How dare we interrupt our Tory 'lords and masters' when they're talking

The majority of our political class live in bubbles of wealth, power, and privilege that most of us could only imagine, swanning around from one lavish and oh-so-important event to another barely ever having to interact with ordinary people (or the lower orders as they tend to think of us).

Last night the Tory establishment class gathered for a speech by Tory Chancellor Philip Hammond at Mansion House, but this time some of the lower orders managed to get in and start making a fuss about climate change (you know, unrestrained capitalism is wrecking the planet, we've got to do something about it before it's too late ... that kind of entirely justifiable point).

The Tory establishment class are used to having things their own way, as they've been for centuries, so they don't take kindly to interruptions, especially when they're busy giving important self-congratulatory speeches about how wonderfully they've been doing overseeing the slowest economic recovery in centuries, the worst period of collapsing workers' wages on record, soaring rates of poverty, collapsing public services, and wanton vandalism of the social safety net.

The impertinence of these Tory safe space-invading protesters was all too much for the Tory MP Mark Field, who furiously leapt from his seat grabbed one of the protesters, violently shoved her against a pillar, and then dragged her away by the back of the neck.

The footage is shocking, and it certainly puts a lot of the right-wing faux outrage over political violence and free speech into clear contrast:

Lobbing milkshake on Nigel Farage generated torrents of 'this terrorism is the death of democracy' outrage.

A crap joke by a comedian was dressed up as 'incitement to political violence'.

And every time a right-wing hate preacher gets themselves kicked off a social media platform for breaking the community standards it's hailed as another example of 'the death of free speech'.

But when a powerful Tory MP and government minister literally attacks a woman and drags her out of the room for daring to interrupt when her Tory 'lords and masters' were speaking, and suddenly it's 'he did the right thing' and 'she was asking for it'!

The outrage only ever goes one way, until the violence and repression of dissent comes from their side, they're suddenly making excuses for it!

But the worst thing of all isn't Mark Field's display of elitist violence against political dissent, nor is it the naked hypocrisy of right-wing faux outrage about violence and free speech, it's the fact that nobody else in the entire room full of Tory toffs sought to intervene, or to even tell him to stop.

As far as the room was concerned this violent and repressive response to political dissent wasn't even vaguely shocking.

It's bad enough seeing ugly bile-spewing right-wing Twitter trolls banging on about how the protester got what she deserved, but the absolute non-reaction of the rest of the Tory toffs in the room as one of their own behaved in this atrocious manner tells you that they have the same mindset as the Tory Twitter trolls.

Of course they're far too refined to overtly blabber it out on Twitter in the hope of winding up social liberals and lefties, but their silence and non-reaction speaks louder than words.

These people weren't outraged because they simply saw nothing to be outraged about.

And these arrogant elitist toffs are the people we've let rule over us for the last nine years.

No wonder the country is in such an absolute mess.

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OR

Exulansis

One of the entries in the fake Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is the made up term "exulansis" which is described as "the tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it".

When it comes to British politics this feeling is particularly apt, given the glaring disconnect between what the mainstream media focus on, and what millions of us experience in our daily lives.

The IPPR estimate that 130,000 British citizens have been driven into early graves as a result of Tory austerity cuts to health and social care services, and the government's own figures admit that literally thousands of disabled people have dies within weeks of being declared "fit for work" by the Tory disability denial system.

Even if these victims had an average of just two loved ones, that's well over a quarter of a million people who have suffered tragic personal loss at the hands of the state. But if you look at the mainstream media output, they barely mention it (the BBC even deliberately buries austerity death figures) in favour of whatever the talk of Westminster bubble is, which is currently the ridiculously undemocratic Tory leadership contest which utterly dominates every single news broadcast and politics show.

Aside from all the deaths, Tory austerity has caused the slowest economic recovery in Centuries and vast amounts of suffering: Soaring food bank dependency, collapsing public services, millions of children growing up in dire poverty despite living in working households, workers trapped in exploitative Zero Hours Contracts and rip-off gig economy jobs. ever more victims of violent crime after the Tories scrapped 21,000+ police and gutted police funding, graduates trapped by vast completely unpayable student loan debts on extortionate inflation+3% repayment terms, the worst sustained collapse in the value of workers' wages since records began, huge NHS waiting lists, especially for mental health services that have been stripped down to the bare bones, millions of sick and disabled people living in fear of the next disability denial assessment aimed at stripping them of their social security payments and forcing them onto the dole queue ...

But all we hear about on every BBC News and politics show is this ridiculous, and brazenly anti-democratic Tory beauty pageant.

Day, after day, after day of the Tory candidates whitewashing their own demonstrable culpability in all of this suffering, and never held to account over their utterly abysmal track record in government (every single one of these men served in Theresa May's cabinet), nor their relentless smears against Jeremy Corbyn.

And this is where the feeling of "exulansis" comes in.

We want someone to represent our feelings; to hold those responsible for our suffering to account for their crimes against us, but the mainstream media class are almost entirely incapable of doing this.

This class of people are almost entirely insulated from the horrors of austerity Britain.

They're on six and seven figure salaries. They have secure homes and comfortable lives. Nobody is snatching food out of their children's mouths or threatening their residency in the UK. They don't rely on the social safety net that the Tories have been vandalising, nor the public services the Tories have driven into the ground. If there's an outrageous queue for the NHS medical service they need, then they can just go private.

The biggest concern or inconvenience that Tory austerity fanaticism has caused them is probably the fact that their bins collection might have been changed from weekly to fortnightly as a result of unprecedented Tory cuts to the local government budget.

And the majority of the politicians these people are supposed to be holding to account are their well-to-do chums with the same comfortable lifestyles and the same privileged backgrounds (wealthy parents, exclusive private schools, Oxbridge, old school ties opening doors to job opportunities us proles could only ever dream of ...).

So when it comes to the ruinous consequences of austerity, mainstream media hacks often come across as visibly bored by it, like it's just the pointless preaching of lefties distracting attention away from the much more important task of regurgitating the latest gossip and groupthink from the Westminster bubble.

Austerity fanaticism barely affects them, so they don't simply care about it, or accept it as an important issue, or recognise the crucial role this disastrous hard-right fanaticism has played in reducing our nation to this shambolic state.

They just see talk of austerity and its dire consequences as an irritating distraction from their beloved Westminster tittle-tattle and the Tory beauty parade they're all so obsessed with right now.

This indifference tells us that the system doesn't care about us. That the people administering the system don't care about us. That the people tasked with holding the system administrators to account don't care about us.

All they care about is the niche concerns of their own exclusive social class, and it definitely shows.

And that's how millions upon millions of us are left feeling "exulansis" at the state of politics, because virtually nobody covering it is even remotely capable of relating to the horrifying real world consequences of the policies enacted by their own social class against people like us that they consider to be beneath them.

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OR

How are "centrists" fine with this demeaning and degrading language?

"Centrist" hack Suzanne Moore has written a truly execrable article for the Guardian whining that Jeremy Corbyn hasn't got any women in his inner circle.

The weirdest thing is that Jeremy Corbyn's shadow cabinets have demonstrably been the most gender-balanced in history, with incredible and capable women in key positions, many of whom would never have been given a chance at the top table had the pro-austerity pro-privatisation orthodox neoliberal "centrists" managed to maintain their grip on the party after they pathetically tanked the 2015 General Election.

She's deliberately seeking to downplay and erase the role of capable and intelligent Labour women like Diane Abbott, and Angela Rayner, and Dawn Butler, and Rebecca Long-Bailey, to create the reality-reversed narrative that Corbyn's somehow a misogynist intent on keeping women down, rather than the Labour leader who has actually done the most to lift capable women into positions of responsibility within the party.

It's not difficult to see what the real agenda is, given that the article hearer image is of "centrist" self-publicity merchant Jess Phillips.

After her call for a "centrist" woman like Jess Phillips or Stella Creasy to take over the Labour Party, the author resorts to the most despicable line of the whole incontinent diatribe by referring to the women in Corbyn's cabinet in the most demeaning language with the phrase "a suitable female pet has to be groomed or the revolution may stall".

Suzanne Moore and all of the "centrist" dupes who have shared this noxious diatribe have deliberately invisibalised and demeaned intelligent and capable non-white, and working class, and genuinely left-wing Labour MPs.

And they've done it purely in order to promote their favoured choice of white, centre-right women from extremely privileged backgrounds (Creasy comes from an aristocratic family, and despite her faux working class pretensions Jess Phillips grew up in an incredibly wealthy household).

And what makes referring to Labour women in Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet as if they're just mindless groomed pets on display, rather than strong independent capable women with minds and political views of their own all the worse is that Suzanne Moore and her "centrist" ilk would immediately assume the role of furious language police if it was anyone else (from either the political right or from the left) who was using such demeaning language about women with diferrent political views to their own.

These people are hypocritically spreading this undisguised misogynist contempt because they simply don't want to have, or even acknowledge the existence of black, or left-wing, or working class Labour women at all, because the only women they're interested in acknowledging or being represented by are white wealthy women who are exactly like them.

They're a bunch of arrogant, racist, classist, prigs, but they're so wrapped up in their self-righteous bubbles of "centrist" delusion that they've convinced themselves that speaking about other women in this grotesque and demeaning way is perfectly acceptable, because they actually believe that any woman who serves with Corbyn is fully deserving of all the contempt, and ridicule, and marginalisation, and abuse that they get.

In reality Moore and her ilk are just a couple of steps away from far-right bigots ripping veils off Muslim women and calling them "letterboxes" because these women won't do as they're told, but this type are so self-righteous in their "centrism" that they can't even see what kind of people they've become.

Suzanne Moore should be ashamed of writing this fact-averse and misogynistic diatribe. The Guardian should be ashamed for commissioning and publishing it. And anyone who shared it for any other reason than criticism of it needs to have a good hard look at themselves too.

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OR

Our future is in the hands of these maniacs!

Our future as a nation is in the hands of a tiny unrepresentative clique of Tory party members who will chose our next Prime Minister for us.

This selectorate is made up of people who are so obsessed with Brexit that they'd be happy to see Scotland and Northern Ireland depart the United Kingdom to achieve it!

The official name of the Tory party is the Conservative and Unionist Party, yet an overwhelming majority of their members now see Unionism as such a low priority that they'd gladly trigger the break up of their beloved Union in order to achieve Brexit (a Brexit that still somehow remains undefined over three years after people voted for it!).

Aside from wilfully lobbing Centuries of Tory unionism into a skip and burning it, Tory party members have also entirely offered up the carefully crafted myth of Tory economic competence to the flames too.

An astounding 61% of Tory members would gladly cause severe economic damage to the UK economy in order to achieve a still-undefined Brexit, that's not economic competence, it's economic insanity!

If they're willing to destroy two of the fundamental pillars of Toryism (unyielding Unionism and the pretence that continually favouring the rich equates to economic competence) then it should come as no surprise that over half of Tory party members would gladly see the permanent destruction of the Tory party in order to achieve their still-undefined Brexit ambition.

But the craziest thing isn't what Tories would give up (Scotland, Northern Ireland, any pretence at being Unionists, any claims on economic competence) and destroy (the Union, the Economy, Britain's reputation, their own damned party) in order to achieve Brexit, it's what they say they'd give up Brexit to avoid.

The only option that makes them so afraid that they'd give up on their Brexit obsession is Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister!

These people would be satisfied with the permanent loss of Scotland and Northern Ireland from the Union, reducing the UK to a rump of just England and Wales!

These people would be satisfied with a severe economic meltdown that would destroy tens of thousands of British jobs, trash the value of the pound, cripple British businesses and institutions, and reduce us to a laughing stock on the world stage for having wilfully done this to ourselves!

They'd even gladly see the destruction of their own beloved political party in order to deliver this United Kingdom-busting, economy-tanking, reputation-trashing Brexit dream of theirs!

But when it comes to the idea of an old guy with traditional democratic socialist principles holding power for a few years, they'd willingly abandon all of their Brexit insanity to prevent it!

• What could it be about not-for-profit public ownership of the railways, National Grid, water supply, and Royal Mail that terrifies them so much?

• What could it be about commonplace social democratic style economic ideas like a National Investment Bank, and decentralisation of politics and the economy away from central government to the regions that drives so much fear into their hearts?

• Why are they so absolutely terrified of reversing economically illiterate austerity fanaticism in order to properly invest in our schools, hospitals, emergency services, local councils, and infrastructure in order to maximise the nation's future economic potential, rather than strangling it?

• Why are they reduced to gibbering with fear at the thought of sensible British foreign policy that avoids turning entire countries (Iraq, Libya ... Iran?) into lawless terrorism breeding grounds based on packs of lies and ridiculously dreamy "spreading democracy" propaganda?

• Why are they reduced to quivering fear by the concepts of full-time workers being paid sufficient that they don't end up relying on benefits and food banks just to survive, and disabled people being freed from persecution and abuse by the state?

The results of this poll paint a picture of a Tory party membership so frightened and confused that they'd wilfully give up the core elements of Toryism, and even the Tory party itself, in order to achieve an objective that they're still unwilling and unable to properly define.

These are people who are so brainwashed and bamboozled that they'd deliberately break up the United Kingdom and wilfully cause a humiliating self-inflicted national economic meltdown in order to achieve their Brexit pipe dream, but they'd give up the thing they'd sacrifice all of their principle for if Brexit meant temporarily having a democratic socialist as Prime Minister!

And the scariest thing about all of this is that the future of the nation is entirely in the hands of these frightened and brainwashed Brexit maniacs.

They get to pick the next Prime Minister between themselves, while the rest of us look on in horror at what they're going to choose to inflict on us.

 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

We'd be worse off without them, but would they be better off without us?

When you look at the facts and evidence, it's pretty damned clear that quitting the EU without at least maintaining very close cooperation on the economy, security, citizens' rights and the environment would be a disastrous move for the UK.

When even Brexiteers like Jacob Rees-Mogg are claiming that Britain won't see any Brexit benefit for at least 50 years, it's hardly an uncontroversial point to say that Brexit is going to be disastrous until almost everyone of working age is a pensioner or dead.

However one point that is rarely raised is whether the EU would actually be better off without us.

You see the over-whelming British attitude towards the EU is apathy, while most of those who do express a view do so with so little regard for the actual structure and makeup of EU democracy, it's pretty much indistinguishable from contempt.

The turnout at the EU elections was just 37%, meaning two thirds of eligible voters didn't even bother to express a view, and of the minority who did bother voting, a massive swathe of them treated the election like a ridiculous proxy referendum on EU membership, with 31% backing the Faragist Brexit Party, and 20% backing the absurd single-issue "Bollocks to Brexit" Lib-Dems.

How many Lib-Dem voters know, or even care, that the Lib-Dems belong to the despicable ALDE group in the European Parliament, and by returning 15 of them, they've massively increased the power of one of the most toxic groups in the European Parliament.

If one thing is absolutely guaranteed in the European Parliament, it's that is some sickening pro-corporate piece of legislation, or an egregious attack on European citizens' rights and freedoms (the TTIP corporate power grab, banning people from using the term "veggie burger" at the behest of the meat industry, attacking Internet freedoms with Link Taxes and Upload Filters ...) comes along, ALDE will be cheering for it and voting it through.

So in order to say "bollocks to Brexit" like a bunch of political toddlers, literally millions of Brits voted for the European Parliamentary group that makes the EU so bloody bad in the first place, and literally millions more had an equally embarrassing political toddler tantrum in the opposite direction by voting for a bunch of lazy expenses-scamming far-right shit-stirrers to protest against the EU.

Aside from our woefully immature attitude to electing members to the European Parliament, there's also the fact that Britain is so often completely out of step with the general European Consensus.

I'll give just a few examples:

When the EU tried to clamp down on excessive bankers' bonuses, George Osborne was the only finance minister in Europe to oppose the proposals, using public money to fight a doomed-to-lose rearguard action in defence of bankers' rights to extract vast bonuses even as they drive their institutions into insolvency!

When the EU tried to protect the European steel industry by putting tariffs on artificially cheap Chinese steel flooding into European markets, once again the Tories were the only major ruling party to object to and obstruct these moves.

When the EU tried to discipline the far-right Orbán government in Hungary for their interference in the independence of the judiciary, the Tories were the only ruling party in Europe to align themselves with all the extreme-right and neo-Nazi parties in the European parliament to vote in favour of Orbán's anti-Semitic regime.

And it's not just limited to British obstruction against the European political consensus, there's a hard-right British mindset that just doesn't exist on the continent.

Even in countries like Germany, where the centre-right CDU have ruled the roost since 2005, publicly owned not-for-profit public services are commonplace and they've actually reintroduced free university education across the board.

In the UK Jeremy Corbyn is derided as some kind of dangerously radical extremist for espousing these policies that are absolutely commonplace on the continent. Policies like publicly owned rail, water, national grid, and mail system, free university education, and decentralisation of economic control and infrastructure investment funds.

What's absolutely commonplace and uncontroversial over there is derided as lunatic extremism over here, and then when it comes to UK government policy Europeans are genuinely shocked when you tell them what the UK government have been doing over the last nine years.

They're shocked when you tell them that they've privatised 3/4 of the schools in England into the hands of unaccountable private pseudo-charities who fill their own pockets at the public expense through bloated executive salaries and dodgy no-bid supply contracts to their friends and family.

They're shocked when you tell them that English kids are facing £9,000 per year university fees on rip-off inflation+3% repayment terms that mean 83% of graduates will never pay off their debts despite entire working lifetimes of paying 9% of their disposable incomes in "education tax".

They're shocked when you tell them that the Tory government has privatised prisons, and the probation service, and the forensic science service, and front line police operations, and absolutely gutted Legal Aid to turn the courts back into the playgrounds of the rich.

What is our normal is radical hard-right extremism to most of them.

And what's their normal is almost universally derided in the media as dangerously extreme Marxist nonsense when Corbyn proposes it over here.

On Brexit we're just an embarrassment hanging around in the doorway, threatening to leave the party in the most destructive way possible, with senior government ministers, right up to our soon-to-be-departed Prime Minister spreading bizarre anti-European conspiracy theories, and her senior ministers referring to our EU neighbours as "Nazi concentration camp guards".

Then after three years of threatening to shoot ourselves in the head if we don't get exactly what we want, we repeatedly rejected the departure deal that we ourselves negotiated, and then pathetically begged and grovelled for yet more time to sort ourselves out, because nobody here can even agree on how to actually do Brexit.

They've shown remarkable patience in the face of this unprecedented chaos and uncertainty, with all 27 remaining EU states coming together to agree their negotiating position, while we, on our own, remain pathetically divided over ours!

When it comes to foreign policy, once again we're completely out of step with the rest of the EU.

When Jeremy Corbyn appealed for calm, and asked to see conclusive proof that Iran were responsible for the tanker explosions in the Gulf of Oman, he was roundly derided in Britain as some kind of lunatic anti-British traitor for daring to question the suspiciously evidence-light assertions of US warmongers like Mike Pompeo and John Bolton.

But then you look at the European reaction to the same incident, and you see that far from being some kind of wildly deranged commie, Corbyn's just expressing the general European consensus.

Germany’s foreign minister Heiko Maas said the grainy video provided by the US is far from sufficient to prove that Iran was behind the attacks. 

France's foreign ministry called on all sides in the region to "act with restraint and towards de-escalation". 

And the EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini called for "maximum restraint".

Nobody in Europe is spitting abuse and shrieking "traitor" at these figures for saying the same kind of stuff Corbyn did, nor demanding that the European public unquestioningly accept the American's evidence-light assertions, and war-mongering rhetoric.

Whichever way you look at it, Britain is glaringly out of step with the general European consensus.

Of course a lot of Brits who believe in more liberal social values, and peaceful internationalist ideals, and the mixed economy social democratic way of doing things, would prefer not to leave the EU at all, but maybe it's just time for people like us to accept that (outside of Scotland) we're actually in the minority, surrounded by a majority comprised of tub-thumping hard-right little-Englanders and those who are outright apathetic towards European principles and ideals, which means that the Europeans might well be better off without us continually mucking things up for them.

The other option of course is for Britain to change course, to ditch the obstructionist British attitudes in the European Parliament, to adopt the European consensus on public ownership and affordable/free university education, to unwind all the egregious Tory privatisation scams that most Europeans are genuinely shocked by when they hear about them, and to seek de-escalation in volatile conflict zones rather than spitting undiluted hate at those who preach caution instead of jingoistic war-mongering bollocks.

But if we're going to take this other option, we've got a heck of a lot of work on our plates to reform the way we do things in Britain haven't we?

 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

Lib-Dem Iraq whataboutery is the pinnacle of hypocrisy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 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

Boris Johnson's tax bribe certainly worked a treat on Alan Sugar

In December 2018 Alan Sugar was furious about the Tory Brexit chaos. He was so furious that he publicly stated that he wanted Boris Johnson to be jailed for the political lies he told during the 2016 EU referendum.

Fast forward just seven months and Sugar is running free publicity for Boris Johnson's bid to become Tory leader and Prime Minister by default.

So what's changed in the meantime?

Boris Johnson hasn't apologised for the lies he told during the EU referendum, in fact his supporters have actually doubled down on his right to lie to the public using spurious appeals to "free speech".

The Tory Brexit chaos hasn't improved a jot. In fact it's far worse. We over-ran the Article 50 deadline and Theresa May was left with no choice but to scuttle off to Europe to pathetically beg for an extension in order to avoid actually following through on her endlessly repeated threats to launch a ruinous "no deal" Brexit meltdown if she didn't get her own way.

Who would have thought that "I'll shoot myself in the head on a specific date if I don't get my own way" would turn out to be an incompetent negotiating strategy?
 

The Tory government's own impact assessments show
that a "no deal" Brexit is the worst possible outcome.

Now we're faced with the prospect of a Boris Johnson-led Tory Brextremist government forcing through the most damaging possible version of Brexit (so bad that it's significantly worse than Theresa May's three times rejected hard-right Brexit proposal) and Sugar is cheering him on from the sidelines.

The only high-profile policy that Johnson has announced is an extraordinary £1,500 per year tax bribe to people earning salaries of above £80,000 per year (with diminishing benefits down to those on £50,000 salaries, and absolutely nothing for anyone earning less than that).

This tax bribe would cost £9.6 billion per year, to be paid for the rest of us in the form of more austerity, more public service cuts, more Tory wage repression, more vandalism of the social safety net ... during the Brexit crisis that Johnson and his ilk wish to manufacture for the benefit of their mega-rich speculator mates who are betting against Britain and British assets in the hope of making a killing on the economic meltdown their Tory chums have promised to deliver.

Consider this egregious Tory tax bribe aimed at the tiny minority of top earners like Sugar and paid for by the rest of us.

And compare it with Jeremy Corbyn's policy of no tax rises for the 95% of lowest earners, and making corporations pay their fair share of tax.

It's absurdly easy to see why Sugar has undergone this remarkable conversion from "lock him up" to "Boris for PM".

He's blatantly just let his greed do his thinking.

And he's done it in such a blatant manner that he's switched from bitterly opposing Brexit to social media cheerleading for one of the most egregious Tory Brextremists!

Sugar's greed-override is so ugly, and selfish, and transparent, that even the most obtuse of people should be able to see it for what it is.

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