Now we know why the Tories were so keen to hide their regional Brexit impact studies

The regional Brexit impact assessment figures that the Tory government were trying to hide have been leaked, and they spell disaster, especially for the North East, North West, West Midlands, and Northern Ireland.

The Brexit assessment looked at the regional impact of three different Brexit scenarios, a Single Market Brexit, a free trade deal, and a "no deal" reversion to World Trade Organisation rules.

In every single region it turns out that "no deal" is by far the most damaging option, ranging from a 3.5% fall in the London economy to an astounding 16% collapse in the North East.

The analysis suggests that aside from London and the South West, a "no deal" Brexit would trigger a financial collapse that is worse than the recession that followed the bankers' insolvency crisis.

The terrifying thing is that as a result of ruinous Tory austerity dogma and their unprecedented campaign of wage repression the UK still hasn't recovered from the last recession, yet the Brextremist faction of the Tory party are pushing for a "no deal" Brexit which would hit us with another, even worse recession.

The second worst scenario is a free trade deal Brexit, which would still see significant economic contraction across every single region.

The least bad option is the Single Market option which would cause a slump of between 1% in London, to 3% in the North East.

It's important to recognise that the least bad Single Market scenario is off the table as long as Theresa May and the Tories are running the negotiations for their own purposes, because they have continually ruled it out.

Whether Jeremy Corbyn and Labour could be convinced to adopt a pro-Single Market/Customs Union stance remains to be seen.* 

One of the standout things about the analysis is the way London is projected to suffer the least under every Brexit scenario, yet London voted heavily in favour of Remain, whilst some of the strongest Leave-voting areas like the North East look set to suffer the most extreme economic downturns from the Brexit they voted for.

This contrast certainly adds some more statistical weight to the Turkeys voting for Christmas narrative.

However it's not all totally clear-cut, because Wales and Scotland look set to suffer very similar levels of economic damage as a result of Brexit, despite Wales voting in favour of Brexit and Scotland voting very heavily against it.

Anyhow, the reason the Tories wanted to keep this analysis secret is beyond obvious. There's no way they can pretend that there's any economic benefit to Brexit now that their own evidence says that it would cause an economic downturn/recession in every single part of the UK.

Another reason they must have been desperate to keep this research under wraps is that it completely destroys their endlessly repeated propaganda trope that "no deal is better than a bad deal".

Their own evidence demonstrates beyond doubt that "no deal" is the worst possible deal, so they'll surely have to bin that appalling nonsense for good after this.

It's important to recognise that anyone still pushing for Brexit under these circumstances is aiming to inflict damage on the UK economy, so the onus is on them to clearly explain what it is that is so damned important that they consider it worth triggering a recession for ...

And no, blue passports (that we could have had anyway without quitting the EU) just won't cut it.

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

OR

* = If I were to give advice on how to achieve such a change of approach I'd suggest that politely pointing to the facts and evidence to request a change of Labour Party policy in order to "protect jobs and the economy" is more likely to succeed than a relentless barrage of #FBPE abuse, revisionism, misrepresentations, and lies from Lib-Dems, Tory concern trolls, and the very same people who were shrieking anti-Corbyn nonsense during the spectacularly failed chicken coup of 2016. 

Right-wing Labour MPs are making fools of themselves on Twitter

Right-wing Labour MPs are so determined to attack the genuine democratic socialists in the Labour Party that they're making absolute fools of themselves on Twitter.

Anyone would have thought that the 2017 election result would have given Corbyn-sceptic orthodox neoliberal Labour MPs a reason to reconsider their right-wing views and unite behind the party leadership. 

Corbyn reversed two decades of Labour Party decline by becoming the first Labour leader to actually gain parliamentary seats since 1997 by securing the biggest increase in the Labour share of the vote since Clement Attlee in 1945.

If Corbyn could achieve this turnaround in Labour Party fortunes with a bitterly divided party full of right-wing backstabbing MPs who hate Jeremy Corbyn with as much passion as they hate his idea of democratising the Labour Party to give ordinary members more say, then what could he achieve with a more united party?

That was the question an awful lot of Labour members and supporters have been thinking about since the election results came in, but obviously not the right-wing Labour MPs themselves.

For them the election result was an absolute disaster because it ruined their chances of launching yet another destructive coup against Jeremy Corbyn. So they're now fixated on a different question:

What can we do now to inflict as much damage as possible on Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour leadership?

the Manchester Central MP Lucy Powell decided to damage the Labour Party publicly attack Momentum and the Labour MP Chris Williamson for supposedly setting up a Momentum campaign in another MPs constituency without consulting them.

Unfortunately for Powell her attack backfired spectacularly when it turned out the new Momentum group was actually being set up in the Middlesbrough South and Cleveland East constituency that was one of just six Labour losses during the 2017 election, not Anna Turley's constituency in Redcar. 

This constituency was lost because of the obnoxious behaviour of the fanatically right-wing and rabidly anti-Corbyn local MP Tom Blenkinsop, who salted the constituency by turning the locals against the Labour Party then quit as an MP because he knew he was facing the humiliation of a thumping defeat in the once safe Labour seat he was parachuted into.

The Momentum group was being set up to help Tracy Harvey who worked hard to undo the damage inflicted by Blenkinsop's ridiculously divisive tantrums, but fell short of retaining the seat against the odds by just over 1,000 votes after UKIP stood down in order to help the Tories win the seat.

Apparently, according to Lucy Powell, Momentum and the Labour left are wrong to try to win back a seat lost to Tory-UKIP collusion due to the dismal antics of an abusive Blairite MP!

What's even worse than the idiocy of her criticism is the fact that the sanctimonious pillock even had the lack of self awareness to lecture the fellow Labour Party members she was publicly and inaccurately lambasting about the need to "unite to fight the Tories"!

This is a woman who participated in the spectacularly failed Anyone But Corbyn coup lecturing other people about party unity!

Then there's the behaviour of Anna Turley herself, the right-wing privately educated Blairite MP who was parachuted into the Labour safe seat of Redcar (and who better to represent a poverty stricken, working class, steel industry dominated northern town like Redcar than a privately educated right-winger parachuted in from London against the will of the local Labour Party eh?)

Having witnessed Powell make such a fool of herself on Twitter over the weekend you would have thought Turley would at least be a bit careful about her own Twitter utterances. 

But no. She was so desperate to wade into the debate and attack the Labour Party left that she fell for a ridiculously obvious bit of Tory concern trolling.

Concern trolling is where a supporter of a rival group or party poses as a supporter in order to create divisions by expressing disingenuous concerns.

Turley decided to use the whole incident to promise a Twitter user called Eileen Robinson who claimed that she would abandon Labour and vote Tory for the first time in her life if there was a Momentum candidate in Redcar.

Turley was quick to promise Eileen that there would be no Momentum candidate but
the problem of course is that Eileen was a lying Tory concern troll who has used Twitter to praise the Tory party, attacked Labour and spread extreme-right nonsense for years, as anyone who could be bothered to check could have found out easily.

So instead of steering well clear of the divisive stink created by Powell, and definitely steering clear of the divisive antics of a glaringly obvious Tory concern troll, Turley decided to use the incident to attack the Labour Party left by making a promise to one of the worst and most dishonest people in Redcar.

The continued divisive behaviour of these Labour Party right-wingers just goes to show how frightened they are.

They know that Jeremy Corbyn is now within touching distance of an outright win, and they know that he's getting ever closer to achieving a mandate to democratise the Labour Party by allowing local party members to remove MPs who are corrupt, divisive, negligent, incompetent or fanatically right-wing.

The orthodox neoliberal Labour MPs who have been parachuted into Labour safe seats are absolutely terrified of Jeremy Corbyn's success because they're actually terrified of their own constituents unifying to demand a better candidate.

The grand irony is that the likes of Powell, Turley and other internal Labour Party wreckers like Wes Streeting is that the only strategy they can think of to try to avert re-selection for bad MPs is to continue with exactly the kind of bitter divisive feuding that makes it even more likely that their own Labour Party members would want to get rid of them.

 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

She knows it's an act of self-harm, but she's doing it anyway

Theresa May knows that triggering Article 50 will be a massive act of social and economic self-harm.

May didn't campaign much during the EU referendum debate because she knew that hanging onto one of the big offices of state, keeping her head down and biding her time was the best strategy for becoming Prime Minister. However on the rare occasions she did bother to campaign she was absolutely clear about how harmful quitting the EU would be.

Here's what she told a secret meeting of Goldman Sachs bankers just weeks before the EU referendum:

"I think the economic arguments are clear. I think being part of a 500-million population trading bloc is significant for us. I think, as I was saying to you a little earlier, that one of the issues is that a lot of people will invest here in the UK because it is the UK in Europe ... If we were not in Europe, I think there would be firms and companies who would be looking to say, do they need to develop a mainland Europe presence rather than a UK presence? So I think there are definite benefits for us in economic terms."

And here are a few extracts from her speech to parliament in April 2016:

"Remaining a member of the European Union means we will be more secure from crime and terrorism"

"If Brexit isn’t fatal to the European Union, we might find that it is fatal to the Union with Scotland ... I do not want the people of Scotland to think that English Eurosceptics put their dislike of Brussels ahead of our bond with Edinburgh and Glasgow."

"If we do vote to leave the European Union ... we risk going backwards when it comes to international trade."

"The reality is that we do not know on what terms we would win access to the single market. We do know that in a negotiation we would need to make concessions in order to access it, and those concessions could well be about accepting EU regulations, over which we would have no say, making financial contributions, just as we do now, accepting free movement rules, just as we do now, or quite possibly all three combined. It is not clear why other EU member states would give Britain a better deal than they themselves enjoy."

"With no agreement, we know that WTO rules would oblige the EU to charge ten per cent tariffs on UK car exports, in line with the tariffs they impose on Japan and the United States. They would be required to do the same for all other goods upon which they impose tariffs. Not all of these tariffs are as high as ten per cent, but some are considerably higher."

Even though Theresa May didn't bother to campaign very hard at all, the few things she did bother to say indicated that she thought that quitting the EU would be an act of social and economic self-harm.

This brings us to the question of why she's doing it if she knows it's such a bad idea. In my view the answer is the same as to the question of why she didn't bother to campaign properly during the referendum debate: She's putting her own self-interest above what she knows is best for the nation.

If she cared more about the best interests of the nation instead of her own political self-interest she would have campaigned against Brexit with everything she had instead of taking a back seat and waiting for the opportunity to become Prime Minister.

If she cared about the best interests of the nation instead of hanging onto political power, she'd make sure that the British people had a say on whether they accept whatever the outcome of the Brexit negotiations are, but she's determined to use her position of power to decide the future of the UK for herself. She wants to act as an autocrat and choose between a hard Brexit (without full access to the Single Market) or a catastrophic "no deal" nuclear Brexit, and give neither the British people nor parliament a proper say on what she decides.

One of the main reasons she feels comfortable committing this act of national self-harm is that she knows that she's insulated from the economic consequences. She will always have her parliamentary pension to fall back on, and no doubt she'll follow other former Prime Ministers like Tony Blair and David Cameron into cushy corporate directorships and onto the lucrative public speaking circuit. She knows that the people who will suffer the consequences of her actions will be the ordinary plebs who work in jobs like manufacturing or live in EU dependent areas like Cornwall or the north east of England.

Theresa May doesn't care about the best interests of the nation; she doesn't care about giving the public any kind of democratic say on whether they agree with the Brexit terms she comes up with; and she doesn't care that it will be other people who suffer the appalling consequences of her actions.

All Theresa May cares about is her own self-interest and hanging on to the position of power that she cunningly worked herself into, and that's why she's triggering Article 50 even though she knows it will go down as one of the most notorious acts of social and economic self-harm in the history of the United Kingdom.

 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

The Tory postcode lottery of destitution

A scathing National Audit Office investigation into the brutal Tory sanctions regime found an alarming number of failings. One of the most serious was the fact that benefits sanctions are inconsistently applied which creates a lottery of destitution. People in some areas of the welfare system are relatively safe from the threat of being thrust into absolute poverty for the most trivial of offences, while people in other situations are subjected to significantly harsher and more draconian standards.

One of the findings of the National Audit Office investigation was that sanctions applied by profiteering private sector welfare contractors were more than twice as likely to be overturned on appeal as sanctions applied by Jobcentre staff. This evidence shows that staff working for private contractors are on average more than twice as trigger-happy in using absolute destitution as a punishment as proper Jobcentre staff are.

Another of the glaring inconsistencies identified by the National Audit Office is that the Tories are operating a postcode lottery of destitution. Unemployed people in some parts of the north east of England are three times as likely to suffer benefits sanctions as unemployed people in the south west.

There are only two ways to explain such huge discrepancies. Either people in the north east are inherently more lazy and feckless than people in the south west (the kind of explanation only a bigot would accept), or the welfare system treats people in the north east much more harshly than it treats people from more affluent regions.

There is an awful lot of evidence that many welfare providers in the north east operate a culture of bullying and humiliation, and that they're extraordinarily trigger happy when it comes to imposing staggeringly harsh benefits sanctions.

MPs representing constituencies in the north east have been complaining about the harsh benefits sanctions regime and the dehumanising culture of humiliation for years. In a January 2015 House of Commons debate MPs from the north east listed one example after another of the appalling suffering inflicted on their constituents, but the NAO investigation has revealed that the sanctions regime in the north east is still far harsher than other parts of the country.

The House of Commons debate included examples of people being sanctioned for missing an appointment due to an emergency hospitalisation; sanctioned for being late for an appointment because of severe traffic congestion; sanctioned for missing an appointment on the day a parent died; sanctioned failing to provide evidence of looking for work on the day after a parent died; sanctioned because the Jobcentre sent an appointment letter to an old address; sanctioned for failing to attend a Work Capacity Assessment that had been cancelled by the provider; sanctioned for attending a grandfather's funeral; sanctioned for failing to complete a form properly; and sanctioned for missing an appointment to collect an ill child from school (Jobcentre staff then falsely accused the parent of inventing a fictional child).

All of these people were thrust into weeks of absolute destitution for utterly trivial offences, but perhaps the most galling testimony came from the MP for Newcastle Central Chi Onwurah who raised the tragic case of one of his constituents who committed suicide as a result of his appalling treatment by the private sector contractor that kept finding him "fit for work" despite all of the expert opinion that he wasn't.

Unfortunately the serious concerns of the north east MPs were ignored by the Tory government, and now it's too late for 18 year old David Brown of Eston in North Yorkshire who committed suicide on October 3rd 2016 after being "belittled" jobcentre staff.

Shortly before he took his own life he told his mother "the way the Jobcentre treat people, it's no wonder people commit suicide".

It's not just a matter of opinion that David Brown took his own life because of the demeaning bullying attitude of Jobcentre staff in the north east, it's the official finding of the inquest into his death.

The problems of bullying and punishment with brutal benefits sanctions exist all over the country, but the evidence suggests that they're significantly worse in the north east. So the question has to be asked why?

Why is the poorest region in England also the place with the harshest sanctions regime and an ingrained culture of bullying and humiliation against unemployed people?

Is it simply because it's an economically deprived area and people working in the north east welfare system see it as their duty to punish poverty with more poverty? Is it because it's largely a loyal Labour Party voting area while the Tories are in charge of the DWP? Has this culture of bullying come about because it's being pushed from above by particularly vindictive regional managers in the north east? Is there some other explanation?

Why does this culture of bullying and abuse in the welfare system exist? Why is it particularly bad in the north east? And what can be done to resolve these problems?

This situation can no longer be ignored. It's almost two years since north east MPs told parliament about the problems of the culture of bullying and humiliation and the unfair sanctions regime in their region, and now an 18 year old lad is dead because nothing was done..

It's beyond obvious that if nothing continues to be done then more humiliation, suffering and death is inevitable.

What could you do?

If you live in the north east you could write to your MP to ask what is being done.

If you don't live in the north east you could write to your MP anyway. It might not be quite as bad as the north east where you live, but the scathing National Audit Office investigation into benefits sanctions found that the benefits sanctions regime costs the taxpayer far more to administer than it will ever save in reduced benefits (which is obviously an outrageous waste of taxpayers' money).

 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 turkeys vote for Christmas?

The North East, Cornwall and the Welsh valleys voted overwhelmingly in favour of Brexit. These are the poorest regions in Britain, and as such have been the beneficiaries of huge amounts of EU funding through the EU Structural Investment Fund.

The EU identified West Wales and the valleys region as the poorest in the whole of North West Europe, and then used the Structural Adjustment Fund to assign the area a whopping £1.8 billion to finance infrastructure improvements, new facilities and improved services in an attempt to revitalise the economy and attract businesses investment, yet the people of Ebbw Vale voted 62% in favour of Brexit, the highest leave vote in the whole of Wales.

The North East and Cornwall have also benefited enormously from the EU Structural Adjustment Fund, yet there too people flocked to the polling stations to vote to have these funds cut off.

As a result of the vote for Brexit the Tory government is due to lurch even further rightwards from the austerity fetishist, NHS wrecking, local authority starving, education system vandalising, upwards wealth distributing, privatise everything ideological extremism of the last six years.

The idea that an even more radically right-wing "leave it to market forces" Tory government is going to decide to replicate the EU funding to these deprived regions rather than distribute the cash towards corporations and the super-wealthy minority who make up the vast majority of their party donors is so utterly delusional that surely nobody could believe it.

The Tories have spent the last six years imposing such severe cuts to local authority funding that even David Cameron's local council were reduced to pleading with him to consider the damage he's doing. Surely it should be common knowledge that the Tories have reserved all of their harshest local authority cuts for the poorest and most deprived areas in the UK? If the much less severe cuts to Tory councils has them squealing for mercy, just imagine how bad the significantly more brutal cuts are in the most deprived regions of the UK.

The Tories knew that Brexit was going to lead to severe economic turmoil and another gaping hole in their budget, but Iain Duncan Smith assured us that several more years of savage Tory austerity would be "a price worth paying" to achieve Brexit. We all know why he thought it was a reasonable price to pay; he liked the price because it's not going to be paid by people like him, it's going to be paid by the sick and disabled, the working poor and people in the poorest areas of Britain who will see even more cuts to their local services that have already been stripped down to the bones after six years of malicious Tory cuts.

It's hard to fathom the thinking of people who have just voted to turn off the supply of EU funding to their regions, and subject themselves and their communities, and the rest of us an even more brutally right-wing Tories.

It looks an awful lot like turkeys voting for Christmas, and it would be easy to dismiss Brexit voters in the poorest areas as merely being hopelessly gullible tabloid reading idiots who let a bunch of psychopathic right-wing press barons who don't even live or pay tax in Britain (Rupert Murdoch, Jonathan Harmsworth, the Barclay brothers) convince them to vote against their own economic interests. It would be easy to say that these people are stupid as hell and thoroughly deserving of what's coming to them, but it wouldn't be useful.

The huge groundswell of support for Brexit in these deprived areas is undeniably a shocking display of economic self-harm, and it's easy to glibly attribute it to stupidity, but it's clearly no coincidence that so many of the poorest areas of all were also the ones that voted the most strongly for Brexit. Something other than stupidity drove these people to act in this way, and desperation and unfocused anger look like likely candidates.

The hard-right economic dogma that every Westminster government since 1979 has subscribed to has left these areas rotting at the margins. For every £1 of infrastructure spending per person in the north east, London gets £24. As vital as the EU Structural Adjustment Fund cash has been to Britain's most deprived areas, it's still nowhere near enough to make up for epic disparities like that.

After six years of brutal Tory austerity, much of it deliberately targeted at the poorest areas of the country, it's no wonder that these places were full of people who were absolutely livid with the status quo, and when, for once in their life they were given an opportunity to vote on something that actually mattered, they lashed out at David Cameron and George Osborne.

The Labour Leave movement fed into this anger by deliberately casting the referendum as an opportunity to punish David Cameron and George Osborne (see image), but it's now become undeniably clear that Labour Leave was completely funded by hard-right Tories, so this ostensibly left-wing "give the Tory toffs a kicking" propaganda was actually paid for by a different, even more rabidly right-wing bunch of Tories seeking to steal Cameron's place at the top table.

The Guardian wrote an article about how Ebbw Vale ended up voting to turn their noses up at hundreds of millions of pounds of EU funding, and one of the guys they interviewed gloried in the fact that "David Cameron got a good kicking" as if seeing a guy who is set to remain a multi-millionaire toff for the rest of his life forced to resign a few years earlier than he'd planned to, is somehow adequate compensation for the fact that his community is now going to be so much worse off.

I guess the conclusion is that when people allow unfocused anger to dictate their actions they can end up making awful decisions.

It really didn't take much mental effort to figure out that the Vote Leave campaign was founded on blatant lies, immigration fearmongering, false promises and the strategy of presenting the referendum decision as a "simple problem - simple solution" choice, when it was actually the most complex multi-layered consideration anyone in the UK (outside of Scotland) has been presented with in decades.

Apparently a lot of people just wanted to lash out at the establishment powers that had spent the last four decades grinding their communities into the dirt, and they didn't give much thought to the actual consequences of their votes would be.

I'm not tempted to gloat at the stupidity of "Turkeys voting for Christmas", because I'm all too aware that the consequences are going to be appalling for an awful lot of people. Many of the wealthier, more highly educated people who voted Remain will no doubt be insulated from the worst of it by virtue of the fact that they're not the traditional victims of Tory ideology. And many of the poorer, less educated people who voted for Brexit will undoubtedly suffer the worst of the Tory ideological rampage that is set to come. But there's no justice in that because there is no justification for hard-right Tory fanaticism, even if the victims brought it upon themselves because they allowed themselves to be misdirected into angrily lashing out in the wrong direction.

 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

Fracking in Ryedale, a guide to Tory style "democracy".

On Monday the 23rd of May 2016 the Tory dominated planning committee of North Yorkshire County Council voted to approve fracking in the village of Kirby Misperton in Ryedale despite a massive groundswell of public opposition to the plans.

The Council received 4,735 objections to the application by Third Energy to begin fracking in Ryedale and only 36 letters of support, but the Council decided to ignore the concerns of the local community in order to turn the scenic village into the first testing ground for the fracking business since fracking tests on the Fylde coast in 2011 were found to be the probable cause of local earthquakes.

North Yorkshire is a stunningly beautiful area, but it suffers from a chronic infestation of Tory voters. Perhaps all of the locals who voted Tory in local and general elections imagined that the unelected Tory peer David Howell was referring to some other part of the north when he declared that "there are large and uninhabited and desolate areas, certainly in part of the North East where there's plenty of room for fracking, well away from anybody's residence"? Maybe they thought that fracking rigs would be imposed on lowly Labour voting "scum" in places like Sunderland or Middlesbrough, not in a scenic Tory village that lies just a few miles south of the North York Moors national park?

Economic concerns

There are plenty of legitimate environmental concern over the fracking business, ranging from land and groundwater pollution to earthquakes, however some of the biggest concerns are economic in nature.

One huge concern is that fracking is only economically viable if energy prices remain high. Even with George Osborne's extraordinary tax breaks for fracking companies, if energy prices fall, it ends up costing more to extract shale gas than it can be sold for. This is the case because fracking has a very low level of Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI), meaning the margins are very fine indeed.

Another really big concerns is the way that the Tories exempted fracking companies from paying liability insurance to cover the cost of cleaning up fracking sites should the companies go bust. This means that if fracking causes some kind of environmental disaster the company responsable can just "cut and run" leaving the taxpayer to cover the entire cost of cleaning up their mess.

It's remarkable that the Tories decided to give the fracking industry such a huge incentive to set up small shell companies that can be abandoned if they end up creating a costly fracking mess, especially given the situation in Wyoming where hundreds of fracking wells were simply abandoned by their operators who chose to disappear into bankruptcy rather than clean up their mess. When gas prices were high these companies were happy to extract shale gas, but when prices fell they chose to forfiet their $50,000 per fracking well liability bonds and leave the entire mess for the US taxpayer to clean up.

The fact that US fracking companies chose to cut their losses when the bonds were $50,000 suggests that the figure was way too low, but instead of setting the UK bonds at a higher rate to prevent the kind of "cut and run" environmental catastrophe suffered in Wyoming, the Tories decided that fracking companies in the UK should pay no bonds whatever!

Third Energy

The Company that was granted the licence to begin fracking in Ryedale looks an awful lot like the kind of small shell Company that would cut and run if their fracking tests caused any kind of expensive environmental damage. The main company is called Third Energy Holdings Ltd and is based in Portland House in Westminster and have  capital holdings of just £21.4 million. However they have established three subsidiaries based at the same address in North Yorkshire; Third Energy UK Gas Ltd, Third Energy Onshore Ltd, and Third Energy Trading Ltd. The fracking licence has been given to Third Energy Onshore Ltd, so no doubt that entity will be folded up and abandoned if  their operations end up causing costly environmental damage.

It is interesting to note that Barclays Bank are investors in Third Energy and have also made individual donations to a number of Tory party MPs. This is hardly an isolated case of conflicts of interest between the Tory party and the Fracking industry.

Tory promises

Before the 2010 General Election David Cameron made a huge fanfare of signing a "Contract with the Electorate" that promised to "give communities the power to take charge of the local planning system". It eventually became clear that the Tories were going to break pretty much every single clause in their so-called contract, so they simply deleted it from their website and relied on the mainstream press to not bother mentioning it at all in the run-up to the 2015 General Election.

Apparrently this Tory commitment to give communities the power to take charge of the local planning system involves completely ignoring a 131:1 scale of opposition to the plans to frack in Ryedale, and swearing to use central government powers to over-rule local councils that decide not to fast-track approvals for fracking rigs in their communities.

So much for Tory promises eh?

Conclusion

The potential environmental impact doesn't matter. The economic frailty of the fracking industry doesn't matter. The fact that fracking companies don't have to pay liability insurance in case of economic problems or environmental damage doesn't matter. The huge 131:1 local opposition to the plans doesn't matter. The conflicts of interest between numerous Tory politicians and the fracking industry don't matter.

All that matters is that the Tories want to allow their mates to use North Yorkshire as a testing site for fracking, and they're determined to have their way, even if it means exposing their contractual promise to empower local communities as the absolute bullshit that anyone with any sense saw it as from the very beginning.

 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

The Tories (not China) are the real villains in the steel crisis

It's clear to anyone who understands rudimentary economics that the root cause of the ongoing UK steel industry crisis is the glut of artificially cheap state-subsidised steel flowing out of China.

Given this fact it would be easy to paint the Chinese as the villains, but actually they're not. The Chinese are only actually doing what's in their own national interest. The Tories are the villains because they're blatantly not working towards Britain's national interests.

China's national interest

The Chinese economy has been booming for decades, but in recent years their astonishing rate of economic growth has slowed significantly. Of course annual GDP growth of 6% plus is inconceivable in the UK (2% growth mainly built on the back of mass immigration is enough to get Tories gleefully slapping themselves on the back), but it represents a big slowdown from the 10% they were averaging between the late 1980s and the global financial sector insolvency crisis.

This slowdown means that the largely state-planned Chinese economy has been left with an a much higher steel production capacity than their economy has demand for, which leaves them with a choice. They can either significantly reduce their steel output, or they can subsidise their steel industry then flood the global market with under-priced steel.

To put this choice into perspective it's important to get an idea of the size of Chinese steel production. In the 1960s and '70s the UK steel industry was bigger than China's, but since then Chinese steel production has grown 63 fold to produce almost half of the entire world output of steel (882 million metric tonnes) while UK steel production has gradually declined. The UK steel industry now produces just 1.3% of the steel that China's does.

If the Chinese government were to immediately slow down steel production it would clearly come at the cost of tens of thousands of Chinese jobs, which makes the alternative of continuing production and flooding the global market look like a better option.

An additional benefit to the Chinese is that by over-producing steel and dumping it at below cost price on the global market, they can cripple foreign steel producers in any areas that fail to impose import tariffs out of adherence to radical free-market dogma.

It's obviously in China's best interests to keep their factories churning out steel and actively increasing their dominance in the global steel market by eliminating competition, because once the competition is gone, the Chinese will be able to jack up the price, and the countries that let their steel industries die will just have to pay the price that China dictate.

What the Chinese are doing is obviously not good for the UK steel industry, but who can blame the Chinese government for adopting an industrial strategy that is beneficial to China?

Tory treachery

At the back end of 2015 the Tories were busy sucking up to China and bribing them to build our energy infrastructure for us, while the UK steel industry was in crisis. 3,000 jobs were lost in Redcar in the north east, which has been a massive blow to the local community with severely detrimental knock on effects in all kinds of other sectors of the economy too (the supply chain, transport, catering, childcare, the leisure industry ...).

Since then the Tories have only made things worse. In February 2016 the Tories successfully torpedoed an EU plan to increase tariffs on dumped Chinese steel. Now they are flat out refusing to consider nationalisation of the strategically vital UK steel industry (which would cost a fraction of 1% of the cost of the bankers' bailouts).

Even if such an ideological no-nationalisation stance comes at the cost of destroying tens of thousands of British jobs, the Tories are determined to stick to it because they value their radical right-wing ideology way above things like British workers, British communities and having some kind of coherent long-term British industrial strategy.

There are two potential reasons that the Tories are actively working against the interests of the UK steel industry. One is that they are so wedded to their radical right-wing free market dogma that they'll gladly sacrifice the UK steel industry on the altar of Laissez-faire capitalism. The other is even worse: It's the theory that they're so desperate to suck up to the Chinese that they're prepared to allow the ruination of the British steel industry in order to seek favours from the Communist Chinese government (like continued backing for their absurd nuclear price-fixing shenanigans at Hinkley Point C for example)

Adherence to radical free-market dogma at the expense of British industry, or making a sacrifice of the UK steel industry in order to curry favour with the Chinese - whatever the case it's clearly disgustingly treacherous stuff from the Tories.

Protectionism

While the Tories were shooting down EU measures to impose import tariffs on dumped Chinese steel, the Americans have been putting big import tariffs up in order to protect their own steel industry from artificially cheap Chinese imports. A lot of British people tend to think of America as being far more right-wing than the UK, but the Tories really are the most fanatically right-wing bunch of all because they'd rather have the UK steel industry ruined under a tide of cheap Chinese steel than ever consider policies like protectionism or nationalisation.

To the Tories "protectionism" is a dirty word because it conflicts with their radical free-market ideology, but a cursory look at the economic history books reveal that the most successful countries in terms of GDP growth have usually been the most protectionist.

From the early industrial revolution until the mid-19th Century the UK was a deeply protectionist economy and they built the biggest trade empire in the history of the World. From the mid-19th Century to the mid-20th Century the US was deeply protectionist while the UK embraced free-market economics. The Americans rose to become the richest and most powerful nation on Earth while Britain dropped several rungs down the global pecking order. From the late 20th Century to the present China has risen from a backwards agrarian economy to become an economic superpower that is indisputably the workshop of the world. And guess what ... China is currently one of the most protectionist economies in the world.

The idea that protectionism is harmful is one of the most backward bits of right-wing economic dogma of all.

Cameron's payback

Since the Tories took sole power in 2015 it's been one scandal, PR disaster or U-turn after another, but the way Cameron and Osborne's so-called special relationship with the Communist Party of China has unravelled is perhaps the biggest embarrassment of all.

After doing everything in their power to prevent the EU from raising import tariffs on artificially cheap Chinese steel in order to curry favour with their Communist "special partners", the Chinese repaid this Tory loyalty to China's economic interests by ... erm ... imposing a 46% import tariff on Welsh steel just as the UK steel industry crisis was coming to boiling point with the Indian company Tata announcing their decision to abandon all of their UK operations!

If it wasn't such a serious issue with so many tens of thousands of jobs at stake, this sheer level of Tory ineptitude would be laughable.

Conclusion

It's irrational to blame China for acting in their own economic interest. What is completely unacceptable though is that the Tories have allowed this steel industry crisis to go from bad to worse. They sacrificed 3,000 jobs in Redcar in the winter of 2015 and then continued fighting against the interests of the UK steel industry by torpedoing the EU move to increase tariffs on Chinese steel dumping in February 2016.

Even when the entire UK steel industry has gone into meltdown, top Tories had to be shamed into giving up their jollies in Lanzarote and Australia to come back and pretend that they give a damn about the UK steel industry.

Their response is absolutely pathetic, and the 11 million people (24% of registered voters) who voted the Tory party into absolute power in 2015 really should be ashamed of supporting such a bunch of hopeless charlatans.
   

 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.

MORE ARTICLES FROM
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 
                 
David Cameron's surrender to the Chinese
                                       
The Tory nuclear price-fixing deal
                
The Tory "economic recovery" mantra is a lie
                         
The pathetic Tory response to the steel industry crisis
                        
Austerity is a con
           
The Tory ideological mission
                     
Asset stripping "bankrupt Britain"

                                
Margaret Thatcher's toxic neoliberal legacies