13 things everyone should know about the ECHR

Priti Patel's Rwanda deportation flight was never actually intended to take off.

It was a £500,000 publicity stunt designed to ramp up the culture war against the European Convention on Human Rights, and the court that protects these rights and liberties.

The Tory ploy was to deliberately try to break the law, in order to claim that the nasty Europeans are preventing us from doing what we want to, and agitate for Britain to leave the jurisdiction of the ECHR.

Given that the UK government is intent on whipping up culture war propaganda against it, here are 13 things that people should know about the ECHR:

It's got nothing to do with the EU

The ECHR has absolutely nothing to do with the EU. It's an independent institution established in 1950.

So all these far-right polemicists shouting "leave means leave" over the Rwanda situation are either thick as mince, or being deliberately misleading.

Churchill's finest legacy

Winston Churchill was a true enigma of a man. A right-wing racist who despised Indians and set soldiers on British workers, but a war leader in the fight against Nazism, and a man who promoted the idea of internationally accepted human rights to prevent the horrors of fascism from happening again.

The development of the ECHR was supported by both Churchill and Labour PM Clement Attlee, meaning anyone who wants to rip Britain out of of the ECHR is trashing the legacies of the favourite 20th Century Prime Ministers of both the right and the left!

Protection from fascism

The ECHR was designed to protect European citizens from fascism, and make sure nothing like the horrors of the Second World War could ever happen again. So you've really got to wonder about the true motivations of any government that wants to drag their country out of it.

The life's work of Johnson's own grandad

Boris Johnson's own grandfather James Fawcett was a member of the ECHR from 1962-1984, serving as its President from 1972-1982. He dedicated his life's work to human rights, and wrote books on international law, and the application of the ECHR.

It's not just an indication of the decline of Fawcett's family lineage that his own grandson is the radical-right philistine who is intent on wrecking his life's work, it's indicative of our national decline too.

For all of our many faults, Britain was once a great nation in some ways, stocked with decent, honest, earnest men like Fawcett who worked for the betterment of humanity.

These days we lift up and celebrate the absolute worst among us, like the bone-idle, incompetent, lying, philandering oaf who is intent on wrecking the life's work of his own grandfather, purely because he knows contemptuously undermining human rights and international law plays well to Britain's depraved hard-right capitalist media.

These days it's all about self-interest, not the betterment of others, and it's a crying shame that we've fallen so far as a nation in just a couple of generations.

Red meat for tabloid-addled reactionaries

It's hard to imagine the warped mindset of the kind of tabloid-addled reactionary who desperately wants to see their own human rights ripped up, purely because they're angry that their beloved Tory government couldn't unlawfully deport a few poor refugees, who they've never even met, and know nothing about.

But this kind of rabidly right-wing ultranationalist reactionary is Johnson's base. The Tories knew they couldn't win elections without attracting the millions who used to vote for UKIP and the BNP, so this policy of destroying our human rights is red meat, intended for their consumption.

ECHR protects British rights

We regularly hear about how the ECHR protects immigrants, by preventing the UK government from defying the law to deport them, but it also protects the rights of British citizens too.

It was thanks to the ECHR that the bans on homosexuality were lifted in Scotland and Northern Ireland; employers were prevented from discriminating against their workers on religious grounds; teachers were banned from brutalising children with corporal punishment; the ban on people in Gibraltar voting in general Elections was lifted; and the multiple rulings to protect the British public from police brutality.

A very British institution

The ECHR was largely drafted by British lawyers, and British judges have always been major players in the institution, with three of Britain's eight ECHR judges having served as president of the court (Nicholas Bratza, Humphrey Waldock, A.D. McNair). 

Only France and Italy out of the other 46 member states have even had two presidents of the court, and many nations have never had a single one.

Leaving would be Putinesque

In all of Europe, only Belarus has never signed up to the ECHR. The only countries to have walked out of it are Greece, after they suffered a violent military coup in 1969 (then re-joined 1974), and then Putin's Russia after the invasion of Ukraine.

Do we really want to join the brutal Papadopoulos Junta and Vlad Putin's Russia as the only European regimes to have torn up their own citizens' European rights?

Crucial to the Irish Peace Process

Boris Johnson has already made his contempt for the Irish Peace Process absolutely clear by barefaced lying that his Brexit deal wasn't going to create a border down the Irish Sea, creating a border down the Irish Sea, and then defying international law with his efforts to rip up the Northern Ireland Protocol after having told everyone it was a great deal, and signing us up to abide by it.

Britain can't quit the ECHR without ripping up the Good Friday Agreement, which stipulates that the UK have the ECHR enforceable in Northern Ireland.

This latest attack on the ECHR demonstrates that Johnson's contempt for the Irish Peace Process knows no bounds.

Internationally accepted rights, or a set of Tory allowances?

The Tories want to tear up the ECHR and replace it with a British "Bill of Rights" which will be drawn up by ministers from the billionaire-bankrolled Tory party!

What kind of idiot wants to have their internationally accepted rights lobbed in the bin, so that the radical-right ghouls Johnson has surrounded himself with can decide what rights and liberties they will and won't allow us to keep?

Know your rights

The first 18 Articles of the ECHR are the most fundamental. Most of the rest relate to technical details of how the court functions. Here are the rights that Boris Johnson and the Tories are seeking to rip up:

Why the British press hate it

Johnson is intent on attacking the ECHR because Britain's rabidly right-wing corporate media outlets hate it.

The main reason they hate it is because of Article 8, which guarantees British citizens the right to privacy, and prevents them from engaging in the phone-hacking and private surveillance scandals that led to the Levenson Inquiry.

They're still furious that they can't hack into our phones, private communications, medical records, etc ... to do stuff like leak gossip about celebrities and their families, smear left-wing and socially progressive figures, and release the private information of dead British soldiers.

Why the Tories hate it

The Tories hate the ECHR for a very similar reason to the right-wing capitalist media; it constrains their ability to make life worse for people.

• Whenever they want to deport immigrants (or black British citizens) they detest having to try to do it in a way that complies with the ECHR rules.

• When they defund the justice system and scrap entitlement to Legal Aid, they know that they're denying people the right to a free and fair trial.

• When they implement mandatory unpaid labour schemes for the unemployed, they know they're trampling over people's right not to be subjected to forced labour.

• When they bring in legislation to erase our ancient British right to participate in non-violent protest, they know they're attacking our rights to free expression, assembly, and association.

They hate the ECHR because it stands in the way of them being the vicious, malicious bastards that they really want to be.

Conclusion

I'm fairly certain that few could read all of this and still conclude that they want the Tories to trample all over Churchill's finest legacy by walking out of the ECHR, to join Belarus and Putin's Russia as Europe's only non-signatories.

You'd have to be the worst kind of simpleton to imagine that Johnson's billionaire-bankrolled Tories are better placed to decide what our fundamental rights and liberties should be, than a Europe-wide panel of human rights advocates and legal experts.

The big problem is that the kind of low-information voter this malicious anti-ECHR rabble-rousing is aimed at doesn't have the intellectual rigour to actually learn about the issue they're being programmed to froth about, or the patience/comprehension ability to read a detailed summary, if they were ever to somehow come across one.

it's bad enough that decades of failing education and exposure to radical-right capitalist media has created such an enormous demographic of reactionary low-information voters, but that the government actively panders to them like this is a national disgrace.

 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

Carole Cadwalladr is trashing her own reputation

Let me start by saying that I think the Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr has done some fantastic work exposing the dodgy dealings and deceptiveness of interlinked Brextremists like Arron Banks, interfering foreign billionaires like Robert Mercer, Vote Leave, and the network of dodgy opaquely-funded hard-right pseudo-charity like the Taxpayers' Alliance and the IEA.

The work she's been involved in is a prime example of the kind of large scale investigative journalism that mainstream media organisations can do incredibly well when they focus on holding the powerful to account rather than attempting to shape public opinion through the dissemination of their groupthink-inspired political narratives, blatant smear campaigns, and/or recycling government press releases or the output of shady publicly-funded propaganda units.

The scale of the abuse she's received from Brextremist mobs like the Arron Banks' Leave.EU propaganda operation is a testament to what a good job she's been doing.

If Brexiteers like the BBC's Andre Neil really believed she was the ridiculous cat lady crank woman they routinely portray her as, they'd ignore her completely, rather than deliberately whipping up storms of online abuse to try to intimidate her into silence.

The problem of course is that if you set yourself up as a political integrity campaigner, then you need to make sure you're absolutely clean yourself, and unfortunately Carole has dropped a total clanger, that doesn't just undermine her integrity, but damages the fightback against the shady Brextremist liars by association.

When the Institute For Statecraft scandal broke people were rightly outraged that this UK government-funded pseudo-charity has been caught interfering in the domestic affairs of our European neighbours and smearing the government's political opponents at home.

Sure people should be allowed to criticise Jeremy Corbyn if they like, but if the Tory government has just flooded £2 million+ into their covert propaganda operation, there's absolutely no excuse for them repaying the favour by launching social media attacks on the Tories' political opponents.

Just imagine if it was the other way around and Jeremy Corbyn had handed £2 million in public cash to a shady left-wing propaganda unit to attack and smear his political rivals, the media outrage would be white hot and relentless.

In the wake of the breaking scandal Carole Cadwalladr made what seemed like a very strange intervention with a Twitter thread that clearly and quite brazenly pivoted criticism away from the Institute For Statecraft and back onto Jeremy Corbyn and other senior Labour figures.

Who writes a thread about the scandalous smear tactics of a publicly-funded propaganda outfit that bounces criticism back onto the target of their smears by basically repeating all the hyperbolic accusations?

At the time I pointed out that what she'd done was a classic example of a propaganda pivot, but what I didn't know then was that Carole had deliberately concealed her own personal involvement with the organisation in question while she was deflecting criticism away from them and back onto the target of their smears.
 

Deliberately pivoting criticism away from a very dodgy government-funded propaganda unit by echoing their attacks on a political rival of the party that pumped £2 million+ into their coffers is bad enough, but omitting the fact that she'd actually worked with them just a month previously, well that's exactly the kind of deceptiveness and lack of integrity that Carole has so successfully exposed in others.

And given that she's an award-winning investigative journalist, there's absolutely no believing that she failed to spot the link between the Integrity Initiative organisation who invited her to speak at their lavish taxpayer-bankrolled seminar for journalists, and the Integrity Initiative Twitter account she worked so hard to pivot criticism away from in her Twitter thread just a month later.

She's been caught red-handed playing the exact same deceptive propaganda games as the people she (rightly) criticises, but her reaction isn't to stop, take stock of how damaging this mess is for her campaign for greater political integrity and accountability, or to apologise.

Nope, it's to play the victim and create false equivalence between the right-wing Brexiteers who abuse her so disgustingly, and critics who point out that she's been caught making a shocking lapse in judgement.

Of course Carole can involve herself with the shady government-funded Institute for Statecraft if she wants to, and nobody with any sense of proportion is going to say that she's a "deep state operative" for giving a speech at one of their many lavishly-funded anti-Russia seminars.

However people can rightly point out that if the Putin government had been caught red-handed pumping £2 million into a shady psuedo-charity propaganda unit that works to create a 'new cold war' siege mentality in European politics and the media, deliberately interferes in the domestic politics and media organisations of European democracies, and spreads anti-opposition propaganda at home, Carole would obviously have been all over it rather than actively running social media distraction for them.

People can justifiably claim that she's spectacularly undermined her own credibility by writing a prolonged Twitter thread pivoting criticism away from them and onto Jeremy Corbyn, without even bothering to mention her own connection to the organisation in question.

The sensible approach would obviously be for her to attempt to repair the damage with an apology for her appalling lapse in judgement, but we'll see what happens.

Judging by her antics so far, it'll be more spinning, more deflection, and more efforts to dismiss people's legitimate concerns about her behaviour with straw-man 'the Russian stooges are calling me a deep state operative ho! ho! ho!' tactics.

In the hope that you're reading this Carole, please just apologise for this terrible lapse in judgement, undertake to try and avoid such poor and deceptive choices, be open and honest about your associations with any organisation you write about in future, and get back to what you're good at (investigating the shady behaviour of people like Arron Banks and dodgy opaquely-funded hard-right pseudo-charities like the Taxpayers' Alliance and the IEA).

 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

20 questions mainstream media should ask about the Institute for Statecraft scandal (but probably won't)

The Tory government has been caught red-handed shovelling over £2 million in public cash at a dodgy propaganda unit called the Institute For Statecraft which disguises itself as a charity for the purposes of avoiding tax.

A cache of leaked documents has revealed that this publicly-funded pseudo-charity has been interfering in the democratic processes and broadcast media outlets of our European neighbours, and furthermore the Twitter account they runwith the extraordinarily misleading name "Integrity Initiative" has repeatedly published highly partisan political attacks on the Labour opposition.

Here's a full article on the scandal with more details.

The mainstream media have been extremely quiet on the story, and don't be naive enough to expect to be hearing any BBC coverage of this scandal whatever.

However if we did have any kind of functional mainstream media (one that was intent on actually holding the powerful to account and asking incisive questions about their behaviour rather than generally running distraction for them and burying their scandals), here are some of the questions mainstream media journalists should be asking about the Institute for Statecraft scandal:

• What is  UK-based charity doing meddling in Spanish political processes?

• What is a UK-based charity doing bragging about "silencing" people on Serbian television?

• Are the Spanish and Serbian governments aware that a UK-based (and UK government funded) organisation has been actively meddling in their states, and did they give permission?

• What Key Performance Indicators have the Tory government set in regards to the £2 million+ in public funding, or is it just a "no strings" handout from the government?

• Aside from the £2 million+ in government funding, who else is funding this pseudo-charity?

• Were Tory government ministers aware ofInstitute for Statecraft's foreign interference tactics before the internal document cache was leaked?

• Did Tory government ministers sign off on the covert political interference in other European states, or did the charity use public funds in this manner purely of their own accord?

• Is this foreign meddling an abuse of charitable status, and how much do these clearly uncharitable political activities undermine public faith in what charities actually exist to do?

• Is it acceptable for the governing UK party to lavish £2 million+ of public funds on an organisation that smears their political rivals?

• Does a UK governing party actually have any legal responsibility to ensure that the public funds they're distributing are not used for the purpose of attacking their political rivals, and if not, why not?

• Does the £2 million in government funding for an organisation that is interfering in other nations' sovereign affairs constitute evidence that the Tories are quietly privatising and outsourcing the functions of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office?

• If this was a right-wing pro-Brexit pseudo-charity (like the Institute for Economic Affairs for example) that was caught red-handed spreading partisan political smears and interfering in democratic processes, would award winning investigative journalists like Carole Cadwalladr be quite so keen to talk the scandal down and pivot criticism away from the guilty parties?

• Does the fact that numerous UK mainstream newspaper journalists have been named as collaborators working in "clusters" on behalf of the Institute For Statecraft in the leaked documents explain their media colleagues' disinclination to properly investigate the scandal?

• Have members of the "cluster" cells this pseudo-charity has set up received payment or incentives for their involvement, and if so how much? 

• Have the MPs who have involved themselves with this pseudo-charity properly declared their involvement, and any payment or benefits, on the Register of Parliamentary Interests?

• Is the colossal amount of money this government-funded pseudo-charity is flinging around on running seminars and foreign jollies (globs of between £20,000 and £60,000 for seminars and academies),  an absolute affront to decency at a time when disabled people, low-income workers, and literally millions of British children are being condemned to destitution by Tory austerity dogma?

• Isn't setting up shadowy publicly-funded operations to spread online propaganda and interfere in the affairs of other European democracies exactly what the UK government accuses Putin and the Russian state of doing?

• Even if we agree with this pseudo-charity's extraordinary use of public funds, isn't getting caught red-handed meddling in other countries affairs a massive display of incompetence from whoever signed off on this scheme at the Foreign Office?

• Doesn't getting caught engaging in shady cyber-war activities and overseas political interference massively damage the UK's credibility when it comes to criticism of stuff like Russian propaganda bot farms, and Russian political meddling overseas?

• Is it time for the Charity Commission to draw up new rules to prevent this kind of egregious political abuse of charitable status?

Aside from these specific questions, there's also the thought experiment of whether Jeremy Corbyn would be getting such an easy ride had he become Prime Minister and then set about pumping £2 million+ of public funds into a shady left-wing pseudo charity that smeared his political opponents at home and interfered in the democratic processes and broadcast media of our European neighbours? [if your answer to this thought experiment isn't "absolutely no way" then you can't have been paying much attention at all for the last three years have you?]

None of these are difficult questions to come up with, and any journalist willing to peruse the cache of leaked documents should be easily capable of thinking up plenty of other pertinent questions about this scandal.

However it seems unlikely these questions will be asked by most mainstream media outlets (and especially the BBC) because they undermine the prevailing mainstream media narrative that casts the Russians as the perpetual baddies because they spread propaganda and interfere in other countries affairs (which they do) and the Brits as the honest and trustworthy goodies standing firm against the nasty Russian threat (despite getting caught red-handed engaging in the same kind of propaganda tactics, foreign meddling, and geopolitical influence-mongering).

In fact the leaked Institute for Statecraft documents reveal the shady means by which this prevailing 'new cold war' mainstream media narrative is actually being spread, including the development of "clusters" of journalists working to spread the Institute's propaganda.

Half of the problem is that in order to question the Institute for Statecraft scandal, a lot of mainstream media hacks would have to question themselves and their colleagues.

 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

Theresa May's Putinesque propaganda war

Interfering in other countries' democracies, channelling public funds to shady operations that attack and smear opposition politicians and undermine the freedom of the press, maintaining secretive networks of loyalist journalists and civil servants at home and abroad, spreading social media disinformation, electoral cheating to maintain power, and all as the head of a political party bankrolled by dodgy Russian oligarchs.

You could be forgiven for thinking that this is a description of Vladimir Putin and his regime, but in fact it's Theresa May and the Tories.

Anyone who has paid the remotest attention to how the Tory cabal funds itself will know that they've racked up more than £3 million in donations from dodgy Russian oligarchs and Putin cronies since 2010, including the sale of direct personal access to government ministers just weeks before the Tory government quashed Labour moves to clamp down on the tsunami of dodgy Russian cash flooding into the City of London.

Anyone who was paying attention during the 2017 general election will know that the Tory party is just as willing to use despicable social media propaganda to achieve their objectives as Vladimir Putin and the armies of Russia-based social media propaganda bots.

And who could forget the brazen electoral cheating the Tories got away with in 2015?

And now we're learning about the incredibly shady activities of a government funded propaganda operation called the Institute for Statecraft after the leak of a cache of damning internal documents about the global propaganda operation they're running (see here to browse the documents for yourself).

The Institute for Statecraft has been set up as a charity so as to avoid paying tax, and has benefited from around £2 million in public cash channelled through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

They've established what they refer to as "clusters" in democratic states across the developed world, including the UK, Spain, France, Greece, the US/Canada, Scandinavia, the Baltic region, and the Balkans. These shady cells act as anti-Russia propaganda outfits and also actively interfere in other countries' democratic processes.

One of the operations they're most proud of was their mobilisation against the appointment of Army reserve colonel Pedro Baños as Spain’s Director of National Security with a concerted smear campaign in the media within hours of the announcement.

They also openly brag about their interference in Spanish politics and the "silencing" of non-conformist voices on Serbian television in a document called "Top Three Deliverabilities for the FCO".

So the UK government is funding this organisation to the tune of £millions, and they're reporting back on their successes in interfering with the political systems and free press of other democratic states.

For an organisation that has been ostensibly created in order to counter Russian propaganda, this all seems more than a little Putinesque does it not?

The Institute for Statecraft operates a Twitter account called "Integrity Initiative" which, according to their Twitter bio, exists to "counter disinformation and malign influence" and "promote media literacy and media freedom".

So now we have an organisation that brags about silencing unwelcome voices on Serbian television simultaneously posing as champions of "media freedom" on Twitter!

And it gets worse. This government funded Twitter account has published several highly partisan political attacks on Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party, including one Tweet labelling him a "useful idiot" and others sharing the work of bitter anti-Corbyn propagandists in the mainstream media.

So we have a shady propaganda outfit that's pretending to be a charity in order to avoid paying tax raking in £millions from the Tory government while they abuse the leader of the opposition on social media.

The channelling of public funds into a shady organisation that attacks and smears the leader of the political opposition is an absolutely appalling look for an organisation that ostensibly exists to counter Putinism.

The Tory government's use of public cash to fund a shady organisation that interferes in other countries' democracies, attacks press freedom, and bitterly attacks the leader of the opposition would be an absolute outrage under any other circumstances.

Just try to imagine it. Jeremy Corbyn becomes Prime Minister and then sets about channelling £2 million in public cash into a shady left-wing pseudo-charity propaganda outfit that actively interferes in other democratic states and bitterly smears his political opponents at home.

Do you honestly believe that there wouldn't be absolute outrage about it across the BBC and the corporate mainstream media?

But you almost certainly won't be hearing anything about this outrageous Tory scandal on the BBC or in the right-wing propaganda rags, and one of the principle reasons why is that this shady pseudo-charity has infiltrated them (especially the Times with three of their 'journalists' listed as Institute for Statecraft assets) as well as dozens of charities, think tanks, and government departments.

Another principle reason is that the mainstream media groupthink is to desperately defend the crumbling and incompetent Tory establishment out of fear that Jeremy Corbyn will actually follow through on his word and reform the political system to put the interests of ordinary people at the heart of government for the first time in decades, rather than continually pandering to the wealthy and coddled establishment cass to which most mainstream media hacks belong.

Hence this scandal will be brushed under the mainstream media carpet along with all the other outrageous Tory scandals they either forget about within days, deliberately obfuscate, or don't even bother to cover at all.

 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

The BBC's investigation into its own bias is a ridiculously contradictory whitewash

Whether you like Jeremy Corbyn or not, it's easy to see that the state operated broadcaster casting the main political opposition as agents of a foreign power is the kind of extreme propaganda you'd expect to see in a tyrannical state like Russia, rather than a liberal western European democracy.

After a flood of complaints about their decision to red tint and alter a picture of Jeremy Corbyn and photoshop it onto a picture of the Kremlin, the BBC investigated itself and found that their decision to do that was totally "fair and impartial"!

This latest ruling is a truly Orwellian piece of propaganda which focuses heavily on Corbyn's hat, and completely ignores the glaring contradiction between their initial responses to the scandal, and the findings of this report.

The report tries to claim that it is supposedly "immediately apparent to viewers that the contrast and colour balance of the photo had been adjusted to create a stylised image but this was standard practice on the programme" but if we compare this excuse with their initial excuse we find a glaring contradiction.

Their initial excuse was that they'd used the same Kremlin background for the Tory defence secretary Gavin Williamson, the whole thing falls to bits, because in Williamson's case they didn't red-tint or otherwise alter the image, and they positioned the picture of Williamson facing away from the Kremlin rather than merging him in to create a "stylised image".

So their current excuse that it's "standard practice" to manipulate photos to create "stylised images" is totally contradicted by the picture that they Tweeted out as their previous excuse!

To see the excuse morph from one thing to another like this is extraordinary, especially when one excuse clearly contradicts the other.

Even if you actually dislike Jeremy Corbyn, you'd have to be completely cracked to agree with the BBC's whitewash conclusion that there are supposedly "no grounds for regarding the contents of the item as less than impartial or fair to Mr Corbyn", especially given the blatantly contradictory excuses the BBC have pushed out to justify it.

Since Theresa May came to power in 2016 the Tories have accepted £800,000+ in donations from Russian oligarchs and Putin cronies, and the Tories have repeatedly obstructed Jeremy Corbyn's efforts to clamp down on all the Russian dark money flowing into the City of London, yet it's not Theresa May portrayed as a Putin stooge on the BBC, it's Jeremy Corbyn ... And what's even worse is that they actually expect people to be gullible enough to swallow their Orwellian claims that using this photoshopped image as their background was completely "fair and impartial"!

This isn't even the first time the BBC has been caught photoshopping images of Jeremy Corbyn to make him look bad. In the run up to the 2017 General Election they photoshopped him into a picture with Osama Bin Laden, and after the Trump election they photoshopped a Trump "Make America Great Again" baseball cap onto his head.

Each time they create anti-Corbyn photoshop propaganda like this they generate more complaints and controversy, but they keep on doing it, and then keep on completely absolving themselves of blame like petulant children. 

The more people complain about their transparent bias that we're all being made to subsidise through our TV licences, the more biased propaganda they feel inclined to put out, and the more Orwellian the excuses they come up with to defend the petulant contrarianism of their producers.

If they'd even vaguely admitted that the background was poorly considered and politically biased, or that there was a significant discrepancy between their treatment of the Tory defence secretary and Jeremy Corbyn, then we could perhaps believe that they intend to learn from their mistakes and recommit themselves to political impartiality.

But given their whitewash the conclusions are obvious. If a state funded and supposedly impartial broadcaster can look at such a transparently biased editorial decision and conclude that they did absolutely nothing wrong, that's an open declaration that they see no problem with the dissemination of blatant anti-Corbyn propaganda.

Furthermore it's clearly an open invitation to BBC politics producers to continue disseminating anti-Corbyn propaganda, safe in the knowledge that no matter how obviously biased it is, any BBC investigation will be another total whitewash. 

This whitewash is an open declaration that the BBC intends to continue disseminating anti-Corbyn propaganda, and they have absolutely no intention of admitting that this is what they've been doing, or that it is wrong.

 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

What is a Corbyn's hat distraction tactic?

In recent weeks a new kind of propaganda strategy has been deployed in order to muddy the waters and get people quibbling over trivial details to distract attention away from the main issue.

It's a specific kind of distraction tactic based on getting people arguing over the trivial minutiae of a subject rather than the big picture, and I'll explain why I've decided to coin the term "Corbyn's hat" distraction tactic to describe it.

Corbyn's hat

The reason I've decided to call this kind of propaganda ploy a "Corbyn's hat" distraction tactic is that the most glaring example I've ever seen to date involved sidetracking an important debate about broadcaster bias into a heated argument over Jeremy Corbyn's hat.

The bigger issue was that the BBC (which is supposed to be a politically impartial state broadcaster) made the extraordinary decision to mock up a giant poster of a red-tinted Jeremy Corbyn in front of the Kremlin to use for the background of one of their shows in which Corbyn's evidence-seeking stance on the Sailsbury poisoning was ridiculed and no mention of the £800,000+ Theresa May's Tories have taken in donations from Russian oligarchs and Putin cronies.
 

This wasn't the first time the British state broadcaster has used photoshop to attack Jeremy Corbyn, they even photoshopped him with Osama Bin Laden during a debate on terrorism during the 2017 General Election.

This staggeringly biased editorial decision displayed the kind of extreme pro-government anti-opposition bias you'd actually expect to see in Putin's Russia, so it's no surprise that it generated a lot of complaints, but somehow the BBC and their mates in the establishment club managed to focus the debate down onto the trivial issue of whether Jeremy Corbyn's hat had been photoshopped.

The literal big picture (that the supposedly impartial BBC blatantly photoshopped a red-tinted picture of Jeremy Corbyn onto the Kremlin) was lost in a ridiculous quibble over whether the BBC had also altered Jeremy Corbyn's hat to make it look more Russian, with hard-right Tories and so-called 'centrists' alike pouring scorn on the "Corbyn's hat" debate as if that was the core issue, rather than an utterly trivial side issue distraction away from the Putineqsue behaviour of the BBC.

You couldn't really get a clearer example of people quibbling over a trivial issue to distract from the big picture when the big picture was literally a big picture.

Effectiveness

Getting people quibbling over a trivial side issue rather than thinking about the big picture is distinct from other propaganda distraction tactics like "whataboutery" (trying to deflect attention onto a different subject altogether) and the "dead cat" tactic (doing, saying, or revealing something so grotesque that public attention is diverted away from the serious issue at hand) because it doesn't actually change the subject of the debate, it just narrows it down to such an extent that people end up quibbling over one very specific aspect of the subject, rather than viewing the subject in its broader context.

This "Corbyn's hat" type distraction strategy is highly effective because it's not an obvious "look! a squirrel" kind of distraction, it's a distraction that involves directing attention at a trivial aspect of the subject, which means that people could actually conclude that they've debated the subject and come to a conclusion on it, even though they've completely sidetracked away from the main issue.

Clearly a distraction tactic that allows the victim to erroneously believe that they've actually debated and understood the wider subject is a much more effective form of propaganda than a simplistic ploy to switch their attention to another matter altogether.

Windrush landing cards

Theresa May created the Windrush scandal by introducing vile UKIP-pandering anti-migrant legislation in 2014. Legislation that has resulted in British citizens without documentation being denied employment, denied housing, denied social security, denied pensions, and denied NHS care. These dehumanising and discriminatory rules have left thousands living in fear of imprisonment and deportation from their own country.

In a desperate attempt to deflect blame away from herself Theresa May stood at the dispatch box and misled parliament by claiming that the decision to destroy Windrush landing cards was taken by Labour in 2009.

It didn't matter that the Home Office had already admitted that the landing cards were destroyed in October 2010, under Theresa May's watch, her misleading claim was the ideal "Corbyn's hat" distraction for the Tory propaganda machine, and the debate waged for the rest of the day over who destroyed the landing cards.

The fact is that even if Labour had destroyed them, which they didn't, it was only because of Theresa May's vile Faragist anti-immigrant legislation that the Windrush scandal developed.

But by sidetracking the debate onto who destroyed the Windrush landing cards the Tory propaganda machine created the misleading impression that there's some kind of debate over whether Labour or the Tories were to blame, when the indisputable reality is that Theresa May's grotesque UKIP-pandering attack on immigrants is to blame.

Be vigilant

Using a "Corbyn's hat" distraction to deliberately sidetrack the debate into ridiculous quibbling over a minor aspect of the issue is clearly and undeniably an effective propaganda strategy, so be vigilant, and don't be afraid to call out "Corbyn's hat" distraction tactics the next time you see this kind of propaganda in action.

 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

This article was part of the "What is ... ?" series. To see more articles in the series, click here.