Yesterday provided yet more damning proof that we've entered the era of full on fake news in British politics, which goes so much further than randoms making up fake websites and spreading copy n' paste lies.
We've now reached the level where mainstream journalists are spreading ludicrous made up nonsense, because they know they can get away with it, because nobody will hold them to account.
The Hindu Council
The first piece of fakery was spread by the ITV journalist Paul Brand, who tweeted an anti-Labour letter from the "Hindu Council" accompanied by the dramatic claim that "Major interventions in this election today from pretty much every major faith in Britain. Astonishing".
But if you actually read the letter, it's a poorly written anti-Muslim diatribe, full of bizarre clunky language, spelling mistakes, weirdly tangential points, utterly brazen bias in favour of the Indian BJP government, and seething undisguised hatred of Muslims and the Labour Party.
Then if you look up who the "Hindu Council" are it turns out to be a tiny ultra-obscure pro-BJP pressure group with just 206 Facebook followers!
206 Facebook followers: "major intervention" ... "extraordinary"!
It looks an awful lot like Brand didn't research where the letter came from, didn't even bother to read the lamentable diatribe, and just tweeted it out as a "major ... major ... astonishing" scandal because the letter chimed with the anti-Corbyn agenda!
The anti-Corbyn mob obviously pounced on Brand's Tweet and retweeted it over 3,000 times amplifying it beyond the scale of anything this bunch of hyper-partisan weirdos could ever have dreamed of.
Then the Daily Mail picked up on it and included it in one of their grotesque anti-Labour diatribes, but they couldn't even find a picture of the leader of this ridiculously obscure 'Hindu Council' outfit (Anil Bhanot), so they had to include a picture of Corbyn himself in the article header image instead!
Instead of reporting the news, Brand blatantly created it by lavishing free publicity on a nasty hyper-partisan bunch of Muslim-bashing BJP extremists, and by fabricating the absolute fiction that this tiny ultra-obscure operation is somehow representative of the entire Hindu faith in Britain, purely because their vile, incompetently scrawled letter chimed with the mainstream media "Get Corbyn" agenda.
Leaked chat screenshot
The next piece of fakery was even more absurd, and even more widely retweeted, with multiple iterations of the image in question going viral on Twitter.
The original source for the screenshot was the Sky News Technology correspondent Rowland Manthorpe, who published an outraged Tweet about a supposed Labour WhatsApp plot to media-manage the reaction to the Andrew Neil - Jeremy Corbyn interview (more on that later).
The glaringly obvious thing about the leaked media management instructions from a supposed Labour campaigner is that they're all right-aligned, which means, as anyone who has ever used a messaging app will know, whoever leaked this set of instructions to the press is actually the person who wrote them.
You would have thought that the Sky News technology correspondent should have an understanding of the absolute basics of how messaging apps work, but apparently not.
Manthorpe shared the screenshot with absolutely no indication that the leak had been composed by the person who leaked it.
When pushed on the actual source of this screenshot, Manthorpe said it was posted in a Labour activist group, then said that the post has now (conveniently) been deleted.
He won't say which activist group it came from, nor who leaked it to him, so it's entirely unattributed, as well as being obviously fake.
All we know about it really is that whoever came up with this scam was so utterly thick that they didn't even bother setting up two accounts so that they could send it to themselves, then leak what they'd written themselves as received messages, rather than sent ones.
But despite the ridiculous cack-handed fakery of it, this absurd screenshot has been spread all over social media, and seen hundreds of thousands of times, all triggered by a technology correspondent who apparently doesn't know how messaging apps work!
Andrew Neil's lie
Corbyn's interview with Andrew Neil went about as well as anyone would have expected given Neil's ridiculous interview technique of spewing furious monologues, and then continually hectoring and interrupting when his interviewee victim attempts to reply.
Neil caught Corbyn in an all time classic trap, called the wifebeater fallacy, listing a load of Labour's failings on antisemitism, then demanding Corbyn apologise for it all, even though he had absolutely no influence over almost all of it (Labour disciplinary procedures are independent from the party leader for obvious reasons).
Corbyn refused to fall into the wifebeater trap, because he knew the mainstream media would play it as an admission that he was personally apologising for being an anti-Semite, which he obviously isn't ... but it's a double edged sword, so literally all of the front pages of the right-wing propaganda rags bar the Daily Star are blaring about Corbyn refusing to apologise to Jews!
The only problem is that in his barrage of 'evidence' about Labour anti-semitism, Neil included an outright lie.
He said "let me give you the case of Lesley Perrin...She posted a video denying the Holocaust and questioned whether the six million figure was accurate. And what did the Labour Party do? It gave her a written warning. No expulsion, no zero tolerance, just a written warning".
This seems unequivocally bad, but then look into the actual facts of the case and it turns out that Perrin actually quit the Labour Party as soon as the investigation into her comments was opened.
Labour didn't let her off with "just a warning" as Neil claimed, because they actually had no power whatever to investigate or discipline her, once she'd quit the party.
Of course it's fair game and a legitimate line of questioning to ask Corbyn about antisemitism, and what Labour are doing to combat it, but if the problem is as awful as so many people are making out, why on earth is there a need to exaggerate and make things up?
Neil's lie isn't actually as bad as the previous two examples, because he could simply have got his 'facts' muddled up in his extended Labour antisemitism monologue, but it's far worse in scale because him hectoring Corbyn to apologise for something that didn't even happen formed the basis of anti-Corbyn hatchet jobs on the front pages all of the billionaire-owned right-wing propaganda rags the following day.
Consequences
The BBC's Andrew Neil won't be held to account for lying about Labour disciplinary procedures. Just like Sky's Roland Manthorpe won't be disciplined for sharing the kind of obvious fakery a technology correspondent should be able to spot instantly. Just like ITV's Paul Brand won't be disciplined for boosting a ridiculously obscure bunch of politically partisan, far-right Islamophobes purely because their rabid screed aligned with the "get Corbyn" mainstream media agenda.
These people, from three of the UK's biggest and most influential news broadcasters, will suffer no consequences whatever for amplifying extremist groups, spreading ridiculous fakery, and telling lies about antisemitism, so they'll obviously do it again, and again, and again, because they know they can get away with it, and because they know they get rewarded with masses of attention when their fakery goes viral.
No consequences for them means terrible consequences for the rest of us: which will manifest as the continued deterioration of journalistic standards to the point where journalists can just spread whatever made-up bollocks and lies they like in order to generate retweets, and front page headlines, to the point it becomes almost impossible to differentiate between what's real, and what's just partisan fakery.
How are we supposed to believe anything we see from mainstream media broadcasters when their journalists are willing to just make stuff up, and amplify palpable nonsense, purely to fit the partisan political agenda they're pushing?
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.
Last week the Sky News reporter Lewis Goodall turned up in Stoke to vox pop a load of people who were queuing to get into a Jeremy Corbyn speech. One of the people he spoke to accidentally said that Jeremy Corbyn had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (instead of the Sean McBride Peace Prize).
Goodall then included this short clip in a compilation deriding the "cult of Corbyn". The piece then went mega viral on Twitter with right-wingers and the usual 'centrist' bullies absolutely dog-piling the poor woman for her stupidity.
What nobody was ever told amongst this outpouring of hatred, contempt and derision was that the woman in question had quickly realised her mistake, then asked Lewis Goodall not to use the clip where she misspoke.
He ran it anyway.
Of course running a clip when a member of the public has asked you not to because they realised they'd misspoken betrays an extreme lack of journalistic ethics on Lewis Goodall's part, but this isn't really the main issue.
The main problem is the way the mainstream media and a bunch of vile Twitter bullies savagely attacked a random member of the public in a desperate proxy attack on Jeremy Corbyn.
We've all seen the shocking levels of anti-Corbyn bias in the mainstream media. The way they endlessly promote absolute rubbish like not bowing-deeply enough, fake photoshop pictures to make it look like he was dancing, the Czech spy nonsense, the Russian stooge nonsense, the wreath nonsense ... all in order to distract public attention away from the grotesque track record of the Tory government they're trying to protect.
Corbyn has shown that he's strong enough to withstand these attacks, and left-wing public figures like me have gradually learned to withstand the regular tides of insults, abuse, defamatory accusations, lies, and threats from right-wingers and so-called 'centrists' (Labour right-wingers being about on a par with Ukippers for abusive blind fury responses to information and opinions they don't like).
But it's a completely different story when the anti-Corbyn mob turn their hatred on a random member of the public in a desperate attempt to portray everyone who supports Jeremy Corbyn and his democratic socialist policies as members of some kind of stupid cult.
Despite asking that the clip not be broadcast, the poor woman has been reduced to ruins, anxiety, and depression. Ashamed that she's been made to look so stupid, and even more ashamed at the damage she feels her seven second peace prize comment has done to Jeremy Corbyn and the mass movement for democratic socialism.
If mainstream media hacks and Twitter bullies are prepared to do this to an ordinary member of the public as part of their vendetta against Jeremy Corbyn, who on earth would trust them to speak out on behalf of ordinary members of the public when they're suffering systematic persecution by the government, wage repression, draconian sanctions, the effects of Tory austerity dogma, or anything else?
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.
Labour are once again ahead in the polls, and like clockwork Margaret Hodge has emerged to badmouth her own party in the most extraordinary manner. In this article I'm going to look at just some of the desperately cynical, wantonly offensive, and downright dishonest nonsense she spewed in her interview with Sky News.
Muddying the water
Hodge said a lot of off-the-charts nonsense in her interview, but I've got to start with the most cynical and dangerous of her assertions. In an effort to have a stab at Jeremy Corbyn she claimed that there's "a fine line between being pro-Palestinian, and being anti-Semitic".
This is blatantly untrue. One involves having a bit of basic human decency and expressing solidarity towards the victims of decades of brutal Israeli repression. The other involves being a disgusting bigot who hates Jewish people for no reason other than that they're Jews.
There is no "fine line" between decency and indecency, and this effort by Margaret Hodge to claim that there is, is nothing but a cynical effort to intimidate decent people out of expressing solidarity with the Palestinians for fear of being labelled a racist bigot for having done so.
Trivialising the Holocaust
After screaming vitriolic and defamatory abuse in Jeremy Corbyn's face Margaret Hodge was subjected to a brief disciplinary procedure which involved the sending of a few letters, an meeting, and her getting let off scot free for an offence that would have seen any ordinary Labour Party member hoofed out of the party for good.
In a desperate attempt to present herself as the victim, Hodge actually compared this disciplinary process to the horror of fleeing Nazi Germany.
Just try to imagine the absolute tower of self-righteous delusion a person would have to be sitting upon in order to imagine that trivialising the horrors of the Holocaust in order to pose as the poor victim of a flawed softball disciplinary process that let her off scot free for an offence that would have had any normal person in a normal job rightly expecting the sack.
By trivialising the Holocaust in this way Hodge has demonstrated that she's massively over-privileged and extremely disconnected from reality.
Entitlement
Let's not forget that this is the same Labour Party that attempted to rig the 2nd Corbyn leadership election by purging thousands of left-wing members for "crimes" such as once retweeting a non-Labour MP, voting for a different political party long before they even joined Labour, and even liking the Foo Fighters too much!
Hodge was let off scot free for what would probably have seen any ordinary person like you or I sacked from our jobs, but she didn't have a single word of criticism when thousands of ordinary people were being purged from the Labour Party for no reason other than they were likely to vote for Jeremy Corbyn in a leadership election!
Basically Hodge believes she should be allowed to do whatever she likes to bring the party into disrepute, because disciplinary processes, punishments, and expulsions are only for the little people.
Hypocrisy
In comparing Labour's softball disciplinary procedure to the Holocaust in her victim-pleading rant Hodge has accidentally revealed her own hypocrisy.
The pro-Israeli lobby have long argued that it's grotesque to compare stuff like the deliberate killing of scores of unarmed civilians (including medics, journalists, and children) in the vast open air prison camp of Gaza to Nazism or the Holocaust, even to the extent of smearing a Jewish Holocaust survivor as an anti-Semite just to have another crack at Corbyn.
But if comparing indisputable acts of brutality and repression to the actions of the Nazis is tasteless, then how on earth can it be considered reasonable to compare something as benign as an internal party political disciplinary process to the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust?
Outright lies
By claiming that Jeremy Corbyn has overseen an increase in anti-Semitism Hodge wasn't just veering off into hyperbole, she was outright lying.
The evidence is absolutely clear that rates of anti-Semitism have fallen dramatically in the Labour ranks since Corbyn became leader.
The obvious explanation for this trend would seem to be that the massive influx of left-leaning socially liberal people into the Labour Party since 2015 has significantly diluted the pre-existing levels of anti-Semitism.
Let's not forget that back in 2005 Labour's top spin doctor Alistair Campbell masterminded grossly offensive poster campaign depicting a Jewish political rival as a pig and a Fagin character.
This was at a time when Hodge was an actual government minister, but somehow, she didn't speak out about this grotesque anti-Semitism right at the heart of the Labour Party and use it to attack the party leadership.
Now that anti-Semitism rates have fallen dramatically under Corbyn, and nobody at the top of the party is doing anything remotely as bigoted as running an anti-Semitic poster campaign, now she's persistently complaining about the issue?
Surely anyone with any sense at all can see that someone who turns a blind eye to the blatant anti-Semitism of her political allies can't possibly be making a fuss over the issue in good faith when it comes to her political opponents?
Rabid anti-Corbynism
Hodge attempts to undermine Jeremy Corbyn's popularity by raising concerns about the "rise of populism" but completely gives the game away with her list of supposed populists.
She mentions Boris Johnson and Donald Trump first, with no negative description, but when it comes to Corbyn she says "the cult of Corbynism", thus revealing she's actually got more antipathy towards Corbyn's democratic socialist agenda than Boris Johnson's extreme-right ultranationalism, or the frightening and ideologically incoherent lunacy of Trumpism!
It's no surprise that Hodge is such a vehement opponent of Corbynism given that she was the beneficiary of a £1.5 million tax-dodging scam via a Liechtenstein-based fund.
If anyone is likely to oppose Corbyn's determination to clamp down on the tax-dodging of the mega-rich it's someone who participates in that kind of thing.
Excuse me, who are the cultists?
In insultingly dismissing everyone who supports Jeremy Corbyn as a "cult", Margaret Hodge is simply showing how out of touch she is with the wishes of the Labour Party membership.
People don't support Corbyn because they see him as some kind of infallible idol but because he represents a genuine alternative to the hard-right neoliberal orthodoxy that has served the mega-rich and the political class do well over the last four decades at the expense of the rest of us.
the reality is that a lot of people are drawn to Corbyn because of his principles and policies (stuff like renationalising the railways, sticking up for workers, combating tax-dodging, stopping arms sales to despotic regimes like Saudi Arabia) but wish he was a bit better at forcing the point home.
Hodge really doesn't seem to realise that the vast majority of British people have absolutely had it with self-serving political elites flogging off our national assets to their mates on the cheap, gutting our local communities, trashing our wages and working conditions, and imposing ruinous austerity dogma on the nation in order to make the poor and ordinary shoulder the entire cost of the bankers' bailouts, lavishing handouts and tax breaks on corporations and the mega-rich, and fiddling their expenses all the while to maximise their own personal gains.
The reality is that it's the Westminster establishment club and their lackeys in the mainstream media who are living in a cult, but because they have little or no concern for ordinary people.
They're content in their cosy little ideological echo chamber full of reassurances that strict adherence to the orthodox neoliberal ideology is still an unquestionable article of faith, and that anyone who actually listens to what the little people want must be the mad, bad, dangerous, extremist with the cult following!
Irresponsible journalism
One of the most disturbing things about the interview is the complicity of the interviewer, who instead of actually questioning any of the dishonest, deluded, and borderline deranged nonsense Hodge was spouting, actually nodded along like it's the received wisdom!
Maybe you could give the journalist a break for being too taken aback by the outlandishness of it to interject during Hodge's extraordinary Holocaust hyperbole, but failing to point out the fact that she was outright lying about anti-Semitism having increased under Jeremy Corbyn is an extraordinary failure.
Isn't it the least we can expect from journalists that they actually hold powerful establishment figures to account when they lie, rather than acting as their enablers and mouthpieces?
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.
While the majority of the mainstream media have been fixated on the primary task of portraying Jeremy Corbyn as a Russian stooge (in order to deflect attention away from the incredibly incriminating behaviour of the Tory party) the Sky News team have been busy trying to hold the Tory government to account over the absolute shambles they're making of Brexit.
First Sky News disclosed that the Tories have taken the extraordinary step of imposing gagging orders on key border operators to prevent them disclosing what the government are plotting.
Taking back control
Thinking back to the EU referendum debate and all the talk of "taking back control", this rhetoric hardly seems compatible with highly secretive government plotting and their efforts to gag private and public border agencies to prevent them from warning the public what they actually have in store for us.
Surely nobody figured that "taking back control" actually meant handing even more control to the Tory government to wilfully hide their schemes from the public, their political opponents, and British businesses alike?
Then the Sky News team delved into the details of what the Tory government have been so desperate to hide.
Controlling our borders
Apparently the scheming Tories have drawn up three different Brexit scenarios to test out on the various public and private border operators which have been labelled "hard Brexit", "Soft Brexit" and "No deal".
Under the "no deal" scenario the Tories have decided that the only way to deal with the border issues is to throw the UK border open completely, and unilaterally abandon customs checks!
This "throw open the borders" option is quite extraordinary given that "controlling our borders" was such an elemental part of Leave propaganda that delivered the Brexit vote, and was quickly adopted by the Tory government as one of the narratives they used to attract the hard-right ultranationalist blue-kip demographic who were fleeing the wreckage of UKIP.
Chaos
The reason the Tories have decided to model this extraordinary "open borders" approach to Brexit is obvious. If they had any intention whatever of securing our borders, they would have had to have invested £billions in new customs checking facilities, infrastructure, software, and staff, but they've done nothing to address this enormous challenge for the best part of two years.
We now know that the Cameron government didn't bother to do the slightest amount of contingency planning just in case they lost the Brexit referendum, and that the Tory cabinet are still bitterly divided over the actual objective of Brexit almost a full year after Theresa May triggered Article 50.
All in all it's hardly surprising that giving the Tories the green light to just make it up as they go along is resulting in such abject chaos.
No back door
The EU have no intention of throwing open their borders if no customs deal can be agreed before Brexit actually goes ahead, meaning that Britain's decision to throw open our borders would be a unilateral one.
Many on the Tory right conceive post-Brexit Britain as a kind of backdoor into Europe for substandard produce (like chlorinated chicken or hormone riddled beef), but the EU have no intention of letting that happen.
Even if it means huge delays for British exports to the continent while they build the infrastructure to carry out the customs checks, the EU simply aren't going to allow the UK to act as a backdoor conduit for unscrupulous profiteers to flood the European market with substandard produce.
Reality-reversal
So in this farcical Tory Brexit scenario "taking back control" equates to allowing the government to make it up as they go along behind closed doors, and "controlling our borders" equates to throwing our borders open because the Tories have done absolutely nothing to build the customs infrastructure necessary to actually check what's coming in!
Given that this "throw open the borders" approach is the polar opposite of what Leave voters were promised during the debate, you would have thought that more of them would be spitting blood about it, but then this kind of analysis relies on a fundamental misunderstanding that a lot of Remainers still seem unable to get their heads around.
The misunderstanding is the idea that people who were duped into supporting this chaotic hard-right "let's make it up as we go along" Brexit can be convinced to change their minds with facts, evidence, analysis and the like.
They can't be convinced to change their minds through appeals to reason because Brexit was an emotive decision for them, so it doesn't matter how much we point out stuff like the way "control our borders" has morphed into "throw open our borders", they'll simply perform cognitive gymnastics to pretend that they knew that throwing open the borders was the plan all along, and that's what they voted for.
The terrifying thing is that it doesn't matter how much chaos, division, economic damage Brexit delivers, nor how many promises are broken, businesses are destroyed, jobs are lost, or families are thrown into poverty. millions of Brexit voters will continue to insist that that's exactly what they voted for.
It's clear that to a lot of people unleashing such chaos and destruction on your country and your fellow citizens is a price worth paying in order to avoid admitting that you were 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.
Emboldened by the absolute flood of lies told during the EU referendum debate the Tories came to believe that they can outright lie to the public with total impunity.
During Theresa May's vanity election they lied over and again.
Theresa May herself was one of the worst culprits of all, lying about Diane Abbott, lying about Labour's immigration policies, and lying that she would quit as Prime Minister and let Jeremy Corbyn take over the Brexit negotiations if the Tories lost just 6 seats (they lost 13).
The Tory campaign of lies and smears resulted in the Tories losing their majority, and a massive surge of Labour Party support amongst the under-45s (a demographic time bomb that looks set to lock the Tories out of power in the long-term), but they still haven't learned their lesson that ever growing numbers of people are completely sick of political lies and Murdoch style muck-raking.
The newly elected Tory MP in the super-safe seat of Chelmsford Vicky Ford doesn't seem to have learned this lesson about political integrity.
In a Sky TV interview less than two weeks after the chastening Tory losses she decided to outright lie that leading Labour Party politicians have been "calling for riots on our streets".
Here's what John McDonnell actually said (which is obviously precisely the opposite of what Vicky Ford's claims):
Presumably she thinks that she's now got such a safe Tory seat that she can lie to the British public like this with complete impunity.
The mainstream media obviously won't hold her to account for lying to the public like this, so it's up to the public to make sure she doesn't get away with it.
Just as the disgraced Liam Fox will always be referred to as the disgraced Liam Fox for having allowed his special friend Adam Werrity to snoop on classified meetings and documents (behaviour which would have seen any ordinary civil servant or soldier jailed), I'm now going to refer to Vicky Ford at all times as the liar Vicky Ford as if it's her official title, and I hope you do too.
If enough of us do this then perhaps she'll learn that making up political lies does far more damage to her own reputation than to the people she was trying to slur.
We should also remember that the people of Chelmsford elected a liar, and that if they re-elect her at the next election, then they'll mark themselves out as a disgraceful town that actively endorses political liars and political lies.
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.
The Tories and their cheerleaders in the mainstream media are now so rattled by the fallout from the woeful week they've been having (Philip Hammond getting his sums wrong by a mind-boggling £20 billion, their shambolic "magic money tree" manifesto. their depraved Dementia Tax policy of asset stripping elderly people, Theresa May's deranged Facebook meltdown, Boris Johnson and Damian Green making absolute fools of themselves on the BBC) that they've resorted to recycling the tired old Jeremy Corbyn-IRA smears and outright lies.
Sophie Ridge on Sky News tried to browbeat Corbyn over the fact he talked to the IRA, but he just talked sense. He explained the absolute futility of the hard line military approach to the problem and explained that what actually resulted in the peaceful settlement was the negotiation process, and he strongly condemned the IRA (and everyone else in the conflict) who planted bombs and killed innocent civilians.
Watch the video clip:
You heard Corbyn renounce the violence of the IRA there right?
Here's another clip of Corbyn condemning the violence of the IRA just for good measure:
And here's the outrageous Tory Party Press Office reaction to that interview:
It's a brazen and outrageous lie, but the Tories are obviously so rattled now that they've got nothing else to resort to but this kind of desperately dishonest shit-slinging.
Even if you don't like Corbyn, his policies, or his efforts to bring about a peaceful settlement to the violence in Northern Ireland, you've got to accept that dishonest smearing like this is utterly beneath contempt haven't you?
How to deal with these lies
The Tories rely on these outrageous lies to disgust people into rejecting Jeremy Corbyn.
Every single time you see or hear some right-winger trying to smear Jeremy Corbyn for seeking a negotiated peace settlement with the IRA ask them to explain these four things.
1. Tell them that Jeremy Corbyn has publicly condemned the IRA bombings, and all the bombings during the civil war in Northern Ireland. Ask them to watch the clips above and admit it.
2. Tell them that when Jeremy Corbyn was openly and honestly talking to the IRA to try to get them to stop the bombings and negotiate a peaceful settlement, Margaret Thatcher was holding secret negotiations with the IRA whilst brazenly lying to the British public that "we do not negotiate with terrorists". Ask them whether they prefer the Jeremy Corbyn's honesty or Margaret Thatcher's outright lies to the British public.
3. Ask them if they know about the serving Tory councillor Maria Gatland who was literally a member of the IRA in the 1970s and worked to smuggle guns for them to kill civilians with? Ask them if Corbyn talking to the IRA to persuade them to renounce violence was some kind of unforgivable crime, how come it's fine for a Tory politician to have actually been members of the IRA?
4. Ask them if they know about the unelected Tory peer David James who has openly admitted that he used to launder money for the IRA? Ask them if Corbyn talking to the IRA to persuade them to renounce violence was some kind of unforgivable crime, how come it's fine for a Tory politician to have actually laundered money for the IRA?
If video evidence, undeniable facts and absolute proof of sickening Tory hypocrisy aren't enough to beat these Tory liars, then sadly nothing ever will be, but just by standing up to them and confronting them with evidence weakens their position, and exposes them as a shockingly dishonest bunch of smear-artists.
If there is any sense of decency left in Britain these outright lies will backfire, and people will decide not to vote for a party that is so willing to lie to the British public in order to try to keep their grip on political power.
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.
On June the 2nd 2016 David Cameron made a rare live television appearance on Sky News to argue against Britain quitting the EU. During the debate Cameron described Brexit being an "act of self-harm for Britain" and urged people not to "roll the dice" on their wages and their families' futures by voting to leave the EU.
The Brexit fantasy-land
Given the abject lack of anything resembling a coherent post-Brexit economic restructuring plan from Vote Leave, it's impossible to argue that Cameron is wrong to assert that Brexit would be a huge gamble. Several high profile members of the anti-EU campaign have openly admitted that all of their proposed post-Brexit policies are nothing more than completely uncosted "options", yet the likes of Boris Johnson, Chris Grayling and Michael Gove keep on making more and more uncosted promises.
An awful lot of people seem to want to believe in the ridiculous utopian fantasy that the post-Brexit Tories (that will have just been taken over by the most fanatical hard-right fringe of the party) would suddenly stop deliberately underfunding the NHS and attacking its workforce in order to justify their policy of carving it up for privatisation, or begin reversing their deliberate house price inflation schemes.
If there is any money to be saved from quitting the EU (which is debatable given the likelihood of Brexit triggering a deep recession and more than cancelling out any savings), who on earth would be naive enough to imagine that the newly emboldened hard-right fringe elements of the Tory party wouldn't simply funnel it all towards the super-wealthy minority (as is the Tory way)?
A dangerous gamble
Of course Cameron is right that Brexit would be a dangerous gamble. There's absolutely no way that entrusting the economy to a bunch of hard-right fanatics with no economic restructuring plan could be considered the safe option, however it's important to recognise how we got into this ridiculous situation in the first place.
The reason the UK is having a referendum on membership of the EU has absolutely nothing to do with giving the people a say in their own affairs. David Cameron and the Tories have time and again demonstrated their utter contempt for participatory democracy. The reason we're having this referendum is that in 2015 it suited David Cameron's personal self-interest to offer it.
Cameron's short-term pay off
Back in 2015 Cameron was facing a huge rift in the Tory party between the Eurosceptic and Europhile factions, he'd just suffered two of his own MPs making high profile defections to UKIP and he was in severe danger of losing millions of anti-EU Tory votes to UKIP.
Offering the Eurosceptic Tory MPs the referendum they wanted was a good way of stopping any more defections to UKIP, and it also drew the UKIP thorn. The move wrong-footed UKIP so badly that we ended up witnessing the utterly bizarre spectacle of Nigel Farage explicitly directing UKIP supporters to vote for the Tories rather than for his own UKIP candidates. The short-term payoff for Cameron was that the fanatical hard-right Thatcherism on steroids party ended up nicking more votes from Labour than they did from their Tory ideological blood brothers!
Cameron's ploy was undeniably successful in the short-term, but the consequence was a referendum on the EU that neither side were remotely prepared for. Just as the Vote Leave campaign have absolutely nothing resembling a coherent post-Brexit restructuring plan, the Remain campaign have been left scrabbling desperately to form any kind of positive case for Britain to stay in the EU.
Cameron the gambler
It's absolutely clear that David Cameron is a reckless gambler from his decision to turn the Scottish referendum into an "all or nothing" choice rather than offer the Scottish electorate their preferred option of Devolution Max. By ruling out the most popular compromise option and setting the referendum up as a straight choice between self-rule and continued subservience to Westminster, Cameron was guilty of gambling the entire future of Scotland just to avoid giving them a few more powers.
The panic stricken last few days of the Better Together campaign featured the much ridiculed "Vow" (which handed Scotland many of the devolved powers that Cameron's absurd gamble was designed to avoid giving them in the first place) and the bizarre spectacle of Gordon Brown riding to Cameron's rescue with a load of fearmongering pensioner-scaring rhetoric. The fearful hysteria from the Unionist camp in the last week of the Scottish independence debate demonstrated that Cameron was an awful lot closer to losing his "all or nothing" gamble than he ever imagined that he would be.
After almost losing an extremely risky gamble like that, anyone with any sense would surely have learned their lesson and been careful to avoid putting themselves in that kind of situation again, but Cameron clearly didn't.
Cameron's EU gamble is even more risky than his Scottish gamble because, although it had a number of flaws in it, at least the SNP bothered to draw up an actual plan for what a post-independence Scotland would look like so that people could read it and consider it on its merits. The Vote Leave campaign has nothing more than hot air and a litany of completely uncosted fantasy land promises.
The prophecies of post-Brexit economic doom from the Remain camp (and a host of international organisations) have sometimes been far-fetched, but anyone who thinks that the financial markets are going to react positively to a rapid bailout of the EU with no kind of economic restructuring plan must be living in Brexit fantasy land where the UK suddenly emerges Phoenix-like from the wreckage of a four decade long hard-right neoliberal experiment to become some kind of idealised 1950s style utopia.
You only need to look at the stock market slumps and falls in the value of the Pound when pro-Brexit polls come out to understand the kind of chaos that is on the cards if people allow unrealistic utopian expectations to lure them into gambling on Brexit, but such economic turmoil wouldn't be their fault. It would be David Cameron's fault for creating this ridiculous gambling opportunity in the first place.
Conclusion
David Cameron is guilty of gambling the entire future of the UK economy for the short-term benefit of stealing some of UKIP's thunder in the 2015 General Election. Even if you think people must be pretty damned gullible to entrust the future of the UK economy to a bunch of fanatically hard-right chancers with no economic restructuring plan whatever, at least Brexit voters are making that gamble because they believe in it. David Cameron didn't believe in it at all when he actually created the opportunity for Brexiters to "roll the dice" in the first place. His only consideration at the time was his own selfish short-term strategic self-interest.
Anyone who would gamble the entire future of the UK economy for a little bit of short-term strategic advantage is clearly being an appalling hypocrite if they then go on to criticise other people for participating in the reckless gamble that they were guilty of actually creating in the first place.
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