13 things everyone should know about the ECHR

Priti Patel's Rwanda deportation flight was never actually intended to take off.

It was a £500,000 publicity stunt designed to ramp up the culture war against the European Convention on Human Rights, and the court that protects these rights and liberties.

The Tory ploy was to deliberately try to break the law, in order to claim that the nasty Europeans are preventing us from doing what we want to, and agitate for Britain to leave the jurisdiction of the ECHR.

Given that the UK government is intent on whipping up culture war propaganda against it, here are 13 things that people should know about the ECHR:

It's got nothing to do with the EU

The ECHR has absolutely nothing to do with the EU. It's an independent institution established in 1950.

So all these far-right polemicists shouting "leave means leave" over the Rwanda situation are either thick as mince, or being deliberately misleading.

Churchill's finest legacy

Winston Churchill was a true enigma of a man. A right-wing racist who despised Indians and set soldiers on British workers, but a war leader in the fight against Nazism, and a man who promoted the idea of internationally accepted human rights to prevent the horrors of fascism from happening again.

The development of the ECHR was supported by both Churchill and Labour PM Clement Attlee, meaning anyone who wants to rip Britain out of of the ECHR is trashing the legacies of the favourite 20th Century Prime Ministers of both the right and the left!

Protection from fascism

The ECHR was designed to protect European citizens from fascism, and make sure nothing like the horrors of the Second World War could ever happen again. So you've really got to wonder about the true motivations of any government that wants to drag their country out of it.

The life's work of Johnson's own grandad

Boris Johnson's own grandfather James Fawcett was a member of the ECHR from 1962-1984, serving as its President from 1972-1982. He dedicated his life's work to human rights, and wrote books on international law, and the application of the ECHR.

It's not just an indication of the decline of Fawcett's family lineage that his own grandson is the radical-right philistine who is intent on wrecking his life's work, it's indicative of our national decline too.

For all of our many faults, Britain was once a great nation in some ways, stocked with decent, honest, earnest men like Fawcett who worked for the betterment of humanity.

These days we lift up and celebrate the absolute worst among us, like the bone-idle, incompetent, lying, philandering oaf who is intent on wrecking the life's work of his own grandfather, purely because he knows contemptuously undermining human rights and international law plays well to Britain's depraved hard-right capitalist media.

These days it's all about self-interest, not the betterment of others, and it's a crying shame that we've fallen so far as a nation in just a couple of generations.

Red meat for tabloid-addled reactionaries

It's hard to imagine the warped mindset of the kind of tabloid-addled reactionary who desperately wants to see their own human rights ripped up, purely because they're angry that their beloved Tory government couldn't unlawfully deport a few poor refugees, who they've never even met, and know nothing about.

But this kind of rabidly right-wing ultranationalist reactionary is Johnson's base. The Tories knew they couldn't win elections without attracting the millions who used to vote for UKIP and the BNP, so this policy of destroying our human rights is red meat, intended for their consumption.

ECHR protects British rights

We regularly hear about how the ECHR protects immigrants, by preventing the UK government from defying the law to deport them, but it also protects the rights of British citizens too.

It was thanks to the ECHR that the bans on homosexuality were lifted in Scotland and Northern Ireland; employers were prevented from discriminating against their workers on religious grounds; teachers were banned from brutalising children with corporal punishment; the ban on people in Gibraltar voting in general Elections was lifted; and the multiple rulings to protect the British public from police brutality.

A very British institution

The ECHR was largely drafted by British lawyers, and British judges have always been major players in the institution, with three of Britain's eight ECHR judges having served as president of the court (Nicholas Bratza, Humphrey Waldock, A.D. McNair). 

Only France and Italy out of the other 46 member states have even had two presidents of the court, and many nations have never had a single one.

Leaving would be Putinesque

In all of Europe, only Belarus has never signed up to the ECHR. The only countries to have walked out of it are Greece, after they suffered a violent military coup in 1969 (then re-joined 1974), and then Putin's Russia after the invasion of Ukraine.

Do we really want to join the brutal Papadopoulos Junta and Vlad Putin's Russia as the only European regimes to have torn up their own citizens' European rights?

Crucial to the Irish Peace Process

Boris Johnson has already made his contempt for the Irish Peace Process absolutely clear by barefaced lying that his Brexit deal wasn't going to create a border down the Irish Sea, creating a border down the Irish Sea, and then defying international law with his efforts to rip up the Northern Ireland Protocol after having told everyone it was a great deal, and signing us up to abide by it.

Britain can't quit the ECHR without ripping up the Good Friday Agreement, which stipulates that the UK have the ECHR enforceable in Northern Ireland.

This latest attack on the ECHR demonstrates that Johnson's contempt for the Irish Peace Process knows no bounds.

Internationally accepted rights, or a set of Tory allowances?

The Tories want to tear up the ECHR and replace it with a British "Bill of Rights" which will be drawn up by ministers from the billionaire-bankrolled Tory party!

What kind of idiot wants to have their internationally accepted rights lobbed in the bin, so that the radical-right ghouls Johnson has surrounded himself with can decide what rights and liberties they will and won't allow us to keep?

Know your rights

The first 18 Articles of the ECHR are the most fundamental. Most of the rest relate to technical details of how the court functions. Here are the rights that Boris Johnson and the Tories are seeking to rip up:

Why the British press hate it

Johnson is intent on attacking the ECHR because Britain's rabidly right-wing corporate media outlets hate it.

The main reason they hate it is because of Article 8, which guarantees British citizens the right to privacy, and prevents them from engaging in the phone-hacking and private surveillance scandals that led to the Levenson Inquiry.

They're still furious that they can't hack into our phones, private communications, medical records, etc ... to do stuff like leak gossip about celebrities and their families, smear left-wing and socially progressive figures, and release the private information of dead British soldiers.

Why the Tories hate it

The Tories hate the ECHR for a very similar reason to the right-wing capitalist media; it constrains their ability to make life worse for people.

• Whenever they want to deport immigrants (or black British citizens) they detest having to try to do it in a way that complies with the ECHR rules.

• When they defund the justice system and scrap entitlement to Legal Aid, they know that they're denying people the right to a free and fair trial.

• When they implement mandatory unpaid labour schemes for the unemployed, they know they're trampling over people's right not to be subjected to forced labour.

• When they bring in legislation to erase our ancient British right to participate in non-violent protest, they know they're attacking our rights to free expression, assembly, and association.

They hate the ECHR because it stands in the way of them being the vicious, malicious bastards that they really want to be.

Conclusion

I'm fairly certain that few could read all of this and still conclude that they want the Tories to trample all over Churchill's finest legacy by walking out of the ECHR, to join Belarus and Putin's Russia as Europe's only non-signatories.

You'd have to be the worst kind of simpleton to imagine that Johnson's billionaire-bankrolled Tories are better placed to decide what our fundamental rights and liberties should be, than a Europe-wide panel of human rights advocates and legal experts.

The big problem is that the kind of low-information voter this malicious anti-ECHR rabble-rousing is aimed at doesn't have the intellectual rigour to actually learn about the issue they're being programmed to froth about, or the patience/comprehension ability to read a detailed summary, if they were ever to somehow come across one.

it's bad enough that decades of failing education and exposure to radical-right capitalist media has created such an enormous demographic of reactionary low-information voters, but that the government actively panders to them like this is a national disgrace.

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The self-awareness deficiency of the common British street thug

In case the news passed you by, the extreme-right hate preacher Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley Lennon) has been found guilty of contempt of court for ignoring court reporting restrictions, and risking the collapse of three interlinked child sex abuse prosecutions, despite having been previously warned to stop ignoring court orders.

Instead of taking it on the chin, admitting he screwed up, and accepting the judgement of the British rule of law, the treacherous little shit-weasel has resorted to attacking the most senior judge in the English and Welsh legal system as a "liar", and begging Donald Trump for political asylum in the United States!

The lack of self-awareness of this self-styled patriot is extraordinary.

His actions demonstrate that he doesn't actually love Britain or British institutions at all. He hates our justice system and our rule of law, and he seeks to flee the country entirely when things go against him.

There are of course a few problems with street thug Tommy's appeal for asylum in Trump's America. 

The main problem being that he's banned for life from the United States for fraudulently entering the country on a false passport.

Another glaring problem is that his convictions for violent assault and his public boasting about Class A drug use mean that he should definitely be refused entry at the border.

And then there's the sheer hypocrisy of it.

Just imagine the uproar Tommy and his rabble would make if a foreign hate preacher had been thrown out of Britain for life for entering on a fake passport, then cheekily put in an appeal for asylum to the British government to escape being jailed in their own country.

They'd be going absolutely ballistic about it.

But because it's their beloved street thug behaving in this extraordinary way, they're actually rallying around to support him, and repeating his pathetic sob stories about how being punished for his own unlawful behaviour makes him the poor innocent victim of political persecution.

Another problem for Yaxley-Lennon is what to do with all of his property he's invested in, using the donations from all of the absolute dupes who throw so much cash at him?

Surely if he flees Britain in order to evade justice, it must be possible to seize his property, which would provide an excellent opportunity to turn his luxuriant £1 million countryside mansion in Bedfordshire into a refugee hostel until he decides to come back from hiding and see out his sentence?

But the most glaring issue of all is the absolutely barefaced demonstration that Yaxley-Lennon is no patriot at all, to the point of hating and repeatedly undermining our judicial system, then begging a foreign leader to step in and rescue him from the consequences of his own unlawful actions.

This treacherous behaviour gets down to a deeper truth: Claims of patriotism from the modern extreme-right are an absolute fraud.

Theirs is an internationalist movement, in which they're far more likely to adore a misogynist bully like Trump, or an extreme-right harridan like Marine Le Pen, or a murderous extreme-right terrorists like the Christchurch mosque killer or the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, because of their shared political ideology, than they are to even tolerate and respect their fellow countrymen who happen not to share their extremist views.

The truth is that it's all about ideology to extreme-right agitators like Yaxley-Lennon, and the flags of the nations they happen to inhabit serve as nothing more than convenience to them. As visual bait to lure in the kind of mindless unthinking idiot who imagines that as long as it's wrapped itself in the national flag, then it unquestionably has to be a true patriot.

But even as Yaxley-Lennon trash-talks the British judicial system and begs to become a migrant in a foreign land to escape the consequences of his own actions, the hard-of-thinking will continue throwing their cash at him, because easily-duped idiots will always behave like easily-duped idiots.

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The Golden Biscuit prize for duplicitous posturing goes to ... Ed Davey of the Lib-Dems

In 2014 Tory Home Secretary Theresa May pushed through the outrageous "Immigration Act" which was intended to create a "Hostile Environment" for anyone without the certification to prove that they had a right to live in Britain.

Toty Hostile Environment was eventually used to deny housing, employment, banking services, social security, and even life-saving medical treatment to Black british citizens of the Windrush generation.

Scores of black British citizens were even deported under Theresa May's "deport first, hear appeals later" principle, with several actually dying in exile overseas, thousands of miles away from their families and friends, and the land that they called home.

In March 2019 this despicable legislation was declared unlawful in a British court of law for the racist way it was used to discriminate against black Brits.

Yet on the newly instituted Windrush Day, Theresa May set about audaciously whitewashing her demonstrable track record of racist discrimination against black Brits, and the ever-duplicitous Lib-Dems are distancing themselves from the policy that they helped vote through, and even pretending that they're long-standing opponents of hostile Tory immigration policies!
 

Yes, Theresa May bears ultimate responsibility for the Hostile Environment, (and for making it even worse in 2016), but the Lib-Dems absolutely loved it at the time, in fact one of their MPs Mark Hunter actually served as one of the "tellers for the ayes" in the parliamentary vote!

Check Hansard if you don't believe me.

Former Lib-Dem leader Tim Farron voted in favour of Theresa May's unlawfully racist Hostile Environment.

Current Lib-Dem leader Vince Cabe voted in favour of Theresa May's unlawfully racist Hostile Environment.

Only 3 of the then 57 Lib-Dem MPs listened to their consciences and defied the Lib-Dem party whip to vote against Theresa May's unlawfully racist Hostile Environment.

But taking the Golden Biscuit prize for duplicitous posturing is current Lib-Dem leadership candidate Ed Davey who published a Windrush Day article pinning the blame entirely on the Tories, and whitewashing the fact that he himself voted in favour of Tory hostile immigration legislation in 2014!

It just goes to show how utterly degraded the standard of political discourse has become that we're surrounded by duplicitous liars on all sides, from the lying Brextremists who dragged us into absolute chaos via a tide of shockingly dishonest propaganda on one side, to the entirely unapologetic Lib-Dems on the other who whitewash their crimes against the British people (Hostile Environment, austerity fanaticism, wage repression, ruinous public service cuts, welfare vandalism, erosion of Legal Aid and the judicial system, shockingly illiberal secret courts, unpayable student debts, the slowest economic recovery in Centuries, and so much more) rather than fessing up and apologising to the nation for what they did.

And the worst thing of all is the tendency of these duplicitous liars to climb up onto their moral high horses and sneer down at those of us who refuse to buy into their despicable lies, or believe their Orwellian whitewashing of their utterly malicious track records.

According to them, the people who actively voted in favour of the Tory hostile environment they're now carping about from the sidelines, they're the reputable social progressives, and us on the left who opposed hostile environment all along are the partisan political militants!

I'm tempted to say you couldn't make it up, but the ever-duplicitous Lib-Dems already have.

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The two biggest lies in British politics

Whatever our political views, or our position on Brexit, it's impossible to deny that British politics is now in an absolutely farcical state.

After almost three years to prepare for it, the Tory government have twice missed their own Brexit deadlines, and left themselves no choice but to go grovelling to EU leaders to beg for extensions in order to avoid the danger of the "no deal" Brexit meltdown that they repeatedly bluffed that they were going to launch if they didn't get their own way!

Whether you think Brexit is a great idea, terrible nonsense, or somewhere in between, only the delusional would try to argue that Brexit hasn't turned into an absolute shambles.

So how did we get here?

There are obviously all manner of interrelated reasons, but one of the biggest reasons of all is the susceptibility of the British public to believe in the most absurd political lies, and two political lies in particular have played crucial roles in creating this nationally humiliating Brexit farce.

The austerity lie

In the wake of the 2008 financial sector insolvency crisis the Conservative party launched an extraordinary propaganda campaign to shift blame for the crisis from the reckless bankers who gambled themselves into insolvency onto the Labour government.

Of course the Blair-Brown neoliberal incarnation of Labour shared some measure of responsibility for failing to oversee the financial sector and regulate the risks they were taking, but in the pre-crisis era it's vital to remember that the Tory opposition continually demanded even more financial sector deregulation!

As the crisis was brewing the Tories weren't warning of the dangers and offering to do things more sensibly, they were demanding that Labour deregulate even further and make the risks even greater!

After the Tories established the lie that the Labour government were to blame for the global financial sector crisis and the Lib-Dems enabled them into power in 2010, they set about their agenda of transferring the cost of the bankers' crisis onto the poor and ordinary people who make up the majority of the British population.

They imposed ruinous austerity policies, ruthlessly slashed vital public services like the NHS, policing, and education, gutted local government funding, oversaw the worst period of collapsing real terms wages since records began, vandalised the social safety net, built the lowest number of new houses since the 1920s, and reduced infrastructure funding to the lowest rate of any country in the developed world.

Meanwhile they rewarded the bankers and speculators who caused the crisis in the first place by slashing taxes for corporations and the mega rich, lavishing unprecedented handouts on the asset rich, and creating a privatisation bonanza by handing out £billions of state assets on the cheap, or completely for free.

They made the majority of people pay for the crisis while they simultaneously worked to transfer ever more wealth to the mega-rich class who caused the crisis in the first place!

The Brexit lie

Millions of Brits felt the pinch of reduced living standards through stagnating wages, failing public services, low-paid insecure work, destruction of the social safety net, reduction of in-work benefits, and severe local government cutbacks, but the next Tory lie was even more brazen than the last.

Instead of admitting that all of this suffering was the result of their (by then completely discredited) ideological austerity agenda, they opportunistically pinned the blame for the consequences of their own hard-right policies onto immigrants and the EU in order to propagandise in favour of Brexit.

Tory Brextremists cynically weaponised the dire consequences of their own austerity lie in order to create their next massive lie.

The opportunistic Tory Brextremists own the majority of the blame for this grotesque Brexit lie, but the centrists own a fair share of responsibility too.

Between 2010 and 2015 the Lib-Dems actively participated in the Tory austerity government, so they could hardly set the record straight on the Tory Brexit lie without implicating themselves as culprits in the living standards collapse they helped the Tories to deliver.

The Labour right-wingers also share a portion of the blame too because their pathetic "austerity-lite" positioning at the 2015 general election gave the English public virtually no means of fighting back against austerity other than protest-voting for the Green Party in a rigged electoral system where they didn't stand a chance of making any real breakthrough.

The architects of Labour's "austerity-lite" agenda Ed Balls (who lost his seat) and Chris Leslie (who defected to the CUK squatters) are complicit in creating Brexit because they pathetically acquiesced to the Tory austerity lie instead of standing up and fighting the Tory malice and deception head on.

If the centrists had actively confronted economically illiterate Tory austerity fanaticism head on, instead of actively enabling it and pathetically imitating it, then it's highly unlikely that we'd ever have ended up in the farcical situation we're in now.

Why do people end up believing such obvious lies?

The Tories blamed the Labour government for a financial crisis caused by the mega-rich in order to dupe the majority of British people into believing that we all deserved to be economically punished with austerity dogma, and then the Tory Brextremists blamed the collapsing living standards caused by this ruinous austerity agenda on immigrants and the EU in order to break Britain's membership of the biggest trading block on the planet.

So how did so many millions of people end up believing these absurd lies and actively re-electing the party that kept telling them?

It's tempting just to blame these millions as idiots who will believe any old nonsense, but a widespread lack of critical thinking skills isn't actually the fault of the individuals, it's clearly the product of an education system that rewards obedience and rote learning more than it rewards questioning and critical thinking.

If kids spend a decade and a half learning to unquestioningly rote learn and repeat what the teacher authority figures tell them in order to get the dopamine hit of praise and good grades, then what do we expect of them in adulthood when they end up reading the hard-right propaganda rags and watching BBC political output that steadfastly refuses to provide balanced coverage on austerity fanaticism?

Is it any wonder that millions end up uncritically rote learning and believing nonsensical lies?

If the mainstream media was fit for purpose then the debate over austerity fanaticism would have raged endlessly since 2010, rather than most journalists simply accepting the outright lie that there was no alternative to punishing the majority to pay the cost of a financial crisis engineered by the mega-rich minority.

The BBC are especially to blame because when it comes to issues like climate change or extreme-right terrorism, they're always willing to "balance" sensible or scientific views with the mad ramblings of science-deniers and far-right extremists.

But when it came to the economic illiteracy of Tory austerity fanaticism, they threw "impartiality" out of the window to simply accept austerity dogma as essentially unquestionable, and never ever sought to balance their political panels with at least as many anti-austerity voices as pro-austerity ones. 

The mainstream media deserve a large share of the blame for their outright refusal to subject ruinous Tory austerity fanaticism to the constant barrage of scepticism that it so richly deserved, and then for their complicity with the Tory blame-shifting lie that immigrants and the EU were to blame for the consequences of their own hard-right austerity agenda.

If the mainstream media hack pack were even remotely interested in holding the powerful to account then the vast majority of Brits would have been well aware that Tory austerity was always a con job, and that austerity dogma was the primary reason for the collapse in living standards that Brexiteers gleefully blamed on immigrants and the EU.

If the mainstream media had actually worked to hold the Tories to account on their austerity lies during the 2010-2015 austerity coalition, then there's absolutely no way they could have got away with blaming the dire consequences on immigrants and the EU.

The mistake of course is the assumption that it's the job of mainstream media journalists to hold the powerful to account, when reality proves over and again that the majority of them actually see it as their job to act as gatekeepers of public discourse tasked with shutting out and relentlessly smearing those who dare to question the establishment order.

They don't get paid lavish six and seven figure salaries for questioning the establishment order, they get paid so handsomely for defending it.

 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 Hostile Environment legislation ruled unlawfully racist

In 2014 Theresa May was the Tory Home Secretary who introduced the vile Hostile Environment legislation that ultimately led to the Windrush scandal, but on March 1st 2019 a key plank of that legislation was ruled unlawful by the High Court because of the way it has unleashed a disgusting wave of racism.

The aspect of Hostile Environment that's been found unlawful is the "right to rent" policy that essentially turned private landlords into untrained freelance immigration agents by threatening them with jail and unlimited fines if they were caught renting property to people who couldn't prove their right to live in the UK.

The combination of this policy, and the Tory government's unwillingness to monitor and oversee the system they'd put in place created a massive increase in racism amongst private landlords.

Instead of implementing time consuming checks on residency status, huge numbers of landlords simply decided to not rent to any blacks, Asians, or foreigners, regardless of whether they had the correct paperwork or not.

The Home Office's own research showed that 25% of landlords would refuse to rent property to people unless they had British passports, yet despite their own department providing the compelling proof that their policy was being used to impose racist discrimination in the housing market, the Tory Home Office issued a statement saying that they were "disappointed" with the ruling, and that they're considering an appeal.

So after having one of their flagship policies being declared racist and unlawful by a British court of law, the Tory response isn't to apologise, it's to issue a statement that they're disappointed in the legal judgement against them!

It's important to remember that the "right to rent" policy is only one aspect of Theresa May's barbaric Hostile Environment. She also used similar threats to try to deny employment, banking services, social security, and even medical treatment to people who couldn't immediately prove their right of residence (like Windrush Brits who moved to the UK prior to 1971 and their descendants).

Theresa May and the Tories didn't just legislate to turn landlords into unwilling and untrained immigration enforcement officers, they did the same to bank clerks, teachers, medical professionals, and millions of ordinary employers too.

The attitude was that the Tory government couldn't be bothered to enforce their own immigration laws, so they would offload the task onto ordinary untrained members of the public, with no concern whatever for the fact that proportions of these ordinary people were always going to be racist, or incompetent, or just too damned lazy to bother doing things fairly, or at all.

And then there's the fact that scores of black British citizens have been refused reentry to the UK, including several who ended up dying in exile overseas.

But the Tories and the appalling "centrists" who colluded with Theresa May to impose this racist legislation by abstaining (Labour right-wingers) and even voting in favour of it (most of the Lib-Dems) can't pretend that they didn't know that these Hostile Environment policies would end up unleashing a sickening wave of racism and discrimination against Windrush Brits because they were warned.

Diane Abbott warned them during the parliamentary debate, but they ignored her. Immigration and anti-racism charities warned them from the beginning that these policies would end up stoking racism, but they ignored them. Even the Residential Landlords Association warned that turning landlords into unwilling and untrained immigration enforcement officers would lead to racist discrimination, but the Tories and "centrists" ignored these people too.

But if Tories and "centrists" are talented at one thing in particular, it's completely ignoring concerns over their own policies (just look at the fact that they're all still pushing ruinous austerity dogma even after 9 years of such wanton devastation that even right-wing economic organisations like the IMF and OECD turned their backs on the austerity ideology years ago).

So every time you see the mainstream media fixating on their agenda of portraying the Labour left (who were amongst the tiny minority who actually voted against Theresa May's racist Hostile Environment in 2014) as a hotbed of racism, just remember that the Tories have actually been condemned in court of law for ignoring all the warnings and imposing racist policies that have breached the human rights of thousands of real people.

Just remember that the mainstream media agenda of smearing the Labour left will always take precedence over reporting the observable reality that Theresa May and the Tories are a proven bunch of racists who ignored all the warnings and deliberately implemented unlawfully racist policies.

 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 knows exactly what she's doing

A few months ago a despicably dishonest Independent article misrepresenting Jeremy Corbyn's  speech to the EFF (the British manufacturing lobby) went mega-viral on Twitter as tens of thousands of anti-Corbyn ranters gleefully spread it around because that pack of lies, distortions and ludicrously misrepresented selective quotations confirmed their biases.

Today Theresa May has given an utterly risible speech to the CBI (the British business lobby) in which she whitewashed the Tories' ruinous track record in government, casually ignored her own appalling track record at the Home Office, and spread dog-whistle anti-European xenophobia in the hope of appealing to the fickle extreme-right ultranationalist blue-kip demographic who are apparently deserting her party in droves.

Theresa May whitewashed the devastating impact of ideologically driven Tory austerity dogma for the last eight years, she championed the tax-dodging, job-destroying Corporate behemoths like Amazon who are wrecking high streets up and down the country by using their artificial tax advantage to undercut tax-paying businesses, she praised the gig economy, she misrepresented the Tories' despicable track record of imposing the longest sustained decline in workers wages since records began, and she openly bragged about cutting the deficit by 80% in 8 years when they had originally bragged that they'd have completely eliminated it in less than five years.

But the most despicable and duplicitous aspects of her speech came near the beginning where she whitewashed her disgraceful personal record at the Home Office, spread ludicrous fairy stories about the kind of immigration system the UK will supposedly have if her hard-right shambles of a Brixit deal somehow avoids failing at the first hurdle, and uttered a desperately cynical anti-European sound bite designed to whip up hatred against Europeans in general, and most specifically Europeans who have come to the UK under their European Freedom of Movement rights.

When Theresa May publicly accuses EU citizens who have come to live and work in the UK of "jumping the queue" she knows exactly what she's doing. She's deliberately appealing to the basest instincts of the extreme-right ultranationalist Blue-kip mob who were instrumental in allowing her and her horrible Tory mates to cling onto power by their fingertips in 2017.

Theresa May and her advisers know that the Blue-kippers are abandoning the Tory party in droves because Theresa May's hard-right job-destroying power grab of a Brexit deal is nowhere near bonkers or destructive enough for their tastes, so she's attempting to woo them back with crude hate-mongering caricatures of European migrants as a queue-jumping job-nicking threat (rather than people who are on average far more likely to be hard-working net contributors to the UK economy than the British-born)!

When she creates the narrative that "unskilled" EU citizens are unfairly queue-jumping ahead of skilled workers from elsewhere, she's completely ignoring the fact that £millions worth of crops have already been rotting in the fields because of the hostile environment she's created towards EU workers is driving them away before Brexit has even happened, and because neither British workers, nor skilled workers from outside the EU want to do that kind of back-breaking low paid seasonal work.

And by creating this crude 'job-nicking' caricature she's ignoring the fact that aside from agriculture, other hugely significant sectors of the UK economy like manufacturing, health care, and the leisure industry rely heavily on EU workers too, meaning her Brexit shambles would be a disaster for these sectors too.

By painting EU workers as 'queue-jumpers' who have cheated their way into Britain, she's once again distracting from her own appalling track record by inviting the blue-kip mob to focus their hate on the 3 million EU citizens living in Britain.

Additionally Theresa May has created a bizarre fantasy of what immigration would look like under her Brexit deal. She claims that "instead of a system based on where a person is from, we will have one that is built around the talents and skills a person has to offer".

But her track record in the Home Office paints a very different picture. Take the way Theresa May made it her personal mission to chase foreign students out of Britain when all the economic and academic experts tried to warn her that it was a damaging mistake. Take the way she fixated on cutting immigration to below 100,000 regardless of the skills and talents of the people in question. Take the way she introduced draconian and discriminatory new immigration thresholds to block entry of non-EU spouses of British citizens regardless of their skills, talents, or earning potential. And take the way she massively expanded "Golden Visa" schemes to allow mega-rich immigrants (Russian oligarchs, corrupt Chinese officials, the families of African dictators, Middle Eastern oil barons) to buy British residency regardless of where they sourced the £millions they've been buying their way in with.

The only way anyone could possibly believe that Theresa May is motivated by a desire to make the UK immigration system fairer is by ignoring her hate-mongering rhetoric, and mindlessly taking her at her word that she wants to make the system fairer rather than examining her proven track record of making the UK immigration system way more unfair, corrupt, and illogical than it ever was before!

So have the Twitterati reacted with fury to Theresa May's vainglorious, deceptive, and downright despicable speech in the way they reacted to the pack of lies and deceptions they gleefully spread about Jeremy Corbyn's industrial policy speech a few months ago?

Of course they haven't.

Many of them are too busy desperately trying to save Theresa May's skin by attacking Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party to give the slightest damn about Theresa May's dangerous hate-mongering rhetoric against the 3 million EU citizens in the UK, about her transparently ridiculous false promises of fairer immigration system, or about her brazen whitewashing of her own track record at the Home Office.

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Theresa May isn't a victim of sexism, she's a perpetrator of it

Sometimes you see a celebrity express a political opinion and you're glad they've used their political platform to raise awareness of important issues (Gary Lineker's support for refugees comes to mind) but often you end up wondering what kind of ridiculous bubble of privilege they're inhabiting that they could have got things so hopelessly backwards (Morrisey's embrace of the extreme-right for example).

Paloma Faith's extraordinary effort to cast Theresa May as a victim of sexism (rather than a perpetrator of it) is one of these Morriseyesque interventions.

A crap comparison

Faith's argument is that the primary motive for people ridiculing Theresa May's dance moves was that she's a woman (rather than the fact that she's an incredibly powerful person demeaning herself as a publicity stunt).

Faith's ridiculous counterpoint to the criticism of Theresa May's dance moves was the absurd argument that "when Tony Blair came out as loving music and being in a rock band everyone said it was cool and great".

Let's just skim over the fact that not everyone thought Tony Blair's dalliance with pop culture was "cool and great" (I certainly didn't) to consider the fact that the real difference between the two things has nothing to do with gender and everything to do with image management competence.

Tony Blair's "Cool Brittania" schtick in the 1990s was every bit as much of a PR stunt as Theresa May's widely ridiculed "dancing queen" entrance to the Tory party conference, just Blair's schtick was executed relatively competently, while Theresa May's attempt to look cool and self-aware was utterly cringeworthy to behold (like a Youtuber who goes viral for doing something absolutely naff, so they keep doing it again and again in a pathetic quest for more attention).

A far more relevant comparison would be with Jeremy Corbyn who was bitterly attacked by The S*n for supposedly dancing at the Cenotaph based on crudely manipulated images of him having an animated conversation with a war veteran who had been photoshopped out of the pictures.

So at least Theresa May actually danced-craply before getting ridiculed for crap dancing, Jeremy Corbyn didn't even dance at all before he was vitriolically lambasted for his supposedly unacceptable dancing.

If there's a bias going on, it's actually the fact that Theresa May gets such an easy ride over her despicable policies and outright lies, simply because she's a Tory. 

Just try to imagine the mainstream media fury had Jeremy Corbyn used public cash to bribe the DUP bigots into propping up his government, deported British citizens to their deaths overseas, quoted a vile Twitter troll in parliament to score cheap political points, deliberately continued selling weapons to war criminals, or sided with all the neo-Nazi parties in the European Parliament in order to support the vile anti-Semitic Orbán government in Hungary.

And if other party leaders like Jeremy Corbyn or Vince Cable decided to crap dad-dance their way onto stage as some kind of ludicrous PR stunt to pretend they're charming entertainers rather than boring politicians, the public would certainly ridicule them for it too.

Theresa May is a misogynist

And then there's Theresa May's despicable track record in government to consider, especially the deliberately sexist policies she's imposed.

Since 2010 Theresa May has been a leading member of the Tory government that has ensured that 86% of the economic burden of Tory austerity dogma has been loaded onto the shoulders of poor and ordinary women.

Mainly-male financial sector gamblers caused the bankers' insolvency crisis, and Theresa May and the Tories have ensured that millions of ordinary women up and down the country were the ones to pay the cost of it.

Then there's Theresa May's own legislation to consider. When she was Home Secretary she introduced a harsh new income threshold for British people bringing non-EU spouses to the UK, but by imposing a single arbitrary figure Theresa May ensured that British men are twice as likely as British women to bring a foreign spouse to the UK.

The arbitrary income threshold also created a massive regional disparity with people in London and the South East far more likely to have sufficiently well-paid jobs to meet the threshold than people in poorer regions like the North East, South Wales, Northern Ireland, or the Highlands of Scotland (where high-pay jobs are harder to come by, but the costs of living are significantly lower).

Theresa May deliberately imposed a system that heavily discriminates against women (especially women in poorer regions of the UK) and in favour of wealthy men.

It's actually offensive to attempt to cast Theresa May as the poor innocent victim of sexism when she's actually a deliberate perpetrator of it.

Extreme identity politics

This effort to rebrand Theresa May as a poor innocent victim of sexism is indicative of the kind of extreme identity politics that has invaded British political discourse in recent decades.

Attempting to dress the perpetrator of numerous grotesquely sexist policies up as a victim of sexism simply because of her gender is a glaring example of not judging a woman by her actions, but just because she's a woman.

When people began ridiculing Theresa May's dance moves I wrote an article detailing loads of the horrific Tory policies that are far more worthy of criticism than her cringeworthy dancing, but when a public figure does something utterly absurd people are obviously going to criticise and ridicule them no matter what their gender.

Ignoring Theresa May's track record of imposing incredibly harmful sexist legislation in parliament to cast her as a poor innocent victim of sexism because of this public derision is actually sexist in itself because it's a demand that Theresa May be exempted from both ridicule of her ludicrous behaviour and criticism of her own sexist political track record, simply because she's a woman.

Why should Theresa May get a free pass on the sexist policies she's imposed on millions of British women?

And why on earth should a demonstrable misogynist get sympathy and displays of solidarity when members of the public ridicule her absurd, demeaning and cringeworthy behaviour, simply because she's a woman?

 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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