It doesn't matter how many positive platitudes about health workers and the universal health care system they spout, right-wing politicians actually hate the NHS with a burning ideological passion, because they hate socialism, and the NHS is one of the world's finest examples of socialism in action.
Any right-wing politician in the UK with even a few brain cells to rub together knows that the NHS principle of health care that is free at the point of need is still overwhelmingly popular with the British public.
This means that they have to lie about their ideological fantasy of carving the NHS into pieces to give away to their corporate mates, and scrapping the socialist principle of universal health care.
They know they have to lie because the vast majority of British people would reject them if they dared to tell the truth about what they'd like to do with the NHS.
In fact, the NHS is so popular it's even supported by the majority of Tory voters (how Tory voters who love the NHS reconcile this with their choice to vote for an anti-socialist party that vandalises the NHS every time they get into power is one of the crucial political questions of British politics).
This pragmatic need to cover up their hatred of the NHS means that it's rare that right-wing politicians tell the truth about the NHS, but occasionally they do.
One right-wing politician who let his true feelings about the NHS seep out is the Tory MP Jeremy Hunt who co-authored a book calling for the NHS to be scrapped and replaced with a private insurance based system.
It just goes to show how much contempt David Cameron had for the NHS that he put Jeremy Hunt in charge of it, and it goes to show that Theresa May is equally contemptuous toward the NHS that she decided to keep him on as health secretary when she had the chance to get rid of him.
That's two Tory Prime Ministers in a row who saw a man who wanted to scrap the NHS as the ideal person to run the NHS!
Another Tory right-winger who outlined his contempt for the idea of universal health care is the Tory propagandist Henry Hill, who went as far as publishing his blueprint for wrecking the NHS in a blog post.
The former UKIP leader Paul Nuttall is another right-winger who has spoken openly about his NHS views. Before he became UKIP leader Nuttall wrote blog posts and made speeches expressing his hatred for the NHS and its staff, celebrating the ideological vandalism the Tories have been doing to the NHS since 2012, and making up outright lies about NHS staffing levels and the efficiency of NHS services.
Yet another right-wing politician who accidentally let the truth out about the Tory policy towards the NHS is the chairman of Conservative Health Paul Charlson who claimed that charging for NHS services is "a good idea in principle… [BUT] It would be political suicide for a party to introduce this. They could only really do it if there was a feeling in the country that health services
were falling apart".
The Tory strategy is that the NHS has to be under-funded and mismanaged to the point of destruction in order that they can try to get away with scrapping the free at the point of need principle and bringing in charging for services, which would allow the wealthy to queue jump.
Whatever Tory and UKIP politicians say about how much they love and respect the NHS, it's vital to remember that they're just lying through their teeth because they know that's what the vast majority of the British public want to hear.
In reality right-wingers hate the NHS with a burning ideological passion and can't wait for the day that they get to scrap the unmistakably socialist principle of prioritising health care by need rather than the ability to pay.
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.
UKIP was always a Trojan Horse of a political party. It was absolutely obvious that they were a fake protest party designed to hoover up the votes of the dissatisfied in order to push the UK political spectrum ever further to the hard-right.
Anyone who cared to actually listen to their contempt for the NHS and the hard-right policies they promoted could tell what they were up to, but somehow UKIP kept building momentum and attracting more and more voters who seemed entirely unconcerned that the party they were endorsing were pushing ever more fanatically right-wing policies into the political mainstream.
For a while the UK political scene was looking absolutely grim for anyone who believes in centre-left and liberal ideas, because the Tory+UKIP share of the vote was absolutely massive. At the 2015 General Election the combined Tory-UKIP vote share dwarfed the Labour vote share in every age demographic, even the under-30s!
We knew that all it would take would be for the UKIP and Tory votes to combine, and Britain would suffer a landslide election victory for a hard-right ultra-nationalist party that would make the Thatcher regime look like a bunch of mild-mannered moderates in comparison.
Had the 2015 Tory and UKIP votes combined together under the Tory flag, and the other parties kept more or less the same vote share, the Electoral Calculus website suggests that the Tories would have landed a super-majority with 406 seats, Labour would have slumped to 183 seats (their worst performance since the 1930s) and the Lib-Dems would have been reduced to just 2 seats!
After the Brexit vote in June 2016 and the subsequent implosion of UKIP under the hapless and directionless leadership of Paul Nuttall, it seemed that our worst fears were coming true. Theresa May and the Tories were soaring high in the polls and ex-Ukippers were flocking to the Tory party to follow the Brexit flag Theresa may had opportunistically nicked off actual Brexiteers when it suited her carer interests to do so.
In the week that Theresa May announced her self-serving snap election, the Tories had a massive lead in the opinion polls.
YouGov put the Tories 48-24 ahead of Labour, and ComRes polled a 50-25 lead for the Tories.
The only debate amongst mainstream media hacks at the time was whether Theresa May was going to ride the Blue-kip surge to a super-majority of 50+, or a mega-majority of 100+.
We all know what happened next.
We all witnessed the most extraordinary turnaround in political fortunes as Jeremy Corbyn built a massive wave of support, especially amongst young voters and the millions who had been disenfranchised and reduced to apathy through two decades of having no influence over politics other than the colour of the rosette being worn by one out-of-touch neoliberalism-fixated shill or the other.
Theresa May still benefited from a massive influx of hard-right ultra-nationalist Blue-kippers, which is the main explanation for how probably the worst general election campaign in living memory resulted in a 2.3 million increase in the Tory vote, but the Blue-kip surge was more than countered by the astounding 3.5 million increase in the Labour vote.
Jeremy Corbyn achieved this extraordinary turnaround in two main ways. Firstly he offered an actual manifesto of hope instead of the disastrously uninspiring kind of austerity-lite slop that Labour offered up at the 2015 General Election. And secondly by playing an absolute master-stroke. Despite howls of outrage from the usual suspects, Corbyn decided to go into the 2017 General Election offering a centre-left version of Brexit, rather than opting for a "let's cancel Brexit" campaign that would have been furiously derided as an anti-democratic sore loser campaign.
Corbyn's strategic decision payed off brilliantly as a sizeable chunk of the less rabidly right-wing UKIP vote deserted to Labour instead of the Tories, and the Lib-Dems who did run a sore loser campaign actually dropped another 0.5% from what most observers assumed to be their absolute nadir in 2015.
There's never going to be another Blue-kip surge for the Tory party because the UKIP Trojan Horse is burned to cinders. And the Tories have got an even bigger problem than that too. The grotesque brand of hard-right ultra-nationalism that the Tories embraced in order to appeal to the Ukipper demographic is electoral cyanide to the younger generations, who are very much more keen on stuff like environmentalism, feminism, multiculturalism and social liberalism.
The Tories must keep pushing the regressive hard-right ultra-nationalist policies or their brand new, but now fundamentally important Blue-kip demographic will desert them. But they're sitting on a demographic trapdoor, because the electorate is more divided by age than it's ever been, and the demographics that most adore regressive hard-right fanaticism are the not-long-to-live over-65s, while younger voters who have a dozen or more elections in front of them absolutely detest it.
The Tories can't get off the demographic trapdoor they've positioned themselves over because their fanatically right-wing Blue-kip demographic would abandon them if they did, but this demographic is going to gradually die off, leaving Labour to power to victory at some point.
The trope amongst bitter centrist dad Blairite types these days is to ignore the fact that Jeremy Corbyn achieved the biggest increase in the Labour vote share since 1945, and to actually whine that Corbyn should have won the election outright.
But what they're missing (either wilfully, or through sheer political ignorance) is that Jeremy Corbyn has burned the UKIP Trojan Horse to the ground, and left the Tories utterly dependent on appealing to the basest instincts of the regressive Blue-kip demographic.
Just imagine how much scorn and derision would have been poured on anyone who had predicted back in April that Jeremy Corbyn could more than counteract the Blue-kip surge by doing two things that conventional political wisdom claimed as impossible; bringing out the youth vote, and re-engaging non-voters.
But somehow he actually managed to do it, and it's surely only a matter of time before the Tory party collapses into the "no deal" Brexit hole they keep digging beneath their own foundations, giving Jeremy Corbyn and the reenergised Labour Party a chance to finish off the job.
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.
UKIP are in complete meltdown and it seems highly likely that their ex-voters will get to decide which kind of Brexit the United Kingdom goes for.
At the 2015 General Election UKIP picked up some 3.8 million votes, which accounted for almost 13% of all votes cast. In 2017 they'll be lucky to break 4% the way things are going, which means that some 2.5 million+ ex-UKIP voters will have a huge influence on the kind of Brexit Britain ends up getting.
If you're an ex-UKIP voter fleeing the chaos under Paul Nuttall's oafish and inept leadership, then you're almost certainly wondering which other party to support in the 2017 General Election.
This article is designed to help you make up your mind by considering the case against Theresa May and the Conservatives.
Me and Ukip
Before I start with the six questions, I'd like to make it clear what my relationship with UKIP is. As far as I'm concerned there are three main types of Ukipper.
Tory opportunists
There are the opportunistic ex-Tories who have riddled the party and turned it more into a vehicle for ultra-right Thatcherite economics (even though most of the voters and membership are significantly more economically centrist than Tory voters) than a genuine protest movement. I despise people like Roger Helmer, Janice Atkinson, Douglas Carswell, William Legge, Bill Etheridge, and the current leader Paul Nuttall. They all stood as Tory candidates in elections before infesting UKIP and turning it into a Tory Trojan Horse Party.
The extreme-right
As you know an awful lot of distasteful extreme-right fanatics have hitched their colours to the UKIP bandwagon. The BNP vote has disintegrated to almost nothing since their high point in 2009 (over a million votes) and the Britain First hate chamber regularly promotes UKIP. I have no time for the extreme-right, white supremacists neo-fascists and the like. You would understand how much I despise these people if you'd seen just a fraction of the abuse, hate mail, threats, insults and death threats these people have sent me over the years.
You
Aside from the Tory opportunists who colonised UKIP and the extreme-right bandwagon-jumpers, there's another Ukipper demographic, and judging by my reading of the statistics it's actually by far the biggest. It's a demographic of quite reasonable, economically centrist, non-bigoted people who just saw UKIP as a means to an end, the end of course being Brexit.
This article is for you.
The six questions
Question 1: Are you a patriot?
Do you believe that British infrastructure and services should be run by Britain, for the benefit of British people ... or do you believe that it's best off as it is, carved up and sold off to all manner of corporations and foreign governments?
Do you believe that the Chinese government should own significant stakes in our railways, water companies, power stations and National Grid? (as they already do)
Do you think it's right that 74% of our rail franchises are operated as cash cows for foreign governments, but the UK state is barred from bidding to run its own rail network for the benefit of the British people? (as is the case now)
Theresa May likes running Britain in this ridiculous manner, and she's absolutely determined to keep it this way.
As far as Theresa May and her neoliberal Tory bully-boys are concerned, it doesn't matter if the governments of China, and France, and Qatar, and Singapore get a slice of UK public infrastructure, as long as their corporate mates get nice flat slices too.
As long as their corporate mates get the chance to milk obscene profits out of the British people, who cares if communist China and the Islamist tyrants in Qatar get to cream some off too? - That's genuinely the Tory attitude!
Jeremy Corbyn wants to repatriate British infrastructure and services, including the rail franchises, the Royal Mail, the national Grid and the water companies (check the labour manifesto for yourself)
jeremy Corbyn also wants to set up a network of not-for-profit energy companies in order to challenge companies like EdF (the French government) and Eon (German state owned) to increase competition and get a better deal for UK energy customers. Theresa May and the Tories hate this idea and want to stop it at all costs.
If you're an economic patriot you wouldn't dream of voting for Theresa May and her treasonous neoliberal agenda, you'd vote for Jeremy Corbyn and renationalisation.
Question 2. Do you want sensible immigration policies?
In 2010 Theresa May promised to reduce migration to below 100,000 (she increased it to the all time record high of 336,000).
In 2015 Theresa May promised to reduce migration to below 100,000 (she totally failed again).
In 2017 Theresa May is promising to reduce migration to below 100,000, but who on earth would believe her empty anti-immigration rhetoric 3rd time around?
Instead of just plucking an arbitrary number out of the air like Theresa May, don't you think a better approach might be to look at immigrants as people rather than as numbers?
Some of them are people coming to live with their British families (highly likely to integrate into British society and contribute to the economy and to society). Some of them are foreign students who bring huge amounts of cash into the economy (£25 billion per year) then go back again. Some of them are workers who fill skills shortages (if a job needs doing it's obviously better that an immigrant does it than nobody, otherwise the economy suffers).
However some of them are deliberately brought into the UK to undercut British workers.
Don't you think an immigration policy that differentiates between socially and economically beneficial migration and harmful immigration practices like undercutting, gangmastering, and exclusive overseas recruitment makes more sense than treating a wealthy foreign PhD student, the foreign spouse of a British national or an NHS doctor as exactly the same as someone who has been brought in by gangmasters in order to undercut UK wages?
Well, Labour has listened to reason and they're not plucking numbers out of the air like Theresa May.
They've set out a policy of clamping down on harmful migration and companies that undercut the minimum wage, and they're also proposing to introduce a migration fund so that areas that have had high levels of migration over the last decade will get extra funds to stop infrastructure and public services from getting over-stretched. Don't believe the Tory lies that Labour want uncontrolled migration, read the Labour manifesto on immigration for yourself.
Question 3: Do you believe in public safety?
Since 2010 the Tories have overseen the longest and deepest cuts in police numbers in history. They've reduced the number of police per 100,000 people back to 1970s levels.
They've also slashed the UK border force (meaning more than a million people per month pass through our airports without proper security checks), shrunk the army to its smallest size since the Napoleonic era (and brazenly lied to the public about their army-slashing agenda too), sacked 10,000 fire service personnel, and closed dozens of A&E units.
The Tories clearly and undeniably considered their (economically illiterate) austerity dogma to be of far more importance than public safety.
Labour would put 10,000 more cops on the street, increase funding to the UK border agency, hire 3,000 more fire fighters, and stop the latest Tory plan to close even more A&E units in its tracks. Theresa May and Amber Rudd refuse to say whether they would stop cutting police numbers now, even after Manchester!
If you believe in public safety you wouldn't dream of voting for even more Tory austerity cuts to the public safety budget would you?
Question 4: Do you believe in fairness?
Theresa May's shambolic and uncosted manifesto of misery has something nasty for almost everyone.
- She's promising to snatch food out of infant school children's mouths.
- She's scrapped the 2015 Tory pledges not to raise National Insurance and Income Tax for ordinary workers (any guesses why?).
- She's going to scrap the Triple Lock and Winter Fuel Allowance for pensioners.
- She's planning to asset strip anyone who gets ill and needs social care with her so-called Dementia Tax.
- She's also keen to bring back the barbaric practice of ripping live foxes to pieces with packs of dogs when 84% of the British public want it to stay banned.
The objective of all of these cuts is to save money so that she can hand another £70 billion in tax giveaways to corporations and the super-rich!
Jeremy Corbyn believes that after seven years of it, it's time to stop the Tories loading austerity onto the poor and ordinary in order to help the super-rich elitists literally double their wealth.
Jeremy Corbyn thinks it's time to redress the balance a bit by pledging no tax rises for the 95%, and making those who can easily afford it pay a little bit more. Don't you agree with him?
Question 5: Do you support the Westminster establishment?
Theresa May is the embodiment of the Westminster establishment. In 1997 she was handed one of the safest of safe Tory seats. In 2010 she was handed the Home Office and allowed to stay there for six years despite her record-breakingly bad performance on immigration, and her savage ideologically driven cuts to the public safety budget. Then in 2016 she was hand-picked as Tory leader by her fellow Tory MPs without even the Tory membership getting a vote.
Jeremy Corbyn is about as anti-establishment as you can get. He was a constant thorn in Tony Blair's side, opposing the disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq, opposing Gordon Brown's bonkers PFI economic alchemy schemes, opposing the reckless deregulation of the financial sector, opposing the introduction of the ID database, opposing every harebrained privatisation.
Then in 2015 Corbyn stood as a 200-1 outsider to become the Labour Party leader and somehow won a landslide victory with the votes of 250,000 ordinary Labour members!
After the Brexit vote the Westminster establishment tried to use it as an excuse to destroy him, but he stood strong against the Anyone But Corbyn coup that was orchestrated by the Labour faction of the Westminster establishment. And he was swept back to the leadership with an even bigger majority than he had before!
Just go out to your local newsagents and look at the front pages. Can't you see that such an extreme fearmongering campaign against Jeremy Corbyn can only be explained by a neoliberal establishment that is absolutely shit-scared of losing the grip on power they've held since 1979?
Brexit was part one of the anti-establishment revolution. Corbyn is step two.
If you hand the keys of 10 Downing Street to Theresa May, you're simply inviting the Westminster establishment to conduct Brexit exclusively in their own interests, not in the interests of ordinary people up and down the country.
If you give Jeremy Corbyn a crack, he'll give the complacent Westminster establishment the shake-up they've so thoroughly deserved for decades
Question 6: What kind of Brexit do you want?
Do you want a Brexit that is negotiated by the right-wing core of the Westminster establishment to benefit them, and their corporate mates, and the dodgy tax-dodgers who bankroll their party, and the property speculators who are queuing up to get their teeth into the NHS property portfolio under Theresa May's Naylor Report firesale plans?
Or do you want a Brexit that brings British infrastructure and services back under British control, to be used for the benefit of the British people?
A Brexit that makes sure every kid gets the chance of a decent education no matter what their background, and every adult who needs retraining gets free access to the National Education Service too?
A Brexit that properly funds public services like the NHS, police, fire service and UK Border Agency?
A Brexit where immigration is determined by a sensible policy-based approach that allows positive migration and clamps down on negative migration, rather than just plucking numbers out of the air and missing them by miles>
The choice is clear. You can vote Tory for a Brexit for the billionaires, or you can vote Labour for a People's brexit.
I know which kind of Brexit I'm going to chose. Do you?
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 front page of the Daily Mail screamed about the supposed bias on the BBC Debate and the right-wing demagogue Nigel Farage even called for people to be sacked over the fact that the audience didn't cheer Amber Rudd and Paul Nuttall enough!
This victimy whinging from right-wingers about the supposedly biased audience at last night's TV debate is yet another example of the feeble "poor us" victim complex narrative that right-wingers like Nigel Farage deliberately stoke in order to drum up support from the cognitively impaired.
Instead of just recognising that Amber Rudd had a bit of a nightmare (hardly surprising given that her father had died just two days before, but her mercilessly self-serving leader Theresa May still sent her grieving subordinate into the firing line to take the hits she wanted to avoid being seen taking herself) and that the new UKIP leader Paul Nuttall was his usual charmless, boorish and flagrantly dishonest self, it all had to be a conspiracy by the nasty BBC didn't it?
Media bias
Right-wingers whinging about media bias is extraordinary stuff. The research has shown time and again that the media is intensely biased against Jeremy Corbyn and in favour of the Tories.
Analysis of press coverage of the 2017 General Election campaign at Loughborough University has shown that the print media is intensely biased against the Labour Party, and on average still actually singing the praises of the Tory party despite their catastrophically inept election campaign so far (calling a self-serving election they promised they wouldn't call, their farcical uncosted shambles of a manifesto, their plans to snatch food out of children's mouths, thier scrapped pledges not to raise Income Tax and National Insurance for ordinary working people, their depraved plan to asset strip frail elderly people who need social care, their cowardly leader refusing to appear in the election debates ...).
The BBC isn't quite as biased as the Tory-worshipping print media, but they're still bad. The BBC Politics team is stuffed full of Tories and Laura Kuenssberg was famously caught out manufacturing fake news by splicing together different questions and answers in order to attack Jeremy Corbyn.
During the EU referendum campaign the right-wing bias of the broadcast media was laid bare. An astounding 71.2% of political sources were from the Tory party compared to just 18.4% from Labour. When you factor in the 7.6% of coverage that went to UKIP, the two hard-right political parties were given 77.8% of the airtime, while all the other political parties combined subsisted on just 22.2% of the airtime between them!
Audience appeal
The BBC Debate audience wasn't shockingly biased. There was no conspiracy.
The fact is that Paul Nuttall has always been a noxious and deeply unpopular buffoon, and Amber Rudd has always been a bit of a plonker (who Theresa May should never have sent into the firing line when she should obviously have been at home grieving).
If the right-wingers wanted applause from the audience, maybe they should actually have made stirring speeches about how Britain deserves better (Jeremy Corbyn and Caroline Lucas did several), witty political jibes (Tim Farron skewered the cowardly Theresa May multiple times, the best being his closing speech) or appeals to basic human decency (Angus Robertson's impassioned defence of the contributions immigrants make to our society, or Caroline Lucas' condemnation of arms dealing to depraved Islamist tyrannies like Saudi Arabia).
It's simple. The two hard-right politicians didn't get applauded much because performed poorly and talked humourless and uninspiring rubbish for most of the debate.
People didn't want to hear Paul Nuttall's divisive anti-Muslim ranting (especially so soon after Manchester) and the Tory broken robot repetition of the same tired propaganda tropes is no more appealing for the fact that it was Amber Rudd doing it this time, not the cowardly Theresa May.
Victim compexes
The hard-right thrive on victim complex narratives. They know that the most effective forms of political propaganda are the ones that create strong emotional reactions, and a hugely effective way of creating strong emotional reactions is by inflating people's victim complexes.
The hard-right have deliberately created a right-wing "snowflake" demographic who walk around with victim complexes the size of hot air balloons, and react with outrage at every perceived injustice.
These people are remarkably easy to trigger into totally abandoning their cognitive faculties and wallowing in self-pity with conspiracy theories about how white, wealthy, middle-age males are the most persecuted people in society, and how the nasty BBC are terribly biased because they didn't stuff the debate audience full of people so thick they couldn't even recognise the fact that Amber Rudd had a nightmare of it, and Paul Nuttall was his usual obnoxious, abrasive and deeply unappealing self.
Conclusion
The actual evidence (mountains of it) demonstrates that the mainstream media bias is actually intensely anti-left (hence the existence of homemade blogs like mine to try to counteract it a bit), but facts and evidence are are utterly irrelevant in the world of hard-right victim complex wallowing.
No! According the the hard-right demagogues though. According to them the evidence of your eyes is wrong. Amber Rudd didn't have a stuttering nightmare, and Paul Nuttall wasn't an abrasive boor. What actually happened is that they both performed magnificently, and the only reason they looked ill-prepared, unappealing and hopelessly out of their depth was an evil BBC conspiracy to undermine them.
And if you'll believe that lamentable, reality-denying, victim-complex riddled gibberish, you'll believe literally anything won't you?
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.
Nigel Farage is having a huge hissy fit because he wants a seat in the unelected House of Lords or a Knighthood and Douglas Carswell (UKIP's only actual MP) lightly mocked him over it.
The jaw-dropping hypocrisy of Britain's self-proclaimed saviour from the terrible anti-democratic EU technocrats scuttling around in search of peerage to sit in the unelected House of Lords is so brazen that perhaps even a few 'Kippers might actually be capable of thinking "hang on a minute".
When asked by UKIP insiders to intervene in order to help secure anti-democratic gongs for Farage, Carswell responded in an internal party email that maybe Farage could be nominated as an OBE for "services to headline writers". Carswell's email has now been leaked and Farage is having a total meltdown over it.
Farage's furious reaction to Carswell's jibe is an illustration of just how enormously over-inflated his ego has now become. Farage has claimed that Carswell's slightly mocking words were motivated by "jealousy" and then demanded that the comically inept new UKIP leader Paul Nuttall expel Carswell from the party for daring to criticise him.
Imagine the size of the ego that imagines a bit of light personal ribbing against the dear ex-leader is more damaging to the party than a witch hunt to expel the party's only MP!
Carswell is also clearly despised by Arron Banks, the obnoxious millionaire UKIP donor who is busy blackmailing the party into making him party chairman by threatening to stop pumping cash into the party if they don't.
I'm no big fan of Douglas Carswell because (like Farage, Nuttall and Banks) he's an ex-Tory, and he consistently votes in favour of pretty much every appalling scam the Tories come up with. However, being called "a terrible individual" by a slimeball like Arron Banks is clearly a feather in his cap that he can be well and truly proud of. And winding up Farage so much that he's has a pathetic dictatorial foot-stamping fit ... well that's provided everyone with a little bit of light political amusement, which we can all be thankful for in these dark and dangerous days.
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.
Even judged by the staggeringly dishonest standards of his political contemporaries the UKIP leader Paul Nuttall is in a field of his own.
- Nuttall put a furious anti-NHS diatribe up on his website, then when called out about it decided to delete the page and pretend that he now loves the NHS. Only the most ridiculous Internet n00b could believe that deleting the webpage makes things disappear from the Internet.
- Nuttall's LinkedIn profile claimed that he had a PhD from Liverpool Hope University which was an outright lie. His excuse for this one is that the page had nothing to do with him or his team, expecting people to believe that his own LinkedIn profile was actually part of some terrible anti-UKIP conspiracy.
- Nuttall was forced to admit that claims that he'd played professional football for Tranmere Rovers were outright lies. Just imagine the stupidity of a person who thinks that the football nerds wouldn't eventually go through the records to check out such a bold claim.
In the wake of the Hillsborough lie Nuttall seems to have gone into hiding. I can't see his Twitter feed these days because he blocked me for tweeting this photo at him, but I'm told that he's stopped tweeting. He's also completely pulled down his website, presumably to stop people scouring it for more of his blatant lies.
The idea of going into online hiding just a week before a high profile by-election is quite extraordinary.
Most politicians wouldn't try to hide from the lies so pathetically, but it seems that Nuttall's lies are so numerous and so brazen that he feels that he's got no choice but to keep his head down and hope that the people of Stoke Central are stupid enough to elect such an obvious and distasteful liar, with no connections whatever to the area, as their parliamentary representative.
The problem with Paul Nuttall isn't that he's dishonest. If dishonesty was any kind of political impediment how on earth would it be possible to explain David Cameron's political career?
No - the problem is that Nuttall is such a hopelessly bad liar that surely even the most idiotic of people (Daily Express readers, Britain First enthusiasts ...) can't help but see that he's an absolute bullshitter.
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.
UKIP have clearly learned from the fake news epidemic that swept Donald Trump into the White House, and they're trying to imitate it in their own pathetically amateurish way.The first example of UKIP fake news aimed at influencing the Stoke Central by-election was a pathetically shoddy photoshopped image claiming that Stoke residents were hanging out St George's crosses in order to protest against "unpatriotic" Jeremy Corbyn.
As the Skwawkbox blog pointed out, not only was the image crudely and obviously photoshopped, the Ukipper that did it actually got the flag the wrong way up, which is considered a grave insult in the world of vexillology.
If anyone is "unpatriotic" it's clearly the Ukipper who thought it was fine to photoshop an upside down English flag onto some random house in Stoke.
Soon after the Fake flag protest picture was exposed another one soon appeared, this time showing the Labour by-election candidate Gareth Snell with a burka clad woman. It didn't take much investigation to find the original photo, which was a publicity shot of Gareth Snell with the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
The first image demonstrated the grotesquely ignorant brand of nationalism promoted by extreme right groups like UKIP and Britain First by getting the flag upside down.
The second demonstrates something a lot more distasteful. It clearly shows the Ukipper assumption that the people of Stoke are a bunch of gullible bigots. Whoever decided to turn Jeremy Corbyn into a burka clad woman made two obvious assumptions about the people of Stoke: Firstly that they're gullible enough to fall for another crudely photoshopped image, and secondly that they must be such a bunch of bigots that they'd find a picture of a woman in a burka so terrifying that they'd rush off and vote for UKIP.
I hope the people of Stoke Central are smart enough to see through this appalling fake news bullshit from UKIP, and hand the NHS-hating local address-faking hard-right charlatan Paul Nuttall the electoral defeat he so richly deserves.
If you know anyone who lives in Stoke, or anyone with connections to the city, please consider sharing this article with them to help to publicise the disgusting dirty tricks that UKIP are employing to in order to dupe Stokies into voting for their extreme-right Thatcherism on steroids party.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
