Analysing the Daily Express budget analysis

These days the Daily Express is basically nothing more than a pravda propaganda rag for the Tory party, so you'd have to be pretty naïve to expect anything other than heavy pro-Tory bias in their Budget analysis, but in 2021 they went the extra mile with a quite astonishing front page.

Rishi Sunak has just raised the UK tax burden to the highest level since the post-WWII recovery period in the 1950s!

He even admitted it in his budget speech, using the passive voice to say that  "taxes are rising to the highest level of GDP since the 1950s", as if the taxes are somehow rising of their own accord, rather than him being the person who is raising them!

Yet the front page of the Express blares Cheers! Rishi On A Mission To Cut Taxes

He's just raised taxes to the highest rate in over half a century, but hooray for his future ambition to cut taxes!

The disjunct between the reality and the presentation is absolutely laughable.

There are an awful lot more issues in the small print too (too many for me even to fit into the article header infographic!).

2 Billion extra for schools This might sound great if you've been living in a sensory deprivation chamber for the last 11 years, but in reality it's not enough to even return per-pupil funding back above 2010 levels this year, next year, or the year after. 

It'll finally catch up in 2024/25, meaning that an entire generation of school kids will have had their education hindered by massive budget cuts for no discernible reason whatever. Yet the Express somehow consider this decade and a half of wanton destruction of our nation's future economic potential as a cause for celebration!

£150 billion spending spree Hang on. We just suffered a decade of austerity cuts because public spending in the wake of a crisis was supposedly terribly bad, yet the debt's gone up dramatically since 2010, and now we're supposed to celebrate £150 billion in post-crisis spending as if the last 11 years simply didn't happen?

If spending in the wake of a crisis is good, then that obviously means a decade of Tory austerity extremism was pointless, ruinous self-harming, economically illiterate, and extremely bad, doesn't it?

Business Rates Boost For High Street  Everyone knows that tax-dodging online retailers have been dramatically undercutting High Street outlets for the last decade, and that giant out-of-town supermarkets are now soaking up entire family shopping budgets that used to be divided amongst perhaps a dozen different small independent High Street businesses.

Nothing's been done about this until it's far too late, and now High Streets across Britain have been reduced to derelict ghostly shadows of their former glories, occupied mainly by boarded up premises, thrift stores, gambling outlets, and charity shops.

There's some limited help on the table now, especially for the likes of pubs, restaurants, and tea rooms, but it's far too little, far too late.  The lockdown measures have absolutely hammered the majority of the retail economy by forcing them to close their doors, while online retailers and supermarket giants were allowed to continue operating, soaking up £billions in artificially inflated profits. 

There's no effort to rake any of these artificial gains back, and nor will there ever be with a Tory rich-boy like Sunak running the show.

Universal Credit Giveaway The framing here is absolutely insidious. What Sunak's actually done is ever-so-slightly reduced the amount that the state confiscates out of low-earners' wages through reduced social security payments.

Under the Tory-designed Universal Credit system the government used to confiscate 63p in every additional pound a low income worker earns, but Sunak's reduced the confiscation rate to 55p in the pound (which is obviously still more than half!). 

Somehow confiscating a tiny bit less of low-income workers' wages is a giveaway, but the £billions he's handed to bankers by cutting the Surcharge Tax to 3% isn't a giveaway.

In fact it somehow doesn't even warrant a mention!

"By the end of this parliament I want taxes going down, not up" Somehow the Express is celebrating this statement from Rishi Sunak as if it's some almost divine political objective, rather than one of the key strategies of Tory electoral politics:

Front-load all the tax-hikes and attacks on people's incomes into the years after winning power, then ease the boot of people's necks a little bit prior to the next election so they feel like things are getting better and vote Tory, and repeat, and repeat, and repeat.

It's an expression of standard, cynical, short-term electoral political strategy, not some kind of saintly moral mission!

Cheers! Rishi The main headline, and the picture of Johnson and Sunak (who doesn't even drink) holding pints are an example of the oldest trick in the budget book.

Place a slight cut in the price of a pint at the forefront of the budget, in order to distract the plebs from the horrifying details you don't really want them thinking about:

• Highest tax rate in seven decades
• Massive tax break for bankers
  
• Cutting tax on short-haul flights (just days before hosting a climate conference!)
• Implicit admission that austerity was a huge mistake
  
• National Insurance hike for millions of ordinary workers
• Insufficient help for High Streets
  
• School funding still below 2010 level
• No windfall tax for pandemic profiteers

Unrivalled coverage This is just about the only thing they managed to get right on their entire front page. It's so laughably bad that not even the Daily Mail or S*n managed to do worse!

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Boris Johnson's tax bribe certainly worked a treat on Alan Sugar

In December 2018 Alan Sugar was furious about the Tory Brexit chaos. He was so furious that he publicly stated that he wanted Boris Johnson to be jailed for the political lies he told during the 2016 EU referendum.

Fast forward just seven months and Sugar is running free publicity for Boris Johnson's bid to become Tory leader and Prime Minister by default.

So what's changed in the meantime?

Boris Johnson hasn't apologised for the lies he told during the EU referendum, in fact his supporters have actually doubled down on his right to lie to the public using spurious appeals to "free speech".

The Tory Brexit chaos hasn't improved a jot. In fact it's far worse. We over-ran the Article 50 deadline and Theresa May was left with no choice but to scuttle off to Europe to pathetically beg for an extension in order to avoid actually following through on her endlessly repeated threats to launch a ruinous "no deal" Brexit meltdown if she didn't get her own way.

Who would have thought that "I'll shoot myself in the head on a specific date if I don't get my own way" would turn out to be an incompetent negotiating strategy?
 

The Tory government's own impact assessments show
that a "no deal" Brexit is the worst possible outcome.

Now we're faced with the prospect of a Boris Johnson-led Tory Brextremist government forcing through the most damaging possible version of Brexit (so bad that it's significantly worse than Theresa May's three times rejected hard-right Brexit proposal) and Sugar is cheering him on from the sidelines.

The only high-profile policy that Johnson has announced is an extraordinary £1,500 per year tax bribe to people earning salaries of above £80,000 per year (with diminishing benefits down to those on £50,000 salaries, and absolutely nothing for anyone earning less than that).

This tax bribe would cost £9.6 billion per year, to be paid for the rest of us in the form of more austerity, more public service cuts, more Tory wage repression, more vandalism of the social safety net ... during the Brexit crisis that Johnson and his ilk wish to manufacture for the benefit of their mega-rich speculator mates who are betting against Britain and British assets in the hope of making a killing on the economic meltdown their Tory chums have promised to deliver.

Consider this egregious Tory tax bribe aimed at the tiny minority of top earners like Sugar and paid for by the rest of us.

And compare it with Jeremy Corbyn's policy of no tax rises for the 95% of lowest earners, and making corporations pay their fair share of tax.

It's absurdly easy to see why Sugar has undergone this remarkable conversion from "lock him up" to "Boris for PM".

He's blatantly just let his greed do his thinking.

And he's done it in such a blatant manner that he's switched from bitterly opposing Brexit to social media cheerleading for one of the most egregious Tory Brextremists!

Sugar's greed-override is so ugly, and selfish, and transparent, that even the most obtuse of people should be able to see it for what it is.

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Boris Johnson's tax giveaway is a bribe to those with the actual power to make him Prime Minister

Boris Johnson has announced he plans to introduce a huge tax cut for people earning over £50,000 per year.

Despite mainstream media assertions that this tax cut is aimed at the middle class or the "aspirational class", it's obviously a tax cut aimed at the wealthiest people in society.

You hardly have to be an expert in how marginal tax rates work to understand that the biggest benefits accrue to the highest earners.

Anyone earning below £50,000 per year, which is around 92% of UK workers, will see absolutely no tax reduction whatever.

Some middle class guy earning £55,000 per year is only going to see a 5% tax reduction on £5,000 of his income, which works out at £250 per year.

Meanwhile everyone earning over £80,000 would feel the benefit of the full £1,500.

Boris Johnson's tax giveaway would cost £9.6 billion per year in order to hand out an extra £1,500 per year to the 5% of highest earners with salaries of over £6,667 per month, with diminishing benefits down to those on £4,167 per month, and absolutely nothing for anyone earning less than that!

Some clueless "centrists" like Dan Hodges have been asking why on earth Johnson would announce a policy of enriching the 5% of highest earners at the expense of everyone else, noting that such a policy would play right into the hands of Jeremy Corbyn and surely make him Prime Minister (as if Prime Minister Corbyn would be a terrible thing in comparison to the absolute shit-show of hypocrites, charlatans, and psychopaths that constitutes the Tory leadership race).

The answer to Hodges' question is stunningly obvious.

Boris Johnson likes to play the harmless buffoon, but he actually knows exactly what he's doing here.

He knows the general public don't actually have any say whatever on who becomes the next Tory leader.

The people who actually get a say on who becomes our next Prime Minister are primarily his fellow Tory MPs, who are obviously influenced by the corporate fat cats who bankroll the entire Tory operation.

Then it'll be up to the Tory party membership, who are heavily influenced by mainstream media.

All Tory MPs would personally benefit from Johnson's tax giveaway. The bankers and corporate fat cats who bankroll the Tory party would obviously all see the full benefit of this handout too.

Salaries of £80k+ are hardly uncommon in newsrooms, and all political editors will be taking home bigger salaries than that.

And it's hard to say for sure (because the Tories are so reluctant to admit how many members they've got, let alone who they are) but a hefty proportion of them are likely to be "I'm alright Jack" bastards on incomes of above six grand a month who are still perfectly happy with Tory austerity fanaticism, even after nine ruinous years, because the dire consequences always fall on other people.

In other words Boris Johnson's tax giveaway isn't aimed at generating public popularity at all, it's aimed at winning the support of those with the actual power to make him Prime Minister.

His winning strategy is to appeal to the personal greed of high income Tories and mainstream media hacks, and screw everyone else.

It's nothing short of a £9.6 billion bribe to the wealthiest people in society, paid for by the rest of us, with the sole purpose of persuading the extremely wealthy to give him the power he craves.

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12 things you should know about the gilet jaunes movement

Over the last week France has been rocked by the biggest riots in over a decade but much of the media coverage has been sketchy at best.

Fuel protest

The gilets jaunes (yellow vests) movement started as a grassroots protest against a hugely unpopular hike in fuel tax designed to load the economic burden of climate change goals onto ordinary people, and especially those in non-urban areas who rely on cars to survive.

That these planned tax rises on petrol and diesel have coincided with a global spike in fuel prices has exacerbated the situation, leaving millions of French families wondering where they're going to find the cash to pay for these huge fuel price hikes.

Climate change

As gilets jaunes the movement has spread it has evolved and grown into a much broader protest against Emmanuel Macron and the French government.

Macron and his supporters keep on banging on about ecology and how progressive it is to tax fuel, but they're talking a completely different language to the people facing the economic burden of these policies.

Of course a lot of people accept that something needs to be done to combat climate change, but loading the majority of the burden onto ordinary people who have no choice but to drive, whilst actually giving handouts to the mega-rich with the other hand is the exact opposite of a progressive approach.

Anyone trying to characterise the gilets jaunes movement as a simple fuel protest against reasonable and progressive climate change measures is either catastrophically under-informed or behaving in a deliberately disingenuous manner.

Yellow vests

The reason for the yellow vests is that since 2008 French drivers have been required by law to have a yellow high visibility vest in their vehicle in case of breakdown, meaning that high visibility jackets are a cheap and widely available symbolic "uniform" for the protesters.

Violence

The vast majority of the 280,000+ gilets jaunes protesters have been peaceful and non-violent, but as is always the way the vast majority of the mainstream media coverage has focused on the violent minority.

This isn't an effort to downplay or excuse any of the unacceptable violence and vandalism, it's just an effort to redress the balance a bit by pointing out that the violence and chaos in Paris is unrepresentative of the enormous movement that is going on across the whole of France.

Delegitimisation

Assorted 'centrists' and Macron fanboys have tried to create the argument that the entire movement "lost legitimacy as soon as it turned to rioting/looting/car burning".

The problem with this tactic of tarring an entire movement of hundreds of thousands with the behaviour of the very worst minority is that it would make it ridiculously easy to render all political protest illegitimate through the tactical insertion of a small number of violent agent provocateurs into any and all protest movements.

Any reasonable person should be capable of differentiating between the hundreds of thousands of non-violent protesters across France who blocked roads and fuel depots without rioting or violence, and the small minority of lawless thugs the media have concentrated on.

The price of Macron

When Emmanuel Macron won the French Presidency "I'm alright Jack" centrists across the world went into raptures that their favoured brand of neoliberalism-lite was back on the agenda, but now that Macron's opinion poll ratings have collapsed to minus 50, hundreds of thousands of people are actively protesting against the government, and the streets of Paris are ablaze, perhaps it's time for a quick reappraisal.

Macron only won the Presidency because the only other option on the ballot was the hate-mongering extreme-right ultranationalist Marine Le Pen. In a choice between the neoliberal frying pan and the fascist fire, the French public understandably chose to stay in the frying pan.

As you'd expect from a neoliberal with a huge parliamentary majority, the result has been a massive squeeze on poor and ordinary people in order to fund handouts and tax cuts for the mega-rich.

It's not like the French public could have had any illusions about what was going to happen given that Macron was personally responsible for the massively unpopular anti-worker legislation that destroyed the parti socialiste from within before he jumped ship to create a 'centrist' protest movement against the political establishment that he was one of the worst examples of!

Given the long history of public protest in France, a revolt against Macron and his neoliberal agenda was always on the cards, the only surprising thing being that it's taken so long to happen.

Rebellion

One of the big ironies is that Macron connived his way into power by creating and leading a faux rebellion against the French political establishment, yet he's only halfway into his second year in office and he's the focus of a new, more genuine, and more furious anti-establishment revolt.

If you promise the people a revolution and a government that listens to and works on behalf of ordinary people, then deliver nothing but a 'more of the same' anti-worker, neoliberal agenda, is it any wonder they'd be furious?

Social media

The gilets jaunes movement began on social media with petitions and a Facebook event aimed at disrupting traffic on November 17th. Since then it's spread onto the streets.

The spontaneous social media growth of the protest means there's no real defined leadership structure, which has its advantages and disadvantages.

Extreme-right opportunism

The French extreme-right have been quick to jump on the protests with Macron's defeated Presidential rival Marine Le Pan trying to associate herself with the movement and encouraging her supporters to infiltrate it.

The structureless and leaderless nature of the movement has made it possible for the French extreme-right to infiltrate the protests, but this leaderless nature also prevents them from usurping it by establishing themselves as its leaders.

Popularity

Various opinion polls have put public support for the gilets jaunes at between 72% and 84%. meaning Macron is in a really tricky situation. He's styled himself as an authoritarian who won't give in to protest, but he's only going to increase his (already extraordinary) levels of unpopularity if he seeks to crush this extremely popular movement by force.

The squeezed middle

The reason the  gilets jaunes movement is so popular is that they're representing the frustration of millions of ordinary French people who feel they're getting insufficient return for their labour and their taxes.

Like most Europeans the French are reasonably content to pay high taxes in return for quality public services, decent pensions, and a strong social security system, however Macron's fuel tax hikes have coincided with hardline neoliberal policies from Macron such as gutting the social security system, attacking pensions, and attempting to flog off the French rail network to his private sector mates. And to top it all off one of Macron's first reforms was to slash wealth taxes paid for the extremely rich.

Of course anti-worker legislation, privatisation mania, attacks on the social security system, and massive handouts to the mega-rich must sound familiar to British people who have been suffering these same policies under 8 years of disastrous Tory rule, but the French are different. They won't just sit back and accept this ideologically-driven assault on their living standards, and even twice re-elect the bastards who have been doing it like the British have, they're making it clear they're simply not having it.

What next?

With Macron outright refusing to drop the next 6.5% hike in fuel prices sceduled for January, and with such high levels of public support it seems unlikely the gilets jaunes protests will just stop altogether any time soon.

The extent to which the protests continue over the next few weeks and months would seem to depend on whether Macron decides to cede ground by dropping the planned fuel hike, or intensifies the situation by outright ignoring the concerns of protesters and seeking to forcibly clamp down on the protests by imposing emergency legislation.

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The Tories create laws to benefit themselves at the expense of the rest of us

In 2016 former Tory Chancellor George Osborne introduced a new 3% Stamp Duty rate for people buying property to rent out, but for some reason he decided to create an exemption for anyone purchasing more than six properties at the same time.

The very next year the Tory Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt took advantage of this loophole by purchasing seven luxury flats in Southampton, saving himself almost £100,000 in Stamp Duty.

Osborne's loophole was obviously designed to benefit the mega-rich with sufficient capital to purchase seven or more properties at once, but to see one of his actual Tory colleagues taking advantage of it just goes to show what a grotesque bunch they really are, designing legislation to benefit themselves and their mega-rich mates at the expense of everyone else.

The scandal doesn't stop there either. Jeremy Hunt also defied parliamentary ethics when he "forgot" to declare this investment on the parliamentary register of interests, and he also broke the law when he "forgot" to tell Companies House about his financial interest in the company used to buy the flats (an offence that could result in a two year prison sentence if it was one of us that did it, rather than a member of the privileged class).

This scandal reveals the sheer self-serving greed of the Tory party by proving that they design legislation to benefit them and their own class at the expense of the rest of us, but don't expect it to dominate the mainstream news because exposing this scandal runs entirely counter to the current primary objective of trying to ensure a poor Labour result at the local elections.

If this was one of Jeremy Corbyn's shadow ministers then we know they'd be hounded from pillar to post over it until they were forced into resigning, and how the scandal would dominate the headlines for days, but because it's a Tory member of the establishment class it'll receive very limited coverage, and Hunt will ride out the storm without even coming close to being under pressure to resign.

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Ruth Davidson's self-disproving lie

The Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson is a ridiculously brazen person, but on April 6th 2018 she truly excelled herself by posting a self-disproving lie on Twitter.

• Who could forget Ruth Davidson's brass necked photo shoot in a disability mobility vehicle during the 2017 General Election campaign at the very same time as her beloved Tory party were stripping 800 mobility cars per week from disabled people up and down the country?

• Who could forget Ruth Davidson's pretending to be an opponent of bigotry and sectarianism, then sitting by and doing absolutely nothing as Theresa May lobbed a £1 billion bribe at the sectarian DUP bigots to prop up her government?

• Who could forget Ruth Davidson allowing a pair of revoltingly bigoted Tory councillors simply slide back into the party after the fuss had died down?

• And who could forget her completely disregarding longstanding rules and conventions about politicising the armed forces by cosplaying as a soldier for the cameras?

Even after all of this utterly brazen behaviour Davidson's latest effort is truly astounding. She's sent out a Tweet claiming that Scottish Income Tax payers earning over £26,000 will pay more tax under the SNP.

Not only is this claim a lie, it's actually contradicted by the newspaper clippings that she attached to her Tweet. The second attatched image includes a handy chart which clearly demonstrates that those earning £26,000 per year will pay £70 per year less in tax, and that only those earning over £33,000 will have to pay marginally more Income Tax in order to help fund the numerous things that make Scotland a much fairer society than England (free university tuition, free prescriptions, baby boxes, free eye care, free elderly care ...).

Just consider the arrogance of Ruth Davidson's self-disproving lie. And just think about how little regard Ruth Davidson must have for the people she's attempting to convince with it.

She obviously sees potential Scottish Tory voters as a spectacularly gullible bunch of barely literate knuckle-draggers if she thinks they'll be won over by a lie so blatant that it actually contradicts itself.

Still, given all the damage the Tories have inflicted on Scotland and the Scottish economy over the decades, Scottish Tory voters must be either absolutely riddled with gullibility, or be such servile and self-hating lowlifes that they actually get some kind of warped kick out of being lied to and mistreated by their merciless (and mainly English) Tory overlords.

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The Scottish Tory Annie Wells and her contempt for poor and ordinary people

The Tory MSP Annie Wells has come out with an extraordinary attack on millions of ordinary people that implies those earning below £33,000 per year are not ambitious hard-working or successful.

She posted her insulting Twitter rant in response to the Scottish government budget that included small income tax rises for people earning above £33,000 per year.

Her Tweet claimed that the progressive tax reforms implemented by the SNP government sent a message "don't be ambitious, don't be hard-working, don't be successful" to higher income Scots who have to pay a little bit more tax to fund public services, and things like free university education and free prescriptions. The clear implication of her rant being that people who earn less than £33,000 per year are not ambitious, not hard-working, and not successful.

This obnoxious elitist stance is yet another Tory assertion of the self-attribution fallacy: The warped idea that there is a form of natural economic justice at play ensuring that rich people become rich because they're superior, and poorer people remain poorer because of some inherent failing or moral deficiency (not because society is rigged against them and in favour of out-of-touch elitists like Annie Wells).

To put her toxic views into context the starting salary of a police officer in Scotland is £23, 493, a nurse starts on £22,128, and a firefighter begins on £22,017. All of these people earn at least £10,000 below Annie Wells' cutoff point.

Even if these public sector workers work hard over the years and climb the pay scale to eventually earn above £33,000, the SNP budget also includes decent pay raises for public sector workers, so they might have to pay a few extra pence a week in tax, but in return for much better pay than their counterparts in the rest of the UK. If they were lucky enough to benefit from Scotland's policy of free university education, they'd also save a fortune by not having to pay out chunks of their salary every month on aspiration tax either.

Annie Wells earns £60,000 per year as a member of the Scottish Parliament, which means she's raging that she's facing a 29p per week increase in income tax.

As many people have asserted, tax is the subscription fee we pay to live in a civilised society. Annie doesn't want to pay a tiny bit more because she's a high profile member of a political party that has spent seven long years actively repressing the wages of UK workers, and especially public sector workers like police, NHS staff and fire fighters.

It's vital to acknowledge that not all high earners are as selfish as Annie and her Tory chums. Several of people responded to her insulting Tweet by saying that they're perfectly happy to pay a few quid extra in tax to make Scotland a better and more progressive country (see image).

Annie is furious because she's bitterly opposed to the concept of a society where public sector workers wages rise in line with inflation. She's also firmly opposed to the idea of a society in which education is treated as social good that benefits all of society, rather than a commodity to be sold at the highest possible price so that people from ordinary backgrounds who aspire to better themselves end up in £50,000+ debt (like students in England do thanks to her Tory party colleagues' imposition of the highest public university tuition fees in the world).

Annie's contemptuous Tweet crying that a minority of Scottish people who are doing really quite well in life might have to pay an extra few pennies a week in order to make Scotland a slightly fairer and more civilised place just goes to prove how out-of-touch she is with the realities faced by millions of Scottish people who aren't doing as well as she is financially, and the fact that like most Tories, she only really gives a damn about serving the interests of the rich.

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Isn't it incredible what right-wing Brexiteers are trying to pass off as "the will of the people"?

Had the Brexit campaigners actually ever come up with a serious policy document outlining their plans for how to manage the Brexit transition period, and a proposal for what post-Brexit Britain was to look like, I would have given the idea of quitting the EU some serious consideration. But since there was no policy document, nor any outline of realistic objectives, it was beyond obvious that the whole thing would turn into an extraordinarily damaging let's make it up as we go along Tory administered farce.

And just look at the state of it now:

• We've passed the halfway point between the Brexit vote and the deadline of March 29th 2019, we're still completely stalled on the very first phase of the negotiations!

• Theresa May made the catastrophic decision to trigger Article 50 before her ministers even really knew what they wanted out of Brexit, then wasted two months on her spectacularly misjudged vanity election, and even now the Tory bickering is still going on. Calling a referendum with no contingency plan for what to do if people voted for Brexit was bad enough, but setting the clock ticking on the exit process before they developed a coherent plan was even more reckless.

• The fanatical hard-right faction of the Tory party are propagandising ever more loudly for a ruinous "no deal" flounce out of Europe, and they're continuing to drag their weak and directionless leader ever closer to the economic cliff edge. 

• Tories like Liam Fox are proposing reductions in UK consumer protections and product standards as part of a UK-US trade deal. Any such reductions would render access to the Single Market impossible because continued free trade between the UK and EU would create a gateway for US companies to sneak their inferior products into the European market. 

• The right-wing fringe of the Tory party that are dictating Theresa May's every move are desperate to ensure the most chaotic possible form of Brexit because they know that the ensuing economic disaster will provide rich pickings for their disaster capitalist mates, who will use the post-Brexit economic meltdown to grab £billions in British infrastructure and assets, like vultures stripping the meat off a corpse. 

• The Tories are also determined to use Brexit as an excuse to erode parliamentary sovereignty by shrouding the Brexit process in secrecy, and trying to give themselves the power to rewrite thousands of UK laws with no democratic scrutiny whatever.

• Theresa May's behaviour makes it all too clear that she's powerless to stop the hard-right fanatics in her own party from using Brexit as a convenient Trojan horse to introduce the kinds of anti-worker policies millions of Brexit voters would abhor.

• The more moderate centre-right 'One Nation' type Tories seem entirely unwilling/unable to oppose the anti-democratic Blue-kip takeover of their party.

• Hard right Tories and billionaires like James Dyson are pushing ever harder to use Brexit as an opportunity to trash UK workers' rights and to turn Britain into a huge corporate tax haven with a 0% corporation tax rate.

The extraordinary thing is that the hard-right fringe of the Tory party are still trying to pass off this shambolic lurching towards an economic cliff-edge into a hard-right abyss of disaster capitalism, trashed workers rights, and ever more giveaways to corporations and the mega-rich as the "will of the people".

Hardly any Brexit voter will have voted the way they did because they actually wanted even more exploitation of British workers, even more handouts for corporations and the mega-rich, and a disastrous economic meltdown to make the bankers' crisis look like a picnic in comparison. But the hard-right Brexiteers are still trying to pass off their shambolic scheming as "the will of the people" regardless.

Only a tiny fraction of Leave voters must have envisioned a Brexit that involved gutting the value of the pound; tanking the British economy; allowing vulture capitalists to buy up £billions worth of British infrastructure and assets on the cheap; binning British workers' rights and consumer protections; trashing trading relationships with our European allies; eroding parliamentary sovereignty; scrapping British people's rights to live/work/study/retire in any of 31 other European countries; and reducing the British state to grovelling and begging on the world stage for trade deals.

But in a way the hard-right Brexit fanatics are right to continue calling this mess "the will of the people" because millions upon millions of people voted Leave despite the warnings that the Brexiteers had nothing even remotely resembling a coherent Brexit plan, and that a "let's make it up as we go along" Brexit administered by the Tory party would surely end up being an extremely damaging shambles, especially for people like the young, the working poor and the vulnerable.

Brexit voters had absolutely no excuse for not knowing that the Tories have spent the previous six years relentlessly squeezing the poor and ordinary in order to lavish huge tax cuts on corporations and the mega rich.

They must have known that the Tories had overseen the worst slump in the real value of UK workers' wages since records began; slashed in-work benefits for the working poor; massively increased child poverty; lumbered students with vast unpayable debts; attacked workers' rights; savagely mistreated sick and disabled people; devastated public services; and allowed an absolute explosion of exploitative employment practices.

They can't have failed to notice that while the Tories were loading the burden of austerity dogma onto ordinary people, they were simultaneously slashing corporation tax to the lowest level of any advanced economy, lavishing vast bonuses on bankers at loss-making publicly owned banks, selling off swathes of public infrastructure on the cheap to their mega-rich mates, stuffing the unelected House of Lords full of their cronies, and continually cutting taxes for the very richest people in Britain.

There's no way that it's possible to imagine that a political party with a proven track record like that would somehow reverse direction and suddenly decide to manage the Brexit process in the best interests of ordinary British people (rather than on behalf of the tiny mega-rich clique who bankroll their party).

So in a way this absolute farce is "the will of the people", because people were clearly and repeatedly warned that a Tory administered Brexit would surely descend into chaos and Tory fantasies of turning Britain into a hard-right dystopia, but they voted for it anyway.

 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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