Analysing the Daily Express budget analysis

These days the Daily Express is basically nothing more than a pravda propaganda rag for the Tory party, so you'd have to be pretty naïve to expect anything other than heavy pro-Tory bias in their Budget analysis, but in 2021 they went the extra mile with a quite astonishing front page.

Rishi Sunak has just raised the UK tax burden to the highest level since the post-WWII recovery period in the 1950s!

He even admitted it in his budget speech, using the passive voice to say that  "taxes are rising to the highest level of GDP since the 1950s", as if the taxes are somehow rising of their own accord, rather than him being the person who is raising them!

Yet the front page of the Express blares Cheers! Rishi On A Mission To Cut Taxes

He's just raised taxes to the highest rate in over half a century, but hooray for his future ambition to cut taxes!

The disjunct between the reality and the presentation is absolutely laughable.

There are an awful lot more issues in the small print too (too many for me even to fit into the article header infographic!).

2 Billion extra for schools This might sound great if you've been living in a sensory deprivation chamber for the last 11 years, but in reality it's not enough to even return per-pupil funding back above 2010 levels this year, next year, or the year after. 

It'll finally catch up in 2024/25, meaning that an entire generation of school kids will have had their education hindered by massive budget cuts for no discernible reason whatever. Yet the Express somehow consider this decade and a half of wanton destruction of our nation's future economic potential as a cause for celebration!

£150 billion spending spree Hang on. We just suffered a decade of austerity cuts because public spending in the wake of a crisis was supposedly terribly bad, yet the debt's gone up dramatically since 2010, and now we're supposed to celebrate £150 billion in post-crisis spending as if the last 11 years simply didn't happen?

If spending in the wake of a crisis is good, then that obviously means a decade of Tory austerity extremism was pointless, ruinous self-harming, economically illiterate, and extremely bad, doesn't it?

Business Rates Boost For High Street  Everyone knows that tax-dodging online retailers have been dramatically undercutting High Street outlets for the last decade, and that giant out-of-town supermarkets are now soaking up entire family shopping budgets that used to be divided amongst perhaps a dozen different small independent High Street businesses.

Nothing's been done about this until it's far too late, and now High Streets across Britain have been reduced to derelict ghostly shadows of their former glories, occupied mainly by boarded up premises, thrift stores, gambling outlets, and charity shops.

There's some limited help on the table now, especially for the likes of pubs, restaurants, and tea rooms, but it's far too little, far too late.  The lockdown measures have absolutely hammered the majority of the retail economy by forcing them to close their doors, while online retailers and supermarket giants were allowed to continue operating, soaking up £billions in artificially inflated profits. 

There's no effort to rake any of these artificial gains back, and nor will there ever be with a Tory rich-boy like Sunak running the show.

Universal Credit Giveaway The framing here is absolutely insidious. What Sunak's actually done is ever-so-slightly reduced the amount that the state confiscates out of low-earners' wages through reduced social security payments.

Under the Tory-designed Universal Credit system the government used to confiscate 63p in every additional pound a low income worker earns, but Sunak's reduced the confiscation rate to 55p in the pound (which is obviously still more than half!). 

Somehow confiscating a tiny bit less of low-income workers' wages is a giveaway, but the £billions he's handed to bankers by cutting the Surcharge Tax to 3% isn't a giveaway.

In fact it somehow doesn't even warrant a mention!

"By the end of this parliament I want taxes going down, not up" Somehow the Express is celebrating this statement from Rishi Sunak as if it's some almost divine political objective, rather than one of the key strategies of Tory electoral politics:

Front-load all the tax-hikes and attacks on people's incomes into the years after winning power, then ease the boot of people's necks a little bit prior to the next election so they feel like things are getting better and vote Tory, and repeat, and repeat, and repeat.

It's an expression of standard, cynical, short-term electoral political strategy, not some kind of saintly moral mission!

Cheers! Rishi The main headline, and the picture of Johnson and Sunak (who doesn't even drink) holding pints are an example of the oldest trick in the budget book.

Place a slight cut in the price of a pint at the forefront of the budget, in order to distract the plebs from the horrifying details you don't really want them thinking about:

• Highest tax rate in seven decades
• Massive tax break for bankers
  
• Cutting tax on short-haul flights (just days before hosting a climate conference!)
• Implicit admission that austerity was a huge mistake
  
• National Insurance hike for millions of ordinary workers
• Insufficient help for High Streets
  
• School funding still below 2010 level
• No windfall tax for pandemic profiteers

Unrivalled coverage This is just about the only thing they managed to get right on their entire front page. It's so laughably bad that not even the Daily Mail or S*n managed to do worse!

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The gammons are incredibly easy to please aren't they?

Tory tax-dodger Michael Ashcroft has gone viral on Twitter posting a quite frankly deranged diatribe combining World War Two nostalgia and hard-right tabloid talking points.

The gammons absolutely lapped it up because WWII fetishism, spewing hate at minorities, and blasting anyone who dares criticise their beloved Tory lords and masters combines three of their absolute favourite things.

In this article I'm going to run through the whole thing, highlighting what a load of historically illiterate and quite frankly bigoted cobblers it is.

Firstly it's always important to establish what the source is. In this case it's the Tory tax-dodger Michael Ashcroft who is safely hiding away from the coronavirus crisis in the tax haven of Belize.

This is a guy who conned his way into the unelected House of Lords with commitments that he would end his non-dom tax status and begin actually paying his fair share of taxes in the UK, which he clearly never did.

Just look at his smug Tory face and ask yourself why the gammons love a Britain-hating tax-dodger like this so much.

Perhaps it's because somewhere deep beneath their faux patriotism, they also hate Britain too?

 

And why is it that the people who fetishise WWII the most egregiously always seem to be the baby boomers who weren't even alive when it happened?

The "Your Country Needs You" slogan was the most famous poster campaign from the First World War, so top marks to Ashcroft for getting his wars jumbled up whilst pretending to be a lover of British history and a patriot.

Probably the most famous Second World War slogan was "Careless talk Costs Lives", which was nice and clear. But imagine if the government had decided to replace this clear and intelligible statement with garbled gibberish like "Stay Alert By Washing Your Hands", which sounds more like the kind of thing a stroke victim would say before collapsing, than a government information campaign.

There would definitely have been complaints.

The thing with this coronavirus/Blitz analogy is that it completely falls to bits when you look at the contrasting government responses.

Back in 1940 the government threw everything it had at defending Britain from the Blitz during the Battle of Britain.

At the beginning of the coronavirus crisis Boris Johnson deluded himself into believing the world would celebrate him as the "Superman of Capitalism" for deliberately allowing the virus to spread, and then he told a confused looking Phillip Scholfield about how he was being advised to let the virus "move through the population".

It's easy to imagine that the British people would have asked questions like "why aren't you doing enough to prevent these air raids?" if the government policy of the day had been to allow the Nazi bombers to move freely through our skies!

In reality the air raid sirens didn't actually apply to everyone.

It was the job of people like Air Raid Wardens, anti-aircraft gunners, police, the fire service, the ambulance service ... to stay above ground and deal with the consequences, while the general public were expected to make their way to air raid shelters.

A similar situation exists now, with NHS and care home workers, the emergency services, retail staff, delivery drivers, bus drivers, utilities engineers and many others expected to work through the crisis.

You'd have to be dangerously mindless and politically illiterate not to have questioned who is affected by the lockdown measures and who isn't, or come to your own conclusions about who the essential workers in our economy really are.

A transparent dig at transgender people to rile up the gammon.

Why is it that the hysterical anti-trans droolers are so utterly obsessed with toilet facilities, to the extent of demanding that trans-women expose themselves to danger by using the male facilities?

And a comparison with the social norms of the 1930s and '40s shows us that all LGBTQ+ people were subjected to horrific systematic discrimination, imprisoned, sent to mental institutions, and even tortured with barbarism like chemical castration.

Are we really going to accept this maudlin nostalgia for the good old days when queer folk were routinely persecuted by the state?

And now a dig at vegans.

This WWII/Coronavirus analogy has just descended into simple-minded minority bashing hasn't it?

But if we try to actually consider the analogy, the reality is that even eight decades ago, and fighting a desperate war for survival, the British government managed to provide the public with portable gas masks.

The current Tory government failed so badly at providing sufficient ventilators that they ended up sending Covid-19 infected patients back to die in care homes so that their deaths wouldn't be recorded in the daily death stats.

Another dig at vegans!

First: Vegan milk is a good thing. If you haven't tried almond milk before, give it a go. I'm not vegan, but I actually prefer it to ordinary milk these days.

Second: If the UK government could have got away with replacing the milk in some people's rations with manufactured ersatz milk, they would have been absolutely delighted. If some 10% of the population wanted milk alternatives instead of milk, that would have meant less demand on farmers, and more dairy produce to share between the rest. A win-win for everyone, and a boost for the war effort too.

But let's all hate vegans eh? 

 Bloody hell!

He's finished with the LGBTQ+ community and the vegans, so now he's going after 'the blacks'!

He's clearly having a dig at skin tone plasters here, as if they're some kind of assault on decency and common sense.

A white person's reaction to skin-tone plasters tells you all you need to know about their attitudes.

Some will say "oh, that's cool", and easily grasp the fact that it's a good thing that non-white parents will now have the option of using plasters that don't imply that their kids' skin is the wrong colour, and wonder why this simple innovation didn't happen a lot sooner.

Others will adopt a culture war attitude and treat the concept of choice in plaster colours as if it's some kind of barbaric assault on Western Christian culture, even though they'll endlessly point to extravagant (to the point of being confusing) levels of choice elsewhere in the economy as evidence that their beloved capitalism is a good thing!

The fact is that the UK government spent the pre-war years rapidly building up stockpiles of weapons and ammunition because they saw the threat of Nazi expansionism coming.

In contrast the Tory government were repeatedly warned that stockpiles of medical equipment and protective gear were shockingly inadequate in the case of a viral respiratory disease, but they ignored the warnings, because ensuring adequate supplies for an emergency contrasted with their crackpot "let's cut our way to prosperity" austerity agenda.

Yet another astoundingly weak analogy that actually ends up making his beloved Tories look worse, if you know anything about the subject at all, which he apparently doesn't.

The gammons absolutely love this kind of ignorant, history-rewriting, minority-bashing, pro-government drivel don't they?

Conclusion

Digging beneath the inaccuracies, the brazenly inaccurate historical revisionism, and the multiple examples of minority-bashing, the core messages here are don't dare to be different, and don't criticise your government, no matter how badly they screw up.

But this also falls down spectacularly when we remember that widespread public dissatisfaction led to the departure of Britain's first war leader Neville Chamberlain, and his replacement with Winston Churchill.

If Britain was the kind of intolerant, fanatically right-wing, history-rewriting, dissent-crushing, minority-persecuting, leader-worshipping, autocracy that Ashcroft and the gammons so desperately want it to be today, Churchill would never have become Prime Minister, we would probably have lost the Second World War (or negotiated peace with the Nazis), and we'd have been just about as bad as the Nazis were anyway.

Aside from the fact it's almost always baby boomers doing the most egregious WWII fetishism, it also often tends to be people who have far more in common with the ideology of the Nazis than with the Allies doesn't it?

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A critique of the fake-Jennifer copy n' paste Tory propaganda operation

A hyper-partisan Tory diatribe is doing the rounds on social media, with many of the iterations purporting to be from the actress and comedian Jennifer Saunders.

The reality is that the poorly written blame-shifting Tory rant was one of those dire copy n' paste jobs that are always doing the rounds in Tory, far-right, and Brexity circles (like the copy n' paste post pretending that the poster had read the Lisbon Treaty for example).

The actual Jennifer Saunders has been forced to come out and distance herself from this vile Tory rant, but that hasn't stopped the page owners from crying victimhood because they were cornered into deleting the post, and posting yet more pro-Tory propaganda on the Saunders fan page.

It's become clear that hyper-partisan Tories are infecting all kinds of local "for sale" pages, community groups, and fan pages with their disgusting pro-government propaganda, and this obnoxious copy n' paste rant is still doing the rounds in Facebook pages and groups all over the country.

As far as I can see nobody has done a comprehensive critique of this mega-viral copy n' paste nonsense, so I guess it's up to me to go through it point by point:

Anyone who has questions about the government's handling of the crisis is a "crayon eater".

An opening sentence aiming insults at anyone who questions the government suggests that this is going to be a very long way from an impartial appraisal of the facts.

The funny thing about this opening salvo is that someone has actually corrected the grammatical errors that appeared in the now deleted version from Fake-Jennifer, but they somehow decided not to correct any of the provable lies, deceptions, and displays of grotesque political illiteracy in the rest of the statement!

This is a lie. Plain and simple. It's a complete misrepresentation of how NHS procurement works.

In 2018 the Tory government set up a government-run company called NHS Supply Chain to manage NHS supplies, with the Tory health secretary Matt Hancock controlling the shares, meaning the government does deal with logistics for the NHS.

The Tories restructured the NHS supply chains to put the health secretary in ultimate charge, but the hyper-partisan copy n' paste Tory liars definitely don't want you to know that.

Furthermore the Tories repeatedly ignored warnings that NHS stockpiles were woefully inadequate. Jeremy Hunt ignored the warnings after Operation Cygnus in 2016, and Hancock ignored the warningsover inadequate PPE again in 2019.

It's difficult to express the level of contempt you should feel towards someone claiming to "respect" NHS doctors and nurses, whilst simultaneously seeking to deflect blame away from their beloved Tories, and onto the NHS.

Operation Cygnus took place in 2016, not "two years ago", and as already mentioned, the NHS actually said that they were unprepared for a respiratory pandemic, with particular concerns about the hopeless lack of protective gear, plus insufficient intensive care beds and respirators.

The Tories were still busy inflicting their austerity cuts to the NHS, and further reducing bed capacity, so the appeals for more PPE fell on deaf ears. The claim that the Operation Cygnus report included the quotes "we can flex" and "we are OK" is frankly absurd, as anyone who has ever set eyes on an internal bureaucratic report before can attest.

The Brexit bit is absolutely confounding. It's ridiculously obvious that four years of Brexit chaos, stemming from the fact the Brexiteers never even had a plan for how to actually do it, means government has been utterly distracted on all the Brexit issues.

The idea that the NHS said "we are OK" is bizarre enough, but "we are OK because ... Brexit" is absolute ridiculousness.
 

Questioning whether the NHS Supply Chain company which is ultimately controlled by Matt Hancock even understand that ships take time to travel from China is being posited as a defence of the government!

Then there's a criticism of globalisation. Why oh why didn't we prioritise UK-based manufacturers? Well because if any government had attempted to do that then the Tories and their minions in the right-wing propaganda rags would have screeched "protectionism", "communism", "Marxism" at them, just like they did with Labour's modest proposals to renationalise rail, water, and the national grid.

You see running things in the national interest is absolutely forbidden by the Tory ideology, if there's the remotest chance of it interfering with the profiteering of capitalists.

And now to make excuses for this grotesque capitalism above the national interest Tory ideology, the Tory tribalists are making out that NHS managers are responsible for the neoliberal globalisation agenda, not the politicians who made the prioritisation of local suppliers illegal!

As a result of four decades of neoliberal pro-privatisation politics, mainly pushed by the Tories, the majority of care homes are now operated by profit-seeking private companies, therefore the Tories are absolved of blame!

The idea that the government should just let care home residents die in a pandemic because the care home is privately operated is quite frankly disgusting.

OK, if the care homes couldn't cope with their responsibilities during the crisis and needed bailing out at the public expense, lets have the debate about renationalisation of care services after the crisis is over, but the government's first priority in this pandemic should obviously be to prevent people from dying, wherever they happen to be. 

It doesn't matter how many times you write MANAGERS in capital letters, the fact remains that the secretary of state Matt Hancock has ultimate responsibility.

And look, it's not just the NHS to blame for the Tory failings either, it's journalists and ordinary members of the public too (who the copy n' paste Tory propaganda brigade quite obviously regard with absolute contempt).

Anyone with any sense can see that the corporate media are crap, not because they criticise the Tories, but because they continually allow them to play politics on easy mode, whilst continually attacking the opposition, and even outright faking scandals about them.

As for ordinary members of the public expressing their opinions, you hardly had to be a trained virologist or epidemiologist to figure out that just letting the virus spread exponentially through the population for weeks instead of following the established WHO protocol (test, trace, isolate) was a very poor strategy in the crucial early stages.

That's why South Korea - who tested and contact traced from the beginning - has a total of 243 deaths, and the UK has 20,000+ according to the official statistics, and almost certainly double that when all the care home and community deaths are finally counted.
 

"The government has probably made some mistakes" is some hell of an under-estimate in regards to a crisis that's taken tens of thousands of lives, followed by rather a lot of words to argue that anyone who dares to discuss what these "probable mistakes" might be, deserves to be dead.

Ah yes, "let's get through this and beat this together" by ... erm ... copy n' pasting incredibly divisive, hyper-partisan Tory screeds full of outright lies, blame-shifting, Trumpian rhetoric, ALL CAPS SHOUTING, and a load of insults and sneering condescension towards ordinary members of the public who dare to ever engage their critical thinking skills.

The worst thing about fake-Jennifer and all the other Tory partisans sharing this outrageous rubbish is that they're probably stupid enough to believe that propagating such egregious blame-shifting lies is good for the country, because they're incapable of separating the interests of Boris Johnson and his cabinet of hard-right thugs, from the interests of the nation as a whole (which are obviously best served by not having a lazy, incompetent, elitist liar like Johnson running the show).

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Who was behind the NHS Susan Tory propaganda account?

Somebody has been stealing the identity of NHS staff in order to set up fake Twitter accounts to sow public confusion and support the government narrative of the day, whatever it happens to be.

These fake NHS worker accounts began by pushing the pseudo-scientific "herd immunity" strategy before switching purpose to begin pushing for the easing of coronavirus restrictions - which will obviously lead to another wave of deaths if it's done before the government has developed the capacity to carry out mass testing and contact tracing.

The "NHS Susan" account was one of them, which posed as a pro-EU, disabled, trans, junior doctor who was pushing a #BanTheClap campaign to stop people clapping for the NHS on Thursdays.

The intention was clearly to sow confusion and create a fake veneer of medical approval towards policies and ideas that the vast majority or real NHS staff would strongly object to.
But it was always completely fake because the photograph that was used on the "NHS Susan" account is actually a picture of a Greek nurse called Mia who was featured in an article about the valuable contribution of foreign medical workers in the NHS.

An independent investigator from Far Right Watch has claimed that "NHS Susan" was part of a botnet of at least 128 propaganda accounts, all operated from a single Hootsuite account.

The Hootsuite account is reportedly registered to a single individual, with three others having permission to post, although the exact identities and employment details of these individuals hasn't yet been revealed.

The investigator hasn't released the bot operators' identities yet, but they claim to have contacted the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), asking questions, and offering to share the data they've collected on the propaganda botnet for the purposes of internal investigation, but they've said they've been given the cold shoulder.

You would have thought that at the very minimum the DHSC would have a duty of care towards NHS employees who have had their identities stolen, but apparently nobody there is even remotely interested in investigating what's been going on.

One thing that did happen was that when people started investigating who was behind these bots, the Tory propaganda accounts like "NHS Susan" were instantly killed off.

It seems highly unlikely the mainstream media will pay any attention to this pro-Tory disinformation campaign, just like they ignored the massive orchestrated Tory election fraud on election day 2019, and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and the bizarre antics at the Department of Education when Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings were running the show there.

In the wake of the initial revelations the DHSC has launched an extraordinary counter-campaign replying to every verified Twitter account to have Tweeted about the scandal with a copy n' paste assertion that "these claims are categorically false" and a link to a web page that doesn't actually contradict a single one of the claims.

It's absolutely undeniable that fake accounts like "NHS Susan" were created by somebody, and that they stole the identity of real NHS staff for the profile pictures, so the claim that the story is "categorically false" is blatantly untrue.

Perhaps some of the assertions aren't exactly correct (we'll see soon enough if/when additional data is released), but the kernel of the story, the fake pro-Tory Twitter accounts, is undeniably true because people have got the screenshots, so it's simply a lie to say the whole thing is "categorically false", especially when not a shred of counter-evidence has actually been produced.

A more sensible and less partisan approach from the DHSC would have been to announce an investigation into who was behind the fake NHS accounts, and to categorically condemn the theft of NHS staff members' identities (who, after all, are their own employees).

The fact that the DHSC has gone down the road of blanket denial, whilst offering no condemnation of the identity theft, and providing no counter-evidence whatever to actually undermine the claims does look deeply suspicious.

There will be more revelations about this Tory propaganda botnet later today, hopefully including the exact identities of the individuals who have been operating it.

The account to follow for more information is John O'Connell.

Footnote: You may have noticed that I stopped producing blog posts for several months. The reason is that Facebook has changed their algorithm to make links to my site almost invisible. Even when literally thousands of people share the link, barely anyone actually sees what's been shared. It feels like wasted effort producing articles that virtually nobody reads, when I can still produce infographics and informative posts that are seen by hundreds of thousands.

I'm going to give it another try, but it's unlikely that I'll return to writing blog posts as consistently as I used to.

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3 extraordinary fakery scandals in a single day from 3 of Britain's biggest broadcasters

Yesterday provided yet more damning proof that we've entered the era of full on fake news in British politics, which goes so much further than randoms making up fake websites and spreading copy n' paste lies.

We've now reached the level where mainstream journalists are spreading ludicrous made up nonsense, because they know they can get away with it, because nobody will hold them to account.

The Hindu Council

The first piece of fakery was spread by the ITV journalist Paul Brand, who tweeted an anti-Labour letter from the "Hindu Council" accompanied by the dramatic claim that "Major interventions in this election today from pretty much every major faith in Britain. Astonishing".

But if you actually read the letter, it's a poorly written anti-Muslim diatribe, full of bizarre clunky language, spelling mistakes, weirdly tangential points, utterly brazen bias in favour of the Indian BJP government, and seething undisguised hatred of Muslims and the Labour Party.

Then if you look up who the "Hindu Council" are it turns out to be a tiny ultra-obscure pro-BJP pressure group with just 206 Facebook followers!

206 Facebook followers: "major intervention" ... "extraordinary"!

It looks an awful lot like Brand didn't research where the letter came from, didn't even bother to read the lamentable diatribe, and just tweeted it out as a "major ... major ... astonishing" scandal because the letter chimed with the anti-Corbyn agenda!

The anti-Corbyn mob obviously pounced on Brand's Tweet and retweeted it over 3,000 times amplifying it beyond the scale of anything this bunch of hyper-partisan weirdos could ever have dreamed of.

Then the Daily Mail picked up on it and included it in one of their grotesque anti-Labour diatribes, but they couldn't even find a picture of the leader of this ridiculously obscure 'Hindu Council' outfit (Anil Bhanot), so they had to include a picture of Corbyn himself in the article header image instead!

Instead of reporting the news, Brand blatantly created it by lavishing free publicity on a nasty hyper-partisan bunch of Muslim-bashing BJP extremists, and by fabricating the absolute fiction that this tiny ultra-obscure operation is somehow representative of the entire Hindu faith in Britain, purely because their vile, incompetently scrawled letter chimed with the mainstream media "Get Corbyn" agenda.

Leaked chat screenshot

The next piece of fakery was even more absurd, and even more widely retweeted, with multiple iterations of the image in question going viral on Twitter.

The original source for the screenshot was the Sky News Technology correspondent Rowland Manthorpe, who published an outraged Tweet about a supposed Labour WhatsApp plot to media-manage the reaction to the Andrew Neil - Jeremy Corbyn interview (more on that later).

The glaringly obvious thing about the leaked media management instructions from a supposed Labour campaigner is that they're all right-aligned, which means, as anyone who has ever used a messaging app will know, whoever leaked this set of instructions to the press is actually the person who wrote them.

You would have thought that the Sky News technology correspondent should have an understanding of the absolute basics of how messaging apps work, but apparently not.

Manthorpe shared the screenshot with absolutely no indication that the leak had been composed by the person who leaked it.

When pushed on the actual source of this screenshot, Manthorpe said it was posted in a Labour activist group, then said that the post has now (conveniently) been deleted.

He won't say which activist group it came from, nor who leaked it to him, so it's entirely unattributed, as well as being obviously fake.

All we know about it really is that whoever came up with this scam was so utterly thick that they didn't even bother setting up two accounts so that they could send it to themselves, then leak what they'd written themselves as received messages, rather than sent ones.

But despite the ridiculous cack-handed fakery of it, this absurd screenshot has been spread all over social media, and seen hundreds of thousands of times, all triggered by a technology correspondent who apparently doesn't know how messaging apps work!

Andrew Neil's lie

Corbyn's interview with Andrew Neil went about as well as anyone would have expected given Neil's ridiculous interview technique of spewing furious monologues, and then continually hectoring and interrupting when his interviewee victim attempts to reply.

Neil caught Corbyn in an all time classic trap, called the wifebeater fallacy, listing a load of Labour's failings on antisemitism, then demanding Corbyn apologise for it all, even though he had absolutely no influence over almost all of it (Labour disciplinary procedures are independent from the party leader for obvious reasons).

Corbyn refused to fall into the wifebeater trap, because he knew the mainstream media would play it as an admission that he was personally apologising for being an anti-Semite, which he obviously isn't ... but it's a double edged sword, so literally all of the front pages of the right-wing propaganda rags bar the Daily Star are blaring about Corbyn refusing to apologise to Jews!

The only problem is that in his barrage of 'evidence' about Labour anti-semitism, Neil included an outright lie.

He said "let me give you the case of Lesley Perrin...She posted a video denying the Holocaust and questioned whether the six million figure was accurate. And what did the Labour Party do? It gave her a written warning. No expulsion, no zero tolerance, just a written warning".

This seems unequivocally bad, but then look into the actual facts of the case and it turns out that Perrin actually quit the Labour Party as soon as the investigation into her comments was opened.

Labour didn't let her off with "just a warning" as Neil claimed, because they actually had no power whatever to investigate or discipline her, once she'd quit the party.

Of course it's fair game and a legitimate line of questioning to ask Corbyn about antisemitism, and what Labour are doing to combat it, but if the problem is as awful as so many people are making out, why on earth is there a need to exaggerate and make things up?

Neil's lie isn't actually as bad as the previous two examples, because he could simply have got his 'facts' muddled up in his extended Labour antisemitism monologue, but it's far worse in scale because him hectoring Corbyn to apologise for something that didn't even happen formed the basis of anti-Corbyn hatchet jobs on the front pages all of the billionaire-owned right-wing propaganda rags the following day.

Consequences

The BBC's Andrew Neil won't be held to account for lying about Labour disciplinary procedures. Just like Sky's Roland Manthorpe won't be disciplined for sharing the kind of obvious fakery a technology correspondent should be able to spot instantly. Just like ITV's Paul Brand won't be disciplined for boosting a ridiculously obscure bunch of politically partisan, far-right Islamophobes purely because their rabid screed aligned with the "get Corbyn" mainstream media agenda.

These people, from three of the UK's biggest and most influential news broadcasters, will suffer no consequences whatever for amplifying extremist groups, spreading ridiculous fakery, and telling lies about antisemitism, so they'll obviously do it again, and again, and again, because they know they can get away with it, and because they know they get rewarded with masses of attention when their fakery goes viral.

No consequences for them means terrible consequences for the rest of us: which will manifest as the continued deterioration of journalistic standards to the point where journalists can just spread whatever made-up bollocks and lies they like in order to generate retweets, and front page headlines, to the point it becomes almost impossible to differentiate between what's real, and what's just partisan fakery.

How are we supposed to believe anything we see from mainstream media broadcasters when their journalists are willing to just make stuff up, and amplify palpable nonsense, purely to fit the partisan political agenda they're pushing?

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

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