The S*n welcomes you to the new Teletubbies era of political discourse

Just look at the absolute state of the front page of The S*n.

Doesn't it make you embarrassed for Britain that this ridiculous rag is Britain's best selling newspaper?

Doesn't it make you cringe at the pathetically subservient mentality of the hacks who came up with this Teletubbies level of vapid pro-government political discourse?

And doesn't it make you pity the readers of this pathetic rag that they allow themselves to be condescended to like a bunch of pre-school toddlers?

Doesn't it just perfectly illustrate that significant swathes of the mainstream media don't exist to hold powerful establishment figures to account, but to actively cheerlead for them, whitewash their faults and failings, and protect them from scrutiny?

Doesn't the text claiming that Johnson "gave Corb a roasting" just prove how gullible Murdoch's propaganda hacks assume their readers to be given that in the parliamentary debate they were referring to Corbyn asked Johnson 10 specific questions, all of which were answered with absolutely nothing but bluff, bluster, and smears?

Even the ideologically straitjacketed propagandists at Pravda in Soviet Russia or Der Stürmer in Nazi Germany would have been ashamed to produce such a pathetically infantile and ridiculously sycophantic piece of pro-government propaganda garbage.

But this embarrassing gibberish really is the state of mainstream media 'journalism' in 21st Century Britain.

It's the anti-Corbyn hypocrites who are really trivialising remembrance

It's 100 years to the day since the end of the First World War, a conflict my great-grandfather died in, leaving his two young daughters fatherless. My mother's grandfather was one of 8 million military casualties (a similar number of civilians died during the conflict too).

I've spent the day thinking about my great-grandfather's tragic death and the ramifications that have rippled down through the generations for my family, and contemplating the unimaginably vast waves of grief, suffering, and poverty that WWI wreaked upon millions of other families all across the world.

Today of all days we should be solemnly remembering the horrifying consequences of war, but like clockwork the right-wing virtue signallers are out in force to use Remembrance as a stick to attack their political foes with.

This year they're deliberately trivialising the whole subject with pathetic claims that Jeremy Corbyn's grey raincoat wasn't solemn enough (?!?) and outright lies that he wasn't wearing a poppy (he wore two poppies on his raincoat and suit jacket while he laid a large wreath of poppies at the Cenotaph).

In 2015 the right-wing shreikers made ludicrous efforts to claim that Corbyn disrespected veterans and the war dead by not bowing deeply enough at the Cenotaph (when he was actually the only political leader to stay behind after the ceremony to chat to veterans as the rest of the dignitaries cleared off to a slap-up meal in the warmth).

The next year it was the absurd claims that Corbyn supposedly danced on his way to the Cenotaph, which turned out to be pictures of him having an animated conversation with a WWII veteran who had been crudely photoshopped out by The S*n (isn't photoshopping them out of pictures in order to create cheap political smears a wonderful way for Rupert Murdoch's hacks to 'respect' veterans on Remembrance Sunday?).

Every November 11th this howling right-wing mob set about screeching about Corbyn's coat, the angle of his bow, the size of his poppy, or pictures they've deliberately photoshopped to make him look disrespectful. In doing so they're proving that they don't really give a shit about Remembrance, nor solemnly considering the death and suffering of war, nor the welfare of veterans, nor efforts to ensure that such mass slaughters are avoided in the future.

All they care about is bitterly twisting the whole issue of Remembrance to score ridiculously cheap political points.

This deliberate trivialisation of Remembrance would be absolutely shocking if we didn't know any better.

After all these are people are the mob who have backed the Tory austerity con to the hilt despite the massive death toll; who supported Theresa May's racist and depraved "deport now, hear appeals later" Hostile Environment policy; who caused immense amounts of suffering and death by supporting the Tory defunding the NHS and social care; who believe in selling £billions worth of weapons to the despicable Saudi tyrants who murder their critics with impunity and deliberately use famine and disease as weapons of war to kill unimaginable numbers of civilians in Yemen; who have supported the merciless eight year Tory campaign of impoverishment and abuse against British disabled people; and who sat by and said nothing as the Tories created a huge rise in homelessness on our streets (which is an issue that disproportionately affects veterans who have been left out in the cold by society after having outlived their usefulness in the armed services).

These howling right-wingers are people who have time and again proven themselves willing to sacrifice thousands of people's lives on their horrific austerity bonfire, through their systematic abuse of disabled people, through their deadly NHS and social care cuts, through the massive increases in extreme poverty, homelessness and suicide that they've engineered, and huge numbers more deaths overseas through to their unwavering support for the murderous Saudi war criminals.

Of course these people would gladly trivialise and debase Remembrance to score cheap political points, because they simply don't have the basic human decency to even understand what Remembrance is all about.

Compassion, empathy, and solemn reflection are so alien to these despicable people that howling about trivial nonsense like someone's coat being supposedly disrespectful, or their poppy being too small actually seems like a great idea to them, despite the fact that such crude and unnecessary distractions from the meaning of remembrance are the equivalent of them turning up at the cenotaph wearing pairs of underpants on their heads and shouting gibberish in order to wreck the ceremony.

To them it's a festival of virtue signalling, faux patriotism, furious witch hunts against anyone who dares not conform (by not wearing a poppy, or by choosing to wear a white one instead), and opportunistic point scoring against their political rivals.

They don't even have the wit to realise that their pathetic efforts to paint Jeremy Corbyn as supposedly disrespectful every single year on November 11th are actually infinitely more disrespectful than anyone's choice of coat, depth of bow, or size of poppy will ever be.

 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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Why on earth is the Guardian editor siding with The S*n over the people of Liverpool?

If you ever needed a demonstration of how far to the right the Guardian has shifted, consider the fact that their political editor Heather Stewart decided to insult the people of Liverpool, and insult the intelligence of the rest of us by presenting hacks from the S*n as poor innocent victims, solely in order to score ridiculously cheap political points against the Labour left.

The Tweet in question relates to a Momentum event in the city of Liverpool. It wasn't Momentum's choice to hold the Labour Party Conference in the city (it was the Labour leadership) but once it was settled that all the conference events were going to be in Liverpool it was obvious that anyone with any decency and respect for the victims of the Hillsborough disaster would avoid inviting hacks from The S*n to their events.

The reason is simple. When police negligence resulted in the deaths of 96 innocent Liverpool fans in 1989, The S*n produced a truly vile pack of lies on their front page to deliberately deflect blame from the police onto the victims of the tragedy. Worst of all, the headline above the extraordinary pack of front page lies read "The Truth".

For decades this grotesque fan-blaming narrative was used to deflect blame from the true culprits onto the victims of the disaster.

Just imagine how the families of the deceased felt to have their loved ones falsely blamed for their own deaths. Just imagine how the traumatised survivors of the tragedy felt to be smeared as drunks who pickpocketed the dead and urinated on the "brave cops" (you know the "brave cops" who actually caused the tragedy through their negligence).

Just imagine how it felt to suffer these lies for decades before the truth was finally admitted; that police negligence caused the disaster and the fan-blaming propaganda was all a pack of lies.

To their eternal credit the fans of Liverpool's rival club Everton FC put aside all their footballing differences and supported the Boycott the S*n campaign too out of solidarity for their friends, family members, neighbours, and work colleagues from the red half of the city.

So if you can't see why The S*n is still boycotted across Liverpool to this day, you really can't have much in the way of basic human empathy.

Despite this well-known and commonly understood history between The S*n and the city of Liverpool, Heather Stewart decided to use this show of respect for the Boycott The S*n campaign as a stick to beat Momentum with, publicly calling the decision "outrageous" and comparing it to Donald Trump's tactic of excluding journalists who criticise his Presidency or dare to ask him awkward questions.

After being called out on her misrepresentation, Heather's response was to feign ignorance with 'oh, I couldn't have imagined that not inviting a S*n hack to an event in Liverpool could have had anything to do with Hillsborough' type Tweets.

There's no way that the political editor of a British newspaper could have remained entirely ignorant of the reasons The S*n is boycotted in Liverpool. No way at all.

So dressing this respect for the Boycott The S*n campaign up as some kind of Trumpian press censorship, rather than respect for a Liverpool-specific boycott is clearly an attempt to deceive the reader.

And feigning ignorance in the aftermath is perhaps even worse. 

Not only is siding with hacks from The S*n to present them as the poor innocent victims of lefty oppression an gross insult to the people of Liverpool, it's an insult to the intelligence of everyone else that she expects us to believe it too.

It's a clear demonstration of the level of contempt Heather and many of her fellow Guardian hacks seem to have for ordinary people. 

They think we're crap-brained and gullible enough to fall for their politically partisan smears, even when they're as poorly crafted as Heather's.

Heather's smear also demonstrates something else about the media. Her decision to shit all over the people of Liverpool in a show of solidarity with hacks at The S*n, just in order to smear the left-leaning grassroots campaign group Momentum is evidence that the mainstream media is a clique where comfortably wealthy hacks from the hard-right Murdoch propaganda empire and from the supposedly left-leaning Guardian have way more in common with each other than they do with ordinary people.

In recent years The Guardian have run countless articles bitterly attacking left-wing independent media sites like mine, and decrying the fact that the traditional mainstream media hacks are having their role as gatekeepers of political discourse undermined, and Heather's S*n solidarity Tweet is about the best demonstration of why this is happening that you could ask for.

If the Guardian's political editor has more empathy towards hacks from the Murdoch propaganda empire than she does for the people of Liverpool and the victims of the Hillsborough tragedy, then she's clearly living in an insulated bubble very far removed from the real world.

And if she's willing to distort the Liverpool Boycott The S*n campaign solely in order to score cheap political points against the Labour left, she's using the same kind of despicable and deceptive journalistic tricks as S*n hacks do, and displaying the same outright contempt for her audience too.

So it's absolutely no wonder at all that ever more people are cancelling their subscriptions to The Guardian and making donations to independent media sources instead.

 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 are plotting to turn schools in deprived areas into military indoctrination centres

They announced it on April Fools Day, but it's no joke: The bumbling former fireplace salesman with no military experience Theresa May has put in charge of our armed forces is plotting to militarise schools in deprived neighbourhoods.

For the last eight years the Tories have been routinely ignoring teachers and education experts who have argued that better funding and more modern teaching methods are fundamental to an education system that is capable of producing adults with the skills and aptitude to cope with the rapidly changing modern work environment.

The Tories ignored them in order to concentrate on their ideological agenda of giving away thousands of state schools, for free, to unaccountable private sector pseudo-charities (many of them owned and operated by major Tory donors), reverting to old fashioned rote learning methods, and then inflicting the largest cuts to the education budget in decades.

It's not just teachers and education experts who have been complaining about the devastating impact of extreme Tory budget cuts. Generals have furiously condemned the Tories for slashing the armed forces leaving them "unfit for purpose".

But instead of announcing an end to the ideologically driven austerity cuts to the armed forces, Gavin Williamson and his Tory pal Robert Goodwill are concocting an extraordinary plot to introduce special "military schools" in deprived areas in order to create a new generation of cannon fodder kids.

Anyone who is familiar with the rise of fascism should be deeply concerned about the concept of indoctrinating school children with the "military ethos". If parents actually want their kids to develop the military ethos, there are plenty of cadet organisations for them to sign them up to.

It hardly seems like a controversial concept, but the classroom should be a place for education, and cadet organisations should be places for developing the military ethos.

Another extraordinary facet of the announcement of this Tory school militarisation project is that the link didn't go to an official government press release, it went to an article in Rupert Murdoch's right-wing propaganda rag The S*n!

Not only did Gavin Williamson use the official Ministry of Defence social media account to provide free publicity for The S*n, the comments underneath the S*n article made it perfectly clear the kind of people this policy is aimed at.

Here's a quote from one of the comments that Williamson decided to promote via the official Ministry of Defence Twitter account: "the whole of the education departments in the UK have for decades been taken over by the left".

So when the reality is that since 2010 huge swathes of the education system have been given away to private sector interests (including unelected Tory lords and major Tory donors like Robert Harris and John Nash) but Williamson is using the official MoD Twitter account to help spread the ludicrous reality-reversing conspiracy that the whole of the education system has somehow been taken over by the left!

The idea of turning schools in deprived neighbourhoods into military indoctrination centres in order to create new generations of cannon fodder is grotesque in its own right, but the decision to use an official MoD social media account to give free publicity to The S*n and a slew of bizarre below-the-line right-wing conspiracy theory nonsense is even worse. 

It's nothing short of politicisation of the armed forces in order to spread blatant pro-Tory propaganda.

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Jacob Rees-Mogg just shared some catastrophically innumerate Brexit propaganda from The S*n

The Tory Brextremist-in-chief Jacob Rees-Mogg has taken to Twitter to demonstrate what a gullible and innumerate fool he is.

He made this demonstration by Tweeting a clipping of some absolute idiot-fodder from The S*n.

Rupert Murdoch's hacks at the S*n helped to bring about the Brexit farce with a relentless barrage of misleading pro-Brexit propaganda, but they're so invested in it that they're refusing to admit what a shambles it's turning out to be, and continuing with yet more pro-Brexit distortions.

It hardly takes a genius to spot some of the many things that are wrong with the S*n clipping that Rees-Mogg liked so much he tweeted it to his followers.

One of the most obvious problems is that a significant number of the items mentioned are produced within the EU.

Why would you worry about paying a tariff of fake mozzarella-style cheese when membership of the European Single Market means that we can buy genuine mozzarella from Italy with no tariff at all, and be sure that you're buying the genuine thing because of protected designation of origin labelling rules?

Then there's the supposed saving on beef. Why on earth wouldn't you just eat British or Irish beef that come with 0% tariffs, rather than crying that you have to pay a tariff on imported hormone-riddled beef from the United States?

Aside from beef and mozzarella, there are numerous other products that could easily be purchased tariff free because they are mass produced in the EU, like cherry tomatoes, butter, and dog food.

Then there's the "no deal" Brexit scenario to consider. A decision to quit the EU with no trade deal in place would mean a reversion to WTO rules, and WTO tariffs. This would mean that tariffs would have to be paid on products imported from the EU, and that the EU would impose tariffs on products of British origin.

Brextremists like Rees-Mogg and the secretive "party within a party" ERG Brextremism group he leads are actually pushing for a "no deal" Brexit flounce that would dramatically increase the tariffs on regular supermarket items, but they're deliberately reversing reality and pretending that they're opposed to tariffs.

Then there's the LG flatscreen TV. It's hardly a secret that the EU has a bilateral Free Trade Agreement with South Korea, meaning that tariffs of South Korean flat screen TVs have already been eliminated.

A chaotic "no deal" flounce out of the EU would actually mean the re-imposition of tariffs on South Korean electronics. So that's yet another piece of Orwellian reality reversing nonsense from the Brexiteers at the S*n.

The S*n clipping is truly Orwellian in the way it invents fake tariffs on products to make Brextremism look like a great option, when everyone knows that the kind of hard Brexit favoured by Rees-Mogg and his ilk would result in new tariffs being applied on products from within the EU, and on products from within the dozens of other economies the EU has bilateral trade agreements with (like South Korea). 

Then there's the supposed tariff on the Viking bicycle. Whoever compiled this deliberate misinformation forgot to mention that Viking is actually a British company, and that British consumers wouldn't have to pay import tariffs on their bikes under any circumstances.

Perhaps the most shocking aspect of all is the disgraceful mathematical illiteracy of the whole thing. Take the butter as an example. If the butter costs £1 originally but has a 50% tariff applied on it, then the price rises to £1.50, not to £2.

If the price is £2 after the imposition of a 50% tariff, then the original price was £1.33, not £1.

The same goes for all of the other calculations too. Every single one of them have been made by someone so innumerate they'd fail Year 6 maths.

If the Brexiteers are so innumerate that they can't even cope with simple mathematical operations that my 9 year old son can understand, then who on earth would trust their judgement on an issue as complex as Brexit?

When it comes to Rees-Mogg actually sharing this nonsense, once again we're drawn back into the age old debate of whether the Tories have resorted to this lamentable propaganda because they're thick enough to believe it themselves, or because despite knowing that it's absolute reality-reversing and innumerate trash, they're such arrogant elitists they see the general public as such a bunch of gullible halfwits that we'll simply believe it without conducting any critical analysis whatever.

There is a case to be made that because Ress-Mogg is this type of arrogant elitist because he once described people who attended state schools as "potted plants".

If he's arrogant enough to dismiss 93% of the UK population as "potted plants" he's easily arrogant enough to deliberately spread such brazen misinformation. But in this case I think it's sheer stupidity. The man has seen something that triggers his confirmation bias, and instead of subjecting it to even the most rudimentary of critical analysis, he's just tweeted it out to his followers.

The way Rees-Mogg actually thanked the S*n for making these misleading and innumerate calculations indicates that he couldn't be bothered to check that they were accurate before sharing them, which is decidedly odd behaviour given that he considers himself a member of the vastly superior intellectual elite, yet it was state educated "potted plants" like me who actually bothered to conduct some rudimentary critical analysis on what he shared.

Idiot or elitist, either way, Rees-Mogg's dissemination of such abject and innumerate misinformation is absolutely unforgivable. But the Tory party is such a mess these days that there's not the flicker of a chance that he'll ever be made to apologise for spreading such easily disprovable lies.

 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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If the suffragettes were active today they'd be despised by the establishment elitists

This week the political establishment and the right-wing propaganda rags have been celebrating 100 years since the 1918 Representation of the People Act which gave some women the right to vote in General Elections for the first time.

There are several extraordinary things about this celebration. 

The first is that the 1918 Representation of the People Act wasn't an equalisation of voting rights at all, it was a deeply sexist and classist compromise designed to enfranchise a small number of property-owning women from the privileged classes, whilst maintaining the disenfranchisement of millions of ordinary woman.

Yes it was a small step in the right direction, but the way it was done is indicative of the sexist and elitist attitudes that still abound today in British society, and especially in Westminster and the right-wing propaganda rags like the Express, Daily Mail, and S*n.

The next thing to note is that this compromise legislation was only achieved through the sustained political activism of the Suffragettes (a word initially coined by the Daily Mail as a term of abuse).

Make no mistake about it, the political elite and right-wing media who are lauding the achievement of the suffragettes today are exactly the people who would have bitterly despised and disparaged them at the time.

The suffragettes protested noisily and often, they regularly associated with trade unions and left-wing political movements, they interrupted political speeches, they defied the law, they criticised the elitist political establishment, and many of them even resorted to destruction of property and acts of violence in the name of their cause.

As a result they were continually criticised in the press, harassed, arrested, and even fed through tubes that were brutally forced up their noses when they went on hunger strike.

• Now look at the new Tory drive to criminalise political protest. 

• Look at the contempt with which the political elite and the right-wing press sneer at modern day activist movements. 

• Look at the unbridled hatred of trade unions and the political left that pervades the ruling Tory party and the right-wing press. 

• Look at the barely disguised contempt with which most politicians consider the views of the general public, and the contempt with which right-wing press hacks expect us to believe their campaigns of lies and smears against social progressives and the political left.

• Look at the contempt with which the Tories deliberately filibustered the debate on votes at sixteen for no other reason that they know that young people won't vote Tory because the Tories have nothing to offer the young except more debt, lower wages, worse services, and more expensive housing and education than any previous generation.

• Look at the way the Tories and the right-wing press smear the centre-left democratic socialist Jeremy Corbyn as some kind of terrifying extreme-leftist when he's never said anything remotely as militant as Syvia Pankhurst's declaration that she was going to "fight capitalism even if it kills me".

The absolute brass neck of the establishment elitists is extraordinary. They laud the social progressives of the past at the very same time as they despise and disparage the social progressives of the present.

The lesson from 1918 is clear. Society does not advance because powerful elites benevolently choose to improve things on our behalf. It advances because ordinary people stand up and fight for their rights.

And even when pople eventually overcome the combined resistance of the political elitists and the mercenary hacks who do the bidding of the right-wing press barons, the establishment elitists only give away compromises instead of the full freedoms that are demanded.

Every generation must keep up the fight for social justice because when the elitists who rule over and dictate what we see in the media us are not completely indifferent to our suffering, they actively make things worse by erecting new barriers to social mobility, new methods of persecuting the poor, the sick, the young, and the disabled, new curtailments on workers' rights, and new laws designed to silence those who would use facts and evidence to protest against them.

Any generation that gives up on the fight for social justice simultaneously betrays the brave activists who went before them by allowing their achievements to be undone, and betrays the generations who come after them by ensuring that they have to work twice as hard just to make up the ground that was lost during the period of widespread public apathy.

 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 Daily Mail is by far the most dishonest newspaper in Britian

In 2017 the Daily Mail was by far the biggest offender when it came to making up inaccurate content. They had 37 inaccuracy-based complaints against them upheld by the press self-regulator IPSO. That's more than twice as many as the two next worst offenders (the Daily Express and The S*n).

It's important to bear in mind that these 37 upheld complaints only scratch the surface of the dishonesty and inaccuracy of the mainstream press. IPSO only proceeds with investigations if newspaper content provokes a wave of public complaints. Even if numerous people do complain, it's entirely up to IPSO whether they bother conducting an investigation or not.

Even though the complaints procedure is so inadequate, the number of rulings against inaccurate content paint a concerning picture of a right-wing dominated mediascape where cynical hacks working for billionaire propaganda barons (Jonathan Harmsworth, Rupert Murdoch, the Barclay brothers) consider themselves free to make up reams of inaccurate content, safe in the knowledge that they'll receive little or no punishment, even on the occasions that the toothless press regulator bothers to investigate and proves them to be liars.

Back in 2016 the three worst offenders were also the Daily Mail. S*n, and Express who racked up 43 rulings for inaccurate content between them. In 2017 the total between these three serial offenders has risen to 70, suggesting that the problem of hard-right propaganda rags spewing inaccurate/misleading/dishonest content is getting significantly worse.

In 2016 the Daily Mail racked up 17 rulings against their inaccurate content, but in 2017 a total of 17 adverse rulings was only enough for The Daily Express to secure a distant second place, after the Daily Mail managed to more than double the rulings against them to 37.

These figures suggest that the Daily Mail is by far the most dishonest newspaper in Britain. In fact their deluge of inaccurate, heavily biased, and misleading content was enough for Wikipedia to classify them as an unreliable source, yet millions of people still read this vile and demonstrably dishonest hard-right hate rag.

What you can do

If you see any misleading/inaccurate/dishonest content in the mainstream press, you should consider lodging a complaint with IPSO.

Yes, IPSO is far from ideal, and totally toothless when it comes to punishing newspapers that lie to their readers, but they work on a public complaints basis, and if people don't complain about inaccurate content, they simply won't bother to investigate it.

Save the link to the IPSO complaints form in your bookmarks, and use it to lodge a complaint the next time you come across a mainstream media article that you consider to be demonstrably misleading/inaccurate/dishonest.

 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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An attack on the Working Time Directive is an attack on British workers' rights

Lying Brexiteers are actually trying to dress up their move to scrap the Working Time Directive as "taking back control" by "putting the decision how hard to work back into the hands of the people who matter - the ordinary British worker".

In reality this is the exact opposite of what scrapping the Working Time Directive would do.

The Working Time Directive prevents employers from forcing their employees to work more than 48 hours per week.

Under this rule British workers are absolutely free to work more than 48 hours per week if they want to, but nobody can force them to with threats of punishment or the sack if they don't.

If you've never taken advantage of the absolute freedom EU workers have to work beyond 48 hours per week if they want to, just speak to someone who has worked as a doctor in a busy NHS role, a construction worker, a seasonal agricultural worker, in the tourist trade in the summer, or in the retail trade at Christmas time.

The Working Time Directive allows British workers some freedom to decide how many hours they work, and scrapping the Working Time Directive would put the power to decide back into the hands of their employers.

As things are now employers can't force employees to work super-long hours, so if they want them to, they've got to use incentives like overtime and bonuses rather than threats. Removal of the Working Time Directive would allow employers to resort to threats instead, and drastically reduce the financial incentives paid out to those workers who currently chose to work extremely long hours.

It's absolutely outrageous that Brextremists are once again pushing reality-reversing Orwellian propaganda to try and convince the gullible that scrapping workers' rights is good for workers, but these are the kinds of extreme mind games they insist on playing.

Looking into the reasoning behind such dishonest trickery reveals two very clear motivations. One is that they're deciding to lie in this outrageous manner because they believe that they simply can't win the argument with the truth. And the other motivation is the absolute contempt they must have for ordinary working people that they expect them to mindlessly believe the absurd story that revoking the workers' right to decide how much overtime their employer can make them do is somehow giving them more control over their own working lives!

Scrapping the Working Time Directive would definitely be "taking back control" in a way, but it would be taking control of the ability to decide away from British workers and handing it to their bosses.

But who could possibly have imagined that a Brexit process administered by the hard-right fringe of the Tory party would ever have ended up manifesting as anything other than a deliberate upwards redistribution of wealth and power?

 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 Daily Mail is accusing others of divisiveness!

The Daily Mail is a hateful and divisive hard-right propaganda rag that deliberately stokes divisions in society in order to deflect criticism away from the mega-rich establishment class (like their tax-dodging billionaire owner Jonathan Harmsworth, and the Tory political establishment they promote so relentlessly).

So it's particularly ironic to see the Daily Mail run a front page splash about how Facebook is supposedly "ripping society apart".

Anyone with a few brain cells to rub together knows that the main purpose of the Daily Mail is to rip society apart as much as possible in order to prevent solidarity forming between the lower orders, because they know as well as we do that if the British people actually stood together for once and demanded change, the tiny self-serving cabal of establishment elitists would be powerless to stop us because we massively outnumber them.

So they divide and divide and divide. They continually stoke hatred of immigrants, Muslims, single mothers, the unemployed, refugees, students, judges, public sector workers, Millenials, academics, and anyone who expresses even remotely left-wing or liberal ideas.

The central purpose of the Daily Mail is to continually divide society, yet here they are damning Facebook for "ripping society apart" on their front page on the very same day that Rupert Murdoch's biggest propaganda rag launched their own front page attack on Twitter.

Once we see this front page Daily Mail attack on Facebook as part of a concerted mainstream media campaign against social media, we get to the main point of it.

The Daily Mail hate Facebook and other forms of social media because they give a voice to other people. Social media gives a voice to people like me to point out what a vile extreme-right propaganda rag the Daily Mail is; their history of promoting fascism and praising Adolf Hitler; their support for modern day fascists like Norbert Hoffer in Austria, their contempt for democracy and the rule of law; their call for Jeremy Corbyn to be killed just weeks after Jo Cox was murdered in the street, the fact they've been banned from Wikipedia as an unreliable source; the racist, sexist and homophobic attitudes they continually promote; and the way they regularly ridicule the credulity of their own damned readers.

Despite being one of the most hateful and divisive publications in Britain, there are many at the Daily Mail who actually consider themselves to be the rightful gatekeepers of public discourse. So it fills them with impotent rage that social media is allowing other people to express dissenting opinions, and undermine the enormous power and influence of the right-wing billionaire press barons they work for.

Of course Facebook and Twitter are not perfect. Anyone who has ever ventured into the extreme-right Britain First hate chamber will know the kind of terrifying depravity that these companies host on their sites, yet the extreme-right, immigrant-hating, anti-Muslim, ultra-nationalist hate fest that is Britain First is simply a purer distillation of the hatred that Daily Mail hacks have spent decades deliberately stoking.

The Daily Mail can't really be angry at the existence of hatefests like Britain First, other than for the fact that they're stealing the target audience of hate-filled, extreme-right, white supremacist halfwits they've spent decades cultivating for themselves.

This furious front page splash is proof that Facebook and other social media sites are an absolute disaster for the Daily Mail.

Not only does social media provide a platform to decent people to stand up and offer alternatives to the divisive, hard-right, pro-establishment propaganda that the Daily Mail and the rest of the right-wing press churn out on an industrial scale, social media also provides a platform for extreme-right fanatics like the Britain First mob to steal and further-radicalise the Daily Mail's own core audience of angry hate-filled right-wingers.

So social media is undermining the power of the Daily Mail from both ends.

The direction of travel is obvious now. The Internet is breaking down the walled ideological gardens of the past. Only the older generations and the technology averse still turn to a single source like the Daily Mail for their news. Ever more people are obtaining their news from myriad different sources via our social media feeds, which may include the occasional Daily Mail article, but alongside all sorts of other stuff, including independent media pages like this one.

The Daily Mail hacks are like the Luddites who wanted to reverse the industrial revolution by smashing milling equipment. They're furiously decrying social media because they desperately want the social media cake to be unbaked and returned to its neatly segregated ingredients like it was before.

This anti-Facebook headline is another piece of evidence that the right-wing propaganda barons and their mercenary hacks are losing their vice-like influence over British political discourse, and the mix of terror and impotent fury this erosion of influence is provoking in them is an absolute joy to behold.

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