Jo Swinson is positioning herself as the Nigel Farage of Remain

Ever since Jo Swinson became Lib-Dem leader she's been shifting the Lib-Dem position ever further towards the extreme fringe of Remain, to the point tearing up the longstanding Lib-Dem policy of demanding another referendum and replacing it with a threat to stop Brexit without even holding a referendum.

Swinson's increasingly militant behaviour and language makes it pretty obvious that she's attempting to position herself as the Nigel Farage of Remain.

Here are ten similarities between Swinson's approach to politics and Farage's.


EU fanaticismThis first similarity is the most obvious. Swinson and Farage both promote fanatically one-sided views of the EU.

Farage's rhetoric tells us that the EU is irredeemably corrupt and corrosive to the British way of life, while Swinson's rhetoric holds the EU up as the essential and irreproachable source of all that is good and decent.

Both of these positions are extreme and over-simplistic. There's an element of truth in both, because there are dreadful problems with the EU like the undemocratic and austerity-pushing European Central Bank, and the passage of endless pieces of unashamedly pro-corporate legislation through the European Parliament, but the EU is also the source of many of our rights, liberties, and living standards (workers' rights, environmental laws, food standards, consumer protections, freedom from discrimination, and of course the right to move freely around most of the continent of Europe).

We don't live in a Star Wars universe of heroic goodies and irredeemable evil empires. We live in reality, where virtually all large organisations, including the EU, have a mixture of good and bad characteristics.

To focus exclusively on one side without acknowledging the other is profoundly dishonest, and in this regard Farage and Swinson are two cheeks of the same arse.

Lies

Besides adopting one-sided and profoundly dishonest EU militancy, both of these figures are also perfectly willing to resort to outright lies to push their agendas.

Farage has lies so many times it's impossible to compile them all here. Just think of his endless claims that the majority of British laws are made in Europe when the real figure is 13.2%, or his EU referendum lies about Turkey being on the verge of joining the EU, when in reality they've still only managed to complete a single one of the 33 chapters required for membership in 13 years!

Swinson proved her willingness to lie through her teeth on her very first day in the job as Lib-Dem leader, publicly accusing Jeremy Corbyn of taking a two week holiday during the EU referendum period.

In reality the longest break Corbyn took from an extensive campaign schedule was in the mourning period after the brutal murder of Jo Cox.

Meanwhile Swinson barely campaigned at all for Remain in 2016, making virtually no public appearances, in preference for sitting at home tweeting cat pictures!

Swinson has also been caught out telling other lies like supposedly opposing unlawful Tory employment tribunal fees when she actually voted in favour of them!

Both of these politicians have proven themselves such ideological fanatics that they'll resort to deliberate lies in order to con members of the public into supporting them.

DefectorsFarage and Swinson have both benefited from the significant publicity boost of attracting defectors from other political parties, however in this regard Swinson is clearly even worse than Farage.

When Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless defected from the Tories to UKIP in 2014, at least they put their decision to their constituents by resigning and calling parliamentary by-elections.

There's no such respect for democracy in the Lib-Dems, with Swinson welcoming six defector MPs into the Lib-Dem ranks (now making up a full third of their parliamentary party) without a single by-election being held.

It's extraordinary to think that a party with "democrats" actually in their name are demonstrably more averse to democratic accountability that the Ukipper extremists at the far-right fringe of the political spectrum!

Goalpost shifting
Another thing Farage and Swinson have in common is their disingenuous goalpost-shifting tactics.

During the EU referendum Farage repeatedly insisted that the UK could easily get a deal with the EU so that we could be like Norway, or Switzerland, but he's now shifted to No Deal militancy, and treats the basic idea of leaving with any kind of withdrawal deal or future trading arrangement as if it's treason.

Swinson on the other hand has spent the last few years loudly and repeatedly calling for an "another roll of the dice" referendum. But then suddenly at her first Lib-Dem conference as their divine leader, she's flip-flopped to the new, much more militant position of just cancelling Brexit without even seeking a public mandate to do so!

Both of these politicians have demonstrably shifted the goalposts on Brexit to more militant positions, so anyone with a grain of sense must be extremely wary that these slippery snakes will simply switch position on any of their other stated principles if they think it serves their interest to do so.

Political chameleons
In order to make excuses for lying and flip-flopping from one position to another, it's necessary to engage in reality-reversing Orwellian history revisionism, and both of these politicians are adept at changing their political colours at will.

Farage's chameleon-like behaviour is more obvious, having effortlessly switched from the purple and yellow of UKIP to the light blue of Brexit Party, but Swinson's is actually more pernicious because she adopts different colours at the same depending on who she's talking to.

One minute Swinson is justifying her new "screw democracy, just scrap Brexit" policy by saying we need to get on with reversing austerity, but then within hours she's appealing to hard-right fiscal conservatives in Tory/Lib-Dem marginals by attempting to outflank the Tories to the right with grotesque pro-austerity tropes like "magic money tree" and "tough economic choices".

Media fawningAnother similarity between Farage and Swinson is the way the mainstream media seem to fawn over the pair of them, endlessly affording them airtime to flip-flop around, and spout their deceptions, and smears, and distortions, and outright lies, almost always unchallenged.

Farage usually gets more pushback from random members of the public who call into his radio show than from the mainstream media hack pack, and Lib-Dem tribalists responding to fact-based criticism of Swinson and her disgusting voting record with torrents of abuse, whataboutery, excuses, smears, and mental health abuse just goes to show how unfamiliar they are with the idea of their divine leader actually being held to account on anything.

Austerity

One of the most interesting similarities between Farage and Swinson is the way that both of them are entirely unwilling to admit that years of ruinous austerity fanaticism laid the groundwork for Brexit to happen.

Their reasons for refusing to acknowledge reality are very different, but the wilful austerity ignorance is the same.

Farage is loathe to admit that the domestic austerity policies of the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition were responsible for collapsing living standards prior to the 2016 EU referendum, because the main Brexiteer shtick during the EU referendum was to blame the consequences of austerity fanaticism (collapsed wages, huge NHS queues, unaffordable housing, failing public services, failing local services, failing social safety net) on immigrants and the EU.

Swinson is even more loathe to admit the link between austerity fanaticism and the Brexit backlash, because to admit that austerity laid the groundwork for Brexit would be to admit her own role in causing this Brexit chaos.

Not only does she consider it to be politically unwise to admit fault, she's also far too much of an egomaniac to apologise for her outrageous living standard-annihilating actions in the past.

Overseas allegiances
One of the weirdest things about the pair of them is their unmistakable loyalty to overseas political figures.

Farage is quite obviously enamoured with Donald Trump to the point where you wonder whether his obsession with forcing a calamitous No Deal Brexit meltdown actually has more to do with forcing Britain into subservience to Trump, than it has to do with Brexit purism.

Swinson on the other hand is full of adoration for Guy Verhofstadt, who was the leader of the ALDE group in the European parliament for 10 years, and is a man who personifies pretty much everything that's wrong with the EU.

Just consider the appalling speech Swinson invited him to give at her first Lib-Dem conference as party leader. Verhofstadt claimed that the reason the UK should stay in the EU is that the world is dividing up into empires, and that Britain would be safer within the European mega-empire.

Reject Brexit not because it's an ill considered and chaotically administered mess, but because it would cause Britain to miss out on the game of Liberal neo-imperialism Verhofstadt envisages for the future of mankind!

It's such a disturbing view of the world on so many levels, but Swinson adores the guy, and he even got a rousing round of applause from the Lib-Dem audience for his Liberal neo-imperialist fearmongering!

Betrayal

One of the starkest similarities of all between the pair is the way they resort so willingly to the divisive rhetoric of "betrayal".

Farage constantly bangs on about betrayal of the leave vote, but Swinson uses the exact same divisive rhetoric to attack Jeremy Corbyn for supposedly betraying Remainers.

Who cares that Labour is offering the referendum that the Lib-Dems spent years demanding, as far as Swinson and her ilk are concerned, attacking Corbyn is even more important than opposing Brexit, to the point that they're using the Brexiteer-style rhetoric of betrayal to attack him.

One suspects that even if Corbyn got the EU flag tattooed on his face and leapt into a volcano humming Ode to Joy, Swinson and her mob would still be screeching "betrayal" at him.

Fringe politics

Another of Swinson's attacks on Corbyn is that he supposedly exists at the fringe, or the sideline of political debate, but anyone with the slightest acquaintance with political reality can see that Farage and Swinson are the ones positioning themselves at the fringes of the Brexit debate, both screeching "fuck off" at half the voting electorate who didn't vote the way they wanted, while Corbyn is trying to position himself near the centre in order to try and clear up the mess, rather than spewing hyper-partisan rhetoric to deliberately exacerbate tensions for party political advantage.

But according to Swinson's absurd reality-reversed logic, the militant fringe intent on ignoring one half of the electorate or other, is the "centre ground" and Corbyn's attempts at compromise and deescalation are the militant fringe!

Conclusion

Jo Swinson continually pretends that she's positioned on the sensible centre-ground of politics, but her grotesque track record of enabling ruinous austerity fanaticism, her outright refusal to acknowledge that austerity dogma laid the groundwork for the Brexit backlash, or to apologise for it, her willingness to lie through her teeth, her increasingly militant Remain tactics, and the remarkably easy ride she's afforded by the mainstream media demonstrate that she's just as much a political extremist as Nigel Farage.

Additionally the unquestioning cult-like loyalty of the Lib-Dem tribalists to her ever-changing position, and the torrents of abuse they spew at anyone who dares question their divine and irreproachable leader suggests that she's every bit as dangerous too.

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

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The BBC's outright hypocrisy over racism

When Danny Baker Tweeted a picture of a chimp dressed up like an aristocrat in reaction to the royal baby coverage, he was quite rightly criticised.

He later apologised and claimed that he was trying to lampoon inherited privilege, and hadn't even considered the racial connotations, but by then it was too late for him, he'd already been sacked by the BBC.

Having listened to Danny Baker's shows many times in the past I've never heard him say anything remotely racist (it's mainly irreverent nonsense) and given his long broadcasting history of never saying anything even remotely racist or bigoted, my opinion is that his apology should be taken in good faith.

The problem of course is that the BBC's decision to sack Baker betrays barefaced hypocrisy.

You only have to look back to Alan Sugar's brazenly racist Tweet about the Senegal football team last year to find a completely different approach from the BBC. Sugar was completely unapologetic about his racist Tweet, and the BBC somehow decided not to sack the star of their hit show The Apprentice.

Either the BBC's attitude to racism has developed extremely quickly from allowing unapologetic racists to get away with it last year, to sacking people for racist-looking Tweets now, or there's something else at play.

Maybe the BBC considers social media racism to be perfectly fine when it's aimed downwards, at nations like Senegal, and at African beach vendors, but when it's aimed at the royals, even inadvertently, it's an instant sacking offence.

This kind of Nazi-style racism is considered
fine and dandy by the BBC.

Then to exacerbate the hypocrisy on the very evening that Danny Baker was sacked they invited Nigel Farage onto their flagship Question Time show for a record 33rd time. 

Despite Farage's long history of making racist comments about Romanians, using Nazi style propaganda to attack refugees, aligning with outright fascists in the European Parliament, whipping up anti-Muslim sentiments, and wilfully spreading the extreme-right white supremacist "great replacement" conspiracy theory, he's always welcome in BBC studios.

And then there was the time that they invited the extreme-right hate preacher Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) onto Newsnight for a softball interview on the very day one of his acolytes was jailed for a murderous terrorist rampage in Finsbury Park.

And then there was the time that the BBC invited leader of the Generation Identity hate group onto Newsnight on the very day one of their followers had carried out the mass killings in Christchurch, New Zealand.

And then on the day after Danny Baker's sacking, the BBC invited the right-wing polemicist Ben Shapiro onto their Daily Politics show, despite his history of anti-Muslim hatemongering, his racist comments about Arabs, his constant spreading of far-right conspiracy nonsense like Obama birtherism and the Nazi-derived cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, and the fact he inspired the extreme-right terrorist who carried out the Quebec City Mosque shooting (who obsessively viewed Shapiro's Twitter output).

 

If Danny Baker's Tweet was so offensive he had to
be barred from the BBC, why isn't this?

The BBC's warped explanation for platforming Shapiro was to boast about how many Facebook and Twitter followers he has, as if his popularity is somehow a shield against his repulsive political views, and his dangerous extreme-right conspiracy-mongering.

Of course the BBC's 'he's got loads of supporters' argument could have been used in favour of inviting Hitler onto the BBC in 1939, or the murderous Chilean dictator Pinochet in the 1980s, or Osama Bin Laden in the 2000s.

This facile 'he's popular so we have to give him a platform' argument also creates the impression that if Danny Baker had had a few hundred thousand more followers on social media, perhaps he wouldn't just have not been sacked, but he would have actually been invited onto flagship BBC politics shows to talk about his distasteful Tweet!

It seems that if you're an out-and-our racist or an extreme-right polemicist with a long history of spreading racist ideas and far-right conspiracies, the BBC are clamouring to invite you on their shows to help you to widen your profile, and if you're a star of one of their hit shows and you aim your despicable social media racism downwards and then outright refuse to apologise for it, that's perfectly fine too.

But woe betide you if the royal family are the subject of your ridiculously ill-considered Tweet.

I'm not trying to argue that Danny Baker is blameless, or that he didn't deserve criticism for what he Tweeted.

What I'm saying is that the BBC's hypocrisy is absolutely undeniable if they sack him over what he did despite his long broadcasting history on non-racism, and his apology, while they continue to wilfully platform unrepentant racists, and extreme-right polemicists like Alan Sugar, Nigel Farage, 'Tommy Robinson', Generation Identity, and Ben Shapiro.

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Tory MPs are publicly promoting an imported extreme-right propaganda outfit

The Tories know that they're deeply unpopular with the younger generations, but instead of offering young people anything like actual reasons to vote Tory, numerous Tory MPs have secided to begin publicly promoting an extremely dodgy far-right propaganda outfit called Turning Point that has been imported directly from the United States.

The US chapter of this youth radicalisation programme has links to racists and white supremacists, spreads the anti-Semitic Nazi era trope of "cultural Marxism", and created a 'hit list' of supposedlty left-wing University professors for their followers to send abuse and death threats to.

Aside from their despicable tactics and dodgy political associations, the US Turning Point movement also have a propensity for ludicrous self-owns like the time they triggered universal ridicule for dressing themselves in diapers at Kent State University to protest against the concept of safe spaces.

There's absolutely no way that these Tory MPs can pretend that they don't know who is behind this far right youth radicalisation programme given that the founder has pumped £100,000 into Tory party coffers since 2017. 

And there's no way they can deny the links between this organisation and extreme-right propaganda outfits like Infowars and Breitbart, especially given the photographic evidence that the Turning Point UK leadership are associates of Infowars propagandist and soy salesman Paul Joseph Watson.

The Turning Point UK agenda is obvious. They're funnelling huge amounts of cash from dodgy mega-rich donors into efforts to radicalise young people on university campuses using the age old fascist technique of pretending that they're being censored in order to get the victimhood and self-pity vibe really going.

Tory MPs to have actively promoted this grotesque propaganda operation include Jacob Rees-Mogg, Priti Patel, Bernard Jenkin, Anne-Marie Trevelyan, and Steve Baker.

Noticeably all five of these Tory figures are Brexiteers, which makes their backing of a US-based mainly US-funded far-right indoctrination programmes on UK campuses seem rather unusual.
 

How can a bunch of people who never stop banging on about the importance of British sovereignty be so enthusiastic about the spread of imported far-right propaganda into British universities and British political discourse?

The answer is simple. They never actually gave a damn about sovereignty and simply saw Brexit as a convenient Trojan Horse to push their own radical right-wing agenda of scrapping workers' rights, food standards, environmental laws, freedoms from persecution, and consumer protections.

Thus their support for imported far-right Turning Point propaganda outfit derives from the fact that they're ideological blood brothers all pushing the same radically right-wing political agenda.

When UKIP attempted to jump on the alt-right bandwagon by signing up right-wing Youtubers like Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad), Paul Joseph Watson (Prison Planet), and Mark Meechan (Count Dankula) people saw it as a last desperate effort of a dying political party to remain relevant.

Now that the Tories are embracing far-right propaganda tactics things are a lot more serious. This isn't just the crumbling edifice of Nigel Farage's publicity vehicle embracing the extreme-right in a desperate effort to remain relevant, it's the actual party of government embracing the extreme-right to try and stay in power.

The last time we saw the British government embracing extremism to such an extent was the 1930s when Tory MPs signed up in droves to pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic groups like The Right Club and the Anglo-German Link.

Scroll forward eight decades and the majority of Brits who made such enormous sacrifices to beat fascism during the Second World War have passed away, our cultural memory of the horrors of Nazism is fading, and imported fascism and anti-Semitism are right back in fashion in the Tory ranks.

Anyone who is not concerned by this latest Tory lurch to the extreme-right is just as complacent as those who ridiculed Winston Churchill and the anti-fascists in the 1930s for warning of the dangers back then.

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Why are the mainstream media ignoring the brazen extreme-right takeover of the Tory party?

After Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party in 2015 the party membership swelled with hundreds of thousands of new members, mainly traditional Labour folk enthused by the party's first democratic socialist leader in decades.

The mainstream media were horrified by this surge of support for a guy who threatens the hard-right neoliberal orthodoxy that has served people like them so well for the last four decades, at the expense of millions of the rest of us, so the attacks on these new Labour Party members have been pretty much constant ever since.

The Labour membership surge

Ever since the Labour membership surge mainstream media hacks and opponents of democratic socialism have worked tirelessly to discredit it.

Aside from all of the abuse ("trots", "dogs", "rabble", "thugs", "Nazi stormtroopers") two themes have constantly stood out, the idea that left-wing people joining Labour are "entryists", and that Corbyn supporters are a "cult".

Anyone who is familiar with the history of the Labour Party would surely put up a counter-argument that the likes of centre-right pro-privatisation Thatcherites like Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, John McTernan, Margaret Hodge, and Alistair Campbell were the "entryists" who took over the party, and that the post-Corbyn membership surge is the mass home-coming of those who were driven away from the party by the right-wing pro-privatisation pro-austerity Tory lite agenda between 1997 and 2015.

But still the mainstream media persists in portraying the hundreds of thousands who joined Labour since 2015 as "entryists" and "cultists" rather than just ordinary people enthused by an actual alternative to the hard-right Thatcherite consensus of the last four decades.

Ukipification of the Tories

Ever since the 2016 EU referendum it's become increasingly obvious that the Tory party is being usurped by the small hard-right anti-EU faction (the crackpot element John Major used to refer to as "the bastards").

Theresa May called her vanity election in 2017 because she believed that having unified the traditional Tory vote with the extreme-right ultranationalist Blue-kip demographic, a landslide majority would be inevitable. But she didn't count on Jeremy Corbyn or the energised Labour membership orchestrating the biggest turnaround in British politics since universal suffrage.

Since the 2017 general election we've all seen how Theresa May dances to the tune of the ERG Brextremists, knowing that Jacob Rees-Mogg and his ERG mob easily have the parliamentary numbers to trigger a leadership election if she refuses to obey their instructions.

And now we've even got the spectacle of Nigel Farage's extreme-right anti-immigrant Leave.EU campaign openly bragging that they've infiltrated the Tory party membership with 10,000 Brextremists in order to ensure that the next leader of the Tory party is a hard-right Brexiteer.

They're so confident of their success that they've actually announced what they're up to on Twitter!

The mainstream media silence on this ongoing Brextremist takeover of the Tory party is staggering given the absolute brazenness of it, and the enormous fuss they made over the Labour membership surge.

The Orwellian state of the British media

On the one hand you have hundreds of thousands of left-leaning people finally coming home to the Labour Party after years in exile due to the right-wing pro-privatisation, pro-austerity gruel being offered by the orthodox neoliberal leadership.

And on the other hand you've got an extreme-right Brexit campaign group openly and publicly bragging about the way they've infiltrated the Tory party in order to interfere in the party's leadership election.

But somehow the former is the grave concern worthy of hundreds of columns and TV segments ranging from patronising faux outrage to outright abuse of ordinary people, and the latter barely gets a single mention.

If anyone in British politics is an "entryist" surely it's got to be a follower of Nigel Farage and Arron Banks tearing up their UKIP membership in order to join the Tory party and influence the next leadership election in favour of the most extreme Brexiteer in the running?

If anyone in British politics is a "cultist" surely it's people who continue to glibly dismiss every single piece of evidence that a "no deal" flounce out of the EU would be a social and economic catastrophe as "Project Fear".

Yet somehow left-wing Labour supporters are still continually derided as "entryists" and "cultists" by the mainstream media, while the Brexit cultists who are openly and brazenly usurping the Tory party in front of our eyes are just left in peace to get on with it!

The only conclusion that can be drawn out of this extraordinary contrast in mainstream media coverage is that the vast majority of the coddled mainstream media class are way more comfortable with extreme-right, anti-immigrant, Brextremists brazenly taking over the ruling Tory party in front of our eyes than they are with the Labour opposition returning to its democratic socialist roots!

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OR

Theresa May is crying about "abuse and intimidation" after she hired the "Enemies of the People" guy!

Theresa May is pushing hard for new laws to criminalise protest against the government by pretending that she's opposed to abuse and intimidation in public life because it constitutes a "threat to democracy".

If we think back to the fact that fake news was the last great threat to democracy the Tories were frothing about, it's deeply ironic that this latest call for a crackdown on non-violent political protest is built on the foundation of the right-wing fake news epidemic that followed the Jacob Rees-Mogg protest, which was framed as left-wing activists attacking Jacob Rees-Mogg, when in reality the violence was instigated by a Rees-Mogg supporting goon (who likes to dress up as a Nazi in his spare time) against the noisy but non-violent protesters.

Even if we ignore the fake news foundations that this latest Tory attempt to silence those who would criticise them, it's incredibly difficult to take Theresa May's sudden concerns over "threats and intimidation in public life" seriously.

• Theresa May was the Home Secretary who sent divisive and intimidatory "Go Home" vans around ethnically diverse areas (a play for the bigoted extreme-right vote so brazen it was even described as "too much" and "un-British" by Nigel Farage and the Ukippers!)

• Then there was the time Theresa May decided to quote a misogynistic extreme-right Twitter troll in parliament in order to score a cheap political point against Jeremy Corbyn. If she cared so much about "abuse and intimidation in public life" at the time, how on earth did she consider it appropriate to give a vile and abusive extreme-right misogynist a massive "shout out" in the House of Commons?

• Then there's the fact that Theresa May actually hired the Daily Mail hack who wrote the intimidatory "Enemies of the People" front page story as her press secretary. She clearly thinks that someone so vile that they would abuse and intimidate high court judges for doing their jobs is perfectly fine, as long as he's slinging his abuse and intimidation at her opponents (opposition parties, activists, judges, academics, anyone who stands in the way of her hard-right anti-democratic interpretation of Brexit).

• Then there's the numerous waves of abuse and death threats hurled at any Tory MP who dares to cast doubt on Theresa May's Brextremism. These grotesque intimidation tactics are used by the extreme-right ultranationalist blue-kipper demographic that Theresa May has welcomed into the Tory party with open arms. She knows that these waves of death threats are being sent by her own supporters, but she's repeatedly turned a blind eye to it, and has chosen instead to declare her concerns about "abuse and intimidation" in the wake of an anti-left fake news story concocted by the regularly abusive hard-right freaks at Breitbart and the Guido Fawkes blog!

So the next time you hear Theresa May expressing her transparently fake concerns over abuse and intimidation in public life, remember that throughout her career she's been willing to utilise intimidation and political abuse to her own ends, even to the extent of hiring the "Enemies of the People" guy as her press secretary!

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OR

Arron Banks is plotting to take over the Tory party

The hard-right Trojan Horse political party UKIP is collapsing into farce and bankruptcy, but the big hitters have already jumped ship. Nigel Farage quit as UKIP leader immediately after the 2016 EU referendum result came in, and the Brexiteer and major Leave.EU donor Arron Banks bailed out soon afterwards too. in order to concentrate on building the profile of his fanatically right-wing Westmonster propaganda operation.

We've all seen how Theresa May has redirected the Tory party towards hard-right ultra-nationalism in order to attract all of these fickle Ukippers fleeing the wreckage of their party.

We've seen how former UKIP councillors have been welcomed into the Tory party with open arms, and even utilised as pro-Tory plants in the BBC Question Time audience.

And we've all seen how the majority of Tories have simply put up with this rapid shift towards the extreme-right political fringe because their power at any price ideology still sees this Blue-kip bastardisation of their own party as preferable to a centre-left government that would work to reverse inequality, protect the vulnerable, and dismantle barriers to social mobility.

They'd genuinely rather see their own party turned into a demeaning UKIP tribute act than live in a slightly fairer society.

The extent to which the Tory party is being colonised by radical hard-right blue-kippers was obvious enough even before the 2017 General Election, but now Arron Banks has come out and actually explained his plot to seize control of the Tory party.

While the Labour Party membership has soared to over half a million since Jeremy Corbyn became leader, the Tory party membership has slumped so pathetically that they've been refusing to even admit how embarrassingly low it actually is for four years. Estimates put their membership at somewhere between 50,000 - 70,000, which is somewhere between 8% - 12% the size of Labour's.

Arron Banks' idea is for UKIP to fold and for their politicians and party members to infiltrate the Tory party en masse in order to push for the hardest and most economically ruinous "no deal" Brexit.

Here's what he said:

"We could have a clear majority in the Tory party for a real Brexit within months if UKIP wound up and all its members and FORMER members, all of its latent support in the country now joined up to the Conservative Party … Maybe by flooding back into the Conservative party we can change the course of history again. With a leadership challenge on the cards once more, this may be the perfect time."

So here we have a former UKIP donor explicitly outlining his plot to infiltrate and usurp the Tory party for his own purposes, yet the Tories are doing nothing at all to stop it. In fact it seems likely they'd welcome the half million or so remaining Ukipper die-hards with open arms, because they're looking down the barrel of an absolute trouncing at the next General Election without them.

If centre-right Tories had any decency and dignity at all they'd be demanding new rules to prevent ex-Ukippers flooding in to their party and taking it over from within (perhaps a ban on membership or leadership election votes for anyone who has been a UKIP member in the last five years).

But the disgraceful reality is that most of them actually seem to see the rapid Ukipification of their party as the only hope to retain their weakening grip on political power.

They realise that they wouldn't have even had sufficient MPs to bribe the DUP bigots into propping up their government if it hadn't been for the support of the fanatically right-wing and demonstrably fickle Blue-kip demographic, so they're now absolutely terrified of making any move whatever that might drive them away again.

One of the most extraordinary things of all is that Tories can look at the undeniable and ongoing Ukipification of their party, and even read about Arron Banks' plot to usurp the Tory party completely, yet believe the reality-reversing mainstream media trope that Labour are the party that has been taken over by a radical fringe element!

They actually choose to believe that Labour's popular centre-left policy platform that has attracted hundreds of thousands of new members to the party is the terrifying and sinister plot, whilst minimising/ignoring their own party's grotesque metamorphosis into a UKIP tribute act headed by a cowardly and directionless leader who is terrified of doing anything that might anger the fickle blue-kip demographic she's courted so egregiously, the secretive cabal of hard-Brexit Tory MPs who could oust her at any moment, the DUP bigots who prop up her government, or the Daily Mail hate mob who unleash torrents of abuse and death threats at anyone who dares defy Paul Dacre's fanatically right-wing and profoundly anti-democratic interpretation of the Brexit vote.

There are still a few centre-right "one nation" type Tories left, like Ken Clarke, Sarah Wollaston, Dominic Grieve, Anna Soubry, Nicky Morgan and the like.

Let's be absolutely clear that none of these people are heroes because they've actively promoted grotesque and destructive Tory policies like austerity dogma, wage repression, catastrophic infrastructure funding cuts, privatisation mania, and the systematic abuse of sick and disabled people.

However it's important to distinguish between these old school Tory-Tories and the much more rabidly right-wing Blue-kippers. 

The problem is that these old school Tories know from experience that whenever they defy the ongoing Ukipification of their party then they get bombarded with hate mail and death threats from the Blue-kip hate mob.

Will the old school Tory-Tories have the courage and the strength to fight back against the ongoing extreme-right drift of the Tory party?

Or will they simply acquiesce to the Ukipification process because they either believe in maintaining political power at any cost, or they're too afraid of the growing power of the Blue-kip mob to dare stepping out of line again?

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

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Why is Nigel Farage suddenly talking in favour of a second EU referendum?

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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