First we found out that the Tory Brextremist faction have been gleefully paying tribute to the KKK by going around calling themselves "the Grand Wizards" and then within the space of a day the Tory MP Suella Braveman openly promoted the modern era reworking of the anti-Semitic Nazi era conspiracy theory of Cultural Bolshevism (Kulturbolschewismus) by ranting about the threat of cultural Marxism.
This is definitely a story about obscene bigotry and extreme-right fanaticism within the Tory ranks, but it's also a story of two very different styles of journalism.
The chief political editor of the BBC News Laura Kuenssberg was the one to break the extraordinary Grand Wizards story, but she named no names, and did absolutely nothing to hold the Tories to account for their grotesque tribute to the KKK white supremacist terrorist group who have lynched and killed thousands of people.
In fact once the story that she broke started going mega-viral, she desperately tried to put the story back in its box with an extraordinarily panicked Tweet aimed at downplaying the story, and creating the absurd fiction that none of the Tory ERG Brextremists were aware of the fact that Grand Wizard is the name of the head of the KKK when they started calling themselves "the Grand Wizards".
What Kuenssberg tried to do was portray the scandal as just an innocent mistake, but it simply came off as a desperate last ditch PR damage limitation exercise on behalf of the Tory party after her original matter-of-fact Tweet ballooned into a huge scandal.
Suella Braveman ranting on about the extreme-right Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory demonstrates an extraordinary lack of awareness, and to do it when the Grand Wizards thing was still brewing up into huge scandal was unbelievably bone-headed.
But this time the journalist didn't treat it as some kind of benign anecdote and then desperately try to row the story back when people pointed out how outrageous it was. This time Dawn Foster immediately pointed out to Braveman that the mass-murdering extreme-right terrorist Anders Breivik was fixated with the Cultural Marxist conspiracy theory.
This challenge resulted in Braveman actually doubling-down on her use of the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, claiming that "no one can be offended" because "we're in a war" and "it's damaging to our British genius"!
It's delightful to see a journalist actually holding a politician to account on the dangerous rhetoric they're spouting rather than running damage limitation PR for them like Laura Kuenssberg
But it's disheartening that Dawn is one of the minority who actually do their job and hold the powerful to account, and even more dispiriting to see that most of the mainstream media have chosen to just ignore the fact that a Tory MP and former government minister has been publicly spouting Nazi rhetoric.
Of course there are reasons for this lack of coverage. One is that highlighting an extremely overt and obvious case of Tory anti-Semitism would spectacularly undermine the carefully curated mainstream media narrative that Labour are the nasty bigots with the anti-Semitism problem.
Another reason this story isn't getting traction is that a lot of the pro-Tory establishment propagandists in the mainstream media hack pack understand how much of a headache this would present for Theresa May if it gets amplified.
May would be left with the choice of suspending Breveman from the party which would incur the absolute wrath of the ERG Brextremists, or she could ignore it which would infuriate the "moderate Tories" who detest what she's allowing their party to turn into.
Tories from all factions of the party are already itching to get rid of Theresa May, so her supporters in the press don't want to rock the boat by amplifying this story, for fear of causing the May government to collapse and ushering Jeremy Corbyn into Downing Street in the ensuing General Election.
These outrageous Tory scandals aren't just an indictment of a Tory party that is rushing headlong towards the extreme-right to such an extent that they're publicly espousing the vile rhetoric that motivated Anders Breivik and the Christchurch killer, it's an indictment of the mainstream media for allowing this to grotesque Tory radicalisation go on right in front of their faces as they desperately try every trick in the book to paint the vehemently anti-racist Labour opposition as the terrifying bigots.
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If Theresa May wasn't such a weak and directionless leader the under-secretary of state for Brexit Steve Baker would be in serious trouble for the lunatic conspiracy theories he's been spewing in the House of Commons.
The Brexiteer conspiracy-mongering began in response to Buzzfeed getting hold of a leaked copy of the Tory government's damning Brexit impact assessment.
The conspiracy theory was introduced into the House of Commons by Jacob Rees-Mogg, who is the leader of the hard-right ERG Brextremist pressure group that Baker himself used to lead until Theresa May promoted him into her government. The conspiracy theory is that someone called Charles Grant from the CER had uncovered plot by civil servants to "develop an economic model to show that all [Brexit] options are bad".
Instead of dismissing this bonkers conspiracy theory as the nonsense that it is, the Brexit junior minister Baker responded by saying "I'm sorry to say that my honourable friend's account is essentially correct".
Opposition MPs reacted furiously to this attack on the impartiality of the civil service and Charles Grant immediately released a statement that "I did not say or imply that the Treasury had deliberately developed a model to show that all options outside the customs union were bad with an intention to influence policy."
The leader of the civil servant's union Dave Penman slammed Baker's conspiracy-mongering by saying that "to stand at the despatch box and refuse to challenge a half-baked conspiracy theory about the civil service - one that even now is being disowned by its supposed source - is the height of irresponsibility from a serving minister."
Penman went on to say that Baker is "incapable of separating his ideological position from being a minister of state" and called on Theresa May to reflect on whether he's fit to be a government minister.
Aside from attacking the civil service Baker also provoked fury by claiming that the Brexit impact assessment should not be believed because all government reports are "always wrong".
So here we have an actual government minister undermining the government and the civil service with crackpot conspiracy theories and claims that all government research and evidence is worthless, yet Theresa May does absolutely nothing to hold him to account.
The reason for her cowardice is obvious. Both Baker and Rees-Mogg are influential members of the secretive ERG Brextremist pressure group. May knows that this group has sufficient members to force a vote of no-confidence in her leadership, so she doesn't dare stand up to them in any way.
In fact she keeps bribing them by promoting their leaders into her government. First she promoted Steve Baker, then Suella Fernandes in her shambolic January cabinet reshuffle, and now their new leader Jacob Rees-Mogg is clearly angling for a similar promotion.
May won't punish Baker or Rees-Mogg because she's terrified of them, so instead she's been throwing a load of red meat to the baying ERG dogs with a renewed attack on the rights of European citizens and a public dressing down for the Tory MP Phillip Lee who dared to suggest that the government should be led by "evidence, not dogma".
Incredibly Lee was disciplined by Theresa May's whips and told to air his (actually incredibly sensible for a Tory) views "in private", while Baker and Rees-Mogg have been let off scot-free for airing their bizarre conspiracy theory in the House of Commons, and bringing the government and the civil service into disrepute.
It's quite clear that Baker and Rees-Mogg's decision to engage in bizarre Brextremist conspiracy-mongering right underneath Theresa May's nose is a way of demonstrating their power over her.
As long as they go unpunished they've proven to the rest the Tory party that they're an untouchable faction who can do and say whatever they like with total impunity, while anyone else who steps out of line from the Brextremist agenda will be hit by waves of abuse and death threats sent by the vile hard-right Blue-Kip mob that Theresa May has welcomed into the Tory party with open arms.
This debacle just goes to prove once again that Theresa May is a pathetically weak and directionless leader who is totally in hock to the hard-right Brextremist faction of her party.
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Most people are aware that ever since Theresa May threw away her parliamentary majority in her vanity election, she's been at the beck and call of the extreme-right Europhobic fringe of the Tory party because she has no room to manoeuvre without continually appeasing them.
What is less commonly known is the fact that this hard-right fringe of the Tory party have clubbed together to form a shady and highly secretive "party within a party" which uses taxpayers' cash to bankroll their push for an extreme and highly destructive hard-right version of Brexit.
This group of Brextremist Tory politicians call themselves the European Research Group, and between them members have claimed over £250,000 in parliamentary expenses for work they claim to have done on behalf of this fringe pressure group.
The Tory MPs who have claimed taxpayer cash for work done on behalf of their secretive Brextremism operation include Michael Gove, Andrea Leadsom, Sajid Javid, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Chris Grayling, David Gauke, Penny Mordaunt, and Liam Fox.
Here is a list of known members of the group (politicians with positions within Theresa May's government in bold):
- Suella Fernandes (the current chairperson of the group & PPS at the Treasury))
- Steve Baker (previous chairperson of the group until promoted into the Brexit department)
- Liam Fox (Minister for International Trade)
- Craig Mackinlay (Former UKIP politician who defected to the Tories)
- Andrea Leadsom (former Tory leadership candidate, Leader of the Commons)
- Sajid Javid (Minister for communities and local government)
- Chris Heaton-Harris (The Tory whip who sent McCarthyite inquisition letters to UK universities)
- Jacob Rees-Mogg (regularly touted as a future Tory leader)
- Chris Grayling (Minister for Transport)
- Michael Tomlinson (low profile Tory MP and deputy chair of the group)
- Michael Gove (Minister for the Environment)
- Penny Mordaunt (Minister for International Development)
- David Guake (Minister for Work and Pensions)
Mackinlay claims that such a move would raise £150 million by charging everyone who visits the UK from the EU, but it's spectacularly easy to spot the flaws in this plan.
The first major flaw is that the £150 million "profit" does not take account of the lost tax revenues caused by driving away potential visitors with time consuming and costly visa applications. It would only need a small percentage drop in tourism from the continent to massively reduce tax revenues and eclipse the £150 million "profit" leaving country significantly worse off.
Aside from the obvious false economics of the scheme there's also the fact that such a move from Britain would obviously trigger a reciprocal response, with the EU requiring visas for British visitors to any of the EU member states. This would create the situation where EU citizens would have the choice of visa free travel anywhere within the EU, or the time and expense of applying for a visa to visit the UK. Meanwhile British citizens would have to apply for visas to visit all ten of our top ten travel destinations (which are in order: Spain, France, Italy, Ireland, USA Portugal, Germany, Netherlands, Greece, Poland).
It's bad enough that this fanatical group of Tory MPs has appointed a rabid former-Ukipper to come up with an absurd plan to kick the UK tourism industry to pieces, significantly reduce UK tax revenues in order to raise a paltry £150 million by rinsing cash out of any EU citizens who still chose to visit Brexit Britain, and trigger a reciprocal tit-for-tat response from the EU that would significantly impact millions of British visitors to the continent.
But the fact is that they're actually claiming huge wodges of taxpayers' cash to promote this kind of hard-right Brextremism is the most extraordinary thing about it.
Then there's the fact that members of this secretive Brextremist group are embedded throughout Theresa May's government, with leading members of the ERG claiming that they have the power to "get anything they want" from Theresa May.
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The Green Party co-leader Jonathan Bartley told the Tories exactly what every decent and well-informed person in the country must be thinking about the Tories savage cuts to the welfare system.
On BBC Question Time Bartley focused on the cuts to Employment Support Allowance that is paid to people who have been deemed too unfit to work, describing the £30 per week cut as "despicable", and he's absolutely right.
The Tories have repeatedly tried to claim that this massive cut to disabled people's subsistence benefits will motivate them to look for work, but the parliamentary work and pensions select committee have said that the cuts are actually likely to push disabled people into poverty and actually make it harder for them to find work.
Liz Sayce, the chief executive of Disability Rights UK said that "We’re not aware of one single disability employment or benefits expert who thinks this particular cut will be an incentive for disabled people to get a job".
Mark Atkinson from the disability charity Scope, said: "We know that reducing disabled people’s incomes won’t incentivise them to find a job and won’t help halve the disability employment gap. It will just make life harder".
Rob Holland, of learning disability charity Mencap, said "the government has presented no robust evidence that cutting disabled people’s benefits will ‘incentivise’ them to find work. Instead the evidence suggests that this £30-a-week cut will push disabled people further from work, closer to or into poverty as well as affecting their health".
Despite universal opposition from disability and employment experts the Tories have ploughed on and imposed these brutal cuts regardless, endlessly repeating their totally unsubstantiated claims that slashing sick and disabled people's subsistence benefits will somehow help them find work.
These despicable disability benefit cuts aren't the only appalling cuts the Tories have made this week. In order to hand tax cuts to the already wealthy they've also snatched money from bereaved families, slashed the in-work benefits of the working poor, and introduced child welfare cuts that will condemn a further 250,000 British children to poverty.
All the Tory representative on Question Time Suella Fernandes could come back with was a load of utterly misleading guff about how the Tory government are "making work pay". This is absolutely not the case. Under this Tory government British workers are getting the worst deal in the developed world because the UK is the only developed nation where the economy is growing but workers are suffering real terms declines in their wages.
Even if Fernandes' risible "making work pay" claims were true, which they blatantly aren't, there's absolutely no way that anyone but the most gullible of Tory tribalists could accept that slashing the benefits of people who have been deemed too unwell to work and reducing the in-work benefits of the working poor could possibly be effective methods for ensuring that work pays.
Once again the Tories have been exposed as a callous bunch of liars who are engaged on an ideological mission to snatch money from the poorest people in society in order to redistribute it to the already wealthy.
Will this stop people from voting Tory?
It seems unlikely. There are just too many utterly selfish "I'm alright Jack" bastards in Britain with no empathy whatever for those they perceive to be beneath them on the social ladder. They'll vote Tory because they actually approve of snatching cash from people who are too sick to work, from bereaved families, from the working poor, and from children, because they want to pay a few quid less a year in income tax.
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.
