Remain liars are every bit as politically toxic as Leave liars

People who vehemently oppose this ongoing Tory Brexit farce are perfectly understandable. After all it's been obvious from the beginning that the Brexiteers had no real plan for how to extricate the UK from the political union we've been integrating with for four decades, and that their Leave campaign was run by a bunch of opportunistic liars.

The problem of course is that there are liars on the Remain side too. People who have seen the effectiveness of the Leave lies, and instead of thinking 'we need to find more efficient and effective ways of countering these lies' they've gone for the 'if they won by lying, we need to lie through our teeth too' strategy.

One of the worst things about Brexit is the way it created such a tribalist division that ordinary Brexiters have felt compelled to defend the most extreme and egregious Brexiteer lies out of some weird tribal loyalty to people on the same side of the Brexit division.

Anyone with a social media account must have seen some desperate Brexiter performing absurd mental gymnastics to try and defend Boris Johnson's "£350 million for the NHS" lie, even after the Vote Leave director Dominic Cummings admitted that it was a lie, and that Leave probably wouldn't have won without it.

And the same goes for Remainers and the outright liars in the extremist fringes of the Remain camp.

When Eddie Marsan publishes an 18 month old picture of Jeremy Corbyn doing an Eric Morcambe pose on Twitter in order to spit vitriol at Jeremy Corbyn for campaigning in one of Britain's poorest and most austerity-damaged communities, he's lying through his teeth.

And when the lawyer Jo Maugham amplifies Eddie Marsan's lie by Retweeting it with a sneering anti-Corbyn screed of his own, it's simply another outright lie.
Spreading political lies and dismissing the people of Morecambe (and their 26.4% child poverty rate) because Jeremy Corbyn decided to campaign there instead of attend an anti-Brexit march in London with the likes of Alistair Campbell (anti-Semite and the professional liar who helped create the Iraq disaster), Tom Watson (who announced that he actually wants to vote in favour of Theresa May's shambolic Brexit deal to a chorus of boos from the crowd), and Chuka Umunna and his band of parliamentary squatters (who are literally begging Theresa May to let them prop up her pro-Brexit pro-austerity government) is exactly the kind of elitist London-centrism that people often unfairly smear the entire anti-Brexit movement as being.

All these lies do is reinforce the idea that Remain is some kind of elitist project with absolutely no regard for the truth, or for left-behind communities like Morecambe that have been ravaged by issues like deindustrialisation, austerity dogma, collapsing wages, child poverty, exploitative employment practices, trashed public services, barren high streets, failing schools, food bank dependency, local government cuts ...

But instead of calling out these lies, loads of Remainers (especially the #FBPE cultists) have actively retweeted them, and used them to publish bitter and shockingly dishonest anti-Corbyn screeds of their own.

If people like Marsan and Maugham are willing to use outright lies in order to further their political agenda, then they're clearly just as politically toxic as the Brextremists who created this Tory Brexit farce in the first place.

And if you're willing to help amplify, or even just make excuses for these Remainer lies just because you feel like you have some tribal debt of allegiance to them because they're on the same side, then you're every bit as bad as the Brexiters who think that the Leave campaign were justified in lying their way to victory in 2016 because they ended up getting what they wanted as a result.
But in a way the people spreading these sneering Remainer lies are even worse, because at least the Leave lies had a clear sense of purpose (tricking and terrifying people into voting Leave) while sneering-at-Morecambe type lies just make Remainers look like a bunch of smug, lying, sneering, metropolitan elitists who don't give a shit about ordinary people or left-behind communities, which is clearly a staggeringly counter-productive way of portraying yourself and your movement. 

In conclusion, political lies erode the standard of political discourse, and political liars should be called out, no matter whether these liars are on your side of any particular political divide or not.

 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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Did the Tories continue their Facebook dark ad campaign during the Manchester Arena bombing pause?

After Facebook were pressurised into releasing a trance of highly deceptive dark ads posted by Vote Leave and their affiliates during the EU referendum, it soon became clear that these despicable Brexit campaigners continued flooding Facebook with their pro-Brexit propaganda during the 3 day pause in campaigning after the murder of Jo Cox by a right-wing extremist.

It's absolutely sickening that these Brexiteers colluded to take advantage of Jo Cox's murder by secretively continuing their dark ad campaign during the pause that they publicly agreed to participate in, but this behaviour raises another question that's extremely difficult to answer.

Given that multiple contributors to the Vote Leave campaign are high profile Tories, including several current and past members of Theresa May's cabinet (Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Liam Fox, Priti Patel, Chris Grayling, Steve Baker), and the fact that the Tories spent £millions on a very similar campaign of targeted social media dark ads during the 2017 General Election, it's definitely worth wondering whether they also took advantage of the pause in campaigning after the Manchester Arena terrorist atrocity to continue pumping out dark ads on the sly.

The problem of course is that it's pretty much impossible to know because of the UK's incredibly lax attitude towards regulating online political campaigning.

This article certainly doesn't constitute an allegation that the Tories did continue their campaign of dark ads during the pause in campaigning after the Manchester Arena bombing, it's simply stating that due to the incredibly lax nature of the current electoral rules, it's impossible to know whether they did or not - which is obviously completely unacceptable.

It is however justifiable to at least wonder whether they did, given the very similar targeted dark ads strategy, and the involvement of at least half a dozen of the same people in both campaigns.

The only reason we've come to learn about the leave campaign's dodgy ads and grotesque scheming to take advantage of the Jo Cox pause is the testimony of whistleblowers from within the Leave camp and because a committee of MPs demanded the evidence from Facebook (who eventually, and reluctantly, coughed up details of the absolute lies they'd helped to spread).

So if we want to know about the content, reach, and timing of all Tory dark ad campaign during the 2017 General Election, we'd need whistleblowers from within the Tory election campaign to step forward, and a Tory-dominated committee of MPs to demand evidence from Facebook about what dark ads the Tories were running, and when!

Essentially the Tory party are the only ones who get to decide how much the public get to know about their own massive targeted dark ad campaign during the 2017 General Election!

In my view the entire system of electoral regulation needs to be updated to take account of targeted social media dark ads as a matter of urgency.

There should be a system put in place where all online political campaign ads must be registered with the Electoral Commission before publication, the registered information should include copies of the campaign advert, details of all hyperlinks within the ad, time of posting, cost of posting, and details of who the ad was targeted at (with geographic targeting of particular regions classified as local campaign spending). All of this information should be uploaded onto a publicly accessible and easily searchable database.

The consequence for non-compliance should be mandatory jail time for rule breakers.

As long as political parties and campaign groups are left free to spend £millions on targeted social media dark ads full of lies and misinformation without any oversight or public scrutiny of what they're doing, then it's beyond obvious that the outcomes of democratic votes cannot be trusted.

Incidentally, this means that if anyone calls for a second Brexit referendum before the electoral rules have been tightened up to clamp down on this kind of online electoral cheating, they're being dangerously naive.

What you can do

• Share this article to raise awareness of the problem of targeted social media dark ads.

• Contact your local MP to express your concerns about targeted social media dark ads, and to demand better regulation.

• Contact mainstream media journalists you admire and ask them to push for better regulation of online political campaigning, and for serious punishments for those who break the rules.

• Support independent media by making small monthly donations to the independent media sites you appreciate.

 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 the Vote Leave campaign cynically used the Jo Cox killing to their advantage

When the Labour MP Jo Cox was brutally murdered in the street by a "Britain First" screaming extreme-right terrorist during the EU referendum campaign, all of the Brexit campaign groups agreed to a three day pause in campaigning as a mark of respect.

On Thursday 26 July 2018 Facebook finally released a massive tranche of Vote Leave dark ads that were run during the EU referendum campaign. The immediate response was shock at the dishonesty of the content, the slick clickbait nature of the adverts, and the complete lack of imprints or information identifying the dark ads as Vote Leave campaign material.

Then people started looking into the time stamps of the dark ads and found that a load of them had been uploaded during the agreed pause in campaigning, meaning Vote Leave were taking advantage of the Jo Cox pause to continue pushing their own Brexit propaganda while the Remain campaigners stopped to pay their respects.

When this information became public the Vote Leave campaign director Dominic Cummings initially denied that the dark ads were run during the pause, and claimed that they were just being uploaded for later.

This excuse crumbled almost immediately with the leak of a conversation between Darren Grimes and the AIQ staffer who was running the dark ad campaign which showed that Grimes' response to the dark ads starting up again at 10pm on the day after the killing was "oh fantastic".

Now it's already been proven that Vote Leave illegally overspent during the EU referendum (for which they've been hit with the maximum possible fine by the Electoral Commission) and that this overspend was due to their campaign of social media dark ads.

Serious questions remain over the legality of the adverts they ran, given the desperately misleading content, and that they contained absolutely no indication that they were EU referendum campaign material at all.

However there's not much prospect of prosecution of their decision to carry on campaigning after agreeing to pause out of respect to Jo Cox, because the agreement between the campaigns didn't take the form of a legally enforceable contract, it was just a matter of integrity and basic human decency.

Vote Leave's decision to carry on secretly campaigning so as to use the Jo Cox pause for their own advantage is particularly cynical given how numerous Brexiteers actually accused Remain campaigners of "politicising the killing" and "using it to their advantage" in the aftermath of the murder.

Now it's absolutely clear that Vote Leave deliberately and cynically used the pause in campaigning to their own advantage, which even a hefty proportion of Leave voters would no doubt find utterly repulsive if they knew about it.

So the big question now is how the mainstream media will cover these revelations. Will they be swept under the carpet so most people don't even know that Vote Leave decided to cynically use the Jo Cox pause to their own advantage, or will this scandal be presented as the outrageously cynical and dishonest behaviour that it was?

My guess is that this decision to take advantage of the Jo Cox murder won't be dominating any headlines, and if it is mentioned at all, buried in the back pages, it will only be down to the sterling work of people like Carole Cadwalladr (one of the few mainstream media journalists worth their salary).

What you can do

Share this article to help spread awareness of the despicable behaviour of the Vote Leave campaign. 

Contact journalists in the mainstream media and ask them to cover the story of how Vote Leave cynically continued campaigning during the Jo Cox pause.

Write to your MP and ask them to take action to prevent the use of social media dark ads in future democratic votes. One way would be to introduce a new law that all campaign adverts (paper or digital) must be registered with the Electoral Commission and clearly marked as campaign literature, with jail time for those who break the rules. 

Take a look at the evidence for yourself. Look at how dishonest and immigration fixated these dark ads were, and try to get your head around the staggering number of people who saw and were influenced by these misleading dark ads in the run up to the EU referendum vote.

Support independent media in their efforts to counter-balance mainstream media bias by setting up small subscriptions to your favourite independent media sites.

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Note: Article amended over a mistaken attribution of the "oh fantastic" comment to Vote Leave director Dominic Cummings, rather than Darren Grimes (who was given £625,000 by Vote Leave to spend on Facebook dark ads).

Why do so many Corbyn critics insist on outright lying about what Labour's Brexit position actually is?

I've got no problem with people expressing opposition to Labour's six tests Brexit policy if they're still strongly in favour of remaining in the EU. The right to criticise and dissent are absolutely vital in any kind of democracy.

What I object to is the number of Remainers and Corbyn critics who insist on outright lying about what Labour's Brexit position actually is.

Labour's position

Despite continual misrepresentations by their political opponents, the Labour shadow cabinet position on Brexit is actually pretty clear and simple. 

Labour have devised a compromise position that respects the result of the referendum, but which insists that the final Brexit deal is subjected to Keir Starmer's six tests. 

This means that if the final Brexit deal the Tories negotiate with the EU is going to be a disaster for Britain (as the Tory government's own impact assessments indicate it will), the Labour Party will oppose it.

Labour have already shown their determination to fight against a hard-right Tory interpretation of Brexit by seeking to add amendments to the EU Withdrawal Bill in order to prevent the Tory government from using Brexit as a Trojan Horse to attack our workers' rights, consumer protections, environmental laws, equality rules, and food standards.

After the Tories ripped up these amendments Labour were left with no choice but to vote against the EU Withdrawal Bill (which is hardly colluding with the Tories as so many people like to claim they are).

Unfortunately Labour and the other opposition parties didn't have the parliamentary numbers to stop the Tory EU Withdrawal Bill because a whole load of so-called "mutineer" Tory MPs like Anna Soubry who make a lot of noise about opposing hard Brexit decided to back Theresa May and the secretive cabal of ERG Brextremists who dictate her every move, and actually voted in favour of it.

Owen Smith

The reason Owen Smith was sacked from the Labour Shadow cabinet is obvious. He decided to break ranks with the agreed position that Labour needs to subject the final deal to Keir Starmer's six tests, and publicly set out his own bespoke Brexit policy.

Any competent political leader can't have their ministers going off and making up their own policies on the hoof, because that's the path towards the kind of incompetence and directionless of Theresa May who has so little authority over her own party that she couldn't even sack Boris Johnson from her cabinet after he made up his own Brexit policy that totally contradicted her own!

Love them or loathe them, strong leaders like Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher would never have allowed their ministers to just make up their own policies on the hoof. That's why Corbyn was right to sack Owen Smith, just as he was right to force out the unmistakably Corbynite MP Chris Williamson a few months ago after Williamson decided to announce his own bespoke policy on Council Tax.

Of Course Owen Smith has every right to criticise Labour's Brexit position from the back benches, but only a ridiculously weak and directionless leader like Theresa May would allow him to criticise the party position from within the party leadership.

The timing

Perhaps the worst thing about Owen Smith's decision to announce his own Brexit policy from within the shadow cabinet is the appalling timing just as the 2018 local election campaign is gearing up.

You'd have to be astoundingly gullible to imagine that Smith only just realised his opposition to the agreed Labour position right now, just when attacking his own party from within the cabinet would do the maximum damage to Labour's chances at the local elections.

Agree with Smith's call for a second EU referendum or not, it's impossible to argue that the timing of his decision to cause chaos by breaking from the agreed party line is incredibly damaging to the chances of thousands of Labour local election candidates up and down the country.

The lies

I wrote an article pointing out that the Labour right-wingers have form for this kind of internal wrecking behaviour, and that Smith's decision to publicly defy the agreed party line looks an awful lot like a deliberate effort to damage Labour's chances at the 2018 local elections in order to use the poor result as an excuse to have another crack at deposing Jeremy Corbyn as party leader.

The response to this article was an absolute cascade of lies and misrepresentations from Remainers, and the anti-Corbyn faction of the Labour Party. Here are just a few of the examples:

Aside from these examples of various different lies and misrepresentations of Labour's Brexit position, it's easy to find plenty more. Just peruse through the #FBPE hashtag on Twitter and you'll find dozens upon dozens of people outright lying with claims that Labour support Tory hard Brexit.

Why people lie

As I said before I've got no objection to people opposing Labour's position under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership, that's an essential part of democracy. What I object to is this bombardment of lies, smears, and brazen misrepresentations of what Labour's position actually is.

So why do so many people insist on lying like this?

In my view there are two plausible answers:

They're either ignorant people who have heard the lies elsewhere, and uncritically regurgitate them as their own opinions, rather than actually checking the facts and rejecting them as lies.

The other alternative is that they do actually understand Labour's Brexit position, but they also know that the Brexiters won with a campaign of absolute lies, so they're adopting the same staggeringly dishonest tactics because they think it's the most effective way of attacking Corbyn.

It basically comes down to stupidity or mendacity.

Are these people just ignorant rote learners who don't even understand Labour's actual Brexit policy, but insist on attacking it with lies? Or are they cynical propagandists who believe that lying about Labour's position will have more impact than any kind of fact-based critique?

Why the truth is important

The thing is that whatever our political stance (pro-Corbyn, Corbyn-sceptic, Remainer ...) it's absolutely vital to demonstrate that we're actually better than the lying right-wing Brextremists.

The Brextremists use deceptions, smears, false promises and lies to get what they want. 

That they rely on lies to achieve their objectives is absolutely undeniable after the Vote Leave director Dominic Cummings admitted that they would never have won without the "£350 million for the NHS" lie.

We know this because the other even more right-wing and dishonest Leave.EU Brexit campaign worked with Cambridge Analytica to con people into voting for Brexit, and that Cambridge Analytica openly admitted that their strategy is that "it doesn't have to be true, people just have to believe it".

Whether we support Labour's position of subjecting the Brexit deal to Keir Starmer's six tests or not, those of us who oppose the Tories and the hard-right Brexit liars must ensure that the foundations of our political positions are facts, evidence, cogent analysis, and honest presentation. 

Otherwise we come across as being just as dishonest as they are, which leaves all the decent honest people in society with nowhere to turn but political apathy.

 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 loading the majority of the cost of the Brexit settlement onto non-Brexiters!

It's not immediately clear what the Tories have agreed to offer the EU because they keep insisting on conducting the Brexit negotiations in such an opaque and anti-democratic manner, but what is clear is that they're now accepting that accounting for 13% of the EU economy the UK has a responsibility cover 13% of the EU's debts and liabilities.

13% of the EU's debts and liabilities adds up to about 100 billion euros, but the Tories are trying to make it seem that the UK will pay a discounted rate of £40-£60 billion by offsetting other things against the cost. It looks like financial trickery, but it's hard to examine the detail, because the announcement doesn't come with a position paper outlining the details, it's been delivered in a cloud of rhetoric, speculation, and bitter condemnation from the hard Brexiteers.

The concept of the UK disowning their responsibilities and leaving the EU without covering their share of the debts and liabilities was always a politically illiterate fantasy. Just imagine the damage such a move would have done to the UK's national reputation. Not only would we be blundering chaotically out of the world's biggest trading bloc based on a referendum that was only called as a political gimmick for David Cameron to poach a few thousand UKIP votes with, but we'd be doing it in a way that demonstrated absolute contempt for our treaty obligations.

Just ask yourself which countries would ever sign a trade deal with post-Brexit Britain if we'd demonstrated our willingness to completely shaft our trade partners by walking away from our deal with them without even covering our costs. Nobody, that's who.

The right-wing Brexit extremists have continually tried to frame this financial settlement as an unconscionable outrage and a vindictive imposition by the EU, but in doing so they've only demonstrated that they're the clueless ideological extremists who are entirely unwilling to engage with the actual reality of the situation they've created.

They'll howl, and wail, and cry tears of delusional self-pity over this cost, but they're the ones who are responsible for delivering us this situation. They're the ones who toured around the country in a bus that claimed a £350 million per week benefit to quitting the EU without bothering to explain that any gains from quitting would be offset by the tens of billions we'd have to find to cover our share of the debts and liabilities.

After the post-Brexit collapse in the value of the pound, £100 billion euros worth of liabilities works out at £88.5 billion pounds.

£88.5 billion pounds divided by the 17.41 million Brexiters who voted to enable this chaotic Tory-administered Brexit farce works out at £5,080 worth of damage for every single one of them.

Perhaps fewer of them would have voted in favour of enabling an absolute shambles of a Tory-administered "let's make it up as we go along" Brexit if the Vote Leave bus would have had "Every single one of you muppets who believes our lies will cost the UK £5,000 apiece before we even get to leave the EU" emblazoned on the side.

The sad thing is that the bulk of this cost isn't even going to be borne by the Brexit voters at all. The way the Tories have proposed to stagger the payments decades into the future makes it clear that the younger generations who voted so strongly against Brexit, or didn't even get a chance to vote in the referendum, will cover much more of the cost, while the older demographics who enabled this shit show get to enjoy their retirements and die before the debt they created is ever actually paid off!

You couldn't really get a clearer example of Tory inter-generational warfare than making the young pay the cost of a decision taken by the largely by the old, but what else would you expect from a political party that has spent the last seven years using hard-right austerity dogma to force the poor and ordinary to cover the cost of a financial sector insolvency crisis that was caused by the recklessness, negligence, and downright criminality of the mega-rich?

 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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"Taking back control" by ... err ...uh oh!

"Let's take back control" was one of the big Brexiter slogans during the toxic and ridiculously rushed EU referendum campaign. We heard it over and over again during the EU referendum debate, but we never got any explanation of what this appealing little sound bite was actually going to mean in practice.

Now that Theresa May's pitiful threat-based "negotiating strategy" has backfired and totally unified the 27 remaining EU states in their resolve to ignore her threats and deny her ridiculous demands that they start negotiating a EU-UK trade deal before she has even guaranteed the rights of EU citizens who live in the UK.

Theresa May's threat to turn the UK into a giant tax haven if the EU don't give her what she wants may have gone down well with the billionaires who own right-wing propaganda tabloids like the Express, Daily Mail and S*n, but it clearly went down incredibly badly with the people she's actually going to have to negotiate with.

The EU are hardly renowned for political unity but Theresa May's threat to deliberately damage the EU by turning Britain into a parasitical low-regulation corporate tax-haven has backfired spectacularly with all 27 member states unanimously agreeing to the proposed EU negotiating stance.

The shadow Brexit minister Keir Starmer absolutely slammed Theresa May for pandering to the fanatical hard-right fringe of the Tory party instead of trying to secure Britain's best interests saying that she "should have spent the last nine months building alliances across Europe, not pandering to those in her cabinet and her party who want to sever all links with the EU and retreat from our closest allies and most important trading partners".

It was always clear that Brexit was going to leave the UK in a very weak diplomatic position, but Theresa May's toddler tantrum of a "negotiating strategy" and her efforts to use the lives of EU citizens in the UK as bargaining chips have made the situation very much worse than they needed to be.

Britain is isolated and belligerently hurling threats around instead of trying to negotiate in a diplomatically competent manner, and the 27 EU states are unified in agreement that the separation deal comes first, that the rights of EU citizens are vital, and that when the EU-UK trade deal happens, it will happen democratically, with every other EU state getting a democratic vote to ratify it. The only state that won't be guaranteed a democratic vote on the final deal will be the UK. Some "taking back control" that is!

Theresa May's refusal to allow any kind of meaningful democratic vote on Brexit isn't the only display of anti-democratic attitudes, there's also the fact that her government are pushing through an appalling anti-democratic power-grab called the Great Repeal Bill that would allow Tory ministers to rewrite the laws of the land with no democratic scrutiny from the Houses of Parliament.

It's becoming increasingly clear that the disgustingly dishonest Vote Leave mob had no intention of giving any measure of control to the British people. What they actually meant when they said "let's take back control", was "you should hand control over your future destiny to the fanatical hard-right fringe of the Tory party".

If Theresa May decides to continue pandering to this fanatical hard-right element of the Tory party then a "no deal" cliff edge Brexit looks inevitable, meaning control will lie with the most extreme elements of the Tory party who want to turn the UK into a low-wage, low-skill, low-welfare, low-regulation, corporate tax haven economy.

And if she somehow develops some competent leadership skills and decides to ignore these incessant demands for an economically ruinous "no deal" extreme Brexit from within her own party, control will clearly lie with the remaining 27 EU states that will all have a democratic veto over any future EU-UK trade deal.

In light of this appalling lose-lose situation for British citizens and British businesses, I wonder how anyone honestly believes that they actually "took back control" when they voted in favour of a Tory administered Brexit.

 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 delivering a post-Brexit recruitment crisis death blow to the NHS

We all remember the "Let's give the NHS the £350 million ..." lie, we all remember the Brexiteers immediately disowning it as soon as it became clear that they'd won, and we all remember the pathetic displays of Brexiter excuse making that demonstrated the mentality that it's now absolutely fine for politicians to lie through their teeth, as long as the end result is the outcome the apologist wanted.

The "£350 million per week" lie was so instrumental in achieving Brexit that the director of the Vote Leave campaign Dominic Cummings has even admitted that the Leave campaign would have lost without it.

Tory Brexiteers like Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and the disgraced Liam Fox have proven that they can lie with impunity in order to get the outcome they wanted, and then simply disown their lies. But it's much worse than that alone. The Tories aren't just failing to deliver the promised funding boost the NHS so badly needs, they're still busy deliberately running the health service into the ground, and Brexit is helping them to wreck it even more quickly.

Since Brexit the number of EU nurses quitting the NHS has risen to an all time high, while the number of new nurses arriving from the EU has slumped by an incredible 92%.

"Ah but we can train up our own nurses instead" cry the complacent excuse-making Brexiters. These excuse-makers are either lying through their teeth too, or they're such dim bulbs that they genuinely don't understand that the Tories have a burning ideological hatred of the socialist NHS principle of providing health care on the basis of need, not on the ability to pay for it, and have every intention of wrecking it in order to justify scrapping the principle of universal care and privatising the NHS facilities they haven't already given away to their private sector mates.

The reality is the complete opposite of this Brexiter fantasy of training more of our own nurses. One of the very first things Theresa May did after she was undemocratically parachuted into 10 Downing Street by her Tory mates was to scrap the NHS bursaries that allowed people to train as nurses without creating mountains of debt. As a result of this applications to nursing courses have plummeted by 10,000 in a single year.

Far from training up more of our own nurses as the complacent Brexiters like to fantasise, the Tory government has exacerbated the NHS recruitment crisis by driving huge numbers of potential nurses away from the profession by scrapping their financial support.

Tory Brexiters like Boris Johnson, Liam Fox, Michael Gove and Iain Duncan Smith lied through their teeth that Brexit would be good for the NHS, but now their party is gleefully hammering nails into the NHS coffin.

Rather than being furious that they were lied to huge numbers of Brexiters are still actually making excuses for the Brexiteers' NHS lies and flat out reversing reality by claiming that we could make up the Brexit nursing shortfall by training more UK nurses when the evidence says that the exact opposite is the case.

That's the problem with political tribalists, once they've made a decision they'll continue vociferously defending it no matter how much they have to defend outright dishonesty, reverse reality, and perform demeaning acts of mental contortionism to do it, because it's always very much easier to fool a person than to convince them that they've been fooled.

 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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