Criticism of the Iraq invasion doesn't stem from "hindsight"

Tony Blair and his allies have some incredible gall to try to dismiss the findings of the Chilcot report as being based on "hindsight".

Back in 2003 when the likes of Tony Blair, Jack Straw and Alistair Campbell were incessantly propagandising in favour of British involvement in George W. Bush's imperialist warmongering, there were plenty of people pointing out the flaws in their case for war.

The claim that our criticisms of their warmongering have solely sprung up solely through the wisdom of "hindsight" is a disgusting display of attempted revisionism as I will demonstrate using quotes and evidence from before the first shot was even fired.

The February 15th protests

On February 15th 2003 people protested all over the world against the invasion of Iraq. The protest in London was attended by far more than a million people (or just three men and a small dog if you believe the official estimates). I arrived on one of the hundreds of coachloads of protesters from all over the country. I had two principal reasons for opposing the war. I believed that the case for war was based on fabricated and exaggerated evidence (like the ridiculous claim that Iraq could attack the UK within 45 minutes), and I believed that the war would lead to a power vacuum in Iraq which would dramatically increase (not decrease) the threat of sectarian violence and terrorism.

The wave of sectarian violence that hit Iraq after the war and the rise of barbarous Islamist fanatics like ISIS are clear demonstrations that my second concern was valid, and the findings of the Chilcot Report vindicate my suspicions that the Blair government were deliberately overstating the intelligence case for war.

It's clear that other people attended the Stop the War protest for different reasons to mine, but one thing is undeniable; Tony Blair and his clique just ignored our concerns. In fact they didn't just ignore us, they smeared and belittled us. I remember getting home after the long coach journey back to Yorkshire to see mainstream media coverage of Tony Blair dismissing all one million+ of us as just a bunch of Saddam Hussain apologists.

Robin Cook

In his famous resignation speech Robin Cook pointed out a number of things. One of the most important themes was that the invasion and occupation of Iraq would represent an appalling failure in British diplomacy.

"I do not think that anybody could have done better than the Foreign Secretary in working to get support for a second resolution within the Security Council. But the very intensity of those attempts underlines how important it was to succeed. Now that those attempts have failed, we cannot pretend that getting a second resolution was of no importance.  

 France has been at the receiving end of bucketloads of commentary in recent days. It is not France alone that wants more time for inspections. Germany wants more time for inspections; Russia wants more time for inspections; indeed, at no time have we signed up even the minimum necessary to carry a second resolution. We delude ourselves if we think that the degree of international hostility is all the result of President Chirac. The reality is that Britain is being asked to embark on a war without agreement in any of the international bodies of which we are a leading partner—not NATO, not the European Union and, now, not the Security Council.  

 To end up in such diplomatic weakness is a serious reverse. Only a year ago, we and the United States were part of a coalition against terrorism that was wider and more diverse than I would ever have imagined possible. History will be astonished at the diplomatic miscalculations that led so quickly to the disintegration of that powerful coalition. The US can afford to go it alone, but Britain is not a superpower. Our interests are best protected not by unilateral action but by multilateral agreement and a world order governed by rules. Yet tonight the international partnerships most important to us are weakened: the European Union is divided; the Security Council is in stalemate. Those are heavy casualties of a war in which a shot has yet to be fired."

Charles Kennedy

The Chilcot report found that the peaceful options had not been exhausted before Bush and Blair rushed into war. Charles Kennedy made this point in a passionate speech against the invasion.

"Before launching an almighty assault upon Iraq, is it not better to pursue the course of disarmament on the ground in the presence of weapons inspectors? No matter how sophisticated modern technology, even compared with at the time of the last Gulf war, is it not more precise to have weapons dismantled in the presence of inspectors rather than so-called precision bombing trying to take them out?"

Jeremy Corbyn

As the democratically elected leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn has a much higher profile in 2016 than he did back in 2003 when he opposed the invasion of Iraq (he can be seen sitting behind Robin Cook during his resignation speech).

One of Corbyn's criticisms of the rush to invade and occupy Iraq was the legacy of violence that it would create. Trying to shout down anyone who points out the rise of ISIS with accusations of that they're using "hindsight" is appalling when Jeremy Corbyn said this before a shot was even fired.

"It will set off a spiral of conflict, of hate, of misery, of desperation that will fuel the wars, the conflict, the terrorism, the depression and the misery of future generations."

Tony Benn

Of all of the opponents of Blair's insistence on helping the United States with their invasion and occupation of Iraq, Tony Benn was the most eloquent and compelling. 

As with David Kelly, Robin Cook and Charles Kennedy, Tony Benn didn't live to see the day that he was completely vindicated by the findings of the Chilcot Report, but he will always be fondly remembered by those of us who had the foresight to see that Blair's warmongering would result in a catastrophe, because he was one of the principled minority of politicians who gave us a voice.

"All war represents a failure of diplomacy."

David Kelly

The biological weapons expert and former weapons inspector in Iraq David Kelly paid for his evidence based opposition to the invasion with his life. Whether you believe the official suicide verdict, or that there were more sinister forces at play, what is undeniable is that he died just two days after being ruthlessly bullied by a bunch of Blairites in a Foreign Affairs Select Committee lynching for having dared to speak confidentially with a member of the press about Blair's "dodgy dossier" being based on exaggerations and misrepresentations.

Hans Blix

The head of the UN weapons inspection team spoke directly to Tony Blair back in February 2003 to cast doubt on the so-called WMD intelligence that Blair built his case for war on. The Chilcot report makes it clear that Blair and his allies misrepresented and over-stated the intelligence case, which is precisely what Blix said to Blair before the invasion was even launched.

Trying to pretend that flaws in the intelligence case for war were only exposed after the war is appalling revisionism when they were clearly being warned about the flawed evidence by experts like Hans Blix before the war even started.

Conclusion

The fact that Tony Blair and his cronies have come up with these ludicrous claims that criticisms of the Iraq invasion are based on "hindsight" is actually quite telling. The Chilcot Report  exposed the fact that they were willing to distort evidence to promote their war back in 2003, and their fabrication of this ridiculous "hindsight" argument just goes to show that they still have the exact same mentality.

As far as they're concerned the real facts and evidence don't matter. The only thing that matters is concocting justification stories for what they want, which in 2003 was the invasion of Iraq, and in 2016 is avoiding prosecution for war crimes.

 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

Why would anyone try to defend the Labour Leave shills?

On the day that Brexit was announced I pointed out the undeniable fact that Labour Leave were massively bankrolled by a bunch of hard-right Tories. Every single one of their major donations came from extremely right-wing individuals and organisations. I then described this as "shilling" and said that some people within the Labour Party should be ashamed of themselves.

Some extremely touchy and defensive people came along to attempt to argue back. One of them accused me of insulting fellow socialists, and another one crudely traduced the words I actually said to "So Tony Benn, Bob Crow, Dennis Skinner all well known right-wing Tories".

This is my response to those accusations:

I didn't insult anyone for being a socialist. If you actually read my words I didn't actually insult anyone.

What I did do is point out the undeniable fact that Labour Leave was completely bankrolled by hard-right Tories, and the described that as "shilling".

If anyone thinks that a so-called Labour movement that is completely bankrolled by Tories is not an example of "shilling" I'd be genuinely interested to hear your explanation (displays of bizarre mental gymnastics are always fun to watch).

PS - Tony Benn would never have taken money from a bunch of Tories in order to make the case for Brexit. He opposed the EU but (unlike some in the Labour movement) he also passionately opposed the Tories too.

The main question these angry defensive reactions from Labour supporters raises is why so many people within the Labour movement are prepared to actively defend the Labour Leave campaign's decision to accept so much Tory cash and turn themselves into paid Tory shills to such an extent that they make (completely lame) attempts to shoot the messenger? 

Another question is why people feel compelled to drag the names of people like Tony Benn and Bob Crow through the muck to defend this blatant Labour Leave shilling?

Yes Tony Benn and Bob Crow argued against the EU when they were alive, but the idea that they would have accepted cash from a bunch of radically right-wing Tories to make that argument is, in my opinion, an insult to their memories. They were both, as far as I'm concerned, left-wing men of integrity, not anti-EU fanatics who would bend their left-wing principles beyond breaking point in order to criticise the EU.

Insinuating that they would have behaved like the Labour Leave mob in accepting huge amounts of Tory cash is insulting to their memories, and an insult to anyone who has the misfortune of reading such a weak display of excuse-making too.

 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

Isn't it amazing what people choose to forget?

It's amazing how public perceptions can be manipulated by the mainstream media to accept completely ahistorical narratives about fundamentally important issues.

Take the EU referendum debate as an example. Anyone who mindlessly absorbs their political opinions fro the corporate mainstream media would probably end up believing that the EU debate is between anti-EU "common sense" right-wingers vs pro-EU "do-gooder" lefties.

The strange thing is that last time there was a referendum on membership of the European community, by far the most vocal opponents of EU membership were left-wingers like Tony Benn, while the right-wing fringe of the Tory party were the most vocal champions of the European project. This right-wing pro-European stance was exemplified by Margaret Thatcher's pro-European jumper (see picture above). This was at a time when Thatcher represented the extreme-right fringe of the Tory party, while most Tories were still of the "one nation Conservative" ilk; content with the prosperous post-war consensus that there should be a mix between state socialism and regulated capitalism. Meanwhile the left-wing of the Labour party provided by far the strongest opposition the the European project.

Nowadays the polarity of the EU debate has been completely switched. The figureheads of the anti-EU movement are people like Nigel Farage (who gets the votes of millions of working class people despite describing himself as "keeping the flame of Thatcherism alive"!) and Michael Gove (the arch-Thatcherite who oversaw the privatisation of thousands of English schools into the hands of unaccountable private pseudo-charities), while the more left-wing elements of the British political spectrum (Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party, the Green Party, the SNP and Plaid Cymru) are taking a more pro-European stance.

It's interesting to consider how this complete reversal of British political polarity has come about.

Back in the 1970s the right-wing fringe saw the European project as an excellent opportunity to push their extremist right-wing economic dogma onto the whole of Western Europe, and in many ways they were successful. Take the EU competition rules that prevent member states from renationalising public infrastructure (no matter how abysmally it is run by the private sector), the anti-democratic European Central Bank, the free movement of labour within Europe or the brutal socially and economically destructive austerity ideology forced on Greece. In many ways the EU has been an absolute triumph for right-wing economic fanaticism.

The problem for militant right-wing fanatics is that the EU is a collaborative project, so for every bit of fanatically right-wing economic dogma they've managed to force onto the entire European community, there's always some pesky left-wing and liberal rules too, like the Working Time Directive, environmental regulations, animal welfare laws, curbs on bankers' bonuses or assertions of the human rights of EU citizens.

The extreme-right fringe of the Tory party (and I include UKIP in that definition) have given up on the European project not because they haven't managed to force right-wing economic dogma onto the rest of Europe (because they undeniably have), but because the structure of the EU means that they're constrained from pushing the even more militant right-wing agenda they want in the UK.

If the Tories get to quit the EU and become the first country ever to tear up the European Convention on Human Rights, they'll be liberated to create the most extreme-right authoritarian government in Europe since the fall of fascism, and they'll do this without the slightest regard for the fact that their ideological figurehead (Margaret Thatcher) was one of the most vocal supporters of the European project back in the 1970s.

The situation for the left is perhaps even more bamboozling. The EU is clearly completely riddled with toxic right-wing economic dogma (look at the deliberate annihilation of the Greek economy to serve the interests of German and French banks and the circling pack of multinational vulture funds), yet it's absolutely clear to the left-wing parties that continued membership of the EU is far less bad than jumping out of the frying pan of the EU technocracy and into searing fire of unconstrained Tory economic insanity.

The best the left seem to be able to come up with is the idea that the EU is deeply flawed, but that the solution is to fix it from within, rather than to fire the ejector seat and land in a putrefying ocean of unconstrained Tory fanaticism.

There are signs of hope that the EU can be reformed from within (the rise of left-wing parties in Greece, Portugal and Spain), however the EU technocrats have demonstrated their abject fear of democratic socialism through their treatment of Greece and their insistence on continuation of their negotiations towards the TTIP corporate power grab, despite the fact that pretty much everyone in Europe who has actually heard of it thinks that it's an unspeakably awful idea to allow corporations to completely over-write sovereign democratic and judicial institutions with secretive unaccountable transnational corporate tribunals.

As far as I'm concerned, the EU stinks. However unconstrained Tory fanaticism stinks an awful lot more. I guess the debate boils down to whether you have more faith that the EU institutions can be shifted away from the promotion of fanatically right-wing economic dogma, or whether you think there is some way of stopping the even more fanatically right-wing Tories should they be handed absolute power through a vote for Brexit.

I think I've made it pretty clear in this article that I don't want to tell you how to vote. As far as I'm concerned it's a choice between a rock and a hard place. I just hope that my explanation of the complete polarity shift in the EU referendum debate since the last referendum gives you some idea that the majority of contemporary opinion on the subject is politically partisan rubbish (which is nothing less that you'd expect from the billionaire sociopaths who own most of the UK 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

12 significant Tory-UKIP defectors

Tory MP Mark Reckless chose the eve of the Tory party conference to carry out his headline grabbing defection to UKIP. Just a month before another Tory from the extreme-right Eurosceptic fringe of the party Douglas Carswell defected to UKIP. These are just two of the latest and most high profile of a long sequence of defections from the Tories to UKIP.

In this article I'm going to look at twelve significant Tory-UKIP defectors.

Nigel Farage

The UKIP party leader Nigel Farage clearly assumes the majority of people are stupid enough to fall for his jovial pint-swilling "man of the people" act. I mean how gullible would you have to be to believe that a privately educated former Tory party activist and commodities trader in the City of London is the kind of guy to stand up against the wealthy establishment in order to defend the interests of ordinary people?

perhaps it is a little unfair to judge Farage only by his establishment background, because the left-wing firebrand Tony Benn also came from an establishment background and nobody could ever accuse him of being a Tory. Of all the many many things that Farage has said and done to actually prove that he's still a Tory at heart is the way he lionises Margaret Thatcher and declares himself and UKIP to be the heirs to Thatcherism. A man can hardly declare that he is the only politician "keeping the flame of Thatcherism alive" without looking like a Tory in a purple tie.

Stuart Wheeler

Many might imagine that Nigel Farage is the driving force behind UKIP, but he's just the charismatic front-man. The guy who is really running the show is the Eton educated UKIP party treasurer Stuart Wheeler. Wheeler made his fortune setting up the spread betting firm IG Index in the 1970s. Until 2011 he was a Tory party supporter, so much so that the £5 million donation he made to the Tories in 2001 to bankroll their General Election campaign is still the single largest political donation in British political history.

Wheeler has gone from bankrolling the Tory party to bankrolling UKIP, and he's brought a large network of other former Tory party donors with him. UKIP is bankrolled by former Tory party donors to such an extent that 90% of their donations now come from the people who used to bankroll the Tory party!

Neil Hamilton

The Tory MP for Tatton Neil Hamilton became a political joke after he was caught up in the cash for questions scandal in 1994. Despite having the fourth strongest Tory majority in the whole country Hamilton was easily defeated by the anti-corruption campaigner Martin Bell at the 1997 General Election. Subsequently Neil and his wife Christine were given numerous opportunities to keep themselves in the limelight on shows like Have I got News for You and The Weakest Link.

In 2011 Nigel Farage handed Neil Hamilton his ticket back into politics by supporting his bid to join the UKIP National Executive Committee. By 2014 Hamilton had worked his way up to deputy Chairman of the party and campaign director for the 2014 European Elections.

Back in the 1990s I found it infuriating that several TV shows allowed this guy to blatantly cash in on the corruption allegations against him, but it's even more infuriating that UKIP have welcomed him back into the world of politics with open arms.

William Legge

Eton educated William Legge (or "The 10th Earl of Dartmouth" to use his establishment title) was a Tory member of the unelected House of Lords from 1999 to 2007. In 2009 he was elected as a UKIP MEP for the South West region, which I suppose is actually better than simply being appointed to the bloated anti-democratic shambles that is the House of Lords. The point still stands that he's one of the many former Tories now wearing the purple and yellow of UKIP.

Roger Helmer

Roger Helmer is another Tory MEP to have defected to UKIP. He was originally elected a Conservative MEP in 1999, but defected to UKIP in 2012. Many people have taken offence at Helmer's bigotry (claiming that rape victims "share a part of the responsibility", comparing gay equality with bigotry and incest, claiming that homophobia is a meaningless word ...) and his climate change denialism, however I'm much more concerned about his links to a foreign right-wing corporate pressure group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
 
ALEC is a profoundly disturbing organisation that writes corporate friendly "model legislation" which is then turned into state law by ALEC friendly legislators. Laws written by, or heavily influenced by ALEC include the classification of environmental protest activities as "terrorism", further privatisation of the US education system, deregulation of the US energy and telecommunications markets, support for the private prison-industrial complex and the appalling "stand your ground" murderers' charter.

Helmer was appointed as an Adam Smith Scholar by ALEC in 2005 and served on the ALEC International Relations Task Force. It seems extremely odd that someone with such strong links with an organisation intent on rewriting the law in the US and abroad in order to suit corporate interests, would want to join a party that endlessly harps on about protecting British sovereignty. The only way it makes any sense is if the endlessly repeated UKIP concerns about British sovereignty are just a smokescreen to obscure an extremely right-wing pro-corporate agenda.

Janice Atkinson

Janice Atkinson sprung into the public consciousness when she decided to verbally abuse some Green Party activists and was photographed making obscene gestures at them during the 2014 European election campaign. Despite this loutish behaviour she was still elected as a UKIP MEP for the South East.

Before Janice Atkinson defected to UKIP in 2011 she was a failed Tory. She was a press officer for the Tory party during their disastrous 2005 General Election campaign and in 2010 she was a failed Tory parliamentary candidate in the West Yorkshire constituency of Batley and Spen. It was the failure of politicians like Janice Atkinson to win back seats that were lost to Labour in 1997 that prevented the Tories from forming a majority government in 2010.

Even though she is clearly an obnoxious individual, it is difficult not to admire her opportunism. She was clearly failing to get anywhere within the Tory party, so she made the decision to jump ship and get herself on the gravy train of European parliamentary expenses with UKIP instead.

Bill Etheridge

Bill Etheridge is another of the crop of Tory party failures to have joined UKIP before the 2014 European elections. Prospective Tory party councilors Bill and his wife Star resigned from the party after having been suspended for posting pictures of themselves holding golliwog dolls on social media.

Nigel Farage was given reason to regret welcoming Etheridge into the UKIP fold when he decided to advise a UKIP youth conference that they should try to imitate the speaking style of Adolf Hitler!

Bill Etheridge is clearly a man with an appalling lack of self-awareness. After the Daily Telegraph reported his Hitler comments, he had the cheek to criticise their coverage as "tasteless" and "disgusting" as if advising the UKIP youth to strut around like a bunch of little Hitlers is perfectly acceptable.

Another indicator of his appalling lack of self-awareness is a sneering Facebook attack on the Tory party for their feeble "vote UKIP get Labour" propaganda campaign. His riposte is that "if you vote UKIP, you get UKIP". It seems that he has completely forgotten his political past, otherwise he might have said "Vote UKIP, get Tory rejects like me".

Nathan Gill

Yet another embarrassing addition to the UKIP fold as a result of the 2014 European elections is the former Tory party activist Nathan Gill. Shortly after he was elected as the UKIP MEP for Wales it was revealed that until 2008 he had run a home care company in Hull that had mainly employed Polish and Phillipino immigrants on poverty wages, many of them living in bunkhouse accommodation. Gill didn't close his immigrant reliant business because of any new found opposition to immigration, the business went bankrupt with debts of £116,000.

The appalling hypocrisy of going from an employer who pays such low wages that they are forced to rely upon dozens and dozens of immigrant workers living in bunkhouse accomodation, to standing as a candidate for an anti-immigration party is undeniable.

Aside from the fact that he seems to be a perfectly inappropriate candidate for an anti-immigration party, another question must surely be why UKIP couldn't find any better candidates in the whole of Wales than a man with no real business experience apart from driving his company into bankruptcy, despite cutting costs by exploiting cheap foreign labour?
Amjad Bashir

Amjad Bashir is yet another long-term Tory party activist turned UKIP MEP. He explained that his main reasons for joining UKIP are to remove the UK from the EU, his opposition to gay equality and his desire to dramatically cut down on immigration.

The hypocrisy and self-interest of a Pakistani born immigrant joining UKIP and making statements like "we now have to seriously restrict immigration" is appalling. He's one of the beneficiaries of immigration into the UK from the former colonies, now he wants to kick away the ladder to stop others coming and benefiting in the same way that he has.Douglas Carswell

Despite his propensity for expenses scamming (flipping his second home, getting the taxpayer to pay for all manner of expensive furniture and subsidise his food bills) and his climate change denialism, Charterhouse educated Douglas Carswell was a darling of the Tory party, attracting glowing praise from the Telegraph, the Spectator and the Tory blogger Guido Fawkes. Despite all of the praise, Carswell's main political achievement within the Tory party seems to have been the ridiculous campaign to politicise the police by introducing elected PCCs, a policy which resulted in the lowest electoral turnouts since universal suffrage!

In August 2014 Carswell defected to UKIP claiming that David Cameron was not doing enough to deliver change. 
Mark Reckless

Of all of the new crop of Tory MPs in 2010 Mark Reckless was one of the least notable. In fact, hardly anyone had even heard of him until he decided to follow Douglas Carswell's lead and defect to UKIP. His decision to announce his defection at the UKIP conference, and just a couple of days before the Tory party conference seemed premeditated to create the maximum possible publicity.

Before he defected to UKIP a few of the only notable things he did were joining five other Tories to vote against the tripling of "aspiration taxes" for university students, excusing the fact that he missed a parliamentary vote by claiming that he was too drunk and laying into Douglas Carswell for defecting to UKIP!

David Silvester

The eleven other people mentioned in this article have all defected from the Tory party and achieved important positions within UKIP (party leader, deputy chairman, MEP, party treasurer, candidate MPs ...) however it is important not to forget the dozens and dozens of Tory party councilors to have defected to UKIP too.

Until 2013 David Silvester was a Tory councilor in Henley-on-Thames, but then he decided to defect to UKIP. He hit the headlines in 2014 when he decided to blame the Somerset Floods on the introduction of gay equality legislation (in my view one of the very few decent things the Tory led government has actually done).

UKIP initially tried to defend Silvester's absurd comments by saying they were just his own personal opinion, however Nigel Farage went on to say that it was "incredibly damaging" when "defectors" from the Conservative Party join Ukip and say "appalling and outrageous things". If Farage is really so concerned about defectors from the Tory party damaging the reputation of his party, one has to wonder why he continues to allow extremists from the far-right fringe of the Tory party to flood into his party through the door that he is holding open for them?

 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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What Is ... the difference between a Debt and a Deficit?

Sometimes it is easy for me to take my understanding of basic economics for granted. Having written articles explaining things like Credit Default Swaps, Information Asymmetry and Fiscal Multipliers in this series, it is a bit of a step down to explain the difference between simple economic concepts like debt and deficit, but I have two good reasons for doing so.

Reasons for writing this

Firstly, the education system in the UK has denied the vast majority of state schooled children an education in the economic fundamentals. The 7% of kids that attend private fee paying schools are much more likely to receive a basic education in economics at a young age, then to attend Oxford University universities in order to study Politics, Philosophy and Economics (which has represented an open door to political power to countless politicians ranging from honourable politicians like Tony Benn, all the way down to untrustworthy spivs like David Cameron).

Without the basic grounding in economics that the children of the wealthy tend to receive, many ordinary people go though life, by no fault of their own, as functional economic illiterates.

The second reason is that even people in positions of power that should know this absolutely foundational economic stuff get deficits and debts confused. One of the prime examples being the Tory MP Claire Perry, who proclaimed debts and deficits to be "the same thing" during a Radio 4 interview in 2012.

The ordinary man or woman in the street has an excuse for this kind of confusion (having never received an education in the economic fundamentals). Claire Perry MP has no such excuse having worked for two banks (Bank of America, Credit Suisse) a major management consultancy firm (McKinsey), an advisor to George Osborne (2006-2009) and an economic spokesperson for the Coalition government. It is no wonder that the economic system failed so spectacularly in 2008-09, and that George Osborne's economic plans have been so ruinous if a person can have a career like that without apparently knowing the fundamentally basics of economics.

Explanation

I find that the best way to explain the difference between a debt and a deficit is through the use of a simple driving analogy.

Lets imagine that the speed of the car is the debt and the rate of acceleration is the deficit (the rate at which the debt grows).

If you put your foot hard to the floor (run a high deficit) the speed of the car (the size of the overall debt) increases rapidly. If you apply the accelerator gently (run a small deficit) the speed of the car (size of overall debt) still increases, but at a slower pace.

Once you are aware of this, the true meaning of the Tory bluster about how they've "cut the deficit by a third" becomes clear. It is an open admission that they are still borrowing ever more money, and they've not even halved the rate of borrowing that was going on during the incredible fallout from the biggest financial sector insolvency crisis in human history (2009-10). They just seem to be hoping that people are too economically uneducated to read between the lines of their bluster about the cuts they've made.

Returning to the car analogy, the Coalition government still have their foot on the accelerator quite hard, but they're trying to convince their passengers (the public) that the car is getting slower with misleading narratives about how they are "paying down Britain's debts" to quote David Cameron verbatim. 

Anyone who claims (as Claire Perry did) that a debt and a deficit are "the same thing" is essentially saying that the speed of our hypothetical car and its rate of acceleration are "the same thing". For someone actually working in the field of economics to make such a ludicrous claim is akin to a physicist (lets say a NASA engineer) not knowing the difference between the speed and acceleration of the space flight he's supposed to be plotting the trajectory for.

When George Osborne came to power in 2010 he made two claims repetitively. That he would eliminate the budget deficit via his ideological austerity experiment, and that he would protect the AAA credit rating of the UK economy. He has failed dismally to achieve either of those objectives. According to his latest (still fantastical) projections, the deficit won't be eliminated until 2018-19 (well into the next parliament) and under George Osborne's watch the UK has been stripped of its AAA credit rating for the first time since the 1970s.The fact is that George Osborne has already borrowed more money in under four years than New Labour did in the preceding 13. Another fact is that by 2015 Osborne will have racked up a mind boggling £207 billion more in debt than he projected he was going to back in 2010.
  It is absolutely no surprise at all that "Osbornomics" has failed so demonstrably, given that he himself has no formal economics qualifications, and his economics adviser between 2006-09 is apparently so economically illiterate that she thinks a debt and a deficit are the "same thing".

To illustrate exactly how clueless the Tory shadow treasury were at the time Claire Perry was Osborne's economics adviser, it is worth noting that George Osborne was still describing the Irish economy as "a shining example of the art of the possible in policy-making" and explaining how the UK should emulate them in 2006. Osborne's Irish eulogy came just 2 years before the Irish economy imploded catastrophically, and just 4 years before Osborne himself had to sign off on a £7 billion bailout for Ireland because their "shining example of the possible" had revealed itself to be a classic illustration of a crony capitalist Ponzi scheme scaled up to the national level.

Conclusion

I hope that after this explanation you have a better understanding of the basic difference between a debt and a deficit (and a handy little analogy to remember it by). I hope you also appreciate how utterly scandalous it is that a Tory party economics adviser could be so clueless as to confuse these two very basic economic concepts, and even claim that they are "the same 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.

 

Read more articles in the "What is...." series

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 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 
         
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The Tory ideological mission
                 
What is a ... Credit Default Swap?
  

How Tory immigration rules discriminate against British children

The immigration rules in the UK are an absolute shambles, and have been for decades. Despite their immigration rhetoric, the Tories have made the situation a whole lot worse since the Lib-Dems enabled them back into power in 2010.

Most people have views on immigration, but the vast majority don't really have a clue how the immigration system actually works. In this article I'm going to explain how some of the most ludicrous elements of the UK immigration system actually end up discriminating against British families.

The Tories make a big show of pretending to clamp down on immigration, and plenty of hopelessly ill-informed people buy into their ludicrous propaganda charade of "Go Home" vans and draconian restrictions on certain demographic groups.

The demographic group I'm going to focus on in this article is British people that happen to have fallen in love and married (and perhaps had children with) non-EU citizens.

In June 2012 the Tory Home Secretary Theresa May introduced new immigration rules to prevent low-mid income British citizens from bringing their foreign spouses to live in the UK. Her new rules set out stringent family income conditions.

If a British citizen earns below the arbitrary income threshold of £18,600 (which increases by £3,800 for the first dependent child and then £2,400 for every subsequent child), they are prevented from bringing their non-EU spouse into Britain, and faced with the stark choice of either splitting up their family, or keeping their family together and living in exile from their own country. Thus a UK citizen with a non-EU spouse and two children must earn £24,800 per year in order to live in the UK (the potential earnings of the non-EU spouse are barred from consideration, no matter how highly skilled they may be).

The fact that the prospective incomes of the non-EU spouse are not counted, means that these rules discriminate against families in which the British partner is the primary child carer or the lower earner. 

The fact that the same arbitrary income requirements apply across the whole UK mean that the rules discriminate strongly in favour of people from London and the South East (where incomes are higher) and strongly against people from poorer regions like the North East of England.

Research by Oxford University Migration Observatory shows that of UK citizens in employment 47% would not be able to bring their foreign spouse to the UK. This rises to 61% for women and 51% for people from Wales, however only the 29% of London's poorest working residents are denied the right to live with a non-EU spouse because of these discriminatory rules.

Amazingly this law is only been applied to British citizens, because the non-EU spouses of citizens from every other country within the EU are protected from this kind of blatant economic discrimination under EU law. Thus, if a non-EU citizen is married to a German, Pole, Spaniard, Greek or any other EU nationality, they do not have to comply with these stringent new immigration rules and are free to settle in the UK without worrying about these earnings restrictions, which only ever apply if the non-EU immigrant is married to a British citizen.

These draconian new rules have forced thousands of British families to either split up and live in separate countries, or for the British citizen (and their British children) to live in exile from their own country in order to keep the family unit together.

These rules which glided through parliament lubricated by acres of tabloid rhetoric about "getting tough on immigration" are an absolute abomination. Just think about it for a minute. What kind of person would make the ideal kind of immigrant?

Someone who is already integrated into British culture by virtue of being the spouse (and parent) of other British citizens? Someone who in all likelihood speaks some English with their British family members? People who perhaps have valuable skills? People who are planning to stay in the UK on a long-term basis, rather than saving money by working in the UK for a few years before returning to their homeland?

These are precisely the kinds of people that this draconian legislation discriminates against!

This disgraceful legislation openly discriminates against British families, but the minimum income conditions (which were the highest in the world last time I checked) ensure that it is only the families of the poor and ordinary ("the lower orders" as they are seen by the Tory establishment) that suffer this discrimination. The wealthy families, and the families of other EU citizens (virtually no matter what their income) are entirely unencumbered.

What makes this appalling situation so much worse is that the Tories have actually made the immigration system easier for super-wealthy non-EU citizens who possess the wealth to simply buy their way in. Buying their way in directly is actually the expensive way of doing it (UK residency can be bought in just 2 years at a cost of £10 million), because it is equally possible for them to buy citizenship of another EU country (Malta for example - which costs about £500,000) then take advantage of European Freedom of Movement legislation to settle in the UK.
 
It doesn't matter how these super-rich individuals managed to acquire their wealth in the first place (Russian oligarchs, corrupt Chinese officials, members of the inner circle within African dictatorships, whatever), the gate is as wide open to them as much as it welded shut for thousands of British citizens simply because the partner or parent they love happens to be from outside the EU. 

What is even more shocking still, is that having introduced these draconian rules for ordinary British people in 2012, the Tories are actually looking at more ways in which they can make it even easier for rich foreigners (with no familial connection to the UK whatever) to buy themselves British nationality.

One of the most important factors to consider here are the rights of the children in the British families that are being discriminated against by the Tory led government. These British kids are being forced into a situation where they must live in exile from their own country, or to live without one of their parents. This is an open example of discrimination against British children, by their own government, based on nothing more than their parental income.

Tony Benn once borrowed the words of Oscar Wilde to accuse the Tories of measuring the price of everything and the value of nothing, and Theresa May's ludicrous immigration rules which discriminate against British children based on nothing more than their parental income (whilst they simultaneously make it easier for rich foreigners to buy their way in) are a prime example of this warped Tory financialisation of everything.

The Tories have demonstrated their determination to serve the interests of the super-rich, no matter what their nationality, whilst openly discriminating against British children on purely financial grounds. If you are not utterly disgusted by this, it's hard to imagine the kind of warped mentality you must have, in which wealthy foreigners (no matter the source of their wealth) are inherently more valuable than British children.

This abusive Tory immigration system makes me thoroughly ashamed to be British, yet the mainstream media oligopoly and the Tory establishment continue to weave their ludicrous propaganda narratives about how they are supposedly improving the situation, and millions are naive enough to believe it, simply because they are unaware of how the system openly discriminates against British people, and in favour of the global super-rich.

What you can do ...

As a conclusion I'd like to offer some advice on what you can do, which I'll present in two sections, one for those that are directly affected by these rules, and another for those who see this grotesque discrimination against their fellow Brits as an abomination and want to do something about it.

If you are affected

The first thing to do is consider your family tree. If you have grandparents from any other EU state (or an Italian paternal great-grandparent), you can apply for their nationality and freely enter the UK with your spouse under European Freedom of movement legislation as a citizen of your ancestral nation.

If the ancestry route is not an option for you, you can consider moving to another EU state with your spouse (perhaps Holland or Spain). Once you acquire residency there, I believe you are protected (as a resident of another EU state) from this kind of economic discrimination under Freedom of Movement Legislation, should you wish to return to the UK. The problem with this strategy is that after a few months of freely living Spain or the Netherlands, you might just decide that you'd rather not return to the country that openly discriminates against your spouse (and children) and to stay where you are!

Thirdly, I'd suggest that you consider legal action, especially if you have children. If you take legal action on behalf of your child, against the economic discrimination they are suffering based on nothing more than the economic circumstances of their parents (you), theirs could be the landmark case that blows this whole stinking charade out of the water. There are several potential avenues to take from a legal perspective, including - economic discrimination, collective punishment and violation of the right to family life. It would take a very brave couple to bring such an action, but in my view such a case would certainly be winnable.

Lastly, get in touch with the activist group BritCits. Even if you find that they can't help you in any material way, it is always good to know that there is a supportive community of people that are enduring the same hardships as you are. There is also this Facebook group called I love my foreign spouse.
 
If you are not directly affected

You should write to your MP to express your discontent at these ludicrous immigration rules.

To ensure the best response you could follow these basic guidelines:

• 1. Be polite: This is fundamentally important because rude, crude or aggressive correspondences are extremely unlikely to elicit positive responses.

• 2. Include your full name and postal address (even in emails): This creates a statutory obligation on your MP to respond to your concerns.

• 3. Be specific: If you ask them specific questions, you make it much more difficult for them to fob you off with simplistic party-line propaganda narratives. If they fail to answer your specific question in their reply, write back to them to insist that they provide a proper answer.

• 4. Ask that they raise the subject in parliament: You are within your rights to request that they raise any issue in parliament (during Prime Ministers questions, or during Home Office questions for example). Your MP has no obligation to raise your question, but they are inordinately more likely to ask it should you actually request them to do so, than if you don't bother.

• 5. Cite some evidence and ask for specific feedback on it: Please feel absolutely free to cite this article, however there are plenty of other webpages that address these issues from different perspectives, so don't feel that you need to cite this specific page.

You can find contact details for your MP on the parliament website.
 

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