How did the Tories end up picking such a manifestly unfit candidate for Mayor of London?

Before he was selected by the Tories as their candidate to challenge Sadiq Khan in the 2020 London Mayoral Election, few had heard of Shaun Bailey, in the weeks after his selection most of the people who have heard about him and his obnoxious views surely wish they hadn't.

Here are just a few of Bailey's views that have come to light since he was selected as the Tory candidate for one of the biggest political jobs in Britain:

• He said that young inner city girls get passed around gangs of boys "like prostitutes" then deliberately become pregnant to get "a flat" and benefits.

• He claimed that people celebrating Muslim and Hindu festivals like Diwali and Eid in Britain are robbing Britain of its community and turning it into "a crime-riddled cesspool".

• He shared a bigoted Tweet attacking the current London Mayor Sadiq Khan as "Mad Mullah Kahn of Londonistan" as recently as 2017.

• In 2010 he attempted to appeal to the reactionary Tory base by saying that black people should "stop complaining" about racism and discrimination.

• He said that the provision of free condoms "normalises sex" and "leads to criminality".

• He made the extraordinary claim that smoking cannabis does much "more damage to society" than people taking highly addictive and dangerous drugs like crack and heroin!

• He claimed that good looking girls "tend to have been around" sexually, and men are so thick they imagine that women won't have sexually transmitted infections as long as they look pretty and clean.

• He's openly admitted his pro-Brexit views, which puts him at odds with the majority of Londoners who voted in the 2016 EU referendum.

• He claims to represent ordinary working class people having come for an ordinary background, but he consistently promotes the ruinous ideologically driven Tory austerity dogma that has trashed ordinary peoples' wages, and gutted their local services over the last 8 years, solely in order to further enrich the already spectacularly wealthy.

• He said working class people need rules or they "get into crime".

• He said that society needs to stop thinking that it's "acceptable for mothers to have babies on their own".

• At his Manifesto for London event Bailey and his supporters proposed slashing free bus travel for London pensioners and extending the tube to "shithole" parts of London like Thamesmead.

Aside from his track record of saying and sharing misogynistic, bigoted, and anti-working class views, his bizarre views on drugs, his ideological opposition to contraception and sex advice services, spreading extreme-right tropes like "Londonistan" and his support for Tory austerity dogma that's done so much damage to the communities he pretends to represent, there's also the fact that he's a raving hypocrite.

Bailey has adopted the extreme-right propaganda tactic of pinning the blame for rising violent crime in London on Sadiq Khan, but back in 2012 he was part of David Cameron's team as a "crime aide" as they set about gutting the police budget, and slashing the number of police on London's streets.

He was also part of David Cameron's team as the Tories made savage austerity-driven cuts to funding for youth services.

He's now got the absolute chutzpah to blame Khan for the horrendous consequences of his own party's policies, and even make promises of more "bobbies on the beat" and better youth services central elements of his election campaign!

So how did the Tories end up picking a virtual nobody and blatant chancer with a string of distasteful comments about London, women, Muslims, Hindus, and working-class people as their candidate for such a high profile job?

The answer is simple, they're suffering a desperate recruitment crisis, with very few competent and talented individuals wanting to stand as Tory politicians.

The editor of Conservative Home Mark Wallace has admitted that the number of applicants to stand as Tory MPs is down "across the board", with many local Tory associations receiving only a handful of applications when in the past they would have had scores of potential candidates to choose from. He went on to blame this collapse in applications on pessimism, demoralisation, and dissatisfaction with Theresa May's leadership.

This dearth in applications from talented (or even remotely competent) people is hardly surprising given that last year the Tory party raised more in bequests from dead people than they did in membership fees from the living, and that any rises in membership over the last few months have been down to ex-ukippers and other extreme-right fringe entryists seeking to infiltrate the party to usurp it from within.

The problem for the rest of us of course is that there are millions of habitual Tory voters out there who have proven time and again that they'll vote Tory no matter how despicable and incompetent the Tory representatives they're voting for (how else is it possible to explain the political success of the economic illiterate George Osborne, the wannabe tyrant Theresa May, the callous butcher Iain Duncan Smith, the serial incompetent Chris Grayling, and the reckless gambler David Cameron?).

Some of the habitual Tory voters are just the dull-witted dupes who mindlessly believe the nonsense and lies they read in the right-wing propaganda rags, but others put even less thought into it. To them it's like football. They support the blue team, and it doesn't matter how dire their performances are, or how despicable their cheating, they'll always support them over the reds, yellows, and greens (even if they stop actually paying for their season ticket/Tory membership fees).

So despite the absolute dearth of talent in the Tory ranks leading to the selection of a manifestly unfit figure like Shaun Bailey as a candidate for one of the most high profile political jobs in Britain, the Tories will remain confident that they'll always have enough tribalistic support to avoid the collapse into political obscurity this outrageous political anachronism of a party truly deserves.

They know that putting up a candidate like Shaun Bailey in London is an admission of defeat before the campaign even starts, because his bigotry, misogyny, hard-right austerity fanaticism, puritanical views, and anti-working class condescension, and pandering to the extreme-right are never going to sell in a progressive, modern, multicultural city like London, but presumably they're not actually meant to.

Blaming Muslims and Hindus for crime, disparaging young women, attacking the working class, pushing hard-right pseudo-economic nonsense, spewing archaic puritainical nonsense about contraception and sex advice services, and blaming the Labour mayor for the consequences of his own party's policies isn't intended to win the London mayoral election, it's intended to shore up the hard-right reactionary vote in the home counties and rural England.

The people of London will no doubt reject him, but the bigoted Colonel Blimps and "I'm alright Jack" bastards in the shires will see his defeat as further evidence that "Londonistan" is lost, and as cause for further retrenchment into even more right-wing and reactionary views as the carcass of the Tory party is cannibalised by the Brextremists and blue-kip infiltrators.

 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

Right-wingers just ended up owning themselves with their Sadiq Khan balloon

When some Lefty-liberal protesters decided to crowdfund a Donald Trump baby blimp for his state visit to the UK, right-wing Trump supporters absolutely shat themselves with rage.

How dare Sadiq Khan allow people the freedom to protest with a silly blimp they raged. 

And then they concocted a master-plan: "Let's crowdfund a blimp of our own to put Sadiq Khan and the lefty-liberals in their place once and for all".

So that's what they did. They actually invested their time and their money in creating a blimp of Sadiq Khan wearing a yellow bikini.

Oh how they must have anticipated the lurid victimhood narratives they could spin to their gullible followers when the horrible leftist tyrant Khan banned the balloon. 

The extreme-right know that once they've inflated people's victim complexes to the size of ... well ... inflatable parody blimps, then it only takes the slightest puff of hot air to get them all floating in the direction they want them to ...

So all it would take would be Sadiq Khan banning the balloon in a fit of rage and they'd be able to hark on endlessly about how the liberal-left allow protest against the right, but ban protest against themselves ...

But then disaster struck for them. Instead of banning the balloon in a fit of rage Khan just laughed at it."If people want to spend their Saturday looking at me in a yellow bikini they're welcome to do so, but I don't really think yellow's my colour though".
 

And Khan's not the only one who is going to be laughing at these deluded right-wing idiots for wasting their time and money on this, because not only did their protest backfire when Khan just laughed at it, it's also a demonstration that they've got no ideas of their own, and rely on pathetically ripping off ideas from the liberal-left rather than doing anything innovative or remotely useful of their own.

In fact they've not just ripped off a leftie-liberal idea, they're so dull-witted that they've ripped off a pretty rubbish lefty-liberal idea, because a 20ft odd balloon is way less impressive that it sounds (more of an oversized child's helium balloon than a Goodyear Blimp), and whether you're right-wing or left-wing, crowdfunding tens of thousands of pounds to create an underwhelming parody balloon is an absolute waste of effort when that time and money could be used actually helping needy people, or supporting grassroots political activism.

Conclusion

The right-wingers behind this pathetically derivative balloon idea were hoping to own the left, but they've simply ended up owning themselves by nicking a rubbish idea off the lefty-liberals and making it even more lame than it already was.

 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 extraordinary lies that Tory activists are spreading on social media

Tory activists on Twitter are so desperate to turn the social media tide against Labour that they're spreading a barrage of outright lies, including extraordinary claims that Labour were responsible for some of the most unpopular Tory privatisations of the Thatcher and Major era.

I'm going to look at the output of one particular Tory social media activist in particular. The "Sarah Adams" account.

One of Sarah Adams' most commonly occurring claims is that Labour privatised British gas, electricity, water, and railways.

I'm sure that everyone knows that these were Thatcherite privatisations, and that the fantastic 2017 Labour Manifesto pledged to bring a lot of this stuff back into public ownership, but here are the links for the avoidance of doubt,

• Tory privatisation of British Gas.

• Tory privatisation of British electricity supply, British nuclear expertise and power stations, and the National Grid.

• Tory privatisation of the British water supply.

• Tory privatisation of British Rail.

• Labour manifesto pledge to renationalise water, rail franchises, and national grid, as well as establishing new publicly owned not-for-profit power companies.

Blaming your political opponents for what you have done yourself is an absolutely nailed-on example of fascist propaganda.

Sarah Adams also claims that Labour sold off all NHS buildings, which is odd given that the 2017 Tory manifesto included a policy of forcing NHS trusts to sell off their buildings and land in line with the Naylor Report.

If all NHS buildings have been sold by Labour as is claimed, what's the Tory plan to force NHS authorities to sell them off to property speculators all about?

One of the most extraordinary things about this disgracefully dishonest Tory propaganda account is the way it repeatedly calls Labour MP "utter liars" in the same damned pictures that it's spreading reams of absolute lies.

Aside from the pack of lies I dissected in the article header image there's a lot more.

It's absolutely clear that Tory activists are so rattled by Labour's success on social media that they've resorted to spreading outright lies and vile race-baiting images, but then it's hardly surprising that they resort to disgusting and dishonest tactics like this given the disgusting BNP-style Tory London Mayoral campaign in 2016 and the tide of outrageously misleading propaganda that gets spread by official Tory party social media accounts.

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OR

Playing 'good Jew - bad Jew' to delegitimise Jewish people you disagree with is blatant anti-Semitism

One of the most extraordinary things about the anti-Semitism furore is the way that Jeremy Corbyn's right-wing opponents are prepared to issue blatantly anti-Semitic statements in order to attack him as an anti-Semite, but they repeatedly get a total free pass from the mainstream media.

First we had Theresa May using the grotesque "self-hating Jew" trope to attack every single Jewish member of the Labour Party as tolerant of anti-Semitism, then we had the Tory government minister Sajid Javid hiding behind parliamentary privilege to smear hundreds of Jewish Labour activists as supporters of the fascist ideology that resulted in the genocide of their forefathers!

Incredibly, right-wingers have tried to argue that silencing and delegitimising Jewish voices you don't agree with by smearing left-wing Jewish people as "self-hating Jews" and "neo-fascists" is somehow not anti-Semitic behaviour!

Now the right-wing (and non-Jewish) Labour MP John Woodcock has gone even further by slamming Jeremy Corbyn for celebrating the Jewish Seder festival with a left-wing Jewish group called Jewdas.

Apparently Corbyn is still an anti-Semite for attending and participating in a Jewish festival, because the people there are somehow the wrong kind of Jews.

Using grotesquely divisive 'good Jew - bad Jew' shit to delegitimise and dismiss Jewish voices you disagree with is about as clear an example of anti-Semitism as it's possible to see. But Woodcock didn't just get a free pass on it, his vile comments were uncritically repeated all over the mainstream media, including the oh-so-impartial BBC.

It's difficult not to resort to anger when you see a person resorting to spectacularly divisive anti-Semitism in order to smear one of their political opponents as anti-Semitic, but perhaps the best response to this kind of sick hypocrisy is humour.

One of the most telling responses to Woodcock's vile effort to delegitimise and silence left-wing Jews came from the poet and children's laureate Michael Rosen, who wrote him a poem (see picture).

Not only did Woodcock resort to the anti-Semitic game of dismissing Jews who don't agree with him as illegitimate Jews, he also attached a link to the filthy extreme-right Guido Fawkes hate chamber to his Tweet.

If anyone has any doubt about why politicians (and especially Labour MPs) should not be giving free publicity to Guido, just find any Guido article about Sadiq Khan or Diane Abbott and take a look through the disgusting tidal wave of bigoted and abusive filth in the comments section.

Not only has Woodcock resorted to the anti-Semitic 'good Jew - bad Jew' game in order to smear Jeremy Corbyn as anti-Semitic for actually attending and participating in a Jewish religious festival in his spare time ... he's also posted a link to one of the most outrageously bigoted extreme-right hate chambers in British politics whilst pretending to oppose bigotry!

Here are a selection of Guido comments about Sadiq Khan and Diane Abbott for you to consider as you evaluate John Woodcock's decision to support this site whilst simultaneously posturing as someone who is opposed to bigotry!

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OR

Surely Londoners aren't gullible enough to blame Sadiq Khan for the consequences of Tory austerity dogma

By now surely we're all familiar with the Tory strategy of blaming others for what they're guilty of themselves.

The way opportunistic Tory MPs gleefully jumped on the Labour anti-Semitism furore in a week in which their own party has been rocked by one outrageous bigotry scandal after another is a clear example of this, but perhaps the clearest example of all is the right-wing fixation with attacking the Labour Mayor of London Sadiq Khan for the consequences of devastating Tory cuts to the London police budget.

After 26 year old Abraham Badu became the tenth murder victim in just twelve days in the capital, a flood of right-wingers have been desperate to cast the blame onto Sadiq Khan and the Labour Party instead of turning their attention to the unprecedented Tory cuts to police services in London.

Here are some of the facts about the devastating impact of Tory austerity dogma on London policing since 2010.

• The Tories have slashed £600 million from the London police budget since 2010, and intend to impose another £400 million in cuts by 2021.

• As a result of these unprecedented austerity-driven cuts the number of London police personnel has collapsed by 30% from 14,330 to 9,985.

• Tory austerity cuts have also resulted in the loss of 65% of London's police community support officers, a reduction from 4,607 to 1,591.

• Tory austerity dogma has resulted in the closure of 120 police buildings across the capital, and the elimination of almost all of the capital's police counters.

The reality of the situation is that Sadiq Khan has pleaded with the Tories to stop their ideologically driven vandalism of the London police force, but they've simply ignored him and carried on regardless, despite rapidly rising levels of violent crime and the increased threat of terrorism (both from Islamist fanatics and extreme-right terrorists).

The Labour Party as a whole stand with Corbyn and proposed a reversal in the Tory cuts to the police budget in order to hire 10,000 extra police officers across England and Wales. 

Unfortunately more members of the public voted in favour of continued Tory cuts to the national police budget than for Labour's plan to reverse the worst of the cuts, so this policy will have to wait until Labour are eventually elected. 

The thing is that right-wingers know that a lot of people are driven by emotions rather than facts, so they're intent on pinning responsibility for the surge in violent crime on Khan because as a left-wing Muslim political leader he's a very convenient scapegoat for people with a bigoted right-wing agenda.

If you don't believe the Tories would utilise lies, bigotry, and anti-Muslim prejudice for their own political purposes, just think back to Zac Goldsmith's disgusting BNP-style election campaign back in 2016.

The right-wing smear merchants know perfectly well that the unprecedented Tory cuts to the London police service are a major factor in rising violent crime rates, and they know that Sadiq Khan is a vocal opponent of these police cuts. But they're absolutely intent on using emotion, anger, and underlying anti-Muslim prejudice to frame the debate about rising crime in the capital so as to turn Khan into the scapegoat.

The really sad thing is that significant numbers of people are so gullible and easily led that they'll actually believe the ludicrous reality-reversing propaganda that the guy who actually campaigns against the £1 billion in Tory cuts to the London police budget is ultimately responsible for the rise in violent crime.

If this kind of fundamentally dishonest reality-reversing propaganda wasn't effective at convincing a significant number of people to blame an opponent of Tory austerity dogma for the horrific consequences of Tory austerity dogma, then the Tories and the right-wing press simply wouldn't use it would they?

But on the bright side, Londoners were smart enough to reject the lies and Islamophobic smear-mongering when it formed the basis of Zac Goldsmith's mayoral campaign in 2016, so hopefully they're smart enough to reject it now that the Tories and their right-wing cheerleaders are using similar tactics to blame Sadiq Khan for the devastating consequences of their own fixation with ruinous austerity dogma.

 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

It's time for the Labour Party right-wingers to pick a side

In recent years the right-wing faction of the Labour Party have had an extraordinary track record of incompetence, but their misdirected criticisms, their furious berserker attacks on their own party, and their unfathomable willingness to mindlessly regurgitate hard-right propaganda tropes are in danger of ushering in something far worse than Theresa May's directionless and shambolic incarnation of the Tory party.

The track record of incompetence

We're all familiar with the way Labour's chance to walk the 2015 General Election was totally squandered when the Labour right insisted on meekly imitating ruinous Tory austerity dogma instead of actively confronting it and relentlessly criticising Tory austerity dogma as the economic vandalism that it undoubtedly is.

We saw them lose 40 of the 41 Scottish seats in 2015 and then we saw them conclude that the answer to this unprecedented electoral wipe-out was to replace their hopeless right-wing leader Jim Murphy with yet another Labour Party right-winger, the hapless Kezia Dugdale!

Then we saw the right-wing Labour leadership candidates get completely trounced by a 200-1 outsider candidate with a core principle that Labour should actually oppose the Tories instead of meekly imitating them.

Then we saw the spectacularly failed Anyone But Corbyn coup, which only ended up in Corbyn strengthening his mandate to lead the party, and creating a second huge surge of enthusiastic pro-Corbyn people joining the Labour Party.

The damage they've done to the Labour Party is only rivalled by the way they've marginalised themselves within the party and completely trashed their own reputations.

The right-wing Progress "party within a party" was once the most powerful and formidable Labour faction by far, with Progress-backed MPs ruling the roost for over two decades, but now they're an absolute joke of an outfit who are clearly far more intent on their internal wrecking campaigns than actually presenting an alternative view of what Labour should be doing other than the centre-left democratic socialism that Jeremy Corbyn and the overwhelming majority of the membership want.

Haringey

The mainstream media have been desperately trying to create the fiction that the leader of Haringey Council Claire Kober has resigned because of bullying by the left-wing of the party, and the Labour right are loving it, retweeting her lurid accusations and highly damaging berserker attacks on the Labour Party. It's as if they imagine that helping her wreck the Labour Party in Haringey is some kind of master-strategy, rather than the next bout of self-defeating flailing by people who are incoherent with rage that they're still not getting their own way.

What the mainstream media have almost ubiquitously failed to explain is that Claire Kober had made her position as Haringey Council leader totally untenable by relentlessly pushing a hugely unpopular £2 billion privatisation/social cleansing scheme called the Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV), and that she was accused of using "wrecking ball tactics" and running Haringey council "like her own personal fifedom" by a resigning Labour councillor just weeks ago.

Aside from the Labour NEC and both of the local MPs urging Kober to stop the HDV privatisation scheme, she was also caught creating a secret dossier on six Labour council candidates in an attempt to have them purged as council candidates for the party.

So there's strong grounds for arguing that the woman who is loudly and relentlessly crying victim is actually the bully who won't listen to reason, and the ones being smeared as bullies are generally just local people and ordinary Labour Party members who didn't like her autocratic rule, and didn't want her £2 billion privatisation/social cleansing scheme to go ahead.

Northamptonshire

The mainstream media and the Labour Party right have made so much noise about Haringey you could be forgiven for having missed the fact that the Tory run Northamptonshire Council has completely run out of money and is effectively bankrupt.

The Tories there have banned all new spending and they're actually looking to sell off the £53 million council offices they just built, just to cover their own running costs!

This local government meltdown should be a national scandal, but instead of a concerted effort to draw attention to this Tory financial catastrophe, the Labour right are intent on keeping Haringey and Claire Kober's berserker attack on her own party in the headlines as much as possible!

Political intimidation

Last week an extreme-right terrorist admitted in court that he'd plotted to assassinate the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and the Labour Mayor of London Sadiq Khan. A couple of days after admitting this assassination plot he was found guilty of carrying out the Finsbury Park extreme-right terrorist attack.

Hardly anyone on the Labour right took the time to condemn this outrageous plot to murder Corbyn and Khan, or to point out the link between the hateful rhetoric of the right-wing press and hate-mongering Tory MPs like Nadine Dorries, and the rise in extremist political intimidation.

They could easily have pointed to the massive waves of abuse and death threats the Brextremist blue-kip mob hurl at any Tory MP who dares question Theresa May's fanatically right-wing and staggeringly anti-democratic interpretation of Brexit. to create a very strong warning about the violent extremism of the far-right.
  
But no, they decided to bite their tongues and reserve their furious condemnation for a few days later when half a dozen or so anarchists protested noisily at a Jacob Rees-Mogg speech (even though the instigator of the violence at the event was clearly the white-shirted Rees-Mogg supporter who smacked a woman in the face).

It's beyond belief that Labour right-wingers who remained silent over a plot to actually kill the Labour Party leader all suddenly began pushing the Guido Fawkes outrage narrative that noisy but non-violent protest is now completely unacceptable, and that the left in general are somehow to blame for the violence instigated by the Rees-Mogg supporting thug who saw fit to smack a young woman in the face.

The danger

There's no doubt that there are many on the Labour right who would rather wreck the Labour Party and leave the Tories in power perpetually than see Jeremy Corbyn lead the party to victory.

Don't just take my word for it that they feel this way - take Tony Blair at his word. He's the one who wanted to be "absolutely clear" that he'd rather see the Tories win than a Labour Party led by a genuine democratic socialist.

The problem with this internal wrecking strategy is obvious: Theresa May is already dancing to the tune of the hard-right Brextremists, and it's only a matter of time before these fanatics pull the plug on her and attempt to install their leader Jacob Rees-Mogg as Prime Minister.

Rees-Mogg is supported by the lunatic right-wing fringe of the Tory party (who use taxpayers' cash to subsidise their secretive Brextremist ERG faction), the death threat hurling blue-kip mob, former Ukippers like Arron Banks and Nigel Farage (who now see an extreme-right Rees-Mogg takeover of the Tory party as a much easier prospect than breathing life back into the corpse of UKIP), the alt-right (who see Rees-Mogg as the British version of Trump), and even the Britain First hate mob who inspired the terrorist who plotted to kill Corbyn and the terrorist who succeeded in killing Jo Cox, and now see themselves as Rees-Mogg's Sturmabteilung thugs.

If the Labour right continue their utterly misguided thrashing around, then they're likely to hand power directly to Rees-Mogg and the extreme-right fanatics who adore him.

Instead of championing Clair Kober and her berserker attack on her own party because she's not going to get her own way on her massive privatisation scheme, they should be focusing attention on the catastrophic Tory economic meltdown in Northamptonshire.

And instead of mindlessly repeating hard-right Guido Fawkes tropes about how non-violently protesting against Jacob Rees-Mogg is supposedly shockingly unacceptable, they should be focusing their criticism on the extreme-right Brextremists who repeatedly send waves of death threats at the behest of Paul Dacre and the hard-right Daily Mail propaganda rag, glorify extreme-right terrorism, plot to raise a slush fund to incite more extreme-right terrorist attacks, plot to kill Labour politicians, and support Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Their motivation

It's difficult to know whether these Labour right-wingers mindlessly regurgitate Guido Fawkes propaganda tropes, continually attack their own party, and routinely ignore the catastrophic failings of the Tories because they're terminally stupid, or whether this behaviour is motivated by such a deep ideological hatred of democratic socialism that they'd rather help Jacob Rees-Mogg and his hard-right Brextremists into power than allow the Labour Party that they once controlled with an iron fist revert back to centre-left democratic socialism.

Their choice

It's becoming increasingly obvious that the only choice the Labour right are left with is between Jeremy Corbyn and a genuine democratic socialist pushback against four decades of neoliberal dogma, or the wanton destruction of Jacob Rees-Mogg and his coalition of the most fanatical hard-right Brextremists.

Astoundingly, their continued internal wrecking suggests that a significant section of the Labour right are intent on backing Rees-Mogg and the dangerous fanaticism of the extreme-right!

 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

Exposing the copy n' paste Tory lies about the Grenfell fire

The widely accepted narrative from the 2017 General Election is that the Tories didn't romp to victory as they expected to because they were completely routed on the social media battleground.

The response of Tories to this absolute drubbing isn't to reflect on what they were doing wrong, but to double-down on it, hence the absolute bombardment of copy n' paste pro-Tory lies that has been inspired by the likes of Raheem Kassam of Breitbart London.

I've already written a post exposing the outright lies about the Grenfell tower fire that Raheem Kassam blared onto Twitter, and in this post I'm going to break down a a copy n' paste Tory propaganda post that has been smeared onto my page several times by several different right-wing activists over the last couple of days which claims to be "the facts".

I'll go through it point by point to show what a despicable and devious pack of lies and misrepresentations it actually is:


1 - the block of flats was run not by any council but by KCTMO. This body is made up of 8 TENANTS, 4 councilors and 3 independent members.

The block is run by KCTMO but the management committee includes 8 residents, which includes both tenants and leaseholders. The local council still retains control over the budget of the organisation.

2 - Labour hold the seat that the block is situated in.

Labour does indeed hold the local council seat in which Grenfell tower is situated, but that's just one of seven Labour seats on the council (40 Tory, 7 Labour, 3 Lib-Dem). Noting that the tower block is in one of the very few non-Tory wards in Kensington and Chelsea is an obvious distraction tactic.

3 - Labour run the London Council who manage the under funded London Fire Service

As noted above Kensington and Chelsea council is a Tory controlled council, and has been a Tory controlled council since its inception in 1964. 

The idea that Kensington and Chelsea council manage the fire services of the entire city of London is transparent nonsense. Why would anyone bother to invent such a ludicrous lie? How could anyone expect others to be thick enough to believe such a ludicrous lie?

The reason London's fire service is underfunded is not because the (Tory controlled) Kensington and Chelsea council cut it (!!!) but because the Tory Mayor of London Boris Johnson imposed savage austerity cuts, including the closure of 10 London fire stations in one fell swoop. 

4 - incidentally Emma Coad the sitting Labour MP for that ward also sat on the KCTMO.

Emma Coad was only elected as the Labour MP on June 8th 2017, just days before the fire. 

Before that the Tory MP for Kensington was Victoria Borwick (who lobbied Theresa May to drop David Cameron's ban on the ivory trade from the 2017 Tory manifesto instead of lobbying her to follow the expert advice and ban flammable cladding on high rise buildings).

Coad was on the board of KCTMO until 2012 when she resigned. She left long before any refurbishments to Grenfell tower were made. Coad's time on the board was before the residents fire safety concerns were repeatedly raised and ignored by the organisation. 

5 - the advice to stay put which Sadiq Khan has been so vocal about was given by the London Fire Service.

It is true that fire service advice to high rise tenants is often to remain within their properties, but had the fire authorities known that the private contractors had cut corners by cladding the entire building in flammable plastic, I'm pretty sure they would have issued very different advice.

6 - the decision to change contractors during the refurb was made by KCTMO.

The decision to outsource so much refurbishment work to unaccountable subcontractors and sub-subcontractors was a total mess. At the top of the pyramid of responsibility was still the Tory controlled local council which had to sign off on the bills.

7 - the decision not to spend a paltry £138k on fitting sprinklers again KCTMO.

Who knows where this £138,000 spend on sprinklers comes from? The building wasn't fitted with sprinklers (despite a succession of Tory housing ministers spending four years sitting on a report calling for sprinklers in tower blocks to avoid a repeat of the Lakanal fire in 2009).

8 - the decision to create ALMO organisation such as the KCTMO was made under the Right To Manage legislation passed in 2002 as part of the Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Act.

This is an outright lie. KCTMO was founded on April 1st 1996 by the Conservative council at the tail end of John Major's Conservative government.

9 - this was put in place to give leasehold tenants a greater say and the ability to self manage, which has clearly proven to be a disaster.

Is this really a right-winger implying that renationalisation of all the council housing that has been carved up and given away to private management companies would be a good idea? If it is, it would be a total reversal of the last four decades of hard-right neoliberal housing policy.

10 - and which Govt was in a charge when this law was passed? Yup you guessed it Labour.

Another outright lie. As mentioned above KCTMO was founded in 1996 by a Tory council, under a Tory government.

11 - Sadiq Khan as mayor of London Produced a report to say that the fire service did not need further funding.

A spectacular misrepresentation: Sadiq Khan produced a report as housing minister on funding in 2008; 9 years ago! He became Mayor in 2016. In November 2008 on public record Khan said: "We are committed to sustainable funding for all fire and rescue authorities"  before pointing out that Labour made significant investments in the fire service: "I have the figures for the past 10 years, and interestingly the smallest increase was 1.9 per cent. in 1998-99, when we were tied to Conservative spending limits. From then on, there have been increases of 3.9 per cent., 5.4 per cent., 6.2 per cent., 7.3 per cent., 6 per cent. and 4.9 per cent". So funding went up under Labour. 

Since becoming mayor in 2016 Khan has said "no more cuts to London Fire Brigade" and supported Jeremy Corbyn's manifesto which included a funding increase for the UK fire services and the hiring of 3,000 extra fire fighters.

12 -Emma Coad elected Labour MP was on the board of the Tenant Management group who are being accused of not listening to tenants.

This is a lazy repetition of the misrepresentation from point 4, she was on the board but resigned in 2012. 

It's also worth noting that points 4 & 12 are essentially the same thing, and that points 8, 9 and 10 are three strands of the same lie. It doesn't reflect well on whoever made this list that they padded it out so pathetically. 

It reflects even more poorly on the pro-Tory copy n' paste disinformation merchants that they read this pack of lies and misrepresentations and failed to even notice that several of the points were lazy repetitions.

Conclusion

The conclusion is that right-wingers are extremely rattled. They can see that they're losing the social media battle, but instead of changing their tactics to adopt a more fact-based approach to debate, they're trying to flood social media with an absolute barrage of lies about a horrific tragedy in a pathetic attempt to absolve their beloved Tories of blame.

Be warned. These people are feeling cornered and they will spread the most extreme and brazen lies in order to defend their beloved right-wing agendas of flogging off UK public infrastructure, vandalising our public services, devaluing our wages, and ensuring a massive upwards redistribution of wealth.

Tory sympathisers can see they're getting routed on social media so they're determined to render the battlefield unusable by turning it into a Trump-style shit-show of lies, distortions, distractions and abuse.

So be careful what you believe on social media. If it's not backed up by reliable sources then either disregard it, or search out the truth for yourself.

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