A lot of people, especially hardcore Remainers, don't seem to understand why the Lib-Dems are such a reviled and toxic brand.
Just about the briefest possible explanation is that they wilfully helped a radically right-wing Tory government absolutely trash the living standards of tens of millions of people which eventually resulted in the Brexit backlash, then demonstrated their total lack of contrition by elevating possibly the worst offender of all to lead their party.
After two years at the helm their beloved Saint Vince is on his way out, but that the two vying to replace him (Jo Swinson and Ed Davey) were both such enthusiastic austerity-wreckers that they were more loyal to the Tory whip than the current Tory leadership candidate Jeremy Hunt!
Another extremely clear indication of the fact they're not even remotely sorry about what they did.
So in this article I'm going to run through six things that should make any remotely decent person recoil in disgust at Vince Cable's behaviour, and the Lib-Dems for not only keeping him on, but actually lifting him up to be their beloved leader.
1. The Royal Mail
You probably know that the Tory/Lib-Dem Austerity Coalition decided to outright defy the public will by flogging off Royal Mail in 2013.
As Business Secretary Vince Cable was personally responsible for the process, and he managed it in such a way that it essentially turned into a vast fraud against the British public that cost us hundreds of millions of pounds.
The first element of the fraud was Vince's decision to limit members of the public to a maximum of £749 worth of shares, whilst allowing city speculators to buy up unlimited amounts of shares.
This meant that the vast majority of the profits from the privatisation scam he pulled would be gobbled up by city spivs.
The second element was deliberate under-valuation. The Royal Mail's extensive property portfolio was assigned a ludicrously low valuation in comparison to the the cost of buying a matching portfolio of thousands of acres of lucrative city centre land from scratch.
Furthermore Cable ignored all the warnings that the initial share price was far too low, having chosen the lowest valuation of all supplied by a firm called Lazard.
The third element was the cash in.
When the share price immediately bounced upwards, and several of the city investors made instant £millions at the public expense by buying up millions of shares then flogging them when the price corrected like they knew it would. One of these corporate investors, which made themselves a staggering £8 million instant profit was Lazard, the very people who advised Cable to under-value the shares in the first place.
How Saint Vince decided not to bar them from the process is anyone's guess.
As for the property portfolio, the new private owners have raked in £hundreds of millions by flogging off chunks of Royal Mail land to property developers at the real market price and cashing in the enormous difference from Vince's extraordinary undervaluation in unearned profit.
2. Arming human rights abusers
One of Vince Cable's jobs as Business Secretary in the Austerity Coalition was to sign off on arms export contracts.
During his time in the job he signed off on weapons sales to loads of countries on Britain's own watchlist of human rights abusers, including the homophobic, misogynistic, head-chopping, terrorism-spreading, democracy-crushing, journalist-dismembering Saudi war criminals.
Getting confused between your own socially liberal views and the Liberal Democrats because they have the word "liberal" in their names is kind of understandable if you don't really think about any of the details.
But anyone who is actually genuine about their social liberalism would steer well away from a party that saw absolutely no problem in flogging weapons to despots, tyrant, human rights abusers, and war criminals ... unless of course you're only really socially liberal when it comes to white Europeans like yourself, and don't give a shit about the human rights of brown people in far away lands who end up being tortured, maimed, and massacred by the weapons Saint Vince sold them.
3. Vince's money laundering loophole
In 2011 Vince Cable made an extraordinary decision to abolish identity checks on the registration of British companies.
This may not sound like a big deal, but it set off an extraordinary wave of criminality and money laundering.
The ability to set up a company in a country with a reputation as strong as the UK, in the space of only a few minutes, with virtually no risk of having your identity checked was an open invitation for every fraudster in the world to consider routing their ill-gotten gains through British shell companies.
Pressure groups, other countries, and the EU have pleaded with the UK to close this loophole, and begin insisting that the owners of British companies properly identify themselves, but the only person who has ever been convicted for setting up a fake company in the entire time is campaigner called Kevin Brewer, who set up a fake company called John Vince Cable Services Ltd, in order to demonstrate how Cable's reform made it so easy to create fake companies and masquerade as other people!
The guy who tried to blow the whistle on Saint Vince's tsunami of fraud got convicted in court for his efforts, while those responsible for the countless £billions in fraud that Cable unleashed get away scot free!
4. Austerity fanaticism
One of the worst things about Vince Cable was that in the wake of the global financial sector insolvency crisis he was one of the only UK politicians talking any kind of sense. He was capable of explaining how and why the collapse happened, and he also warned against excessive public spending cuts.
But as soon as the opportunity to become a government minister with the Tories presented itself, he completely changed his tune. From explaining the actual causes of the crisis, he flipped to joining in with the utterly dishonest and hyper-partisan Tory nonsense about "Labour bankrupting the economy".
But worse than this was his embrace of Tory austerity fanaticism.
He knew that it was economically illiterate, he knew that it was bad for the economy, and he knew that repressing wages and stifling economic demand would smother the post-crisis economic recovery, but he joined in with it anyway in return for a six figure ministerial salary, a chauffeur driven car, and a temporary sense of self-importance.
And thus he wilfully helped the Tories to deliver the slowest economic recovery since reliable records began, despite knowing all along that the Tory austerity prescription was toxic economy-choking nonsense from the very beginning.
5. Brexit cynicism
Tory austerity policies like unprecedented wage repression, ruinous public service cuts, deliberate infrastructure under-investment, and wanton vandalism of the social safety net caused a massive collapse in UK living standards.
Then along came the Brexiteers to blame it all on immigrants and the EU.
Vince Cable could have come clean during the EU referendum and admitted that collapsing wages, failing public services, unaffordable housing, and the desperately failing social safety net had nothing to do with immigrants and the EU, and everything to do with the domestic UK government policy of austerity fanaticism.
But in order to say that he would have been admitting his own complicity in the living standards collapse, so instead he chose to say nothing, and allow the Brexiteers to use the living standards collapse he helped to engineer as a recruiting call for the Leave campaign.
And then after the Leave vote happened, Saint Vince has cynically positioned himself and his party as the wonderful saviours come to rescue the rest of us from the Brexit chaos he helped to create and unleash.
And to top it all off, what he's actually offering is the ridiculous strategically inept bollocks of another referendum with the Tories who created this Brexit mess still in charge and pushing for a no deal meltdown from the steps of Downing Street
At least a Labour government or Labour-based coalition would be firmly opposed to the insanity of no deal chaos, but Saint Vince wants the Tories running the ballot because if there's one thing he hates more than Brexit, it's the idea of a genuinely left-wing government ending ruinous austerity fanaticism, running the railways and water supply as not-for-profit public services, and making corporations and the mega-rich actually pay their taxes.
Saint Vince is like a mugger robbing your stuff and punching your teeth out, then expecting praise and gratitude for offering you a tissue to stem the flow of blood gushing from your gums!
But somehow people buy into it.
6. The rest of his voting record
I've detailed 5 things that Saint Vince has been directly involved with, but there's so much more to be found in his voting record.
Here's just some of the other stuff Saint Vince and the Lib-Dems "greatest hits" between 2010 and 2015:
- Introduction of unlawful Tribunal Fees designed to protect bad bosses by pricing low-income employees out of the justice system.
Conclusion
The fact that the Lib-Dems picked Saint Vince as their beloved leader after all of this dreadful stuff just goes to show that they're not even remotely sorry.
And the fact that the two Lib-Dems vying to replace him come from the exact same "capital before people" mould show that they simply don't care about the damage they've done.
All they care about is finding another demographic to con into voting for them, just like they conned and betrayed the student vote, the electoral reformers, the anyone-but-Tory vote, and the anti-war demographic the last time they sneaked their way into power.
Don't be a dupe, and don't believe their deceptions, because you know exactly how much they're wiling to betray and exploit the people who stand with them, and you know exactly how unrepentant they are about the all of the disgusting things that nobody can deny that they did.
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After I pointed out Vince Cable's pivotal role in flogging off the Royal Mail at miles below its true value a couple of hard-right pro-privatisation astroturfers turned up with a novel argument aimed at defending the sell-off.
Their argument says that Vince Cable and George Osborne flogged off Royal Mail for 330p per share, and after initially soaring to 445p on the first day (because investors realised how under-valued it was) six years later this share price has receded to 260p.
Their argument goes along the lines that 2013 was actually a good time to sell off Royal Mail because six years later in 2019 the share price has fallen by roughly 20%.
What this argument completely ignores is what has been happening at Royal Mail since it was flogged off in 2013.
One of the main revenue streams the new capitalist owners have found is flogging off chunks of Royal Mail land to property developers for £hundreds of millions.
It's estimated that they've already raked in over £400 million in land sales. That's over half of the £787 valuation of the entire Royal Mail property portfolio at the point of sale, raked back in by selling off just a few chunks of inner city prime building land!
For example a 2.7 acres Royal Mail site in Battersea was sold to developers for £101.2 million, but the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition priced it at just £12.9 million.
The neoliberals in government flogged this piece of prime building land off at less than 13% of its real value, meaning the other 87% of the value of this public land went straight to the new private owners.
Another example is the 6.25 acre Mount Pleasant sorting office that was valued at £29 million by the Tory/Lib-Dem government at the point of sale, then flogged off for £193 million just a few years later. A cool £164 million profit for the new corporate owners from Vince and George's deliberately under-valued sale of public land.
That's almost £300 million of Vince Cable and George Osborne's £787 million valuation of the entire freehold Royal Mail property portfolio recovered through the sale of under 10 acres of Royal Mail land!
So did the new corporate owners reinvest these massive property windfalls in the Royal Mail business? Maybe to diversify in the face of collapsing demand for hand delivered letters?
Of course they bloody didn't. They paid it out in bloated executive salaries and shareholder dividends that have exceeded £1 billion since the privatisation!
The last Royal Mail boss just quit with a huge £2.7 million golden goodbye, and his replacement was welcomed with a staggering £5.8 million tax-free golden hello! All paid for not through successful operation of the business, but through selling off public land that was acquired at miles below its true value.
The owners of Royal Mail know that the postal delivery business is not a brilliant money spinner in itself, but that the Royal Mail property portfolio is an absolute goldmine of prime building plots in towns and cities across the nation.
Royal Mail is being asset stripped before our very eyes, with what was publicly-owned land until 2013 being flogged off for massive unearned corporate profits.
They're not doing anything smart, or innovative, or productive to "earn" this cash, they're simply gorging themselves on the vast difference between what the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition said the Royal Mail property portfolio was worth when they flogged it off, and what it's actually worth.
And the incredible thing is that defenders of this maniacal neoliberal zeal for privatisation that sees our public land flogged off at a tiny fraction of its true value will concoct ludicrous little fairy stories about how it was all good, and fine, and proper because the share price happens to have fallen slightly after six years of absolutely brazen asset stripping!
And the sad thing is that some people will be so gullible, and so averse to considering the facts for themselves, that they'll actually mindlessly believe this abject neoliberal nonsense that everything is fine and dandy, and that Osborne and Cable actually did us all a wonderful favour by flogging off our land at a ridiculous fraction of its real value.
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.
In the Autumn of 2013 Vince Cable was the Tory/Lib-Dem Coalition minister who sold off the Royal Mail to a bunch of private profiteers at way below its market value. In 2017 he has the absolute brass neck to complain about the consequences of that sale.
Vince knew that he was ripping off the public by flogging the Royal Mail at way below its real market value, but he simply didn't care.
Vince knew that public opinion was dead set against the sell-off, with 67% of the public against to just 20% in favour, but he went ahead anyway.
Vince knew that Royal Mail sorting offices across the nation were sitting on prime bits of development land worth £billions, and that the sale of just a few of these sorting offices would recoup the entire £2 billion price he flogged the Royal Mail off for.
In hindsight the sale of the Royal Mail has been described as "crony capitalism at its worst" and the widespread predictions that the private owners would cash in on the property portfolio have come true.
When Vince Cable flogged off the Royal Mail in 2013 he valued the 6.25 acre Mount Pleasant sorting office at £29 million. Just a few years later in 2017 the private owners flogged it off to developers for £193 million.
A cool £164 million profit at the public's expense.
The same story in Battersea where 2.7 acres were sold off for £101 million, when the "book value" of the land was marked as just £12.9 million when Vince flogged it off.
The sale of just two London sites has raked in almost £300 million for the private owners of what was our public property just a few years ago, yet when Vince flogged it off he priced the entire Royal Mail property portfolio of over 2,600 sites at just £787 million!
Within five years the private profiteers Vince flogged our property to have recouped almost half of his total property valuation with just two property sales!
Anyone would have thought that the man responsible for inflicting such a brazen rip-off on the British public would disappear from public life in shame, but not Vince.
After losing almost all of their MPs as a result of their collusion with the Tories and their ruinous austerity agenda the Lib-Dems have been left with a rump of just a dozen MPs, and in their wisdom they decided to appoint the man responsible for this outrageous rip-off as their party leader!
And now Vince is on Twitter complaining about the planned closure of the Royal Mail sorting office in Hampton in his own constituency.
Vince Cable was responsible for one of the most brazen public swindles of the Coalition government, but he's so arrogant that he thinks that everyone will have just forgotten by now.
He's so confident that he's got away with this massive swindle that he's actually trying to score political brownie points for protesting against one of the consequences of the rip-off privatisation he carried out less than five years ago!
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The bald man in the BBC Question Time audience demanded answers from the Labour shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry, but he wasn't remotely interested in what she had to say, because he'd already diligently rote learned his political opinions from the right-wing media.
When he said "I'd like to hear an example of a country where Corbyn and McDonnell's ideas have worked" you might have imagined that he was interested in listening to the answer, but when Thornberry replied "most of central Europe" and when pressed to name specific countries she said "Germany" and "Sweden" he sneered derisively as if she was the delusional one.
Thornberry's response elicited cackling and sneering from the Tory tribailists in the BBC audience, but that just goes to show how these people have been led like sheep into believing that Jeremy Corbyn is some kind of terrifying left-wing extremist, rather than a centre-left democratic socialist who is proposing economic policies that are perfectly normal across Europe and the rest of the developed world.
Of course there is no country on Earth where a government has come to power and enacted absolutely everything in the Labour Party manifesto, but significant elements of Labour's economic policies are absolutely commonplace across the developed world.
One of Jeremy Corbyn's most prominent headline policies is the abolition of tuition fees (which should more accurately be described as Aspiration Taxes) and making university education free. University education is free (or very low cost) across most of Europe, including Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and let's not forget Scotland either. If Germany and Scotland can afford to offer free university education, why can't England?
Jeremy Corbyn wants to reverse the extreme Tory cuts to Corporation Tax that have been going on since 2010. He plans to increase the rate for major corporations to 26%, while setting a lower rate of 21% for small corporations. 26% would still be the lowest rate in the G7 advanced economies, which means Corbyn's tax policies are so far from being extreme-left that they're actually more pro-corporate than the USA, France, Germany, Japan, Italy and Canada!
One of Corbyn and McDonnell's most interesting ideas is the establishment of a National Investment Bank in order to fund future infrastructure projects. Other countries that have National Investment Banks/Sovereign Wealth Funds include Norway, Singapore, South Korea, Australia, and the Chinese economic powerhouse actually has several.
The Labour Party Manifesto pledged to renationalise the National Grid. Some might see this as radical leftist extremism, but they'd have to be utterly clueless to have been bamboozled into such a position by the right-wing dominated media, because the United States actually has a network of not-for-profit publicly accountable electricity distribution grids.
Perhaps if you're so rabidly right-wing that you think Texas is an extreme-left state awash with commies and Marxists you might believe that Corbyn's energy policies are extreme-left, or maybe you've got some semblance of a grip on political reality?
Corbyn and McDonnell also want to renationalise the railways. There are several countries in the developed world with national rail companies including France, Norway, Singapore, Hong Kong and Italy. The really interesting thing is that under the Tories' shambolic privatisation agenda these foreign state rail companies are actually running 74% of the franchises on the UK rail network, and the only country that is banned from bidding to run UK rail franchises is the UK itself.
Perhaps a more pertinent question when it comes to national rail networks wouldn't be where else do they have publicly owned railways, but where else have they managed to make such a godawful, inefficient, and ideologically-incoherent mess of their rail network?
Another Labour Manifesto pledge was to bring the Royal Mail back under public ownership. Other countries with national mail systems include Canada, Switzerland, Belgium, and Finland.
Then there's the policy of reversing the Tory strategy of carving up the NHS and distributing the pieces to profiteering corporations (including corporations run by major Tory party donors). You don't have to look very far for an example of a successful not-for-profit public health system. The NHS itself was doing brilliantly before the Tories set about vandalising it. The NHS was ranked as the most efficient health service in the world, and had the highest approval ratings ever, then the Tories imposed huge austerity cuts and imposed a massive top down reorganisation called the 2012 Health and Social Care Act. Since then waiting times have skyrocketed, huge numbers of A&E units, maternity wards and walk in centres have been axed (often against furious local opposition), NHS staff are overworked, underpaid and demoralised and huge numbers of people are dying as a consequence.
The truth is that we don't have to look abroad for evidence that Labour's policies work, we just have to look at the devastating ideological vandalism the Tories are inflicting on the NHS, and recognise that Labour have pledged to stop the vandalism and set about reversing the damage.
The problem of course is that vast numbers of people are so shockingly gullible that they simply believe what the mainstream media tell them about Jeremy Corbyn being some kind of terrifying leftist bogeyman with bonkers extreme-left policies. They're unwilling to even consider the fact that most of Corbyn's headline economic policies are commonplace across the developed world, and in fact it's radically right-wing Tory policies like handing control of state schools to private sector pseudo-charities, privatising police services, and vandalising the health system that are desperately unpopular, and pretty bloody rare in successful developed economies.
So the big question has to be how do we reach out to people who are so damned gullible that they uncritically rote learn the mainstream media propaganda about Jeremy Corbyn being an extreme-left bogeyman, and sneer derisively when anyone points out the fact that Corbyn's policies are absolutely commonplace across the developed world while the Tories are the ideological extremists?
How do we reach out to people who prefer to believe in mainstream media lies than in observable reality?
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.
We've all seen right-wingers howling with outrage at the idea that the empty investment properties of the mega-rich could be temporarily requisitioned in order to house the homeless survivors of the Grenfell tower fire.
In fact we've seen them engaging in dishonest emotional manipulation by describing these empty investment properties as "homes" as if the absent billionaire owners actually live there, rather than leave it empty in order to cash in on the price inflation caused by the utterly negligent Tory attitude to the housing sector.
The Tories who express outrage at the idea that empty investment properties could be temporarily requisitioned for the public good are clearly demonstrating that they believe that the property rights of absent billionaires are infinitely more important than the suffering of disaster victims.
This sick property rights above all attitude would be bad enough in its own right, but then you get to the shocking hypocrisy of these people when it comes to the Tory policy of permanently requisitioning public assets in order to distribute them to their super-rich hedge fund mates (like they did with Royal Mail), private health profiteers (the ongoing NHS carve-up), unaccountable private sector pseudo-charities (thousands of publicly owned schools given away, for free to these education profiteers) and even foreign governments (in 2016 the Tory government handed our publicly owned aviation fuel distribution network directly to the governments of Oman and the UAE).
It's extremely telling that these people care more about property rights than they do about people, and it's telling that they care more about the temporary inconvenience to (mainly foreign) billionaire property speculators than they do about the permanent Tory theft of infrastructure and services that belong to all of us.
These people have become so indoctrinated by radically right-wing propaganda that they really can't see the shocking hypocrisy of spewing faux outrage about the idea of temporarily requisitioning empty investment properties for the public good, whilst supporting a political party that permanently requisitions our public property in order to distribute (often for free) to whichever of their mates want a slice of it.
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.
Don't ever let anyone tell you that Jeremy Corbyn and The Labour Party are pushing extreme-left policies because they want to renationalise some stuff.
The majority of the public actually back the policies of running the NHS, railways, water companies and Royal Mail as not-for-profit public services.
Democratic public ownership of the things Labour propose to nationalise is absolutely commonplace across Europe plenty of other western economies, such as nationalised rail (France, Netherlands, Japan, Italy, Ireland ...), a publicly owned national grid (Denmark, New Zealand, Sweden, even Texas!), a publicly owned mail system (Canada, Switzerland, Belgium, Finland) and a national investment bank/sovereign wealth fund (Norway, Singapore, Australia, South Korea).
Just look at the evidence. The ones pushing an extremist agenda are clearly the Tories who have spent the last seven years privatising stuff like the NHS (against the will of 84% of the public), literally thousands of schools (against the will of 81% of the public) and chunks of the police force like the forensic science service (against the will of 87% of the public).
The Labour Manifesto clearly aligns with the views of the majority of people. It's the Tories who have been pursuing a fanatical economic agenda that is only supported by a tiny minority.
The only reason the Tories keep getting away with their extremist economic agenda is that the complicit mainstream media consistently fail to properly hold them to account over their extremely unpopular economic policies, and instead present the reality-reversing narrative that Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party, not Theresa may and the Tories are the ones pushing the fanatical, extreme and highly unpopular economic agenda!
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.
