Keir Starmer: A Misunderstood Political Genius

He may have his detractors on the left, but Keir Starmer is a true political phenomenon who has already proven himself perhaps the greatest politician in the history of British politics. 

Just consider his remarkable track record.

You have to admit that it takes a certain amount of genius to get parachuted into a safe Labour seat that's never been lost to the Tories since it was created in 1983.

Then to participate in an internal coup against the party's democratically elected leader just over a year later was a demonstration of his breath taking audacity (it's just a shame that silly Labour Party members failed to appreciate Owen Smith's ice cream van of political delights isn't it?).

After the Labour right's failed 2016 chicken coup, they then almost failed in their efforts to sabotage the 2017 election meaning the Labour surge delivered the biggest swing in the party's favour since 1945.

Something needed to be done, and Keir Starmer was the man to do it.

In 2019 the Labour right desperately needed to lose the next general election in order to take back control of the Labour Party, and handing Boris Johnson a whopping great majority to impose a ruinous radical-right Brexit shambles was clearly a small price to pay for to achieve this over-riding objective, wasn't it?

These people clearly have their priorities absolutely spot on.

So Keir Starmer came up with the ideal plan to drive away pesky northern Labour voters in their millions. He was going to tell the 150+ Labour held constituencies that voted leave in 2016 that Labour was now "The Party of Remain", and indicate to everyone, that after three tedious years of Brexit horse trading he was going to prolong the whole interminable process even longer by holding a "sore loser" referendum.

And if anyone needed to be shown that they had no place in the Labour Party, it's the stupid gullible idiots who thought Britain would be better off outside the EU. Am I right?

2017 proved that it's much harder to deliberately throw a general election than anyone had ever imagined, but in 2019 Keir Starmer turned out to be the man to deliver Labour the electoral thumping that so many of their MPs were craving.

This guy really delivers doesn't he?

Then Starmer delivered again with a masterful Labour leadership election campaign, in which he lied through his teeth about virtually everything in order to dupe Labour members into believing in the absolute fantasy that he was going to continue with Corbyn's humanist democratic socialist policies, when he was, and always will be, a loyal servant of capitalism and establishment interests.

It's been genuinely delightful to see Starmer backtrack on all of his pro public ownership pledges and impassioned speeches against NHS privatisation, hasn't it?

And if anyone needed to suffer a cruel betrayal, it's the stupid gullible socialists who genuinely believe that some things (public transport, energy, water, mail, education, health ...) are too important to be left in the hands of greedy and reckless capitalist profiteers. Am I right?

Then in another political masterstroke Starmer bragged to Andrew Marr that he would lie to people again if he thought it would win him more political power, proving that he's every bit as dishonest as Boris Johnson, but somehow even more open and upfront about being a cynical and opportunistic political liar than the bloviating oaf.

If anyone deserved to be shown that Labour's not the political party for them, it's people who are sick of being lied to by politicians, isn't it?

After winning the Labour leadership election Keir Starmer immediately binned all of his pro-Remain posturing, rubber stamped Boris Johnson's shambolic Brexit mess, and pledged never to try to make any substantial improvements to it.

And if anyone needed to be shown that the Labour Party delights in betraying them, it's stupid gullible Remainiacs who thought Britain made a mistake in quitting the EU in a hailstorm of Tory jingoism, incompetence, and hubris. Am I right?

After he cleverly cheated his way to the top of the party Starmer immediately brought in new leadership election rules to make sure the Labour Party would always be led by people like him. We all rolled around laughing at the way his new rules would have excluded every person of colour who has ever stood to be Labour leader, as well as all but two of the women who have ever been nominated too, including both of the women who had the temerity to stand against him in 2020.

If anyone needed to be given a right good kicking by the Labour Party it's uppity women and pesky people of colour isn't it?

One of the absolute best things about Starmer is the way he's finally got to grips with antisemitism.

Instead of endlessly apologising and desperately trying to get the right-wing dominated Labour Party bureaucracy to deal with antisemitism allegations in a quick and efficient manner like his disgraced predecessor, Starmer's playing an absolute blinder by having his goons systematically accuse left-wing Jews of being self-hating antisemites, and driving more Jews out of the Labour Party than any Labour leader in history!

After the shambles of the Corbyn years, Starmer honestly doesn't get enough credit for turning Labour into an institutionally antisemitic party that weaponises the antisemitic "self-hating Jew" trope to bully and exclude scores of Jews.

And if anyone needed to be subjected to systematic persecution by Starmer's Labour Party it's the Jews isn't it?

Another of Starmer's great achievements is his development of an excellent "Hierarchy of Racism" within the Labour Party, and making Labour a Hostile Environment for people of colour. Imagine the balls it takes to block 19 mainly Black and Asian Labour councillors from seeking re-election in Britain's most multicultural city of Leicester, after having deliberately thrown the Forde Report and all of its anti-racism recommendations in the bin! 

Starmer is a man who takes a no-nonsense approach to telling Black and Asian voters that Labour isn't the party for them, and he deserves a lot of credit for it.

Not only is Starmer doing a wonderful job of maintaining a "Hierarchy of Racism", he's also brought back all the anti-immigrant mug people like Yvette Cooper who so wisely abstained on Theresa May's unlawfully racist Hostile Environment in 2014, facilitating the Windrush scandal and the systematic abuse of thousands of Black and Asian Brits across the country.

And if anyone needed to be made unwelcome in Starmer's Brave New Labour Party it's Windrush Brits and those stupid, annoying anti-racists, isn't it?

Another of Starmer's major political achievements was driving anyone with any kind of socially liberal principles out of his shadow cabinet by instructing them to abstain on Tory legislation to give impunity to rape cops, and to those who commit war crimes in British military uniforms.

If anyone needed to be driven away from the Labour Party it's the kind of wishy washy social liberal who thinks British soldiers shouldn't be committing war crimes, and that undercover cops shouldn't be tricking unsuspecting women into having sexual relationships with them. Am I right?

Another of Starmer's triumphs was banning several Labour-affiliated organisations, and then retroactively purging loads of Labour Party members for having shared links and social media posts in the times before they were banned.

It's genuinely hilarious that Labour is led by a lawyer who clearly detests the concept of due process, and if anyone needed to be driven away from the Labour Party it's the kind of naive idiot who believes in fairness and natural justice, isn't it?

One of the best things about Starmer is the way he's actively turned his back on ordinary workers in the midst of an unprecedented inflation crisis. He's absolutely right to ignore the pleas of British workers who have simply had it too easy for too long, and fully deserve to have their living standards eroded away by inflation and capitalist greed. It's not like the founding principle of the Labour Party was to represent the interests of workers in the corridors of power, is it?

And if anyone needed to to be shown the cold shoulder by the Labour Party it's those tiresome workers and irksome trade unionists, isn't it?

And Keir's made it absolutely clear that when he tries to drag Britain into another foolish, unwinnable, and unlawful war of aggression, he'll viciously purge anyone within the Labour Party who tries to warn him not to.

If anyone needed to be driven away from the Labour Party it's the kind of pathetic snowflake who thinks Britain shouldn't be arming apartheid states and blood-soaked tyrannies like Israel and Saudi Arabia, or creating terrorism breeding grounds and vast refugee crises by reducing foreign countries to rubble, isn't it?

Another of Keir's genius moves was to get a trendy bunch of London image consultants to tell him to try to trick working class people into voting for him with a fascism-adjacent ultranationalist propaganda blitz of "flags, family, and fatherlandism", before rigging Labour selection processes to exclude working class people in favour of the kind of upper middle class, comfortably wealthy liberal-capitalists the Labour Party is meant to be represented by.

If anyone needed to be patronised like a bunch of idiots and excluded from participation in the Parliamentary Labour Party, it's the working class, isn't it?

You have to applaud Starmer's judgement in appointing a private health bankrolled lickspittle like Wes Streeting as his shadow health minister, and allowing him to publicly attack NHS workers and repeatedly spout NHS privatisation propaganda.

If anyone needed to be completely disillusioned by the Labour Party it's those daft idiots who love the NHS, and consider it the finest achievement of any Labour government in history, isn't it?

These awful leftists have tried to claim that Starmer's politics is just reheated Blairism, but this is incredibly unfair. In 1997 Blair stupidly tried to give people hope that Britain deserved better than Tory sleaze, chaos and continued national decline, and he foolishly tolerated alternative views within the Labour ranks, allowing the likes of Tony Benn, Robin Cook, and Jeremy Corbyn to defy him over the Iraq invasion, without even mercilessly hounding them out of the party to create a closed ideological echo chamber like Starmer obviously would have done.

Keir Starmer is just a man with the the downright good sense to tell centrists exactly what they want to hear? "We're lying to you, we don't care, nothing is going to get better, and we're just going to be marginally more competent than the Tories at managing Britain's inevitable economic decline", and he deserves a lot of credit for that.

So it's sickening to see all these Jews, people of colour, socialists, trade unionists, social progressives, and Remainers queuing up to air their petty grievances about being lied to and abused by Starmer's Labour when people have been saying literally the most horrible things about our beloved leader.

They've called him "The Silent Knight", and "Keith Stalin", and "a haircut in a suit", and they've even deliberately misspelled his name as "Kier"!

Just think about the pain and trauma these awful people have caused to poor old Keir with their horrible mouth words ... and then they have the absolute temerity to whine that they're merely being systematically purged, marginalised, discriminated against, abused, and ignored!

Have they no sense of perspective?

Keir Starmer is like a 1997 era Tony Blair without any of the useless and unimportant things like charisma, inspiration, oratory skills, verve, or tolerance of other people's opinions.

All in all, he's an absolute dream boat for sensible liberal-capitalist centrists isn't he?

It's as clear as day that Keir Starmer is so much more than a "boring haircut in a suit". He's as dishonest, vindictive, and profoundly unlikeable as politicians get, and isn't this exactly the kind of person that us Brits demonstrably love to be ruled over by?

And who could possibly doubt Starmer's genius strategy of driving away pesky, annoying, and unimportant minorities like:

• People who wanted the UK to leave the EU
• People who wanted the UK to remain in the EU
• People who are sick of political liars
• Workers
• The trade unionists who actually fund the Labour Party
• The clear majority of Brits who believe in public ownership
• People who disapprove of rape cops and war criminals
• Genuine socialists
• 200,000+ Labour Party members and activists
• People who don't want Britain to repeat horrifying foreign policy disasters like Iraq
• Social progressives
• The working class
• People who believe in democracy and natural justice
• People who love the NHS and respect NHS workers
• Anti-racists
• Women
• People of colour
• Jews

In order to appeal exclusively to important core political demographics like:

• Comfortably wealthy Guardian hacks on six figure salaries
• Fading celebrities who remember their receding heydays coinciding with Blairism
• Liberal-capitalist twonks who support political liars, as long as it's their political liar
• Billionaire capitalists, media moguls, and private health profiteers
• "Soft Tories" who want vicious, dishonest, radical-right neoliberalism that's just a fraction less malicious than the Tories themselves

The man's a misunderstood political genius, and there's no way that the British public could ever be foolish enough to believe that they deserve better.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

OR

The ringleader of the Gove ambush was a Tory

When Michael Gove was accosted by protestors in the street, the self-righteous condemnation from establishment politicians and the corporate media hack pack was instantaneous.

The usual radical-right suspects like Julia Hartley Brewer and Tom Harwood shared clips of the incident to whip up outrage by exclaiming how "shocking" and "unacceptable" they found it.

Several senior Labour MPs rushed to join in the performative outrage with tweets condemning the incident.

Former Labour leadership candidate Yvette Cooper described the scene as "completely unacceptable" and thanked the police for stepping in.

The dreadful Chris Bryant dialled up the outrage with more vehement condemnation and the ludicrously over-dramatic declaration "what have we become?"

Labour's Shadow Home Secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds took a break from his19 month invisibility act to proclaim that these scenes were particularly inappropriate because they happened in the week after the David Amess murder.

Obviously a load of Tories jumped into action too, attempting to weave the incident into their absurdist non-sequitur of a narrative about how the murder of an MP by a known Islamist extremist who slipped through a government anti-radicalisation programme ... means they now need to abolish Internet anonymity!

The thing that absolutely none of these establishment outrage mongers bothered to mention is that the ringleader of this harassment was until recently a Tory party councillor!

Will Coleshill was ejected from the Tory ranks in 2018 for hurling racist abuse at a Labour Party councillor, but he's come back to do his beloved former party a massive favour by giving the political establishment and corporate media outrage-mongers an incident to moral high-horse about, and weave into their authoritarian drive to crush Internet freedom.

Will Coleshill has never hidden behind Internet anonymity. He uses his real name on all of his social media accounts, and on his Resistance GB bio too, and on his abandoned Tory party councillor profile too.

He carries out all of his extremism in public, using his real name, and gets away with it.

Coleshill has got form for harassing MPs too, having accosted Jess Phillips in the street in 2019.

There's literally no excuse for Labour MPs to not know who this racist Tory-boy extremist is.

It's no wonder the Tories are playing along with the outrage-mongering narrative, because it could hardly fit their radically right-wing authoritarian agenda better, but what the hell are Labour playing at?

Why on earth are they spewing faux outrage about the incident, rather than pointing out that the ringleader was actually one of the Tories' own?

The answer seems to be that Keir Starmer is completely onboard with the Tory agenda. He's already declared that he'll whip Labour MPs into supporting the Tory attack on Internet freedom if they rush the legislation back into parliament this year!

I'm sure his dwindling band of apologists will be more than willing to do the required mental gymnastics to explain how "forensic" it is for Sir Abstainsalot to promise to support legislation that isn't even properly drafted yet ...

The fact that the ringleader of the Michael Gove ambush was actually a Tory would be a great attack point for any opposition worthy of the name, but instead Starmer and the useless nincompoops he's surrounded himself with have actually joined in with the Tory outrage-mongering, and the hard-selling of the Tories' authoritarian crackdown on Internet freedom!

It looks an awful lot like the entire political establishment class is colluding to attack our freedoms, and racist Tory-boy agitator Will Coleshill is actually helping them push this radically right-wing authoritarian agenda.


Big credit to Lloyd Hardy on Twitter for doing the digging on Will Coleshill's very recent Tory past. Make sure to give him a follow if you're on there.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

OR

Once again the Tories are hiding their own culpability behind vapid 'culture war' nonsense

Boris Johnson's Tory government have opened up a new front in their nauseating culture war, by trying to blame the term "white privilege" for catastrophic failings in the educations system, that leave working class kids (white and non-white alike) at huge disadvantages in comparison to kids from wealthier backgrounds.

I'm going to give a non-exhaustive list of other factors that are infinitely more damaging to the prospects of working class kids than this term, but first I'll briefly explain what "white privilege" actually means.

The term certainly doesn't mean that all white people are wealthy and privileged, only a fool or someone who is trying to fool you would try to argue that.

It means that in a still-racist society there are advantages to being white.

White people are obviously less likely to suffer institutional racism like being harassed by the police or denied painkillers when seriously ill; we're less likely to have our CVs immediately thrown in the bin for having non-white sounding names; and we don't have to face disgusting examples of inter-personal racism like the majority of non-white people have experienced in their lifetimes.

This obviously doesn't mean that life is a bed of roses for all white people, because there are all kinds of other forms of discrimination such as classism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of anti-queer bigotry, ageism, persecution of the disabled, persecution of the neurodiverse ...

Only those with malicious intentions would even try to portray recognising that whiteness is an advantage in a racist society as some kind of attack on poor white people, which brings us to the Tory government, and their woeful efforts to hide their own catastrophic failings behind yet more culture war bollocks.

So here are eleven things that are infinitely more damaging to the prospects of working class kids than the existence of the term "white privilege".

1. Education cuts

Ever since the Lib-Dems enabled them back into power in 2010, the Tories have been inflicting brutal cuts on England's education budget, with the worst cuts of all concentrated in the poorest areas of the country. This means that working class kids have borne the brunt of this deliberate Tory strategy of under-funding the education system, and trashing the nation's future economic potential.

How dare they pretend to give a damn about the prospects of working class kids, when their own longstanding policy is to systematically underfund the schools these working class kids attend?

2. Tuition fees

When the Tories and Lib-Dems colluded to triple university tuition fees, and bring in rip-off new repayment terms (inflation +3%) they ensured that kids from poor and ordinary backgrounds would need to drive themselves tens of thousands of pounds into debt just to get their degrees, and that the vast majority of post-2012 graduates (83%) would never be able to pay these debts off despite making entire working lifetimes of repayments.

Is it even possible to think of a better way of putting working class kids off academic attainment, than telling them they'll have to suffer an entire lifetime of unpayable debt if they aspire to go to university?

3. Youth service cuts

Anyone who claims to give the slightest damn about kids in deprived working class communities should be championing youth services aimed at honing kids' talents, giving them social skills, and keeping them away from crime and drugs.

The Tory government has been relentlessly slashing youth services budgets to the bone (70% cut in less than a decade).

4. Sure Start

If you want to give kids the best possible opportunities in life, it's crucial to begin the positive impact as soon as possible, which is why, despite their many other faults, the 1997-2010 Labour government did a great job in setting up Sure Start.

Despite the overwhelming evidence that Sure Start is extremely beneficial to kids' prospects, the Tories have slashed it to pieces since 2010, resulting in 500+ closures, and once again, the worst cuts have been reserved for the most disadvantaged areas.

5. Free School meals

Anyone who claims to care about the prospects of working class kids wouldn't hesitate for a second over providing free school meals during a global pandemic, because there's mountains of evidence that well-fed kids concentrate better and get better grades, while starving hungry and malnourished kids often fail to live up to their academic potential.

But we've all seen how the Tory government repeatedly voted against providing free school meals during the coronavirus pandemic, and had to be shamed into action by the footballer Marcus Rashford, on more than one occasion.

6. Social security cuts

Since 2010 the Tory government has implemented round after round of savage social security cuts. It hardly takes a genius to understand that policies like slashing working tax credits and cutting entitlement to child tax credits and child benefit would end up having profoundly negative consequences for children in the poorest families.

But there's just something in the Tory mentality that gives them a perverse sense of pleasure at the idea of punishing the poor for their poverty, and ensuring that their kids grow up even poorer too.

7. Adult education cuts

Since 2010 the Tories have relentlessly attacked adult education spending, even though any sane government would be investing in adult education in order to ensure that the economy has a skilled and flexible workforce, and so that workers have the means and ability to retrain should they lose their jobs.

The Tories clearly don't want a modern, flexible, highly-skilled workforce, they want to minimise retraining opportunities, and ensure working class people who lose their jobs end up languishing in exploitative low-pay gig economy jobs, working for capitalist mega-corporations, because their retraining options are so severely limited.

And to make things even worse, despite all of his cheery rhetoric about investment and upskilling, Johnson's government is pressing ahead with yet another round of cuts to adult education spending.

8. Wage repression

After the Tories came to power in 2010 they imposed the longest sustained period of wage repression since records began. 

There's basically no better strategy to erode the prospects of working class kids, than to spend the best part of a decade systematically eroding the real value of their parents' wages, and ensuring that when these kids do eventually enter the workforce, they'll be earning less in real terms than those who were entering the workforce a decade previously!

9. School privatisation

Since 2010 the Tories have been overseeing an extraordinary programme of school privatisation in England, to such an extent that 75% of English secondary schools are now controlled by private profiteering pseudo-charities called "Academy Chains" (many of them owned and operated by major Tory party donors).

These profiteers aren't allowed to leech profits out of the education system in shareholder dividends because of their so-called charitable status, but there are loads of other ways of soaking cash out of our kids' education budgets into private pockets, not least vastly inflated six figure salaries for profiteering academy chain directors and their cronies, and endless tides of massive untendered supply contracts handed out to their friends and family.

If you think that the existence of the term "white privilege" has more to do with working class academic under-achievement than this widespread looting of education budgets by Tory party donors and assorted other spivs and profiteers, there's something seriously wrong with the way you're looking at the world.

10. Soaring child poverty

Several of the aforementioned issues, like social security cuts and Tory wage repression have combined to drive half a million more kids into poverty over the last five years, with a shocking 75% of all the kids in poverty, now living in a household where at least one adult works.

It's utterly obscene for the Tories to pretend that they give a damn about working class kids, when their own policies have resulted in hundreds of thousands more kids growing up in dire poverty, and literally millions of kids learning the very early life lesson that 'work doesn't pay', because they see their parents struggling in destitution, despite having jobs.

11. Classism

Britain has one of the most rigid and persistent class hierarchies in the world. The wealthy privately-educated 7% minority are vastly over-represented in politics, corporate media, the judiciary, corporate boardrooms, and the top-paying public service jobs.

Two of our last three Prime Ministers went to the exact same elitist private school, which charges vastly more than the average annual salary in yearly fees.

People still use ludicrous anachronistic terms like lord, baroness, and sir in all seriousness, and we've still got unelected hereditary peers in the House of Lords for pity's sake.

The evidence shows that people from working class backgrounds, with regional accents, are routinely paid thousands of pounds per year less than the posh, for doing exactly the same work.

And the current Prime Minister is a hateful elitist, who used incredibly derogatory language to attack working class children as "ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive, and illegitimate" in a disgusting tirade in which he also derided working class men as "drunk, criminal, aimless, feckless, and hopeless".

Is it any wonder at all that society is geared to fail working class kids, when we insist on picking sneering elitists like Johnson to run the show?

Conclusion

If you look at their actual track record in government, it's obvious that the Tories have been conducting class warfare against the working class. 

They've slashed education budgets, handed control of schools to a bunch of sleazy profiteers, gutted youth services, ruined sure start, smashed the adult education system to pieces, and imposed rip-off unpayable student debts.

Beyond their outright vandalism of the social ladder, to make it so much harder for working class kids to escape poverty, they've also been actively making the poverty worse with their twin agenda of wage repression and social security cuts.

And these Tory vermin think that they can just hide this dreadful and downright malicious track record behind a smokescreen of vapid and divisive culture war bollocks about the term "white privilege".

The reason they think they can get away with pushing this absolute gibberish is that they're confident that the majority of the lower orders (as they see us) have been leaving the education system with such under-developed critical thinking skills, that we won't even notice that we're being duped into blaming "woke teachers" or whatever, rather than the powerful elitists who actually run the country, and are obviously to blame.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

OR

Priti Patel doesn't even know how the law works!

It's widely accepted that Priti Patel is one of the least intelligent members of the least talented government this country has ever suffered, but once again she's made an absolute fool of herself.

You'll probably already be familiar with some of her other blunders, like claiming that applying the death penalty to innocent people would serve as a deterrent, getting caught working as an agent for another state embedded within the UK government, and being unable to read a six digit number off a piece of paper.

Her error this time is particularly sinister and disturbing because it highlights the fact that she has absolutely no understanding of the fundamental basics of how the criminal justice system functions in a liberal democracy.

Patel's latest blunder came about when she put political pressure on the Chief Constable of Avon and Somerset police to ensure criminal prosecution of the activists who took down the statue of Tory slave-trader Edward Colston over the weekend.

This is simply not how the law works, and this kind of political interference represents a dangerous step towards police state authoritarianism.

The way it's supposed to work is that the police conduct an investigation, and then pass their evidence to the Crown Prosecution Service.

The CPS then make a decision whether to bring the case to trial, based on considerations such as the likelihood of conviction, and whether a trial would actually be in the public interest.

The legitimate role of the government, and specifically the Home Secretary, is to propose new laws, and alterations of existing laws, which are obviously subject to parliamentary approval before they can be enacted.

A legitimate position for the Home Secretary to take would be to argue that the current laws prohibiting vandalism of public monuments are not strong enough, and to propose new legislation.

It's completely illegitimate for the Home Secretary to put pressure on the police or the CPS in order to demand prosecutions, because then any case that is brought, can obviously be perceived as politically motivated.

And once we slip into the territory of politically motivated prosecutions, we end up with political prisoners, meaning we're living in a police state.

Patel is obviously far to dim to understand any of this, but ever since the Stalinist Cummings Purge of  the 21 liberal-capitalist Tory MPs in September 2019, the Tory party is even more bereft of talent than it was before.

I'm obviously no huge fanboy for purged Tories like David Gauke, Ken Clarke, Rory Stewart, Justine Greening, Dominic Grieve, Philip Hammond ... but at least these individuals would have been somewhat more likely to actually understand a little bit about the history and structure of the legal system, and the critical importance of avoiding political interference in the application of justice.

The fact of the matter is that if the protesters who organised the statue removal are found, and prosecuted, they can easily demonstrate that the prosecution was politically motivated, thanks to Patel, and then portray themselves as political prisoners if they're convicted.

I'd actually expect black civil rights campaigners to be queuing up to face such a ludicrous prosecution, because the prospect of being jailed for opposing slavery, in a politically partisan trial, would obviously create a powerful martyrdom narrative and turn their predicament into an instant cause célèbre.

Furthermore, conviction at the behest of a right-wing government would make a powerful demonstration of the systemic racism that the Black Lives Matter protesters were protesting against in the first place!

So whichever way you look at it, Patel has screwed up.

If you're you're even remotely liberal, you'll be opposed to politically motivated prosecutions as a matter of principle.

And if you're of the authoritarian persuasion, and want to see the statue-removers punished, then Patel's politicisation of the process has made the prospect of a reasonable conviction all the more difficult than it already was!

As ludicrous as this situation is, it's also deeply concerning, because once again we're an absolute laughing stock of a country, with a profoundly unintelligent and disturbingly authoritarian Home Secretary who demonstrably doesn't give the slightest damn about how the law is supposed to work in liberal democracies.

Any reasonable person, of any political persuasion (other than rabid right-wing authoritarianism) must be left wondering how on earth we've sunk so low.


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OR

This Tory statue outrage is the latest manifestation of their 'property above people' ideology

On Sunday June 7th 2020 anti-racism protesters tore down the Edward Colston statue in Bristol and threw it into Bristol Harbour. Many would argue that this represented a fitting end for a statue of a slave trader whose ships threw 19,000 slaves into the Atlantic Ocean.

The outraged Tory reaction to the removal of this slave trader statue is an absolutely telling demonstration of their militant ‘property above people’ ideology.

In the midst of a huge global uprising against racism, you might have thought that the Tories would have tried to keep a low profile, given their very recent history of implementing unlawful systematically racist policies, and the racist words and actions of their leader. But no, they couldn’t help themselves.

The unlawfully racist Tory Hostile Environment resulted in the systematic persecution of black British citizens. They were denied housing, employment, social security, banking services, and even life saving medical treatment. Scores were even deported, with several actually dying in exile overseas.

But Tory MPs have more tears for the fallen statue of a historical slave trader than for the thousands of real life victims of their own Windrush scandal!

We all know the Tories love a statue of a racist, because in the middle of the 2019 General Election campaign Boris Johnson and a load of other senior Tories flocked to Plymouth to pay homage to a statue of the notorious antisemite and anti-black racist Nancy Astor.

Not only was Astor a vile fascist sympathiser and antisemite who described Adolf Hitler as a welcome solution to the “world problem of Jews”, she also told a room full of African Americans that they should be “grateful for slavery”!

It’s absolutely beyond question that Tories see more value in statues of racists, than in the actual lives of the people who have suffered at the hands of slave traders, fascists, antisemites, and their own racist policies of systematic anti-black discrimination.

The rhetoric they’ve used to defend their beloved slave-trader statue gives a horrifying insight into the Tory mindset.

Their primary tactic has been to adopt the ludicrous pretence that removing monuments and statues to discredited figures and ideologies equates to erasure of history, which is a ludicrously weak argument.

Did these Tories cry bitter tears of frustration about the erasure of history when monuments to Lenin were torn down in post-Soviet Russia? Of course they didn’t.

Did they howl with outrage when the statue of Saddam Hussain was torn down in Baghdad, and the symbols of Ba’athism were destroyed across Iraq? Of course they didn’t.

Did they vehemently object the erasure of history when statues and monuments to Jimmy Savile were removed after his depraved crimes came to light? Of course they didn’t.

Would they argue that it was wrong to remove all the Swastikas and monuments to Hitler after the defeat of Nazi Germany? Because any kind of consistent application of their erasure of history principle suggests they believe Germany should still be covered in the iconography of Nazi Germany, and Russia should still be covered in the symbolism of the Soviet Union.

Then there’s the nonsensical demand that people should have just waited for politicians to sort it out, rather than taking matters into their own hands.

The problem of course is that the people of Bristol left it in the hands of the politicians to sort out, and instead of taking the required action of calmly taking the statue down, moving it somewhere appropriate (like a slavery museum) and then replacing it with a monument to the victims of the transatlantic slave trade, they spent literally years debating the precise wording of a plaque to be attached to the plinth!

And the local council allowed the slavery apologists at the Society of Merchant Venturers more say on the wording of the plaque than black civil rights activists in the city, or even the mayor!

No wonder people got sick of the political game-playing and eventually took matters into their own hands.

Another problem with the Tory erasure of history attack line is the fact that in one single day the removal of the statue did more to raise public awareness about Britain’s participation in the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade than leaving the statue in place for another century would have done (ridiculous plaque or not).

As David Olusoga pointed out, the removal of the statue wasn’t erasure of history, it was actually a defining moment of history.

And if the Tories really gave a damn about the erasure of history where were their torrents of outrage when the Windrush boarding cards were destroyed by the Home Office, or when the national records were vandalised to erase Britain’s colonial crimes?

The Tory objections to the destruction of actual historical records were non-existent of course, because they don’t mind history being erased if erasing it suits their purposes, and because their erasure of history argument is obviously just disingenuous nonsense to obscure the actual reason they’re enraged by the removal of a slave trader statue.

Perhaps the most despicable Tory argument of all is the way they invoked the Holocaust Museum at Auschwitz as if it constitutes some kind of direct comparison.

’If the Auschwitz concentration camp wasn’t demolished, how dare you pull down our slave trader statue?’

The answer of course is that Auschwitz was preserved as a memorial museum about the Holocaust, while the Edward Colston statue was erected as a memorial to a slave trader.

You’d have to be disgustingly ignorant, or wilfully obtuse to treat them as identical cases.

But what’s even more sickening than this grotesquely misleading comparison in itself, is the way that Tories will dredge up the suffering of one people, in order to whitewash the suffering of another.

Let’s remind Jewish people of the horrors of the Holocaust in our hastily constructed, and searingly incoherent justification of a modern day monument to a slave trader!

The Tory reaction to the removal of this slave trader statue has been divisive, deluded, depraved, and above all disingenuous.

It’s divisive because demanding that memorials to slave-traders should be left standing is an insult to all right-minded people who object to the Tory ‘property above people’ mentality, it’s a spit in the eye for black Brits, and it's especially insulting to the African American and Caribbean descendants of the victims of the transatlantic slave trade.

It's deluded because leaving it to the politicians resulted in endless naval gazing over the precise wording of a stupid little plaque, rather than the required action of just calmly taking it down and replacing it with a memorial to the victims of slavery.

It’s depraved because the logical conclusion of their erasure of history argument would mean leaving Swastikas over Germany, the Saddam Hussain statue in Baghdad, and all the Jimmy Savile statues and monuments that used to be dotted around Leeds.

And above all it’s disingenuous because whatever rhetoric they're spouting to oppose the removal of this statue, the real reason they're so furious is that slave-trader Colston was a Tory MP, and they see the removal of this monument to one of their beloved Tory brethren as an attack on Toryism.

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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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