One of the most incredible things about right-wing propaganda is the extraordinarily contradictory nature of it.
Take the resurgence of the anti-Semitism smears against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party as an example.
We all know that these kinds of smears are intended as distraction tactics because the Tories have lost the argument completely when it comes to actual policies, so they resort to smears.
A few weeks ago they were smearing Corbyn as a communist Czech spy, then he was supposedly a Putin stooge for capitalist Russia, then he's a hard-left Marxist again, then he's a Stalinist for demonstrating the leadership skills that Theresa May so badly lacks, and now it's back to anti-Semitism again.
One of the big problems with the right-wing using accusations of anti-Semitism to attack Jeremy Corbyn is that these very same people were perfectly happy to use anti-Semitic tropes to attack Ed Miliband when he was Labour leader.
When anti-Semitism is useful to the Tory purpose of defending the interests of corporations and the mega-rich they're perfectly happy to use it as a weapon to attack a Jewish leader of the Labour Party, but when they're feeling afraid because Jeremy Corbyn's centre-left policies are so popular, they use accusations of anti-Semitism against him to distract people from talking about policy.
Then there's the grotesque history of anti-Semitism within the Tory party itself. When the so-called hard-left stood in solidarity with the Jews, the Irish and the working class to beat Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists at the Battle of Coble Street in 1936, the Daily Mail were telling their readers to join the BUF, propagandising against Britain accepting Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution, and Tory politicians were signing up in droves to secret anti-Semitic pro-Nazi societies called the Right Club and the Anglo-German Link.
Then there's the history of right-wingers using anti-Semitism to attack the left. Until very recently the political right regularly used the anti-Semitic "Jewish global conspiracy" trope to attack the left, using Jewish left-wing figures like Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxembourg, Karl Liebknecht, Ralph Miliband, Noam Chomsky and Bernie Sanders to argue that left-wing politics is actually a Jewish plot to control the world. To seamlessly go from these anti-Semitic attacks against the left to decrying the left as anti-Semitic takes some incredible brass neck.
Then there's the fact that the head of the pro-Corbyn campaign group Momentum is a Jewish guy called Jon Lansman. The right-wingers want people to simultaneously believe in two mutually exclusive pieces of anti-left propaganda. They want the public to fear and despisee Momentum which is led by a Jewish guy, and they want us to hate Labour because it's supposedly an anti-Semitic party!
The only way these two positions can be reconciled is by using the vile anti-Semitic trope of the "self-hating Jew" to dismiss the existence that Lansman and all other Jewish members of the Labour Party. And this is precisely what Theresa May did in parliament. She was desperate to deflect public attention from the devastating impact of Tory cuts to the local government budget that she casually dismissed every single Jewish member of the Labour Party as a bunch of self-hating Jews with her outlandish claim that there is no place for people who oppose anti-Semitism in the Labour Party.
Then there's the fact that the Tories have a very clear strategy of appealing to the hard-right ultranationalist blue-kip demographic who are fleeing the wreckage of UKIP.
Analysis by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research has found that anti-Semitic attitudes are very much more prevalent amongst extreme right-wingers than any other political demographic (see image).
So the Tories are attempting to pull off a truly incredible balancing act. They're working their socks off to attract the deeply anti-Semitic hard-right ultranationalist blue-kippers into the Tory fold (because they know they'll never be able to cling onto power without them) whilst they simultaneously try to smear the political left as a bunch of anti-Semites!
Conclusions
The resurgence of the anti-Semitism smears right before the local elections is a very clear indicator that the Tories really don't want people talking about policy. The reason being that if the debate focused on policy then attention would obviously fall on the catastrophic consequences of the ideologically driven Tory cuts to the Communities and Local Government budget.
The Tories have reversed history to distance themselves from their own party's sickening history of anti-Semitism, and from the anti-Semitic tropes they were perfectly happy to use to attack the left with when Labour had a Jewish leader just a few years ago.
The Tories have incredible cheek to use anti-Semitism smears against the left when their only hope of electoral survival is to attract support from the hard-right ultranationalist blue-kippers, who are demonstrably the most anti-Semitic demographic of all.
Theresa May actually used the profoundly anti-Semitic "self-hating Jew" trope to attack Jewish members of the Labour Party just last week, but the mainstream media apparently don't give the slightest damn about the disgusting spectacle of a non-Jew using an anti-Semitic trope to accuse actual Jewish people of condoning anti-Semitism, even when it's the Prime Minister doing it!
With their history-rewriting, reality-reversing, smear-mongering campaign the Tories are proving one thing beyond doubt. It clearly takes a boundless amount of contempt towards members of the general public to assume that we're so ignorant of history, absurdly gullible, and thoroughly immune to cognitive dissonance that we'd actually fall for their cynical weaponisation of anti-Semitism in order to distract from their own appalling record in government.
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If we set aside our views on Brexit for a moment and try to look at Jeremy Corbyn's decision to sack Owen Smith for publicly criticising Labour's six tests position from a reasonably objective stance, it's obvious that Smith had to go.
Love them or loathe them Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher were strong leaders, as were Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee in the mid 20th Century.
It's inconceivable that any of these strong leaders would ever have allowed a member of their cabinet to publicly defy the party policy to set out their own personal policy in a newspaper article. Any cabinet member who did that, would have been sacked, and rightly so.
The problem of course is that after eight years of shockingly weak leadership under the Tories, people have got used to the government behaving like a total rabble, where gross incompetence is the norm, and with ministers regularly making up policy on the hoof and getting away with it. So when they see a party leader actually imposing discipline it comes as a shock to them.
Things were bad enough under David Cameron, whose tolerance to the incompetence of his ministers was so extreme that George Osborne and Theresa May survived easily despite six years of endlessly missed targets and hopelessly botched legislation, and the even more incompetent Iain Duncan Smith remained unsacked until he chose to betray Cameron by walking out of the government at the most damaging moment possible.
But under Theresa May things have become utterly farcical. We had the former Defence Secretary Michael Fallon announce the off the hoof policy that Britain was abandoning the "Mutually Assured Destruction" stance to announce the policy of Britain being open to using nuclear weapons as attack weapons. Not only did Theresa May not sack Fallon on the spot for announcing such a reckless abandonment of Britain's longstanding nuclear weapons policy, she actually let this insane new policy stand.
Then Fallon's replacement as Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson embarrassed Britain by saying that "Russia should just go away, and shut up". Theresa May is such a weak leader that once again she didn't correct this nonsense with a firm reiteration of the government's actual position, or ask for Williamson's resignation.
Then worst of all there's the Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who even set out his own bespoke "Manifesto for EU Withdrawal" in a 4,000 word essay for the Daily Telegraph. This wasn't just the usual foot in mouth blabbering we've all come to expect from Johnson, it was a deliberate and calculated effort to undermine his own government's Brexit negotiating position.
Does anyone imagine that strong leaders like Thatcher, Blair, Churchill, or Attlee would have just sat back and done absolutely nothing when their own Foreign Secretary publicly undermined the official party position?
Regardless of whether you agree with Boris Johnson's decision to publicly undermine the Tory government by calling for a much harder form of Brexit, or with Owen Smith's decision to break collective responsibility to call for a second EU referendum, it's obvious both needed to be sacked, otherwise we'd end up with rudderless political parties full of ministers who feel entitled to just make up policies as they go along.
The reality of the situation is that Teresa May is such a weak and incompetent leader that she allowed a senior cabinet minister to go completely unpunished for brazenly undermining the official party stance.
Meanwhile Jeremy Corbyn behaved in the way any competent political leader would when one of his shadow cabinet ministers publicly criticises the official stance of their party in a newspaper column, rather than raising his concerns within the shadow cabinet, or through the democratic apparatus of the Labour Party.
The remarkable thing is that Theresa May's display of weakness and incompetence towards Boris Johnson's absurd display of disloyalty barely elicited barely a whisper of criticism from mainstream media hacks.
Then just a few months later we've had to endure howls of outrage from the very same hacks who remained silent about Theresa May's weakness and incompetence after Jeremy Corbyn rightly sacked Owen Smith for timing his attack on the Labour Party position just before the local elections in a calculated effort to do as much damage as possible to Labour's election chances.
It's as if eight years of Tory incompetence has done so much damage to the fabric of the United Kingdom that weakness and poor leadership are now accepted as the standard, and any signs of competence and strong leadership are met with furious condemnation and howls of outrage!
Regardless of our views on the important issues of the day (Brexit, austerity dogma, wage repression, rising poverty, the productivity crisis, NHS and social care funding ...) surely nobody thinks it's right that modern Britain is a place where unmistakably weak leadership goes almost completely uncriticised, while displays of routine political competence are attacked and derided as being somehow shocking and unacceptable?
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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.
The sheer cynicism of the Labour right-wingers never ceases to amaze. The timing of their latest manoeuvres just before the local election campaign doesn't just give their game away, it shows what a ruthlessly self-serving bunch they really are.
Remember Jeremy Corbyn's first set of local elections in 2016 when the right-wing Progress mob planned to use a poor set of results to instigate a leadership challenge, but their plot was foiled when Corbyn managed to hold onto Miliband's best ever set of local election results?
Remember when the coup plotters briefed the Daily Telegraph that they were going to use the Brexit result to get rid of Corbyn whichever side won, then they were stumped when he refused to bow to their anti-democratic plot by resigning, forcing them to run the hapless Owen Smith to stand as the Anyone But Corbyn candidate.
Well this time it's obvious what they're up to. They're going to create as much internal mess as possible in the run up to the 2018 local elections in the hope of creating a poor result for Labour, with the aim of using these poor results as another excuse to oust Corbyn.
Owen Smith coming out and defying the party line (which is that Labour will vote against Tory Brexit if it fails to meet the six conditions laid out by Kier Starmer) is the first blow in a internal wrecking campaign designed to reduce the Labour vote.
They know that in order for this strategy to work hundreds of Labour councillors will have to lose their jobs, and multiple local authorities will need to be ceded to the austerity fixated Tories. But they see these disastrous outcomes as a price worth paying in order to have another stab at getting rid of Corbyn and turning Labour back into a centre-right, pro-austerity, orthodox neoliberal party they want it to be, so that they can hover ever so slightly to the left of the barkingly right-wing Tories and deny the electorate any real economic choice.
The thing that makes this strategy of the right-wing Labour MPs so damned cynical is that that they definitely didn't want to try this kind of electoral own goal tactic at the General Election last year, because they knew that they'd be in danger of losing their own jobs if they conducted an internal wrecking campaign during a General Election.
Pure self-interest was the reason they gave up their coup-plotting for a while, backed Corbyn's fantastic 2017 election manifesto, and actually showed a bit of unity during the election campaign.
Instead of taking the hit themselves, they're brazenly looking to load the consequences of their scheming onto ordinary hard working Labour councillors up and down the country.
The fact is that the victims of this wrecking behaviour won't just be Momentum-backed candidates by a long stretch, it'll be Labour candidates from across the party, including those who support the right-wing Progress "party within a party" too.
Then there are all the innocent members of the public who will have to suffer even more austerity dogma under local Tory rule, because these right-wing MPs want to throw away the chance for Labour to win big because they're far too fixated on their own myopic agenda of getting rid of Corbyn at any cost.
Even Labour members who have serious doubts about Jeremy Corbyn must be able to see how cynical the timing of these moves are. Is anyone gullible enough to believe that Owen Smith only just realised his objections to Keir Starmer's six tests policy now, right when it would do the most harm to Labour's local election chances? The reality is that Smith sat in the Labour shadow cabinet and cynically waited for the most damaging moment to attack the party line, safe in the knowledge it would be other people within the Labour Party who pay the price, not him and the right-wing Progress MPs.
Every single Labour Councillor up for re-election,and every one of the tens of thousands of Labour activists who are gearing up to fight for Labour to win in their local area needs to understand that as far as the Labour right-wingers are concerned, you people are just pathetic disposable little pawns in their power game.
They don't care if you lose your job, or miss your best ever opportunity to serve your local community, or have to suffer another five years of catastrophic Tory rule in your local area. Their priority is having another crack at deposing Jeremy Corbyn, so "fuck you".
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.
Theresa May knows perfectly well that the Islamist tyrants who rule Saudi Arabia have been conducting a brutal campaign of airstrikes in Yemen that have resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people, including over 5,000 children. And she knows that a significant proportion of these airstrikes have been classified as war crimes because they've been carried out against civilian targets and refugees.
Theresa May also knows that the Saudis have been blockading food and medical supplies to the country too, meaning that famine and preventable diseases are rife.
She knows because all of this stuff has been debated in parliament, where her Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson made the grotesque argument that Britian should continue selling the Saudi tyrants the weapons they're committing their war crimes with because if Britain doesn't profit from these war crimes, someone else might.
Yesterday the Saudis carried out yet another air strike in the Ghamer area of Saana, resulting in at least ten civilian deaths including women and children, with several more suffering severe injuries too.
Swathes of the UK mainstream press continue to turn a blind eye to this campaign of Saudi airstrikes against Yemeni civilians, their war crimes, their execution of refugees, and the famine they're creating because this stuff is really inconvenient for Theresa May and the Westminster establishment club who rolled out the red carpet for the Saudi tyrants just a few weeks ago in order to flog them even more weapons to commit these atrocities with.
And even if you're the kind of person who can turn a blind eye to these military attacks against civilians and the use of famine as a military tactic just because the victims are brown people in a far off land, don't forget that Theresa May is still hiding the report into the funding of terrorist activities in the UK that allegedly points the finger at the Saudi tyrants.
Theresa May simply doesn't care about the victims of her actions. She doesn't care about the dead children in Yemen, or those dying from famine and preventable disease, or even that her Saudi mates are suspected of funding terrorism in the UK.
All she cares about is making sure that Britain stays at the top of the list to supply weapons for the Saudi tyrants for them to commit their war crimes with.
And to think that she pretends to be a Christian.
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.
The Daily Mail are whipping up a huge storm of nationalist outrage that their beloved blue passports will be manufactured in France, but if you look at the root cause of this issue it turns out that the Daily Mail and their readers are heavily responsible.
The reason that the production of UK passports was put out to competitive tender in the first place is that the production of passports was privatised in 1996. Before that British passports were produced by a state owned company.
This privatisation was one of the last acts of vandalism of John Major's dead duck Tory administration. And who supported these Tories back into power in 1992 despite knowing all about their obsession with hard-right privatisation dogma?
The Daily Mail and their readers of course.
Then there's all the other Tory privatisation scams the Daily Mail and their readers have enabled through their unyielding support for the hard-right privatisation obsessed ideological dogma of the Tory party.
Here's some of the other stuff the pro-Tory propaganda rags and their Tory-voting readers are responsible for:
- The pre-1997 Tories were bad enough, but the post-2010 Tories are even worse. They don't just hand British infrastructure and services to their private mates and then let them gradually fall into the hands of foreign governments. They've decided to cut out the middle man and flog off our national silver direct to foreign governments. Perhaps the most egregious example being the sale of the GPSS underground aviation fuel pipe network to the governments of Oman and the United Arab Emirates for £82 million, followed immediately by a ten year £237 million contract to use the system we owned until the Tories flogged it off.
All of this Tory economic vandalism puts the passport contract into context.
If having our passports printed overseas is the grotesque affront to our national identity that the Daily Mail are making out that it is, then surely the distribution of our rail services, nuclear expertise, national grid, water supply, and airport fuel supply network are also affronts to our national identity?
But the Daily Mail and their readers have relentlessly backed the political party that inflicted all this crackpot privatisation dogma on our nation. And what's more is that they continually hate-monger against Jeremy Corbyn because he wants to undo the worst of the damage and return core British public services and infrastructure to British ownership.
So if the Daily Mail really wanted to "stand up for Britain" they'd ditch the toxic Tories and throw their weight behind Jeremy Corbyn and his economic repatriation policies.
If they had any sense of perspective at all the Daily Mail (and their readers) should have a good long period of self-reflection about their role in creating the passport situation they're so furious about ...
But we all know that they won't, and that they'll be back to Corbyn-bashing and their outright refusal to describe hard-right Tory privatisation mania as the profoundly anti-British agenda that it actually is.
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.
The Tory party reaction to the Cambridge Analytica scandal is every bit as cynical and opportunistic as you'd expect.
Instead of focusing on the election rigging psychological warfare tools these shady characters have built on the the Facebook data they stand accused of stealing, the Tories are attempting to reframe the whole debate to paint Facebook as the big bad villains, and to promote the Tories' pre-existing agenda of clamping down on Internet freedoms.
In an article for George Osborne's Evening Standard propaganda sheet the Tory Culture minister Matt Hancock has bragged about his plan to "bring an end to the Wild West culture" of social media.
This article makes his Facebook-blaming, responsibility-shifting, censorship-pushing agenda all too clear. Not just by what he says, but also by what he conspicuously fails to say.
Here are some of the many issues that Matt Hancock "forgot" to mention in his "Wild West" article.
One of the reasons the Tories are trying to shift the focus of the blame onto Facebook is really obvious. They recognise that the intimate financial links between the big players in this dodgy election rigging outfit and their own party look terrible, so shifting as much of the blame as possible to Facebook is a simple deflection tactic.
Another reason they're keen to blame Facebook is the £2.1 million they blasted on targeted dark ads.
The Tories outspent Labour by 4:1 on Facebook ads, but their influence on the site was more than negated by a rag-tag bunch of viral left-wing bloggers working on shoestring budgets.
If you'd spent such a huge amount of money in an effort to buy Facebook popularity and ended up getting humbled by a tiny bunch of bloggers who didn't even spend a single penny on buying Facebook ads, you'd be furious too.
Which brings us to what the Tories have in store for Facebook. There's no doubt whatever that the Tories will seek to use this mess to their own advantage, even though the money trail flows right back to the Tory party.
The most likely approach they're going to take is to strong-arm Facebook into clamping down on the freedom that has allowed independent voices to gain popularity by challenging the pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, wage repression pushing, welfare slashing, hard-right political agenda that so often goes completely unchallenged by the mainstream media.
Meanwhile they have absolutely no intention of clamping down on the use of the kind of targeted political dark ads they used extensively during the 2017 general election campaign.
Sensible proposals include updating the existing rules against spreading political lies during elections, a requirement that all political ads be logged with the electoral authorities, and for geographically targeted social media ads to be classified as local election spending.
You'll never hear Tory politicians proposing any of these measures, because all of them would go against their self-interest.
When the Tories say that they want to make the Internet "safe", it's obvious that what they actually mean is that they want to turn social media into another comfortable "safe space" for themselves, where those who challenge the hard-right neoliberal orthodoxy are pushed to the margins. And if they can cynically make use of a crisis that was actually created by their fellow Tories at SCL/Cambridge Analytica to achieve it, all the better for them.
Anyone who paid attention to the bullet points above has got to be able to see that a bunch of Tories promising to keep us safe on the Internet is akin to a skulk of foxes promising to take care of security for your chicken coop.
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.
