How to lose support and alienate people: The Progressive Alliance communication strategy

When attempting to build a broad political coalition you've decided to call "The Progressive Alliance", it may be considered wise not to deliberately antagonise pretty much anyone with vaguely progressive or left-leaning views ... but there's no telling liberal capitalist aggro-centrists how to do political communication is there?

• Liberal capitalists laid the groundwork for Brexit by propping up the ruinous Austerity Coalition, which caused the unprecedented wage collapse, failing public services, the housing crisis, and the devastating under-investment that the Brexiteers then cynically weaponised by blaming on immigrants and the EU.

• They delivered their own worst nightmare of Brexit with their condescending and ineffective "jobs for the boys" non-campaign.

• They blew probably the best opportunity ever to hammer the Tories by turning the Brexit referendum result into an excuse to launch a bitter factionalist coup to get rid of Labour's democratically elected leader instead!

• Then they handed the keys of Downing Street to Boris Johnson by turning the 2019 General Election into a rerun of the Brexit referendum they'd already lost. 

If these people has 1% of the strategic capabilities they imagine themselves to have, we wouldn't be in anything like as much of a mess as a nation, but they will keep insisting that tepid, unappealing, liberal capitalist gruel must be the only alternative to radically right-wing conservative capitalist poison.

A lot of the People's Vote campaigners who invested so much work in throwing the 2019 general election have respawned themselves as The Progressive Alliance, which apparently aims to remove the Tories from power by building an astonishingly unlikely political coalition.

I won't spend too much time explaining why it's so unlikely, you just have to consider the vitriolic anti-SNP bile in Keir Starmer's much-lauded Labour conference speech to understand that the Labour right detest the SNP Westminster-outsiders infinitely more than they mildly disapprove of their Tory Westminster brethren.

Anyway. Onto the astonishing infographic in the article header image.

This is a real thing, that was actually designed and approved by Progressive Alliance people, and posted on their social media accounts (here's the link on Facebook, at least until they delete it).

"But The Lib-Dems went into coalition with the Tories"

The Progressive Alliance may try to trivialise this with the misleading claim that it all happened "a decade ago" when the Lib-Dems were still enabling Tory malice will into 2015, and the Brexiteer-style cry of "get over it", but the fact is that the ruinous Austerity Coalition imposed a shocking range of anti-progressive policies that are still causing devastating social and economic consequences today. 

What's more, the Lib-Dems are completely unapologetic about it, to the extent that they picked one of the very worst Tory-collaborators, Ed Davey, as their their new leader, when they had the chance to turn over a new leaf with the much more progressive Layla Moran.

The message here is that if you're horrified by austerity ruination; systematic "fit for work" disability persecution; Theresa May's unlawfully racist Hostile Environment and the ensuing the Windrush scandal; the worst period of wage repression in recorded history; unlawful Tribunal Fees; the Royal Mail scam and £billions in other privatisation rip-offs; the student loan betrayal; the brutal social security sanctions regime; arms sales to tyrants, despots and war criminals; privatising literally thousands of schools into the hands of unaccountable private profiteers; devastating local government cuts; economically illiterate cuts to the drivers of future economic prosperity (education, infrastructure, R&D); or any of the other profoundly anti-progressive policies enacted between 2010 and 2015, you can just piss off, because this lot don't want your vote.

"Jeremy Corbyn is no longer Labour leader"

The logic of attacking Jeremy Corbyn supporters and socialists in general is unclear.

Apparently sneering at them with the Brexiteer style slogan "he lost, get over it" is going to magically win them over to the Progressive Alliance cause!

Who cares that Corbyn was demonised by the press and repeatedly sabotaged from within his own party, purely for promoting progressive social and economic policies?

If you supported Corbyn's policy platform, you can also piss off, because the so-called Progressive Alliance don't want your vote!

"Blah blah jabber jabber Tony Blair blah blah Iraq"

The UK government ignored the legitimate concerns of millions of British people, illegally invaded another country, caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, and a refugee crisis of millions.

They triggered a cycle of terrorist violence that spread throughout the target country, across the entire region, and eventually culminated in terrorist atrocities across Europe perpetrated by the ISIS fanatics that metastasised out the lawless terrorism breeding grounds that Tony Blair and his ilk created in Iraq.

"Blah blah jabber jabber ... get over it": What an arrogant and offensive way to dismiss legitimate concerns over one of modern Britain's most horrific foreign policy catastrophes! 

If you're the kind of progressively-minded person who opposed the Iraq war, the so-called Progressive Alliance clearly hold your political opinions in the same regard as dog much on their shoes, they simply don't want your vote.

"The Lib-Dems will just flounce off with the Tories"

They want to re-argue point one over again, just to make their list look longer, but the essence of their case is that we should just trust the Lib-Dems this time, despite them being led by one of the worst Lib-Dem ministers in the ruinous Austerity Coalition!

This is less an effort to tell potential voters to piss off, more of a desperate appeal to the astonishingly gullible!

"But Keith ... [insert politically illiterate rant here]"

Ah right.

listen up!

Anyone who has any concerns whatever about Keir Starmer's pathetic abstention of a leadership so far; his broken pledges; his obsession with factionalist infighting; his campaign of abuse against left-wing and socially progressive Jews; his repeated purges of left-wing and progressive voices out of his shadow cabinet; his abject failure to hold the Tory government to account; his repeated abstentions on sickeningly anti-progressive pieces of Tory legislation like the Rape Cops Bill; or even just his robotic lack of charisma.

You can all piss off too!

"I will always vote for [party] out of loyalty"

Nobody doubts that tribal voters exist, but has anyone ever uttered such an unconvincing phrase to say that they won't tactically vote to get the Tories out?

I guess if we're expected to believe that people said "blah blah jabber jabber Tony Blair jabber jabber Iraq". we're expected to believe anything!

And as for pointless tribally motivated voting, what about all the liberal capitalist dweebs who went out and belligerently voted Lib-Dem and Green in ultra tight Labour-Tory marginals in 2019, despite Labour caving in and offering them the sore loser referendum they said they wanted?

Loads of these people, who helped create a Tory mega-majority, have now quietly thrown away their "People's Vote" outfits, and come back wearing "Progressive Alliance" garb, to tell other people how to vote!

Conclusion

Given the shockingly outdated and unrepresentative Westminster voting system, I tend to agree with tactical voting, and have voted tactically myself in the past.

People like me should be the natural target audience for a campaign like The Progressive Alliance, but for whatever reason they've decided to tell me to "piss off" four different ways, taken me for a gullible idiot, and insulted my intelligence, all in a single infographic!

They're clearly more concerned with laundering the reputations of their liberal capitalist idols like Tory Blair, the Lib-Dem austerity enablers, the right-wing Labour saboteurs, and the democracy-defying CUK squatters, who all helped turn people away from progressive politics in different ways. and installed Boris Johnson in Downing Street, than in actually building a broad coalition of progressive and left-wing people.

If our hopes of a better future rely on the strategic capabilities of this lot, we're clearly doomed to Tory rule forever!

 

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OR

Snake oil and arsenic pills: Beware the political quack doctors on both sides of the Brexit debate

Whatever your position on the Brexit spectrum, it's impossible for anyone with rudimentary critical thinking skills to deny that there are loads of obnoxious and downright dishonest people on both sides of this increasingly polarised debate, and that the further towards the polar extremes, the higher the liar and fanatic intensity becomes.

Brexit snake oil

The biggest lie of all during the 2016 EU referendum debate came from the Brexit snake oil sellers who opportunistically used the dire consequences of ruinous hard-right Tory austerity dogma as a weapon to attack immigrants and the EU with.

It's absolutely obvious that it was six years of callous and divisive domestic government policy that was causing the collapse in living standards that these opportunists weaponised to push their agenda.

• Ruinous Tory austerity dogma resulted in a massive transference of wealth from the majority to the mega-rich establishment class (who bankroll the Tory party).

• Tory wage repression led to the longest real-terms collapse in UK workers' wages on record.

• Tory vandalism of the social safety net led to massive reductions in in-work benefits for the working poor, as well as the systematic impoverishment and abuse of sick and disabled people.

• Tory under-investment in stuff like infrastructure, affordable housing, and education led to a short-term collapse in economic demand, and a long-term ruination of our future economic potential.

• Tory cuts to public services like the NHS, policing, the fire service, and local government created all kinds of devastating consequences like massive NHS queues, soaring violent crime rates, huge increases in fire-related deaths, and crumbling local services.

Far-right Brextremists (many of them Tory MPs who actively voted in favour of all of these devastating policies) cynically weaponised this collapse in living standards to falsely point the finger of blame at immigrants and the EU.

The snake oil solution they were selling was that quitting the EU and abolishing our own rights to Freedom of Movement would magically resolve all problems like stagnating wages, failing public services, unaffordable housing, violent crime, huge NHS waiting lists, and all of the other austerity-related ills caused by the Tory government's austerity fanaticism.

Sadly millions of people fell for it and bought this Brexit snake oil.

The failure of centrism

The reason that the far-right Brextremists managed to get away with flogging this ludicrous blame-switching snake oil is the abject failure of centrism to oppose this destructive Tory austerity ideology.

For five years between 2010 and 2015 the Liberal Democrats actively supported all of the disastrous Tory austerity policies that caused the living standards collapse. They couldn't very well turn around in 2016 and point out that the real blame lay with the destructive austerity policies they helped the Tories enforce rather than immigrants and the EU without demonstrating their own culpability. So they sat on their hands and just let the far-right Brextremists sell their immigrant-blaming snake oil.

The right-wing orthodox neoliberal centrist faction of the Labour Party had a very similar problem because during the 2015 General Election they adopted a ludicrous "austerity lite"  policy of pathetically imitating Tory austerity dogma rather than actively opposing it.

They couldn't reverse position completely the very next year and point out that Tory austerity dogma was to blame for collapsing living standards, not immigrants and the EU, without making themselves look like a bunch of U-turning idiots.

Furthermore any centrist conversion to anti-austerity positioning in order to undermine the blame-shifting lies of the Brextremists would have completely validated Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour-left who had opposed Tory austerity fanaticism from the very beginning.

The Labour right-wingers knew that if they admitted that austerity was a con in order to denounce the snake oil of the far-right Brextremist political quack doctors, they'd end up actively validating the man they were itching to get rid of, as demonstrated by the Anyone But Corbyn coup they launched immediately after the Brexit vote came in.

They chose not to counter the Brextremists' blame-shifting lies because their primary over-riding priority wasn't preventing Brexit at all, it was plotting their coup to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn and re-establish neoliberal control of the Labour Party leadership.

Centrist arsenic tablets

The abject centrist failure to criticise the Brexit snake oil sellers was bad enough, but now that we're stuck in the middle of this interminable Brexit farce these appalling people have actually turned to the same kind of political quack doctor tactics as the Brextremists who created brexit in the first place.

Centrists like the Liberal Democrats and the CUK squatters have now set themselves up as quack doctors too, promising that their disgusting political concoctions of neoliberalism, austerity, and privatisation are a magical cure to this Brexit ailment.

They're attempting to sell the exact policies that created the Brexit disease in the first place as their magical quack doctor cures to the Brexit problem!

There's absolutely no denying the fact that the Lib-Dems are a disgraceful bunch of pro-austerity pro-privatisation neoliberals (just look at their disgraceful track record in government voting through every nasty Tory austerity policy, every deeply illiberal Tory assault on freedom, and every rip-off Tory privatisation scam).

The CUK squatters are just as bad, if not worse. Their economics spokesperson is Chris Leslie (one of the main architects of Labour's election-losing "austerity-lite" strategy at the 2015 General Election), Anna Soubry described the ruinous living standards-wrecking policies of the coalition years as "marvellous", their Transport, Environment, and Energy spokesperson is the private water industry lobbyist Angela Smith, and they've just hitched their boat to the pro-privatisation neoliberal EPP group in the European Parliament.

What makes CUK perhaps even worse than the Lib-Dems  is that they know perfectly well that they're pushing "more of the same" - more austerity - more privatisation - more neoliberal orthodoxy - more imperialist warmongering - but they've given themselves the Orwellian reality-reversal of a name Change UK.

The centrist Lib-Dems and CUK squatters are selling the austerity arsenic tablets that actually cause Brexit in the first place as their wonderful miracle cure to the Brexit problem!

Anyone who falls for this quackery because they love their soothing mouth words about opposing Brexit is wilfully drinking this toxic centrist arsenic pills even though their hair is already falling out and they've started pissing blood as a consequence.

Avoid the quackery

Fortunately there are other political parties opposing hard-right Tory Brexit besides the neoliberal arsenic pills quacks.

The Greens, SNP (Scotland), and Plaid Cymru (Wales) have all vehemently opposed austerity fanaticism, privatisation mania, public service cuts, and the rest of the hard-right economic vandalism that caused the Brexit vote in the first place since long before the 2016 EU referendum.

Their policies on Brexit is pretty much identical to the Lib-Dems and the CUK squatters, in that they want another roll of the dice in a do-or-die final say referendum showdown between Remain and a hard-right Tory administered Brexit. But they come with the added bonus of opposing ruinous austerity fanaticism.

Perhaps putting Remain up against a hard-right Tory version of Brexit will increase the chances of a Remain win, perhaps it won't, but the possibility of creating a devastating and inescapable double-mandate for Brexit can't be discounted, especially given the complacency, condescension, and downright incompetence of the remain campaign back in 2016.

Labour's position is different. They want to create a fail safe Brexit with access to the Customs Union and Single Market, no border in Northern Ireland, and cooperation on science, the environment, and security. Once they've disarmed Brexit to make it as economically harmless as possible. Then they're willing to put it to a final say referendum against Remain (which is a policy agreed on at Labour Conference and supported by the majority of Labour Party members).

Labour have changed direction dramatically since the unbelievably inept austerity-lite betrayal of the Labour centrists in 2015. The two chief architects of this nonsense are gone (Ed Balls lost his seat and Chris Leslie is dictating the economic stance of the CUK squatters), and Corbyn has moved Labour to an economically literate anti-austerity, pro-investment economic position.

So if you're going to vote against the far-right Brexit snake oil salesmen in the upcoming European Parliament elections (like you should), make sure you choose sensibly, and try to avoid actively endorsing the equally repulsive arsenic tablet vendors on the Remain side of the debate.

 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

Political guide 2019 European parliament elections

This article exists as an accompaniment to the political guide infographic. It's all pretty self-explanatory but it's important to back up some of the assertions with evidence and analysis.

Political position

The Green Party and Labour under Corbyn are Democratic Socialist parties occupying the traditional centre-left position before neoliberalism came along and dragged the entire political spectrum off to the right.

The Tory leadership are hard-right neoliberal being the party that originally injected this toxic strain of economic fanaticism into the UK government when they won the 1979 general election. A significant proportion of Tory backbenchers are far-right rabble rousers, but since the party leadership has not been completely usurped yet, they're still best classified as hard-right neoliberals.

The Lib-Dems and the new CUK squatter party are both "centrist" neoliberal, in that they're not as militant about their neoliberal ideology as the Tories, and often choose to focus on other issues (like Brexit, or social policies) but they also strongly resist any challenge to the established neoliberal orthodoxy, and actively support it if it suits their selfish political purposes.

The SNP and Plaid are both quite mixed political parties held together more by civic nationalism than economic stance. Overall they're more-or-less centre-left and I don't think many of their members would complain too vehemently as being described as social democrats.

Under Gerrard Batten UKIP have turned into a militant hard-right political force, expending far more effort on whipping up anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim hate, rather than detailing real political policies.

Farage's Brexit Party have only just been launched, but going on the fact they've already had two party leaders exposed as outrageous bigots, and Farage's willingness to participate in far-right rabble rousing throughout his political career, it'd take a hefty dose of gullibility to believe they're going to suddenly become centrists or social democrats.

Austerity

The Green Party deserve a lot of credit for being the only explicitly anti-austerity UK-wide political party in 2015, however Labour have learned their lesson from their abject failure to oppose Tory austerity fanaticism that lost them that election, and under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership they've moved to opposing Tory austerity dogma, rather than pathetically imitating it.

SNP and Plaid are both opposed to ruinous Tory austerity fanaticism too.

The Lib-Dems repeatedly try to distance themselves from the devastating Tory austerity fanaticism they enabled between 2010 and 2015, and will tie themselves in cognitive knots trying to pretend that the collapse in living standards these austerity policies caused had nothing to do with the massive upswell in public anger that carried Leave marginally over the winning line in the 2016 EU referendum.

The CUK squatter party are definitely pro-austerity. They've appointed Chris Leslie as their economics spokesperson, and he was one of the key architects of Labour's disastrous "austerity lite" agenda at the 2015 general election. Anna Soubry described the policies of the 2010-2015 austerity years (wage repression, public service cuts, infrastructure under-investment, defunding of local governments, vandalism of the social safety net ...) as "marvellous", and every single one of them either voted in favour of, or cynically abstained on George Osborne's devastating austerity cuts in 2015.

UKIP were explicitly pro-austerity before Batten became leader, but neither they, nor Farage's Brexit Party like to talk about austerity at all, because it's a lot easier to pin the blame for the devastating consequences on immigrants and the EU if you simply ignore the fact that austerity even exists.

Brexit

Theresa May and the Tory leadership are still trying to force their botched thrice-rejected hard-right Withdrawal deal through parliament.

Labour want to create a soft Brexit with Single market and Customs Union access, protected workers' rights, food standards, and environmental laws, and cooperation on science and security. They're also willing to hold a confirmatory referendum, and to consider retention of Free Movement (as demonstrated when they voted in favour of Nick Boles' compromise Brexit in the indicative votes).

The Lib-Dems, CUK, Greens, SNP, and Plaid Cymru are all Brexit-sceptic and they all seem to be prioritising another referendum, which is fine, but there's clearly no guarantee that Remain would win it given that nothing at all has been done since 2016 to clamp down on electoral liars and cheats (with serious punishments like bans from public office and jail time) or to regulate online social media dark ads.

It's fair enough opposing Brexit, I'm highly sceptical about it too, but if your strategy is simply another roll of the dice in a rigged game, you've got to acknowledge the risk of creating an inescapable double-mandate for a ruinous hard-right Brexit.

UKIP and Farage's Brexit Party are both pushing for a militant "no deal" Brexit that would bring economic chaos to the whole of the UK, and massively re-ignite tensions over the Northern Ireland border.

Social issues

When it comes to stuff like gay rights the Tories have moved dramatically from their homophobic Section 28 discrimination in the 1990s, but on disability rights their systematic abuse of disabled people has been condemned as a human rights violation by the United Nations. In any decent and compassionate society this despicable abuse would be considered an national scandal, but the mainstream media and most Brits don't even seem to care that tens of thousands of disabled people have died within weeks of being declared "fit for work" in Tory disability denial assessments.

The Tories also introduced Theresa May's vile Hostile Environment which led to unlawful abuse of black British citizens, including being forced into exile from their own countries.

And anyone supporting the use of British weapons in war crimes committed in Yemen by the homophobic, misogynistic, head-chopping, democracy-crushing, terrorism-spreading, journalist-dismembering Saudi tyrants has no right whatever to pose as any kind of "social liberal".

The Lib-Dems pose as social liberals, but they spent five years in coalition with the Tories vandalising the social safety net, systematically abusing disabled people, and supporting Theresa May's unlawful abuse of the Windrush generation. In fact the Lib-Dems agreed harsher social security sanctions (which mainly affect the mentally ill and the severely under-educated) in return for 5p charges on plastic bags!

Labour and the Greens have been vehemently opposing the systematic Tory abuse of sick and disabled people. The SNP and Plaid also have strong track records when it comes to opposing abusive Tory legislation like Theresa May's Hostile Environment, and the systematic Tory abuse of disabled people.

Not a single one of the CUK squatter MPs voted against Theresa May's hostile Environment. The ex-Tory members of the group actually voted in favour of it! They've also put Mike Gapes (a huge fan of imperialist war-mongering and the Saudi tyrants) in charge of their foreign policy agenda. If you believe in turning places like Iraq and Libya into lawless terrorist breeding zones, and support Saudi war crimes in Yemen, you're no social liberal, even if you pose as social progressives on domestic issues.

UKIP and the Brexit Party are rabble rousers intent on actually whipping up hatred against immigrants and minorities in order to push their far-right agenda. You'd have to be absolutely delusional to think they'd actually stand up for the vulnerable when it comes to social policy issues.

Privatisation

Labour and the Green Party campaign explicitly on policies like bringing the railways, water supply, schools, and hospitals back under public not-for-profit ownership. The vast majority of British people agree with this public ownership stance.

The Tories are privatisation fanatics. Since 2010 they've been busy outright defying public opinion by privatising NHS services, the Royal Mail, literally thousands of schools, and even massive chunks of the police and judicial system (including front line police services, probation, court translation,  forensic science, and prisons).

Between 2010 and 2015 the Lib-Dems actively helped the Tories defy public opinion by privatising hospitals, schools, police services, probation, and prisons. Their leader Vince Cable was even the man the Tories put in charge of flogging off the Royal Mail at significantly below it's real market value!

The SNP have a more mixed approach. They've been in power in the Scottish government since 2007 so they could have done more to reverse privatisation in Scotland, however in areas where they have had the power to block it they have prevented a lot of the Tory privatisation mania that's infested England since 2010. In England 3/4 of secondary schools have been privatised, in Scotland the education system remains in the public sector.

The CUK squatter MPs clearly signalled their pro-privatisation credentials by appointing water privatisation propagandist Angela Smith as their energy, environment, and transport minister, numerous other CUK MPs have bitterly criticised Labour's public ownership plans, and they've just hitched their boat to the right-wing EPP European group, which includes the hard-right Spanish PP and Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party. Anyone expecting this neoliberal rabble to begin opposing and reversing Tory privatisation mania is clearly not paying any attention to what they're actually saying and doing.

UKIP used to be extremely vocal pro-privatisation fanatics to the point of promoting the full privatisation of the NHS, but they've quit talking about their economic policies these days in favour of immigrant-bashing and Muslim hate-mongering. Anyone imagining that UKIP and Farage's far-right Brexit mob would set about reversing Tory privatisation fanaticism is even more delusional than the CUK squatter fans!

Conclusion

Whatever your views on Brexit, be very careful that you don't end up endorsing a political party with terrible views and policies on other issues.

This is especially important when it comes to austerity fanaticism given that ruinous Tory austerity dogma was the root cause of the wave of public anger that caused the Brexit vote in the first place.

Voting for a pro-austerity political party because they make a big fuss about opposing Brexit is like worrying about your hair falling out and the blood in your piss as you continue wilfully drinking the political arsenic.

 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

Beware of MPs who are infected with the austerity delusion

The right-wing Labour MP Chuka Umunna has established a cross-party working group to oppose extreme Brexit.

While I see no problem with like-minded MPs forming cross-party groups to stand up for what they believe in, I do think that certain MPs should be incredibly wary of the kinds of people they're leap into bed with.

The leading Tory in the group is Anna Soubry who has repeatedly voted in favour of the Tory policy of economically punishing the majority of people with hard-right austerity dogma in order to fund ever more lavish handouts to corporations and the mega-rich.

The Leading Lib-Dem in the group is Jo Swinson. She is also an austerity fetishist who voted time and again in favour of George Osborne's socially and economically ruinous austerity dogma until she was lobbed out of her seat in the 2015 Scottish backlash against Tory/Lib-Dem austerity fanaticism. She's back again and nothing she has said has convinced me that she's willing to admit the error of her ways.

Then there's Chuka Umunna himself, who is still unwilling to accept that "let's cut our way to growth" is, and always has been a load of economically illiterate hogwash designed to con the gullible into supporting the very same kind of hard-right economic policies that created the conditions for the economic crash in the first place.

The reason we know that Umunna is still an austerity fetishist is that he openly claimed that leaving the Single Market would mean even more austerity measures would have to be imposed, meaning he's still refusing to admit the fact that austerity dogma is demonstrably the wrong solution to economic trouble.

There's no way I'm disputing that crashing out of the Single Market with no deal would cause a bloody big recession, it's beyond obvious that it would cause absolute chaos.

What I'm disputing is that austerity dogma is the solution to anything at all, self-inflicted or not.

What I'm disputing is the automatic assumption by so many Westminster club insiders (including MPs like Chuka Umunna who should surely know better by now) that the only way to deal with an economic downturn is to turn all of macroeconomic theory on its head and set about cutting public spending when established theory says you should temporarily boost public spending in order to offset the decline in private sector activity.

• After seven years of watching the Tory party imposing austerity dogma and then continually missing all of their economic targets, Chuka Umunna still believes in it.

• After years of people telling him that austerity is a con to ensure an upwards redistribution of wealth, Chuka Umunna still believes in it.

• After Labour totally squandered their opportunity to smash the 2015 General Election on a clear anti-austerity platform, and instead actually lost ground by pushing Ed Balls' shockingly unappetising and unpopular prescription of austerity-lite, Chuka Umunna still believes in it.

• After Jeremy Corbyn secured the biggest increase in the Labour vote since 1945 with a clear investment-based alternative to hard-right Tory austerity dogma, Chuka Umunna still believes in it.

• Even after campaigning on an anti-austerity manifesto, Chuka Umaunna still actually believes in it.

In my view the pro-investment politicians backing this cross party group (Caroline Lucas of the Greens, representatives of Plaid Cymru and the SNP, and any non-Osbournite Labour MPs who get involved) should be incredibly wary of working alongside MPs who maintain their burning ideological commitment to the bonkers idea that growth and stability can be achieved through a death by a million cuts strategy of constantly attacking infrastructure investment, wages, emergency services, the education system, and other public services.

Austerity dogma is a toxic ideological derangement that has infested the Westminster establishment club for seven disastrous years, and the outcome of the Brexit negotiations won't really be of much consequence if this virulent form of economic madness within our own political system isn't controlled and contained.

The pro-investment MPs who involve themselves with this anti-extreme Brexit group should be aware at all times that prominent members like Jo Swinson, Anna Soubry and Chuka Umunna are still dangerously infected with this hard-right economic delusion (even after the actual source of the contagion has quit parliament altogether to spend more time with his jobs).

The politicians who haven't been infected with austerity madness who join this group should be aware of the dangerous delusions of their fellow members, and they should be constantly vigilant that this group isn't used as an excuse to re-toxify the economic debate by using it as an excuse to provide a fake veneer of cross party support for the ruinous austerity fetishism of many of the group's most prominent members.

 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

An idea to give Theresa May and the complacent Tories a shock they'd never forget

Here's an idea that could give Theresa May and the complacent Tory elitists a shock they'd never forget.

The idea is a fairly simple one, but like all good ideas it would take solidarity and people pulling together and working hard to make it happen. History is absolutely clear that powerful elites don't give up their power without a fight.

The idea

Britain's woefully antiquated voting system means that we're all familiar with the concept of tactical voting, which is the idea of holding our noses and voting for the (usually pretty unappealing) candidate who is most likely to beat the candidate that we absolutely detest.

What I'm proposing is a kind of tactical voting, but rather than doing it in a piecemeal fashion, it needs to be done in an organised manner in specifically targeted seats so that instead of the opposition being split between several candidates, all the resources are pooled behind a single Unity candidate in each target constituency.

 As far as I'm concerned the target seats should be the seats of the most disgraceful, malicious and downright inept Tory ministers, and also the seats that Tory candidates cheated their way into in 2015 though electoral fraud.

In these specific seats the opposition parties should agree to pool resources in order to field a single Unity candidate.

Unity candidates

Ideally the Unity candidate being fielded to contest the seats of Tory government ministers should have a lot of expertise in the ministers' brief:

• A respected doctor could stand as the Unity candidate against the health secretary Jeremy Hunt.

• Someone with some actual foreign policy experience could stand against the embarrassing buffoon of a foreign secretary Boris Johnson that we're lumbered with.

• A well known human rights campaigner could stand against the human rights scrapping Home Secretary Amber Rudd.

• An environmentalist/countryside campaigner could stand against the Defra minister Andrea Leadsom.

• Someone with actual legal qualifications could stand against the totally unqualified Lord Chancellor Liz Truss.

• A widely respected economics expert could stand against the Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond.

• A public transport expert could stand against the transport minister Chris Grayling.

• An experienced community activist could stand against the Communities minister Sajid Javid.

• A teacher/education expert could stand against the education secretary Justine Greening.

• A welfare expert could stand against the DWP minister Damian Green.

• Someone with experience in the media or arts could stand against the culture secretary Karen Bradley.

In the Tory electoral fraud constituencies, it might turn out that quite a few of the candidates who finished second in 2015 end up standing as the Unity candidate, but one thing is for sure, all the Unity candidates should be selected in an open and accountable democratic ballot of local people.

Accountability

If elected, the Unity candidate should be accountable to the people who elected them, and to the parties that joined forces to support their campaign. The Unity candidate should agree to stick to a democratically developed local manifesto based on the wishes of local people, and to abide to a formal cross-party consensus agreement when voting on national issues.

The Unity candidate should also pledge to serve as a Unity MP for the duration of the next parliament, or to resign their seat and call a by-election if they intend to officially align themselves with any specific party.

The need for speed

Theresa May called an opportunistic snap election in just seven weeks time because she didn't want to allow the opposition sufficient time to organise against her. It was a fantastically self-serving move to put the interests of the Tory party above the interests of the nation as a whole.

This dishonest, self-serving opportunism isn't surprising in the slightest though, because she's a self-serving Tory of the very worst kind who U-turns so often she must be developing centrifugal forces!

Theresa May has clearly tried to wrong foot all opposition to her dictatorial style of government by making the election campaign as short as possible, so there is very little time organise and hold her government's terrible record up to public scrutiny.

This means that if the Unity candidate idea is going to get off the ground, it needs to be done in a matter of weeks because the deadline for nominations is the 11th of May.

A shock they'd never forget

If the Unity candidate idea turns out to be successful, it would give the public an opportunity to vote for real experts, and for non-cheats. It would give people a fantastic opportunity to send a powerful message to the out-of-touch elitists in the Tory party that their ideological vandalism of our society, and their tactic of cheating their way to electoral victory are completely unacceptable.

It would be a genuine anti-establishment rebellion that pretty much anyone but the most die-hard Tory tribalists could get behind.

If it ends up removing even just a few Tory ministers and 2015 General Election cheats from power it would give them a shock that they'd never forget. If people really got behind it, then it could shake the complacent self-serving Tory party to their foundations and deliver a number of highly qualified specialists that any government would be utterly foolish to try to sideline and ignore.

Contact your party

If you like this idea and you're a member or supporter of a political party, contact them as soon as possible and tell them that you would like them to consider supporting the idea of fielding Unity candidates in specific target seats as a matter of urgency.

If you live in a seat held by a Tory government minister, or in one of the seats that the Tories won through electoral fraud in 2015, you could contact your local party too and ask them to cooperate with the other opposition parties, and offer to help them organise the Unity candidate campaign.

Write to your local political representatives here: Write to them

Contact the opposition party you support here:

Green Party: (contact page, Twitter, Facebook)
Labour Party:(contact page, Twitter, Facebook)
Liberal Democrats: (contact page, Twitter, Facebook)
Plaid Cymru: (contact page, Twitter, Facebook)
SNP*: (contact page, Twitter, Facebook)
UKIP**: (contact page, Twitter, Facebook)

Spread the wordTheresa May has complacently opened the door to an idea like this because she thinks the rest of the country are too weak and too disorganised to stand up to her autocratic ambitions but if we all pull together we could achieve a seismic shift in the way we do politics in this country.

If you like the idea of Unity candidates then it's vital to spread the word. Share this article on social media (#Unity2017), talk about the idea with your friends, your relatives, your work colleagues, your neighbours. Help to get some momentum going. Together we can change things for the better.

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* = I have included the SNP here because although there is only one Tory seat in Scotland, it is held by the appalling David Mundell, who is the Scotland Secretary. Maybe, despite their incredibly strong position in Scottish politics, the SNP would like to show solidarity with the other opposition parties by backing a unity candidate in this one seat.

** = I've included UKIP here because, although I detest their hard-right ideology, they do actually support some quite progressive things that I actually agree with (Proportional Representation, democratisation of the House of Lords, more local referendums, devolution for England, cancelling rip-off PFI scams ...). They also have a lot of supporters/voters who are not inherently bad people, who might well get behind a genuine anti-establishment rebellion and have a lot to contribute to the campaign.