The rogue bank, the failing company and the Tory Party donations

In October 2008, at the very height of the global financial sector insolvency crisis, HSBC made a very strange decision: They made a massive £214.2 million loan to a struggling company called IPGL.

To get an idea of what was more normal practice for banks during the insolvency crisis and the post-crisis recession, consider the behaviour of the (majority taxpayer-owned) bank RBS which deliberately withdrew loans or hiked repayment terms in order to drive thousands of British companies into financial difficulties, and then used their Global Restructuring Group to close down the businesses and asset strip them for their own profits.

The RBS Global Restructuring Group destroyed 12,000 businesses in this way in what executives referred to in leaked emails as "the dash for cash". After the scandal was exposed by the hard work of people like Neil Mitchell they've now had to set aside a £400 million slush fund to compensate some of their victims.

Interestingly HSBC took a very different attitude towards the struggling and massively indebted IPGL, which was being run at huge losses by the then Tory party chairman and massive Tory party donor Michael Spencer. Instead of attempting to shut it down and asset strip it, they pumped a massive £214.2 million loan into it at a time when getting loans out of a bank was like getting blood out of a stone.

Spencer then funnelled over four million in donations to the Tory party via IPLG including over £1 million for their 2010 general election fighting fund. IPLG donations also covered the cost of flying David Cameron, George Osborne and others to the Davos World Economic Forum just months before the 2010 General Election.

If HSBC propped up a failing business and that business then went on to pump millions into the Tory party to help them win the 2010 General Election, it's easy to see how people might conclude that the failing business was used by HSBC to launder money into political donations.

HSBC, the Tory party, George Osborne's office and IPGL were contacted by the investigative journalists who broke this story and offered the chance to comment. They all declined.

While this HSBC-IPGL-Tory party business was going on HSBC were also laundering hundreds of millions of pounds in drug money for Mexican drug cartels and funds for terrorist organisations.

After the Tories came to power in 2010 the conduct of George Osborne and David Cameron clearly continued to favour HSBC and Michael Spencer's business interests. Their attempted favours towards Spencer continued even after their fall from grace over the spectacular failure of their EU referendum gamble in June 2016.

• In November 2010 The Tories made the HSBC Chairman Stephen Green an unelected peer in the House of Lords (where he still sits as a Tory peer).

• In January 2011 David Cameron appointed Green as Minister of State for Trade and Investment in the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition government.

• In 2012 George Osborne hampered the US investigation into the HSBC money laundering scandal and lobbied for them not to face criminal prosecutions claiming that such a move could lead to "financial contagion" because the bank was too big to fail.

• In March 2012 Spencer was named by the disgraced former Tory party co-treasurer Peter Cruddas as one of the millionaires to have benefited from the "cash for access scandal".

• In March 2013 George Osborne was the only finance minister in the entire EU to oppose a policy of limiting bankers' bonuses to 200% of their final salary. When it came to the vote he was defeated 26-1.

• In September 2013 Michael Spencer's firm was fined £55 million for rigging the Libor rate. In the very same month David Cameron tried to make Spencer an unelected peer in the House of Lords but was foiled by the ethics committee.

• After the bankers' bonus defeat Osborne wasted £50,000 of taxpayers' money on fighting a futile legal challenge against the EU bankers' pay cap, a battle he finally abandoned in December 2014.

• In January 2015 the Times editor Camilla Cavendish had a dinner with David Cameron and then spiked an investigative story about fraud at HSBC. She was soon appointed as Cameron's adviser at the Number 10 Policy Unit.

• In 2015 George Osborne washed his hands of the HSBC Swiss accounts scandal, and repeatedly refused to confirm whether he had discussions about the bank's collusion in tax evasion with Stephen Green before his appointment as a government minister.

• In January 2016 George Osborne delayed a Competition and Markets Authority report into reducing the dominance of the big four banks that was widely regarded as a move to placate HSBC.

• After resigning in disgrace after his EU referendum gamble failed David Cameron reportedly tried to make Spencer an unelected peer again in his resignation honours list, but was foiled a second time. 

• Although Spencer didn't make it into the unelected House of Lords in David Cameron's resignation honours list Camilla Cavendish (the former Times editor who spiked the HSBC fraud story) did.

The £214 million HSBC loan to the failing IPGL and their subsequent donations to the Tory party have now been referred to the Electoral Commission by the SNP's Roger Mullin, who is calling for an immediate investigation. The Labour MP John Mann has called for a public inquiry into what he called "the biggest party donor scandal ever".

Coverup/whitewash?

The French libertarian philosopher and economist Frédéric Bastiat once wrote that "when plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it", which stands as true today as when he wrote it in the 1840s.

There are so many revolving doors between Westminster politics, the financial system, the financial regulators and the media that it seems unlikely anyone will ever be properly held to account.

The Canary and Move Your Money broke this story on April 28th, but 5 days later the mainstream media has yet to move on it, preferring instead to focus the public attention on "vital" issues like the Shadow Home Secretary getting her figures muddled up in a radio interview and then subsequently correcting them.

The whole thing reeks of corruption, but we all know by now how these things tend to play out. Even if the story does eventually get some limited mainstream media coverage it'll doubtlessly all be brushed under the carpet again, and if anyone ever does end up getting the chop for it, it'll almost certainly be some lowly minion who gets fed to the wolves, not any of the big players.

But at least you know some of the murky details now.

Credits

The investigative work into the HSBC-IPGL-Tory party money flow was done by Fionn Travers-Smith of Move Your Money. The story was publicised by Steve Topple of The Canary.

The SNP's Roger Mullin deserves credit for publicly raising this issue with the Electoral Commission and Labour's John Mann deserves some too for calling for a public inquiry.

Follow them here:

Fionn Travers-Smith (Twitter)
Move Your Money (Twitter/Facebook)
Steve Topple (Twitter)
The Canary (Twitter/Facebook)
Roger Mullin (Twitter)
John Mann (Twitter)

You should also follow the HSBC whistleblower Nicholas Wilson (Twitter) for more corruption coverage.

 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

How Tory cuts to the fire service are killing people

Since 2010 the Tory party has been slashing away at the nation's fire service.

Between March 2010 and March 2016 the Tories axed 9,668 firefighter jobs and the cuts have still been going on for the last year, meaning it's 100% certain the number has easily exceeded 10,000 by now.

The Tories have already slashed the fire service budget by 30% and they have another 20% cut planned by 2020.

By the time of the 2015 General Election the Tories had already shut down 39 fire stations, including 10 in London that were shut down in the same week that the taxpayer owned bank RBS announced a mind-boggling £607 million in bonuses for their staff despite having lost £5.2 billion that year!

The closure of fire stations and the significant reductions in staff and vehicles at remaining stations mean that response times have been soaring all over the country, especially in rural areas. For example in Suffolk the average response time has already increased from 10 minutes to 13 minutes, and with even more Tory cuts in store it's only going to get worse.

Anyone who thinks "oh it's only three minutes, what are you complaining about?" clearly has no experience of how vital seconds can be in an emergency situation, let alone whole minutes.

People are dying because of these cuts. The government's own statistics revealed that the number of fire related deaths soared 17.4% in a single year between 2014/15 and 2015/16.

The Tory minister for policing and the fire service Brandon Lewis is blazé about the deterioration in the nation's fire safety due to the ongoing campaign of Tory cuts, in fact he says that there's room for even more reductions in fire service budgets beyond the 30% cuts they've already announced and the 20% cuts they're planning by 2020.

People are dying because of their fire service cuts and the Tories literally don't care. In fact they're intent on making the situation even worse by continuing their relentless economic assault on the nation's fire service.

Jeremy Corbyn has pledged to reverse the planned Tory cuts and rebuild the fire service. This means that if you vote for a Tory government on June 8th you're voting for more people to die in house fires. You think their lives are a worthwhile sacrifice for whatever benefit you think you'd be getting from a Tory government.

Now that you've read this article and seen the evidence you just can't pretend that's not what you're doing.

 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

Did RBS Group shut down RT's bank accounts to send a message?

In October 2016 NatWest (which is a subsidiary of the majority taxpayer owned RBS Group) took the extraordinary decision to shut down the bank accounts of the Russian broadcaster RT.

In the week before the RBS Group's NatWest subsidiary took the decision to obstruct the operation of RT by scrapping their bank accounts, one of the banking group's biggest scandals was back in the news. Leaked documents showed that the bank had been systematically destroying and asset stripping thousands of British businesses for their own profit. The leaks revealed that the bank was so brazen about its GRG asset-stripping operation that they even referred to it as the "dash for cash" and offered cash bonuses to bank staff for identifying businesses that were ripe for asset-stripping.

Back in 2014 when the asset-stripping activities of the RBS Global Restructuring Group first came to prominence RT hosted some extraordinary criticism of the bank. In one episode of the Keiser Report the host accused the bank of being "financial terrorists" and then conducted a scathing 15 minute interview with Neil Mitchell who has been fighting for justice ever since the GRG destroyed and asset-stripped his business.

In the wake of the scandal RBS managed to deflect most of the criticism and avoided criminal investigations into their conduct by repeatedly assuring parliament, the financial regulators and the public that the Global Restructuring Group was "not a profit centre" and that they'd just been trying to help the 12,000 UK businesses that went through the process.

After the Global Restructuring Group leak in October 2016 the Keiser Report went into attack mode again pointing out that the leaked documents totally contradicted the assurances given 27 times in parliament by RBS executives that GRG was "not a profit centre". Within a week of RT running this criticism, the RBS subsidiary NatWest decided to shut down all of RT's bank accounts.

It seems extraordinarily unlikely that RBS Group decided to scrap RT's bank accounts for financial reasons. The idea that Russia would ever allow their most influential international broadcaster to get into severe financial difficulties is ludicrous. So if the decision wasn't made for economic reasons, it seems likely it was made for political reasons.
When the news broke speculation abounded that the decision was part of a government strategy of toughening relations with Putin's Russia, but the UK Treasury (which owns a 73% stake in RBS Group) quickly denied responsibility for the decision to obstruct the operation of RT, which, if true, means the decision was entirely in the hands of RBS Group executives.

This is bad for two reasons. The first and most obvious reason is that the decision to shut down the bank accounts of a broadcaster that has been highly critical of their banking group sends a chilling message to the rest of the media: "If you dare to criticise the big banks we can make life very very difficult for you". Even if RBS Group tries to claim* that the decision to scrap RTs banking facilities has nothing to do with RT's strong criticism of the RBS Group and their GRG asset-stripping operation, the message to the rest of the media is still loud and clear.

The second reason this is bad is that the UK Treasury is claiming that it didn't have any say over a decision taken by a bank that is still 73% owned by the taxpayer, despite the obvious political and diplomatic ramifications. The fact that RBS Group could make a decision like this without any form of consultation with the government, despite the fact they're 73% owned by the taxpayer, is yet more proof that the nationalisation of RBS was a catastrophic mistake. Not only did a taxpayer owned bank apparently go around asset-stripping some 12,000 British businesses to boost their own profits, they've now taken to making decisions with major political and diplomatic ramifications without the slightest effort to consult the government.

Maybe the RBS decision to provoke Russia into taking tit-for-tat action against British broadcasters suits maniacs like the Tory MP Andrew Mitchell who wants to trigger World War III by shooting down Russian jets over Syria. But anyone with any sense should know that enraging the Russian bear is a daft idea at the beat of times, but when you've just spent the last six years savagely cutting your conventional military capabilities and you're in the midst of an enormous self-inflicted diplomatic and economic crisis, it's staggeringly idiotic.

The British taxpayer has lost £billions on the RBS "investment", and what is worse is that all of that money was poured into the bank with no strings attached, meaning the very same executives who wrecked the bank in the first place were completely free to carry on inflicting even more carnage on the UK economy and the rest of the world by asset-stripping thousands of British businesses, rigging the Libor rate, rigging currency markets, financing the manufacture of cluster bombs, sanction-busting, misselling complex financial products to members of the public, money laundering, committing fraud against their own customers, tax-dodging and now provoking a major diplomatic incident by shutting down the banking facilities of a critical media organisation without even bothering to check with the government first.

 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

* = Who on earth would be gullible enough to believe the claims of RBS executives after they repeatedly lied to parliament about the GRG not being a profit centre?

Philip Green to be "punished" with an impotent slap on the wrist

On the weekend that the first 20 BHS stores shut their doors for good Philip and Tina Green cavorted on their brand new £100 million super yacht Lionheart in Malta.

When Philip Green took over BHS in 2000 the company pension fund had a £43 million surplus. When he sold the company to Dominic Chappell (a twice bankrupt businessman with absolutely no retail experience) the company pension fund was already £571 million in deficit.

Between 2002 and 2004 Philip and Tina Green extracted £400 million in dividends from the company.

When David Cameron came to power in 2010 he decided to bring Philip Green into the government (presumably because his experience of asset stripping of BHS could help Cameron and Osborne in their project to asset strip the entire UK).

Until the scale of the BHS catastrophe became clear the Tories heaped lavish praise on Philip Green, pretending that by associating themselves with the very worst kind of self-serving capitalist they were somehow demonstration their good business acumen. 

“We are extremely fortunate to have Sir Philip, with his immense commercial experience and of course his fantastic track record at managing large organisations, on board.” - Francis Maude, 2010

A few years down the line the Tories are singing a very different tune. This is the updated 2016 Tory view as expressed by Tory MP Richard Fuller:

"It is a portrait of how individual greed can affect the lives of thousands of people ... Personally, I now believe he should lose his knighthood."

11,000 BHS staff have lost their jobs and 22,000 pensioners face stress and uncertainty over their catastrophically mismanaged pension funds, yet the guy who caused all of this misery by greedily pillaging the company and then selling the debt-ridden husk to a manifestly unsuitable owner faces no threat of punishment other than being possibly stripped of his knighthood!

The idea that sycophants no longer sticking the word "sir" before Philip Green's name is somehow a punishment befitting the pillaging of a company resulting in the destruction of 11,000 jobs and a vast pension black hole is yet another demonstration of how out of touch the Westminster establishment club are.

A parliamentary report has found that "Sir Philip systematically extracted hundreds of millions of pounds from BHS, paying very little tax and fantastically enriching himself and his family, leaving the company and its pension fund weakened to the point of the inevitable collapse of both."

As far as the establishment club are concerned, Philip and Tina Green can continue living their spectacularly decadent lifestyles on the hundreds of millions they extracted out of the business they completely ruined because the disappointment of Philip losing his knighthood is supposedly punishment enough.
This is how British justice works. If you're not part of the establishment club and you pinch a bottle of mineral water or smoke a bit of herb you can go to jail But if you're part of the club (like Fred Goodwin or Philip Green) you can systematically ruin a huge business, destroy thousands of jobs and leave the taxpayer looking at vast bills to repair the damage, but you'll be able to keep your ill-gotten gains and your "punishment" will be stopping sycophants from calling you "sir".

No wonder the public are so furious with the out-of-touch Westminster establishment club when these people honestly seem to think that the same impotent slap on the wrist they gave to Fred Goodwin for destroying RBS is punishment enough for Philip Green for pillaging BHS too.

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

OR

Bad week for the Tories - Attack Jeremy Corbyn

In the wake of George Osborne's March 2016 Budget of Failure the Tory party endured the worst week they've had had since the Lib-Dems enabled them back into power in 2010.

A bad week for the Tories

Here are just a few things that went wrong for them:

• Before Osborne's budget of failure was even announced a poll revealed that Tory austerity is the least popular it's ever been.

• George Osborne had to admit that he'd failed to achieve two of the three economic golden rules he set for himself, and his own pet thinktank (the OBR) admitted that he only has a 50-50 chance of achieving the third.

• Labour immediately condemned the Tory budget as having "unfairness at its very core" because it planned to impoverish hundreds of thousands of disabled people whilst handing out lavish tax cuts to corporations, the asset rich and high earners.

• Iain Duncan Smith resigned from the government claiming that the disability cuts were indefensible. If the cuts are apparently enough to horrify a callous monster like Iain Duncan Smith, then it's clear that they must be absolutely brutal.

• The Tories had to U-turn on hugely unpopular their plan to impoverish disabled people within days of announcing it, leaving a £4.4 billion hole in their budget.

• David Cameron and George Osborne managed to dig out a dangerously inappropriate and unqualified replacement called Stephen Crabb. It was soon revealed that he had close links to a bunch of homophobic "gay cure" religious nutters and absolutely no idea about the impact of the welfare cuts he'd just voted in favour of.

• It was revealed that George Osborne had tried to hide a plan to rip off the taxpayer by £22 billion by selling the government stake in RBS for only about half of what was paid for it.

• The Home Secretary had one of her deportation schemes condemned by a tribunal as being built upon totally unscientific hearsay. She will now have to explain herself in front of a parliamentary inquiry.

• The Tory candidate for Mayor of London was forced to resign as patron of a disability charity after voting to impoverish people who are too unwell to work by £1,500 per year.

• The massive scale of public opposition to the Tory plan to force privatise every school in England became clear when two separate petitions against it passed 100,000 signatures within a week! [petition one] [petition 2]

• A poll revealed Labour had overtaken the Tories for the first time since Jeremy Corbyn was elected as Labour Party leader.

• Another poll revealed a 10% improvement in Jeremy Corbyn's approval ratings and a 10% decline in David Cameron's.

Attack Corbyn

Given this catalogue of failures, it might have been fair to assume that the mainstream press might actually begin to question David Cameron's leadership, but the mainstream media narrative was quickly set that Jeremy Corbyn was the real failure of the week for apparently not attacking the Tories effectively enough!

Pretty soon online discussion threads were filled with people spouting this feeble narrative as if the thoughts were their own, rather than some absolute drivel they'd rote learned from the right-wing press and mindlessly regurgitated as if it was their own opinion. However, if people actually listened to some of the responses from Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and Angela Eagle this week they'd have heard strong criticisms of the Tories that the likes of Ed Miliband and Ed Balls never managed to deliver.

Spurned Blairites

The biggest problem for Jeremy Corbyn remains the pathetic crowd of spurned Blairites who, even this week, have been feeding anti-Corbyn stories to the mainstream press. Even when the Tory party is visibly imploding, the spurned Blairites are far more interested in attacking Corbyn than they are in attacking the Tories!

Hypocritically, the main focus of their foolish self-destructive attacks on Jeremy Corbyn are that he's apparently "not good enough at attacking the Tories". Well, even if you don't think Jeremy Corbyn has done as well as he could have done - at least he was actually attacking the Tories, unlike the spurned Blairite crowd who are still clearly far more intent on tearing the Labour Party apart, even in the worst week this Tory government has ever endured, than actually criticising the Tories.

Conclusion

The UK has the most right-wing press in Europe, so it's no surprise whatever that they've once again jumped in to try to save their golden boy George Osborne from the absolute mauling he so clearly deserves with pathetically contrived attacks on Jeremy Corbyn.

What is more worrying is that even during the most catastrophic week the Tories have endured in years, there are still crowds of pathetic spurned Blairites willing to feed anti-Corbyn stories to the press rather than concentrate of attacking the Tories. With a party full of self-defeating backstabbers like that, it seems pretty unlikely that Jeremy Corbyn will ever be able to defeat the Tories, even if he continues to up his game.

Another worrying factor is the sheer number of mindless rote-learners out there who are ever so happy to soak up the latest feeble "blame Corbyn" narrative, and repeat it as if it's their own opinion. It just goes to show what a shocking level public discourse has declined to that people would not only allow themselves to be convinced that it was Jeremy Corbyn who had a bad week, not David Cameron, but also to go around trying to convince other people to believe in such transparent gibberish too.

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

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George Osborne's £22 billion rip-off

It doesn't matter who has been in government, New Labour, the Coalition or the Tories by themselves, the Budget has always contained a few headline grabbing measures that the Chancellor talks up at the dispatch box and the mainstream media fixate their attention upon, whilst much less appealing things are buried in the detail of the budget report. In George Osborne's 2016 "budget of failure" there was one huge buried detail that looks set to cost the taxpayer an incredible £22 billion.

A lightly glittered turd

In the wake of Osborne's "budget of failure" there was a spate of news items focussing on the glitter of a sugary drinks tax and cuts to business rates for small companies, as well as analysis of the huge stinking turd of huge cuts in support for disabled people at the very same time as corporations, the asset rich and high earners are showered with tax cuts.

Goodbye "doctor death"

Iain Duncan Smith's resignation sent the press into overdrive, and understandably so. If George Osborne's brutal austerity cuts are apparently too much even for Iain "doctor death" Duncan Smith*, then even the mainstream media have to begin to entertain the idea that they're pretty damned awful, which is what some of us who don't rely on billionaire Tory sociopaths like Rupert Murdoch (S*n, Times, Sky), Jonathan Harmsworth (Daily Mail, Metro, London Evening Standard) and the Barclay brothers (Telegraph, Spectator) for our pay checks have been saying for quite some time.

George Osborne's £22 billion rip-off

While the majority of the post-budget news coverage is understandably focused on the civil war that has erupted within the Tory party, a few people have noticed that buried deep in the 2016 Budget report is the revelation that the Tories are expecting the taxpayer to take a £22 billion loss when they sell off the government stake in RBS to the private sector.

A £22 billion loss on a £45.5 billion investment is an incredibly poor deal, especially when put into perspective.

James Wright at the Canary claims that £22 billion would be enough to pay 103,000 nurses for ten years, the construction of nearly 150,000 affordable homes, 6,000 new average sized primary schools or 40 brand new state of the art hospitals.

Another way of putting this rip-off into perspective is that £22 billion is more than 62x the projected annual saving (£0.35 billion) the Tories used to justify their brutal policy of slashing the incomes of hundreds of thousands of disabled people by £1,500 per year.

But .. but ... what about Gordon Brown

Right-wing political commentators love to harp on about Gordon Brown's decision to sell off a chunk of the UK gold reserves at the bottom of the gold market as an example of Labour's economic incompetence, yet that blunder only cost the taxpayer an estimated £2 billion, which of course is still an awful lot of money to waste, but less than 10% of the £22 billion George Osborne is planning to rip off the taxpayer by.

If the right-wing blowhards who have produced endless outraged articles about "Brown's bottom" had any integrity whatever, they'd obviously now be far more outraged about George Osborne's plan to rip off the taxpayer by selling our stake in RBS for only marginally more than half of what we paid for it, but we all know that that's never going to happen.

What to do instead

It hardly seems like a coincidence that RBS made vast losses for the majority of time it's been largely owned by the taxpayer, and now that it's recovering towards financial viability the Tories are planning to sell it off at a massive loss to the taxpayer.

In my view the massive public stakes in major banks that were deemed necessary in order to fend off a total financial sector meltdown in 2008 should have been used to create a publicly owned not-for-profit national investment bank to target investment at economically useful activities like infrastructure improvements, housebuilding and support for innovative British industries struggling to raise capital during the credit squeeze.

Instead the publicly owned banks were allowed to return to the exact same reckless and even downright criminal behaviour that preceded the 2007-08 financial sector meltdown: The inflation of another vast unsustainable property bubble, asset stripping of British businesses and the payment of outrageous bonuses (despite the fact the bank was losing £billions every year).

The idea of a national investment bank is still not completely out of the question. but it will be all the more difficult to achieve if George Osborne gets away with selling the public stake in RBS at a £22 billion loss to the taxpayer.

What we can do to oppose this rip-off

Thanks to the 11 million people (24% of the electorate) who voted Tory in 2015 there's not actually a lot that can be done to stop George Osborne selling off our stake in RBS at a vast loss to the taxpayer. Enough people bought into the utterly ludicrous narrative that George Osborne is economically competent that he now gets to conduct the biggest fire-sale of public assets in British history, hammer the poor and ordinary with the burden of ideological austerity and shower corporations and the well-off with ever more lavish tax cuts.

If you do object to this rip-off, it is probably a good idea to write to your local MP to explain your objections. If they are an opposition MP you can ask them to oppose the sale as much as they can, and if they're a Tory, you could ask them to justify this rip-off plan and then post the reply you get in the comments section of this article so that we can see a. the crap excuses they come up with and b. whether they all just use the same utterly contemptuous copy n' paste reply as Tory MPs so often do.

 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.

* It seems unlikely there are many people credulous enough to take Iain Duncan Smith at his word, that he resigned over severe cuts for poor and vulnerable people at the same time as corporations, the asset rich and high earners get showered with tax cuts. The upwards redistribution of wealth is the core ideology of the Tory party, he can't possibly expect anyone to believe that he objects to that. A much more plausible theory is that his resignation is part of the ongoing Tory civil war between the pro- and anti-EU factions. A theory that seems a little less farfetched than IDS suddenly developing a conscience is the idea that it's an effort by Iain Duncan Smith to damage pro-EU Osborne and Cameron as much as possible in order to ingratiate himself with Boris Johnson in the hope of staying at the Tory top table a bit longer.

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