Even judged by the staggeringly dishonest standards of his political contemporaries the UKIP leader Paul Nuttall is in a field of his own.
- Nuttall put a furious anti-NHS diatribe up on his website, then when called out about it decided to delete the page and pretend that he now loves the NHS. Only the most ridiculous Internet n00b could believe that deleting the webpage makes things disappear from the Internet.
- Nuttall's LinkedIn profile claimed that he had a PhD from Liverpool Hope University which was an outright lie. His excuse for this one is that the page had nothing to do with him or his team, expecting people to believe that his own LinkedIn profile was actually part of some terrible anti-UKIP conspiracy.
- Nuttall was forced to admit that claims that he'd played professional football for Tranmere Rovers were outright lies. Just imagine the stupidity of a person who thinks that the football nerds wouldn't eventually go through the records to check out such a bold claim.
In the wake of the Hillsborough lie Nuttall seems to have gone into hiding. I can't see his Twitter feed these days because he blocked me for tweeting this photo at him, but I'm told that he's stopped tweeting. He's also completely pulled down his website, presumably to stop people scouring it for more of his blatant lies.
The idea of going into online hiding just a week before a high profile by-election is quite extraordinary.
Most politicians wouldn't try to hide from the lies so pathetically, but it seems that Nuttall's lies are so numerous and so brazen that he feels that he's got no choice but to keep his head down and hope that the people of Stoke Central are stupid enough to elect such an obvious and distasteful liar, with no connections whatever to the area, as their parliamentary representative.
The problem with Paul Nuttall isn't that he's dishonest. If dishonesty was any kind of political impediment how on earth would it be possible to explain David Cameron's political career?
No - the problem is that Nuttall is such a hopelessly bad liar that surely even the most idiotic of people (Daily Express readers, Britain First enthusiasts ...) can't help but see that he's an absolute bullshitter.
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UKIP have clearly learned from the fake news epidemic that swept Donald Trump into the White House, and they're trying to imitate it in their own pathetically amateurish way.The first example of UKIP fake news aimed at influencing the Stoke Central by-election was a pathetically shoddy photoshopped image claiming that Stoke residents were hanging out St George's crosses in order to protest against "unpatriotic" Jeremy Corbyn.
As the Skwawkbox blog pointed out, not only was the image crudely and obviously photoshopped, the Ukipper that did it actually got the flag the wrong way up, which is considered a grave insult in the world of vexillology.
If anyone is "unpatriotic" it's clearly the Ukipper who thought it was fine to photoshop an upside down English flag onto some random house in Stoke.
Soon after the Fake flag protest picture was exposed another one soon appeared, this time showing the Labour by-election candidate Gareth Snell with a burka clad woman. It didn't take much investigation to find the original photo, which was a publicity shot of Gareth Snell with the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
The first image demonstrated the grotesquely ignorant brand of nationalism promoted by extreme right groups like UKIP and Britain First by getting the flag upside down.
The second demonstrates something a lot more distasteful. It clearly shows the Ukipper assumption that the people of Stoke are a bunch of gullible bigots. Whoever decided to turn Jeremy Corbyn into a burka clad woman made two obvious assumptions about the people of Stoke: Firstly that they're gullible enough to fall for another crudely photoshopped image, and secondly that they must be such a bunch of bigots that they'd find a picture of a woman in a burka so terrifying that they'd rush off and vote for UKIP.
I hope the people of Stoke Central are smart enough to see through this appalling fake news bullshit from UKIP, and hand the NHS-hating local address-faking hard-right charlatan Paul Nuttall the electoral defeat he so richly deserves.
If you know anyone who lives in Stoke, or anyone with connections to the city, please consider sharing this article with them to help to publicise the disgusting dirty tricks that UKIP are employing to in order to dupe Stokies into voting for their extreme-right Thatcherism on steroids party.
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.
It was no surprise at all to see that the out-of-touch and elitist Labour Party MP Tristram Hunt was quick to throw his support behind the anti-democratic and unbelievably poorly timed "chicken coup" attempt against the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
It's no surprise that Hunt chose to back the coup because he had spent the last ten months since Corbyn's landslide victory in the Labour leadership election throwing petulant tantrums on the sidelines because the Labour Party membership voted for Corbyn (59.5%) rather than his own favoured candidate from the right-wing fringe of the Labour Party Liz Kendall (who ended up in last place with just 4.5% of the vote).
As soon as the coup attempt started unfolding Hunt was quick to publish an open letter lambasting Jeremy Corbyn for failing to do enough to return a vote for Remain, and demanding his resignation.
The polling evidence suggests that Jeremy Corbyn actually delivered 63% of the Labour Party vote for Remain (just 1% less than the SNP), which is a decent achievement considering the fact that the Labour Remain case was seriously undermined by a Labour Leave campaign that was massively bankrolled by millionaire Tories (funnily enough Hunt didn't reserve any of his Brexit anger for them).
A look at the EU referendum result in Tristram Hunt's constituency of Stoke-on-Trent Central reveals that 69.4% of people voted for Leave, which was the 15th highest Leave vote in the entire country!
Talk about trying to shift the blame for your own failings!
This landslide of Leave voters in his own constituency demonstrates that Tristram Hunt is terribly out of step with his constituents. He clearly failed to mobilise the Remain vote in his own constituency, which is hardly surprising given the fact that he's an Oxbridge elitist who was parachuted into a working-class Labour Party safe seat, meaning he has very little in common with the people he's supposed to represent.
Tristram Hunt is the kind of guy who actually sneers at the hopes and aspirations of "little people" like his constituents. His vision for the future of the Labour Party is that it should be led by Oxbridge 1%ers like him, not by people from ordinary backgrounds like the vast majority of his constituents.
Aside from the fact that Hunt clearly failed to mobilise the Remain vote in his own constituency making his criticism of Jeremy Corbyn look more than a bit hypocritical, there's also the fact that his whinging about Brexit makes it look like he's not remotely interested in listening to his constituents or understanding why they voted for Leave in such overwhelming numbers. Hunt is clearly far more interested in scoring political points against the leader of his own party (who he has worked tirelessly to undermine since day one) than working to understand the anger and frustration that drove so many traditional Labour voters to vote Leave.
Dismissive attitudes like that from elitist Labour MPs like Tristram Hunt are precisely the kind of thing that ends up driving traditional Labour voters into the arms of Thatcherite snake oil merchants like UKIP.
Perhaps the most ridiculous part of Hunt's coup supporting letter was his assertion that "Labour urgently needs to play the role of effective opposition", which in his mind is apparently best achieved by immediately paralysing the Labour Party with an attempted anti-democratic coup against the leader, then a week long refusal to put up a candidate to take him on in a democratic contest!
It's beyond obvious that coup supporters like Tristram Hunt wanted to bully Corbyn into resigning because they knew that their Anyone But Corbyn candidate would get annihilated if a strategically inept, insincere, gaffe-prone political water carrier like Angela Eagle is anywhere near the top of the list for consideration. Now they're delaying and delaying because Corbyn's refusal to be bullied into resignation has backed them into a corner. They have to put up a candidate, but they don't have anyone even remotely capable of beating Corbyn in a democratic vote.
Instead of playing the role of effective opposition, the actions of MPs like Tristram Hunt have created an paralysing impasse. Hunt said he wanted to achieve one thing, but his actions resulted in the polar opposite.
If Hunt was capable of listening to his own advice, then as soon as the vote for Brexit became clear, he would have been demanding that the Labour Party speak with a unified voice in condemnation of David Cameron's failed gamble with the entire future of the UK and the blatant lack of a Tory plan of action for what comes next.
Even if this display of Labour Party unity had only lasted a few weeks, until the public narrative that Brexit was caused by Cameron's gamble was set firm, it would have been good for the party, and very good for the future leadership prospects of whichever Labour MPs made the loudest criticisms of the Tories.
Instead, out-of-touch MPs like Tristram Hunt were so giddy with excitement at the perceived opportunity to launch their pre-planned plot to depose their own leader that they completely failed to consider the wider perspective and ended up kicking the Labour Party down into the hole the Tories had just dug for themselves.
The decision to damage the Labour Party so seriously and then back themselves into a corner, instead just of unifying behind their leader (even if only temporarily) could end up being the eventual undoing of out-of-touch Labour Party elitists like Tristram Hunt. If Jeremy Corbyn fights his re-election campaign on a platform of allowing constituents to democratically deselect Labour MPs who fail to represent their interests (through greed, corruption, adherence to right-wing economic ideology, or petulant efforts to undermine the Labour Party), out-of-touch Labour MPs like Tristram Hunt could find themselves cleared out and replaced with other people who are more interested in actually representing the interests of the people who elected them.
Jeremy Corbyn clearly isn't the main problem with the Labour Party. The main problem is that it is riddled with right-wing out-of-touch elitists like Tristram Hunt who have been parachuted into safe Labour seats where they have nothing in common with the people they're supposed to represent.
Not only have Hunt and his ilk spent the last 10 months petulantly undermining the Labour Party leadership at every opportunity, it's also no wonder that people feel that the Labour Party no longer represents their interests when their MP, with whom they have practically nothing in common, isn't even remotely interested why they actually voted Leave in such huge numbers, but instead is intent only on using the Brexit vote as ammunition to attack his own party leader with.
The Labour Party doesn't need to urgently rid itself of Jeremy Corbyn, it needs to rid itself of out-of-touch, right-wing, elitist Labour MPs like Tristram Hunt who clearly don't give the faintest damn about the views of their constituents.
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.
