Had the Tories spent less time trying to steal our private data, maybe they could have focused on preventing terrorism?

The Manchester Arena atrocity couldn't have come at a better time for Theresa May and the Tories.

May was completely falling to pieces over her hated policy of asset stripping people who get ill and need social care, Labour were surging in the polls (especially in Wales) and even the mainstream press were finally holding Theresa May to account over her maliciousness and ineptitude!

Then some horrible bastard killed and maimed dozens of innocent people in Manchester, including several children. Political campaigning was suspended, and Theresa May and her bumbling Home Secretary Amber Rudd could spend the following day strutting around, looking important and doing COBR meetings instead of floundering about ineptly trying to defend their horrific Dementia Tax.

Since campaigning was suspended I decided to give it a day until I asked the vital question:

What could the Tory government have done differently in order to prevent this sickening attack?

If you're the kind of person who pays attention to what your government is up to, you'll know that the Tories spent a considerable amount of effort last year on introducing the most extreme state surveillance laws anywhere in the developed world.

The Snoopers' Charter (The Investigatory Powers Act 2016 -to give it it's official name) is an astounding piece of legislation. Not only does it give the state the power to tell lies in court to secure convictions, it also gives over 20,000 state employees the ability to go trawling through all of our private communications data.

Freedom of information requests have revealed that thousands of state employees at dozens of non-terrorism related state agencies (such as the Gambling Commission, the Health and Safety Executive, and the Food Standards Agency) have been empowered to snoop on us.

The question now, in light of the appalling terrorist attacks in Westminster and Manchester that have happened since the Snoopers' Charter came into force, is was this snooping law an effective use of time and resources?

Instead of focusing their efforts on ensuring that a load of people at the Food Standards Agency can now access your private communications data, maybe the government could have done something that would have actually helped to prevent these appalling terrorist attacks?

This isn't political point scoring. It's a legitimate line of enquiry.

Both of the horrifying attacks in Westminster and Manchester happened under this Tory government. And both of them happened after their flagship state snooping policy became law in November 2016.

Asking how these awful attacks happened, and what the government could have done differently to prevent them are legitimate questions.

These are legitimate questions that the mainstream media should be asking (instead of crudely and dishonestly smearing the opposition party leader in order to help Theresa May back into power).

I think it's legitimate to conclude that if the Tories had expended less time and resources on their obsession with accessing our private communications data, and some more time and resources on measures that would actually help to prevent terrorism, then perhaps these terrible attacks might have been prevented?

 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.

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95 years on and virtually nothing has changed

If you use the mainstream media as your primary source of political information you are willingly allowing yourself to be misled.

A London School of Economics study found that just 11% of newspaper articles about Jeremy Corbyn bother to accurately represent a single one of his policies. In the extreme-right Daily Mail and Express the figure was 0%.

If you think the BBC is impartial you're deluding yourself. It was only earlier this year that an internal BBC investigation found that their politics editor Laura Kuenssberg fabricated a fake story about Jeremy Corbyn to launch a partisan political attack on him. She was allowed to keep her job, and she's still pushing so much pro-Tory bias that she recently warped the story of Theresa May hiding from the press into an "isn't Jeremy Corbyn shit" Tweet!

The UK print media is overwhelmingly dominated by right-wing propaganda rags, and even the supposed left-liberal media outlets (The Guardian, Mirror and Independent) that have much smaller circulations repeatedly fail to hold the Tory government to account for their shockingly woeful track record.and instead focus on dividing the opposition or lazily "churnalising" government press releases.

Just look at the appalling track record of the Tory government:

• They promised to eliminate the budget deficit by May 2015, but they now admit that they don't have a chance of clearing it until well after 2021. That's over eleven years to do what they said they would do in less than five, and now the person responsible for this abject failure is quitting as an MP in order to work as editor of one of the newspapers that is supposed to hold the government to account!

• The Tories have created more new public debt in seven years than every single Labour government in history.

• The Tory government has vandalised the NHS with £billions in cuts at a time of rising demand for services. They've also intensified the NHS recruitment crisis by driving 10,000 potential nurses out of the profession in a single year by scrapping NHS bursaries.

• The Tories have tripled university tuition fees meaning that students in England now face the highest fees for study at public university anywhere in the world. The debts they're incurring means that 2/3 of them will never pay off their student debts despite paying a 9% aspiration tax on their disposable income for their entire working lives.

• In 2010 Theresa May promised to reduce net migration to below 100,000. Instead she oversaw the biggest influx of migrants in British history during her time at the Home Office.

• The Tories have overseen the lowest levels of house building since the 1920s at a time of increased demand (thanks to the record braking immigration boom they've overseen) meaning house prices have soared to the most unafforadble levels in history.

• The Tories divided the nation over Brexit and didn't even bother to develop a contingency plan in case the public voted the way the hard-right fringe of the Tory party told them to. Then instead of dealing with the mess they created, they all ran away leaving the fanatically right-wing authoritarian opportunist Theresa May to take over unchallenged.

• Theresa May's Brexit "negotiating strategy" is a sick joke. It took her 6 months of dithering to come up with her "no deal is better than a bad deal" rhetoric, but she negligently didn't even bother to investigate the seriousness of the economic consequences of it before making the threat of a "no deal" strop away from the negotiating table the centrepiece of her strategy!

• The Tories' proposed Great Repeal Bill is an astoundingly bare-faced assault on democracy which will allow Tory ministers to rewrite thousands of laws with no parliamentary scrutiny (so much for voting for Brexit because the EU is undemocratic eh?).

• After dithering for 9 months Theresa May finally triggered Article 50 and then plunged the nation into the turmoil of an opportunistic and self-serving snap election when her ministers should undeniably have been concentrating on the most complex and risky set of diplomatic negotiations the UK has ever faced.

• The Tories have been conducting systematic abuse of disabled people, including the confiscation of over 50,000 mobility vehicles and a dehumanising and discriminatory corporate administered Work Capacity Assessment regime that costs the taxpayer far more to operate than it will ever save in reduced benefits payments.

• The Tories are imposing the harshest cuts to school funding in decades (click here to see how much they're planning to slash from your local school's budget).

• The Tories have created a social care funding crisis with their £4.6 billion worth of cuts. This means even more pressure on the NHS, more pressure on unpaid carers, and more vulnerable people dying.

• The Tories have overseen devastating local government cuts, and they've deliberately targeted the harshest cuts at the poorest Labour-voting areas, whilst actually handing funding increases to several well-to-do Tory councils in the Home Counties!

• The Tories just introduced the most extreme surveillance laws of any developed nation on earth that allow over 20,000 state employees to snoop on your private data, (including thousands of non-terrorism related workers employed by agencies like the Health and Safety Executive, The Gambling Commission and the Food Standards Agency).

• Three of Theresa May's senior staffers quit within a week of her announcing her self-serving snap election, but the mainstream press barely cover the story. Just imagine all the ridicule and condemnation from the press if it was Jeremy Corbyn's staffers abandoning ship at such a crucial juncture.

• In 2016 the Tories voted down an opposition amendment to their Housing Bill to ensure that all rented properties are "fit for human habitation". Just imagine the mentality of a party that believes that landlords shouldn't have an obligation to ensure they ensure their properties are habitable before they rent then to people to live in.

• Since 2010 the Tories have increased the number of children growing up in poverty by 400,000, and now their latest attacks on child welfare system and in-work benefits are set to dump 250,000 more kids into lives of poverty.

• Since 2010 the number of people using food banks and the number of workers on exploitative zero hours contracts have both risen exponentially.

• The Tories have overseen the longest sustained decline in workers' wages since records began meaning that the UK has suffered the worst decline in wages in the developed world apart from crisis-stricken Greece.

• Despite the parliamentary foreign affairs select committee finding that Saudi Arabia is using British weapons to commit war crimes in Yemen the Tories are still granting arms export licences to Saudi Arabia, and Theresa May was over there grovelling in front of their tyrannical islamist rulers this Easter.

• Under Tory rule the UK is the only country in the developed world where workers' wages are declining while the economy actually grows. Just think about it. If the economy is growing but the share of the wealth going to workers is falling, where on earth is all of that extra wealth going? To the tiny super-rich minority of course.

• The Tories signed up to an absolutely ridiculous nuclear price-fixing deal with the Chinese and French to bribe them into building a nuclear power station for us (we can't build our own because the Tories privatised all of our nuclear expertise in the 1990s) in return the UK taxpayer will subsidise them by paying double the market rate for electricity for 35 years!

• Theresa May keeps claiming to be a strong leader but she's such a self-serving coward that she's refusing to face the other party leaders in a live TV debate, she turns her campaign events into Tory "safe spaces" filled with Tory party loyalists bussed in from miles away, with ordinary members of the public banned and the press barred from asking her questions. She's behaving more like Kim Jong Un than a British Prime Minister.

Despite all of this material to attack the Tories with and much more, the mainstream press continue cheerleading for them, and allowing the ridiculously backwards Tory "strong and stable leadership" mantra to go unchallenged.

Just think about it. Is it any wonder that the tax-dodging newspaper billionaires and the hacks who work for them are so biased in favour of the Tories given that Jeremy Corbyn is vowing to clamp down on tax-dodgers and make sure that the super-rich actually pay their way?

So never mind the newspaper billionaires, push out those who have brought your country to the verge of ruin.

Well, at least check out some of the Labour Party policies that the right-wing billionaire press barons don't want you thinking about before you decide how to vote.

 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.

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David Cameron "did a funny" so all is forgiven

David Cameron has been using his lucrative US public speaking tour to brazenly reinvent history but the mainstream media (including supposedly left-wing outlets like the Guardian) were too busy cooing over his Trump joke to bother holding him to account over his absurd revisionism.

Cameron made a lame jape about the best thing about having resigned in disgrace after losing his EU referendum gamble was that he no longer has to listen to wiretapped Donald Trump conversations and the mainstream press adored it. They lavished Cameron with praise for his wit, as if he'd thought of the joke himself rather than had it written for him by one of his script writers.

The press were so busy lauding Cameron for his edgy topical joke and helping him rehabilitate his ruined reputation that they totally failed in their duty to hold him to account over the revisionist drivel he was spouting.

Cameron claimed in his speech that the US and the UK have been "the guardians of freedom, of tolerance, of equality and, yes, of justice".

Freedom

As Prime Minister David Cameron was a big supporter of stripping law abiding citizens and civic organisations of their freedoms.

Cameron's government introduced the Gagging Law to stop charities, voluntary groups, community organisations and trade unions from criticising the Tory government.

One of the freedoms David Cameron and his savagely authoritarian Home Secretary Theresa May despised the most was the right to privacy. Cameron's government introduced Internet filters and legalised the unlawful snooping that the secret services had been doing for decades. Shortly after he quit the Internet Snoopers' Charter was passed, meaning that the concept of freedom from state snooping has been essentially abolished and the UK state gained unprecedented snooping powers that would have turned the East German Stasi green with envy.

Here's a genuine David Cameron quote to give you a clear idea of what his true feelings about freedom were.

"For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens 'as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone." [source]

What he was clearly expressing there was a desire to scrap the freedom of ordinary law-abiding citizens to go about their lives without being snooped on and persecuted by the state.

Tolerance

David Cameron's track record on tolerance is a mixed bag. To his credit he fought down the right-wing of his own party and collaborated with Labour, the Lib-Dems and various other opposition parties to deliver gay equality. But on the other hand Cameron and his government were never averse to using extreme divisive rhetoric in order to appeal to the extreme-right demographic. 

Take Theresa May's trolling of high migration neighbourhoods with her appalling "Go Home" vans. Take Theresa May's regular use of divisive anti-migrant rhetoric to appeal to the Ukipper demographic. Take Theresa May's spouse visa rules that openly discriminate against women, and against people who live in the less affluent regions of the UK. Take Iain Duncan Smith's sickening dehumanisation campaign against sick and disabled people. Take George Osborne's austerity agenda that loaded the burden of cuts mainly onto the shoulders of women.

Cameron always talked a good game on tolerance, but the divisive language and discriminatory practices of his government clearly proved that Cameron's Tory party had a very different agenda to the inclusive tolerant agenda Cameron so often liked to talk about.

Equality

The United Kingdom is an astoundingly unequal country. Parts of the UK are the richest places in the world, but of the 10 poorest regions in northern Europe, 9 are in the UK. 

David Cameron's government made this situation very much worse by handing one tax break after another to the super-rich minority, whilst loading the burden of George Osborne's ideological austerity agenda onto everyone else. The result of which is that the super-rich minority ended up literally doubling their wealth, while ordinary working people suffered the worst collapse in the value of their wages since records began.

Cameron's government were so successful in rigging the economy in favour of the super-rich minority that the UK was the only country in the developed world to see wages falling in value while the economy was actually growing. 

If the economy was growing, but the share of the wealth going to working people was in decline, where did all of the extra money go? To the tiny super-rich minority who bankrolled Cameron's Tory party of course.

Justice

If David Cameron's pretensions about being a champion of freedom and equality were laughable, then his claim to have been some kind of guardian of justice as Prime Minister was frankly absurd.

Who could forget that it was David Cameron's government that stripped legal aid to the bone in order to ensure that ever fewer ordinary people have access to adequate legal representation?

Who could forget that David Cameron's government was ruled to be unlawfully discriminating against people with mental health disabilities by forcing them through their discriminatory Work Capacity Assessment regime, and that Cameron's government ignored the ruling and carried on regardless?

Who could forget that David Cameron's government set about privatising vast swathes of the justice system creating loads of glaringly obvious financial conflicts of interest?

Who could forget that David Cameron's government trashed the concept of open justice by introducing Secret Courts where a person can have their fate decided in a courtroom they are not allowed to enter, under charges they are not allowed to know based on evidence they are not allowed to see?

Who could forget that when David Cameron's government were judged to have broken the law by unlawfully forcing thousands of unemployed people onto unpaid "workfare" placements, they stuck two fingers up at the justice system by rewriting the rules and retroactively applied them so that their unlawful rules would have been lawful had they been written that way at the time?

Who could forget that this retroactive rewriting of the law scam was subsequently ruled unlawful in the courts?

Conclusion

David Cameron gambled the entire future of the UK in order to gain a little bit of short-term party political advantage and he lost.

Instead of remaining in politics to try to fix the situation he himself created, he ran off at the first opportunity to embark on a lucrative public speaking tour of the United States in which he spouts absolute drivel about how he was some kind of guardian of the things his government relentlessly attacked.

Instead of holding him to account for this disgraceful behaviour the mainstream media overlook it all because he "did a funny" about Donald Trump.

The media are supposed to hold the powerful to account and expose their lies, not help them to polish up their tarnished reputations and laugh obsequiously at their jokes.

 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.

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Theresa May's Snoopers' Charter gives 20,000+ people the ability to go data trawling

People who were actually paying attention to what Theresa May was up to will already know that her Internet Snoopers' Charter allows all kinds of state employees to trawl through the private communications data of innocent people. Until now we didn't really have much idea of how many people Theresa May has given permission to snoop on innocent law-abiding citizens, but now we know that the number is at least 20,000!

The research was done by Claire Broadley at Who is Hosting This. Over 100 Freedom of Information requests were submitted, and although several government agencies including the Home Office (the department that actually introduced the Snoopers' Charter!) didn't bother to respond, those that did respond have revealed that over 20,000 people have been given the power to snoop on the private communication and browsing data of innocent people.

Unsurprisingly there are a lot of cops and military personnel in the list of 20,000+, but there are also 45 people at the Food Standards Agency, 56 at the Gambling Commission, 59 at the DWP, 326 at the Department of Health Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, 75 at the Information Commissioner’s Office, 548 at the Office of Communications, 45 at the Health and Safety Executive, and hundreds more at various other non-terrorism related government agencies.

Even if you're the kind of person who remains unconcerned at the government legislating that our Internet providers create massive hackable data dumps of all of the private communications data of millions of innocent people, and nonchalant that these data dumps can be browsed by the employees of all manner of UK government agencies, surely you've got to accept that allowing 20,000+ people to trawl these data dumps of private browsing and communications data is an obvious recipe for data misuse?

Do you really believe that nobody amongst these 20,000 government employees might try to use their new snooping powers to do stuff like search for blackmail material or tittle tattle to sell to the tabloid press, commit industrial espionage, settle old scores by leaking embarrassing personal information, search for inside information to sell on or manipulate markets with, trawl around looking for sexually explicit material to masturbate over or sell, cyber stalk their current or ex partner, or any manner of other ways of misusing the private communications data they've been handed access to by Theresa May's government?

The really interesting thing is that there are right-wing authoritarian people out there who defend this to the hilt. These right-wing blowhards are normally the kind of people to furiously decry the nanny state and the meddling of quangos like the Health and Safety Executive. But now, because it's their beloved nanny-dominatrix Theresa May has imposed the most extreme surveillance system of any developed nation in history, they're suddenly deliriously happy that so many government agencies have been given permission to trawl through everyone's private data, and unable to see any potential problem whatever with the creation of vast hackable data dumps, or the fact that over 20,000 people have been given permission to trawl them, and the recipe for large-scale data misuse that entails.

 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.

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The terrifying right-wing contempt for justice and the rule of law

The underlying contempt for justice amongst many on the political right has been clear for some time. It's come to the fore in recent times with the British right-wing propaganda rags attacking judges as "enemies of the people" and now Donald Trump Twitter abusing a well respected judge for daring to over-rule his Muslim ban as unconstitutional, but for those of us who have been paying attention, it's been an obvious problem for a long time.

You only have to look back at Theresa May's appalling track record at the Home Office to see manifestations of this opposition to the concept of open justice.

One of the big alarm bells was the introduction of Secret Courts through "Justice and Security" legislation in 2013. This legislation fundamentally undermines the concept that justice needs to be seen to be done in order to be effective. If people can be locked up by a court they can't enter on charges they don't know relating to evidence they're not allowed to see, then how can anyone know that the justice system is being administered fairly?

Theresa May's reaction to the Edward Snowden revelations was telling. Instead of seeking justice against the people who had been unlawfully stealing the private communication data of millions of British people and businesses, she introduced rushed legislation to temporarily legalise what they had been doing unlawfully for years (Dripa) and then permanently legalised mass data retention and snooping by all manner of non-terrorism related state agencies through the Snoopers' Charter, an act that also retroactively legalised the criminal behaviour of the surveillance state and allows the state to lie in court in order to secure convictions!.

Theresa May's next huge display of contempt for the rule of law came when she attempted to bypass parliament entirely out of a desire to conduct the Brexit process as an autocrat who gets to make and repeal laws at their personal will, free from legislative or judicial oversight.

As this astounding power grab was defeated in the courts the right-wing press went into an unprecedented frenzy of condemnation. The tabloid hatchet jobs on the judges who ruled in favour of parliamentary sovereignty (against autocracy) were absolutely shocking. It's hard to imagine how anyone could be uneducated enough not to be horrified at the Daily Mail describing judges as "enemies of the people", but millions of people actually applauded these displays of contempt for the rule of law under the delusion that High Court judges are the evil metropolitan elite, and Theresa May is some kind of not-at-all dictatorial woman of the people!

Revealing their true character Theresa May and the Tories refused to condemn the appalling tabloid hatchet jobs on the judges. As far as they were concerned a wave of public contempt towards the justice system was exactly what they needed in order to disempower parliament and the courts and centralise even more political power in the hands of the Theresa May and the Tory party.

Credit: Sousa & Machedo Arts

The refusal of the Tory government to condemn the abuse of judges was deeply shocking, but the sight of an actual President of the United States actively delegitimising and threatening judges is pretty near top-level craziness.

Trump signed an astonishing 22 Executive Orders in his first couple of weeks as President. It soon became clear that he didn't even bother to read some of them. He apparently had little idea that Steve Bannon had promoted himself onto the National Security Council in one of the Orders he signed without bothering to understand. 

It's no wonder that this blizzard of hastily drafted Executive Orders is falling foul of the United States constitution. Trump's Muslim Ban was so profoundly unconstitutional it's astonishing that it was ever enacted. Not as astonishing though as Trump's petulant and abusive reaction to being denied his own way by the justice system.

You don't have to be an expert in the history of the American justice system to understand that a sitting President publicly lambasting a judge for the "crime" of upholding the constitution of the United States is utterly extraordinary stuff.

Neither do you have to be an expert in the authoritarian dictatorships of the 20th Century to see that contempt for the rule of law goes hand-in-hand with despotism. There's little excuse for not at least having heard of the political show trials in Nazi Germany, the Great Purge in Soviet Russia or the campaigns of extrajudicial killings carried out by US backed Latin American dictators.

My mention of Soviet Russia makes it clear that justice-hating despots can come from the left or the right, but modern manifestations of this contempt for justice are clearly coming from the political right:Theresa May's repeated assaults on the justice system; the Britain First leader openly calling for instant lynch mob killings on the streets;  the baying attacks on judges from extreme-right propaganda rags like the Daily Mail and the Express,  the Michigan Republican leader Dan Adamini calling for a repeat of the 1970 Kent State shooting of unarmed protesters; Donald Trump Twitter-ranting about the judge who dared to defy his Muslim Ban by upholding the US constitution.

It's pretty clear where this contempt for justice stems from. Wielders of political and economic power like to see justice system as something that exists primarily to defend their interests. They certainly don't see it as something that exists in order protect the interests of ordinary people from them.

The establishment elitists see justice as a commodity that can be bought and sold, not something that exists to serve everyone. Thus the extraordinary tantrums when the justice system intervenes to prevent them carrying out some of their appalling schemes.

The rage of the Express and the Daily Mail against the judges who ruled to protect the concept of parliamentary sovereignty, and the rage of Donald Trump against the judge who upheld the United States constitution both come from the same essential source. The hard-right craving for despotism and the establishment of a permanent dictatorship of those with the most capital.

 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.

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The baying enforced optimism mob

British people have a tendency to point at the absurdity of American politics and exclaim stuff like "phew, at least we're not as bad as that" in order to make ourselves feel better about our own corrupt and malfunctioning political system.

Sometimes we have a point. Even the archaic and desperately unrepresentative Westminster voting system probably couldn't result in the candidate who lost the election by 3 million votes becoming our political leader (although in 1951 Churchill got 230,000 fewer votes than Attlee and somehow won the election), and Theresa May's press team have yet come out with anything quite as bonkers as "alternative facts".

In other ways the British system is even more crackers than the American system. Take Theresa May's appallingly invasive Snoopers' Charter, the likes of which simply couldn't happen (legally) in America because the American public are technically protected from this kind of invasive state interference by the US Constitution.

Another example of a kind of madness that is peculiar to the British is the enforced optimism about Brexit. Anyone raising doubts or questions about the glories of Brexit is now routinely shouted down, told to "shut up" and derided as a "Remoaner", "traitor", "sore loser", "whinger" and all manner of other Brexiter insults and character attacks by a baying mob of furious Brexit fanatics.

Of all of the insults hurled by the enforced optimism crowd "Remoaner" is  by far the most lacking in self-awareness. Brexit only came about because anti-European campaigners relentlessly moaned about Europe for 40 years, then immediately after they got what they wanted, anyone who raises concerns of any kind about the conduct of Tory Brexit is suddenly guilty of the heinous crime of "moaning"!

It doesn't seem to matter a jot to the enforced optimism crowd that Theresa May has outlined a savagely right-wing Tory interpretation of Brexit that is almost certain to end up isolating the UK from our 27 former European allies.

Attempting to cherry pick access to the Single Market for favoured corporations (Theresa May specifically mentioned banking and vehicle manufacturing for these special favours in her woeful Brexit speech) is spectacularly unlikely to work, because no sane club would ever allow departing members to cherry-pick themselves a better deal than the deal offered to the actual remaining fee-paying members.

Theresa May's over-optimistic cherry-picking strategy looks bad enough in its own right, but it looks even worse when backed up with the threat that "we'll turn ourselves into a bargain basement corporate tax haven if you don't give us what we want, and then you'll be sorry".

Thus Tory Brexit is clearly going to be a lose-lose situation for ordinary British businesses and citizens. Either we get a country that is even more rigged in favour of major corporations than it is now (they get to benefit from Single Market access while the rest of us are locked out and have to pay tariffs), or we end up in a corporate tax haven dystopia where public services and infrastructure are slashed away at even more than they already have been in order to cover the cost of bribing multinational corporations to locate here.
Don't dare to point this out though, or you're certain to be furiously denounced as a "Remoner" or even a "traitor" by the enforced optimism mob.

Another indicator of this delusional enforced optimism is all of the ludicrous talk of rushing through trade deals with other countries. 

Theresa May pinned her hopes on the prospect of a quickfire trade deal with Trump's America in her Brexit speech as if the Trump administration are going to just hand Britain a wonderfully beneficial deal instead of putting our diplomatically isolated country into a half-nelson and demanding as many benefits for American corporations as possible in return for a face-saving deal for Theresa May to crow about.

Imagine the delusional levels of optimism necessary to imagine that the socialist NHS principle of providing care on the basis of need, rather than the ability to pay for it would survive a Tory-Trump trade deal.

Aside from the US and EU (our biggest trading partners by miles) talk of other trade deals is delusional nonsense too. We have obvious cultural links with countries like New Zealand, South Africa and India, but we export twice as much to tiny Belgium as all three combined, so they're hardly likely to rescue us if Theresa May succeeds in erecting a vast trade barrier between Britain and the continent.

As for China; who could forget Chinese State Media slamming Brexit as a display of a "losing mindset" and Chinese experts laughing off the fantasy of a quickfire China trade deal with estimates that such a deal would likely take a team of 500 British diplomats ten years to make?

Cartoon credit: Kevin Kallaugher

The enforced optimism crowd keep telling us that Brexit represents a wonderful opportunity for Britain to draw up brilliant new trade deals all over the world, but the geopolitical reality is a lot more sobering.

Britain has put itself in an extraordinary position of diplomatic weakness, because every potential trade deal partner will know perfectly well that we need them more than they need us, and will therefore be looking to extract as many favours and bribes as possible in return for signing our hastily cobbled-together trade deals.

What is even more worrying than the delusionally over-optimistic interpretations of the Tory Brexit shambles is the way that all of this fantastical nonsense is ruthlessly enforced by a baying mob of furious Brexiters, who see any efforts to doubt or question the Tory handling of Brexit as completely unacceptable attempts to snatch away their beloved Brexit utopia.

Us Brits can continue to laugh and sneer at Donald Trump and the farcical state of American politics if we like, but the goings on closer to home are just as ludicrous. The Tories and their chums in the right-wing press are busy concocting bizarre Orwellian narratives (Theresa May and the party of wealth and privilege are the anti-establishment rebellion! The bullies are the victims! Our weakness is our strength!) and millions of people are soaking up these counter-factual stories and then mindlessly regurgitating them as if they're their own well-considered political opinions rather than painfully obvious drivel they've just obsorbed through the process of mental osmosis.

Let's be honest with ourselves: With the farcical shit-parade of Tory Brexit going on, we don't really occupy sneering-at-others territory do we?

 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.

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