So apparently the UK political scene is so banjaxed that we're actually trusting Lib-Dems again, and it's not even four years since their disastrous coalition with the Tories came to an end!
Maybe Remainers flocking to support the pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, social safety net-trashing Lib-Dems would make some kind of sense if the Lib-Dems had shown any kind of remorse for what they wilfully helped the Tories to do to the United Kingdom. But no. There's no remorse at all.
- There's no remorse over the brutal Tory sanctions regime, nor the despicable disability denial system that has resulted in literally thousands of people dying within weeks of being declared "fit for work" and thrown off their disability benefits.
- There's no remorse over Lib-Dem votes in favour of deeply illiberal policies like secret courts, the gagging law, bedroom tax, dripa, Theresa May's Hostile Environment, and the catastrophic strategy of turning Libya into a lawless terrorism breeding ground like Blair and Bush did to Iraq.
- And worst of all there's no remorse about the way the far-right blamed the collapsing living standards these disgusting policies causes on immigrants and the EU in order to promote Brexit, and the Lib-Dems just bit their tongues, because any effort to explain that the real causes of the living standards collapse (austerity, wage repression, infrastructure under-investment, public service cuts, vandalism of the social safety net) would have illustrated their own complicity. So they just stayed silent and let the far-right win.
And now just look at the delight on the faces of Danny Alexander, Nick Clegg, and George Osborne in the photo above.
These three men impoverished literally millions of their fellow countrymen, and deliberately trashed the future economic potential of the UK in order to fund a disgusting sequence of tax cuts and handouts to corporations and the mega-rich.
They raked in lavish six figure salaries while they were doing it, and now all three have quit politics to rake in even more extravagant salaries from private sector employers.
They don't give a shit about all the people they trampled into destitution, nor the fact that their ruinous economic policies created the dramatic collapse in living standards that led directly to Brexit.
But somehow, even when there are plenty of explicitly anti-austerity options for Remainers to choose from (Green Party, SNP, Plaid Cymru) Remainers are flocking to support the austerity-enabling Lib-Dems.
Assuming that people aren't completely gullible idiots with goldfish-memories, the only possible conclusion is that an awful lot of Remainers are the comfortably well off who never suffered the truly dire consequences of austerity dogma, wage repression, welfare cuts, and public service destruction.
They want to reward the party that enabled all of this malice in the first half of this decade because they were comfortably well-to-do during that period, and quite content at the time because the impoverishment was happening to other people below them on the social ladder.
They want to go back to the way things were before because they were perfectly comfortable when the destitution was being forced on "the lower orders" in order to fund tax cuts and handouts for corporations and the mega rich.
And they certainly don't want to consider that the vile poverty-spreading policies the Lib-Dems enabled were one of the main causal factors in the Brexit chaos in the first place.
They're like lung cancer sufferers dramatically increasing the amount of cigarettes they smoke in the hope that it'll somehow cure the disease they've given themselves.
By supporting a party that enabled so much ideological malice against the poor, working classes, disabled people, local communities, they're actually intent on making themselves look exactly like the aloof metropolitan elitists that the Leave camp always love to portray Remainers as.
Every time they turn up in comments sections to proudly brag that they're voting Lib-Dem because they "don't care about anything else except stopping Brexit", they're displaying their outright contempt for the people who actually suffered under the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition.
If these people can afford to not care about austerity dogma, wage repression, public service cuts, vandalism of the social safety net, etc, then they can hardly complain when left behind communities say that Remainers don't give a shit about them and their problems can they?
And what makes it so much worse is that they're so mindlessly optimistic that the Lib-Dems won't just completely shaft them again.
How exactly does electing a load of pro-austerity pro-privatisation neoliberals into the European Parliament do anything to stop Brexit when the only place it can actually be stopped is Westminster?
Voting for the austerity-enablers who helped create the Brexit backlash in the first place is nonsense, especially since boosting the number of austerity-enforcing neoliberals in the European Parliament does nothing practical to actually stop Brexit whatever.
But then the Brexit Party Faragists are ridiculous nonsense on the other side of the Brexit spectrum, so I guess maybe the thinking of these Lib-Dem supporters is as simple as "if Brexit supporters are going to vote for a polarised right-wing nonsense party, then so will we"!
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Polly Mackenzie was never a Lib-Dem MP, but as one of Nick Clegg's core advisers she played a crucial role during the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition period. She's just admitted the kinds of depraved horse trading that went on between the Lib-Dems and the Tories at the time in a Twitter mini-thread.
She starts off with an unobjectionable and actually rather astute observation about how the Tories seem to announce a new green measure or plastics ban every time they want to move the news away from their latest scandal, but she followed the Tweet up with some more observations that shine a light on the grotesque horse trading the Lib-Dems did with the Tories.
She claims that the clampdown on plastics was actually a Lib-Dem idea, and that they finally secured the limited introduction of 5p charges on plastic bags in return for their support for a toughening of the draconian Tory benefit sanctions regime.
Here are a few facts about the benefits sanctions regime:
- Benefits sanctions condemn individuals and their families to periods of absolute destitution for up to two years by stopping their social security payments.
- Benefits sanctions have been applied for the most grotesquely inappropriate of "offences" such as having a heart attack during a work capacity assessment, a veteran selling poppies a few hours a week, being five minutes late to an interview, missing an appointment because their child was stillborn, missing an appointment because they had a stroke (see a list of grotesque examples with sources in this article)...
- Benefits sanctions have been shown not to work. It's obvious that removing a person's ability to eat properly, clean their clothes, print documents, travel to interviews reduces rather than increases their ability to find work, but the Tories insisted the opposite. That condemning people to absolute destitution is a way of helping people.
So in return for the limited introduction of 5p plastic bag charges the Lib-Dems green lighted even more savage Tory abuse of some of the most vulnerable people in society.
There's nothing wrong with caring about the environment, in fact it's highly commendable, but if you're willing to kick thousands of extremely vulnerable people under a bus in order to make a minor step forward in combating excess plastic waste, then you've got your priorities disgustingly wrong.
So the next time you hear someone trotting out the tired old Lib-Dem platitude about how they were a "moderating influence" on the Tories, remind them of the way they decided to give Iain Duncan Smith even more power to brutalise the most vulnerable people in society in return for nothing more than 5p plastic bag charges (that would have eventually been introduced anyway due to EU legislation).
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The former UKIP leader Nigel Farage has propelled himself back into the headlines by announcing that he's coming around to the idea of a second referendum on EU membership.
This is obviously quite a sensational announcement given the absolute bile Brexiters generally fling at people who suggest that perhaps the British people deserve a democratic vote once the terms and conditions of Brexit are actually known.
Most Brexiters strongly resist the idea of a second referendum because they know that the 2016 referendum was a freak result, won with a tiny minority against a backdrop of collapsing public services and stagnating wages caused by ruinous Tory austerity dogma.
Brextremists are understandably afraid that a second vote would result in a reversal of Brexit, especially in light of Theresa May's catastrophic, increasingly unpopular, and profoundly anti-democratic handling of the Brexit process so far.
The fact that Farage is going against the position held by the majority of Brexiters by suggesting a second referendum raises the obvious question of why?
If we take Farage at his word, he's claiming that a cancel-Brexit campaign fronted by the likes of Tony Blair and Nick Clegg would fail spectacularly, and anyone with a grain of political sense must be able to realise that Clegg and Blair are now so politically toxic they would undoubtedly damage any 2nd Remain campaign by association.
However, it's also worth noting that the likely leaders of the 2nd Leave campaign would also be politically toxic too. Only a fool would put their trust in the likes of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove after their "£350 for the NHS" lies, and Theresa May would be at the forefront of the whole 2nd Brexit campaign trying to argue in favour of whatever lamentable deal she's managed to cobble together.
Even taking into account the fact that Blair and Clegg are politically toxic, a second EU referendum campaign looks like an almighty risk for Brexiters, given that their likely figureheads are just as politically toxic as the their opponents.
Aside from saying that he's coming around to the idea of a second referendum, Farage said something else telling. He said that the idea of a multiple choice referendum would confuse the British people.
This is interesting because he's clearly envisioning a binary choice between just two options.
Obviously the hard-right Brextremist mob have jumped on this idea saying that the choice should be a fake Brexit or Brexit choice between whatever hard-right Tory Brexit Theresa May manages to cobble together, and a totally catastrophic "no deal" flounce out of the EU.
But this kind of ridiculous false choice is clearly not what Farage has in mind, because it's impossible that Blair or Clegg would front either of those campaigns.
Farage clearly wants to re-fight the battle all over again and win a decisive Brexit victory against those who wish to remain in the EU.
This is interesting because it indicates that he's willing to shackle himself to whatever deal Theresa May and her three Brexiteer charlatans come up with. This seems like a pretty bold gamble given the chaotic and incompetent shambles the Tories have been making of the Brexit process so far.
Farage also doesn't seem to have considered the fact that that a second Brexit vote could be seen as a way of slapping the government in the face.
Just as huge numbers of people saw the 2016 Brexit vote as an ideal opportunity to slap David Cameron and George Osborne in the face by voting Brexit, a second referendum could easily be seen as a means of slapping Theresa May in the face, but this time by voting to lob her chaotic Brexit shambles onto the scrapheap.
One of the more compelling explanations behind Farage's U-turn on the idea of a second referendum is pure self-interest.
Ever since Farage felt the euphoria of winning the Brexit vote in June 2016 his star has been fading. He's gone from being a leader of one of the most consequential political rebellions in decades to begging unsuccessfully to be made Donald Trump's butler, backing Marine Le Pen's failed National Front presidential bid in France, speaking at extreme-right rallies in Germany, and backing an alleged paedophile who actually managed to lose an election for the Republicans in Alabama!
Perhaps Farage wants a second referendum because he wants to be back in the limelight again?
Then there's Farage's financial backer Arron Banks who managed to build up a huge social media propaganda empire through the last EU referendum. Unlike the official Vote Leave campaign that folded up after the 2016 referendum, Banks' Leave.EU operation has continued churning out extreme-right propaganda and links to Banks' own Westmonster propaganda site ever since.
A second referendum campaign would obviously allow Banks to further expand his extreme-right propaganda empire, no matter what the final result.
All in all Farage's confidence that a second referendum would result in a landslide for Brexit seems massively over-optimistic given that such a scenario would offer the British public a chance to step back from the cliff edge, and to give Theresa May a massive slap in the face in the process.
However, whether Farage is motivated by exuberant over-confidence, or by self-interest, or just by a desperation to push himself back into the limelight, one thing is for sure; whether he intended it or not he's done a huge favour to those of us who believe democracy would be better served by a serious and properly informed Brexit referendum once the terms and conditions have been made clear, than by the hastily rushed and profoundly dishonest farce of a debate that happened in 2016.
Like him or not, Farage has completely shattered the Brextremist trope that a second referendum would be anti-democratic and against "the will of the people", because we now have one of the leading Brexiteers arguing that a second referendum would actually be a democratic opportunity to decide the situation once and for all.
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The rumour is that Nick Clegg is due to be handed a knighthood in the New Year's Honours.
Aside from the fact that the British honours system is an absolute affront to democracy, there's surely nobody less deserving of such a politically motivated award than Nick Clegg.
If we think back to 2010 we'll recall the fact that after decades of rebuilding and restructuring, the Liberals were a genuine third party, looking at securing well over 20% of the vote.
The Liberal Democrats were in fine form, with popular and engaging policies like their pledge to oppose any more tuition fee increases, and their determination to reform our outrageously outdated and unrepresentative political system.
In Vince Cable they had another apparent asset in someone who could talk about economics in an engaging and understandable manner. Before the General Election he cautioned against the fire-sale of public assets at below their true market value, and against austerity dogma with appeals for increased public investment in infrastructure projects.
By 2017 the Lib-Dem share of the vote has collapsed to just 7%, Nick Clegg is gone as party leader, and ousted from his Sheffield Hallam constituency too.
The reasons for this collapse in fortunes are obvious.
One of the main reasons is that Clegg and his Lib-Dem chums immediately betrayed everyone who voted Lib-Dem because they believe education is a right and a social benefit, rather than a privilege to be commodified and sold at the highest possible price.
By colluding with the Tories to increase tuition fees to £9,000 per year, with interest on the debts hiked to an absolute rip-off 3% above inflation, Clegg has lumbered hundreds of thousands of students with vast debts that over three quarters of them will never pay off, despite paying 9% of their disposable income in aspiration tax for their entire working lifetimes.
When it came to much-needed reform of the political system, Clegg betrayed that core Lib-Dem demographic too.
Instead of making fair votes one of his red lines in the coalition negotiations, he capitulated and agreed to nothing more than a referendum on a worst possible voting reform called Alternative Vote. A voting system Clegg himself once famously referred to as "a miserable little compromise".
The referendum was lost and reform of the House of Lords wasn't even attempted as Clegg actually sat by and watched David Cameron stuff the Lords with unelected cronies at a faster rate than any Prime Minister in British history!
Then there was Clegg's economics spokesperson Vince Cable, who went from warning against public asset fire-sales and ruinous austerity dogma, to serving in George Osborne's treasury, selling off the Royal Mail at way below it's true market value, and helping Osborne slash Britain's rate of infrastructure investment to the lowest level in the developed world.
What's worst of all is that the Lib-Dems are rabidly pro-European, and only the most blinkered of Lib-Dem fanatics could possibly try to deny the vital role Nick Clegg played in creating Brexit.
Firstly he enabled the Tories back into power and then backed their ruinous austerity fetishism and wage repression policies to the hilt, thus eroding the living standards of millions and creating the ideal situation for a massive public "fuck you" to the political establishment.
Then there's the way he normalised lying to the electorate with his absolutely brazen deceptions about opposing tuition fee increases. Watching Clegg completely get away with that extreme level of dishonesty surely emboldened the most shockingly dishonest Brexiteers like Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Priti Patel, and Iain Duncan Smith.
Then there was his refusal to press the Tories into electoral reform to make the voting system fairer and more representative. Had he made the introduction of a proportional voting system a red line in his coalition negotiations, David Cameron would never have been able to win a thumping majority with just 36.8% of the vote, and he would never have been able to gamble the entire future of the UK on a whim like he did.
Not only has Clegg wrecked his own party and rendered himself so politically toxic that his own constituency got rid of him, he's also played an instrumental role in bringing about the Lib-Dems own worst nightmare in Brexit.
Anyone with any grip on reality whatever would look at a man who wrecked his own party, lied to the electorate, wilfully imposed ruinous Tory austerity dogma and wage repression on millions of people, played an instrumental role in delivering his own worst nightmare in Brexit, and even got dumped by his own constituents, must surely conclude that he deserves a badge of shame rather than a reward.
However the Westminster establishment club are so shockingly out of touch with reality that they can look at an incompetent, profoundly dishonest, self-defeating, and massively discredited charlatan like Nick Clegg and think he deserves one of the highest honours the nation can bestow on a person!
Nick Clegg's reward for such abject failure actually tells us way more about the ridiculous bubble of delusion the Westminster establishment club exists in, than it tells us about the man himself.
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It looks a lot like the Liberal Democrats are lining Vince Cable up to run as an unopposed candidate to lead their party.
The problem of course is that Vince is a shockingly discredited figure whose appointment as leader would be yet another demonstration of the fact that the Lib-Dems are still living in denial about the damage they did by enabling the Tories back into power in 2010, rather than using the strong 3rd party position they had to actually hold them to account.
The economy
I used to quite like Vince Cable because he was one of the few politicians who seemed to have any real understanding of the global financial sector insolvency crisis at the time, but he pissed that reputation away completely when he conducted one of the most obviously self-serving U-turns in political history.
Before the 2010 General Election Vince repeatedly warned against deep ideologically driven cuts to public spending. He said "it would be reckless to plunge the economy back into recession through the immediate large-scale slashing of public services and jobs" and against making "damaging cuts in investment that undermine the country’s long-term future" [source].
Seven years of economic stagnation and failed economic targets from the Tories as a result of their ideological fixation with austerity dogma says that Vince was absolutely right to warn against reckless large-scale slashing of government expenditure and deliberate under-investment in the nation's future.
The problem of course is that Vince abandoned his anti-austerity position faster than you could say "opportunism" when the 2010 General Election resulted in a hung parliament, and went off to spend five years at the Treasury actually helping George Osborne to implement his socially and economically ruinous austerity agenda.
It's one thing being an ideologically driven nitwit like George Osborne who actually seemed to believe that "let's cut our way to growth" was a coherent and viable economic strategy, but Vince was one of the leading voices against this kind of economically illiterate delusion.
Vince abandoned economic sense entirely and lent a veneer of respectability to austerity dogma by actually serving George Osborne at the Treasury, which makes him an awful lot worse than Osborne, because Vince knew perfectly well how much damage he was actively helping Osborne to inflict, but he did it anyway.
Tuition fees
Vince Cable was one of the leading Lib-Dems who decided that completely shafting the students who helped vote them into power was a price worth paying for the self-satisfaction of a few years of ministerial salaries and the taste of some second hand Tory power.
The result of the Lib-Dem betrayal of their core student demographic is that students from the poorest backgrounds are now leaving university with £57,000 worth of debt, and an astonishing 75% of graduates are projected to never pay back their vast debts because of the extortionate 6% interest rates.
Despite these shocking statistics Vince Cable is insistent that the Lib-Dems imposing these vindictive disposable income-wrecking taxes on aspiration, despite their 2010 election pledge to actually scrap tuition fees, was the right thing to do.
Shafting one of your core demographics is an astoundingly inept move, and the Lib-Dems will never recover for as long as they continue the farce that imposing the highest public university fees in the world on English students was somehow a justifiable move.
It's much more than the fact that students won't come back to the Lib-Dems, it's the fact that anyone with any political sense at all will think to themselves "if the Lib-Dems were prepared to totally shaft their own student demographic for their own self-serving reasons, why wouldn't they shaft me too?"
Liberalism
Another Lib-Dem principle to get slung into the political dustbin during the coalition years was the party's commitment to liberalism. Between 2010 and 2015 the Lib-Dems helped the Tories to impose some of the most right-wing authoritarian and downright illiberal legislation since universal suffrage.
One of the worst examples of Lib-Dem backed illiberalism was Theresa May's depraved move to scrap the principle of open justice with Secret Courts (Closed Material Proceedings) in her 2013 Justice and Security Act.
This legislation creates the situation where a defendant can have their fate decided in a courtroom they are not allowed to enter, on charges they are not allowed to know, based on evidence that they are not allowed to see, and instead of having their own lawyer, they're given what is called a "special advocate" who is appointed to "defend" them by the state that is prosecuting them!
Vince Cable was an enthusiastic backer of this outrageously illiberal assault on the openness and accountability of the justice system, so anyone who supports the Lib-Dems because they consider themselves liberal should understand that Vince is so illiberal that he actively supported most of Theresa May's most illiberal and downright malicious schemes.
Warmongering
Before his conversion to Toryism Vince Cable was a man who described the invasion and occupation of Iraq as "the last straw" and complained about the nebulous ever changing justification for the occupation of Afghanistan.
After his conversion to Toryism Vince became a man who voted in favour of creating a terrorist breeding ground in Libya, and then even backed David Cameron's lunatic plan to hand Damascus to ISIS by attacking Assad (which was thankfully defeated when 30 Tory MPs and 10 Lib Dems had the good sense to rebel against Cameron's rush to war making him the first Prime Minister to lose a war vote since 1782).
Charles Kennedy won a great number of people to the Lib-Dem cause with his principled stance against imperialist warmongering, but Vince Cable helped to demolish that legacy by backing every imperialist adventure Cameron proposed, no matter how ridiculously ill-conceived.
Strategic ineptitude
Back in May 2010 one thing was absolutely clear to most of us; David Cameron and the Tories needed Nick Clegg and the Lib-Dems a hell of a lot more than the Lib-Dems needed the Tories, but Clegg, Cable, Alexander and co were so giddy with excitement at the chance to become government ministers that they agreed to an absurdly one-sided coalition arrangement that saw them shaft their own core demographics, abandon their own principles, and cement the Tories into power for 5 ruinous years.
A look at Theresa May's deal with the DUP bigots shows what kind of agreement the Lib-Dems should have aimed at.
The DUP knew that Theresa May needed their 10 votes more than they needed her, so they blagged everything they could, including a £1 billion bung for Northern Ireland, promises that the Tories would bin bits of their own manifesto, and on the DUP side they reserved the right to rebel against any particular bits of Tory malice they don't like, and limited the agreement to two years!
The Lib-Dems had 57 votes to bargain with, but they were the ones who made most of the concessions in their desperation to bag ministerial salaries for themselves!
The Lib-Dems were so strategically inept they willingly allowed the Tories to bind their hands and feet and then spend five years whipping them to within an inch of their lives, and Vince was a major player in negotiating this absolute capitulation of a deal.
Why would anyone with the remotest bit of political nous vote ever for a party led by such a strategically inept charlatan?
Vince Cable is dead wood
Vince Cable is the living embodiment of Lib-Dem betrayal. He stands for nothing except for self-serving political opportunism, and that's why he would make such a fantastic choice of leader for the Lib-Dems.
If they wanted to rebuild their shattered reputation then they would need to move on from the shockingly unprincipled old guard and find a leader with a coherent vision of what the purpose of the Liberal Democrats actually is, and the conviction to stick by this vision when opposition parties offer them trinkets and baubles to lob all of their convictions in the political bin.
Vince was a major player in the Lib-Dem leadership who saw their share of the vote plunge from 23% (on the verge of turning the UK into a genuine three party state) to below 8% (back to the kind of hopeless mess they were in under Jeremy Thorpe back in the 1970s).
You'd have to be as delusional as ... well ... as delusional as a Liberal Democrat to imagine that the voters will come flocking back to the Lib-Dems if one of the main architects of their collapse is handed the leadership in an uncontested election.
But good on them for finding their ideal leader. Who better to lead an unpopular party of self-serving political opportunists than one of the most discredited and unprincipled charlatans in British politics?
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.
One of the things that astounded me during the hastily rushed EU referendum debate was that people actually got hooked in by the faux anti-establishment rhetoric of millionaire right-wing toffs like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Iain Duncan Smith, Roger Helmer and Michael Gove.
A bunch of millionaire right-wing toffs telling us that we could stick it to another bunch of millionaire right-wing toffs by voting to quit the EU! Who could possibly buy into that?
I mean I fully understand the desire to give the likes of David Cameron, George Osborne and Nick Clegg a good kicking. Anyone who followed my work before May 2015 will know my opinions on that lot, but the idea of handing total power to the hard-right fringe of the Tory party to do it, well that's a plan that would have any sensible progressive mired in second thoughts.
And so it has transpired that Brexit did indeed empower the right-wing fringe of the Tory party to set about remodelling the UK as some kind of horrific right-wing dystopia. The level of dictatorial right-wing authoritarianism only superseded by the level of outright incompetence (they had seven whole months to come up with a Brexit plan, but they were still rushing to get it finished at 04:17 on the morning of the release and it was still riddled with embarrassing errors and empty rhetoric).
The really odd thing is that so many Brexiters have actually gone along with this total reversal from anti-establishment rebellion to full-on rearguard action in defence of the Tory establishment.
It's as if the word "Brexit" has some mystical power over people. It doesn't matter how barbarically right-wing things get, people have made their decision and they're sticking with it.
It doesn't seem to matter to Brexiters that Theresa May tried to scrap parliamentary sovereignty in order to set herself up as an all-powerful autocrat who can make and repeal laws at her own discression, with no parliamentary or judicial oversight whatever.
It doesn't seem to matter to Brexiters that Theresa May's long-awaited "negotiation strategy" is some kind of diplomatically inept toddler tantrum about how they Tories want a better deal for the UK than the deal available to remaining EU members or they'll turn the UK into the world's biggest tax haven.
It doesn't seem to matter to Brexiters that Theresa May gathered up her begging bowl and scuttled off to the United States at the first opportunity to plead for a Tory-Trump corporate power grab of a trade deal that would make TTIP look like a walk in the park.
Even if Theresa May announced that Brexit gives her a mandate to confiscate all newborn babies to be killed and cooked for a massive Tory banquet, it seems that a load of Brexiters would be yelling "shut up", "Remoaners", "will of the people", "traitors", "sore losers" "get over it" ... at anyone who dared to put their head above the parapet to object that Tory paedo-cannibalism wasn't even mentioned during the EU referendum debate.
The way Brexit has turned from an anti-establishment rebellion into a desperate rearguard action to protect the Tory establishment tells us a lot about the human psyche. Once you've sold people a simple opinion (based on fearmongering, misrepresentations, extremely dodgy propaganda, Nazi style posters, staggeringly over-optimistic fantasies and outright lies), it doesn't mater if you subsequently rewrite the terms of the contract so it bears no relation whatever to the original promises, people will be loathe to change their opinions, because to do so would be to admit to themselves that they were a naive fool who allowed themselves to get totally duped by a bunch of extreme right-wingers.
How else is it possible to explain left-wing Brexiters still stubbornly defending Theresa May's terrifying authoritarian scheming, the bumbling incompetence of her three Brexiteers and the fascistic gloating of Nigel Farage?
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.
The former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has a book to sell.
Some of the criticism of Tory politicians that Clegg and his fellow Lib-Dems enabled into power is quite extraordinary, and raises the obvious question of why on earth he didn't speak out at the time.
Take this extraordinary quote as an example:
"Welfare for Osborne was just a bottomless pit of savings, and it didn't really matter what the human consequences were, because focus groups had shown that the voters they wanted to appeal to were very anti-welfare, and therefore there was almost no limit to those anti-welfare prejudices"
George Osborne repeatedly inflicted harsh welfare spending cuts (especially on disabled people, the working poor and children) whilst simultaneously handing out tax breaks to corporations and the super-rich. Between 2010 and 2015. He could only do this because Nick Clegg and his fellow Lib-Dem MPs voted in favour of one savage piece of Tory anti-welfare legislation after another.
Clegg now admits that he knew all along that George Osborne's cuts to social security were not driven by necessity but actually by a desire to appeal to a small savagely right-wing demographic of voters.
He also admits that the cuts were made without regard for the catastrophic human consequences of huge numbers of vulnerable people and children being driven into absolute destitution.
Clegg has openly admitted that he and his party voted in favour of policies despite knowledge that they were being implemented without regard for the human consequences.
Between 2010 and 2015 Nick Clegg could have spoken out at any time; He could have taken a stand and instructed his MPs to vote against some of Osborne's most brutal welfare cuts; He could have said tax cuts for the rich were completely unacceptable in the same budget as harsh welfare cuts for the poor; He could have crossed the floor and opposed Osborne's socially and economically destructive austerity agenda at any time - but he chose not to. He chose to go along with things that he knew to be wrong so that he could stay in power for a bit longer.
Clegg also laid into Theresa May accusing her of pandering to "the cardboard-cutout prejudices that large parts of her party have about Europe" and repeatedly trying to insert false statistics into official reports (tampering with official reports is Clegg has accused her of in the past too).
Nick Clegg and the so-called Liberals had plenty of opportunities to actually stand up to Theresa May by refusing to vote in favour of appalling illiberal legislation that came out of the Home Office. Some of the most egregiously illiberal things that Clegg and the Lib-Dems helped Theresa May to impose were Secret Courts (so a person can now have their fate decided in a courtroom they are not allowed to enter, on charges they are not allowed to know, based on evidence that they are not allowed to see), DRIPA (hastily covering up the unlawful activity that the UK secret services that was exposed by the Edward Snowden leaks) and minimum income thresholds for UK spouses (extremely discriminatory legislation designed to rip apart thousands of British families from poor and ordinary backgrounds).
Had Clegg and the Lib-Dems rebelled against any of this appallingly illiberal nonsense from Theresa May instead of actively voting in favour of it perhaps Theresa May's coronation as Prime Minister wouldn't have been such a foregone conclusion?
In the Guardian article publicising his book, the three main regrets that Clegg has about his participation in the coalition government are detailed as the "punch in the face" he delivered to Lib-Dem voters by helping the Tories to erect a massive social mobility barrier by hiking tuition fees (aspiration tax) to £9,000 per year, his appallingly pally press conference in the garden of 10 Downing Street when the Coalition deal was announced and his agreement to sit next to David Cameron during Prime Minister's Questions.
The first regret is so obvious that even someone like Clegg had to admit it. Stabbing one of your most loyal core demographics in the back is such a staggeringly inept move that it's extraordinary that nobody in the Lib-Dems (barring a tiny minority like Charles Kennedy) tried to stop it.
The other two regrets appear to stem more from Clegg's own vanity than any real introspection about what went wrong. Of course the gleeful press conference is excruciating in hindsight. Of course it was embarrassing to have sit next to David Cameron every week as he evaded questions, regurgitated scripted put-downs and lied incessantly. But the idea that these are two of the most important things he got wrong is ridiculously self-absorbed.
- Clegg and the Lib-Dems didn't just vote through a load of George Osborne's savage welfare cuts, they also worked as ministers in Iain Duncan Smith's DWP. Anyone who witnessed the Lib-Dem MP Steve Webb's excruciating performances trying to defend Bedroom Tax will know how much damage that did to the party.
- The failure of the Lib-Dems to challenge Theresa May on savagely illiberal legislation like Secret Courts, her toxic anti-immigrant ranting or her track record of incompetence was completely unacceptable. Had the Lib-Dems tried to hold her to account for her extremism and incompetence instead of biting their tongues for five long years, perhaps this inept and fanatically right-wing authoritarian woman wouldn't now be considered "a safe pair of hands" by quite as many people.
- Anyone who started following the Lib-Dems because of Charles Kennedy's principled opposition to the invasion of Iraq must have been horrified by the Lib-Dems involvement in the mess in Libya. Imagine the levels of delusion necessary to believe that Libya is now better off now that it's civil society has been reduced to ruins and the country has been overrun by ISIS.
- Andrew Lansley's top-down reorganisation of the NHS designed to carve it up into little pieces and then give them away his private sector mates (who donate hundreds of thousands of pounds to the Tory Party) was only passed thanks to Lib-Dem votes in the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The facts that such an NHS privatisation-by-stealth policy was not included in the manifesto of either coalition party, and that David Cameron had explicitly ruled out a top-down reorganisation of the NHS didn't bother the Lib-Dems at all. Handing huge slices of the NHS to a bunch of Tory donors was part of the price they were willing to pay for a tiny taste of second hand Tory power.
- Before the 2015 General Election Vince Cable was popular because he talked a bit of economic sense. After the General Election he switched to parroting George Osborne's austerity gibberish. Switching from talking sense to repeating the exact kind of rubbish he was criticising before the election was one of the most infuriating U-turns I've ever seen, and clearly motivated by political expediency rather than any genuine conversion to austerity fetishism.
The betrayal over tuition fees was clearly the most visible of the Lib-Dem sell-outs, but it was far from the only one they needed to do in order to keep their six figure ministerial salaries and their chauffeur driven cars. They sold out on pretty much all of their core principles. They betrayed the students, they shafted the political reformers, they abandoned economic sense to endorse Osborne's destructive austerity agenda, they drove away the anti-imperialists that Charles Kennedy attracted to the party, and they assisted Iain Duncan Smith in his mission to trash the welfare state that was originally envisaged by the Liberal MP William Beveridge.
It's incredible that the Lib-Dems betrayed so many of their core demographics, drove away two thirds of their voters and pretty much wiped themselves out in their traditional strong areas of Scotland and the south west of England, yet Clegg is so self-obsessed that he cites that excruciatingly chummy press conference with David Cameron as one of his biggest regrets.
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