Brexit Party and the Faragists know exactly what they're doing when it comes to propaganda. Make as many false-promises to as many people as possible in the hope that they're dumb enough to believe that they'll actually follow through on any of it.
Their position on British Steel is absolutely extraordinary. They've proposed a John Lewis style workers' partnership to save the institution from insolvency, but they also propose reducing UK tariffs on almost all imports to zero, meaning the UK would be absolutely flooded with cheap imports, meaning the inevitable ruination of the British Steel industry, workers' partnership or not.
But besides the fact that their stated aims are mutually contradictory nonsense, it gets even worse. The candidate they're standing in the Peterborough by-election is a guy called Mike Greene who works for a private investment fund called Greybull Capital LLP.
These are the owners who have driven British Steel into insolvency, which is just one of the numerous company collapses they've overseen in recent years.
They were behind the collapse of Monarch Airlines that collapsed owing £500 million to suppliers and creditors, and leaving 110,000 stranded tourists across Europe who needed repatriating at a cost of £60 million to the British taxpayer.
Then there was the subsequent collapse of the spun-off Monarch Aircraft Engineering the following year with the loss of 408 jobs.
Snooker and pool fans will remember the collapse of Rileys in 2012, which was then acquired by Greybull who then flogged off half the chain's sites before ditching the lot in 2014. Rileys was destroyed, but Greybull made a 10% profit on their dealings so hooray for them eh?
They were involved in the Comet buyout before the electrical retailer collapsed into insolvency in 2013 triggering the loss of 7,000 jobs. This bankruptcy resulted in a £25 million loss to the public purse in unpaid VAT.
Then there was the collapse of My Local in 2016 with the loss of 1,200 jobs, with Greene intimately involved in that particular Greybull insolvency.
And now in 2019 we've got Greybull driving British Steel into administration too, with 5,000 jobs at risk, and another 2,000 through supply chains.
And Brexit Party are gleefully fielding one of Greybull's senior figures as their parliamentary candidate in the Peterborough by-election.
And herein lies the great deceit of the Faragists.
They appeal to people's patriotism and pretend that it's the prideful British thing to do to vote for the most militant form of Brexit possible, but then their first candidate ever for parliament is a guy who works for a faceless vulture fund that's driven loads of British businesses into insolvency, destroyed literally thousands of British jobs, and left the UK taxpayer footing the bill time and time again.
They're not pushing a "no deal" Brexit because they think it'll be good for Britain, they're pushing it because they know that they can make vast amounts of money by betting against Britain, the Pound, and British companies as they push the UK economy over an avoidable cliff.
Then they can make even more by flooding their ill-gotten gains back into the UK to buy up £billions in distressed British assets on the cheap in the resulting chaos.
They want to do to Britain what Mike and his Greybull mates have been doing to British companies like Monarch, Rileys, My Local, Comet, and British Steel.
"No deal" Brexit is a deeply unpatriotic national asset stripping strategy being sold to the gullible as the patriotic thing to support, but the fact that the Brexit Party's first ever parliamentary candidate is a key player in the Greybull asset-stripping operation tells you all you need to know.
But then the bookies have Greene and Brexit Party as favourites to win in Peterborough, so none of the opposition parties are being clear enough in highlighting this guy's insolvency-strewn CV.
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After I pointed out Vince Cable's pivotal role in flogging off the Royal Mail at miles below its true value a couple of hard-right pro-privatisation astroturfers turned up with a novel argument aimed at defending the sell-off.
Their argument says that Vince Cable and George Osborne flogged off Royal Mail for 330p per share, and after initially soaring to 445p on the first day (because investors realised how under-valued it was) six years later this share price has receded to 260p.
Their argument goes along the lines that 2013 was actually a good time to sell off Royal Mail because six years later in 2019 the share price has fallen by roughly 20%.
What this argument completely ignores is what has been happening at Royal Mail since it was flogged off in 2013.
One of the main revenue streams the new capitalist owners have found is flogging off chunks of Royal Mail land to property developers for £hundreds of millions.
It's estimated that they've already raked in over £400 million in land sales. That's over half of the £787 valuation of the entire Royal Mail property portfolio at the point of sale, raked back in by selling off just a few chunks of inner city prime building land!
For example a 2.7 acres Royal Mail site in Battersea was sold to developers for £101.2 million, but the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition priced it at just £12.9 million.
The neoliberals in government flogged this piece of prime building land off at less than 13% of its real value, meaning the other 87% of the value of this public land went straight to the new private owners.
Another example is the 6.25 acre Mount Pleasant sorting office that was valued at £29 million by the Tory/Lib-Dem government at the point of sale, then flogged off for £193 million just a few years later. A cool £164 million profit for the new corporate owners from Vince and George's deliberately under-valued sale of public land.
That's almost £300 million of Vince Cable and George Osborne's £787 million valuation of the entire freehold Royal Mail property portfolio recovered through the sale of under 10 acres of Royal Mail land!
So did the new corporate owners reinvest these massive property windfalls in the Royal Mail business? Maybe to diversify in the face of collapsing demand for hand delivered letters?
Of course they bloody didn't. They paid it out in bloated executive salaries and shareholder dividends that have exceeded £1 billion since the privatisation!
The last Royal Mail boss just quit with a huge £2.7 million golden goodbye, and his replacement was welcomed with a staggering £5.8 million tax-free golden hello! All paid for not through successful operation of the business, but through selling off public land that was acquired at miles below its true value.
The owners of Royal Mail know that the postal delivery business is not a brilliant money spinner in itself, but that the Royal Mail property portfolio is an absolute goldmine of prime building plots in towns and cities across the nation.
Royal Mail is being asset stripped before our very eyes, with what was publicly-owned land until 2013 being flogged off for massive unearned corporate profits.
They're not doing anything smart, or innovative, or productive to "earn" this cash, they're simply gorging themselves on the vast difference between what the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition said the Royal Mail property portfolio was worth when they flogged it off, and what it's actually worth.
And the incredible thing is that defenders of this maniacal neoliberal zeal for privatisation that sees our public land flogged off at a tiny fraction of its true value will concoct ludicrous little fairy stories about how it was all good, and fine, and proper because the share price happens to have fallen slightly after six years of absolutely brazen asset stripping!
And the sad thing is that some people will be so gullible, and so averse to considering the facts for themselves, that they'll actually mindlessly believe this abject neoliberal nonsense that everything is fine and dandy, and that Osborne and Cable actually did us all a wonderful favour by flogging off our land at a ridiculous fraction of its real value.
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Jacob Rees-Mogg isn't just a ridiculous "Lord Snooty" cartoon caricature of a man, he's also the leader of the secretive 'party within a party' group of Tory ERG Brextremists who are pushing Theresa May towards an economically catastrophic "no deal" Brexit meltdown.
I'm not the only one to have pointed out the way that a significant number of Tory Brextremists are positioning themselves to benefit from Brexit, from Jacob Rees-Mogg opening investment funds in Ireland to maintain access to the Single Market, through top Tory Brextremists like John Redwood and Michael Ashcroft advising their wealthy speculator mates to get their cash out of Britain while they tank the economy, to former Brexit junior minister Steve Baker investing in a company advising their clients to buy gold as insurance against the approaching Tory Brexit meltdown.
It's absolutely clear that a number of Tory Brextremists are simply hard-right disaster capitalists looking to make fortunes betting against Britain, then use the ensuing chaos to tear down the remnants of the social safety net, gut workers' rights and environmental protections, and make £billions buying up distressed British assets on the cheap.
They're steering the UK economy towards the "no deal" cliff edge with the aim of asset stripping the wreckage like vultures stripping the meat off the carcass.
And for anyone arguing that such a deliberate act of national vandalism is far-fetched, consider the fact that the Tory government's own impact assessments rate a "no deal" Brexit as by far the most economically damaging option, (a scenario that would cause an economic meltdown to make the 2007-08 Bankers' crisis look mild in comparison) and that Jacob Rees-Mogg's father actually wrote the book on how to profit from economic crises.
And what better kind of economic crisis is there for profiteering from than one where the speculator class know the exact date it's going to happen in advance?
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.
