The Tory Blue-Kip strategy was 20 years in the making, but when Theresa May activated it in April 2017 by triggering the snap election, it backfired spectacularly and actually ended up costing the Tory party their parliamentary majority, and now, just a couple of years later the Tory party is teetering on the brink of electoral ruin thanks to multiple splits in the political right.
The Blue-Kip strategy
Before Theresa May called the 2017 General Election, the numbers seemed to make perfect sense for the Tories. If they could combine the Tory vote with the UKIP vote, Labour would be annihilated and the other opposition parties wouldn't stand a chance either.
After years of upping the far-right, anti-immigrant, ultranationalist rhetoric in order to appeal to the Ukip crowd, Theresa May and the Tories decided to put their plan into action, and to an extent it worked. The far-right ultranationalist boost increased the Tory vote by 2.2 million from 2015, but what they didn't count on at all was the Corbyn surge which added an astounding 3.6 million votes for Labour.
Not only did the Tories fail to achieve the 150-200 seat mega-majority they'd dreamed of, they actually lost their parliamentary majority and put themselves at the beck and call of the Northern Irish DUP sectarians.
Demographics
One of the most obvious consequences of this massive shift in British politics was that the Tories have rendered themselves utterly reliant upon the extremely fickle Blue-Kip demographic, because if the 2.2 million flowed out as quickly as they'd flowed in, the Tory party would obviously end up getting hammered at the next General Election.
So the Tories were forced to continue pandering to the Blue-Kip demographic with far-right politics, anti-immigrant posturing, rabble-rousing, and overt displays of ultranationalism, despite the fact that the less rabid type of Tory voter and the younger generations are absolutely repulsed by this stuff.
In a way Theresa May and the Tories did reasonably well to keep this almost impossible shambles rolling for as long as they did, alternating top spot in the polls with Labour for the next year and a half.
OK they've had the majority of the mainstream media firmly on their side, and "centrists" continued helping the Tories by refusing to critique the ruinous austerity policies that trashed our living standards and caused the Brexit vote in the first place (the Lib-Dems who colluded with austerity fanaticism for five years, and the Labour right-wingers who lost the 2015 General Election by pathetically imitating austerity instead of vehemently opposing it) but the demographic trapdoor they've painted themselves over was always going to give way at some point.
And now that the Tories have failed to deliver the far-right ultranationalist fantasy of Brexit they're clearly in very deep trouble.
Brexit
Delivering Brexit was always absolutely crucial for the Tories to retain the support of the fickle Blue-Kip demographic.
I guess May imagined it would be easy enough to do with a 150-200 seat mega-majority in parliament, but once that fantasy was destroyed by the Corbyn surge in 2017, delivering any kind of Brexit became impossible, hence the national humiliation of the UK government having to go to Brussels to beg the EU to give us more time to sort out the extraordinary constitutional deadlock that Theresa May has created for us.
She knows that her endlessly repeated threat of punishing the British people with a devastating "no deal" meltdown if she didn't get her own way would have utterly destroyed the myth of Tory economic competence and driven millions of people away from the Tories for ever, so she knew that she could never actually follow through on her threats, despite wasting literally £billions on "no deal" planning to make it look like she was serious.
And she also knows that she can't get her shitty almost universally unpopular deal through parliament without significant compromise, and that any compromise towards Customs Union membership, Single Market access, protected workers' rights and the like would sound the death knell for Toryism by driving the far-right Blue-Kip demographic away from the Tories for good.
So she can't deliver Brexit, she can't follow through on her threats, and she can't compromise.
After steering the nation into this absurd deadlock situation and then simply clinging to power instead of letting someone else have a go, it's extraordinary that the Tories have any political support left at all.
Brexit Party
Theresa May's failure to deliver Brexit has led to her worst nightmare, the resurrection of UKIP under a new shinier brand, and in a matter of weeks pretty much the entire Blue-Kip demographic has surged away from the Tory party to pledge allegiance to Nigel Farage's new opaquely-funded Brexit Party.
The worst Tory local election results since 1995 (despite the Brexit Party not even standing candidates) have been followed up by extraordinary polls showing Labour establishing significant leads after huge numbers of people have abandoned the Tories to switch support to the Brexit Party.
So the people Theresa May has spent her entire time as PM pandering to have disappeared even more quickly than they flocked into the Tory ranks in the first place!
CUK and the Lib-Dems
The Brexit Party is clearly Theresa May's biggest problem, but then she also has another major headache too because there are two so-called "centrist" parties jostling to hoover up the Tory vote at the other edge by imitating their pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, orthodox neoliberal policies under the Remain banner.
At the 2016 EU referendum 57% of Tories voted for Brexit, but 43% voted Remain, which is hardly an insignificant proportion.
If these people start to believe that they can have the exact same "impoverish the poor to further enrich the wealthy" neoliberal policies elsewhere, without the inconvenience of being ideologically tied to this Tory Brexit shambles, significant numbers of them are going to buy into yellow or grey versions of orthodox neoliberalism, and the more effort Theresa May puts into preventing the Blue-Kip exodus, the more she's going to drive people out at the other end of the party.
The egotistical CUK squatters have made an absolute mess of almost everything they've touched in their first three months, but picking an ex-Tory leader who positions them to the right of the Tory party on economic policy, appointing the austerity fanatic Chris Leslie as their economics lead man, and the pro-privatisation Angela Smith as their business, environment, and transport bod are clearly moves designed to bring orthodox neoliberals into the CUK fold, and to attract the big money donors who are getting close to losing their patience with bankrolling the decaying Tories and their interminable Brexit farce.
Division of the right
Even those of us who were only children, or not even born in the mid-80s know all about the SDP and how divisions on the political left ended up handing Margaret Thatcher a majority so large that it wasn't finally eroded until 1997, but now, as a result of Theresa May's extraordinary incompetence, the political right is fracturing into various factions.
The far-right ultranationalists are deserting the Tory party in droves to back the Brexit Party Faragists and the remnants of UKIP, while the orthodox neoliberal right-wingers are ever more tempted by the pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, pro-EU posturing of the CUK squatters and the Lib-Dems.
It's looking increasingly likely that all that will be left of the Tory party will be the rump of political tribalists who treat political parties with the same undying loyalty as football fans treat their teams (no matter how shit they are they'll never abandon them to support another team, the worst they'll ever do is stop turning out to support them).
Labour
The division of the political right and the vast Labour membership surge since Jeremy Corbyn binned orthodox neoliberalism and returned Labour to their democratic socialist roots mean that the party will probably never have a better shot at regaining the government than the next General Election, and finally reversing the neoliberal economic fanaticism that has done so much damage to the UK since Thatcher infected the Westminster political establishment class with this toxic hard-right militancy in 1979.
Of course the CUK squatters and Lib-Dems will try to erode the Labour vote too, by appealing to the orthodox neoliberals in the Labour ranks, but grotesque living standard-eroding stuff like austerity dogma, privatisation mania, brutal social security cuts, and deliberate infrastructure under-investment have far more appeal to right-wing Labour MPs than they do to ordinary Labour Party members and voters.
Labour will continue to be attacked from both sides for their policy of trying to de-escalate Brexit, rather than whipping it up even more for their own political purposes with cries of "betrayal" and "treason" from the Brextremists, and the desperate pining for a final 'do or die' 'now or never' clash of civilisations 'another roll of the dice' referendum from the Remain Ultras.
This is unfortunate, but the Tories created this massive social division, and political opportunists from both sides are fully intent on whipping up the hate, and actually widening the divide for their own selfish political purposes, rather than seeking some kind of compromise that neither side will particularly like, but most ordinary people can live with.
This isn't to say Labour shouldn't back another referendum (they've voted in favour of one twice already), it's just that they should make sure they offer a more moderate Brexit (Customs Union, Single Market, protected workers' rights, co-operation on science, security & environment) and do everything in their power to make sure ruinous undefined options like "no deal" are kept off the ballot (surely the #1 lesson from the 2016 referendum is that undefined options in national referendums are a dreadful idea?).
The worst mistake Labour could make is to follow Theresa May's lead and pick one side of this hyper-partisan Brexit division, because you only have to look at the chaos she's created through this wilful partisanship, and the ongoing breakup of the Tory vote to understand the risks.
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There is literally no reason to vote Tory in the upcoming European Parliament elections (you know the elections that Theresa May previously swore that the UK wouldn't be participating in).
No matter what kind of political perspective you have, there's now clearly a better choice for you:
Orthodox neoliberal + Brexit sceptic
If you're a traditional pro-privatisation, pro-austerity, orthodox neoliberal who used to consider the Tory party home, but you're sceptical about quitting the EU then you can vote for CUK or the Liberal Democrats.
CUK have clearly indicated their pro-austerity stance by handing their economics spokesperson role to Chris Leslie (one of the core architects of Labour's disastrously uninspiring pro-austerity agenda at the 2015 General Election).
They've also indicated their pro-privatisation credentials by appointing Angela Smith as their transport, energy, and environment spokesperson (she's a lobbyist for the privatised water industry).
The Lib-Dems spent five years in coalition with the Tories enforcing the ruinous austerity policies that trashed our living standards and caused the wave of public anger that carried the Leave vote narrowly over the winning line in 2016.
They also helped the Tories introduce all kinds of bonkers hard-right privatisation scams including flogging off the Royal Mail property portfolio at a fraction of its real value, the shambolic privatisation of the probation service, the Eurostar sell-off, the privatised forensic science service shambles, privatisation of thousands of taxpayer-funded schools, privatised prisons chaos, flogging off the aviation fuel supply network and then renting it back for 10 years at three times the sale price, the sale of every fire engine in London for two pounds ...
If you love austerity and privatisation but have your doubts about Brexit, there are much better choices than voting Tory.
Orthodox neoliberal + Brexit supporter
If you adore the pro-privatisation, pro-austerity, anti-worker, neoliberal ideology and want a hard-right Brexit at any cost, then the Brexit Party definitely seem to fit the bill.
Nigel Farage is a Thatcher-worshipping, pro-privatisation, right-winger who has a track record of openly fantasising about the full privatisation of the NHS.
If you want to see Brexit used as a Trojan Horse to trash workers' rights, abolish our environmental laws and food standards, and to privatise what's left of our public land and public services, why would you vote Tory when you can support Farage and the Brexit Party?
Fan of far-right extremism
A significant proportion of Tory MPs have been deliberately trying to attract the extreme-right ultranationalist demographic. From Zac Goldsmith's vile BNP-style London Mayoral campaign in 2016, through Theresa May's unlawful racist "Hostile Environment" abuse of black British citizens, to the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Steve Baker publicly promoting the German extreme-right and cheering on the sinister activities of an imported far-right youth radicalisation programme from the US, Tories have been working hard to attract extreme-right bigots into the Tory fold.
But if you're an extreme-right bigot why vote Tory when you can vote for a much more brazen far-right operation that continually peddles anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim bigotry, and even supports their candidates when they make "jokes" about raping their female political opponents!
If you want far-right filth, despite the concerted Tory efforts to ramp up the hate, UKIP are now in a totally different league.
Anti-austerity + Brexit-sceptic
Maybe you're a former Tory voter who has recently woken up to the fact that austerity was always a con job designed to transfer as much wealth as possible from the majority of people to the mega-rich elitist class (you know, the economic class who completely bankroll the Tory party).
And maybe you're also dismayed at the Tories for abandoning the European Union and the Single Market that they helped to create in the first place?
Well if you're after an anti-austerity Brexit-sceptic party, then look no further than the Greens (or the SNP in Scotland/Plaid Cymru in Wales).
Anti-austerity + soft Brexit
If you're a Tory voter who has eventually come to realise that David Cameron and George Osborne's austerity agenda was always just a scam to make the poor and ordinary pay the cost of the bankers' insolvency crisis while the Tories showered the mega-rich with tax cuts and handouts, and you think that Brexit should go ahead but in the least damaging form possible, then Labour are offering what you're looking for.
Labour would reverse austerity and begin actually investing in our country and building our future economic potential, rather than doing precisely the opposite. And Labour's policy is to develop a close negotiated relationship with the EU that doesn't involve driving the UK economy off a "no deal" cliff edge or trashing our manufacturing industry with customs checks and causing absolute chaos over the border in Northern Ireland.
Conclusion
Whatever your stance on several of the most important issues of our era (Brexit, Austerity, the rise of the far-right) there's always a better option than voting Tory in the European Parliament elections.
And when it comes to the local elections, why on earth would anyone ever consider voting Tory when they're the ones who have absolutely trashed local government funding since 2010, meaning councils up and down the country are charging much higher Council Tax rates in return for reduced, scrapped, over-stretched, and downright failing local services?
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This article exists as an accompaniment to the political guide infographic. It's all pretty self-explanatory but it's important to back up some of the assertions with evidence and analysis.
Political position
The Green Party and Labour under Corbyn are Democratic Socialist parties occupying the traditional centre-left position before neoliberalism came along and dragged the entire political spectrum off to the right.
The Tory leadership are hard-right neoliberal being the party that originally injected this toxic strain of economic fanaticism into the UK government when they won the 1979 general election. A significant proportion of Tory backbenchers are far-right rabble rousers, but since the party leadership has not been completely usurped yet, they're still best classified as hard-right neoliberals.
The Lib-Dems and the new CUK squatter party are both "centrist" neoliberal, in that they're not as militant about their neoliberal ideology as the Tories, and often choose to focus on other issues (like Brexit, or social policies) but they also strongly resist any challenge to the established neoliberal orthodoxy, and actively support it if it suits their selfish political purposes.
The SNP and Plaid are both quite mixed political parties held together more by civic nationalism than economic stance. Overall they're more-or-less centre-left and I don't think many of their members would complain too vehemently as being described as social democrats.
Under Gerrard Batten UKIP have turned into a militant hard-right political force, expending far more effort on whipping up anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim hate, rather than detailing real political policies.
Farage's Brexit Party have only just been launched, but going on the fact they've already had two party leaders exposed as outrageous bigots, and Farage's willingness to participate in far-right rabble rousing throughout his political career, it'd take a hefty dose of gullibility to believe they're going to suddenly become centrists or social democrats.
Austerity
The Green Party deserve a lot of credit for being the only explicitly anti-austerity UK-wide political party in 2015, however Labour have learned their lesson from their abject failure to oppose Tory austerity fanaticism that lost them that election, and under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership they've moved to opposing Tory austerity dogma, rather than pathetically imitating it.
SNP and Plaid are both opposed to ruinous Tory austerity fanaticism too.
The Lib-Dems repeatedly try to distance themselves from the devastating Tory austerity fanaticism they enabled between 2010 and 2015, and will tie themselves in cognitive knots trying to pretend that the collapse in living standards these austerity policies caused had nothing to do with the massive upswell in public anger that carried Leave marginally over the winning line in the 2016 EU referendum.
The CUK squatter party are definitely pro-austerity. They've appointed Chris Leslie as their economics spokesperson, and he was one of the key architects of Labour's disastrous "austerity lite" agenda at the 2015 general election. Anna Soubry described the policies of the 2010-2015 austerity years (wage repression, public service cuts, infrastructure under-investment, defunding of local governments, vandalism of the social safety net ...) as "marvellous", and every single one of them either voted in favour of, or cynically abstained on George Osborne's devastating austerity cuts in 2015.
UKIP were explicitly pro-austerity before Batten became leader, but neither they, nor Farage's Brexit Party like to talk about austerity at all, because it's a lot easier to pin the blame for the devastating consequences on immigrants and the EU if you simply ignore the fact that austerity even exists.
Brexit
Theresa May and the Tory leadership are still trying to force their botched thrice-rejected hard-right Withdrawal deal through parliament.
Labour want to create a soft Brexit with Single market and Customs Union access, protected workers' rights, food standards, and environmental laws, and cooperation on science and security. They're also willing to hold a confirmatory referendum, and to consider retention of Free Movement (as demonstrated when they voted in favour of Nick Boles' compromise Brexit in the indicative votes).
The Lib-Dems, CUK, Greens, SNP, and Plaid Cymru are all Brexit-sceptic and they all seem to be prioritising another referendum, which is fine, but there's clearly no guarantee that Remain would win it given that nothing at all has been done since 2016 to clamp down on electoral liars and cheats (with serious punishments like bans from public office and jail time) or to regulate online social media dark ads.
It's fair enough opposing Brexit, I'm highly sceptical about it too, but if your strategy is simply another roll of the dice in a rigged game, you've got to acknowledge the risk of creating an inescapable double-mandate for a ruinous hard-right Brexit.
UKIP and Farage's Brexit Party are both pushing for a militant "no deal" Brexit that would bring economic chaos to the whole of the UK, and massively re-ignite tensions over the Northern Ireland border.
Social issues
When it comes to stuff like gay rights the Tories have moved dramatically from their homophobic Section 28 discrimination in the 1990s, but on disability rights their systematic abuse of disabled people has been condemned as a human rights violation by the United Nations. In any decent and compassionate society this despicable abuse would be considered an national scandal, but the mainstream media and most Brits don't even seem to care that tens of thousands of disabled people have died within weeks of being declared "fit for work" in Tory disability denial assessments.
The Tories also introduced Theresa May's vile Hostile Environment which led to unlawful abuse of black British citizens, including being forced into exile from their own countries.
And anyone supporting the use of British weapons in war crimes committed in Yemen by the homophobic, misogynistic, head-chopping, democracy-crushing, terrorism-spreading, journalist-dismembering Saudi tyrants has no right whatever to pose as any kind of "social liberal".
The Lib-Dems pose as social liberals, but they spent five years in coalition with the Tories vandalising the social safety net, systematically abusing disabled people, and supporting Theresa May's unlawful abuse of the Windrush generation. In fact the Lib-Dems agreed harsher social security sanctions (which mainly affect the mentally ill and the severely under-educated) in return for 5p charges on plastic bags!
Labour and the Greens have been vehemently opposing the systematic Tory abuse of sick and disabled people. The SNP and Plaid also have strong track records when it comes to opposing abusive Tory legislation like Theresa May's Hostile Environment, and the systematic Tory abuse of disabled people.
Not a single one of the CUK squatter MPs voted against Theresa May's hostile Environment. The ex-Tory members of the group actually voted in favour of it! They've also put Mike Gapes (a huge fan of imperialist war-mongering and the Saudi tyrants) in charge of their foreign policy agenda. If you believe in turning places like Iraq and Libya into lawless terrorist breeding zones, and support Saudi war crimes in Yemen, you're no social liberal, even if you pose as social progressives on domestic issues.
UKIP and the Brexit Party are rabble rousers intent on actually whipping up hatred against immigrants and minorities in order to push their far-right agenda. You'd have to be absolutely delusional to think they'd actually stand up for the vulnerable when it comes to social policy issues.
Privatisation
Labour and the Green Party campaign explicitly on policies like bringing the railways, water supply, schools, and hospitals back under public not-for-profit ownership. The vast majority of British people agree with this public ownership stance.
The Tories are privatisation fanatics. Since 2010 they've been busy outright defying public opinion by privatising NHS services, the Royal Mail, literally thousands of schools, and even massive chunks of the police and judicial system (including front line police services, probation, court translation, forensic science, and prisons).
Between 2010 and 2015 the Lib-Dems actively helped the Tories defy public opinion by privatising hospitals, schools, police services, probation, and prisons. Their leader Vince Cable was even the man the Tories put in charge of flogging off the Royal Mail at significantly below it's real market value!
The SNP have a more mixed approach. They've been in power in the Scottish government since 2007 so they could have done more to reverse privatisation in Scotland, however in areas where they have had the power to block it they have prevented a lot of the Tory privatisation mania that's infested England since 2010. In England 3/4 of secondary schools have been privatised, in Scotland the education system remains in the public sector.
The CUK squatter MPs clearly signalled their pro-privatisation credentials by appointing water privatisation propagandist Angela Smith as their energy, environment, and transport minister, numerous other CUK MPs have bitterly criticised Labour's public ownership plans, and they've just hitched their boat to the right-wing EPP European group, which includes the hard-right Spanish PP and Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party. Anyone expecting this neoliberal rabble to begin opposing and reversing Tory privatisation mania is clearly not paying any attention to what they're actually saying and doing.
UKIP used to be extremely vocal pro-privatisation fanatics to the point of promoting the full privatisation of the NHS, but they've quit talking about their economic policies these days in favour of immigrant-bashing and Muslim hate-mongering. Anyone imagining that UKIP and Farage's far-right Brexit mob would set about reversing Tory privatisation fanaticism is even more delusional than the CUK squatter fans!
Conclusion
Whatever your views on Brexit, be very careful that you don't end up endorsing a political party with terrible views and policies on other issues.
This is especially important when it comes to austerity fanaticism given that ruinous Tory austerity dogma was the root cause of the wave of public anger that caused the Brexit vote in the first place.
Voting for a pro-austerity political party because they make a big fuss about opposing Brexit is like worrying about your hair falling out and the blood in your piss as you continue wilfully drinking the political arsenic.
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.
All 11 of the MPs to have joined the Independent Group have outright declared their intentions to squat in their parliamentary seats without calling by-elections to put their defections to the electoral test.
This behaviour is technically within the rules, although 2 MPs who defected from David Cameron's Tories to UKIP back in 2014 (Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless) tried to set the electoral precedent that political defectors should respect democracy and call by-elections.
The problem of course is that this refusal to call by-elections to give their constituents another say under the dramatically changed circumstances is that it betrays a searing hypocrisy because they all also advocate another Brexit referendum.
These people believe in putting things to the vote again when it suits their interests, but vehemently oppose the idea of voting again when they'd be in danger of losing their privileged positions in parliament.
This hypocrisy is so obvious, and so clearly motivated by self-interest and entitlement that it's obviously going to be a massive problem for everyone in the another referendum campaign.
Not only are People's Vote advocates going to have to deal with the (unfair and manipulative) characterisation that they're a "sore loser" campaign, they're now also going to have to deal with (entirely legitimate and justified) criticism of this extraordinary anti-democratic hypocrisy from 11 of their most high profile advocates.
If I was involved in the People's Vote campaign I'd be absolutely furious with these self-serving narcissistic cowards for giving opponents an absolutely devastating attack point, but somehow no.
Not only are the anti-Brexit pockets of the Internet so busy having raptures about the formation of this new opaquely funded pro-austerity "centrist" party that they can't even see that it's actually a massive distraction from the fact that a Tory Brexit meltdown is less than 1,000 hours away, they also refuse to see that this self-serving refusal to call by-elections is such glaring hypocrisy that it's created a devastating attack point against the People's Vote campaign.
What's even more concerning from a Brexit-sceptic perspective is that several of these people are the same strategically inept idiots who tied the nation up in a pointless and self-serving Anyone But Corbyn coup plot in the immediate aftermath of Brexit.
When the nation desperately needed to focus on coherent objectives (like fixing blame for the Brexit chaos squarely on the Tories who delivered it, demanding a wide ranging Brexit commission instead of allowing Theresa May to run it as a closed Tory shop exclusively for Tory party advantage, and unifying the Brexit resistance rather than creating even more divisions) Chuka Umunna, Chris Leslie, Mike Gapes and their ilk instead delivered a massive political distraction by seeking to undermine the will of the Labour Party membership with a naval-gazing coup plot they'd been planning to launch for weeks beforehand, no matter what the outcome of the Brexit referendum.
Instead of any coherent form of action to deal with the Tory Brexit mess these idiots completely wasted the vital first few months on a brazenly self-serving, ridiculously divisive, and spectacularly failed anti-Corbyn coup that actually ended up actually increasing Corbyn's legitimacy as Labour leader with a resounding double-mandate from party members!
The anti-democratic and profoundly hypocritical way this political squatter group has been formed is proof that they've learned absolutely nothing about the elitist self-serving attitudes that resulted in their previous humiliating failure.
By refusing to call by-elections they're demonstrating exactly the same elitist entitlement as before, and by handing Brexiteers a devastating attack point to undermine calls for another referendum, they're in danger of delivering another spectacular political whopping by their political opponents too.
Just when the nation needs strong leadership in the face of an impending Tory Brexit meltdown, the same useless bunch of strategically inept, ridiculously self-serving, democracy-defying political narcissists have pushed themselves to centre stage in such a tone-deaf and hypocritical manner that they're actually freely handing out ammunition to their political opponents.
If this ludicrously unprincipled vanity project is really the best our political system can come up with in the face of an unprecedented self-inflicted socio-economic disaster looming on the horizon, we're absolutely fucked aren't we?
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.
BBC Question Time is a remarkably biased show. Regular viewers will be familiar with the regular appearances of Tory Party plants in the audience, and they'll also be familiar with the way the panel of five guests is always heavily loaded in favour of pro-austerity neoliberals, and the way that left-wing panellists are hectored and interrupted far more than right-wingers.
However the episode on February 7th 2019 was quite extraordinary with the notorious Billy "the bigot" Mitchell making yet another appearance as one of the select few audience members allowed to ask a question.
Billy Mitchell is an orange order supporting former UKIP candidate with a long track record of spouting extremely right-wing British nationalist bile. Wings Over Scotland has more details on the four appearances, and Billy's extraordinary bigoted, sectarian, British nationalist, pro-Trump, anti-EU, pro-Putin, orange order, creationist views.
Of course a minority of the Scottish public are actually orange order supporting sectarian bigots like Billy, and they should be allowed to express their views (even if they are despicable) but how on earth have the BBC decided that this tiny sectarian demographic in Scotland should be represented by the same man as if he's just a random member of the public rather than someone they've repeatedly selected to represent orange order bigotry on national television?
The odds against being selected to speak on the show more than once are very high, but when someone's been selected as a speaking audience member on at least three occasions the odds are simply too high for it to be a coincidence.
But there's no need to rely on the mathematical improbability of being selected as a speaking member of the audience on so many occasions, because pictures from before the show reveal Billy the bigot getting offscreen access to at least one member of the Question Time panel (something that isn't supposed to happen according to the show's own rules).
There is clearly a very serious problem with the methodology the BBC are using to determine the makeup of Question Time audiences, and to decide which audience members get picked to ask questions of the panel.
And there's obviously a very serious problem with their selective enforcement of their own rules when it comes to certain politically partisan far-right audience members being given off air access to the panel before the show, whilst ordinary members of the public are expected to abide by the rules.
The woman in charge of picking the Question Time audience is Alison Fuller Pedley who has an extraordinary track record of controversy including sharing Britain First content on her (now deleted) Facebook page, colluding with a UKIP councillor to bring Question Time to his home town, inviting the EDL street thuggery group to appear in the Question Time audience, and following the Facebook page of an extreme-right hate mob called the British Patriot Front.
Whether she's a far right fanatic pushing her own personal agenda onto the show, or someone actively working to push extremist far-right ideas into mainstream political discourse it's appalling either way.
But as is the way with big institutions, whenever people complain about her antics, or the obviously partisan audience selections the BBC go into 'circle the wagons' ultra-defensive mode. And whenever people ask about the exact process they use for deciding the balance of audience members on their politics shows, they refuse the Freedom of Information requests.
The BBC has a "closed box" approach to their methodology for picking audience members and which audience members get to speak, the woman who runs this process has a concerning history of far-right activity, and they've just been caught red-handed giving an orange order bigot yet another speaking appearance on the show.But given their long track record of ignoring criticism over their lack of political impartiality (including the extraordinary case where they gave a question to an extreme-right fanatic who was facing jail time for a disgusting string of online abuse and death threats) it's highly unlikely that anything will be done to reverse this Question Time trend of deliberately promoting far-right extremist views into mainstream political discourse.
As far as they're concerned far-right political views make cracking publicity for their show, hence the fact that they decided to actually Tweet Billy the Bigot's question, provoking absolute raptures from across the extreme-right online fringe.
Not only do they think they're doing nothing wrong by rigging their audiences and questions in order to push extremist far-right views into the mainstream, they actually see it as their job to do this.
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On Sunday December 9th 2018 some 3,000 people attended an extreme-right "Brexit Betrayal" protest in London led by the street thug and convicted fraudster Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (Tommy Robinson) and the absolute dregs who haven't yet abandoned UKIP (even former leaders Nigel Farage and Paul Nuttall have recently quit the party in disgust at what it's become).
Here are 12 things you should know about the protest.
Stephen Yaxley-Lennon
Most of the other speakers barely managed to hold the attention of the crowd because the majority of them were just waiting for their idol "Tommy Robinson" to stick it to the Muslims and immigrants.
Yaxley-Lennon followers don't give a damn that he's using a fake name, that he's a convicted fraudster, that he's a hate-preacher who has inspired deadly terrorist attacks against innocent people, and they don't care that he's living the high life on the back of all of their donations and hundreds of thousands in payments from shady hard-right propaganda outfits in the US who are seeking to destabilise Britain and other developed nations by funding extreme-right agitators.
Yaxley-Lennon has amassed a fortune in donations and used it to build a significant property portfolio, including a large country house in rural Bedfordshire.
Do the people who throw cash at him realise that he's just siphoning it off to enrich himself?
They probably do realise it, but just don't care, just like "Tommy" and his extreme-right flock don't care about all the evidence that the EDL street thug organisation that he founded is absolutely riddled with paedophiles and other sex offenders.
The decline of UKIP
The UKIP leader Gerard Batten was at the demo alongside Yaxley-Lennon, and it just goes to show how far the party has collapsed since their heyday just a few years ago when they won 24 seats at the 2014 European elections (all but 7 of them have subsequently quit the party) and bagged almost 4 million votes at the 2015 General Election.
Now they've been reduced to a tiny kernel of ideological extremists pathetically riding on the coat tails of an extreme-right hate preacher and convicted fraudster, and even then only attracting 3,000 people to the event they invested so much time, money, and effort to publicise.
I'm obviously not at all fond of Nigel Farage or his successor Paul Nuttall (to put it mildly), but it's no surprise that even hard-right cranks like them have quit the party in disgust at what UKIP has become.
Huge counter-protest
3,000 people turned up to the extreme-right Brexit Betrayal protest, an estimated 15,000 turned up to the anti-fascist counter-protest.
It's clearly not going at all well for the extreme-right if there are five counter-protesters telling them to piss off for every extreme-right supporter at their event.
A noose for Theresa
One of the Brexit Betrayal protesters brought a noose to the protest. When asked why he was carrying it he explained that it was for Theresa May. "That's for Theresa May, that's what treasonous people get".
It's obviously despicable and barbaric for people to go around calling for their political opponents to be hanged, but then Theresa May and her hack mates in the right-wing propaganda rags bear a lot of responsibility for actively creating this febrile and abusive political environment.
Remember "Crush the Saboteurs"?
Remember the McCarthyite Tory witch hunt against pro-European academics?
Remember when the Daily Mail printed their "enemies of the people" front page and sparked a wave of abuse and death threats against the three High Court judges who ruled against Theresa May's Brexit power grab because parliament is sovereign?
Well Theresa May actually hired the hack who wrote the "Enemies of the People" article shortly afterwards as her Downing Street press secretary!
Let's be clear that nobody deserves this kind of vile political abuse, but surely Theresa May and her mates must have had an inkling that their strategy of whipping up such torrents of ultranationalist fervour, hatred, and death threats over Brexit would one day rebound back on them if they ever tried to do anything whatever that went against the wishes of the radical extreme-right Brextremist fringe?
High-viz jackets
One of the most despicable things about the extreme-right Brexit Betrayal mob is the way they've tried to appropriate the yellow high-viz vest thing from the French gilets jaunes movement.
Like them or loathe them (over 70% of French people support them by the way) it's impossible to deny that the central theme of their movement is anger at economic injustice.
French people are furious that Macron is imposing fuel tax hikes on ordinary people to protect huge corporations (70% of carbon emissions come from 100 of the biggest corporations), and even lavishing a vast tax break on the 1% of wealthiest people in France.
The "no deal" fanatics at the Brexit Betrayal march are protesting in favour of the opposite.
They actually want to trigger an economic meltdown and yet another collapse in British living standards by demanding the most chaotic and economically damaging interpretation possible of the Brexit vote.
Presumably they're doing this because they're fully aware that extreme economic deprivation and the rise of extreme-right ideologues and tyrants go hand-in-hand.
It's an absolute insult to nick the symbolic and effective yellow vests off the French protesters for entirely contradictory purposes.
Extreme-right recruitment
Aside from all the UKIP propaganda at the Brexit Batrayal March, there were several extremist organisations using the demo as a recruitment opportunity. There were loads of banners and literature and placards from the vile white supremacist Generation Identity movement , and the extreme-right EDL successors the "Democratic Football Lad's Alliance" were handing out their propaganda too.
Jo Cox
Nooses, home made banners full of outright political lies, extreme-right and white supremacist literature and banners are appalling enough, but they pale into insignificance in comparison to this absolutely vile conspiracy theory about the murdered MP Jo Cox.
There is no doubt whatever that Cox was brutally murdered in the street by a "Britain First" screaming extreme-right terrorist who later gave his name in court as "death to traitors, freedom for Britain".
Just imagine the mindset and motivation of someone who would chose to claim that this murder was some kind of false flag operation by the political establishment to murder one of their own.
The extreme-right inclinations of Jo Cox's killer is obviously so close to the extreme-right views of the person holding this vile placard that they'd rather promote outrageous and sickening conspiracy lies than accept that the murder was committed by one of their own.
Funding
As usual the question needs to be asked, where did this rag-tag band of extreme-right fanatics dig up all the cash to promote and hold this demonstration? Who paid for the publicity? Who paid for the flags and banners? Who paid for the stage and sound equipment?
You'd have to be delusional to think it was Ordinary Joe right-wingers who stumped up the cash given that only 3,000 odd even bothered to turn up. So who was it? Another one of the shady US propaganda outfits who bankroll Yaxley-Lennon, or someone else?
Israel and the British extreme right
On the face of it Zionists and the British extreme-right make extremely odd bedfellows, especially given the history of extreme-right abuse of British Jewish communities (the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, Wood Green in the 1970s) but there were Israeli flags on display amongst the Union flags, pro-Trump propaganda, UKIP banners, and white supremacist placards.
It was always the left (the socialists, the communists, and the anarchists) who stood in solidarity with British Jews against the extreme-right thugs trying to parade through their neighbourhoods, so seeing Israeli flags at extreme-right marches really does induce confusion.
What do Zionists hope to achieve from colluding with the British extreme-right fringe, and what do the extreme-right fringe get out of promoting Zionism?
Jonathan Pie
Everyone with a social media account must have seen at least one Jonathan Pie video. At his peak his brilliant eviscerations of the Tory government were social media gold.
He's disappeared off the radar a little bit recently, but then he's re-emerged at the Brexit Betrayal march, getting welcomed like a hero and doing loads of grinning selfies with the Ukippers and Tommy Robinson fanboys.
Is he working on some kind of undercover exposé of the inner workings of the extreme-right fringe, or was he just basking in the adulation of a bunch of extreme-right fanatics?
The Daily Mail hate chamber absolutely loved it
The comments on the Daily Mail article about the Brexit Betrayal march are exactly what you'd expect from the extreme-right echo chamber of hate that the Daily Mail have cultivated.
The top rated comment of all is a declaration of 100% support for 'Tommy Robinson'. Just imagine offering your uncritical and unyielding 100% support to any political figure, let alone a street thug, wife-beater, and convicted fraudster like Yaxley Lennon!
Most of the other top rated comments praised extreme-right agitators, smeared the left-wing and anti-fascist counter-demonstration, hurled abuse at someone called MacConnell (I think they probably meant the Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell), and spread the usual extreme-right victimhood narratives.
One of the most down rated comments? A concerned Brexiteer saying that Brexit should be about Brexit and sovereignty, not a platform for providing free publicity to criminal extreme-right thugs like Yaxley Lennon.
Conclusion
This collection of 3,000 bigots, racists, ukippers, EDL street thugs, and outright cranks clearly doesn't represent all of the 17.4 million people who voted for Brexit, but then Brexiteers never were a unified group with unified demands.
Unfortunately for those who held their noses and voted alongside the millions of bigots, xenophobes, Ukippers, extreme-right agitators, Britain First followers, EDL street thugs, and the hard-right fringe of the Tory party in favour of Brexit, they've got virtually no representation in the mainstream media, meaning this grotesque circus of bandwagon-jumping extreme-right cranks is how they're're going to be portrayed unless you start speaking out, condemning this revolting freakshow, and explaining what it is that reasonable Brexiteers like you actually want.
Of course not all Brexiters are racists, but on the evidence of the Brexit Betrayal protest, all the racists are definitely Brexiters.
If you're an non-racist, no-bigoted, non-fascist Brexiter, are you really going to let this utterly vile mob speak for you?
Are you really going to allow extreme-right agitators and hate preachers to usurp Brexit and use it to promote their disgusting ideology?
Well if you do you're either dooming your Brexit ambitions to failure, or worse, dooming Britain to a terrifying future of extreme-right demagoguery, ethnic and religious persecution, and extreme repression of political non-conformity.
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