Why genuine 'centrists' should be backing the left

For the last nine years Britain has been charging headlong to the far-right, with one increasingly militant Tory government after another.

In 2010 the Lib-Dems enabled the Tories back into power for the first time in 13 years, and the results were disastrous. The Lib-Dems voted through every single piece of wanton Tory ideological malice, including the austerity fanaticism that trashed our living standards and laid the groundwork for the Brexit backlash to happen.

The Lib-Dems love to pretend that they were some kind of wonderful moderating force, but the truth is easy to find. If we look at the absolute worst stuff the austerity coalition did, Lib-Dem fingerprints are all over all of it: Austerity fanaticism, unprecedented wage repression, disability persecution, NHS privatisation, catastrophic local government cuts, Bedroom Tax, 75% of secondary schools in England privatised, Theresa May's unlawfully racist Hostile Environment ...

And to make matters even worse leading Lib-Dems actually took personal responsibility for delivering the absolute worst of it, the most egregious examples being Vince Cable's outrageous decision to flog off our Royal Mail at miles below its true value to a bunch of city spivs, and Jo Swinson doing nothing whatever to stop the imposition of unlawful tribunal fees, despite being Employment Minister in the austerity coalition!

Things did get even worse after the Lib-Dem collapse in 2015 as the unrestrained Tories intensified the already unprecedented rate of privatisations, and imposed the most brutal social security cuts in the history of the welfare state, but it's beyond obvious that things could never have even got to that stage without the deliberate calculated collusion of the Lib-Dems.

Then in 2016 the Tories gambled away the nation's future on a ludicrous Brexit referendum in which the Leave option was left entirely undefined, allowing Brexiteers to cynically promise voters the moon on a stick, with absolutely no intention of following through on their false promises.

The day after his gamble backfired Cameron was gone, replaced by the fanatically right-wing wannabe tyrant Theresa May, who had all the hard-right politics, inflexible stubbornness, control-freakery, and authoritarianism of an all-powerful autocrat, but thankfully not the competence, or self-awareness, or discipline to actually follow through on her outrageous threats, or actually 'crush the saboteurs'.

May did manage to inflict even more ideological damage during her two year reign, not least her decision to starve the NHS of new recruits by wantonly scrapping NHS bursaries, creating a ticking time bomb of a recruitment crisis that will destroy the NHS if it is not resolved soon.

And now we have Boris Johnson, who is so wilfully intent on pandering to the far-right ultranationalist demographic that stalwarts of Conservatism who backed all of the austerity fanaticism, and wage repression, and welfare vadalism, and disability persecution, and public service cuts, and infrastructure under-investment are now fleeing the party in droves in absolute disgust at what it's becoming, including Johnson's own brother Jo.

It's mind-bogglingly obvious that the UK needs to rapidly abandon this race to the extreme-right fringe and reset back towards the centre ground. It's equally obvious that it's literally impossible to move away from the territory of the hard-right without moving somewhat to the left.

Thus there are actually two kinds of 'centrists'. One type who recognise the obvious truth that the UK needs to move significantly leftwards in order to gravitate back towards the traditional centre ground, and another smug, complacent, orthodox neoliberal bunch who just want to pause where we are with a "more of the same" agenda, enjoy the trappings of power for a few years, and then hand deliver power back to the next hard-right government that comes along.

The problem of course is that there's no commonly understood distinction between these two different kinds of 'centrism'.

There are those 'centrists' who believe in the mixed economy of socially owned infrastructure and services, and privately owned but well-regulated businesses, who believe Britain has gone way too far to the right.

And there are those 'faux centrists' who believe in always standing just a couple of milimetres to the left of the Tory party, no matter how far off to the crackpot far-right extreme they've gone, and never shifting an inch back towards where the traditional centre actually used to be.

Unfortunately an awful lot of the second kind of 'centrist' have made their home in the Liberal Democrats, hoping to turn it into a Conservatives MkII party to hold firm on the hard-right political territory, to keep the crushing living standards-destroying austerity coming, to keep the tax dodge loopholes open for the benefit of their mega-rich backers, and to keep annihilating the wages and working conditions of ordinary working people under the utterly misguided delusion that the best way to make the rich richer, is to force the poor and ordinary into destitution.

I'm as guilty as anyone for vehemently condemning this kind right-wing faux 'centrism', and maybe genuine 'centrists' who do actually recognise the need for a dramatic leftward turn back towards the centre ground might have felt caught in the crossfire as the left have repeatedly slammed the faux 'centrists' for their ludicrous pretence that their pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, anti-worker, welfare-vandalising, infrastructure under-investing, hard-right fanaticism is anywhere near the legitimate political centre.

I'm sorry if this is the case, and people who just wants things to return to normality feels caught in the crossfire.

It's just that a bunch of right-wing neoliberal militants intent on creating a veneer of legitimacy for their radical hard-right agenda by pretending that it's some kind of moderate, mainstream, centrist philosophy have stolen the positioning of legitimate 'centrists', who do actually recognise the need to rebalance somewhat towards the left.

Any legitimate 'centrist' really has to understand that millions of people in Britain literally can't afford yet more years of "more of the same" neoliberal orthodoxy shamelessly disguised as 'centrism'.

We need fundamental change to undo some of the worst hard-right excesses of the last decade; investment instead of austerity, a well earned wage rise for British workers, restoration of the wantonly vandalised social safety net, de-privatisation of police, hospitals, schools, and prisons, and de-centralisation of political power ...

Legitimate 'centrists' should be saying "no bloody way" to Jo Swinson and the Lib-Dems' transparent efforts to restructure their party as Conservatives 2.0 disguised as 'centrism' to dupe the gullible, and "yes please" to Labour's strategy of actually investing in Britain's future, and undoing as much of the hard-right Tory damage as they can.

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6 reasons you should detest Vince cable and the Lib-Dems

A lot of people, especially hardcore Remainers, don't seem to understand why the Lib-Dems are such a reviled and toxic brand.

Just about the briefest possible explanation is that they wilfully helped a radically right-wing Tory government absolutely trash the living standards of tens of millions of people which eventually resulted in the Brexit backlash, then demonstrated their total lack of contrition by elevating possibly the worst offender of all to lead their party.

After two years at the helm their beloved Saint Vince is on his way out, but that the two vying to replace him (Jo Swinson and Ed Davey) were both such enthusiastic austerity-wreckers that they were more loyal to the Tory whip than the current Tory leadership candidate Jeremy Hunt! 

Another extremely clear indication of the fact they're not even remotely sorry about what they did.

So in this article I'm going to run through six things that should make any remotely decent person recoil in disgust at Vince Cable's behaviour, and the Lib-Dems for not only keeping him on, but actually lifting him up to be their beloved leader.

1. The Royal Mail

You probably know that the Tory/Lib-Dem Austerity Coalition decided to outright defy the public will by flogging off Royal Mail in 2013.

As Business Secretary Vince Cable was personally responsible for the process, and he managed it in such a way that it essentially turned into a vast fraud against the British public that cost us hundreds of millions of pounds.

The first element of the fraud was Vince's decision to limit members of the public to a maximum of £749 worth of shares, whilst allowing city speculators to buy up unlimited amounts of shares. 

This meant that the vast majority of the profits from the privatisation scam he pulled would be gobbled up by city spivs.

The second element was deliberate under-valuation. The Royal Mail's extensive property portfolio was assigned a ludicrously low valuation in comparison to the the cost of buying a matching portfolio of thousands of acres of lucrative city centre land from scratch. 

Furthermore Cable ignored all the warnings that the initial share price was far too low, having chosen the lowest valuation of all supplied by a firm called Lazard.

The third element was the cash in.

When the share price immediately bounced upwards, and several of the city investors made instant £millions at the public expense by buying up millions of shares then flogging them when the price corrected like they knew it would. One of these corporate investors, which made themselves a staggering £8 million instant profit was Lazard, the very people who advised Cable to under-value the shares in the first place.

How Saint Vince decided not to bar them from the process is anyone's guess.

As for the property portfolio, the new private owners have raked in £hundreds of millions by flogging off chunks of Royal Mail land to property developers at the real market price and cashing in the enormous difference from Vince's extraordinary undervaluation in unearned profit.

2. Arming human rights abusers

One of Vince Cable's jobs as Business Secretary in the Austerity Coalition was to sign off on arms export contracts.

During his time in the job he signed off on weapons sales to loads of countries on Britain's own watchlist of human rights abusers, including the homophobic, misogynistic, head-chopping, terrorism-spreading, democracy-crushing, journalist-dismembering Saudi war criminals.

Getting confused between your own socially liberal views and the Liberal Democrats because they have the word "liberal" in their names is kind of understandable if you don't really think about any of the details.

But anyone who is actually genuine about their social liberalism would steer well away from a party that saw absolutely no problem in flogging weapons to despots, tyrant, human rights abusers, and war criminals ... unless of course you're only really socially liberal when it comes to white Europeans like yourself, and don't give a shit about the human rights of brown people in far away lands who end up being tortured, maimed, and massacred by the weapons Saint Vince sold them.

3. Vince's money laundering loophole

In 2011 Vince Cable made an extraordinary decision to abolish identity checks on the registration of British companies.

This may not sound like a big deal, but it set off an extraordinary wave of criminality and money laundering.

The ability to set up a company in a country with a reputation as strong as the UK, in the space of only a few minutes, with virtually no risk of having your identity checked was an open invitation for every fraudster in the world to consider routing their ill-gotten gains through British shell companies.

Pressure groups, other countries, and the EU have pleaded with the UK to close this loophole, and begin insisting that the owners of British companies properly identify themselves, but the only person who has ever been convicted for setting up a fake company in the entire time is campaigner called Kevin Brewer, who set up a fake company called John Vince Cable Services Ltd, in order to demonstrate how Cable's reform made it so easy to create fake companies and masquerade as other people!

The guy who tried to blow the whistle on Saint Vince's tsunami of fraud got convicted in court for his efforts, while those responsible for the countless £billions in fraud that Cable unleashed get away scot free!

4. Austerity fanaticism

One of the worst things about Vince Cable was that in the wake of the global financial sector insolvency crisis he was one of the only UK politicians talking any kind of sense. He was capable of explaining how and why the collapse happened, and he also warned against excessive public spending cuts.

But as soon as the opportunity to become a government minister with the Tories presented itself, he completely changed his tune. From explaining the actual causes of the crisis, he flipped to joining in with the utterly dishonest and hyper-partisan Tory nonsense about "Labour bankrupting the economy".

But worse than this was his embrace of Tory austerity fanaticism. 

He knew that it was economically illiterate, he knew that it was bad for the economy, and he knew that repressing wages and stifling economic demand would smother the post-crisis economic recovery, but he joined in with it anyway in return for a six figure ministerial salary, a chauffeur driven car, and a temporary sense of self-importance.

And thus he wilfully helped the Tories to deliver the slowest economic recovery since reliable records began, despite knowing all along that the Tory austerity prescription was toxic economy-choking nonsense from the very beginning.

5. Brexit cynicism

Tory austerity policies like unprecedented wage repression, ruinous public service cuts, deliberate infrastructure under-investment, and wanton vandalism of the social safety net caused a massive collapse in UK living standards.

Then along came the Brexiteers to blame it all on immigrants and the EU.

Vince Cable could have come clean during the EU referendum and admitted that collapsing wages, failing public services, unaffordable housing, and the desperately failing social safety net had nothing to do with immigrants and the EU, and everything to do with the domestic UK government policy of austerity fanaticism.

But in order to say that he would have been admitting his own complicity in the living standards collapse, so instead he chose to say nothing, and allow the Brexiteers to use the living standards collapse he helped to engineer as a recruiting call for the Leave campaign.

And then after the Leave vote happened, Saint Vince has cynically positioned himself and his party as the wonderful saviours come to rescue the rest of us from the Brexit chaos he helped to create and unleash.

And to top it all off, what he's actually offering is the ridiculous strategically inept bollocks of another referendum with the Tories who created this Brexit mess still in charge and pushing for a no deal meltdown from the steps of Downing Street

At least a Labour government or Labour-based coalition would be firmly opposed to the insanity of no deal chaos, but Saint Vince wants the Tories running the ballot because if there's one thing he hates more than Brexit, it's the idea of a genuinely left-wing government ending ruinous austerity fanaticism, running the railways and water supply as not-for-profit public services, and making corporations and the mega-rich actually pay their taxes.

Saint Vince is like a mugger robbing your stuff and punching your teeth out, then expecting praise and gratitude for offering you a tissue to stem the flow of blood gushing from your gums!

But somehow people buy into it.

6. The rest of his voting record

I've detailed 5 things that Saint Vince has been directly involved with, but there's so much more to be found in his voting record.

Here's just some of the other stuff Saint Vince and the Lib-Dems "greatest hits" between 2010 and 2015:

• Relentlessly forcing the cost of the financial sector insolvency crisis onto poor and ordinary people, whilst simultaneously showering corporations and the mega-rich with one lavish tax cut and handout after another.

• Tripling university fees, despite pledging not to before the election, and rubbing salt into the wounds by tinkering with the repayment terms to introduce inflation+3% interest on the loans, meaning that a whopping 83% of graduates will never pay off their student debts despite entire working lifetimes of repayments!

• Bulldozing Charles Kennedy's legacy into a pit and burning it to ashes by voting to turn Libya into a vast lawless terrorism breeding ground just like the devastating chaos Kennedy so eloquently opposed in Iraq.

• Voting through Theresa May's Hostile Environment, which has been used to discriminate against and deport black British citizens from the Windrush generation.

• Introduction of unlawful Tribunal Fees designed to protect bad bosses by pricing low-income employees out of the justice system.

• Helping the Tories to annihilate police budgets, and totally gut funding for youth centres and early intervention schemes, which have led to a massive escalation in violent crime and gang culture.

• Forcing terminally ill people to go through discriminatory and degrading "fit for work" assessments for the crime of not dying quickly enough.

• Unprecedented cuts to NHS and social care budgets that have been associated with an estimated 130,000 people being driven into early graves.

• There's no remorse over the deliberate wage repression policies that led to the worst sustained decline in UK workers' wages on record, and set up an entire decade of lost wage growth.

• Voting through a massively wasteful top-down Tory reorganisation of the NHS that appeared in neither parties' manifestos) aimed at carving up as many NHS services as possible for distribution to private profiteers. 

• The establishment of a disgusting disability denial regime that has been condemned by the United Nations for "grave and systematic violations of disabled people's rights".

• Supporting all kinds of other deeply illiberal and hard right malice like Secret Courts, Bedroom Tax, enhanced snooping powers, the gagging law, hostile environment, Theresa May's family separation rules, privatised prisons, unlawful forced unpaid labour schemes, the draconian sanctions regime, instructing private contractors to deliberately discriminate against people with mental health conditions ...

Conclusion

The fact that the Lib-Dems picked Saint Vince as their beloved leader after all of this dreadful stuff just goes to show that they're not even remotely sorry.

And the fact that the two Lib-Dems vying to replace him come from the exact same "capital before people" mould show that they simply don't care about the damage they've done.

All they care about is finding another demographic to con into voting for them, just like they conned and betrayed the student vote, the electoral reformers, the anyone-but-Tory vote, and the anti-war demographic the last time they sneaked their way into power.

Don't be a dupe, and don't believe their deceptions, because you know exactly how much they're wiling to betray and exploit the people who stand with them, and you know exactly how unrepentant they are about the all of the disgusting things that nobody can deny that they did.

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Theresa May's audacity

In March 2019 Theresa May's despicable 2014 Hostile Environment legislation was declared unlawful in a British court of law for the racist way it was used to discriminate against Windrush Brits.

This unspeakably vile piece of legislation was used to deny housing, employment, banking services, social security, and even life-saving medical treatment to black British citizens.

Scores of black Brits were even deported overseas under May's unbelievably outrageous "deport now and hear appeal later" principle. Several of these British deportees actually died in exile overseas.

When the Windrush scandal finally broke in 2018 May outright refused to take responsibility for the Hostile Environment rules she pushed through as Home Secretary, instead having Amber Rudd take the fall for it (before being rapidly bounced back into government to take over the DWP just a few months later).

Today Theresa May released a stomach-churningly hypocritical video praising the Windrush generation, banging on about Windrush day, and announcing a Windrush statue to be erected in Waterloo Station.

Theresa May and every single one of the MPs who voted in favour of her despicable Hostile Environment should never have the audacity to even utter the word "Windrush" unless it forms part of a profuse apology for their role in creating such a shameful national scandal.

But instead Theresa May and numerous others in the Westminster establishment class are using Windrush Day to pat themselves on the back, and to whitewash the pivotal roles they played in causing so much suffering.

Perhaps the only people rivalling Theresa May for audacity are the Lib-Dems who released a Windrush Day Tweet claiming that they would "Redouble [their] efforts to challenge the hostile immigration policies which created the Windrush Scandal".

Anyone reading Tweet this without knowing what a bunch of duplicitous tosspots the Lib-Dems are would probably imagine that May's Hostile Environment was passed despite vehement Lib-Dem objections.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In reality the current Lib-Dem leader Vince Cable voted in favour of it, his predecessor Tim Farron voted in favour of it, the new Lib-Dem leadership candidate Ed Davey voted in favour of it, and the other leadership candidate Jo Swinson joined the Labour right-wingers in abstaining in order to help it glide through parliament virtually unopposed.

Of the 57 Lib-Dem MPs at the time, just 3 had the decency to defy the party whip and vote against it (all of them departed from parliament now).

In fact the Lib-Dems were so keen on Theresa May's hostile environment that their MP Mark Hunter acted as one of the tellers for the "Aye" lobby!

The SNP, Plaid Cymru, and the Greens did themselves proud by opposing this disgusting legislation from the beginning.

Labour, which was still in catastrophic late-stage Blairism mode, badly let themselves down by whipping their MPs to abstain so the legislation could pass without substantial opposition, with just six Labour MPs defying the whip to vote against it. This honourable six include Jeremy Corbyn (now party leader), Diane Abbott (now shadow Home Secretary) and John McDonnell (now Shadow Chancellor).

The fact that three of the honourable six now occupy the top three jobs demonstrate that Labour have moved on from this despicable episode in their history, but the party should be deeply ashamed that they abandoned the principles of social justice like this, and be vigilant of ever going back to the dark days of Blairites, Tory enabling abstentions, and horrifying anti-immigrant mugs.

The Tories and Lib-Dems have no such excuses. The Tories elevated the architect of this disgusting and unlawful legislation to lead their party, and the Lib-Dems elevated Vince Cable, who actively voted it through, as leader of their party.

Neither of these parties has shown an appropriate level of contrition for their roles in this institutional racism scandal, and now they're both pathetically rewriting history to pretend that they ever gave a shit about the Windrush Brits they actively legislated to discriminate against.

As a white British person I'm fucking outraged at the audacity of this Orwellian revisionism from Theresa May, the Tories, and their Lib-Dem enablers, and I can only try to imagine how black British citizens must feel to see these audacious bastards rewriting history to whitewash away their demonstrable track record of supporting racism.

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Lib-Dem Iraq whataboutery is the pinnacle of hypocrisy

A lot of people seem to have incredibly short political memories so it's important to remind anyone about the Lib-Dems disgusting and deeply illiberal track record in government between 2010 and 2015 and all of the vile policies they supported.

Policies like austerity fanaticism, tripled tuition fees, turning Libya into a lawless terrorism breeding ground, Theresa May's racist "Hostile Environment", inflicting the worst period of collapsing wages since records began, disability persecution, devastating public service cuts, Secret Courts, police cuts, the gagging law, the Royal Mail privatisation scam, increased snooping powers, welfare vandalism, infrastructure-underinvestment, the sanctions regime, the 2012 NHS-privatisation-by-stealth act, workfare, prison and probation privatisation, unlawful Tribunal Fees, overseeing the lowest peace time house building rate since the 1920s, Bedroom Tax, and all the time lavishing massive tax cuts and handouts on corporations and the mega-rich.

It's also worth reminding people that it was this vile combination of hard-right Liberal Democrat-endorsed policies that trashed our living standards and caused the furious public backlash that manifested in the 2016 Brexit vote.

It's absolutely stomach-turning to see smug unapologetic Lib-Dems now appealing to the politically gullible by posing as noble white knights to save us from Brexit without even apologising for the crucial role they played in creating Brexit in the first place.

But whenever you point stuff like this out, the Lib-Dem tribalists have one stock response, and it's every bit as cynical and dishonest as positioning themselves as the "stop Brexit party" after they wilfully helped the Tories lay the groundwork for Brexit to happen in the first place.
 

An example of Lib-Dem "Iraq whataboutry" from a thread
about the 130,000 people pushed into early graves
by Tory/Lib-Dem austerity fanaticism.

  This stock response is to go "but what about Iraq?"

They know that this is unbelievable disingenuous because Labour members have showed contrition over Iraq by electing one of the few Labour MPs who vehemently opposed the disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Alongside the fact that Jeremy Corbyn was the only anti-austerity candidate in the 2015 leadership election, the fact he was a principled opponent of possibly the biggest error of judgement in Labour's entire history was a major factor in him becoming party leader.Huge numbers of people would never have been drawn back towards the Labour Party without contrition over the Iraq catastrophe, and Corbyn's move away from pathetically imitating economically illiterate Tory austerity fanaticism to actually oppose it.

The Lib-Dems on the other hand have shown absolutely no contrition whatever over their role in trashing our living standards.

In fact they're so lacking in remorse that they sent a massive "fuck you, we're not even remotely sorry" to the entire nation by picking Vince Cable as their leader.

Vince Cable willingly served as one of George Osborne's austerity hatchet men at the Treasury for the full five years, and he also personally orchestrated a massive fraud against the British people by flogging off the Royal Mail portfolio to city speculators at a tiny fraction of its true value, at a cost of literally hundreds of millions of pounds.

And then just look at their new leadership contenders Jo Swinson and Ed Davey.

Their despicable voting records between 2010 and 2015 show that they were actually more loyal to the pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, anti-worker, welfare-vandalising Tory whip than the Tory leadership contenders Jeremy Hunt and Michael Gove!

These weren't just "junior partners" in the austerity coalition. They were such enthusiastic participants that they voted through even more Tory malice than two of the highest profile Tory ministers in the austerity government!

They're still not even remotely sorry, and they're still saying "fuck you" to the British public by fielding these despicable austerity-enablers.

Yet with their other face they're harking back to the disastrous Blairite invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2013 despite knowing that the Bairites lost control of the Labour Party years ago, and it's now led by a guy who stood alongside their former leader Charles Kennedy when he took his brave and principled stance against war-mongering in Iraq.

But bringing up something that Labour have shown remorse over as blatant whataboutery to distract from something that demonstrably causes no pangs of conscience whatever to the Lib-Dems isn't even the worst of it.

The worst of it is that in 2011 the Lib-Dems, (including their current leader Vince Cable, and their two new leadership contenders Swinson and Davey) voted in favour of doing exactly the same thing to Libya as Blair did in Iraq.

The Lib-Dems know that they shat all over Charles Kennedy's legacy by voting to turn Libya into a vast lawless terrorism breeding ground just like the Blairites voted to do to Iraq eight years previously.

They know exactly what they did, and that the blowback included the appalling Manchester Arena bombing carried out by a terrorist from the Libyan chaos they created, but they're absolutely 100% unrepentant because they insist on picking the very people that did this as their current leader, and as his successor too.So these despicable hypocrites will use the catastrophe in Iraq to crudely deflect attention away from their complicity in the ruinous austerity coalition that laid the groundwork for Brexit, but to do this they have to completely ignore the fact that they voted in favour of their own chaos-causing, terrorism-fuelling, refugee-creating disaster in Libya.

They're actually using their historic opposition to the Iraq catastrophe under Charles Kennedy's leadership to deliberately distract attention away from the fact that they bulldozed his centre-left anti-war legacy into a pit and burnt it to ashes by propping up a disgustingly illiberal hard-right Tory government, and voting in favour of their war-mongering exploits in Libya.

Yes, the ongoing chaos and suffering in Iraq is an indelible stain on the history of the Labour Party, but you couldn't think of more hypocritical and unprincipled people to point this out than those who outright refused to learn the lessons from that imperialist war-mongering catastrophe, shat all over their principled former leaders' legacy, and voted to do exactly the same thing again to Libya in 2011.

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Brexit is a £1 trillion con job

Just over a decade ago the British state conjured up staggering amounts of money in order to save the City of London financial sector from insolvency.

This unprecedented tsunami of cash included £200 billion in liquidity support, £76 billion to bail out RBS and Lloyds, £40 billion to bail out Bradford and Bingley and the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, £280 billion in insurance cover for financial sector assets, and £435 billion in quantitative easing.

In 2010 the general public decided to punish Labour for having been in power during the financial sector insolvency crisis by replacing them with a Tory/Lib-Dem coalition (despite the fact that the Tories had been squealing for even more financial sector deregulation even right up until the financial sector meltdown was kicking off!).

The Tories and their despicable Lib-Dem enablers immediately began loading the cost of the bailouts onto ordinary British people via a ruinous programme of austerity fanaticism, unprecedented wage repression, devastating public service cuts, deliberate under-investment in infrastructure, and vandalism of the social safety net.

Meanwhile they continually lavished vast tax cuts and extravagant handouts on corporations and the mega-rich, as they raided the infrastructure budgets of Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and northern England to further boost spending in already wealthier areas like London and the south east.

The consequences of these policies were absolutely dire. The slowest economic recovery in two Centuries, the longest period of real terms wage depreciation since records began, soaring child poverty and in-work poverty, unprecedented cuts to the education system, unprecedented cuts to local government budgets, catastrophically failing public services like the NHS, police & fire service, tens of thousands driven into early graves, the most unaffordable housing in history ...

And then David Cameron decided to gamble the entire nation's future in order to nick a few thousand UKIP votes at the 2015 General Election.

An environment of collapsing wages, insecure jobs, soaring poverty, failing public services, unaffordable housing, and an annihilated social security system was exactly what the Brexiteers needed in order to push Leave marginally over the winning line in the 2016 referendum.

All they needed to do was blame the consequences of these devastating domestic policies on immigrants and the EU, then watch the votes flood in as the Tories and Lib-Dems outright refused to admit the truth, that it was actually them to blame for the living standards collapse, not immigration or the EU.

The austerity fanatics and their vile austerity-enabling sidekicks couldn't counteract the lie without implicating themselves, so they just sat back allowed the lie to stand, and allowed Leave to win.

Britain has been in a state of constitutional chaos ever since, especially so after Theresa May decided to give the British public the chance to get rid of the Tories who created this Brexit chaos in the first place, and instead of seizing the opportunity we decided to intensify the chaos by keeping them in power but without a majority so that the government was beholden to the Northern Irish DUP sectarians and the ERG Brextemists in the Tory ranks.

Hence huge numbers of financial institutions simply giving up on all the chaos and uncertainty in the UK to seek economic refuge in the safety of the Single Market, taking £1 trillion in assets with them as they flee.

Dublin, Frankfurt, Paris, and Luxemburg being the main beneficiaries so far.

So that's £1 trillion in financial sector bailouts. The British people being forced to cover the cost of these bailouts through Tory/Lib-Dem austerity fanaticism. Then a furious backlash against collapsing living standards resulting in the financial sector pissing off out of Britain taking £1 trillion in assets with them!

The saddest thing of all is that millions of Brits remain absolutely incapable of seeing this con go on right in front of their eyes, and it's not just an inability to synthesise information without allowing the mainstream media propagandists to do their thinking for them that's causing people to completely miss the bigger picture, it's an extraordinary level of political forgetfulness.

Remainers flocking to support the Lib-Dems seem to have completely forgotten* all of the Lib-Dem lies, and their red-handed culpability in laying the groundwork for Brexit by helping the Tories wantonly trash our living standards for five devastating years.

It's just four years since the Coalition ended, yet huge numbers of people have apparently already forgotten how appallingly the Lib-Dems behaved, and we're somehow back to trusting them again, despite all their betrayals, despite their austerity-collusion, despite the fact that their entirely unrepentant leader Vince Cable wilfully served as George Osborne's austerity hatchet man at the treasury for five years, and despite the fact he defrauded the UK taxpayer of hundreds of millions by selling off the Royal Mail property portfolio at a fraction of its true value.

If people can't even remember four years ago, what hope is there of them remembering how the very same financial sector that's scarpering with £1 trillion in assets today were the beneficiaries of £1 trillion in bailouts 11 years ago?

So what are the lessons here? 

• Brexit is a chaotic and ongoing economic disaster.

• There's nothing patriotic about supporting the diminishment of your own nation.

• Capitalism has no national loyalties, even to the extent of scarpering just a decade after being lavishly bailed out at the public expense.

• People are apparently so forgetful the bankers' bailouts are ancient history to them, and they're even back to trusting the Lib-Dems 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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* = Well, either they've forgotten, or they were actually perfectly fine with ruinous austerity fanaticism all along because they were socially and economically insulated from it. So they've either somehow forgotten it all in the space of four years, or they're a bunch of horrible "I'm alright Jack" wankers who simply didn't mind austerity malice at all because the dreadful consequences always fell on other people, meaning they're exactly the kind of insufferably aloof and uncaring metropolitan elitists their opponents always claimed that they were.

The Royal Mail property privatisation scam is really paying off (at the public expense)

After I pointed out Vince Cable's pivotal role in flogging off the Royal Mail at miles below its true value a couple of hard-right pro-privatisation astroturfers turned up with a novel argument aimed at defending the sell-off.

Their argument says that Vince Cable and George Osborne flogged off Royal Mail for 330p per share, and after initially soaring to 445p on the first day (because investors realised how under-valued it was) six years later this share price has receded to 260p.

Their argument goes along the lines that 2013 was actually a good time to sell off Royal Mail because six years later in 2019 the share price has fallen by roughly 20%.

What this argument completely ignores is what has been happening at Royal Mail since it was flogged off in 2013.

One of the main revenue streams the new capitalist owners have found is flogging off chunks of Royal Mail land to property developers for £hundreds of millions.

It's estimated that they've already raked in over £400 million in land sales. That's over half of the £787 valuation of the entire Royal Mail property portfolio at the point of sale, raked back in by selling off just a few chunks of inner city prime building land!

For example a 2.7 acres Royal Mail site in Battersea was sold to developers for £101.2 million, but the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition priced it at just £12.9 million.

The neoliberals in government flogged this piece of prime building land off at less than 13% of its real value, meaning the other 87% of the value of this public land went straight to the new private owners.

Another example is the 6.25 acre Mount Pleasant sorting office that was valued at £29 million by the Tory/Lib-Dem government at the point of sale, then flogged off for £193 million just a few years later. A cool £164 million profit for the new corporate owners from Vince and George's deliberately under-valued sale of public land.

That's almost £300 million of Vince Cable and George Osborne's £787 million valuation of the entire freehold Royal Mail property portfolio recovered through the sale of under 10 acres of Royal Mail land!

So did the new corporate owners reinvest these massive property windfalls in the Royal Mail business? Maybe to diversify in the face of collapsing demand for hand delivered letters?

Of course they bloody didn't. They paid it out in bloated executive salaries and shareholder dividends that have exceeded £1 billion since the privatisation!

The last Royal Mail boss just quit with a huge £2.7 million golden goodbye, and his replacement was welcomed with a staggering £5.8 million tax-free golden hello! All paid for not through successful operation of the business, but through selling off public land that was acquired at miles below its true value.

The owners of Royal Mail know that the postal delivery business is not a brilliant money spinner in itself, but that the Royal Mail property portfolio is an absolute goldmine of prime building plots in towns and cities across the nation.

Royal Mail is being asset stripped before our very eyes, with what was publicly-owned land until 2013 being flogged off for massive unearned corporate profits.

They're not doing anything smart, or innovative, or productive to "earn" this cash, they're simply gorging themselves on the vast difference between what the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition said the Royal Mail property portfolio was worth when they flogged it off, and what it's actually worth.

And the incredible thing is that defenders of this maniacal neoliberal zeal for privatisation that sees our public land flogged off at a tiny fraction of its true value will concoct ludicrous little fairy stories about how it was all good, and fine, and proper because the share price happens to have fallen slightly after six years of absolutely brazen asset stripping!

And the sad thing is that some people will be so gullible, and so averse to considering the facts for themselves, that they'll actually mindlessly believe this abject neoliberal nonsense that everything is fine and dandy, and that Osborne and Cable actually did us all a wonderful favour by flogging off our land at a ridiculous fraction of its real value.

 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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