying for his employers within government. Randox were paying Paterson £100,000 per year, he sat in on ministerial meetings about the company, and they ended up getting £600 million in Covid contracts. 

🔵 A cross-party committee of MPs found that Paterson had brazenly defied the rules, and ordered him to serve a 30 day suspension from parliament. Instead of accepting the findings of the Paterson investigation Boris Johnson ordered Tory MPs to vote through controversial legislation designed to tear down the parliamentary standards authority, and let Paterson off scot free!

🔵 Tory leader of the House of Commons Jacob Rees-Mogg was one of the leading advocates of using the Owen Paterson scandal as an excuse to demolish the parliamentary standards authority. In 2018 Rees-Mogg used his company Saliston to lend himself almost £6 million at significantly below the market rate of interest, and he didn't even bother to declare these loans on the register of MPs interests (no wonder he was so keen to tear down the parliamentary standards authority!).

🔵 Boris Johnson has been caught up in multiple scandals himself, dating back to before he even became Prime Minister. There was the £126,000 in public cash paid to his mistress Jennifer Arcuri without any declaration of their relationship as one of Johnson's registered interests; the dodgy loan he received to decorate his Downing Street flat; his false declaration of a luxury holiday in Mustique; and his recent holiday in the luxury Spanish villa owned by a tax-dodging company operated by former Tory MP Zac Goldsmith, who Johnson gifted a lifetime peerage in the unelected House of Lords after he lost his parliamentary seat in the 2019 General Election. 

🔵 On the subject of the House of Lords, all sixteen of the Tory Party's former treasurers over the last seven years have been handed unelected lifetime peerages in the House of Lords, after having donated over £3 million each to the Tory operation! 

🔵 Tory politicians have been handing out untendered PPE contracts like sweeties, to such an extent that former Health Secretary Matt Hancock's former pub landlord, and his dad's mate, and his sister even got lucrative £multi-million contracts. Hancock 'accidentally' failed to include his 20% stake in his sister's PPE contract winning company on the register of MPs interests! 

🔵 The Tory government was found to have broken the law in handing a £560,000 coronavirus contract to former colleagues of Tory minister Michael Gove and Boris Johnson's ex-adviser Dominic Cummings.

🔵 Another of the major winners of this no-tender PPE bonanza was Meller Designs, which was a fashion designer until they bagged £160 million worth of PPE contracts, boosting their annual profits from £144k to £13 million. The owner is a regular Tory Party donor called David Meller, who personally lobbied the unelected Tory minister James Bethell for PPE contracts. 

🔵 P14 Medical was turned from a failing company into an absolute cash cow via a whopping £276 million in untendered PPE contracts. The owner Steve Dechan, a Tory party councillor in Stroud, used his profits from the Tory PPE bonanza to buy himself a luxurious £1.5 million country house in the Cotswolds. 

🔵 A company called Clipper Logistics got in on the untendered PPE bonanza with a £1.3 million contract. No surprise that the owner of the company is a major Tory Party donor called Steve Parkin. 

🔵 Another major Tory donor called Haraldur Agustsson bagged over £100 million worth of untendered PPE contracts across his companies Globus Shetland and Alpha Solway. 

🔵 After raking in over £1 billion in untendered coronavirus contracts, Tory-linked firms repaid the favour by kicking back a small percentage of their gains via £615,000 in donations to the Tory party!

The Tory minister who oversaw so many of the astounding no-tender PPE contracts was the unelected House of Lords stooge James Bethell who failed to declare 27 meetings with private health companies that went on to rake in over £1 billion in untendered covid contracts and then made up loads of nonsensical and contradictory excuses as to why he couldn't hand over his phone after he was caught red-handed using private WhatsApp chats to conduct government business.

🔵 The Tory government has pumped an astonishing £37 billion into the privatised shambles that is their Test and Trace operation, which has become the largest publicly funded corporate feeding frenzy in British medical history. It's been hit by ballooning costs, missed targets, 600 million lost covid tests, and scandalously high consultancy fees. The Public Accounts Committee have slammed it as an unimaginable waste of money that's had "no clear impact". No worries for Dido Harding who has presided over this absolute shambles, because she's married to the government's "anti-corruption tsar", Tory MP John Penrose!

🔵 The corporate outsourcing giant Serco have been lavished with literally hundreds of millions of pounds worth of Test and Trace contracts. Their CEO is Rupert Soames, brother of former Tory MP Nicholas, and grandson of Winston Churchill!

🔵 Former Tory DWP minister Iain Duncan Smith got in on the private medical pilfering, chairing a government taskforce that produced a report advising the government to give the green light to non-alcoholic hand gel, while earning a £25,000 per year salary from Britain's largest producer of non-alcoholic hand gel (a salary he forgot to declare as an interest in the report). 

🔵 More than a quarter of Tory MPs use the practice of second-jobbing in order to boost their salary of £82,000 (plus lavish expenses).

🔵 In 2015 the Tory government scrapped the requirement that MPs who take second jobs register their employment contracts with parliamentary authorities, which means that the employment details of every single one of the second-jobbing MPs across parliament are secret.

🔵 Perhaps the most egregious Tory moonlighting MP is Ben Bradley who claims salaries for 60 hours per week on top of his MPs duties. The average MP works 69 hours a week, so if Bradley's not shirking his responsibilities as an MP, we're expected to believe that he's putting in 129 hours a week at work, leaving him less than five and a half hours per day for sleeping, eating, travel, leisure, shopping, personal hygiene, and family life. All combined! 

🔵 Tory MP Mark Pawsey has a moonlighting £30,000 per year second job as chairman of the Foodservice Packaging Association. He leads Westminster’s All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Packaging Manufacturing Industry (no conflict of interests there eh?), and he's repeatedly spoken during parliamentary debates to criticise regulation of the food packaging industry, and to decry efforts to make retailers and manufacturers contribute more to the cost of recycling their plastic waste.

🔵 Tory MP Alun Cairns was hired on a lucrative £15,000 salary (more than £200 per hour) by a company that was part of a consortium that was awarded a £10 million coronavirus contract the following month.

🔵 More than 50 former Tory ministers have taken up private sector jobs in sectors they covered during their time as government ministers, many of them are still in parliament as MPs, or in the vast unelected crony club that is the House of Lords.

🔵 Tory Minister Nadhim Zahawi banked £1.3million from oil company Gulf Keystone Petroleum while working as an MP, but kept his second job earnings secret via a parliamentary loophole that allowed him to avoid declaring the payments by diverting them through a consultancy company he established with his wife.

🔵 At least 90 Tory MPs also boost their incomes by over £10,000 per year as private landlords, and many of these exploitative landlord MPs have repeatedly voted against proposals to regulate the private rental sector, and 72 of these landlord-MPs voted down legislation to require landlords to make private rented accommodation "fit for human habitation".

🔵 34 Tory MPs have accepted political donations from firms linked to the Russian oligarch Viktor Fedotov, whose dodgy dealings were revealed in the Pandora Papers. Not a single one of these donations has been returned. 

🔵 The Pandora Papers also revealed that the unelected Tory lord Paul Deighton, a former government minister, had failed to declare a load of his secret offshore investments.

🔵 Former Attorney General Geoffrey Cox has been raking in literally £millions for legal consultancy work, which included representing the British Virgin Islands tax haven, while arguing against closing tax loopholes in parliament! 

🔵 In 2004 Cox bought a £535,000 Battersea flat, relying on public funds to pay his £1,750 a month mortgage repayments. He now rents the property out for about £1,000 a week, living in a different London flat so he can claim £1,900 a month in public cash to pay the rent! 

🔵 Former Prime Minister David Cameron was caught lobbying the Tory government on behalf of a company called Greensill Capital, who were paying him absolutely vast consultancy fees. The government then over-rode their own £50 million limit on emergency Covid loans to award Greensill a whopping £400 million, all of which was loaned to companies associated with billionaire Tory-donor Sanjeev Gupta. Greensill went bankrupt a matter of months later! 

🔵 Tory MPs have been taking thousands of pounds worth of freebies and junkets from gambling companies and the gambling lobby then making pro-gambling statements in parliament and producing pro-gambling advertorials for websites like ConservativeHome. Probably the worst offender is Tory MP Laurence Robertson who earns £24,000 per year (at £200 per hour) as a gambling lobbyist who argued against stronger regulation of the gambling industry in parliament, then had the barefaced cheek to claim that there was no conflict of interest. 

🔵 The leader of the Scottish Conservatives Douglas Ross "forgot" to declare £28,000 in earnings from his second job, but insists that it's all just a big mistake.

This lot is just the visible tip of the Tory corruption iceberg!

If you're aware of any other Tory corruption scandals, feel free to add details in the comments.

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Is there any proposition vile or ludicrous enough that the Tory mental gymnasts won't defend it?

Let's not pretend there's not a common human tendency to resort to absurd post hoc justifications for outrageous behaviour when it's our own, or perpetrated by those we support.

This tendency exists, and anyone who has ever even attempted to develop a rational worldview must have confronted their own tendencies to perform this kind of mental gymnastics routine.

Post hoc mental contortionism to defend the indefensible has been a feature of discourse for as long as any of us can remember, but in recent months there's been a constant stream of Tories willing to take the most absurd and demeaning positions to defend the outrageous behaviour of their political tribe.

There's never been a government full of people willing to absolutely demean themselves by defending the utterly indefensible.

The most obvious and glaring example that springs immediately to mind is the absurd story that Dominic Cummings engaged in a lockdown-defying 30 miles each way to the historic beauty spot of Barnard Castle in order to test his eyesight.

The idea that you'd conduct an eyesight test by packing your family into a car and driving them around the country is as absurd as the concept that undertaking such a reckless public-endangering test was an excuse to defy lockdown measures.

But a whole stream of Tories were herded onto social media to announce how convincing they'd found Cummings' explanation, and that it was 'time to move on'.

But the biggest absurdity of all came when Tory government minister Michael Gove told a right-wing radio interviewer that he too had conducted this kind of radically dangerous driving-eyesight test, which they both had a jolly good laugh about because deceiving the public with absolute bullshit is clearly some kind of lovely in joke for ex private school Tories to chuckle over.

On the subject of Michael Gove, he was at the centre of another one of these frenzies of Tory mental gymnastics when his wife posted a picture of his bookshelf, which proudly displayed the work of the Holocaust-denier David Irving, and the outrageous bible of racist pseudo-science, The Bell Curve.

It's not hard to imagine the absolute cacophony of outrage from the Tories had a figure from the left, like Jeremy Corbyn for example, been found with the work of racists and Holocaust-deniers on his bookshelf.

Yet the Tory reaction to Gove's bookshelf was to snap into ultra-defensive mode, and suddenly begin portraying Holocaust-denial as 'required reading actually' and even deriding critics of Holocaust-denial as Nazis!

Another Tory figure to have provoked numerous impromptu displays of Tory mental contortionism over the last few months is their beloved cult leader Boris Johnson.

When he skipped five consecutive COBRA meetings in the crucial early stages of the pandemic, the Tory mental contortionism circus pretended that it was supposedly perfectly normal (no Prime Minister in history before Johnson has skipped five COBRA meeting in a row during a national emergency), and that he was actually in the right to focus on other issues, despite skipping one of them to lark about with a Chinese dragon!

When Johnson publicly bragged about defying social distancing rules (and basic self-preservation) by shaking hands with coronavirus patients, and then presented "take it on the chin" as the preferable option to "draconian measures" like ... erm ... actually attempting to contain the virus, the Tories put on their cognitive clown outfits again and utterly demeaned themselves by jumping through all manner of hoops to defend the ridiculous behaviour and reckless rhetoric of their cult leader.

Then there was the absolutely ludicrous Tory decision to completely sideline the government's own scientific advisers in order to replace the clear and concise slogan "Stay At Home", with a sequence of nonsense verbiage like "Stay Alert By Washing Your Hands!".

Suddenly Tories were flocking onto social media to pretend that this absolute gibberish was perfectly clear and intelligible, despite the fact that if you'd said "Stay Alert By Washing Your Hands!" to anyone pre-2020, they'd have assumed you were having a stroke and called you an ambulance.

And now we've got the absolutely repulsive spectacle of Tories tying themselves in knots to actually defend monuments to slave traders.

When the people of Bristol took matters into their own hands, after six interminable years of political incompetence, to remove the statue of Britain's most notorious slave-trader Edward Colston, the Tories complained bitterly about the lawlessness and the vandalism.

But then when Tower Hamlets Council removed the statue of slave-trader Robert Milligan, in a completely calm, lawful, and safe manner, the Tories erupted in paroxysms of outrage again.

It turns out that the lawlessness and vandalism objection they started with was just a cover for their real objection, which is apparently that they just like statues of racists, because they get some kind of perverse dopamine kick out of the fact that other people find the memorialisation of Tory slave traders and Tory fascist sympathisers abhorrent and disturbing.

But they'll just keep on inventing one post hoc justification after another to defend what can essentially be boiled down to statue trolling.

The latest post hoc excuse is that they're simply defending history, but where on earth were they when their own party was using austerity extremism as an excuse to shut down 800 libraries, annihilate funding for museums, and trash public investment in history departments and history education at every level of the education system?

They clearly don't really give a damn about the nation's history, or they'd have raised concerns over the last decade of Tory historical vandalism, it's just the latest contortion required of them by the leaders of the CCHQ freakshow circus.

In a matter of months the Tories have proven themselves willing to excuse all kinds of nonsense and depravity, from pretending that driving a vehicle on public roads with failing eyesight constitutes reasonable behaviour, to vehemently defending Holocaust-denial as if it constitutes required reading. And from laughing off the actual Prime Minister mocking his own government's social distancing measures, to publicly eulogising slave-traders!

As a nation we've lumbered ourselves with the most inept and cultish government in British history, with piss-witted simpletons in almost every single crucial position, and no matter how badly they keep on screwing up, we're stuck with them for another four years thanks to their 80 seat majority.

There's very little we could do to rid ourselves of them, and the increasingly bizarre and contorted displays of mental gymnastics they're willing to perform to defend the outrageous words and actions of their own cult illustrates the fact that it simply doesn't matter how bad things get, they'll just spout total gibberish, and continue to get away with it.

They know the gibberish they're spouting is absolute bollocks. We know it's absolute bollocks. And worst of all they know that we know it's absolute bollocks.

But they also know there's basically nothing we can do about it, so they're actually getting a perverse kick out of doing stuff like defending the indefensible, excusing Holocaust-denial, and eulogising slave-traders, because they believe that a nation that elected an incompetent, bone idle bigot like Boris Johnson as their leader will never hold them to account for any of it.

Hopefully the British public with eventually grow tired of this lamentable Tory freakshow of mental contortionism, and get rid of them.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. My online work will always remain free to access, but you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing, if you feel like it.

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It's not the drugs, it's the hypocrisy

Two contenders in the Tory leadership race have now admitted to taking drugs. Michael Gove has owned up to snorting cocaine on multiple occasions, while Rory Stewart admits that he smoked opium.

Now I'm certainly not going to moral high horse about drug use because I'm a strong believer in rational drugs policy aimed at regulation, harm reduction, and treatment rather than the prohibitionist orthodoxy of unregulated black markets, criminalisation, and imprisonment.

But it's impossible not to clock the absolute hypocrisy of these men.

They've both served in a militantly prohibitionist Tory regime for nine years which not only maintained draconian punishments for possession and use of the very Class A substances like cocaine and opioids they've admitted using, but actually introduced a raft of harsh new punishments on substances like the mild stimulant khat (which is mainly used by the Somalian immigrant community) despite their own scientific advisers pointing out that khat is such a mild stimulant that it would be inappropriate and disproportionate to criminalise it [source].

One of the most absurd new anti-drugs laws these hypocritical Tories supported was Theresa May's kafkaesque legislation banning all drugs that haven't even been invented yet!

These hypocrites believe in other people suffering severe criminal punishments for possession of mild and virtually harmless stimulants and even drugs that don't even exist yet, but feel absolutely fine snorting cocaine and smoking opioids themselves!

These Tories firmly believe in criminalisation and imprisonment for thousands upon thousands of people from poor and ordinary backgrounds for using much less harmful and addictive substances such as cannabis, magic mushrooms, khat, MDMA, and mephedrone, while they've used much more harmful and addictive drugs like cocaine and opiods without the slightest worry that they'd ever end up in jail for it.

Politicians like Gove and Stewart support the draconian prohibitionist orthodoxy because they quite simply don't believe that the laws apply to people like them in the elitist establishment class.

As far as they're concerned the drug laws exist in order to keep the "lower orders" in line, while the wealthy and privileged like them can do whatever they like with absolute impunity.

So it's not the fact that they've used drugs, it's the sheer hypocrisy of these wannabe Prime Ministers actively supporting harsh prohibitionist drug laws for ordinary people because they know that the rules simply don't apply to elitists like them.

Who on earth wants to be led by people who believe in one harsh and punitive set of rules for the majority of us, and another extremely lax and forgiving set of rules just for them and their elitist mates?

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Jacob Rees-Mogg's anti-intellectual fans want him purged from politics because he's got a degree!

Anyone who has ever taken a look through the various Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson fan pages on Facebook will be familiar with the racism, bigotry, anti-Muslim hate, xenophobia, anti-immigrant abuse, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, lionisation of far-right ideologues like Tommy Robinson and the Britain First hate group, extremist rhetoric, threats of violence & civil war, and gleeful fantasies about the public execution of their political opponents [sources 1,2,3,4,5,6] ... but in this article I'm going to take a quick look at something that is somewhat less sinister because it's quite frankly hilarious.

 

Anti-intellectual purges of the political system are actually a rarity
on a page where abuse, bigotry, racism, threats, conspiracy theories,
and fantasies about the public execution of political opponents
are the norm.

 Between all the abuse, bigotry and threats of violence that can be found in the Jacob Rees-Mogg Supporters' Group on Facebook, there's an extraordinary thread in which numerous Rees-Mogg supporters fantasise about an  anti-intellectual purge of the political system where anyone with a university degree is thrown out of the House of Commons and barred from standing for election!

The obvious problem of course is that their own demagogue Jacob Ress-Mogg would be one of the victims of this anti-intellectual cull of MPs as a result of the undergraduate degree in history he obtained from Trinity College Oxford in 1991 (in the days before the neoliberal-fixated Westminster establishment club introduced staggeringly high tuition fees designed to enforce a lifetime 9% education tax on those with parents unable to stump up tens of thousands per child to cover the fees).

The absurdity of wishing their own hero out of parliament because he's fallen foul of their anti-intellectual standards is hilarious, but it's also illustrative of the way anti-intellectualism is spreading like wildfire on the political right.

Surely everyone remembers Michael Gove's extraordinary "we've had enough of experts" appeal to anti-intellectualism during the EU referendum debate, and how experts and academics were almost completely sidelined in favour of fact-averse rhetoric-spewing Tories on either side of the debate?

And there's a reason the political right love to tell people to trust their base emotional instincts rather than looking to the kind of facts, evidence, logic, and reason that people like experts and university professors tend to use.

The reason for this anti-intellectual propaganda is that facts, evidence, logic, reason, and observable reality tend to defy their far-right worldview.

The extreme-right need people to reject facts, evidence, reason, science, and logic because reality has a left-wing bias.

If people actually listened to the evidence then it would be obvious that quitting the largest free trade area on the planet with an unprecedented shambles of a Tory government running the show is bound to end up causing a socio-economic chaos.

If people actually listened to the evidence then endlessly giving away not-for-profit public services to private profiteers so they can rent them back to us at way above the original cost is a bloody awful idea.

If people actually listened to reason they'd pin the blame for declining living standards and collapsing public services on 9 years of ruinous Tory austerity dogma, wage repression, social security cuts, and deliberate under-investment in public services and infrastructure projects, and never buy the extreme-right snake oil explanation that immigrants, the EU, political correctness, and human rights are somehow to blame.

So in order to dissuade people from thinking along these lines the extreme-right have to continually spread mistrust of experts and academics.

They tell us "why believe the experts when you can believe your own gut instincts instead?"

And they tell us "don't trust academics because they're actually terrifying lefties spreading dangerous "cultural Marxism" in order to destroy white western civilisation".

The Nazis used exactly the exact same techniques to justify their ideological purges of academia and the business world, and in fact the whole "cultural Marxism" theory the extreme-right use to discredit expertise and academia these days is lifted straight from Nazi Germany where it was called Kulturbolschewismus and blamed squarely on the Jews.

So yeah, the absolute ignorance of anti-intellectual right-wingers calling for their own demagogue to be purged from politics because he's got a degree is hilarious, but the anti-intellectual ideology that underpins this absurd nonsense is actually quite concerning.

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Yet more biased coverage from the supposedly impartial BBC

If you want to get an idea of the astounding levels of bias in BBC broadcasting, just consider the disparity in coverage between their wall to wall negative coverage of Jeremy Corbyn attending a Holocaust event eight years ago in which the Jewish Holocaust survivor Hajo Meyer presented a talk called "the misuse of the Holocaust for political purposes", and the absolute silence they've maintained on the fact that three senior Tories, including a government minister (Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Michael Gove), had meetings with the extreme-right white-supremacist fake news merchant Steve Bannon just last week.

Why is it that the BBC is so desperate to draw the British public's attention to an event that happened eight years ago in an attempt to link Corbyn to the views that were exrpessed there, but so keen to keep the British public in the dark about three of the main front runners to replace Theresa May as Tory leader all holding secretive meetings last week with an extreme-right fake news merchant who told the French neo-fascist Front National to wear their racism as a "badge of honour" and helped unify the swastika-waving "Jews will not replace us" Alt-right maniacs with the Trump campaign.

Defining anti-Semitism

Whether you agree with Hajo Meyer's claims of parallels between the Nazi Holocaust and the treatment of the Palestinian people in Gaza, his statement obviously makes a complete mockery of the IHR definition of anti-Semitism that defines such comparisons as anti-Semitism.

If your definition of anti-Semitism is so warped that it actually categorises survivors of the Holocaust as anti-Semites for equating the suffering they endured in the past with the suffering of Palestinian people in the present, then it's obviously completely messed up, and simply intended as a method of repressing and silencing political criticism of Israel by redefining it as anti-Semitism.

Any definition of anti-Semitism that allows non-Jewish supporters of the Israeli occupation to silence and banish Jewish people who are opposed to the Israeli occupation from the Labour party clearly has nothing to do with combating anti-Semitism, and everything to do with policing political speech in order to prevent criticism of the Israeli government.

And anyone who thinks that Corbyn sharing a stage with a Jewish Holocaust survivor eight years ago is somehow far more newsworthy than three very senior Tory MPs colluding with a vile extreme-right fake news merchant just last week, well they must be absolutely cracked, mustn't they?

Why is the BBC so skewed?

Under enormous pressure from the mainstream media Jeremy Corbyn has actually issued an apology for attending the event eight years ago because, in his words, views were expressed there that he didn't "accept or condone". However absolutely no pressure whatever has been applied to Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg, or Michael Gove to apologise for colluding with a bigoted extreme-right fake news merchant just last week.

There are several big reasons for this staggering disparity. The first is Corbyn and Labour's naive attempts to actually deal with the anti-Semitism allegations by conducting inquiries, consulting, debating, and expelling those who are found guilty of anti-Semitism.

One might have imagined that this is the correct type of approach, but in the modern media environment it's demonstrably not.

Witness the way the Tory party has simply stonewalled all calls for an investigation into rampant anti-Muslim bigotry in the Tory ranks. Despite pleas for an urgent investigation by the Muslim Council of Britain and the senior Tory politician Sayeeda Warsi, they simply ignore the problem, and the story barely appeared in the news, let alone dominating headlines for week, after week, after week like the Labour anti-Semitism row.

The moral of this disgusting story is obvious: When dealing with the mainstream press, outright denial and stonewalling of complaints is infinitely less likely to generate headlines than actual efforts to deal with contentious issues. Therefore the paradoxical situation is created whereby attempting to deal with the problem rather than ignoring it is categorically the wrong approach.

Another major cause of this disparity in coverage is the fact that so many anti-Corbyn Labour MPs are prepared to use anti-Semitism as a weapon to attack the reputation of their own party, and to brief the press against their own leader (even though the evidence shows that rates of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party have dropped significantly since Corbyn took over), while Tory MPs insist on turning blind eyes on allegations of anti-Muslim bigotry and the rising prevalence of extreme-right white supremacist and ultranationalist hate speech in the Tory ranks (aside from the honourable exception of Sayeeda Warsi).

A third significant reason for the continued mainstream media fixation with Labour anti-Semitism while examples of Tory anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim bigotry, and collusion with extreme-right white supremacists get a total free pass is "mainstream media "groupthink".  

A lot of well paid mainstream media hacks recognise that stories that damage Labour align with the mainstream media "groupthink" that Corbyn must be stopped because he represents a threat to the four decade neoliberal orthodoxy most of them have benefited from very nicely indeed. They also understand that criticism of the Tories runs absolutely counter to that underlying agenda of protecting the hard-right neoliberal orthodoxy at all costs.

A fourth reason is the shockingly right-wing bias of the print press in the UK, which is so right-wing skewed that even a liberal publication like the Guardian that fears democratic socialism and promotes centre-right liberalism (of the Blairite & Lib-Dem kind) is considered by many to be too left-wing.

Given that many journalists, including TV broadcasters are intensely workshy churnalists who much prefer to lazily parrot bilge from hard-right propaganda rags rather than do anything resembling investigative journalism or cogent analysis of their own, it's hardly surprising that the BBC's political output has an unmistakably right-wing bias. 

Conclusion

Whether you agree with these attempts to explain the mainstream media's astoundingly biased coverage or not, surely you've got to accept that their efforts to smear a Jewish Holocaust survivor as an "anti-Semite" for comparing his lived experience of the Holocaust to the suffering of the Palestinians simply in order to have a political dig at Jeremy Corbyn represents a repulsive new low for the BBC and the rest of the anti-Corbyn mob?

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Why is the leader of the Scottish Tory youth movement spreading recycled Nazi conspiracy theories?

In the grand scheme of things James Bundy isn't an important figure. Yes he heads up the Scottish Tory youth wing, but he's hardly a household name. However in one vile Tweet he's managed to perfectly illustrate the appalling ideological decomposition of the Tory party, and the outright complicity of the media who have allowed this to happen right in front of their eyes.

In his Tweet Bundy decided to rail against a BBC article about gender stereotyping of children by invoking a truly sinister anti-Semitic conspiracy trope straight from the Nazi propaganda playbook.

By invoking "cultural Marxism" as a threat to our way of life, Bundy has recycled a the Nazi propaganda trope of "Kulturbolschewismus" (cultural Bolshevism) which posited that modern culture (art, architecture, music, literature, groundbreaking television shows, anything the Nazis disapproved of really) was the result of a Jewish conspiracy to undermine the Western way of life.

Once Hitler and the Nazi party assumed power they outlawed modernist styles in music, architecture, literature and art, began the systematic persecution of Jews and leftists, and imposed their own strict ethno-nationalist standards.

After the defeat of Nazism the concept of "Kulturbolschewismus" was kept alive by fringe extreme-right ideologues and their supporters, largely flying under the radar in British political discourse until the rise of UKIP, Brexit, and the sudden blue-kip takeover of the Tory party.

In a desperate post-Brexit bid to unify the Tory vote with the UKIP vote to deliver a hard-right landslide, Theresa May and the top Tories began openly courting the extreme-right demographic, and welcoming them into the Tory fold.

Unfortunately for Theresa May her blue-kip gamble failed as Jeremy Corbyn rallied the beleaguered Labour Party to an unprecedented electoral surge which almost matched the combined vote share of the Tories and the mass influx of extreme-right ultranationalist blue-kippers fleeing the wreckage of UKIP.

The loss of her majority has rendered Theresa May absolutely and desperately dependent on continually appeasing the dangerous extreme-right fringe that she welcomed with open arms, otherwise she knows they'd just flock back to UKIP, or to the next extreme-right fad.

The fact that the leader of the Scottish Tory youth wing now feels absolutely comfortable sharing propaganda tropes crudely recycled from the Nazi playbook just goes to show how rotten the Tory party has become.

The use of this kind of anti-Semitic recycled Nazi propaganda must be increasingly commonplace within Tory circles if their Scottish youth leader is openly spouting this shit in public.

Anyone would have thought that traditional "one nation" Tories and even economically hard-right pro-privatisation Thatcherites and Majorites would be absolutely disgusted at the way their party is being usurped by extreme-right lunatics openly spouting fascist propaganda. 

But no, you barely hear any complaints about it (except for the honourable exception of Sayeeda Warsi who will not drop the issue of extreme-right anti-Islamic bigotry in the Tory ranks), so presumably because they consider welcoming fascists on board as "a price worth paying" just to keep Jeremy Corbyn out of power and stop him from renationalising the railways, water companies, and national grid, implementing an actual industrial strategy, and introducing a £10 minimum wage.

Then there's the news that three very senior Tories (Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Michael Gove) have been colluding with the dangerous extreme-right white-supremacist Steve Bannon, who told the French extreme-right Front National to embrace their racism "as a badge of honour".

James Bundy is the Scottish Tory youth leader and he's left free to spread anti-Semitic Nazi conspiracy tropes on Twitter, and Michael Gove is an actual government minister openly cavorting with an ideologue of the "Jews will not replace us" extreme-right. Yet Theresa May does nothing to discipline them, and virtually nobody in the mainstream press gives a damn about it.

Te mainstream media have endlessly reported the Labour anti-Semitism debate in outraged tones, yet they choose to ignore a Tory government minister cavorting with a dangerous extreme-right fanatic, and a Tory youth leader spreading Nazi conspiracy tropes. In light of this double standard there's little doubt whatever that their outrage is highly selective, and politically motivated.

Just imagine that Bundy was a Labour youth activist and he was caught spreading recycled anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda tropes on social media.

Do you really think the mainstream media would refuse to cover it despite people all over social media trying to goad them into providing a tiny bit of balance. Or do you think they'd already be all over it like a pack of snarling dogs*?

The fact is that they don't give a shit about the ongoing extreme-right takeover of the Tory party, because providing any coverage of this ideological decomposition of the Tory party runs entirely counter to the over-riding groupthink agenda of undermining any alternative to the four decade hard-right neoliberal orthodoxy that most mainstream media hacks have done very nicely indeed out of thank you very much.

So if keeping orthodox neoliberals in power requires outright collusion with actual fascists like Steve Bannon these days, and the normalisation of fascist conspiracy theories and extreme-right hate speech within mainstream political discourse, as far as most comfortable mainstream media hacks are concerned, so be 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.

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* = And rightly so because all anti-Semitism, bigotry, and fascist propaganda should be vehemently condemned on sight.

Opportunistic Tories are trying to take credit for an EU policy they steadfastly opposed at the time!

In 2014 the European Parliament held a vote on reducing disposable plastic bag waste. The Tory MEPs in the European parliament voted against the measure and demanded a load of concessions from the European Parliament.

In 2015 the legislation was finally passed in the European Parliament. The new measures oblige member states to either adopt measures ensuring that the annual consumption level does not exceed, on average, 90 lightweight plastic carrier bags per person by the end of 2019, and not more than 40 bags per person by 2025; or alternatively, to ensure that they are not given for free at stores and sales points by the end of 2018.

Tory MEPs refused to vote in favour of this legislation.

Now we fast-forward to January 2018 and suddenly Michael Gove and Theresa May are  trying to claim credit for the shiny new Tory policy of ... errrm ...clamping down on disposable plastic bag waste.

Neither the Tories, nor their sycophants in the mainstream press have bothered to point out that these measures against plastic waste originated in the EU. And neither is anyone pointing out that the Theresa May and Michael Gove are actually trying to steal credit for a policy that their fellow Tories in the European parliament voted against, and worked to undermine and obstruct.
 

 Take the coverage of the extended 5p plastic bag charge in the hard-right Daily Mail propaganda rag.

There's loads of praise for Theresa May and the Tories in the article, yet not a single mention of the fact that the plastic bag charges are a result of EU legislation to clamp down on plastic waste, nor of the fact that the Tories tried to scupper these rules as they made their way through the European Parliament.

If the rabidly anti-EU Daily Mail had any integrity whatever they wouldn't be presenting this extended plastic bags charge as a glorious victory for Theresa May, they'd be howling with rage at the nasty EU interfering with our God-given British right to lob as much plastic waste as we like into our waterways and oceans.

Just like the Daily Mail, it's obvious that the Brextremist Michael Gove is not going to admit that the policy he's attempting to soak up all the credit for is actually a product of the EU that he hates so much.

And neither is Theresa May going risk upsetting the new blue-kip demographic of rabidly right-wing and ultra-nationalistic ex-ukippers she's rendered herself completely reliant upon with a dose of the truth.

There's absolutely no way she'd dare to destabilise her own position by explaining to this fickle and reactionary mob that her shiny new policy is actually one of the measures that her party tried and failed to defeat in the European Parliament.

Of course it's a good thing that measures are being taken to address the shocking levels of plastic pollution in the environment, but to see Tories attempting to wring as many positive headlines as possible out of a policy they steadfastly opposed in the first place is yet another demonstration of what a shifty and opportunistic bunch of charlatans these people actually are.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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