eBay have joined the culture war ... on the side of anonymous hard-right Twitter trolls!

In case you've been living under a rock for the last 9 years, there's an ideological war going on in UK politics.

On the one side there are hard-right fanatics who believe in impoverishing the poor and ordinary (via ruinous austerity, unprecedented wage repression policies, devastating public service cuts, catastrophic infrastructure under-investment, and vandalism of the social safety net) in order to lavish handouts and tax cuts on corporations and the mega rich. These austerity-fetishists are backed up by the vast majority of the UK mainstream media, and by various corporate lobbying groups like the CBI and a network of shady secretively-funded hard-right think tanks (Policy Exchange, Adam Smith Institute, IEA, CPS, Taxpayers' Alliance ...).

On the other side are the people who oppose austerity-fanaticism on the grounds that "let's cut our way to growth" is absolutely nonsensical pseudo-economics that outright defies economic history, and that this pro-cuts narrative is simply being used as a smokescreen to hide the real agenda, which is a massive and unprecedented upwards redistribution of wealth, regardless of the cost to the poorest and most vulnerable people in society.

Arguing in favour of a pro-austerity position is increasingly unjustifiable for a number of compelling reasons.

The primary reason is that it's spectacularly failed in its own terms. Back in 2010 the Tories promised that austerity would lead to complete elimination of the budget deficit by early 2015. It's now 2019, and after 9 years of cratering living standards and soaring in-work poverty, the budget deficit is still not eliminated!

Another compelling reason is that even right-leaning international organisations like the IMF and OECD have openly admitted that austerity is an economically damaging ideology.

But such is the power of the mainstream media in the UK that the austerity fanatics are still routinely presented as occupiers of the "common sense" position, while it's up to a bunch of small independent media outfits, economics experts, and lone wolf bloggers like me to make the counter-argument that austerity is economically illiterate nonsense that crushed living standards, caused the wave of public anger that drove Brexit marginally over the winning line in 2016, and pushed tens of thousands of people into early graves.

But some people on the political right simply can't tolerate the fact that there's any opposition to austerity fanaticism and its dire consequences at all, hence a new anonymous hard-right propaganda campaign aimed at defunding left-leaning news sources like Evolve Politics and The Canary by pressuring advertisers into pulling their ads from these sites with false accusations that these Impress regulated sites are spreading "fake news".

They obviously think it's easier to simply get opponents of austerity dogma and the systematic persecution of disabled people shut down with accusations of spreading "fake news" and spurious allegations of anti-Semitism, than to actually argue in favour of the policies they support.

These anonymous pro-austerity Twitter trolls first dragged the cancer charity MacMillan into their culture war by getting them to pull ads off The Canary (which happens to be one of the most consistent champions of sick and disabled people's rights in the British media and exactly the kind of socially progressive site a cancer charity would benefit from advertising on).
 

EBay UK publicly announcing their collusion with
this hard-right censorship campaign

And now they've convinced eBay to pull their ads from the Canary too.

Now I'm strongly against people cancelling their donations to a cancer charity because they've been tricked by hard-right culture warriors, because they do great work helping cancer sufferers with issues like palliative care ... but fuck eBay right?

If eBay are going to pick sides in the culture war and come out batting for the anonymous hard-right smear-mongering austerity fanatics, then fuck them.

But there's no good in just swearing to yourself that you won't use their services, or bickering about their decision on social media.

Write to them and tell them that if they're going to collude with an anonymous hard-right censorship campaign to defund Impress regulated websites, then you're not going to use their services, and you're going to tell people how eBay is actively siding with the hard-right to repress and censor legitimate criticism of stuff like austerity, wage repression, public service cuts, UN-condemned government discrimination against disabled people, brutal social security cuts, and deliberate under-investment in the drivers of future economic growth like infrastructure, housing, and education.

Here are some ways of getting in touch with eBay:

Email their UK managing director: Rob Hattrell
Facebook: eBay UK
Twitter: eBay UK news
Instagram: eBay UK

And please remember these rules for effective communication

1. Be firm but polite (absolutely no swearing or abuse)
2. Tell them what they did wrong
3. Ask them what justification they had for what they did
4. Ask them to rectify their actions
5. Tell them you will be boycotting their services until they rectify

Here's a template email you can copy n' paste in case you don't have the time to compose your own

-------------------------------------

Dear Rob Hattrell,

I'm writing to raise my concerns about eBay's decision to side with an anonymous right-wing campaign to smear the Impress regulated website The Canary as "fake news". As you will know, your company have publicly announced a decision to block adverts on their website as a direct result of this political censorship campaign.

I would like to know what investigations and considerations you undertook to justify this action.

• Did eBay contact the independent UK Press Regulator Impress to ascertain whether the accusation of "fake news" against the Canary is a fair one?

• Did eBay identify any examples of "fake news" at all on The Canary website and report them to the press regulator before the decision to blacklist was taken?

• Did eBay contact The Canary for comment before this action was undertaken?

• Or did eBay take a hard-right pressure group entirely at their word and block advertising on a left-leaning website without conducting any investigations to verify the accusations first?

• Did eBay consider the free speech ramifications of siding with an anonymous hard-right campaign to defund and silence left-leaning socially progressive political commentary?
  
  Did eBay consider the reputation damage that uncritically siding with an anonymous hard-right censorship campaign could do to the eBay brand?

I hope you understand that I will be boycotting eBay and advising my friends and family to do likewise until this situation is rectified.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Regards

-------------------------------------

Aside from contacting eBay with your concerns, you can also help to support independent anti-austerity media with a small monthly donation, or just by sharing their articles, infographics, and videos.

The Canary
Evolve Politics
Novara Media
Another Angry Voice (me)

12 left-leaning independent media sites you should be following

The UK mainstream media is the most right-wing and the least trusted in Europe. For decades a handful of savagely right-wing propaganda barons have been allowed to debase the standard of political debate by relentlessly attacking and smearing anyone who dares to stand up and argue against the neoliberal orthodoxy (privatisation mania, deregulation, wage repression, tax cuts for the rich, social security cuts for the poor, and ruinous austerity dogma) that has served the interests of billionaires so well at the expense of the rest of us.

Instead of counteracting the toxification of UK political discourse by the right-wing propaganda barons, the supposedly left-liberal media have repeatedly joined in the dog-piling of alternative voices. 

The Guardian, The Independent, and The New Statesman all host some of the worst offenders when it comes to pretending to be left-wing, but actually arguing for the continuation of neoliberal economic policies at home and imperialist war-mongering overseas.

A monthly online subscription to The Guardian costs £12, but instead of using that cash to fund an organisation that hosts some of the most insidious anti-left commentators of all, why not consider making a few smaller £1 subscriptions to truly independent left-leaning sites?

If you can't afford to subscribe to all/any of the following sites, you can still help by sharing this article, and by following the social media accounts of these pages and sharing their posts to help them reach a wider audience.

Here are twelve suggestions (in no particular order):

Novara Media

[Website - Twitter]

Novara Media have been running for five years, and they're going from strength to strength, despite the fact that the majority of their contributors are unpaid volunteers. Most of the other sites on this list concentrate on blog posts, articles, and occasionally infographics. Novara Media are one of the leading left-leaning producers of video content.

One of the best reasons to support Novara Media's work is that they helped spring the phenomenal Ash Sarkar onto the political scene. With a bit more support Novara Media could easily become a production line of left-wing talent.

Vox Political

[Website - Facebook]

Vox Political is a one-man blog operated by Mike Sivier since 2011. The blog usually focuses on disability rights, welfare issues, and Labour politics.

Mike is a Labour Party member so a pro-Labour slant is to be expected, however he has done amazing work, including extensive investigations into the number of people to have died within weeks of being declared "fit for work" under the Tory government's dehumanising and discriminatory assessment regime for sick and disabled people.

Pride's Purge

[Website - Twitter]

Pride's Purge is a one-man political blog established in 2011 that is mainly focused on disability and welfare issues. Articles range from compelling evidence based critiques to outright satire.

In the early days of Another Angry Voice Tom Pride was a major inspiration for my work, so if you see some value in what I do now, please consider supporting one of the guys who inspired me to do it.

Evolve Politics
[Website - Facebook]

Evolve Politics is a left-wing news and current affairs website that was founded in 2015. During the 2017 General Election they were one of the most mega-viral pro-Corbyn websites on Facebook (the other two being Another Angry Voice and The Canary).

Since 2017 Evolve has gone from strength to strength, improving the standard of their content and the breadth of their coverage.

The Canary

[Website - Facebook]

The Canary is an unashamedly left-wing and socially liberal website that was established in 2015 by Kerry-Ann Mendoza who previously ran the Scriptonite Daily blog.

The site has multiple contributors meaning the quality of the articles are extremely variable, ranging from superb examples of evidence based journalism to annoying clickbait. What is undeniable is that The Canary has played a massive role in holding the Tory government to account over issues the mainstream media have tended to downplay or outright ignore, especially the devastating impact of hard-right Tory austerity dogma.

We Own It

[Website - Twitter]

We Own It is a campaign against privatisation mania that has been running since 2013. Their mission statement says that "Public services should belong to all of us - whether that's the NHS, schools, water, energy, rail, Royal Mail, care work or council services".

Setting up a small donation to support We Own It would help them continue to fight against Tory privatisation scams, and to promote the concept of not-for-profit public services run for the benefit of the British people rather than a handful of corporate shareholders.

Zelo Street

[Website - Twitter]

Zelo Street is the blog of a left-leaning social liberal from Crewe called Tim Fenton that's he's been running since 2009.

Fenton is an astoundingly prolific writer, producing an average of three articles per day, every day for the last six years. He's always at his best when he's critiquing extreme-right fanatics and the output of hard-right propaganda rags like the S*n, Daily Mail and Express.

Tax Research UK

[Website - Twitter]

Tax Research UK is the personal blog of the economist Richard Murphy, which he's been running since 2006.

Richard has campaigned on a number of important issues from tax-dodging to inequality. Probably the most famous blog post he's ever produced is the myth-buster post that proves that Tory governments always create more debt than the Labour governments!

Murphy would probably deny that he's an out-and-out lefty, but there is certainly a huge amount of crossover between us full-on lefties and his anti-austerity pro-investment economic views, his opposition to tax dodging, and his work on inequality, so he's definitely worth a follow.

Double Down News

[Website - YouTube]

DDN have produced some absolutely outstanding videos since they were established in January 2017. Aside from left-leaning UK political content, they've also conducted some outstanding interviews with the likes of  Lowkey, Akala, and DMC.

The Skwawkbox

[Website - Twitter]

The Skwawkbox is a left-wing news blog founded in 2009 that mainly focuses on Labour Party politics which exists to present information that rarely makes it into the mainstream media (except when mainstream media hacks nick Skwawkbox exclusives and pass them off as their own work, which is heppening more and more regularly).

The Skwawkbox is particularly hated on the Labour party right for its effectiveness in providing rapid counter-narratives to fight back against each anti-Corbyn attack point the Labour right-wingers come up with.

The London Economic

[Website - Twitter]

The London Economic is a left-leaning news website that rose to prominence during the 2017 General Election campaign. It was originally founded as a personal blog by the editor Jack Peat. Of all of the sites listed here it's the one that most closely resembles a traditional mainstream media source, with various sections ranging from the economy to sports, which is partly down to their relationship with the South West News Service news agency.

Another Angry Voice

[Website - Facebook]

When I started the Another Angry Voice in 2010 I had absolutely no idea that it would become one of the most recognisable left-wing sites on the British political scene, let alone make me by far the most viral political writer on Facebook during the 2017 General Election!

I'm very proud of what I've achieved without any establishment or mainstream media connections whatever, but I'm also well aware that I couldn't have achieved any of it without the support of people who see some value in my work. 

Without all the likes, comments, and shares I could never have reached an audience of millions of people, and without the subscriptions and donations there's absolutely no way I could devote so much of my time to writing articles and creating infographics.

Conclusion

That 11 of the 12 sites in this list has been founded in the last decade just goes to show how much social media has opened up the UK political landscape to the kind of left-wing voices who would never have been given a platform by the mainstream media gatekeepers of political discourse.

The rise of left-wing independent media sites has finally created a little bit of counter-balance to a mainstream media that has consistently favoured the hard-right neoliberal orthodoxy for the past four decades. But the reach of all of these 12 sites combined is still a drop in the ocean compared to the enormous reach of right-wing propaganda operations like The S*n and The Daily Mail.

That's why every £1 counts. Every pound that ordinary people spend supporting bloggers, independent websites, and campaign groups, rather than mainstream media outlets, makes a difference because pretty much everyone working on independent left-wing media sites is either earning a tiny fraction of what their mainstream media counterparts get paid for protecting the neoliberal orthodoxy, or working on an entirely voluntary basis.

There's no way that self-serving billionaires like Rupert Murdoch, Jonathan Harmsworth, or the Barclay brothers would ever fund writers who critique the hard-right neoliberal orthodoxy that has served their interests so well, so it's absolutely up to ordinary people to begin funding and supporting the kind of media that's going to stick up for their interests, rather than the vested interests of right-wing billionaires.

 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.

OR

Imagine the uproar if an independent left-wing media site had published irresponsible fearmongering fake news like this

Everyone remembers the absolute furore a couple of months ago over that story in The Canary that the BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg was listed to speak at the Tory Party conference right? 

It didn't seem to matter a jot that Kuenssberg was actually listed as a guest speaker in Tory conference publicity, the mainstream media picked up her subsequent denial and created the narrative that left-wing independent media is creating "fake news".

Of course the Canary article attached more importance to the event literature about a Tory party fringe event than it was probably worth, but they absolutely didn't fake the evidence that she was listed as a speaker there, and the question of why the chief political editor at the (supposedly impartial) BBC was listed as a speaker at the Tory party conference was actually a legitimate one.

Now consider the absolutely undeniable fake news that the Daily Mail spread about the incident at Oxford Circus on Friday 24 November. They picked up a Tweet from November 11th and spun it into a headline about a lorry having supposedly ploughed into pedestrians, adding to the fear and panic over the incident.

Whether you think the Canary story about Laura Kuenssberg was justifiable or not, there's a vast difference between picking up on publicity listing her as a speaker at a Tory conference event and then working it up into an article about a lack of political neutrality at the BBC, and picking up a weeks old Tweet, combining it with unverified accounts of gunshots and using it to stoke public panic about an ongoing public safety incident.

One is an example of stretching something real beyond what it's probably actually worth, and the other is deeply irresponsible fearmongering.

Most of the mainstream media let this shockingly inaccurate and deeply irresponsible Daily mail headline pass without comment. 

The only reasonably big news outlets to run the story were the Huffington Post, RT, IB Times and The Irish Post. Apparently this kind of wildly inaccurate fearmongering by one of the most visited websites in the UK didn't warrant any kind of critical coverage on the BBC!

Just imagine how the BBC/Daily Telegraph/Murdoch Press would have dog-piled a site like Evolve Politics or The Skwawkbox had they published a load of pathetically researched, shockingly inaccurate fearmongering fake news about an ongoing public safety incident, then deleted it instead of issuing a proper retraction and clarification?

The question here is a simple one: Why is it that independent left-wing media outlets are apparently being held to very much higher standards than the right-wing press?

Aside from the Daily Mail fake news about the incident at Oxford Circus, there's also the way that the mainstream media regularly churnalise misleading drivel from the right-wing Guido Fawkes blog into headlines, like the fake news story they broke about Jeremy Corbyn having backtracked on a supposed promise to wipe out pre-existing student debts, when no such promise was ever actually made.

There's an ongoing mainstream media tactic of lazily churnalising misleading Guido Fawkes tropes into headlines while the majority of mainstream media coverage of independent left-wing media sites like The Canary, Squawkbox, and Evolve Politics is highly critical on the rare ocasions such sites get coverage at all.

Why do inaccurate and poorly researched Guido Fawkes posts so often frame mainstream media narratives, while a fraction of the inaccuracy or exaggeration from independent left-wing sites would be used to justify the increasingly common mainstream media trope about how such sites are unreliable and inherently untrustworthy?

Of course I'm not arguing that independent left-wing media should be afforded the same leeway as muck-raking right-wing trash sites like the Daily Mail and Guido Fawkes. 

When independent media outlets make mistakes or exaggerated claims it's absolutely right that they issue retractions or clarifications, and everyone in left-wing independent media has a big responsibility to work hard to make sure our assertions are backed up by facts and evidence.

The issue here isn't that certain independent left-wing media outlets have occasionally made mistakes or exaggerated claims (of course they have, nobody is perfect), or even that journalists in the mainstream media are seeking to amplify these mistakes or exaggerations in order to discredit independent left-wing media as a whole (self-interested mainstream media hacks attacking a perceived threat to the established order of things is actually pretty understandable). 

The problems are that the mainstream media fail so badly to dog-pile and eviscerate the Daily Mail and other right-wing media outlets in the same way when they're guilty of publishing very much more irresponsible and inaccurate things, and that they actually churnalise misleading crap from the Guido Fawkes blog into mainstream media headlines without bothering to subject their posts to a fraction of the critical scrutiny they apply to claims from sites like The Canary or Novara Media (on the rare occasions left-wing independent media sites ever actually get a mention in the mainstream media).

 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.

OR

People want honest independent media, not mainstream media distortions

Look back to April 18th 2017 and the day that Theresa May called the snap election of hubris, and you'll remember how all the talk amongst the political pundit class was of the UK becoming a de facto one-party state, the only debate being whether May would be crowned Brexit Queen with a super-majority or a mega-majority.

The polls had the Tories over 20 points ahead of Labour. One poll even had them taking double the vote (48-24). Theresa May had some of the highest approval ratings in history and Jeremy Corbyn was being treated like a figure of ridicule by most of the mainstream media.

Within seven weeks Theresa May's reputation has been shredded, the Tory lead had evaporated (in the end the Tories won the General Election by less than a million votes) and Jeremy Corbyn walks away as the undisputed champion of the election for the way he conducted himself with the integrity of a true statesman, and never once crawled down into the political sewer to sling insults, abuse, smears, deliberate misrepresentations or lies back at the Tories and their despicable right-wing media bully boys.. 

Jeremy Corbyn fought a fantastic campaign. To millions his authentic optimism was a refreshing antidote to Theresa May's robotic repetition of her catchphrases (many of which will continue biting her for the rest of her political career), her cowardly refusal to debate her political opponents, and her refusal to give straight answers to even the most basic and mundane of questions.

We all saw how Corbyn has been monstered by the mainstream media, not just the filth that was relentlessly lobbed at him during this election campaign, but also during the two Labour leadership contests in 2015 and 2016 (where "left-liberal" publications like the Guardian were amongst the worst offenders).

Jeremy Corbyn has a lot of admirers. A lot of people remember him as one of the leaders of the Iraq war protest, and a lot of people really appreciate his statesmanlike refusal to crawl into the sewer and slinging abuse back at the Tories and their bully boy hacks in the mainstream media.

These Corbyn supporters needed media to turn to, and remembering the treachery of the supposedly left-wing media they turned in their droves to independent media.

According to research by Kaleida, of the 10 most shared political articles on Facebook during the election campaign, three were Another Angry Voice articles, including both of the top two.

 #1 So how many of these Jeremy Corbyn policies do you actually disagree with (102,655 shares)

#2 Why you need to speak to someone who works in the NHS (85,045 shares)

#7 Theresa May's extraordinary Facebook meltdown (50,885 shares)

In the final week of the general election the Another Angry Voice Facebook page generated almost one million likes, comments and shares.  That's almost as many as the Labour Party Facebook page managed, and significantly more than the Facebook pages of all of the other political parties combined!

That's one lone wolf guy making more Facebook noise than the pages of every UK newspaper except the Daily Mail and the Independent. And a huge amount of the Daily Mail's interactions were on their clickbait honey trap videos (you know, cute kids, fails, and cat videos) to lure people into their depraved extreme-right echo chamber.

Evolve Politics was even more viral than Another Angry Voice. Their virality rate for the final week of the election was an astounding 578%, working out at 5.78 interactions per follower in a single week! 

With just 92,000 followers Evolve Politics content generated more engagements than the page of the ruling party in the final week of an election campaign!

The best virality the mainstream media managed was 0.4 interactions per follower achieved by the Independent (they produced some fantastic articles to hold Theresa May and the Tories to account, so I'm not at all surprised they were the most viral mainstream media source).
 

7m+ views! Astounding statistics, but all I did was
say something that needed to be said.

 
The Canary, despite having slightly lower interaction and virality figures than AAV and EP, also played a huge role because their content was very much dominated by factual well-sourced articles rather than the mix of articles, infographics and videos approach taken by the other two pages.

The phenomenal virality of factual independent media content should be one of the dominant stories of the post election analysis, but the mainstream media are skirting around it for some reason.

Either they're too blind to have even seen it (do they have no Facebook friends in real life or what?) or they saw it going on and decided not to give any extra publicity to the fact their carefully planned election narratives were getting totally annihilated on Facebook by two small left-wing websites and a lone wolf blogger!

Of course there's a lot of speculation for the mainstream media political pundits to do over the future of the nation under a hung parliament with the Article 50 clock ticking (well done for the smooth and orderly Brexit Mrs May!), but their inept attempts to frame the election through the prism of Brexit-Remain goggles are painful to watch.

This election was so obviously a battle of truth against lies.

Honesty is undeniably in the ascendancy in British politics, thanks in no small part to Jeremy Corbyn for leading by example, and to an epic social media fightback against a frankly depraved smear-mongering campaign by the billionaire propaganda barons and their minions, and the transparently fake pro-Tory "neutrality" of much of the political pundit class.

Maybe the mainstream media will wake up to this absolutely essential honesty vs lies theme at some point? I guess they'll have to won't they. Millions upon millions of us are now seeing right through their propaganda tactics, their depraved smear-mongering and their smug fake neutrality.

 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.

OR

The rogue bank, the failing company and the Tory Party donations

In October 2008, at the very height of the global financial sector insolvency crisis, HSBC made a very strange decision: They made a massive £214.2 million loan to a struggling company called IPGL.

To get an idea of what was more normal practice for banks during the insolvency crisis and the post-crisis recession, consider the behaviour of the (majority taxpayer-owned) bank RBS which deliberately withdrew loans or hiked repayment terms in order to drive thousands of British companies into financial difficulties, and then used their Global Restructuring Group to close down the businesses and asset strip them for their own profits.

The RBS Global Restructuring Group destroyed 12,000 businesses in this way in what executives referred to in leaked emails as "the dash for cash". After the scandal was exposed by the hard work of people like Neil Mitchell they've now had to set aside a £400 million slush fund to compensate some of their victims.

Interestingly HSBC took a very different attitude towards the struggling and massively indebted IPGL, which was being run at huge losses by the then Tory party chairman and massive Tory party donor Michael Spencer. Instead of attempting to shut it down and asset strip it, they pumped a massive £214.2 million loan into it at a time when getting loans out of a bank was like getting blood out of a stone.

Spencer then funnelled over four million in donations to the Tory party via IPLG including over £1 million for their 2010 general election fighting fund. IPLG donations also covered the cost of flying David Cameron, George Osborne and others to the Davos World Economic Forum just months before the 2010 General Election.

If HSBC propped up a failing business and that business then went on to pump millions into the Tory party to help them win the 2010 General Election, it's easy to see how people might conclude that the failing business was used by HSBC to launder money into political donations.

HSBC, the Tory party, George Osborne's office and IPGL were contacted by the investigative journalists who broke this story and offered the chance to comment. They all declined.

While this HSBC-IPGL-Tory party business was going on HSBC were also laundering hundreds of millions of pounds in drug money for Mexican drug cartels and funds for terrorist organisations.

After the Tories came to power in 2010 the conduct of George Osborne and David Cameron clearly continued to favour HSBC and Michael Spencer's business interests. Their attempted favours towards Spencer continued even after their fall from grace over the spectacular failure of their EU referendum gamble in June 2016.

• In November 2010 The Tories made the HSBC Chairman Stephen Green an unelected peer in the House of Lords (where he still sits as a Tory peer).

• In January 2011 David Cameron appointed Green as Minister of State for Trade and Investment in the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition government.

• In 2012 George Osborne hampered the US investigation into the HSBC money laundering scandal and lobbied for them not to face criminal prosecutions claiming that such a move could lead to "financial contagion" because the bank was too big to fail.

• In March 2012 Spencer was named by the disgraced former Tory party co-treasurer Peter Cruddas as one of the millionaires to have benefited from the "cash for access scandal".

• In March 2013 George Osborne was the only finance minister in the entire EU to oppose a policy of limiting bankers' bonuses to 200% of their final salary. When it came to the vote he was defeated 26-1.

• In September 2013 Michael Spencer's firm was fined £55 million for rigging the Libor rate. In the very same month David Cameron tried to make Spencer an unelected peer in the House of Lords but was foiled by the ethics committee.

• After the bankers' bonus defeat Osborne wasted £50,000 of taxpayers' money on fighting a futile legal challenge against the EU bankers' pay cap, a battle he finally abandoned in December 2014.

• In January 2015 the Times editor Camilla Cavendish had a dinner with David Cameron and then spiked an investigative story about fraud at HSBC. She was soon appointed as Cameron's adviser at the Number 10 Policy Unit.

• In 2015 George Osborne washed his hands of the HSBC Swiss accounts scandal, and repeatedly refused to confirm whether he had discussions about the bank's collusion in tax evasion with Stephen Green before his appointment as a government minister.

• In January 2016 George Osborne delayed a Competition and Markets Authority report into reducing the dominance of the big four banks that was widely regarded as a move to placate HSBC.

• After resigning in disgrace after his EU referendum gamble failed David Cameron reportedly tried to make Spencer an unelected peer again in his resignation honours list, but was foiled a second time. 

• Although Spencer didn't make it into the unelected House of Lords in David Cameron's resignation honours list Camilla Cavendish (the former Times editor who spiked the HSBC fraud story) did.

The £214 million HSBC loan to the failing IPGL and their subsequent donations to the Tory party have now been referred to the Electoral Commission by the SNP's Roger Mullin, who is calling for an immediate investigation. The Labour MP John Mann has called for a public inquiry into what he called "the biggest party donor scandal ever".

Coverup/whitewash?

The French libertarian philosopher and economist Frédéric Bastiat once wrote that "when plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it", which stands as true today as when he wrote it in the 1840s.

There are so many revolving doors between Westminster politics, the financial system, the financial regulators and the media that it seems unlikely anyone will ever be properly held to account.

The Canary and Move Your Money broke this story on April 28th, but 5 days later the mainstream media has yet to move on it, preferring instead to focus the public attention on "vital" issues like the Shadow Home Secretary getting her figures muddled up in a radio interview and then subsequently correcting them.

The whole thing reeks of corruption, but we all know by now how these things tend to play out. Even if the story does eventually get some limited mainstream media coverage it'll doubtlessly all be brushed under the carpet again, and if anyone ever does end up getting the chop for it, it'll almost certainly be some lowly minion who gets fed to the wolves, not any of the big players.

But at least you know some of the murky details now.

Credits

The investigative work into the HSBC-IPGL-Tory party money flow was done by Fionn Travers-Smith of Move Your Money. The story was publicised by Steve Topple of The Canary.

The SNP's Roger Mullin deserves credit for publicly raising this issue with the Electoral Commission and Labour's John Mann deserves some too for calling for a public inquiry.

Follow them here:

Fionn Travers-Smith (Twitter)
Move Your Money (Twitter/Facebook)
Steve Topple (Twitter)
The Canary (Twitter/Facebook)
Roger Mullin (Twitter)
John Mann (Twitter)

You should also follow the HSBC whistleblower Nicholas Wilson (Twitter) for more corruption coverage.

 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.

OR

The "why haven't you killed yourself yet?" scandal

People tend to react with disbelief when I try to explain to them how badly disabled people are treated in Britain.

They tend to disbelieve me when I tell them that the UK government has been severely critisised by the United Nations for their "systematic violations" of disabled people's rights.

They tend to disbelieve me when I tell them that the dehumanising Work Capacity Assessment regime for disabled people has been ruled unlawful in the courts for the way it discriminates against people with mental health conditions, and that it costs way more in corporate outsourcing fees to administer than it will ever save in reduced benefits payments.

They tend to disbelieve me when I tell them that disabled people are by far the most likely people to suffer the punitive "Bedroom Tax" regime, and that people with mental illnesses and learning difficulties are disproportionately affected by the draconian Tory sanctions regime (another brutal Tory welfare policy that costs way more to administer than it will ever save in reduced benefits payments).

In March 2017 another scandal erupted about the callous way in which disabled people are treated in Britain. It's so extreme that again, people really struggle to believe that it's actually happening in a supposedly decent and humane society like Britain.

It turns out that the private profit-making companies that are carrying out the dehumanising and discriminatory Work Capacity Assessment and other disability assessments like PIP on behalf of the Tory government have been asking disabled people why they haven't committed suicide yet.

During my #pip assessment I was asked why I hadn't killed myself yet. This is standard, assessors regularly ask this question.

— Alice Kirby (@Alice__Kirby) February 24, 2017

After Alice Kirby Tweeted about this outrageous line of questioning dozens of other disabled people have come forward to testify about how they had been asked similar "why haven't you killed yourself yet?" type questions during the various dehumanising assessment processes the Tory government put them through.

One of the corporate outsourcing giants conducting disability assessments on behalf of the Tory government (Maximus) has openly admitted that asking disabled people questions like "what stops you from acting on the [suicidal] thoughts that you have?" and "Can you think of any reason you're not doing that [committing suicide]?" is "in line with their policies and guidelines".

If you can't see why this is such a shocking and dangerous line of questioning for people with disabilities, you might as well stop reading now and continue living in your bubble of denial about the absolutely disgusting ways in which the Tory government and their corporate outsourcing chums have been treating sick and disabled people.

It's so obviously sick and dangerous to ask people with severe physical and mental illnesses "Why haven't you killed yourself yet?" that I feel like I'm being ridiculously patronising even explaining it, but it needs to be said.

Asking people with severe mental illnesses like depression and Post Traumatic Stress why they haven't killed themselves yet is obviously going to increase the risk of suicide, but it's also likely to increase the risk of suicide amongst people with all manner of other disabilities who may already feel like their condition is a burden on their families, or on wider society. 

In fact the whole process of treating disabled people like they are scroungers on the make who deserve to be put through one dehumanising assessment regime after another is bad enough, but actually asking people why they've not killed themselves yet during these appalling processes is so obscene it's actually beyond my ability as a writer to express how disgusted I am by it.

Shockingly the mainstream media have totally neglected this dreadful scandal. During my research for this article the only coverage whatever seems to be from fellow independent media sources (Black Triangle, Disability News Service, Vox Political, The Canary) and from personal social media accounts. At the time of writing this scandal has been covered in alternative media sources for over a week, yet nobody from the mainstream press seems even remotely bothered about holding the government to account over it.
It's astounding that nobody from the mainstream press has bothered to try to give this appalling story the publicity it deserves. 

Perhaps even worse than the fact these "why haven't you killed yourself yet?" questions are being asked* is the way that the mainstream press have abjectly failed in their duty to hold the Tories to account over this scandal.

Of course ordinary people are going to continue having doubts that disabled people are being systematically abused by the Tory government and their profiteering outsourcing chums if the mainstream press refuse to involve themselves in the subject whatever, leaving the job of holding the government to account to small independent bloggers and websites like me and the others listed in this article.

What you can do

• Follow the independent media sources who have actually bothered to publicise the outrageous "why haven't you killed yourself yet?" scandal while the mainstream press have studiously ignored it. (Facebook pages: Another Angry Voice, Black Triangle, Vox Political, Disability News Service, The Canary).

• Write to mainstream media organisations asking why they have done nothing to expose such scandalous mistreatment of disabled people, and whether they have any intention of actually covering the story at all.

• Write to your MP and ask them to clearly explain their position on whether disabled people should be asked why they haven't killed themselves during the already extremely stressful assessment regimes they're put through. If they try to justify the suicide questions or provide evasive or misleading answers, consider sharing their letters with me, or the other independent media organisations named above so they can be publicly shamed.

 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.

OR

* = After witnessing almost seven years of Tory rule, those of us who actually pay attention to what they're up to expect nothing less than extreme callousness towards disabled people from the Tories and their profiteering corporate outsourcing minions