Charlie is an actor

There's so much wrong with Amber Rudd's tweet on a basic level that it's difficult to know where to start.

Consider the absurdity of an actual government minster using emojis as bullet points to pretend that they're down with the kids.

Consider the unbelievably patronising tone of "I am going to share these good stories with you".

Consider the fact that anyone with the slightest grip on reality can see that this is a desperate effort to whitewash the fact that Universal Credit is a massively delayed, incompetently administered, poverty-spreading, and deeply unfair reform to the social security system.

And just listen to the awful saccharine feelgood background music on the propaganda video she's shared.

But aside from all of the obvious flaws there's something else. Charlie isn't just a personal trainer as is implied in the Tweet and the video, he's actually a professional actor, which is rather a large omission given the Tory DWP's history of inventing fake claimants to provide fake quotes about how great Universal Credit is.

The Universal Credit blogger Alex Tiffin spotted the fact that Charlie is a professional actor and shared several pictures of him doing professional acting work for companies like Sky Atlantic and Vodafone.

The choice not to mention Charlie's apparently extensive acting work is an example of deception by omission, and the presentation of this professional actor as if he's just some Ordinary Joe member of the public is downright dishonest.

The choice to pick a professional actor to play the role of someone who supposedly had their life improved by Universal Credit (rather than ruined by it like most people who experience it) leads to the suspicion that they couldn't actually find any real ordinary people to speak positively about it at all.

One of the worst aspects of this Tory propaganda is that deceptions and lies from the Tory government have become so commonplace these days that nobody is even surprised by them any more.

There are the dupes who still actually believe the lies and deceptions, but even when the dishonesty is revealed, a significant proportion of people have become so normalised to it that they respond with a shrug of the shoulders and a "what do you expect?" attitude, rather than fury that the government is demonstrably being run by a pack of lying propagandists.

Amber Rudd resigned in disgrace over the lies she told about the Windrush scandal, but then she was brought straight back into government within a matter of months to take over the DWP and the Universal Credit fiasco. And this Tweet is evidence that she's clearly learned nothing about honesty or integrity from her extremely brief non-punishment on the back benches.

It's a very dangerous road we're heading down when our government deceives us and lies to us on such a regular basis that most of us end up reacting to it with apathy, not anger.

 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

Theresa May just laughed in the face of the millions of workers her party has spent the last 8 years impoverishing

If you want to get to grips with the shocking levels of mainstream media bias in the UK just consider the reaction to Prime Minister's Questions on December 5th 2018.

Instead of criticising Theresa May for the absolutely shambolic state of her government, or the cynical and evasive scripted non-answers she responded with, or the usual cacophony of braying, jeering, and howling from the 300-odd millionaire elitists on the Tory benches, or the way she openly and contemptuously laughed in the face of the millions of workers her party has spent the last 8 years impoverishing, the BBC politics team and swathes of the mainstream media tried to create the absurd narrative that Theresa May somehow won the debate because Jeremy Corbyn asked the wrong questions!

The crux of their ridiculous narrative was that Jeremy Corbyn used his six questions to absolutely nail the Tory track record on poverty, collapsing wages, Universal Credit, and their grotesque publicity stunt the previous weekend of taking publicity photos in food banks (as if they're actually proud of their record of massively increasing poverty to the extent that huge numbers of people now rely on charitable food handouts to survive).

According the the bitter mainstream media hacks, Corbyn should have concentrated on Brexit minutae and the historic three defeats in a single day Theresa May's government had just suffered.

The absurdity of this warped anti-Corbyn narrative was beyond obvious.

It was always going to be the case that other MPs from all sides of the house (including Theresa May's own Tory backbenchers) would bring up Brexit, Theresa May's shambolic last-minute fudge of a deal, and the government's parliamentary defeats. Here's the SNP's Ian Blackford doing just that.

"Is it time that the Prime Minister took responsibility for concealing the facts on her Brexit deal from members in this House and the public?"

The SNP's Ian Blackford accuses Theresa May of "misleading" MPs. She denies this and the Speaker tells him off for using this word. pic.twitter.com/PJOtkbi5KN

— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) December 5, 2018

Another element of the ridiculousness is that the three parliamentary defeats Theresa May suffered came as a direct consequence of Jeremy Corbyn and his Labour Party colleagues voting against the government.

These defeats didn't just materialise out of nowhere like the mainstream media hacks want to present it, the happened because Jeremy Corbyn worked with other opposition MPs and a small bunch of Tory rebels to inflict them.

Yet another element of the ridiculousness is that there are 5 days of parliamentary debate scheduled on Theresa May's Brexit shambles before the crunch vote on December 11th. PMQs was one of the very few political opportunities to talk about any other issue for the entire week, and the hacks all supposedly wanted Corbyn to waste it away on even more Brexit bickering!

By choosing not to gloat about Monday's parliamentary defeats and focus on poverty and collapsing living standards Corbyn opened a second front of attack, and a really important one too.

If Theresa May's Brexit deal is going to be stopped, triggering either a General Election or another EU referendum, it's now absolutely vital to make the crucial point that stagnant wages, soaring poverty, collapsing public services, crumbing infrastructure have nothing to do with immigration and the EU and everything to do with 8 ruinous years of Tory austerity dogma, wage repression, and under-investment.

If you're one of the millions of UK workers to have suffered a decade long real-terms decline in your wages, here's Theresa May and her millionaire Tory chums openly laughing at your plight!

They make us poorer then they actually laugh at what they've done. Disgusting. pic.twitter.com/n1M9e4f5J9

— Another Angry Voice (@Angry_Voice) December 6, 2018

Then there's the fact that Corbyn's questions on poverty created an extraordinary clip that was so wildly inappropriate that it should have been widely broadcast and seen/heard by almost everyone. When Corbyn challenged Theresa May on Britain's "lost decade" of wage growth, she openly laughed about the collapsing living standards her party have inflicted.

• As a result of deliberate wage repression policies and ideologically driven cuts to in-work benefits millions of UK workers are far worse off in real terms than they were 10 years ago. 

• Tory Universal Credit has created massive spikes in poverty and unfairness everywhere it's been rolled out. And the curse of UC is spreading to places like Liverpool and North Kensington (where Grenfell Tower happened) just before Christmas.

• From 2010 onward Tories imposed the longest real-terms collapse in workers' wages since records began.

• Rates of in-work poverty are absolutely soaring, with 2/3 of children growing up in poverty actually living in working households.

• A damning United Nations report has slammed the Tories for replacing traditional British concern and compassion for vulnerable and suffering people with a "punitive, mean-spirited and callous approach".

• Exploitative and low-paid jobs like Zero Hours Contracts and fake self-employment in the gig economy have spread like wildfire since 2010.

• The UK is still absolutely rock bottom of G20 wage growth league table.

And when Jeremy Corbyn challenged Theresa May on this absolutely outrageous track record, she actually sat there and laughed.

Instead of furiously attacking Jeremy Corbyn for asking vital questions about the poverty that is ruining the lives of millions, maybe mainstream media hacks could just have asked one single question about whether it was appropriate for Theresa May to sit there and laugh at the appalling wave of poverty the Tories have created?

But no. Holding Theresa May to account simply isn't part of their remit.

Even when her government is in chaos and she's openly laughing at the millions of people her party have deliberately impoverished, mainstream media hacks deliberately switch targets and aim their fury at Jeremy Corbyn for clinically highlighting a Tory track record of failure that extends way beyond recklessly gambling away the nation's future to nick a few thousand UKIP votes, then wasting two years cobbling together an absolute shambles of a Brexit plan.

For them it was an unforgivable mistake for Corbyn to have cornered Theresa May on poverty, and to even create the shocking situation where she openly and publicly laughed at the millions of workers her party have impoverished (a clip they would have shared with the nation if they had any intention of actually doing their jobs rather than cobbling together ludicrously tendentious anti-Corbyn outrage pieces).

What they apparently wanted to hear sequence of questions about the convoluted intricacies of Brexit with very limited appeal to people who live outside the Westminster bubble.

Think about it. If you're one of the millions who are struggling to put food on the table or heat your home, and can't even imagine how you're going to give your kids any kind of enjoyable Christmas, the last thing you want to hear is politicians quibbling about backstops, Brexit legal advice, a thing called a "Grieve amendment", etc.

The reason mainstream media hacks are presenting this as a terrible blunder from Corbyn is that he didn't say exactly what they wanted to hear. They're all living the high life on six figure salaries so why on earth would they ever give a shit about the tsunami of poverty and suffering the Tories have unleashed on millions of ordinary people, let alone when their blinkered Brexit obsession is reaching its absolute peak?

In fact they don't give a shit to such an extent that they still remain oblivious to the fact that it was this Tory policy of deliberately inflicting poverty and suffering on millions that generated the wave of public anger that actually lifted the Brexit vote just marginally above the 50% threshold.

This week they don't want to hear anything at all about anything that actually impacts the lives of millions, they want limited-appeal context-free Brexit bickering and nothing else, and they're going to scweam and scweam unless they get what they want.

 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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Is food bank gloating the sickest Tory publicity stunt yet?

Since the Tories came to power in 2010 rates of poverty in the United Kingdom have soared, and ever more people have found themselves in such dire economic circumstances that they've had to resort to charitable food handouts from an ever expanding network of food banks.

The Tories always bluster on about how "work is the best route out of poverty" but what they don't ever admit is that under their extreme economic mismanagement the number of UK workers living in poverty has been increasing way faster than the new jobs Tory ministers keep bragging about.

The upshot of this deliberate Tory policy of turning the UK into a low-wage economy is that four million British workers are living in poverty, and ever increasing numbers of working people are becoming reliant upon food bank charity in order to feed themselves and their families.

You would have thought that the dire consequences of this ideologically driven Tory assault on the economic well-being of UK workers would be a source of shame for them, but you'd be making the mistake of imagining that members of this grotesque elitism club are capable of feelings like guilt, remorse, or shame.

In fact the Tories are so shameless that they actually decided to launch a coordinated publicity stunt to gloat about the wave of food poverty they've inflicted.

It's difficult to imagine the thinking processes of the Tory wonks who came up with a coordinated effort to send Tory MP out to their local food banks for publicity pictures to upload onto Twitter.

Perhaps they thought that pictures of Tory MPs at food banks would cast them in a sympathetic light as if they actually care about people in poverty?

Aside from the fact that numerous Tories were so inept at pretending they cared about poor people that they all lazily copied the same copy n' paste Tweets, there was also the obvious public backlash to consider.

Soaring rates of poverty in the UK didn't just happen by chance. The huge rise in families in such poverty that they can't afford to feed themselves are the result of eight devastating years of Tory economic misrule. 

• Ideologically driven Tory assaults on the social security system (such as disability benefits cuts, "Bedroom Tax", the Universal credit fiasco, and the draconian sanctions regime) have played a crucial role in spreading extreme poverty, but there are other factors too.

• Tory wage repression polices have resulted in the longest sustained collapse in the real value of workers' wages since records began.

• Not only have the Tories overseen a historic collapse in the value of workers' wages, they've also attacked the social security system for low-paid workers. Arbitrary and ideologically driven cuts to Tax Credits, Housing Benefit, parental pay, and Child Benefit have dumped huge numbers of workers into destitution.

• The Tory decision to engineer a deliberate six week wait into applications for Universal Credit has also left huge numbers of families in destitution, because the last thing you need when you lose your job is six weeks without a penny as you wait for Universal Credit to kick in.

• The shocking rise in Zero Hours Contracts and fake self-employment jobs in the gig economy have created levels of job insecurity not seen since the 1930s.

• Tory austerity dogma has resulted in economic stagnation, shocking under-investment in infrastructure and public services the slowest post-crisis economic recovery in Centuries, and startling collapses in economic demand and productivity. All of which has made Britain a much poorer place than it could have been under a sensible investment-based economic recovery strategy.

In light of these factors is it any wonder that huge numbers of people saw the Tory food bank publicity campaign as the political equivalent of depraved trophy hunters posing beside the carcasses of the wild animals they've shot?

It just goes to show how wildly out of touch with reality most Tories must be that none of them even questioned the wisdom of a deliberate coordinated effort to associate themselves with the appalling wave of food poverty they've created.

The fact that their ruinous hard-right anti-welfare anti-worker, anti-investment policies have created such suffering and destitution is bad enough, but their total bone-headed willingness to even recognise what they've done makes them utterly unfit to rule ever again.

 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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How bad is the Tory Universal Credit disaster?

There are so many problems with the Tory government's botched Universal Credit policy it's impossible to list them all, but here are just a few:

• There's a demonstrable link between Universal Credit being imposed on an area and rising rates of poverty and food bank dependency. The Trussell Trust has reported that Food Bank usage has soared 52% in Universal Credit areas, while the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have highlighted the way that Universal Credit has tipped struggling families into absolute destitution (the 42 day wait from initial claim to first payment being one of the worst aspects).

• Despite the 42 day wait a shocking one in six of the unfortunate people who have been subjected to the Tory Universal Credit experiment were still not even paid in time. Imagine if the business you were involved in had a 1/6 failure rate. There'd be hell to pay.

• There's the fact that Universal Credit discriminates heavily against the self-employed (especially seasonal workers and self-employed people with fluctuating monthly earnings), This means extreme income losses for self-employed people who are transferred to Universal Credit. That's some 5 million self-employed people in the UK at risk of impoverishment if this flawed Tory scheme is ever rolled out nationally.

• Another flaw in Universal Credit means that some people would actually be financially penalised for working extra hours. Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that some people would actually end up with less disposable income if they changed from working 3 days a week to 5. What kind of incompetent government economically punishes people for working longer hours?

• The way Universal Credit is paid out per household creates a very strong risk of domestic violence perpetrators taking control of the entire family budget. One victim told a committee of MPs that her husband would "wake up one morning with £1,500 in his account and piss off with it, leaving us with nothing for weeks". Shockingly the Tories have continued pushing ahead with the scheme despite these warnings, doing nothing but issuing an Orwellian statement that they take tackling domestic violence "incredibly seriously" as they simultaneously turn a deliberate blind eye to the devastating consequences of their own policy.

• Universal Credit is so badly flawed that it economically penalises parents for getting new jobs, forcing them hundreds of pounds into debt because the system won't take account of their childcare costs. Just imagine the combination of incompetence and outright malice that drives Tory ministers to continue rolling out a scheme that penalises people for finding work.

• A National Audit Office report into the early stages of Universal Credit found that £34 million had already been wasted on botched IT systems. In 2014 the amount wasted on botched Universal Credit IT systems was upped to £500 million+ by the Public Accounts Committee.

• A leaked 2013 report described the absolute chaos in the Universal Credit team. One respondent said that there was "a near complete absence of anything that looks like strategic leadership in the programme", and another said "I have never worked somewhere where decision making was so apparently poor at senior levels. This programme should be a case study for how not to engage with your people to get the most out of them".

• David Cameron had such a lax attitude to incompetence amongst his ministers that he simply ignored the hundreds of millions in scrapped IT projects and the reported administrative chaos at the DWP, allowing Iain Duncan Smith to continue as the minister responsible for the chaos until he resigned over Brexit in 2016.

• There's the fact that it's ridiculously delayed. The entire country was supposed to have been converted to Universal Credit by October 2017, but instead just 815,000 people in a few unfortunate areas had been subjected to it by March 2018.

• In 2017 Labour Party and other opposition MPs voted for a "pause" in the roll-out of Universal Credit to deal with some of the most glaring flaws. The vote was won by 299 votes to 0 after the government deliberately abstained on the vote, but the Tories have carried on with the roll-out regardless.

• In 2017 the Tories quietly shelved plans to roll out the full version of Universal Credit in the areas of several senior Tory MPs (Iain Duncan Smith, David Gauke, Damian Green, and Theresa May), including two of the DWP ministers who were responsible for devising and implementing the scheme in the first place. Cancelling the roll-out of Universal Credit in their own constituencies as they force it on Labour and SNP areas is a very clear implicit admission that they know Universal Credit is utterly flawed and devastatingly unpopular.

• In July 2018 the Tory DWP minister Esther McVey outright lied to parliament about the botched roll-out of Universal Credit, claiming that a damning National Audit Office report didn't take account of changes to the system when it actually did. Theresa may refused to sack her despite this egregious breach of parliamentary standards.

• There's the fact that the Tories repeatedly lied and misled to pretend that Universal Credit isn't making people worse off, before Esther McVey finally admitted the truth that people would be worse off under the scheme she's imposing just one day after Theresa May had lied to the public that nobody would lose out.

• The former Tory Prime Minister John Major attacked the scheme, saying that Univeral Credit has the potential to be as disastrous for the current Tory government as Poll Tax was for Margaret Thatcher!

• Fury amongst the Tory MPs has been further exacerbated by a Residential Landlords Association report showing a massive increase in landlords with Universal Credit tenants in rent arrears. A rise from 27% in 2016 to 61% in 2018. The immense suffering of the working poor under this botched scheme was never likely to factor into Tory MP's concerns, but ever growing numbers of wealthy Tory-voting landlords losing cash to the scheme is much more likely to grab their attention.

Despite all of these problems the Tory government continue pushing on regardless. They don't care that the scheme is pushing people into poverty and Food Bank dependency; they don't care that it's an absolute gift to controlling domestic violence perpetrators; they don't care that it penalises self-employed people and entrepreneurs; they don't care that they've wasted over £500 million of public cash on this botched scheme; they don't care that it actually creates various disincentives to work; they don't care that it's years behind target; they don't care that parliament voted for them to stop and iron out some of the worst faults; and they don't care that Theresa May outright lied to the nation when she said people wouldn't be worse off just one day before the minister in charge of it admitted that they would be.

The only real hope that the Tories will stop pushing this malicious and incompetent farce is if they start getting stick from the wealthy Tory-voting landlord class who find that Universal Credit is impoverishing their tenants so much that they can't afford to pay the rent.

If the Tories won't listen to the interests of the rich, then who will they listen to?

The other option of course is a Labour government. Whether they'd "pause" the Universal Credit roll-out in order to try and fix all of the Tory flaws, or scrap it altogether is a question that will be answered by the next Labour manifesto.

Whatever the case, anyone who votes Tory in light of this absolute farce is complicit in the waste, the inefficiency, the dishonesty, the poverty, and the suffering.

 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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Hours after legislating to starve children of the working poor Tories gorged themselves on a luxury banquet

On the evening of Wednesday February 7th 2018 Tory MPs enjoyed a lavish banquet at their Black and White fundraiser event for the assortment of amoral millionaires and billionaires who bankroll their despicable party.

Tables at the event sold for up to £15,000, Tory MPs auctioned themselves off in a sickening "cash for access raffle", and Theresa May delighted the crowd with her extremist rhetoric about how she's on a mission to "defeat socialism" (which obviously entails destruction of the socialist NHS).

Just hours before this grotesque display of opulence, the Tory party sneaked a piece of legislation through parliament designed to confiscate free school meals from the children of the working-poor.

Anyone who has been paying attention to the devastating consequences of Tory austerity dogma and their unprecedented campaign of wage repression will be familiar with the shocking rises in child poverty and in-work poverty since the Lib-Dems enabled the Tories back into power in 2010.

As a result of the longest sustained collapse in the real value of UK workers' wages things are now so bad that an astounding 67% of the children growing up in poverty actually live in working households.

The Tories have no sympathy whatever for the human catastrophe they've created, and they've decided to deny free school meals to children whose parents earn more than a paltry £7,400 per year.

Just imagine earning a paltry £617 and being told that you're too rich for your kids to be provided with a free school meal.

The Tories knew that such a move would cause uproar if they tried to pass a specific piece of legislation through parliament to bring in these changes, so they did it via a Statutory Instrument so as to avoid the hassle of parliamentary debates, votes, and press coverage.

Just imagine how mercilessly self-serving these Tory MPs are that they can legislate to starve the children of the working poor in the morning, then rush off to stuff themselves at a lavish black tie dinner in the evening, without even a thought for the anguish and suffering they're inflicting on these poor kids and their families.

Just imagine being a millionaire/billionaire who can afford to blast £15,000 on a single meal, deciding to donate to a political party that has just legislated to deny free school meals to the children of those who earn way less than £15,000 in an entire year.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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The Tories are dressing their failures up as success stories again

Theresa May has some incredible brass neck to criticise past Labour governments for supposedly "rushing" their welfare reforms, and then claim that the Tories are bringing in Universal Credit "properly". 

Not only is the Tory mishandling of Universal Credit trashing people's lives (in the places it has been rolled out payment delays are rife and food bank use, indebtedness, rent arrears and evictions are soaring), it's also massively over budget and already five years behind schedule!

When the Tories announced their flagship Universal Credit policy back in 2010 they claimed it would have been fully rolled out by 2017, meaning the process should already have been totally finished by now. Since then they've repeatedly moved the completion date back, so that it's now 2022!

They're running five years late, they've written off hundreds of millions in waste, and they're still rolling it out in a way that's wrecking people's lives. But what's even worse than the actual incompetence is their insistence that they're doing the job properly and that they actually deserve praise for not rushing!

The Tories really are masters at dressing up their cockups as success stories.

In 2010 they promised that their fanatically right-wing austerity agenda would have eliminated the deficit by 2015. When 2015 came around they hadn't even halved the deficit, but instead of admitting that they'd failed to even come close to meeting their own target and apologising, they dressed their failure up as a success by endlessly repeating "we've cut the deficit by a third" (or to put it another, less flattering way; we've missed our target by two thirds).

The complicity and collusion of the mainstream media allowed the Tories to completely get away with sprinkling a bit of glitter on their reeking economic turd and then presenting it to the public as if it were a delicious cake of success.

Now these Tory charlatans are actually trying to excuse the fact that their catastrophically mishandled implementation of Universal Credit is running 5 years late with an absurd well at least we didn't rush narrative.

No doubt the craven and subservient political pundits in the mainstream media will allow Theresa May to get away with re-framing this absolute farce as a good thing, because it's actually their job to do that.

The majority of mainstream media hacks are not in the business of holding the powerful to account or standing up for the vulnerable, they're in the business of rehashing government press releases as if it's their own work, generating low grade clickbait, endlessly recycling right-wing economic fairy stories, attacking anyone who poses the slightest threat to the pally Westminster-media status quo they reap the benefits of, and lazily churnalising trash from the Guido Fawkes blog into headlines.

The acquiescence of the mainstream press is glaringly obvious, otherwise how on earth could Theresa May take it for granted that nobody would call her out by making the absurdly easy point that not rushing is hardly something to boast about when your flagship welfare policy is running five years behind schedule.

 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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Theresa May's idea of providing certainty is to demand unicorns!

Given Theresa May's lamentable failures to clear up doubts about her Brexit strategy, it's time to consider whether this absolute shambles has come about through abject incompetence, or as more and more people are beginning to suspect, an underhand strategy of deliberately undermining the Brexit process until the negotiations fail. 

Theresa May's reliance on her "no deal is better than a bad deal" rhetoric is a strong indicator that she might actually want the negotiations to fail. Otherwise why on earth does the centrepiece of her negotiating strategy play right into the hands of those in her own party who desperately want the negotiations to fail, by allowing them to characterise any UK concession in the negotiations as proof of a "bad deal", which May has continually portrayed as being a worse option than marching the country over the "no deal" cliff edge?

The suspicion that Theresa May is less than fully committed to achieving a negotiated settlement was further aroused when she rushed to meet her own arbitrary and self-imposed March 2017 deadline for triggering Article 50, starting the clock ticking on the time limited process of leaving the EU before her government had developed anything even remotely resembling a coherent negotiating position. 

What made this rush to trigger Article 50 even worse was that immediately after initiating the time limited process of quitting the EU, she suddenly decided to squander two months of the very limited negotiating period on a needless vanity election.

After wasting two months of the negotiation period in order to throw away her parliamentary majority in a fit of hubris, Theresa May and the Tories have made shockingly little progress on the first stage of the Brexit negotiations that need to be resolved before the trade talks can get underway. 

Of course the Irish border issue is highly complex, but the other two items should have been resolved already. Instead of cynically using the lives of EU citizens as gambling chips, a fair offer on citizens' rights could have been made as a demonstration of goodwill before the negotiations even started, and agreement on a financial settlement really shouldn't be taking so long to quibble over.

It's seven months since Theresa May triggered Article 50, and somehow we're still bogged down in stage one of the negotiations. The idea of coming up with even the framework of a comprehensive mutually beneficial free trade agreement between the UK and the EU in a single year is fantastical enough, but now Theresa May has decided to up the stakes by saying that unless the trade talks are completed by March 2019, she's going to screw off the idea of having a transition period, and immediately shove the UK economy off the "no deal" cliff edge.

This latest move is quite extraordinary, especially given that she's been under increasing pressure form British business leaders to provide some certainty on the post-Brexit transition, but instead of providing certainty, she's actually decided to hand them a huge incentive to scale back UK investment and move as many of their operations as possible overseas and out of the increasingly likely "no deal" Brexit disaster zone.

Just look at the Tory track record in government. This is a party that has spent seven years on their flagship welfare policy of combining six benefits into one payment and they're nowhere near getting it right. Originally announced in 2010, the Tories claimed that Universal Credit would have been completely rolled out across the UK by now, but after one reset on their completion date after another, they're now predicting completion in 2022 (five years behind schedule). What's worse is that even in the areas in which Universal Credit has been rolled out are beset with massive problems like delayed payments, indebtedness, rent arrears, food bank dependency, and even evictions.

Just think about it. If the Tories can't even complete the task of competently streamlining the benefits system within the seven year time period they set themselves, how on earth can investors and business leaders have any confidence that the same people are going to secure a comprehensive multi-faceted trade deal with the EU in just one year, especially since they've already wasted seven months without even getting beyond the first round of negotiations?

Additionally Theresa May's threat to scrap the transition phase (the policy that she brazenly nicked off Labour and then begged for in her Florence speech just a few weeks previously) if the trade deal isn't completed by March 2019 doesn't even make any sense.

What is the point of even having a transition phase if the trade deal is fully completed? The only way a transition phase makes sense is if the broad outline framework of the deal is signed off on by March 2019, but then the complicated details are agreed and implemented gradually sector by sector in order to mitigate some of the worst difficulties and uncertainties of the transition.

Even if we ignore the fact that there are bitter divisions in her own cabinet over what kind of Brexit they actually want, and overlook the Tories' proven track record of incompetence and endless delays when it comes to rolling out their flagship Universal Credit policy, and forget the fact they've wasted seven months of the negotiation period already, Theresa May's latest threat to jump off the "no deal" cliff edge if trade talks aren't completed and ratified by March 2019 looks an awful lot like a ridiculously spoiled brat threatening to jump off a cliff unless she gets a unicorn for Christmas.

Either Theresa May is delusional enough to think that she can actually get a unicorn for Christmas if she just stamps her feet hard enough, or she's demanding a unicorn because she actually prefers the "no deal" meltdown scenario that is favoured by the hard-right fringe of the Tory party, and is seeking to blame the EU by crying that they're at fault for not giving her the unicorn she was demanding.

Whatever her motivation, this latest escalation of the "no deal" threat can't possibly be inspiring any confidence whatever amongst investors and business leaders. They just demanded clarity on how the government is going to proceed with Brexit in a manner that creates as little uncertainty and economic turmoil as possible, and what they got was exactly the opposite, a ridiculous escalation of Theresa May's diplomatic temper tantrum. 

 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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Don't imagine the Tories dropped their rip-off DWP charges out of the goodness of their hearts

The Tories have announced that they 're now planning to scrap their policy of charging 55p a minute for people to phone the Universal Credit hotline, and all of their other rip off DWP hotline charges.

Don't make any mistake. They're not scrapping their vindictive policy of wringing cash out of some of the poorest people in society out of the goodness of their hearts. They're doing it because they got caught, and in Jeremy Corbyn Labour have a leader who is prepared to ignore what the right-wing tabloids might say about him, and hold the Tories to account for their malice.

It's absolutely no coincidence that DWP helplines are being made free just one week after Corbyn roasted Theresa May about the rip-off charges in parliament. This Tory U-turn has only happened because Britain has an effective opposition that is holding the government to account and forcing them into one U-turn after another.

Corbyn's predecessor Ed Miliband wasn't actually such a bad guy, but unlike Corbyn he didn't have the courage of his convictions, and surrounded himself with economic right-wingers like Ed Balls and Chris Leslie.

Not only did Miliband squander the 2015 General Election by adopting Ed Balls' ridiculously uninspiring "austerity-lite" narrative when outright opposition to ruinous and failing Tory austerity dogma was required, he also allowed other Labour right-wingers to mimic the Tories in order to pander to the right-wing press.

One of the most notorious examples came when Miliband's shadow DWP minister Rachael Reeves vowed that Labour would be tougher on benefits claimants than the Tories (as if systematically abusing disabled people, using unemployed workers as sources of free labour to distribute to their corporate mates, slashing in-work benefits for the working poor, and their draconian sanctions regime weren't harsh enough already)!

Just imagine if the right-wing of the Labour Party had succeeded in their numerous plots and schemes to oust Jeremy Corbyn from the Labour leadership. 

Their desperation to appeal to the editors of the right-wing propaganda rags would have prevented them from ever being seen to side with social security claimants, so the pressure over these ludicrously unfair DWP hotline charges would never have been applied, Theresa May wouldn't have been forced into performing another screeching U-turn, and the Tories would have continued wringing money out of poor people forced to righ the DWP over stuff like the unacceptable delays in their Universal Credit payments.

The difference with Corbyn is that he doesn't give a damn if mercenary hacks at right-wing propaganda rags like the S*n, Daily Mail, Express and Telegraph are going to attack him for standing up for the millions of working and non-working people on social security. Corbyn can see that charging people 55p a minute to deal with DWP errors in the Universal Credit system is just wrong, so he stood up and said it was wrong, and as a result forced the Tories into changing direction.

Of course the right-wing tabloid hacks are going to hate him for it. Of course people who have been conditioned to despise all social security claimants (whether they're working, not working, or physically unable to work) will hate him for it. But when Ed Miliband's pro-austerity anti-welfare incarnation of the Labour Party fumbled the golden opportunity that was the 2015 General Election, they proved that Labour simply can't win elections by crudely aping the Tory party in the hope of appealing to the kind of people who are never going to support Labour anyway.

You don't hold the powerful to account by meekly imitating their policies in the hope that you get a go at being in power next. You hold them to account by identifying their malice, incompetence and greed then haranguing them over it until they're forced to change direction, then eventually after the public have seen the powerful forced into either defending the indefensible, or U-turning for the umpteenth time, they get sick and tired of it and vote for a government with some actual principles.

This latest screeching U-turn from Theresa May is proof that Jeremy Corbyn is doing an increasingly effective job of holding the Tories to account, and what Labour (and the other opposition parties) need to do now is to continue to actively oppose this absolute shambles of a Tory government, especially when their policies are unfair, incompetent, or downright vindictive. 

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