Britain never had a reckoning with the fascists in our midst

In the 1930s the British upper classes were absolutely riddled with fascists and antisemites.

There was Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists, which boasted tens of thousands of members, and loads of high-profile supporters including the Daily Mail proprietor Lord Rothermere (great-grandfather of the current owner), who was a personal friend of Adolf Hitler.

There were fascist-sympathisers throughout the aristocracy and the royal family. We've all seen the pictures of Edward teaching the young future queen Elizabeth to do Nazi salutes in the gardens of Balmoral Castle (despite royalist efforts to censor them).

The Tory party was particularly infested with fascists, with loads of Tory MPs and lords signed up to secretive organisations aimed at promoting fascist and antisemitic ideologies.

The Anglo-German Fellowship was dedicated to fostering stronger relations with Nazi Germany. It boasted dozens of Tory party politicians amongst its membership, as well as Bank of England director Frank Cyril Tiarks (who was also a member of the British Union of Fascists), Bank of England governor Montagu Norman, Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, and Geoffrey Dawson who was editor of The Times.

Tory members of the Anglo-German Fellowship included Peter Agnew, Lawrence Dundas, Ernest Bennett, Robert Bird, Robert Tatton Bower, Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, Robert Vaughan Gower, Thomas "Loel" Guinness, Norman Hulbert, Archibald James, Alfred Knox, John Macnamara, Thomas Moore, Assheton Pownall, Frank Sanderson, Duncan Sandys, Murray Sueter, Charles Taylor, Ronald Tree, Lord Brocket, Lord Galloway, the Earl of Glasgow, Lord Mount Temple, Lord Londonderry, Lord Nuffield, Lord Redesdale, Lord Rennell, and the Duke of Wellington.

The Anglo-German Fellowship was supported by a propaganda operation called The Link, headed up by the traitor Barry Domville.

There was also the Imperial Fascist League which was led by the virulent antisemite Arnold Leese, who continued propagandising in favour of Nazi Germany deep into the Second World War from a series of hideouts.

Then there was the truly despicable Right Club which sought to drive Jewish people out of public life, founded by the Tory MP Archibald Ramsay.

The Right Club attracted a load of high profile establishment figures, including the 5th Duke of Wellington, Lord Redesdale, Lord Lymington, Arnold Leese, A. K. Chesterton, George Henry Drummond, the 2nd Duke of Westminster, Tory MP John Hamilton Mackie, and William Joyce (who went on to become Lord Haw-Haw).

The Right Club finally collapsed in 1940 when they were discovered plotting to undermine the British war effort by stealing secret cables between Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt, with the intention of leaking them.

And let's not forget that the widely-celebrated Tory MP Nancy Astor was one of the leaders of the fascist-sympathising Cliveden Set.

Tories, royals, capitalists, and establishment elitists adored Nazi Germany because the first thing Adolf Hitler did when he came to power was to send all the socialists, communists, anarchists, trade unionists, and other assorted leftists to the concentration camps.

They saw fascism as the perfect means of preserving their own wealth, power and privilege, through the ruthless persecution of the political left.

A small minority of the most egregiously pro-fascist figures like Barry Domville, Arnold Leese, Oswald Mosley, and Archibald Ramsay were interned as national security threats during the Second World War, and Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) was captured and executed for treason in 1946.

However the vast majority of these establishment fascists were allowed to keep their positions of power and influence in the upper echelons of British society throughout the Second World War, and long into the post-war period.

Loads of these aristocratic fascists were even handed important promotions in the post-war period, and lavished with establishment honours like knighthoods and seats in the unelected House of Lords.

Is anyone really naïve enough to believe that all of these people simply gave up their extreme-right, antisemitic, and rabidly anti-left politics, despite having suffered absolutely no punishment whatever for holding such disgusting beliefs, even after our cities had been pounded to rubble by the people they'd been championing?

Of course they didn't. They just learned to hide their despicable extreme-right political views more carefully.

This abject post-war failure to stamp fascists out of public life is one of the big reasons why there's still a disturbing and powerful seam of fascist ideology within Britain's grotesque establishment class.

You look at the racism of the British tabloid press and their constant scapegoating of immigrants; the revocation of British rights from Commonwealth citizens in the 1970s; Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech; the anti-gay hysteria of the 1980s; the decades-long campaign of blacklisting of left-leaning journalists from the BBC; the rampant racism within institutions of state like the Metropolitan Police; the casual disregard for the millions of victims of Britain's imperialist war-mongering; the systematic demonisation of all left-wing political figures; the extreme-right ultranationalism that drove Brexit over the winning line; the fetishisation of nationalist symbolism and the military; the idolisation of disgustingly antisemitic Nazi-sympathisers like Nancy Astor; the massive blacklists of trade union activists across numerous industrial sectors; the ongoing systematic persecution of disabled people; Theresa May's unlawfully racist "Hostile Environment" and the Windrush Scandal; the constant right-wing agitation for the destruction of our human rights; Boris Johnson's depraved "let the bodies pile high" attitude to the plight of vulnerable people during the pandemic; and Priti Patel's deportation of refugees to Rwanda ...

The reason the British establishment class is so rotten is that we never had a reckoning with the people who wanted Britain to emulate Nazi Germany.

Instead we let them keep their positions of power and influence, and quietly seep their disgusting fascist ideology into the fabric of British society.

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Why? Just why?

I said from the beginning that I would give the new Labour Party leader a chance, but that I'm no party political tribalist, so no party should ever assume that they're entitled to my vote. They have to earn it through their policies and their actions.

Watching Keir Starmer allow the Times to hide his first editorial as Labour leader behind a paywall is somewhat of a blow given that I was at least hoping, on the basis of his widely reported intelligence, that he would do quite well.

What's especially galling about this paywall move is the fact that the Times is owned and operated by the billionaire propaganda baron Rupert Murdoch, who is clearly no friend of the labour movement.

The two glaring issues that should occur to anybody are that it makes very little sense for a new leader to hide one of their crucial first statements behind a paywall so that huge numbers of people won't even read it, and that it doesn't make a lot of strategic sense to actively drive traffic and new subscribers towards a publication that is staffed by a bunch of right-wing orthodox neoliberals who will viciously tear you down if you ever dare to propose anything even remotely left-wing or socially progressive.

Beyond the issues of who will actually read this, and the wisdom of actually driving traffic and subscriptions towards a publication that will no doubt be attacking you in the very near future, is the appalling optics of it.

If they wanted to reach out across the political divide (which is a sensible thing), it would have been easily possible for Starmer's team to insist that the paywall was lifted for this particular article, so that everyone could read it.

Failing that they could have pitched to other right-leaning publications with the "no paywall" stipulation.

The most important thing from a communications perspective is that people actually access and read what you're saying, and you do that by making it openly available on the Internet, rather than pitching it almost exclusively to few thousand die hard Tories on their ancient dead tree technology.

Just imagine if Corbyn had released a statement on a massively important public health issue, but hidden it behind a paywall on some left-leaning publication.

The 'sensibles' would have been going absolutely crackers over it, and deriding it as another example of uselessness wouldn't they?

Competent political leaders should ensure that their statements are never hidden behind anyone's paywalls as a matter of course, especially on really important public health issues, and the publications that won't go along with it simply don't get the exclusive editorials, and don't get the clicks.

But they didn't do this. They allowed it to be hidden away behind a Murdoch paywall which sends a very clear message, not from Starmer to the public (most of whom won't even have read what he said below the paywall fade out) but from the Murdoch propaganda empire to the public.

"Starmer is our boy. If you want to know what he's saying, then you come through us. We're in control of the narrative. We're in control of what you see and hear. And look, Starmer is wilfully going along with our way of doing things. There's no hope of ever doing things differently."

Why Starmer would go along with this is anyone's guess.

He knows that he's never going to win over the Murdoch propaganda empire. They absolutely despise him, not just for his involvement in chasing down their phone hacking illegality as Director of Public Prosecutions in the early 2010s, but for standing with the striking Murdoch empire print workers in Wapping, back in the 1980s.

Starmer is supposed to be an intelligent player, but within a day of becoming leader his optics are absolutely hopeless. He's hiding his statements behind paywalls instead of hosting them on open platforms, and he's willing to allow himself to be presented as a Murdoch stooge, even though he knows perfectly well that the Murdoch hacks will never ever accept him!

What on earth is going on? And who approved this hopeless idiocy?

Footnote: You may have noticed that I stopped producing blog posts for several months. The reason is that Facebook has changed their algorithm to make links to my site almost invisible. Even when literally thousands of people share the link, barely anyone actually sees the shares or follows the links. It feels like wasted effort producing articles that virtually nobody reads, when I can still produce infographics and informative posts that are seen by hundreds of thousands.

I'm going to give it another try, but it's unlikely that I'll return to writing blog posts as consistently as I used to.

 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 astounding facts that Louise Ellman 'forgot' to mention

When a right-wing Murdoch propaganda rag decided to run another anti-Corbyn hatchet job the BBC and the Labour right-wingers rolled into action immediately to join forces.

Before the Times article had even been published BBC Newsnight were broadcasting an outraged interview with the right-wing Jewish Labour MP Louise Ellman to bolster the story.

The crux of the criticism was that back in 2010 Jeremy Corbyn had been involved in an event where one of the speakers compared the Israeli occupation of Palestine with the Nazi Holocuast (a comparison which falls foul of the IHR definition of anti-Semitism that Labour are under immense pressure from the pro-Israeli lobby to adopt into their disciplinary code).

In the Newnight interview the right-wing Labour MP Louise Ellman expressed her shock and outrage that Jeremy Corbyn had attended the event.

Nowhere in the entire segment did Ellman, (the bitterly anti-Corbyn) interviewer Emily Maitlis, or the Times reporter think to mention that the guy who made the Israel-Nazi comparison was actually a Jewish Auschwitz survivor called Hajo Meyer who compared the suffering of the Palestinian people to his own lived experience of the Holocaust.

An unbelievably brazen omission, but as we'll see, not the only ridiculously brazen omission of the segment.

The fact that the Murdoch-Labour right-BBC nexus sought to smear a Jewish Holocaust survivor as an anti-Semite just goes to show how shockingly unfit for purpose the whole IHR definition of anti-Semitism actually is.

If this warped definition allows non-Jews to police the language of Jewish people, and even Holocaust survivors, there's something catastrophically wrong with it (which is why it is the subject of such fierce debate, and why it's even been strongly criticised by the guy who actually drafted it).

Another example of a Jewish person who made Nazi references in relation to Israeli oppression was the late Labour politician and relentless peace campaigner Gerald Kaufman.

If the Labour right-wingers and pro-Israeli lobby had had their way back then, Kaufman would have been expelled from the Labour Party as a result of this speech in 2009.



Just think about it. Right-wing non-Jewish Labour supporters of the Israeli occupation like Stephen Kinnock are demanding harsh new anti-Semitism rules that would have seen the Jewish peace campaigner Gerald Kaufman unceremoniously kicked out of the Labour Party for expressing his own opinion.

How anyone can think it's acceptable for non-Jews to use accusations of anti-Semitism to thought police Jews is absolutely beyond me.

Returning to the absolutely atrocious BBC Newsnight segment and the other omission I referenced earlier, another thing the outraged Labour right-winger 'forgot' to mention about the event in 2010 she was so outraged about is that she was actually there for the entire duration of it.

Spewing synthetic outrage that Jeremy Corbyn was involved in an event that Ellman herself actually attended has to be one of the dirtiest, most opportunistic, and least honest bastardisations of the whole anti-Semitism debate so far.

So not only did we have the Murdoch-Labour right-BBC nexus obscuring the fact that the victim of their anti-Semitism witch hunt was actually a deceased Jewish Holocaust survivor, the outraged Labour right-winger also obscured the fact that she was actually there in person at the event she was howling faux outrage about.

The fact that she was actually there at the event also makes the first omission even more glaring because there isn't the slightest possibility of confusion over the identity of the man being smeared as an anti-Semite. She knew that he was a 90 year old (now deceased) Jewish Holocaust survivor and actually played along with it.

Amazingly the presenter Emily Maitlis went on to deliver a segment on the influence of "fake news" with a straight face later in the episode!

Nobody expects the BBC to get everything right all of the time, but this Newsnight segment was an absolute abomination of utterly biased reporting and the deliberate and cynical omission of crucial facts.

Here's a link to the BBC's complaints form

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If anyone is Vladimir Putin's "useful idiot", it's Boris Johnson

We're well and truly through the looking glass now guys. 

It was bonkers enough to witness the incoherent (and quite obviously anti-Semitic) "wrong kind of Jews" vitriol that was spat at Jeremy Corbyn over the weekend for spending the Jewish religious festival of Seder with young politically engaged Jews, instead of shopping like Theresa May was, but this Boris Johnson stuff is getting truly Orewllian.

Boris Johnson scored a massive own goal  against his own government for Vladimir Putin by lying about what the British chemical weapons experts at Porton Down had said.

Whatever the British government says now, the Russians can retort with "look at the way the British Foreign Secretary and Foreign Office lied about Salisbury", and they've actually got a point, and it's all Boris Johnson's fault.

But then Boris Johnson posts a tweet crudely deflecting attention onto Jeremy Corbyn with a load of tired old "Russian stooge" nonsense, and then a load of Tory drones in the mainstream media obediently do as they've been prompted and set about deliberately switching the debate away from Boris Johnson's lie and onto Jeremy Corbyn.

So an unmistakably Tory scandal stemming from yet another Boris blunder is somehow transformed into a stick to whack Jeremy Corbyn with!

Suddenly the debate is no longer Tory lies vs Porton Down expert analysis, because it's been warped into pro-government patriotism vs Russia, Putin, treason, eek.

Of course gullible people are going to side with the government who just got exposed as liars when the mainstream media misrepresent the debate as an us against them, support the government or you're a Putin-loving traitor situation.
 

And then we have mercenary Rupert Murdoch hacks deriding anyone who criticises Boris Johnson for trapping himself in a lie as Vladimir Putin's "useful idiots".

The guy who scores a massive propaganda own goal for Russia gets a free pass, and anyone who criticises what he did gets derided as a "useful idiot" for Putin!

You couldn't make it up, except they did, and they expect people to actually fall for it!

And then to top it all off we've got the BBC pushing the kind of dangerous "scrutiny of the government is treason" type propaganda you'd actually expect to see in Putin's Russia.

The Tories and their establishment chums in the mainstream media are desperately trying to reverse reality to make people believe that:

The people who mindlessly bang the drum for war, lap up the government lies, and start playing ridiculous distraction tactic games when the government lies are exposed - they're the clear-thinking rational voices.

And the people who ask for evidence, scrutinise the government line, and criticise government ministers who get caught out telling lies - they're cultists, kooks, conspiracy theorists, traitors, Putin's useful idiots!

The thing is that there are an awful lot of people who are gullible enough to fall for this kind of Tory Orwellian reality reversal, otherwise they wouldn't try it, but then there's also another form of damage too.

Even those of us with the critical thinking skills to see through the bombardment end up disorientated and confused by the constant barrage of reality-bending propaganda. It's called "gaslighting", and it's a propaganda tactic that Putin and his cronies use in Russia in order to mindfuck their political opponents, and the public at large.

So we've got a Tory party who are bankrolled by Russian oligarchs and Putin cronies and a bunch of obsequious Tory-serving mainstream media hacks using Putin-style mindfuck techniques to disorientate and misdirect the British public, and we've got the BBC state broadcaster transmitting Putin-style pro-government anti-opposition propaganda into our homes, and now they expect us to believe that anyone who dares question any of this lunacy is a traitor and a Putin stooge!

It absolutely beggars belief that they think they can get away with it. Please just tell me that I'm not alone in realising that British political discourse has become such a ridiculously Putinesque farce.

 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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Politicians & journalists need to consider their own roles in toxifying the political environment

Just imagine if an independent left-wing website had published an article from a self-confessed Holocaust denier that featured brazen displays of sexism and anti-Semitism like the Sunday Times just did.

You know as well as I do that the right-wing media would pick up on the article and use it to smear the entire left as a bunch of misogynistic and anti-Semitic bigots, and to generate the absurd narrative that it's abusive and violent fanaticism in politics is solely a left-wing issue.

When the Sunday Times published an extraordinary article from the controversialist Kevin Myers which was dripping with sexism (repeated claims that women don't earn enough because they're not as driven, logical or masterful as men) and casual anti-semitism (allusion to the age old greedy money-grabbing Jew trope) they simply expected to get away with it as if printing such casual bigotry is just "fair comment".

We all know that we would never hear the end of it if some Corbyn-supporting site had hosted such brazenly sexist and anti-Semitic content, but because it's one of Rupert Murdoch's propaganda sheets, we're all supposed to be mollified with the deletion of the article and the explanation that it was just a "mistake" (as if commissioning a Holocaust denier to write an article full of bigoted stereotypes and then publishing it is the kind of mistake we've all made in our lives).

The bigoted Times column that would have had
right-wingers howling with outrage if such sexism
and anti-Semitism had appeared on a left-wing blog.

The most shocking thing about the article isn't that it was written (we all know there are still loads of sexists, racists and anti-Semites out there) but the fact that a supposedly reputable newspaper saw fit to publish such outright bigotry.

It tells you everything you need to know about the cultural acceptance of sexism and anti-Semitism at the Sunday Times that they actually commissioned an article from a known Holocaust denier and nobody at all saw fit to raise concerns about the extreme bigotry in the article as it went through the editing and publishing process.

Of course anyone who pays attention to the political environment knows that most of the hateful and violent extremism comes from the political right. We know that it was an extreme-right "Britain First" screaming fanatic who murdered Jo Cox, that the three people jailed for bombarding the Labour MP Luciana Berger with anti-Semitic abuse were all extreme-right fanatics not "lefties", and that the Finsbury Park terror attack suspect was a Britain First follower, and that his attack was wildly celebrated in the Britain First hate chamber.

Then there's the fact that Tory party has an incredibly lax attitude towards extreme-right propaganda that goes right to the top of the party (consider Zac Goldsmith's bigoted BNP-style campaign to become mayor of London, or Theresa May's decision to quote an bigoted extreme-right Twitter troll in the House of Commons as a cheap dig against Jeremy Corbyn, and the countless Tory politicians who have been caught out saying bigoted things and/or sharing extreme-right content on social media).

Not only do the Tory party have a very lax attitude towards right-wing extremism, the right-wing press who run constant propaganda for the Tories also feature regular displays of bigotry and right-wing extremism.

The Sunday Times are far from alone in hosting extreme bigotry for which independent left-wing websites would (rightfully) be condemned for if they did anything like as bad.

Unlike the radio station LBC the Daily Mail saw no problem with continuing to employ the unspeakable woman, even after she publicly called for a "final solution" against Muslims.

A columnist who writes for a newspaper that supported Adolf Hitler and the rise of fascism in the 1930s calling for a modern day Holocaust against Muslims is offensive on so many levels, but the Daily Mail are as comfortable with employing the unspeakable woman today as they are with their history of promoting fascism in the 1930s.

Then there's the S*n who published an article comparing a mixed race footballer with a gorilla, and the Daily Telegraph that called for the Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon to be beheaded for having the wrong political opinions.

Self-righteous MPs have launched an inquiry into the abuse of MPs, but the inquiry will tell them absolutely nothing unless they widen the scope of the investigation to look at what is inspiring people to send so many abusive messages to MPs.

Without widening the scope of the inquiry to look into the extreme behaviour of the right-wing press (the casual displays of bigotry and extremism outlined above, declaring judges "enemies of the people" for the "crime" of standing up for parliamentary democracy, the "crush the saboteurs" headline, the extreme smear-mongering campaign against Jeremy Corbyn during the election) and to investigate MPs own extreme behaviour and tolerance of extreme-right online abuse when it suits their purposes (like Theresa May quoting an extreme-right Twitter troll in parliament) then they'll never get to the bottom of why so many ordinary people feel emboldened to lob extreme abuse and threats at politicians.

If MPs and supposedly reputable newspapers create a political atmosphere where bigotry, threats, smears, abuse and extreme-right nastiness are normalised, it takes incredible feats of self-regarding hypocrisy for theat lot to react to ordinary people behaving in the very same way as if they're uniquely sick degenerates, rather than easily led people simply imitating the behaviour they see politicians and journalists continually getting away with.

 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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Painting the establishment class as the true victims of Grenfell tower is depraved Tory propaganda

On June 14th 2017 at least 80 people were killed in the horrifying Grenfell tower fire.

The disaster generated a huge emotional response because it was such a visual demonstration of the huge inequality in austerity Britain. Of course we all knew how bad it was before the fire.

You'd have to be criminally ignorant to not know that tens of thousands of sick and disabled people have died within weeks of being declared "fit for work" in corporate disability denial factories.

You'd have to have been living in a bubble to not know that tens of thousands of vulnerable people have died as a consequence of savage Tory cuts to the social care system.

You'd have to be profoundly ignorant of the way the world works to imagine that the increased emergency service response times, and increased NHS waiting times due to Tory austerity cuts haven't been paid for in human lives.

But people being burned alive in a tower with inadequate safety features and covered with highly flammable cladding is obviously more immediate and more visual, and as a consequence the anger is more visceral, especially given the aloof response of the Tory government, the shocking ineptitude of the local Tory council, and the absolute barrage of lies and excuses from the Tories and their attack dogs in the right-wing media.

In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy the extreme-right Breitbart London editor and former UKIP adviser Raheem Kassam tried to paint the Tory party as the true victims of the Grenfell fire by spreading a load of absolute lies that the Labour Party were responsible, including the easily disprovable assertion that the Local council was Labour controlled (unsurprisingly in actual reality the local council in the richest area of London has been permanently ruled by the Tory party).

Kassam's lies were so sickeningly obvious that only the most freakishly fact-averse extreme-right fanatics could possibly have fallen for them, but his central narrative that the establishment are the true victims of the fire was obviously considered useful by the right-wing media, and hence, within a month of dozens of neglected and ignored poor people burning alive in the richest borough of one of the richest cities in the world, we have Clare Foges of the Times using the same disgusting argument that the true Grenfell victims are the poor establishment class.

In her abomination of an article Foges tries to portray anyone who considers the political ramifications of the fire for themselves as engaging a circus of "blame-mongering" and "mob-rousing".

Thus anyone who draws their own political conclusions about the fire and the hopelessly inadequate local government response is an unreasonable "blame-monger", and anyone who actively engages in protest isn't an angry citizen utilising their right to peaceful protest, but a member of a scary and detestable "mob".

Foges also gets the excuses in early by predicting that the Grenfell investigation (cover up?) may find that nobody was to blame with a claim that "we should be wary of attributing to conspiracy that which is adequately explained by cock-up; that there were simple failures of foresight, questions unasked that should have been asked".

So the essential themes of what Foges is arguing are:

Don't think for yourself. Don't question the establishment line. It was probably all just an unfortunate mistake for which the establishment elitists are absolutely not to blame. Anger is unreasonable. You should hate anyone who is angry about Grenfell. They're a dangerous mob. They're the true villains. 

The conclusion of Foges article plays a very cynical trick by conflating criticism of the establishment class with criticism of Britain.

Foges criticises the concept that Britain is "a country rigged by an unfeeling elite that cares nothing for people because they are poor" with the absolute non sequitur that Britain is "a nation that is compassionate, generous and decent".

It's profoundly dishonest to argue that it's shameful to accuse the elitist establishment class of callous and uncaring elitism because British society as a whole still retains elements of compassion, generosity and decency. But that's exactly the cynical and manipulative trick that Foges plays on the reader.

The obvious bad faith conflation of the establishment class with Britain as a whole in order to use faux patriotism to attack "the left" is such a sickening display of contempt for the reader it's extraordinary that people buy into this kind of insulting propaganda crap.

But unfortunately we know that millions of people do willingly buy into this kind of intellectually dishonest rubbish because we spent six infuriating years listening to David Cameron spout this kind of logically incoherent, bad faith, fallacy-riddled propaganda gibberish, which brings us neatly to the fundamental thing that Foges "forgot" to mention in her impassioned defence of the establishment class ...

What Foges "forgot" to mention that she was employed as a special adviser and speechwriter for David Cameron for seven years, and that Cameron including one of her jokes in a speech is what she considers the absolute highlight of her career so far!

Is it any wonder that a woman who helped David Cameron by scripting his intellectually dishonest pro-austerity speeches would come out swinging wildly against anyone making the argument that mindless adherence to ruinous austerity dogma could have played a crucial role in the Grenfell tower tragedy?

Is it any wonder that a journalist with such an intimate relationship with the Tory party would seek to manipulate the minds of middle England by deliberately recasting the all the players in the Grenfell tower tragedy into different roles?

Is it any wonder that an establishment insider would seek to portray the callous and uncaring political elitists who allowed it to happen, and responded so inadequately, as the poor innocent victims, write the poor women who tragically burned to death after having had their fire safety complaints repeatedly ignored out of the script entirely, and merge the angry local residents and "the left" together into a single character to play the role of the detestable villain for middle England to hate and pour scorn upon?

This attempt to rewrite the establishment class as the poor innocent victims of the Grenfell fire would be sick enough in its own right, but that it's coming from a very recent member of the most powerful Tory inner circle of all reveals another revolting aspect.

The fact that someone with such close links to the Tory party can pose as some kind of objective journalist in order to spread such intellectually dishonest Tory propaganda reveals the ongoing collusion between the Tory party and the mainstream media.

Is it any wonder that huge numbers of people have completely lost faith with the mainstream media when the architect of ruinous austerity dogma George Osborne can walk straight out of parliament and into the offices of the Evening Standard as their editor; when employees of the supposedly impartial BBC politics department can walk straight into 10 Downing Street to write biased political propaganda for the Tory Prime Minister; and former Tory propagandists like Clare Foges can continue writing the exact same intellectually dishonest Tory propaganda in the pages of Rupert Murdoch's Times?

Is it any wonder that ever more people are turning to independent media for their news because they can see that the establishment insiders club that the mainstream media are supposed to hold to account, and the mainstream media themselves are pretty much the same damned thing.

 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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Right-wing internal Labour Party wreckers are making anonymous threats again

Rupert Murdoch's Sunday Times is reporting that cowardly anonymous right-wing Labour MPs are threatening to damage the Labour Party as much as possible by resigning and triggering by-elections.

One of the most important things to note about this story is that despite the content relying on nothing more than the word of cowardly Labour right-wingers who refused to give their names, they've used an image of the Liverpool Wavertree MP Luciana Berger to illustrate their story, creating the highly misleading impression that she's one of these internal Labour Party wreckers, when she's not.

Yes Luciana got duped into tarnishing her own reputation by supporting the pre-planned and spectacularly failed Anyone But Corbyn coup last summer, but she was hardly alone in falling for their toxic scheming, and since the coup plot failed so spectacularly she's regularly reaffirmed her determination to respect party democracy and the will of the membership, and now she's angrily demanded that the Sunday Times remove her image from the article because she's got nothing to do with these threats.

Luciana Berger clearly isn't the source of these deliberate destabilisation tactics, but someone is briefing the right-wing press with this divisive nonsense, and these latest threats are very consistent with the right-wing internal wreckers' pattern. 

There is a small group of right-wing Labour MPs who are determined to do as much damage to the Labour Party as possible by constantly plotting against the party leadership, smearing ordinary members, and anonymously briefing the press with their divisive bile to stoke internal party divisions.

After anonymously briefing the Telegraph about their (aborted) plot to overthrow Jeremy Corbyn after the May 2016 local elections, they were back at the Telegraph again a few weeks later to detail their new plot to use the EU referendum (whatever the outcome) to launch their coup against Jeremy Corbyn, which they duly did.

These are the people who, during Theresa May's vanity election, attacked left-wing independent media as "propaganda and ideological purity dressed up as news and views and beamed on the internet direct to the politically deranged" and anyone who ever reads sites like Another Angry Voice, Evolve Politics or The Canary as "junkies" during an election campaign in which the virality of left-wing independent media played a huge part in Theresa May losing her majority.

Then in May 2017 they were back at the Telegraph again, this time talking about how they were looking forward to Theresa May winning a landslide victory so that they could destroy the Labour Party from within by launching a breakaway party.

After briefing the press about their (hastily aborted, and then spectacularly failed) plots to overthrow Jeremy Corbyn, about their visceral hatred for left-wing independent media and anyone who reads it (millions of Labour Party members and voters), and their fantasy of using the Tory landslide they were craving to engineer a split in the Labour Party, they're now swearing to do like Jamie Reed did in Copeland and inflict as much damage on the party as possible by resigning and triggering tricky by-elections.

It's about time someone in the Labour Party did something about these right-wing internal wreckers, and perhaps the responsibility is with the people who see themselves as genuine centrist Labour MPs like Luciana Berger?

By publicly naming and shaming the deliberate wreckers behind all of these anonymous threats, plots and the abuse and contempt towards ordinary Labour voters, they'd be doing a great service to the Labour Party. 

I'm sure pretty much everyone in the Parliamentary Labour Party knows who the main internal wreckers are, and I'm pretty sure that there are quite a few significantly less fanatically hard-right Labour MPs who now know these constant divisive threats are going way too far, and who have plenty of evidence to expose the wreckers' identities.

Like all major political parties Labour will always have divergences of opinion and plenty of internal debate, but there's a huge difference between healthy political debate, and running off to bitterly brief the right-wing propaganda rags about your latest incredibly divisive threats to damage the Labour Party as much as possible when your faction continues not getting its own way.

The fact that these wreckers are too cowardly to put their names to all the threats and bile they anonymously spew to their chums in the right-wing media just goes to show what kind of obnoxious people they really are.

This constant stream of threats and abuse also goes to show how much work all the genuine Labour people have in front of them to reduce the toxifying influence of these right-wing wreckers who clearly value their hard-right neoliberal economic ideology way above the party they're pretending to serve as they regularly insult and smear its members and constantly plot to damage it as much as possible.

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