The inane Twitter ramblings of Liz Truss

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

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

Feeling Tiggerish

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

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

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

Miners

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

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

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

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

Authority

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

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

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

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

Capitalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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OR

Amber Rudd didn't even bother looking at the evidence before refusing the Orgreave inquiry

On the 18th of June 1984 police launched an unprovoked mounted charge against striking miners at the Orgreave coking plant in South Yorkshire. The so-called "Battle of Orgreave" has been mired in conspiracy ever since.

The inquiry into the Hillsborough disaster highlighted the fact that several police officials who had been involved in the Hillsborough cover-up had also been involved at Orgreave. This revelation hardly seems surprising given that the two incidents both included acts of mass perjury by police officers, deliberate victim-blaming, attempted cover-ups, interference by the Tory government and mainstream media collusion.

Orgreave provided one of the most famous examples of mainstream media manipulation in British political history. The BBC News footage broadcast into millions of homes that night reversed the events of the day to show striking miners throwing stones at the police followed by the mounted police charge. The evidence is absolutely clear that the mounted charge came first and was unprovoked, then the stone-throwing came afterwards as an attempted fightback against extreme and unprovoked police violence. However despite the repeated revelations that the BBC News team had reversed the events of the day in order to paint miners in a negative light, just like with Hillsborough, there are still people out there to this day who insist on believing the mainstream media's distorted victim-blaming version of events.

A former Merseyside police officer who had been drafted in at Orgreave claimed that South Yorkshire police had been "anticipating trouble and in some ways relishing it and looking forward to it" and that when the violence erupted "I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I was just seeing police officers attack people. These were people on the ground and even if they weren't doing anything – just walking away – police officers had their batons and they were just hitting people".

Despite having instigated the violence themselves, the police then attempted to prosecute 95 miners for rioting and violent disorder, but the trial collapsed when it became clear that much of the evidence presented by police was fabricated.

At the time Michael Mansfield QC called the malicious attempted prosecution "the worst example of a mass frame-up in this country this century", while the miners' solicitor Gareth Peirce claimed collusion between the objectives of the police and Thatcher's government by saying the malicious prosecution had been launched in order to "to make a public example of people, as a device to assist in breaking the [miners'] strike".

In June 1991 South Yorkshire Police paid £425,000 in compensation to 39 miners for assault, wrongful arrest, unlawful detention and malicious prosecution. No police officers were ever prosecuted for any of these offences.

In 2015 a review of court papers from the malicious trial of Orgreave miners by the Independent Police Complaints Commission found "evidence of excessive violence by police officers, a false narrative from police exaggerating violence by miners, perjury by officers giving evidence to prosecute the arrested men, and an apparent cover-up of that perjury by senior officers".

In May 2016 the PCC for South Yorkshire Alan Billings admitted that police conduct at Orgreave had led to a longstanding high level public mistrust towards the police in the region and claimed that the battle was the closest the UK had ever come to having "a politicised police force" acting as a paramilitary wing of the government.

It was then revealed that Margaret Thatcher and her Tory cabinet had attempted to intervene in the malicious Orgreave prosecutions in order to speed them up despite Thatcher's own assurances lies to parliament that "it would be quite wrong for politicians to interfere in such matters".

Despite ever mounting pressure for an inquiry into Orgreave (especially the fabricated evidence during the malicious prosecution, the attempted cover-up and the links with the Hillsborough disaster), Theresa May managed to stall it until she was anointed Prime Minister by her fellow Tory MPs, leaving the job of refusing to hold an inquiry to her successor Amber Rudd.

Rudd's refusal of an inquiry led Labour MP and Shadow Lord Chancellor Richard Burgon to claim that "the Conservative refusal of an Orgreave Inquiry is not about protecting the police of the past - it's about concealing orders and interference from the Thatcher Government".

In the week following Amber Rudd's refusal to hold an inquiry into Orgreave the Guardian revealed that she hadn't even bothered to review the evidence collected by the IPCC, nor the evidence held by South Yorkshire Police. The Home Office then flatly refused to detail what evidence Rudd had actually reviewed (if any) before making her decision to torpedo the expected inquiry.

It's absolutely extraordinary that Rudd could have decided that there was no grounds for an inquiry without even bothering to request or review two fundamental tranches of evidence. In fact it looks an awful lot like vindication of Richard Burgon's accusation that the Tories are still playing self-serving party politics.

The released cabinet papers have already demonstrated that Margaret Thatcher was intent on playing politics with the justice system by pressurising those who were conducting the malicious Orgreave prosecution to hurry it up, and now Amber Rudd is demonstrating that even after 32 years the Tories are still intent on playing party politics with the justice system by refusing to hold an inquiry into the undeniably appalling and unlawful police conduct at Orgreave.

What you can do ...

If you believe that Amber Rudd's decision to refuse an inquiry is completely unacceptable then please consider signing this petition.

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OR

The Tory blueprint for wrecking our public services

I don't often frequent the political cesspit that is the Conservative Home Blog, but I was pointed in the direction of an article entitled "How a government can beat the BMA" written by the site's deputy editor Henry Hill.

Before I get to explaining the Tory blueprint for tearing apart our public services, I'm first going to look at what this blog post tells us about the rotten Tory mentality of the author.

Class war politics

Before we even get to the contents of the article, it's clear from the title alone that the author is of the stunted Tory class war mentality, where workers and trade unions are the enemy, and any kind of compromise or co-operation between employers and workers is political weakness. This rotten and destructive class war mentality completely dominates Tory politics because they consider their ideological assault upon the trade unions in the 1980s to be one of their greatest victories. It doesn't matter a jot to these people that the UK keeps lagging further and further behind Germany, where trade unions and employers generally co-operate for the best of their industries rather than retrenching into destructive ideological class war at the first opportunity.

As far as most Tories are concerned, trade unions and ordinary workers are always the enemy and if disputes don't come about naturally they can always be deliberately provoked (as with the junior doctors contract and the force privatisation of every school in England) in order to bring back the ideological class war struggle they crave for.

The miners' strike

The class war mentality of the author was clear from the title, but the actual contents reveal the sheer scale of his absurd class war obsession. The article is peppered with references to the Miners Strike in the 1980s. The author tries to imagine Jeremy Hunt as a victorious Thatcher figure destroying the power of the British Medical Association (and presumably condemning their industry to destruction in the process, as was the case with the coal miners), he draws tortured parallels between the Junior Doctors' strike and the Miners' strike and concludes chillingly that "one day the BMA will have their 1984".

Comparisons between the Miners' Strike and the dispute over the Junior Doctors contract are obviously utterly facile.

• The Miners' Strike came about as a response to the existential threat against the mining industry. At the time right-wing people sneered at the idea that the objective of the dispute was to kill the mining industry in order to destroy the power of the NUM trade union. By December 2015 the very last deep coal mine in the UK at Kellingley was closed down and the once powerful NUM had shrunk from 170,000 members to fewer than 100. The idea that a similar fate can be imposed on the medical profession is utterly laughable.

• The Miners' Strike concerned pretty much the entire coal mining industry, the Junior Doctors dispute only concerns a small fraction of the total NHS staff.

• The Miners' Strike was a full scale strike that crippled the industry and lasted almost an entire year. The Junior Doctor's strikes have been a series of short strikes with cover provided by other medical professionals to ensure patient safety.

• Margaret Thatcher used the police as her own personal militia in order to attack the mining communities of the UK. The idea of David Cameron sending the police in to violently oppress a bunch of doctors is clearly ludicrous.

• There is a strong global demand for medical professionals. If the Tories do successfully manage to crush the BMA and destroy the working conditions of NHS workers, unlike the striking miners, medical professionals have many more opportunities to move somewhere like Canada or Australia where they would be treated with a little less contempt by their government. 

Anyone drawing parallels between these two staggeringly different examples of industrial action is clearly living in cloud cuckoo land.

Forcing people to live longer

Before I get to outlining the details of the Tory strategy to privatise the NHS, I'm just going to detail one more thing that highlights the rotten mentality of the author. Henry Hill has a big whinge about the NHS saving people's lives as if preventing people from dying is not only some kind of economic crime, but an act of cruelty against the individual who has been saved from death!

"Anybody who the NHS 'saves' from a tobacco or food-related deaths will die of something and the NHS will pay for it. If that person is forced to live a long life, they will likely end up costing the NHS more than they would had they died younger."

The idea that the NHS is somehow forcing people against their will to live longer is utterly absurd and an insult to anyone unfortunate enough to read such drivel. Of course people are likely to continue using the NHS if they're not shovelled into an early grave, but it's not beyond the bounds of reason that they will continue working, contributing to their family life or to their local community in some way too is it?

Reducing people's lives down to a balance sheet consisting of nothing more than their costs to the health service is a perfect example of the Tory "price of everything and the value of nothing" mentality.

The strategy

There are four main prongs to the strategy Henry Hill details in his blog post. Diluting the workforce with unqualified staff, removing the right to take industrial action, breaking up the service into many separate employers and drip-feeding the destruction of the NHS slowly so that the public are less likely to notice.

Diluting the workforce with unqualified staff
The author suggests that most of the work doctors do is easy and could be done "by a physicians' assistant with a fraction of the training or wages". He then goes on to fantasise about a health service filled out with well-meaning volunteers based on the Territorial Army model. A health service increasingly staffed by low-skill, low-paid workers and well-meaning volunteers doesn't seem to be a recipe for efficiency to me, but then it just depends how efficiency is defined doesn't it? If quality of service isn't included as a measure of efficiency at all, then the lower the staff costs the more efficient the service.

Removing the right to industrial action
The author wants to see medical professionals stripped of the right to take industrial action like soldiers and the police. If that proves unpopular, then destruction of the right to strike can be achieved in other ways. One is to attack the right to strike at source by introducing a Trade Union Bill designed to make trade union democracy completely unworkable by rendering an abstention as a stronger vote against strike action than an explicit vote against strike action. Another method is the third prong of the Tory attack.

Breaking the service into many separate employers
Breaking the NHS up into many separate employers would remove the power of collective bargaining and render attempts at cross-NHS strikes "sympathy strikes", which were outlawed when the Tories introduced the harshest anti-worker trade union rules in western Europe back in the 1980s. Other benefits to the Tories (and the private health investors who bankroll them) is that smaller chunks of NHS services are not only easier to privatise, it also makes it much easier for private corporations to cherry-pick all the profitable pieces for themselves, whilst leaving the unprofitable bits for the taxpayer to run.

Drip-feeding the destruction of the NHS in doses the public won't notice
The 2012 Health and Social Care Act was a masterclass in the privatisation by stealth strategy. The former Tory party leadership candidate Michael Portillo once explained why this plan to carve the NHS open for mass privatisation wasn't even mentioned in the 2010 Tory manifesto. He said it was because "they did not believe they could win an election if they told you what they were going to do". Even now there are still an awful lot of people out there who are so misinformed that they scoff at the idea that the NHS is being steadily privatised and NHS facilities turned over to the treatment of private patients. Through their policy of deliberately under-reporting the Health and Social Care act and the subsequent waves of privatisations, the mainstream media have been complicit in fostering this all-too-common public mentality that the ongoing privatisation of the NHS is some kind of insane lefty fantasy rather than observable reality.

The education system

There are several parallels between the Tory plot to carve up and privatise the English NHS against the will of medical professionals and public, and the Tory plot to carve up and privatise the entire English education system against the will of the teaching profession and the public alike.

Tory academies and free schools are allowed to employ completely unqualified teachers. The carve up of the education system into the control of numerous private sector academy chains (many owned and operated by major Tory party donors) allows wages and working conditions to be undermined and will eventually be used by the Tories to rule out coordinated industrial action by teachers.

The only difference seems to be that George Osborne and Nicky Morgan are so full of hubris that they were unwilling to continue with their slow and steady approach that has already seen 5,000+ schools handed over to shady unaccountable private sector operators and chose to announce the forced privatisation of every school in England by 2022 as part of George Osborne's 2016 budget of failure.

Conclusion

The Tories are usually very reticent about explaining their true intentions, but occasionally one of them lets it slip.

One example is the vice-chair of the Conservative Health group Paul Charlson explained that abandoning universal NHS healthcare for a fee based system "would be political suicide" unless "there was a feeling in the country that the health service was falling apart" which explains the constant barrage of right-wing propaganda about how crap the NHS is. 

This "How a government can beat the BMA" blog post from Henry Hill is in a different league. It doesn't just accidentally let a piece of Tory ideology slip out, it clearly explains the Tory blueprint for tearing apart our public services, repressing workers' rights and wages and diluting the workforce with unqualified labour, as well as openly displaying the disgusting class war mentality and utter contempt for working people that is so rife within the Tory party.

 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.