Analysis of Anna Soubry's extraordinary Newsnight rant

On the evening of Monday February 5th 2018 BBC Newsnight broadcast an extraordinary interview with the Tory MP Anna Soubry in which she called for Theresa May to conduct a purge to remove Brextremist MPs from the Tory party.

In this article I'm going to analyse some of the stuff she said in the interview embedded below.

.@Anna_Soubry tells @nicholaswatt it’s time Theresa May stood up to the “hard ideological Brexiteers” and “slung ‘em out” https://t.co/gwWZsznN7M pic.twitter.com/IVemTGXeet

— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) February 6, 2018

The clip begins with an assertion that "Labour's front bench itself is ideological" and a claim that the Tory front bench "probably isn't".

This is absolute nonsense for several reasons.

Of course Labour's front bench does have an ideology, they have a clear and unmistakable ideological commitment to democratic public ownership of vital UK infrastructure and services like the NHS, police services, the courts, the education system, the rail network, Royal Mail and the National Grid. (An ideology that is commonplace across the developed world and which has massive public support).

But it's obvious that the Tory front bench has an ideology too. They're not just wedded to the neoliberal ideology of privatisation mania (flogging off the national silver on the cheap to unaccountable private entities), their ruinous obsession with austerity dogma stems directly from their ideological desire to shrink the role of the state too. 

Anyone trying to weaponise the concept of "ideology" with claims that they have no political ideology of their own is clearly trying to bullshit you, because even the most directionless, opportunistic and self-serving of politicians are still guided by an ideology, an ideology of prioritising their personal self-interest.

Soubry then goes on to assert that Theresa May's cabinet are "in hock to 35 hard ideological Brexiteers"

This is undoubtedly true but the number is an underestimate. The Tory Brextremist faction even have their own secretive group called the ERG, which has significantly more than 35 members. In fact they have easily enough MPs to call a vote of no confidence in Theresa May if she doesn't do exactly what they demand. Their previous two leaders (Steve Baker and Suella Fernandes) have both been elevated into Theresa May's government, and the next ERG leader in line is Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Soubry then claims that these Brextremists are "not Tories" and "not the Tory party I joined 40 years ago".

The problem here is that they are Tories, and undeniably so. Just like Anna Soubry and the more Europlilic Tory MPs all of the Brextremist Tories voted in favour of every crackpot Tory privatisation scam; they voted in favour of loading the cost of the bankers' crisis onto the shoulders of the poor and ordinary through austerity dogma and wage repression; they voted in favour of welfare cuts and the systematic abuse of disabled people; they voted in favour of erecting one barrier after another to social mobility; they voted in favour of slashing taxes for corporations and the mega-rich whilst simultaneously slashing tax credits and other in-work benefits for the working poor; they voted in favour of gagging their political critics and unprecedented state snooping powers; and they voted in favour of imposing unlawful restrictions on workers' rights to take bad bosses to employment tribunals. 

The Brextremists are just one faction of the Tory ideology. They've always been there, and Soubry knows it because in her next damned sentence she accuses them of bringing down John Major in the 1990s and David Cameron in 2015, which they obviously couldn't have done if they're not a longstanding faction of the Tory party.

"And it's about time Theresa May stood up and slung 'em because they took down John Major and they took down David Cameron, two great leaders, neither of whom stood up to them."

This is an overt call for an ideological purge of the Brextremist wing of the Tory party, which is remarkable because it's only a few weeks since Nadine Dorries of the Brextremist wing was calling for an ideological purge of so-called "Mutineer" Tories like Anna Soubry. 

So now we have two distinct factions of the Tory party calling for the other to be purged, yet the mainstream media remains absolutely fixated on highlighting and magnifying the internal disputes within the Labour Party with the aim of presenting them as hopelessly divided. 

Then there's the delusion that Theresa May has the authority to stand up to Jacob Rees-Mogg and the Brextremist faction he leads. In reality Theresa May is a puppet Prime Minister with no authority whatever because she would be ousted immediately if she ever dared to defy her Brextremist puppet masters. 

Then there's the absurd description of John Major and David Cameron as great leaders. Admittedly Major had more integrity, competence and authority in his little finger than Theresa May, but he was also the leader of a dead duck administration that clung pathetically onto power for years. And as for David Cameron, he gambled away the entire future of the UK in a ludicrous short-term party political ploy to nick votes off UKIP. It doesn't matter what else he did (most of it terrible) that's how he'll be remembered in the history books.

"The time has come for the moderates, the centrists in the Conservative party - dare I use the expression - to 'take control' of our party and make it the sensible, moderate, centrist 'one nation' party that its voters, and I think its members are."

In a political system that has been drifting ever further to the right for four decades, the concept of 'centrism' is a complete misnomer. 

If 'centrism' involves supporting ruinous austerity dogma, imposing the longest sustained collapse in the value of workers wages since records began, systematically persecuting sick and disabled people, slashing in-work benefits for the working poor, overseeing the lowest levels of house building since the 1920s, lumbering students with vast unpayable debts before they even start their careers, privatising thousands of taxpayer funded schools into the hands of unaccountable pseudo-charities, attacking workers' rights, and catastrophically under-funding the NHS and social care services ... then 'centrism' is clearly extremism, not moderation.

"If it comes to it I'm not going to stay in a party which has been taken over by the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson."

She needs to face facts and accept that the Tory party has already been taken over by the extremist blue-kip faction, and those who remain within the party and continue voting in favour of hard-right anti-democratic abominations like Theresa May's European Union Withdrawal Bill (like Soubry did) are even worse. 

They're collaborators who know exactly how bad it is, but they vote in favour of it out of a combination of self-interest and misguided loyalty to a party that's been usurped over by the hard-right fringe.

 "Unless Theresa stands up and sees off these people she's in danger of losing huge swathes of, not just the parliamentary party, but the Conservative party"

This analysis is half correct at the absolute best.  

Tory party membership is already down to well below 70,000, meaning years of austerity dogma, wage repression, and persecution of the sick and disabled have already taken a massive toll on 'one nation' type Tories. Of those who remain Tory members, a hefty majority are already pro-Brexit, and Tory MPs these days are left bolstering their ranks of activists with the worst kind of extreme-right, white supremacists, Brextremists, and the alt-right fringe. 

As for the parliamentary party, Soubry herself illustrated their spinelessness by actually voting in favour of the EU Withdrawal Bill, which was nothing short of a shambolic hard-right power grab dressed up as a Brexit bill. If they were going to revolt, they would have revolted over that.

What the Tories are seriously in danger of losing is voters, because the more they pander to the fanatically right-wing ultranationalist blue-kip faction, the more they'll alienate the rest of the public, and especially the under-50s. 

"If that means leaving the party for some new alliance, God knows, but we just simply can't go on like this any longer. Something is going to have to give, because if it doesn't, not only will we end up with Jacob Rees-Mogg as our Prime Minister, we'll get a devastating hard Brexit which will cause huge damage to our economy for generations to come. And I am not prepared to sit by any longer and put up with this nonsense."

There are many points to raise here, so I'll resort to bullet points.

• Talk of a new 'centrist' alliance is fantasy stuff. If there was any real public appetite for an orthodox neoliberal pro-EU party then surely the Lib-Dem share of the vote surely wouldn't have collapsed even further in 2017 from what almost everyone assumed to be their absolute nadir in 2015.

• Jacob Rees-Mogg is Prime Minister in all but name. He controls the ERG Brextremist group who control theresa May's puppet strings, and if she ever defies him, they have the power to remove her, and he's clear favourite to win the leadership vote if it's put to the party members.

• We're already heading for an extreme hard Brexit thanks to the collaboration of Tory MPs like Anna Soubry who refused to join the alliance of Labour, SNP, Lib-Dem, Plaid Cyru and Green MPs who voted against the EU Withdrawal Bill.

• The future economic potential of the UK has already been trashed thanks to Tories like Anna Soubry and the eight punishing years of Tory austerity dogma, wage repression, and the lowest levels of infrastructure investment anywhere in the developed world that they've overseen. It's a bit much for her to suddenly begin pretending to care about devastating long-term economic consequences now!

• Soubry says she's not prepared to put up with it any longer, but why on earth did she wait until after she helped push through the horrific EU Withdrawal Bill to make this stand?

Remainer reaction

Huge numbers of Remainers and #FBPE hashtags on Twitter have been sharing this rant as if Soubry is some kind of hero of the Remain movement, but she actually voted in favour of Theresa May's hard-right anti-democratic EU Withdrawal Bill just a few weeks ago.

It's extraordinary that people are buying into this empty posturing, because it's a demonstration that they place more value on Soubry's mouth words than they do on her actual actions!

Anyone who is genuinely committed to opposing an extreme Tory Brexit should be furious with this rant, because it's just empty rhetoric from someone who actively collaborated with the Brextremists just a few weeks ago by voting in favour of the shameless and shambolic legislation they've put forward to seal their hard-right power grab.

Brexiteer reaction 

Soubry's rant has enraged the Brexiteers, with numerous calls for Soubry to be expelled from the party. No doublt she'll be inundated by another wave of death threats from the revolting Blue-kip mob too.

As delusional as she is, there's no way Soubry deserves death threats for expressing her political opinions. Nobody does.

When it comes to the calls for expulsion from the party though, that's surely got to be fair game , because she called for her political opponents to be purged in the rant. It would be profoundly hypocritical of her to cry-victim when her opponents respond to her rhetoric with more of the same.

If Soubry does get punished by May, then that will help to illustrate the point that the Tory party is completely controlled by the Brextremists, because it's only a few weeks ago that the Brextremist Nadine Dorries was allowed to get away with a similarly divisive and damaging call for an ideological purge of "mutineer" Tory MPs.

If Soubry gets punished after Dorries was let off for spewing exactly the same kind of factional rhetoric, then that's an obvious indication of which faction of the Tory party is in control of Theresa May.

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Imagine the press reaction if some crazed leftist had admitted their plot to kill Theresa May ...

The extreme-right suspect in the deadly Finsbury Park attack has admitted in court that he originally intended to kill Jeremy Corbyn when he hired a van and drove it to London on June 19th 2017.

In the end the van was driven into a group of Muslims in Finsbury Park in Jeremy Corbyn's Islington constituency, resulting in one death and several serious injuries.

The mainstream media have reported the fact that the terrorism suspect intended to kill Jeremy Corbyn, but in a fairly neutral manner and without any effort to apportion blame on the people who radicalised him.

Just imagine the mainstream media reaction if the roles were reversed and it was some kind of radical extreme-leftist who had plotted to kill Theresa May, then driven a vehicle into a random group of people outside a Conservative club in her constituency later that day.

Even if the attacker was a member of some random Stalinist cult with no links whatever to the Labour Party, we all know that there would be a concerted effort to link the attacker with Jeremy Corbyn and Momentum, and to force Jeremy Corbyn to apologise for the attack as if it was his personal responsibility.

Yet Theresa May has been allowed to get away with saying absolutely nothing about it, as if extremist plots to kill her political rivals are perfectly normal and unworthy of comment.

As it stands nobody in the mainstream media is holding hate-spewing Tory politicians or the right-wing propaganda rags responsible for the extreme rhetoric they used against Jeremy Corbyn, which eventually triggered this assassination plot against him.

Take Zac Goldsmith's disgusting BNP-style propaganda during his failed bid to become Major of London, or the grotesquely misleading attacks on Jeremy Corbyn on the front pages of the right-wing propaganda rags during the general election, or the continued hate-inciting rhetoric of Tory MPs like Nadine Dorries.

All of these people who have attempted to smear Jeremy Corbyn as some kind of supporter of radical Islamist terrorism should be held accountable when people decide to take the law into their own hands and develop assassination plots, especially after the murder of Jo Cox by a right-wing extremist in 2016.

We know that Darren Osborne was radicalised by Britain First, and that he was praised and lauded as a hero in the Britain First echo chamber after the attack was carried out, but when that extreme-right organisation is actually held to account for radicalising people like Darren Osborne into plotting to assassinate politicians is a question for a different article.

The big questions here are why hate-inciting Tories like Zac Goldsmith and the right-wing propaganda rags are not being forced to apologise for spreading the kind of extreme anti-Corbyn smears that inspired Darren Osborne to develop a plot to assassinate him? And why Theresa May is being allowed to get away with saying nothing when we all know the mainstream media would be desperately trying to smear Jeremy Corbyn by association, and demanding that he apologise in person if the circumstances were different?

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Where is the mainstream media condemnation of the extremist blue-kip takeover of the Tory party?

Remember when Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour leader and the mainstream media had an absolute fit over it? Remember when the hundreds of thousands of new Labour Party members he attracted were continually smeared by the press as "infiltrators" and "entryists"? 

Then there was the way that any talk of democratising the Labour Party from within was described as if democratic re-selection of MPs was some kind of terrifying ideological "purge", rather than a means of actually holding them to account for their actions.

And the way that everyone involved from Corbyn all the way down to the hundreds of thousands of Labour members and supporters who voted for him were repeatedly smeared as "extremists".

Despite all of this rhetoric Corbyn's election and re-election as Labour leader were actually fantastic demonstrations of grass roots democracy in action. 

An out-of-touch clique of right-wing Labour MPs plotted to get rid of him in the summer of 2016, but ordinary Labour voters unified behind Corbyn because they want a proper party of democratic socialism, not another feeble austerity-lite imitation of the Tory party. 

However the mainstream press didn't present it that way at all. Instead they created the narrative that Corbyn represented some kind of terrifying extremist take-over of the Labour Party by a disgusting horde of dangerously left-wing extremists, then they pushed this warped version of events as hard as they damned well could (from the rabid right Daily Mail all the way through to the faux-left Guardian).

The truly incredible thing is that the United Kingdom is now witnessing a very real extremist takeover of a major political party, yet the mainstream press absolutely refuse to portray it in the same terms as their fantastical narratives about "entryism", "extremism", "infiltrators" and "purges" they concocted over the Labour revival under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership.

Theresa May has taken an extreme and belligerent approach to Brexit from the beginning. She's repeatedly shown contempt for parliamentary sovereignty, and the rule of law. Again and again she's tried to bypass parliament and to conduct the Brexit process in the most secretive and unaccountable manner possible.

She's also tried to appeal to the basest instincts of the hard-right Blue-kip demographic who abandoned the absolute wreckage of UKIP in order to mindlessly follow her because she's waving the Brexit flag she so opportunistically nicked off actual Brexiteers when it suited her career interests to do so.

Ever since her vanity election backfired Theresa May has demonstrably been a hostage of the most fanatical elements of the Tory-DUP coalition she's cobbled together.

The faction of her own party that has the most sway over her has clearly been the hard-right Europhobes who see Brexit as a brilliant opportunity to trash workers' rights, consumer protections, food standards, environmental regulations, parliamentary sovereignty and literally anything else that might get in the way of their dream of a terrifyingly hard-right Tory hegemony.

Then there's the DUP bigots who took their £1 billion bribe, and have then proceeded to demonstrate that they're in absolute control, and that May can't do anything on Brexit without their approval first.

And then there was the Amendment 7 rebellion. 11 Tory MPs defied Theresa May and voted with the opposition parties in order to ensure that the final Brexit deal is subject to parliamentary approval before it becomes law.

The howls of outrage over this rebellion in defence of parliamentary sovereignty were extraordinary. The one "mutineer" who held an official position in the party (Stephen Hammond) was revenge sacked immediately, and there were soon calls for all of the "rebel" MPs to be thrown out of the party and banned from ever standing as Tory MPs again.

Contrast this extreme Tory intolerance of dissent with the Labour left's calls for democratic re-selection of Labour MPs and it's extraordinary to see the latter situation was greeted with screams of "purge, purge, purge" while this brazen Tory display of intolerance towards dissent barely elicits a murmur of mainstream media commentary!

Then there's the fact that this abusive and intimidatory atmosphere towards pro-democracy Tory MPs has been nurtured by the outside group Leave.EU, which is the propaganda outlet of the extreme Brexiteer and UKIP donor Arron Banks.

Just consider the concerted mainstream media campaign of demonisation against the internal ans accredited Labour campaign group Momentum, and contrast it with the absolute silence on the powerful grip Arron Bank's dodgy extreme-right propaganda outfit is exerting over the Tory party.

It's obvious to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention that the Tory party is being usurped by an extreme-right anti-democratic faction right in front of our eyes, yet the mainstream press won't even describe it for what it is, let alone launch into the kind of hyperbolic language that is very much more appropriate now than when they used it to fearmonger about the rejuvenation of the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership.

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OR

What is ... synthetic outrage?

Outrage is a very useful tool for politicians and journalists alike because it can be used to sell political ideologies as well as newspapers. Some things are genuinely outrageous, and deserving of media condemnation and decisive political action, but often it suits the purposes of vested interests to manufacture a load of synthetic outrage in order to further their own objectives.

In this article I'm going to use various examples to show how the tactic of using fake outrage to sell political ideologies or newspapers is not a specifically left-wing or right-wing thing, but a tactic that transcends the political spectrum. I'm also going to consider how displays of synthetic outrage seem to be becoming ever more common as the standard of political debate in the UK continues it's lamentable and seemingly inexorable decline into the gutter.

Political correctness

Political correctness and manufactured outrage are clearly not the same thing, but there are links. The hard-right love to decry political correctness as some kind of leftist-liberal conspiracy to deny people freedom of speech, but they're simply wrong. 

Of course a lot of right-wingers would like to return to the past when it was considered perfectly acceptable to hurl racist, sexist and homophobic abuse around and do stuff like spit in the prams of mixed race babies and throw bananas at black footballers, but times have moved on. Whether they like it or not there is now a general consensus in the UK that kind of shit is completely unacceptable. Whether they like it or not, in modern Britain it's not OK to hurl insults, physically attack, abuse or discriminate against people based purely on their ethnicity, sex or sexual orientation.

This change in attitudes doesn't mean that hard-right people are banned from using disgusting language to denigrate people, it just means that the majority of people will recognise them as the nasty narrow-minded bigots that they are if they start ranting on about "niggers", "wogs", "spics", "pakis", "bitches" or "queers".

I think most people would agree that given the history of abuse and discrimination that used to be tolerated in this country, political correctness has a place and a purpose. However there are some who have taken it way too far, and resort to displays of synthetic outrage at the slightest provocation.

If someone has clearly demonstrated that they're a tiny-minded bigot, then it's fair to dismiss them as such because arguing with idiots is a waste of time, but if someone has simply mis-spoken, used archaic terminology or demonstrated that they might have underlying prejudices, it's an appalling and self-defeating idea to shout them down as a bigot, racist, homophobe or whatever. 

It's often the case that people don't even realise that what they're saying could be construed as being offensive or discriminatory, so it's best to try to reason with them first rather than snap immediately into hot-headed condemnation. 

A likely reaction of someone who doesn't think of themselves as being a bigot to a polite explanation of how their use of language could be considered offensive could be a change in their use of language. Their reaction to being immediately shouted down as a bigot is highly likely to be self-defensive, which could easily manifest as an reaction against all forms of political correctness due only to being hit with displays of unjustifiable synthetic outrage when they didn't even understand the problem with the language they were using.

Right-wing political correctness

Considering that the backlash against political correctness is a touchstone issue for so many right-wing people, displays of political correctness from right-wingers are drenched in hypocrisy.

One of the most appalling examples was the sudden conversion of millions of die-hard Tories to political correctness after the death of Margaret Thatcher. We all saw right-wingers suddenly switch from decrying political correctness as a toxic ideology of the left to sanctimoniously lecturing anyone who dared utter the slightest criticism of Thatcher or her appalling political legacy as being guilty of disrespecting the dead.

In the wake of Thatcher's death, it really didn't matter how carefully worded the criticism, right-wing people immediately snapped into synthetic outrage mode, decrying anyone who presented an evidence based critique of her political legacy with the same vitriol as they spewed at the "ding dong the witch is dead" people.

Just a month before Thatcher died, the left-wing Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez died of cancer triggering a huge outpouring of delighted gloating from right-wingers. The death of the RMT trade unionist Bob Crow a couple of years later also triggered a similar wave of gloating, insult laden diatribes from delirious right-wingers. It seems that this "must respect the dead" element of right-wing political correctness only applies to dead people with right-wing ideological views. 

The hypocrisy of right-wingers describing socially liberal political correctness (which has the purpose of protecting living people from insults, attacks and discrimination) as an attack on their free speech, whilst using displays of synthetic outrage to make others conform to their special brand of right-wing political correctness (that criticising recently deceased people is completely unacceptable if they happen to have had right-wing views) is a clear demonstration that an awful lot of right-wing people are completely immune to cognitive dissonance.

A fake storm of misogyny

It doesn't take a great deal of nous to recognise that the BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg is severely biased against the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Eventually, after another particularly egregious display of political bias, someone set up a 38 Degrees petition against Kuenssberg's biased reporting. 

This petition was obviously uncomfortable for the 38 Degrees team for some reason, so they had to invent a reason to delete it. The story they eventually concocted was that the petition had been hijacked by a bunch of misogynists, which gave Tory politicians including David Cameron and the disgraced death threat inventing liar Lucy Allan a perfect platform to air their synthetic outrage about this fictional hoard of misogynistic lefties attacking a journalist just because she's female.

The spectacle of right-wing MPs (one of whom has been guilty of using deeply patronising and sexist language in the past) lining up to attack the left as sexists was almost too much to stomach. Anyone with the vaguest semblance of political literacy understands that the left stood up against the sexism and bigotry of the right-wing political establishment, so to see right-wingers gloating and posturing with coordinated displays of synthetic outrage was utterly nauseating.

The big problem with these Tory displays of synthetic outrage was that the 38 Degrees team completely invented this tide of sexist abuse, meaning that these displays were not only manufactured for political convenience, but also based on nothing but a pack of lies.

I've been a big supporter of 38 Degrees work over the years, but I was appalled that they decided to lie about the behaviour of their own supporters and hand a load of free ammunition to the Tories to launch a sustained synthetic outrage attack the liberal left, but I'm even more appalled by their bone-headed refusal to apologise for what they had done.

Tabloid outrage merchants

Frankie Boyle explained the way that the mainstream press use synthetic outrage in a brilliant blog post about offence and free speech. The whole thing is wort a read, but here's the relevant extract:

"No tabloid journo - whose life is invariably a shattered kaleidoscope of prostitutes, gambling, cocaine, self-loathing, literally going through a strangers bins, erectile disfunction and cocaine - is genuinely offended when some students dress up as the Twin Towers for Halloween. Outrage just makes good copy. It's easier to write, and simpler to understand. A tabloid hack knows that their average reader can barely read and they're not going to try to communicate anything like ennui in the vocabulary of a ten year old."

The right-wing tabloid press love to use synthetic outrage to sell copy because they know that it's easy to write and simple to understand, which is essential given that their whole purpose is to cultivate large audiences of simple-minded people to uncritically absorb their hard-right political propaganda and then repeat it as if it's their own brilliant insight, rather than just some drivel they rote learned from the S*n, Star, Mail, Express, Telegraph, Evening Standard or Metro.

Guardian above-the-line trolling

The Guardian has been on a slow rightwards trajectory for over two decades, but in recent years they've given up almost all pretense at being a left-liberal publication and veered sharply towards actively promoting pro-austerity hard-right economics in their editorial stance. 

Despite this ever faster sprint towards hard-right economic orthodoxy in their news coverage, there's still stuff worth reading in the opinion section (especially contributions from the likes of Frankie Boyle, Stewart Lee, Harry Leslie Smith, Robert Skidelsky, Ha-Joon Chang, Owen Jones ...). Unfortunately, in order to find the good stuff you have to wade through some utterly appalling drivel that I have begun to think of as reverse-psychology clickbait, which consists of synthetic outrage articles written in the most intensely patronising and alienating language. 

In my view the Guardian editorial team have either lost the plot completely by deciding to post so many articles consisting of little more than synthetic outrage drivel, or, more likely, they're playing a cynical game of publishing the most infuriating articles possible in the hope of attracting a load of clicks, comments and advertising revenue as people wade in to criticise the woeful pap they've been presented with.

Either the Guardian have lost the plot completely in allowing the likes of Jessica Valenti to call for Orwellian style cleansing of the language and claim that "all the worst words used to insult men are distinctly female" (erm ... cock, prick, wanker, creep, perv, dick head ...) or they're playing a very cynical game of attracting clicks by deliberately winding people up with contrived synthetic outrage articles and then watching the advertising revenue flow in.

David Cameron's lies

One of the most glaring displays of synthetic outrage I've ever seen came from the Brexiter Tory MP Nadine Dorries, who decided to attack David Cameron as a liar for daring to suggest that Turkey are a very long way from being able to join the EU, (even if their membership application isn't vetoed by the French). She worked herself up into such a fit of manufactured outrage that she even ended up calling for Cameron to resign over the issue.

The bizarre thing about it is that she has repeatedly bitten her lip and said nothing when David Cameron told lies about not planning to increase VAT, about not wanting to cut, privatise or top-down reorganise the NHS, about the national debt (the exact same lie twice), about the UK economy having been "bankrupted", about the leader of the opposition, about having no plans to slash working tax credits ...

It's extraordinary that Dorries could calmly say nothing for all those years as she watched Cameron lie, and lie, and lie, and lie, and lie again - but as soon as he says something that conflicts with her anti-EU sentiments, she ends up shrieking and wailing about it, even though Cameron's claims about Turkey were a case of over-egging the pudding at worst in comparison to his track record of telling outright porkies.

Moral high-horsing

Perhaps the most disgusting displays of synthetic outrage I've ever experienced came after I posted a heartfelt tribute to the humanitarian work of the murdered Labour MP Jo Cox.

Most of the people who commented left condolences and tributes, but a vocal minority set about moral high-horsing as if posting a tribute to the political work of a murdered MP is somehow completely unacceptable.

To pretend that there was no political aspect to the killing, or that it's somehow morally wrong to even consider the political aspects is a bizarre strategy that is strongly suggestive of extreme-right sympathies (because any political analysis is certain to conclude that the killer was a mentally unwell person with a head full of violent, extreme-right, white supremacist politics). 

Had eyewitnesses said that the killer was shouting "Allahu Akbar" rather than "Britain First" and initial investigations found that he had links to radical Islamist groups rather than neo-Nazi groups, does anyone seriously believe that there would be so much of this sanctimonious moral high-horsing and demanding that people don't consider the political dimensions of the killing?

Some of these moral high-horsers tried to claim that it was somehow disrespectful to her family to use a quote from one of her own parliamentary speeches to "promote an agenda" (her own agenda) and even called for the Another Angry Voice Facebook page to be shut down. 

I will not apologise for trying to ensure that Jo Cox's voice was heard louder on the day of her death than it ever was when she was alive and fighting for the welfare of Syrian refugees and their children. Remember what her her husband Brendan said about what Jo would have wanted: He said that she would have wanted people to unite against hatred. In the current political climate, where hatred of refugees is so commonplace, I'm sure that posting a quote of her expressing her concern for the welfare of Syrian refugees is respectful to his wishes.

Some of these moral high-horsers even used phrases like "her body isn't even cold yet" as an attempt to silence me, and other who were expressing their views.

It's completely twisted to imagine that a tribute consisting of a quotation of his wife saying something that she cared deeply about would be more offensive to Brendan Cox than someone harking on about the residual heat of her corpse in order to stoke up synthetic outrage and silence other people from talking about her or the circumstances of her death. It just goes to show how warped people's perspectives to become when they allow themselves to get worked up into fits of synthetic outrage.

Conclusion

Synthetic outrage has always been a thing, but the declining standards of political debate, and the fact that the Internet gives pretty much anyone a platform to air their views, mean that it's becoming ever more prevalent in political discourse.

Sometimes displays of synthetic outrage are simply annoying or hypocritical, but when people begin manufacturing outrage in order to disparage and silence people with whom they disagree, it's much more dangerous. It's perfectly possible to use synthetic outrage to sell newspapers, generate online advertising revenue or promote particular political agendas, but when people start using it as a tool to silence others it stops being just a crude propaganda tool and becomes a weapon of oppression.

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

OR

Why do pro-Brexit Tories suddenly care about David Cameron's lies?

David Cameron has never been particularly popular with the hard-right fringe of the Tory party, but despite giving them the EU referendum they demanded the pro-Brexit Tories seem keen to knife him in the back before the votes are even counted.

It's no surprise to see the anti-gay rights pro-banker Tory MP Andrew Bridgen rushing to attack David Cameron and calling for a vote of confidence. Slightly more surprising was the contribution of Nadine Dorries who put on an incredible display of synthetic outrage with claims that Cameron had "lied profoundly" over his claims that Turkey would not be joining the EU in the next three decades.

Of course David Cameron has no magic crystal ball to make such long-ranging future predictions, but in consideration of the fact that Turkey has been seeking EU membership for 29 years (since 1987) and has only successfully negotiated one out of the necessary 15 chapters needed to secure EU membership so far, Cameron's claim hardly seems like the most egregious of all of the lies he's ever told.

Nadine Dorries' synthetic outrage over David Cameron's over-egged claims about Turkish accession to the EU taking at least another three decades if it ever happens at all is remarkably hypocritical to behold given the way that she has held her tongue and refused to criticise David Cameron over numerous much more blatant and significant lies over the last six years.

VAT

Just before the 2010 General Election David Cameron repeatedly stated that the Tories had no plans to put up VAT to 20%. In June 2010, just two months after the General Election, David Cameron's pre-election lies were exposed when the Tories raised VAT to 20%.

Nadine Dorries (and the rest of the right-wing fringe of the Tory party) didn't bother complaining about this blatant lie, in fact she even voted in favour of David Cameron's dishonest VAT hike!

A massive pack of lies

In 2010 David Cameron made a massive fanfare of signing a pre-election Contract with the Electorate which contained 16 promises. He said at the time that "if we don't deliver our side of the bargain, kick us out in five years".

After a few years it became absolutely clear to the Tories that they were going to break pretty much every single promise that the "contract" contained, so instead of admitting it and asking to be kicked out of power the Tories simply deleted every single trace of the contract off their website and hoped that the public would simply forget about it before the 2015 General Election.

Nadine Dorries never spoke out about the Tory failure to live up to David Cameron's "Contract with the Electorate", nor their decision to sneakily delete every trace of it off their website.

The NHS

Before the 2010 General Election David Cameron famously promised "no more top-down reorganisations of the NHS". After the 2010 General Election David Cameron's government launched the biggest to-down reorganisation in the entire history of the NHS.

Nadine Dorries didn't speak out about the fact that David Cameron had lied about his intentions towards the NHS, in fact, she even voted in favour of Cameron's top-down reorganisation of the NHS!

Bankruptcy

One of David Cameron's favourite dishonest claims is that the UK was supposedly "bankrupted" during the New Labour administration, a lie he has told in parliament. Anyone who knows anything about economics knows that the claim that the UK economy has been declared bankrupt in the recent past is complete hogwash. Either the person claiming it is a complete economic illiterate who rote learns their facile political opinions from the pages of the right-wing press, or as in David Cameron's case, they're a despicable chancer who feels entitled to tell lies about the UK economy because he has such contempt for his audience that he thinks they're credulous enough to believe such absolute gubbins.

Nadine Dorries has never spoken out about David Cameron's habit of lying that the UK has been declared bankrupt.

Reducing the national debt

Another of David Cameron's favoured political lies is to claim that the Tories have been reducing the national debt, when they've actually failed to even halve the rate at which it is growing despite promising in 2010 that they would have eliminated the deficit completely by 2015 (the deficit was £76 billion in 2015-16).

David Cameron was rebuked by the UK Statistics Authority for telling this lie in a 2013 party political broadcast, but since the worst punishment they can give him for telling outright lies is the sending of a stern letter, Cameron decided to demonstrate his utter contempt for the UK Statistics Authority (and anyone who gives a damn about the truth) by repeating the exact same lie at the 2014 Tory part conference.

Nadine Dorries never once spoke out against David Cameron's habit of lying to the electorate about reducing the national debt when his government has actually created more new public debt than every Labour government in history combined.

Lying to evade questions
 

When Jeremy Corbyn asked David Cameron a question about the sweetheart 3% tax deal that had been cooked up with Google Cameron evaded the question completely by spouting an extraordinary stream of lies about the leader of the opposition as a desperate attempt to deflect attention away from the extremely lax treatment of multinational corporations that refuse to pay their fair share of tax.

Nadine Dorries never objected to the fact that David Cameron chose to evade the question about the sweetheart Google tax deal by spouting a load of lies about the leader of the opposition and she never raised the question of why Cameron was never held to account for telling such a stream of lies in the House of Commons by the Parliamentary Standards Committee.

Tax Credits

Before the 2015 General Election David Cameron and other leading Tories gave their word that the Tories wouldn't set about impoverishing the working poor by slashing Tax Credits. Just a few months after the 2015 General Election the Tories set about trying to slash Tax Credits for the working poor. They were only prevented from doing so after a major House of Lords rebellion.

Nadine Dorries never complained that David Cameron had lied to the electorate about Tax Credits, in fact she even voted in favour of the plan to slash in-work benefits for the working poor!

Conclusion 

Nadine Dorries has never complained about the way that David Cameron has contributed to the lamentable decline in the standard of political debate by lying over and over and over again. She never got upset about the extraordinary litany of lies and deceptions David Cameron has spewed on all manner of subjects, but now she's suddenly bothered!

The reason she's suddenly bothered now is pretty obvious. She didn't give a damn about Cameron's lies before because it suited her own personal self-interest to keep her mouth shut. Now that she's eyeing a ministerial position in a new post-Brexit government led by the extreme-right fringe of the Tory party she's keen to stick the knife in.

Nadine Dorries doesn't give a damn about honesty in public debate, like all of the members of the Tory party who have turned blind eyes to David Cameron's lies over they years, she's only really interested in serving her own personal self-interest.

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