The gammons are incredibly easy to please aren't they?

Tory tax-dodger Michael Ashcroft has gone viral on Twitter posting a quite frankly deranged diatribe combining World War Two nostalgia and hard-right tabloid talking points.

The gammons absolutely lapped it up because WWII fetishism, spewing hate at minorities, and blasting anyone who dares criticise their beloved Tory lords and masters combines three of their absolute favourite things.

In this article I'm going to run through the whole thing, highlighting what a load of historically illiterate and quite frankly bigoted cobblers it is.

Firstly it's always important to establish what the source is. In this case it's the Tory tax-dodger Michael Ashcroft who is safely hiding away from the coronavirus crisis in the tax haven of Belize.

This is a guy who conned his way into the unelected House of Lords with commitments that he would end his non-dom tax status and begin actually paying his fair share of taxes in the UK, which he clearly never did.

Just look at his smug Tory face and ask yourself why the gammons love a Britain-hating tax-dodger like this so much.

Perhaps it's because somewhere deep beneath their faux patriotism, they also hate Britain too?

 

And why is it that the people who fetishise WWII the most egregiously always seem to be the baby boomers who weren't even alive when it happened?

The "Your Country Needs You" slogan was the most famous poster campaign from the First World War, so top marks to Ashcroft for getting his wars jumbled up whilst pretending to be a lover of British history and a patriot.

Probably the most famous Second World War slogan was "Careless talk Costs Lives", which was nice and clear. But imagine if the government had decided to replace this clear and intelligible statement with garbled gibberish like "Stay Alert By Washing Your Hands", which sounds more like the kind of thing a stroke victim would say before collapsing, than a government information campaign.

There would definitely have been complaints.

The thing with this coronavirus/Blitz analogy is that it completely falls to bits when you look at the contrasting government responses.

Back in 1940 the government threw everything it had at defending Britain from the Blitz during the Battle of Britain.

At the beginning of the coronavirus crisis Boris Johnson deluded himself into believing the world would celebrate him as the "Superman of Capitalism" for deliberately allowing the virus to spread, and then he told a confused looking Phillip Scholfield about how he was being advised to let the virus "move through the population".

It's easy to imagine that the British people would have asked questions like "why aren't you doing enough to prevent these air raids?" if the government policy of the day had been to allow the Nazi bombers to move freely through our skies!

In reality the air raid sirens didn't actually apply to everyone.

It was the job of people like Air Raid Wardens, anti-aircraft gunners, police, the fire service, the ambulance service ... to stay above ground and deal with the consequences, while the general public were expected to make their way to air raid shelters.

A similar situation exists now, with NHS and care home workers, the emergency services, retail staff, delivery drivers, bus drivers, utilities engineers and many others expected to work through the crisis.

You'd have to be dangerously mindless and politically illiterate not to have questioned who is affected by the lockdown measures and who isn't, or come to your own conclusions about who the essential workers in our economy really are.

A transparent dig at transgender people to rile up the gammon.

Why is it that the hysterical anti-trans droolers are so utterly obsessed with toilet facilities, to the extent of demanding that trans-women expose themselves to danger by using the male facilities?

And a comparison with the social norms of the 1930s and '40s shows us that all LGBTQ+ people were subjected to horrific systematic discrimination, imprisoned, sent to mental institutions, and even tortured with barbarism like chemical castration.

Are we really going to accept this maudlin nostalgia for the good old days when queer folk were routinely persecuted by the state?

And now a dig at vegans.

This WWII/Coronavirus analogy has just descended into simple-minded minority bashing hasn't it?

But if we try to actually consider the analogy, the reality is that even eight decades ago, and fighting a desperate war for survival, the British government managed to provide the public with portable gas masks.

The current Tory government failed so badly at providing sufficient ventilators that they ended up sending Covid-19 infected patients back to die in care homes so that their deaths wouldn't be recorded in the daily death stats.

Another dig at vegans!

First: Vegan milk is a good thing. If you haven't tried almond milk before, give it a go. I'm not vegan, but I actually prefer it to ordinary milk these days.

Second: If the UK government could have got away with replacing the milk in some people's rations with manufactured ersatz milk, they would have been absolutely delighted. If some 10% of the population wanted milk alternatives instead of milk, that would have meant less demand on farmers, and more dairy produce to share between the rest. A win-win for everyone, and a boost for the war effort too.

But let's all hate vegans eh? 

 Bloody hell!

He's finished with the LGBTQ+ community and the vegans, so now he's going after 'the blacks'!

He's clearly having a dig at skin tone plasters here, as if they're some kind of assault on decency and common sense.

A white person's reaction to skin-tone plasters tells you all you need to know about their attitudes.

Some will say "oh, that's cool", and easily grasp the fact that it's a good thing that non-white parents will now have the option of using plasters that don't imply that their kids' skin is the wrong colour, and wonder why this simple innovation didn't happen a lot sooner.

Others will adopt a culture war attitude and treat the concept of choice in plaster colours as if it's some kind of barbaric assault on Western Christian culture, even though they'll endlessly point to extravagant (to the point of being confusing) levels of choice elsewhere in the economy as evidence that their beloved capitalism is a good thing!

The fact is that the UK government spent the pre-war years rapidly building up stockpiles of weapons and ammunition because they saw the threat of Nazi expansionism coming.

In contrast the Tory government were repeatedly warned that stockpiles of medical equipment and protective gear were shockingly inadequate in the case of a viral respiratory disease, but they ignored the warnings, because ensuring adequate supplies for an emergency contrasted with their crackpot "let's cut our way to prosperity" austerity agenda.

Yet another astoundingly weak analogy that actually ends up making his beloved Tories look worse, if you know anything about the subject at all, which he apparently doesn't.

The gammons absolutely love this kind of ignorant, history-rewriting, minority-bashing, pro-government drivel don't they?

Conclusion

Digging beneath the inaccuracies, the brazenly inaccurate historical revisionism, and the multiple examples of minority-bashing, the core messages here are don't dare to be different, and don't criticise your government, no matter how badly they screw up.

But this also falls down spectacularly when we remember that widespread public dissatisfaction led to the departure of Britain's first war leader Neville Chamberlain, and his replacement with Winston Churchill.

If Britain was the kind of intolerant, fanatically right-wing, history-rewriting, dissent-crushing, minority-persecuting, leader-worshipping, autocracy that Ashcroft and the gammons so desperately want it to be today, Churchill would never have become Prime Minister, we would probably have lost the Second World War (or negotiated peace with the Nazis), and we'd have been just about as bad as the Nazis were anyway.

Aside from the fact it's almost always baby boomers doing the most egregious WWII fetishism, it also often tends to be people who have far more in common with the ideology of the Nazis than with the Allies doesn't it?

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No wonder the political right want to destroy Jeremy Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn's policy of preventing tax haven-based companies from profiteering from public funds isn't radically left-wing, it's not even particularly left-wing at all, it's actually just common sense.

A radically left-wing policy would be to ban all corporations from undertaking government-funded work (or even to turn all corporations into worker-controlled syndicates) but Corbyn is proposing nothing of the sort. All he's saying is that if companies intend to make profits from public funds via outsourcing contracts, they should at least demonstrate that they're paying their fair share in tax.

It's actually a demonstration of how fanatically right-wing the cult-like Thatcherite political consensus really is that any of them ever thought it OK for corporations to dodge paying tax on their publicly funded profits in the first place, and that absolutely nothing has been done to clamp down on these ridiculous practices while orthodox neoliberals have controlled the levers of political power.

Of course the political right are furious with these proposals, because corporate parasitism on the state is a significant business model for the mega-rich.

Tax-dodging corporate parasitism is basically risk-free, because profiteering from desperately one-sided public sector outsourcing contracts and avoiding paying tax on the profits carries way less risk than investment in anything innovative or economically productive. And if the contract somehow fails, the state ends up stepping in anyway to clear up the mess at the public expense.

Dodge paying tax on the publicly funded profits, and then use public funds to pay for the losses!

It's an incredibly brazen business model, but it's been going on for decades (remember when the Blair government actually privatised the HMRC property portfolio into the hands of a private company based in Bermuda for tax reasons?), and Jeremy Corbyn is threatening to put a stop to this ridiculous nonsense.

It's common sense proposals like this clamp-down on tax-dodger profiteering on public funds that the political right are terrified of, because they know that the vast majority of British people would agree with them wholeheartedly if they heard about them. 

So instead of openly declaring their support for tax-haven based profiteering from public funds, the political right resort to a relentless cascade of smears, deceptions, and outright lies.

They know they can't counter Corbyn on policy because the more people find out about Corbyn's actual policies, the more people end up agreeing with him and supporting him, so their only hope is to continue with the smear campaign in the vain hope of debasing the standard of political debate to such an extent that people remain largely unaware of Corbyn's actual policies.

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12 solutions to the UK housing crisis

The opaquely funded hard-right think tank IEA has offered a £50,000 prize for an essay outlining a strategy for dealing with the housing crisis. I'm obviously not going to win it with this article given that they're stipulating that the proposal must be a right-wing market based strategy, which is lunacy given that the housing crisis has actually been caused by decades of right-wing market based housing policy. 

As far as I'm concerned a right-wing market based solution to a problem caused by right-wing "leave it to market forces" ideology meets Einstein's definition of insanity; doing the same things over and again, but expecting different results.

So I won't be winning the IEA prize, but the challenge did get me thinking about strategies to deal with the housing problem. Here are 12:

Stop the social housing fire sale

The first, and most obvious step is petting an end to the disastrous fire sale of social housing at way below market value under the Right to Buy scheme. 

The fact that 40% of Right to Buy former social housing properties have ended up in the hands of private landlords is compelling evidence that this scheme was never actually motivated by a desire to increase home ownership at all, but by an ideologically driven desire to ruin social housing provision.

I do believe that social housing tenants should continue to have the option of buying their property, but only at full market value, and only if all of the money from the sale is reinvested in building/repairing social housing for the benefit of future generations.

Build social housing

In the wake of the 2007-08 bankers' insolvency crisis the Bank of England magicked up over £400 billion in Quantitative Easing, which they used to prop up the value of assets mainly held by the super-rich.

If the state can invent new money to protect the wealth of the super-rich, then it should also be able to create money in order to benefit wider society through infrastructure projects.

One such infrastructure project could be a fund for the construction of hundreds of thousands of new social housing units, which would not only benefit the tenants, but wider society too.

The construction of the houses would create jobs and demand within the economy, the tenants would pay rent creating a revenue stream for the government, and being freed from sky-high rents in the private rental sector would provide the social housing tenants with extra disposable income to spend, save, or invest in productive economic activities like starting small businesses.

Monetary reform
 

Source: Economics Help

One of the main reasons house prices have spiralled out of control is that the amount of money directed into the housing sector is dictated by profit-seeking private banks, not by any logical process.

As long as the private banks keep creating ever more money to pump into the housing sector, it's obvious that house prices will continue to inflate further and further beyond the reach of ordinary people, until there's another financial sector collapse, another set of bailouts, and the whole property price inflation frenzy starts up again.

If the amount of money directed into the housing sector is controlled so that it more-or-less matches wage growth, then house price inflation would no longer keep rising so ridiculously. 

Prioritise lending 

One of the most obscene things about the UK housing market is that it's usually way simpler to obtain a mortgage in order to rent the property out (buy-to-let) than it is to get a mortgage as an owner-occupier.

This is absolutely backwards. The easiest mortgages to obtain should be for people who intend to use the property as a home, and those who intend to use the property as a profit-seeking endeavour should be discouraged by significantly higher rates.

This could be achieved through government intervention with a tax on for-profit mortgage lending, the proceeds of which could be put into a fund to reduce rates for owner-occupier mortgages, and especially first time buyers.

Additional taxes on buy-to-let profiteers would also create a disincentive to them buying up all the affordable property in their area order to live off other people's backs.

Scrap Council Tax

Just think about it. You couldn't really get a more illogical form of local taxation than a tax based on a hastily conducted house valuation process that happened in 1991.

Council Tax either needs to be scrapped and replaced with a more logical form of property taxation, or at the very minimum reformed and updated based on current property valuations.

Land Value Tax

One alternative to Council Tax would be the adoption of Land Value Tax, which taxes all land based on its value.

One of the main benefits of Land Value Tax is that it gives idle land monopolists a huge incentive to put their land to productive use by selling it, renting it, or actually doing something productive with it themselves.

Here's a link to a full article on the subject.

Clamp down on slumlords

One of the worst aspects of the UK housing market is the virtually unregulated environment in which unscrupulous slumlords are left to operate.

In 2016 the Tory party voted down an amendment to their Housing Act that would have created a legal requirement to ensure that all private rental properties are "fit for human habitation".

You would have thought that a minimum legal standard to ensure that private landlords are prevented from renting out properties that are unfit for human habitation would be a decent starting point in tackling the scourge of unscrupulous profiteering slumlords, but no. The Tories voted against it, and it's hardly surprising that 71 of the Tory MPs who voted this measure down are private landlords themselves.

Security of tenure

One of the worst aspects of the private rental market is the lack of security of tenure. The fact that landlords can hoof tenants out after six months creates a perverse incentive to get rid of decent tenants in order to hike the rent and get a new set of tenants in. The landlord gets the benefit of a bi-annual rent hike, and the estate agents get the benefit of two sets of rip-off agency fees every year.

The losers are obviously the tenants who end up on an involuntary cycle of house moving, rent hikes, and rip off agency fees.

One solution to this grotesque profiteering would be to introduce new rules to reward good tenants with security of tenure. If tenants have stayed up-to-date with their rent, and kept the property in decent condition after six months, the landlord should be legally required to significantly extend the notice period on their next contract, so that good tenants never face the prospect of being forced out of their homes at just one month's notice.

Rent controls

The prospect of rent controls gets right-wing free market fanatics wetting their pants with fear. They know that the shockingly unregulated UK rental market is an excellent source of unearned income, and rent controls would significantly impede their profiteering.

The benefit of rent controls is that they prevent private landlords from socially cleansing certain areas by hiking rents way beyond the reach of ordinary people.

If people in wealthy areas want their bins collected, their supermarket shelves stacked, their hair cut, their car washed, or their house cleaned, then it's grotesque to expect those workers to spend hours commuting in from miles outside the area just to do the low-paid work.

As the state builds more social housing, one of the most efficient ways of preventing social cleansing is to introduce local rent controls.

Tax empty properties

There are hundreds of thousands of empty properties across the UK. Research published in January 2018 found that there are at least 11,000 properties that have stood empty for over ten years!

This is absolutely scandalous at a time of rising homelessness, soaring private rents, and millions of working people priced out of the housing market.

One obvious solution is to impose a tax on empty properties, giving the owners a clear financial incentive to either rent them out or sell them off.

Housing stock upgrades

One of the simplest solutions to the housing problem would be a national investment in housing upgrades. There's absolutely no excuse for modern houses to have no roof insulation. heating properties with inadequate insulation is a ludicrous waste of energy and resources.

One of the simplest ways to encourage investment in housing upgrades would be to introduce new minimum standards for private rental properties. If the housing isn't adequately insulated, the landlord is barred from renting it out (and if they leave it empty, they face paying the empty property tax).

Another way of improving housing stock is subsidised schemes to fit insulation and solar panels. Unfortunately the Tory government has been busy ideologically vandalising these kind of housing upgrade schemes because they don't comply with their crackpot "just leave it to market forces" ideology.

Ban tax-dodgers

One of the most obvious solutions of all is to ban tax-dodging shell companies based in tax havens from buying British property. If you're not a British citizen or resident, or an entity registered in Britain, then you're not allowed to buy British property.

Anyone who thinks it's not a real problem that tax-haven shell companies are able to buy up British property really needs to take a look at the Private Eye registry of offshore ownership to get a handle on the shocking scale of the problem.

Just think about all of that dodgy money sloshing around the UK property market, and how much of an effect it's had in adding to property price inflation.

And just think about all the tax that's not been paid, in the UK or wherever the money originated,

There's absolutely no justification for allowing tax-haven based entities to continue buying up such huge swathes of Britain.

 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 Tories can't blame anyone else for the High Street apocalypse they're created

After the department store House of Fraser's announced that they're shutting down half of their outlets a load of Tory apologists suddenly began astroturfing the Internet to posit the most absurd excuses for it.

One of the most common excuses was that department stores like House of Fraser simply can't compete with online retailers like Amazon and Ebay.

The obvious flaw in this line of defence is that there's nothing more inherently efficient about online retailers, especially given the extra transportation overheads of running millions of deliveries to customer's houses, often several separate deliveries per order!

Of course online retailers are often cheaper than high street stores, but the price difference has little to do with inherent efficiency, and a lot more to do with the fact that they've been getting away with paying almost zero tax on their British profits for the last decade.

This taxation disparity is a problem that is attributable to the Tory government that has not only failed to rectify the problem in their 8 years in power, but has also repeatedly intervened to obstruct international efforts to clamp down on the worst tax-dodgers of all.

Another factor that critically undermines this "natural consequence of online retailing" argument is the subsequent total collapse of Poundworld just a few days later.

It's easily possible to argue that people are more likely to buy their kitchenware, clothing, and furniture online these days, but surely nobody is going to attempt to argue that the online marketplace has undermined Poundworld's ability to hawk cleaning products, stationary, cheap Chinese tat, and Jammie Dodgers.

The real reasons for the Tory High Street apocalypse are glaringly obvious.

Firstly the sustained period of Tory wage repression since 2010 has absolutely battered people's disposable income. The less money they have in their pockets, the lower economic demand becomes. And the lower economic demand falls, the harder time retailers have selling their wares, whether at the top end of the High Street, or the bottom.

Then there's the Brexit chaos the Tories have delivered. The post-referendum 15% drop in the value of the Pound was felt almost immediately by anyone with overseas interests, especially in the importation market. It's taken longer for this collapse to filter through to the High Street in the form of price inflation, however the effects are becoming real and obvious, even to the most committed of Brexit enthusiasts.

And let's not forget the tax-dodging activities of the online retailers that the Tories have turned such a consistent blind eye to over the last eight years.

All in all the Tory High Street apocalypse has been clearly and undeniably caused by the Tory fixation with hard-right economic dogma, and the absolute shambles they've made of Brexit. But as usual, their sycophantic supporters are desperate to cast around for someone else to blame other than their beloved Tory lords and masters.

This time blaming Labour is pretty much out of the question since it's been almost a decade since they held power, and there's no clear way of blaming the EU either, so they've fallen back on that age old excuse of "market forces", as if the "market" is some kind of monolithic unchangeable force, rather than something that needs to be constantly directed and constrained by effective government policy.

If one part of the market is spectacularly undermining another because of the vast and unfair tax advantages you've allowed them to benefit from, there's nothing inevitable about it at all.

Any sane government would intervene to level the playing field, but the Tory refusal to intervene is indicative of the myopic hard-right economic fanaticism that infests their party.

The Tories exist in a world of simplistic hard-right mantras: "public ownership - bad", "private sector - good", "workers' rights - bad", "corporate deregulation -good", "government intervention - bad", "immensely powerful monopolies - good".

The Tories have created the High Street apocalypse, and their unyielding fixation with hard-right anti-interventionist dogma means they're utterly unwilling to do anything at all to stop it. 

All they'll ever do is make pathetic excuses and seek to cast the blame elsewhere.

 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 scrounging royals have been stashing their cash in tax havens

The royal family have been caught out using secretive offshore tax havens to hide at least £10 million while they simultaneously expect the British taxpayer to bankroll their lavish lifestyles, to refurbish their central London palace (because they're pleading poverty), and to throw in a free luxury yacht for the Queen too.

The royal family expect to live their lavish lifestyles on the backs of ordinary taxpayers, but then they spit in our faces by stashing their cash in secretive offshore tax havens.

Just imagine the forelock-tugging subservience of the people scrabbling to perform mental gymnastics to make excuses for this outrageous behaviour. 

Just imagine the kind of subservience that allows these people no real interest in stuff like fairness, decency, or integrity because all logical and moral considerations are overruled by deference to people they consider to be their rightful lords and masters.

The whole concept of monarchy is a ridiculous anachronism. It's an embarrassment to all of the countries that insist on persisting with unelected heads of state that are determined by birth, not by merit. 

Not only does this archaic system of hereditary patronage still persist in the UK, but the idle beneficiaries of it are so comfortable and complacent in their positions that they feel entitled to stash their unearned wealth in tax havens while pleading poverty so that ordinary taxpayers have to pay the cost of renovating the central London palace they've neglected to maintain properly for decades.

One of the worst things about royalist forelock-tuggers is that so many of them have allowed themselves to be trained by the mainstream media to spit outrage, bile, and hatred upon command at "scroungers" like a pack of salivating Pavlov's dogs. But when it comes to the biggest, dodgiest and most high profile pack of scroungers of all, they react with delight at the very thought of their own subservience to them.

How is it that people can fail to draw a connection between the tax-dodging of the super-rich establishment class, and the fact that our public services are at breaking point and in-work poverty and child poverty are soaring out of control?

How is it that people can think it fair that the hard-working exploited poor should not get any help whatever from the state to provide for a third child, but erupt in joy that William and Kate are expecting a third child who is destined to live its entire life suckling on the taxpayers' teat?

How is it that the thought of a guy claiming unemployment benefits and working cash in hand on the side provokes such ire, but the thought of a family of scroungers living lives of absolute luxury at the public expense and stashing their cash in secretive offshore tax havens has them in raptures of delight?

I guess it's just a matter of approach. 

If the tax-dodging scrounger is just some working class chap who tries to hide what he's up to, then the forelock-tugger Daily Mail-reader types would gladly spew hatred at him upon demand.

However if this hypothetical scrounger took a more brazen approach and flaunted his ill-gotten gains by riding around the streets in a gold carriage wearing a diamond encrusted hat, perhaps they'd love him for it? Perhaps they'd queue for hours for the chance to catch a glimpse of him and save up their hard-earned cash to buy mugs, plates and all kinds of awful tat with his face printed on it? And perhaps they'd gladly have their taxes used to refurbish one of his mansions and buy him a brand new luxury yacht, even though they know perfectly well that he's living large at the public expense and diddling the taxman as he does it?

Who knows how these people think? How they maintain such unshakeable faith in an antiquated system of patronage bestowed on an idle bunch of scroungers who spit in our faces by hiding their cash in tax havens while they simultaneously plead poverty and expect ordinary taxpayers to pay for their yachts and castles?

I guess the answer is that some people just like to be subservient. They like to be abused and taken advantage of by people they consider to be their superiors. Like Stockholm syndrome, but with flags, and castles, and parades, and pageantry, and golden carriages.

 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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Google are helping to rig the general election for the Tories

The Google motto is "don't be evil", but taking cash from a particular political party to help them undermine democracy with a vicious smear campaign is pretty damned evil isn't it?

The Labour manifesto

The Labour Party has produced a fantastic manifesto full of policies to help ordinary British people, and rescue the economy from the damage inflicted by seven punishing years of socially and economically ruinous hard-right Tory austerity dogma, but anyone who attempts to find it with a Google search is confronted by an outrageous Tory attack advert as the first link.

As you can see the first hit is a Tory party attack advert full of lies, the next hits are mixed mainstream press coverage of the manifesto, and the actual link to the manifesto is off the bottom of the screen (I had to zoom right out to to take the screenshot).

 

Tory smears

The Tories are able to flood the Internet with these attack adverts because they're being bankrolled by huge donations from the mega-rich who don't want Corbyn to win the election and make them start paying their fair share.

Several of the major donors who are bankrolling the Tory election campaign are proven tax-dodgers and people running their businesses out of tax havens.

The attack ad itself is an absolute abomination full of misrepresentations, out-of-context quotations, smears, and outright lies.

One of the most brazen misrepresentations is where they claim that Corbyn wants to raise income tax to 25% simply because he once observed that the income tax rate used to be 25% in previous generations (which is true).

In reality Labour have pledged to not raise income tax for the 95% of ordinary workers and it's the Tories who have scrapped their 2015 manifesto commitment to not raise income tax (don't you just wonder why they would scrap such a pledge?).

Another lie is that he won't reduce the deficit (the Institute for Fiscal Studies report on his spending plans says that he will reduce the deficit) and another lie is that he wants "unlimited immigration" (just read the Labour manifesto on immigration for yourself to see their actually very sensible immigration policies).

This kind of manipulative Tory lying and smearing is indicative of the entire 2017 Tory general election campaign. There's nothing positive about their own manifesto at all, just a constant barrage of misrepresentations, lies and smears about the Labour Party.

Google's role in this

By allowing the Tories to hijack Google searches for the Labour Manifesto with their astoundingly dishonest smear campaign, Google are ensuring that thousands upon thousands of people who were looking for Labour Party policies end up looking at savage Tory smears against the Labour Party instead.

We know that huge numbers of people will have fallen for the attack ad because there is mountains of research to show that huge numbers of people are incapable of differentiating between sponsored adverts and legitimate content. There's also research to show that once the link is far down enough that people have to scroll down to see it, it's very much more unlikely that it gets clicked than the top results.

The electoral rules are a total farce if they allow one party with a lot of cash to hijack Internet searches for other parties' manifestos with brutally dishonest attack adverts, but even if this thing is technically legal, Google has no actual obligation to take the Tory cash and help them subvert democracy.

If Google had any company ethics whatever, they'd specify that political Google searches during democratic elections are off limits for sponsored adverts, especially sponsored adverts from rival political parties.

One other thing to note is that under David Cameron's Tory government Google were given an extraordinary sweetheart tax deal by the HMRC that worked out at an effective tax rate of just 3%.

The manifesto that Google is helping the Tories to hijack and suppress with their attack ads actually contains a pledge to make the taxation system fairer. One of Labour's key taxation policies is to put an end to sweetheart tax deals between major corporations and HMRC.

I'm not saying that Google are deliberately interfering in our election in order to ensure defeat for a party that would make them pay their fair share of tax.

I can't say that because I don't have any evidence of conspiracy. In to prove that there has been collusion we'd need incriminating evidence like internal company emails or emails between Google and the Tory party.

It would be interesting to see what Google did about these attack ads, and whether executive decisions were taken to allow this kind of political hijacking in full knowledge that it was an obvious subversion of the British people's democratic right to seek accurate representations of Labour's own policies.

I can't allege a Google conspiracy to undermine our democracy in order to ensure a government that is favourable to their financial interests. But even without hard evidence of conspiracy it still looks very very bad for Google to be taking cash from the Tory party in return for allowing them to hijack the Labour manifesto with outrageous attack adverts.

If Google had any kind of corporate ethics at all, they simply wouldn't allow this kind of democracy-wrecking smear attacks on their search engine.

Streisand effect

If enough people share this article and inspire others to go and read the Labour Party manifesto for themselves, we could create what is called the Streisand effect.

The Streisand effect is the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicising the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet.

It is an example of psychological reactance, wherein once people are aware something is being kept from them, their motivation to access and spread the information is significantly increased. 

Read the Labour Party manifesto for yourself here

 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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