Welcome to the idiocracy!

Last week I wrote an article detailing the extraordinary bad faith tactic of Performative Stupidity, which is the increasingly prevalent journalistic method of attacking something, not by detailing it and then highlighting criticisms, but by simply pretending to be too stupid to understand it!

This week I've come across the most glaring example yet of this Performative Stupidity dumbing-down of political discourse, which takes the form of a Tweet that implies that any policy that takes more than three words to explain is somehow inferior to policies which can be expressed in three words or fewer, or "less" as the supposedly award-winning journalist puts it.

The intended take away being that super-simple policies for dealing with massively complex and divisive issues are credit-worthy, while anything that takes more than three words to explain is open to derision!

Labour's Brexit policy

Labour's Brexit strategy really isn't that difficult to understand. Here it is again:

1. Prevent Tory No Deal chaos and economic ruination. 

2. Remove the Tories (who created all this Brexit chaos in the first place) from power. 

3. Renegotiate the Withdrawal Agreement (Customs Union, Single Market access, no border in Ireland, protection of workers' rights, cooperation on environment, science, and security). 

4. Put the renegotiated deal to a confirmatory referendum with remain as an option, meaning that there are sensible (non-meltdown) options on either side.

Of course this is more than three words, because it's rather difficult to cram a 4-point action plan into "three words or less [sic]" isn't it?

But if you did insist, for some unfathomable reason, on dumbing it down to just three words, you could say "Final Say Referendum" - but why on earth would you even want to do that?

Labour's policy is to offer representation to both sides of the Brexit divide in a way that avoids completely trashing the economy if people once again reject the option to Remain (sorry 27 words is far too many for my tiny little journalist brain to comprehend, how about you cut it down to 3 and I'll have another go!).

But then you look at the Lib-Dem and Tory Brexit policies that are supposedly so wonderful and virtuous for being reducible to just three words, and they really should be setting off all kinds of alarm bells, at least for the kind of journalist who uses the traditional method of actually scrutinising things, rather than the new method of pretending not to understand them.

Lib-Dems: Revoke Article 50

Two questions about this spring immediately to mind.

The first is what the hell happened to the Lib-Dem policy of demanding another referendum?

Demanding a People's Vote referendum has been the Lib-Dem shtick for the last couple of years, but now they've transitioned to a completely different policy, of revoking article 50 with no democratic mandate from the people via a referendum, and there's no criticism from the mainstream media hack pack whatever!

Every time Labour has even slightly modified or reworded their Brexit stance it's been met with a barrage of mainstream criticism and derision, but the Lib-Dems publicly tear up their entire policy and flip-flop to something entirely different, and they actually get praised on the basis that the new policy can be summed up in just three words!

The second glaringly obvious question is how?.

How do the Lib-Dems intend to revoke Article 50 when a parliamentary majority to revoke Article 50 with no democratic mandate from the people is literally impossible in the current parliament, and vanishingly unlikely in the next parliament?

These are the kind of questions that award-winning journalists should be asking, rather than evaluating policies purely on how few words they can be reduced to.

Tories: Leave October 31st

There are plenty of questions any reasonable journalist could ask about this, but I'll just stick to the two most glaringly obvious ones.

How do the Tories ensure the UK leaves the EU on October 31st when they've thrown away their parliamentary majority by hoofing 20+ Tory MPs out of the party for daring to defy Dominic Cummings, when they've completely lost control of the parliamentary order paper, and when they've lost every single parliamentary vote since Johnson became Prime Minister?

Just like the Lib-Dems, it's easy having simple ambitions. But without a realistic plan of action for how you actually achieve them, what are they actually worth?

The other glaring question is why?

Why the rush to leave on a specific date, even if the consequences of leaving in such a rush are likely to be extremely catastrophic (by your own government's internal Yellowhammer impact assessment).

Little children know to wait for a safe opportunity to cross the road rather than rushing out across busy traffic because an arbitrary amount of time has passed, but somehow the Tory government don't, and furthermore their "run in front of traffic" Brexit strategy is apparently praiseworthy for the fact it can be condensed to just three words!

Welcome to the idiocracy!

Any journalist with any kind of integrity would seek to present all of the main parties' Brexit strategies, and then subject them to criticism. But the current trend is to either pretend to be too stupid to understand Labour's position, or to praise other parties' policies, not because they make any kind of pragmatic sense, but because they can be simplified into the simplest of simple sound bites!

Is the best measure of a policy whether it is achievable from a pragmatic perspective, or how few words it can be expressed in?

Apparently the new answer to this question is the word count!

And the guy responsible for this deliberate stupidification of British political discourse isn't just some Twitter idiot mouthing off, he's an apparently award-winning Financial Times journalist.

If award-winning journalists at one of Britain's most prestigious newspapers is engaging in this kind of ludicrous performative stupidity, then it just goes to show how broken our mainstream media is.

We want super-simple solutions to massively complicated and multi-faceted problems or we're going to pretend to be too stupid to understand is a corrosive and irresponsible bad faith stance in its own right.

But in light of the fact that Brexit was caused by exactly this kind of simple solution (quit the EU) to complex problems (austerity, failing public services, unaffordable housing, negative wage growth, soaring utility bills, NHS queues, over-crowded schools, vandalised social safety net ...), it's illustrative of the fact that award-winning journalists at the top of their god-damned profession haven't even learned one of the most basic and salient lessons from this whole Brexit debacle: "sometimes things are a lot more complex than a slogan you can fit on the side of a bus, let alone into "three words or less [sic]".

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

OR

If they want to fight a culture war, Brexit-sceptics urgently need to up their game

One of the most infuriating things about covering this interminable Brexit shambles is the stultifying 'groupthink' that infests the Remain movement.

It's impossible to count the number of times I've been insuted and accused of being a Brexiteer for questioning the strategy of investing so much time and effort in demanding an incredibly risky "another roll of the dice" referendum with the Tories still in power, and nothing whatever having been done to clamp down on electoral cheats, political liars, and social media dark ads since Remain lost the previous referendum in 2016.

Despite all the smears and abuse from the 'groupthink' mob I actually hold a significantly firmer stance against the Brexit chaos than a lot of them seem to, believing that Article 50 should be revoked (as per the ECJ ruling that the UK can revoke it at any time) and that another referendum should only ever be held under a specific set of circumstances:

1. The Brexiteers must come up with a detailed manifesto detailing how they would seek to implement Brexit (Single Market? Customs Union? Protection of workers' rights? Protection of environmental laws? Consumer protections? Security co-operation? Negotiating objectives for a post-Brexit trade deal with the EU. Plans for the Irish border issue. What if Scotland vote's against it again? ...) that they can be held to account on. 

2. Electoral laws must be strengthened to clamp down on electoral cheats and liars with substantial fines, bars from political office, and jail terms for the worst offenders. 

3. New regulations must be introduced to clamp down on social media dark ads.

The problem of course is that the trendy Remainer 'groupthink' is to continue demanding another referendum now, so my views that the absolute priority should be preventing a catastrophic "no deal" meltdown, and that another referendum with undefined options on the ballot is an insanely risky strategy are considered unacceptable thought crime by a significant swathe of Remainers, who spit hate at me and even accuse me of being a Brexiteer because I won't mindlessly go along with the insanely risky gamble that they insist is the best approach.

However with the impending prospect of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, surely it would be sensible for these another referendum now advocates to accept that their dream of a do-or-die, clash of civilisations culture war of another referendum is becoming vanishingly unlikely, and stop throwing even more energy and resources into demanding something that's just not going to happen?

But "sensible" just isn't in a lot of these people's natures.

From their spreading of delusional fantasies that pre-2016 Britain was some kind of magnificent utopia, to spitting hate at people who are even more sceptical about Brexit than they are for the heresy of thinking that an "another roll of the dice" referendum with the Tories still in charge is actually a terribly risky idea; from refusing to critique austerity and its living standards-trashing role in causing the Brexit backlash in the first place, to arrogantly sneering at left-behind communities like Morecambe; a lot of this behaviour is strategically inept, dangerously counter-productive, and about as far from "sensible" as it's possible to get.

And "sensible" simply doesn't take into account the sunk costs fallacy either.

In order to switch from Another referendum now to Revoke Article 50 and no more undefined options on ballots ever they'd have to admit that huge amounts of the time and effort they expended on their People's Vote hysteria were essentially wasted, when they should have seen sense months ago and switched to Revoke Article 50 after it become absolutely obvious that Theresa May and the Tories had made an absolute mess of the Brexit negotiations.

Even though the looming spectre of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister by default means their another referendum now objective is further away than it's ever been, the temptation for them will obviously to continue chucking away even more time, effort, and resources rather than admit that it was a mistake, and move on to a more coherent and less risky strategy.

You only need to look at how the Brexiteers have worked tirelessly to move away from the "we can be like Norway" and "only a madman would quit the Single Market" positioning of the 2016 referendum to the "no deal" militancy of today to understand that Brexit-sceptics need to adopt an equally firm position in response in the face of this ever intensifying ideological fanaticism.

If you're absolutely set against any kind of Brexit compromise as a strategy to ensure that a ruinous "no deal" meltdown can't happen, then you really need to take something solid into the culture war you're determined to provoke, rather than some pathetic wishy-washy "let's play again in the rigged game we lost at last time" nonsense.

Brexit-sceptics shouldn't be demanding a re-roll of the dice under the exact same circumstances they lost the last time, they should be demanding revocation of Article 50 because of the unbelievably shambolic mess the Brexiteers have made of their own damned project, and stipulations to ensure that any future referendums are conducted fairly, and with clearly defined options rather than vague objectives on the ballot.

Anything less is just doomed-to-fail weakness in the face of the extreme ideological militancy of "no deal" fanaticism.

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

OR

People's Vote are just as willing to use deceptive propaganda as the Brextremists

Despite all the numpties trying to pretend that Labour's Brexit position is too complicated to understand, it was always a quite simple strategy of trying to de-escalate and de-toxify Brexit by reconciling Leave and Remain instead of picking either the 52% or the 48% and tailoring their policies exclusively for them.

With Labour's vote share collapsing to leave them in 3rd place between the (exclusively 52%) Brexit Party and the (exclusively 48%) Lib-Dems, it's quite clear that people don't actually want Brexit reconciliation.

It doesn't matter how much it actually makes sense to try to de-escalate Brexit so that it doesn't continue degenerating towards an outright culture war between the two polar extremes, there's no way to pretend that it's popular.

Compromise and reconciliation are deeply unsexy political concepts when most people seem to want the certainty of picking one side or the other and naively hoping that their side doesn't end up on the losing side of the culture war they're gearing up for.

If I was forced to pick a side in a do-or-die showdown between the two polar extremes of the debate I'd obviously end up on the Remain side because "no deal" is such an unbelievably stupid concept that would trash our economy and absolutely burn all of the UK's negotiating capital the instant we did it.

But there's no denying that the Remain faction is just as riddled with ideological militants, opportunists, and outright liars as the opposite end of the spectrum.

The People's Vote graph in the article header is proof of how far these people will go to deceive.

After months of relentlessly misrepresenting Labour's position (oppose "no deal", repeatedly oppose Tory Brexit, push for a general Election, propose a fail safe least harmful version of Brexit, support calls for a final say referendum) as nasty pro-Brexit fanaticism in order to drive voters into the arms of the Lib-Dems, they're suddenly claiming Labour as a Remain party because it's the only possible way to make it look like the pro-Brexit parties (Brexit Party, Tories, UKIP) didn't win a bigger vote share than the exclusively Remain parties.

The weirdest thing about this kind of deception is the cultish myopia of it.

It's not designed to deceive Leave voters into change their mind, nor to deceive the undecided.

It's pure self-delusion aimed at convincing their own tribe that they won a clear majority, when the only way to create this deception is to suddenly appropriate the support of the very people they've been relentlessly misrepresenting, attacking and abusing for over a year in order to erode their support and pinch their voters!

An herein lies the danger of an another roll of the dice referendum.

It doesn't matter how much you dislike the Brextremists, it's obvious that their propaganda is clearly and unambiguously designed to win people over to their cause. They won the 2016 referendum, and Farage's Brexit Party just stormed these Euro elections. No matter how much we may dislike it, their propaganda is effective, and it clearly works.

Even though Remain lost in 2016 and they've got a lot of convincing to do in order to make up the ground, People's Vote propaganda like this isn't designed to win people over at all, it's purely self-righteous reassurance for the echo chamber.

The only people retweeting this blatantly deceptive graph are clearly on a Remainer self-delusion trip.

They don't want to admit that they've wasted the last three years so badly that despite all the Brexit chaos, and uncertainty, and deadlock, the exclusively 52% parties still somehow bagged a bigger vote share than the exclusively 48% parties.

The Tories have done such a spectacular job of ballsing Brexit up that Remain should be winning the argument all over the country by now, but their absolute obsession with a sore-loser referendum, their mobilisation behind the pro-austerity Lib-Dems who helped the Tories cause Brexit in the first place, and their spreading of absurd self-deception nonsense like this clearly answers the question of how Brexit Party swept the vast majority of English and Welsh constituencies.

It turns out that an awful lot of Remainers aren't even remotely interested in reaching out to left-behind communities to explain that it was domestic government policies like neoliberalism, privatisation mania, austerity fanaticism, wage repression, public service cuts, infrastructure under-investment, and vandalism of the social safety net that caused the living standards collapse, not immigrants and the EU.

In fact they're so uninterested in winning this argument they've actually flocked to support the pro-austerity, pro-privatisation Lib-Dem neoliberals, which is all very well in the mainly-metropolitan and well-to-do patches of the country that never experienced the full force of ruinous Tory austerity, but Remainers actively rewarding the austerity-enablers makes winning the argument even harder in the much more numerous places that were wracked by austerity fanaticism, and just turned out in much bigger numbers to vote for the far-right Brexit Party Faragists.
These people aren't interested in effective campaigning at all, all they're interested in is smugly congratulating themselves that they were right all along.

If they wilfully refuse to deal with the issues and injustices that caused Brexit in the first place in preference for spreading ridiculously misleading infographics designed to convince themselves that they won when they're still somehow losing, then they're never going to triumph in the "another roll of the dice" referendum they've invested so much of their time, effort, and resources on demanding are they?

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

OR

Why are people so keen for another roll of the dice in a rigged game?

I'm about as Brexit-sceptic as it's possible to be, having argued from the beginning that a "make it up as we go along" Tory Brexit would end up in chaos. However this doesn't prevent me from identifying problems with the campaign to stay within the EU, especially when it comes to strategy.

People on the Remain side of the national Brexit division that the Tories created in 2016 by exploding their internal party squabble onto the entire nation have poured a vast amount of political energy into demands for another referendum, and they've been successful to the point that 37% of people see Brexit getting revoked after Remain win another referendum as their preferred option.

The problem of course is that just because you personally want the dice to roll one way, doesn't mean that they are guaranteed to fall the way you want them to, especially if you know perfectly well that the game is rigged against you.

We know that an absolute bombardment of targeted social media dark ads helped Leave win the 2016 referendum, and we know that the Electoral Commission has done literally nothing to regulate online campaigning in the last three years.

We know that Brexiteers lied through their teeth and financially cheated in order to get the Leave outcome they wanted, and we know that the Electoral Commission has done literally nothing to bring in proper punishments (bars from public office, significant fines, jail time) for political liars and cheats.

We know that the almost complete lack of political opposition to ruinous Tory austerity policies in 2015 (wage repression, public service cuts, vandalism of the social safety net, catastrophic under-investment in infrastructure spending) that were trashing our living standards ended up creating the huge wave of public anger that drove the Brexit vote marginally over the winning line in 2016, and we know that Tory austerity fanaticism is still trashing people's living standards, and that many on the Remain side of the debate are still vocal austerity advocates!

And now thanks to Facebook's decision to bring in their own bespoke political accountability rules and the Guardian's sifting through the data, we know that a network of shady fake-grassroots hard-Brexit outfits have spent £1 million on targeted Facebook propaganda promoting "no deal" Brexit.

To put this fake grassroots "no deal" spending in perspective, it's more than the Facebook spending of every single political party in the UK combined in the same period.

There is absolutely no evidence to support the assumption that another referendum would be conducted any more fairly than the last one, and in fact we've got irrefutable evidence that shady "no deal" enthusiasts are already spending vast amounts of money on campaigning for a ruinous hard-right Brexit before the confirmatory referendum has even been announced.

Yet a significant proportion of the political class, and 37% of people in general choose to believe that the best way out of this Brexit farce is another roll of the dice in the rigged game, with virtually no consideration of the risk that the loss of another referendum would definitely end up creating an inescapable double-mandate for a ruinous hard-right Tory-administered Brexit.

I can understand the principle that the issue should be put back to the British people so they can decide the final outcome, I've got no problem with the principle of a confirmatory vote.

What I've got a problem with is the naive optimism and lack of practical action from those who have decided that another roll of the dice is the best solution to this farcical Tory Brexit mess.

If this really is the best solution they can come up with, how is it possible that so little effort has been expended on pushing for electoral reforms to ensure that the same electoral cheats, liars, and dark ad propagandists don't prosper just as much in the next referendum as they did in the last one?

If another referendum is really the best solution then why has so little effort been expended on explaining to people in left-behind communities that it was ruinous Tory austerity policies that trashed their living standards, not immigrants and the EU?

Compare the minuscule amount of real practical effort expended on ensuring the cheats don't prosper again, and on outreach to left-behind communities with the vast tides of bile, and vitriol, and outright lies that have been spewed by militant Remainers all over social media (especially by #FBPE echo-chamber dwellers on Twitter) and the catastrophic misdirection of political energy is obvious.

The practical course of action would have been to work hard to ensure a more level playing field, and to repeatedly unpick the central lie of the 2016 leave campaign (that immigrants and the EU were to blame for the dire consequences of Tory austerity policies).

But the chosen course of action by an awful lot of militant Remain campaigners has been screeching at, patronising, and insulting the very demographics that they desperately need to convince to support Remain in the next referendum (2016 Leave voters, the left, the working class, people from left-behind communities ...)!

The desperate lack of pressure to reform the outdated electoral laws that allowed the last referendum to degenerate into such a cesspit of misinformation, fear-mongering, deception, false promises, dodgy online ads, lies, and outright cheating suggests that a lot of another referendum campaigners have simply accepted that the next one is going to be just as much of a shit-show as the last one.

And all the hyper-partisan shrieking, and vitriol, and lies from the militant Remainers suggest that a significant proportion of Remainers see adoption of the same grotesque tactics that Leavers used to win in 2016 as their only hope.

The problem of course is that the hard-right have way more practice at this kind of dishonest partisan politics than social progressives and the left. They know who they need to direct the hate, and blame, and abuse at in order to secure the outcome they want. A lot of militant Remainers are so strategically clueless that they've spent the last few years spitting hate, and blame, and derision at the very people they need to convince in order to avoid another referendum defeat!

If the behaviour of militant Remainers is so toxic that it's putting off their Brexit-sceptic allies like me, just imagine how it plays with people who are suspicious of their pro-EU message?

Like I said before, I can see the idealistic desire for the people to have another say before our Brexit fate is sealed, but consideration of the practical issues, like the total inaction on electoral reform, the continuation of living standards-wrecking Tory austerity fanaticism, and the strategically inept and blatantly counter-productive rhetoric of so many on the Remain side, all add up to a serious concern that Leave are highly likely to win again.

Pushing for another roll of the dice when you know the game is still rigged against you, and that nothing has been done to unpick the central blame-shifting lie of your opponents, and that your side are woefully inept at utilising the kind of hyper-partisan political rhetoric your opponents won with last time, and that failure this time around will absolutely cement the kind of ruinous hard-right Brexit you oppose so much, obviously makes your strategy a huge gamble.

In fact it's easily just as much of a gamble as David Cameron took back in 2016 based on the arrogant assumption that he simply couldn't lose isn't it?

A lot of the politicians and campaigners pushing for this gamble are so arrogant and self-righteous that they refuse to even entertain the possibility that they could lose again, and there's absolutely no doubt that if they do, they'll immediately cast around for other people to pin the blame on (Jeremy Corbyn, lefties, the working class, people from deprived areas, and maybe even the Tories who created this Brexit mess in the first place this time around!).

But the real blame will lie with them for focusing so much of their energy on getting another gamble in a blatantly rigged game, when they should have spent so much more of their energy on combating the actual root causes of 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.

OR

Why are the British political class such reckless gamblers?

2016

When David Cameron promised an EU referendum in order to stop the flow of Tory party MPs and voters defecting to UKIP he knew that he was gambling the entire future of the UK in return for a bit of short-term party political advantage, but he did it anyway because he was blindly confident that he was going to win.

We all know what happened next, and it's pretty obvious why. It's because David Cameron was a crap gambler.

In 2014 he agreed to a Scottish independence referendum and then watched on in horror as the SNP turned the thing into a massive 9 month long grassroots campaign that brought the Yes vote a hell of a lot closer than anyone was expecting.

So Cameron's strategy for his EU referendum gamble was to squeeze the whole thing into as short a time span as possible in order to keep the debate as quick and ill-informed as possible.

What Cameron failed to factor in when he compressed the debate like this was that unlike the Scottish independence referendum where the mainstream media and Westminster establishment class were firmly on his side, in his EU referendum the right-wing propaganda rags and half of his own MPs were agitating for Brexit.

Cameron lost because he was too stupid to understand that he was playing a completely different game to the last one, and that the rushed campaign he organised ended up massively favouring the loudest and most dishonest players, and gave little time and space for actual experts to be heard.

And what made it even worse is that Cameron didn't bother to compel the Brexiteers to compose a Brexit manifesto to which they could be held should he lose, or even draw up the skeleton of a contingency plan in case people didn't vote the way he told them to.

Cameron was such a reckless gambler that he didn't even realise that he rigged his own game against himself, and outright refused to even consider the possibility that he might lose.

2019

So we're all clear about how how David Cameron gambled away Britain's future in 2016, so let's move forward to 2019 where we have Remainer politicians like Vince Cable agitating for another referendum.

It's absolutely clear that another referendum is simply another roll of the dice. The Tory party is still full of Brexiteer ideologues, the right-wing propaganda rags will still promote Brexit to their audience of millions, and public opinion has barely shifted against Brexit despite 30 months of untrustworthy and brazenly incompetent Brexit floundering from Theresa May and the Tory government.

Additionally we have to consider the Electoral Commission that allowed the 2016 referendum to turn into an orgy of fear-mongering (from both sides), outright lying, and financial cheating. They've not been reformed at all, they have no extra powers than they had before to properly punish the liars and cheaters.

And then we have to consider the most risky element of all from a Remain perspective, the fact that if Theresa May remains in power then she'll have the power to decide the options on the ballot paper, the wording of the options, and the timing of the ballot.

Anyone who imagines she wouldn't use these crucial decisions to maximise Tory party political advantage clearly knows nothing about what the Tory party is, or how it operates.

So the Remainers who are calling for another referendum can see how badly loaded the dice are likely to be if Theresa May gets to run the game, but somehow they still want to play, and they still refuse to consider the dire consequences if they lose.

If they lose their gamble with the nation's future then they will have created an inescapable double-mandate for Brexit, and what's worse is that they'll have left the Tories in charge to administer it.

We all saw how the Tories dealt with the 2008 economic crisis that was triggered by the reckless gambling of their banker mates. They loaded all of the economic burdens on poor and ordinary people through austerity dogma, wage repression, severe social security cuts, public service cuts, and privatisation mania. Meanwhile they protected the wealth of the the mega-rich and even showered the bankers who caused the crisis in the first place with tax cuts and handouts!

Does anyone honestly believe that the Tories wouldn't take exactly the same approach with a Brexit economic crisis?

Does anyone honestly believe that a double-mandate for Brexit wouldn't be used as an excuse for more austerity dogma and wage repression for the masses, and more tax cuts and handouts for the mega rich?

So if the lives and livelihoods of millions are at stake like this, why are the Remainers so desperate to roll the dice again with the Tories still in charge?

The only possible answer is that they're too arrogant to believe in the possibility that they could lose.

"This time we'll make the stupid plebs see sense", "this time they'll vote the way we tell them to", "this time we'll save them from their own stupidity", "this time we'll defeat the combined force of the right-wing propaganda rags with our earnest facts and statistics and unbelievably cringeworthy trampoline jumping escapades".

Another referendum is likely to happen sooner or later, but it's an extraordinarily risky gamble without first removing the Tories who created this entire Brexit mess in the first place, and without scrapping Theresa May's malicious threat of deliberately triggering a "no deal" economic meltdown into the dustbin of history where it belongs.

If these people absolutely insist on playing with loaded dice and then lose, then they'll be even more responsible than David Cameron was for having delivered the ensuing Tory carnage.

Conclusion

In answer to the question I asked at the top of this article, there are many reasons that the British political class are such reckless gamblers that they'd even play with loaded dice without accepting the possibility that they might actually lose.

One of the main reasons is arrogance. They believe in their own righteousness so much that they can't comprehend that there isn't much room for righteousness in a game of dice.

Another reason that gamblers gamble is that it's exciting. The political class love being in campaign mode, appearing on the telly, speaking in front of crowds, the breathless excitement of uncertainty, the adoration of their supporters.

But probably the main reason is that e ery ast one of them is financially insulated from true hardship. They've got hefty parliamentary salaries and gold-plated pensions to fall back on if it all goes wrong.

All the Westminster establishment class have got to lose if their gamble goes wrong is personal pride. They can just say "oops" if it all goes wrong then retire to put their trotters up like David Cameron. Meanwhile it's millions of ordinary people up and down the country who will be the ones who pay the actual costs of suffering, and job losses, and food inflation, and hardship, and death.

The main reason they're so addicted to gambling is that it'll always be ordinary people like you and me who have to pay down their gambling debts when it all goes wrong. And who would say no to free bets at the casino with other people's money?

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

OR

The new Guardian business model: Deceptive headlines to generate rage shares

Corbyn: Brexit would go ahead even if Labour won snap election blares the Guardian headline.

Why is Corbyn saying this unhelpful absolutist nonsense? Surely Labour needs a more nuanced stance on resolving Theresa May's Brexit mess? These were my first responses when I saw the headline, but then I noticed the distinct lack of quotation marks so I did what most of the thousands of people who rage shared the article didn't, and actually read the full article.

Within the first few paragraphs it becomes clear that what Corbyn actually said is very different from Brexit would go ahead even if Labour won snap election. (in fact he isn't quoted saying this anywhere in the article at all).

Corbyn's actual position is that if Labour won a snap election he would go back to Brussels to try to secure a better deal. Corbyn's statement that "you'd have to go back and negotiate, and see what the timetable would be" is clearly completely different to I'm going to force Brexit through regardless.

In fact Corbyn's position here is actually common sense. If he's lobbing Theresa May's shambles of a deal into the dustbin of history (where it belongs) the obvious next step is to speak to the EU negotiators to establish the basics of their position under the new circumstances. Are they prepared to renegotiate now that the government has changed? Are they prepared to renegotiate if Theresa May's Customs Union red line is dropped? Are they prepared to extend the Article 50 deadline to allow time for further negotiations?

Yes, the EU have told Theresa May "no renegotiation" but you'd have to be crackers to think they'd absolutely refuse to renegotiate if the British people voted to reject Tory Brexit and the new Prime Minister came with a new Customs Union proposal (that would certainly help to deal with the tricky Irish border issue).

If they said "no" they'd essentially be telling Britain that we're stuck with the unpopular shambles of a deal that both the British public and the British parliament have rejected, which would be an astoundingly anti-democratic stance.

If you're incredibly generous to the Guardian you could try to argue that Corbyn saying that he'd take the logical step of going to Brussels to talk about the practicalities and timescales of renegotiation is not entirely contradicted by the absolutist position blared out in the article headline, it's more of a distortion than an outright lie.

But then after trawling through 18 paragraphs of the article (including several on the absurd "stupid people" / "stupid woman" distraction) we get to the part that absolutely contradicts the bold absolutist assertion in the article headline.

When asked what Labour's position would be in the case of a second referendum Corbyn answers that "it would be a matter for the party to decide what the policy would be".

Admittedly Corbyn goes on to reiterate his position that his first step would be to see whether the EU would open the door to renegotiation, but how the hell is talking about what Labour's position would be in a second referendum compatible with the absolutist stance from the article headline that "Brexit would go ahead"?

If Corbyn is leaving the door open for a second referendum, and saying that the party's stance would be decided by the (largely pro-Remain) membership, why the hell is the Guardian unambiguously claiming that Corbyn's position is the absolutist stance that Brexit will go ahead regardless?

Why is the content of the article so clearly at odds with the headline?

And why are the crucial details that expose the headline as a lie buried in paragraph 18?

Surely a fairer and more accurate headline might read "Corbyn leaves option of second referendum on the table" or "Corbyn: If EU won't renegotiate, Labour members will decide referendum policy".

But nope, the Guardian chose to run a deceptive headline in the hope of creating a storm of outrage shares like the (admittedly far more despicable and deceptive) mega-viral Independent article earlier in 2018 that grotesquely cherry-picked highly selective quotations out of a Corbyn speech about trade policy to misrepresent what was said as an attack in immigrants.

The Guardian know that the vast majority of people who read the headline won't end up clicking through and reading all the details of what Corbyn actually said. And they also know that an accurate headline wouldn't generate a fraction of the 48,000 (at the time of writing) rage shares on social media, so it's perversely in their commercial interests to publish a deceptive headline in order to maximise the amount of exposure.

If they can ensure far more exposure, and a higher level of clicks through the use of a deceptive headline, why wouldn't they?

The Guardian clearly don't give a damn about further trashing their own reputation through the dissemination of dishonest rage-share click bait headlines.

They're clearly more interested in fuelling the anti-Corbyn bonfire with deceptive headlines than helping the public to understand the reality of what Corbyn actually said.

When a news organisation is prepared to publish deceptive headlines like this it becomes ever clearer that they're not actually trying to report the news, but to create it.

They're not providing reasonably impartial coverage of what was said, they're pushing political propaganda.

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

OR

Another referendum with the Tories still in charge would be a disastrous gamble with the nation's future

Theresa May's Brexit shambles is so hopelessly dead in the water that she's demonstrably terrified of putting it before a parliamentary vote.

In my view the only sensible course of action once it collapses for good is to stop the clock ticking by scrapping the Article 50 deadline by revoking Article 50 in accordance with the ECJ ruling that the UK parliament can do this without fear of retribution, or by asking the EU for an Article 50 extension to sort out Theresa May's mess (as suggested by the Irish taoiseach).

The British public should then be presented with a repeat referendum with two choices: "cancel Brexit" vs "back to square one and try again" but a sensible choice like this is impossible with the Tories.

A second referendum with Theresa May and her incompetent bunch of Tory charlatans still running the show would be an inevitable disaster.

The big (and very obvious) risk with a second referendum (no matter who is in government) is that it could end up creating a completely inescapable double-mandate for Brexit.

If the Tories were to remain in power during a re-run of the 2016 EU referendum, it's beyond obvious that a parade of Tory Brextremist government ministers actively promoting a "no deal" meltdown would add to the ultra-nationalist frenzy and make a repeat Brexit vote significantly more likely.

And what's more if the Tories were still in charge, the Brexit that this double-mandate would set in stone would either be Theresa May's shambolic and almost universally unpopular deal, or an even more ruinous "no deal" meltdown, with absolutely no chance of escape from one or other of these dreadful options.

At least a Labour/progressive coalition government faced with an inescapable double-mandate for Brexit would be able to scrap Theresa May's bad faith threat-based negotiation position into the dustbin of history, go "back to square one", and try for something less harmful to the national interest than either of the absolutely woeful options she's left us with.

The other glaring problem with leaving the Tories in charge during a repeat of the EU referendum is that it would result in a continuation of ruinous Tory austerity dogma whatever the outcome.

It's beyond obvious that we're only in this appalling position in the first place because hard-right Brextremists weaponised the devastating austerity-related collapse in living standards since 2010 by pinning the blame on immigrants and the EU, rather than on the Westminster politicians who were actually to blame for imposing years of wage repression, devastating public service cuts, under-investment in infrastructure and housing, and ideologically driven attacks on the social safety net.

Even if Remain campaigners somehow managed to overcome the disadvantage of Brextremist Tory government ministers openly extolling the virtues of a "no deal" meltdown to overturn the 2016 Brexit vote, what's the point if the Tories who are entirely responsible for the Brexit farce are left free to continue enforcing the very same malicious, poverty-spreading, wage-repressing, public service-trashing ideological nonsense that caused the Brexit vote in the first place?

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

OR